Archive for August, 2006

Masta Killa with GZA and Inspectah Deck "Street Corner" - Wu-Tang albums are never quite complete without a bleak street ballad in the mode of "Can It Be All So Simple?," and this is the requisite number on perennial Wu-underdog Masta Killa's second record. Masta Killa is a fine MC, but even on his own records, he's reserved and understated. He always seems severe and focused, dropping slow, sharply enunciated lyrics that often eschew persona in favor of cerebral meditations, and emphasize subtle internal rhythms rather than straight rhymes. On this track, he's paired up with the two MCs in the Clan who most obviously compliment his style -- his mentor, the GZA, and the increasingly rugged-sounding Inspectah Deck, who turns in one of his best verses in years. Following a quote that trails off on the suggestion that a revolution is not coming, and that "the world is just going to drive on and on," Deck begins his verse dreaming of going down in a blaze of glory fighting for a revolution that sounds more like a bloody end point before moving on to describe his life in a world that just keeps moving, and changes only in barely perceptable increments because in fact, a true revolution is a maddeningly slow, ongoing process. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site. This week: Faunts, Bardo Pond, and The Pipettes.

Also: A very high quality recording (in spite of some mysterious fading midway through "Half A Canyon") of a Wowee Zowee-era Pavement show is available in its entirety on Rbally.

The Rapture "Pieces of the People We Love" - The Rapture's breakthrough album Echoes was dominated by a visceral sensation of desperation and panic which, in combination with the music's strong house and disco influences, yielded a sound that closely approximated the inner workings of a neurotic introvert attempting to break free of their fears and become a dancing, romancing, fully functional party person. The long-delayed follow-up to that record is not nearly as full of angst, though its extroversion still seems forced, though not even remotely insincere. Part of the Rapture's appeal, especially back in 2002/2003, came from the fact that they were quiet indie boys who were willfully surrendering to dance music, and the subtext of the album mirrored exactly what was going on with many indie-centric critics and fans at the time.

Pieces of the People We Love is a generally positive, upbeat set of songs, but its most interesting moments come when the group seems to be surveying a post-Echoes indie landscape packed with bored, arms-crossed fans with bad haircuts watching shitty "punk-funk" bands and wondering if they ever really made a difference at all. They initially come off like overbearing Dance Commanders on the brilliant "Whoo! Alright Yeah...Uh Huh," but by the time the song reaches its singalong breakdown and "I used to think life was a bitter pill, but it's a grand old time" postscript, it's clear that they are only nagging you to get out there and live it up because they really, really care about you. The Motown-biting title track reinforces the impression that they're all about the love; that they weren't joking around when Luke Jenner was pleading "I need your love!," but there's something less needy in the song and on the album as a whole. It's not quite confidence, but perhaps the realization that they aren't going to wither and die alone and unloved if their short term gambits do not work out in their favor. (Click here to pre-order it from Insound, who have it on sale for $7.99.)

Elsewhere: My review of the Outkast film Idlewild is up on The Movie Binge.

Miho Hatori "Ecdysis" - Video treatment: At the start of the clip, Miho Hatori buries a bag of candies, but when they are put in the soil, a colorful stalk pops up from the ground. As the churning bassline enters the mix, the radiant, pastel-hued stalk grows higher and higher. At first, she goes about her business, but is distracted by its presence -- she can see it everywhere she goes in her town. She decides to climb it, and as she does, she sees her home eventually disappear beneath her as she scales up the stalk and into the stratosphere. We see beautiful and strange things in the clouds, and eventually she leaves the earth behind, and travels through the cosmos on the stalk, science be damned! Right around the 3:34 mark, she reaches her final destination, a glorious city that appears to be entirely composed of an organic chitinous substance on a planet with a brilliant lavendar sky. (Click here to buy it on import from Amazon.)

NEU! "Für Immer" - NEU!'s "motorik" songs capture in song the feeling of passing through time and space, and hurtling at great speed toward an endless horizon. It is some of the most optimistic and peaceful music that I have ever heard; conveying this total absence of fear in what lies ahead, and this silent convinction that the future is a beautiful place. "Für Immer" ends at a point that sounds a little like bliss and a lot like oblivion, but the truly ecstatic part of the composition is the sensation of accrued velocity on the way to that destination. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

Elsewhere: The Anchor Center presents a clever, thoughtful review of Au Revoir Simone's "Through The Backyards" in video form.

Clinic "Animal Human" - Though they are still generally lacking the manic spark that made their first three records some of the most compelling art-punk of the past twenty years, Clinic sound far more focused and inspired on their forthcoming LP Visitations. Of course, this is all relative to their previous record, Winchester Cathedral, the only dud in their discography, though not actually a bad album so much as a document of a band in an awkward creative holding pattern. They are still cannibalizing their own back catalog on the new album (the opening track's vocal melody is extremely similar to that of "Welcome" from Walking With Thee, for example), but Visitations has a tone that is both subtly and obviously different from their previous work.

When Winchester Cathedral was released, I suggested that their approach to music was to deliberately treat elements of their style as a limited set of modular variables that can be taken apart and recombined with new textures, and I'm even more confident about that theory now. It's not tremendously different from Jack White's approach to his songwriting and visual presentation in The White Stripes, though Clinic's taste and execution is far more obscure and abstract. One of the most exciting things about Clinic for me has been in the way Ade Blackburn often sings without enunciating recognizable words, and sometimes alternates between phonetic mutterings, adenoidal yelps and cryptic lyrics containing ambiguous references to religion and spirituality.

There are more lyrics than ever on Visitations, but that doesn't make the record any easier to understand. In fact, somehow the record feels even more dense and oblique, and I'm uncomfortable making too many observations about its content just yet, as I feel that it is only just now beginning to reveal itself to me after getting through it about eight times as of this writing. I am especially impressed by "Animal Human," a track that starts off as an eerie prayer, and ends with a scratchy funk guitar groove that is unlike anything the group has ever written before while also sounding like no one else but Clinic. (Click here for Domino Records' Visitations site.)

Robert Pollard "Serious Bird Woman (You Turn Me On)" - Bob Pollard simply would not be Bob Pollard if he wasn't doing everything he could to sabotage his own pop songs, and that is just something you have to decide to either dislike (along with most of the rest of the world), or embrace, if you're willing to find charm in his quirks and often questionable creative decisions. "Serious Bird Woman" is essentially a catchy power ballad with largely straightforward lyrics for a love song, albeit one addressed to an, um, Serious Bird Woman. Pollard has written so many tunes with sincerely heartfelt lyrics existing side by side with odd jokes and bizarre imagery that the Bird Woman thing is almost a non-issue, but his choice to sing the song as...weirdly...as he does on the album recording is just puzzling to me, especially since he's capable of singing it so much better live. Is this deliberate, or is it just evidence of carelessness? It's hard to tell, especially when I'm starting to think that the awkward singing on the studio recording actually works. (Click here to pre-order it via Pollard's official site.)

Elsewhere: My review of The Quiet is up on The Movie Binge.

Stephen Malkmus "Kindling For The Master (Major Swellings mix)" - There are many strange things about this double 12" of "Kindling For The Master" remixes, but chief among them is the fact that it seems to be released on a random whim quite some time after Face The Truth came out last year, and that all of the remixers somehow agreed to make sure that SM's original recording was still the perkiest and most danceable version available. I am fairly certain that "Kindling" (easily one of my favorites from FTT, by the way) would make for much peppier remixes than what's on offer -- was MSTRKRFT too busy, too expensive, or too '00s to deal with the Malk? The Major Swellings mix by Prins Thomas does alright by the song by keeping the structure and key instrumental components intact and extends the track into a bleak, sinister groove that kills a lot of the fun in the song, but at least sounds pretty cool. (Click here to buy it from Domino.)

Young and Restless "Satan" - This cut may not be long on ideas, but is a nearly perfect specimen of a particular sort of punk song from this period, and may actually sound better in a few years when no one is doing this sort of thing, or doing it quite like this, anymore. The screamo bits are a nice touch, but the singer doesn't go too overboard, or maybe I just say that because I've been giving that new Blood Brothers record a shot a few times recently, and I find myself really going for the songs until I invariably reach the moment when I just can't take the gratuitous shrieking that comes up in every single song. Is it a total lack of imagination on their part, or are they just trying to please their audience, or are they actively attempting to devalue their own currency? (Click here for Young & Restless' official page.)

There's not going to be a regular post here today, but my new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site, and features songs from The Loud Family, Space Cowboy, and Rocketship. If you have access to MTV's Urge service (um, basically, if you have a current version of Windows Media Player on your computer, you can read it), you may want to check out my review of the surprisingly listenable Paris Hilton record on the Pop Informer blog. Also, my review of the absolutely dreadful movie Accepted is up on the The Movie Binge.

Rifle Nice "Bubble Trouble" - "Bubble Trouble" is surprisingly graceful for a song with some bits of very goofy singing and a general low-budget sci-fi soundtrack vibe, but the quality comes through in the group's craft and control. The song has a strong center in its rhythm section, but all other elements in the track casually float around as though they were in a gravity-free environment. (Click here to buy it from Rifle Nice's official site.)

The God Damn Doo Wop Band "Talk Too Much" - It's really too bad that indie audiences generally treat even top quality non-rock pop pastiches with a condescension normally reserved for Civil War reenactors and cosplay enthusiasts, because there's really no good reason for there not to be new songs written in appealing old traditions. Relative to the number of lame-ass trad-rock retreads out there (not to mention the sheer number of mindblowingly bad acoustic singer-songwriters, GAH), I don't feel like there's nearly enough girl-group pop stuff being written these days. The God Damn Doo Wop pull off their song with minimal irony, full commitment, and loads of melody, so let's hope that God blesses rather than damns them. (Click here to buy it via the God Damn Doo Wop Band's MySpace page.)

Marit Bergman "No Party" - If you're getting confused, this is the Marit from Sweden who did "Adios Amigos" and that track with her singing the Pet Shop Boys' "Rent" over the top of Justus Köhncke's "Timecode," not the Marit who did "Only A Fool" and "Don't Save Me." (That's Marit Larsen, who is from Norway.) Bergman's latest single begins as an unassuming acoustic ballad, but by the time its chorus hits, the arrangement grows lush and a flood of bittersweet emotion overtakes the song. "No Party" absolutely nails a particular sort of angst and loneliness, especially in how it captures the perverse sort of romanticism that goes hand in hand with feeling alienated and confused in a strange place. (Click here to buy it from Marit Bergman's official site.)

Beastellabeast "The Final Mistake" - The song is slick and slippery, with its rubber band bassline, bumpy beats, and lead vocals that seem to be sliding in and out of the groove. If the Slits were more inclined to fuss around in the studio, they may have arrived at something like this. Alternately, this could be like the sound of Le Tigre loosening up to the point that they could barely stand erect. (Click here for the Beastellabeast MySpace page.)

Stereolab "Metronomic Underground / John Cage Bubblegum (Peel session)" - Inspired mainly by seeing the tracklisting for their forthcoming "hits" anthology (which is pretty decent as an introduction to the Groop in spite of inexplicably omitting some key singles such as "Lo Boob Oscillator," "The Noise of Carpet," "The Free Design," and "Captain Easychord") on Stereogum last week, I've spent a majority of my listening time over this past weekend revisiting the Stereolab catalog, focusing mainly on their peak period from about 1993 on through 1996. It's been an interesting thing, because perhaps more so than any other top-drawer indie act of the 90s, none is more hopelessly out of sync with the indie music of this decade than Stereolab. Whereas even the artiest of 00s acts place a premium on emotion, mood, or visceral rush, Stereolab were almost entirely cerebral, choosing instead to create music that meditated on philosophy, criticism, art, and economics within sonic structures that were like the pop manifestations of epiphanies and extended trains of thought. We have music for all sorts of things, but Stereolab were essentially exploring a largely unknown territory of pop compositions that expressed keen intellectual interest and fascination with obscure reference points from art, music, and academia.

It's hard to imagine that it's been so long already, but this year marks the tenth anniversary of the band's masterpiece Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Nearly every track on the record is a stone classic, most especially the opening epic "Metronomic Underground," which is arguably the single best song in the Stereolab discography. Built on a foundation of a genuinely funky (though characteristically asexual) bass groove, the track's gradual layering of musical elements and graceful tangents seems to imply both a sense of architectural space and the gradual arc of a rational argument. This remarkable Peel session recording moves at a slightly brisker tempo than the original album version, and the rawness of the production allows for more bite in the keyboard tones, resulting in a more physical and aggressive take on the composition. As the song reaches its climax in its seventh minute, the leads dissolve into a brilliant mess of sputtering electronic noises before transitioning into a particularly raucous rendition of "John Cage Bubblegum" from the Refried Ectoplasm compilation. The genius of Stereolab's best work is very well represented in this recording, mainly in the way that they were able to approach their brainy, somewhat austere subject matter with the same sort of passion that Prince would reserve for sexuality, or Metallica would embrace in articulating rage. Though the band is still capable of writing strong material here and there, that sort of spark and energy is largely missing from their work following Emperor Tomato Ketchup, meaning that even the catchiest tunes from Dots and Loops onward tend to seem less dynamic in comparison. (Click here to pre-order Serene Velocity from Rhino, and here to buy Emperor Tomato Ketchup from Insound.)

My DJ set @ Skinny 8/17/2006
Harry Nilsson "Jump Into The Fire" / Sonic Youth "Jams Run Free" / Peter Bjorn and John "Young Folks" / Squeeze "Squabs on Forty Fab" / Stevie Wonder "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" / Phoenix "Long Distance Call" / Electric Six "Infected Girls" / Maxi Geil & Playcolt "Makin' Love in the Sunshine" / The Make Up "Born on the Floor" / Elvis Costello "You Belong To Me" / Erasure "Chains of Love" / Wide Boy Awake "Slang Teacher" / New Young Pony Club "Get Dancey" / Of Montreal "The Party's Crashing Us (I Am The World Trade Center mix)" / Bonde do Role "Ma'quina de Ricota" / CSS "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" / Death From Above 1979 "Blood On Our Hands (Justice mix)" / Muscles "One Inch Badge Pin" / MSTRKRFT "She's Good For Business" / Andrew WK "Don't Call Me Andy" / Led Zeppelin "The Ocean" / Zalatnay Sarolta "Hadd Mondjam El" / Can "Mushroom" / The Rolling Stones "Monkey Man" / The Rogers Sisters "Money Matters" / Art Brut "Modern Art" / Space Cowboy "I Know What Girls Like"

This was easily the weirdest, least cohesive DJ set that I've ever done, largely because I was pretty much just playing songs in a bar and improvising most of it off the top of my head. Honestly, the dancey part of this set was an uninspired indulgence; it worked much better when it was in a mid-tempo rock zone. Big thanks to the lovely Lady Byrd from Who Needs Radio for setting this all up.

Squeeze "Squabs On Forty Fab" - When you don't know which Squeeze song to play, you always have the option of putting on this fantastic medley containing many of their finest compositions. In order: "Take Me I'm Yours," "Cool For Cats," "Up The Junction," "Is That Love?," "Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)," "Separate Beds," "Another Nail In My Heart," "Slap & Tickle," "Goodbye Girl," and "Someone Else's Heart." (Out of print, but click here to buy it from Amazon Marketplace.)

Zalatnay Sarolta "Hadd Mondjam El" - This works very well coming after Led Zeppelin, mostly because it sounds so much like their riff-rock style taken in a more deliberately funky R&B-centric direction without losing the heaviness, lithe rhythm section, or emotive wailing. It's really a shame Zalatnay's music is so incredibly obscure, I can imagine that quite a few people would love this stuff, regardless of the Hungarian lyrics. (Out of print.)