Maritime Fun with Cap'n Guthrie

Slip slip slippin'

2008-02-12T16:14:00.000-05:00

Alas a distant malaise has come over me today, my day off. I say distant because it is hard to perceive, like looking through the back end of binoculars, and hard to punctuate and hard to locate. I feel it humming away spinning inside of me like a dark crystal of spinning energy and blue whorls and wisps, heart shaped, pulmonary, veined and arteried. Perhaps because snow falls from artery clouds today.

I've waited so long for this white ground and flakey footprints and brown sludge streams coupling and running along the gutters in fine swishing fastness. Unfortunately, my ass has planted itself, literally, down on my couch (pale eggshell colored ass-roots twine down in between couch cushions and grasp quarters, bread twisty-ties, indiscernible red plastic pieces, dog hair, human skulls, fingernails, toenails, skyscrapers, buttons, hopes, dreams, knock-knock jokes, actual shit, coffee grounds, fake rubber vomit, female condoms, scurvy, and other such effluvium). I cannot get up from this dark prison set aside for me by myself.

Wait a minute. Yes I can.

Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth - Straighten it Out

Pinch

2008-02-10T20:49:00.000-05:00

What are these empty fields of sound that stretch off into the distance as if they were spitting into the eye of the horizon, speckled with tiny tumbling bushes that are prickly to the touch but soft puffs of incognizible motion to the distance? What is this screaming sky that is coming down out of the blue and whites and passing in black spots on the ground?

I have seen the globe so far past my eyes perception, far beyond my presence. I have seen so much farther than any details in the crunching soot at my feet or the air dripping with dryness clenching at my throat and I have taken too much time drifting away from myself through this tiny bright window that I now type through at to you. There are pictures here. and sounds.

and off farther away I see the distant tables, thats mesa to you sir, and they sound like strangling bending air that squelches between beats like jelly mushing out from the inside of a bad sandwich. and I hear notes and sounds that tumble down cogs and cogs of a machine.

It is a contraption in the desert, a turned vehicle that flipped somehow, perhaps in the wind, perhaps in the somnambulance of an over-imbibed driver, perhaps placed here by a divine hand that rained them down and only the rest were crushed into sand under the weight of time and this one retained its shape and creaking guitar parts and rusted liver-spotted, pimpled rust.

listen -> Can - Pinch

Where I've been

2008-02-09T13:01:00.000-05:00

"Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in"
I shuffle into the back of the blogosphere, collar up as if splayed across a neighborhood watch sign, and sit down. Wooden foldout screeching a protest and shifting slightly to the right as I sit on empty air and crash to the floor causing a disturbance that draws no eyes from the empty room.

"Maybe you should've written or something before taking off."

"Are you mad?" I ask

"Not really, I've dealt with abandonment in the past." cleaning a mug.

I don't really want to talk about it. This is too hard so I'm going to take it easy, maybe kick my feet up. You see: I've been breathing the salty sea air on whaling missions and traveling across the globe in hot air balloons. and if I haven't been doing that then I certainly have been treking, somnambulant, across the vast landscapes of music and writing. Consuming. Consuming more than one might ever have thought possible. You, blog, are my bucket. It's about time to purge myself of this, this, this what?

This great corpulence. My belly has grown and I have popped through to the other side of my taste like pushing a finger through an opaque plastic trashbag. I find myself gravitating to the thick sounds of Jazz and funk and hip-hop and Kraut more than I find myself gravitating to the corpuscles of indie-pop that so many blogs have smitten themselves with, like licking the barnacles on the bottom of a ship. Why? Why?

It boggles me to jumbles.

I will share with you.

Pharoah Sanders - The Creator Has A Master Plan

Corporeal Punishment

2007-07-19T11:41:00.000-04:00

I know I've left you stranded before, left you wallowing in deep swampy pools of the dimmest water without a wooden plank to helplessly grasp. or even half of a bright orange life-vest. I was off gallivanting with prostitutes and steamy wads of cash ejected from offshore slot machines on open-water steamboats, I apologize. I do indeed enjoy writing for you my crew, or maybe this is just writing for me.

Some days when I wake up to consume my black morning sludgewater I think of you and I think of me and I think of the sea-green waters that have yet to be traversed by us and I get excited at the prospect. Other days I wake up with crustacean eyes and a barnacled demeanor, I stare up at the timber ceiling in my room. Suddenly I bust in to my own cabin with a group of sweaty, grimacing, tattooed strongarms clutching thick coils of thick rope with their sweaty, meaty paws. I've come to keelhaul myself.

I can't tell you how difficult it is to play the role of punisher and punished simultaneously, to be the one standing shipside of the plank with a scimitar:

"Ye broke the cardinal rule of music blogging: not hosting yer own MP3's. Whats worse, ye been using Badongo, putfile and (Spits on the deck) RAPIDSHARE?" and then quickly jump to the oceanside of the plank to play the tattered me in tattered sackcloth, hands tied with shaggy, cutting searope:

"No no... I swear! I'm getting to it... I'll start hosting as soon as I can, I swear"

I jump back boatside and eye myself squinteyed for a second, my posse of gnarled sailors behind me, reething their muscles and waiting for me to try and escape so they can exact their flogs against my sallow back.

"so ye been sayin' for a fornight now and I haven't seen anything. And ye been slackin on the posting m'boy, you know what that calls fer!"

"I know I know, please, please don't do this! not again!"

I readjust my captain's tricorner, sheath my curved blade, saunter out to the end of the plank next to bearded me and stare darkly into my eyes and then pinch my cheeks and say:

"too late ye scurvy dog, say 'ello to Davy Jones!"

))kick((

Under the boat it's quite peaceful. Everytime I plunge, Buddy Holly plays for some inexplicable reason.

Buddy Holly - True Love Ways

The ropes cut deep into my hands as the bottomside of the boat, splintered and be-barnacled, rasps along my face and stomach and legs drawing blood that in turn draws the sharp toothed harps and pianos. These sea creatures live for chum like me, they pluck along behind me and lick their lips. They are slow moving creatures though, often being drawn astray by schools of violins, bottom feeders, following boats for scraps of resin: dropped overboard. The strings converge and scatter as I skitter along the sharp base of the boat.

I ignore these hyenas, mere scavengers, it is the blood-thirsty saxophone I worry about. Traveling alone, these creatures can swim faster than seven deckhands can pull, and typically, I'm pulling myself alone so any sign of the sax could be certain death. I've heard stories of keelhauling ropes suddenly going slack and waters turning chunky and crimson. Everyone present at those fishy feasts said they heard the faint glimmerings of Paul Desmond, of Take Five. I shudder to think even now of the jaw gnashing fates of those men and women.

So far I've come up on the other side, blue cheeked, lacerated and bloody, coughing up saltwater, but I've survived. I welcome myself back to the boat, slap myself (painfully) on the back and hand myself a hot cup of joe.

"ye lived through it again meboy, now hurry up and get that MP3 hosting"

__________________________

Check out my new roomie's blog: Battle of The Midwestern Housewives

Check out Sufjan doing a performance at BAM about the BQE. Apparently he will be playing old stuff and new stuff. I'd like to see it considering the live version of Majesty Snowbird is one of my new favorite musics. Are you going?

Just another creepy video

2007-07-17T10:04:00.000-04:00

I think that, perhaps, Neil Sedaka could be one of the most brilliant men in existence in our time. Let us begin a short journey through this half-assed post wherein I try to pass off clicking around on a bunch of youtube videos and embedding them as an actually well thought out musical analysis (which I suppose you don't come here for anyway [if you're a moocher here for the mp3's just skip to the bottom!])

here we go:

I've known gaydars that could pierce through thick iron walls wrought from the deepest forges at the molten center of Detroit, alas my gaydar glands withered at birth and never went through the same growth spurt as my peers. but I can still see that Sedaka is as gay as two canarys in an appletini birdbath.

here's the classic Breaking Up (with your boyfriend) is Hard to Do

Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen:

watch how uncomfortable he is in this one:

Neil Sedaka with Fountains of Wayne at Joe's Pub (I was at this show, it was quite splendid).

His genius is possibly second only to mine. The funny thing is he has been famous for so long that he has the same demeanor of a dictator who will kill one for the slightest infraction, an index finger bend, a poorly placed butt-scratch, but does it with a sadistic sense of humor as well, like instead of putting one in front of a shooting squad he confines one into a room where only reality TV is playing. I love him. Here's some downloads for those who want them:

Neil Sedaka - Calendar Girl

Neil Sedaka - O, Carol

Neil Sedaka - Come Back Jo

Neil Sedaka - Lets Go Steady Again

genius.

DISCO SUCKS!

2007-07-16T13:35:00.000-04:00

I can't believe there was ever a world, the geetar-exclusive world of my parents, where disco was lambasted for the color of it's skin. for it's keyboards. for the colorful-chessboard floors where knights and rooks tested their boogie-mettle, kings and queens of every color did coke off the pawns, bishops swung their index-fingered fist the only way they knew how: diagonally. Travolta-ly.

Awkward-thirteen-year-old-me-at-an-eighth-grade-dance-ly.

Well, our friends The Cansecos are making sure that disco is not merely en passant (ok, I recognize that my meticulous, self-parodying, metaphoric stilting has just now slipped and gutted itself on the knife blade that it walks daily, please forgive) and if you haven't already listened to the Juiced Remix sessions via P-fork or GVB then it's your serendipitous disco-day! for The Cansecos have remixed their September bound album and posted the resulting crotch-heat on their website. If the album is as good as this remix I smell a possible successor to The Avalanches classic "Since I Left You" in my party rotation. or at least an accomplice.

check it oot

The Cansecos - Side A

Side A is a jaunty frolic through some sampled Donna Summer and cascading strings.

The Cansecos - Side B

this 'uns a manly, synthy, bass bumpin side that likes to take it slow in bed but still has that hot disco man-musk emanating from the black curly bush on it's chest. damn, I just turned myself on.

Check out that fucking bassline at 15 minutes in and you'll sprout an extra pair of testicles by accident.

check out their older stuff on myspace and maybe buy their self titled album from 2002.

check mate.
(ugh, let the self flagellation commence.)

Papoose

2007-07-13T12:23:00.000-04:00

These days, the Zeitgeist moves faster than anyone cares to remember. I remember only several years ago when the moons and stars were still aligned. Back when the curvature of spacetime had not been warped sticky, like four dimensional honey, dripping with the sheer weight of useless information; Blogs: millions upon millions of satellites orbiting that blazing ball of gas, Google.

Sean Bell was shot and killed by undercover police at his bachelor party. Papoose is a rapper from Bedford Stuy in Brooklyn who wrote a song called "50 shots" about the incident. The incident was important and terrifying, but much of media has performed it's obligatory outcry and the story has fallen back back back through the pages of the newspapers. The Zeitgeist has moved on. So will I.

The thing that fascinates me about Papoose is his penchant for disseminating information, as if his raps were political pamphlets thrown, billowing down from a rooftop. He's New York's new wiz kid, produced, with ballyhoo, like the school braniac at a spelling bee.

Clearly NAS is no longer New York's answer, if you were prithee to the red-light, green-light middling sounds of "Hip-Hop Is Dead." Jay-Z is merely keeping house: making sure the floo is closed in the chimbly when he leaves for a month, getting creative with the leftover Ramen noodles and spices, stealing the neighbor's wi-fi.

Truth be told Papoose isn't really that great, listening to him is kind of like squinting your eyes and pretending the face you drew on the paper bag is Jay-Z. He doesn't have much charisma, his voice is like a younger Jay-Z, his rhymes lose footing very quickly by backpedaling over meaning. Why is he so lucrative? Well, I suppose you could ask that same question about Kanye. Why is Kanye so lucrative? Kanye's lyrics are frequently god-awful (have you heard the new one? we won't talk about the identity politics of "You could be my black Kate Moss tonight" or the even stranger identity politics implicit in positioning himself as the post-apocalypse God-child Tetsuo in 'Akira') but he's a fantastic composer of beats.

What is appealing about Papoose to Jive that he would be worth 1.5 mil? well, aside from the fact that he already has major draw (see his mix tapes: Busta, Nas, Mary J Blige, Swizz Beats, Just Blaze) in the NYC area, he has garnered much acclaim more because of his ideas than his words, very much like Kanye (and R Kelly's wily ego). 50 Shots was pretty widely accepted as being a return to the New Yorkpolitcal consciousness form that Ghostface said was dead after Amadou Diallo was shot in 1999. ("I knew New York was wack when they shot my man Amadou Diallo forty-one fucking times and ain't nobody stand up. But if that shit happen in L.A. somewhere, they would have went to bat for Amadou Diallo. It would have been hell. Stores getting burnt the fuck up. New York don't stand for nothing.") Its a return to "The Message" that Grandmaster Flash made popular so many years ago during Hip-Hop's honeymoon period at the Roxy in NYC.

case in point:

Recently I read an interview in Vibe about Papoose's signing to Jive records for 1.5 million. He spoke about his upcoming release in Sept. 07, "The Nacirema Dream" (see what he did there?), but what fascinated me most in the interview revolved around his work on the copious mixtapes emblazoned with his name. Specifically the stuff about his Law Library series.

(I have combined all three tracks into one for easier listening and easier access and heres some lyrics one, two, three but rest assured, I don't care for you, my readers, that much.)

Papoose - Law Library 1,2 & 3

Papoose's Law Library series trampolines upon a simple concept and it is this: people don't know the law without lawyers to explain it to them. If they can't afford lawyers why not eloquently (quite for papoose) describe a person's rights to him over a beat?

I'm not a big fan of the beats on the songs themselves: muzakky dimly lit tunes with green lampshades and spectacles. It fits the mood of the song and doesn't detract from the words, which is the idea.

These songs are what I'm talking about when I say his ideas are superior to his flow. There's nothing that special about the songs but they are riveting simply because of the sheer amount of useful information one is receiving in such a short period. He's no Aesop Rock, but then again, Aesop wouldn't be able to deliver these lines with such clarity, we'd be plodding through a swamp of metaphors and assonance before any sort of meaning could be arrived at.

Anyhoo, enjoy yourself with this one and we'll look out for Papoose's debut in Sept. it ought to be stupid big when it drops.

here's Ye with his stupid new expensive video (Scream anyone?)

Plim

2007-07-12T08:06:00.000-04:00

I woke up early this morning. I've been trying to go to sleep at a more reasonable hour. I've spent far too many a night in the past year closing my eyes and slowing my breath at the so-called witching hour, that hour in the night where the shapes and sizes of normal things like pillows and tables are transmogrified into horrible creatures, pint glasses and cigarettes, who beg me to sap them of their ambrosial broth.

The leaf, my friends, will be turned over.

I woke up early this morning and remembered that my morning ritual of coffee had been disrupted by a lack of it. I drew my pantaloons to my waist and proceeded towards the grocery store down the block to retrieve the seeds that would germinate into the brown liquid I do so dearly enjoy.

and I felt the deliquescent heat seep from the windowsills, the orange rust on iron bars, the chalk white stoops, the leftover gravel. It rained very hard yesterday, meaning something about the weather is changing, the scorching heat being shunted further east, over the sea, by cool sprays up in the stratosphere.

When I returned to my apartment and composed my breakfast and coffee into a satisfactory symphony of flavors, my computer greeted me with a sonic recap of my brisk footed circuit.

Bon Iver - Skinny Love

I don't usually use promos (last time I used one, a contrary reader called me the N word. Inappropriate.) but my canvas morning imbibed this music, plim: To swell, as grain or wood with water.

Story goes that Justin Vernon holed himself up in his father's cabin after the breakup of his old band (these guys) like so many Ed Drostes or Springsteens. He stayed there the three months of Winter and emerged, be-bearded and bedraggled, with this album.

Some of the music sounds like it could be buried beneath the scratch-n-sniff surface of Grey's Anatomy in some sort of papery montage treacly tripe, it does fall short at that. But other moments of the album work on so very simple a level that it burrows beneath the brick wall holding my nose up in the snooting position and my fingers hit repeat unhindered by my listening brain.

Bon Iver - For Emma

If Jana Hunter had an alter-ego of the opposite sex it would be Justin Vernon, I swear.

Here is a place to read more about the album: Amble Down

Here is a moospace

Here is a place to listen to the entire album: Bon Iver

oh, yes, and before I forget, Kitsch Me Gorgeous, that handsome devil, has a link to a recap of the 77Boadrum show in Brooklyn last Saturday that yours truly went to, as well as a link to a Boooootleg. check out this LIIIINK

and now for something completely different:

smokin that shit?

2007-07-11T12:08:00.000-04:00

As I proclaimed yesterday, fanfare accompanied, white stallions parading the promenade of my blog castle, hip-hop is my newest passion. There was once a time where I would falter and crumble to my knees as soon as a wanderlusting beat of the PHAT variety slipped brashly into the curvaceous folds of an ear or two. I lived in fear of the everyday gambol down any main thoroughfare, in fear of those humming, buzzing trunks.

Perhaps it was the whiteness that my parents had imbued into my skin and bones by refusing to listen to anything without guitars and screeching vocals, nay, refusing to listen to anything that wasn't, gulp, BLACK. I attempted to remedy this as a young fledgling listener, but my surveys of the landscape of hip-hop music was misinformed and, eventually, kidnapped. The temptation: sweet succulent rock-and-roll-sample candy by diddys and Will Smiths.

Wu-tang descended from the sky with Enter The 36 Chambers, light emanating from around her strange dark cover. I understood. I wanted more.

What is the purpose of this foolish narrative that I spin for you as an eight legged she-devil might for her lover, and later, her prey?

It is merely to prepare you for the weeks to come, for I have been consuming Ice Cubes and Ice-T's and Public Enemy's and Pharcydes with the fervor of a man once starved of certain culture. It's as if I were neglected in my childhood and prohibited from drinking anything but coke, caffeine-free diet coke. The kind that comes in the languid brass colored label so you know that its contents are merely the base, rewardless skeletal structure of the potentially delicious liquid confection.

Anyway, I've been listening to KMD's Black Bastards, their notorious album that was scheduled in 1994 but was unreleased by Elektra because of the hanging Sambo character pictured above. It was later released in 2001 by Sub Verse Records.

MF DOOM, before he was MF DOOM, was Zev Luv X in KMD. His brother, DJ Subroc was the group's DJ and was struck by a car in 1993 and killed spinning his brother into a deep depression and causing him to go into hiding only to reemerge in 1998 when he began performing in the newyorican poets cafe with his trademark mask.

what a weirdo:

On the menu today is two songs that describe the connection between MF DOOM's current style and the similarities between that and one of my favorite tracks on KMD's black Bastards album.

KMD - Sweet Premium Wine

Notice the pseudo-dialogue that takes place in this track. "You're drinking too much of that wine of yours!" If you're at all a MF Doom fan, or even any of the tracks on Madvillan which was only a little bit produced by Doom but mostly produced by Madlib, you'll recognize the style. Thats not to say that no one else has done this before, but it's definitely one of DOOM's little idiosyncrasies to crate up a dialog from old television and radio samples.

MF Doom - Beef Rapp

granted I could use a better example of Doom's pastiche work, but I like this first song from 2004's MM...Food.

And here's another of my favorite track on KMD's black bastards:

KMD - Smokin' That Shit

that bass is fucking phat.

oh, hello again

2007-07-10T09:58:00.000-04:00

Well, that was a fun weekend wasn't it? I had a couple of delicious encounters with some great music.

I'll take a moment at a later date to describe to you the Boredoms show I went to on Saturday with the 77 drums and the giant spiral of them. Absolutely incredible.

Anyhoo, the rest of my ears have been taken up by a lot of hip-hop. I recently finished Jeff Chang's "Can't Stop, Won't Stop" a book that I believe everyone with even a peripheral, tiny shadows and squiggles in the corners of perception, interest in hip-hop should read. There is nothing I'd rather do these days than hear the raspy, undertoe vocals of Doom or the curvaceous, bubble lettering of Busta. I appreciate, as much as a middle-class white male can appreciate, the words and the individual personas and the tiny projectile roots jutting from the thick rooty gnarls below the platinum glow of today's Lil' Waynes.

Anyhow, lets get on with it. I'd heard a few times about "The Cool Kids" from Austin's SXSW, where they performed. But I hadn't really given them a listen until Gorilla Vs. Bear posted a song called I Rock (formerly Mikey Rocks)

Cool Kids - I Rock

They're from Chicago Ill. and they slap some slow vocals over some thin beats and call it a song. And songs they is: I Rock is a thin concept with a thick, trunk buzzing note over a slow beat. Now, this tactic has been used by everyone from Ulysses S. Grant to Kevin Sorbo, songs based entirely upon thick bass beats are like cheap made for TV hallmark mini-series for the current Atlanta leaning hip-hop crowd.

It is sometimes hard to remember why those thick beats are so popular anymore, until someone does it right again like The Cool Kids in this song or Lil Momma's minimalistic beat heavy jumping Lip Gloss that everyone has heard but it needs a little reiteration.

Be, Poppin:

The Cool Kids new album "The Bake Sale" is scheduled for release later this year

check out their myspace page for more music.

Get a Brain Morans

2007-07-04T11:16:00.000-04:00

It is America's birthday again. I'm going to see a lil band called Pterodactyl tonight with some other hot acts in Willyburg. I hope to see you there.

I am, at this moment, trying to decipher from the mist raging about my head, what the best song would be to give you on this most glorious of holidays.

My first instinct is to find something with fireworks worked into its fabric like a bejeweled American flag on the back of a denim jacket. Bros, of course, comes to mind, but I've inundated you with Panda Bear far too much.

How about some Ice Cube? Everyone needs a little Ice Cube.

blast this shit at the members of your family holding paper plates of hot dogs and potato salad.

Ice Cube - Amerikkkas Most Wanted

have some loch nessie monster:

Does your Dog Bi-yai-yai-yaiiiite?

2007-07-03T09:49:00.000-04:00

It is Summer.

Perhaps there is a certain musk that is released when the air is heated to a certain temperature. As boiling a kettle of water releases a whistling steam to attract one's attention so does the very marrow of the summer air whistle an imperceptible tone that attracts memory. I remember straw colored straw on brown chalky hills behind my house in San Diego when I was but a lad of six; my parents scrubbing the dirt from my knees and scolding me for vanishing from their panoptic windows overlooking our cul-de-sac. Yellow and blue beaches, bare brown feet of girls, dry grass clippings, surreal poolside games. Somehow all of these coagulated during the early ninties all in one place.

Television is not now, nor ever really was, a final destination for overtly creative minds with a penchant for the surreal. In the early Ninties that destination was (and still is) more likely found behind the mask of a foamy headed punching bag dressed to the nines in Mickey Mouse accoutrement or perhaps, if you will allow me to stretch-armstrong a bit, the emerging surrealist pseudo-realities of Gangsta rap ("you are now about to witness [more or less] the strength of street knowledge"). At that time, though, children's programming was entering a surrealist renaissance on a little channel known as Nickelodeon with programs like Ren and Stimpy, Rocko's Modern Life and, of course my favorite, Pete and Pete.

Whats all this masturbatory faux-academia got to do with music? Well, if you've never seen Pete and Pete, FOR SHAME!! **stage direction for guthrie: accusatory finger pointed skyward atop a clenched fist of epic proportions**, you wouldn't know the R.E.M. sound-a-bit-like band Polaris who magnificently performed the opening credits and various songs throughout the show. Occasionally the writers of the show would warp episodes above and around and through Polaris' music like a klein Bottle, indecipherable.

Polaris - Summerbaby

Exhibit A: an episode of Pete and Pete season one called "Hard Day's Pete" wherein young Pete must search for his favorite song that he hears Polaris, conveniently and splendidly practicing in a garage on the way to school, playing one day. He hears the song only once and attempts to remember the song by snapping together various chords. A fantastic premise, for how many of us have heard amazing songs only once that escape to the darkest dregs of the cortex, drip down our spines and disperse through our nerves as a milky blue dissipating substance. I would not let Pete's song escape me, for it is an amazing example of the show's finger on the pulse of pop-media in its day.

Polaris' frontman, Mark Mulcahy of Miracle Legion (of whom I will speak in a moment), wrote an incredible gem of a summer song for this exact episode called 'Summerbaby' that I feel is necessary to broadcast across this internets. Unfortunately the music recorded for the show (featuring Mulcahy stuttering the around into an incredibly catchy Arou-hou-hou-hou-hou-nd) was only released on a Cassingle in Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal (I'd give my larynx and my left butt for that thing). However! The re-recorded versions are true-to-form and that form is the catchy, fuzzy side of velcro.

Miracle Legion was Mulcahy's band from the mid-eighties that, yes, also sounded like the jangle-echo of early R.E.M. And whats wrong with that?
The answer is this: nothing.

Their first EP, called The Backyard, is five songs of summery pop-perfection. Would you like it? Yes?

Miracle Legion - The Backyard EP

Now that you have the whole thing you should really really go buy some of their later albums that are more on sale than The Backyard EP.

A grrrrail?

2007-07-02T15:19:00.000-04:00

If my writing seems to slug across your screen rather than the usual zip-line quick wit Blogalism you're used to, its because I have just now returned from a week long vacation. It involved me sitting in the dark recesses of a beach house, occasionally removing to the beach to darken my snowy complexion beaneath the golden strands descending from Apollo's airy chariot. Alas, my traipsing through these intertubes has left my skin beyond repairidly white and I found myself more often gazing upwards towards Apollo's twin sister, Diana. Her milky white crescent illuminating enough to display my epidermal shortcomings, but not reflecting her brother's rays enough to bronze them. Where shall I begin with the music today... where to begin...

Have I a platter of rad for you today, my friends! Well some may think it crass to call this rad but I think it, my friends, is not crass. For when was the last time you heard four hundred damn guitars playing at once? Never!

It is A Crimson Grail by Rhys Chatham a student of punk rock and a mentor/friend to members of Sonic Youth and Band of Susans. He began his career as a piano tuner for minimalist La Monte Young. and it sounds like this:

If vines growing up thick brick had a sound it would be this. If heat's fish-eye sine waves above a sweltering road could be plucked it would be this. If cumulo-nimbus could be compressed into a jar and slowly let out at the bottom of a swimming pool, retaining their shape, it would be this. If a lover's form could be effectively holstered into a hip flask, a quick, concealed dram beneath mahogany stairs would fill your body with these vibrations. Then there are two more movements, whose dimensions surpass description.

she's a doosie, hope you don't mind 20 minutes.

Rhys Chatham - A Crimson Grail

I've been reading Nabokov, can you tell?

buy A Crimson Grail

Cookie

2007-06-29T16:47:00.000-04:00

"A little later we all decided to use Patrick's car and go out to Berkeley to see Jim Morrison play at some ballroom there. We wanted to distribute the Blue Cheer LSD that had gone through the laundry by accident. Susan had stashed it in the dirty laundry the day before. Mark hadn't known and washed the whole load (about $400 worth of the stuff) with the detergent Cheer. Now the whole batch of LSD was Blue Cheer and Cheer combined. We planned to give it away free, providing of course people didn't mind the accompanying side effects of the detergent.
Jim Morrison was good, as usual, and so was the LSD, despite the slight stomach cramps. We even handed a lump of the goo to him onstage and he happily ate it. After the concert, we left to smoke opium at home, leaving Kathy and Eve to go backstage to try and fuck Morrison. While smoking opium and listening to KMPX (the best radio station at the time), we heard an unfamiliar song. It was great, unlike anything else we'd ever heard. I offered, since we didn't have a phone, to go out into the three a.m. morning can call KMPX and get the title and the name of the musician.
While I was in the phone booth, after I talked to the KMPX D.J. and found out it was a cut from a new album, Doctor John the Night Tripper, a black man with short hair walked up and stood next to the booth. I thought he was waiting to use the phone, but no, it was me he was waiting for." - Cookie Mueller

The Land of Milk and Honey

2007-06-28T11:06:00.000-04:00

Its been a long time since 2002 when I became obsessed with droney wee-wee glacier pop from our snowier blond friends in the northern part o europe and islands nearby.

hey, slow that shit down assholes: snow sounds like arppegiated chords with reverb and you know it.

well, back from the dead, the glacier pop has come. at least for this music listener. like I've said in the past I have become gradually more obsessed with the cold opaque liqueur these evil Denmarkian kings (and queens) pour into my ear. and I haven't even thrown myself into the Efterklang yet.

Anyhow, I'm here as your fishmonger to breathe new life into your snowy, albeit neglected, folders of your computers with Slaraffenland.

Their album Private Cinema is a triumph of atmosphere and a clever Broken Social Sceneish use of the horn section. Don't go looking for these guys to change your life any more than Sigur Ros did back in 2001, they're not trying to change your life. They're just trying to make your ears happy and use up all of the little O's with a line through it: ø which is a depletable resource that they mine from the ground in Iceland and Sweden.

How do you think they pay for their instruments to make pretty, fairy pop for us? Growing white asparagus and playing as elf extras in Lord of the Rings? Thats racist.

Slaraffenland - Polaroids

Polaroids begins with (gasp!) beautiful Aurora Borealises of flute, a snare and a bass kick in, an (what?) arpeggiated chord on an acoustic guitar, a chant/hymnal vocal line, an incredible horn section. and then you kick back and take a nap and watch the earth turn very slowly.

I'd very much like for you to go to their myspace page and listen to more of their music.

I'd also like if you listened to a song that pitchfork posted a while back thats even better than the one I played for you above. Which is here

and you should buy the whole album because its quite very good.

and now for something completely different:

The Myspace Shuffle vol. !!

2007-06-27T10:09:00.000-04:00

HYPO is Anthony Keyeux from Paris. He runs with the O.Lamm kids (who you should check out as well). I seriously can't find much about HYPO, mostly because I can't read Fraaansh. but check out HYPO's split album with Emmanuelle de Héricourt (another one of them Frenchies) called The Correct Use of Pets. The two collaborated on a majority of the music including my favorite track on the album:

Naughty Place begins with an electronic war beat; some real jock-strap thunder that actually didn't catch my attention at first. but then HYPO introduces the hook, which is so simple and so obvious and so damn near perfect that I have absolutely no idea why I haven't heard anything like it before.

The song is an engine in cold weather. constantly starting and stopping. but you keep turning the key. because each time you start it up again you hear a new rattle or a new bassline. It starts and stops and starts and stops. and finally the M83 vocals and synth intervals kick in and you've got the wheels turning. Unfortunately, it only moves a few verses and then burns up. You've gotta get out and push it started again.

HYPO - Naughty Place

On the same record EDH has a metallurgic song that starts as a harsh solid clang and eventually melts into a resonating tuba-blast driven pot of molten T-1000.

EDH - Lament

Here is the video for Naughty Place that is good in concept but doesn't really work with the movement of the song.

HYPO's moospace.
EDH's moospace.
buy the record

me on the internet? no way!!
also six degrees #13 (14) is going up soon if you'd like to hear my voice

oh yeah. oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah.

2007-06-26T12:08:00.000-04:00

Ahh the internet. Its good for a few things, you know. have you been on it? I like to googles. and I like to use emails. I just heard about this thing called intent messenger: its like emails except faster!

Its gonna be the next big thing I bet. If you ever surf well you're gonna love surfing on the internet because its like riding waves that are made out of computers. and if you like surfing on the internet you should watch this video by this band Figurines because this is what it looks like when you're surfing the internet: Way fast! and catchy! and nothing makes sense!

This is from their album from 2006 called skeleton, a handsome likkle album of music.

Also this: Have you ever stood on the beach doing that heiroglyphics dance? Legs akimbo, arms in front and back shaped like a "Z" and you shoot those hands back and forth across your body, you shoot em back and forth across your body, and you're watching them big blue waves crashing and crashing and you just keep going even though you know everyones watching you and probably thinks you're a dork. but you don't care because you've got Hey Girl by the Figurines playing in your head.

Figurines - Hey Girl

and then the song cracks open at the end and you just start kicking sand around and jumping up and down yelling Come on Come on come on come on come on Come on Come on come on come on come on Come on Come on come on come on come on Come on Come on come on come on come on Come on Come on come on come on come on.

thats what surfing the internet is like.

you should buy their album maybe.

or maybe get ready to buy their new album which is coming out in the U.S. on September, eleventh (maybe its a topical album?).

moospace

good old panda bear

2007-06-25T13:34:00.000-04:00

Panda Bear - A Musician and A Filmmaker

My saliva glands run overactive when I hear about something Noah Panda Lennox Bear has done in the past. I met one of his ex-girlfriends once (so she claimed) and I was immediately in awe of this beauty that could climb such a tower and topple such a mind. (Harpy's clawing at her back, tearing flesh from bone. Raw fingers gripping the shallow rock inlets searching for the next rough pull towards the top.)

perhaps I give Panda Lennox too much credit.

Digging through my computer files yesterday I came across an overlooked cache of music that confounded and enticed me, making my saliva glands, once again, work overtime so that I was a drooling, foaming fool. Buried betwixt the fatigue-green files on the insides of my Mac were countless musics that I had overlooked or tried to delete at one time or another: 'twas like finding a Jackson ($20) in the pocket of jeans I hadn't worn for three years.

It was also like finding three year old blue cheese salad dressing nestled squishily in the other pocket. why i would have put blue cheese dressing in there in the first place is beyond me, it may have been a fad at the time. Regardless!! I found some old old old old Panda Bear from Panda Noah Lennox Bear's first self titled album on Deakin's (of AC) Soccer Stars label that has since become Paw Tracks.

Some of it sucks! Some of it makes Noah Bear seem like a normal dude with a keyboard and a guitar who is just starting to write songs. It's also easy to hear some of his genius that would later firework from his mouth and fingers and rain down upon the hungering crowd like manna.

Panda Bear - We Built A Robot

Particularly the eleventh track "We Built A Robot" a synthy, bass pumpy, chiming song that is a very very distant cousin to Hot Chip's earlier work. Panda Noah sounds as though he built a robot out of Erector Sets with the kid from next door and when they turned it on it crashed through the front door and blinked in and out of vision beneath the lamppost lit streets as it fled off to god knows where.

Maybe I shouldn't post this. Don't worry Lennox Bear, if you want I can post some of my highschool poetry.

eeeughh, maybe not.

I don't even know if you can buy this anymore but I'm sure if you bought one of his other albums he'd appreciate it.

and now for something completely different:

Thanks to Joe's Pub ROFL and John Tofu Seroff Hut for a good time last friday. (thats where I saw this amazing video)

booty booty double dancer

2007-06-23T03:15:00.001-04:00

my, my, my, meg baird

2007-06-22T16:59:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, I realize, I come across albums that both myself and my mother would listen to if we had found the same thing independently. It hurts to admit that, but sometimes things are so transcendently beautiful that it clearly works under any circumstances for anyone.

Meg Baird - Waltz of the Tennis Players

I save the best for last. Meg Baird is a member of the folky freaky band "espers" and recently (may 22) dropped her solo album called "Dear Companion."

Did I say dropped? Thats wrong because this album floats back and forth like a feather in a light breeze or falling leaves in warm rain or Joni Mitchell from an open white curtained window overhead or Nick Drake from a crackly record on a porch or someone humming a Dolly Parton tune in an empty subway station. If those sound like things you're interested in I'd pretty much say go ahead and buy the album from Drag City.

Meg Baird - Maiden in the Moor Lay

This one runs its fingers through overgrown yellow mustard plants exploding across an open field. Shadows of clouds drift somnambulant; dark islands amidst the sunlight.

I can't recommend it enough.

go to her myspace page to hear moar.

buy it from her label: drag city.

don't look for her on youtube, you get only one terrifying result.

Happiness is a solid, Joy is a liquid

2007-06-21T10:27:00.000-04:00

"...the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid" J.D. Salinger in "Nine Stories"

My body is a locus of infinite possibilities, my ears very much the same. My brain floats in a pool of inequalities. at times I will have the silicon fjords of Efterklang, glaciering around in there. at other times I'll listen to the hit-your-face-with-a-hammer sounds of bands like Black Eyes.

lately I've been taking in the sounds of "1 2 3 4" by Ms. Feist. now I'm not that big on the album but if you're not sold by watching this amazing video then I don't know what will sell you on this song.

right? I like the one guy in the striped red sweater that probably arrived late to the shoot and was all like "oh shit, I was supposed to wear solid red? well, I can't get back to my house now! My Dad dropped me off on his way to work."

anyhoo, theres all that going into my head these days and then theres this L.A. band Silver Daggers an amalgam of LA post hardcore and free jazz. They sound like "Cough" era Black Eyes but something about them allows for a much more accessible sound. They sound excited and youthful and joyous to be making the racket they're making whereas Black Eyes sounded tattered and haggard and defeated.

Silver Daggers - Joy

"Joy" is one of those rare riots that occurs not from anger or despair but sheer, unadulterated joy. Like when you and your buddies are all back together and wasted and you all just want to get into trouble and smash down walls and break windows and set shit on fire. The unstoppable bassline kicks in like a cinder block and the cacophonous brass section is fists thrashing the air.

Check out Silver Dagger's myspace page.

and buy their record at Load Records.

Brass Construction

2007-06-20T17:10:00.000-04:00

Brass Construction - Changin'

I had been listening to Map Of Africa all morning. If you haven't listened to Map Of Africa you're missing out on some amazing DJ butt-funk (otherwise named Beardo-Disco by some jerks with a better wit than I). Friends were visiting and we dropped into the thrift store foolishly positioned around the block from hundreds of upper-middle class white art school kids with expensive lofts. I thought I'd help them out a bit since they obviously weren't about to get any money selling vintage rainbow-suspenders and Kenny Roger's amazing line of cowboy shirts (everything that man touches is gold). lo and behold there were two records that I espied. one, a yardbirds LP, a dandy record, the other: Brass Construction (inset).

What a funky day it would turn out to be. Brooklyn's Brass Construction, as I am told by allmusic.company, released their first LP in 1975 amidst the rising tide of Hop-Hop and disco. DJ Kool Herc most likely played them at his house parties where he invented the continuous break later to be known as hip-hop.

Changin' is my favorite track on the album simply because of that bass that bass that bass that bass. Good god it struts down the street through the admiring string strikes under open fire hydrants, the choppy keys leaning out their windows, the guitar jingles like hot asphalt, and the brass juts along like drivers watching from inside their steamy car pileups, pulling along trying to keep up with that bass that bass that bass.

You can get the full album here at this fucking!!! awesome blog Headfonehaus.

SOUL TRAIN: dancing to the groove.

Lol, Wut?

2007-06-18T16:20:00.000-04:00

New-Rave is probably the worst title for any type of music known to man. Spurred by a wanton Klaxon tongue and disemenated by NME's wandering jizz shots, new-rave has become synonymous with the colorful eye-hurt spitting out of pants and shirts in Vice's "Do's" section and hitting you at full force in vagina, mouth and ass. I'm not really into tights, thanks, but the music is definitely a force worth listening to, en mi opinion.

I'm totally into crystal castles right now partially because they seem to be doing the new-rave thing in a darker, less cloyingly unicorny way than The Klaxons or compatriots in day-glo: Hadouken!

I mean, this is electro-hipster distilled in a lab, vocodered, and jerked into a small slim-jim package. Don't say I didn't warn you when you snap into it's snot nosed 8-bit nintendo clicks and twees. If you're not a fan of MSTRKRFT do not open. Fortunately they cut the crap to a short enough length that nothing ever really gets tedious.

I'm a particular fan of Air War on their myspace page (complete with downloads so I'll refrain from putting some here) which is a stroll through a circuitboard, unintelligible vocals bouncing about and hissing like electricity, a nice steady thump making sure people's booties participate.

Crystal Castles - Myspace page #1

crystal castles - myspace page #2

Overall, though, Crystal Castles remix of It Fit When I Was A Kid by Liars is a great example of their potential. Though it relies upon the simple octave keyboard strokes heard in just about every lazy electro dance number, the song still manages to take the spacious, haunting Liars song, make it danceable and even retain the darkness of the original as a great remix should do every time.

Its here: XLR8R

Googly goo

2007-06-15T19:12:00.001-04:00

So remember how I was telling you about that new Animal Collective song that they played at the show I saw last weekend? WELL!! I've tracked down a bootleg version that was posted on the Animal Collective message board. They people on Collected Animals (isn't that a clever name?) are calling it "Will To Joy" suspiciously similar to the title the people on youtube were calling it. hmmmmmmm.... its almost as if it were the same people.

Animal Collective - Will To Joy (?)

Sooooo this track is from their performance in Austin (I believe the first video I posted before was from Austin). Its quite pretty iddnit? I can't wait to hear the album version of it or, hell, I can't wait to see them again.

Also!!! Flight of the Conchords, the new HBO show, is FUCKING hilarious! I feel like a dirty whore for posting this but its seriously that good. Two bits to the man, woman or child that finds a full version of the robot song.

Antelope

2007-06-15T07:38:00.000-04:00

I'm a big proponent of the DC punk scene simply because it doesn't really get enough attention.

Whats that?
Bad Brains?
Dismemberment Plan?
Fugazi?

pish-posh, not enough attention.

There are so many good bands from DC that fly under the radar simply because people are butts and only care about what craaaaazy Ian Mackaye will do next. Seriously its unfortunate that the tastemakers have deemed Antelope to be unworthy of more than a mediocre rating. Oh well, so much for listening to Antelope, right? Not to feed the ol' blog-o-sphere versus Pitchfork flame here but I find the review of Reflector to be more of a review of the DC scene than a record review. I think its one of the best releases of early 2007 and simply writing it off as post-punk thats not "anthemic" is fucking retarded. but every man to his own opinion.

anyhoo. Antelope writes guitar and drum licks that pop and snap together like k-nex. Listening to an Antelope song sounds like looking at schematics, which, if you know anything about me at all, you'd know that schematics are my newest pleasure. I love how everything just makes sense regardless of whether I understand what that triangle and squiggle line represent.

Antelope - Mirroring

Mirroring, the fourth track on Reflector, comes in with a little plucky raindrop guitar lick. The drums kick in with an unexpected subtle punch. The second guitar winds in. Vocals come in. Its like watching a basket weave itself, and when the song is over you've got a nice little carry-all for picnics.

Antelope - The Demon

The Demon starts similarly. You've got to give Antelope credit for understanding their aesthetic, also for writing lyrics that are thankfully non-sensical. I mean if you're a DC connoisseur you'll have already made yourself well acquainted with Q And Not U's wordplay, or lack thereof. Its not about what they're saying (ok, you could try and make sense of it if you're stoned) its about rythm.

Check them out if you're in Japan cause they're touring you now. otherwise: buy the record here.

What's in a gnome?

2007-06-14T14:57:00.000-04:00

(The scene: Late at night. Two men are seated at a long dimly lit mahogany table in expensive business suits. They are listening to the song "Priest, Poet, & The Pig")

Suit 1: "Wow, these guys are great. Long Hair. Thick Riffs. huge beards. kids like the beards these days."

suit 2: "Yeah, beards equal legitimacy and authenticity, always have, always will. Just look at ZZ Top. Who even owns any of their albums post-Eliminator? Nobody! but they're still fucking sweet! anyway, we've got to do something about that name!"

suit 1: "What? Band of My Morning Foghat? I like that name, its...its so distinct"

suit 2: "Nonsense. Distinct band names are going to be the death of this industry. We need band names now that are un-googleable. Back in the Sixties we used to glue adverbs and pronouns to maps of the U.S. and throw darts to figure out a band's name."

suit 1: "but google didn't exist back then"

suit 2: "You ever been on Acid? I wouldn'tve even known my own momma's titties if they were jiggling right in front of my nose back then, son.

suit 1: "Oh... thats...uh..."

suit 2: "we needed band names that were short and easy to remember. Naming a band "Yes" was a stroke of genius, I mean how many times do people say "Yes" in a day? It was free advertisement. We knew we had lost that spirit in the late Nineties when Godspeed You Black Emperor! came out. The only people who say their name in its entirety are dicks or kids that just found out about them and are on the verge of becoming dicks because of it."

suit 1: "so what do we rename these guys?"

suit 2: "We need something ubiquitous yet with neutered meaning to kids today. I know, Vietnam!

suit 1: "and we can capitalize the N so that it seems distinct without actually being different at all! Fuck you Soulseek!"

suit 2: "Welcome to the team, son. We'll need someone sharp like you to market the accessible, radio-friendly music we have here at Kemado Records."

(end scene)

Actually VietNam is one of my favorite new bands I've heard this year.

check out some more Dad-rock, foghat glory in their song Welcome To My Room. Before you listen to it you have to either get on a "hog" of some sort or be swinging around one of those oversized wrenches like Joanne here:

You can do it, Joanne.

Sad pretty music

2007-06-13T16:36:00.000-04:00

Hula - As For Hell

I have no idea why these guys aren't getting any press at all. It just goes to show that there is an important factor to getting your band noticed and its this: Marketing. MARKETING! When I think marketing I think of guys named Zack with bleach blonde gel-spiked hair who just want to "shoot the shit" with you in their office. Don't worry Hula! This tiny corner of the Blogosphere is here to help.

Hula just recently emerged with a new album for 2007 called The Cloud That Eats Hands and it is a gorgeous gorgeous album. Hula sounds like finally throwing out the coffee grounds from the coffee the two of you made the day before you broke up: Bittersweet. It's so easy to get bogged down by the "emo" or worse "boring" moniker when you make sad, pretty music and only a few other artists like Elliot Smith and Low capture this sound as crystal clear as Hula can.

The whole album shimmers with deep deep space, guitars that waltz in and out of each other's steps, gorgeous melodies and lyrics, and then of course the pastoral steel guitar that fastens all of the pieces together like glitter sprinkled over glue. The surprising thing is, every song is painted with the same palate and yet I never tire of the songs.

Hula - Helena

Helena is the first song on the album. Like a roller coaster chain it pulls you up to the top over and over and then breaks the tension not with a steep descent but with an unexpected slow motion plummet into a pool of water. Its a gorgeous windswept, mountainous song about "solar powered washing machines" and running away to live in a friend's cabin.

check out their website for more Mp3s and some music videos. Check out their live performance of Fallout, a drony dark monster lumbering through the forest. and buy their album so that they start marketing this shit more, more people need to hear from them!

BONEFISH!!

2007-06-12T16:42:00.001-04:00

Well, before the big blogs start lumbering their way to the leaks I'll point you fools in the direction of some muthafuckin' new Animal Collective tracks from Strawberry Jam. Takes a bit to load exactly because of people like me linking to these mofos. Pick yr poison bitches.

ARR MATEYS

SHIVER ME TIMBERS

is it just me or does peacebone sound like a merry go round broke down?

strawberry jam is out in September and I already have a massive erection.

The Myspace Shuffle

2007-06-12T15:01:00.000-04:00

I came across Katrine Ottosen opening for some crappity crap band whose name I don't even remember. Actually the most likely weren't that crappity crap but following this beaooooooteeful tiny waif of a Copenhagian...Copenhagonian...Denmarkian...Dutch? lady was a stupid thing.

Most North European music I hear these days (The Fonal Records kids, Efterklang) capture the pastoral beauty of their snowy dark countries but most hedge the cities, burrowing below them or soaring above them but never walking through them at night. Ottosen's voice is a wisp that shivers down nighttime brick alleyways in the snow, alone, on the way to a dimly lit bar with a baby grand piano in the corner for a drink.

Do Your Trick drifts on sparse keyboard strokes, tiptoe percussive samples and lots of open space. You'll listen but when the song finishes you'll blink, look at the time and wonder where the past four minutes went. Thats not a bad thing, its like watching snow fall outside your window.

Katrine Ottosen - Do Your Trick

Flower in The Night on her myspace is a slowed down spy movie peering around corners and clutching the bottom of moving trucks. and right in the middle an Air-ish arpeggio rolls in a beat and the song escapes through the city. Listen up:

Katrine Ottosen's Myspace

Unfortunately she doesn't play in the US, let alone New York, very often but according to her myspace she will be playing Rockwood Music Hall in the Lower East Side in New York City on the Seventeenth. Check it.

Around and Around Again

2007-06-11T12:31:00.000-04:00

Welcome to Simian Mobile Disco's world. An amalgam of Scottish countryside, Iraq and the set of ROOTS. Apparently everyone in this world is a pedophile, even the thirteen year olds. Seriously: if you can't grow a mustache then just don't. However! if you look like you should have a wispy pencil thin mustache comprised entirely of your big brother's pube shavings (like everyone in this video) then rock that shit dawg. Its one or the other. And also, SMD, don't make everyone look so depressed! The only person having a good time in this video is that sixteen year old in the track suit spitting down his slutty older sister's throat.
(To quote a line from El Topo: "we are deformed because of the many years of incest")

Yes Yes! This song, I Believe, has the best hook I've heard in the synth-heavy euro-trash disco scene since Da Funk. Its got the kind of beat that is made for guys who pretend to ironically dance like they're constantly in STOMP! and wear trashcan lids on their feet except thats just a cover up because they're just bad-dancing white-ass dumps. ALSO! it is prime for the awkward How-low-can-you-go?! crab walk grind that some dudes still think is cool outside of eighth grade dances and bar mitzvah's. Those aside, this song is prime for the I'll-take-you-home-tonight deal sealing make out sesh on the dance floor. I'm down with that.

Simian Mobile Disco is comprised of James Ford, the producer for the latest Arctic Monkey's album and The Klaxons, and Jas Shaw who, um, is in Simian Mobile Disco. This is from their new album Attack Decay Sustain Release due out June 18 which, by the by, is being streamed on the SMD website.

anyhoo: the first single from the album is a song called 'It's The Beat' featuring Ninja from The Go! Team who consistently tells the listener that the beat is the part of the song that one must vigorously shake one's body to. R2D2, fresh from being repeatedly beaten onstage and recorded for Excepter's live streaming project, generously provides his hip-hop stylings as the hook to most of the song.

oh, Pitchfork beat me to the punch? fancy that.

BONUS: listen to the excepter streams at the same time as SMD's album stream on their website if you want to add a little Tapatio to your euro-techno. It works surprisingly well, kinda like apples and cigarettes.

the only state's name that wasn't taken by a band

2007-06-08T16:12:00.000-04:00

When I think of certain decades I have a sort of synaesthetic response. Its not so much that the 80's makes me think of gloworms, popples, Care Bears and/or unchecked AIDS epidemics. Rather, I think of various shapes and colors and sounds, each falling into place like colors on a Rubik's cube.

The early ninties were neons, Cherokee brand acid washed daisy dukes for boys and of course Big Dogs clothing: ergonomically designed to conceal FUPAs and forcefully exhume the most decayed cultural memes, print their corpses across mainsail sized t-shirts, and then piss in your eyeballs with whatever Dog pun pus they happened to concoct. Maybe this was a southern thing. that and Big Johnson T-shirts.

Anyhoo: I've been trying to determine what this decade, the aughts, will be remembered for? It seems the i-pod computer solids is the number one contender. All the dayglo klaxons tawdry-kaka thats coming into fashion now seems to be walking down that road. but there's a folk-art thing going too. a kind of earthy-tone, sea-foam green crayon running parallel to the Devendras and Newsoms. The very same seed that the "Dad beard explosion" has germinated from in the last few years. In other words it's cool to like The Band and CCR again so raid your attic for crackly old vinyl with your Dad's name written on the liner notes.

And thats where bands like Arizona are coming from these days. Arizona is an NYC band that likes to wear flannel and when you ask them why, they go "What?" and look around going "Get a-load of this guy" thumbs a-jabbin' at you. Their songs are catchy and lovely and carry around hatchets and corn-cob pipes. Check oot their myspace page because they are very very unsigned but if they stick around I bet they'll be puttin out some good stuff.

Te Amo Tanto sounds like Neil Young singing on a Grateful Dead track with a little help from Derek and The Dominoes. Check it.

Arizona's myspace page.

A Not So Brief Hiatus

2007-06-05T11:37:00.001-04:00

Alright don't be jerks now. I'm sorry. bloggy and I just had to be apart for a little while. I'll take you to a baseball game and buy you a hot dog to prove that I still love you.

anyhoo: I saw Animal Collective (just to prove how much I love them I come out of hibernation because of them) last Friday at the South Street seaport where the whole set was gorgeous and wonderful yada yada yada. Then they played this incredibly blissed out gem that even got the tiny little baby hipsters all around me moving their hips a little more than the alloted one inch diameter that separates disinterest from actual bona-fide dancing.

I have found, however, that this song will not be on Strawberry Jam and was apparently written several weeks before the show!!! DAMN DAMN YOU FATES!!! also apparently everyone on youtube is a dummy because no one got the whole song. It sounds like it was penned by Panda Bear on account of the harmonies and melody is so fucking strong but I could be wrong about that. let us piece it together, together, like a family again.

as soon as Avey Tare stops screaming and the samba egg starts coming in get ready to click the next one. They're not quite perfect but you'll get the idea of how it felt to be in the audience for this song.

aaaaaaand click!

AMIRITE AMIRITE!!!!! HOLY MOTHER OF GOD I'VE GOT TO INVENT A TIME MACHINE!!!

fans are dubbing this song You Got The Will To Joy which doesn't make any damn sense, but hell if I care what Panda and Avey are saying. they're not really that kind of band now are they? I'd call it Bliss Conniption. or maybe Grandeurysm. oh god. and thats the ball game.

Dan Deacon

2007-04-29T10:47:00.000-04:00

Browsing Brooklyn Vegan yesterday led me to a young chap by the name of Dan Deacon, as you can see from the video above he's out of his fucking mind and writes music that is the soundtrack to tea parties on the ceiling. He hangs out with the dudes of Ecstatic Sunshine in that Baltimore crowd.

He has a new album coming out this year on May 8 called Spiderman of the Rings. It's like Tamborello from Dntel decided to eat a bunch of crazy berries off the awesome bush. The lyrics make less sense than a meat loaf sandwich.

here's "Wham City" which is indeed long but worth the listen at least for the absurdly catchy middle part.

and here's Crystal Cat the closest thing to a dance track on the album.

gonna get my pants suit on?

Backpedaling

2007-04-27T10:46:00.000-04:00

Let me say this and let me say this real fast so that all you stupid people with pipes through your Broca's area will get it: I hated The Arcade fire. *GASP* what? How could anyone hate The Arcade Fire? Thats like hating America. or *GULP* loving terrorism!

Cool your rocket-skates there, Ashcroft, and look at me with both eyes. I will now, readers, stoop to all of your vomitous, poor tastes at tell you that, yes, I am a convert to the church of the Neon Bible. Now, before you pull out the bathing suits and streamers and Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil filled kiddie pools, I must tell you that I still dislike The Arcade Fire's first album Funeral and wish it were dead.

I'm not one of those assholes who dislikes something based on overhype. If anything I'd be the first to jump into that pit of rabid Tyra Bankses if someone told me it was cool. But the first Arcade Fire album, to me, sounds like a very very fat man blocking one of those moving sidewalks in an airport. Multiply that by ten songs and add Win Butler's stupid warble and you've got something that I find exceedingly more mediocre that people give it credit for.

Actually, that I find the songs mediocre even though I find them overbearing really attests to the arrangements themselves. I must give AF my commendations on penning songs whose forefingers are all pointing in the same direction. Truly, though, the new album changes directions ever so slightly enough, that I find myself enjoying their sounds.

The songs on Neon Bible sound either like a flick of the wrist or a full bombardment but never, in my opinion, sound like they're slapping me in the face with their "indyness." Neon Bible sounds more like they're juggling on a unicyle on a tightrope to me, a good thing. Theres a tautness about it that I find more appealing that Funeral's un-tautness. and a dark, monastic, cloistered feel to it. Theres more storm. The windows are a little more tinted this time around. and Win Butler's voice is lower in the mix, less'n he sings like Springsteen. Thats just fine with me:

Theres more uncertainty here I feel, because each song is more timid in approaching an answer than their last album. The cathartic and sublime (and predictable) endings in Funeral are replaced in Neon Bible by an obscuring deepness of sound most visible, I think, in (Antichrist Television Blues).

and of course intervention, the single, punches you in the face first thing with a fucking full organ. This song fulfills every tenet I've laid down for this album. It really couldn't possibly be a member of Funeral's repertoire, its far too tinted to allow us any sort of relief from it's bombardment, which I find much more appealing than the heart-on-the-coffee-table sounds of Funeral.

unfortunately this crapfest comes after it:

yes, I dislike the first half of this song, but get through the first two minutes of the festival of crap and the end finds itself as the darkest and most revealing Butler allows himself to get on Neon Bible.

"Theres a great black wave in the middle of the sea."

No Brakes on Life

2007-04-26T08:08:00.000-04:00

Its so funny how easy it is to forget about certain things.

This week has been The Dismemberment Plan in all of their iterations. Yesterday consisted of me listening to a couple D Plan albums on repeat. D Plan is not a huge thing in NYC which is so strange coming from Virginia because, well, if you don't like D Plan in Virginia you're pretty much banished.

Truth is it took me a while to get used to the idiosyncrasies in The D Plan's music. Its funny to watch those idiosyncrasies through D Plan's career, from "!" through "Is Terrified" and "Emergency and I" one can really hear each individual member's personal style coagulating from the hit you with a frying pan sound of "!" into the subtle weirdness of Emergency and I. Seriously check it out:

"!" is a pretty mediocre album that is telling of what the D Plan would become. but upon first listen its easy to notice how low the vocals are in the mix and how much the bass sounds like a fucking howitzer. Mixing must have been such a difficult task for D Plan througout their career since each member is fighting each other member for singularity of style but thats what makes the sound work so well. They're a unit that consistently sounds about to explode and the more subtle they were able to make that explosion sound, the better their albums were.

so anyhow here's the first song off of D Plan's first album called Survey Says:

now check out Is Terrified when they started to figure something out about their DC roots or something, and Travis Morrison found out about falsetto. Actually the song is pretty standard guitar rock during the chorus, but check out the synth and drums verses and post chorus.

And then of course Emergency and I when they managed to hone their sound to as sharp as it would ever be. I suppose The City is a bad example but its just such a great song that I can't pass up putting it on here.

and then maybe a little after that comes the Juno/D Plan split where the D plan released their biggest booty shakin' song, "The D ismemberment Plan Gets Rich" that I feel magnificently condenses their raucous premergency and I sound with the sharpness but ultimately too condensed sounds of Change.

god that song is so fucking great. shook my ass to that song on stage w/ D Plan at their last show (not their post-breakup last shows).

Chuck Brown and The Soul Searchers

2007-04-20T10:57:00.000-04:00

Chuck Brown is to Go-Go music as the 4th duke of sandwich is to modern eating trends. What is Go-Go music you ask? Well Go-Go is a variation of Funk music developed in Washington DC by none other than Mr. Chuck Brown. The beats are typically laid back in a 4/4 signature with conga percussion beside a regular drum set. Sometimes it verges on a reggae-like or calypso percussion because of the syncopation. Also! The songs tend to bleed into one another so as to keep people shakin' they asses. Shows run very long because the artists work an element of jazz in there too, noodling around whatever foundation the song has laid down. Lyrics are sparse too, smidgeoned between keyboards and horns they are typically ad-libbed, call and response or just a repeated phrase.

Interestingly, because the music focuses on the live it seems like there are a lot of references to popular culture thrown in for almost no reason at all. For example when I saw Chuck Brown last night at Joe's Pub he worked in the Godfather theme as well as the Woody Woodpecker theme. and it was clear that the band and he had practiced it and worked it in beforehand because the three brass and two keyboardists all flowed through it perfectly. An intriguing bit of post-modern appropriation if you ask me. I would imagine theres a little bit of re-appropriation in the genre as well, but none of the songs last night "sampled", if you will, any tunes that could be poignantly deconstructed and I'm not familiar enough with live performances of Go-Go to say one way or the other.

Or this is just the last vestiges of my academic self, having crystallized into a kidney stone like obstruction, being pissed out onto this webpage. How many licks to the center of self-deprecation? one. Ah ta-hooo. Ah Three. The world may never know.

Brown basically just took his funk band in the 70s and completely and decisively created a new genre that people could dance to for a solid two hours straight. Thats right, fuck Pilates and swishy, neon track suits (okay, those can stay). Head to the 9:30 Club in DC which he apparently plays on a semi-regular basis and you'll see what I'm talking about.

He also has a new album coming out soon which apparently has some hip-hop influences on it. (he did have his daughter come on stage and do a little rappin' which sounded great) All in all imagine Go-Go as a kind of Funk paella that you can put anything delicious in and it'll taste just fine.

Heres Chuck Brown's big hit "bustin' Loose" from the album of the same title.

and another Go-Go band called Rare Essence for your listening pleasure

Also: get a load of Chuck Brown he is AMAZING!!!!

100th post!

2007-04-17T14:38:00.000-04:00

Well, this is my 100th post. huzzah.

Anyhow lets get back to the crux of the music here. I recently found my old copies of Black Eyes self-titled and "Cough" Black Eyes were an awesome post-hardcore band on Dischord that Mother nature herself prevented me from seeing. Q And Not U was all like "we'll play at your school" and Black Eyes was touring with them and everyone got psyched because it had been a good year for music at University of Mary Washington (Rilo Kiley, Schatzi, Denali [actually they sucked]), but damn!!!!!!! it snowed. Of course I had many a time to see Q and Not U in the following years (as they became one of my fave bands) but Black Eyes eluded me and eventually essploded into a mess of instruments; the players shed from their musical coils and into record labels and perhaps even (shudder) retail jobs.

No matter. They made some yummy music in their time.

This is Pack of Wolves from their self titled debut on Dischord. Sometimes listening to it kind of feels like swallowing a full grown undeclawed cat, but you'll get over it once the digestive juices kick in. They've got two drum sets, two basses, two singers and they're joined at the hip by one guitar.

See what I mean? Pack of Wolves is a big fucking shrilly mess and its great.
I mean, they're not exactly Engelbert Humperdinck which is a crime. I mean it should be a crime that everybody is not Engelbert Humperdinck. Heh, Humperdinck.

Black Eyes, like I said, essploded into a gigantic mess right before their second and final album called "Cough" which is a combination of seventies no-wave, free-jazz, post-hardcore and noise. What a mess. I rushed out to buy this album at the local (and now essploded as well) independent record store in Fredericksburg,VA. I made sure to listen first and was so perturbed and disgusted by Black Eyes' new sound that I listened to the whole album. Sitting there amidst the Pavement, Bjork and Sonic Youth posters and kitschy seventies Humperdinck lamps I heard an album so distraught with a bands collapse that I consciously thought to myself "Self! this album is a level above you. You're not ready for it yet." (I wish I had that kind of foresight when I tried to read Chaucer again the other night).

Well I don't know what has happened to me since then. Perhaps I got bored of how music sounds and started expanding the borders of my musical country into uncharted territory. My compass has lost its magnetism, my maps tattered scrolls exhumed from the vaults of Wikipedia, my metaphorical supplies running low. Perhaps I've bathed my veynes in swich licour a little too much, because now I feel comfortable in territories I was uncomfortable in some time ago. Maybe I feel comfortable in a band clapping and screaming into a microphone, sliding their guitars up and around and down through the pits of aural heck, and calling that a song.

Regardless, here is "drums" arguably the most songy of the songs on "Cough" by Black Eyes.

Of course, I prefer Fathers of Daughters for its visceral slap to the face and samba whistles? Yes, it hurts so beautiful. but for some reason I can't get imeem to accept it so I'll just post Eternal Life instead. Another crushing blow to melody.

anyway, pick up a copy at Dischord

also make sure to check out the stycast for six degrees #6 which is going up on Wednesday around two or three.

The Point by Harry Nilsson part 3

2007-04-13T11:23:00.000-04:00

This is the third installment for my Harry Nilsson shrine, bewreathed and candled as if I were the celebrant raising this cup of youtube above my head and offering it to you, my readers. This is the part of the service where the kids are getting antsy, the blessing is nearly done:

"Take. Eat. This is my youtube which is given for you, do this in remembrance of Nilsson."

Unfortunately! The videos are craptacular. Oh well, at least it gets the point across (seriously, no pun intended there. I'm not even that lame)

So, anyhow, this song is called Life Line and its probably the prettiest song on the album with descending harp plucks, a lilting melody that is echoed by a bunch of Nilssons and flutes that sound sampled but I'm not so sure about that one.

I'm particularly impressed with the simplicity of the vocal dynamics versus the harmonies, not so much in the album version but this alternate take from the 2002 remastered album. One can really appreciate the writing process when Nilsson plays the song solo on the piano with only a couple of backing vocalists and an organ in there too.

The video is strange and takes place in the narrative immediately before Oblio and Arrow (the boy and his dog) begin walking through a forest of not so subtle vaginal openings disguised to look like some kind of weird foliage. This is particularly interesting because the vaginal imagery begins when this song plays, and its pretty easy to spot. I wasn't entirely sold on the notion that the giant pit Oblio looks into is vaginal until I saw the two droplets of white "tears" fall into the pit. Am I insane? let me know if I'm insane, cause I don't really see the video in any other way now.

Criticals Metrics

2007-04-11T20:02:00.000-04:00

Critical Metrics is a new website that I've been visiting. Check it out herre. You might as well add this to your bookmarks folder or sidebar on your blog because this shit is going to blow the fuck up (and if it doesn't I think there is something seriously wrong with the internet).

You'll figure it out as soon as you get there because the website design is impeccably um designed but I'll tell you what it does anyway. Essentially the site is a music review aggregator. They'll take small snips of articles from a bunch of important music websites (and unimportant ones [blender, eugghh]) that positively describe recent individual songs. One can listen to the songs themselves and put them on a playlist. So basically its like the hype machine except it doesn't completely remove all importance from the writing and actually supports the binary between positive and negative reviews (ew, I just used the word binary and was okay with it. it really has been a year since school ended) which is a good thing.

On another note everyone should check out the new Bright Eyes single (which I have embedded below, hee hee). And I'm serious about everyone because the single is fantastic, even if you're a naysayer from his past albums. Okay, maybe he is a teensy bit heavy handed, and okay maybe his voice is kinda shitty, and okay maybe he is really really really heavy handed sometimes. but goddamn the boy can write a song!

so check these bad boys out

Cassadaga - Four Winds

Lifted or the story is in the soil, so keep your ear to the groud - False Advertising

Lifted or the story is in the soil, so keep your ear to the groud - Lets Not Shit Ourselvs (To Love and be Loved)

I'm Wide Awake Its Morning - Poison Oak

I'm Wide Awake its Morning - At The Bottom Of Everything

Fevers And Mirrors - Something Vague

enjoy!

sucks

2007-04-11T08:18:00.000-04:00

So Johnny Cash's house burned down. damn.

anyway-oh here is my new stycast: six degrees #5

NIN

2007-04-07T11:50:00.000-04:00

I've never been a big NIN fan but the new album sounds pretty good. Stream all of it herre.

paucity of brains, overload of drones

2007-04-06T21:34:00.001-04:00

Last night I went to studio B to catch Lesbians on Ecstasy. It was a pretty mediocre evening for music all around in my opinion, but then again, I'm not a tiny little hipster lesbian. For you see the lesbians arrived in droves, stepping from their handsomely designed hipster pads overlooking McCarren par, crawling from the slime and muck of the gutters, springing forth from the goddess Diana's hunting lodge in the sky.

Now now now, my knowledge of little tiny lesbians is not simply tugboated along by The L Word or any other such nonsense. Nay I was tugboated along by an entourage of tiny little lesbians myself to catch a show and wait for more tiny little lesbians. All in all I'd call the evening "gay." and it was a very fun evening filled with laughter, emotions, danger, and too much dancing (and you thought that was impossible).

Unfortunately the first two acts seemed to have a hard time imagining the audience in their underwear. The first act was called Telepathe from the big BK, they were actually pretty cool deriving a lot of beat oriented material from, of all places, Liars. Check out Sinister Militia on their myspace and you'll see what I mean.

Now I love me some liars and what Liars makes up for in just-okay melodies they make up for in some really interesting sounds and song construction. Seemed to be the same case for Telepathe. Unfortunately for Telepathe it looked like their music was a little too underperformed by last night to have really won me over. Not that they have no shot in hell, at least I know about them now. And their drummer is cute (but alas, she didn't appear to like the boys). and their guitarist asked me for some "blow" in the bathroom. That's charisma that could win any erstwhile music critic over in a second.

The second act was a woman from England called No Bra. A tall skinny lady with, um, no brazierre on and, um, no shirt. Pretty good. She was petrified to be in New York for the first time and you could see the fear in the backs of her eyes. Some crazy electro shit.

once Lesbians on Ecstacy got on I probably wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between them and Girls on Crack, or from freakin' Celine Dion. Yes, I had a couple pairs of beer goggles on last night. I woke up this morning and my head felt like the screams of thousands of forlorn lottery losers crying out at once. My mouth tasted like a fifth grade Cafetorium floor. My stomach, a geyser.

but thank god for The Field and their amazing new album "From Here We Go Sublime." Imagine listening to drum'n'bass from inside of your mother's womb, thats what this album sounds like. Beautiful.

The Point by Harry Nilsson: part 2

2007-04-05T09:19:00.000-04:00

Here is a bit more of Nilsson's "The Point."

now now. Bear with me. Indulge Me. Turn your brain off. You see, I must expunge this psychadelia my parents left simmering in the crock pot of my soul. Think of this as a potluck of my body (its kinda like an acid doused Eucharist). Put your keys in the bowl (that part comes later, Mary Magdalene). We ain't going nowheres till I burn these images into your mind. Also! don't worry, there's only one more installment.

And hey it might do you some good to actually read what I'm saying once in a while.

So this is my favorite song on the album. Its called "Think About Your Troubles"<-- thats the mp3 - Unfortunately the recording of this song on youtube looks and sounds like a snuff film. A bad one at that. (I know my snuff films)

Anyhow, it starts with a delicious beat, beaten on a cowbell. Nilsson floats in with an orchestra of Andrew Birdesque pizzicato strings, a piccolo, and a clone who moans and adds pseudo-commentary over his shoulder. (Nilsson: "and soon this salty water" Nilsson's Clone: "not too good for drinkin" uh, thanks?)

The song is beautiful, but more important here is the imagery that accompanies it. Its about as strange as the imagery gets in the movie (and that includes the pointed village/castle, the purple and orange triangular citizens of the city, the pointed forest's blatant use of sexual imagery, the three flying fat ladies, the list goes on) Watch for the Uncle Sam reference, the Phallic reference, the Lite Brite reference. (props to Kitsch and Emily for the idears)

Perhaps because I'm in a house of scholars we decided that it would be a great idea to deconstruct the movie's imagery/themes etc. while we were watching it. Turns out that the movie is pretty fascinating when one considers all of the intersections of race/gender/class going on here. This movie has it all: the "magical negro," the intersexed child, the bourgeoisie elite. Its obvious that the boys club surrounding The Beatles was a bit misogynist, but watching this video makes it all too apparent that the early seventies were - lets put it this way - a period of transition.

Six Degrees #4

2007-04-04T17:03:00.000-04:00

one month! This one is about American soul/gospel/spirituals in the 20th century.

Six Degrees #4 on www.Stylusmagazine.com

give me a shout in the comments if you like it!

The Point by Harry Nilsson part 1

2007-04-02T09:47:00.000-04:00

Harry Nilsson, protege of Los Beatles and John Lennon's carousing partner while in LA, was a little bit of an acid tripping crazy pants. But, hey, who gives a care right?

The Point! was a record that he created in 1971 and later a movie narrated by Dustin Hoffman for ABC. Interesting though, later on the recorded version something legal happened and Ringo Starr added his voice as the narrator instead.

"I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it.'" -- Harry Nilsson

I mean, this quote pretty much explains the album as well as the movie. Trippy, awesome and out of it's mind. Of course everyone remembers the song "Me and My Arrow" if not directly then from Blackalicious' sampling of it in their song Blazing Arrow.

I'm amazed because nobody seems to have ever heard this album, and thats a crime, I love this album. Particularly because the movie was such a huge part of my childhood (I don't understand why, it must have been the closest thing to acid one could ever give to one's kids)

The songs are all fantastic, unfortunately the narrative of the album kind of gets annoying after a while. I can't imagine that I'd have the patience to listen to this on record when it first came out, which is most likely why this album wasn't very popular. But good god, its such a damn good album! The arrangements for a full string section, the beautiful arrangements for vocals surpass everything I've heard from Nilsson frankly and the songwriting doesn't really involve in a dialog with the plot at all and are simply love songs or break up songs ("and if we wake up just to break up/I'll carry on, oh yes I will" about his dog? I think not.)

2007-03-30T11:56:00.000-04:00

six degrees #3

This episode of six degrees traces Avant Garde composition all the way from Luigi Russolo, the Futurist noise composer in the early twentieth century, through Spacemen 3 in the late eighties and ninties.

Want to see the most amazing and terrifying thing ever?

2007-03-22T18:55:00.000-04:00

Just follow your mouse!

Its fun for the whole family! And also proof that we've gone so far as a society to bring back the centuries old art of the Paper doll to mock people who probably don't need any more mocking (or gawking in this case).

But this is also awesome, and I made one.

Six degrees #002

2007-03-22T00:20:00.000-04:00

So Stylus has just added my second edition to my podcast, Six Degrees. Huzzah!

Now go listen please or I'll start trying to lean over you and complain about The Family Circus when you're doing Sudoku.

If you haven't already

2007-03-21T13:53:00.000-04:00

seen the crayola commercial using Animal Collective's "Sweet Road" from Sung Tongs check it here

Avey Tare aparently responded to questions on the animal collective message board which I'm completely ripping from Shameless Complacency blog instead of the message board cause my pants are over-sodden with memberships to useless message boards anyway.

hey…

yes noah and i ok’d our song being in that commercial. They sent us a version so we could see it before hand and found it really funny and i checked up some on crayola just to make sure they werent that bad of a company which from the info i gathered seems like they are ok.

I wouldnt expect to be seeing our songs in too many other commercials. We are pretty careful about it. We turn down mostly everything (alot of beer commercials actually…always asking for sweet road…go figure) and dont feel the need to expose our music that way. This particualr instance seemed cool cause it invovled somthing for kids and somthing which had a big impact atleast on me when i was young, that being crayola markers and crayons.

cute guys. cute.

Spreadin' them wings

2007-03-20T19:09:00.000-04:00

I really have nothing today. I suppose I can talk about the shows I've been seeing recently such as LAURIE ANDERSON AND LOU REED at Joe's Pub. I was a very happy camper. Laurie Anderson is as lovely as ever and a really nice lady and Lou, well, he was old.

The show itself was pretty good. Laurie Anderson played mostly new material from her forthcoming album, it was surprisingly more ambient than her typical stuff. It retained her humorous spoken observations, though.

Kitsch, my hetero life partner, noted that much of the material sounded dated a sentiment I concur with, although I'm not sure what to do with that. I'm not sure how to go about criticizing two living legends on stage together. Saying they sound "dated" is like saying the Empire state building looks dated, its true but you can't really argue either way. Now if the Empire State Building stopped doing what it does best, which is to be tall, then we'd have a problem.

Its always good to see living legends.

We All Have Hooks For Hands

2007-03-17T17:09:00.000-04:00

I'm a sucker for catchy. I've been known to say that Creed is catchy. (ith ahhwmms wahd ohhpeaghn) I'm also a sucker for twee.

I'm a moderate fan of The Boy Least Likely To, I like their birthday cake aesthetic, their Gramma's music trunk in the attic aesthetic.

So while browsing through Chicago's Afternoon Records website I stumbled upon a magical little band called "We All Have Hooks For Hands" a very new band that has yet to release its debut album but put up an awesome song called "Hold On, Come On" that drinks from the same tap as The Arcade Fire and the icing-balloons of The Boy Least Likely To.

I want to see these guys live, be the jumping singing-along drunk in the corner and then go have really cute make out session with a girl in a cat sweater.

We All Have Hooks For Hands - "Hold On, C'mon"

L. Diamond

2007-03-16T16:59:00.000-04:00

The New Yorker called Becky Stark a "Less florid Tori Amos" Sure. I call her a cutie pie and so is her music. Actually sometimes its a little bit too cutie pie and sounds like an Eastertime marshmallow Peep that got burped out by a bunny on a Broadway stage.

here's more from the New Yorker "Her words and topics are neither obscure nor figurative: the heart, and love, are the main subjects of the upcoming Lavender Diamond album imagine our love..."

but she sounds like she's having such a darn good time, kind of like John K. Samson of the weakerthans always sounds like he's got a smile on his face and that makes me feel warm.

The real draw behind Lavender Diamond is that their music doesn't really fall into a category at all. I mean, its indie pop, but its not like you'd take this onto a dancefloor, unless you're as into prancing in flowy pastel dresses as I am.

Truly, though, everything about this music should make me angry and vomitous. If I wanted to listen to pretty acoustic sing-alongs I'd grow a Youth group leader goatee and work at a summer camp.

check out the best track on the EPhere

and here's one for all the stupid babies:

Six degrees #001

2007-03-15T09:51:00.000-04:00

Yes friends, I have officially written a podcast for Stylusmagazine.com

Its pretty hott. I think I'm going to continue to do them because, well, why wouldn't I?

Its kind of a pain in the ass but its not all bad thanks to Wikipedia and Allmusic.

Stypod!!!

Unfortunately for this one I merely wrote the script and the mix. In the future I hope to do it myself. Give me feedback.

Sami Sänpäkkilä

2007-03-13T20:03:00.000-04:00

Alex brought home a li'l Finnish comp by Fonal records the other day. Once upon a time I may have said something to the degree of "this sounds like the faint played slow and backwards" These days, these days I've taken on that squall of sonic experimentation that Alex once represented to me and I've sailed straight through it leaving a Cap'n Guthrie shaped hole behind. I've been dubbed "the new Alex" by Ms. Sarah Appleby, musically at least. I hardly have a Masters in some useless ka-ka. Nay. I have a Masters of the Universe.

I'll take that Sarah. I'll take that.

So! Here we we we are. In Finland. Um. Theres lots of hot blonde people, lots of beard, lots of reeds. I feel like there are a lot of reeds in Finland.

The music is great for the most part. Trekking between dark laptop psych-folk and distinct eastern European gypsy sounds Fonal records seems to have itself a nice li'l package here.

And you thought the only good thing to come out of Northeast Europe was Black Metal and genocide. HA!

Es is the name Sami Sänpäkkilä (ow, my tongue) has given himself and his dark, ambient looping project. Les Fleurs Sont Des Bonnes Auditrices is so simple it could beat up Nancy Reagan's anti-drug slogan team and have room left over for a "book it" pizza party afterwards.

The rubato piano loop over crackling, creepy sing-songing voices and the occasional thunderclouds made of zeros and ones in the distance will brand themselves on your brain. I can't stop listening to it, its so very subtle.

Es - Les Fleurs Sont Des Bonnes Auditrices

Sami also does a little bit of video work (most of his music is designed for his videos) but he also works with other fonal records people including Risto, a pretty decent indie pop band with nonchalant singer and everything. but theres more cred here because they're singing in a different language!

check the Rakkauden Rock vid:

A certain someone

2007-03-08T13:55:00.000-05:00

A certain someone dear to my heart (and internship) has directed me to this video because, and I quote, I am "a panda bear." cute. I wish I was some days, then I wouldnt have to blog.

yes yes, it is most certainly panda in his most strangeness of being and I think that dude in the shower works at other music. no idea about that cat though. mr twinkles? thats what I've dubbed him.

Anyhow I don't really think this fits the mood of the song, but its ok, music videos are old hat anyway. Also, the song is shortened, clearly 12 minutes of song is too long for the youtube elite. I mean, 12 minutes is too long for me too, unless I'm listning to Bros.

anyhow, enjoy it.

haha ha

2007-02-16T15:24:00.001-05:00

I got a scanner!

2007-02-05T19:57:00.000-05:00

apples in mono

2007-02-01T12:04:00.000-05:00

Birdy and the Squirrel Nut Zippers

2007-01-31T23:56:00.000-05:00

Have I gushed over Andrew Bird to you yet? I did? When was that? Is it about time again? sure it is.

Unfortunately, I missed his show when he visited this old mealy apple I'm living in currently. I noted this, whiningly, to one of my coworkers who was quick to reply "Andrew Bird? why, he plays here from time to time, don't worry you'll see him"

I promptly did not believe her out of jealous spite. but through the darkened shadows of my subconscious I began to realize how oh so wonderfully true that statement could be. For you see, Joe's Pub spanks the shit out of the singer/songwriter clan. and who else's photo to be next to singer/songwriter in the OED than one A. Bird?

Oh, there are others? I wasn't aware.

Truth is, I have a soft spot for our contemporary boy wonders like Bird, Timbaland, Patrick Wolf and that guy from Beirut. I know not why. During the gestation of each song I imagine them kneeling before an insidious, musty tome in a heavycurtained library; poring over its strange markings with an eyeglass. I find very appealing musicians that can construct and construct a measure of pop music like the grammar of a sentence.

Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs was one of my favorite albums of 2005. It was mostly an impregnable chestpiece of fluid pop. With, albeit, a few links missing. Nevertheless, its highs blew Sufjan out of the water with gale force winds and a surprising longevity.

Particularly A Nervous Tick Motion Of The Head To The Left with its dark, perpetual Rube Goldberg beat and prairie whistle hook. His words are always precise, incisious.

It may be prudent, now, to mention his former career as a quote honorary member unquote of that awesomer-than-you-remember band The Squirrel Nut Zippers. As long as you can detach that dreadful taste that the late Ninties swing fad left like a re-used zip-lock, you're golden. Who, by the way, are...back? Apparently they're going back on tour according to their wiki, their site, and this preposterously shitty Digg entry. Check out their sinister stomp-thump, bass sax (you know I like bass sax), pocketwatch twirling, song Bad Businessman. and of course everyones favorite, "hell," is on their myspace, to which I will direct you ah-here.

By the way, Man Man is the same band. They just have a shitton more hipster irony. and more top-hat.

So I got ahold of Oh! The Grandeur! by Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire (thats pre-"Andrew Bird" Andrew Bird), which I hadn't bothered to listen to because I'm a chump, apparently. Go back and find this shit, particularly the jumpy, smoky, cat-gut strings of Vidalia. Or, essentially the same song but with more pizzicato and KALAMZOO! type vaudeville moustache, Feetlips.

Anyhow, Bird has announced his next album, and it, like the rotating of the earth or the hilariousness of the elderly, leaked a tad bit ago. "More Cowbell" posted a track called "Heretics" off of Bird's next album called "Armchair Apocrypha" here. But shhhhhh! Stereogum had to take theirs down, so keep mum about this.

I'm actually not a big fan of the track, its a little more down the ruh-ruh-ruh-rock avenue than down the hodge-podge structure of Mysterious production of eggs. But I sure do love them pizzicato strings, birdy m'boy.

I'm looking forward to this one, heres hoping it isn't a fixin'less baked potato.
___________________________
Link O' Rama
___________________________

Rest in peace Northsix, I only went to a couple of your shows but you were a pretty bitchin' venue. Sucks about that ConEd.

Also, Luis Guzman is doing cheese commercials now? WHAT? Its like watching a second trimester abortion.

Also: Pretty Girls Make Graves are not my favorite band but... its like a thousand (four hundred) voices crying out, a ripple in the force, when a big act kaputzes.

However, taking their place is yet another matador band with a stupid name (Okay, Matmos is cool): Lavender Diamond. They sound like a circa "Let It Be" Beatles cover band gone wild and writing their own songs, with strawberry cream-cheese spread and Julie Andrews singing lead vocals. and the sounds they make are pretty good.

Lavender Diamond - You Broke My Heart

Get ready to de-holster your Jenny Lewis comparisons.

- im out

JFK!!!!!

2007-01-31T01:24:00.000-05:00

okay so Neely is clearly a genius. First it was Washington Washington, the low-bassed, heavy sex breathed funk comedy gold. Now its the, Casio bassed, fast drum looped thump fest with a droning vocal hook.

God Neely is a fucking genius.

And thats what I think about that!

2007-01-31T00:46:00.000-05:00

In other words: the new explosions in the sky is good, but it also sounds like ummmm.... all the other explosions in the sky albums.

slept in

2007-01-30T12:06:00.000-05:00

Take Pills

2007-01-29T10:26:00.000-05:00

I feel confident to say that Animal Collective is the closest thing to a favorite band that I have right now. Now I don't exactly know what the criteria is for a favorite band, because the last favorite band I was willing to venture from my little obscure musical woodland camp was Radiohead, but only because of Kid A and several songs from OK Computer and the ones after that (Bends and Pablo Honey? Oi! Out!) and I let their importance in my life wane and expire several years ago now.

My adventurousness and willingness to use flag symbols to communicate my sequestered musical tastes have changed with the time and the constant influx of music; very rarely do I venture a "favorite band" anymore without a schoolgirlish grin and a downnosed shoescuffle. In other words, AC blows my mind with just about everything they do. And that holds very true for Panda Bear's new album "Person Pitch."

The blogosphere has been bloated with Panda praise like swimming trunks coming out of a pool so I'll just add my two cents and shut the hell up. Person Pitch is most likely going to be one of my favorite albums of the year, assuming The Arcade Fire doesn't pull my ears off and jam them up my nostrils with a hot pitchfork (they won't).

Sounding like it was recorded in a subway stop, intentionally so I'd imagine counting the number of subway/train samples Panda Bear uses, the drone/echo factor here is, on a scale from one to echo, way off the fucking charts. But thats a good thing, don't let it scare you, Panda uses delay like Bob Ross uses afro. deftly. And if "Young Prayer" didn't convince you that Panda Bear had a natural affinity for beautiful melodies then you might want to think about turning up that hearing aide, Dad.

Take Pills starts with a strangely beated, but on beat, loop of a subway car passing, and slowly a few instruments smolder their way through beneath Panda Bear's mournful tune from way down one of the subway tunnels. And then your trains stops at a stop and here he comes down the track with a full parade of echoing, harmonizing himselfs playing one of the greatest and most joyous melodies I've ever heard that babbles its way down the scale. And as soon as it starts the doors shut and your train moves on, and you turn back to reading the onion.

Panda Bear - Take Pills

Heres a couple from Gorilla Vs. Bear

Panda Bear - Bros

Panda Bear - Comfy in Nautica

- Signing out

Person Pitch

2007-01-28T15:38:00.000-05:00

Nihilists With Good Imaginations

2007-01-28T12:05:00.000-05:00

Upon listening to the new Of Montreal album (yes I'm a blogging cliche) I find myself being drawn to the darker, more emotionally convoluted songs on the album than the poppier, albeit still emotionally convoluted, songs. If you haven't heard it I suggest doing the hearing because its a fantastic album. Much more easy to listen to completely than Sunlandic Twins or Satanic Panic.

That latter album I enjoy, but towards the middle I start to lose interest. Somewhere around the treacly city bird. Nevertheless! Satanic Panic has my (and most people's) fav O' Montreal track: Lysergic Bliss.

The compositional chops of that song sticks me with a bayonet, twists it, and throws me out the side of Kevin Barnes' technicolored parapet. Its impossible to resist such an intelligently executed vocal arrangement that manages to both hearken back to the beach boys and still break from the inexplicable botulistic paralysis the boys manage to hold over vocal arrangements in rock music to this day. Barnes did a bit on Sunlandic Twins as well, not as impressively as Satanic Panic, but well enough.

The new album, however, does not utilize as much of those crrrraaazy vocals that I laud Of Montreal for. actually, Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer is the album that the second half of The Sunlandic Twins merely mentioned in passing. It's more of an off-broadway phantom of the opera gig than the productions of their past. Dark twisting pipes, silly but affecting lyrics, constant and chugging riffage: they sound like
pyrotechnics/swinging chandelier/gasping audience on this album. But its all smoke and mirrors deflecting, and thus drawing, attention to Barnes' depression and crumbling marriage. but there is a whole lot more beneath the surface than the music ia initially willing to reveal, and so it is more rewarding than Andrew Lloyd Weber's entire catalogue, except maybe cats.

Enough of that hubub, bub - The following is one of my favorite tracks off of the new album because it is really the only one that draws up bridge blueprints between the band circa Satanic Panic, an exit at "Wraith Pinned to the Mist" on Sunlandic Twins, and now. Those vocals I said were missing from this album are in full force here, though not as impressively helixed as lysergic bliss, they do their job, they do. actually, a good majority of the music here is Barnes' voice, a humpty dumpty bass, a drum track and a few paper-football keyboard flicks.

Listen:
Of Montreal - Gronlandic Edit

Its kind of a crime to post this song and leave out the following two tracks, considering they're all cogs in a three part Spacely sprocket machine. Especially the long and heartbeating centerpiece of the album "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal." but I'm doing my best here dammit. Just go out and buy the album.

Of Montreal

Brooklyn vs. DC

2007-01-27T13:43:00.000-05:00

I managed to foist a ticket to Deerhoof last night from my compatriot in Pub, J. Seroff of Tofu Hut. Its good to know people in internet places.

Unfortunately I missed the first show by the as of now unsigned band Proton Proton, who, my other compatriot in pub, Grace, assured me was one of her favorite unsigned bands from Brooklyn. Afterwards she gave me the Proton Proton EP being sold at the show, a dischordant mess that swirls and discharges and reunifies all within the same song.

I, like the David Karesh I am, lead you into the compound where Proton Proton offers their riff driven punch. Plates begins with overdriven harmonics and an
ex models-esque guitar zapcrunch on the alternating beats, and, like I said, starts and stops on several dimes.

Sand seems to be more the direction Proton Proton wants to go, and, though it is a sloppier song in its construction, it seems like they are a bit more confident in the performance itself. The two guitars jump back and forth between speakers answering each other until it breaks down into an all out riff jam in the middle.

Listen:
Proton Proton - Plates

Listen:
Proton Proton - Sand

But wait there's more!

I do not mention Proton Proton because I think they are particularly awesome. I do indeed think they are going somewhere smart, but only in the ephemeral way I once wondered at the couple who attained "most likely to succeed" status in highschool. Nay, I bring up Proton Proton because they are indicative of this sound coming out of Brooklyn. A dischordant mish-mash, and I do not use dischordant lightly.

DC is the king of Dischord for obvious reasons. Fugazi not being the least of them. but, as of late, Dischord has been a bit lacking in the, well, dischord. I've seen The Aquarium several times because they happened to play several shows with a friend's band. Not Dischordant. The Evens, Ian Mackaye's political acouso-folk band is kind of a bore (search your feelings, you know it to be true). Also not dischordant. In fact, the only band not atypically Dischord to come out recently, Antelope (former members of el guapo, the song is called goggles, I kinda like it don't you?), sounds like Fugazi w/ nutri-sweet and a lime.

So what is the summation of all of these links and proclamations? Well, I'm not claiming that the DC music scene is dead or anything even remotely like that, its just...going through some phases, some changes, growing little budding bosoms. And who can blame them? DC's BMOC, MacKaye is reaching his mid forties(!!!). He's no longer the virile young hellian he once was. Who's going to take over, Dave Smalley? The Former singer of Dag Nasty? The guy who runs ConservativePunk.com and has a fucking hummer?? yeah. sure.

So, the gap. Is there a gap? Probably not. At least none big enough that anyone would care about filling it. Brooklyn certainly doesn't claim to fill it, and I'm not claiming that Brooklyn does, but there is a definite analogousness between the DC sound and the Brooklyn sound of bands like Ex Models, Excepter, Proton Proton, Pterodactyl and even Grizzly Bear.

Its the discordance, the flippant lack-of-structure, and a splash of darkness. But there is something else that differentiates the two. perhaps its the direct, or indirect, political nature of DC's scene. and the lack thereof in Brooklyn. but that focus, though important, is not a specifically aesthetic one.

Fascinating, then, that New York does not have the same consistency maker as a single, and singular, label, run, basically, by the creators of the scene and the sound(i.e. Fugazi).

Actually, very much like their counterpart cities, Brooklyn's indie scene swirls and changes with a dark, spacious, but fluid sound and DC's is more angular, more visceral, more immediate. The overall spacious, dark, fluidity of New York's streets seem to tug it's gaudy, bleak, barge-like art scene behind them. and Brooklyn watches and waits, a little to the side, and describes that in it's music. DC is small, jagged, easy to get lost in, and full of laws (both in action in the city, and in utero for the country).

Of course, these comparisons rely upon the flimsy, one dimensional pyramid of speculation. I wish it were that easy to describe a scene in a few words, and there are clear omissions. but hey, I can always fall back on the notion that nobody actually reads all of my posts all the way through! I'm golden!

-cap'n guthrie out

Justice Fruit Pies aka my celebrity mix

2007-01-26T18:11:00.000-05:00

click: listen while reading.

I've been sitting in my own head for a while, thinking and staring at an idea, with that expression that every kid has on the packaging for a rock tumbler , and thinking to myself: yes! yes! why not?!

Well the time has come. I am currently in the process of making a celebrity mix. Right?

The idea is this: Justin Timberlake, though talented, probably doesn't listen to a wide variety of music, if any at all. He probably listens to himself like GOB on Arrested Development, come to think of it. 'course, if I was JT I'd do the same thing, and I'd probably be doing it with a lot more people.

I'm carrying around said mix in my bag from here on out and I'm going to give it to any celebrities I see, regardless of who they are. Imagine the possibilities! There probably are none, none possibilities, but imagine them anyway.

I saw Michael Showalter at Union sq a couple of days ago, he was just hangin out, and I kicked my own ass because I didn't have the mix. I also saw Mos Def at the Amy Winehouse show, and I kicked my own ass because I didn't have the mix again.

I mean, if some random dude came up to me and said "I have made a mix for you, sir" and then T-1000'd back into the crowd, I'd probably listen to it. Wouldn't you? Not to mention! If the person put their email address on it wouldn't you email them? no, neither would I. Thats why I'll probably not put my email address on it. That would just be creepy.

Not saying that this isn't phenomenally creepy anyway.

here's the tracklist:

1.) Les Primitif Du Futur - Fox Muesette
2.) Girl Talk - Friday Night
3.) Hank Williams - The Honkytonk Blues
4.) My Chemical Romance - Dead!
5.) Destroyer - Your Blood
6.) Aesop Rock - Daylight
7.) Junior Boys - Double Shadow
8.) TV on the Radio - I Was a Lover
9.) Amy Winehouse - Back To Black
10.) Velvet Underground - Who Loves the Sun
11.) Kasai Allstars - Kabuangoyi
12.) Pavement - Father to a Sister of Thought
13.) Grizzly Bear - On a Neck, on a Spit
14.) 10CC - The Dean and I
15.) Lila Downs - La Tequileria
16.) Spank Rock - What it Look Like
17.) The Kinks - Picture Book
18.) Harrison Ford - If Not For You
19.) Loretta Lynn - Love Is The Foundation
20.) Sam Cooke - Get Yourself Another Fool

adventure time

2007-01-26T18:05:00.000-05:00

Amazing. absolutely amazing.

pic unrelated

2007-01-25T01:36:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry, mostly to myself, for not having updated this old bitch in a long time. You see, when you store your writing in the attic for days and days and days it starts to mildew and get a little stinky and get covered in husks of spiders. I blame Joe's Pub but it most likely has to do with a little snifter of depression. Fortunately a long walk from 31st street Manhattan to Willoughby avenue Brooklyn gave me time to crank my depression into submission and spindle my manic phase back out of her hidey hole.

I like how this is a livejournal now.

Anyhow, I don't know how many of you've gotten to hear sum of dat Amy Winehouse, but let me tell you this: her forthcoming album (in the US) is the first album I've heard to be released this year that I can't stop playing on repeat.

Now! the whole album is superb, but people give less than two shits about a whole album as they now do about Yao Ming if anyone ever did. You all want your i-pod's corpulent and resplendent, you brats, and I, being the whore I am, will afford you a couple songs to stuff those little white rectangles. Trust me, though, you'll want to run out and buy Back to Black as soon as it's out, its damn good.

My initial reaction when I saw her (and was momentarily trapped in a corner by Mos Def's back) was that she sounded like Lauren Hill. No doubt this allusion will be made time and time again by jerks like me who have nothing better to compare. She still sounds like Hill, but it has become clear to me (and the media) that she is a little drunker around the edges than the stab-you-in-the-face-with-a-crucifix Hill. Regardless, both of their influences incubated beneath a warm light bulb in the same classroom where Soul, R&B and funk once learned their shapes (though funk was held back several years due to white music executives not believing it was worthy of anything besides this)

Anyway, we won't get further into that slip'n'slidey slope of authenticity and identity that a white girl singing traditional soul might ask of us, I will simply say that the songs "You Know I'm No Good" and "He Can Only Hold Her" (the latter of which, as I was shown by Mr tofu, actually lifts riffs and tunes from various soul songs) are amazing cuts and perfect examples of the smashing (SMASHING I SAY!) this album could do to our little american sandcastle pop-charts.

You might recognize "You Know I'm No Good" if you've heard the Ghostface Killah version on More Fish, his B-Side Album for fishscale released late last year. I actually haven't gotten a chance to hear it yet but the copy of the album I got had the Wu-Tang master's song on there. Its good, but not as good as the Winehouse vrsn. It works better with Winehoue's brilliant and painful lyrics about compulsion to cheat on her boyfriend. also: works better with her sultry vixen vixen vixen voice than Killah's raspy, feaux-bitter (though convincing as always) spitting. It's a shame that his rapping outshines her simply because her vocals seem sampled or used for a hook. But those horns those horns, god damn give me more of those horns. I need more bass sax in my ears and more broken up chords building me up and finally the follow-the-bouncing-ball hook. God damn. that hook is so good.

listen:
You Know I'm No Good

Initially, "He Can Only Hold Her" is a clear reference to Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)" and in fact, when I saw her, a little tongue in cheeky Winehouse square-knotted Hill's masterpiece into the end of this song all easy like. But jesus
another perfect hook emerges with them brassy trumpets mere seconds into this one and the backup singers singing along and overtop and underneath and around and each doing barrel rolls. and the back bone of the song is the jazzy echo guitar fucking around behind everything.

listen:
He Can Only Hold Her

and I'm out- its bed time.

Congotronic, robotic, rock your body

2007-01-09T19:00:00.000-05:00

Kitsch my adorable little silly of a roommate claims that when I heard him listening to Konono #1, the first of the two congotronics albums, I said something to the degree of the following: "This sounds like Stewart Strange music."

Stewart was a kindly young man who attended my collegiate institution; he was prone to putting African tribal beats on the stereo in the midst of parties awash with tiny hipped people stoking the fire in their loins with much Rapture-fueled ass flailing. He would complain: "None of you know how to dance" and then performing some sort of white-guy body incantation that nestled somewhere between an Andy Kauffman dance and a morbidly obese woman shrieking down a waterslide. Bless his heart for trying, but (at the time) we were more interested in the mechanics of looking fiercely aloof.

It is quite possible that I said something of the sort to Kitsch. I try to piss him off as much as I can because he's button cute when he's flustered, and now that I've incriminated myself I suppose I'll get on with it.

Truthfully, I'm sure I didn't like it at the time. Entire genres would ebb and flow in the time it once took for me to even slide along the surface of just one of them, eons in the music listening world. The affliction lingers even today, but the sheer amount of music I consume out of of post-collegiate boredom allows my mind to pluck the pretty things from beneath the surface; I can have my perfect musical moments and eat 'em too.

phew! preface: complete.

Congotronics 2, though not as widely acclaimed as #1, has some pretty fucking perfect moments. In particular I speak of the fourth track by Kasai Allstars called Kabuangoyi. Definitely a headphone track, it has a strange droning repetition, a circular musical staff, the colorful notes aligning themselves behind a treble or bass cleff and marching. It is joyous and beautiful and it is tempting to place it between the frets of Western music, but any western precedent I try to place it beneath has loose footing, not to mention would reek of that silvery roadkill smell called appropriation.

Check it: Kasai Allstars - Kabuangoyi

There's A Moon In The Sky

2007-01-08T10:33:00.000-05:00

Long long long before VH-1 began mongering its over-the-counter pop criticism, long long before the same network began to air loose knit ski-lodge sweaters and shoulder-pad friendly music, long before the same crowd worked out to Barbarella Fonda: there was a band known as The B-52's.

And they did far more than write Love Shack for the same twits mentioned above. They were once a post-punk band, trolloping down the same post-modern, half-ironic trail as contemporaries Devo and sounding like the brain child of David Byrne and Andy Gill's younger, pre-war obsessed sister (if she lived in Athens, Georgia [and actually existed]).

I've been obsessed with their first album recently, with the surfadelia of Rock Lobster and the perfect slide fretting end riff of Theres a Moon In The Sky (And Its Called The Moon). This is the kind of stuff you're allowed to put on at solo cup parties where the chump kids of the twits play Sublime. Its okay because: "hey, aren't these the same dudes who did Love shack?" I rubber stamp that "pretty good".

Rock Lobster

There's A Moon In The Sky (Called The Moon)

Joe's Pub

2007-01-04T00:07:00.000-05:00

So! I've been trying to get my fingers back on the keyboard because, after New Years/Christmas/bindle-stiffing away from New York, my work ethic and my writers block have been eyeing each other like an unmanned battering ram and a castle gate (respectively). I've determined that I am my own love of my life (because I can't seem to accept anyone else into that position), but determining how to create a green paper catapult for the siege and razing of my romantic, sixteenth century notion of the tormented writer (complete with parapets and stone and starving peasants) may be harder than anticipated. The slings and arrows of hunger can be subdued with coffee and cigarettes, but hackneyed metaphors are much more difficult to quell.

I've sure been listening to Destroyer's Rubies a whole lot recently. Its a night drive of an album; its an echoing cathedral of an album; its a solitary drunken subway smile of an album.

Happy New Years

2007-01-01T13:39:00.000-05:00

How was your new years eve? Mine was pleasant with 10 CC's of guitar Hero II injected into my face, ample amounts of Bloody Marys (labeled BM at some point in the night, much to the chagrin of those who hate bad puns [I hate my fair share of them believe it or not]), and fondue. Pretty good.

One thing I realized while playing guitar hero II: whoever wrote the music for sonic the hedgehog must have listened to a whole hell of a lot of Rush. Seriously, listen to YYZ and tell me that you don't feel like you should be bouncing yourself against a fat doctor in a giant drill machine, I dare you.

- signing out bitches.

Brooklyn Radiodingles

2006-12-31T13:51:00.000-05:00

Far be it from me to see an attractive lady's picture on the internets and to not click on it. This very mentality has gotten me into plenty of virus trouble throughout the years. Somnambling my way through this old bitch of zeros and ones, peering through tiny portals at those intangible worlds of Amazonian or Ikean products gets tiring. A man must recreate.

Perusing through the racks of Brooklyn Radio I discovered that this very website, whose path of glory I helped weed and tend for a few words or two, is not simply a website filled with gossip and garbage about blip festivals. This website has a quiver filled to the brim with sharp and splendid radio shows (as the name implies, no doy). So! I clicked. I clicked on little miss DJ Robyn's (as seen above) webdio show (podcast I guess).

Whats this? A cute tiny little white girl playing mostly reggae? God that's sexy. Now, I don't claim to be a reggae connoisseur. I'm about as close to being a ball and cup connoisseur, and thats far far far. Don't worry though, I know good music when I hear it. The December 11th show is a mixture of Soul, Reggae, a sprinkling of hip-hop and a little little beard rock. Ms. Robyn is the talented creator of the "Thunder Chicken" mix tape as fanfared in Fader magazine.

I would suggest listening to this fine young lass' show because I've been listening for, ohh *checks watch* 45 minutes now and there seriously hasn't been a single dud. Download it! Share it with your friends!

Aside: get me her phone number too.

more show reviews to come!

The most recent

2006-12-30T19:10:00.000-05:00

Recently I've been going on a binge of compact discs and groovy black discs both of which make me expend far too much of that tiny green paper with dead people and numbers. Let me tell you about that music first:

CD's

1.) Ex Models - Zoo Psychology
I saw these assholes about two CMJ's ago, a hazy drug infested memory those three fall days were. It was at North six, oh so familiar Williamsburg is to me now, then seemed as though I would be pulled aside and had my wallet inspected. They were painful to watch, insistent more upon making disgusting brown notes than perhaps performing their music. I left early. Now I have a much more open mind about squeals and whirring grinding sonics, though is still not as palatable to me as a lovely melody or a clever pop lyric (I've been known to call Excepter "dial-up internet" music). I thought I'd give em a try anyway and overall I'm pleased with my decision.
Its the kind of music you play with a pillow over your head, trying to annoy those assholes above you playing Reggaeton at 2 in the morning.

2.) The Kinks - The Village Green Preservation Society
Perhaps you have heard of The Kinks? well, so had I. They're one of those bands with such importance and such a damn huge discography that I just kept putting them towards the back of my mental rolodex (Zappa, fortunately, begins with a Z) I told myself that if I ever found this CD I'd start up on them. and what I mean by that is I saw this in the used bin and my hand snatched it up like a mom at a Talbots sale.
Writing about village green is the same as writing about any Shakespeare play, what do I say? Picture book may be the best pop song of the sixties after, perhaps, Wouldn't it be nice?

3.) Joni Mitchell - Blue
I sometimes can't handle Mitchell's soothing and warbly lady voice, it reminds me too much of driving around in the car with my mom; not necessarily a bad thing, not necessarily a good thing either. However! This was a Christmas present from my mommy (reason: I was fed up with receiving bad Fugazi albums when I asked for good Fugazi albums so I just told them to get me whatever they liked when they were my age [potentially dangerous since my mom was really into prog {not saying that all prog is bad, but ... you know}]). There may always be a hazy filmy substance around Joni Mitchell's music for me, but I'm excited to own it and give it a good adult once-over.

4.) Sigur Ros - two hot dogs (aka untitled)
oh my brother tried so hard, This is what I mean. My family's heart is in the right place, he even asked his youth group leader (who miraculously doesn't have a youth group leader goatee or talk about learning new chords all the time) who "listens to the same music as me" and told him to get me this (the most icicle laden as well as disparately good and bad of their albums) or to get me Sufjan Stevens. Yikes. Well, its ok Will, I accept and! appreciate your gumption.

LP's

1.) Foghat - Foghat
All I want to do is smoke some fucking weed and play air bass guitar along this album. I feel like Foghat gets the short end of the stick for being the 70's equivalent of 311, its the white guy funk/blues that yr average frat boy can like (and fuck to)! Who cares, its dude rock. I've earned it listening to all this pussy ass Joanna Newsom and chick rock like Joni Mitchell and Cat Power. I need some hairy smelly cock in my ears.

2.) Todd Rundgren - Something / Anything?
I like it, but coming down from calling Joanna Newsom "pussy" and saying I need more dude rock leaves me utterly confused; somewhat like a cat determining the many properties of a bottle cap on the floor. Half of this album is sweet guitars and choppy pianos and the other half is simpering love songs, then again I haven't listened to side 3 and 4 so I may be shitting out of my mouth right now.

3.) ambient 2 - Brian Eno and some other dude
I love Music for Airports so much that when Ambient 4 sounded utterly different I had an acidic reflux in my brain. Ambient 4 sounds like a great soundtrack for a zombie movie (Re: Resident Evil the game) but it doesn't sound like the beautiful and gorgeous, antiseptic and impersonal sounds in Ambient 1. Not saying I dislike ambient 4, I just have a harder time finding the right atmosphere to place ambient 4, maybe a seance; I've been meaning to channel the entire original cast of Porgy and Bess anyway.
I haven't really been able to snatch a listen yet, thats the painful truth of LP's. besides being awesome scene cred they're just not as transportable as the podtangles.

4.) Love - Da Capo
The Coup De Grace! This baby cost me a leg and a leg and an arm. Thats alright, I still have enough limb to put this on the record player and listen with all of my ears. I haven't given it a heart to heart quite yet though. Also, I didn't realize that the second side was all one song? 18 minutes? pretty good.

Overall, this month has been a great month for music (for me). However! I've basically been slashing my wallet's neck each time I've plunged into a record store. So that green dye is washing down the drain like psycho and I'm going to be eating Record sandwiches pretty soon. Regardless! I'm most likely going to continue my habits on account of my current job is being a hipster by profession (culture as commodity! culture as commodity!!) soon enough I gotta start makin' that cash and if it involves shakin' my ass then so be it, although it will more likely be selling my shit on ebay (maybe selling LP's???)

Oh yes.

2006-12-29T13:24:00.000-05:00

Oh yes, this is a painting of exactly what you think it is. Dont worry I'm still around.

More for me than for Yours

2006-12-26T17:48:00.000-05:00

Rolling Stone (when did people start calling it RS? OMG! roflcopter, so on so forth. [making fun of leetspeak is easier than making fun of Cold Stone employees]) has posted their top 25 bands on myspace.

I really don't care whether you read it or not, I'm gonna check it out and probably get pissed at RS's apparent lack of non-white people who listen to something other than rock (never said I'm not a hypocrite). Enjoy if you must:

THE LINK IS HERE!

Bono: knight, fucking chump

2006-12-26T16:44:00.000-05:00

What an effing chump.

If you are unaware of my disdain for this effing chump all you need know is this: he is one of my unknowing arch-enemies for no other reason than that he is an effing chump and wears stupid sunglasses. And he writes shitty music with his shitty band.

Anyhow, for those of you who are into Mozart and can read music you should check out this and tell me what you think about it. Initially, I believed that this suspiciously international committee had put recordings of Mozart's music up. Alas, I was mistaken. Alas, it was merely Mozart's entire recorded sheet music. I was forlorn. I hung my head and listened to some comfort food.

However! This is an interesting turn of events for music. It is, once again, the democratizing power of the internet-muse emerging from betwixt the trees made of law, conservative fauns playing their conservative pan's flutes.

Dammit! If I want pornographic pictures of Wolfgang Puck I should be able to find it on the internets! Same goes to my until-now dormant desire to sololy perform The Magic Flute as Tom Sellick playing Bertold Brecht atop my Brooklyn apartment and entirely on slide guitar.

Anyway, I need more slide guitar in my life.

P.S. I'm going to be visiting the Brooklyn Tabernacle choir as soon as I get back to Brooklyn. If you're around and in for some awesome gospel music I'd love to have you with me.

The Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness

2006-12-26T16:20:00.000-05:00

So, I guess you've all heard how James Brown died on that formerly pagan holiday some of us know as Christmas?

Well, maybe you hadn't but maybe you should? Or maybe someone came up to you on the street, slapped you across the face, spit down the back of your shirt, and screamed something incoherent about the godfather of soul. Thats what happened to me. Or at least if felt that way when I was bombarded by a poorly written Memphis newspaper article about the man.

I mean, I didn't know him very well, but we all knew him, right? We'd all like to have drank with him, maybe a few illicit drugs, maybe he'd shoot us with a shotgun, but you know what they always say: Don't boil the goat until the turnip's been browned.

God, get me back to New York, home. Where I can smoke n' cuss n' drink n' wear my life like jean pants instead of pajamas.

On the upside: my brother has a Wii and I am currently playing the newest Zelda. It own. nay, pwns. Zounds!

2006-12-22T14:35:00.000-05:00

yo! these japanese dudes caught a giant squid! 22 Feet long!

happy holidays- see you on the flipside or something.

Its that time

2006-12-21T17:56:00.000-05:00

So! 50% because I'm lazy and 50% because and I have nothing else to write about and 50% because everyone and their ass-faces have released a top of 2006 type thing and 37.3% because I've been away all afternoon and 1% because you actually want to know. If I do my math right I'd say that comes out to about 100% "who gives a shit?"

So! since no one really gives a shit I'm going to write a list for 2006 that is UNPRECEDENTED!!! Mostly because it gives you a glimpse into how poor my music taste is but also because its merely an amalgam of my favorite noises that I've heard this year. That includes new albums, reissues, albums I should have heard but never got around to until recently, gossip, that sound people make when they realize that they're falling on the subway and knocking into you and then of course don't say sorry just kind of saunter off because they know they look like a douche, tea steam, parsnips.

So! without further ado its:

10! = Dreamies

Two 25 minute tracks that directly reference revolution number 9 with mr Bill Holt clipping soundbytes like sunday morning coupons beneath his vocals and what is that, a moog? It falls a bit in line with the early seventies folk but is gloriously weird for that time and definitely falls in line with the work that John Cage was doing around then. Knowing Holt quit his job in 1970 simply based on this idea that he had to continue the story The Beatles were telling with revolution number 9 is fascinating enough to hear this at least once. I mean, I its pretty nice to hear too.

9! = He Poos Clouds

Thought: The Arcade Fire can get in a tour van accident involving two guys precariously carrying chicken coops across a busy intersection and I wouldn't give a care. However! Piqued, my interest was, by this deluge of press that Owen Pallet was getting due to his string arrangements for Funeral. His first album, Has a Good Home, was admirable in its looped violin and pluckedness but it sounded rushed. His vocals and melodies were far too boring to hold my interest over the mediocre song structures.
I initially listened to Final Fantasy because I may or may not be a crazed, bemouthfoamed lunatic when it comes to the video game of the same name. So I stuck with him, even when his next album's name was "He Poos Clouds". Not interested.
but I listened anyway. I was rewarded with intricate indie-baroque, possibly supplied with extra bombast found in dumpsters behind major Broadway playhouses, impeccably placed crescendos and decrescendos, dischordance when appropriate. Its like listening to Bach if Bach wore girls jeans and didn't have that whole "God" thing between himself and being a raging homo. Oh, and also lived in Chicago.

8! = Cylinders

The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project is the best thing thats happened to recorded music from the pre-disc recordings era. Aside from, you know, being recorded in the first place. UCSB is digitizing as many old cylinders as they can get their stubby little academic fingers on. It's a great resource for anyone remotely interested in pop music of the late nineteenth century and early 20th century. It's also the best thing that has happened to heat my boiling desire to hear minstrelsy music and thus fuel my raging bigotry and racism. Dig deep and you might hear a few pretty little diddies covered with an aesthetically pleasing gravy of static.

7! = Yoyoyoyoyoy

A common argument against Spank Rock's YOYOYOYOyoyoyoyo is... I'm actually not sure what the argument ever was? I mean, I've heard smatterings of an acidic taste from the ... sexism? I just don't hear it, Pitchfork.
Or, rather, I don't understand how one could take Spank Rock to task for sexism when Fishscales and Clipse (though absolutely phenomenal albums) get higher ratings and still have twice as much mysoginy. Is it less okay to speak with sexist language when a hip-hop album is DFA and hipster (re:college educated white Williamsburgite) approved?
All questioning aside, this is a direction that I'd like hip-hop to start moving in, a focus on inovative production is my remedy for the bachwashed Outkast Atlanta sludge that we're listening to these days. At least we still have The Neptunes and Timbaland to spice shit up a bit. Anyway this is the best booty shakin album I heard all year, and that includes this.

6! = Drum's not Dead

The concept for Liars new album, Drum's Not Dead, sounds like something out of a Maruice Sendak book. Drum, representing headstrong braveness, and Mt. Heart Attack, representing mountains and heart attacks and... not-Drum, constantly battle it out on this dangerous album. I say dangerous because holy shit it has so much potential to just be annoying. Anything this drum and beat heavy could get annoying Soooo very fast. Instead its a calvalcade of drums and cymbals and guitar fuzz and chase scenes through the unfocused woods in the middle of the night and resonating piano or bell chimes and room room room room room to walk around and explore. I love the Liars because they manage to make the most fucked up, ugly music sound like its supposed to be somewhere, sound like you're somewhere you're not supposed to be. Don't dive head first into this one.

5! = My Love

The new Justin Timberlake album is a festering pile of hipster bait, piled on a stump with several concentric rings going round round round a la Wile. E Coyote. What does that target signify? Well some would say the word "fag" but obviously those are the Bro's who look up Hoobastank tabulature when they're not working at Sam Goody. Rather, that target is to loop everyone (aside from certain Sam Goody employees) everyone into the hip VH1 celebrity Perez Hilton crowd and most people jump right in. I think, however, that the album stutter steps and trips right there. The Coldplay part at the end of Lovestoned, the crunky Chop Me Up, the "Hi my name is bob and I work at my Job" idiocy of Losing my Way. I was psyched about this album until I realized Timbaland blew his load on the song that I am truly putting at number 5: My Love.
No shit right? I mean, maybe I was lucky in that I naturally stay as far from a ny radios as an ant from a cucumber. My roommate Joanna is not so fortunate and had to hear this song emerge like constant, unending stockticker tape from her radio. I forgive those of you who had to deal with this, I understand. I, on the other hand, could listen to this song on repeat (and have) for hours on end. Timberlake might not choose the brainiest of lyrics, but he sure can fucking make me believe (almost) anything he says. And Tim, well he's Timbaland, pretty much can't go wrong there. The man has the heavyweight belt to prove that he is one of the most creative forces in pop music within the last fifteen years. I can't wait to hear his new album (without Magoo this time!).

4! = Gulag Orkestar

You know, I never really thought about how this album is so very important to 2006 for me until right now. It reminds me of a lot of different occurences about the year. Having heard about it through my friend Sarah I took a gander and gandered some of the best melodies overtop beautiful east-european kind of gyspsy feel. It may be musical colonialism (Zach Condon, Mr. Beirut himself has admitted to not having any ties nor having ever been to eastern Europe) and it makes me shudder a bit to say that I dont give a gall-durn. There is a strong backlash against this album because Condon might not live up to everyones expectations as a performer, but all I'm going off of are his beautiful songs and pretty damn decent lyrics.

3! = Silent Shout / So This Is Goodbye

Kitsch and I may have gotten in a whopping game of "who jerks off to music more" over Silent Shout the other day, but really in all seriousness I love Silent Shout. I prefer other albums a bit more but this one is still pretty fucking fantastic with the modulation of vocals. Nothing is more foreign, disconcerting, beautiful than hearing the soft pearly vocals of Karen Dreijer modulated to a genderless deep bass.

From the opening track to the final seconds of the last track Junior Boys prove that they know what they're doing. Double Shadow jumps out of a dark, bathroom-fucking groove, In the Morning has those quintuplet pinpricks that are thrown off kilter by the beat, So This Is Goodbye drunken bubbling around your head. Everything on this album has one if not two three four five perfectly crafted hooks. It may not have the sonic/dead space exploration of Last Exit, but its still a great album that I put at three along with Silent Shout.

2! = Yellow House

Grizzly Bear took all of my favorite things about music and made them into an album. Seriously, guys, way to go. Folk, gorgeous beach boy harmonies, laptop twists, non-formulaic structures, perfect hooks that they just toss aside (the stomp claps on Little Brother) I can't really write much more about this album than I've already said. It really is just about perfect.

1! = Ys

I mean, seriously? who didnt expect this. I didn't within the first five seconds of Emily. oh also, within the next 55 minutes and thirty one seconds. There is nothing more I can really say about this album than that it is wildly innovative while managing to retain the simple commonplacities of music. The songs structure themselves like poetry, weaving in and out and in and out of each other. Only Skin will drop you in the water with Newsom, then gust you up into the air, remind you that she still has the reigns, and slap you across the face all within several minutes. Each verse is its own tiny composition and each new verse is reminiscent of the last, but is curious enough to poke its nose down holes one never expects.
Her words are perfect. Poetry need not be filled with archaic diction (hell, my favorite poet is Billy Collins) but that she uses it makes her verse all the more fascinating, I find. That she is even able to balance these extraneous words in her lyrics is incredible even for a poet, but that she is able to pad them down neatly into the meter and constant shifts of her music is beyond all comprehension to me. So I sit back, and listen, and find new nooks each time I hear them.

Thats all folks!

Props to: Clipse, Girl Talk, Destroyer, Boy from School by hot chip, Isis, Josef K, Vince Guaraldi, Moondog, Lloyd I'm ready to be Heartbroken by Camera Obscura, Cat Power, Sam Cooke, and whoever the hell else I'm too lazy to think of right now.

I shall be your dearie

2006-12-20T20:01:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I'm posting about my girlfriend again. and by girlfriend I mean...umm...secret middle school crush who I admire from afar and then put notes in her locker saying "do you like me? check the box that says yes or no"

Gorilla Vs. Bear recorded J. Newsom playing that scottish song she played at her show I caught back in November. Its so short but its probably one of the best things to ever come out of her mouth. heres hoping she comes out with a whole album of traditional scottish songs.

Cap'n Guthrie Backpedals #2

2006-12-20T18:31:00.000-05:00

Well, well, well, so you've decided to read me again have you? I appreciate it and, perhaps, so will you when you realized that I'm going to renege my opinion about a band comprised entirely of horses.

SOOOOOO...when I first heard band of horses I was all like "whatever dude, this sounds like My Morning Jacket" and then I said "My Morning Jacket sounds like cats on a scratching post made out of chalkboard." I've learned, since then, that both of those statements are only partially true. The former statement? well I'll get to that. The latter statement? Most of their songs are too boring to sound like a cat scratching a chalkboard.

So, what is this post for? Will I continue to toss out polarizing particles and then refuse to back them up? A negative magnet speaking about negative magnets, as it were? (If you don't like it then you'd do better to not click any of those links on the right hand side of this very page).

Who gives a shit about all these hyporhetoricals, all I know is that this band of horses album is great with its powerful twisty wind chime melodies, Built To Spilly shimmers, the best parts of My Morning Jacket (re: the singing, mahgeeta). I'm not going to lie, I'm a sucker for soaring, echoing vocals; my sweet-tooth falling frequently upon bands like Keane or The Appleseed Cast. Here, in the lush green world of sunbeams through treebranches that Band of Horses makes, I feel like I should go outside with sword and shield and save a damsel in distress and then immediately after that feel like I should probably take a nap.

They sometimes have the penchant for sounding like a country version of Bloc Party (Wicked Gil) but, hey, thats not all that bad right?

too bad the music video for one of the best songs sucks. Check it anyway tho:

Lets celebrate post #51 and try to get that damn Junior Boys video off the page!

2006-12-20T16:34:00.000-05:00

Well, lets not waste our breathing on Stylus' top 100 because its just weird . They put Lets Get out of this Country above The Life Pursuit? They put Annuals above both of those? weird dudes, weird. I can't wait to see their zany list for the top ten.

So I've heard a bit about this silly Tune Glue thing. I mean, its a marketing tool for Capitol Records, sure, but does it work? Did Capitol Records do their research? Well when I typed in little known bands like Bob Dylan and, perhaps you've heard of him, Meat Loaf, well everything came up roses, and I don't mean Ethel Merman.

But seriously it had everything from The Silver Apples, to Ethel Merman, to Apocalyptica, to the slavic band Eva Braun (not to mention connected with several other slavic bands).

Its a pretty awesome little tool, but not always accurate. I put in Animal Collective and it linked me to The Books and Broken Social Scene. I'm not sure how those bands match up... maybe because Animal Collective uses computers and...guitaaaarrrs?? Thats like saying Public Enemy sounds like Wu-Tang Clan because they're hip-hop in the same era...which tune glue,um, does say. And I'm sure they kind of stretch the rules when it comes to pitching their own bands which light up with annoying house-down-the-block christmas colors.

So its not altogether the most accurate thing on the web, but hey, isn't the beauty of the internet that anyone can claim anything and be 50% accurate? Its not? well what the fuck am I writing a blog for?

In response

2006-12-19T12:34:00.000-05:00

Alright, I said I wasn't going to do this but my response to Kitsch's comment on my last post was so long that I decided to just post it to see what other people say (although he's the only one that responds anymore, you douche bags.)

Cookie Mountain and YS are tough albums and Silent Shout isn't quite everyones cup o' tea. Liars being in the top 10 at all is bizarre, that album is great but more difficult than the rest of the top ten put together. I like that 2006 was a year of great, complicated albums and I like that Pitchfork is not really compromising too much when it comes to reader accessibility vs. straight up good albums.

I don't know what to think about silent shout being number one, though. a lot of people did like it, but in my opinion the second half is a bit lackluster, and the lyrics aren't really anything special (I'm dancing for dollars/for a fancy man).

Not that I expect them to wow me with their English considering they're, what, sweeeeeedish? Its just that I feel calling something a great ALBUM and ranking it against other ALBUMS presumes that an album is a cohesive collection of songs that all speak in the same direction. The Knife has got itself a good cohesive sound going, sure, but nothing in the album really feels like they had a mission in mind. It feels more like they've got a good sound and ... what ... what else?
More to come??? I don't know. I dont have opinions anymore. I'm a barrel of opinions with the bottom cork pulled.

Pitchfork's Top Ten

2006-12-19T10:18:00.000-05:00

Well, regardless of who you are in independant rock, that is, regardless of whether you heed or screed Pitchfork, you must know that their top fifty albums are the most important list to come out for our little (big) crowd of people pretending we know more about music than others. Just ask Sufjan or Travis Morrison. The former is on the verge of being played alongside Dave as the between set music at every college open mic night in the country. The latter? probably scrubbing toilets with a potato peeler at the same coffee shop that Sufjan is being played, the poor guy. (actually I have it from a good source that his next album sounds kinda good? One can only hope).

So I won't bitch and bemoan the top fifty. I'll link it and you'll be happy, even though you've probably already read it and started bitching and bemoaning it to your buddies. I will say this: number one and two, for me, was kinda wtf? not in the wuhtuhfuh-are-you-thinking? way.
more in the wuhtuhfuh
thats-not-what-I-expected-because-those-two-albums-aren't-that-great, um, way.

Here's the top ten:

10: Scott Walker - The Drift
09: Boris - Pink
08: Grizzly Bear - Yellow House
07: Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury
06: Liars - Drum's Not Dead
05: The Hold Steady- Boys and Girls in America
04: Ghostface Killah - Fishscale
03: Joanna Newsom - Ys
02: TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
01: The Knife - Silent Shout

Pitchfork's top fitty

Tell me what it look like

2006-12-19T08:28:00.000-05:00

Far be it from Cap'n Guthrie to not follow some sort of crowd. I mean, if theres a crowd one would naturally saunter along the edge, hopping your eyes above heads and ducking between knees to view the spectacle. Right? Unless its a crowd of angry Spandau Ballet fans. In that case, walk the other way: a fupa-clad crowd of Midwestern Mannheim Steamroller fans are probably right around the corner. Ever seen a tai chi battle comprised entirely of moms? Problematic.

No, the crowd I speak of is that intrepid group of reporters, the bloggers. They are crowded around a little song: little club track called Lindsay Lohan's Revenge by Pase Rock. Funny, because they're crowded more around Spank Rock; merely a guest on this song.

The song is...hilarious? I can't tell. Its unfortunate that Lohan decided to show her hoo-hoo in public: yes, put cha panties on. and yes, I agree that she should be a little more careful with her lack of underpants when she's a superstar but then waaaaait a minute. In the middle of the song Spank and Pase begin to tell her to take them panties ... off? even more than that: her hoo-hoo looks like a "baby rat"? Furthermore, Spank starts to say he'd "nibble that cheese?"

Santogold then comes in with his verse and you realize that this song has gone from being a cute little dance floor commentary on celebritism to being an all out Farrelly Brothers poo-poo fest. I can imagine the guys all sitting in adjacent bathroom stalls, note pads betwixt their knees, fingers mounted upon pens; giggling; shouting to each other; words like "fart" and "doody" being flung about like baboon's poo at crowds of midwestern tourists.

Lindsay Lohan's Revenge

Video not-unrelated:

Chinese people want their democracy, Axl Rose willing to give it to them

2006-12-15T15:23:00.000-05:00

After long long times of ten years the Guns and the Roses have released a tentative realease date for their release of "Chinese Democracy" they've also released several dates to be released from their touring schedule.

January 10: Sacramento
January 11: Bakersfield
January 13: Reno
January 16: San Diego

God I just annoyed myself too.

anyhow you get the gist of that, now get the gist of this: Axl Rose's apology letter where he actually apologizes a whole shitton for failing fans of GNR.

I don't know about you, but I personally need more songs with three guitar solos and guys in top-hats (even though guys in top hats have gone on to play shitty music) however the new album, according to Mr. Sebastian Bach of Skid Row (a totally credible and intelligent source on good music) in a Rolling Stone (a totally credible and intelligent source on good music) interview is this: “It’s a very cool album – it’s badass with killer screams, killer guitar riffs, but it’s got a totally modern sound. The word for it is ‘grand.’ It’s fucking epic. He’s reinvented himself yet again.”

Having not realized that Rose has ever reinvented himself, aside from intentionally making himself a hideous ogre with those corn-rows, I misunderstand Bach's statement. Why can't Axl be normal like other has-beens and start reading the Kaballah and getting pregnant and showing off his vagina during his birthday party when he has a come-back. Well, perhaps he hasn't actually reinvented himself? Perhaps Chinese Democracy is going to be the biggest most overwrought and expensive piece of trash since Michael Jackson's video for "Scream" ?

you gasp, that would be really fucking hard to do, but Axl might not be the most stable of people, Youtubers proves it.

or he could be like Van Halen and get the guys back together for one more round with the kids.

contourtionism

2006-12-15T15:05:00.000-05:00

Bless those Bears of the Grizzly variety. I didn't get a chance to see them play with TV on the Radio because, well because I'm lazy and didn't check the schedules. God I want to see that TV but no problem, both bands are from Brooklyn so no problems there.

Grizzly Bear has announced new tour dates in 2007 and I stole the list below directly off of Tiny Mix Tapes much to their chagrin (actually they don't give a damn)

Several dates are with Akron/Family (aka Animal Collective wannabes), Dirty Projectors (folk? Computer? Prince? Gospel?), and The Papercuts (the most palateable the three bands) .

02.01.07 - Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda’s *
02.02.07 - Boston, MA - Museum of Fine Arts *
02.03.07 - Northampton, MA - Iron Horse *
02.04.07 - Montreal, QUE - Main Hall *
02.05.07 - Ottawa, ON - Barrymore’s *
02.06.07 - Toronto, ON - Lee’s Palace *
02.08.07 - Ann Arbor, MI - Blind Pig * ^
02.09.07 - Chicago, IL - Subterranean *
02.10.07 - Minneapolis, MN - 7th St. Entry *
02.11.07 - Iowa City, IA - The Picador *
02.13.07 - Denver, CO - Larimer Lounge
02.14.07 - Salt Lake City, UT - Kilby Court
02.16.07 - Seattle, WA - Neumo’s $
02.17.07 - Vancouver, BC - Plaza Club $
02.18.07 - Portland, OR - Mission Theatre $
02.20.07 - San Francisco, CA - Great American Music Hall $
02.21.07 - Los Angeles, CA - Troubadour $
02.23.07 - Tucson, AZ - Plush $
02.24.07 - Marfa, TX - Ballroom Marfa $
02.26.07 - Norman, OK - Opolis $
02.27.07 - Dallas, TX - Club Dada $
02.28.07 - Austin, TX - Emo’s Jr $
03.01.07 - Baton Rouge, LA - Chelsea’s $
03.02.07 - Atlanta, GA - Drunken Unicorn $
03.03.07 - Chapel Hill, NC - Local 506 $
03.04.07 - Washington, DC - Black Cat $
03.06.07 - New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom $

* with Dirty Projectors
^ with Akron/Family
$ with Papercuts

Cap'n Guthrie, back and refreshed

2006-12-14T20:48:00.000-05:00

Okay. So I ran away from home, red and white checkered bindle, a heavy thirst for alcohol, a pocket full of cigarettes, and an unhealthy smattering of cares ground down into dust to be scattered in the wind (only to subsequently blow back into my eyes and infect them worse than rubbing my face all over a McDonalds ballpit)

Several college buddies visited over the weekend and quickly fled the BKNYC. I, bad judgement me, turned my hands into giant hooks like T-1000 and latched them onto the back of the car. They tried their best to swerve and shake me off but I soon sat in the back of a Yaris passing EZly down the interstate.

I ended up in Fredericksburg and eventually hopped a bus to Charlottesville where I saw Dave Matthews slink into a coffee shop where I was reading Faulkner and charging my phone, swipe his eyes along the myriad UVA females in the room, and return to his two toe-headed little girls and feed them, what, coffee? I dont know. I needed a smoke break and a record or two to clean my pallate of bad coffee, Birkenstocks (as ubiquitous as white guy dreadlocks in Charlottesville), and lead singers whose Birkenstock, bad coffee drinking, UVA going fans inexplicably know on a first name basis.

The used bin held several good finds: Pavement's Brighten The Corners (why is everyone used-binning all over Pavement these days?), the Re-issue of A Charlie Brown Christmas (which is actually a lot sexier than you remember. Is that weird?), Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, and a rare(???) Live LP by John Cage/David Tudor called Variations IV.

As you may know, the music news is in short supply to those, like me, who have been astride the beautiful blue skies and poor transportation in the Sort-Of-South VA. I've taken my jacket off several days in a row now; Am I a true New-Englander now? or have we humans simply turned the atmosphere into the baby-fingerprint-smeared windows of a hot car in a Wal-Mart Parking lot?

I'll never know, but I will get back to you on this John Cage LP once I get a proper listen on my Beogram (initial reaction: sounds like it may hurt my face) . Thanks for being patient, I hope I didnt lose any of you, considering your attention spans are as thin as pages in the compact OED, assholes.

Stephen and the Colbert's

2006-12-11T10:43:00.000-05:00

You may remember my post of a few days ago being about those Decemberists and Stephen Colbert's wordbattle. Well here I am, drinking coffee out of Donald Duck's ass (literally. the mug is shaped like his ass) inVirginia and watching Colbert rebutt once again to The Decemberist's shreddin' challenge. I was Agog. Now I am even more agog, and delighted.

This man. This man Colbert. Genius:

Junior Boys at Studio B

2006-12-08T20:58:00.000-05:00

So I'll be up front about this: I did not stay for Morgan Geist. I'm sorry. I know you were all dying to hear about the DJ stylins of Geist, but I had to leave. Really for two reasons:

1.) Studio B, a club that manages an amalgamation of a roller rink and a Gwen Stefani video (not to mention above average costs for drinks), attracts the most beautiful Hipsters this side of Manhattan. For most people this would be A+, for me its a nerve racking, cornering C minus minus minus.

2.) That article that I so recently wrote for Brooklynradio.com was due at 12:00 last night and The Junior Boys didn't go on until 11. Pain in the ass. but the good pain, you know? Like anal sex.

Thats out of the way. Now onto the show.

Honestly it was a bit of a let down. When I walked into Studio B I felt the humming of thousands of libidos rather than the buzzing of thousands of music fans. Granted, libidos should go hand in hand with those sexy boys. Don't get me wrong, plenty of ladies were cooing along to the sultrier songs, but less ladies, hell people in general, than I was expecting. What I mean is this: the audience seemed less interested in the music and more interested in the booze and the disco lights. I had a difficult time determining who was there for the band and who was there because Studio B is just their scene.

I've never been to a show where looking obnoxiously hot is more important than enjoying the band. Granted there is always that element, we're all guilty of too cool for schooling it, but I should at least be able to play "who's the fan? who's the friend?" without thinking too hard. (dancing in the fan is inversely proportional to the amount of song-is-over dancing in the friend)

I had heard that they played with a drum kit, but I didn't really believe it until I saw them get up on stage. Jeremy Greenspan (drink of choice Vodka Tonic) and Matt Didemus (Budweiser) who were standing next to me during the entire opening DJ (all I could muster were furtive glances and maybe a kissy face or two when they turned their backs) played bass and laptop/keyboards respectively. Then some other dude, who must have had six arms that I didn't see, played the drums. Not that impressive until you see him playing Birthday: his patience and punctuality must be extraordinary to play that song.

They opened with "The Equalizer" which was nice enough, but around the second song, "Like A Child", the qwerty calisthenics going up and down kept cutting out. I don't think Studio B cared much because it took them a while to realize that the song didn't just suck but had a-whole-nother part that was lost in some wire somewhere along the way. They only played three tracks from the old album, "Birthday", "Teach Me How to Fight", and ... "Under the Sun" as an encore? Thats the most repetetive, boring track on the album. I was a little perturbed.

Obvious omissions were "High come Down","Last Exit" and "Double Shadow". I'll give them the first two because the drummer would have had a seizure, but Double Shadow seems like a gimme for a dance floor. They did, however, play So This Is Goodbye, which pleased Guthrie.

Overall I'd give the show a B+ for effort (even though the Junior Boys looked as bored with the audience as the audience was pretending to look with them) and a D to Studio B.

Six bucks for a stella? Fechh.

Junior Boys myspace

P.S. Junior Boys are sponsoring a make our music video contest at here dot com. Here's a cool one below:

Perhaps

2006-12-08T10:23:00.000-05:00

You've heard about my multitude of talents, but did you know I could write as well?

Yeah, neither did I until I got this piece at Brooklyn Radio covering the Blip Festival and the general frenzy surrounding game boy music and shit.

Here it is:
Passion of the Gameboy: The 8 Bit Fest

Yikes.

Cap'n Gutrhie Halfasses the Grammys

2006-12-08T08:32:00.000-05:00

I may be a bit late on this but, honestly, spending much time on the Grammys is like washing your lawn. So here is a quick recap of my reaction to this (and every) years grammy awards: wutufuh?

Somewhere along the line the Grammy committee was replaced by a group of white southern college girls and Zach Braff because thats really the only explanation that I can give for why James Blunt is at the top of the list. So, album of the year? Well you can choose between this smorgasboard of dump:

St. Elsewhere - Gnarls Barkley: Weird R&B does not equate to good R&B. Pitchforkmedia really flexed their taste making muscle here. "Crazy" would have come and gone, pounding its bassline through my roof in a steady arc in its progression, but then the album got stuck on a windowhook and I had to listen to it all summer long. bastards.

Stadium Arcadium - Red Hot Chili Peppers: What is it about bands named after food? Bread, Korn, Cake. Most of them suck. Truth be told I'm a fan of about a third of RHCP's catalogue, when they do their funky non-fratboy music me and Keidis are alllright.

Futuresex/Lovesounds - Justin Timberlake: I'm actually not too hot on this album anymore. at first I jumped out of my pants listening to it but the only song that really stuck with me was My Love. and what a damn doosie that song was. I'd slarve Timbaland's Doad any day.

Honestly I haven't listened to the John Mayer album nor have I heard the Dixie Chicks album. I feel no need to and I feel no shame in commenting on how I will probably think that they're just ok or worse. However, I've changed my tune on Mary J. Blige after hearing the supernal We Ride(I see the future). Alex you're a fucking prick.

Good luck looking through that list without blinking, or falling asleep its long as a fucking freight train. I can give you a summary right now: Spiro Gyra, James Blunt, Bette Midler, Buckcherry?, Matisyahu (on reggae no less), Weird Al.

Good to go.

Cap’n Guthrie’s interview with Kurt of The Depreciation Guild

2006-12-07T15:57:00.000-05:00

I'm currently in the midst of writing an article about Blip Festival and the Chip revolution happening here in New York Citahhh. I got a chance to sit down with Kurt Feldman of The Depreciation Guild, who played on the third day of Blip Festival, and just go through the ins and outs of the growing scene and to talk about some hot babes.

CG: Gimme your name, band name, etc.

K: uh, Kurt Feldman I’m the Guitarist for The Depreciation Guild, and uh songwriter, programmer, main entitity.

CG: alright pretty good. What do you use, what are your major instruments in the group?

K: Well, The Depreciation Guild consists of two guitars, vocals, and our 8 bit setup which is basically played through our computer. We compose all of our songs on a tracker, which was kind of a project that started, I guess around like the late ninties, and was actually abandoned by 1999. So, the software that we actually use is an interface called a tracker and it outputs Nintendo code, like, authentic Nintendo code which can actually play through a Nintendo.

CG: How did you find out about this [style of music], did you find it out through friends? Or people…

K: no actually, I mean, I’ve always been kinda just drawn to Nintendo music and just, like, the nostolgaic sound that is kind of associated with Nintendo music. And I’ve just sort of been drawn to the simplistic rawness of the way it sounds. Like the pulse waves and you know all the sounds that are produced by such a simple machine and I kind of wanted to see, you know, how much you could push the machine. I had found out about micromusic.net probably around 2002, I started listening to some gameboy artists

CG: like gameboy, like people had already started re-using game boy sounds?

K: yeah, ones who were at the forefront of that scene were, you know, nullsleep,
Bit-Shifter people who were submitting, you know, kind of just random tracks to this website called micromusic.net and I was drawn to that I was really fascinated by it. I started downloading music and I remember I heard this track by this guy named halley and it totally blew my mind because he was doing things that sounded like electric guitars and sounded like really crunchy distortion but it was all being produced, supposedly, by a Nintendo and I kind of found it hard to believe.
After hearing that I was like, wow I want to do this and I want to figure out how and I really didn’t know any way so I just kind of did some web searches, typing random things into google, and I got this result for this program called Nerdtracker ii and that was this program that I just mentioned before. It outputs the code which you can actually play on a Nintendo at 100%, and you’re actually playing your songs on the hardware itself.

CG: do most of the other artists who do this, like through the game boys… I mean I saw someone using a gameboy advance the other day [at blip festival], they use this program?

K: actually for gameboy its different. There was a guy named Johan Kutlinsky who invented this program called LSDJ and you can actually purchase it through his website. It’s a totally comprehsensive synthesizer for your gameboy and basically what you have to do is you have to purchase not only that program but a writable cartridge in which you can burn that game on to a cartridge and then from there you can kind of save your data on to your gameboy itself and compose, you know, on the train or wherever you are. You actually program in the notes themselves and it reads it like a sequencer would read it.

CG: yeah I saw a bunch of the guys [at Blip Festival] blowing out their gameboy cartridges [to clean them].

K: yeah

CG: to what extent do you think the music, like this [chip music], has spread or is spreading? I mean obviously with Blip Festival there was a pretty good turn out which I suppose is indicative of a lot of interest in this type of art.

K: yeah, well [The Depreciation Guild] joined up with 8-bit peoples bout a year ago and I had been to a bunch of Nullsleep’s shows, he runs 8 bit peoples… well that show [Blip Festival] was set up by nullsleep and bit-shifter and actually Nullsleep’s girlfriend I think also helped organize it and Mike Rosenthal who runs The Tank [ the club where blip festival was held] um they all kind of like pooled their resources on that, but Jeremiah Johnson, who is the owner of 8 bit peoples, which is a website net label … hes the one that set that up, and since we joined 8 bit peoples a year ago I’ve watched the website grow exponentially.

CG: like message boards and stuff?

K: no not so much message boards but with like myspace and all the artists starting to join up on myspace. The knowledge of 8bit music is really spreading. And also the fact that all the music is available for free on 8 bit peoples so there is really no cost barrier preventing people from accessing this music. And its interesting because its kind of this archaic medium that nobody has really dared to touch for a while and theres a few guys who are getting really into it right now.

CG: what led you to bring guitars into the mix? And also kind of a shoegazy MBV sound?

K: um well, that’s just the music that we love. The guitars and Nintendo mix actually pre-dates this band [The Depreciation Guild] we’ve got a couple songs on our computer which, Adrian and I used to play in this other band which was just kind of a straight up “Indie-band” and at the very end of our career as a band, we were together for about 4 and a half years (so Adrian and I have worked together for a while.) But there were other members you know there was a live drummer and a bass player too, we had composed a couple of songs that were originally intended for use by that band and it was just that idea came to mind.
I started writing chip tunes and I said hey lets combine the two. I think it would be cool to add a synthesizer element to our music, and it didn’t really work because our drummer wasn’t very good. [In order] to play along with a synth you kind of have to have a metronomic sense of rhythm. And in the wake of that band I said hey lets do this to Adrian, let get rid of the drummer and the bass player its all in this code right here, all we need is us. Lets just do this together.

CG: Cool, So do you, like, to go to other peoples shows around here? Like nullsleep shows?

K: yeah Nullsleep does shows and Bit-Shifter does shows around here, actually there is kind of a like a burgeoning chip-tunes scene here in New York. The two places where its really thriving right now is like New York and Japan, and also parts of Europe like Sweden.

CG: Covox.

K: Covox is from Sweden, Random is from Sweden.

CG: but whenever they all come over, like for Blip Festival, do you manage to catch them?

K: yeah well, actually its been a very rare occurrence for that. The only other instance for that was Aonami [from japan] who played last year and he played a set with us so that was actually really awesome. But since then, the Blip festival has really been like the first opportunity to gather all these amazing chiptune artists from around the world and put them under one roof and celebrate that which was totally mind blowing for everybody.

CG: how did Blip Festival come about, did 8 bit peoples just toss it out there?

K: I guess it was a crazy idea that just like ended up working really well.

CG: There was a lot of art as well

K: yeah, there was a lot of art involved, some of those guys who did the visuals… actually do shows at Pulse Wave, which is The Tank’s normal location in China Town…And they do that once a month. Some of those guys are New York based artists.

CG: yeah, what kind of systems do they work with. A lot of the art looked like when you get dust in your cartridge but, obviously, more complex.

K: yeah more intentional. You actually kind of have to fool around with the wiring … Chip Bending, which is intentionally messing up hardware and synthesizers and stuff. It’s the same principle for those guys like NoTendo who do screwed up visuals with old Nintendo cartridges.

CG: and they do a lot of shows around the city as well?

K: they do a lot of stuff at The Tank. Actually there’s installations there, which is one of the reasons why The Tank is so cool is that it’s like a performance art space in general so its got like shows there, installations with related media, not necessarily messed up video game stuff. Sometimes it is but it could be other things with different mediums.

CG: Overall, I thought there was a pretty mixed audience at Blip Fest.

K: Yeah, some pretty hot babes there too.

CG: Seriously hot babes. Who do you think the audience is for a lot of this stuff? Where do you think they come from?

K: well some of our fans are our friends, and other ones are people who will find us through 8 bit peoples and locate us through myspace. And it kind of touches a nerve in not only like the video game nostalgia part but how that’s incorporated into familiar music like Shoegaze.

CG: how you suggest to anyone interested in creating this chip-art, how would you suggest they go about doing that?

K: theres a ton of free resources online that you can latch onto. 2A03.org is another website that Nullsleep runs and its dedicated to composing on the 2A03 chip, the rycode chip inside the Nintendo, hence the name 2A03.org. and that has a bunch of free resources for composing Nintendo stuff. But be aware that you’re gonna have to devote a lot of time. Its not really a casual hobby. You’ve got to really sit down with it and learn the software, learn the hardware. To really learn all that it takes a long time. It took me several months to get really proficient with the program. But if you’re computer savvy and you have the drive to do it then, you know, its possible.

CG: when is The Depreciation Guild’s next show?

K: December 14^th at "Lit" 2 Avenue between 5 and 6 street.

CG: and you [Kurt] do a DJ set at reboot restaurant every other Friday?

K: Yeah 37 street Avenue A, yeah we do shoegaze, ethereal dream-pop sets my friend Christoph and I both DJ.

CG: awesome, well I guess that’s it, thanks a lot for letting me interview you.

K: No problem.

Check out The Depreciation Guild's Myspace for a couple of MyTunes and drop by the 8bitpeoples website if you want to read more about this chip-movement.

Cap'n Guthrie Backpedals #1

2006-12-06T16:33:00.000-05:00

In light of my last post I will be starting a new segment that you will see every other Wednesday from this point on called: "Cap'n Guthrie Backpedals" Its where I actually step down from the deck to rabble on with the crew and take a look at my musical mistakes, of which there are few (hence doing it every other week).

and first on the list is Matmos - The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of The Beast.

I was pretty psyched about Matmos and their banging on things and recording it. They record things like cow guts, snailshells, jerking off onto a microphone. no kidding to all of that. Sounds pretty fun right?

Well I didnt think so when I first heard it. To my ears it sounded like a musical version of Wheres Waldo. Wheres the cow guts? Which of those sounds are the roses? Where is Bjork? These thoughts clouded my ears. Forced overthinking's cottony substance into them. Instead of hearing music I heard a sequence of splats and squishes made of the "what sound was that" game.

That isn't to say I didn't want to hear music. I wanted so hard to be able to piece the beats and swirls and farts into my ears and brains. Alas, my thoughts would not let me. It was like reading a great book printed on several hundred cinderblocks. All I wanted to do was lift each sound up and take it somewhere to study its crevices rather than see the completed edifice.

However! After the hair-dye and tight pantaloon fueled dust died down around Matmos I waved my hand through and through the grimy air. Coughing, wincing in eyepain, and listening. and liking.

I enjoy the swishing almost watery sound of Germs Burn for Darby Crash. I enjoy the psychotic Rag for William S. Burroughs. I enjoy the deep brass and brashness of Snails and Lasers for Patricia Highsmith. Each song tells the story of the particular gay or lesbian artist it mentions in its title and each song, amazingly, is listenable in each their own manic way.

I therefore renege on my earlier selve's cold shoulder. The album is like listening to a more fluid, warmer in a way, version of The Books. No distant clipping of samples or bouncy computerized flips and gadgetry.

Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein

Matador Records

Lance Bass and boyfriend split? Guthrie's all over that shit.

2006-12-06T09:39:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd take a moment, a breather, from furiously bending my fingers in unnatural ways in order to bring you musical zeros and ones. I have been writing in this blog for several weeks now, the stickysweet lingerings of champagne still clinging to the front of her hull, and trying to write in it every day. I have succeeding with fairly few misspellings(sp?) but what of it? Where will I go? What will I do?

My thoughts, like an unruly van full of preteens. My head, a chuck-e-cheese's.

Of course, I will continue to write. I am compelled by my music, it goads me, eggs me. It lives in the tips of my fingers and tells them to touch these plastic keys. and if I forget? I turn flagellate; my back becomes bloodied and stripped raw from several guitar strings taped to a set of keys.

Since Monday I have had no job aside from the writing work that www.theladders.com was gracious enough to give me, alms for the poor. In other words, this is my living now, I am a...a... freelancer. I shake my metal cup, huddled beneath a blanket, and accost those who are daring enough to walk to the outside corners of the internet.

But the future looks bright. Soon enough this blog, the ceiling leaking from the blog above, the floorboards creaking and flimsy enough to see the blog below, will be redone. The boxes are still lying everywhere, but it will only take a month or two to clear them out, put them on the curb. and a buddy of mine is getting rid of a couch, so you guys can at least have a seat.

In other words, keep reading and I'll keep you posted on the best news like this and this and this.

Pazz'n'jop'n'Hinder

2006-12-05T18:17:00.000-05:00

Back in my senior year of high school we all though it would be pretty awesome if we were not dancing to Green Day's "Time of Your Life" and by we I mean my friends and I. Instead we wished to be spinning and kicking and grabbing our crotches to the sinister synths of Thriller. Alas, a much worse fate awaited us at the end of that Prommish tunnel: "Heres to the Night" by Eve 6. That jagged and rusty toenail clipper of a band jabbed itself into my ears again and again, not to mention the voices countless brownroot blondes and swooshfront haired chumps singing in not-so-unison to it. Plus, my date wouldn't dance to the few songs that did appeal to my friends and I.

It was the worst prom ever.

This tangent has a point, and it is this: voting for something that clearly, clearly will not win because everyone else has a sense of obligation is sometimes foolhardy. But if there is anything that saturday morning cartoons have taught me (everything) you have to fight for what you believe in.

I believe that Hinder, yes the band I once described as sounding like a Nickleback burrito that Bon Jovi crapped out, should win The Village Voice's Pazz'n'jop end of the year top ten albums list. Why? Precisely because the blogger "Anthony is Right" is campaigning for every voter to vote for Hinder's perfectly titled 2006 album EXTREME BEHAVIOR.

Why is he campaigning for this? Precisely because The Village Voice is no longer run independantly but is owned by The New Times Media, kind of like clearchannel for beloved art scene go-to mags. Furthermore the beloved Pazz'n'jop mogul, Robert Christgau (if you don't already know all this), was canned/sacked by The New Times Media. Why? It certainly left a lot of people scratching their chins and heads.

Anyway, I think its an hilarious idea to vote Hinder as the top album of the year simply because Hinder's fans are all those brownrooted blonde girls who now wear curlsided cowboy hats and swooshfront haired boys who now all have chlamydia. If I were a respected music journalist (and I am) and voting on this (and I'm not) I'd jump on the Hinderwagon like Hinder jumped on the Nicklewagon. Done.

I've found an even more painful version than the music video of "Lips of an Angel." I mean seriously I'll give you ten high fives or bucks if you sit through the whole thing.

Grizzly Bear's "Knife" music video

2006-12-05T11:27:00.000-05:00

According to Stereogum.com Grizzly Bear has been in the production stages of a video for their near-perfect song Knife for about three months now. You know, that song with the moaning doo-wop and the tiny guitar sparks on the offbeat? Yeah that one.

God knows that they were going to come up with something effing awesome but who knew they were going to end up in the middle of the badlands with rockpeople and crazy contraptions that look like a gold prospector's mining apparatus? I don't know how their lush, leafy pop is going to work in the desert, but I don't put it past them to make. it. work.

The production company behind it is called "Ghost Robot" the same guys who did Hell House in 2001. They look pretty legit and also kinda pissed that Stereogum "spilled the beans".

Pretty psyched about this video considering how sweet it looks, I can't wait.

Blender's 50 worst artists of all time

2006-12-04T15:47:00.000-05:00

I love lists. I love 'em. I can't get enough of em. They're like crack to me. Crack laced with orgasms and breasts. I know people think lists are the death of the music critic, that no one needs to write anymore all they need to do are create lists, blah blah blah. I find that to be as ridiculous as the bouncing cards at the win of a solitare game.

The reason people don't like to read about music anymore is because there are too many assholes like me trying to stuff their face with assholish words. "HEY! Hey jerk! Listen to Kraftwerk if you like that band. No fuck you! You'll like it or I will cut you with a broken, jagged Love LP." But lists can be great! Its a simple way to let people in on a dialogue that is so closely protected by the be-hooded inner cult of critics without making them jump through hoops or draw pentagrams in catsblood on their palms and feet. My top ten picks of the year are X, Y, Z, A, and B, you should hear them. Simple. Clean. not necessarily pretentious (though it could swing that way). No sacrificial celebrity babies involved.

What I hate are when certain assholes out there claim to have recieved some sort of authenticity excalibur handed to them from the deep and vomitous waters of the Frat house keg bucket. You know, a lot of lists can really just be ignored because they're so inane or clearly have absolutely no idea what they're talking about (TIME). Rather, my biggest pet peeve is the opposite end of the spectrum, the worst (whatever) (song/album/yada) of (whenever) kind of lists. Vh1 is a constant offender. But today's whipping (frat) boy is Blender magazine.

If you look at top ten lists as tastemaking then you're an idiot who obviously can't discern for him/herself whether or not you disagree with the author of that list. Its simple: "Oh, hey Steve, I keep hearing that this Joanna Newsom CD is great, can I listen to it?" (much time passes) "Damn Steve, I just can't agree that that Newsom CD is great. Thanks for letting me borrow it, though. Lets go get some tacos, brojangles."

On the other hand there are the "worst of" lists like the one that Blender has pooped onto our plate. "Oh, hey Steve, I heard this album sucks. I don't want to listen to that. Lets go get some burritos, brosef"

My point is this: "worst of" lists do no good to the world. You can say ICP sucks all you want, but you're not opening a critical dialogue about their mysoginy, racism, or violence (the bigger issues than just sucking). As many kids as I'd rather have not listening to ICP I'd rather them listen to it and decide for themselves that they dislike it than listen to someone else's opinion.

Ultimately my personal perturbance stems from this: There are too many people in the world who are more willing to talk when it comes to what is deemed as 'good' because 'good' is easy, but no one ever wants to start a dialogue about what is deemed 'bad' because calling something bad has the potential for harsher disagreement. "worst of" lists give them an exit key without ever having to critically determine what they dislike about ICP's music or Iron Butterfly's music or Starship's music.

But I guess Blender's main audience is comprised of guys who don't know that you can jerk off to fully declothed women anytime you want on the internet.