weird band alert: KRAFTWERK

NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE Danny By The River aka Winterlong aka Electric Prayers (BOOTLEG) 
PINK FLOYD Animals (COLUMBIA)
BASIC CHANNEL Octagon/Octaedre (BASIC CHANNEL)
EL JESUS DE MAGICO Scalping the Guru (COLUMBUS DISCOUNT)
DON CHERRY Live in Ankara (SONET)
NENEH CHERRY Homebrew (VIRGIN)
DESMOND DEKKER Rockin' Steady: The Best of Desmond Dekker (RHINO)
ERIC B & RAKIM Paid in Full (4TH & BROADWAY)
ANNE BRIGGS s/t (4 MEN WITH BEARDS)
BOB DYLAN Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (COLUMBIA)
BROSELMASCHINE s/t (SPALAX)
COLLIE RYAN The Hour Is Now (SEBASTIAN SPEAKS/YOGA) 
ANNE BRIGGS s/t (4 MEN WITH BEARDS)
NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (REPRISE)

The Neil Young & Crazy Horse show is from 1969 in Cincinnati, the then-standard opening solo set by Neil followed by the then-standard closing electric set by the original quartet of Neil on guitar, Danny Whitten on guitar, Ralph Talbot Billy Talbot on bass, Billy Molina Ralph Molina on drums, all four on vocals, and I'm surprised to find that this is the second Crazy Horse bootleg in a row where I've preferred the acoustic set to the electric. I mean, it's still a good listen with plenty of good jamming, but for laser-beam live-band interplay you still can't beat the studio takes on the Everybody Knows LP. Sometimes that's just the way it is. On that night in Cincinnati "Down By The River" was 19 minutes long, which is maybe a few minutes too long, and nowhere do Whitten's rhythm guitar stabs snap the whole band to breathtaking attention like they did in at least two places on the LP version. Gonna have to put that one on later, as well as conduct further research on various other live NY hypotheses....

I can't let go of the El Jesus De Magico album, or maybe it won't let go of me. I never quite 'get it' when it's on or quite 'remember it' when it's over, and I'd even go so far as to call it 'uneven'... but yet there remains something really compellingly despondent about its slow-grinding, jammy, psyched-out grooves.

Wow, the iPod shuffle played a 1978 album by Don Cherry and followed it with a 1992 album by his stepdaughter Neneh Cherry. Both albums are terrific, the one by Don an easily overlooked live set recorded in 1969 at the US Embassy in Ankara (Turkey), with a local rhythm section, which is pretty cool when the drummer turns out to be the thunderous Ofay Temiz. Side two is really cool, all tunes segued, some spacy jamming on various Turkish folk themes giving way to a Cherry composition that gives way to a sweet version of "The Creator Has A Master Plan" (always good to hear Don sing) that gives way to a definitive DC two-flutes-at-once coda called "Two Flutes." As for the Neneh album, it was the thoughtful and delayed follow-up to her big-selling1989 debut Raw Like Sushi. I've been listening to it since the year it came out, and I still love every song, even when she and Michael Stipe himself fist-pump their way through "Trout," the ultimate show of Lollapalooza Nation camaraderie. Stipe is actually straight-up rapping on this one and I don't even care, it just makes me want to get a smart drink and check out information tables in a chill-out tent.

Having a nice evening with Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, which I just might be ready to declare the 4th-most-underrated Dylan album of all time. It first shuffled up at about 4:45PM, right as I was getting off the train and walking over to the grocery store, opening with a sweet ten minutes or so of instrumental three-chord tone-poem played by combinations of Dylan, Roger McGuinn, and Bruce Langhorne on guitars, with none other than Booker T. from the MGs on bass. And of course "Billy" is a great song in all its iterations, and of course "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" is one of the greatest of all songs, and hearing this stuff reminds me that I can check out the director's cut of the movie sometime soon, which is a nice feeling... James Coburn's finest hour...

Broselmaschine album remains incredibly deep... don't miss the track 7 "Schmittergung" with its near 10-minute kosmische spoken word extensions.

If you were wondering, the list of albums at the top of this post is of the albums I listened to today, in order. The first eight came up continuously in one iPod album shuffle playing session, but after Eric B & Rakim I broke shuffle and played the sublime 1971 full-length debut Anne Briggs album because I overheard a co-worker upstairs playing it in passing and wanted to hear the whole thing back in my office downstairs. And now, after playing the Briggs once, and then starting the iPod back up a couple hours later with a fresh album shuffle, it has gone right into four more early 1970s folk albums, right in a row: first Dylan (1973), then Broselmaschine (1971), then Collie Ryan (1973), and then the fourth one being the Briggs album again! Okay, I'll call the Don Cherry > Neneh Cherry sequence a fluke, but this has gotta be taste-recognition software, right?

 

CONQUEROR Hammer of Antichrist (FIFTH DIVISION)
SUN CITY GIRLS Tibetan Jazz 666 (CLOAVEN CASSETTES)
GUNS & ROSES Use Your Illusion II (GEFFEN)
VIV Sea Shells Listening (PEBBLE)
COSMIC JOKERS s/t (SPALAX)
THE YOUNGER GENERATION "We Rap More Mellow" (BRASS)
SEQUENCE "Funk You Up" (SUGAR HILL)

Still mostly bored with black metal, but there is something about Canada (see also Wold), which would after all be an appropriate musical heir to Norway, another resource-rich decadent suburban caucasian lifestyle happening on the next harsh-but-lush wintry continental shelf just 3000 miles across the pond, and it was with these heavy latitudinal thoughts of the climes of the great northern earthen pole in mind that I had a good listen to the Hammer of Antichrist CD by the Canadian "BESTIAL BLACK DEATH DEVASTATION!!!!" metal band Conqueror just this morning. The disc compiles two of their records, the War Cult Supremacy full-length from 1999 and the Antichrist Superiority demo from 1996. War Cult Supremacy has a better recording and is a powerful album, but I just don't think the riff onslaught trances out as much as it does on Antichrist Superiority, and yes, it's probably because it's easier for me to get lost in the grimy depths of demo fidelity. Either way, it has an overall raw and hungry surging power where the full-length sounds just a little more clinical and well-fed.

Put on Use Your Illusion II just to hear opening track "Civil War" and took it off soon after... the Izzy Stradlin tune is okay, though not as good as the stuff on the Ju Ju Hounds album... I love "Yesterdays," but after that was just not in the mood to sit through the Dylan cover, even if the delirium of "Get In The Ring" did await on the other side....

That's Sea Shells Listening by VIV in the upper right, image from Sound Projector magazine)

VIV is a group from the Brighton, England area... they sent a 3" CDR two or three years ago (under the name of Vole) and it was good and fresh-sounding improvised music, essentially free jazz but with a strong folk and prog undercurrent, a group tone that has come even further to the fore on this superb new full-length called Sea Shell Listening. Standard instruments like saxophones and drumkit mix uniquely with marimba, tapes and electronics, folk-style acoustic guitar, and other intangibles for big long tunes that are in fact mostly swells of dynamics and tone, certainly as close as anyone else has gotten to late-period Talk Talk playing the sound of strong flower petals breathing quietly after a thunderstorm..... 

The debut album by the Cosmic Jokers is about as deep into pure ambience as 1971 kosmiche rock got while still sounding like a rock band (i.e. keys, guitars, bass, and drums, sometimes even vocals), more specifically a mean rock band... not overtly, but it's in there... with German rock, no matter how beautiful or celestial, the meanness comes via a certain starkness of instrumentation and tone.

I'd never heard of this The Younger Generation 12" before but it's from 1979 and features Cowboy, Kid Creole, Melle Mel, Mr. Ness, and Rahiem (aka The Furious Five without Grandmaster Flash being mentioned on the label, although he is mentioned in the lyrics). Melle Mel sez: "Rap like hell and make it sound like heaven." Sequence song is also a slammer, take it from someone who knows...

EEEEEEEE RECORDS

At first I thought it was another nondescript underground paste-on CDR noise label, but upon closer inspection of the xeroxed pasted-on artwork (and a clarifying e-mail from the label CEO) it became apparent that EEEEEEEE (that's 8 capital E's to be EEEEEEEExact) is a reissue label, digging up obscure cassette-only underground stuff from the 1980s and giving it a new strange life.

First disc I put in was by Exploding Head Trick, described as a Rock In Opposition band from Minneapolis, extant from roughly 1986 to 1993... now there's an undocumented slice of musical history. I've never really understood R.I.O... I've barely even listened to Henry Cow... I've never even read the R.I.O. wikipedia page. You might even say that I've always been in opposition to Rock In Opposition, which may be why Exploding Head Trick sometimes sounds to me less a part of an important lineage in Progressive Rock History, and more like they're in some sort of "all about science" musical that my kids might go to. It's mostly in the earnest vocal melodies sung by the main guy, but also the incredibly perky 1980s instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and prog violin by the main lady, who also sings some nice Cocteau Twins style arias here and there). That said, the instrumental musical interplay can get surprisingly complex and even excitingly raw. I've listened to it three times already so it's certainly not terrible... but I still don't understand Rock In Opposition. 

Next on the stereo was Face In The Crowd and a reish of their 1985 cassette Sax And Drums And Rock And Roll, which the EEEEEEEE website promotes as part of the UK DIY movement, but I don't know.... just because it's post-punk and a British band is doing it (itself) doesn't automatically mean the music is essential listening. Other than weirder saxophone and some dirgier songs, this kind of sounds like a run-of-the-mill angry pub rock band to me. And maybe that suits them fine, except the "run-of-the-mill" part. I think it's a recording of a gig, kind of a boomy audience recording quality... again, not bad, cool artwork too (pictured at the top), and it does keep the label roster unpredictable, but it's probably my least favorite of the bunch. See for yourself, the whole album is available for download via the label website.

Actually, at least part of me would say that the most ambitious EEEEEEEE release, the Girls On Fire 5-disc anthology Girls Who Grew Up To Be Arts Administrators, The GOF Story Vol. 1-5 is my least favorite, which is funny because the label CEO thought that it "may be the most Blastitudinous" of his releases. Why do people think I only like the weirdest stuff? Hmm, maybe it's because I've been posting reviews of really weird music on the internet for almost a decade... either way I would definitely call it the hardest to listen to in its entirety, and not just because it's 5 discs. Girls On Fire is the work of Leslie Singer, who was a founding member of DC band Psychodrama and later decamped to San Francisco where she recorded and released five cassettes of her varied rants, over guitar tweak-out (I Think About Jackson Pollock), intricate and relentless drum machine terror (In My Blood), outright sheets of noise (Confessions Of A Shit Addict), and more (the other two discs I haven't listened to yet). Those descriptions might make it sound more listenable than it may actually be, as the ranting is pretty constant and the music rarely gets to breathe on its own, but with five long and involved releases that came out from 1983 to 1985, the Girls On Film oeuvre is no slouch in the history of solo power electronics. 



As for my FAVORITE of the EEEEEEEE bunch, it's gotta be the album by Harry Zantey, hardcore industrial solo EMS synth,"recorded live, one take, no overdubs," and released waaaay back in 1981 in Australia. He was a member of the original Sydney-based 1970s lineup of Crime and the City Solution, but this is a lot heavier, scorching and dark stuff.

And my second favorite has gotta be the 1986 cassette by Sons of Bitches. Synth industrial nerd weirdness from Providence, Rhode Island. You can't help mentioning Ralph Records when describing this because of the synth sounds and sardonic approach, and these guys are vocally and textually even dorkier than the Residents. Thing is, they do it in a very musically interesting way. The vocals are not of central importance, and they know the secret of good synth/industrial/noise music; that it must not only contain the sound, but be aware of the silence on the other side of it. There is a novelty pop feel that may be too much for some, with totally silly keyboard tones plinking away while a guy named Oblivion David Stomach grumbles in a joke grumpy voice about syphilis and other stuff, but it's a surprisingly varied album, with a lot of extended instrumental forays, so stick with it. It also made me think of The Terrifying Sickos... first time a record has done THAT in, well, ever. (Probably because I read about them earlier today in a Hattiesburg, MS scene report WFMU blog post by DJ Brian Turner.)

Anyway, get in touch at http://EEEEplusEEEE.bravehost.com if you'd like to check this stuff out.

OTHER HITS OF TODAY:
RICHARD YOUNGS Beyond The Valley Of The Ultrahits (SONIC OYSTER)
HAIR POLICE Strict 7" (TROUBLEMAN UNLIMITED)
MICHAEL MAYER Immer (KOMPAKT)
KEITH JARRETT Dmitri Shostakovich: 24 Preludes & Fugues op. 87 (ECM)
EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING Primary Colours (AARGHT!/GONER)
CONQUEROR Hammer of Antichrist (FIFTH DIVISION)
JUAVVES "Muy Aburrido"  ("Sounds Like: if you were to like smoke weed then go surf and like while you're on top of a sick wavve you were to take a sick bong rip and smoke more weed.")

J.J. CALE Naturally (SHELTER)
FATHER YOD AND THE SPIRIT OF '76 Kohoutek (CAPTAIN TRIP)

Love J.J. Cale, here with his 1971 debut album, featuring songs that were better-known through inferior cover versions, like "Call Me The Breeze" and "After Midnight." My favorite song right now is the honey-sweet ballad "Magnolia."



Here's a sweet live version that seems to be from sometime in the 1980s...
all hail The Tulsa Sound...



The debut album by Father Yod and company is frustrating. The instrumental work on it is pretty great, featuring the long-running Djin/Sunflower/Octavius gtr/bs/drums trio augmented by excellent keyboards and surprisingly accomplished R&B-style female backing vocals. Ah, but then there's the singing/preaching of Father Yod, crashing through all of that atmosphere about 2.8 times louder than the rest of the band combined. Believe me, I have a lot of respect for the man and his teachings, I just wish he had some volume control. I think progressive.homestead.com says it best: A little bit 'incredible strange' or over the top of odd singing vocals, not always with the best voice in an improvisational manner.

VARIOUS ARTISTS The Smithsonian Anthology Of American Folk Music (SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS)
HORNER PARK JAZZ BAND live at Horner Park, Chicago
KURT VILE Childish Prodigy (MATADOR)
MUDBOY Mort Aux Vaches (STAALPLAAT)
TELEVISION #3 ("Little Johnny Jewel" 7" & assorted demos, bootleg) (CHICAGO MEDICAL SOCIETY)

"Kassie Jones" by Furry Lewis seems like it's 10 minutes long, with a totally circular feel as the guitar part cycles and lyrics come and go, always changing while the rhythm stays the same, occasionally landing on a refrain ("On the road again... I'm a natural born Eastman on the road again") while interesting little chestnuts bubble in and out of consciousness. ("I ain't good lookin' but I take my time" . . . "Memphis women don't wear no shoes" . . . "Gonna shake it like Cheney did, like Cheney did.") It is over 6 minutes long, which makes it the longest song on the Anthology, I think. Here's the first half of it:



And here's a version he did 40 years later:



The Horner Park Jazz Band, a 14-or-so piece big band of all kinds of delightfully casual veteran amateur musicians, really made my day today at a fall/harvest/pumpkin type festival in Chicago's own Horner Park. Two guitars (one lady who strummed chords the whole set, couldn't really hear her, and a guy who played some sweet leads here and there), plenty of brass (including crucial baritone sax), a guy playing a well-miked piano that had been wheeled outdoors... I would say the (excellent) drummer was a good 70 years old, and the kit he was playing might've been even older... honestly, hearing them interpret swing classics reminded me of a Sun Ra band doing the same, the better players carrying along the lesser players with a lot of soul/spirit/fun.



New Mudboy album is a good one, to these ears his most solid long-player yet. Does not come across as a solo keyboard album quite as much as This Is Folk Music did, but yet still hits hard with plenty of heavy solo organ. A couple quirk-threatening 'carnival' moments, or at least one early on, but he stays the course with focused material, does some interestingly evil-sounding things with heavy vocal breathing, and then builds that bridge from the 1960s to the 2000s with pulsing celestial monochord zone-out for most of the last half of the album. Comes in an tri-hinge plywood deal. (Oh, I guess Mort Aux Vaches is a series Staalplaat releases in collaboration with the Dutch radio station VPRO. The name is French for "Death to Cows," which is the French equivalent to "Fuck the Pigs" and it comes from May 1968.)

Speaking of casual, still can't believe how casual Television's 1975 debut record "Little Johnny Jewel Parts One and Two" was and is. And how much great jamming it exudes regardless.

DON CHERRY 1978 Swedish Documentary

POPOL VUH In Den Garten Pharaos (THINK PROGRESSIVE)
TRAD GRAS OCH STENAR Mors Mors (1/2 SPECIAL)
PINK FLOYD The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (CAPITOL)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Siamese Soul - Thai Pop Spectacular Vol. 2 (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES)
GRATEFUL DEAD Two From The Vault (GRATEFUL DEAD RECORDS)
TOWER RECORDINGS The Galaxies' Incredibly Sensual Transmission Field Of The Tower Recordings (COMMUNION)

For some reason I think I still prefer the early synth/percussion duo Popol Vuh albums (Affenstunde and In Den Garten Pharaos) to the devotional rock/chamber music albums with guitars and Djong Yun on vocals (like Hosianna Mantra and Einsjager & Siebenjager). Here, let's have a little battle of the bands:



VS.

TOM KARLSSON: Pojknacke LP (LYSTRING) Not sure where this LP is from, but it came fairly anonymously, in a stark white gatefold sleeve adorned with meticulously repellent hand-drawn artwork, at least on the inside sleeve and the labels, and I kind of wanted to listen to it once and get it out of the house... but the music is excellent. Having lost the one-sheet, I was thinking it was an album by sort of mysterious harsh industrial/power electronics band or project called Pojknacke, but the internet tells me that Pojknacke is the title, and the artist (musical and presumably visual) is actually Tom Karlsson. Hey, at least he was helpful enough to draw "A" and "B" as part of his label art, no one does that anymore! (And his name is on the spine, along with title and label, I just hadn't checked yet.) Anyway, this really is some sort of early-style harsh industrial album, but with a welcome profusion of quiet space, room for some jarring off-kilter samples, obscure but agitated European speaking voices that may even be samples themselves but mostly probably not... eventually some serious subtle (on side B not so subtle) heavy avant-rock improvisational jamming... a couple out-and-out tunes with goofy ranting punk vocals... it doesn't all work equally well, and it's maybe 10 minutes too long, but it's still really good.

VOID Live at the 9:30 Club
TOWER RECORDINGS Furniture Music For Evening Shuttles (SILTBREEZE)
BLANK DOGS Mirror Lights (DRONE ERRANT)
ROXY MUSIC Stranded (VIRGIN)
ARBOREA s/t (FIRE MUSEUM)
MORBID December Moon demo
DON CHERRY Eternal Rhythm (MPS)
DUTCHESS AND THE DUKE She's The Dutchess, He's The Duke (HARDLY ART)
RUSTED SHUT Hot Sex (DULL KNIFE)
TERRY RILEY Persian Surgery Dervishes (MANTRA)
BOB DYLAN Self Portrait (COLUMBIA)
DIALING IN The Islamic Problem (MUSIC FELLOWSHIP)
TOM KARLSSON Pojknacke (LYSTRING)
ENUMCLAW Opening of the Dawn (HONEYMOON MUSIC)

Having the Tower Recordings album come up on shuffle this morning was quite synchronicitous (if that's a word), as just the other night at the Kurt Vile show the Os Mutantes song "Delmak-O" came over the PA in between bands, and as its lovely tones and incongruous mid-song raveup emerged through the bar noise I remembered what a great song it was, literally the only Os Mutantes song I've ever liked, and how I was introduced to it in 1998 by a Tower Recordings cover version, track two of the Furniture Music album, and how I should pull that album out and listen to it for the first time in years. Well hey, thanks iPod, no pulling necessary... but it's funny about Tower, I did listen to their Fraternity of Moonwalkers album a couple times recently, and it didn't really hold up for me. In the mid-late 90s, when I listened to it a lot, it was pretty exciting, I guess because Matt Valentine was, as Dave Keenan would have it, "inventing free folk"... still, MV then was more of a sketch artist, a ringleader, a sweet guitar player, but not exactly a strong tunesmith, not the kind of guy who takes hold of a song and stuffs it into your soul, more like a guy who makes cool flickering patterns when you close your eyes. Which is cool, but not too deep or heavy, and to me it hasn't stood the test of time. This is still their best album though, or 2nd best behind their would-be swan-song big-band six-song jam-out released on LP and CD in 2004 as The Galaxies' Incredibly Sensual Transmission Field Of The Tower Recordings.

Okay, okay, I enjoyed this Blank Dogs cassette EP alright. It ended 45 seconds ago, and I think I can still remember how one of the songs went, which is a first.

I love it when I'm listening to a Roxy Music album and random Bryan Ferry lyrics pop out like "Through silken waters my gondola slides/and the bridge... it sighs." Not to mention, "Tous ces moments/Perdus dans l`enchantement/Qui ne reviendront/Au Jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais..."

Arborea album is still holding up very well. Eerie husband & wife folk music from Maine.

May not've checked out Dutchess & the Duke but the main Termbo guy was so genuine in his year-end love for their debut album that I went ahead and did it. I don't think I'll ever like it that much, but there is some undeniably good songwriting here, however indebted to Jagger and Davies it might be. The "You fucked me in a phonebooth" hook really works. Haven't heard their new album, Sunrise/Sunset, which came out last month.

Brief thoughts on a few more new records... Dialing In is one Seattle woman doing some field recordings/loops/pedals/vocals overlays with a wild dark atmosphere, powerful and interesting but also kind of all over the place and confusing. For example, I'd like to tell you the name of one really good track with this grinding looping low-end, and I think it's on side B, but the sides don't have any text on the labels, or even "A" and "B" in the run-out etchings, and both sides appear to have 3 tracks (judging from banding) but there are 7 titles listed on the sleeve... so I really don't know what the track is... that's what I mean by confusing. But it's 'good confusing' enough that I want to listen again. [Though it's now a couple months later and I can't say that I have - ed.] The Tom Karlsson LP is really good, rather disturbing, and reviewed elsewhere. Enumclaw is a member of the Philly synth/kosmische band Niagara Falls playing solo. His LP, like the parent band, is extremely faithful to its inspiration, which is 1970s synth-based German cosmic music, no more, no less. So still no points for originality, but the album does get some for beauty, with long tracks that sit in a nice simple compositional space that's a little more tranquil, direct, and memorable than the most recent Niagara Falls LP, Sequence of Prophets.