You Are My Nightmare And I’ll Never Wake Up



The Comateens “Nightmares” – I once played this song for someone who just naturally assumed it was by one of the new wave/post-punk revival bands who were all the rage in 2002/03. After learning it was from 1981, it seemed to make all the difference. It possesses all the elements both revivals were striving for (the cheap drum machine beat, the rubbery bassline, and the uncomplicated primitive synthesizer sound), but it was created out of enthusiasm for things new and not tailored to adhere to guidelines which are now well laid out. It’s a shame the Comateens couldn’t hold it together past the mid-’80s, and a greater shame still that Nik North passed on before he could cash in on the sound his band helped invent.

Urban Verbs “Subways” – There’s a grand tradition of nepotism in rock. Urban Verbs may have caught the ear of Warner Bros. in 1980 because their frontman Roddy Frantz was the brother of Talking Head Chris Frantz, but that’s where most of the similarities end. The band was more focused on creating sweeping, anthemic new wave soundscapes than they were dipping their toes into the avant garde. Ultimately, a lot of their output was entirely forgettable, but “Subways” is the kind of song which should be remembered alongside “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and “Telecommunication” as milestones of new wave. (Wounded Bird reissued their first album on cd last year)

A little bit softer now

Captain Beefheart “Peon” – Even if you don’t usually like Mr. Van Vliet (i.e., think he’s too screechy or weird), you might like this song, off Lick My Decals Baby, which my husband was convinced to buy by some enthusiastic record-store clerks. I tend to think of it like “Beefheart does ‘Classical Gas'” except it’s not as up-tempo. Nor is it insanely cheesy. There’s also something about this album that reminds me especially of the first track off Milk Man; guitar tone, maybe? The best thing about this song, though, is its screwy time-signature, which I have yet to figure out because it keeps changing. So if you’re trying to tap your foot along, you can practically feel the neurons of confusion firing in your brain. The album’s very out of print, unfortunately. If you want, you can pay some seller on amazon $89.99, or you could make a trip to Athens and hit the wonderful Low Yo Yo Stuff (next to the 40 Watt downtown), which would probably run you a lot less. They try to keep a copy in stock at all times.

Bill Jones “The Barley and the Rye” – Bill is, of course, short for Belinda rather than William, and I’ve worked on getting my entire family hooked on this album (Panchpuran). She’s Irish-Indian. She plays about a million instruments (accordion! penny whistle!). And she has the liltiest voice ever. I’m not one of those folks who heads straight for the Celtic section of the CD store, at all, but she reawakens my secret love for folk music. I was raised on the stuff. Anyway, get your waltzy folk on. You can buy the album direct from her at the Brick Wall Music site linked to under her name or from amazon.

Fashion or Fuck You

S Prcss: The Sun Provides Vitamin D: At the day job, I watch a ton of TV — eight screens, with at least three turned to the offspring of ESPN at all times — and I hear the Mitsubishi ad which licensed Air’s “Surfing on a Rocket” about 11 (!) times daily. It wouldn’t be generous to say that, eight out of those 11 times, I wish the song that those echoing chords was about to turn into was this one, by the Philadelphia now-duo S Prcss; this track, off their recent EP ‘Taste Like Daughter,” starts off like it’s going to be a gorgeous shoegazy meditation, but it turns into a menacing minor-key rager in a manner as sneaky and quick as a summer cloudburst that absolutely drenches all pedestrians within 75 blocks. S Prcss as a unit is paring itself down (when I interviewed them, 16 months or so ago, they were a trio in search of a bassist; for ‘Taste Like Daughter,’ they’ve stripped themselves down to a duo), but it makes their recorded output only that much more vital; they tumble and rumble the everyday tropes of rock and roll just long enough to ensure that brightly glittering gems come out. (Buy ‘Taste Like Daughter’ from My Pal God records.)

The Rogers Sisters: Freight Elevator: What this track does is, when you think about it, kind of amazing; It takes the ferocious vocals of Lynn Breedlove and weds them to pyrotechnic, spare rock and a straight-outta-Emily’s-Sassy-Lime countermelody. The forthcoming Rogers Sisters EP, ‘Three Fingers,’ has tons of moments like this; as someone whose nascent post-L.A. Guns tastes were weaned on the Kill Rock Stars comps, it’s really heartening (and shake-my-booty-on-the-E-train-exhilarating) to hear a band that distills the greatest moments of the early ’90s into such a potent, fiery cocktail. (Visit the Rogers Sisters’ official site.)

hello special friends!

Juan Torres “Alma Llanera” hello everyone in fluxland! i (m s1ocki) am thrilled and privileged and honoured to be but a brief and surely insignificant element of this mighty cultural gatekeeper, which has brought so much joy to so many hearts. today i would like to share with you what may be one of my favourite songs ever!

i found this song on an old record left out in the trash with a bunch of other, not-so-good stuff, outside a weird & slightly confused-seeming local record, comic, book, and hipster novelty store. the artist is mexico’s juan torres (not to be confused with cuban musician juan pablo torres–i think), and the album was called, i think “juan torres y su organo melodico vol. 2”–though the volume number may be incorrect. as i was sifting through these discarded records one fine day in, i believe, 1999 or thereabouts (as the media beat its war drums and y2k hysteria was reaching a wild, fevered peak), this little gem popped out at me and nothing has been the same since.

“alma llanera” is a venezuelan folk song (the title means “soul of the plains.”) and it is really something special, especially in sr torres’s spirited organ arrangement–the opening bars alone are worth price of admission (in this case, totally free), and soon it explodes into a sparkling, syncopated (though this may not be the right word as i don’t know from musical terminology like at all) explosion of joy and shivery incredibly amazing incredibleness. i liked this song so much i used it to soundtrack a vaguely ambitious art film i made on super-8 (featuring guerilla footage of european modern dancers!–but i digress). i hope you love it as much as i do!

My 2 Best Listening Experience in the Last 3 Months

If there’s anything we all agree on about music, I think, it’s that your subjective evaluation of it is deeply influenced by the context in which it is heard, and as it happens, my two best listening experiences of the last two months have been not because of a great album or song, but almost entirely because of context. Well, context and good songs. Let me explain.

#1 Liz Phair “Love/Hate” – I was feeling claustrophobic one Saturday morning/afternoon in June–we’d stayed in Friday because we were too tired or too broke or too lazy, if I recall, and while video games are nice they do sap your will to live after a while–and so I decided to take a little walk around Miss Clap’s neighborhood up in Washington Heights with my discman at my side. I loaded it up with my obsession of the moment, the self-titled Liz Phair album, and as it was a brief walk, I skipped through to my favorite songs.

Miss Clap’s apartment building is a block away from the famous buildings that perch impossibly above the huge expanse of I-95 leading to the George Washington Bridge (if you’ve ever driven from New Jersey to Brooklyn via the George Washington and Triborough bridges, you’ve seen them), and when you walk up the street just outside, Audubon, you can walk on what feels a lot like a freeway overpass but what is actually a major Manhattan thoroughfare, with nice views north and south. And so as I set out, I walked down to the park running beside Riverside drive, and there I heard “Extrordinary” and “Why Can’t I,” the latter of which I usually love uniquivically, but which wasn’t really doing it that day. I cut up 178th for a block and heard “Rock Me.” And as I started to walk over the interstate, I clicked onto “Love/Hate.”

And it was perfect. Those opening chords pounded in and I looked down at those 16 or whatever lanes of freeway with cars going down them in the bright sunshine on a weekend morning and it felt like exactly what I wanted to do, like I was a fool not to be driving somewhere right then. I stood on the edge of the sidewalk and I looked over–something I enjoy doing regardless–and I listened to the song and I could almost feel myself blaring it from a stereo as I tore down the freeway. I wasn’t, but it felt like it anyway.

Besides the great feeling, it also drove home to me the difference between “Why Can’t I” and “Love/Hate”: the former was a pop song, and the latter was a rock song, and in their way they were almost archetypical examples of each. “Love/Hate” felt good in sunshine with cars; “Why Can’t I” felt good walking through a park downtown on a quiet day. The difference is that Love/Hate has its rock beats on the 1 and 3, and “Why Can’t I” has its pop beats on the 2 and 4. Easy schmeazy.

#2: Wasteland “HH Babies” – I think it was Simon that wrote how the Wasteland album, Amen Fire, was an entirely interior album, one that sounded like indoors, especially like dark indoor places, tunnels and basements. But I really only grew to appreciate that album while listening to it on a Greyhound bus pulling out of Youngstown, Ohio. Maybe it’s because I don’t get a lot of chances to listen to music on speakers in isolation, but it was only once I got a chance in an admittedly enclosed place to listen on headphones to the things on that album that made it interesting. But while I was in an enclosed bus, I was looking out at buildings and traffic lights and sparse trees aligned besides railway tracks and grey skies, and this was how it made sense to me.

There’s something perfect for me about listening to music while on a Greyhound, and I don’t really know what that is. It might have something to do with that connection in my brain between rock and cars that I mentioned above, but as often as I’m hearing, say, the Starlight Mints in an exciting way, I’m also hearing Jay-Z with clear ears. I rarely feel good about putting out my own music without getting a session in with it on the ol’ Greyhound. And so when I go off on these trips, I know what I listen to will be important.

I had set off on an Independence Day weekend trip back home with a full CD case but with no real agenda. I spun through a few things and it was OK. But then, after the sun set–oh then–it started in on a thunderstorm. I was perplexed; I love thunderstorms, but what to put on, knowing how it would hit me? The new PJ Harvey? Lightning Bolt? Nah: the new Wasteland EP, Spirit Shots. And oh yes, it was the right decision.

This track is a reasonably good indication of the basic Wasteland formula: hip-hop beats under a bevy of noises, especially extremely high-pitched digital noises. And I’m at a loss to explain exactly why this worked so well, aside from the obvious parallels with the lightning-y noises here. But there was something about the combination of the sealed-off, air-conditioned bus compartment, the slumbering passengers, the lightning strikes in a dark sky illuminating a soggy pastoralia, and these tones and rhythms that made me feel entirely different. It felt like a fog had enveloped the riders and that I was somehow unaffected as they lay unconscious. It felt like everything had slowed down and that the lightning bolts were cracks in the sky. It felt like I was listening to the weather play a song. It felt perfect.

And so I am, I guess, asking you to do things with these songs: if not to stand above I-95 while playing Liz Phair, to at least blare it in a car; if not to rush onto a bus during the next thunderstorm and listen to Wasteland, to at least put it on during a good hard downpour. Give it a try and see.

My Computer Mechanism Wants You Mentally

with each passing year, the idea of fatboy slim becomes more and more untenable. it’s been four years since his last album and, really, that one only got a pass because of the video with christopher walken making like jules munshin. clearly, big beat has run its course, finding refuge in the occasional x-games commercial — even madison avenue is blanching at it at this point. if anything, however, norman cook is a sage man, demonstrating a penchant for reinvention. after four years of deliberation, monitoring trends, finger on the pulse, he has emerged from the lab with a novel idea: he will be the new uncle kracker.

at first sight, it makes as much sense as, i don’t know, sampling jim morrison, but the more one thinks about it, the more it makes (business) sense. “the joker” features bootsy collins on vocals, and, if your classic rock q(104) is low, it’s a song by the steve miller band, probably better known to most as either “some people call me the space cowboy,” “some people call me maurice (guitar sound replicating a wolf-whistle),” or even “the pompatus of love.” unlike uncle kracker’s “drift away” or any of his hits that kinda sound like “drift away,” norman’s take on “the joker” doesn’t have that down-home, front-porch feeling, probably because norm has an e-mail account — perhaps it’s more akin to uninspired smashmouth (and, hey, if you’re thinking “it’s summer, where is the obligatory smashmouth hit” be sure to pick up the princess diaries 2 ost; honest-to-goodness uninspired smashmouth, but we know you’re picking it up for lindsay lohan’s debut anyway). given that this is the same man who participated in the housemartin’s #1 u.k. cover of isley-jasper-isley’s “caravan of love,” perhaps this is a logical progression. even so, that record, a capella, of all things, is downright revoultionary when compared to this desultory recasting.

it’s a hard song to say much about and an even harder song to hate. still, given how massive it’s bound to be, you may find a way before summer is over. “the joker,” it should be noted, is cook’s u.s. single: i imagine that steve miller’s brand of good-natured boogie didn’t take the u.k. by storm. and, yes, u.k. fans, if you think a cover of a thirty-year old fm rock standard is retro, wait until you hear what he’s got lined up for you: apparently, it’s about the internet.

Believe what you want, he’s not my boyfriend



Well I think if we’re all going to live up to the Fluxblog summer gangbang promise, there has to be some inter-poster interaction. And I think the uber-theme this week here is context.

You see, Eppy posts one song he thinks is no good, to provide context for another song that he thinks is great (and I kind of agree, though it’s great in a very non-Fluxblog way, which I guess is the point). Tom comes up with a theme which is about how nostalgia recontextualises music (and in the baggy post he talks about how different subgroups can recontextualise the same era in totally different ways). Paul gives us a song in the context of the city it sings about, and Jebni gives us some songs in the context of a personal tragedy.

(And by the way, that Cyndi Lauper track is absolutely ESSENTIAL – that has made my week, despite the sad context)

And me, I think context is the big bugbear for everybody today. Is it “noise” i.e. does it interfere with our appreciation of “pure” music? Or is the context part of the fun? Is Toxic more fun because it’s Britney singing it? Or is that just irrelevant?

Well, frankly, to use a Barbelith injoke in a public forum, anyone who says it’s irrelevant needs to take a quick trip to selfawaria. We’re stuck with context. Just as you can’t know your own mind by looking at it, you can’t separate your enjoyment of music from what you think that music ‘means’ culturally.

But it struck me in a cab this morning, listening to Def Leppard on headphones, that if I imagined this record (“Hysteria”) as electronica, which sonically it almost could be, how almost completely shorn of context it could be. Electronic sounds somehow (to me anyhow) seem to mean contextually less because there is more diversity both sonically and culturally around electronic music than almost any other recognisable sound.

So to illustrate that I offer two instrumental electronic music mpegs. Partly because after surveying what’s been posted so far this week, I think that’s what’s missing. And I ask – what do you think the context is? Which one do you like more? Because, me, I think shorn of context, these two are very similar. And they both make me smile. And they’re both reminding me of someone who never says quite what she means, leaving a lot to context and ambiguity.

Some music

Also some music

(contextual spoilers coming up – do not read until you have listened)

One of these tracks comes from an LP on the Karloff label, and the other from a 12″ EP on Aftershock. The latter is probably no longer available to purchase having been released about 5 months ago. But in either case, your best bet to buy em is Juno.

What should be noted about both of these tunes is that both of them are more lighthearted, melodic and poppy than one would normally expect from the allotted contexts of the artists. But you already knew that, right? (and if you didn’t fuck off, lightweight) (or congratulations true believer)

Dead On Arrival, The 90s Revival (Part 3)

Frank Black “Big Red” I wrote something about the Pixies once which even in these reunited times still holds up. Pertinent here is the idea that Frank Black sounded most human and engaged when he was singing about aliens and spaceships: “Big Red”, which I hope you Fluxblog readers all know, is from his second solo album and is a charmingly hooksome song about the colonisation of Mars. It sums up for me the breezier, more joyful side of ‘Alternative’ music in the early 90s.

Alternative music has been criticised, or rather, the idea that ‘alternative music’ exists has been criticised – it was a marketing conceit, a branding exercise that reduced the colorful, creative patchwork of 80s independent music to pigeonholed homogeny. I can see that point, and later in the 90s things did get pretty awful as the bubble burst. But at the same time as soon as Nirvana hit big ‘Alternative’ was inevitable. Post-Nirvana there was a swell of interest in the people who’d been doing ‘that kind of thing’ for ages – what resulted wasn’t always enjoyable but it was interesting, a one-off opportunity for a generation of indie musicians to make commercial music which would be marketed heavily. A grab at the brass ring, in other words. Throwing Muses, Tanya Donelly, Evan Dando, Dirty-era Sonic Youth, Kim Deal, Bob Mould and Frank Black – from my side of the Atlantic it looked in ’92 very much like these people, more-or-less familiar from well-thumbed Melody Makers, had decided to try and make pop music and see where it got them. Mostly it got them nowhere, or back where they started from. But some fun music resulted.

There are two ways Alternative (in its early 90s, Gen X marketing buzz sense) could revive. People making music that rips it off, sure – but the paths these artists trod have hardly been short of walkers since. More interesting maybe would be another indie boom – a new commercial consensus that would lead to the underground heroes of today being given the chance to ‘sell out’. The sounds would be different, but the spirit of ’92-’93 would linger.

(Meanwhile the poll goes on.)

Advance, Australian Ford

“You Should Have Killed the Monkey First” Adam Ford – To date, I think Adam Ford is the person from farthest away who I met first on the internet and then in person. He’s from Australia. It was in New York, the winter of 2000, when I went up to Fliptone Studios to do some recording and timed it so a bunch of Barbelith people were meeting at the same time. Adam was there just to be in New York, I think. He gave me a copy of his book of poems Not Quite the Man For the Job. The title piece from that book is a kind of retelling of the Green Lantern origin story, only funny and poignant at the same time. Adam Ford is my kind of person; a man of letters, a man of science, and a man who’s not afraid to let his geek banner fly high and proud. A man not afraid to demand his pedipulator. Not all of his poems or spoken word pieces (or even his novel) are about comic books, but some of the best ones are. This is one of those.

“Metamorpho” The Songs and Stories of the Justice League album – Some time in 2001, Mr. Ford was generous enough to not only tell people about this album, but also to record it and swap it for mix tapes. It’s a treasure from 1975, although it feels between 10 and 20 years older, alternating short “radio play” pieces with theme songs for the various heroes. The Justice League roll call is pretty funny, but the Metamorpho song has this weird kernel of pathos buried under the forced “let’s be hip, kids!” tone. It tells its own eerie story, complete with a heart-wrenching narrative twist at the end. Plus, you can dance to it. Well, maybe that’s just me. Anyway, you can read more about the record and see scans of the covers over here (scroll down to “music”).

“Music is Crap” Custard – The flip side of that same Justice League tape got really worn out. It was a mix of Australian surreal spoken work performers and indie pop bands like Custard that I’d never heard of, but were beautiful, catchy, and should have been global superstars. Unfortunately, not too many people in the States seem to have heard of any Australian independent popsters other than Ben Lee and Darren Hanlon. But the country is full, I say! Full of rich, earthy indie pop loam! Vast herds of bizarre, docile-eyed indie pop animals, grazing in plenty! This song doesn’t really have anything to do with comics, but it is about aliens who hate music, and is really, really happy about it. The only Custard I can find on Amazon is this album, and a record by some speed-metal band I can only assume is totally unrelated.

True love 4ever, grant.

A Less Nutty Robyn Hitchcock

Love Tractor “I Broke My Saw” – Love Tractor tends to be more known for their instrumental stuff, since that’s how they started out, that is, if they’re known much at all these days. But listening to their songs with vocals, I can’t understand why they never hit it totally huge. Mike Richmond, who I actually worked with for a year or so without making any kind of connection, was described in the Trouser Press guide as the title of this post, and he is all yelpy and great. This song kicks off Themes from Venus and is based on a poem by the late John Seawright, another Athens notable. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but their lyrics never do; i.e., they make a sort of dream sense in the way words get played around with sonically, but there’s not usually a coherent narrative.

Love Tractor “Satan” – Here’s another track from the same album. As far as I can tell, it seems to be anti-New Wave and pro-metal, but then, it might also be a big joke, since it’s certainly not Motorhead-esque in sound or anything. Both of these make me think of parties in Athens, parties that involve a lot of hanging out on the porch of an old house bedecked with Xmas lights and feeling the stillness of the air in the summer (breezes are a rare thing) and the condensation from a beer bottle trickling slowly down your arm. This town can be very cliquish, but it can also be pleasingly laid back in a way that I think of as very Southern. If you hit the magical moment, you could go right from talking about them silver britches into Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Basically, I wasn’t around when Love Tractor was playing shows. My college days were way after that time. And yet, these songs come with built-in nostalgia, even when you’re hearing them fresh. They also make me want to dance, which is something I don’t do in public. Looks like it’s not available new from Amazon (or anywhere else), but there are some used copies for purchase.

You Should Be What You Wanna Be

Hans Appelqvist “Zenna & Marie” – A few years ago, I was in a car in deep New Jersey, very late at night, with a driver who was flipping from station to station, and happened on some hip-hop station that was having a call-in talent hour. Two young girls had phoned in and were doing a complicated clap-and-slap-and-rap routine; I still remember the sound of it, like they’d never had this much fun before and didn’t even think it was possible. The recording that’s come closest to the feel of that moment for me is this song, from the Swedish composer Hans Appelqvist’s 3-inch CD Att M?ta Verkligheten, on which he plays with recordings of people’s speaking voices in a bunch of languages. Hint: keep listening–it goes places by the end that aren’t at all obvious at the beginning, and it sounds awesome at the same volume, at the same deep-night hour, and through the same speakers you’d use for a hip-hop station’s call-in show. I don’t think the two little girls here realized that there was going to be music added to what they were saying… but what song are they trying to remember, or sing along with?

This track appears here by kind permission of Mr. Appelqvist. Americans can buy Att M?ta Verkligheten through Forced Exposure, here; you can also get it through the extraordinary Swedish experimental label that released it, Hapna (Also highly recommended from them: the wild organ/accordion/drum duo Sagor & Swing’s Orgelplaneten.) And you can download a bunch of Appelqvist’s other work here.

There ain’t a big enough ASCAP



Robbie Fulks – “Fuck This Town” – Sometimes, I hate living in Nashville. And I’m not even a struggling musician. This city eats its own and shuns the outsiders. Take the case of Robbie Fulks. In “Fuck This Town,” Fulks not only tells the tale of what “Music City, USA” did to him, but puts the stories of countless others into a concise and appropriately bitter 2+ minute song. When metal was big in the ’80s, naive kids from all over, desiring fame and acclaim, were wounded and heartbroken by their experiences in Los Angeles. The same can be said of the grunge boom in the early ’90s. Nashville, however, has been doing this for many decades, and continues to do it to this day. How do they get away with it? Smoke and mirrors. The rest of the world thinks it’s just a happy-go-lucky bunch of bumpkins releasing country records, crossing their fingers for success, and saying their prayers before bed. Wrong, world! Music Row is a haven for bloodthirsty opportunists with their ears to the ground, chewing up and spitting out singers and songwriters for big profits. Nashville is where artistry goes to die. (Click here to buy the album South Mouth)

And He Went For a Ride

Johnny Cash (w/Krist Novaselic et al) “Time of the Preacher” – My first guest-post here on Fluxblog is a joke about two different covers of the same classic song. (Walk into a bar, etc.) The first one is by someone whose main work in the past few years has been with covers, although this track isn’t taken from one of those albums. It is instead from a collection called No Depression: What It Sounds Like, Vol. 1, wherein Johnny covers this near-perfect Willie Nelson song backed by various Seattle folks, including (sigh!) Krist Novaselic and, apparently, various members of Alice in Chains, presumably in some sort of quid-pro-quo for Cash’s cover of “Rusty Cage” on Unchained. (Apologies for the vagueness; my knowledge of this is somewhat limited.) Oddly enough–or not, depending on your opinion of the folks involved–it’s not particularly good, the halfway-between-rock-and-country bassline aside. It’s too fast, a bit too rote, and whoever mixed it didn’t seem to do justice to the usual sludgy AiC sound while also not going down the nice and dirty route taken by Van Lear Rose, on which the guitars here would have made considerably more sense. There’s a certain value to the switch between wanking and tentative, almost unschooled tail-off at the end of the solo (around 2:10), but the rest of it just doesn’t work very well, especially not as some sort of statement of what No Depression sounds like. (This doesn’t sound like Uncle Tupelo to me, but then…) As much as I’d like to blame this on the my-personal-definition-of-“better-off-dead” Alice in Chains, I think the problem is mainly Johnny’s–he sticks too close to the original and fails to really reimagine it, which means that he doesn’t entirely convey the story behind it, an almost fatal flaw in a song that was intended to stand as part of a whole. Hearing those iconic first six notes played all metal instead of on a solo nylon guitar is an interesting inversion–you almost think they’re going to launch into a Don Caballero song or something–but as a whole, it’s more an interesting curiosity. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Carla Bozulich “Medley: Time of the Preacher/Blue Rock Montana/Red Headed Stranger” – For reinvention, it’s hard to beat this cover, which takes two tracks totaling 2:49 in length and stretches it into an insanely beautiful 6:42 monster. Taken from Carla’s song-for-song cover of Willie’s original album, this is one of the multiple styles employed thereon, roughly classified as Dirty 3 without a drummer and then, uh, Dirty 3 with a drummer. And a vocalist. Who kicks ass. It takes the open spaces described in the lyrics and literalizes them with the music, spreading out the chords and reducing the attacks to slight whispers in the breeze while pedal-steel and static float on top like dust, foregrounding the vocals as the interior monologue made flesh. Bowed upright bass approximates an organ and the violin joins in tentatively. Then the drums crash in. Like in some Westerns, the power here comes from the combination of deliberateness and confidence: they are moving at this speed because they do not need to move any faster, and were they, something would be lost. Listen to it after the Cash version and I think it emphasizes how much this is a burst of steady sunshine on a dry day in an open landscape. It is slow-moving but profoundly happy, in spite of the sadness of the lyrics, or maybe even because of it. As Carla’s guitar locks in with the drums and the pedal steel fills in the gaps, it gets louder, but not faster, and sort of reluctantly. When those toms kick in you’re all like “yes, this rocks!” like the rock-out section in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” you eventually realize that it doesn’t necessarily rock any more or less than what came before. It is not ecstatic because it has been this ecstatic already. It is a lovely little thing. (Click here to buy it from Carla.)

Energetic, Boisterous, Rollicking, Rousing, Confident, Manic, Quirky

Jules & the Polar Bears “Good Reason” – Sound quality on this is admittedly horrible (mp3 from LP) but worth persevering through and crank it the eff up. Jules Shear hasn’t ever had a hit, but he sure has created them for other people, most notably “All Through the Night” for Cyndi Lauper and “If She Knew What She Wants” for the Bangles. The thing is, he’s burdened with this voice that a lot of people can’t get past, but this song (off J&PB’s second album, Fenetiks, which is as out of print as it gets and may not ever have been on CD) at least is super ticky-tocky and of its time (1979) and danceable in a white-boy way, and it’s even got good lyrics, which is pretty much par for the course. You might be able to pick up a copy of his Best Of here in the used section, which has some of these early cuts, and here’s the full selection of what’s available CD-wise. You’d probably be best off digging through the dollar bin at a rekkid store.

Zumm Zumm “By 30 Years Your Money’s Gonna Ruin Everything” – 45 seconds of Athenian cute punk goodness. I know almost nothing about these guys. They play occasionally here in town, and I haven’t made it to a show yet. I think their lyrics could turn a lot of people off, as they’re pretty standard anti-corporate bla bla, but when they’re hard to understand, you don’t even have to. I have a big weakness for a tempo this fast. Plus, you can order the little CD this is off of (Gerald Bronson) for a mere $5. What’s not worth $5?

Rediscovered Treasure (the music of second chances)

Bill Cosby “Don’cha Know” – I discovered the album Silver Throat (Bill Cosby Sings) back in the late ’80s, looking for stand-up comedy in the used record racks (mainly for filler in mix tapes). I figured it’d be great material for samples, a little singing and a lot of comedy. After all, 1. It’s Bill Cosby; 2. It’s obviously from the mid-60s, the height of his comic career; 3. Cover art has Coz with a big, white cowboy mustache. Well, I soon discovered that the subtitle did not lie. It’s a genuine rhythm & blues album, sung by Bill Cosby, with absolutely nothing funny about it except the (unfortunate) cover. Most of the tracks are covers of blues and R&B hits by people like Jimmy Reed and Ray Charles. I stuck it on my jazz/blues shelf and forgot about it… until Flux posted “Hikky-Burr” a few weeks ago. Forget about comedy, this is an amazingly solid record, with a few songs (like this one) credited to Cosby himself as composer. It’s pretty hard to find, but apparently, old copies are for sale at Amazon’s zShops.

The Fascinators “Fascinators’ Minor” – Years ago, the summer before I left home for college, I became caretaker to a burned out house down the street – mowing the lawn and keeping animals out of the structure, mostly. The former residents were an old couple who left behind a great book and record collection. I took two of the less-fire damaged records because I loved the cover art – very 1950s-looking calypso albums. I listened once and thought, eh, if I ever throw a theme party, I’ll pull it out, and forgot about ’em. Then, about five years ago, I started putting an “album of the month” out on display in my living room, and I’d play each one from beginning to end. Well, Champion Steel Drum Bands of Trinidad was a real winner, with a sound unlike anything else I’d ever heard. I only regret I hadn’t gone over to that house with a milk crate and pulled more stuff off the shelves before leaving town. You’ll be lucky to find this record anywhere I think, but I imagine any of the others put out by Cook Laboratories will be similar. Coincidentally, yesterday morning (the day after Flux so kindly uploaded this file), there was a “musicians in their own words” piece on NPR by steel pan player Andy Narell, who covered some of the history of the form – beautiful, upbeat music made by thugs out of recycled metal trash.

Neil Young “Computer Age” – I have a strong feeling I rediscovered this song when most people did, after Sonic Youth covered it on the early 90s tribute album

The Bridge. But I bought the original album, Trans, shortly after it came out in 1982 – in the “used” rack, obviously chucked out by a disgusted Young fan who couldn’t figure out what the heck all this computer crap was doing in his countrified rock and roll. I bought it because I’d heard this song on a New Wave show, and fallen in love with its bridge – to my teenage ears, that haunting, alien vocoder melody promised something new and strange and beautiful just around the corner. After a few listens, like everyone else in the world, I grew to loathe the album, because it’s two-thirds proto-electronica sci-fi soundtrack, and one-third failed folky art-rock (most of that being the one, interminable song “Like an Inca”). Listening to it again, though, some of it is absolutely brilliant, about 15 years ahead of its alternate timeline, and I fall back in love with this particular song every time I hear it. There’s an import version of Trans on Amazon, but according to the reviews, some songs have been remixed by Swedish producers to appeal to the “European techno-pop crowd.”

Thanks for listening. Yours sincerely, grant.

Dead On Arrival, The 90s Revival (Part 2)

Shaft “Roobarb And Custard” – Inasmuch as dance music can have a ‘self-image’, it’s one of progress: read anyone who writes a lot about dance and you see a healthy fear of inertia and a love of the new. But at the same time there’s always been a revivalist streak there, often deep-buried. The marketing reissue cycles seem to be much shorter when dealing with the (perhaps more frazzled) club demographic than the rock one – ‘old skool’ can mean four or five years ago, ‘…ever!’ means ‘last year at most’ and retro parties are common. You see it particularly with early-90s hardcore rave music, which (very simplistically) arrived close to fully-formed at the top of the British charts, fell from favour and mutated to become darker, and then drifted into stagnation. Lookbacks to 1990-94 or some slice therein have been popular ever since.

At its peak of populism though, rave itself was shot through with a nostalgic spirit. “Toytown Techno” – fast and cheap dance tracks using samples from old kids’ TV themes or adverts or computer games – was hated by the purists but SOMEBODY was buying it in droves. And it turned out that the name producers didn’t mind it either, or didn’t mind cashing in – Aphex Twin put out a Pacman single, and Shaft turned out to be then-hot ambient craftsmen Global Communication in disguise.

Kids TV and rave made a perfect match: the sudden appearance of a half-forgotten tune could trigger “what the fuck??” hysteria in a crowd, and many children’s themes had a faintly demented aura which worked well with the ever-quicker breakbeats. Roobarb And Custard, a cartoon about a yellow dog and a purple cat locked in conflict, was particularly suitable – its main theme was sharp, springly and nagging and (even better!) it had been animated in such a way that every character vibrated and shuddered non-stop at great speed. As an example of the crasser end of dance music, it’s glorious.

Could cartoon rave come back? It barely went away – happy hardcore track makers have long known that filching the break from a familiar tune can bring the rush on nicely – but its chances now seem greater than ever. The massive familiarity of listeners with simple theme tunes (from computer games as well as TV) and the power of the net as a vector for home-made novelties suggest that while it may never be cool again, toytown techno will truly never die.

(Vote for rave in the ongoing poll if you fancy hearing some at the end of the week.)

Peanut Butter Is the New Cupcake?



I’ve been subletting an apartment in Manhattan for the last month as a way to clear my head and get some serious work-related writing done. And it’s afforded me a lot of things: a chance to just walk to my place of residence after getting screamingly drunk, rather than toughing out the 45-plus minute drive back to New Jersey (God’s country). I mean, there are some nights that I’ve driven so drunk that I couldn’t even begin to tell you whether or not I hit something. Or someone. I don’t think I ever did though.

Temporarily living in NYC has also given me a chance to experience some of the finest restaurants in the world. There’s a Manhattan-only pizza chain called Two Boots that is positively excellent – their pizza is nowhere near as cheesy as Domino’s or Papa John’s – the only pizza you can get in my neck of the woods for over twenty-five miles – and they name each different pizza after a funny character from a movie or television show!

But the place that I’ve truly fallen in love with is called Peanut Butter & Co. on Sullivan Street. I have no fucking idea how to make the previous words light up magically and take you to their website, but their URL is www.ilovepeanutbutter.com . I mean, beat that name! And you’d better love peanut butter if you plan on eating at this place, because that’s what it’s all about. They’ve got tuna fish sandwiches on the menu as well, but how much of a douchebag would you feel like eating tuna fish at a place called Peanut Butter & Co.?

I walked by the place one night and looked in their window. I was intrigued, so I made a lunch date with myself for the following afternoon. The thing that I found most appealing was the act that you were presented with: once you’re inside, everyone must uphold the illusion that a peanut butter sandwich should actually cost five dollars. And it’s not like some mammoth peanut butter sandwich either; it’s the kind that you would bang back in thirty seconds when you were eleven. Everybody was just going along with the act, pretending that they weren’t getting hosed. Why? Because it’s funny that a place would just sell peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!

I wasn’t going to order the normal PB&J, nor was I going to go for the kitchy heart-clogging ‘Elvis’ (grilled PB&J with bananas and honey, bacon optional – $6.50). So I got the Peanut Butter Club ($6.00), which turned out to be a normal peanut butter and jelly sandwich done up club-style. So I paid a dollar more for a single piece of bread. Whee!

Ordering was fun enough, with the guy behind the counter helping me craft my Club. ‘Will you have that on white or wheat, sir? Would you like smooth or crunchy? What type of jelly would you like?’ So ten minutes later – TEN MINUTES!? – I get my sandwich. And I eat it. And it’s good. Really good. Really Really Good. But it’s good because it’s FUCKING PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY. This was the first restaurant I’ve ever eaten at where I knew I could walk into the kitchen and teach the cooks (sandwich chefs?) a thing or two about the artistry of their foodstuffs.

As I said, it was good. But by the fourth bite, it was just okay. And I was sick to my stomach by bite number six. Too much of a good thing? I dunno. But I left Peanut Butter & Co. knowing I would never return.

Except I did return this afternoon. And I had another Peanut Butter Club. And I felt sick at exactly the same moment as last time. So either I’m more out of practice eating sugary shit than I thought – I gave up all sweets and snacks about two months ago, along with caffeine and soda – or this place is onto something. They give you the full rollercoaster experience: anticipation, satisfaction, a creeping disgust followed by nausea, which is chased by a creeping temptation to return. Weird. So do I recommend eating there? No. But I will continue to overpay for their magnificently gross sandwiches.

— Tom Scharpling

I’m a Different Person.

hello. no, i am not matthew perpetua either. worse yet, i don’t even have a link to an easily-consumable, tightly-compressed version of the song i wish to discuss today, but fear not, if you know me — and here’s where i’d insert a link if i wasn’t mildly embarrassed about my site’s dormancy — you know that i tend to write about things right of the dial, i.e. things easy to purchase … if you live in the u.k. or don’t mind import fees, that is.

still, we’re not out of the woods yet: i don’t really know much about dance music. normally, this isn’t a problem; today it is, since i plan on discussing the shapeshifters’ “lola’s theme” which is shaping up to be the summer anthem of 2004, according to those who know better. to paraphrase justice stewart, though, i know it when i hear it and i know what i like and, my, do i like this.

the cognoscenti can correct me if they see fit, but “lola’s theme” makes better use of a seven-second sample than any song i’ve heard since “music sounds better with you.” as with much of the best art (and all of the most pretentious), what makes “lola’s theme” work is the shapeshifters’ judicious selection: the sample comes from a johnnie taylor record (“what about my love” for the trainspotters) from 1982, a good six years after people stopped keeping tabs on him, if they were keeping tabs on him at all. on taylor’s record, the strings and counterpoint horns are slower and reserved for the chorus; the shapeshifters’ maximize the tempo, giving them a majesty that only taylor’s voice lends to his original, and skip the vegetables getting right to the dessert, fading and filtering the sample to keep the listener from getting a bellyache.

there are lyrics, to be sure, but despite my own looping of the song, the most i can recall are from the chorus, something like “i’m a different person … turn my life around.” which may not be exactly right, but no matter the wording, i’m certain the sentiment is the same: it could be about a boy or a girl; it could be a metaphor for music. like all the dance music i love best, “lola’s theme” sounds like saturday night without a sunday morning to come. it’s a pair of eyes meeting across a room without the morning after. it’s a distillation of that exact moment when everything seems as if it is changing for the better. it’s there for you when you need it, again and again and again.

monday mourning soundtrack

I’m in no mood to be hip or oblique, to make interesting choices of song, or even to even write well. A friend of mine has just been killed, so indulge me some schoolboy-style literalism, because I’m sure Josh wouldn’t — indeed, he’d probably tell me I was a sentimental wanker, but fuck it.

It’s appropriate that my songs of mourning have all appeared in film soundtracks. To those who are alarmed that Hollywood films are turning into big music videos, we must reply, “so fucking what?”. The overpowering prominence of pop songs in film is often great, my favourite example in recent memory being the use of Tears for Fears’ “Head Over Heels” in Donnie Darko’s slo-mo school corridor scene — what Katy Stevens has described as “diegetic choreography”. And right now I feel like some diegetic choreography, some collusive sense that there’s some meaning in the world, that its seemingly random movements, including mine, can be given some kind of context, some kind of dance.

Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come” — That this was left off the soundtrack album of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X is inexplicable, because for me, Cooke’s song is the most affecting thing about the film, its elegiac tone perfectly harnessed. The strange thing is, I don’t even remember if Lee used this version of the song. The manifest lyrical content — about the weary optimism of the struggle against racism in America — was given an extra mournful context when the song became a hit immediately after Cooke’s death, and as Malcolm drives toward his death in Malcolm X, this becomes heartbreakingly eerie, full of sweetness, ambivalence, doom and hope.

Oasis, “Stay Young” — This song got me up in the morning for years, and I need it now. As the B-side to “D’you Know What I Mean?”, it marks the period that even most fans acknowledge as Oasis’ slide into shiteness, but for me it’s proof that there was still some defiantly earnest pop-rawk left in mid-period Oasis. “Stay Young” was also the end credits song for that fantastic B-movie The Faculty, and Celine Dion’s legacy notwithstanding, the moment when the credits roll can provide a rich context to an entire film. Stay young and invincible. Cos we know just what we are.

Cyndi Lauper, “I Want a Mom That Will Last Forever” — This song appeared on the Rugrats in Paris soundtrack (oh yes). I posted it on my blog recently, but it’s getting a second outing because I think it’s one of the most heartbreaking songs ever written. Like Brian Wilson, Lauper has grasped that the most insanely simple and heartfelt stuff need not be bathetic. Sometimes creepy, perhaps, but not something to be dismissed. And it is a bit creepy, like much Beach Boys material is utterly lovable, but still a bit “wrong”: it’s seemingly so unadorned and plaintive that one can’t help reading the lyrics somewhat literally, hearing them turn into strange, insatiable demands for an indestructible android mother, with supertoys that last all summer long to match. I can imagine the robot boy from Spielberg’s (fascinatingly “wrong”) A.I. singing it, with that same obsessive yearning, overflowing from such a small body. And an overflow of yearning is something in which Cyndi Lauper specialises — listen for the stunning moment at the end (3:25) when her voice almost cracks into a sob. And yet, androids aside, “I Want a Mom” not an irony free zone. The most inescapable irony is that as far as I can tell, Cyndi Lauper, who was 47 when she recorded the song, is singing the part of a two-year-old boy, and strange, structural resonances abound. To equate irony solely with tone, and thus with sarcasm, is to utterly misunderstand it, and so my love of this song is a plea for resonance over rhetoric.

It’s all bitter and sweet. And I’m tired. Goodbye Josh. This is Ben from (Anti)popper, signing off.

The Rhythm of the Saints

Brother Danielson “Our Givest” – I still can’t believe I’ve seen almost nothing from this album making the rounds on the mp3 blog scene, but maybe it’s because it really is more of an album than just a collection of songs, which I know isn’t privileged on here but is nice sometimes. It certainly is in this case. So this is just a taste, a song with lots of energy to hook you in. Dan Smith’s voice sort of goes between a more normal range and the usual talking to the angels, and there are very cool chunky rhythms and many parts of the song going at the same time. There is fine jingle-bell stick work. There is a soft, tappy drum bit at the beginning that is probably on the edge of something. And there are also some of the detuned harmonies that go throughout the album and that are one of my favorite things about it. You listen and it goes from a little off to annoyingly off through the rules and into perfect harmony (that is, it doesn’t change; you do). I wrote about this a bit more a while ago.

As far as comparisons go, I do find it difficult to make any except to the Danielson Famile, which there isn’t much point in doing since it’s the same guy. I encourage you to listen to it about as many times as you can stand, and then you’ll start walking to the beat as you make your rounds, and the spirit (of the music) will be alive in the world. And then you’ll go and buy the album and realize how good the rest of it is and how this particular song fits into the structure. And you’ll make it to the last song in the right frame of mind for it to resurrect the eff out of you.

—Hillary