SKULL TIME:
Thee Fourth Annual Stereo Sanctity / Breakfast in the Ruins
Halloween Mix Tape.


(Cross-posted with the other place.)

Well I could hardly yet this much loved (by me at least) blogging tradition slip, could I? No further explanation needed, I hope.

Accidental themes that emerged whilst compiling this year’s Samhain offering: (i) a general preoccupation with zombies, voodoo and the like; (ii) a slight shift away from fun pop tunes toward more genuinely creepy atmospherics and hair-raising metal nastiness (although there’s still some great examples of the former too); (iii) the first volume in this series with no Ramones.

So without further ado…

SKULL TIME!

1.“welcome to the castle”
2.The Misfits - Skulls
3.Cheater Slicks – Night of the Sadist
4.The Recedents – Zombie Bloodbath on the Isle of Dogs
5.Drunks With Guns - Zombie
6.Destroy All Monsters – You’re Gonna Die
7.Claudio Simonetti – Demons
8.German Measles – Olivia’s Eyes
9.Nile – The Nameless City of the Accursed
10.Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel – I Spent the Night in the Wax Museum
11.The Ventures – The Bat
12.Curse – Killer Bees
13.Bruno Nicolai – Funeral Striptease
14.“exorcising a curse”
15.Swamp Witch – Emerald Serpent
16.Anaal Nathrakh – Carnage
17.The Girls At Dawn – Evil One
18.Mater Suspiria Vision – The Ring
19.“god at the crossroads”
20.LA Vampires & Zola Jesus – No No No
21.The Wee Four – Weird
22.Black Time – I’m Gonna Haunt You When You’re Gone
23.Exuma – Dambala
24.“home for tea”
25.Roky Erickson & The Explosives – I Walked With a Zombie


(N.B. – In case anyone wants to turn this into an actual, physical CD, I’ve enclosed some printable artwork in the .zip file – just send the enclosed .jpg to print as a landscape A4, and bob’s yr uncle.)

Labels: halloween, mixtapes

Crawling Age – CD-R

Crawling Age were first on the bill at this great gig I went to last month, headlined by The Real Numbers from America (whom I liked a lot). Crawling Age is kind of a UK garage-punk supergroup of sorts, featuring one bloke from Black Time, one bloke from The Hipshakes and one bloke from… well to be honest I forget which band the other guy is from, but I’m sure they’re pretty good (he was filling in on drums w/ Real Numbers at this particular show).

I think Crawling Age are one of those ‘get together for one day a year / write and record a bunch of stuff in an afternoon’ kind of deals, and indeed, they seem concerned with little beyond having a laugh, swapping instruments so that everybody gets to have a go at everything, and making a lively bunch of oven-ready <2 minute songs, putting seven of the best of ‘em on this CD-R, and giving a free copy to anyone who’s interested. A fine approach! A happy racket!

Live, they lengthened their set to the requisite twenty minutes with much mucking about and a great version of Jowe Head’s immortal ‘Cake Shop’, and the spirit of Swell Maps indeed hangs heavy over these recordings. Hard to put your finger on exactly *where* it hangs amid the murky din of Crawling Age, but when the certain nameless, inexplicable something that Swell Maps forever defined is present, you can never mistake it. It’s there, creeping through the cracks, coagulating amid the background shouts and between song chuckles. Introduce it to the blaring, belligerent murk these men call home in their main bands, and a good thing is born, somewhat not dissimilar to that great Human Race CD I wrote up last year.

Opening song ‘(You Crossed Over To) The Other Side’ is my favourite here, in that it sounds exactly like you’d want a punk song called “(You Crossed Over To) The Other Side” to sound. Eg, it’s 77 seconds long and goes, “YOU CROSSED OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE! / YOU CROSSED OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE! / YOU CROSSED OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE! / YOU CROSSED OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE!”.

‘Don’t Talk’ is my second favourite – great swing, toe-tapping Kinks-via-Teengenerate tune, and an insane guitar solo.

‘Telescopic Love’ is probably my third favourite – longest cut here by a margin of about a minute, rattling along with twisted (TWISTED, no less) metallic sound and weird slap echo like one of those early Neon Boys recordings, or something that might soundtrack a cyberpunk episode of The Sweeney.

‘Venezuela’ is my fourth favourite - a more relaxed number, with immaculately whacked Back From The Grave twang, paying perceptive musical tribute to the titular locale.

In conclusion: I really like this CD. It’s stupidly fun, fulla random, crazy noise, inspired, off-the-cuff song ideas and goofy four-track tangents, and it asks nothing in return. I wish I was in a band like this – sounds like a blast.

No web presence, so you’ll have to find your own merry way to this one (I’d suggest making contact via the protagonists’ other groups), but here’s a few soundcloud uploads.

Labels: Crawling Age

Apparently a random, late night Bandcamp download, I have no idea what drew me to this EP by the enigmatic Stacey Adams, or how it ended up on my iTunes. But I do like it quite a lot, so, uh... good. Clearly the processes that bring me music are in good working order, even when I’m not consciously aware of them.

That said, I know in advance that this music is going to sound absolutely TERRIBLE when try to describe it. But describe it I must, so let’s gird our loins and just get on with it.First thing’s first: Stacey Adams is not, as you might expect, a woman. At a guess, I’d say Stacey Adams probably two men, or maybe just one man, multi-tracking himself. He is (or they are) almost certainly recording at home, in an environment in which not upsetting housemates or neighbours is an active concern.

With requisite equipment in place but need to rock necessarily muted, Stacey Adams make sleepy-headed, weirdly gentle-sounding songs of crumbling mumble-whine and vague dorm-room sadness, utilising a palette of brushed drums and effect-heavy/low volume practice amp fuzz guitar. There’s some bass in there too actually (“don’t mind me”, it seems to be saying), so they could be a three piece? Actually, there are three guys pictured on the banner of their Bandcamp page, and three guys credited in the credits, so duh.

So yes, this is indeed SOFT GRUNGE. In fact it basically has me thinking of the kind of thing Evan Dando might be doing right now, if he was twenty one years old and had spent the past few years digging on all those momentarily trendy ‘chillwave’ groups, thinking “hey, I could do that”. And also if he sang not in a rich, doleful croon, but instead in a kind of strained, reedy chronically ill nerd voice, like a hungover Jad Fair or something.

Additionally, all but one of the songs are named after people – the titular Ms Adams, along with ‘Steve French’ and ‘Sally Salmonella’ – which, given the all-pervasive yearning slob/nerd sensitive boy stench emanating from this thing, we can only assume pay tribute to unrequited crushes, or perhaps lost friends or rivals, or whatever.

Assuming you haven’t already stabbed yourself in the face trying to imagine what all this might add up to, let me reassure you that, contrary to all expectation, this EP is actually quite good, and I like listening to it a lot.

The thing about Evan Dando y’see is that whatever else he might have done, he wrote GREAT TUNES. So much so that he could have recorded them on a penny whistle and bongos in-between kicking homeless children and declaring his support for extreme right wing organisations, and they’d still have been great tunes. Stacey Adams’ tunes are not of the same order of greatness, and indeed they don’t really sound like Evan Dando songs even in the slightest. But they do at least have a certain easy-going, hard-to-hate charm that invites the comparison. So there’s that.

Also, the key I think to making successful homemade rock/pop is to seem both welcoming and effortless. There is nothing more off-putting on the CD-R scrapheap than encountering recordings that seem to yell “I spent 128 hours mixing this track, it nearly killed me, and you’re just sitting there IGNORING it – I want you to work like I did, damn it! Work to appreciate my wonky unnecessary time-changes and multi-layered vocal harmonies! I don’t want to see your attention waver even SLIGHTLY for the next four minutes twelve seconds, for the sweat from my brow has coated each one of them in GOLD!” Total downer, man. However serious/morose your music may be, you’ve gotta meet people with a smile, you’ve gotta make it sound natural. Stacey Adams are extremely good at this. The songs on this EP are not exactly in a happy place, but their sound still seems to say, hey man, come on in, would you like a drink? We were just playing some songs, wanna listen?

Thanks Mr Stacey Adams, sure I’d like a drink, and yeah, I’d be happy to listen. Hey, you guys are soundin’ pretty good.

So yeah: this is a nice EP – have a listen.

Labels: Stacey Adams

Deathblog:
Bert Jansch
(1943 - 2011)

It goes without saying that I was very sad today to hear of the death of Bert Jansch. It was cancer what done it, but I never even knew he was ill, to coin a phrase.

I went through a period of listening to Jansch a LOT a few years back, and whilst there’s not been much folky stuff on my plate of recent, I’ve no doubt those records will be staying with me in irregular rotation for the rest of my life. Just great, great music, made to last the years, etc.

Thinkin’ about it, it’s difficult to really get an angle on how influential Jansch was in his chosen field – hitting the ball that had been thrown out there by Davey Graham a year or two earlier and knocking it outta the court, taking a musical form that had previously stuck stubbornly to tradition and perceived ‘authenticity’, and quietly opening it up into a dense, rolling musical language taking in psychedelia, improvisation, moments of clanging modernist dissonance and Eastern drone.

Whilst still sounding as naturalistic and rootsy as [insert yr own rustic, folkie cliché here], his guitar style, his songs and his deeply peculiar singing voice all have an incredibly strange cadence to them that seems to come from somewhere entirely off the map, something that’s proved impossible to really replicate, however much his successors might try. It would probably sound quite startling if it wasn’t also so welcoming and familiar – music built up out of earth and wood, mushrooms and garlic cookin’ up in a black pan on some portable gas hob, faded floral curtains, twigs and moss and rolling tobacco, that sorta thing.

And I’ve not even got round to Pentangle yet… what an incredible band, like the sound of a bunch of guys in hand-woven hemp robes suddenly launching a mission into deep space… absolutely love ‘em. ‘Cruel Sister’ is just, like, the best damn record ever. [Disclaimer: ok, it’s probably not actually the best record ever, but… y’know, it’s pretty good. Or at least I think it is.]

Needless to say, I’m now cursing the fact I never bothered to make it to any of those Pentangle reunion shows, but I was at least lucky enough to see Jansch at an All tomorrows Parties some time last decade. He was a grumpy sod, but endearingly so, and his playing was absolutely extraordinary – seems like his sound just kept getting more knotty and determined as the years went on.

Really sad to see him go anyway. A sound that no one else can make has gone, to be made no more.

So, a few favourite moments, courtesy of Youtube. There’s a lot more awesome Pentangle footage out there than there is awesome solo Bert footage, so the selection probably reflects that. And seriously, the live Pentangle stuff is SO GOOD. Kinda weird how they always made Jacqui Mcshee sit on that uncomfortable looking high chair, but whatever - these five people so clearly WIN at music, it's almost frightening.

I've been listening to this stuff all through this evening and really enjoying it, so if you're unfamiliar with this whole malarky, do yourself a favour and dig in.

Labels: Bert Jansch, deathblog, folk, Pentangle