Archive for December, 2002

I Don’t Wanna Come Back Down From This Cloud!

It’s really amazing how much most of the new Folk Implosion album sounds like Bush’s Sixteen Stone, to the point that as a listener, I kept expecting for Lou Barlow to start belting out Bush choruses. Honestly, a song like “Fuse” would actually be a lot better if he did start singing the “Come Down” chorus in the middle, it would at least break up the tedium a bit. I wonder if their label is planning on ‘working’ any of this record for Clearchannel radio, I can definitely imagine the sort of people who dig Tool and System Of A Down getting into songs like “Brand Of Skin” and “Creature Of Salt”. I can’t say that I’m really into this record – it’s as good as this sort of thing gets, I suppose; but it is still pretty dull, second-rate 95-vintage post-grunge.

If The Sky Don’t Have Eyes, Tell Me, Why Does It Cry?

I’ll put some more information about these tracks up a little later on, in the meantime enjoy these new mp3s. I’ll be keeping this batch up til around Friday of this week.

Common (featuring Jill Scott) – “I Am Music” This is taken from Common’s excellent new album Electric Circus. It was very hard to narrow down which song to put up here to just one song – I came very close to picking his collaboration with Laetita Sadier “New Wave”, or the successful attempts at fusing psychedelic rock with hip hop on “Aquarius” or “Electric Wire Hustle Flower”. I ended up choosing “I Am Music”, which rather remarkably integrates Big Band jazz, sci-fi whirrrrrrs, and Common’s rapping; and is probably the catchiest and most accessable number on the LP.

I’m really happy to hear an album like Electric Circus, because normally when hip hop artists make efforts to incorporate rock and roll elements into their music, it seems that even in the best results, rock music is reduced to being little more than loud metal guitars and aggressive drumming. A particularly egregious example would be N.E.R.D.’s “Rock Star”, which is a song that seems to place ironic quotations around every nu-metal guitar crunch and hollered lyric. Now, I don’t have a big problem with irony, and “Rock Star” in particular is a pretty clever piss-take on white corporate rap-metal, but it still seems sort of unfortunate that so many artists seem to think that big dumb metal is the only kind of rock music that mixes well with hip hop MCs.

Electric Circus is a very brave album – many of the songs sound completely unlike any other hip hop that’s gone before it – most certainly there’s nothing else in the world quite like “New Wave”. I only wish that song went so far as to make the music over the verses sound as much like Stereolab as on the Laetitia-sung chorus, but that’s a small complaint considering how gorgeous the layers of keyboards are throughout the song. Electric Circus is a great achievement, but I hope that this is just the beginning, and that more MCs follow Common’s lead and begin to raid indie rock, prog, psych, punk, and krautrock for all they are worth in the future. Because after all, why not?

Wendy Rene – “Bar-B-Q” It may not be barbeque weather in most of the world right now, least of all in New York, where we’re still dealing with all of that Christmas day snow; but it’s always a good time to hear this peppy Stax-Volt gem. Ribs and corn-on-the-cob are optional, of course.

Barbara Acklin – “Just Ain’t No Love” I’ve been listening to this song all the time lately, on repeat for up to 30 minutes at a time. This is pretty much a flawless late 60s r+b tune, about as great as pop music gets as far as I’m concerned.

Soft Cell – “Tainted Dub” As mentioned a few months back, here is the fairly rare dub mix of Soft Cell’s big hit cover of “Tainted Love” and “Where Did Our Love Go?”. Good stuff.

Here To Eternity

I’ve been thinking a lot about what Joe Strummer’s death means to me since my last post. I haven’t been a Clash fan for very long, the band has been mostly a very recent revelation for myself. This time last year, I didn’t give the band much thought at all, honestly. So, in a very selfish way, Strummer’s music was mostly very new to me, and I’m upset that I’ll never get to see him perform. Another far more personal thing that’s been bothering me about his death is that he was only a couple years younger than either of my parents, so it also speaks to my growing fear about either of them suddenly passing away in a way similar to Joe Strummer. I wonder if Strummer and his family even knew that he was ill, because these sort of sudden surprise heart attacks are not uncommon, and its certainly not without precedent in my own family.

I also wonder what my reaction would be like if a musician for whom I have an even greater affection died – like, say, a member of Sonic Youth or Stephen Malkmus or Bob Pollard. If I’m crushed and moping around after the deaths of Joe Strummer and Mary Hansen, what kind of state could I be in if it were someone whose work I’m far more emotionally involved in?

Anyway, Jody Beth Rosen has written something far more articulate about this than anything I can manage lately, so check that out if you’ve got a few minutes.

Oh – I’d like to know exactly what this person means by “Is it just me, or does anyone else get the feeling that Punk’s First Wave is fading away…and not burning out.” How exactly should have Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone died, may I ask? (Barring the obvious answer ‘not so fucking young!’) How should they have “burned out”? I’d hate to think that Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain are better models of how to die.

R.I.P. Joe Strummer

Joe Strummer died yesterday of a heart attack at age 50. This is very depressing, he was a great songwriter, a very intelligent man, and still very young. In tribute to his passing, I’ve put up an mp3 of a live recording of The Clash performing “(White Man In) Hammersmith Palais” in New York City in 1981, so that any visitors who don’t understand the significance of this loss can hear the man perform one of his best tunes at his peak.

I’ve Got Something That’s RED HOT

Thanks to the generosity of Phantroll from Waking Ear, I will now be offering a new set of MP3s every few days for your enjoyment. I’m going to keep this first set up til just before New Year’s, because I know the traffic on this site will be down, and I want to give as many folks a chance to get these songs before I put more up. Once the holiday season is over, I’ll probably be changing the songs every three days or so.

In this first batch of songs, we have “Slowly” by Tricky, which I think is one of the man’s best songs, but is inexplicably only found on the soundtrack to the dreary Sandra Bullock/Ben Affleck film Forces Of Nature. This is one of my great frustrations with Tricky – I don’t think the guy has a good sense of what his best work is. This song is an outtake from the Angels With Dirty Faces LP, which was mostly a murky, tuneless affair; and though I can see how this song could not have fit in with what he intended that album to be, I can’t help but wonder why he’d leave a song so sublime on the cutting room floor. As it stands, “Slowly” is one of the sexiest songs he ever produced with Martina Topley-Bird, and will surely appeal to anyone who is a fan of the Maxinquaye and Pre-Millenium Tension albums.

“Something We Got” by The Minx is an out-of-print funky soul number from the mid-60s, which unfortunately hasn’t been released on cd yet, but is available here for you due to my own craftiness and initiative. It’s just an irresistable song; with an excellent bassline, funky keyboard solos, background party shouts, and a memorable vocal hook. This song is way too good to be obscure. Pass it around.

Another song which is too good to be obscure, but thankfully has been reissued in recent years, is Smiley Lewis’ “That Certain Door”. Lewis was an amazing r&b vocalist, and this is a fine example of the man’s vocal gifts.

Finally, I’ve got a performance of “Jo Jo’s Jacket” by The Jicks in Malmö, Sweden on February 10th, 2001. Stephen Malkmus was in good spirits for this whole show, but I think “Jo Jo’s” is the highlight of the set, with him explaining the origins of the song’s title in the introduction, and a silly approximation of the Yul Brynner sample at the beginning of the song. It’s a very enthusiastic reading of one of the most joyous songs that Malkmus has ever written; and heck, it also includes a couple lines in the middle about Christmas, making it the closest thing he’s ever come to a Christmas tune.

So Merry Christmas, everyone. If you want to, feel free to email me about the songs (or any downloading problems) by emailing the address on the sidebar to the left.

Singing The Blues

If anyone out there can help me find a place where I can find Mary McCreary’s 1974 album Jezebel on cd or mp3 (old vinyl records are useless to me, unfortunately), I would greatly appreciate it if you contacted me.

To Signal Kin

Though I am bored to death with the glut of year-end lists clogging up the majority of the music blogs that I read at the moment, I would like to point out that there are a few that I think are very smart and well written in spite of my rather extreme distaste for the very concept of such lists. Kyle Whelliston of the Intersection blog has put together a list of records that I’m mostly disinterested in, but his writing is consistently on-point and enthusiastic, and he’s kind enough to supply an MP3 from each album on his list. My favorite bit is his write-up for Sonic Youth’s Murray Street which offers a 9/11-centric take on the record that I think may be a bit of a stretch, but is still rather convincing. Meanwhile, Fred Sollinger over at Vain, Selfish, and Lazy has a list of pop songs which I mostly quite like a lot, with commentary that verges stylistically on being the kind of Village Voice critspeak that I tend to loathe, but somehow manages never to be anywhere near as dumb or as obnoxious as the average Voice review. The highlight for me thus far has been Fred’s review of the Fischerspooner remix of Kylie Minogue’s “Come Into My World”.

“Give Me Your Tired, Poor, And Huddled Masses / You Know They’re Yearning To Be FREE!”

Right now, U2log is offering an mp3 of Bono performing a brand new U2 song, “An American Prayer” with a cd player of the backing music and a tone deaf choir as accompaniment. It’s a thoroughly mediocre and bland song, and the lyrics are full of obnoxious “Gee whiz! Ain’t America great!” cliches. It’s absolutely ridiculous, honestly. It sounds like a blatant grab for post 9-11 jingo dollars, I can’t think of this as anything other than a purely cynical move on their part. To think that they went from Zooropa to this in ten years just breaks my heart. I really hope that this song ends up on the cutting room floor, and not on the next album.

Recommended Songs Without Explanations

I would put up mp3s if I could, folks…

The Waitresses “Christmas Wrapping”

James Brown “Santa Claus Goes Straight To The Ghetto”

Erma Franklin “I Get The Sweetest Feeling”

Daniel Johnston “I Saw Her Standing There”

Nas “One Love (Large Professor remix)”

Latyrx “Off With Their Heads”

MF Doom “The M.I.C.”

Kool G Rap “Money In The Bank”

Notorious B.I.G. “Unbelievable”

Eddie Fisher “Two By Two”

Billy Butler “The Right”

Judy Freeman “Hold On”

This Ain’t Yr Archetypal Street Sound

I’ve finally come around to liking The Streets’ Original Pirate Material over the weekend. I remember that when I first heard it over the summer, I had thought it was some kind of annoying joke, but perhaps that was because I didn’t listen to it as an album. Maybe it just took me some time to get over how unique it was, I know I’m not alone in this being an acquired taste. I still feel that the sung bits are very lame – is that Mike Skinner singing, or someone else? Whoever it is, they really ought to stop.

I think the thing that made it easier to swallow was that I’ve been listening to Nas’ Illmatic a lot lately, and when I listened to Original Pirate Material late Saturday night I noticed that the tone of those two records were actually quite similar. I don’t think Original Pirate Material is anywhere near as great as Illmatic, but it’s definitely a very good album, and I feel embarassed for not noticing it sooner. In a lot of ways, it’s like the record I’ve been wanting Tricky to make ever since Pre-Millenial Tension; and since it seems unlikely Tricky will embrace hip hop and r+b again, this will have to do.

News From Noisewhere

I can’t verify if this is the real deal, but this is the Pig Lib tracklisting that has been passed along to me.

01. Water And A Seat

02. Ramp Of Death

03. (Do Not Feed The) Oysters

04. Vanessa From Queens

05. Sheets

06. Animal Midnight

07. Dark Wave

08. News From Noisewhere

09. Ladies To Men

10. One Percent Of One

11. Tambourine Wife

I’m guessing that based on the fact that “Us” is ‘track 11’ on the mp3 download from Matador, that “Us” = “Tambourine Wife”.

(Note – I’ve been told that there are in fact 12 tracks on the album…)

That’s When He Should’ve Reached For His Revolver?

Moby Attacked!

Do Eminem and Russ have alibis?

Seriously, that’s one way to prove that yr hard, eh? Jumping a skinny Christian vegan pacifist with a few of your buddies after he signs some autographs. The mace seems a little over the top, don’t ya think?

Poor guy.

That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate!

Thanks to the nice people on the Pavement mailing list, I’ve been able to correct/fill in the blanks on my Jicks Warsaw setlist. It’s still not complete, so if anyone can email me the corrections, that would be extremely rad.

Special thanks to “Hunter” in particular, who was the first to get the corrections to me, but also delivered the unfortunate news that “Memory Pulls” will most likely not be on Pig Lib, which kinda broke my heart.

Terrible News

Stereolab guitarist/vocalist Mary Hansen has died at age 36, she was hit by a car while riding her bicycle in London. I was just listening to Stereolab for the first time in a long while on the day that she died, thinking about how great her dynamic and chemistry with Laetitia Sadier was, she will definitely be missed. More information is available here and here.

Recommended Song With Brief Explanation

The Last Emperor “Secret Wars part one” – Hip hop MCs do battle with Marvel superheroes. Yes. If you love hip hop and have ever read superhero comics, this is a must. [Thanks to Bio K-9]

To Discard The Life I Once Knew

Apparently, based on Zwan’s first single “Honestly”, Zwan : The Smashing Pumpkins :: The Jicks : Pavement. “Honestly” seamlessly picks up where the final Pumpkins singles left off, and it could easily pass for a late period Pumpkins song, or even something off of Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (think “Muzzle” and “Here is No Why”). I’m curious to hear how much this song will represent the first Zwan record, since the few live Zwan songs I’ve bothered to listen to were considerably more dense and prog-ish. Those songs at least gave me some understanding as to why Dave Pajo and Matt Sweeney were suddenly bandmates with Billy Corgan, because this is not at all the kind of song I would associate either of them with.

I do like “Honestly” a lot, but it seems a little too safe and radio friendly. It’s a bit too cynical for me, I would have preferred Billy to come out with a more brash departure from his old band. Of course, perhaps the Zwan record won’t be a departure at all, but more like Malkmus’ first record which was very familiar and a natural progression from the previous Pavement record. I think that for the both of them, breaking up their old bands and starting new ones had less to do with a desire for a drastic artistic change than it had to do with shedding the expectations of their back catalogue and not wanting to play the old hits in concert anymore. Also, the desire to play with new musicians seems like a pretty obvious thing too; though in the case of this Zwan song, I really can’t tell how Pajo, Sweeney, and the girl from that Tool sideproject band fit into this. Corgan’s still with his old Pumpkins drummer and I can’t even begin to speculate as to what parts of that wall-of-guitar sound were performed by Corgan and what wasn’t. That solo is definitely Corgan’s playing, though. I’ve heard variations of that solo in at least 20 Pumpkins songs by now.

Recommended Songs Without Explanations

Stereolab “International Colouring Contest” (specfically the version from ABC Music)

Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players “Do You Know What I Mean?” (available here.)

Hot Hot Heat “In Cairo”

Life Without Buildings “New Town”

Norah Jones “Come Away With Me”

Groundhogs “Strange Town”

Liz Phair “Dance of the Seven Veils” (specifically, the live version from Sessions At West 54th available on this site.)

Adaptation

I saw Adaptation yesterday, and it was absolutely amazing. I give it the highest possible recommendation, I urge everyone reading this to see it as soon as it opens in their area. I won’t be writing anything else about the film here, but I will be contributing to this thread on Barbelith about Adaptation, which so far is just myself and Russ going back and forth about it, waiting for more people to join in.

Why Don’t You Shake It Down For Peace And Love?

You can find excellent movie files of Sleater-Kinney’s spirited performance of “Step Aside” on Conan O’Brien here.

Jicks At The Warsaw, December 7th 2002

* FLY

* JO JO’S JACKET

* WATER IN THE SEA – Very prominent drum/guitar groove, but vocal melody offsets it in a weird unexpected way.

* VANESSA FROM QUEENS – another new song, not previously available as a bootleg mp3 to my knowledge. Midtempo pop, can’t remember much more than that.

* ANIMAL MIDNIGHT – another new song, previously unplayed to my knowledge. Vaguely sinister sounding mid-tempo song.

* VAGUE SPACE

* THE OYSTER (aka Crimson Alligator)

* CHURCH ON WHITE

* DARK WAVE – kinda rocking, with a lot of Malkmus “ooh-oohs”.

* NEVER MY LOVE – cover, original by The Association.

* RAMP OF DEATH – Kinda went right by me in a mid-tempo blur. I didn’t know this one either.

* SHEETS – Another new song, very rocking, one of the best new ones. Some great Malkmus vocals on this one.

* WITCH MOUNTAIN RIDGE (Listed as “prog” on the setlist. may actually be “News From Noisewhere”) – This is song #5 from the Buenos Aires show, the one that starts off “calm me down from new frustration”. I really love this song, I was very happy to hear it.

* JENNY AND THE ESS-DOG

encore:

*US – very nice version, Malkmus played seated for this and the next song. Only SM and John Moen sing on this, Joanna and Mike didn’t join in.

*THIRD RATE ROMANCE – Amazing Rhythm Aces cover, thank you to Hunter. I’m very disappointed that this isn’t an SM original.

*EAGLE ROCK – Memphis Slim cover. Joanna didn’t know it. Malkmus just told her to play mostly A and a “little bit of E”.

*ONE PERCENT OF ONE

I’ll update this setlist once I know what songs were what once I have a copy of Pig Lib. I was very surprised to hear so many new new songs, because I was hyped up to see a lot of the older new songs. I’m afraid that Malkmus may have ditched those songs, which is a real shame because a lot of those songs are better than the less interesting newer songs played last night. I would hate to see “Asp Alert” and “Memory Pulls Me Out Again” be relegated to obscurity, they’re just way too good. I was happy that they played “Jo Jo’s Jacket” and “Vague Space”, as those are my two favorites from the previous record. I was vaguely surprised that no Pavement songs were played this time, given that “In The Mouth A Desert” and “Here” had appeared in some other recent setlists. The performance of “The Oyster” was the highlight of the show for me, especially the newly added extra-long freakout section at the end. Surprisingly, not many of the lyrics to this song or “1% of 1” have been made, though the “Chicago second class, not freight” verse seems to have officially overtaken the “Bennie & The Jets, Eltons wants that early in the set” verse that I prefer in “The Oyster”.

There were waaaaaay too many people with digi-cams at this show.

A Man’s Destiny Is The Mother Of His Own Invention, And His Alone

Christopher Moltisanti on leaving rehab. (Caution: very minor Sopranos spoilers)

“Never Be Influenced By Shallow-Minded Creeps”

Here is a nice little interview with Lance Bangs about Slow Century, via Tim O Thompson. Also thanks to Tim for pointing me in the direction of this very cute letter from Bob Nastanovich to a fan, circa late 1996.

Two-Dimensional Fathers and Seductive Pin-Striped Foreskins

Extracts from the shortlist for the Literary Review Bad Sex Prize 2002 Oh! Chairman Mao!

Recommended Songs Without Explanations

Yellow Note Vs. Pukka “Naked, Drunk, and Horny”

Scissor Sisters “Electrobix”

The Clash “Train In Vain” (live version from Chaos In New York bootleg)

Zoot Woman “Nobody Knows”

Guided By Voices “Beg For A Wheelbarrow”

Mr. X and Mr. Z “Drink Old Gold”

L’Trimm “We Can Rock The Beat”

Har Mar Superstar “EZ Pass”

Sonic Youth “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style”

Cat Power “Good Woman”

Wilco “Cars Can’t Escape”

He Targets The Fans That You Wish You Didn’t Have

Something that you should know about me is that I’m exactly the kind of guy who thinks this MC Paul Barman lyric is brilliant:

Have I made a mockery of a culture like a Choco-Taco? / Was I to rap as France was to Morocco? / Was I colon rap colon colon France colon Morocco?

I’m a sucker for nerdy punctuation jokes, and Barman just can’t stop himself. That line is from “Old Paul”, which could very well be the most sincerely self-deprecating hip hop song of all time. While on other songs, Barman’s self-deprecating humor is more along the lines of Conan O’Brien’s over-the-top selfloathing, on “Old Paul” it really sounds like Barman is seriously considering his place in hip hop, and makes a strong case for his bravery in the face of overwhelming rejection and/or dismissal from nearly everyone. At any rate, it’s excellent pop with a great chorus; and I find it unfortunate that so many people hate this guy when guys like Ja Rule with half as much talent get loads of inexplicable praise.

Solaris

When I saw Solaris over the weekend, I couldn’t stop thinking about a comment made by Steve Buscemi in his directory’s commentary for the Sopranos episode “Pine Barrens”, which I had seen earlier in the week. Buscemi was talking about how much he admired his director of photography on the episode, and how he thinks that the best camera work does not call attention to itself, that the viewer becomes so lost in the story that the last thing on their mind are the technical decisions and cleverness of the photographer and editors. I think that based on Solaris, as well as pretty much everything else I’ve ever seen by Steven Soderbergh aside from Erin Brockovitch, it’s probably safe to say that Soderbergh does not share this opinion.

Virtually every scene in Solaris begs the viewer to acknowledge how beautiful, clever, or well-shot the images are, to the point that the plot seemed besides the point. I know that I had almost no investment in the story, and I’m not sure if it’s really the fault of the story itself since I’ve never seen the original film or read the source novel. At my most cynical, I wonder if Soderbergh chose to make Solaris not so much because he cared about the story, but that to film the story it would require a number of directorial challenges and that the general philosophical tone would allow audiences to forgive several gratuitous and selfconciously ‘arty’ photographic decisions. The film looks and feels as though Soderbergh is checking off a to-do list of film geek and photo techy things that he wanted to fit into a movie, as if he’s thinking “2001 homage – check. Several scenes in which we linger the camera in tight close-up on one actor for the duration of a conversation – check. Another 2001 homage – check…” In many ways, Solaris felt more like a math problem being solved on screen than a genuine moving story, much less one that is meant to be somewhat romantic and intellectually stimulating.

It’s not George Clooney’s fault, though. The guy gives a fairly decent performance, given what he has to work with. He’s a likeable screen presence, and he doesn’t overact, much unlike his tremendously irritating leading lady, Natascha McElhone. McElhone grates on me in many ways which are obvious (poor acting and line reading, a mysteriously fluctuating accent, a tendency to flail about a bit too much) but also in ways that I’m not sure I can verbalize. Something about her is just so wrong, I can’t help but be repelled by her. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie in which an actress bothered me as much as she does – if I were rating this film on a star system, I think that I would take off a star simply for the fact that she was cast in it. She’s just that awful.

It’s probably best for people to avoid Soderbergh’s Solaris unless they have a genuine interest in Soderbergh as a filmmaker, or have already seen and/or read the previous incarnations of the story. It’s not without redeeming qualities — the story may not have done much for me, but it’s not awful; and as gratuitous as many of Soderbergh’s shots may be, they are still quite beautiful and much of it would work well as still photography. Regardless of that, the faults of this film are too distracting and ultimately make this film a passable curiosity.

Blue Moon In Your Eyes

Jesus Christ – I leave for a couple days, and I return to find that my daily traffic has spiked due to about 50+ people arriving here looking for “Sopranos spoilers”, as if I have any better idea of what to expect than they do. Last night’s episode was amazing though, and it’s good to see that I’m not alone in anxiously awaiting next week’s finale. I’m fearing the worst, personally – my predictions are that Carmella will file for divorce, Paulie will die, Carmine will be killed, Junior will go to jail, and it will all be pretty much the beginning of the end for Tony. Things will be extremely dire after next week, setting up the final act of the story next season.

The Shape Of Things That Finally Come

Thank you to Sara for passing this along to me:

I was looking at your web page and saw that you wanted to know what Stewart

Lupton from Jonathan Fire Eater was up to? He is in a new band called Child

Ballads. They are based in Washington DC and are just starting to play shows.

You should keep your eyes open for them!