Various Artists Cambodian Cassette Archives CD
P.G. Six Music From The Sherman Box Series And Other Works CD
Pig State Recon blog post on YouTube pub rock
Terry Riley & Don Cherry Koln Concert

After listening to the Neung Phak CD recently I had to pull out the Cambodian Cassette Archives disc on Sublime Frequencies. It's sounding better than ever, lots of great songs and great thrilling playing, breathless fusion/folk/rock instrumental soloing that imbues every passage and buoys the heavy reverbed-out soul singing... seriously, I know it's impossible to keep up with every Sublime Frequencies release, so if you missed this one by all means go back for it! The Pig State Recon post made me a fall into a 1970s pub rock vortex for a minute, suddenly deep in the world of Rory Gallagher, Budgie, Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Ronnie Lane, and wild card Dr. Feelgood, all from the same year or two, they all kinda look alike, most of them aren't from the English scene but outliers like Ireland, Scotland, Wales.... I'm not gonna start collecting this stuff or anything but it is kinda diggable... Gallagher is pretty trad but also pretty raw... I love Budgie when they get heavy, never thought of 'em as pub rock but it makes sense... I don't really ever want to hear another version of Scott Walker's "Next" but SAHB do seem like a pretty heavy band... this Ronnie Lane clip was fine, kinda middle-of-the-road... and the Dr. Feelgood was kinda revelatory, more like Dr. Feelweird - what brought these guys on? At that point, just before I really got overwhelmed, the Pig State Recon guy snapped me out of the pubs and out of Great Britain altogether with the last two clips, some sweet sweet Curtis Mayfield and super scary 1970s Jerry Lee Lewis. Oh my god, the Killer - even when he was literally phoning it in for maudlin past-his-prime TV appearances with regional pickup bands, he was pretty much as terrifying as rock and roll gets. I didn't know Terry Riley and Don Cherry not only played together, at a 1975 concert in Koln, Germany, but that a very nice-sounding bootleg exists, and here it is making the blog rounds, sounding almost exactly how you would dream it to. Riley is in his moody and delicately churning late-night Persian Surgery Dervishes mode and Cherry plays glorious soaring and dancing trumpet over the top. On one track Karl Berger joins in on vibes and the way he syncs with Riley's machine music is awesome. This is great music and the track times (19:45, 8:13 and 12:16) would be perfect for an LP.... hmm....

Oh yeah, these too:

Harmonize Most High Babylon CD
One Might Add Sailing Team CD
Various Artists American Roots Songbook: The Blues CD
Smog A River Ain't Too Much To Love CD
Naked on the Vague The Blood Pressure Sessions LP
Oper'azione Nafta Cavuru LP
Blank Dogs 7"

Things are looking good for this Harmonize Most High CD... it's on the Ruby Red Editora label... Daniel Carter is in the band... the word "high" is in the band name... cool cover art and an honest-to-goodness 'free jazz poem' on the inside cover that starts "The Sound unafraid/With wings may it soar/The light that radiates/infinite days boundless sky..." push play and the music immediately starts living up to the promise: Carter's psychedelic flute melodies and what sounds like a cello snaking sweet-and-sour underneath (as far as I can tell from the credits it might be "bowed dulcimer" but it sounds too low-end), drums, and holy shit, now a man and a woman are singing that inside-cover poem together in a reverbed-out duet... this is good... but unfortunately this opener isn't a side-longer, it fades out after like 6 minutes and the band tries out some other things, 7 long tracks in all, and sure there are plenty of pockets of brilliance (creative mix of electric guitar and traditional free jazz instrumentation, and one rather awesome bit where somebody raps hardcore over the free jazz and it surprisingly really works) but I can't help thinking that this release was hampered by the editing and sequencing potential of the CD format, i.e. they put too much on here, too many fade-outs and excerpts. I would like to hear this material edited to a single LP, and that first track has gotta be a side-longer! (Note: these opinions worth approximately 1.8 cents.) The One Might Add CD is also on Ruby Red, a duo from Portugal... pretty cool... both play noise/psych electronics but one also plays live drums and his big block-rocking beats that commence from time to time give it a nice twist. The blues CD is intense... "Candy Man Blues" by Mississippi John Hurt... "Devil Got My Woman" by Skip James... the awesome tranced-out "Kassie Jones (pt. 1)" by Furry Lewis... Charlie Patton... Blind Willie McTell... Big Bill Broonzy... I keep listening to the Naked on the Vague LP and it's not because I'm into it - on the contrary, I don't even feel like I've heard it yet. It's too weird to play when the kids are up so I always end up putting it on late at night, the headphones jack on my stereo amp is broken so I have to play it through the speakers, it's too weird and shadowy to play at low volume so I have to crank it but I can't because it'll wake up the wife and/or kids (it already has once), so the volume I end up playing this thing at always ends up being quieter than the radiator, I mean literally. How about that, David Lynch's prophecies have not only come true, they've evolved to the point where we not only have a lady singing in the radiator, we have a guy & lady synth/drums punk duo from Australia playing in the radiator. Point being, I decided to just say fuckit and turn it up tonight for at least a few songs and yeah, now I can hear it. They're a noisy punk duo that uses synths, guitars, lots of delay, and a few other things to play songs that are often 40 to even 60 percent noise pieces. But yet they come off like a punk/song band, not a noise band, much closer to a more minor-keyed Times New Viking than, say, Nautical Almanac. I like their long noise sections but my favorite track is "Lonely Boys" because it's the most immediate song-as-song, with a pounding tribal rhythm all the way through. I'm still not bowled over and there's a few of the new Siltbreeze releases I have felt very alone in not being too excited by (see also Factums - whereas I totally dig the xNoBBQx LP which seems to be another somewhat rare opinion) ... Oper'azione Nafta's Cavuru, also on Siltbreeze, is pretty exciting though, a clattery weird Italian group, lots of improv in their sound but at the same time they are playing songs and it's a pretty good balancing act. These two Siltbreeze albums do seem to be more in an 'actual' (as opposed to 'retro' or 'neo') no wave style than most anything else I've heard in the last 10 years or so, which is commendable, but I think I'm more into the psych/lo-fi/folk/soul/drool side of Siltbreeze, the masterpieces by Pink Reason and Sapat, that great dirged-out LP by Alasehir, and that rambling dazed Ex-Cocaine number... My first time hearing anything at all by Blank Dogs (their new 7" on Daggerman Records) and.... hmm. Yeah, I want to listen to it again but really only to confirm that there isn't a whole lot there. Weird bedroom synth pop/rock, okay, and I like the ghostly flicker it has to it, but I have no idea how these songs go and the needle just picked up 10 seconds ago... it's not bad at all but I'm standing this up to the first Pink Reason 7" (not to mention the second) and it's really not even close. Cool cover though.

Mike Wexler Sun Wheel CD
Yek Koo A Plea For a Night Desert Blue Moon Storm CDR
Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba Segu Blue CD
Kurtis Blow Presents The History Of Rap Vol. 1 CD
Baby Huey The Baby Huey Story - The Living Legend CD
Luscious Jackson In Search of Manny CD
Cheveu DOG + Extra Tracks CDR
Stevie Wonder Fulfillingness's First Finale CS

I've never heard of this guy Mike Wexler on Amish Records, but on first impression he is a unique singer/songwriter that stands apart from the Dan Fogelbergian herd of psych-folk poster boys. He sounds like he has a little more teeth, singing in an odd voice a little bit like Simon Finn, and he writes songs with spacious movements through different parts and developments, not just a waltz through verses and choruses because that's what you're supposed to do - more prog-folk than psych-folk. Good start, but still not sure how the finish is... more listens needed. Yek Koo is the solo guise of Helga Fassonaki from the Metal Rouge duo. Her solo disc here doesn't exactly work as a through-listen, its kinda long and sketchbooky for that, but any one or two tracks on here are fine examples of how her skeletal stasis-drones are the engine that powers the Metal Rouge Winter Calling disc, where guitarist/etc. Andrew Scott provides and color and shape. The Kurtis Blow compilation is one of the finest co-worker spins in recent memory... my first time hearing the complete original version of "Apache" by Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band and holy shit, the drum break on this thing is beautiful, and it's so long the DJ probably coulda gotten by with only one copy of the record... another big highlight is the zoned-out 8-minute Booker T. & the MG's jam "Melting Pot," and "Hum Along And Dance" by the Jackson 5ive, from their 1973 album Get It Together, has gotta be one of the finest examples of 'shit let's just use up the rest of this tape and/or studio time' ever waxed (although the sweet jams were by session musicians, because Motown didn't let the Jackson instrumentalists actually play on records). Baby Huey "Listen To Me" was on the Blow comp so we followed up with his full-length... co-worker proclaimed "A Change Is Gonna Come" to possibly be the greatest recorded song in world history and I would not be surprised if it actually was. The Luscious Jackson still sounds fantastic (what can I say). The Cheveu stuff sounds even better. I'm telling you, one of the "extra tracks," this 10-minute dubbed-out slow-burn live thing "Unemployment Blues," is one of my favorite tracks of the decade... did this thing end up on their new full-length?

Theo Angell Dearly Beloved CD
P.G. Six Music from the Sherman Box Series and Other Works CD
Various Artists Why Is Anything Forbidden 2: A Tribute to Cash Money Records CD
Following Sean DVD
Naked on the Vague The Blood Pressure Sessions LP
FNU Ronnies 7"

Amish Records sent along a package with some good stuff from over the last few years. After being bowled over by his 2007 album Auraplinth, I was excited to hear the previous Theo Angell joint from 2006, Dearly Beloved. It's a good one - the basic Auraplinth approach is well in place, and although the sheer number of excellent songs isn't quite there, there are songs here that rival anything on the newer album, like the 9-minute solo haunter "Finally...Dreams." Also from 2006, the P.G. Six album is actually pretty fantastic - I only knew him as a singer/songwriter with records on Amish and Drag City that I have yet to hear, and as the 'quiet' member of Tower Recordings, but this Sherman Box is all-instrumental stuff for "wire-strung harp" and "bray harp," and though it was recorded to accompany a visual exhibition in an art gallery, it creates an exquisite melancholy & sparse Mazzacane-worthy atmosphere no matter where you put it on. There is guitar on the CD too, as it tacks on a 'reissue' of the Book of Rayguns 7", a sparser-than-you-might-expect piece for six electric guitars that came out on Memphis Luxure (actually Superlux, see comment below), the Tower Recordings 'in-house' label, back in 1995. The Sherman Box music is the real draw, though - very melancholy and contemplative stuff. I've had the Tribute to Cash Money Records CD for awhile and pull it out about once a year for good times. It strikes me as a definitive Deathbomb Arc release, big and sprawling, wildly creative, willing to try absolutely anything for better and for worse, etc. I really know nothing about the Cash Money label and I really don't hear any hip-hop or bling or gangstas referenced on here (thank god, because art-punk kids doing that can really annoy). I mean it starts with this creaky professional folk-rock by Belloq (don't know him) doing the song "The Killer This Time Isn't Me" (don't know it) and it sounds NPR-worthy and also inexplicably GREAT. There's a lot of LA notables on here like Rainbow Blanket, Captain Ahab, The Sharp Ease, Child Pornography, Rose For Bodhan, and non-LA notables like Friends Forever, Yuma Nora, and even Xiu Xiu (remixed by LA notable The Cherry Point!), mostly doing the more expected neo-punk styles but there's plenty of unexpected sounds too and it all runs together in a good way. One track I've gone to check the track listing for twice is this lady Ume because of her strikingly 'feral' trip-hop vocals. I rented the Following Sean DVD after reading about it on Jay Hinman's Celluloid Hut blog... it's about this kid who grew up in the Haight-Ashbury and, when he was 4 years old, had a short film made about him by his neighbor in which he claims to smoke weed and is shown running around the neighborhood barefoot in the height of the hippie madness. Almost 30 years later the filmmaker/neighbor decides to make a feature-length followup in which he reunites with the grown-up Sean (and some other people from the time) and follows his life off and on for almost 10 years. He also reflects on his own life and changes just as much, and the whole thing adds up to a wistful and bittersweet essay on the fine line between freedom and responsibility that EVERYONE has to deal with, whether by balancing on it, or rejecting it, or whatever. The film can get a little hokey, but I did almost got a little teary a couple times without knowing exactly why, always a good sign. Some great old footage of pre-McCarthy American Communist actions shows up here too (Sean's grandparents). I liked the FNU Ronnies 7", almost as much as I like their band name but I'm not sure why. Did it remind me of Chrome? I'll tell you after next listen.

Bob Dylan Live 1966
Various Artists Love and Circuits: A Cardboard Records Compilation (From Aa to Zs) 2CD
John Bender I Don't Remember
John Bender Pop Surgery

The May 17, 1966 Bob Dylan electric set at Manchester Free Trade Hall is legendary of course (it's the "Judas" one) but I think the solo acoustic set that opened the show is just as monumental. In fact, I think the explosive reaction during the electric set was just as much of a response to the acoustic set, which was just as challenging, but in a context where the audience did not feel like they could respond. First of all, they were supposed to be comfortable with acoustic Bob Dylan, but he was playing these songs with a terrifying trance-state laser precision that no one could have expected, digging at the audience slowly and steadily with sharp otherwordly enunciation of mind-boggling lyrics and utterly daring free-falling harmonica solos. No one wanted to be the first one to say anything about it - the setting was too quiet, too churchlike - but when the electric band came out with their amps blazing, not only was the challenge doubled, the audience suddenly had all the permission and context they needed to voice their discomfort, and that's what they did, infamously. Seriously though, I don't know where to begin as far as assessing what Dylan was doing with these acoustic sets. I could talk about how (according to Clinton Heylin in Behind the Shades Revisited) he was snorting heroin before these sets (and how it actually worked for him... just listen to the music, and as the man later said, "Drugs were never that big a thing with me, I could take 'em or leave 'em, never hung me up..."), or how those mad harmonica solos remind me of contemporaneous free jazz innovations, or the way his heartbroken voice makes "Just Like A Woman" not a putdown song (if it ever was) but a song of complete and total sympathy for the helpless childlike state this otherwise strong grown person has been driven to... but I just can't assess this performance in a mere blog post and I hope I'll never be able to because I'd rather just listen. The Cardboard Records thing is just too big and sprawling (57 artists) and I'm not very good at listening to comps. I think I listened to all of Disc 1 and really the only thing I can report on at all is the very first track, by Aa. This might be the first time I've ever heard 'em, and it was nice, bouncy and hepped-up world-music avant-pop, like only the good things about David Byrne (there actually are some) amped up for the 2000s. Other than that I have nothing specific to say but there are a lot of notables on here: Bipolar Bear, Ecstatic Sunshine (wait! I remember their track, it was a near-flamenco guitar duet, unexpected and refreshing), Fat Day, Fuck Buttons, Gowns, High Places, Japanther, Lovid, Numbers, The Oh Sees, Oneida, Parts & Labor, These Are Powers, Zs.... I like all the John Bender albums but his first one from 1980, I Don't Remember Now, remains my favorite. It's got the most spaced-out laid-back synth patterns and chill nervous vocals. From there he got a little more self-consciously dark and weird and odd, I think, more like something on Ralph Records. His third full-length Pop Surgery (1983) is still a fine album though. Here's an interesting John Bender fan-site type thing, which, on this page, reveals a fascinating historical connection - the original 1981 LP issue of the Velvet Underground Columbus 1966 Valleydale Ballroom recording was done on Bender's label Record Sluts (referred to only as RS... click here for a cover image and some more info).

The Terminals Touch CD
Labradford Mi Media Naranja
Pan-American s/t
Andrew Chalk Time of Hayfield
Brightblack Morning Light s/t
Chopin Nocturnes
Burning Star Core Fascination 2CDR (disc 1)
Naked on the Vague The Blood Pressure Sessions LP

In 2007, the Last Visible Dog label released Last Days of the Sun, the first new album by The Terminals in over 10 years, and now they've reissued a classic by the band, the 1992 album Touch. It's funny, putting this on I realize that though I've never actually owned this, a lot of the songs are familiar - the awesome opener "Basket Case," the rollicking Brian Crook-sung "(What I've Heard Of) Wyoming," the epic "Mr. Clean," the scary "That Thing Upstairs Is Not My Mother" - and that the reason is that I taped them all off the radio back in the mid-1990s, during various installments of the community radio show (KZUM 89.3 FM Lincoln) hosted by one Chris Moon, who is now, well, the Providence, RI-based CEO of Last Visible Dog Records... I think right now, while I'm on a Rhythm & Sound/Basic Channel kick and open to various (ahem) contemporary reimaginings of dub, is a good time to pull out these two albums from 1997, the fourth Labradford album Mi Media Naranja and the self-titled debut by Pan-American. Both groups feature Richmond/Chicago musician Mark Nelson (the latter is his solo guise). I think I like the Labradford album the best with its spaced-out windswept nod to some kind of barely-there Morricone-rock. Maybe it's just the Italian (?) title that makes me say that but this is a great album. The Pan-American is a little more under-the-threshold, without the soundtrack riffs to focus on, more comparable to something contemporaneous like Pole... not quite sure what's going on with it yet but I like it. Heard great things about this new Andrew Chalk and it did sound nice when I was paying attention but just as often I wasn't paying attention at all - maybe, to apply Eno's maxim, this album is just slightly more ignorable than it is interesting? Now, Brightblack Morning Light - there's an ambient album that stays interesting because it's done by electric piano and slide guitar playing non-stop swampy roots-rock riffs. I still call it 'ambient' because these are barely songs at all, even when they are singing something specific in two-part harmony. Very weird humid and druggy album - it took me a few listens to get used to it and how 'Muscle Shoals' it was, but now I'm really getting into it. I always rave about Burning Star Core, and I love the Yeh/Beatty/Tremaine BXC trio configuration, but first listen to this Fascination 2 x CDR didn't make too big of an impression. Each disc is a separate live show from 2007. I mean, it does make an impression by being very loud and wall-of-noise, but this lineup is capable of some amazing detail work and I couldn't pull too much of it out here. Excellent design and packaging by Yeh though, as always, and this time including liner notes! The Naked on the Vague LP is new on Siltbreeze, an Australian man/woman drums/synth etc. duo, and it made no real impression at all. Something's in there, I can tell, I'll let you know how the next spin goes.

Anthology of American Folk Music
Neung Phak (Mono Pause) CD
Gown For The Maples CD
Grateful Dead Harper College '70 bootleg CS
Grateful Dead Dick's Pick Vol. 8
Grateful Dead 2/14/1968
Lost 4:6 "The Other Woman"

Aaaaaahhhhh the Anthology....perfect Saturday wake-up/breakfast album. Made it through the first two volumes. I once told a guy that Vol. 2, "Social Music," was my least favorite of the three. He came back the next day saying, "You're crazy, man, 'Social Music' is awesome,' to which I replied, "Hey, the worst volume of the Anthology of American Folk Music is still the third-best album of all time." Angelina got an iPod yesterday and the first disc she ripped was Neung Phak. We saw 'em open for Sun City Girls back in 2004... SCG weirded her out too much but she loved the Neung Phak set (it was terrific) and plays the CD all the time. The kids love 'em too and can even sing the "tui tui tui tui, tui tui, tui tui tui, tui tui, tui tui tui tui tui tui tui!!" line by heart. The band is an alter ego of the Oakland, CA band Mono Pause that performs the modern pop/rock music of Southeast Asia - lots of cover songs, as well as originals/theater/improvisations of their own, very confidently in the vernacular. A founding member is Mark Gergis, who records solo stuff as Porest and is a crucial part of the Sublime Frequencies braintrust, and if you've heard the Cambodian Cassette Archives and Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan CDs that he put together for that label, then you'll recognize plenty of the songs on here. Great songs too, and Neung Phak does 'em very well. I put on the Fantasia soundtrack for the kids, and Phil walked right over, said "I d on't want to play this CD," hit the "DISC SKIP" button, and what should come on but the new Gown For the Maples record, which I had previously thought was good-but-not-great. Phil seemed to like the opening dirgey guitar chords alright, and walked back to his art table where he had some serious coloring projects going, and while he colored he went ahead and listened to the whole album, as did I, and it was heavy and moody as hell, all of a sudden verging right up on great. Recommended for fans of a slow-burning low-end-centric Trad Gras/Crazy Horse type thing... wait, that's everybody. This Harpur College acoustic set is so good that "Beat It On Down The Line," a song I often skip along with most Weir rock'n'rollers (hell, I usually just skip acoustic sets altogether, give or take a "Bird Song"), is awesome on here, and it's followed by a sublime "Black Peter" that balances between roots twang and dream balladry even better than it does on Workingman's Dead. I A/B'd it with the Dick's Pick Vol. 8 3CD soundboard-recorded edition of the same show, which was interesting. The AUD version runs at a slightly faster speed, which I think was a common thing and definitely adds to the energy level. After that I wanted to hear this droned-out version of "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" from 2/14/68 - I used to have a copy, way back in the pre-external HD years, when I had downloaded the show off of archive.org (on recommendation from that Dead appreciation article in Arthur Magazine), and then burned that to a disc, after which I promptly deleted all the mp3s off of my hard drive to "save space," then lended it and a whole stack of other Dead shows on CDR to a flaky girl at work who never gave 'em back to me. She did give me a whole stack of her crappy CDR burns though, which I still have - I guess it was a 'trade' - my shows were better than her mostly-Mydland-era selections so it wasn't exactly a fair one, but she did give me a disc's worth of 2/13/70, so hey, maybe it really is in fact ALL good. ANYWAY, I ended up getting the show again last week from a massive Deadhead download site that was around for about 7 minutes, and man, they were a monstrous searing elephantine beast of a band back then. I prefer the snaky flaky jazzy 1972-1974 stuff, but as far as late-1960s power blues bands go they were at least as heavy as Cream...

Tim Buckley Dream Letter
Charles Mingus Mingus Ah Um
Aerosmith Get Your Wings
Aerosmith Rocks
Dave E & the Cool Marriage Counselors 7"
Grateful Dead 5/8/1977 (Barton Hall, Ithaca NY)
Tent City s/t on Arbor
Tent City Cascade Trinkets
Fontana I Feel Like A Jerk EP 7"
Terrible Twos Radical Tadpoles 7"

Damn, Dream Letter might be my favorite Buckley album. Recorded live one night in London, 1968, it features the exquisite electric guitar/vibraphone atmospheres of Happy/Sad in the service of songs that are as stretched-out and expansive as the stuff on Lorca and Starsailor but without the nightmare quality - these dreams are more eerie and mellow. Get Your Wings gets the proverbial "fuck yes" for the day, perfect album right now. I always loved Steven Tyler's lyrics, utterly gross even when they make no sense which is most of the time. "Get yourself a cooler/Lay yourself low/Coincidental moiter (murder)/With nuttin' to show"............. "You're the bait and you're the hook/Someone bound to take a look/I'm your man, child, lawwwd of the thiiiighhsssss"............ "Salt Lake City/salt lickin' biddies/bogus honey stinkin' uh gin/Well my daddy was hard/his face was pretty scarred/from kickin' ass and playin' poker to win".......... And Tyler's master stroke: "Sweet pandora/God-like aura/Smell like flora/Open up your door-a for me...just for me, yeah.... just for me, yeah.... just for mee-ee-yeah.... just for me, yeah... just for mee-ee-ee" - oh, excuse me, back to work..."Train Kept A Rollin" is just a steamroller and "Seasons of Wither" is majestic, and jeez, after Wings the iPod has gone right into Rocks and it's literally twice as good of an album. Believe it or not, they really only made three great albums, Wings, Rocks, and Toys in the Attic... (for 4th best I'm gonna go out on a limb and say Night in the Ruts...) There's no way I'm prepared to write about Rocks right now so I'll just pull out this unpublished shit I wrote almost a year ago:



DREAMLIKE MOMENTS ON AEROSMITH "ROCKS"

1. "Back in the Saddle." The slightly phased 12-string bass. The forlorn guitar bends matching the "baaaaaaack." The entire "riding hiiiiiiiiiggggghhhhh" outro, that's a great hook, with the guitar leads bouncing all around that monstrous bass/drums groove, Tyler’s ad-libs, and various dubby sound fx (whips, whinnies, wtf?).

2. "Last Child." Utterly forlorn "I’m leaving tonight/I’m leaving back home" non sequitir intro. The way the riff changes underneath the guitar solo, and the way the guitar solo blossoms into harmonized arpeggios for a couple seconds towards the end. Some of Tyler's most dizzying lyrics, with all that stuff about "J. Paul Get in his ear, with your face in a beer" or whatever it is.

3. "Rats in the Cellar." Ragged frenetic tempo, very punk, somehow with what sounds like actual street ambience coursing through it, though with no actual 'city' sfx except for a blazing harmonica solo that sounds like a car horn right when it starts. The way the punk chorus ("East side west side neeeeeeewz") blossoms suddenly and beautifully into "catch me if you caaaaan/cuz you’re weeeeeearing/tearing me apaaaaaaaart." Brief wtf space whoosh sound effect signals a ridiculous super-trashy high-speed raveup/outro with more crazy guitar interplay swirling around with the dubby distorted harmonica.

4. "Combination." The sludgy 'where’s the one?' aspect of the main riff. The constant Perry/Tyler twin lead vocal throughout. "I forgot my naaame" hook, especially when they sing "I got the new Marieeeeeeee." Also, "I found the secret/the key to it all" is a massive hook. This is possibly the best song on the album.

5. "Sick as a Dog." Possibly the second best song on the album, with perhaps the single greatest hook: "Pleeeeeeeeaaaase/I just GOT to talk to you." Also one of the greatest breakdowns in 1970s rock music, down to laid-back half-time guitar/drums and then launching back into the main tempo for a wondrous "taaake me baaaack" hookswirl outro w/handclaps. The song is all sweetness and the lyrics are all sickness, bittersweet hooks all the way.

6. "Nobody’s Fault." Volume swell intro, more lyrical madness, this time apocalyptic, and another relentless dream-hook that goes "Saaaaaaaawrrry/We’re so saaaaaaaaawrrry/We’re so saaaaaaaaaaaawrrryy."

7. "Get the Lead Out." Kind of a silly song, possibly the 9th best on the album. Still awesome. "Y'like good boogie/Like a real good woogie/You're a spring chicken/Let the beat start kickin'/Get outta bed, get outta bed, GET THE LEAD OUT!!!" I can't believe the way he sings "I'll show you my best/Take hold of my rest/We really can't miss" and makes the last line sound like "we'll really cay-mence," like a funny way to say "we'll really commence" which is a funny thing to say anyway. The song's dream-hook is that "Oooooooh nooooooooo/Ooooooooh no" business.

8. "Lick and a Promise." The absurd showpiece intro riff and how it tumbles into a full-swing boogie with a "Johnny-come-lately" yarn o'er the top. And of course the dream-hook is "Naaaaaa naaaaa naaaaa naaaaaa Naaaaaw," especially one of the last times with the arena rock crowd singing along, listen for 'em low in the mix. DUB.

9. "Home Tonight." The whole song is a dream.

And for another type of love song, I love the Dave E B-side where he tells us about that "state of emotional excitement in which a boy chases after a girl".... interesting followup to his more inchoate 1975 fever-dream "Girl" as heard on The Eyeball of Hell... Um, this Tent City stuff is awesome? Thumb piano and fuzz guitar is a great and under-utilized combination. Don Cherry comparisons are appropriate - could totally see him jamming with these guys. They're also capable of more driving rock styles without screwing things up... I liked these two singles on the X! Records label but I really don't remember 'em too well.... the Terrible Twos had a more 'synth-y' nervous quasi-goth sound, and Fontana were more straight-ahead driving rock... the cover of the Fontana one looks great, boldy proclaiming the band name and title sentiment in a great black-on-green stencil...

Magik Markers Road Pussy
Shoes Black Vinyl Shoes
The Hospitals Hairdryer Peace LP?

I hardly ever talk about Magik Markers in Blastitude, mainly because I've never figured out how to describe their particular genius. I know they have their haters, duh, listen to their music, tons of people are gonna hate it, but even at their most theoretically unlistenable they are still slowly accumulating a single body of work, a single reverberation of pride and isolation that rings loudly and defiantly throughout these years of thick and gruelling internet 'freedom'. Even if you might've seen and hated a live show once, I would recommend that you listen to the records, and listen to at least three or four, because there are atmospheres and trances and texts and stances in there that will surprise you, popping up all over the place. Where do I start?, you may ask, and well, I would start right up with their most recent one Boss, which is something of a masterpiece (and also their most accessible release ever, but that's not why I'm recommending it), or their 'debut' from 3 or 4 years ago with the awesome title I Trust My Guitar etc., or the A Panegyric To The Things I Do Not Understand slimline CD on Gulcher, my first scorching inkling that they could really make a killer album (even when it was just two live tracks), or this one right here with an even more awesome title, Road Pussy. A lot of what blossomed into Boss a year or so later is already being worked with here - listen to the first song "Bad Dream", it's a piano ballad, almost like a demo for one of those well-produced tracks on Boss... the second song "Mr. Soul" is one of those strangely patient aggro zone-outs, with Elisa improvising up a particularly good storm on the title, which has nothing to do with Neil Young. "Summer" is an appropriately humid-sounding slow-burn with some good lyrics: "Summer...when the garbage rots/Summer...when the freaks get shot/Summer...it's gonna get long and hot"..... And the last track is an actual comical advertisement for the album itself that features a spot-on usage of the phrase "Jesus shit!".... Oh yeah, and speaking of Uncle Neil, does anyone have a link to a 1970 Crazy Horse bootleg called Electric Prayers? .... Ah, The Shoes, finally listened to this 1977 classic from beginning to end, what a great lo-fi/sci-fi rock sound, Star Wars in the living room. I don't think there's any sci-fi in the lyrics (which all sound like love stuff), it's all in the sound of the guitars and the backing vocals..... Got an LP in the mail, return address Adam Stonehouse, SF, CA, no cover, just a record in a white paper inner sleeve, blank white labels with "SIDE A" and "SIDE B" written in sharpie. I even checked the runout groove, no info there either! So we could call this an Adam Stonehouse solo LP because that's the only identification on or in the whole entire parcel, or we could call it an LP by The Hospitals, because Adam Stonehouse is the founding and as far as I know only constant member of that band, and this definitely sounds like The Hospitals, although I could swear that it does have more of a one-man bedroom-psych feel than their last real release, I've Been To The Island Of Jocks And Jazz (Load Records, 2005). For example Stonehouse is a drummer/vocalist when The Hospitals play live (once again "as far as I know," which isn't very far), but the drums on here are pushed way into the background, and generally, or at least with the volume kinda low at 1AM, this sounds like a very loud and strange solo recording for masses of vocals and electric guitars. It's as if Blue Cheer recorded a loner bedroom psych album, only they did it with all of their concert gear, stacked up and plugged in right next to the mattress and pillows. (Actually that's not a good comparison - regarding volume and craziness, maybe, but the songwriting vernacular is much different - this is way weirder, much more avant-garde, no blues changes.) But anyway, I'm sure this is The Hospitals album that DJ Rick is talking about here (February 26, 2008 post), it probably has a sleeve, etc. (Update: this album also has a website.)

Metal Rouge Ephemeroptera 02 CDR
Deepchord Presents: Echospace The Coldest Season
The Band s/t
The Band Music From Big Pink
Mozart Requiem
William Parker & Hamid Drake Piercing the Veil
Fred Anderson & Hamid Drake From The River To The Ocean CD

Listened to this followup by Metal Rouge to their top-notch Winter Calling disc. That one achieved a haunted and sublime desolation all the way through, but this Ephemeroptera 02 disc is kinda all over the place. It's got some serious music on it, but I was put off by the way it jumped around from experiment to experiment, most of them with a notably more aggro tone than Winter. I'll let you know how the next listen goes.... Basic Channel fans take note - The Coldest Season is worthy, and, Deepchord Presents: Echospace wins for 'band name I'm most likely to get wrong, look up, then get wrong again 2 seconds later'.... Co-worker's been into The Band lately so we listened to their two classics. I said it a few years ago in Blastitude, and judging from today's evidence I still think it's true: The Band is great, of course, but Big Pink is about 5 times better. Compared to most 'classic rock' records The Band may be a masterpiece, but next to the free-flowing psychedelic soul of Big Pink half of it sounds like a bunch of show tunes from a Broadway musical about 'America,' I'm not kidding. On Big Pink it sounds like they're still wearing street clothes but on The Band they were most definitely starting to play dress-up. That said, "Whispering Pines", "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", and "Look Out Cleveland" are three of the most sublime tunes they ever did. Nice little Hamid Drake spotlight tonight - the duet album with William Parker is a good one - very grooving/pulse/trance-out music, you could dance your ass off to it, it's not really a 'free jazz' album - and I really like the one with Fred Anderson too. Despite the way it's billed, it's not a duet album - Jeff Parker plays guitar, Harrison Bankhead plays cello, piano & bass, and Josh Abrams plays bass and guimbri also, great Chicago lineup. The title track is fantastic - I heard it on the radio (WNUR) a while back and it was one of those deals where I sat in the parked car until the song was over, hoping the DJ would announce who it was. He did, and I bought the album a few days later, just like in the old days... The track reminded me of Sun City Girls, especially because of Parker's guitar. I don't think I've ever heard him play with Tortoise, his highest profile gig, but when I have heard him - on the first Azita album, at random improv gigs around Chicago - he's been sweet, not a JAZZ musician, not a POST-ROCK musician, just a guy playing MUSIC. And of course you could say that about Drake and Anderson too, they are all real musical treasures in this city and they all draw from a deeper well than the one marked POST-BOP. Tent City... "Arizona desert punks" garnering Don Cherry comparisons, released on the Night People label... wow, I'm digging this, more on these guys later...

Queen Elephantine Surya CDR
The Child Readers Music Heard Far Off CD
Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba Segu Blue CD
David Newlyn A Nervous State of Mind CS
Mozart Requiem CD
Steve Reich Drumming
The Other Side Of The Mirror: Bob Dylan Live At The Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965 DVD

I haven't really been listing much of the unsolicited stuff I get because I haven't really been listening to it. I am a grown human being with a busy modern life and only have time to listen to 30 or 40 albums a week, and not all of those are going to be brand new stuff I've never heard of that showed up in my mail pile. I mean, I some of those 30 or 40 are gonna be Led Zep albums and/or Dead shows and that's just the way it is. I'd never heard of Queen Elephantine before but the CDR they sent did make it into the player, and here's the reasons: weird name, weird art, "self-released CDR recorded in Hong Kong," slightly occult feel, "a long contemplative trip into the world of inner visions," but this is really just turgid stoner-metal, and just because a stoner-metal song is 65 minutes long does not make it automatically good. The basic sound of the band is acceptable, maybe even slightly idiosyncratic, and might have made an interesting 10-minute song, but for the last 40 minutes and especially the last 20 I couldn't believe it was still going. The Child Readers is a project with Jewelled Antler connections released by the Soft Abuse label, the 3rd or 4th such release I think. All of these discs have kind of gone right through me with nice sounds that don't stick (except of course for the Flying Canyon s/t masterpiece and Blood of the Sunworm by the Giant Skyflower Band... that's a good one), and indeed, the Child Readers play lots of nice sounds, some fairly glorious, like acoustic strings electrified and buzzing, and barely tangible keyboard sounds glittering in the distance, but the meandering/muttering/mumbling attempts at songwriting kinda negate the whole thing. It seems like an homage to the not-so-likable aspects of mid-period Tower Recordings... (is it just me or has Fraternity of Moonwalkers not held up so good?) Bassekou Kouyate is a ngoni player from Mali, and his CD is on the German label Out Here Records, which is distributed by Forced Exposure, which is who sent this promo. I don't think I would've picked this up otherwise, as it seems to be presented with that safe world music marketing sheen that Sublime Frequencies really deprogrammed us from, that sheen that SF associate Uncle Jim would call "beige" (which is kinda funny because FE distributes SF too), but the music itself is great. Basically, any live ngoni music with no-frills production is going to be great, and this is a ngoni quartet, which is crazy - the playing is so versatile and expansive I assumed there were other instruments on here. (C'mon, there's gotta be, right?) The Dylan DVD is a must-see for anyone remotely interested. I mean, it's not like it's all fantastic - I hope to never see nor hear the Dylan/Baez version of "With God On My Side" ever again - but everything here from all three festivals is presented rough and ready, with absolutely no modern-day talking heads edited in, which is enough recommendation to me. There are a couple interviews here and there that took place right then and there on the festival grounds, and Murray Lerner is a fine director in the rock verite style. (I also highly recommend his Isle of Wight movie.) One of the first songs on here, "North Country Blues" from an afternoon workshop, is a great example of how Bob can get a crowd to hang on every line of his songs as he delivers the story and message. Also from 1963 is a pretty searing version of "Only A Pawn In Their Game," and I think I actually prefer his 1963 stuff to the stirring and flashing and NEW but also kinda imprecise 1964 versions of "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Chimes of Freedom," which is actually kind of a strident letdown. But the electric set from 1965, or should I say the two songs he plays with the electric band.... wow. I can see what the hub-bub was about. I mean, opener "Maggie's Farm" really does just sound like a thug-punk runaway train, the drummer from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band not really knowing the song and just driving it straight ahead with no attempt at dynamics or nuance, Dylan's rhythm guitar basically inaudible so you can't really hear the song's one chord change when it actually does happen, Mike Bloomfield just GOONING OUT on lead guitar, slashing through the songs with his impudent spastic head-shake, and here's Bob who just two years earlier was wearing a tucked-in work-shirt and singing impassioned topical songs about the rights and dignity of workers, spitting out the words "I AIN'T GONNA WORK ON MAGGIE'S FARM NO MOAH!!!" I mean, how much more a thumb-nosing could the folk crowd get? Then he goes into a roaring version of "Like A Rolling Stone" and it's like, my god, sure it's loud, but how could the audience not realize they were hearing a work of genius? I mean "Maggie's Farm" is a nightmare that hurtles by in a near-incoherent rush, but "Rolling Stone" is heavenly no matter how raw the presentation. Then Bob leaves, gets cheered, booed, invited back out all wild-eyed, lit up, and sweaty with an acoustic borrowed from Johnny Cash, asking for an E harmonica which someone throws up on stage, going right into imprecise but flashing versions of "Tambourine Man" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (another highly appropriate title - did he have this all scripted out or what?) and then that's it, rock history and therefore art history being made big time.

Preston Ari Swirnoff Maariv CD
The Renderizors Submarine CD
Hank Williams The Best of...(Millennium Collection) CD
old Abbott & Costello radio shows
Sade Lovers Rock

Here's two new ones from the Last Visible Dog - the CD by Swirnoff of the Monosov-Swirnoff duo is subtitled Four Pieces of Electroacoustic Music, with the titles "For Piano and Electronics," "For a Room Full of Organs," "For Electric Guitar," and "For Four Tape Machines," so you pretty much know what you're getting, and the tracks do not disappoint - this is a nice album of extended experimental dream-sound pieces. The cover design looks like a 1950s electronic music LP too. The Renderizors is Brian and Maryrose Crook of The Renderers playing with two of the guys from Sandoz Lab Technicians, and this album Submarine was recorded back in 2000-2001, and even if it took 7 years this thing deserves release - the minimalist psych/noise of the Technicians is a very effective complement to the haunted country songs of the Crooks. A lot of these tracks are little more than a spooked vocal with occasional haunted whale sounds ringing far in the distance, and it really works. Somewhere on like Track 5 they get LOUD for awhile and that works too. Other times it gets so sparse and dusty you think the song might just dry up and completely evaporate. Weird (good) album. These Abbott & Costello shows are pretty nuts. Hard to focus on while at work, but I just heard a bit where an unctuous couple are saying to each other "You're the only woman in the world..." "Oh darling, you're the only man in the world..." "Well sweetheart, you're the only woman in the world..." "You're the only man..." at which point Costello blurts out "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YOU'VE JUST BEEN LISTENING TO ADAM AND EVE!!!!!" There are constant ads for various tobacco products ... in fact, they just gave away 300,000 Camel cigarettes to the "Yank of the Week," a US fighter pilot who had been patrolling the Aegean seaboard when he noticed a German aerial unit about to attack an Allied convoy. He swooped in and destroyed 7 planes all by himself, while his team took out an additional 6. So, they're gonna give all 300,000 cigs to this guy? (Or I should say "they gave?"...) Downloaded Sade's Lovers Rock on a whim because I remember Steve Shelley really dug it or something, and goddamn it's good! So smooth. There's even a song on here, "Slave Song," that has such a Rhythm & Sound/Burial Mix feel that I wonder if it was directly influenced - the Sade album came out in 2000 so it is possible.

Terry Callier What Color Is Love?
Dave E & the Cool Marriage Counselors 7"
Elektronavn Cosmic Continuum CD
Family Underground Salt of the Sun CD
Jay Bayles Marla CDR
Sleep Dopesmoker
LOST 4:5 "The Constant"

I had no idea who Terry Callier was at all until Plastic Crimewave tipped me off about a year ago with his Secret History of Chicago Music strip that runs in The Reader every week. Hmm, progressive Chicago soul from the early 1970s with a nude woman on the cover? How did I miss this so completely? Finally heard the album itself today and hell yes, it's even better than I expected. I actually don't think I can describe it yet. Callier has a strong booming voice, but neither he nor the songs overbear, even though they are huge with strings and flourishes, similar to (and better than) an album like Donnie Hathaway's Extension of a Man (which also came out in 1973), because at heart these are basically folk songs and they are good songs at that. Comparisons to Love aren't out of line, with lots of acoustic guitar in the songs, though this comes from a more Midwestern/Rust Belt place. Thick with ideas and emotions, not a mellow album (although the second-to-last song "You Don't Care" is lovely, near-instrumental except for angelic lady vocals singing the title). Highly recommended, a lot to take in, more later.



Alright, I'm gonna declare the Elektronavn CD to be the real deal. These are two side-long psych jams with an approach that, unlike the good but not as startling Family Underground CD on the same label, has nothing to do with 1990s/2000s drone. Elektronavn, the work of one man named Magnus Olsen Majmon, takes the idea of drone and plays it with a minimal/ritual/tribal/funk/harsh zoned-out seriousness that harks back to the dark proto-industrial side of the 1970s & the 1980s. Via overdubs he layers an ancient Japanese vibe, scary Ligeti vocals, wild Varese percussion, rubbery bass that actually makes me think of Bootsy.... this thing is otherworldly and a little harsh, actually the first record I've ever heard that I could compare to Karuna Khyal Alomoni 1985 in any specific way. I had to pull out Sleep Dopesmoker for the first time in awhile after reading the lyrics on Julian Cope's site and having a "No WAY he really says all this shit" moment, but yeah, he really does, even "Desert legion smoke covenant is complete/Herb bails retied on to backs of beasts." As Cope points out, this song is intentionally funny, but it's also very serious as the perfectly played and developed 63-minute length attests. An amazing achievement. Holy shit, LOST... top 5 episodes ever, right? Some of the best time-travel shit I've ever seen, and Jeremy Davies as Daniel Faraday has gone from annoying me to being totally awesome, I loved him in this episode. Clearly LOST has a big debt to Alan Moore, and I'm starting to think that because actual Alan Moore adaptations don't usually turn out very good, the whole purpose of LOST is to essentially adapt Alan Moore - his ideas, his story structures, his characterizations, etc - without having to do justice to an actual unfilmable and fan-beloved Alan Moore story. So far Season 4 is where it's really starting to click, it's been great...

Sir Richard Bishop Elektronika Demonika
Sir Richard Bishop Fingering the Devil
Sir Richard Bishop While My Guitar Violently Bleeds
Grateful Dead Dick's Picks #12 (disc 3)
Grateful Dead Workingman's Dead
Various Artists The Doo Wop Box
John Martyn Solid Air

Like other maniacs I first heard about Elektronika Demonika back in the 1990s when Rick Bishop was interviewed by Popwatch magazine (online reprint by Perfect Sound Forever here). Back in those pre-knightdom days he described the piece as "ear-shattering, dark electronics and radio communications gathered from various uncommon global frequencies, some of which were recorded from unauthorized satellite systems. Pretty odd stuff," and then added, "It probably won't be released for awhile." Sure enough, it wasn't released until 2006 and I'm just now hearing it today for the first time. In some ways it's more groovin' than I expected, certainly for the first few minutes, but in other ways it's a full-on solo noise piece, in the heavily overdubbed and edited 'soundtrack' vein, more reminiscent of certain 1980s noise than 2000s. And, especially for an album released in an edition of 666 on the date 6/6/06, the 'scary voice' moments at the end of side one and beginning of side two REALLY WORK. Playing this sheds yet more light on why Sun City Girls sound like they do, and just how many different things each member of the trio brought to the table. (As the Sir Rich website says, "There is NO GUITAR on this record.") As soon as Demonika ended and the iPod went right into the ripping solo acoustic version of "Abydos" that opens the Fingering the Devil album, I immediately knew I was gonna listen to that whole thing too, a fiery studio session recorded during an afternoon off in London, England during a 2005 tour. I think it's his best all-acoustic no-overdubs album, rippling with the combative confidence that can only be honed by taking your show on the road. And from there the iPod went right into another SRB album, the great While My Guitar Violently Bleeds. This one starts acoustic with another 7-minute flamenco rippler but then the electric guitars get broken out and the blood starts flowing for the next two tracks, each one twice as long as the previous. Actually, the closing side-longer is a pretty beautiful raga in which bold and flowing acoustic extrapolates over an electric tampura-style drone. Another excellent album that in places rivals Elektronika Demonika for darkness, except this time with guitars. This is my first time hearing anything by John Martyn whatsoever, although I do own a 1998 issue of The Wire that has a great Sun City Girls article by Douglas Wolk and John Martyn is on the cover! Truly, everything has come full circle and I have aligned with the cosmos, just in time for this Martyn stuff to knock me right back on my ass. He's a real soul singer who can really power-belt, and I also wasn't ready for how groovy and funky the music gets, weird tribal disco fusion rock, heavy on the looped/echoed guitar, that honestly sounds 5-10 years ahead of its time for 1974, but then again very much of its time due to all the wah-wah clavinet. And Martyn can also do the melismatic croon, as he does on the rather stunning album opener/title track, with his gloriously and ironically liquid delivery of the line "when you're living on solid air.........."

Elektronavn Cosmic Continuum CD
Om Pilgrimage
Cubs vs. Giants (spring training game on WGN Radio with your hosts Pat Hughes & Ron Santo)

The Ikuisuus label from Great Britain put out the surprisingly scorching/thundering Taurpis Tula LP Cadillac Sitting Like a Ton of Lead last year, and now they've sent along a batch of 4 or 5 new CDs. I've listened to two so far, Salt of the Sun by Family Underground (see last post) and Cosmic Continuum by Elektronavn. Had no idea who Elektronavn was but there was no resisting this thing with its crude psychedelic Quasigyptian pasted-on chipboard gatefold cover art, weird ancient/future artist name (actually one guy playing all the instruments and his real (?) name is even better: Magnus Olsen Majmon), two 'side-long' tracks called simply "Cosmic Continuum I" and "Cosmic Continuum II," with a shout-out in the thanks list to "Yoga and Buddhistic Philosophy," and the music itself completely lives up to all of that, while still being a massive stretched-out left-turn from that. More on 'that' later, I guess... this is the first time I've listened to the newest Om album since a flurry of spins when it came out back in October. I've always liked it but today it sounded better than ever... couldn't believe it when coworker turned on the radio and there was Pat & Ron right in the middle of calling a Cubs game, absolutely live, as if it wasn't 20 degrees outside and every spare space in the city covered with 5 inches of week-old frozen snow. The game, of course, was taking place in the 75 degree weather of Arizona - the Cactus League, they call it - and the Cubs even won, 10-1 or some shit, against "the Giants" - I guess that's San Francisco, right? I don't follow any of the details but I do like the game, and Pat & Ron are a fine comedy team, both intentional and un-. In between pitches Pat brought up a player, I forget his name, who had recently gone vegetarian. Now it is well known that Ron has diabetes, so you'd think he'd be conscientious about how changes in diet can improve or degrade one's overall health, but he could not believe this guy was a vegetarian - in fact, you could hear him sorta scoffing and growling about it. Pat said that the player changed his diet after reading an article on the meat industry in one of his wife's magazines, to which Ron blurted out, "Well, there's a lot of that going around!" Right after that there was a base hit or something and they never got back to it.

Velvet Underground Gymnasium
Family Underground Salt of the Sun CD
Metallica ...And Justice For All
Guided by Voices Bee Thousand
Stars of the Lid The Ballasted Orchestra

Alright, this just-discovered Gymnasium boot is ridiculous. If you're at all interested grab it now. It's probably the sharpest sounding VU boot I've ever heard, made sharper still by some vicious playing. This was from a show at a NYC club called the Gymnasium, some time in the spring of 1967, just a few months before the September recording of White Light/White Heat, and in fact the set includes what is purportedly the first ever live version of "Sister Ray," indeed about 19 minutes long and right in line with what they were about to lay down in the studio. (Was this version Side A of the Sweet Sister Ray 2LP? One song on here - "Guess I'm Falling In Love" - did already appear on the Peel Slowly and See box set.) You might've also heard that the new never-before-heard song "I'm Not A Young Man Anymore" is a good one, and indeed it is a great one, a 7-minute steamrolling pissed-off scorcher with a slashing semi-Eastern guitar riff by Morrison, great Lou vocal hook ("Heeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyy I'M NOT A YOUNG MAN ANYMORE!!"), nutso Lou guitar chords & leads that link the raveup in "European Son" to the raveout in "What Goes On," great Cale bass-playing (the way he flurries it up a little on the turnarounds, much like he did in "Waiting For My Man" underneath Lou singing "feeling dirty more dead than alive" etc), unbelievable. Apparently 100 vinyl copies were pressed up of this and sold out in a few minutes on eBay. And from Velvet Underground to Family Underground, first time I've heard this acclaimed current band from Denmark, their new CD Salt of the Sun on the Ikuisuus label in a nice double-fold-out digipak-thing. Powerful heavy psych-drone stuff, three long tracks in the 25 minute range. Powerful, yes, but I wonder if this is all they do - they inhabit a big valley but I don't know if they ever leave it, or if they can leave it, or if it matters either way.

Current 93 All the Pretty Little Horses
Groundhogs Split
Metallica Master of Puppets
Pink Reason Cleaning the Mirror
Les Rallizes Denudes Deeper Than The Night
Nest/Mhfs 3" CDR
Gown For The Maples CD
Les Rallizes Denudes Deeper Than The Night

King Tubby & Friends Dub Like Dirt 1975-1977 CD
Bassholes Long Way Blues 1996-1998
Ashtray Navigations A Monument to British Rock 3LP (sides 1, 2 & 5)
Nest/Mhfs 3" CDR

I truly love this Bassholes album. I missed out on the Gibson Bros when they were happening, not to mention the first three Bassholes albums, so this album on Matador became my introduction to the genius of Don Howland. I checked out a couple other Bassholes things after this but nothing matched it - I think because only 4 or so songs on here are 'band' songs (the band being the raw duo of Howland and drummer Bim Sherman), and the rest are Howland solo, super-lonesome weirdo 4-track songs, usually just a couple eerie and hollow electric guitar tracks, with Howland sorta croaking out the words in a bone-chilling quiet style, like he's trying to hide the songs from his kids upstairs (you can hear them stomping on the floor above his basement 'studio' during one track). And with some of these lyrics you can see why he would hide 'em, stuff like "Did I really kill my wife/Or was it just a dream?/It felt like being there/Purple is the color/Of her lover's pubic hair," or "I loved you/Your tits and arms/Je t'adore/Your tits and arms," or "Afrodite, your hair bushy black/The love in your brown eyes is stronger than crack/Born of Uranus's castrated schlong/Your magic girdle has inspired this song." The album closer "Turpentine" has some incredibly bad-ass rock'n'roll lyrics like "Some folks like water/Some fucks like wine/But me I like the taste of uh TURPENTINE". And of course, there's always the horrific revenge song right before that, "Angel of Death," which I'll just let you hear for yourself some day. So, maniacs, tell me, does Howland have any other recordings in this particular shivery style? Didn't he release an album as Don Howland at some point this decade? Maybe it's similar - I wanna hear it no matter what it sounds like, but this shivery spooky fragile stuff w/the sick lyrics is amazing. Nest is a New Zealand duo of Andrew Scott, who now lives in Los Angeles and is also part of the excellent Metal Rouge duo, and one Nigel Wright. On this 3" they collaborate with another NZ artist called MHFS on an excellent little 12-minute power-glow drone piece. I mean seriously, it's good shit - here's what Mr. Scott himself sez: "Keep an eye out for MHFS - all his best stuff is out of print, but he's a fucking genius and NZ's best kept secret, I cannot rate him highly enough...."

Ashtray Navigations Monument to British Rock 3LP
Grateful Dead Harper College '70 bootleg CS
David Newlyn A Nervous State of Mind CS

Finally finished A Monument to British Rock tonight in a single sides-three-through-six sitting. I had already listened to Side 3 a week ago, but needed a refresher and the album flowed along very nicely from there and I easily went the distance. Three of the six sides are by the Phil Todd/Ben Reynolds/Alex Neilson trio as heard extensively on the Love That Whirrs CD for Last Visible Dog - together they play a weird shuffling skiffling free-folk meets negative-space fusion/drone hybrid, here for three side-longers. Side 4 is also a side-longer in which the duo of Phil Todd and Melanie Crowley achieve the same feel but with no drums, and less of the relatively rococo string action that Reynolds brings. Sides 1 and 5 are Phil Todd solo and each feature four shorter overdubbed tracks. Side 5 is my favorite one of the whole thing, with each track a separate brilliant glowing setting, more varied than the strange 'electro-tampura' drone-fields he plays on the jam sides, which aren't especially distinguishable from each other, but in a good way that fully inhabits a rich weird atmosphere that really doesn't have much to do with British Rock or anything else except maybe some strange unnamed symptoms of the universe and how they play out when you're lazing on a sunny afternoon. Nice fat LP sleeve too for those three slabs, cool B&W graphics. The Grateful Dead tape was at the rad Gallery Bookstore on Belmont (the one with the sign that says "Town Cleaners") for seven bucks, stuffed right into the music books section. I think this is the first time I've seen a pre-computers Dead tape and figured I should grab it as a totem of those tape-trading days, before its legacy evaporates under the weight of a million external hard drives. This tape has a generic J-card design that could be used for any show - the spine says "GRATEFUL DEAD" with a " / / " thing so you can fill out the date yourself, and the 'cover' is a crude xerox graphic that sets the classic skull & roses image in between "A" and "B" track listing forms. This particular trader just wrote "70" instead of "5/2/70" and even spelled Harpur College wrong, but hey...................it's all good. This show was one of their "An Evening With The Grateful Dead" marathons in which they would start by playing an acoustic set, then sit in on a New Riders of the Purple Sage set, and then come out again as the Dead and play a full electric set, often two. On this night they played two, and it's thought by many to be the band's GREATEST SHOW EVER, available in its soundboard-recorded entirety (except for the NRPS set) as Dick's Pick #8. This version is an audience recording and, being on a mere 90-minute cassette, is naturally incomplete, but it's still a great way to hear the show. For the first time I can really see why some people prefer AUD's, because you do get a lot more of the energy of the night and the venue. Heard from the audience, the acoustic set sounds really raw and surprisingly energetic, with great versions of "I Know You Rider," "Friend of the Devil," "Dire Wolf," possibly the best "Black Peter" ever into a "Candyman" tease right into a rip-roaring "Cumberland Blues" and more, every song is great. Also, AUDs make a whole lot more sense on a hand-made cassette than they do as downloaded or streaming mp3s. When the music has to travel from 1970 stage to somewhere in the 1970 audience to tape to tape to tape to tape and etc all the way to your stereo in 2008, it just feels like that much more of a privilege to be hearing it. The electric side features a Stephen>Cryptical>Drums>Other One>Cryptical medley and then ends with "Cosmic Charlie," only about half of the actual 2nd set, but sweet tape and right now I think I prefer it to the poorly tagged iPod-only version I have of the Dick's Pick... Still liking the David Newlyn tape, fine warm/cold weird/sweet electronic avant pop instrumentals, and good length at 32 minutes.

The Pope Do You Wanna Boogie? 3" CDR
Nessmuk Flies Free 3" CDR
Gang Wizard Live In Paris 3" CDR
Panda Bear "Bros"
Tony Allen "Ole (Mortiz Von Oswald remix)"
Surface of the Earth Interference LP
Enos Slaughter On Sunday LP
Dave E & the Cool Marriage Counselors Searching For Sears 7"
Panzer Talk s/t 12"

The Pope is another band I've never heard of before released by the Abandon Ship label. Heavy metalloid noise rock that does in fact have a boogie/shuffle feel in places but mostly heavy prog/thrash with absurd squeaky distorto vocals. Very "Providence, RI". Anyway, it's kinda odd to be at a place in time when I listen to something and say "It's good!" and "I probably won't ever listen to it again" in the same breath. Basically there is a huge class of bands across the world that are good enough to, let's say, be part of a good show where every band puts on a good set and the energy never drags, but yet they haven't figured out how to make a record that can really be cared about or considered important. Should these hundreds of bands still put out records? Sure, might as well, especially if it's on CDR or cassette... their not-so-essential record can always be someone's introduction into the idea of non-traditional music and the independent short-run releasing thereof, all important concepts, and the act of putting something out there usually still moves things another step on the evolutionary trail, whether it's upward to something that is actually great or important, or downward into an early retirement. I don't mean to get all thoughtful like this in a review of The Pope, for the record they're a not-bad noise-rock band. Alright, let's throw another Abandon Ship 3" by someone I've never heard of into the player and see how it fares... this is Nessmuk with Flies Free. This goes back to the shadowy psych-noise that I associate more with the label. Still not exceptional, though a longer and rather ecstatically-played electric drone/raga called "The Diamond Hard Grindstone of Heaven" stands out. I would play it on the radio, probably even more than once! And hey, we've got time, let's get the remaining new 3" from Abandon Ship in here... it's good ol' Gang Wizard (someone I have heard of!) with Live in Paris. Ah, Gang Wizard... always prolific, always jamming, always piercingly noisy and aggro as hell... they never really put out a bad record because they always just do what they do, but how many Gang Wizard records does any one person need? I would say one or two, with three acceptable in some rare cases. I probably have about seven. The best is Byzantine Headache, a CD they put out on Load a couple years ago. It's great, and I think it's because it's a collection of various recordings from different places and/or times and therefore more edited and considered than their usual release, which is "Here's a crazy 20-minute jam or three we played live not too long ago". Like this one, recorded Live in Paris, which sounds fine and Gang Wizardy, but again, I don't really plan on listening to it a second time, but then I just read the blurb Gang Wizard member Brian Miller wrote about it over on the Abandon Ship website, which makes it sound really interesting because it supplies lots of context that describes the show itself, which kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier, that so many of these bands are important in that they can be a crucial part of an exciting show/event, even when the records don't match up. Anyway. "Bros" by Panda Bear came up on the shuffle and deserves a mention by itself - yes I think he sounds like Brian Wilson, and yes I think his music can be awesome. This song is anyway - what a joyous epic. I don't know what the rest of the album is like yet and I'm not even sure I need to. Went to Reckless and someone who probably shopped at Fusetron a lot in the late 90s-early 2000s had recently dumped a lot of their collection there. I picked up two used LPs, and I'm very happy to get something by Surface of the Earth on vinyl. This band from Wellington, New Zealand was kind of revered for a minute or two in certain freenoise/drone/NZ nerd-circles back in the mid-late 1990s heyday. I was in Wellington in the year 1999 and my host actually made it a point to show me Thistle Hall, the building where SotE recorded all their music, as a cultural landmark. Well, listening to this LP it's easy to see why. I'm not sure if the amassed sound of humming flatlined guitar/amp combos has ever been more beautiful. (RST is the only other artist I can think of that rivals it.) They are masters of controlling a soft/loud balance, and I don't mean that some parts are soft and some parts are loud, I mean that ALL OF THEIR PARTS are both VERY SOFT and VERY LOUD at the EXACT SAME TIME. I was always kinda interested in hearing the Enos Slaughter LP, and now that D. Charles Speer & the Helix (featuring two of the same members) is on a roll the curiosity has been re-piqued. It's an interesting album and an interesting band, but now seems like kind of a semi-awkward transitional album, like psychedelic bluegrass music is trying to emerge out of the cavernous black hole that is the NNCK oeuvre, and it's still awkward and nascent, covered in protoplasm, not quite finding its legs. For every wicked thicket of strange-strings future-bluegrass burn there's an equal or greater amount of time given to freenoise fumbling. I prefer the CDR they put out on the Tequila Sunrise label - I think that was a live set and it has a more focused feel... love the Dave E 7-inch even more than before, "Searching Through Sears" is such a great song!... Y'know, I'm sorry I called the Panzer Talk record 'lite' a few posts ago. That's not really fair, that's a word for like smooth jazz or dentist office music. I think I was referring mostly to the vocals, they're kind of awkward and indie sounding, but what's wrong with that? If anything, this record harkens back to 1990s indie-rock nicely, when as a genre it sounded more post-punk than post-Pitchfork, a pre-Pro Tools sound, when that clean-tone two-guitar interplay could still sound bleak and dusty even when the songs were poppy. I don't know what I'm talking about really but the record has grown on me.

The Melvins The Maggot
The Melvins The Bootlicker
The Melvins The Crybaby
The Modern Lovers s/t
Corleone 10 Yrs Everything I Own Is Broken Or Bent comp DVD

The Melvins put out so much stuff and I'm pretty sure it's all worth hearing (even when it's not worth hearing - they're one of those kinda bands) but The Maggot, from 1999, is the last one I really paid attention to and I'm still chewing on it. "AMAZON" is one of their greatest jams and the whole album is heavy and satisfying in a classic almost-no-bullshit Melvins way. I remember when this album came out it was the rage of the pizza place I worked at. Every delivery driver had a dubbed cassette of it for their car and we would come back from deliveries humming the riff from "AMAZON" and other workers would start humming along while working, sorta like we were in a musical. It was part of a conceptual trilogy of releases that came out within a few months of each other on the Ipecac label, in fact referred to as "The Trilogy". I liked the quiet record too (The Bootlicker), also a good delivery-driving soundtrack, but I never did hear The Crybaby until today (more on that in a minute). They actually came to town on the Trilogy tour (this is Lincoln, Nebraska so cool touring shows were pretty rare) and no less than three delivery drivers called in sick that night to go to the show. I was the third - not too cool, even though my shift was only a 5 to 8 (it was an early all-ages show). I told the shift manager I couldn't make it and he just said, "Oh, you're going to the Melvins too? [big sigh] We'll be fine." The show was amazing - they played two sets with no opening act, and the first set was their 'annoying and/or cover songs' set, starting out with a impressively straight-faced cover of "Tequila", moving on to things like "Okie From Muskogee," a few songs from the The Bootlicker, asking for a volunteer to come up and sing a song that turned out to be "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and amidst it all raging through a barnstormingly awesome and note-perfect version of "Now I'm Here" by Queen. They all wore like hooded friar's robes (except Dale who of course wore nothing but a speedo) and bassist Kevin Rutmanis (ex-Cows, a Lincoln native, he had family in the audience!) had shaved off his eyebrows. ("It's a good look," he said off-mic when Buzz pointed it out.) After about 45 minutes of this goofery they left for intermission, and then the second set was inaugurated with touring guitarist David Scott Stone (a founding member of Get Hustle and the increasingly legendary Slug as well as a reknowned Los Angeles noise/etc musician) walking out and laying down a solo amp-hugging mad-scientist noise piece that seemed to last for about 25 minutes before Buzz came out, adding free-form dirge guitar for what seemed like another 29 minutes, and then Kevin and Dale came out and I swear they went right into something like "Night Goat" and proceeded to go OFF from there for at least an hour straight, Melvins play the hits, one dirge-pummeling epic after another, including "AMAZON". I think the only classic they didn't play was the "Hung Bunny"/"Roman Dog Bird" suite. Today I listened to the whole trilogy back-to-back and it brought back this fine show-going memory. The Maggot and The Bootlicker still sound excellent. I'm hearing The Crybaby for the first time today and it definitely has its moments but I'm not too crazy about it. I do like the 14-minute song that Tool plays on, it's pretty gross and noisy and it has a phone conversation where someone (probably someone in Tool, maybe even Maynard!) says of someone "she has a voice like a fuckin' modem, dude!," which is amazing. After sitting down and watching a good chunk of this new DVD on Corleone Records that puts together almost two hours worth of music-video-type footage by bands on their roster, I was thinking how all the eccentricity and obscurity and creativity reminded me of watching Night Flight when I was 13. I kept skipping around, checking out different things, and ended up watching a video by Ukes of Spaces Corners County with the commentary track on (the DVD has two or three different ones), when one of the commentators said, "This reminds me of watching Night Flight when I was 13." And even if I don't know or care about all the Corleone bands, that's a pretty special warm feeling. Fuck YouTube, I wish there was a nationwide TV channel that was programmed with just random weird post-punk post-everything music stuff. C'mon, it can be from midnight to 8AM, just let me do it. And when you do let me, I'll definitely bring along a copy of this Corleone thing for the library, because there are quite a few careworthy bands on here - the aforementioned Ukes, the great Barnacled whose live performance clip is ridiculous, Mindflayer, Snake Apartment (hilarious weirdo clip with disgusting 'special effects' and is that a southern boogie undercurrent I detect in the music?), Colin Langenus from USA is a Monster, the rather crazy Landed (live clip from like 1999 and Brian Gibson of Lightning Bolt is a pretty terrific drummer), Night Wounds, an impressively progged-out live clip of Alec K. Redfearn & the Eyesores, hip-hop duo Lorna Doom, and more (I haven't seen everything on here yet).

Diamondhead Dirty Realism CDR
David Newlyn A Nervous State of Mind CS
Nuno Canavarro Plux Quba CD
Led Zeppelin Physical Graffiti
Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour (Women's Names)
Silent Running DVD

Diamondhead is the new thing by Lonnie Methe, he of Naturaliste, one of my favorite local bands from my Nebraska daze.... now he's in Austin, TX working with some new players and they're doing jammy improvised stuff that is a little less noise and a little more rock than Naturaliste, actually ending up somewhere close to an xNOBBQx vibe... I realize that won't be a recommendation for some of you but it is for me, I dig that xNOBBQx LP, it's downright chilling. On the other hand, this Diamondhead disc is kind of long and seems indifferently assembled, but there are excellent moments and I'd like to hear their jams presented with the more rigorous editing and conceptualization that went into some of the old Naturaliste stuff (and Methe's solo stuff as Arnoux). But hey, the title is "Dirty Realism," so, you know.... the David Newlyn tape is on Abandon Ship, who just keep cranking things out I have barely or never heard of. No idea who Newlyn is but he's put out a pretty great tape, oft-perfect retro-future keyboard dream music that works in would-be room-clearing high-pitch test-tones without subverting the beauty. You might remember my Popol Vuh award, well, I'm gonna start giving out a Plux Quba award and David Newlyn is the first guy to get it. In fact I put on Plux Quba next, and as far as today was concerned the Newlyn tape actually sounded better. Canavarro's classic just got drowned out by the workplace, which certainly happens often and to albums that are substantially less quiet and/or even greater musically. This Theme Time Radio Hour is singlehandedly notable for introducing me to the amazing and otherworldly Martian doo-wop "Zindy Lou" by The Chimes. Other highlights include Buddy Holly doing "Peggy Sue", Sandy Denny doing "Pretty Polly", girl group The Jaynettes doing the great "Sally Go Round The Roses," and the man, Bo Diddley doing "Mona." Seeing Danny Boyle's Sunshine a couple days ago inspired me to rent Silent Running, a 1972 movie that I've only seen a few scenes from once on very late-night TV (too late for me to stay awake) and other than that via stills in Starlog magazine when I was 8 years old. I could probably get into it, I was digging the space freighter design for sure, but the mis en scene of the interior sequences was reminding me of CHiPs or something, and it wasn't as 'contemplative' as I hoped it would be, mainly thanks to Bruce Dern and his character's frequent outbursts of overzealotry. Didn't even make it to the part where he starts silently running before I had to return it... I guess once the other humans are out of the story and he doesn't have anyone to yell at it probably gets better... I'm not very good at watching movies.

Velvet Underground Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes
Velvet Underground Columbus 1966
Stars of the Lid The Tired Sounds of...
Michael Yonkers No Kidding CD
Neil Young Dead Man
ANP Quarterly #9
Harmony Korine on Letterman
VU bootleg day... no matter what the fidelity (and the Columbus recording has gotta be one of the most infidelic bootlegs ever) I could listen to this stuff all day... the sound of the Columbus one of course ends up working in its favor, spreading out a shadowy and oozing dream cosmos entirely upon the head of a pin in the middle of the deep space inside an atom. Set opener "Melody Laughter" (31 minutes long) sparked a nice discussion with co-worker about how what they were doing was basically ancient music, a raga played on one chord, so it ignored all that bullshit like time and progress, and it could really only be learned by community practice, so it ignored all that bullshit like authority and scholarship, so it was true American freedom/trance music that rang of not only Native American sweatlodge pulses but also droning cracked folk songs like Clarence Ashley's "Cuckoo," which brought Henry Flynt's 'novabilly' classics You Are My Everlovin' and Purified By The Fire into the discussion. All that from "Melody Laughter".... The Michael Yonkers disc is new stuff on the quality Portugal label Ruby Red Editora. It's billed as "SOLO NOISE GUITAR" and it's intense, a definitive document of the absurd industrial techno noise that he gets out of that homemade future cyborg guitar. 11 tracks, 37 minutes, what you see is what you get, very basic presentation, and if you have it on at low volumes it might not sound varied or especially interesting, but turn it up and there are chasms and canyons and all kinds of lost zones in this stuff. Picked up the great new issue of ANP Quarterly with a definitive non-obfuscatory interview with cover subject Harmony Korine, and stuff on artists I'd never heard of like Tomoo Gokita and Leigh Ledare and Uta Barth - the large-scale reproductions of their work are amazing. On the magazine's advice I checked out Harmony Korine's appearances on Letterman. There's one from 1995, right after Kids came out, and it's great, but the one I came across first was this one from 1997 promoting Gummo, and man, of course people are gonna talk about his nervous and bedraggled appearance (not to mention the horrid disgustovision YouTube quality) but his deceptively skillful comic delivery is really something. Go watch it now before I spoil some of the jokes, like when, talking about James Cameron's Titanic, also out that year, Dave asks, "Would you one day like to direct a film on that scale?" "Yeah, the second one. I'd do the sequel." Which is a great joke in itself, which Dave may or may not realize as he asks, "And how would that go??" "I'd use a rowboat. I don't know if it'd sink." Dave pulls out a copy of Korine's just-published book A Crackup At The Race Riots and makes fun by flipping to a page that has only one word on it: "Hepburn." Korine says "Yeah that was supposed to be the first page... but it ended up being like page 67." Just before that, Dave asks "Are you a novelist?" Korine says, "I wanted to write the Great American Novel. Or just a novel. Well, I just wanted it to be American." So good.