Category Archives: Record Review

Baltimore City Paper’s Year-End List

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What do John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and I have in common?

Not much, but we both contributed to the Baltimore City Paper’s Year-End List.

Each individual critic’s list is at the bottom, and here’s mine:

1. Scott Walker – The Drift (4AD)
2. Pissed Jeans – Shallow (Parts Unknown)
3. Wzt Hearts – Heat Chief (Hoss)
4. The Weird Weeds – Weird Feelings (Sounds Are Active)
5. Joanna Newsom – Ys (Drag City)
6. Daniel A.I.U. Higgs – Ancestral Songs (Holy Mountain)
7. The Dead C. – Vain Erudite and Stupid: Selected Works 1987-2005 (Ba Da Bing!)
8. Brightblack Morning Light – s/t (Matador)
9. Times New Viking – Dig Yourself (Siltbreeze)
10. Valley of Ashes – Cavehill Hunters Attrition (Black Velvet Fuckere)

Astonishingly, no Beggars and Matador acts charted on the final 10, but I tried my best, having listed Scott Walker and Brightblack Morning Light. I swear, it’s not just nepotism, I really really like those records!

BURNED OUT? Not Yet Anyways – Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Have You Seen the Other Side of the Sky? (Ace Fu) CD

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So sorry that I haven’t updated in ages, been super-busy and super-procrastinatin’. Lots of stuff in the pipeline, though, that I should have finished soon – most of it intended for publication in the latest issue of Swingset.. Will let you know when they’re ready. In the meantime, there’s this AMT takedown in this week’s Baltimore City Paper:

Messiness, overindulgence, repetition, and amateurishness are often fine ingredients for great music; some of the most memorable albums of the past 50-odd years have been great combinations of all four. Think of Tony Conrad and Faust’s 1972 magnum opus Outside the Dream Syndicate – a fantastic and fascinating tour de force of mind-numbing drone set to a stomping beat so simple that it resembles nothing so much as the human heart. A more contemporary version of such stupid greatness might be Dread by Michigan’s Wolf Eyes, a mix of terror and bad chemicals so traumatically creepy that it sits on a plane higher than most attempts at “dark” music. (That it was made by three fairly normal goofballs doesn’t hurt.)

Yet these four qualities can just as easily collapse on themselves in combination and make for an awesomely bad time…

For some reason, WordPress is acting weird and won’t let me post the rest of the review, which is too bad as the second paragraph is where the takedown occurs. So check out the link, and watch ’em run off the rails.

The Weird Weeds, Weird Feelings (Sounds Are Active) CD

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Weird Shadow

Here:

The best dreams are the bad ones, the ones that unsettle you to the point where you start to believe that what happened in those dreams might have actually taken place. And sometimes the best music is that which evokes the same feelings as those unsettling dreams. The Weird Weeds, a young rock trio from Austin, Texas, are quite skilled at inducing that, well, weirdness and dis-ease. The group’s second album, Weird Feelings, takes a stark, darker approach than its self-released debut, appropriately beginning with the minute-long “Bad Dreams.” It segues into the title track, which is augmented by a seven-person chorus singing, “You feel so alive,” in a dizzying, rapturous swell.

Weeds leader Nick Hennies’ subtle percussions mesh perfectly with Sandy Ewen’s and Aaron Russell’s unified-yet-meandering guitars, and Ewen and Hennies harmonize beautifully, as well as sing solo. Most strikingly, Ewen’s and Russell’s melodies and countermelodies combine into an almost music-box sound, evoking childhood memories of lullabies played through the windup backs of overloved plush toys. The sound of the Weird Weeds is simultaneously haunting and beautiful, and by penultimate song “Cold Medicine”–wherein Hennies and Ewen languidly chant, “Go to sleep, go to sleep”–the somnambulant sensation that the weird dream just might really be happening is complete.

There:

The Weird Weeds

And Everywhere:

Friday, September 15th @ The Cake Shop
152 Ludlow, NYC

The Dirty Projectors
The Weird Weeds
Nat Baldwin
Swan Island

http://www.cake-shop.com/

Buy Weird Feelings from Sounds Are Active.

Awesome Color, Awesome Color CD (Ecstatic Peace!)

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Today’s City Paper contains my review of the Awesome Color CD, out now on Ecstatic Peace!. Check it out:

Rocking a serious Stooges-esque-or is that Stoogian?-vibe comes rather easily to Brooklyn-via-Michigan’s Awesome Color. The band’s self-titled debut is one of the finest examples of today’s version of yesterday’s heavy guitar rock action. Far be it for us to start declaring that an actual movement is afoot or anything, but the past few years have definitely seen a resurgence in a hairy, expressive, hard-rockin’ guitar thing that–despite some of our younger, lamer tendencies to suppress childhood memories of ZZ Top–we can’t get enough of. And thankfully, despite residing in New York, Awesome Color thoroughly rejects any lame “rock is back,” wannabe new wave crapola.

From the first chords of opener “Grown,” you know the louder-than-three-people-should-be (think Blue Cheer) AC is gonna bring it. Indeed, the opening two-thirds of Awesome Color is just about as sweaty as rock gets, even after being laid down in a sterile studio environment and pressed to little plastic discs (and even when Thurston Moore’s behind the console). And while the vocals aren’t as wild with abandon as Iggy’s, Awesome Color’s endlessly repeated holy mantras like “it’s your time” set a pattern for ultramelodic guitar leads to follow along in a gospel-esque-there’s that suffix again-call and response. Clearly the path to heaven, or at least Ann Arbor, runs through Awesome Color.

In other news, The Red Krayola was totally amazing at Northsix last night. 2-hour set, new stuff followed by all the hits. Great action and vibe. UPDATE: you can watch some great videos of the Red Krayola live in Chicago last year at their band page at Drag City.

One last: is anybody reading this damn thing? Drop a comment if y’are.

Walter De Maria, Drums and Nature (no label, no number) CD; Watersports, III (White Tapes, no number) CDR; Watersports, s/t (White tapes, no number) cass

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(The following review appeared in issue #7 of Swingset Magazine)

Painting, sculpture, hell even being in a regular rock band wasn’t enough for Walter De Maria. After moving to New York in 1960, hobnobbin’ and theorizin’ and fluxus-izin’ with crazyman composer La Monte Young, playing drums for a stint in The Velvet Underground, and establishing himself as one of the prominent sculptors in the emerging “minimalist” scene, De Maria looked for – and found – the ever-larger gesture. In search of an art that was more than just “art,” De Maria in 1968 filled the Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich with dirt, kicking off the whole earthworks movement. That same year, he recorded “Ocean Music,” which along with “Cricket Music” (from 1964) is available for the first time on Drums and Nature. “Ocean Music,” recorded with the help of rediscovered minimalist badass Tony Conrad, is a meditative piece beginning with – you guessed it – the sound of waves crashing along some shore somewhere. Some heavy solo tribal drumming eventually mixes in, then subsumes the ocean sound, and what we’ve got is something akin to New Age if New Age wasn’t fucking lame. That is, a perfect representation of the “natural,” but with an acknowledgement of the “human” (incidentally, La Monte Young also recorded a vocal piece with the ocean off Long Island as his backin’ band around the same time for Columbia, but it has yet to see the light of day). “Cricket Music” is less meditative, but no less amazing (and no less truth-in-advertising, title-wise). Listening to these compositionally simple, yet striking pieces, it’s too bad that De Maria hasn’t seemed to have done much since, musically. (Incidentally, if you ever get the chance, you should visit De Maria’s triptych of earthworks masterpieces: Lightning Field in New Mexico, the Earth Room in New York, and the Broken Kilometer, also in New York.)

Watersports are a Brooklyn-based duo who, on first take, don’t seem to have much in common with De Maria: what they do is on a much smaller scale. We live in a world overrun with the detritus of consumer culture, and Watersports recognize this through using petrochemically-produced consumer goods masquerading as “natural” devices. Yes, they make music with (among other more conventional instruments) those cheesy plastic waterfall meditation device thingies. In a sense, making music like this is a sort of ironic post-De Maria move (hence my connection): forget hauling your ass out to the ocean or a waterfall or a river or the woods on the chance you’ll hear some birds, bring (an artificial) nature to your cramped urban apartment! Anyway it’s a lot cheaper, and even cleaner, than filling it with three feet of topsoil. It may be that, in 2005, the closest we can get to nature is to just make our own hybridized, bastardized pockets of it. And while we’re doing that, why not make art from it?

Watersports take this sort of self-invented consumer-culture environmental art to new highs with their III CDR and their second self-titled cassette on their White Tapes label. And it doesn’t stop with the music: to listen to the damn cassette you gotta destroy a part of the red-stickered tape packaging. The CDR doesn’t require such confrontational tactics, but what you get is an extremely quiet, yet tactile (and hella short) meditative modern music, akin at its finest moments to a quieter, spiritually low-key but ultimately De Maria-esque “nature” jam. For those determined to spoil their progeny’s college fund-via-eBay (fuck the future, anyway), the music hidden inside the cassette might be worth disappointing a child. It would be hard to describe any of Watersports’ stuff as confrontational, seeing as their “aggressive New Age” m.o. would probably confuse the hell outta most ADHD-addled Lightning Bolt fans or somesuch, but the cassette is so quiet (even more so than III) that on the first track I had to check whether that was really the ice cream man outside the window or some bleed-through from Watersports’ Kingsland Avenue jamspace environs. A second piece ends the side with more identifiable drums and (perhaps) guitar, thumping a tribalistic jam reminiscent of Amon Duul being played by a housewife on a transistor radio as she daydreams idly while Montel’s on. When “getting back to nature” for most Americans means a fucking humpback whale tape in the car on the way to work, I can’t think of anything more perfect.

Buy Walter De Maria’s Drums and Nature and the Watersports cassette from our friends at Fusetron.

Silver Jews, Tanglewood Numbers (Drag City) CD

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Thanks to Michaelangelo Matos, music editor over at the Seattle Weekly, who published this Silver Jews review in their CD review section this week:

In certain rock-crit circles it’s a foregone conclusion that authenticity as a lyrical quality in pop music is a bugbear at best and a futile pursuit worthy of ridicule at worst. That is, listeners are advised not to read into, much less trust, the machinations and maneuverings of musicians and their lyrics. So how does one respond to Tanglewood Numbers, knowing of Silver Jews frontman David Berman’s drug-abetted suicide attempt, as recently related in The Fader? Do Berman’s more-than-messy ordeals account for the darker mood of the album? Berman, also a published poet, has made — by his own account(ing), in a recent Pitchfork interview — a decent living writing the sort of cute faux-country aphorisms that wouldn’t sound too out of place in that old Phil Hartman Saturday Night Live sketch, where the late comic actor sang songs like “I Just Found a Fifty-Dollar Bill” and “I’m Drunk (Again).” However, in Tanglewood Numbers there’s an undeniable love-soaked yet bleak melancholia twisted in with the cleverness that, even without knowledge of Berman’s gossip-page backstory, rings as “true” as any set of pop lyrics can. Album opener “Punks in the Beerlight” sets the tone, with Berman for the first time sharing the microphone with his wife, Cassie, whose poised vocals offer a counterpoint to his growling drawl (to Berman’s credit, his singing is also more assured here). When they sing a cheesy line like “I love you to the max,” it’s easy to believe that they believe it.

A longer version, with a l’il bit more on the rest of the songs on the album, will appear here shortly.

Buy Tanglewood Numbers from our friends at Drag City.

Endless Boogie, 1 and 2 (Mound Duel) LPs

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Today’s issue of the Baltimore City Paper contains my Endless Boogie review. Despite a few changes/editorial tinkerings (and the strange idea that it’s somehow available on CD), it’s not bad.

Good things come to those who wait. After eight years of existence, the fantastically and oh-so-descriptively named Endless Boogie has simultaneously released two albums every bit as jam-packed as its already legendary word-of-mouth live shows. No surprise there, since both were recorded live to two-track in the band’s practice space; the only thing really missing is the sweat and the beer.

The Boogie is a ferocious four-piece consisting of Double Leopards member Chris Grey on drums, former Naked Raygun Mark Ohe on bass, Swedish psyche-reissue dude Jesper Eklow on guitar, and most major record-dealer Paul Major on guitar and growling vocals. It’s easily the best heavy-minimalism rock band in New York, the most steadily consistent return on your buck, effortlessly blasting the socks off much younger rock pretenders roaming the city’s sanitized post-Giuliani streets.

The already-out-of-print 1 presents rifftastic messes every bit as melodically memorable as the best by Thin Lizzy, Foghat, or Coloured Balls (though usually at 10 times the length). 2, the readily available (for now) black-covered album, begins with the side-long, nearly instrumental jam “Stanton Karma” and enough guitar loudness (complete with audible radio bleed-through from the amplifiers) to make it as heavy as the Great Boston Molasses Tragedy of 1919. Since Baltimoreans aren’t “lucky” enough to reside in America’s capital of immense wealth and institutionalized poverty, Endless Boogie has recently visited Charm City, as well as other burgs up and down the Eastern seaboard. If you get the chance again, you need to check ’em out.

Jesper Eklow, post-review, adds the following nugget:

the radio you hear is just a radio (we always jam to the Mets game). the locked groove is gary cohen talking about pedro astacio getting out of ‘jam after jam after jam’…

SOME OLD SHIT

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Gonna open up the files, here comes some (mostly) short reviews (most of which have been recently published in the new Bejeezus zine, mainly available in Louisville) that have been languishing in the archives. Enjoy.

Dungen, Ta Det Lungt (Subliminal Sounds) CD

Sweden’s been fertile ground for awesome psych reissues in the past coupla years. And wouldn’t you know it? They’ve got some good heavy slabs of new psych bands out now, too. Dungen‘s this band of Scandi whippersnappers who know how to bring the heavy jamz, with plenty of heaping helpings of melody. If anything, the sweetness might potentially put off some of the heavier psych heads out there. But fuck ’em, this album is great. “Panda” kicks off the show with a tune so catchy I’m tempted to learn some Swedish just so I can sing along. Dungen slows things down a bit by the fourth track, “Du hr for fin for mig” (yeah I have no idea what that means, either), which brings in some sappy strings and mellotron/synth soundz for maximum melodrama moments. Good times, and guaranteed to make the girls swoon.

Buy “Ta Det Lungt” from Subliminal Sounds.

Crain, Speed + 4 (Temporary Residence) CD

Whoa, this is a doozy. The debut album by Louisville’s super-heavy (and super-long-gone) Crain has just been reissued by Temporary Residence, and it’s about time. To say that this reissue was long overdue is an understatement. It’d be difficult for me to overstate the effect that Crain’s music had on my formative teenage years. It would also be impossible to recount the many times I saw them kick total ass live, though I do remember the Speed record release show quite clearly. That night I got my copy of the LP (limited glow-in-the-dark edition!) and, also, my mind blown by the sheer force that was Crain’s lineup at the time. Experience the glory for yourself, re-mastered to finesse.

Buy “Speed” from Temporary Residence.

The Weird Weeds, Hold Me (Edition Manifold) CD

To most people, weird as an adjective is a pejorative. Then again, most people are douchebags. C’mon, it’s not all that misanthropic to say that, oh, 80 percent of the earth’s population ain’t worth a damn. I’m sure most of the time you’ve felt that way too. Anyway, Austin, Texas’s Weird Weeds are weird in a non-pejorative way. That is, they are unique, not ooooh bad I don’t want to deal with this because I can’t/don’t/won’t understand it. Currently a three-piece (tho a four-piece on this CD), the Weird Weeds blend beautifully sung melodies with usually spare guitar lines and minimal drumming as accompaniment (though the first song “Paratrooper Seed” starts with what sounds like a nice synth part). Occasionally the players’ free-improv backgrounds come to the fore in the form of some radical-sounding guitar noodling and drum-thumpery (which adds a nicely-needed tension to the proceedings). All in all, this is emotional music, conveying a beautiful sense of desperation, without being emo blah bullshit.

Buy “Hold Me” from Edition Manifold.

 

Optimo, How to Kill the DJ Part Two (Kill the DJ/Tigersushi) 2CD

JG Wilkes and JD Twitch are the dj duo behind Optimo, the most popular dance club night in Glasgow, Scotland. How to Kill the DJ Part Two is their new mix compilation, and it melds dance floor classics with obscurities, and just plain weird stuff. Eclecticism is the name of the game here, and the listener ultimately is who “wins.” You’ve got your typical 00s party hits like Gang of Four‘s “Damaged Goods” (honestly, I get tired of hearing this one but these guys do mix it in inventively, so they get a pass), Arthur Russell‘s “Is It All Over My Face?” (under the Loose Joint moniker) and Carl Craig‘s “Demented Drums” but then there’s also tracks by the Sun City Girls, Langley Schools Music Project (covering “Good Vibrations” and signifying the change on the decks from Wilkes to Twitch), Suicide and Nurse With Wound to keep things interesting. The bonus disc compiles a good, non-mixed mix that listeners can play with. The now sound is the sound everything but the kitchen sink, people.

Keith Fullerton Whitman/Greg Davis, Yearlong (Carpark) CD

Keith Fullerton Whitman and Greg Davis toured together extensively in 2001 and 2002, and Yearlong is a fascinating document of their live electronic and electro-acoustic improvisations over that year. Though there’s very little music on Yearlong that could be described as “accessible,” there are some very pretty moments, along with some of the harsh sounds typical to a number of laptop improvising schtick. But don’t let the harsh sounds fool you: even at their most aggressive, there is a musicality to Whitman’s and Davis’s approaches, and Yearlong — while not for the average shmoe — definitely rewards patient listening.

Buy Yearlong from Carpark.

Excepter, Throne (Load, 068) CD; Excepter, Self Destruction (Fusetron, FUSE041) CD

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With these two super-high-quality releases toward the latter half of the year, and another in the can, 2005 might be the year of Excepter. And what a year it’s been, so far: if you spent most of it drunk and/or high, or just questing after a transcendental state, you could do far worse by spinning these musically fantastic messes. Throne is the more stoned trip of the two, and flows with a lazy grandeur not often heard in today’s music “scene.” Sleepy electronics reminiscent of the RZA’s Ghost Dog score start out the disc on “Jrone (Three),” with a first few whisperings and moans which later grow into heavily echoed lamentations from recently-departed (from the band, I mean) member Caitlin Cook. Stoned soul steam engines take over, the vocals drop out, and soon Excepter spends the rest of Throne charting along some spooky shores in a haunted sailboat, which of course means that you really need to hear it. Self Destruction is in some ways the more straight-forward, yet hella dubbed-out, record out of the pair, though no less essential in its singularly bizarre messiness. Lanky soulja John Fell Ryan – the leader of the group – commences “Shoot Me First” with his deep-throated shamanistic vibes, going even deeper on vocal meditation/collaboration “I Don’t Get Wet in the Rain.” But there’s the dub/house mutated style present too: “Interplay: Lock Room” and “Interplay: Your House” recontextualize cheesy drum machine beats into higher states – though you probably won’t hear this shit at your local shitbag “dance music” nightclub anytime soon. Unlike Throne, Self Destruction is designed more with each track as a stand-alone, individual unit, and thusly gives ya more variety of the endless Excepter sounds to explore. Take the trips.

Buy Throne from Load Records.
Buy Self Destruction from Fusetron.

Roky Erickson, I Have Always Been Here Before: The Roky Erickson Anthology (Shout! Factory, D2K 32556) 2CD

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From the opening yelp of “We Sell Soul,” his debut single as lead singer of the Spades (remember, p.c.-activist types: this was TEXAS in the mid-1960s), to the final cuts from his 1995 solo LP All That May Do My Rhyme, there is not an inessential cut on I Have Always Been Here Before, the finest retrospective of one of America’s most twisted musical treasures ever produced. I’m talking about Roky Erickson, people, and if you’re not familiar with or weren’t impressed by what you may have heard, take another listen. I’m not going to be so bold as to say that American psychedelic music wouldn’t exist without him (despite whatever Mayo Thompson might say, heh), but it shore would be a whole lot more boring planet without Roky’s music to see us through. Disc One begins with the aforementioned Spades a-side, then delves into the early essentials from Roky’s stint as leader of the legendary 13th Floor Elevators: “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” “Reverberation (Doubt),” and “Slip Inside This House” are the hallmarks, but there’s a few more classic (though less fetishized) Elevators tracks. Only complaint is or could be: where’s stuff from Bull of the Woods? The liner notes insinuate that it ain’t “full-tilt” enough, but I don’t think a track like “Dr. Doom” would be far out of place. Whatever. Anyway, stuff from post-incarceration Roky, mainly tracks with the Aliens, round out the disc, and that’s a great thing. Personally, though I love the Elevators, my absolute favorite Roky stuff is the late-70s-Stu-Cook-from-Creedence-produced Aliens stuff, and both discs have plenty of it. Basically, what Roky made with the Aliens remains some of the creepiest yet most strangely beautiful rock music I’ve ever heard, and I still get chills when I hear “I Think Up Demons” (presented here with its correct title), “Bloody Hammer,” and “If You Have Ghosts,” like I did the first time. This anthology could stop there and satisfy me, but it includes more, and fortunately that’s a good thing. The later tracks, in particular, are revealing, making me think that either Roky got an unfair shake from the music press when Openers and All That May Do My Rhyme came out, or maybe I just did listen right, or something. Either way, you gotta get this.

Buy I Have Always Been Here Before from Shout! Factory.