Author: kim

Take it up a notch, please!!

What I pasted below can also be read in its edited/less-embarrassing form if you loiter in a bookstore, flipping through the latest issue of D.I.W. Magazine.  

START!!

Check it out, Skank Williams Jr., I’m back with another installment of Pussy Eraser, DIW’s I’m-Not-A-Metalhead-But-I-Play-One-In-This-Column extreme music examination!! I recently started a sluggish day with the 2 CD live Sentenced set, Buried Alive (Century Media). The day remained sluggish. Bless their sort-of black hearts, they spent 14 years (and a lot of albums) trying to be In Flames, but Sentenced started out DECENT (not GREAT), and went BAD (not catchy BAD). Ever wish that Anal Cunt were smarter, less self-destructive, and more musical? Of course you did. That’s why I’m telling you to run into the loving arms of Chicago’s 7000 Dying Rats. Their expansive Season In Hell (He Who Corrupts Inc) assaults with coherent blasts of grind mixed with genuinely hilarious novelty hip-hop and a track that makes fun of free jazz. I love it!! If you’re the gambling sort, go ahead and bet that Jesu’s Conqueror (Hydrahead) will make every top ten list forced upon bedraggled freelancers come December 2007. Unsurprisingly, but good for us fans, it combines the pop of Silver and the pummel of the debut with at least four songs that annihilate anything on those two discs. Continuing the obligatory Hydra Head string (we are, after all, an indie magazine and not Metal Maniacs), let’s recall when Cave In, uh, caved in (HAHAHAHA!!!) to bad radio metal, then tried to get all loud and shit to save face. That’s applicable here because our favorite label has issued not one, but TWO Cave In side projects. Clouds is the effort of Adam McGrath, and it resurrects the LET’S ROCK….WHAT A FUN IDEA!!! movement of the mid-90’s – you know, when hardcore crusties discovered ZZ Top? Too bad he cut class when they were hitting the How To Write A Good Song portion of the course. Zozobra is Cave In’s bassist, Caleb Scofield – a far more experimental in a Melvins-meets-Wax Trax adventure. If you haven’t figured it out by this sentence, that means it sounds like mid-period Godflesh with a touch of Harvey Milk. Midwestern, cargo pants-rocking, meth-blowing fathers of three at age 20 are problematic on many levels, and I wonder if they’d use contraception if someone invented condoms that felt and appeared like the members of Slipknot. Collect all nine and avoid having nine kids!! Are their babies born wearing visors? Voliminal: Inside The Nine (Roadrunner) turned up in the PO Box – it’s a live DVD set – as far as I can tell, cuz I will not be venturing “inside the nine.â€Â The Handshake Murders (Usurper, on Goodfellow Records) just spent an entire song telling me that they’ll “rip my throat out,â€Â which they are attempting with rearranged Prong riffage and your standard issue metalcore throat shred. To conclude with uber-worthy reissue alerts: Snatch up both of the Trouble reissues (Psalm 9 and The Skull…on Escapi Music) and educate yourself on how lonely it must have been to be a an amazing, prescient, and Christian doom band in the early-80’s. Follow that up with Armored Saint’s CLASSIC March of the Saint on Rock Candy….wow, there was never a more perfect combo of thrash and L.A. pop-metal….fans of ANY metal variation will not deny the brilliance of this record. Check please!!!

–Andrew Earles

SLOTH – SLEAZOID ROCK FROM THE GLAM/GRUNGE ERA

A few years ago I picked up a book about a late 1980s San Francisco club called THE CHATTERBOX that I used to go to when I was underage. I wrote a piece about it for my old blog Agony Shorthand – check it out by clicking here. The funny thing about it was just how long-past that era seems now. “Long-haired punkâ€Â, or glammy, grungy metal/punk, or even speed metal are all totally antiquated forms of rock and roll, but in the Chatterbox era, man that was IT. Those were the bands the Chatterbox made their stock in trade – bands that wore scarves, bands that didn’t bathe, bands that drank way too much, bands with tire tracks on their arms, bands that held up JOHNNY THUNDERS as a patron saint, and even East Coast bands like SLOTH.

I saw SLOTH at the Chatterbox, actually. I had purchased their 45 “Fetch The Wedge/Miss Sleazy Underbellyâ€Â on a recommendation alone (this was before Soulseek and mp3 blogs, kids!) and dug it a lot, and they stumbled into town not long after that. I don’t think they wore any scarves – they were more like a bunch of dirty pizza delivery guys with long hair and t-shirts kicking out the motor city jams. Tons of attitude and west coast dissin’, but all in good fun. At least two guitarists – maybe three? Listen to this 45 and you’ll hear THE HEARTBREAKERS, STOOGES, STONES and all the hesher heroes of long-haired punks everywhere. Great record, way OOP as they say.

Play or Download SLOTH – “Fetch The Wedgeâ€Â (A-side)
Play or Download SLOTH – “Miss Sleazy Underbellyâ€Â (B-side)

Notes

Hey, here’s the last minute/last hour notes taken and used during a recent “performanceâ€Â as an MC (some bands played!!!).

-Beale Street Music Fest

-Stooges

-Yoga

-Lou Reed/Yoga/Meditation

-Joy Division Nikes and the idea that they have slippery soles

-Black Eye Joke

-TV Guide….I’m going to read it to you, so you don’t have to burglarize an elderly family

-Powers Booth Q and A

-Battle of the Bands

-The only way I would endure the Beale Street Music Fest is if Yoko Ono promised to decapitate herself before a live audience, or if Tom Waits agreed to a spoken word set in which he apolozies for tricking people into accepting the past 30 years of his music

-Iggy Pop Brick by Brick jokes

-TV Guide My Name is Earl cover…here’s some easy hillbilly humor for the creatively bankrupt in the audience

-The guarantee joke

-â€ÂCan I get more jokes in the monitor please?â€Â

-Make a joke about the jokes that I crossed off of the list

 

Elliott Murphy, Part 2

Contrary to what the conventional hype would have us believe in this red-hot, media-dominated world (making even David Cronenberg’s Videodrome seem staid and retro) — and despite the pressure to crown each new work a masterpiece, the best, a tour de force — each effort is in fact just another note, a few more strokes of the brush, one more page in the ongoing, overall work that is the artist’s life.

Which brings us to where Part 1 left off: with the March release of Coming Home Again, Elliott Murphy’s 29th album in 34 years. Like many of Murphy’s albums, the new one’s gifts are many; but, like a miserly old dowager (a Brooklyn dowager, even), the album doesn’t give up its treasures freely. With each listening, however, the songs reveal more of themselves, slowly and steadfastly finding their way into your head and your heart.

Lots of good songs here. Right now my favorite is the opener, “Pneumonia Alley.” That guitar line, that hook — the song, so passionate that it’s muscular, so tender it hurts, reaches out and grabs you by the collar and won’t let go as delivers a deep kiss. “As Good As” presents Murphy at his wordplaying best, referencing James Brown, Mount Kilimanjaro and Hemingway’s frozen leopard in the snow, and even Paris Hilton, while still managing to wax poetic (“I saw the continuous coexistence of heaven and hell”) and confessing that he thinks Jewel is “kinda cool.” Other favorites include “Johnny Boy Gone,” the lovely, loping “A Touch of Kindness” and the stark but beautiful “Making Friends with the Dead.” And I want to hear Lucinda Williams or the Rolling Stones (how about Lucinda Williams and the Stones?) cover the countryish “Losing It.”

Check back with me in a few months or, especially, a few years, when I know all these songs by heart and understand them in the correct context of the albums that came before and after Coming Home Again. Then I’ll tell you what I really think.

BO-WEEVILS: A FORGOTTEN CLASSIC OF 1980S GARAGE

THE GORIES claimed this particular song as a big influence, and it’s not hard to understand why. Total stripped-down primitivism, but with a simple, well-played melody in the background that adds some romping bounce where The Gories subtracted chords, structure and skill. These Australians continued for many years beyond this 1986 classic, but to the best of my knowledge this was the single example where they really and truly nailed it.

Play or Download THE BO-WEEVILS – “That Girlâ€Â (A-side of 45)

NY residentz! R-rated Promo Post for Jeffrey Jensen’s The Jewish!!

Jensen wrote:

Dear John,


It’s been a turbulent last few months in the life of your favorite band. We lost our manager Stein. We got denied a record contract. And Nightface has Ass-Herpes (again). We’ve also been eschewing a lot of trash talk claiming we’re a no-talent “noveltyâ€Â act lacking the grapes to “really rockâ€Â. Most of this comes from the mouths of the jealous (a rival band from Queens). All this got us thinking. We’re they serious? Do people really question our grapes? What are our grapes? Either way, we took it as a challenge. So this Saturday we’re serving up a set of jamz that is certain to end this discussion once and for all. The Jewish will play an All American Rock ‘n’ Roll Revue!!! No filler!!! No ballads!!! No fat chicks!!! If that weren’t enough, we’re also debuting a new bassist and security guard/manager. Looks like another one for the ages. Bring Boogie Shoes!!!
The Jewish at 9:00
famous gypsters Cass McCombs and Arboretum play after
Saturday May, 5 2007
at DON PEDRO’S

90 Manhattan Ave @ McKibbin St 

Brooklyn, NY

He never gets tired of that ass-herpes joke.

Me over here, reference WAY over there, but there’s a point here…

and it starts off on the right track…

from the Letters section in Magnet 75:

I’ve never quite understood why MAGNET readers take Andrew Earles so seriously. It’s an intentional shtick: 95 percent of the time he’s abrasive or idiotic, five percent of the time he’s actually amusing. I think those are the actual percentages he’s hoping to achieve. Earles reminds me of the frontman for the late-70’s San Francisco band No Alternative; he called himself Johnny Genocide. In the long periods between songs, Genocide would accost the audience by spitting, throwing beer cans and calling us “a bunch of fuckin’ fags.â€Â I always thought this was stupidly hilarious – even funnier when the audience became upset. When Genocide actually got down to playing his guitar and singing, No Alternative was a damn good pre-thrash punk band. Yet I could never quite take them seriously because of the spectacle they created. In the same way, I have difficulty taking Earles seriously when he’s doing reportage or reviewing outside of the Street Team column. That’s the real problem with Earles, not all these other reader complaints. How much of his non-column work can I trust? Eventually, No Alternative disbanded. Genocide went on to dye his hair black and start a band called the Swingin’ Possums, playing rough and exciting punky rockabilly. Genocide dropped the abuse shtick and let the music speak for itself. Earles might want to take a lesson from him.

– William Breiding

Somewhere

 

 

I downloaded Joanna Newsom’s new EP Joanna Newsom …

I downloaded Joanna Newsom’s new EP Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band a couple of days ago from eMusic, and I finally sat down last night to listen to it.

And it’s a freaking revelation. All you Joanna Newsom-haters who want to know why I love her so much must – nay, MUST – hear this version of “Cosmia”. All the songs on the EP are live arrangements, but they’ve brought some serious intensity here.

First of all, she’s obviously taken some sort of voice lessons, because all the little-girl tone is gone, and she’s somehow taken her voice, which I always thought interesting and sweet, and brought a level of passion and power to her singing that just blows me away. I say this as a person who rarely gets excited about the human voice.

Then, there’s the arrangements. Let me say briefly why I liked Ys. so much: where some Joanna-haters just heard self-indulgence, I heard an attempt to recast American folk music as a much older artform. To explain, consider that The Band was a reflection of American folk and country by a mostly Canadian rock band that took elements of this artform and combined them with a sort of art-rock lens to make music that was completely new but sounded centuries old. Now, over in England, the Fairport Convention, inspired by The Band, decided to do the same with British folk music, only they had, y’know, almost a millenium of music tradition to draw upon. Liege and Lief, their answer to The Band, also blended the old and new in a completely original way, recasting the past as a vital component of folk music moving forward. With this in mind, I think Joanna Newsom’s Ys. is a similar work to Susanna Clarke’s book Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Clarke took the literary trappings of Dickens and Trollope, and recast British history as one of fantasy with near-realistic (at least in terms of Victorian literature) terms. Ys. is to American folk music what Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is to British literature and Liege and Lief is to British folk music, an attempt to recast American history as if it had 1,000 years and a folkway of fantasy to draw upon.

Now, Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band takes one of the songs from Ys., “Cosmia”, and re-arranges it to play up the Appalachian sound. The result is just flat-out gripping, and I barely breathed through its 13 minutes. It starts similar to the album version, just quiet voice and harp, but the other musicians, at first building on Van Dyke Parks’ album arrangements before abandoning them, slowly add intensity until by the final chorus, Newsom is almost hollering, a drum is pounding, and the musicians sound like they are about to break their instruments. As I lay in bed last night, listening to this, breathless, I felt like I was discovering her music all over again, with all due excitement.

NEED NO CAUCASIAN GUILT!

When I was a teen I had a habit of falling asleep at night with the clock radio on, only to wake up around 3 or 4am to turn it off. Most of the time I’d doze to KFJC, my local college radio station, and I was such an adept snoozer that even hardcore punk, screaming early industrial noise and The Birthday Party, three of KFJC’s specialties circa 1981-84, couldn’t stir me. I did get into trouble twice. Once some late-night program was playing a song called “The Boilerâ€Â by a spinoff band made up of members of THE SPECIALS. The song, as I remember, was fairly musically pedestrian but spooky ska number with a spoken-word tale of a woman dodging an attempted rape. At one point in the song she starts screaming, and that coincided with some hideous dream I was having, culminating in me awaking in total, abject terror. Good times!

The only other time I remember that happening was getting startled awake by a song I’m posting for you today, 1979’s “Caucasian Guiltâ€Â by a short-lived San Francisco duo called NOH MERCY. Ah, I recall it like it was yesterday, the mellifluous notes that floated into my slumber as vocalist Esmerelda Kent shrieked, “I didn’t put no JAP in a CAMP!!â€Â. I didn’t hear the song again outside of 1-2 more times that year until an LP compilation came out in 2000 of rare, weird, ultra-DIY, 70s-80s artpunk noise called “I HATE THE POP GROUPâ€Â that had this track on it. It originally was part of another comp, a 7â€ÂEP from 1979 called “EARCOM 3â€Â that I used to see around in the bins, and which had a handful of other noisy acts + two tracks from THE MIDDLE CLASS 45 (!). The other one from them on this EP – the only other song in NOH MERCY’s brief discography – is called “Revolutionary Spyâ€Â, and it’s nowhere near the caliber of “Caucasian Guiltâ€Â. I’m posting it for you completists.

This covers all the bases – drums, vocals, muffled sound, anger, screaming, alternately great yet often painfully lame lyrics, admirable socio-political statements, nasty words, and wonderfully bizarre echo-chamber recording techniques. I love it. I’m including a picture of the band playing live in ’79 at San Francisco’s MAB, courtesy of Steve Harlow, whose punk photo site you should check out. Bombs away!

Play or Download NOH MERCY – “Caucasian Guiltâ€Â
Play or Download NOH MERCY – “Revolutionary Spy”