I reviewed Looptroop Rockers Good Things this week on RapReviews . They are a Swedish rap group, but you'd never know from their lyrics. I was pretty into it. It reminded me of all the lefty kids I went to school with in Pavia. Here's the video for "The Building."
It's some trippy shit. I love it. You can't find a legal copy of it, but if you do a search for it, I'm sure you can find a kind soul willing to share their copy. Here's "Scientific."
My cousin Justin just started a new blog about ambient and world fusion music called Sitars and Soundscapes at etherealworlds.blogspot.com. It makes sense, since even as a kid he was into movie soundtracks. I'm not very familiar with either ambient or world fusion, so it's a great starting point for me.
The latest Spin has an article on Cheap Trick titled "This Next Page Is the Last Page In Our New Magazine." It references the line "this next song is the first song on our new album" from Cheap Trick's Live In Budokan, which the Beastie Boys sampled on Check Your Head. That line was iconic when I was in college. When you said it, everyone knew what it came from. Most of my friends had spent time with Check Your Head, so when we quoted it, everyone knew what you were talking about. In turn, the Beastie's had spent enough time with Cheap Trick's Live at Budokan that they could reference it in their album, and a lot of people would understand where the line came from.
I'm not sure the same thing could be said today. There is so much more music available now, and people don't have as much time or inclination to sit with an album long enough to really absorb it. That same snippet from Live At Budokan would go by at 100 miles an hour to a contemporary listener, immediately forgotten under the crush of new albums, new songs, new experiences, all half-listened to and half-experienced while multitasking (which is another way of saying "doing many things badly at once").
The flip side of this is that it is a lot easier to be exposed to a lot of different kinds of music. I've probably heard more music in the last 8 months than I did during my entire high school years. Of course, I knew my record collection inside and out when I was 17: every chord, every lyric, the track order, everything. Now I know the first five seconds of whatever is on my Ipod, because that's how long I listen to it before I decide I want to move on to something else. Maybe less is more. Maybe more is more.
I stumbled upon Nevver today. It's a blog that posts a song and a still from a movie every day. Brilliant. Now I wanna go see a bunch of French New Wave films.
My review of Mount Eerie's Wind's Poem is now up at Blogcritics. It's bedroom folk inspired by black metal. At it's best, it's like My Bloody Valentine or Mogwai. At it's worse, it's sort of a hot tranny mess, like Bon Iver backed by a metal band. It's definitely not your typical folk album. I was into a lot of this, but I'm not sure how much I'm going to listen to it. I'd recommend checking out Gravenhurst'sFlashlight Seasons, which nails the cavernous, delicate folk, but without the noise. If you are in the mood for something challenging, Wind's Poem is worth your time.
For some reason I got struck by the spirit of Haight Ashbury this week and downloaded four very Haight songs.
The first was the Jefferson Airplane's "It's No Secret." I bought their greatest hits about twenty years ago, along with Metallica's "And Justice For All." My mom had taken me to the Warehouse at 41st Ave in Capitola, and she looked at my CD's and said, "Really?" She was surprised to see me veering away from punk rock. It would be another ten years before I got into Dylan, so she had a ways to wait before we could swap albums. "It's No Secret" is an awesome little pop number. I put it on a mixtape to my high school sweetheart.
Then I downloaded TWO Grateful Dead songs: "Shakedown Street" and "Casey Jones." My future father-in-law loves the Dead, and he's always playing "Shakedown Street" when I go visit them. It's a catchy song, and I like that farting bass. I'm still embarrassed to own it.
I also downloaded "Casey Jones." I love the chorus of this song, and I own "Workingman's Dead' on vinyl, but I've never been able to finish the song. I think because I don't smoke pot.
Finally, I downloaded Sly and the Family Stone's "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey." I had heard a version with Perry Farrel and Ice T, but I wanted to hear the original. It's kind of heavy.
I've been listening to a mountain of new music lately. I just wrote a review for RapReviews of TLM's album Acronyms, which I'll post tomorrow. The album comes out tomorrow, and is worth a listen. I'm also working on a review of a Pohectic comp for them, probably next week. Thanks to blogs like Soul Sides, I'm getting into old soul, and hope to do some writing about Darondo and the Temptation's Psychedelic Soul. The music on that album kills me, especially tracks like the funky "Message From A Black Man."
I'm also getting into dub reggae, and have been listening to King Tubby and Scientist, whose 1980 Best Dub Album In the World is aptly named. That got me back into the Clash, when I realized that they did a lot of dub songs, including their song with Allen Ginsberg, "Ghetto Defendant."
Dub's interesting because it strips down each instrument, and it is excellent music to go to sleep to or ride the bus to (or smoke pot, if you are so inclined, but I'm not).
THEN I downloaded a copy of the Antler's new album, which I haven't had time to listen to, and I got my fiance St. Vincent's new one and Linda Ronstadt's greatest hits. Finally, I got Mount Eerie's new CD to review for BlogCritics. It's pretty awesome, sort of Mogwai meets Iron and Wine. But heavy.
That also means I got a shit-ton amount of stuff to write about. I decided to concentrate more on movie and book reviews for Blogcritics, and the occasional new non-hip hop album I'm excited about. I've also started up a non-review centric blog where I pose short prose pieces, mostly about San Francisco. It's called Where I Belong.
It's a classic old school hip hop album, and one of the more innovative of the era. I'm still not a fan of that clunky 808 sound, but that's just my opinion.
I just got my first review published on Blogcritics.org, a review of Music Review: The Phenomenal Handclap Band. I wanted a venue to do some non-hip hop writing, so that's my plan, Pakistan. I love the album, by the way.
Street rap magazine Murder Dog loved them, giving them four nutts.
Their myspace page has pictures of them posing with girls in booty shorts, so that's a plus. (Actually Dirtball from the SubNoize crew. My mistake. I also apologize for the snarky comment about the girls. Anyone who is willing to walk around in high heels and booty shorts deserves respect. and not just from John Stagliano.)
I saw them on this tour. They also did "Straight to Hell." Joe Strummer is one of my few musical heroes, along with d. boon. Don't ever let me hear you talking shit about them.
And the Clash doing "Straight To Hell." This song always breaks my heart, and is one of my ten favorite songs of all time.
I've been listening to the new Wilco album, conveniently called Wilco (The Album). It's decent. I have a lot of respect for Wilco and I think Jeff Tweedy is an amazing songwriter, but I've never been a huge fan of theirs. I love Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I haven't really listened to anything else. It's not a judgment, it's just that there are so many other bands I want to listen to that I haven't yet felt compelled to explore Wilco's entire oeuvre. This album seems less experimental and innovative than their other efforts, and instead sees them finding a groove and doing what they do best. It opens with "Wilco (the Song), about how the band will cure your depression, proving that they have a sense of humor about what they are doing. The album veers between mellow folky alt-country to rocking folky alt-country. My favorite song is "Sonny Feeling," in which Tweedy goes on an old man rant, including the line "She knows nothing of Eminem's suburban gangster flow."
It ends with a line that has been resonating with me: I’m on my way home from my high school I’m always contemplating Why the kids are still cruel Oh the kids are still cruel Amen, brother.
So I was listening to that, but then I got sidetracked by Introducing the Minutemen, which I downloaded from Emusic. It's a comp of a lot of there stuff, much of it that I own already, but some of which I hadn't. I had forgotten how amazing they were. There are two songs that have been sticking with me; one is "If Reagan Played Disco," with the line "you can't disco in jackboots,"
The other is "History Lesson, Part 2," which details their history with punk rock.It contains the immortal line, "Our band could be your life." It's weird to think that d.boon has been dead for 24 years. He always feels like a friend to me. Every time I ride past San Pedro when I go to visit my in-laws in Long Beach, I get a little nostalgic and sad.
I've been thinking about my top albums of the year so far, and one album that won't make the list is Animal Collectives Merriweather Post Pavillion. I really, really like the song "My Girls," but the more I've listened to that album these past months, the more I'm turned off by their Phishy, jammy, noodly vibe. Their live show is supposed to be amazing, but this rambling, messy, off-key version of "My Girls" fails to convince:
Guess you had to be there. And high off your gourd. I read Last Night A DJ Saved My Life last week, about the history of DJing, and they had a long chapter on Frankie Knuckles and the birth of house music. It got me to seek out Frankie's music, and I immediately recognized the opening synths from 1987's "Your Love" (shown here with an anime video. Whatevs).
I still love "My Girls," but Animal Collective definitely lifted those synths. Fucking dirty, stealing hippies. They should go take some shrooms and dick around some more on vintage synths. While wearing bucket caps. Fuckers.
What are you yelling about? Is it because your mom won't buy you a new Iphone? Is your hairdresser moving? Your art teacher said your anime-inspired paintings were crap?
I got Oliva Tremor Control's 1994 double album Music From The Unrealized Film Script: Dusk At Cubist Castle a few weeks ago. I had heard them described as White Album era Beatles, so I decided to check them out. Also, they were part of the same Elephant 6 collective that begat Neutral Milk Hotel, so they were at least worth a listen.
There are some amazing tracks here. "Define A Transparent Dream, Jumping Fences," and "Spring Succeeds totally capture the poppy, druggy sound of the Beatles (but circa Revolver rather than the White Album); "Holiday Surprise" and "The Opera House" are just damn good power pop. At their best, their songs are beautiful, catchy, and just psychedelic enough to make them difference.
However, like many bands who do drugs to make music to take drugs to, they produced a lot of stuff that might sound awesome a few tabs/stems in, but is not a lot of fun to listen to sober. There is a lot of noisy, unpleasant, and irritating shit on this album, which is in stark contrast to the gorgeous power pop on the rest of the disc. They should have made this two albums: one of the actual songs, and the other of their hallucinogen-inspired noodling. Much like hard drugs, highs are pretty high, but the lows are enough to make you want to swear the whole thing off. Luckily, you can cherry-pick what you actually want to listen to, so the annoying shit (ie most of the second half of the album) can be left off your playlist.
I grew up near Santa Cruz and live in San Francisco. The first album I bought was Herbie Hancock's Future Shock. I buy too many albums. I think about music too much. This is an outlet for my musings on everything from punk to hip hop, so my friends don't have to put up with my rambling.
I am a regular contributor to RapReviews. I used to write for Blogcritics.org. My work has appeared in print in the now-defunct Clamor magazine.
