rockrobster23's Last.fm Journal

Band Fights

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:46:16 +0000

The Beach Boys vs. Great White
Don't go surfing, guys. Have a clambake instead. At least get a bigger boat.

The Gun Club vs. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Survivalist types vs. bikers = fun. Tarantino should direct.

The Magnetic Fields vs. Wall of Voodoo
Science battles magic!

Big Ass Truck vs. Dwarves
Just how many dwarves would it take to prevail over this big-ass truck? Clearly just one dwarf would just be crushed under the giant tires. I'm thinking a dozen dwarves, working smartly together, could beat the truck.

Fuck vs. Hole vs. Anal Cunt vs. The Dicks
For adults only.

The Police vs. The Killers
Oh, wait. This is every show on TV already.

Massive Attack vs. Earth
Seen this one before, too. Will Smith or Tom Cruise was in it.

The Stooges vs. Moe
This one's been done to death, too, but we boys never seem to get tired of it.

X vs. Y
For the algebraically inclined.

Dead Kennedys vs. The Dick Nixons
Rematch of the 1960 U.S. presidential election, this time with zombie Kennedy and Nixon! The Dead Boys and The Zombies can fill out the rest of the cast.

The Pretenders vs. The Real Kids
Kind of archetypal, actually. Artifice vs. authenticity.

What band fights would you like to see?

Reelin' in the Years, Pt. 3

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:51:32 +0000

One song for each year I've been alive, not necessarily the best or favorite, just whatever I feel like talking about when that year comes up.

Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.

1994: In the mid-90s, Pravda released a series of cover/tribute albums focused on the kind of top 40 pop trash that used to be featured on K-Tel and Ronco collections. Like virtually all examples of this kind of collection, the results were mixed, but the high points of the series were among the best covers I've heard. When The Loud Family tackle America's soft-rock hit horse with no name, the results transcend the limp original. Moving from a distorted and phased guitar into an ethereal bed of keyboards, Scott Miller's band delivers a psychedelic re-vision of the original.

I used to own all of the Pravda series, but they all went away at some point. Have to re-download those.

1995: The The Apples in Stereo were the first Elephant 6 band I heard, so they can be credited with leading me to Neutral Milk Hotel and The Olivia Tremor Control, among others. Glowworm is a glorious candy-pop song about the death of a friend. Fun!

1996: Big Ass Truck was basically a Southern boogie band, but with turntables. Theem From sounds as if DJ Food had been in the Allman Brothers. Around this time, a good friend of mine was in a surf band, and I told him they needed to do something like adding a turntablist to differentiate themselves from the thousand other surf bands. He was probably right to reject my suggestion, but I still think most surf guitar bands are pretty much interchangeable.

1997: Only Stephin Merritt could write a song as funny and as bleak as The TIny Goat. "The world's a leech / Crawling down one's throat. / One would rather be a tick than be a tiny goat."

1998: Most self-professed Christian rock bands come off as pale imitations of whatever subgenre they inhabit. Not so with the Danielson Famile, who create a universe all their own, where Neil Young's snotty little brother fronts a 60s girl group. The theology is mostly inscrutable, as in Southern Paws, but that inscrutability is probably liberating; Danielson doesn't feel obligated to explicitly spell out an evangelical message. The commercial appeal is already limited; this band is seriously weird, which of course I find appealing.

1999: Hardly anybody liked Terror Twilight, even a large part of Pavement's rabid fanbase (of which I am a member). Although the album is uneven, it has some of their best songs, including Cream of Gold. For me, it's a great comeback from what was a pretty boring penultimate album (Brighten the Corners).

2000: Did you hear that Calexico's Crystal Frontier (Widescreen) just got used as wake-up music in orbit? The musical taste of astronauts is getting better and better. They probably used to just wake up to HAL.

2001: Gillian Welch's Revelator is relentless. It quietly creeps up on you and destroys your will to live. And it does that without tricks, just Welch's gorgeous bone-tired croon and two acoustic guitars. That such stark simplicity can easily evoke what heavy psych bands sweat to even approach is remarkable.

2002: As long as I'm doing sad songs, let's follow that up with Beck's Lonesome Tears. Some resemblance to Massive Attack here.

Man, it is hard coming up with something to say about this many semi-randomly selected songs. Next time I do this (at track #21,965) I should work backwards, because I feel like I'm out of gas by the time the oughts roll around.

2003: In Bonanza, towards the end of the very brief track, there is the sound of a door opening. On headphones, the door sounds like it is opening right behind you, which is really creepy. And it took me four or five listens, even when I knew it was coming, to stop flinching.

2004: When Reigning Sound decided to call their album Too Much Guitar, they weren't kidding. Like a garage/soul version of Husker Du, all the guitars are overdriven to the point of red fuzz, but also like Husker Du, the fuzz conceals pretty melodies. After a few listens, songs like If You Can't Give Me Everything begin to reveal themselves and sound like 60s shoulda-been-hits.

2005: Blood on the Wall delivers pure punk adrenaline on Heat From the Day. It's nice that New York bands are still doing this kind of thing and not necessarily chasing after the Pitchfork seal of approval.

2006: Speaking of critical darlings, Baltimore's Beach House probably deserves those accolades. Listening to the baroqueAuburn and Ivory and reading about how Baltimore is blowing up with this type of chamber-psych sound makes me wonder about local scenes. I lived in Baltimore in the late 80s/early 90s, and the "Baltimore sound" then was funky hard rock/punk, like Monkeyspank and the All Mighty Senators. These new bands could hardly sound more opposed to that, and I wonder, how do changes like that occur? Gradually? All at once? And are some of these new bands the kids of the old funk-punkers? I'll be in Baltimore next week; maybe I'll ask around.

2007: When I met the guys in The High Strung five years ago, they were playing the same bar with us after having already being on the road pretty much nonstop for years. Genuinely nice guys, who lived in a van! And they're still going. Maybe You're Coming Down With It is a good example of their tight melodic pop songwriting. Their bass player is a melody machine all by himself.

2008: There are a lot of new bands I've started to love (easily a half dozen at least) this calendar year, but according to my strict format, from which I cannot deviate, I can only give love to one in this, the last spot on the tour. And that band is White Denim, a tight, rough n' tumble garage band with some psych and jazz tendencies. shakeshakeshake rocks the hop. So what do you say, dummies?

(If you've heard the song, that's a rhetorical question.)

Reelin' in the Years, Pt. 2

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:15:46 +0000

One song for each year I've been alive. Not necessarily the best or favorite song, just whatever I want to talk about when that year comes up. First part is here.

1977: When I was in junior high, Rush was my favorite band. I even had a Rush belt buckle which I thought was cool. Songs like Cygnus X-1 fell right in line with my love for science fiction, and I liked the mathy, complicated progressions. Later, as punk and punk-influenced music grew to dominate my taste, I dismissed Rush as hopelessly pretentious and mired in prog cliches. They embody so much of what I dislike about prog, but they are undeniably great at what they do, even if what they do is something I don't particularly enjoy anymore. Does that make any sense?

Just as an aside, rockers of the late 70s were weirdly fascinated with spaceships. Besides this song, there's Out of the Blue, and all of Boston's albums, and Jefferson Starship. Spaceships are best reserved for funk.

1978: It was weird to be into Rush and Elvis Costello at the same time. Or at least that's what people would tell me. Lipstick Vogue is one the dozens of great songs Elvis came out with in an amazingly short time, one of the great runs of songwriting in history, up there with Lennon and McCartney.

1979: Talking Heads were supposed to be "new wave," but really they didn't sound much like anything else going on at the time. I don't think I got that songs like Mind were psychedelic in a very original way. My friend Tim and I did an audio review of Fear of Music for the radio station where we worked, and we were reduced to talking about the bumps on the cover. Hard to get a handle on, but this stuff has aged really well. And I wish I had a tape of us talking about the bumps, because that would be a hoot to listen to.

1980: On that same radio station (WBRH, operated by high school students and playing rock at the time), I once did a countdown of the top 100 songs in rock history, according to me, and City Drops Into The Night came in at #1. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was a perfect illustration of the dangers of ranked lists: your picks may look ridiculous later. Or even at the time they are made. What the hell, I still like this song; it's dark and brooding and hard and full of interesting lyrics ("vision's just some costly infection"), like a Jim Morrison with better poetic chops.

1981: I've been in love with The Gun Club's Sex Beat since the first time I heard it, and I've been singing it for years. Great lyrics ("Terri Ann's got a tiger in her hips"), great chugging country blues beat. If I wasn't thoroughly convinced of the futility of ranked lists, I might put this one in a top 10 of some kind.

1982: Wall of Voodoo could have been The Gun Club's geekier younger brother, tinkering with his computer while big bro Jeffrey Lee was at a keg party. It's the same country influence, but filtered though a more polished and literary cynicism and a fascination with electronics. The monologue in Call of the West is too long to reproduce here, but it's a hilarious and evocative catalog of the reasons people want to better themselves, like having "chili every morning" and "to not have to do laundry." Yes, it's all trivial, but taken as a whole, it's life and freedom, and all the stuff that people actually do, and want. Kind of a libertarian manifesto, actually.

1983: And So We Run might be the perfect song for being 18 years old, validating new independence and adulthood. I first heard it at 18, so there you have it.

1984: As moik argued a while back, this was just an enormous year for seminal records. One of my favorites is Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade, a double slab of multicolored dayglo punk fuzz. Pink Turns to Blue might be the most pop/melodic track on the album, but the raw shredded hardcore of side 2 is all great too.

Hey, it's about to storm, and the power might go out. That's just what happens in the country. So I'm going to post this and do some errands. Back when I know the electricity will do my bidding.

***********
And I'm back. Electricity, be my bitch again.

1985: Descendents is part of the wonderful genre of bands writing songs about themselves. It's a great want ad:

We're looking for a few good men. Degenerates need not apply. Attitude is a must. (no big hair)

1986: As a young man, I was very anti-country, until I really listened to Johnny Cash's old stuff (thinking it would be good for a laugh, and discovering how spectacular it was). Then when I ran across Dwight Yoakam's first album, I had to admit that it wasn't just Johnny Cash making an uncool genre cool. Guitars, Cadillacs is a terrific entry point for rockers curious about country. My dad was a big country fan, and I've always regretted that he died before I grew to share his passion.

1987: Most fans of The Replacements seem to prefer the earlier albums, but to me Pleased to Meet Me is just as good as Tim or Let It Be. Skyway is atypically soft, but the regret and ache was always there in Westerberg's rockers, too. Bonus: a muzak version of this plays occasionally at the restaurant I manage, and when that happens I get to feel really smug knowing that nobody else knows what that song is.

1988: Camper Van Beethoven's Tania features one of my favorite opening lines: "O, my beloved Tania, how I long to see your face photographed in 15-second intervals." On paper, it's awkward, but it works musically. If I was Patty Hearst, I would be tickled to death that someone wrote a song this pretty about me, even if it was more about "saving us from boredom" than about me. Fun fact: I waited on Patty Hearst (at a restaurant in Baltimore) sitting at a table with John Waters, Traci Lords, and Johnny Depp. You can probably guess the movie they were making.

1989: De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising came out the same year as Paul's Boutique, which has got to be a hip-hop highwater mark. Ghetto Thang is one of many great tracks on the former record. The little skits haven't aged as well.

1990: Flood was my ex-wife's favorite album. She would run around the house singing "Mr. Horrible, Mr. Horrible!" I didn't realize she was talking about me.

Dead is probably my favorite song on that record, because of the knotty existential dilemma of "I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want" vs. "I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do."

1991: Dash Rip Rock was the first band of my generation to "make it big" out of my hometown, Baton Rouge. They kinda got backlashed locally, though, once they got a bigger audience. Partly it was because they liked to tell the same jokes at each show, and partly it was because local hippie/punk snobs were displeased by the fact that frat boys liked them. Bumfuck Egypt was one of their live staples--and they were a GREAT live band.

1992: Ah, grunge. Them Bones turned out to be pretty prophetic, didn't it? I guess that's what self-fulfilling prophecies do.

1993: It's a shame The Breeders only had one hit off Last Splash. There are so many great songs on that record, including the ecstatic No Aloha. I remember at the time having discussions about whether it was better to have BOTH a Breeders and a Frank Black album, or if it would have been better to have one (greater) Pixies album. Well, I guess I would need to hear this hypothetical new Pixies album to really say. Sounds like somebody has some work to do.

Part 3 coming later tonight.

Reelin' in the Years, Pt. 1

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:08:40 +0000

Back in January, I did this little live blog where I listened to a song from each year I've been alive, in sequence, and wrote about whatever came to mind. You can find it here, here, and here, if you're interested.

Sitting at 11,964 tracks, it's time to do this again, because I've downloaded and ripped a LOT more music than I used to have on my computer (external hard drive), so I'll have a lot more choices in what to listen to and talk about. Also, it's fun to just let go and not have a specific plan or argument I want to make.

Most choices: 1993 (26.7 hours)
Least choices: 1970 (107 minutes)

1965: I'm going to start by cheating. Downtown was actually released in late 1964, but it may well be the earliest piece of popular music I can remember hearing. I probably heard it in the womb. Generally speaking, I would call this kind of stuff "overproduced," but I feel a very comfortable nostalgia about Petula Clark's biggest hit. It's got a charming and brassy innocence, and is a marvelous piece of pop craftsmanship.

1966: You're Gonna Miss Me ought to make some kind of short list of greatest rock songs. So simple and so swingin'. My band used to cover this live and if we were feeling it, we'd just extend the jam at the end and insert snippets of all kinds of other songs in with the basic chord pattern: Gloria is the only one that comes to mind, but the cool thing was figuring out how many other songs worked with that same pattern and just throwing them in on the fly, sometimes from audience suggestions. The Fleshtones do that sort of thing much better than we ever did, but they've been practicing since the dawn of time. Pretty much.

1967: Merle Haggard is a guy I admire tremendously as a songwriter, but I typically find his (or his producer's) arrangements too SLOW. You can't go back from punk speeds, I guess, and I always want to hear songs like Branded Man played at a faster tempo. I don't feel that way about all country, or all 60s music, for that matter, but a lot of Merle's songs tend to sound like they WANT to be faster.

1968: For example, Wichita Lineman moves at a pretty glacial pace by modern standards, but it doesn't sound like it wants to go any faster than it does. And this very particular nitpick may be the only time that Glen Campbell comes out ahead of Merle Haggard in any discussion of country music--although this song is really pretty cool, too, even the with the super-velvety countrypolitan string arrangement. Then again, I'm not a purist, although I do understand the purist argument.

1969: When I was a kid, I always thought Bob Dylan was singing about a puppet. Specifically, Lady Elaine from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. I was probably a teenager by the time I figured out it was Lay Lady Lay. And although it's one of my favorite Dylan songs, I still maintain that my original interpretation makes it a cooler song.

1970: Sticking with country for at least one more, here's Kris Kristofferson's original version of Sunday Morning Coming Down. I have a whole journal specifically about this song, so I'll just say that Kristofferson's version has a soul vibe missing from Johnny Cash's more famous cover, but I still prefer the man in black's take. It's sadder.

1971: More country! I didn't plan it this way, but I have to go where the music takes me, and Townes Van Zandt's Pancho And Lefty might be the best song released that year. If I was still a creator of ranked lists, this might be a top ten selection for the decade. Every line is a little masterpiece. My favorite music blogger, Paul at Setting the Woods on Fire, has a terrific analysis of "Pancho and Lefty" here. Go read it. I'll be here when you get back.

1972: My cat hates it when I listen to music on headphones. He wants to sit on my lap (to comfort me because of the sounds of pain coming out of the region near my head?), but that can't happen when I'm typing. So he's hating things a lot. Anyway, Go All the Way is just about perfect early power pop, and totally fuzzy too (that's good).

1973: Auto_Da_Fe told me one of his early bandmates wanted to name their band Baby Ice Dog, which he thought was totally stupid at the time. Me, I think it would have been really cool, but then I've always worn my heart on my sleeve for Blue Öyster Cult, specifically their first three albums. Yes, it's 70s proto-metal boogie, a genre which has for the most part not aged well, but BOC was different. They had all that stupid mystical 70s hard rock hoodoo, but they had almost a Ramones-ish sense of humor about it, without sacrificing the really important fact that dark pseudo-mystical hoodoo is actually kind of fun, if you don't take it so seriously. Are you paying attention, goths and emoes?

1974: Aerosmith is pretty much irrelevant today, and if you only know their sappy, lame 80s power ballads, you won't recognize the tight electric blues band that played Train Kept a Rollin'. When they shift gears midway through the song and get going on the quicker tempo, it's a makes-me-blush moment. Disregard the clunky ending; that's how all hard rock bands ended songs in that era. Nobody knew they could just stop!

1975: I'm tempted to take a mulligan on this year--there's nothing I really want to talk about. But having cheated on the very first entry, I feel obligated. Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirt Cowboy is a pretty weird song, isn't it? Bernie Taupin's lyrics are typically impressionistic and impenetrable. This was just before Elton John lost all his mojo. Hard to believe now, but he was probably the biggest pop star in the world at one point in the early/mid 70s.

1976: The first time I heard of the Sex Pistols, they were featured on 60 Minutes, which I was watching with my grandfather. He didn't think much of the Pistols, but I remember thinking that it sounded kind of cool. Yes, punk was a necessary storm, but music that sounded sort of like that was already around--AC/DC, for example, shared the crunchy riffs. The main difference was in the vocals. Nobody snarled like that (Anarchy in the U.K.), and for this preteen, that was a little hard to get used to. The most interesting thing to me now about the Pistols is how, at the time, their music seemed so FAST, and now it sounds kind of plodding: a function of how much music audiences in general have gotten used to much faster tempos. Maybe the Pistols should have gone to the "play faster" school with Merle.

That's it for tonight. Parts 2 and 3 tomorrow.

Weekly Top Artists

Wed, 9 Apr 2008 19:05:43 +0000

This may be of interest only to me; it's the kind of journal I usually skip. I'm curious what a list of my weekly top artists looks like over time, starting from when I began using last.fm more regularly, so:

12/2/07--Burial
12/9/07--PJ Harvey
12/16/07--The Books
12/23/07--Subtle
12/30/07--The Books
1/6/08--Broadcast
1/13/08--The Microphones
1/20/08--Uncle Tupelo
1/27/08--Camper Van Beethoven
2/3/08--The Handsome Family
2/10/08--Elf Power
2/17/08--Black Mountain
2/24/08--Jim White
3/2/08--The Olivia Tremor Control
3/9/08--Uncle Tupelo
3/16/08--Camper Van Beethoven
3/23/08--Dead Meadow
3/30/08--John Oswald
4/6/08--Guided by Voices
4/13/08--The Raconteurs
4/20/08--TIE! Delmore Pilcrow and Lyres
4/27/08--Yo La Tengo
5/4/08--TIE! ZZ Top and Desert Sessions
5/11/08--Sleepynaut
5/18/08--The Gun Club
5/25/08--TIE! The Handsome Family and Reigning Sound
6/1/08--Sleepynaut
6/8/08--Secret Knives
6/15/08--Curtis Mayfield
6/22/08--Grandaddy
6/29/08--Calexico
7/6/08--VACATION
7/13/08--TIE! The Moaners and Thee More Shallows
7/20/08--The Young Fresh Fellows
7/27/08--Wilco
8/3/08--The Kinks
8/10/08--Thee More Shallows
8/17/08--The Wrens
8/24/08--Okkervil River

Interesting: Blitzen Trapper and X (currently #2 and #5 on my overall charts) have never led a weekly chart. That's if you define "interesting" very broadly, to include "things that are inherently trivial, esoteric, and of little utility to anyone."

Sleepynaut, To the Delight of Dozens

Fri, 6 Jun 2008 07:20:27 +0000

For many years, people have been telling me that there’s no more good music, and that any halfway-good music of today is not even original, that it’s just bands recycling old styles. That is of course ridiculous, and says more about the person making the statement than it does about new music. It’s like saying, “There are no more good restaurants. All the good restaurants went out of business in the (60s) (70s) (80s) (90s) (when ranch dressing got popular) (please take your pick).”

I would argue the opposite, that there is considerably more good music being produced today than there ever has been before. The availability of cheap home recording equipment and sound mixing software has lowered the financial bar for entry into the recording business, so that virtually anyone can make a decent-sounding recording. The flipside of cheap technology is that it is also easy for talentless morons to make decent-sounding crap, but I’d rather have more of everything and have to do some sifting than be restricted to what a handful of record companies deem appropriate listening.

Sleepynaut is one of those nearly unknown high-quality bands that makes the sifting process a pleasure. Primarily a studio project with a revolving cast of players, Sleepynaut is just one of several projects led by “assembler of recorded pieces” Lattney B. I’m not going to try to untangle all the personnel, because I would probably slight someone’s contribution and thereby unnecessarily piss somebody off.

With an album titled Demos and First Takes, you’re looking for a certain amount of sprawl, and Sleepynaut delivers that. For some listeners, sprawl might translate as “lack of focus,” but Sleepynaut is adamantly eclectic, often changing directions and melting genres together even within individual songs. For example, Frost breaks new ground in the “surf synthpop” subgenre by adding a jazz piano solo that (naturally!) leads into a summer-of-love lysergic guitar workout. Yes, it’s an unholy mess, but it’s a beautiful unholy mess, and the eclecticism delivers the same kind of thrills a well-made mix tape does. In short, it displays a Ween-like mastery of multiple styles, but with fewer dick jokes.

The album opens with the Halloween strings and plucked harp of "Tall, Dark, and Loathsome: an Introduction," sprinkled with sampled dialogue from Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of Dracula. The sound of footsteps leads into a heart-on-its-sleeve strummed acoustic guitar, the opening to the astonishing second track, With Remorse. Drawing from the tradition of carpe diem poetry (think “To His Coy Mistress”), “With Remorse” proclaims:

“We’re all dying.
No antidote exists.
No prayers, no crying
No change of heart can alter this.”

When an ominous bassline enters, two vocal lines begin a round, singing “Flesh decays, and bones lose their density,” working the classic sex-and-death tropes but more tenderly than you might expect given the subject matter.

Belying the “this is just everything we recorded” impression you might get from an album titled demos and first takes, a conceptual thread begins to emerge with As the Girls With the Pretty Painted Faces Go By, which presents a nihilist response to the carpe diem sentiments of “With Remorse.” Sounding like some of the quieter moments of The Magnetic Fields, the song matter-of-factly narrates a young man’s unfulfilled longing for one of the girls of the title (not a specific girl—any of them will do). But once he catches one, he’s “broken her open and she’s empty as a lie.” And so, when you carpe diem, what you seize isn’t always what you really wanted.

The stark, brooding "When You’re Old and Lonely" (UPDATE: this is a Magnetic Fields cover! Didn't know that) takes the argument full circle, as the singer imagines a life without a companion:

"When you’re old and lonely
And the rush of life is past,
Days go by too slowly
And the years go by too fast."

If the singer is still a young man dwelling on what might be, then the song expresses his fear of the consequences of adopting the cynical posture of “As the Girls….” Is it better to grow old with someone imperfect, even “empty as a lie,” or to forego all that disillusionment and become disillusioned in another way? Some may say that these are merely adolescent concerns, and I would in part agree, but would also add that adolescent concerns are not to be easily dismissed, either in life or in rock music.

At this point, you are probably thinking Sleepynaut must be sort a dreary downer band, but I want to also emphasize how much fun much of this album is. There’s the hard-fried country psychedelia of "13th Task," the sunny Kinks pop of Swell, and the perfect, open-hearted chugging folk of Oh, Genevieve, which might be this collection’s “hit single,” even with the kryptonite-to-radio lyric “You’re just a dog with broken eyes.”** And I haven’t even mentioned what might be Lattney’s best song, The Shins-meets-Grandaddy in a song by The Kinks Another Dream Ends In The Mourning, Lane, off an entirely different album by one of Lattney’s other projects (Holly and the Dead Saints).

If you like albums that make psychedelic genre-hopping a virtue—albums like Wild Mountain Nation, Wowee Zowee, The White Album, and Sandinista!—then give Demos and First Takes a listen. There are little prodigies all over the world, and now they are recording their little works of genius, to the delight of literally dozens. Can I get a witness?

**This is a good mondegreen. Lattney has informed me that the lyric is "dress-up doll with broken eyes." Maybe that's some other color of kryptonite.

10K Awards Ceremony: Nancy is Hot

Fri, 16 May 2008 06:29:36 +0000

Wow, 10,000 plays is a lot of songs. Of course it's nothing compared to my friend moik's seven gajillion plays, but it's a milestone.

Blitzen Trapper, congratulations for leading my charts. You keep releasing all these singles and EPs and Daytrotter sessions and I keep listening. I wish more of my favorite bands would put out new songs in between albums like that.

Leading the songs chart is The Lemon of Pink by The Books, but Books, you are dirty cheaters for using the same title for two different songs. Next time, follow Jeff Mangum's example: it's The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1, and Part 2, and so on. Burial, you too: stop calling all those intros and outros Untitled.

For your subterfuge, Books, you are disqualified. Next in line is Angels, which is a great song, but instead I use my cruel and arbitrary power as king to give the award to These Boots Are Made For Walking.

Why? Because Nancy is hot. Plus it's the only song I will karaoke without protest. Johnny Cash style, naturally.

And special kudos to The Handsome Family, my favorite band introduced to me by last.fm. That quote over there in my sidebar that begins "Butterfly..."? Not only is that a great lyric, it's one of the smartest things I've ever heard anybody say.

In another six months, approaching 20K, I hope there's another band I don't know anything about right now that gives me that much back. Discovery is a wonderful thing.

Cheap Sunglasses: ZZ Top and the Price of Fame

Mon, 12 May 2008 20:21:35 +0000

The concept of "the price of fame" is usually applied in the sense of the personal cost to the famous, from the relatively mild annoyance of not being able to go out without being recognized, to the deep existential crises and insanity of megastars like Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson. You could certainly argue that Kurt and Michael would have been crazy anyway, but clearly becoming famous was not healthy for either of them.

But there is another cost of fame that is a little harder to pin down, because it’s the cost that is charged to a band’s account of cool points when the band gets too famous. In some contexts, this cool-points account might be called “indie cred” or “punk cred” or (more generally) “authenticity.” I’m sure there are specific equivalents for jazz and metal and klezmer and so on, but it all comes down to the same thing.

If you are an indie kid or a hipster of any stripe, or have spent any time around hipsters, you have experienced or observed the phenomenon of the band that gets too famous for its original fans to tolerate, as if the band’s quality is dependent upon its obscurity. Of course that’s objectively ridiculous, but music fandom is no science, and people naturally enjoy music for more than its purely musical qualities. So it’s understandable why a fan might grow bitter at the object of his (gendered pronoun intentional—it’s usually guys who do this) affection’s success. Now he has to share with a bunch of bandwagoneers who weren’t there during the lean times and who can’t possibly understand what made this band really great. That’s a bit of a caricature, of course. Sometimes when a band gets famous the quality of the music really does decline, sometimes via intentional changes (the “sell-out”), sometimes because the band has started to run out of ideas, and sometimes because the band has plenty of new ideas but they aren’t very good.

With that groundwork laid, I want to posit a kind of weird argument: that ZZ Top is an underrated band today. Yes, that band that is enshrined in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, the one that played to packed stadiums and sold multi-platinum heaps of records. That band that played a Super Bowl halftime show with James Brown. I realize that the concepts of “underrated” and “overrated” are thrown around a lot here on last.fm, usually meaning “this band is way too good to be so obscure” or “this band isn’t good enough to be this popular.” That’s not really what I’m interested in. Instead, I’d like to talk about ZZ Top’s critical reputation and its lack of currency or buzz among contemporary hipsters, and to argue that ZZ Top is (critically) underrated precisely because of their MTV-era success.

The dominant cultural images of ZZ Top today are drawn from their hugely popular (and amusing) videos from the 1980s. Those videos featured the band as wizard-like observers to the type of little comic dramas common to videos of the period. All of the videos included the same car (the distinctive “Eliminator”) and the same group of “rock sluts” playing the role of intermediaries between the detached, supernatural presence of the band and the ordinary mortals they help. The visual and plot elements are seamlessly integrated with simple, commercial music: straightforward, danceable 4-4 bass-heavy beats (really almost disco), light synthesizers, the rough edges of the “little ‘ol band from Texas” sanded down to a palatable smoothness. Clearly, during the 80s, ZZ Top was doing a great job of branding itself. All successful pop groups are branded to a certain degree—stylistically if nothing else—but with the early 80s videos, branding (or really, re-branding) seemed to be ZZ Top’s main focus.

I say “re-branding” because in the 70s, ZZ Top was already enormously popular and well-known as purveyors of electric blues boogie. Their short, tight songs had not an ounce of fat on them, unlike the bloat-y artistic tendencies of most of their classic rock contemporaries. Listen to the breakneck riffing of Heard It on the X, the sweaty precision of Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings, or the way the simple progression of Bedroom Thang breaks down into an flurry of concise and intense soloing that fades out long before overstaying its welcome. This band ought to be thought of as a major influence on bands like The White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age, and The Black Keys, and you could certainly draw some connections between ZZ Top and some elements of early punk as well (fast, loud, short songs drawing on old rock roots). For all I know, those bands do consider ZZ Top to be heroes, but I haven’t heard them referenced as such. Nor do I ever read anything about ZZ Top on music blogs, even those focused on older stuff. If I’m wrong, enlighten me.

I’m not arguing that ZZ Top ought to be thought of as one of the best two dozen rock bands in history or anything—their period of “good albums” was really too short, and if I was the kind of person who made such lists, they might not make my top 100. In any case, my point isn’t so much about their quality as their reputation. Instead of being thought of as an important influence, they are not really thought of at all in a musical sense. They are cartoons.

To illustrate my sense of what happened to ZZ Top’s reputation, I’m going to make a ridiculous comparison, a what-if involving a band that is only barely comparable to them. Suppose that The Velvet Underground had exactly the same career and (lack of) popularity that they actually had up until the dawning of the MTV era. Now suppose that, under the direction of a shrewd media advisor, they reformed in the early 80s and made a series of popular videos featuring hot video chicks and a unique and stylish car. The entire band has waxed handlebar mustaches or some other odd distinguishing feature. (See, I told you this would be ridiculous.) The music has been stripped of experimentalism; Lou Reed has reined in his avant-garde sensibilities and is focusing on writing short, catchy pop songs with memorable choruses. There are synthesizers. The band sells a bunch of records and becomes much better known for their commercially successful period than their obscure late-60s work. Now think about what their reputation (their indie cred, their hipster index) would be today.

Of course, ZZ Top and The Velvet Underground are rather different kinds of bands: VU was much more adventurous and formally experimental; ZZ Top the superior musicians. And VU never had anything like the early career success that ZZ Top did with hits like Tush and LaGrange. Certainly their influence extends in different directions. But it’s not so ridiculous to imagine an established, well-known band changing directions in mid-career and having their early work nearly forgotten, or not so much forgotten as subsumed by the greater success of later, more commercially palatable music. Think of Bee Gees or Fleetwood Mac, whose early careers are perhaps less well-known than they might be if they had not had huge later success with completely different styles of music than those they started out with.

I’m not bashing ZZ Top for their choices, either. They saw a chance to make a lot of money, and they perfectly executed a strategy to do that, trading in their
Bar-B-Q for a pair of Cheap Sunglasses. I doubt Billy Gibbons cares much about his hipster index, and in any case his band probably has a critical reevaluation in their future. Somebody at Stereogum or Pitchfork will write a positive reappraisal of Tres Hombres, and that will start the process of making it safe for indie kids and hipsters to like ZZ Top unironically.

Worn to the Weft with Delmore Pilcrow

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:55:27 +0000

Delmore: now that's a blues name.
Pilcrow: that's the paragraph mark, looks like a backwards "P".

Yesterday I was preparing to write a journal about a couple of relatively obscure great albums (it's still on the to-do list), when I ran across a really, really obscure album that hasn't even been released yet. In an effort to jump in ahead of the inevitable discussion of whether this band is over- or underrated (too new! not even rated yet, you miserable rate calibrators!), I'm thrilled to be the first to review Delmore Pilcrow's Worn to the Weft.

The tags on the artist page say "folk" and "new weird america" and the like, and I guess that's fair, but misleading. If it's folk, it's of the ragged electrified variety, and if it's weird, it's because it's got some of The Velvet Underground's DNA mingled with spooky old threadbare country and blues. Tracks like Poor Tom and Why Oh Why You are dirty and sturdy blues songs that wouldn't sound out of place on records by The White Stripes or The Black Keys, at least until the latter song breaks down into a fire and brimstone crash n' thump.

However, Delmore Pilcrow are not strict blues revivalists; the album owes some of its lyrical imagery and sonics to country gothic bands like 16 Horsepower, The Gun Club, and Trailer Bride, and some of the gritty riffs (The Most Popular Mister) recall freak-punk pioneers Meat Puppets. Come to think of it, Pilcrow's singer sounds a bit like Curt Kirkwood, too.

Put all that together with decent (if somewhat gnomic) lyrics that have a bit of literary ambition without pretension, and Delmore Pilcrow is a band that sounds fully-formed and ready for a little hype. I run across lots of obscure stuff, but most of it isn't nearly this good.

Lost Treasures of the Internet

Wed, 2 Apr 2008 08:28:18 +0000

Lately I've been digging into an ever-expanding pile of mp3 blogs, and discovering what a tremendous resource they are for introducing listeners (that is, me) to new music. The RIAA be damned, it's an idea that helps artists build an audience and make money.

Just in the past few months, I've been moved to purchase full albums by CocoRosie, Calexico, The Glands, and Dead Meadow (not to mention Jim White's entire catalog) because I downloaded a free track that sparked my interest. That means I'm a model consumer. Gold stars for me, hugs and money to the artists and record companies. Any resemblance to drug distribution strategies must be entirely coincidental; let's just call it the I'm Waiting for the Man business plan.

Besides pushing product that can actually be purchased, mp3 blogs also perform the invaluable service of making out-of-print or otherwise inaccessible recordings available. If you love music (and of course you do), then you know the joy of finding something rare and beautiful: sometimes it's the specific thing you've been looking for, and sometimes it's something you never before imagined hearing.

I'd like to share some of those beautiful things that I've recently found, just lying around on the Internet. Some of this stuff isn't available for purchase, but most mp3 blogs only keep tracks available for a limited time, so if any of this sounds interesting to you, surf over there quick before the download link gets taken down. I'll post the link to the specific page first, then the link to the blog's main page.

Mean Woman Blues showcases Jerry Lee Lewis at his absolute fiercest, "beat[ing] the living shit" out of this Roy Orbison song. It's sex and predatory aggression personified in Lewis's growl and punishing piano riffs; it embodies everything that was scary and exciting about early rock'n'roll. Go get the song, but stay for Ben Greenman's insightful essay.

Mean Woman Blues
Moistworks main page

Staying with the theme of insane piano players, the next piece has no player at all: it's a player piano. Conlon Nancarrow composed music that cannot be physically performed by humans, an idea that perhaps sounds cold (or literally machinelike), but the execution of Study for Player Piano No.3a from the "Boogie-Woogie Suite" makes for one of the most unlikely punk songs ever recorded. And I mean "punk" in the spiritual sense, all you rigid definers of punk rock. I'm probably pissing off the avant-garde/classical crowd as well, calling this punk. Oh well. Maybe the two groups will have a fight in the comments.

No.3a
doklands

Johnny Cash recorded roughly seven million songs in his lifetime, and surprisingly not all of them were produced by Rick Rubin. Allegheny is from 1973, when his popularity was declining. Thematically, this track borrows the "Green Acres" conceit of a comically mismatched couple, except that the woman (voiced by June Carter Cash) is only half French; the other half is Cherokee, or perhaps some kind of woodlands animal, based on June's maniacal squalling. It's an unknown classic in the vein of Jackson.

(This song no longer has its own page; go to the link and scroll down the left column to find the entire out-of-print album from which this song is taken.)
Joe de Vivre

Killed by Death Records (NOT a record label, the site helpfully warns us) is the motherlode for obscure punk. I have barely scratched the surface of this site, and yes, there's a not insignificant amount of unremarkable crap here. But you know the saying about how one man's unremarkable crap is another man's remarkable crap, or something? I thought so. Here's Michigan's The Latin Dogs, described at kbd thusly:

"What shall hit you first is the extremely great guitar sound. Fuzzy, messy and cheap. Sounds like it has been amplified through a small 10 Watt Marshall (you know these cigarette package sized ones) pushed up to eleven. The lyrics are composed with care and true concern about inmates, Reagan, animals, tyrants and the usual suspect."

Latin Dogs
kbdrecords

For fans of propulsive garage rock, I offer you The Vindicators from Calgary. Thinking of Birds features that great Nuggets/60s garage/proto-punk sound.
Barbara (bodhi_44), you will probably find this site of particular interest, as it is "devoted to the lesser-known heroes of Canadian musical history."

Mister Garager's Neighborhood
Five Bucks on By-Tor

Last, a magnificent curiosity, and a testament to humanity's inexhaustible urge to fuck shit up to see what THAT would sound like. When I was in high school, Stairway to Heaven was purported to have Satanic messages embedded in it, which would become clear if the track was played backwards. Naturally, being empirically inclined, and also wanting to fuck shit up to see what it sounded like, I put "Stairway" on a reel-to-reel and reversed it (which is how you had to do it in the old days before computers made this kind of stuff easy). I didn't hear any Satanic messages, but I did identify a spot where Robert Plant could be clearly heard to warble "I wish it would snow."

Composer Thomas Dimuzio has taken the backwards-Stairway meme to a new level by cutting up the reversed Led Zeppelin classic into quarter-note sections, then reassembling the (backwards) notes into forward order again. Dimuzio sure seems to have a lot of spare time, but the result is really cool, and very psychedelic.

Yawriats ot Nevaeh
WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Bonus coverage: via the above WFMU blog, here is a page with 101 different versions of "Stairway," just in case you need a soundtrack to your coming break with reality.

101 Stairways