THE FIFTY BEST RECORDS OF 2009: Part #3

(I'm gonna try to get this whole deal done before January 4th by the way, so stay tuned!)

40. Slasher Risk - スラシア リスク (Obsolete Units)

I only just got hold of this CD, so probably haven’t given it sufficient listening time to wax lyrical, except to confirm that it is a pleasingly varied affair, signalling many potentially rewarding recording directions from this duo, whose freeform skronk-terror I initially had down as potentially un-recordable. Good work everybody! So, a quick table of contents: #1: five minutes of gloriously knuckleheaded heavy metal thunder, #2: eight minutes of a chiming, wintry dual guitar cosmic ambience, reminiscent of something off Charalambides ‘Our Bed Is Green’, #3: six minutes of industrial cacophony, like the sound of something going very wrong in a very dangerous factory, #4: a twenty seven minute live set of brooding no wave skyscraping and exhilarating stalk-n’-slash sonic violence, and #5: two minutes of Japanese street sounds and subway announcements. Depending on his or her aesthetic preferences, any open-eared listener is guaranteed to find at least three of these five disparate selections to be TOTALLY KILLER. So, let’s have a contest -- which of the above do you reckon I’ve selected to post as an mp3 below? Why not write down your choice on a piece of paper, then hit the download button and find out if your right? C’mon, it’ll be fun!

Mp3> Brooklyn



39. Grass Widow – 12” EP (Captured Tracks)

Like many of the new generation of American bands, Grass Widow throw together a bag of long naturalised elements from surf, punk, psychedelia, ‘80s guitar-pop etc, and invest the results with a sorta indefinable strung out, haunted quality. Unlike many of their contemporaries though, Grass Widow go about all this with a great deal of care and self-confidence, making sure that the four tracks they’ve here submitted to Captured Tracks are invested at all times with tightly wound instrumental interplay, captivating, folk-chant harmonies, killer less-is-more guitarwork, a definite sense of emotional coherence and… well, y’know, all the stuff that makes young people playing songs on guitar, bass & drums good, essentially. ‘Lulu’s Lips’ in particular is a winner, evoking some blissed out 5am nightclub loneliness moment perfectly, drifting vocal refrains hovering over an ESG-worthy rhythm workout and an endless practice amp echo of that guitar slide from ‘Rockaway Beach’. And the other songs are great too – ‘Tattoo’ sounds like a female Wipers falling through a Proustian time tunnel, ‘Thirsty Again’ is like a rainswept 6am journey to the beach to go surfing, just after they’ve left that club from the other song. No fooling - this EP is a solid and beautiful thing in a way that even some sensible old curmudgeon who’d never give in and shell out for yet another oversized, overpriced and poorly pressed 12” EP by some overhyped teenagers on Captured Tracks will be able to nod sagely and appreciate. So bite yr tongue and wait ‘til it’s reissued on an early singles CD comp after their debut album proper wipes us all out next year.

Mp3 > Lulu’s Lips



38. Psyched To Die – Sterile Walls EP (Grave Mistake)

I may not have quite realised it back when I reviewed this 7” earlier this year, but after downloading the mp3s on a whim and sticking them on my player for a quick walk to the shops, the truth became clear: THIS BAND RULES! Psyched To Die do pretty much everything you could ask for from a punk-as-genre band in 2009 (or 1982 for that matter), kicking off like a dynamo for eight songs that have the decency to knock you on your ass, get their point across and end. In terms of pure velocity and rage, you could file ‘em under hardcore, only they’re not regimented or boring enough to stay enveloped for more than a few seconds at a time, given their penchant for relatively clean-toned, fast-moving riffing, strangulated Greg Ginn leads, wiry pre-h/c energy and – joy of joys – comprehensible vocals, all topped off with a palpable sense of all-consuming frustration and misanthropy that spills over into not-half-as-dumbass-as-you’d-expect odes to atomic war, mental health-based incarceration, media brainwashing and the like. I wouldn’t have believed anyone could take these hackneyed ol’ elements and make them sound so fresh again, but… here we all are. Punk rock satori, pretty much.

Mp3> Five Year Plan




37. Jacuzzi Boys – No Season (Florida’s Dying)

It’s hard to write about Jacuzzi Boys without invoking their Florida heritage. As I’ve gone off about when I’ve written about them previously, their music seems to play straight into the same “weird Florida” vibe as their state’s rich heritage of exploitation moviemakers. They seem to rise from a world of swamp ghosts and mutant gators, of turquoise swimsuits, surfboards strapped to the top of broken down Cadillacs and radioactive technicolor blood, a world where twilight and blinding sunshine are indistinguishable, and the beach party goes on forever as the casualties pile up. Putting such flipperies aside for the moment though, any garage-trash aficionado would be forced to agree that Jacuzzi Boys are a good example of that odd sub-set of the music that people in the cold parts of the United States simply don’t make. I loved their singles, and this album delivers big-time, with thirteen bursts of pretty much definitive psychedelic punk, executed in the spirit of the 13th Floor Elevators or the ‘80s Flaming Lips, taking simple four-chord rock n’ roll and somehow rendering it impossibly, pupil-dilatingly weird. The dumbest Spring Break frat boy around could probably get his head around Jacuzzi Boys’ killer rhythm section, sweet, almost classic rock, lead guitar moves and seemingly endless faith in the ‘Louie Louie’/’You’re Gonna Miss Me’ turnaround. But what would he make of the manic tape echo that seems to crash in and out of their songs at random intervals? Or the foggy fuzz burbling somewhere deep in the mix? And what of their lyricist’s somewhat… unorthodox.. approach to getting his tales of haunted cabins, ruined birthday parties and bad acid across to the dance floor? These are just some of the things that help make “No Season” the perfect soundtrack to dancing with a mutant jellyfish girl on a flimsy wooden jetty – and it’s a soundtrack I think we could all benefit from keeping within easy reach.

Mp3> Island Ave.



36. Circuit Des Yeux – Sirenium (DeStijl)

Over the past few years, the figure of the “delay pedal lady” has become a prominent fixture in weirdo music, to the extent of becoming an accepted categorisation in its own right, rather than an occasional anomaly. From early adopters like Fursaxa and Christina Carter through to Grouper, U.S. Girls and Pocahaunted, there’s probably some fiend somewhere penning a retrospective history of the ‘movement’ for a broadsheet paper as we speak. It should go without saying that the above practitioners all represent a way of doing things that I greatly enjoy, but it is nonetheless interesting to note that 2009’s most exciting addition to this shaky pantheon seems determined to fuck with whatever reductionist conventions the aforementioned broadsheet fiend is ready to lay at her door, by way of one of the most challenging, puzzling and unsettling LPs of the year. If I start trying to disassemble the music of Indiana-based Circuit Des Yeux, picking out elements of her haunting goth-girl baritone and internal mic level string/piano/snare mutant blues bleedage from the implacable fog that constitutes ‘Sirenium’ … well, that wouldn’t really be doing things justice. To drag up some creaky old reasoning, ‘Sirenium’ isn’t atmosphere-over-content so much as the atmosphere IS the content, with sheets of drifting, mystifying sound laid thick over whatever core song was once present, like layers of lace gauze over a burn victim’s face. As such, it’s hard to really discuss the album as anything other than abstract impressions – impressions that can’t help but form a Twin Peaks-like netherworld of suburban confinement, strange, atavistic beauty and stark, violent terror. Whatever subjective impressions it’s all meant to convey, it’s hard to deny that the result is completely captivating, and it’s more than a little inspiring to think on what it represents in the continuum of DIY/homemade music – one girl and her laptop, in a house, making astonishing, otherworldly sounds pretty much just from herself and a few bits of junk left lying around in the living room.

Mp3> Paranoid

Labels: best of 2009, Circuit Des Yeux, Grass Widow, Jacuzzi Boys, Psyched To Die, Slasher Risk

SINGLES!
March/April/May ’09, Part # 3:

* * *

Psyched To Die – Sterile Walls EP
(Grave Mistake/Firestarter)

Going by the cover, track titles, band name and lyrics sheet, one could easily mistake this for a generic hardcore release, but it’s actually an unusual and thoroughly enjoyable exercise in pre-h/c American punk rock. Sure, there are fast tempos, gang shouts and some mosh-riff sections, but there’s also loads of warped guitar hero soloing, comprehensible vocals high in the mix, trebley, clean sound and a nervy, over-caffeinated quirky kinda energy, recalling The Weirdos, Pagans and ‘Plastic Surgery Disasters’ era Dead Kennedys.

Songs are blasted out tight as fuck, machine gun style, each one wrapped up in about a minute, like the New Bomb Turks with less fat, and the lyrics offer relentless nowheresville nihilism throughout. Composition & vocal duties seem to be split between different band members, so, uh, at least they must share a common goal I suppose, even if it is total hatred of everything. “Sick and tired of the free-range life / the outside world is a fucking mess” contributes bassist J Nixon on the title track, “pretending to be crazy’s the only way out / and I won’t even have to fake being depressed”. Guitarist Mike Yannich, not to be outdone, gives us ‘Permanent Solution’; “I got a permanent solution / living life is just a waste of time / I gotta find a fucking way out”. Nixon wins outright on the hilarious ‘Onward Armageddon’ though, managing to sing “People think of the apocalypse / and dream up stupid fantasy bullshit / about being in the small percentage of survivors / and piecing society back together”, before concluding “I don’t want to be part of no post-apocalypse / I wanna be one of the people it hits!”

Perhaps my favourite song here though is drummer Brian Yannich’s ‘Five Year Plan’, which perfectly captures the spirit of classic Descendents loserdom. As all the smarter punks knew well, this I-hate-everything-and-I-hate-you shtick can turn to self-parody pretty quickly, and these guys sound frighteningly honest when they bring things down to earth to sing “Couldn’t cut it in college / work for minimum wage / I see old faces from high school / they think that I’m a waste” ; “My friends are all getting married/ buying suburban homes / I just sit here complaining / in my room all alone”. Not exactly the most original sentiment that’s ever been expressed in a punk song, but these things can still cut hard.

I guess it was defiance in the face of this kind of terminal failure and depression that was at the heart of late 70s teenage punk – or at least the raw, Californian variety that informs Psyched To Die – and, 30 years down the line, we can still hear it pretty bluntly put by bands like this, for whom adult life apparently hasn’t brought much in the way of improvement.

http://www.myspace.com/psychedtodie
http://www.myspace.com/firestarterrecords

Total Abuse – Demo 06 (Even Worse)

Whoa. Demo-tape-reissued-on-7” action here in a similar brutalist lo-fi hardcore vein to those Sex Vid records that so thoroughly kicked my ass last year. And if Total Abuse lack the brooding, knife wound negativity of Sex Vid, in fact sounding almost cheery by comparison, well they more than make up for such deficiencies with sheer THUNK, taking their triple-speed Sabbath-weight riffage and flailing skronk bursts straight from The Book of Ginn and somehow imbuing it all with an immediacy and momentum that this music has lacked since their hero was still knocking it out pre-‘Damaged’. Nothing new here, but after nearly three decades of identikit eight song h/c 45s, bands like this can still seem like fresh air in a stale cavern. Go figure.

For my money, the recording here is perfect for a band like this – scuzzy and muffled in a GOOD way, just like the early ‘Flag stuff, only with the levels cranked the way they *should* have been on ‘My War’. The guitars are solid brick wall roar, the drums sound like they’re being torn from the overdriven bass-bins of the terrifying, lunatic-driven car that’s about to mow you down from behind. Musicianship I suspect is tight as a whip (the drummer fucking kicks it), but there’s so much bass fuzz and degraded roar it wouldn’t make much difference either way. Song titles: “Breathing Down My Neck”, “Enraged/Pissed”, “I Can’t Live Like This”. Indeed. Things reach their apex at the end of side # 1, sounding like the noise a brave eight year old might hear whilst pushing his ear against the concrete wall of the utterly terrifying underground rock club that his mum has told him never to go near because the patrons might EAT him. Fascinating, repulsive, violent, wrong and irresistible.

Side # 2 actually lightens up a little, playing to the gallery by slowing down for some headbang/mosh pit worthy groove sections on almost pleasant chord sequences, and demanding yet another ‘Flag comparison with good ol’ Rollins shout-alongs on the choruses of “I Give Up” and “Ain’t Got No One”. That said, Total Abuse’s gallery is probably largely comprised of leering indie tourists such as myself in search of total destruction, so you can’t blame ‘em for wanting to give us the finger and give the h/c faithful what they paid for.

http://www.myspace.com/totalabuse
http://www.myspace.com/evenworserecords

Vivian Girls - Moped Girls b/w Death
(For Us)

Yeah, it’s yet another non-album 7” from Vivian Girls, yet another one they’ll be able to shift by the bucketload until the hype spotlight moves elsewhere. And why not, eh? It must be nice to be able to immediately press your latest creations onto little artefacts like this, knowing you’ve got the interest & appreciation of a sizable audience to make it worth your while. And it’s not like there’s a quality control issue or anything – the tunes are still great! In fact, for all that they may be derided in certain quarters as lazy, self-satisfied so-and-sos, VGs are becoming a pretty consistent and prolific outfit, maintaining an admirable cruising speed as regards the essential band-business of making lots of songs, and making them all good.

Their second album is due out in a couple of months, and word is that, in classic 2nd album tradition, it’s going to be a more nuanced affair, slowing down the frantic punk of their earlier material in favour of more classic rock/pop inspired slow-burners. Seeing as how regular readers probably got pretty sick last year of hearing me harping on about my love for the first album’s stunning “Where Do You Go To?”, this strikes me a potentially welcome development. It’s also a shift in tone that seems to be clearly signalled by this 45, with both sides staying strictly mid-tempo, both featuring hazy, uncertain guitar solos and hinting at a beguiling mixture of self-conscious girl group pop (‘Death’ has a beautiful Shangri-Las spoken opening) and hypnotic desert jangle, executed with the kind of singular, indefinable spirit that made fans of this band fall for them in the first place, and that their detractors will likely be scratching their heads over for all eternity. I mean, yeah, obviously I could tick the same crit boxes as them and acknowledge that the Vivian Girls music is formally unremarkable, technically adequate at best, that they probably haven’t done the legwork to justify global indie-fame… but do you think I care, when their music makes me shiver, changes the weather, throws pictures into my mind, makes things better, the way pop music should?

Sadly, it’s the recording that lets them down to a certain extent here though. Put bluntly, these sound like big songs recorded on the cheap, sounding flat where the the LP roared. The lo-fi approach is cool n’ all, don’t get me wrong, but as the Girls move toward a sound with less flat-out distortion, more harmonies and more subtle, reverbin’ depths, I don’t know if the old ‘one take / one mic’ set up is really serving them best.

http://www.myspace.com/viviangirlsnyc
http://www.roughtrade.com/

Wake The President / Je Suis Animal split 7”
(Electric Honey / Lucky Number Nine)

I think I quite like Glaswegians Wake The President. Quite is odd, because they sound a lot like The Smiths, and I hate The Smiths. I guess it’s a bit like how I really liked Camera Obscura’s first album back in the day, despite the fact I (at the time) hated Belle & Sebastian. An example of an unassuming little band taking on the more easily enjoyable elements of the sound in question, without the preciousness or cultural baggage of their precursors perhaps? And crucially in this case, without the distraction of an overbearing vocalist whining on incoherently like a self-important parish priest cursing god for the indignity of having to deal with two blown tyres in the same week. (Hate mail welcomed in the comments box, Moz fans – I loves ya really).

So yes, Wake the President are definitely perched at the more tweedy, un-rocking end of the indie-pop spectrum, so it is to their credit that here they turn in neither a snorefest nor a groanfest, but a really nicely turned out, toe-tapping couple of minutes of this-sort-of-thing, thankyouverymuch. The singer’s delivery is natural and engaging, the rhythm section is all prim and bouncy and the tune is pretty catchy. The guitarist wants to be Johnny Marr so much it hurts, but unlike Johnny Marr, he turns in a wicked little solo towards the end. File under “hard to dislike”.

Je Suis Animal’s side is an altogether more curious prospect, marrying early Sonic Youth ‘building the tension’ guitar lines to an arch, sing-song Laetitia Sadler style female vocal that seems almost entirely disconnected from the band’s backing. Music and vocal proceed to stalk each other as the track develops, the guitars appearing to triumph at around the two minute mark with a dramatic stabbing-you-over-the-dinner-table Blonde Redhead noise-out, before the singer reasserts herself with another run through the song’s cyclical chorus, and we’re out. I say, this doesn’t seem like very ‘indie-poppy’ behaviour at all! Count me officially INTERESTED in whatever Je Suis Animal are up to.

http://www.myspace.com/wakethepresidentband
http://www.myspace.com/jesuisanimal
http://www.myspace.com/luckynumberninerecords
http://www.myspace.com/electrichoneymusic

Labels: Je Suis Animal, Psyched To Die, singles reviews, The Vivian Girls, Total Abuse, Wake The President