monday, november 10, 2008
An Interview with Mitch Easter
Back in the halcyon days of the mid-1980s I sat down behind the console at the University of Alabama's radio station WVUA and stumbled into a musical movement that would go on to shape my preferences from there on out. And no single song reached out and slapped me upside the head harder than Let's Active's "Fell" from the stellar Big Plans for Everybody album.The brainchild of one Mitch Easter of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Let's Active boasted a spot-on pop sensibility and their songs bubbled over with sharp songwriting and restrained studio experimentation. But Easter's influence extended a lot further than as the front man of a college-scene trio.
In the late '70s he built a recording studio in his mom's garage and dubbed it the Drive-In. That local became a nexus for the strange southern alt-rock uprising of the era (R.E.M.'s, Chronic Town was famously recorded there). While the scene in Athens, GA has become synonymous to this movement, but there was a formidable NC presence on the music and Easter had a lot to do with that. read more
monday, august 06, 2007
Low-Life - New Order
In the post-punk landscape of the 80s British rock there is one band that stands head and shoulders above the rest – New Order. You didn’t simply listen to them you had to follow their lead and go from there.Which is all a bit difficult to understand twenty-plus years on. They are so important as a band now that their impact is almost a forgone conclusion. But even a decade ago, the perception of the band was quite different.
In the wake of Trainspotting the shimmering beauty of “Temptation” has become de facto song the band is known by. Which was a surprise to me since it thought “Bizarre Love Triangle” would forever after be the single that defined their legacy.
Yet, I stick to my guns and aver that the 1984 album Low-Life is the pinnacle of this band’s artistic ability and it pains me the album doesn’t get the credit it deserves. From the startling sharp drumbeats that hurl you into "Love Vigilantes" (one of their best and most underrated songs, by the way) to the whirl of sound that finishes "Face Up" there just is not a bad song to be found on this album. Low-Life is no less than everything you love about this band and none of the nonsense. read more
wednesday, august 01, 2007
URGH! A Music War!
After the last reverberations of the punk explosion echoed across the land in the late 1970s, something... unusual happened. Unlike the tidy end to the story that is usually presented something quite different took place after someone first declared punk "dead" - a legion of kids picked up instruments and decided to head out and find their own way.What you got was one of the most musically rich and boldly experimental periods in modern music. Looking back on it all post-Nirvana it’s common to divide things into genres – Hardcore over here, New Wave over there, Ska somewhere on the side next to Reggae and the Butthole Surfers wherever the hell they wanted to be.
Yet, what this 20/20 hindsight misses is that, at the time, it was one glorious cacophony of awesome that most of us dived into completely. Everywhere you went there was someone doing interesting exciting music and every new record you found you fell in love with for a different reason. read more
monday, july 23, 2007
Crowded House
At this point I pretty much know the entire catalog of the New Zealand group Crowded House by heart. I’ve been listening to their work regularly since they first showed up on the music scene in the mid-1980s.Yet every damned time I hear them after a period of time I am simply flabbergasted by how damn good they were. It never fails. I’ll not hear their work for months and a song like "In The Lowlands" will pop up on the iPod and – damn it! – I’ll spend the next week obsessed with them all over again.
Led by the incomparably talented Neil Finn, Crowded House created a four-album testament to a powerful and profound artistic vision that stands completely apart from the era that produced it.
Which is all the more remarkable given the groups staunchly new-wave roots. Crowded House rose from the ashes of the great New Zealand band Split Enz. Led by Neil Finn’s rather frighteningly talented older brother, Tim, the Enz sported a buoyant sound that was very much in the right place at the right time in the nascent age of video. They sported that early 80s quirkiness but with a disarming skill at composing melodies that hooked you quick and hard. read more
wednesday, july 04, 2007
hollAnd
For the past decade I've been a fan of the work of Washington D.C.-based musician and artist hollAnd but I've never quite known who the hell he was.The various bios for the guy littered across the internet don't offer a hell of a lot of information other than his real name - Trevor Kampmann. Beyond that he's been accused of being a former teen actor, a computer graphics designer and reformed professional skateboarder. Photos of him - what few seem to be available - invariably omit his face.
It's hard to say how much of all that is true but it probably doesn't matter.
What I am sure of is that he took up his work as a musician under the name of Sea Saw in the mid-1990s and, before long, his work was appearing under the moniker hollAnd. Since then he has released nine albums of differing lengths that are all damn near perfect. He's also the owner of Analagous, a mastering facility located somewhere in the nation's capital. read more
tuesday, june 26, 2007
Funeral - Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire has an astounding ability to defy your expectations in the most wonderful ways. Songs that should peter out gracefully build in intensity. Lyrics that should be straightforward bend paradoxically on themselves. Simple rock compositions blossom into lush symphonic arrangements.This five-piece ensemble led by Win Butler and Regine Chassagne boasts a powerful multi-instrumental approach very similar to fellow Canadians The New Pornographers. But these boasting driving rhythms and rousing guitars head down a different path altoghether than their countrymen.
Their first full-length album, Funeral arrived without much warning in 2004 but it didn’t take very long to get noticed and garner a passel of glowing review boasting as many ten-dollar words as the given reviewer could toss in (I don't plan on being much of an exception). The vaunted Trouser Press described Funeral as "an album composed in sadness but radiating joy" and summed it up by simply proclaiming the work "essential." read more
thursday, june 21, 2007
No Other Love - Chuck Prophet
The artistic explosion on the left side of the dial in the mid-1980s spent itself quicker than most of us would like to admit. The largess of the great era of college-radio bands hit the high water mark about ’87 or so and the tide went out a lot faster than any of us were ready to handle.I guess we aren’t any different than any generation watching our misspent youth grow smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror. What is odd is that the youthful energy of this music provided so few mature artists came out of the decade scarred but smarter an in command of their craft. Sure, R.E.M. did, but they had been dining at the head table for quite some time anyway.
That the wreckage of Green on Red would give us that artist surprised no-one more than myself. Chuck Prophet was the second banana in a tragically overlooked Arizona alt-rock outfit. Today he describes Green On Red as a band, "whose country-meets-folk-meets-too many drugs Americana was one of the early warning signs of the alt country scare to come." read more
thursday, april 05, 2007
Electric Version - The New Pornographers
The legacy of Canadian bands through the 1980s and 90s was not very good to put it mildly. The cachet of such monumental artists like Leonard Coehn was rapidly eroded by the sheer suckitude of bands like Loverboy, Frozen Ghost and Honeymoon Suite. When you add in the suffering we endured by the commercial radio stranglehold embrace of soul killingly tepid acts such as Bryan Adams and Alanis Morrisette… lets just say it wasn’t very pretty.Well, I guess you had to mark it up to the karmic scales evening out for the largess of comedians that came out of the great white north during that same period.
So what the hell happened in the last 20 years? Suddenly there is nothing less than an explosion of kick-ass great bands pouring out of the frozen hinterlands and god bless them for it. read more
monday, march 19, 2007
Crooked Rain Crooked Rain - Pavement
In the horrendous muddle of grunge that took over the indie airwaves after the rise of Nirvana, Pavement was a breath of fresh air. The avant-guard of nerd rock, they had a snotty sense of humor that meshed perfectly with their wear-it-on-your-sleeve amateurishness.And their greatest achievement was the 1994 effort Crooked Rain Crooked Rain. A better collection of loopy free associative rock and roll would be tough to find anywhere but don't think that's all these boys from Stockton, California wwere up to.
Their don’t-give-a-shit attitude couldn’t hide a shining creativity that fueled this strange mess. If the marketed monster of grunge was tough bluster of heroin addicts recycling the best licks of Black Sabbath, then Pavement were the weed-smokin’ hippies who crashed the party after spending the whole afternoon listening to the Velvet Underground’s live records. read more
wednesday, january 10, 2007
Repo Man Soundtrack
When you are stuck in the middle of nowhere, it’s tough to know what direction you need to go. Living in the vast vacuum of mid-America in the 1980s made it damned hard to figure out what your options were after you got sick of Huey Lewis and the News.There may have been a burgeoning indie scene in some of the major urban areas on either coast but that didn't do much for those of us in the sticks. You kept hearing about these wild bands fueled by suburban ennui and middle-class angst but you certainly weren’t going to hear their stuff on the local Top 40 radio station.
The problem was there was either a complete absence of information or way too damned much.
So you would read the small notices in the music mags and hear bits and hints or you would get fanzines now and then that were chock full of all these bizarre and out there bands. There was no way to separate the good from the downright crappy. And for all the backward looking laudation that goes on from here, two decades after-the-fact, the truth is there was a lot more crap floating around than most of us would like to admit. read more
friday, december 15, 2006
The Good Earth - The Feelies
A friend of mine confessed recently that she owns no less than three copies of the Feelies 1986 album, The Good Earth.It turns out that whenever she rummages through used record bins and sees this now out of print treasure just sitting there with a $7 sticker on the cover she is compelled to buy it.
“I can’t just leave it there like that,” she explained.
This kind of protective ownership is somewhat common among us few Feelies fans that remain out there. They never sold a lot of records and most folks never heard of them but this was one of the great indie bands of the 1980s.
Their influence went a lot further than the few records they happened to sell in their heyday. Their sound, if not their unapologetic semi-dorky look, can be found today with bands like The Shins, Wilco and fellow Garden State denizens Yo La Tengo. read more
wednesday, november 22, 2006
Our Band Could Be Your Life - Michael Azerrad
My youth died one afternoon in late 2000 standing in the hallway of an office building in Riverside, California.I was talking with a friend of mine and suddenly I realized that I recognized the song being played on the Muzak being piped through the speakers in the ceiling – The Replacement’s “Skyway.”
Yeah, by then a lot of the bands I grew up listening to at tinnitus levels during my teenage years had been entering the commercial lexicon. I didn’t jump much anymore when a song I knew from then popped up on a car commercial.
But for something by The Replacements to be transmogrified so horribly… well, that was beyond what one man can be expected to endure.
Luckily, less than a year later, music writer Michael Azerrad came out with Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. While this book may not be the final word on the unique music scene I was lucky enough to grow up with and be a part of, but it’s a welcome record of what happened in that strange wonderful time. read more
thursday, november 09, 2006
The Replacements
One of the things I learned quickly as a college radio DJ hungry for new music was to dig out the most beaten-up records in the station’s stacks and slap them on the turntable.The crap-versus-gold ratio was astonishingly good. In fact, the worse the condition of the record sleeve, the better the music on the vinyl was likely to be.
This method led me to great bands like Mission of Burma, the Hoodoo Gurus and The The, not to mention a raft other college radio staples that I otherwise would have completely missed out on.
But I wasn’t quite ready for what lay in store for me when I pulled out what remained of The Replacement’s Let it Be and played "Unsatisfied" for the first time. It was like every horrible bit of angst of my teenage years were right there in one single song. read more
wednesday, november 01, 2006
Oh, Inverted World - The Shins
Somewhere, way out in left field, The Shins were waiting all along.When this quartet burst out of the vastness of the New Mexico desert in 2001 with Oh, Inverted World it was the completely unexpected thing I had been patiently looking for over a half-decade or so.
The first time I heard this record I was completely won over by the band's delightfully lo-fi approach and their willingness to sport their sincerity on their sleeve. There is a straightforward simplicity of the proceedings that is reminiscent of what I love most about The La’s without pretentiousness which I could do without.
As many critics noted at the time, this is the Pet Sounds for a more cynical generation, particularly the vocals of guitarist/singer James Russell Mercer. Given that point of origin you can understand that this is a band that has a fair bit of harmony and they know how to use it. read more
wednesday, october 11, 2006
Mr. Tambourine Man - The Byrds
Sometimes you are so close to what you really love you need someone to point out the obvious for you to really see it. A few years ago my musical compatriot, Micheal Powell, once exasperatingly commented on my love for "those damned jangly guitars."I hadn’t really thought about it much before then but, after looking though my music collection I noticed there really were a lot of jangly guitars in evidence. And, instead of trying to figure out why, I just moved on.
It turns out there was a very good reason but it has only been relatively recently have I figured out that it all goes back to one record – The Byrd’s Mr. Tambourine Man.
The sound of Roger McGuinn's heavily-compressed 12-string Rickenbacker is one of the most distinctive in all of modern music and its echoes were apparent in all the albums I most dearly love. read more
monday, october 02, 2006
Love Tractor
Boredom should never be underestimated as a creative catalyst.Take Athens, Georgia, for example. Back in the mid-1970s it was the typical sleepy college town – lots and lots of liberal arts majors with way too much time on their hands.
"We had nothing to do except make our own fun," recalled musician Mark Cline in a 2001 interview. "So people would make their own bands and have these band parties just for fun."
Then, starting in the late 1970s, things started percolating. Begining with the B-52s, band after band came out of the scene that were breathtakingly good. As the 80s started to pick up steam, the town became a college rock powerhouse. For a college DJ during those years, you couldn’t escape it. And it was wonderful.
But, other than R.E.M. and the B-52s, very few of the bands from that era broke out of the southern college circuit and into the national consciousness and, for many, that was just fine by them. read more
monday, august 07, 2006
The Stone Roses
The Stone Roses defined a generation with a record nobody saw coming.This Manchester quartet unleashed their eponymous debut album in the waning months of 1989 and most of us on the left side of the Atlantic initially passed it over as another one of those British fad bands. But it didn’t take too many listens to become a believer.
The sheer charisma of this band was incredible, the singing was drenched in emotion and the guitar work was just breathtaking. For one of the first fun time-party-rave albums it also was interestingly cerebral. There are questions of love, life and faith that course through every aspect of this album.
The sheer energy and groove of this album makes it an adventure every time you listen to it – a fact that was true then and still is today. read more
tuesday, june 13, 2006
An Inch Equals A Thousand Miles -Map of the World
Map of the World’s An Inch Equals a Thousand Miles was a shining glorious moment in late 80s alternative music that came out of nowhere and promptly retired back into the abyss.Which has a certain poetry to it, I guess, but when you are talking about a group this talented it seems more of a tragedy.
An Inch Equals a Thousand Miles was simply not like anything else floating around the chaotic glory of the indie scene in 1989. Although it was just a six-song EP I found it packed the wallop of a full length effort by many much more lauded bands at the time.
It had the gritty indie feel but pulled off with twice the grace of more polished efforts. I backed into this band after discovering the garage glory of The Gun Club and The Lyres. They segued well due to the shared glory of the vox organ but that was about where the comparisons ended. read more
tuesday, june 06, 2006
Leftism - Leftfield
For some reason, smack dab in the middle of the 1990s, techno arrived.It had been around for some time but there was this sudden deluge of simply awesome techno that simply seemed to appear out of nowhere: The Chemical Brothers, Underworld, The Crystal Method, Fatboy Slim, Prodigy... where the hell did they all come from?
Despite the incredible surge of great music one band stood out for me - Leftfield. There was something about these guys that had all the shimmering cool ethos of the trance style of techno I loved but they infused it with a laid-back groovy sensibility nobody else seemed to know how to do.
Their debut album Leftism boasted a sound that was intense, hypnotic and seductive. More than that, they hadan amazing ability to put together an adrenaline-pumping track you just gotta hear again and again. read more
thursday, may 18, 2006
Hopes and Fears - Keane
A friend of mine in England sent me a bunch of music last year and I tossed it on my iPod and have been whittling my way through it all courtesy the “shuffle” option. I had heard of Keane due to the overwhelming popularity of their hit “Everybody’s Changing” that was all over the airwaves last year – even here in Peru. I didn't get excited about them though. Having seen so many next-big-thing’s turn into much ado about nothing I tend to be cautious about the next big thing.But after hearing a few more songs from the band over the last few months I had to admit, I was impressed. Keane’s debut album Hopes and Fears is not only a wonderful little album, I believe it is the sign of great things to come. This trio from East Sussex, England have a great sound that remains fresh despite the seriousness they have to the effort. read more
monday, may 08, 2006
Big Star
Grow up in the American south and you spend a hell of a lot of time doing nothing at all. A lot of teenage Saturday nights consist of hanging out on a railroad overpass wondering exactly how far the highway below runs out of town.There is an abundance of boredom that envelops that horrible mass of hope, anxiety and teenage sexual frustration. The first time I heard Big Star it was like experiencing an unstoppable music force that rolled all that into one giant mass and then put guitars behind it all. It was a revelation.
Big Star didn't invent power pop but they created such a beautiful version of it that everyone that came after were obligated to follow in their footsteps. A legion of bands - including Nirvana, the Replacements, R.E.M. and Wilco - have credited Big Star as a major influence and hundreds more have been unwittingly inspired by their distinctive sound. read more
thursday, april 27, 2006
The Anthology of American Folk Music
"I'm glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music." - Harry Smith, 1923-1991Harry Smith was an Oregonian who fled to Berkeley, California in the late 40s and found his beatnik soul. A few years later pulled up stakes and moved to New York City where he did what a lot of people in their early 20s do when they need to make quick cash – he tried to sell his record collection.
But this was no ordinary collection; this was a broad archive of 78-rpm recordings from the 20s and 30s. Instead of purchasing it, Folkways Records president Moses Asch asked Smith to create an anthology and, somehow, Smith was able to whittle down the more than 20,000 records to a mere 84 songs.
The songs that made the cut were chosen for their commercial and artistic appeal. It covered a staggeringly broad range of styles that emerged out of the cultural gumbo of America after the turn of the century - blues, folk, gospel, zydeco, ballads - you name it. Smith later explained he specifically selected songs that were recorded between 1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932 when the Depression halted folk music sales. read more
tuesday, april 18, 2006
Underwater Moonlight - The Soft Boys
When this strange band clambered out of Cambridge in the mid-1970s the rest of England was in the throes of the punk revolution. Instead of following the pack, they decided they had to go sideways. Proudly bearing their antecedents on their shoulders rather than trying to tear them down, the Soft Boys started a strange psychedelic counter revolt ion that almost nobody noticed at the time. Their own website boasts they were "neither crowd-pleasers nor critics' darlings, who never played to a crowd of more than three hundred during their six-year career.""We were," said frontman and founder Robyn Hitchcock, "the wrong ship on the wrong planet."
But the planet came around. Dozens of indie bands that followed attested to the importance of the Soft Boy's glorious masterpiece Underwater Moonlight: The Replacements, R.E.M., and the L.A. Paisley Underground. Perhaps only the Velvet Underground’s first record exceeds it in this category. No less than the vaunted Trouser Press proclaimed it to have “everything — melody, power, wit, laughs and heart, not to mention a great guitar sound.” read more
thursday, april 13, 2006
Ambient 1: Music for Airports - Brian Eno/Harold Budd
It might surprise folks to learn that of all the albums that I have in my collection, the ones I have listened to the most are from Brian Eno’s Ambient series, particularly the first, Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Ever since a friend of mine first introduced me to this album more than two decades ago, it has been a constant part of my life.The Ambient series may be one of the most influential works created by any modern composer. You don't listen to it like normal music. You put it on and let it subtly seep into your world. It doesn't impose but it is not ignorable.
"An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint," wrote Eno in the liner notes of Ambient 1. "I have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised." read more
tuesday, april 11, 2006
Doolittle - The Pixies
Nothing less than the revolution come to your doorstep.These guys had been biting at the fringes of the alternative scene for a few years when this record came out and kicked more ass than anyone thought humanly possible.
Doolittle is the most balanced record produced by an immensely talented band. The early Pixies records (which totally rock) have an amateurish quality at times and, conversely, the later records (which totally rock) tend to be a bit too polished. Doolittle is neither.
This is a band at the height of its powers showing a confident assurance but with a just-under-the-surface rawness as well. When Black Francis screams and the band kicks in, it's like a white hot bar shoved straight into the center of your skull.
You had better believe this baby leaves a scar. read more
tuesday, april 04, 2006
Senor Smoke - Electric Six
Every so often, despite your best efforts to insulate yourself from it, the "buzz" finally becomes too much to ignore.There will be some band, or show or film everyone who is anyone is talking about it and you gotta check it out at least to stay abreast of the references folks are dropping.
So, after a heaping helping of hints and suggestions I finally snuggled up to the warm bosom of iTunes and procured Electric Six's second album Señor Smoke.
My complete assessment of this album can be summarised thusly:
And lordy, cheesy it is. Everything from singer Dick "I'm dying for your sins on the dance floor" Valentine's overwrought vocals to the dueling guitar histronics of The Colonel and John R Dequindre to the squeeky-clean production work of Peter & Peter. But if there is a redemptive aspect to cheese, this album is wallowing in it. read more
thursday, march 30, 2006
The Minutemen
San Pedro, California is just a half-hour drive north of Los Angeles on Interstate 110. It might as well be located in another galaxy. The flaccid idealism that props up the city of angels doesn’t carry one very far in working-class San Pedro. Folks who live here tend to be pragmatic and realists. That sensibility and gravity combined to create one of the greatest punk bands America ever produced.It all started one day in the mid 1970s in San Pedro when a kid named Dennes Boon fell out of a tree onto another kid, Mike Watt. The two became fast friends, partially because of their shared love for music. They both took up instruments but knew early on they were not cut out to be rock stars. But they loved music so they kept playing. And then punk came and everything changed.
In the late 1970s, Los Angeles was a nexus of a thriving second wave punk scene fueled by such acts s the Germs and Black Flag. Sure, lots of folks joined in for the anarchy and the pretense of power screaming at the microphone projected. But Boon and Watt understood the real power of what they saw immediately –that you could do it yourself and that independence was a frontier of possibility rather than an excuse to be sloppy. read more
tuesday, march 28, 2006
Nevermind - Nirvana
It is really hard to overstate the importance of Nirvana’s Nevermind but so much absolute dreck followed in its wake that it’s tough to look at it without the haze of mediocrity that gets in the way. In one sense there is nothing new here. Wild flailing guitars have been around for decades, grunge, as a movement, had already had it’s glorious day in the indie sun and suburban teen angst has been fueling Rock n' Roll since the 50's at least.But in another sense, there is nothing here like anything that had gone before. There is a strange cataclysmic glory in the self-hatred, nihilistic, fuck-it-all fury Nirvana found a way to tap into. Not only did that include all those other folks wearing flannel and sipping dark beer in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s but everyone. read more
tuesday, march 21, 2006
Superchunk
Everyone has a band they feel they have possession of. A band whose music they feel is uniquely theirs. The band they would want to have play the soundtrack of the film made for their life.For me, that band is Superchunk.
I have a lot of favorite bands whose music is an intimate and essential part of my life but none come as close to that secret thrum of my heart the way Superchunk does. Something about these guys simply makes me happy to hear them. Every time I hear them.
And, likely, that happened because they are a lot like me. They started out as dead broke college kids in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that just loved their music. Forming in 1988 they played opening gigs around town while taking classes and working classic dead end jobs – almost as the same time I was doing the same damn thing. read more
monday, march 20, 2006
The Golden Palominos
The Golden Palominos begin and end with drummer Anton Fier. But what makes them great is everyone else you meet in between.Looking back, probably what is probably most amazing is not that this incredible strange menagerie of musicians was able to produce something so transcendent but how they were able to put that much fucking talent in a room and have the result be so completely better than the sum of the parts.
Fier got his start with one of the greatest of the 80s college indie bands – The Feelies. But that band eventually ended up with two percussionists for their landmark The Good Earth album and a third with the prodigious talents Fier possessed was probably a bit much.
So he hit the burgeoning indie circuit handling the sticks for a who’s who of critical darlings of the time including Pere Ubu and The Lounge Lizards. But it wasn’t until he returned to New York and started pulling sessions musicians together for almost hootanany-style jam sessions that the glory of the Golden Palominos was born. Their first recorded effort in 1983 leaned toward experimentalism and sounds woefully dated today but much greater things were to come. read more
tuesday, march 14, 2006
Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison - Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three
With the recent passing of Johnny Cash an onslaught of musical collections purporting to be definitive have flooded the market. The success of the film about his life also added to this trend, which, as should be expected, has mostly foisted a huge amount of b-grade material on an unsuspecting public.While diehard aficionados may have reason to enjoy the more obscure tracks in the voluminous body of work this man created (and many are well worth seeking out) it can be difficult for those less familiar with his music to know exactly where to start. And I can think of no better album than his 1968 classic Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison.
In January 1968 Cash and his band The Tennessee Three played four live shows at Folsom State Prison in Folsom, California. Cash’s wife, June Carter, as well as fellow country music legend Carl Perkins also performed. The result was a watershed record that re-defined the singer’s career. read more
thursday, march 09, 2006
Robyn Hitchcock
"My contention is, however – and it's a bloody obvious one – that beneath our civilized glazing, we are all deviants, all alone, and all peculiar. This flies in the face of mass marketing, but I’m sticking with it." – Robyn HitchcockNo matter how many reassurances you get from the horrible mediocrity foisted upon us all by television, the truth is that the world is a much stranger place than any of us ever imagined. We spend most of our lives being told not to pay attention to the glorious weirdness and, instead, enjoy the claustrophobic comfort of numbing conformity.
Robyn Hitchcock intends to bring this sad state of affairs to an end. For more than three decades his music has worked to nudge us all out of that horrible complacency (or simply shove us wholeheartedly, if given the chance) and force you to see the strange and bizarre nature of this world and, if you can, accept it for its terrible beauty. read more
thursday, february 23, 2006
Rio - Duran Duran
This is not a guilty pleasure. This is actually a record I greatly enjoy and have regularly listened to since pretty much the time it came out. The album's distinctive purple cover painted by artist Patrick Nagel has become iconic and immediately identifiable world wide in ways never dreamed at the time.What is unusual about the record is that it has taken on the disposable trappings of the worst of 80s new wave by association. Most likely because of the impact the videos had to push the popularity of the then-fledgling MTV. But this record has a long and convoluted history and the band certainly is not responsible for the pandora's box they opened with their videos (although they didn't hesitate to pursue that fame relentlessly in their hopelessly mediocre follow-ups.)
Rio was released on the world in May of 1982 and there was already a bit of expectation due to the sucess of "Girls on Film." But, to that point, the band was a weird haircut one-hit-wonder. A poor man's Flock of Seagulls when that actually wasn't considered a put down by any means. It had been recorded under the helm of producer and engineer Colin Thurston in London's Air Studios. read more
thursday, february 16, 2006
The dB's
It is not a big secret that I have a certain affinity for what I describe as "pop" music. If there is a mis-maligned genre of modern music this has to be it. For most the term describes a certain fluffy meaningless brand of music churned out by a studio of producers for a mindless public. And that's certainly the case for the worst of the type. But it's a definition that simply falls short.Good pop music is that undeniably catchy brand of music that you find yourself singing despite yourself days after you heard the record for the first time. It's often well done but not necessarily slick. Sure some of it is mindless but the best of the brand tends to have a message underneath that eventually sinks into your medulla oblongata and refuses to leave. Bands like the Beach Boys, Material Issue and Fountains of Wayne seem to be singing about girls they are swooning over but that's only to the casual listener. read more
tuesday, february 14, 2006
1999 - Prince
When people talk about the best band or best artist of the 1980s, an objective assessment can only lead us to name one person – Prince. No matter who you were and what you were listening to in the 1980s you were under the spell of his royal purple badness and music as a whole was so much better for it.There is a certain amount of disagreement over what is Prince’s best album but it’s kind of a ridiculous argument. So much of his stuff is so far above what anyone else was doing at the time or since that there really is no comparison. But 1999 stands out for several reasons. This record was his first mega-work, one that simply reached out beyond the simple idea of a “record” and was a powerful musical statement. You didn’t just listen to this record, you let it into your life and learned from it. read more
thursday, february 09, 2006
Mind Bomb - The The
An album every bit as important today as when it came out in 1989.As Matt Johnson looked behind him at Thatcher-era England he was troubled by what he saw. Sharpened by personal crisis he instinctively felt the dangers that were facing the modern world. What made him different from so many others was that he wasn't casting blame, he was issuing warnings about the future he saw to be inevitable.
To do this, Johnson discarded the pseudo-pop trappings of his earlier work and created a singular artistic vision. Bringing on ex-Smith's axeman, Johnny Marr, brought the level of the musicianship up to the level of the songwriting. There is a strong consistency to the songwriting and music that gives the work a powerful punch, and makes its message strike all that much deeper.
And Johnson clearly has a message to get across. As you take it in it's best to follow the man's advice with this one - "Please play very loud, very late, very alone, and with the lights turned very low." read more
thursday, february 02, 2006
Camper Van Beethoven
First time I saw these guys the lead singer, David Lowery, started the show by stepping to the mike and simply stating "We're Camper Van Beethoven. We're from California. We're on acid." They then spent the next two and a half hours proving it.Coming out of Santa Cruz in the mid-1980s this five-piece band offered up a bizarre style of music that nobody really knew what to do with. They called their music "surrealist absurdist folk,” and that was a good a description as any. Their early work traipsed gleefully across styles and musical genres carrying absurd lyrics and bizarre guitar and violin solos along with them. They gradually coalesced into a more unified whole by the end of their strange trip but never lost that affinity for the odd.
The heart of the band was David Lowery, who later went on to some renown with Cracker, violinist/keyboardist/auteur Johnathan Segel, guitarist Greg Lisher, bassist Victor Krummenacher and drummer Chris Pedersen (although the lineup changed a bit over the life of the group). The genius of the band was their complete awareness of how inbred and idiotic the alternative scene was despite its continual protestations about how it was above the mainstream music industry’s commission of those same sins. They poked fun at all of it with gleeful abandon. read more
tuesday, january 31, 2006
Lone Justice
"A natural disaster ain't got nothing on me." - Maria McKeeThere is a strange conception that the 1980s were an era of some type of musical torpor. That plastic, Casio keyboard driven pop ruled the earth awaiting only the arrival of flannel clad boys from the Pacific Northwest to set things aright.
Which could not be further from the truth.
Growing up during that decade I was constantly astounded by the vibrant and powerful music that surrounded me. Looking back, it simply amazes me the number of musical masterpieces I bought simply because I had a few extra bucks the day I wandered into the record store.
One that fits this description is the eponymous debut of Lone Justice. This record simply will not age, it has all the ineffable qualities of greatness when listened to today as it did when I first heard it back when it was released in 1985. Born of the West Coast country circuit, this group of musicians had a strong sense of tradition but without the sentimentality that made bands like The Eagles famous. Instead they had at their core the punk ethos of the great Slash Records bands like The Blasters. read more
tuesday, january 24, 2006
Yankee, Hotel, Foxtrot - Wilco
A few years back I lost my job to retrenchment, my girlfriend to frailty and my best friend to AIDS.I spent the next 18 months driving across the United States looking for another job, visiting old friends and spending way way too much time wallowing in nostalgia and melancholy. Despite it all, I had a pretty good time.
During my travels I ended up in a record store in Dallas, Texas and, on a whim, picked up a record I had heard some good stuff about as well as some half-remembered chatter about some controversy or another - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
I played it in my car as I drove around the country. Long stretches of interstate where your mind wanders between the monotony of the pavement and horizon. Where a clever billboard keeps you occupied in thought for 20 miles. I didn’t really listen to the record at first. I just played it. By the third time through it hit me - this has to the greatest album of the 21st century. read more
thursday, january 19, 2006
Two Wheels Good - Prefab Sprout
I've met only a handful of people who even know this record existed but each and every one has been as devoted to it as I am. This record has been a constant companion for more than 17 years and I still love listening to it as much as when I first bought it.Newcastle singer/songwriter Paddy McAloon built a strange niche in the early 1980s with what the Trouser Press describes as "smart and sophisticated garden-pop-jazz." But for some reason, no matter how close to the heart of the matter it gets, that definition falls strangely short. There is something else going on in the core of the songwriting that owes a lot to Memphis blue-eyed soul that catches your fancy as much as The Rightous Brothers caught your parent's.
Then there is Two Wheels Good where McAloon raises the stakes and you never realize it because the result is so seamlessly wonderful. It was one of the first records I bought on the basis of a music review and one of the few times that it paid off. It's a paradox in many ways - a lush melodic daydream that has it's feet firmly on the ground, a lament for love gone bad and a romanticism that somehow things can work out, a soulful pop masterpiece produced by the king of 80s quirkiness, Thomas Dolby. read more
thursday, january 12, 2006
The Jazz Butcher
"The Jazz Butcher is one of the most brilliant incisive pop writers that Britain has produced since the glory days of Ray Davies and Pete Townsend. Criminally overlooked by a media obsessed by the next big thing instead of what is actually good. A truly great songwriter." - Alan McGee, President, Creation RecordsThat quote is at the very top of The Jazz Butcher's website and it sums up a lot about this fantastic band. The Jazz Butcher is, by far, the most criminally unrecognized musical genius alive today. Since the early 80s he and his lovable compatriots - be they "the Conspiracy" or his "Sikkorskis from Hell" - have churned out some of the most compelling, innovative, weird and downright funny music out there. His styles have ranged across a huge expanse of musical territory never less than masterful in any. read more
tuesday, january 10, 2006
The La's
This album is proof that "pop" is not a four letter word; that rock and roll can save your soul and that Lou Reed was right when he said the best thing in the world was the sound of two guitars, one bass and one drummer.It's really hard to imagine a more perfect album than this one-shot produced by The La's in the early 1990s. It has everything one could ask out of a record - exquisitely crafted songs, thoughtful musicianship, and a heaping helping of charisma to top it all off. Throw in a dose of jangly guitars and there isn't much more I can ask of the world.
Sure, the cover of "There She Goes" has become an "adult rock" staple but this is one of the few times that's OK simply because it's that fucking good. I've got a soft spot in my heart for records that have that subtle ability to sneak up on you and this is the most extreme example I know of. read more
tuesday, january 03, 2006
VU - The Velvet Underground
This is the record that changed my life.I was well on my way to being a perfectly normal suburban American male. Go to college, get a sweetheart, get a job and the requisite 2.3 kids and set up in a bedroom community orbiting somewhere around a vague metropolitan area. It all went out the window when Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground arrived with different plans.
It has always been a point of pride with me that I discovered the Velvet Underground on my own. I was wasting a bored afternoon in the only record store in town when I came across this interesting black covered album that featured the arresting image of a VU meter pegging out on the right side. I picked it up with a couple of other records I probably no longer have and went home to discover everything I had been taught in the world had been a lie. read more
tuesday, june 08, 2004
Robert Quine
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The fact is, The Velvet Underground were a pretty big deal to me growing up. And the fact is, all the bands influenced by them stand pretty tall as well, particularly the New York punk scene of the late 1970s. This includes Television, Patti Smith, the Ramones as well as Richard Hell and the Voidoids. read more