DEREK MONYPENY Limerence CS (UNDERWATER EXPERIENCE)
CIRCLE FEATURING VERDE Tower LP (FULL CONTACT)
RHYTON s/t LP (THRILL JOCKEY)
FEMMINIELLI / ARAIGNEE split 7" (FIXTURE)
ARAN RUTH Silver Wings 7" (THE BEEHIVE RECORDING COMPANY)

Full disclosure: Derek Monypeny has written for Blastitude, has had a beer with Blastitude, and will likely have a beer with Blastitude again. He's also carving out new heavy psychedelic space with the solo electric guitar and electric oud, and I like to listen to it, so I'm going to go ahead and tell you about it even though he and I know each other in real life. An Arizona native, Derek lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years, where he played guitar in a few different band contexts, most notably Oaxacan, a group that also served as Sir Richard Bishop's Freak of Araby Ensemble for a 2009 US tour. Not too long ago Derek moved way up the coast to Portland, where he has been doing solo performances on the aforementioned stringed instruments. This tape release documents some of these from the summer of 2011, in which Derek, using tastefully deployed effects and small and patient gestures, digs deep into those thin places where all kinds of inner space visions can flourish. You could talk about the complex social organization and communication among undiscovered species of highly intelligent insects deep under the sands of Mars . . . or any pulsing pattern of pure electricity hurtling somewhere through deep space . . .  or shortwave radio broadcasts of the latest tunes by mutant Touareg troubadours roaming the dark side of the moon . . . etcetera. I also can't help but think of a few lines that have always stayed with me from an essay on solo improvisation, written by Jeff Fuccillo way back in September of 1995, in the third issue of his Woolly Bugger zine: "...every sound made by the solo acoustic improviser plays into empty silent space and thus 'adds to the empty space of silence' that is the only (non)accompaniment given to the solo acoustic improviser's playing." This awareness of and interplay with silence is, paradoxically, the only way for music to truly be heavy (bands can use it too, not just soloists), and it's all over this tape. 100 copies on professionally duplicated chrome tape, buy it from Underwater Experience or Zum (though I think he/they/someone should put this on vinyl as it makes a nice followup to his 2011 debut solo oud LP Don't Bring Me Down, Bruce). P.S. For some upcoming DM show dates, including a couple with Bill Orcutt, click this Facebook link.

My favorite album by Circle, out of the four or five I've actually heard, has always been Tower, which I don't think the band even intends as a real album. On the very back of this new LP reissue it even says, right at the top, "slightly disappointing jams from 2006"! That's really odd, because this is literally the only Circle album I've heard that I haven't found slightly disappointing. Still, I can maybe understand where they're coming from, as Tower isn't even technically by Circle, it's by Circle Featuring Verde, and seems to have been recorded quickly, in a couple days or maybe even a few hours, the band using a single live setup, no apparent overdubs, possibly all improvised/jammed, so maybe they consider it rather throwaway or at least one-off. Me, on the other hand? I'm hearing multiple electric pianos (a favorite instrument of mine) playing mellifluous zoned out deep groove cloud paddle, pushed by genius swinging percussion, a hybrid of jazz, rock, electronic folk, and psychedelic trance, all combining to make one of the most beautiful meditation + motion albums I've heard in any genre from the last 12 years at least. It was originally CD only, released by CD-only label Last Visible Dog, way back in 2007, when CDs still mattered a little bit, but it always seemed like a great candidate for vinyl, partly because at 44 minutes it can actually reasonably fit on a single LP, but mainly because there's something about a bunch of gentle electric piano brain massage that just whispers "analog," of course. (Oddly enough, I see the CD is going for more than the LP on Discogs... that may change with this reissue, though CDs might stay valid if online file sharing keeps getting decimated, and rumored ISP threats are made good on....)

Just refreshingly experienced that increasingly rare cultural chain reaction where you read something about a band, become interested in their music, and then go out and buy their new record. Namely, I read an interview with Dave Shuford last week, then went out and bought the self-titled debut LP by his band Rhyton. He's been in several bands from at least the late 1990s to the present, most notably the No-Neck Blues Band and D. Charles Speer & the Helix, and when the interview revealed him to be in a new instrumental space-jamming electric-guitar power trio, maybe even something like Guru Guru, I had to check it out. The blurb by Reckless compared them to Earthless, which in particular inspired me to listen, because I like the idea of Earthless (they too are a heavy instrumental space-jamming electric-guitar power trio), but I've never quite liked their execution of the idea, whereas Shuford is a musician I've enjoyed and trusted for years. Sure enough, I feel like the interplay of Rhyton is more musical and more spacious, with a crucially lighter touch. Shuford is just a little more sly and coy than the more wall-of-sound guitarist in Earthless, and I prefer that for this kind of music, because it creates space inside the heaviness, room to move around, sit down, be patient, ask questions. Let the drums and bass roll the heavy foundation while the guitar glides gently above like one of those stork-riders in a Moebius painting. As long as we're comparing, I also find the drummer Spencer Herbst to be more musical than Earthless drummer Mario Rubalcaba, even though I doubt anyone would say he is as "good" as Rubalcaba. I know Rubalcada is a modern drum titan, and I completely see why, but I think his style falls into that fairly common trap where its awesomeness is more of a physical feat than a musical one. It's easy to marvel at what he's doing and the heaviness of his tone, but it doesn't particularly swing or shade the band... although that could be the fault of the guitarist and bassist's one-chord space dirge. Either way, I don't want to use any more of this review to talk about Earthless, because Rhyton made an excellent debut LP, with the 12-minute cut "Pontian Graves" a real standout. I also think you can tell they're fairly new at playing together, and that they've got a better album in 'em still. (Maybe with better cover art too! No, it's okay, it's a nice cover, it's been growing on me... I should probably stop leaving it out overnight! Thanks, I'll be here all year! And so will whatever that is growing on the cover of the Rhyton LP! HEYOOOO!)

Man, the incoming 7-inch pile got out of control this past year. I apologize to everyone who sent one in that hasn't been, and probably never will be, reviewed. In fact, I have a terrible confession to make: just a couple weeks ago I looked at said out-of-control pile, tried to get excited about listening to one, and decided to just grab 10 or 15 of 'em and try to sell 'em to the local new and used record emporium instead. Well, they rejected every single single, as it were, even though all were in mint and unplayed condition, so now they're back by the stereo, cluttering up the house. I mean, no one has ever heard of any of these people, and I just don't think I have the energy to help their cause. I could put 'em out on the sidewalk on an old sheet with a "free" sign on top . . . or I could man up, and do what someone somewhere once trusted in me to do: listen, and maybe even write. Sigh. (Wipes single small tear from eye.) So far, I've made it through two or three, and one of them actually hit a real soft spot and it's gonna be a keeper. I wasn't expecting much from the bland cover art and helvetica typeface announcing something called Femminielli/Chauffer on one side and Araignee/Silvia on the other. Maybe glitch/improv/lowercase/experimental? Maybe shoegaze nostalgia? Is that supposed to be a guitar neck on the cover? Finally putting needle to record, I was taken aback by some sort of deeply wrought 80s-retro European progressive synth-pomp balladry. Eventually I realized that the rather-difficult-to-remember-let-alone-spell Femminielli and Araignee are the names of the artists, and this is a split single where each one plays a song. They sound pretty similar though... maybe they're a production team, like Ford and Lopatin! The Drive OST must have rewired my brain because these lush and melancholy tunes are sounding shockingly good to me right now. Certainly better than the generic megaphone-punk and obtuse glitch-improv sides that look to be cluttering up the rest of the pile.... I keep trippin' over 'em.... ouch....

 



















Hey, another bit of music press just got me to pursue that dwindling but hopefully undying transaction where you spend money on a physical copy of a record release. This time, it was a moment in issue #11 of Negative Guest List (i.e. the greatest rock magazine since Forced Exposure), part of a rave review of the debut 7-inch by Detroit psychedelic singer/songwriter Aran Ruth, in which Brendon NGL wrote: "...three tunes which ache with hurt and stoned wonder, and a witch-like power to make even a Handsome Dick fan weep...meet Aran Ruth, and suffer beneath the iron breast of focused, female beauty." Shit, I bought one on Discogs the very next day, and even if two of the three songs have me thinking "good songs, but are they as good as 'If It's Alive, It Will' by Angel Olson?," the other one, called "Flying On Some Silver Wings," the de facto EP title track, might be the closest any other psych-folker has gotten to Comus's "The Herald," which is still nowhere near, but glorious anyway. I hope Ms. Ruth releases a full-length because I would buy it, and I hope this song and this song are on it.

PSYCHEDELIC HORSESHIT Acid Tape CS (FAN DEATH)
PSYCHEDELIC HORSEHIT Laced LP (FAT CAT)
BED WETTIN' BAD BOYS Best Band In Sydney/Worst Band In Sydney 7" (R.I.P. SOCIETY)
NASS EL GHIWANE "the rare 2nd album" (MOROCCAN TAPE STASH)
PINK REASON Shit In The Garden LP (SILTBREEZE)
BORED YOUTH Touch & Go EP (LOST AND FOUND)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Red Waves: 1980-87 Eastern European Avant-Punk & Synthpop Rarities (2007 WFMU marathon premium, compiled by DJ Jason Elbogen)

Wow, this is like the "punk" edition of Blogstitude! Look at all of this "shitgaze" I listened to today! I must say, it had been quite some time since I'd last caught up with early 'gazers Psychedelic Horseshit. I raved about their 2007 (debut?) 7" Who Let The Dogs Out? here, but later that same year their debut full-length Magic Flowers Droned hit me wrong and I've barely listened to 'em since. Of course, I loved bandleader Matt Horseshit's legendary 2009 live-at-SXSW interview with the Washington Post, not only because it was really funny, but for truly important insights (here uncensored!) like "The Velvet Underground, that shit is clean. That is clean as shit! "White Light/White Heat" is a fuckin' album of beautiful, clean static. Clean fuckin' static. That's how it sounded in the room." This statement coincides very well with another one, by Bruce Russell of the Dead C, that I came across today in issue # 2 of Mountain Fold Music Journal (the first three of which are generously offered here as pdf files): "We aren’t lo-fi in the sense that we rely on crap recording to saturate our sound. Our sound is fully saturated in real life." Horseshit and Russell (now there's a law firm I need to put on retainer) are talking about the same thing, the primal distorto-rock weirdsound of the instrument and/or ensemble in a room before it hits the tape. Horseshit calls it "clean static," Russell calls it "fully saturated," and I call it "blastitude" (not really, though I sometimes do call it "primal distorto-rock weirdsound"). In the case of Psychedelic Horseshit and the Dead C and quite a few but not enough others, what ends up being called "lo-fi" is inherent to the music itself and to the people and instruments playing it, regardless of recording studio quality, thus becoming no less than another kind of soul music. Which brings us to these two recent works by Psychedelic Horseshit that I listened to "preview copies" of today after reading a compelling review of Acid Tape in the Negative Guest List fanzine. After one listen I can confirm that Mr. Horseshit is walking it like he talks it; the recording itself is indeed very clean, not lo-fi, and the music he/they are making is indeed way beyond shitgaze, inventing its own unnamed subgenre. I listened to Acid Tape first, and it actually does come on like extended trip music, continuous crossfaded tracks with titles like "Unseen Void" into "Modern Daze" into "Hard As It Gets (Chill Sax Mix)", the last of which actually features some killer live heavy roots reggae kit drumming, which VERY few modern artists comparing their music to "dub" can claim... A few more tracks with titles like "Tired Bluez" and "Gliderz" sprawl out in non-linear fashion and then the album wraps up with a 7-minute ballad that seems to reach for The Clean's "Anything Could Happen" and gets much closer than you'd think it might. It's a trip, and it might not even be a bad one! After Acid Tape, I had to check out Laced, their 2011 debut full-length with the relatively high-profile label Fat Cat, and wow, this record really is 35 minutes of top-notch free-flowing electro-acoustic mind-fug, and, despite weird interludes and constant unlikely/deconstructed combinations of guitars/keys/drumboxes/pedals that are more of a laptop/glitch approach than a rock band approach, it remains an album of thoughtfully composed songs. Or, everything I just wrote could be summed up by the seven-word description on their SXSW page: "drug-fueled sample jam band/ future dub band," (Um, the comma was theirs, not mine.) In fact, they play SXSW this Saturday, March 17th, 7:45 PM at the Sony Club @ Red 7! That's tomorrow night!

Great 7" by Bed Wettin' Bad Boys. Both the band name and cover photo are humorously funny, but the four tunes that follow are perfect strangled/yearnin' basement grunge anthems, loud and gnarly, desperately melodic, pitched somewhere between sundazed and decrepit. And hey, I wonder how this genius-sounding 2010 experiment in the barter system went? From there into the righteous banjo/guimbri/percussion protest rock of Morocco's heaviest band, Nass El Ghiwane. Thanks to D. Monypeny for turning me onto these guys in this article for Blastitude. Wow, Pink Reason sure are pushing things with his/their second full-length Shit In The Garden. First song sounds like the kind of cavernous melancholy basement crunge you've come to expect from him/them, but it's overlaid with some sort of frantic too-loud shitty breakcore beat. Next level! The song underneath sounds awesome, and the fact that it's completely ruined by lo-fi digital breakcore somehow turns out to be awesome too. After that, no more breakcore, just more of that fine Pink Reason depression-gaze, not as flawlessly monolithic as it was on his first full-length Cleaning the Mirror, but surprisingly close, considering that it's been a few years, he's a stylistically unpredictable artist, the potential of a sophomore jinx, etc. The closing duet for stark banjo and microphonic feedback is especially well done.

JOHN LENNON & YOKO ONO Double Fantasy LP (GEFFEN)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Ska Bonanza: The Studio One "Ska" Years (HEARTBEAT)
TOTAL CONTROL Henge Beat (IRON LUNG)
SLUG The Out Sound (PCP ENTERTAINMENT)
BULBS Light Ships CD (FREEDOM TO SPEND
THE SKATALITES Ska Authentic Vol. 1 (STUDIO ONE)

Today my son attended a free Radical Robots class at our local library branch (tax dollars at work!), and while he did that upstairs I was downstairs doing one of my favorite things, pulling random books out of the music section and flipping through 'em... even with the paltry selection at this branch, I could do this for hours. Sometimes I take 'em home, and there's been some great reads.... Grandmaster Flash's autobio... Nowhere to Run by Gerrie Hirshey... Barry Miles's Zappa bio... that Rock Scully memoir about his career "managing" the Grateful Dead... first edition of The Rough Guide to Reggae... Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang... most recently, Patti Smith's beautiful Just Kids memoir... but I'm just as likely to pull something like Ronnie Spector's autobio, spend 10 minutes skimming for scary Phil stories, and then put it right back. Today I did that with a John Lennon bio (can't remember title or author), and although I probably could've found one or two scary Phil stories in it too, I ended up reading the chapter about the making of the Double Fantasy album. How in June of 1980, John took little Sean on a vacation to Bermuda, where he was inspired to write what more or less became his entire half of the record, and how one evening while he was there, he was sitting in a cafe (or maybe it was "Bermuda's most famous disco") and overheard "Rock Lobster" by the B-52s, had an epiphany, sent Yoko a telegram that said "They're ready for you," and, when he got back from his working vacation, started looking for a new record deal, not for John Lennon, but for John Lennon and Yoko Ono. If any executive so much as hesitated at this proposition, the power couple would turn around and leave, which they even did to the legendary Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, even though John really wanted to be on his label. David Geffen did not hesitate, so they signed with him and made Double Fantasy, conceived as a conversation between a married couple, with "I'm Losing You" confirmed by Yoko's "Moving On," and "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)" embellished by "Beautiful Boys," and so on. My parents bought this album when I was 10 years old and I really liked it a lot. John's songs were nice and Yoko's really blew my mind. It taught me so much to hear a woman come on so strong and smart, freaky and funny, intensely and non-conventionally, and then to hear John's "Woman" on side two, what a glorious appreciation. And here I am writing this on March 8th, which is International Women's Day, which, thanks to Yoko, my grandmas, my mom, my sister, my wife, my daughter, my cousins, my aunts, my close friends, and a couple billion other women, I celebrate every day, duh. It's like Ivor Cutler and Linda Hirst said, and Jim O'Rourke repeated . . .

The first time I listened to Australian "underground supergroup" and "2011 critic's favorite" Total Control, they were synth-poppier than I expected. Now I'm listening for the second time, and it seems like there's barely any goddamn synth on this album at all, which proves that they are what all the good bands are: dreamweavers and recalibrators. Maybe it does get synthier on side two, but I no longer need to keep score. I knew this second listen was gonna be a doozy, as I was already liking the album better and better just from thinking about it.

Slug was a band from Los Angeles in the classic 1990s semi-avant-garde noise-rock mold. The lineup included Damion Romero, who has gone on to play superb and distinctive noise music under his own name, and David Scott Stone, who has gone on to play in several notable bands (Wikipedia lists 14), from the Get Hustle to the Melvins to LCD Soundsystem. Slug's production on The Out Sound, their debut full-length from 1994, is a bit dated in that very 1990s noise rock kind of way, but the playing is formidable and there are lots of interesting ideas.

Love that Bulbs album... now there's a dreamweaver/recalibrator for ya... check out the Blastitude feature from a couple years ago . . .

Both Andy Stott 12-inches from late 2011, We Stay Together and Passed Me By, have gotten a second pressing by Modern Love, hopefully the second of many. I grabbed both of 'em this time, and I haven't played anything else for the last 72 hours. Already $20 apiece is seeming like a real bargain. I'll spend $40 easy on a meal for the family at some run-down restaurant, and we only get to eat that once. These records are much more nourishing, and I can play them again, and again, and again. Bass is food. I'm devouring We Stay Together right now. So far, whichever one is playing is the one I like better, back and forth, forth and back. I don't know when I'm going to want to listen to anything else, because I am luxuriating in these deep, heavy grooves. Now I'm listening to Passed Me By and man, the second track on here, appropriately titled "New Ground"... I've listened to it 6 or 7 times since yesterday and it's still CRUSHING me. Absurdly, comically heavy and brilliantly EQ'd for vinyl. Yes, the music is dark ("dark enough to call 'evil'"), but I think if you get all the way into these rhythms, you find a surprisingly warm and embracing core radiating outwards. Certainly these records are funky as hell, and however slow and dragged-out the rhythms are, almost every track is fun to dance to. I mean, I love Demdike Stare, but they really do not make me feel like dancing... Stott surprisingly does. Also, just for kicks, I've been trying to work out if these two releases, taken together as four 12" singles, are to the beginning of the 2010s what Metal Box (three 12" singles) was to the beginning of the 1980s, as far as "dark" disco music would or should sound like in a post-(post-post-)punk world. By now, Stott's time, we are rid of the albatross completely, that is, the need for a frontman, a singer, a cover model, a cult of personality. In that respect, techno made a big advancement past rock. Anyway, these records are available from Forced Exposure. (Currently at "low stock level"!)

BETWEEN And the Waters Opened (VERTIGO)
MATTHEW YOUNG Traveler's Advisory LP (DRAG CITY/YOGA)
YOUNG PEOPLE s/t CD (5 RUE CHRISTINE)
ELEVEN TWENTY-NINE s/t CD (NORTHERN SPY)
ERKIN KORAY Mechul CD (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES)
MINUTEMEN "Ballot Result" Double-Length "Live" Cassette CS (SST)
MINUTEMEN 3-Way Tie For Last LP (SST) 



The Between album is one of the very best 'second tier' krautrock albums I've ever heard. Sublime synth/bongos/flute/devotional action. Like early Popol Vuh with a bit more singing and a bit more, dare I say, Caribbean influence. But this ain't salsa, it's far too devotional. (Oh wait, the song I posted is called "Devotion." No wonder I keep using the word devotional.)



Enjoying this recent reissue of the Matthew Young LP. He seems to be from the Central New Jersey/Princeton area (you can read a recent interview with him here), and he released Traveler's Advisory back in 1986,  featuring gentle waves of guitar and hammer dulcimer playing simple dream-folk songs. Well, the opener "Objects in Mirror" isn't exactly simple... in fact, it's a little quirky/crafty, with maybe a little too much Bourgeois in its Tagg, but even that one is steadily growing on me, and after "Objects" things really sink in. The third track, a cover of Michael Hurley's "The Werewolf," particularly pulled me into this record's steady whispering undertow. Meg Baird's blurb says it really well, read it here. Drag City, here in cooperation with Yoga Records, continues to pluck the gentlest of psychedelic singer-songwriters out from the mists from the past few decades. (See also Gary Higgins, the George-Edwards Group, These Trails, and I would include that Red Favorite album too for a more contemporary example.)

You know, I try to listen to brand new music, but it's so hard to even make it to the 90s, let alone last month... one of the few brand new CDs I recall listening to obsessively this year (played it five times the day I got it) was of material from 1970-1977 by Erkin Koray. You probably know him, he's the father of Turkish Rock'n'Roll, their Elvis, Beatles, and Hendrix all rolled into one. This CD Mechul: Singles & Rarities consists of never-before-reissued material which was made available to the deserving Sublime Frequencies label by Koray himself, from his personal vinyl collection, and the songs are crushing and beautiful, as I'm not sure anyone else in rock history has nailed the sweet spot between 70s heaviness and Mediterranean elegance quite so perfectly as this guy. The only possible American equivalent would have been if the Walker Brothers and Blue Oyster Cult had collaborated back in '71, which definitely did not happen. The other day my man MAGAS tweeted: "In the part of Erkin Koray's wah-wah pedal, stuck halfway between the 'up' and 'down position'...that's where I'm hangin out." You can hang out there too if you get this CD and we cue up track number two, "Ve," in which Koray's terrifyingly beautiful guitar constructs a supernatural cathedral of the heaviest melancholy right before your ears, the same cosmic cry that Hideki Ishida half-wahed his way into, right around the same time, on the monumental "Satori Part II" by the Flower Travellin' Band. I've already enjoyed a couple of Koray reissues over the last few years, but for some reason this release just nails it for me.

I was late enough to SST Records that I heard fIREHOSE before I heard the Minutemen (although this wasn't rare at all, John Moloney says the same thing happened to him in this interview on the Watt From Pedro show), but I was still early enough to be able to buy a bunch of SST stuff new on cassette, shrinkwrapped, right off the racks at record stores in Omaha, such as the Minutemen's overwhelming My First Bells compilation, and their Ballot Result tape, which I enjoyed quite a bit then, and immensely today, after dusting it off and putting it in the ancient cassette walkman I have running through my work stereo. There's only one phrase for this type of compilation, and that's "odds and sods"... live versions, board tapes, audience tapes, tapes from sessions at radio stations... there's an excerpt from a wild free-form attempt at a film score, self-recorded in "Jack Brewer's garage".... there's a subtle lyric change on "History Lesson" where D sings "I could be in his songs / me as his soldier child"...  and best of all, there's the Ethan James/Radio Tokyo remix of "No One," which is absolutely INSANE, violently cutting in and out with nascent hip-hop blastitude, and really dialing up D. Boon's MENTAL guitar shredding.

After listening to Ballot Result, I had to get out my secondhand copy of the Minutemen's previous album, 3-Way Tie For Last, because it has the ballot itself as an insert. It's kind of amazing, and I've scanned both sides and included them for your perusal below. Listening to 3-Way Tie for the first time in many years brings back memories of me grappling with this album in my dorm room, way back in '91 or whenever it was I bought it, listening to it a couple times and not really getting into it, but like any Minutemen album, or any good piece of art, it filled my head with ideas anyway. Listening to it again now, I realize that I've been holding some of those ideas in my head ever since, everything from the cover painting ("Dude/Local 357"), to the fascinating mix of artists covered (CCR, BOC, Meat Puppets, Roky, the Urinals!), to the unabashed grass-roots idealism of the ballot concept, to 40 seconds of delicate solo Spanish guitar entitled "Hittin' the Bong," to D. Boon's utterly heartfelt "anti-war sympathizer" songs throughout (although I didn't even appreciate "The Price of Paradise" until I heard Eugene Chadbourne's heartbreaking acoustic version of it on Kill Eugene a couple years later). I even just realized that I ripped off the cadence of Mike Watt's "Spoken Word Piece" to write a poem of my own years later. (Unpublished.) Still can't completely get into the album, mainly because the production is really strange, surprisingly "mersh," especially considering that it was recorded with Ethan James at Radio Tokyo just like the wonderful-sounding Double Nickels On The Dime was only a year earlier. At least they were forging ahead and trying new things... or maybe it simply sounded that way because, as the liner notes say, the studio was "Now 16 tracks at $25/hour!"

 

BLASTA FAR I SOUND PLAYLIST 2/26/12

TOMMY McCOOK & THE SUPERSONICS The Complete Treasure Island Dub Collection (GOLDENLANE)
THE GLADIATORS "Re Arrange" (COXSONE)
THE GLADIATORS "Fling It Gimmie" (COXSONE)
EDDY DETROIT Immortal Gods (ASSOPHON)
THE NEW ESTABLISHMENT "Hurt So Good (Ver.)" (SIGHT N SOUND)
SYD THA KYD "Flashlight (feat. Lux)"
THE HEPTONES "Pretty Looks" (STUDIO 1)
DELROY & BRENTFORD ALL-STARS "Rain Drops (Ver.)" (COXSONE)
VOICE OF THE SEVEN THUNDERS s/t (HOLY MOUNTAIN)
NICOLAS JAAR Space Is Only Noise (CIRCUS COMPANY)
DON DRUMMOND JUNIOR "Joe Frazier" (BLANK)
THE SKATALITES "Indian Summer" (COXSONE)
JOHNNY CLARKE Dreader Dread (1976-1978) (BLOOD AND FIRE)
DEVON RUSSELL "Jah Hold The Key" (COXSONE)
WADADA LEO SMITH & ED BLACKWELL The Blue Mountain's Sun Drummer (KABELL)
FRANCIS BEBEY Akwaaba: Music For Sanza (ORIGINAL MUSIC)
ROEDELIUS Selbstportrait (BUREAU B)
CHRIS & COSEY Trance (CONSPIRACY INTERNATIONAL)
SUN RA & HIS SOLAR-MYTH ARKESTRA The Solar Myth-Approach Vol. 1 & 2 (CHARLY)

(Today I put my iPod on "all albums, random shuffle" and this is just how it spun... I have a bunch of digitized reggae 45s on there, and instead of album name they're tagged by matrix number, which is different for the A and B side, hence the album shuffle produces a lot of single cuts, which always works well, and today made for a particularly lovely Sunday afternoon and evening... the non-Jamaican artists like Eddy Detroit and Syd tha Kyd blended in beautifully... so did Voice of the Seven Thunders and Nicolas Jaar, for that matter... also great how the Wadada & Bebey albums eased us from reggae into jazz/soul/funk/African, slowly swinging around the Caribbean up the Eastern Seaboard and then out across the Atlantic to Ghana... there was also something very heavy about the segue from Bebey into Roedelius into Chris & Cosey and then Sun Ra.... go ahead and click through the cuts yourself, in order, but remember, to get the full experience, you have to wait for one to finish before clicking the next one!) (And on that note, I'm sorry I couldn't find a youtube for the New Establishment cut.)

WIZARDLOOK PLAYLIST 2/22/12 - 2/23/12

MOON POOL & DEAD BAND s/t LP (AGITATED)
MOON POOL & DEAD BAND "Patsy" b/w "Patsy (Jack Ruby Version)" 7-inch (CASS)
DEMDIKE STARE Elemental Part Three: Rose 12" (MODERN LOVE)
DAPHNE ORAM The Oram Tapes: Volume One 4LP (YOUNG AMERICANS)
NATE YOUNG Stay Asleep (Regression Vol. 2) LP (NNA TAPES)
CUT HANDS Afro Noise I (Volume 2) LP (DIRTER)
THEO PARRISH Ugly Edit #7 12" (UGET)
ANDY STOTT We Stay Together 2x12" (MODERN LOVE)
MAGAS live............................................................

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE ON-DECK PILE

ROLLING STONES Some Girls LP (ROLLING STONES/ATLANTIC) 
BOB DYLAN New Morning LP (COLUMBIA)
BILL MONROE Bill Monroe's Greatest Hits LP (MCA)
GROUPER "A I A: Dream Loss" LP (YELLOW ELECTRIC) 
NOCHT THE ONLY GHOULS s/t 12" EP (VWYRD WURD) 
FNU RONNIES Saddle Up 12" EP (LOAD RECORDS) 

Started out this last Sunday afternoon with an unintentional Dad-rock theme, during which I realized a few things, that I like Side 2 of Some Girls better than Side 1, that "Before They Make Me Run" is the best Rolling Stones song that Keith Richards sings (I guess I had it as "Happy" before), and that "Beast of Burden" was the closest they ever got to Keith's perennial dream of playing reggae, which is to say not very close (Charlie Watts infamously never could figure out how to play the reggae backbeat), but it's there in the gentle melancholy melodic weave of the Richards and Wood rhythm guitar section. I also realized, after being in denial for over 30 years, that Mick Jagger really does start the song by singing "I'll never be your BUH-NEAST of burden." Finally, on "Shattered," I realized that even though this 1978 album is their "answer to punk," there was no way they were a punk band in 1978. Maybe for a few weeks in 1963, but that's another essay. What they were on "Shattered" was a killer new wave band. The groove is incredible, and Jagger's ad-libbing at the end is genius, which is why you just can't write Jagger off. No matter how much he annoys you, he's always turning around and doing another one of those ad libs, or playing killer rhythm guitar on "Sway," or that glorious doot-doo falsetto hook on "Waiting on a Friend," or the blown-out harmonica solo on "Gimme Shelter," or the majestic melodies of "Moonlight Mile," or . . . there's a lot more.

I've already raved about Dylan's New Morning before in this very webzine, some sort of utterly soulful allusive metaphorical rollicking piano-driven gospel trip, especially "Day of the Locusts," "Sign in the Window," "The Man In Me"...... by this time I was making dinner for the kids, so I had to keep the dad rock going. I dug deep into the pile, every record seemingly some sort of bizarre electronic annoyance to the nuclear family and, passing on some recent Baltimore weirdness by Salamander Wool and a self-described "black metal" album by Nocht the Only Ghouls, got to my trusty Greatest Hits LP by Bill Monroe. I played this one a couple weeks ago because my son is studying the American Southeast in school, and his 3rd Grade Social Studies textbook contained a whole page about Monroe as the father of American bluegrass music, and my thrift-scored LP is autographed "Best Wishes, Bill Monroe" which the young dude found fascinating even though we're both about 99.5% sure the signature isn't authentic. Such beautiful bluegrass music, and Proto Dad Rock!

Next, needing something equally non-agitating but maybe less patriarchal, I dug even deeper and pulled out one of the new Grouper A I A albums. I never have any idea which of the two is which, but this ended up being the one that has "Dragging the Streets" on it, or the suite of connected songs that makes up Side A and includes "Dragging the Streets," and all of them sound literally like dragging the streets, but not in the Godflesh Streetcleaner sense, more like a huge healing angelic weight that is slowly pushing all the garbage into the abyss at the edge of town. It actually does make me think of certain Melvins compositions, the way it seems to be constantly hovering endlessly on a very heavy chord, then seemingly always resolving it by rising upwards, like answering a question with another question. But, however Melvins-influenced this album may or may not be, it is not dad-rock. Grouper makes a full-on Earth Mother sound, and please leave any hippie prejudice you may have towards a statement like that behind you, because this is bigger, the sound of the heavens hovering, holding great grey clouds of heavy water. I mean that seriously, which is why I put both of her albums on my year-end list, and why I played this one twice in a row tonight. (And yeah, I guess "Heavy Water" is the name of one of her songs, from her previous album. I must've done that on purpose.)

After the kids go to bed it's safe to put on this aforementioned allegedly "black metal" Nocht the Only Ghouls record. It was sent to me with an unsigned note addressed to "Blastitude, Larry" which read, in part, "I consider the album to be black metal, but you write the reviews." Well, I don't think I would've thought "black metal." I probably would've thought "folk" and "noise," but don't worry Ghouls, good folk music is 100 times heavier than good black metal (and really good black metal is folk music, but I digress). I mean, it's not a complete stretch to call this black metal, because the music is certainly grim and lonely, but it's mostly very quiet, and not obviously evil in intent (no obvious flatted seconds and fifths, no 'unhuman' screamed/growled/hissed vocals, possibly no vocals at all). Possibly a one-man band (oh, it says right here on the back cover that it's two), no apparent drum kit, lots of acoustic guitar... I don't think electric guitar makes an appearance until the second side. It's not grim like black metal, but it is quite grim, more like one of those austere "jagged acoustic guitars and Kevin Drumm" style jams by Gastr del Sol. And that's good, because I'd much rather listen to Gastr Del Sol on a regular basis than almost all of the "true" black metal copy-cats I've heard this last decade-plus. This Nocht the Only Ghouls record is pretty good too. The name of the label is pronounced "weird word" but spelled Vwyrd Wurd. Here's their facebook and their bandcamp.





















Alright, what else in the pile is brand new and not advisable for cranking around elementary school kids?  Ah, the new FNU Ronnies! Perfect! They were the weirdest of weird punk bands back during The Year Weird Punk Broke* and it was probably because no one else was willing or able to compete! I think they were a Philly band, and are now split between Philly and San Francisco, which is one of the (seemingly many) reasons why they haven't released very many records. Well in 2012 they sound weirder than ever, and I feel like the overall flow of this 24-minute EP on the Load label will require multiple listens for me to even begin to understand as music. I mean, they do sound like a band -- I hear the pounding punk rhythms and driving guitar, and things that are probably vocals. Just now I heard an actual singer chanting the actual title of the album, "Saddle Up," in what I just realized is a killer driving punk song. I mean, I know they're a hard-driving sick-cyborg punk band, but there's still confusion around every corner. Can't even tell yet if the confusion is coming from the post-production or from the songwriting itself. I think it might be the latter. Either way, definitely recommended.

* 2008, duh

KRAUS A Journey Through the First Dimension with Kraus 7" (PALTO FLATS)
DIRTY THREE Toward the Low Sun LP/CD/MP3 (DRAG CITY)
JAMES BROWN Hot Pants (POLYDOR) 
CHERRY BLOSSOMS s/t LP (APOSTASY/BLACK VELVET FUCKERE/BREAKING WORLD/CONSANGUINEOUS/HANK THE HERALD ANGEL/YEAY!)
A MIDDLE SEX A Muddled Hex (BLACKEST RAINBOW)
UN s/t (SILTBREEZE)
SUN ARAW Ancient Romans (SUN ARK)
DECAER PINGA Electronic Honky (POLYAMORY)
HEATHEN SHAME s/t (TWISTED VILLAGE)
MONOTON Eight Lost Tracks (ORAL)

Kraus has been kicking around the underground for a bit now... we first wrote about him a couple years ago, and apparently he's also the drummer in The Futurians, whose Spock Ritual album was so good I'm going to have to pull it back out right now. I think I even heard that Kraus and the 90s-00s New Zealand noise/tapes/Bananafish stalwart known as Witcyst might be one and the same person. I don't think it's true, but both are certainly one-man projects, although Kraus is a lot more song-based and rock'n'roll than the outer limit noise of Witcyst. Still very strange stuff, all instrumental (as far as I've heard), oddly uplifiting, oddly cinematic, but with grungy weird distorto tones. In addition to a bunch of tapes and CDRs, he released an LP about a year ago which I have not seen nor heard. However, this new 7-inch single landed in my lap the other day, and it picks up right off where the earlier material I did hear left off, if anything in a still more direct and accomplished manner, a fine introduction to the man's work, cheaper than the LP, available from paltoflats.bigcartel.com.

The Dirty Three are back! Toward the Low Sun is their first album in seven years! Street date is February 28th! This may be cause for celebration among many, and I agree that they are an amazing band... at playing one song. That one song where guitarist Mick Turner and violinist Warren Ellis play a sombre, slow, aching instrumental panoramic/cinematic spaghetti western ballad while drummer Jim White passionately subdivides the beat. I mean, c'mon guys, can't you tear into a King Crimson ensemble riff every now and then? Or any other tempo at all? Their song is certainly a heavy song, and sometimes if I'm in a drunken and sullen mood I might go for a whole LP side, but I've never really been compelled to flip it over.  

James Brown's Hot Pants is a sweet slice of meditational funk. The CD reissue has one bonus track: the full 19 minutes of the endless conversation jam "Escape-Ism." I love the part in the song when James is asking everyone in the band where they're from, and everyone is from the deep and mostly rural south, until they get to Fred Wesley, who says, a bit cockily, "L.A.," and everyone goes "Uh oh, uh oh!" until he clarifies: "Lower Alabama!" Great transcription and annotation of the whole song here. (The blog points out that when James is rapping with the band members and doesn't seem to know them all too well, it's not an act, as Bootsy and Phelps Collins had walked out of the band to join P-Funk only a few weeks earlier!)

The Cherry Blossoms album sounded so good tonight... my first listen in a few years.



A Middle Sex is from somewhere in England, I believe Manchester, and seem to be completely unknown over here, but I think they're a really good band. This CDR from 2007 has the kind of "destroyed rock" that continues the work that showed up on certain Siltbreeze LPs in the 90s, a kind of loud and unabashedly atonal jamming that never ignores a rock pulse and instrumental interplay. These guys can play their instruments well, and play them well with each other, and still take detours like the weird spoken-word intro "A Muddled Hex" and the psyched-out drum machine and minimalist feedback glower called "We Drones." Go here and listen to some songs: http://www.myspace.com/amiddlesex. (I know it's MySpace, so go ahead and make fun of it, or of yourself for using it, on twitter and/or facebook, but it still works, so if you click "Play All" you will be able to hear their music.)  

Sun Araw making music is like a stoked kid mixing paint, throwing in all his favorite colors at once, in hopes of making the most awesome color ever seen..... and every time it just comes up looking like mud. Just replace the favorite colors of paint with the approaches of some of his favorite musicians (Terry Riley, Fela Kuti, King Tubby, George Clinton, Neil Young, anything else that's radical and awesome). The result is still frustratingly muddy. I feel like someone's music should say more than just "what if [someone awesome] jammed with [someone else awesome] and [someone else awesome] and the vocals were unintelligible?" I might be able to enjoy the hero worship as long as he was saying something more with it, something that was his own. (Also, the band name is straight-up annoying.)

MASAKI BATOH Brain Pulse Music LP/CD (DRAG CITY)
BURNING SPEAR Garvey's Ghost (ISLAND)
CAROL "Breakdown" b/w "So Low" 7" (DIRTY DANCE)
FREDDIE McGREGOR unofficial comp from Magic is Juju blog
OST Drive (LAKESHORE)
This mixtape by KURT VILE
This mp3 by MARY HALVORSON & WEASEL WALTER
VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR World Record (CHARISMA) 
FLIPPER Unreleased Studio Session Tape 1982 (NOT ON LABEL)

The new solo album by Ghost frontman Masaki Batoh, to be released February 28th on Drag City, contains music that he played with his brain. The Brain Pulse Music Machine, which apparently will also be available from Drag City (street date TBA), comes with a head unit that reads your brain's alpha and theta waves and then transmits them via radio waves to a motherboard... but I listened to the album before reading the press release, so I didn't know any of this, and the album sounded like excellent and extremely austere and forbidding ancient-style ceremonial Japanese ritual music, not unlike stuff that would pop up on Ghost albums here and there in between those elegant nouveau psychedelic rockers that Batoh usually specializes in, as one of, in my opinion, the great and defining lead singers of the psychedelic 1990s. I also learned from the press release that Batoh was going to make the album entirely out of brain pulse music, but just before recording sessions were to begin, the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 happened, and he decided to add in the ancient acoustic ritual music element as the kind of prayer/dedication/offering to the gods that people of Japan would (pre)historically perform in the face of disaster. In my opinion, this element is what the album is all about, with the brainwaves taking a back seat, although the album does open with a piercing sustained tone cluster that sounds like an ancient woodwind instrument blending with a high-pitched brain tone, and works as a great cry of lamentation, and a call to attention for the grim ritual to follow. Then again, steadily beating on a drum with your hand is a type of brain pulse too. But like I said, I listened to it a couple times before I knew any of the back story, and what it made me think of the most were similarities between ancient Japanese music and ancient American Indian music and how it might just have something to do with that Bering Strait land bridge of 15,000 years ago. So there's a lot of layers of allusion here.

Once you've got a clutch of King Tubby & Lee Perry records and wanna keep going, you might check out Garvey's Ghost, the dub version of the Burning Spear album Marcus Garvey. Leadoff track "The Ghost" is pretty great, but it's a very low-key album, less arresting than the shattered Tubby or Scratch style you might be into, more in a relatively untreated mellow roots instrumental style. In fact, if you're only gonna get one of the two I'd recommend the vocal set Marcus Garvey, because if I'm gonna check out a Burning Spear album, I wanna hear the man sing!

This Carol 7-inch is crazy good. "Breakdown" b/w "So Low." Continental synth pop done right in 1981, complete with dubbed-out rockers-style rim clicks. If I'm reading the internet right, one recently sold for $333.

The official soundtrack to the film Drive is probably the best new fake 1980s pop music I've heard besides Channel Pressure by Ford & Lopatin. Normally I dislike new fake 1980s pop almost as much as I dislike new fake Italian giallo soundtracks, but both of these records have hit a hitherto unknown sweet spot, the kind of feat that can only happen if the songwriting is good (like the way Ford & Lopatin somehow endlessly extrapolate and improve on the Pointer Sisters' "Automatic"), though that hardly seems the case when considering this soundtrack's execrable-but-somehow-wonderful "A Real Hero" by College (feat. Electric Youth). Can you really call that good songwriting? I guess it turns out you can, but really, I think the reason this music is so good is simply because magic is involved, something beyond mortal understanding. Even the artists responsible for these creations don't understand, and never will. Good weird flick too, if you haven't seen it. Caveat: the pop portion of this soundtrack that I was just raving about is just 5 tracks at around 20 minutes. You've got French vocoder jam "Nightcall" by Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx, the stunning pop obsession of "Under Your Spell" by Desire (which I now see is a new band including Johnny Jewel of Glass Candy), some sort of cabaret/torch song which I'm not that into, and a killer Basic Channel-worthy minimalist jam by The Chromatics, which is another Johnny Jewel project, who I guess is the producer, or "developer" of the pop portion of the soundtrack. He also wrote a score for the whole movie, but it didn't get used. Instead, the film was scored by Cliff Martinez, maybe because he's more of an L.A. veteran. (After all, he played drums on the last Captain Beefheart album in '82 and the first two Red Hot Chili Peppers albums in '84-'85!) His ambient cityscapes are nice, but they go on for 50 minutes and, without being able to support the film, eventually fade into irrelevance.








I thought Flipper's "In The Garden" was maybe, just maybe, still the Van Der Graaf Generator album. I confess that about two minutes in I still wasn't 100% sure that it was a different album, and had to look at the iPod screen to find out. I know that sounds nuts.

Here's a coda to the last post about New Zealand, surf, friends, Surf Friends, and the music of the great outdoors. This is one of the best surf videos I've ever seen and the reason is that there's no overdubbed soundtrack music... after immersion in the ancient cross-rhythms of pounding ocean, the watered-down world music (posing as "dub") or plodding post-Creed achievement-rock these videos often use just doesn't cut it. Plus, just last week I spent an hour or so hanging out on this very "beach" (instead of sand, you have to walk over about 100 feet of volcanic boulders, visible in the first 2 seconds of the clip, just to get to the water). The waves weren't nearly as big and only a couple surfers were out, but it was still a fabulous way to spend part of an afternoon. 



Bonus clip (also without music!) of people surfing the infamous Jaws break in Hawaii. Insane!



Special shout to Erik Davis for getting me going yesterday by posting clips from unknown 1970 surf flick Pacific Vibrations on twitter, like this one:

HORSE BACK

I was in New Zealand for the last couple weeks because my Dad is from there and the USA family goes once a decade or so to visit the NZ family. I had no musical plans of any kind for the trip other than the music of the great outdoors (seriously), although 20 minutes after landing, when we were picking up our rental car, a guy came in wearing a Flying Nun T-shirt and I asked him if he was going to see any live music while he was there. He replied that he actually lived in Auckland and was dropping his car off, that his job was taking bands on tour for Flying Nun and others, that he only wears the T-shirt when everything else is in the laundry, and that he didn't really know of any crucial shows in the next couple weeks. I asked who was good on Flying Nun these days, apologizing that I didn't already know, and he said the Surf Friends, apologizing for the name, just that they were "two friends who love to surf and love The Clean." I can't tell if they're actual Flying Nun signees or not from the FN website, but that's who he said. So, at the end of the trip, after traversing the Bay of Islands, the Coromandel Peninsula, the heart of the Waikato, the surf mecca of Raglan, and more, when we made it back to Auckland for a few nights and a cousin's wedding, I broke down and went to Real Groovy, which is apparently the last Queen Street record store standing, to look for a Surf Friends 7-inch. It's true, the Korean food options on and around Queen were more impressive than the funky books-and-records-and-fliers cultural options that used to be on all the main drags, but we both know that all of those options are now on the digital drag, and there were a bunch of kids skateboarding amongst a game of street cricket at Aotea Square, so it was cool.



Surf Friends don't seem to have any vinyl out yet, and Real Groovy just had a couple of their CD EPs. I decided to listen to their music on the internet first because shit tends to be expensive in New Zealand. Real Groovy is a great store though, the Amoeba of Aotearoa, with a massive selection of (overpriced to a Yankee) records and books and movies and T-shirts and lots more. But the point of this story, and maybe every story, is that when we walked into the store, what should be blasting on the sound system but Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, specifically "Down By The River." Angelina said, "All this music, all around, and it's Neil Young on the stereo," and I said, "That's what it all comes around to. That's all you need." Sort of like the music of the great outdoors (seriously). We browsed until the stored closed, with no intention of buying anything, just to listen to Neil and the Horse because the record sounded so good.

A couple days later we were at the Auckland airport waiting for our 12-hour flight to Los Angeles. I had 15 NZ bucks left. Not much, so when I saw that the new issue of Mojo had feature articles on two of my Top 5 bands of all time, the Rolling Stones and Can, plus one on Todd Rundgren to boot, and that it was perfectly overpriced at $15.20 NZD, boom, I had my in-flight reading material. I'm thumbing through it at the gate, and there on page 58 they're asking PJ Harvey "what's the best thing you've heard all year," and what does she say but: "I really can't stop listening to Neil Young, particularly his first two solo albums [Neil Young and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere]. It's just doing something for my soul that my soul really needs, and I'm pretty much only listening to him. It's been about five months now (laughs)."

And THEN, when I get home to Chicago some 24 hours later, my facebook and twitter feeds are buzzing with the news of "Horse Back," a brand new 37-minute jam by Neil Young and Crazy Horse just posted on neilyoung.com. I'm listening to it right now for the second time. It's endless. It's what it all comes around to. It's kinda like the music of the great outdoors. And this kinda is too:

MY FAVORITE RECORDS OF 2011

I would've written about more of these but I seem to have almost completely forgotten how to write record reviews, especially about the albums I love the most. Not necessarily in order and subject to change...

FORD & LOPATIN Channel Pressure
PEAKING LIGHTS 936
ALVARIUS B Baroque Primitiva 
ANDY STOTT We Stay Together
ANDY STOTT Passed Me By
MEG BAIRD Seasons on Earth.
GROUPER A I A : Alien Observer
GROUPER A I A : Dream Loss
BLUES CONTROL & LARAAJI Frkys Vol. 8
VILLAGE OF SPACES Alchemy and Trust
STARE CASE Lose Today
JOVONTAES Things Are Different Here
HIVE MIND Elemental Disgrace
SKOAL KODIAK Kryptonym Bodliak
APACHE DROPOUT s/t
DAN MELCHIOR Assemblage Blues
DAN MELCHIOR UND DAS MENACE Catbirds & Cardinals
ICEAGE New Brigade
CONTAINER s/t
ANGELS IN AMERICA Narrow Road To The Interior
HAUNTED HOUSE Blue Ghost Blues
IMPLODES Black Earth
SANSO-XTRO Fountain Fountain Joyous Mountain
MAGICAL BEAUTIFUL Here Come The Wild Waves
THE POLYPS Ants on the Golden Cone
SIC ALPS Napa Asylum

OMAR SOULEYMAN Leh Jani 2LP (SHAM PALACE)
NEIL YOUNG Zuma (REPRISE)
POWER OF THE SPOKEN WORD The Language of a Dying Breed (SACRIFICIAL) 
PREGNANT s/t (BURN BOOKS)
HOW TO DRESS WELL Love Remains (LEFSE)
KEITH HUDSON Brand (PRESSURE SOUNDS)
TOMMY McCOOK Blazing Horns/Tenor In Roots (BLOOD & FIRE)





















The new Omar Souleyman double LP Leh Jani is the first release on the Sham Palace label, which is Mark Gergis's own subdivision of Sublime Frequencies, which is an interesting move in that I could see Alan Bishop and Hisham Mayet also with their own subdivisions as each of the three do seem to have a distinct area of interest. Anyway, there has been a lot of Souleyman releases by now, so far be it from me to suggest that you may still need more, but Leh Jani just might be my favorite one yet, even though it only has 3 songs on it: the 30-minute title jam split onto Sides 3 and 4, with two more 15-minute jams taking up Sides 1 and 2. Apparently this music made up a C60 that was one of the first Omar cassette releases that Gergis procured on a trip in Syria. He excerpted a few minutes of "Leh Jani" onto Highway to Hassake, Omar's auspicious 2007 debut CD for Sublime Frequencies, but now the entire cassette has been cut onto 12" vinyl at 33RPM and it's a lot of fun, the title track being a totally driving and upbeat chanter in which seemingly about 75 different bouncing and ripping keyboard and electric bozouk solos get exchanged, by Rizan Sa'id and Hamid Souleyman respectively. I swear it never gets monotonous, and when either side of the record ends I instantly want to flip it over. I think the reason the groove stays interesting for 30 minutes is because of how sensuous, light, and airy the musicianship on top of it is. (See also: Can.) The other record features more of those insistent dabke grooves, with "Introduction/Mawal" having a slower tempo, and also a lot of talking, presumably because of the "Introduction" aspect.

When in doubt, jam "Danger Bird." 

It's always funny to watch otherwise intelligent people who aren't from Nebraska talk about bands that are from Nebraska. When the subject is broached, they suddenly turn into self-parodies in a stumbling race to make the first joke about cornhusking and/or lack of electricity. I'll agree that Nebraska is not a premier musical hotbed, but you must admit that great bands can come from there. How can an engaged rock music listener deny The Boys? The Crap Detectors? For Against? For the love of god, Power of the Spoken Word?? This last band of antisocial miscreants released a single LP in 1985, called The Language of a Dying Breed, and if they'd come from California and released this record on SST, or come from DC and released this record on Dischord.... but never mind all that, this record is from Lincoln, Nebraska and was released on the band's own label Sacrifical Records. The stunning "pagan hardcore" cover art by Mott-ly (who, full disclosure, is one of my favorite people of all time, RIP) certainly looks a lot more like something from the deep Great Plains than it does either of the coasts. Also, the bass player was named Tree. Just Tree. As for the music, it's post-Void mutant hardcore, one of the few bands I can compare to the early Meat Puppets, where bass and drums tear through frantic rhythms, ripping dirty guitar solos spill out indiscrimately, and the singer is basically a DMT elf. Add to that a more stern and gothic metal crossover undercurrent (Die Kreuzen and Voivod are other reference points) and a whole bunch of that Great Plains isolation x-factor, and you're close.



Speaking of SST and ripping dirty guitar playing, I feel like there's been a few bands lately, from both here and there (okay mostly from Olympia, WA), that have been doing a kind of scratchy proto-grunge late 80s early 90s Homestead/SST-informed dirt-rock kinda thing. Not that I really know what I'm talking about, but Gun Outfit, maybe? Long-Legged Woman? Milk Music? The seven or eight better examples that I'm sure you can come up with? All I'm saying is, throw Pregnant onto the pile. Am I still speaking English? Yeah, I'm just talking about a band from New York City that I haven't heard too much about, other than a mention in Tony Rettman's Rettsounds column that seems like it might've been a whole year ago. Maybe it's because of their name! Pregnancy and rock just don't mix. Anyway, their medium long-playing (just over 20 minutes) debut finally came up on the iPod and it's really good. Anthemic rollicking yearning melodic tunes driven by big guitar chords and vocals that cut.   



Alright man, chillin' at home, Monday night, hard day at work, havin' a hard time with my lady, you know I gotta put on that new How To Dress Well album.... Ha! Just kidding! It came up on shuffle! First time I've listened to it since the week it was released! Things are fine with my lady and I! But seriously folks, it seems like the hype on this guy didn't really continue past 2010's fabled "Summer of Chillwave," but then I don't look at Pitchfork very often. Maybe it did continue, or maybe it just wasn't that great of an album... to me, the guy seemed a little like a one-hit wonder, that hit being "Ready For The World," which still sounds fantastic. I got the album on the strength of that tune, but the rest didn't connect with me, just kinda hovered at a too-chill remove. Now I've got it on headphones and it does sound better and closer. The songwriting still isn't super strong, but I appreciate the meditative R&B angle a lot more than I do "beach pop" or whatever. He's not a bad straightforward soul singer, although it's kinda hard to tell because his voice is low in the mix, distant, often (as in maybe a little too often) overdubbed into lovely angelic chorales.

If you want a good dub album, get Brand by Keith Hudson. I mean, first get Keith Hudson's Pick A Dub, but if you already have that, Brand is also the kind of dub you hear in your dreams. Unlike Pick a Dub, it has a lot of Keith's own idiosyncratic and gravelly roots vocals dubbed in, which is a caveat for some. His vocals are very heavy with a real wrecked and gravelly emotional quaver, and sometimes are best in small doses even if you like them, which is why Brand is perfect. In other Jamaican news, I've grown to really love the combination of horns and reggae, especially those jazzy vintage horn solos that sound like they're blown in by a warm and salty sea breeze. That's why I'm finally massively getting into the Skatalites and early offshoots, such as anything with saxophonist Tommy McCook's name on it. This Blazing Horns set seems to have been recorded at the later end of the essential 1970s roots era, apparently at Yabby You's studio. Yabby You's stuff is always rock solid but after the 1977 Jesus Dread cut-off there's something a little too clean and sparkly about it... but maybe it's just me, and either way McCook blows lots of lovely solos here, so I won't complain. 

STONE COAL WHITE s/t LP (CALI-TEX)
LEE PERRY Wizdom 1971-1975 LP (ASCENSION)
SKOAL KODIAK Kryptonym Bodliak LP (LOAD)
FACTUMS Gilding The Lilies 2LP (ASSOPHON)
ICEAGE New Brigade (WHAT'S YOUR RUPTURE?)

It only takes a few seconds of introductory wah-wah guitar vamping for "You Know" by Stone Coal White to register as one of the most dusted late-night funk jams ever recorded, and that's before the moaning falsetto vocals come in and really make the case. You might've heard this track already on the Chains & Black Exhaust compilation from 2002, which was released without a track listing. "You Know" was the last jam on the album before the epilogue & encore, a perfect closer/cool-down/nod-off, and one of the last of the then-anonymous tracks to be identified by the message-board headz. No wonder, because Stone Coal White was an extremely underground band from Dayton, Ohio, more or less the wild and loose house band for a shell-shocked motorcycle gang called Bad to the Bone, and they had such a funky live show that their fliers often required a "Rated X" next to their name. They only released two 45 RPM singles, in small pressings, somewhere very deep in the early 1970s. For the preservation of "You Know" alone, and the other tracks released on the two 45s, this new record is essential, but one possible reason why the band didn't release more material when they were active is evident: things get reaaallly loose on here. A scorched warm-up jam called "Warm Up," humorous Curtis Mayfield goofs, special-guest soul sisters belting unhinged gospel, a Bill Withers cover, that type of thing... like Funkadelic, despite grim trappings, the band had a lot of fun.

I already thought single LPs by Factums were too long, with too many foreboding and severe tracks stringing too many lumbering dystopian synth riffs one after another, so how am I going to approach a double LP with 29 tracks?? It's not that I dislike this band... I think they're pretty awe-inspiring. I have no idea how they assemble these synth-punk Frankenstein monsters one after another, and I just can't process their material except in small doses, which they seem to rarely offer it in.  This release looks and feels real good (nice paper selection, nice typewriter art cover), and it's certainly as good of a place as any to start trying to comprehend what they're up to. Just be prepared, pack an extra lunch and bring some ibuprofen!  

Just popped by the internet to see what the kids were into these days, and before I knew it I had listened to the whole 24-minute debut album by Iceage, twice. When they toured the U.S. this summer, I never actually heard their music, but I heard quite a bit about 'em, which made 'em sound pretty good, and it turns out that in fact they are. Right from the brief industrial noise intro I was hooked, and they held me throughout 11 more songs of dark and rather frantic Danish teenage punk that skips around unpredictably through emotional flourishes, strange harmonic choices, and a gnarly reverbed-out twin-guitar sound. All presented in a way that does not wear out its welcome, which gives you time to think about what you heard. Canny aesthetic moves abound... for one thing, they inherently understand that the best thing you can do with a black metal influence in 2010 is to not play black metal. 

I LOVE THE POINTER SISTERS

Serious jam by these West Oakland ladies live in 1974... don't miss the drum solo!