I've heard unlikely or obscure tunes muzak'd before...but unless the original song borrows a melody, I believe that today, I've topped everything along such lines I'd heard before: today, in a relatively upscale suburban mall, I heard a muzak version of The Bonzo Dog Band's "Canyons of Your Mind." The original is (as you can hear if you listen) obviously goofin' on Elvis, particularly his big, dramatic ballads - but, as usual with the Bonzos, is built on a solid song underlying the broad, comedic antics (including The Worst Guitar Solo In The World).
Seems as good a time as any to celebrate the Bonzos, a band that lays a fair claim to have been the main influence on Monty Python, and thereby an indirect influence on much of the comedy that follows. (In fact, Bonzos co-leader Neil Innes wrote many songs and much incidental music for the Pythons - and later went on to write most of the music for the immortal Rutles.) "Rhinocratic Oaths" is the most Python-esque song in the Bonzos' catalogue, and it demonstrates as well the peculiar warping of a particularly British strain of jazz.
The voice you hear is Viv Stanshall's (later rather well-known for the narration at the end of the first part of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells ("plus...tubular bells!"), itself a wry joke on the Bonzos' own "The Intro and the Outro," which features a rather odd series of, uh, guest musicians.
But let's not limit the Bonzos to inventing Monty Python: hell no, they invented heavy metal, too. Don't believe me? Listen to "Mr. Apollo" (this mix is gorilla-enhanced).
But not all is fun and games in the Bonzos' world. Neil Innes occasionally veered disturbingly toward writing genuinely affecting, moving songs - such as "Ready Mades" (covered years later by The Condo Fucks - at least I think that's the band's name...), which, among other things, tells the sad tale of a man who arrested for something he put on display. (I'm pretty sure this song takes place directly around the block from Penny Lane.)
Back to that muzak'd version: Devo sort of did this, but I always thought it'd be a brilliant idea for The Residents to hire a genuine Muzak arranger (cap'd this time because I'm referring to the actual corporation - even though I believe they've long since changed their name) to arrange several of their tracks...but making sure to preserve as many odd chords and rhythmic structures as possible. I'm pretty "Santa Dog" would sound fantastic arranged for a hundred strings and more french horns than could be drowned in the biggest Vegas fountain.
The Bonzo Dog Band:
"Canyons of Your Mind" (Tadpoles, 1969)
"Rhinocratic Oaths" (The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, 1968)
"The Intro and the Outro" (Gorilla, 1967)
"Mr. Apollo" (Tadpoles, 1969)
"Ready Mades" (Tadpoles, 1969)
Showing posts with label noise. Show all posts
Showing posts with label noise. Show all posts
1.22.2009
unless you're insured by Mutual of Omaha
About a month ago, someone on the Robyn Hitchcock mailing list mentioned that he'd had a dream in which Hitchcock was on David Letterman's show and announced that he was about to premiere his new song, called "(Here's One I Bet You Wouldn't Want to Meet) In the Wild." Unfortunately, our dreamer couldn't recall how the song went - so I decided to write the song instead.
The first problem was that rather unwieldy title: how to make it scan? I played with it for a while, and came up with what I hope is a viable solution. The wordiness and staccato rhythm dictated some of the rest of the song's texture, with a lot of rapid-fire words. The lyrics came pretty quickly - I think the idea is quintessentially Robyn, in some ways similar to "Lions and Tigers" - although figuring out how to sing them presented more difficulty!
It seemed as if the music should be relatively simple, so I stuck largely to conventional chord sequences and rhythms (with a few tricks thrown in to make things interesting). The most fun was coming up with actual guitar parts as opposed to just strum-strum-strumming away. Some day I might even practice often enough to be able to play them reliably and consistently. Editing magic!
Lyrics:
Here's one I bet you wouldn't want to meet in the wild
The scent of raw meat between the politician's teeth
Slavering over a shivering child
At home we find it best to try to keep them in line
Some jingling coins and some velvety loins
Makes them forget they're already dying
Oh Mr. Perkins, you've such a glaring white smile
But don't mind Jim, so secretive and grim
You'll have alligator shoes in a while
Here's one I bet you wouldn't want to meet in the wild
With a sleight of wrist and the invisible fist
He's anointed the bank vaults in his castles in the sky
Clipped wings and a nice little perch will be fine
And yesterday's news is covered up with rotting food
You won't smell it if you just keep on buying
Here's one I bet you wouldn't want to meet in the wild...
(The bridge, incidentally, refers to this program, and urban legends like this one.)
Monkey Typing Pool "(Here's One I Bet You Wouldn't Want to Meet) In the Wild" (2009)
The first problem was that rather unwieldy title: how to make it scan? I played with it for a while, and came up with what I hope is a viable solution. The wordiness and staccato rhythm dictated some of the rest of the song's texture, with a lot of rapid-fire words. The lyrics came pretty quickly - I think the idea is quintessentially Robyn, in some ways similar to "Lions and Tigers" - although figuring out how to sing them presented more difficulty!
It seemed as if the music should be relatively simple, so I stuck largely to conventional chord sequences and rhythms (with a few tricks thrown in to make things interesting). The most fun was coming up with actual guitar parts as opposed to just strum-strum-strumming away. Some day I might even practice often enough to be able to play them reliably and consistently. Editing magic!
Lyrics:
Here's one I bet you wouldn't want to meet in the wild
The scent of raw meat between the politician's teeth
Slavering over a shivering child
At home we find it best to try to keep them in line
Some jingling coins and some velvety loins
Makes them forget they're already dying
Oh Mr. Perkins, you've such a glaring white smile
But don't mind Jim, so secretive and grim
You'll have alligator shoes in a while
Here's one I bet you wouldn't want to meet in the wild
With a sleight of wrist and the invisible fist
He's anointed the bank vaults in his castles in the sky
Clipped wings and a nice little perch will be fine
And yesterday's news is covered up with rotting food
You won't smell it if you just keep on buying
Here's one I bet you wouldn't want to meet in the wild...
(The bridge, incidentally, refers to this program, and urban legends like this one.)
Monkey Typing Pool "(Here's One I Bet You Wouldn't Want to Meet) In the Wild" (2009)
1.14.2009
you animal!
Normally, I listen to songs before I post them. But it's 11 at night, Rose is sleeping, and my headphones are in the next room (I'm lazy), so I haven't heard this song I'm posting. Why am I posting it?
Because (1) Neko Case and Anti- Records will make a cash donation to Best Friends Animal Society for every blog that posts this song. So even if the song sucks (and I seriously doubt it will, given my experience with Case's last two albums), it's still worth posting.
Oh, and (2) I will donate money to the same organization if Neko herself comes by my house...say, next Thursday at about 2pm.
Neko Case "People Got a Lotta Nerve" (Middle Cyclone, 2009)
(via Anti-'s label blog - which also has info on posting the track yourself)
Because (1) Neko Case and Anti- Records will make a cash donation to Best Friends Animal Society for every blog that posts this song. So even if the song sucks (and I seriously doubt it will, given my experience with Case's last two albums), it's still worth posting.
Oh, and (2) I will donate money to the same organization if Neko herself comes by my house...say, next Thursday at about 2pm.
Neko Case "People Got a Lotta Nerve" (Middle Cyclone, 2009)
(via Anti-'s label blog - which also has info on posting the track yourself)
1.04.2009
there's more to life than books, you know - but not much more
Several worthy tracks fell between the cracks of my 2008 mixes - mostly because while there's a place for random tracks, and a place for songs from my favorite albums, there's not a place for songs from albums I own that don't make my top 20. (I don't make the rules, I just - wait: I do make the rules. Guess I could change that.)
One album that might well end up among my twenty favorite albums of 2008, if I were to redo the list after some months, is Simon Bookish's Everything/Everything. I'd just downloaded the album from eMusic a few days before putting together my lists. I downloaded it on the strength of the two tracks linked below, which had been sent around the flackosphere for months.
First, you gotta love a guy who calls himself "Simon Bookish"...and then puts out an album with this cover:
I suppose the simplest way to describe Simon Bookish's music is that it sounds almost exactly what you'd expect music by "Simon Bookish" to sound like. It might also help to imagine a collaboration among David Bowie, David Byrne, and Philip Glass (even though Bookish has a song called "Terry Riley Disco," the horn and keyboard arrangements are closer to Glass's work than Riley's). Both "Synchrotron" and "Dumb Terminal" feature extended, multipart structures, which isn't necessarily typical - but I think Bookish does much to recuperate the diminished stature of the saxophone, abused over these years by everyone from annoying blues honkers to Sanborn-esque cheese merchants. There's also much to be said for the sort of insouciant abstraction of the lyrics, along with Bookish's alternately melodramatic and distant vocals.
Everything/Everything is on Tomlab (another good indicator, if you know that label's work), and Bookish apparently has released two earlier titles, Unfair/Funfair and Trainwreck/Raincheck (noticing a trend?), which apparently do not necessarily sound anything like this.
Simon Bookish "Synchrotron" (Everything/Everything, 2008)
Simon Bookish "Dumb Terminal" (Everything/Everything, 2008)
One album that might well end up among my twenty favorite albums of 2008, if I were to redo the list after some months, is Simon Bookish's Everything/Everything. I'd just downloaded the album from eMusic a few days before putting together my lists. I downloaded it on the strength of the two tracks linked below, which had been sent around the flackosphere for months.
First, you gotta love a guy who calls himself "Simon Bookish"...and then puts out an album with this cover:
I suppose the simplest way to describe Simon Bookish's music is that it sounds almost exactly what you'd expect music by "Simon Bookish" to sound like. It might also help to imagine a collaboration among David Bowie, David Byrne, and Philip Glass (even though Bookish has a song called "Terry Riley Disco," the horn and keyboard arrangements are closer to Glass's work than Riley's). Both "Synchrotron" and "Dumb Terminal" feature extended, multipart structures, which isn't necessarily typical - but I think Bookish does much to recuperate the diminished stature of the saxophone, abused over these years by everyone from annoying blues honkers to Sanborn-esque cheese merchants. There's also much to be said for the sort of insouciant abstraction of the lyrics, along with Bookish's alternately melodramatic and distant vocals.
Everything/Everything is on Tomlab (another good indicator, if you know that label's work), and Bookish apparently has released two earlier titles, Unfair/Funfair and Trainwreck/Raincheck (noticing a trend?), which apparently do not necessarily sound anything like this.
Simon Bookish "Synchrotron" (Everything/Everything, 2008)
Simon Bookish "Dumb Terminal" (Everything/Everything, 2008)
12.31.2008
2008 top 20
Here's a selection of songs from my 20 favorite albums of 2008. I sequenced them to play in order, so the order doesn't reflect any ranking of the songs' host albums.
Ringtone Tycoon: The Automated Pushover
1. The Bye Bye Blackbirds "The Ghosts Are Alright" (Houses & Homes)
2. Ghosty "A Good Customer" (Answers)
3. These New Puritans "Elvis" (Beat Pyramid)
4. School of Language "This Is No Fun" (Sea from Shore)
5. Department of Eagles "Waves of Rye" (In Ear Park)
6. TV on the Radio "Family Tree" (Dear Science)
7. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks "Out of Reaches" (Real Emotional Trash)
8. Shannon McArdle "I Was Warned" (Summer of the Whore)
9. The Black Watch "Peppermint" (Icing the Snow Queen)
10. Mike Viola "That Part of Me Is Dead" (Lurch)
11. Albert Hammond Jr. "In My Room" (¿Cómo Te Llama?)
12. Wire "All Fours" (Object 47)
13. School of Seven Bells "Connjur" (Alpinisms)
14. Momus "Fade to White" (Joemus)
15. The Week That Was "The Story Waits for No One" (The Week That Was)
16. The Chap "Wuss Wuss" (Mega Breakfast)
17. Sam Phillips "My Career in Chemistry" (Don't Do Anything)
18. Portishead "We Carry On" (Third)
19. Beck "Chemtrails" (Modern Guilt)
20. Clinic "Shopping Bag" (Do It!)
Playlist: enjoy! Everyone have a happy new year, and here's to 2009!
Ringtone Tycoon: The Automated Pushover
1. The Bye Bye Blackbirds "The Ghosts Are Alright" (Houses & Homes)
2. Ghosty "A Good Customer" (Answers)
3. These New Puritans "Elvis" (Beat Pyramid)
4. School of Language "This Is No Fun" (Sea from Shore)
5. Department of Eagles "Waves of Rye" (In Ear Park)
6. TV on the Radio "Family Tree" (Dear Science)
7. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks "Out of Reaches" (Real Emotional Trash)
8. Shannon McArdle "I Was Warned" (Summer of the Whore)
9. The Black Watch "Peppermint" (Icing the Snow Queen)
10. Mike Viola "That Part of Me Is Dead" (Lurch)
11. Albert Hammond Jr. "In My Room" (¿Cómo Te Llama?)
12. Wire "All Fours" (Object 47)
13. School of Seven Bells "Connjur" (Alpinisms)
14. Momus "Fade to White" (Joemus)
15. The Week That Was "The Story Waits for No One" (The Week That Was)
16. The Chap "Wuss Wuss" (Mega Breakfast)
17. Sam Phillips "My Career in Chemistry" (Don't Do Anything)
18. Portishead "We Carry On" (Third)
19. Beck "Chemtrails" (Modern Guilt)
20. Clinic "Shopping Bag" (Do It!)
Playlist: enjoy! Everyone have a happy new year, and here's to 2009!
12.30.2008
2008 mixes - covers!
I've always rather liked cover songs - or at least, I've never been one of those folks who can't imagine a cover that does anything but make one want to listen to the original (which is not to say that some covers don't do exactly and only that). So this is the second or third year in which I've compiled a playlist consisting solely of covers I'd run into during that year. Here's the 2008 version:
Ringtone Tycoon: "it's okay, they're speaking Chinese..."
1. Marnie Stern "Don't Stop Believin'" (Journey): Among the more interesting varieties of covers are those that begin in your mind as clearly ironic...but then turn out to represent aspects of the original song that were more interesting than you'd remembered it. Okay - fooled ya. I don't know if this is ironic...but Stern's usual spastic yet fluid guitar playing covers every square millimeter of this track, such that the mundane little song underneath is almost not there. (Also: "South Detroit"? I believe that would be properly known as "Windsor, Ontario"... There is, however, a "South Detroit" in South Dakota, according to Google...so maybe we've been wrong all along, and the narrator is from South Dakota.)
2. Chica and the Folder "I'll Come Running" (Brian Eno): Despite being entirely synthetic, this one sounds almost like an arrangement Eno might have used for the original...perhaps if an Oblique Strategies card had read "Blackout" or something.
3. Darker My Love "The Fool" (Sanford Clark): A somewhat obscure fifties track, if I'm remembering correctly, covered here as part of some shoe-based marketing program. Does that sound promising? No - but I like the song much better than I would have guessed.
4. French Kicks "Trouble" (Lindsey Buckingham): I didn't plan on including covers of this Lindsey Buckingham song two years in a row...but that's just how it came out. Of Montreal did it last year...I wonder who'll do it 2009?
5. The Monks of Doom "The 15th" (Wire): This might be the Wire song you want to play for someone to evidence the band's genius as both songwriters and arrangers...the Monks of Doom, however, make the arrangement less luminously brilliant and add an ending (and a fake ending) that suggests they're taking the song into their own, more improv-friendly territory...but instead punt in favor of giving the 'puter some.
6. Parenthetical Girls "Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)" (Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark): Architecture & Morality is one of my favorite albums (the source of this track's original), and one reason is its blend of electronic, acoustic, and old-school musique concrète sampling...and what's astonishing to me is how well Parenthetical Girls (of course you've guessed by now: no women in that band either...) have reproduced the effect of the textures and tones of the original version's opening section - even though the orchestration is quite different. Beyond that, the arrangement is slightly more intimate than the original, largely due to the substitution of what might be a harmonium for mellotron, and the fade's accompaniment of the martial drumming with reams of acoustic percussion (rather than the sort of clattering electronic soundscape that backs the original's acoustic drums).
7. Eliza Lumley "How to Disappear Completely" (Radiohead): Covering Radiohead is the new black, or the new loud, or maybe just the new "new x"...but there's a reason for that, which is that brouhaha about distribution models, stylistic changes, and bad hair only obscures that Radiohead also writes very good, durable songs. Lumley's version barely exists, and in so nearly not doing gets quite pointedly at the panicked desolation at the heart of the song.
8. Morrissey "Redondo Beach" (Patti Smith): When the Smiths' first singles came out, and Johnny Marr's fabulously inventive and textured guitar-playing surrounded Morrissey's series of two-note melodies, everyone figured Marr would go on to become a big star, while Morrissey would probably become a writer or a journalist or simply a celebrity. Instead, Marr's taken the title of our last track to heart (even when he appears, who can tell? hear his appearance on last year's Modest Mouse album for evidence), while Morrissey's had a career full of solid albums...and has developed into a fine, supple singer without losing his distinctiveness. Here he wraps himself around Patti Smith's tragic little number to nice effect.
9. Brazilian Girls "Crosseyed and Painless" (Talking Heads): First, I believe this is the sole act in this year's mixes with "girls" or "women" in its name that actually has women in it. Take a bow. Yeesh. Anyway: a nice, intense cover of Talking Heads' already intense song.
10. No Age "It's Oh So Quiet" (Björk): Another species of cover is the kind in which the band does nearly a complete rewrite. There are some similarities in melodic countour here...but essentially, this is a No Age setting of the lyrics to Björk's song (which isn't actually hers, but let us not quibble).
11. Radiohead "The Headmaster Ritual" (The Smiths): Whereas this is nearly a carbon copy...but it's interesting to see how well Thom Yorke's voice fits the lyric and melody, and the way Marr's idiosyncratic guitar part with its odd passing chords is flawlessly reproduced. This is from a live online performance, if I recall correctly, via Stereogum (I linked them the last two posts, and they still haven't paid me, so you get to find the URL yourself this time).
12. Scott Miller "Cara Lee" (Chris Stamey): Miller, late of Game Theory and the Loud Family, is a semi-retired father of two these days ("semi-retired" from music anyway), but he made this recording and offered it for free if enough people donated to a particular charitable cause. They did, he did, and here it is again...but you might give to Donors Choose anyway.
13. The New Frontiers "Look at Miss Ohio" (Gillian Welch): I think this is the only track here whose original is unknown to me (I found a free stream of that Sanford Clark number above, which I hadn't known beforehand), but since I can nearly hear Welch's voice singing this one, I'm guessing it's pretty close.
14. My Morning Jacket "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" (Donovan): Okay, am I imagining this, or was the Donovan original one of the earlier instances of a song used in a commercial for an utterly unrelated product...like some time in the '70s? Anyway, I like the original regardless, and My Morning Jacket tweak it just enough to make it interesting...
15. Spoon "Peace Like a River" (Paul Simon): I would not have expected Spoon to cover Paul Simon...but here they do, from a Daytrotter session, and it somehow fits the band better than I would have guessed.
16. Calexico "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)" (Bob Dylan): From a series of online downloads of live tracks covering Dylan songs. If anyone knows who the guy is that sings the Spanish verse, let me know: he gives it this incredibly grave dignity, and while the series is called "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan," as effective as Bob can be singing his best, he couldn't do this.
17. The Last Town Chorus "Modern Love" (David Bowie): Yet another common species of cover: the radical tempo change gambit. Do a fast song slow, do a slow song fast - you get the picture. Done well, though, it brings out whole new realms of meaning, since all the connotations of "slow" (and, often, "quiet") get applied to lyrics lacking such registers in the original. (Speaking of which: I've always thought Roger Daltrey's bellowing on "Who Are You" often utterly missed what seemed to be the point of the lyrics...and that if Pete Townshend had sung the verse about "how can I measure up to anyone now, after such a love as this?" in his own, much more vulnerable voice, particularly holding back the volume quite a bit, the song would have been much more effective. So, uh, I guess I'm saying I'd like to hear a cover of the song by its actual writer...)
18. Seksu Roba "Moon Song" (My Bloody Valentine): It's Theremin Night at the Luna Lounge, and here's a glittering trove of swank dressed up just for your very sophisticated palate...
19. Laura Cantrell "Love Vigilantes" (New Order): Cantrell found the country song hidden within the New Order track and pulled it out intact. Sad that so many lyrics that began as fiction end up being all too plausible, though. (Uh, not the visitation part - the rest.)
20. Xiu Xiu "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" (Bauhaus): Xiu Xiu is, of course, not for everybody - I fully understand the folks who would rather claw their own eyeballs out than listen to either the band's sometimes horrendous cacophony or Jamie Stewart's vocal exhibitionism - but at their best, they're not only compelling but (often overlooked) write great melodies besides. This, of course, is not their song...but anyone expecting Stewart to suddenly start howling or yelping will be... I guess you'll just have to find out.
Play it, Sam - play it.
Next: My favorite 20 albums of 2008 (and accompanying playlist).
Ringtone Tycoon: "it's okay, they're speaking Chinese..."
1. Marnie Stern "Don't Stop Believin'" (Journey): Among the more interesting varieties of covers are those that begin in your mind as clearly ironic...but then turn out to represent aspects of the original song that were more interesting than you'd remembered it. Okay - fooled ya. I don't know if this is ironic...but Stern's usual spastic yet fluid guitar playing covers every square millimeter of this track, such that the mundane little song underneath is almost not there. (Also: "South Detroit"? I believe that would be properly known as "Windsor, Ontario"... There is, however, a "South Detroit" in South Dakota, according to Google...so maybe we've been wrong all along, and the narrator is from South Dakota.)
2. Chica and the Folder "I'll Come Running" (Brian Eno): Despite being entirely synthetic, this one sounds almost like an arrangement Eno might have used for the original...perhaps if an Oblique Strategies card had read "Blackout" or something.
3. Darker My Love "The Fool" (Sanford Clark): A somewhat obscure fifties track, if I'm remembering correctly, covered here as part of some shoe-based marketing program. Does that sound promising? No - but I like the song much better than I would have guessed.
4. French Kicks "Trouble" (Lindsey Buckingham): I didn't plan on including covers of this Lindsey Buckingham song two years in a row...but that's just how it came out. Of Montreal did it last year...I wonder who'll do it 2009?
5. The Monks of Doom "The 15th" (Wire): This might be the Wire song you want to play for someone to evidence the band's genius as both songwriters and arrangers...the Monks of Doom, however, make the arrangement less luminously brilliant and add an ending (and a fake ending) that suggests they're taking the song into their own, more improv-friendly territory...but instead punt in favor of giving the 'puter some.
6. Parenthetical Girls "Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)" (Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark): Architecture & Morality is one of my favorite albums (the source of this track's original), and one reason is its blend of electronic, acoustic, and old-school musique concrète sampling...and what's astonishing to me is how well Parenthetical Girls (of course you've guessed by now: no women in that band either...) have reproduced the effect of the textures and tones of the original version's opening section - even though the orchestration is quite different. Beyond that, the arrangement is slightly more intimate than the original, largely due to the substitution of what might be a harmonium for mellotron, and the fade's accompaniment of the martial drumming with reams of acoustic percussion (rather than the sort of clattering electronic soundscape that backs the original's acoustic drums).
7. Eliza Lumley "How to Disappear Completely" (Radiohead): Covering Radiohead is the new black, or the new loud, or maybe just the new "new x"...but there's a reason for that, which is that brouhaha about distribution models, stylistic changes, and bad hair only obscures that Radiohead also writes very good, durable songs. Lumley's version barely exists, and in so nearly not doing gets quite pointedly at the panicked desolation at the heart of the song.
8. Morrissey "Redondo Beach" (Patti Smith): When the Smiths' first singles came out, and Johnny Marr's fabulously inventive and textured guitar-playing surrounded Morrissey's series of two-note melodies, everyone figured Marr would go on to become a big star, while Morrissey would probably become a writer or a journalist or simply a celebrity. Instead, Marr's taken the title of our last track to heart (even when he appears, who can tell? hear his appearance on last year's Modest Mouse album for evidence), while Morrissey's had a career full of solid albums...and has developed into a fine, supple singer without losing his distinctiveness. Here he wraps himself around Patti Smith's tragic little number to nice effect.
9. Brazilian Girls "Crosseyed and Painless" (Talking Heads): First, I believe this is the sole act in this year's mixes with "girls" or "women" in its name that actually has women in it. Take a bow. Yeesh. Anyway: a nice, intense cover of Talking Heads' already intense song.
10. No Age "It's Oh So Quiet" (Björk): Another species of cover is the kind in which the band does nearly a complete rewrite. There are some similarities in melodic countour here...but essentially, this is a No Age setting of the lyrics to Björk's song (which isn't actually hers, but let us not quibble).
11. Radiohead "The Headmaster Ritual" (The Smiths): Whereas this is nearly a carbon copy...but it's interesting to see how well Thom Yorke's voice fits the lyric and melody, and the way Marr's idiosyncratic guitar part with its odd passing chords is flawlessly reproduced. This is from a live online performance, if I recall correctly, via Stereogum (I linked them the last two posts, and they still haven't paid me, so you get to find the URL yourself this time).
12. Scott Miller "Cara Lee" (Chris Stamey): Miller, late of Game Theory and the Loud Family, is a semi-retired father of two these days ("semi-retired" from music anyway), but he made this recording and offered it for free if enough people donated to a particular charitable cause. They did, he did, and here it is again...but you might give to Donors Choose anyway.
13. The New Frontiers "Look at Miss Ohio" (Gillian Welch): I think this is the only track here whose original is unknown to me (I found a free stream of that Sanford Clark number above, which I hadn't known beforehand), but since I can nearly hear Welch's voice singing this one, I'm guessing it's pretty close.
14. My Morning Jacket "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" (Donovan): Okay, am I imagining this, or was the Donovan original one of the earlier instances of a song used in a commercial for an utterly unrelated product...like some time in the '70s? Anyway, I like the original regardless, and My Morning Jacket tweak it just enough to make it interesting...
15. Spoon "Peace Like a River" (Paul Simon): I would not have expected Spoon to cover Paul Simon...but here they do, from a Daytrotter session, and it somehow fits the band better than I would have guessed.
16. Calexico "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)" (Bob Dylan): From a series of online downloads of live tracks covering Dylan songs. If anyone knows who the guy is that sings the Spanish verse, let me know: he gives it this incredibly grave dignity, and while the series is called "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan," as effective as Bob can be singing his best, he couldn't do this.
17. The Last Town Chorus "Modern Love" (David Bowie): Yet another common species of cover: the radical tempo change gambit. Do a fast song slow, do a slow song fast - you get the picture. Done well, though, it brings out whole new realms of meaning, since all the connotations of "slow" (and, often, "quiet") get applied to lyrics lacking such registers in the original. (Speaking of which: I've always thought Roger Daltrey's bellowing on "Who Are You" often utterly missed what seemed to be the point of the lyrics...and that if Pete Townshend had sung the verse about "how can I measure up to anyone now, after such a love as this?" in his own, much more vulnerable voice, particularly holding back the volume quite a bit, the song would have been much more effective. So, uh, I guess I'm saying I'd like to hear a cover of the song by its actual writer...)
18. Seksu Roba "Moon Song" (My Bloody Valentine): It's Theremin Night at the Luna Lounge, and here's a glittering trove of swank dressed up just for your very sophisticated palate...
19. Laura Cantrell "Love Vigilantes" (New Order): Cantrell found the country song hidden within the New Order track and pulled it out intact. Sad that so many lyrics that began as fiction end up being all too plausible, though. (Uh, not the visitation part - the rest.)
20. Xiu Xiu "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" (Bauhaus): Xiu Xiu is, of course, not for everybody - I fully understand the folks who would rather claw their own eyeballs out than listen to either the band's sometimes horrendous cacophony or Jamie Stewart's vocal exhibitionism - but at their best, they're not only compelling but (often overlooked) write great melodies besides. This, of course, is not their song...but anyone expecting Stewart to suddenly start howling or yelping will be... I guess you'll just have to find out.
Play it, Sam - play it.
Next: My favorite 20 albums of 2008 (and accompanying playlist).
2008 listening diary - part 2
The second of two "listening diary" mixes for this year (see my previous entry for general bloviation thereon).
Ringtone Tycoon: Mormon Jigsaw?
1. Ezra Furman & the Harpoons "We Should Fight": Begin with the rock, son. Begin with the rock.
2. The Eat "Communist Radio": It's short. It's fast. It's 1979.
3. Service Group "All I Wanted to Say": I discovered this because the band's main songwriter is my brother-in-law's cousin (I think I have that right). He used to work on crew for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I include that info only so Buffy fanatics will check it out. Pure power-pop - no longer as favored a genre as it once was for me; still, done right it hits the spot, kind of like junk food is good once in a very rare while. Good junk food, anyway.
4. The Misbelieves "Come On Now Kids Yeah It's Bonnington Truce!": This is written by the same guy who wrote the instant classic "Touch You Natalie Jane" (billed to Popsicle Thieves) a few years ago, and which was on my best-of mixes for that year. I think he's got the touch. Random songs educate the youth: here are a few words.
5. Neil Gaiman ft. Claudia Gonson "Bloody Sunrise": Uh, let me see...this is song written in the style of Magnetic Fields, sung by Claudia Gonson, who actually does sing for Magnetic Fields, and which was written by noted fantasy author Neil Gaiman, after a bookshelf full of fake titles (along with a bunch of other songs written by other folks on those titles), and...wait, I'm lost. Here - follow Gaiman's links instead. This would all be terribly postmodern (emphasis on "terribly"), except that this really does sound like a Magnetic Fields song, and a fairly good one at that, and Stephin Merritt's often written about vampires anyway. (I think it's a fairly accurate claim that Merritt has written and recorded the only concept country-western electronic album about vampires. Therefore he's also written the best concept country-western electronic album about vampires - no slouch that Merritt fella.)
6. Gil Ray "X-Ray Beach": Gil used to be the drummer, then a guitarist, for Game Theory, then was that band's successor the Loud Family's drummer in its last years. He put together this surf instrumental because surf instrumentals are fun. And in fact, one of the bands that put out one of my twenty favorite albums this year (see forthcoming post) regularly opens its sets with a cover of this track.
7. The Wrens "In Turkish Waters": No, no, don't have a heart attack: there's no new Wrens studio album. This is one of Stereogum's 'Gum Drop specials...and (I just found out now - though Stereogum probably mentioned it but I forgot) is another contribution to the same series as the Gaiman track. At least we know the band hasn't all dropped dead, or run for New Jersey elective office, or murdered annoying music journalists.
8. Tris McCall "Girl with a Bicycle": We continue with the New Jersey section of the mix: for the last few months Tris has been posting demoes at one of his websites. This, so far, is my favorite, a percolating little piece of semi-psychedelic whimsy about a classic subject (hint: it's in the title). Rumors that the synth at the end was played by directly wiring Tris's cortex to the inputs are, alas, unconfirmed at press time.
9. Son Lux "Weapons": Blame Tris McCall - those squalling synths put me in a sort of electronic/prog mood, so here's this track: moody, layered, all too contemporary in lyric subject.
10. Rudely Interrupted "Don't Break My Heart": Once I remember that this isn't, in fact, Wire's "One of Us," its own charms become considerable. If you see me wandering around going "malfunction...malfunction..." you can blame this song.
11. The Hidden Messages "As If": A British band that e-mailed me out of the blue late in 2006 ended up placing songs in that year's list, its debut in last year's list, and released a couple more songs this year...and here's my favorite of that bunch. Anti-ironic, orchestrated, joyous pop with more hooks than, uh...a terrifying cloning disaster involving New Order's bass player.
12. Sinkane "Autobahn": Not the Kraftwerk marathon. The drums keep threatening to fall down the stairs, and somehow it's the repetition of the song's few vocal phrases that keeps them put. And someone's remembering a flute they heard once, quite long ago, rather far away.
13. Rox "My Baby Left Me": Only the sadly 21st century massive compression gives this one away as a contemporary recording. Shoulda been a massive hit in 1971.
14. The Joy Formidable "Austere": After that high-pitched vocal opening, you don't really expect that bass sound - and the band also has a good line in switching the rhythm around to make things interesting...alternating with straightened-out phrases both to avoid predictability and preciousness.
15. The Girls "Transfer Station": Of course there's no one female in this band. Duh. Otherwise, why would they call the band "The Girls"? (Ditto "Women" below, and just plain "Girls" - no article - one of whose songs almost made these mixes too...) What there is is a nice driving rhythm and more wailing synth (especially at the end).
16. The Mojomatics "Wait a While": This is for those of you who think rock'n'roll should not have synths but should have buckets of reverb. And should be short.
17. The Homophones "Everyone's Dead": Such a cheery little number, with a jolly glockenspiel, homoerotic imagery, and dead cops in your head. No, really - it's cheery.
18. Women "Black Rice": One route: make things simple, but don't make everything obvious. Make them into a little jigsaw puzzle, but make sure the resulting picture doesn't just depict a jumble of disorganized jigsaw puzzle pieces.
19. Setting Sun "Not Waste": This is one of those songs that works for me almost entirely due to one or two unexpected chords. Without those chords, it'd be a reasonably good, moody little song...but the presence of that particular chord sequence somehow elevates and transfigures the entire emotive world of the song, and enables the song to haunt my damned brain. Funny, that.
20. Planar "No Numbers": There has to be a sort of floaty, goodnight track every year...
21. Tom Bolton "Little Star": I would not have thought it was possible to wring anything decent from such a well-established, simple little melody...but Bolton manages it.
22. The Speakers "You'll Remember": What works for me here? Well, this song kept threatening to get booted off the list...it was all just kinda okay...and then I kept listening to the end, and something about its last few minutes kept insisting on its presence in these mixes. It was destined as a last song from the beginning, also.
Ici la playliste actuelle. Je ne parle pas français.
Later this evening: covers mix!
Ringtone Tycoon: Mormon Jigsaw?
1. Ezra Furman & the Harpoons "We Should Fight": Begin with the rock, son. Begin with the rock.
2. The Eat "Communist Radio": It's short. It's fast. It's 1979.
3. Service Group "All I Wanted to Say": I discovered this because the band's main songwriter is my brother-in-law's cousin (I think I have that right). He used to work on crew for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I include that info only so Buffy fanatics will check it out. Pure power-pop - no longer as favored a genre as it once was for me; still, done right it hits the spot, kind of like junk food is good once in a very rare while. Good junk food, anyway.
4. The Misbelieves "Come On Now Kids Yeah It's Bonnington Truce!": This is written by the same guy who wrote the instant classic "Touch You Natalie Jane" (billed to Popsicle Thieves) a few years ago, and which was on my best-of mixes for that year. I think he's got the touch. Random songs educate the youth: here are a few words.
5. Neil Gaiman ft. Claudia Gonson "Bloody Sunrise": Uh, let me see...this is song written in the style of Magnetic Fields, sung by Claudia Gonson, who actually does sing for Magnetic Fields, and which was written by noted fantasy author Neil Gaiman, after a bookshelf full of fake titles (along with a bunch of other songs written by other folks on those titles), and...wait, I'm lost. Here - follow Gaiman's links instead. This would all be terribly postmodern (emphasis on "terribly"), except that this really does sound like a Magnetic Fields song, and a fairly good one at that, and Stephin Merritt's often written about vampires anyway. (I think it's a fairly accurate claim that Merritt has written and recorded the only concept country-western electronic album about vampires. Therefore he's also written the best concept country-western electronic album about vampires - no slouch that Merritt fella.)
6. Gil Ray "X-Ray Beach": Gil used to be the drummer, then a guitarist, for Game Theory, then was that band's successor the Loud Family's drummer in its last years. He put together this surf instrumental because surf instrumentals are fun. And in fact, one of the bands that put out one of my twenty favorite albums this year (see forthcoming post) regularly opens its sets with a cover of this track.
7. The Wrens "In Turkish Waters": No, no, don't have a heart attack: there's no new Wrens studio album. This is one of Stereogum's 'Gum Drop specials...and (I just found out now - though Stereogum probably mentioned it but I forgot) is another contribution to the same series as the Gaiman track. At least we know the band hasn't all dropped dead, or run for New Jersey elective office, or murdered annoying music journalists.
8. Tris McCall "Girl with a Bicycle": We continue with the New Jersey section of the mix: for the last few months Tris has been posting demoes at one of his websites. This, so far, is my favorite, a percolating little piece of semi-psychedelic whimsy about a classic subject (hint: it's in the title). Rumors that the synth at the end was played by directly wiring Tris's cortex to the inputs are, alas, unconfirmed at press time.
9. Son Lux "Weapons": Blame Tris McCall - those squalling synths put me in a sort of electronic/prog mood, so here's this track: moody, layered, all too contemporary in lyric subject.
10. Rudely Interrupted "Don't Break My Heart": Once I remember that this isn't, in fact, Wire's "One of Us," its own charms become considerable. If you see me wandering around going "malfunction...malfunction..." you can blame this song.
11. The Hidden Messages "As If": A British band that e-mailed me out of the blue late in 2006 ended up placing songs in that year's list, its debut in last year's list, and released a couple more songs this year...and here's my favorite of that bunch. Anti-ironic, orchestrated, joyous pop with more hooks than, uh...a terrifying cloning disaster involving New Order's bass player.
12. Sinkane "Autobahn": Not the Kraftwerk marathon. The drums keep threatening to fall down the stairs, and somehow it's the repetition of the song's few vocal phrases that keeps them put. And someone's remembering a flute they heard once, quite long ago, rather far away.
13. Rox "My Baby Left Me": Only the sadly 21st century massive compression gives this one away as a contemporary recording. Shoulda been a massive hit in 1971.
14. The Joy Formidable "Austere": After that high-pitched vocal opening, you don't really expect that bass sound - and the band also has a good line in switching the rhythm around to make things interesting...alternating with straightened-out phrases both to avoid predictability and preciousness.
15. The Girls "Transfer Station": Of course there's no one female in this band. Duh. Otherwise, why would they call the band "The Girls"? (Ditto "Women" below, and just plain "Girls" - no article - one of whose songs almost made these mixes too...) What there is is a nice driving rhythm and more wailing synth (especially at the end).
16. The Mojomatics "Wait a While": This is for those of you who think rock'n'roll should not have synths but should have buckets of reverb. And should be short.
17. The Homophones "Everyone's Dead": Such a cheery little number, with a jolly glockenspiel, homoerotic imagery, and dead cops in your head. No, really - it's cheery.
18. Women "Black Rice": One route: make things simple, but don't make everything obvious. Make them into a little jigsaw puzzle, but make sure the resulting picture doesn't just depict a jumble of disorganized jigsaw puzzle pieces.
19. Setting Sun "Not Waste": This is one of those songs that works for me almost entirely due to one or two unexpected chords. Without those chords, it'd be a reasonably good, moody little song...but the presence of that particular chord sequence somehow elevates and transfigures the entire emotive world of the song, and enables the song to haunt my damned brain. Funny, that.
20. Planar "No Numbers": There has to be a sort of floaty, goodnight track every year...
21. Tom Bolton "Little Star": I would not have thought it was possible to wring anything decent from such a well-established, simple little melody...but Bolton manages it.
22. The Speakers "You'll Remember": What works for me here? Well, this song kept threatening to get booted off the list...it was all just kinda okay...and then I kept listening to the end, and something about its last few minutes kept insisting on its presence in these mixes. It was destined as a last song from the beginning, also.
Ici la playliste actuelle. Je ne parle pas français.
Later this evening: covers mix!
12.29.2008
2008 listening diary - part 1
This is the first in my series of year-end music recaps with accompanying playlists. The first two (including this one) assemble free-range music that came my way unencumbered by that twentieth-century phenomenon known as "the album" (as I pointed out last year, "album" simply means "a collection of songs" and has nothing to do with the physical format that collection takes). As someone who occasionally blogs about music, I receive lots of links to mp3s: I am apparently a valuable corrosive in the plumbing system of the music industry, presumed to have a certain power to burn through the various assembled nasties that prevent music from flowing freely through the sewage system of the music industry, only to be discharged in a fetid rush, in the middle of the night, via some unauthorized conduit, on property of mysteriously tangled ownership, whence its fertile effluvia might cause the flowers of commerce to bloom in profusion. I'm guessing the industry would rather the plumbing metaphor be run in reverse, with profits flowing fresh as water through its carefully maintained faucets...but (as the philosopher Ice-T once said) "shit ain't like that."
Anyway: here's the first playlist, carefully assembled to provide all essential nutrients and a carefully calibrated bouquet of aural efflorescence...
Ringtone Tycoon: German Mixup?
1. Statues "The Last Stand": Begin with the rock, son. Begin with the rock.
2. 18th Dye "Backdoor": I think the lines about the mom and the dog are really about the cartoon "Marmaduke"...
3. Duchess Says "Ccut Up": Hey! You got guitar in my synthesizer! But you got synthesizer in my guitar!
4. An Horse "Warm Hands/Scared as Fuck": Via Said the Gramophone...whose writer (too lazy to check which one) noted a titular ambiguity - I preserve the perhaps mythical "Scared as Fuck" part simply because it's a beautiful contrast with the chorus affirmation "I'm not really scared" (whose "really" already brings us halfway there, of course).
5. Crystal Stilts "Crystal Stilts": I like bands that write songs named after themselves (or bands that name themselves after songs they've written). 'Scuse me while I wash off this reverb.
6. Eugene Francis Jnr & the Juniors "Poor Me": I like the circling keyboard part, and the way the guitars get a little woozy, and the general air of this one...although I find it's one of those songs I somehow fail to be able to get very specific in writing about. Oh wait - is that mandolin in the background? Nice!
7. Bob Hund "Reinkarnerad exakt som förut": This track was linked at The Sugarplastic's website...and at first I thought it was a joke: really Ben Eshbach recording under a different name...except I found independent mention of this album and artist elsewhere. Anyway, it's unsurprising that Eshbach liked this one.
8. Camphor "The Sweetest Tooth": There's still room for nicely arranged, tuneful, even "adult-orientated" (a la Stereolab) pop music. Isn't there?
9. Devotchka "Transliterator": I believe this track was one of Stereogum's "'Gum Drop" tracks of the week - anyway, I'd earlier dismissed these guys as one of those annoying "gypsy rock" bands that cater to former frat boys grasping after sophisticated occasions to overdrink...but there's way more going on here than that. In fact, that is not going on here at all.
10. Monkey "Heavenly Peach Banquet": You know, I can't really imagine monkeys cooperating overmuch at a "peach banquet." I'm guessing they'd just start throwing them around, overturning tables, scampering around, and generally behaving obnoxiously. Sorta like Oasis. But then, this is actually Damon Albarn from Blur, with collaborators...he'd probably be perfectly capable of appropriate peach banquet behavior.
11. The Grizzly Owls "What's a Girl to Do?": Apparently, my new hobby is collecting songs called "What's a Girl to Do?" - first, in 1994 or whatever, there was the Wrens; then last year or so, Bat for Lashes had their/her song of that title...and here's the Grizzly Owls, with yet another song of that title, which both wins the earworm award for this playlist and confirms that indie rockish folk still haven't finished with the damned "name your band after animals" trend (to rather absurd ends, here).
12. 13ghosts "Riverside": Another haunting track...isn't there a reference to feeding swans on the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle?
13. Phonograph "Paper Bag": Country and lunar. From a Daytrotter session.
14. HIJK "Paper Boat": This is one of those songs for which neither band nor title sticks (not that they're inappropriate) but then, once I hear the song again, I go, oh yeah: that one! (Pretend this track's entry has content.)
15. Diet Cola "Wicked Witch of the Northeast": The nice thing about these listening diaries (and indeed, about the ongoing mp3-ization of music listening) is that it returns us, to an extent, to pre- album-era rock, when a band could get a nice buzz just on the basis of one song, and that one song might be primarily a matter of one very cool guitar sound or something. Is that a career? Who cares? It's a great noise this song's got.
16. Josh Ritter "Wildfires": Okay, yes: I followed up the noisy track with the sensitive, acoustic-guitar -based track. So sue me. Anyway, Ritter subtly varies his guitar playing here...the change in tone and texture from the opening to the song's ending is a case in point. (When I make these mixes, I'll listen only to the ends and beginnings of songs to decide on transitions...so such differences become striking).
17. The Harpeth Trace "Who Knows Where You Are": Sometimes, you wake up and you're sure you had this dream...but all you remember is one curious detail, like bits of a feather stuck underneath a carpet. Yeah, it's one in the morning, so?
18. Figurines "Hey, Girl": You gotta give this band credit just for calling a song "Hey, Girl" - doing so speaks to a real confidence in the song itself, since no one's going to remember the title as anything distinctive. And indeed, this is (along with the Grizzly Owls' track above) the second-most persistent earworm in this mix. Something about the way that melody hooks and reaches around reminds me of Rollerskate Skinny (and I know: that probably strikes most people as saying something like, you know, this building reminds me of Yetzske Office Supply headquarters in Deadoak, Idaho - but in fact, if you've been to Deadoak, Idaho, you'll know what I mean).
19. The Sadies "Translucent Sparrow": Remember that song in which Camper Van Beethoven talks about giving some cowboys some acid? The cowboys went and gave that acid to the Byrds and a passing mariachi band.
20. Passion Pit "Sleepyhead": I wouldn't want to break the mood. And I don't mean the mariachi mood.
21. DM Stith "Just Once": Let's say you took some colored ink, and you mixed some ground-up iron filings in with it. Then you filled a metal tank with water, put a few lights overhead, then slowly poured in some of that ink. Oh, and then you turn on a bank of very powerful magnets you've installed in a band around the outside of that tank, and crank the lights up to absurd candlepower. This song has a middle section that's kind of like that.
The playlist itself.
More tomorrow (or later today, if you prefer).
Anyway: here's the first playlist, carefully assembled to provide all essential nutrients and a carefully calibrated bouquet of aural efflorescence...
Ringtone Tycoon: German Mixup?
1. Statues "The Last Stand": Begin with the rock, son. Begin with the rock.
2. 18th Dye "Backdoor": I think the lines about the mom and the dog are really about the cartoon "Marmaduke"...
3. Duchess Says "Ccut Up": Hey! You got guitar in my synthesizer! But you got synthesizer in my guitar!
4. An Horse "Warm Hands/Scared as Fuck": Via Said the Gramophone...whose writer (too lazy to check which one) noted a titular ambiguity - I preserve the perhaps mythical "Scared as Fuck" part simply because it's a beautiful contrast with the chorus affirmation "I'm not really scared" (whose "really" already brings us halfway there, of course).
5. Crystal Stilts "Crystal Stilts": I like bands that write songs named after themselves (or bands that name themselves after songs they've written). 'Scuse me while I wash off this reverb.
6. Eugene Francis Jnr & the Juniors "Poor Me": I like the circling keyboard part, and the way the guitars get a little woozy, and the general air of this one...although I find it's one of those songs I somehow fail to be able to get very specific in writing about. Oh wait - is that mandolin in the background? Nice!
7. Bob Hund "Reinkarnerad exakt som förut": This track was linked at The Sugarplastic's website...and at first I thought it was a joke: really Ben Eshbach recording under a different name...except I found independent mention of this album and artist elsewhere. Anyway, it's unsurprising that Eshbach liked this one.
8. Camphor "The Sweetest Tooth": There's still room for nicely arranged, tuneful, even "adult-orientated" (a la Stereolab) pop music. Isn't there?
9. Devotchka "Transliterator": I believe this track was one of Stereogum's "'Gum Drop" tracks of the week - anyway, I'd earlier dismissed these guys as one of those annoying "gypsy rock" bands that cater to former frat boys grasping after sophisticated occasions to overdrink...but there's way more going on here than that. In fact, that is not going on here at all.
10. Monkey "Heavenly Peach Banquet": You know, I can't really imagine monkeys cooperating overmuch at a "peach banquet." I'm guessing they'd just start throwing them around, overturning tables, scampering around, and generally behaving obnoxiously. Sorta like Oasis. But then, this is actually Damon Albarn from Blur, with collaborators...he'd probably be perfectly capable of appropriate peach banquet behavior.
11. The Grizzly Owls "What's a Girl to Do?": Apparently, my new hobby is collecting songs called "What's a Girl to Do?" - first, in 1994 or whatever, there was the Wrens; then last year or so, Bat for Lashes had their/her song of that title...and here's the Grizzly Owls, with yet another song of that title, which both wins the earworm award for this playlist and confirms that indie rockish folk still haven't finished with the damned "name your band after animals" trend (to rather absurd ends, here).
12. 13ghosts "Riverside": Another haunting track...isn't there a reference to feeding swans on the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle?
13. Phonograph "Paper Bag": Country and lunar. From a Daytrotter session.
14. HIJK "Paper Boat": This is one of those songs for which neither band nor title sticks (not that they're inappropriate) but then, once I hear the song again, I go, oh yeah: that one! (Pretend this track's entry has content.)
15. Diet Cola "Wicked Witch of the Northeast": The nice thing about these listening diaries (and indeed, about the ongoing mp3-ization of music listening) is that it returns us, to an extent, to pre- album-era rock, when a band could get a nice buzz just on the basis of one song, and that one song might be primarily a matter of one very cool guitar sound or something. Is that a career? Who cares? It's a great noise this song's got.
16. Josh Ritter "Wildfires": Okay, yes: I followed up the noisy track with the sensitive, acoustic-guitar -based track. So sue me. Anyway, Ritter subtly varies his guitar playing here...the change in tone and texture from the opening to the song's ending is a case in point. (When I make these mixes, I'll listen only to the ends and beginnings of songs to decide on transitions...so such differences become striking).
17. The Harpeth Trace "Who Knows Where You Are": Sometimes, you wake up and you're sure you had this dream...but all you remember is one curious detail, like bits of a feather stuck underneath a carpet. Yeah, it's one in the morning, so?
18. Figurines "Hey, Girl": You gotta give this band credit just for calling a song "Hey, Girl" - doing so speaks to a real confidence in the song itself, since no one's going to remember the title as anything distinctive. And indeed, this is (along with the Grizzly Owls' track above) the second-most persistent earworm in this mix. Something about the way that melody hooks and reaches around reminds me of Rollerskate Skinny (and I know: that probably strikes most people as saying something like, you know, this building reminds me of Yetzske Office Supply headquarters in Deadoak, Idaho - but in fact, if you've been to Deadoak, Idaho, you'll know what I mean).
19. The Sadies "Translucent Sparrow": Remember that song in which Camper Van Beethoven talks about giving some cowboys some acid? The cowboys went and gave that acid to the Byrds and a passing mariachi band.
20. Passion Pit "Sleepyhead": I wouldn't want to break the mood. And I don't mean the mariachi mood.
21. DM Stith "Just Once": Let's say you took some colored ink, and you mixed some ground-up iron filings in with it. Then you filled a metal tank with water, put a few lights overhead, then slowly poured in some of that ink. Oh, and then you turn on a bank of very powerful magnets you've installed in a band around the outside of that tank, and crank the lights up to absurd candlepower. This song has a middle section that's kind of like that.
The playlist itself.
More tomorrow (or later today, if you prefer).
12.25.2008
at this time of year...
Here's an old favorite. Although the song doesn't mention Christmas specifically, it's always felt like a Christmas song to me. So here it is, "Bells" by Wobble Test, my all-time favorite Milwaukee band.
This is from their debut cassette, from 1990, called trixienickybambibo (also known jokingly as "Four Dead Dogs"...since that's where the names in the title come from, each band member's childhood dog). That's my memory at least...someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
Wobble Test "Bells" (trixienickybambibo, 1990 cassette)
This is from their debut cassette, from 1990, called trixienickybambibo (also known jokingly as "Four Dead Dogs"...since that's where the names in the title come from, each band member's childhood dog). That's my memory at least...someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
Wobble Test "Bells" (trixienickybambibo, 1990 cassette)
12.22.2008
the ball is gone...in a flash
A little late...but my previous entry may clue you in to the fact that my plan to post this earlier got a bit derailed...(Oranj is recovering quite well, by the way).
Anyway, I'm probably now the last music blogger to post SF Seals' "Dock Ellis" in memory of the pitcher who died a couple days ago...and who is best known for his claim to have thrown a no-hitter on acid. Barbara Manning is a major baseball fan (SF Seals was her band...named after a minor-league baseball team) who wrote an entire album around baseball, but here she imagines, with brilliant sonic acuity, what it must have been like to have been Dock Ellis that evening.
Manning isn't the only musician to have written a song called "Dock Ellis": here's Lotion (best known for having been blurbed by none other than Thomas Pynchon) with their "Dock Ellis" song.
SF Seals "Dock Ellis" (The Baseball Trilogy, 1993)
Lotion "Dock Ellis" (Full Isaac, 1993)
Anyway, I'm probably now the last music blogger to post SF Seals' "Dock Ellis" in memory of the pitcher who died a couple days ago...and who is best known for his claim to have thrown a no-hitter on acid. Barbara Manning is a major baseball fan (SF Seals was her band...named after a minor-league baseball team) who wrote an entire album around baseball, but here she imagines, with brilliant sonic acuity, what it must have been like to have been Dock Ellis that evening.
Manning isn't the only musician to have written a song called "Dock Ellis": here's Lotion (best known for having been blurbed by none other than Thomas Pynchon) with their "Dock Ellis" song.
SF Seals "Dock Ellis" (The Baseball Trilogy, 1993)
Lotion "Dock Ellis" (Full Isaac, 1993)
12.11.2008
ghosts blow wilder
I've been on a bit of a David Sylvian kick lately (also found this very interesting and lengthy interview, in which Sylvian is, unsurprisingly, revealed as intensely thoughtful and self-insightful). Some moments in Sylvian's career find him moving as far away from conventional tonality as anyone still working primarily (though not exclusively) in a song-based musical framework - and so I also find myself wondering again at the way listeners who aren't musically trained experience such harmonies. Though I can't claim to be able to instantly decipher some of the denser chords I might hear, my ears have developed sufficiently that a lot of that comes pretty much without thinking...or when I'm wrong, I'm wrong by being half-right. (Example involving a rather interesting chord, whose source I now can't recall, except that it was on guitar: I thought I was hearing an augmented chord, but what it turned out to be - I was curious enough after hearing the song it's from in the car to listen again once I got home, and figured it out on the guitar - was a sort of stacked chord that might be called a D11+ or something: D-F#-A-C-E-G# (the F# was implicit). What's interesting is that all four basic chord types are present, three notes at a time, within this chord: major (D-F#-A), diminished (F#-A-C), minor (A-C-E), and augmented (C-E-G#). Or: it's an augmented chord with the bass raised a whole step...why I was hearing an augmented in the first place.)
Anyway, the point is that I'm aware that most people who aren't musicians (and many who are) can listen to lots and lots of music, and be pretty expert as fans or even critics, without necessarily looking at it in theoretical terms. My working theory is that complex harmonies "translate" to tone color, that you can play a simple chord on a piano, say, then play the complex chord, and people will hear the sounds as texturally more complex. (Which, in terms of the physics of sound, they actually are.)
These two David Sylvian songs are a good test of that in some ways. First is a song Sylvian himself regards as the pinnacle of his first band Japan's career, "Ghosts," from that band's final album Tin Drum. While there's a fairly simple song underlying what we hear, seemingly every other musical phrase has a new synth sound attached, many of which are artfully detuned or feature altered overtone series - that is to say, they're warped tonally, timbrally, even if the actual notes sounded are relatively straightforward. (And they're not always that.)
The second song I'm posting is Sylvian's 1989 single (a bit of a jab at Virgin Records' demand that he release a single to go with the Weatherbox compilation), rather cheekily titled "Pop Song." Cheekily, because on first listen, it's anything but. As George Harrison said (in a song that followed its own rather winding harmonic pathway), "If you're listening to this song, you may think the chords are going wrong." But also cheekily because, listen to it a few more times, and you realize there is too a pop song buried underneath the crabbed, intertwined harmonies. From those dense harmonics melodic counterpoints can be extracted...and even the song's slightly off-center chord structure reveals itself as a variation on your basic fifties I-vi-VI-V progression (often abbreviated to I-vi). And those squiggly, near-Zappa-like, jagged instrumental interjections? I imagine you could play many of them at half speed, or offset by a sixteenth- or eighth-note, and they might sound almost normal. "Pop Song" is essentially a détourned pop song.
Japan "Ghosts" (Tin Drum, 1981)
David Sylvian "Pop Song" (single, 1989)
Anyway, the point is that I'm aware that most people who aren't musicians (and many who are) can listen to lots and lots of music, and be pretty expert as fans or even critics, without necessarily looking at it in theoretical terms. My working theory is that complex harmonies "translate" to tone color, that you can play a simple chord on a piano, say, then play the complex chord, and people will hear the sounds as texturally more complex. (Which, in terms of the physics of sound, they actually are.)
These two David Sylvian songs are a good test of that in some ways. First is a song Sylvian himself regards as the pinnacle of his first band Japan's career, "Ghosts," from that band's final album Tin Drum. While there's a fairly simple song underlying what we hear, seemingly every other musical phrase has a new synth sound attached, many of which are artfully detuned or feature altered overtone series - that is to say, they're warped tonally, timbrally, even if the actual notes sounded are relatively straightforward. (And they're not always that.)
The second song I'm posting is Sylvian's 1989 single (a bit of a jab at Virgin Records' demand that he release a single to go with the Weatherbox compilation), rather cheekily titled "Pop Song." Cheekily, because on first listen, it's anything but. As George Harrison said (in a song that followed its own rather winding harmonic pathway), "If you're listening to this song, you may think the chords are going wrong." But also cheekily because, listen to it a few more times, and you realize there is too a pop song buried underneath the crabbed, intertwined harmonies. From those dense harmonics melodic counterpoints can be extracted...and even the song's slightly off-center chord structure reveals itself as a variation on your basic fifties I-vi-VI-V progression (often abbreviated to I-vi). And those squiggly, near-Zappa-like, jagged instrumental interjections? I imagine you could play many of them at half speed, or offset by a sixteenth- or eighth-note, and they might sound almost normal. "Pop Song" is essentially a détourned pop song.
Japan "Ghosts" (Tin Drum, 1981)
David Sylvian "Pop Song" (single, 1989)
12.08.2008
every day I write the book
I'm racking my brains, almost certain there's at least one other song that fits this category, but...I can't come up with a third song whose title is the same as a book (fictitious or obscure) named within that song's lyrics.
Here are the two that occurred to me:
R.E.M. "Life and How to Live It" - this fiery live version was recorded in Madison, Wisconsin, May 10, 1985 - a show at which I was actually present. A cow-orker of Rose's dubbed this from a friend of hers who recorded it - the curious thing is, not too long ago I ran into an online bootleg of the same show...whose break (from turning over the cassette tape, nostalgists) was in the exact same place: in other words, which almost certainly came from the same source. Anyway, this was always a great live R.E.M. song - a year or two, Matthew from Fluxblog posted a more recent live version.
Belle and Sebastian "The State I Am In" (BBC version) - from the recently released collection of BBC recordings on Matador, this version begins almost off-handedly, Stuart Murdoch half-whispering the song's opening lines, reinforcing the song's seemingly conversational structure. This version builds to a nice yet still quite controlled peak (those who dislike the band would say "timid" or "repressed" but miss the point), demonstrating the young band's slightly off-kilter grace.
Here are the two that occurred to me:
R.E.M. "Life and How to Live It" - this fiery live version was recorded in Madison, Wisconsin, May 10, 1985 - a show at which I was actually present. A cow-orker of Rose's dubbed this from a friend of hers who recorded it - the curious thing is, not too long ago I ran into an online bootleg of the same show...whose break (from turning over the cassette tape, nostalgists) was in the exact same place: in other words, which almost certainly came from the same source. Anyway, this was always a great live R.E.M. song - a year or two, Matthew from Fluxblog posted a more recent live version.
Belle and Sebastian "The State I Am In" (BBC version) - from the recently released collection of BBC recordings on Matador, this version begins almost off-handedly, Stuart Murdoch half-whispering the song's opening lines, reinforcing the song's seemingly conversational structure. This version builds to a nice yet still quite controlled peak (those who dislike the band would say "timid" or "repressed" but miss the point), demonstrating the young band's slightly off-kilter grace.
12.02.2008
The Tragedy of Julian Cope
Julian Cope's career has been a long, curious one - and if nothing else, the man earns considerable credit for integrity: he seemingly has never done anything but what he wants to do. And considering that all observers of his early career saw him headed straight for superstardom, it was more than an empty room he turned his back on.
That said, musically at least his career seems a headlong retreat away from his greatest compositional strengths. Cope's first band, The Teardrop Explodes, was among the early '80s British acts regarded as "neo-psychedelic" - and indeed, the music of the late sixties has exerted an ongoing power over Cope's muse. The problem is, what we generically refer to as "psychedelia" is really at least two, rather distinct musical approaches: the British approach, and the American (primarily West Coast) approach. The British approach is exemplified by Syd Barrett's work with early Pink Floyd, while probably the best representative of the West Coast style is the Grateful Dead...or at least, a stereotype of the Grateful Dead, including its jam-band descendants. What was valued most was freedom, spontaneity, living in the musical moment...and so bands tended to jam, to stretch songs out to the breaking point, sometimes dispensing with "songs" altogether: their formal constraints were non-conducive to freedom. This aesthetic preference even extends to (stereotypical) wardrobe: loose-fitting, flowing, in a seemingly uncoordinated riot of colors and fabrics - and hairstyle: just let it grow. Another reductive but useful way of looking at this is that the music is essentially outward-looking - even the emphasis on feeding one's head, freeing one's mind, were essentially about tearing down the walls of consciousness, breaking down the doors of perception, letting the sunshine in: making the indoors outdoors.
By contrast, Barrett's music retreated inward, to a candy-colored, pseudo-Victorian children's world, often nostalgic, emotionally muted yet intense. Sonically, this played out in tightly constructed songs whose psychedelic elaboration worked essentially inward, in ever-more detailed arrangements and tone coloration. Similarly, British psychedelic bands of this era tended to favor colorful but carefully tailored clothing, and hairstyles also were a bit more controlled, even nostalgic, with Victorian and Edwardian fashion pieces making momentary comebacks. (Consider the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper: a small-town, military band of an earlier era, exuberant mustaches exploding into technicolor satin uniforms.) And if latterday jam bands represented West Coast psychedelia's descent into sheer, flatulent slackness, latterday British psych turned ever inward, traceable actually in Pink Floyd's own post-Barrett evolution into a vehicle for the exploration of Roger Waters' neuroses, whose musical nadir was maybe that band's The Final Cut - an album which, in my memory (haven't listened to it for years), is entirely at the tempo of a dying man's last few heartbeats, and is seemingly recorded by attaching a contact mic to Waters' tonsils.
So what's this got to do with Julian H. Cope? He's a real dead loss, that's what: his early stuff (both with The Teardrop Explodes and solo) is a brilliant flowering of British neo-psychedelia, cunningly composed songs jammed full of lively arranging detail. The Teardrop Explodes "Colours Fly Away" is a fine example: after a Pepperish burst of horns, Cope constructs a melody that constantly balances on precarious harmonic peaks, a strategy echoed in the chorus chords, which move tentatively, stepwise, while the bass repeats the same figure beneath them. Cope's own "Quizmaster" (from his first solo album) is another example, beginning with a classic descending chord sequence (what Cope would later call a "glam descend") that gradually effloresces into less expected sequence, before resolving into a simple two-chord turnaround that leads back to the opening descending sequence.
But some time in the last two decades, Cope moved away from songwriting and toward a sort of performance-oriented, real-time rock'n'roll. At its best, with a good band (and live, I'd imagine), it can be powerful and bracing...but too often it's merely slack, predictable chord sequences carrying dull pentatonic melodies artlessly sung and recorded. "Feed My Rock'n'Roll" is a fairly dire example (it's from Cope's most recent release, Black Sheep), although Cope's last few releases (available solely through his Head Heritage site) have shown glimmers of his craftsmanship. For the most part, though, Cope's gone for the jam-oriented spontaneity that's a direct descendant of West Coast psychedelic rock...and in recordings, at least, it seems noisy and attenuated, because neither his players nor the quality of his recording techniques represent the most important element of that musical approach: its power and capacity for surprise.
And I want to like this stuff. As I said, I admire Cope's bullheaded integrity, and although he tends to follow the implications of his political and spiritual beliefs far further than I'd ever be comfortable with, those beliefs are consistent and ultimately far more humane than the beliefs he's most strongly opposed to. (Probably why everyone thinks he's just crazy...) But even though I'll probably continue to buy whatever he releases, the pattern for nearly everything he's released since the '90s has been a couple-few good songs surrounded by a lot of forgettable ones.
The Teardrop Explodes "Colours Fly Away" (Wilder, 1982)
Julian Cope "Quizmaster" (World Shut Your Mouth, 1983)
Julian Cope "Feed My Rock'n'Roll" (Black Sheep, 2008)
update: the broken link to the Teardrop Explodes track has been fixed.
That said, musically at least his career seems a headlong retreat away from his greatest compositional strengths. Cope's first band, The Teardrop Explodes, was among the early '80s British acts regarded as "neo-psychedelic" - and indeed, the music of the late sixties has exerted an ongoing power over Cope's muse. The problem is, what we generically refer to as "psychedelia" is really at least two, rather distinct musical approaches: the British approach, and the American (primarily West Coast) approach. The British approach is exemplified by Syd Barrett's work with early Pink Floyd, while probably the best representative of the West Coast style is the Grateful Dead...or at least, a stereotype of the Grateful Dead, including its jam-band descendants. What was valued most was freedom, spontaneity, living in the musical moment...and so bands tended to jam, to stretch songs out to the breaking point, sometimes dispensing with "songs" altogether: their formal constraints were non-conducive to freedom. This aesthetic preference even extends to (stereotypical) wardrobe: loose-fitting, flowing, in a seemingly uncoordinated riot of colors and fabrics - and hairstyle: just let it grow. Another reductive but useful way of looking at this is that the music is essentially outward-looking - even the emphasis on feeding one's head, freeing one's mind, were essentially about tearing down the walls of consciousness, breaking down the doors of perception, letting the sunshine in: making the indoors outdoors.
By contrast, Barrett's music retreated inward, to a candy-colored, pseudo-Victorian children's world, often nostalgic, emotionally muted yet intense. Sonically, this played out in tightly constructed songs whose psychedelic elaboration worked essentially inward, in ever-more detailed arrangements and tone coloration. Similarly, British psychedelic bands of this era tended to favor colorful but carefully tailored clothing, and hairstyles also were a bit more controlled, even nostalgic, with Victorian and Edwardian fashion pieces making momentary comebacks. (Consider the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper: a small-town, military band of an earlier era, exuberant mustaches exploding into technicolor satin uniforms.) And if latterday jam bands represented West Coast psychedelia's descent into sheer, flatulent slackness, latterday British psych turned ever inward, traceable actually in Pink Floyd's own post-Barrett evolution into a vehicle for the exploration of Roger Waters' neuroses, whose musical nadir was maybe that band's The Final Cut - an album which, in my memory (haven't listened to it for years), is entirely at the tempo of a dying man's last few heartbeats, and is seemingly recorded by attaching a contact mic to Waters' tonsils.
So what's this got to do with Julian H. Cope? He's a real dead loss, that's what: his early stuff (both with The Teardrop Explodes and solo) is a brilliant flowering of British neo-psychedelia, cunningly composed songs jammed full of lively arranging detail. The Teardrop Explodes "Colours Fly Away" is a fine example: after a Pepperish burst of horns, Cope constructs a melody that constantly balances on precarious harmonic peaks, a strategy echoed in the chorus chords, which move tentatively, stepwise, while the bass repeats the same figure beneath them. Cope's own "Quizmaster" (from his first solo album) is another example, beginning with a classic descending chord sequence (what Cope would later call a "glam descend") that gradually effloresces into less expected sequence, before resolving into a simple two-chord turnaround that leads back to the opening descending sequence.
But some time in the last two decades, Cope moved away from songwriting and toward a sort of performance-oriented, real-time rock'n'roll. At its best, with a good band (and live, I'd imagine), it can be powerful and bracing...but too often it's merely slack, predictable chord sequences carrying dull pentatonic melodies artlessly sung and recorded. "Feed My Rock'n'Roll" is a fairly dire example (it's from Cope's most recent release, Black Sheep), although Cope's last few releases (available solely through his Head Heritage site) have shown glimmers of his craftsmanship. For the most part, though, Cope's gone for the jam-oriented spontaneity that's a direct descendant of West Coast psychedelic rock...and in recordings, at least, it seems noisy and attenuated, because neither his players nor the quality of his recording techniques represent the most important element of that musical approach: its power and capacity for surprise.
And I want to like this stuff. As I said, I admire Cope's bullheaded integrity, and although he tends to follow the implications of his political and spiritual beliefs far further than I'd ever be comfortable with, those beliefs are consistent and ultimately far more humane than the beliefs he's most strongly opposed to. (Probably why everyone thinks he's just crazy...) But even though I'll probably continue to buy whatever he releases, the pattern for nearly everything he's released since the '90s has been a couple-few good songs surrounded by a lot of forgettable ones.
The Teardrop Explodes "Colours Fly Away" (Wilder, 1982)
Julian Cope "Quizmaster" (World Shut Your Mouth, 1983)
Julian Cope "Feed My Rock'n'Roll" (Black Sheep, 2008)
update: the broken link to the Teardrop Explodes track has been fixed.
11.25.2008
Mr. Jones takes Monday and Wednesday off
I was amusing myself by creating Winamp playlists featuring songs or artists featuring days of the week, and I noticed that David Bowie's name kept popping up. How many days of the week have been included in Bowie song titles, I wondered...
And so, here's David Bowie's week: as it turns out, he has so far taken off Monday and Wednesday.
"Sunday" (Heathen, 2002)
"Love You Till Tuesday" [single version] (1966 - reissued on The Deram Anthology)
"Thursday's Child" (Hours, 1999)
"Friday on My Mind" (Easybeats cover - Pin-Ups, 1973)
"Drive-In Saturday" (Aladdin Sane, 1973)
bonus:
"After Today" (use on Sunday or Tuesday as the following day's missing track - Sound + Vision exclusive, 1975)
"I Know It's Gonna Happen One Day" (Morrissey cover - Black Tie, White Noise 1993)
And so, here's David Bowie's week: as it turns out, he has so far taken off Monday and Wednesday.
"Sunday" (Heathen, 2002)
"Love You Till Tuesday" [single version] (1966 - reissued on The Deram Anthology)
"Thursday's Child" (Hours, 1999)
"Friday on My Mind" (Easybeats cover - Pin-Ups, 1973)
"Drive-In Saturday" (Aladdin Sane, 1973)
bonus:
"After Today" (use on Sunday or Tuesday as the following day's missing track - Sound + Vision exclusive, 1975)
"I Know It's Gonna Happen One Day" (Morrissey cover - Black Tie, White Noise 1993)
11.22.2008
the advantage of a cold start heart
The new millennium version of Wire has been intense and inspiring, but one puzzlement and disappointment has been the relative absence of Graham Lewis's singing. I've always liked bands with more than one lead singer, particularly if the singers' approaches were sufficiently different that (as with Wire's "Ambitious") if each singer did the same song in different versions, the song itself takes on a wholly different air.
In Wire's newest material, Lewis's voice has been rare, and when it has appeared, it's either been electronically distorted or sounded rather shot, and I feared it was just gone. But here's the Daytrotter Session version of "Mekon Headman" (which I'd like to think is about Jon Langford, but probably not...), whose original version is on Wire's most recent Object 47, and Lewis's voice is strong, supple, and powerful: not quite as complete an instrument as it was at its peak, but stronger than I've heard it for years. The performance is nice, too - but the version from these sessions of "Boiling Boy" is even better, with Lewis's bass brought to the forefront. You need to listen to this loud, with either a good set of headphones or a nice pair of speakers; tinny little computer speakers cannot hold that bass.
(The other two songs from the session, "Mr Marx's Table" and "Silk Skin Paws," are well worth hearing and downloadable from the Daytrotter site.)
Wire "Mekon Headman" (Daytrotter Session, 2008)
Wire "Boiling Boy" (Daytrotter Session, 2008)
In Wire's newest material, Lewis's voice has been rare, and when it has appeared, it's either been electronically distorted or sounded rather shot, and I feared it was just gone. But here's the Daytrotter Session version of "Mekon Headman" (which I'd like to think is about Jon Langford, but probably not...), whose original version is on Wire's most recent Object 47, and Lewis's voice is strong, supple, and powerful: not quite as complete an instrument as it was at its peak, but stronger than I've heard it for years. The performance is nice, too - but the version from these sessions of "Boiling Boy" is even better, with Lewis's bass brought to the forefront. You need to listen to this loud, with either a good set of headphones or a nice pair of speakers; tinny little computer speakers cannot hold that bass.
(The other two songs from the session, "Mr Marx's Table" and "Silk Skin Paws," are well worth hearing and downloadable from the Daytrotter site.)
Wire "Mekon Headman" (Daytrotter Session, 2008)
Wire "Boiling Boy" (Daytrotter Session, 2008)
11.04.2008
YES!!
This song always makes me feel good.
And I feel good.
Talking Heads "Pulled Up" (Talking Heads: 77, 1977)
And I feel good.
Talking Heads "Pulled Up" (Talking Heads: 77, 1977)
10.26.2008
M...M...M...!
We begin with Negativland's "By Truck" - a reconfiguration of the usual perspective, wherein the importance of trucks to the consumption of our breakfast cereals received its due.
We follow that with Was (Not Was)'s absurdist logic problem "Tell Me That I'm Dreaming" - which, as an aside, features a line that might perhaps take early '80s entrepreneur-worship to its ridiculous extreme.
And finally, Aphex Twin mutters like a masturbating dwarf in a basement window-well, making some sideways associations, in "Milkman."
Our common thread? Well, my first published online writing was for the late, lamented Milk magazine - and so, although I'd thought of this trio of tracks before this realization, their consideration seems fitting for this my 1,000th post.
Negativland "By Truck" (Thigmotactic, 2008)
Was (Not Was) "Tell Me That I'm Dreaming" (Was (Not Was), 1981)
Aphex Twin "Milkman" (Richard D. James Album, 1997)
(That link above is to a fascinating article by Peter Blegvad, illustrator, musician, and curious thinker, whose work - particularly his The Book of Leviathan and his collaborative album with John Greaves and Lisa Herman Kew: Rhone - is worth seeking out...although frankly, the rest of his musical output is less compelling than that album.)
We follow that with Was (Not Was)'s absurdist logic problem "Tell Me That I'm Dreaming" - which, as an aside, features a line that might perhaps take early '80s entrepreneur-worship to its ridiculous extreme.
And finally, Aphex Twin mutters like a masturbating dwarf in a basement window-well, making some sideways associations, in "Milkman."
Our common thread? Well, my first published online writing was for the late, lamented Milk magazine - and so, although I'd thought of this trio of tracks before this realization, their consideration seems fitting for this my 1,000th post.
Negativland "By Truck" (Thigmotactic, 2008)
Was (Not Was) "Tell Me That I'm Dreaming" (Was (Not Was), 1981)
Aphex Twin "Milkman" (Richard D. James Album, 1997)
(That link above is to a fascinating article by Peter Blegvad, illustrator, musician, and curious thinker, whose work - particularly his The Book of Leviathan and his collaborative album with John Greaves and Lisa Herman Kew: Rhone - is worth seeking out...although frankly, the rest of his musical output is less compelling than that album.)
10.17.2008
The Mystical Beast (slight return)
A first here at the Architectural Dance Society: a guest columnist. Dana was the proprietor of the wonderful Mystical Beast site for several years, which was one of the first blogs to post mp3s regularly (the site's still up, although the song links are dead), and we met on the old Loud Family mailing list back when that band was extant. He recently e-mailed me with the following observation:
Have you ever listened to "Reflected" (early Alice Cooper), "Elected" (mid Alice Cooper), and "Bell Boy" (mid Who) all in a row?
My reading: "Reflected" is a Who rip-off with some acid guitar and weird chord changes added. "Elected" is a revisitation of "Reflected" but sounds an awful lot like "Bell Boy" in terms of production, riffs, and overall feel. "Elected" came out in '72 as a single and '73 as an album track, "Bell Boy" in '73.
I wonder who influenced who (since release date doesn't necessarily indicate when the song/production was conceived). Weird. I don't usually think of Townshend looking to Alice Cooper for inspiration.
I hadn't been familiar with "Reflected" before this, but "Elected" obviously borrows its main verse melody. But that thing where the chords change over a static bass (as in the verses of "Bell Boy") is a Who trademark - and so "Reflected" is indeed borrowing from the Who (in fact, given its slightly iffy production and raw feel, you could almost pass it off as a newly discovered Guided by Voices track - hell, even the weird chords would fit Pollard's usual MO). And in "Elected" you have an arrangement that's very similar in syncopation and feel, even in instrumentation (real horns vs. synth horns...oddly enough, since John Entwistle often overdubbed his own horn-playing on Who records), but rather than place those chords over a bass pedal tone, the bass first plays its own rather melodic line, and then goes to a rather grandly dramatic walking descent.
So my take is that Townshend didn't really need to rip off Alice Cooper (or Bob Ezrin, who contributed largely to the arranging on Alice Cooper's records of this era), since ol' Vince Furnier had already been dipping heavily into the Townshend Songwriting Book of Tricks with these tracks.
It's still unexpected to find Alice Cooper and the Who put together like that, though!
Alice Cooper "Reflected" (Pretties for You, 1968)
Alice Cooper "Elected" (Billion Dollar Babies, 1972)
The Who "Bell Boy" (Quadrophenia, 1973)
Have you ever listened to "Reflected" (early Alice Cooper), "Elected" (mid Alice Cooper), and "Bell Boy" (mid Who) all in a row?
My reading: "Reflected" is a Who rip-off with some acid guitar and weird chord changes added. "Elected" is a revisitation of "Reflected" but sounds an awful lot like "Bell Boy" in terms of production, riffs, and overall feel. "Elected" came out in '72 as a single and '73 as an album track, "Bell Boy" in '73.
I wonder who influenced who (since release date doesn't necessarily indicate when the song/production was conceived). Weird. I don't usually think of Townshend looking to Alice Cooper for inspiration.
I hadn't been familiar with "Reflected" before this, but "Elected" obviously borrows its main verse melody. But that thing where the chords change over a static bass (as in the verses of "Bell Boy") is a Who trademark - and so "Reflected" is indeed borrowing from the Who (in fact, given its slightly iffy production and raw feel, you could almost pass it off as a newly discovered Guided by Voices track - hell, even the weird chords would fit Pollard's usual MO). And in "Elected" you have an arrangement that's very similar in syncopation and feel, even in instrumentation (real horns vs. synth horns...oddly enough, since John Entwistle often overdubbed his own horn-playing on Who records), but rather than place those chords over a bass pedal tone, the bass first plays its own rather melodic line, and then goes to a rather grandly dramatic walking descent.
So my take is that Townshend didn't really need to rip off Alice Cooper (or Bob Ezrin, who contributed largely to the arranging on Alice Cooper's records of this era), since ol' Vince Furnier had already been dipping heavily into the Townshend Songwriting Book of Tricks with these tracks.
It's still unexpected to find Alice Cooper and the Who put together like that, though!
Alice Cooper "Reflected" (Pretties for You, 1968)
Alice Cooper "Elected" (Billion Dollar Babies, 1972)
The Who "Bell Boy" (Quadrophenia, 1973)
10.07.2008
whittled on the griddle of Japan
One of my favorite semi-obscure little bands is The Sugarplastic. They had a moment's glory back in the '90s with a single release on Geffen, which instantaneously garnered them 7,396 XTC comparisons. On that: the short version is that the band quite openly acknowledges their love of and influence by XTC - but that's not the whole story: for example, Rose pointed out bits that sounded rather Pixies-like...and indeed, the Sugarplastic's penchant for steady 8th-note rhythms, sometimes broken up with irregular meters, is one of two quirks I've noticed in nearly every one of their songs (the other is a love of little chromatic lines).
Anyway: they're one of those bands whose members would seem to have day jobs that prevent them from focusing career energies on the band (to judge from his website, Ben Eshbach, the main songwriter, is quite the smart cookie), and so their release schedule has been quite irregular. Their last recording was released in 2005, and their website is infrequently updated.
Eshbach's site also contains mp3s of early Sugarplastic songs that are somewhat difficult to find, as well as some of his own MIDI experiments (not terribly interesting to my ears). One of the better Sugarplastic tracks at that site (follow the link above to explore further) is "Motorola Rocketship," which was released on the Japanese version of their third full-length release Resin in 2000. The arrangement, as is typical for the band, is fairly transparent, allowing the various parts to interweave without obscuring one another. The sort of early-sixties rock feel in the rhythm guitar and the occasional Beach Boys-like touch in the vocals is relatively unusual in their stuff: even though it's still fairly subdued, this is pretty much as rocking as the band gets.
A much earlier song, "Ottawa Bonesaw," is another story. Doing web searches on the band, I discovered that (unsurprisingly) Dana formerly from The Mystical Beast had already written about the Sugarplastic. While he finds much to like about their music, he notes that sometimes they can sound "a little cutesy-poo" and "white-bread." My guess is, this isn't one of his favorite tracks. For me, though, it's maddeningly catchy - and I find myself thinking of it as a slightly off-kilter children's song, so the cutesy stuff has a reason to exist: the rhymes based on people's names, the funny voices, etc., make much better sense if you imagine this is music for kids. (My theory is that the song is loosely based on a French-Canadian children's book whose title, in English, is "To You a Good Evening!" - the song title is a mangling of the French title "À Toi Bonsoir!"... Okay, probably not.) Regardless, I think more people should howl the title at the moon in the manner of the song's closing.
The Sugarplastic "Motorola Rocketship" (Resin, Japanese edition, 2000)
The Sugarplastic "Ottawa Bonesaw" (Ottawa Bonesaw, 1993)
Postscript: Curiously, if you Google the titles of these two tracks, one link will lead you to an academic study on pattern recognition in music, whose authors used these two Sugarplastic songs to determine whether a particular band could be recognized by their software. Fans do funny things.
Anyway: they're one of those bands whose members would seem to have day jobs that prevent them from focusing career energies on the band (to judge from his website, Ben Eshbach, the main songwriter, is quite the smart cookie), and so their release schedule has been quite irregular. Their last recording was released in 2005, and their website is infrequently updated.
Eshbach's site also contains mp3s of early Sugarplastic songs that are somewhat difficult to find, as well as some of his own MIDI experiments (not terribly interesting to my ears). One of the better Sugarplastic tracks at that site (follow the link above to explore further) is "Motorola Rocketship," which was released on the Japanese version of their third full-length release Resin in 2000. The arrangement, as is typical for the band, is fairly transparent, allowing the various parts to interweave without obscuring one another. The sort of early-sixties rock feel in the rhythm guitar and the occasional Beach Boys-like touch in the vocals is relatively unusual in their stuff: even though it's still fairly subdued, this is pretty much as rocking as the band gets.
A much earlier song, "Ottawa Bonesaw," is another story. Doing web searches on the band, I discovered that (unsurprisingly) Dana formerly from The Mystical Beast had already written about the Sugarplastic. While he finds much to like about their music, he notes that sometimes they can sound "a little cutesy-poo" and "white-bread." My guess is, this isn't one of his favorite tracks. For me, though, it's maddeningly catchy - and I find myself thinking of it as a slightly off-kilter children's song, so the cutesy stuff has a reason to exist: the rhymes based on people's names, the funny voices, etc., make much better sense if you imagine this is music for kids. (My theory is that the song is loosely based on a French-Canadian children's book whose title, in English, is "To You a Good Evening!" - the song title is a mangling of the French title "À Toi Bonsoir!"... Okay, probably not.) Regardless, I think more people should howl the title at the moon in the manner of the song's closing.
The Sugarplastic "Motorola Rocketship" (Resin, Japanese edition, 2000)
The Sugarplastic "Ottawa Bonesaw" (Ottawa Bonesaw, 1993)
Postscript: Curiously, if you Google the titles of these two tracks, one link will lead you to an academic study on pattern recognition in music, whose authors used these two Sugarplastic songs to determine whether a particular band could be recognized by their software. Fans do funny things.
9.25.2008
the pigment that you promised
One thing our remodeling project has done (some might be thankful for this) is interrupt my usual summer efforts to desecrate the art of recorded sound. Typically, I'd try to record a song or two during the summer when I have more free time; this summer, my keyboard and equipment have been unplugged in the basement...and when I have time off, either there's been a bangin' and a hammerin' from on high, or it's later at night and Rose is trying to sleep. I suppose if I were into it enough I could do an all-laptop number - but before I could do that, I'd need to familiarize myself with some new MIDI software and the like (also got a new outboard USB doohickey to connect to the keyboard and such - all I've used it for so far is to digitize a 45).
Anyway, all this is by intro to the fact that the last recording project I did was last spring, when I covered an obscure Robyn Hitchcock song for the third in a series of fan-based Hitchcock tribute collections. The deadline for submissions was several months ago...but I've heard nothing about the project since then (not about my own work, nor about the project generally), so I think I'll sneak out my cover of "Creatures of Light" in my own little blog.
The original version was released on a 7" single for Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine in 1995 and so far as I know had no other release. It sounds to me nearly improvised: Robyn's lyrics (insofar as I can make them out: I guessed in several places) are less polished than usual, and the song's structure is a bit freeflowing as well.
For my cover, I decided to run with those aspects of the song. My initial conception involved two overlapping guitar improvisations, along with two keyboard improvs on top of those, and some percussion. I used a tuning I hadn't used before (and I'm not Mr. Alternate Tuning Guy either), which I call Heather Has Two Daddies (it's D-A-D-D-A-D: the D's in the middle are the same pitch). Of course I exploited the drone possibilities of this tuning (also useful when you're a crap guitar player), and the two D's that are nominally the same pitch drifted slightly out of tune as I thrashed madly at the guitar, so you get a bit of resonance from that fact as well. I ended up using only one guitar track, which was highly edited down from a longer version (much of which was me fucking up the simplest parts...).
I'd mentioned that I had a sort of first-take ethos originally. That involved my letting my mad rhythmic impulses somewhat free reign (you'll notice the original doesn't stick strictly to 4/4 either), but in order to play over that initially recorded guitar part without totally screwing up, I had to map out what I had done. Thus it is that I'm aware of the odd bar of 11/8, 5/4, and the like that sprung mysteriously from my fingers...
Anyway, the percussion didn't work: I'd envisioned a sort of tabla-sounding thing - didn't have a tabla, didn't have a tabla setting on my keyboard (that's an oversight, Yamaha...), so I looked around for something that might deliver a similar sound. I tried tapping out some rhythm on, of all things, Rose's giant inflatable exercise ball...but not exactly being Steve Albini, I couldn't record it right, so instead of a rich, ringing tone I imagined, it sounded more like drops of water randomly hitting a metal sink basin. Percussion scrapped.
Onto the keyboard: I recorded the first go-round, then went back and did another one (muting the first track while listening to the guitar part). When playing them back, I'd accidentally left on both keyboard tracks (which had been improvised independently), and decided I rather liked the way they accidentally worked together. In some places, obviously, I'd worked out a part; in others, I just played, and in those later parts we have passing odd discords and fortuitous ghostly harmonies, depending - so I decided to keep them both on.
I mentioned that Hitchcock's lyric is even more cryptic than usual: I decided, for some reason, that "Captain Morrison" was essential to the story, and so that bit received some emphasis. I also added the vocal harmonies at the end (loosely inspired by "I Can See for Miles") and a few filigrees of backwards guitar and the like to add some flavor.
Robyn Hitchcock "Creatures of Light" (7" with Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine, 1995)
Monkey Typing Pool "Creatures of Light"
(Note: all rights in this composition remain with Mr. Hitchcock)
Anyway, all this is by intro to the fact that the last recording project I did was last spring, when I covered an obscure Robyn Hitchcock song for the third in a series of fan-based Hitchcock tribute collections. The deadline for submissions was several months ago...but I've heard nothing about the project since then (not about my own work, nor about the project generally), so I think I'll sneak out my cover of "Creatures of Light" in my own little blog.
The original version was released on a 7" single for Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine in 1995 and so far as I know had no other release. It sounds to me nearly improvised: Robyn's lyrics (insofar as I can make them out: I guessed in several places) are less polished than usual, and the song's structure is a bit freeflowing as well.
For my cover, I decided to run with those aspects of the song. My initial conception involved two overlapping guitar improvisations, along with two keyboard improvs on top of those, and some percussion. I used a tuning I hadn't used before (and I'm not Mr. Alternate Tuning Guy either), which I call Heather Has Two Daddies (it's D-A-D-D-A-D: the D's in the middle are the same pitch). Of course I exploited the drone possibilities of this tuning (also useful when you're a crap guitar player), and the two D's that are nominally the same pitch drifted slightly out of tune as I thrashed madly at the guitar, so you get a bit of resonance from that fact as well. I ended up using only one guitar track, which was highly edited down from a longer version (much of which was me fucking up the simplest parts...).
I'd mentioned that I had a sort of first-take ethos originally. That involved my letting my mad rhythmic impulses somewhat free reign (you'll notice the original doesn't stick strictly to 4/4 either), but in order to play over that initially recorded guitar part without totally screwing up, I had to map out what I had done. Thus it is that I'm aware of the odd bar of 11/8, 5/4, and the like that sprung mysteriously from my fingers...
Anyway, the percussion didn't work: I'd envisioned a sort of tabla-sounding thing - didn't have a tabla, didn't have a tabla setting on my keyboard (that's an oversight, Yamaha...), so I looked around for something that might deliver a similar sound. I tried tapping out some rhythm on, of all things, Rose's giant inflatable exercise ball...but not exactly being Steve Albini, I couldn't record it right, so instead of a rich, ringing tone I imagined, it sounded more like drops of water randomly hitting a metal sink basin. Percussion scrapped.
Onto the keyboard: I recorded the first go-round, then went back and did another one (muting the first track while listening to the guitar part). When playing them back, I'd accidentally left on both keyboard tracks (which had been improvised independently), and decided I rather liked the way they accidentally worked together. In some places, obviously, I'd worked out a part; in others, I just played, and in those later parts we have passing odd discords and fortuitous ghostly harmonies, depending - so I decided to keep them both on.
I mentioned that Hitchcock's lyric is even more cryptic than usual: I decided, for some reason, that "Captain Morrison" was essential to the story, and so that bit received some emphasis. I also added the vocal harmonies at the end (loosely inspired by "I Can See for Miles") and a few filigrees of backwards guitar and the like to add some flavor.
Robyn Hitchcock "Creatures of Light" (7" with Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine, 1995)
Monkey Typing Pool "Creatures of Light"
(Note: all rights in this composition remain with Mr. Hitchcock)
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