My butt has been famously sore regarding The Lawrence Arms for a while now (ie YEAH, MORE LIKE THE BORENCE ARMS and such), but yesterday, whilst staining the deck by headphones and moonlight, I stumbled upon a truth so shocking it BLEW MY MIND and I DIED. Namely that Oh Calcutta!, the band's 5th full length from 2006 is actually really good.
You see, due to the band's pedigree, I've given the first 4 LPs and EP collection an absurd amount of attention, which is patently weird/unhealthy considering how much I hate almost every song they've ever recorded. My partner has actually expressed concern regarding this, which seems pretty apt considering most people don't endlessly obsess over things they don't care for, but dammit, half of The Broadways make up this band. My hope had been that I was simply looking at TLA in the shadow of a behemoth (my favorite album, Broken Star), and that once I shook off this unfair comparison, I'd be able to cherish the band on their own unique, beautiful merits.
Unfortunately, clarity-of-opinion came when I beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was "Lousy Songwriting", and "falling asleep" followed with him. A Guided Tour Of Chicago and Ghost Stories are just dull, half-written sub-Broadways-isms, and Apathy And Exhaustion and The Greatest Story Ever Told are a bunch of overproduced, riffless wisps alternating between half-memorable Brendan tracks and thousands of soggy, nearly identical McCaughan ballads. The auto-tune on Chris' vocals not only makes those albums sound like soft, flappy penises, but penises so soft they are frequently mistaken for liquids. Seriously, listen to "Your Gravest Words" and "Brickwall Views" back to back and tell me they're not fucking identical.
Needless to say, the hard work didn't really pay off. There are a few really great tracks floating around in the Ambien fog, and the lyrics are a particularly impressive mesh of literary and pop-culture references (see: The Greatest Story Ever Told), but hey, it'd be even more impressive if that same amount of effort was put into writing actual melodies and interesting arrangements.
I never bothered with Oh! Calcutta! based on this backdrop essentially, which is kinda funny seeing as the opening number, "The Devil's Taking Names", is one of my favorite songs of theirs. A few tracks in and I was incredibly surprised to not find myself unconscious in the paint tray, lungs slowly filling with wood stain (or some other, smarmy exaggeration like that). I'm going to have to assume that the intermediate period between TGSET and O!C! is to blame here, during which Brendan started the fairly straightforward punk rock band, The Falcon, and Chris finally decided against his strict adherence to the Wesley Willis school of songcraft. Oh! Calcutta! features the band eliminating the obvious binary of song-styles by actually collaborating more apparently on writing and vocal duties, resulting in an incredibly solid 12 tracks of high-paced melodic punk rock with great hooks and a kind of urgency the band never employed before. Brendan's never sounded fiercer, and sheds a lot of the punk-caricature cadence of his vocals, while Chris apparently concluded that using autotune on a punk album might be a little too hilarious for words, and started singing in the off-key, folky register he would later employ on his Sundowner project.
I've read that a lot of people saw this as a throwback to the band's first two records, but this really doesn't sound anything like the half-assed Midwest pop-punk that populated either LP. Essentially, this sounds like The Falcon if they had the kind of chemistry that comes with playing together for a decade.
I definitely need to let this album sink in a bit more, but I am honestly pretty excited by them for once. That's something I sorta figured would never happen unless the band slowly replaced all three members or stopped writing music entirely.
God I love when bands I hate suddenly become good and then go on hiatus for 7 years.
"...and now time for something completely different", I quoted unironically to you in early High School with my zAnY sense of humor, pony tail and chauvinistic approach to female relations.
But yeah, it's a post about Australian goregrind. I don't think I've done that yet.
I know everyone has a story, and they are all united in how uninteresting they are to outsiders, but in short, XTREEM MUSICK was my gateway into the world of not only being an annoying music anthropology guy, but also wielding a riot shield against sexual congress with my peers. For some reason, XL Last Days Of Humanity shirts and greasy, waist length hair don't really aid you in leveling the schoolyard with a nuke of pheromonal supremacy. At this point in my life I'm mostly a pop punk kid (chuck tayz amirite lol), but sometimes, when I go extra-chromosome werewolf, I get nostalgic for the awkward summers of high school where I'd sit and wait by the mailbox for my stack of deplorably illustrated CDs to arrive. There is literally nothing quite like the embarrassment and confusion that pummels your psyche into simple syrup like your mom stumbling upon your stack of Meat Shits and Cock & Ball Torture CDs. That moment was easily the shamefuck moment to fill in for most people's adolescent "getting caught spanking to Naruto X Naruto clones fanfic on the family Dell at midnight" regret stories, and I think it's at least 70% responsible for the chronic distant, "deep pain stare" I carry today.
Anywheyprotein, for my sweet money, the best grind scenes the world ever blessed us with weren't in the UK or US, but 2000's era Australia and the Czech Republic. While the latter boasts a cray number of super innovative, boundary pushing bands (fucking srsly, my mind still boggles over that shit), Australia seems content with just getting high and writing songs with titles like "Fuck... I Just Copped A Beer Glass To The Head!!", thus allowing everyone to win.
Here's the general M.O. of Oz grind bands I've discovered via observation & talking to lots of band members on the Teufel's Tomb forum back in the mid-2000's:
1.) write a bunch of really catchy, addictive songs that aren't typically pushing the envelope but just crazy solid and lots of fun to jig to
2.) don't take your self seriously. like, at all
3.) wait so long to record anything new that your fanbase gets passed onto their children (unless you're TDEBN)
4.) get fucked over by your label/producer/primary source of income that floats the Anti-Lucrative Boat Of Creating Goregrind
Now that that's established, let's take a look at some of the bigger bands out there. But not Blood Duster. Blood Duster sucks.
The Day Everything Became Nothing
Having grown up in the interbutt helmed explosion of information technologies, I owe many tons of shit to a handful of e-personae. In fact, if it weren't for certain cults of personality, I probably wouldn't know shit from other, different shit, musically speaking. Seeing as I can trace many of my fixations to precise individuals, I think I'll publicize this to forever halt the temptation to act as a self-conscious blogbaby/bastion of wisdom & experience-type: Andy Radin's history lesson on scholarly approval and unveiling of emo's glory days gave me an un-embarrassing (relatively) emotional outlet for my teenage angst, Mitch Clem introduced me to pop-punk as something much richer than a mainstream 2000's farce, and Dave Lang's weekly jives on the avant-garde made the entire underground seem less paralyzingly vast and impenetrable. Prior to any of this, though, was my stumbling upon Teufel's Tomb - a currently defunct metal review site full of assholes joking about how stupid the music they loved was. It was here I gained not only a love for the most neanderthalic of genres (death metal, grindcore, goregrind, etc) but through their laxness, dodged the grotesque bullet of becoming an IMN (internet metal nerd), forever battling the plebs for taste supremacy. TDEBN's debut, Le Mort, was thoroughly praised by two of the writers I trusted most, and being brand new to goregrind, everything about it intrigued me endlessly. What kind of goregrind album didn't feature some dismal rotten.com cover or a logo written in squiggly bullshit? I grabbed up a copy pretty shortly after without even sampling it since I'm loose cannon who lives on the edge, and to this day it remains one of the absolute densest, grimiest albums I've ever heard. The production turns this already down-tuned crusher into a quivering, in-the-red, spine-kaleidoscopingly heavy mass of pit riffage to destroy bedrooms to, and the songwriting is top notch across the board. Consisting of members of Fuck...I'm Dead and Blood Duster, TDEBN sound pretty much exactly like neither band, and deliver a ridiculous goregrind anvil full of thick, chundering grooves, catchy off-time riffs, and an absurdly low pitch shifted growl in the Last Days Of Humanity vein. While I completely love this album, none of the band's other material packs quite the same grisly punch as the debut, but if you need a source of bowel herniation, this is your band. LONGEST HIATUS: Only 3 years between Brutal and their split with Cliteater. Where's another LP, though?
Captain Cleanoff
This didn't actually drop until years after I moved on from my strictly metallic/grind/gore phase, but holy dix was it worth the wait. Prior to this, the Cap'n had put out a single track since 2001's awesome self-titled mCD, so shuffering and shmiling (suffice) to say, I had long given up on the band by the time their first full length was released in 2008. Fortunately I was able to tear myself out of a strictly folk punk/noise rock phase to hear this, because for what it's worth, this is one of the absolute best pure grindcore releases since Terrorizer's World Downfall. Except srs. If there's one thing I've listened to way too fucking much of, it's grindcore/gore - from the classics through the newer schools and the most bedroom entrenched of bands - so I should at least be able to feign some sort of credibility here.
YEAH INTERNET PERSONALITY.
The production is a crusty, warm, mid-range that perfectly accents the razor-sharp, old-school riffage without burying their cadence, the vocals are a frantic mess of inhuman screeches and Lord Worm-esque gutturals, and yet somehow the whole package is catchy as [some airborne illness]. I'm always impressed by bands who can flourish and write excellent songs in a such a confining genre without pushing the stylistic envelope too much, and these guys certainly have that down pat. There's just that difficult-to-define "it" component here that makes this band not only stand out, but rank up with there with the best - past and present. I know this might sound hyperbolic as my ass is fine, but I dunno, I've had 5 years to change my mind, and so far still ranks up there with From Enslavement To Obliteration, Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses, Reek Of Putrefaction, and Misery Index. YEAH I SAID IT.
LONGEST HIATUS: A whole 6 years between the self-titled mCD and Symphonies Of Slackness
Super Fun Happy Slide
Named after some forgettable detail from a "Treehouse Of Horror" Simpsons episode, and paired with the infamous x-ray blowjob pic and a logo that may as well have been in comic sans, Super Fun Happy Slide stepped out onto the scene off an elevator of class. The "band" kicked up around 2004 as a the solo project of current drummer Brad, let loose the Super Fun Happy Demo, an hilarious 12 minutes of goofy samples, catchy mid-high paced grinding fun, and hilarious songtitles such as "The Day Everything Became Something" and "Regurgitation Of Giblet Like Chunks Of Pathologically Perverse Gore". Pretty shortly after, college football star Brad recruited a few more members to release the Rehearsal Demo in 2005, and with a stylistic shift towards tighter, speedier early-Napalm Death grind, thus began the descent into inactivity.
Okay that's not totally true. I'm sure the band kept touring and writing. It's sort of hard to tell with all these bands, though, seeing as I'm in 'Murka and they're all the way down in the land down under. I wonder how much they collectively hate Crocodile Dundee.
Oh but yeah they wouldn't release anything else 'til 2012.
Anyway, being captivated early on by their silly humor and catchy high paced grinding AKTION led me to chat with Nik on the Teufel's Tomb forums, and after much shit-shooting and such, he asked me to do some art for them. I quickly obliged and did an admittedly-too-detailed piece illustrating the track "Placenta On The Dance Floor" (which you can see here if you promise not to look at anything else) for a shirt design in exchange for an advanced copy of their brand new CD. Boring story possibly less boring (and shorter), the site crashed pretty shortly after, taking the forum with it and all contact I had with the band, thus eliminating the contract. The Undislodgeable Nugget Scenario didn't see the light of day for years after that, but as far as I'm concerned, was worth the wait. If you like raw, blasting, straight-forward grindcore with tons of catchy riffs, the band has a new album slated for release later this year, too.
So expect it in 2016, I guess.
LONGEST HIATUS: A punishing 7 year gap between Rehearsal Demo and The Undislodgeable Nugget Scenario. I'm pretty sure the latter was recorded 3 years earlier than it was released, too.
Fuck...I'm Dead
BREAKING NEWS: Did you know that Fuck...I'm Dead changed their name along with their logo way back in 2009? They must've said FUCK OFF, ELLIPSES - AND TAKE YOUR IMPLIED PAUSE ELSEWHERE and are apparently now just Fuck I'm Dead. I find myself in compliance with this decision because I don't think I've ever said their name aloud with the brief pause included, which was doing a great disservice to their artistic vision. I bring this up because going it's somehow never struck me in all these years how fucking stupid all of these bands' names are. Maybe there's an unspoken contest in Australia to one-up the clownliness of their contemporaries? That aside, Fuck...I'm Dead (since I've not yet heard their new, grammatically truncated material and am, thus, unable to comment) is surprisingly, a LOT less dopey and mindless than their name might entail (let alone the song titles). Their debut full length, the 5-minutes-in-Photoshop 1.0-illustrated Bring On The Dead, is a blazing fast 21-track assault of some of the tightest, most, uh, musical grind you're likely to stumble upon. "Twist Of Death" kicks things off with one of the best samples ever sampled (which has remained a joke in my friend group for years) before "caving in your head for a raging 23 minutes with an unholy blend of melody, grind, groove, and aggression" as some metal review guy might say. It's pretty incredible how memorable these tracks are for their speed and brevity, but I suppose this sort of genre doesn't often inspire the most technically skillful of musicians to participate.
I'm going to assume this album's about as difficult to come by as, well, almost everything else I listed here, but c'mon, who actually BUYS MUSIC anymore? Either way, seat yourself down for a listen. It's honestly one of the best, most original grind albums I can think of.
LONGEST HIATUS: 9 ridiculous years between the split with Engorged and last year's Another Gory Mess. The fuck, u guys. Intense Hammer Rage
Ok so this band is admittedly a hard sell. While they fall in line with standard goregrind principles like "record everything so it sounds like a bunch of gunky diesel engines struggling to turn over" and "be super gross and offensive because you probably like horror movies", Intense Hammer Rage actually take it a step further than this. In fact, so much so that their Avagoyamugs CD from 2001 was confiscated by Australian authorities on it's way to Razorback Records in Kentucky, their houses were raided, and the band was collectively fined thousands of aussiebucks. This is probably because the production makes the guitar sound like a bunch of mud shivering rhythmically. Also the lyrics on here hit clownshoes levels of disturbing. See, while goregrind typically tackles all sorts of important issues like eating people, stringing together random multisyllabic words from pathology journals, accounts of atrocious buttpain-fueled misogyny, and corking dead people, pedophilia has always been sort of No Man's Land.
Some of my best friends are pedophiles
I like to watch them, I like their style
Some day I might be a pedophile
I practice, I perform on drunk midgets
Hone my skill with donger and with digits
Nearly ready for someones kid
I'll hunt one down, do you know where yours is?
Excerpts like this (as well as the samples from South Park and Dogma) pretty clearly point to these guys as tongue-in-cheek motherfuckers, but there's not really a lot of leeway to be granted when you're writing songs about this sort of thing. Particularly in the eyes of the Australian authorities, I guess.
Beyond being the least SFW band in the world, IHR are an incredibly bizarre, original goregrind/brutal death metal unit with easily the sickest three-pronged vocal attack I've ever heard (srs). Having once been a vocalist for a death/grind band, I have literally no clue they're producing half of these sounds, but apparently it's without the aid of a pitch shifter. On top of that, the fills are crazy and the riffing is surprisingly technical without being a lot of feverish foreskin tugging. If you're interested, their first full length, Devogrindporngorecoreaphile, is my favorite release of theirs, and probz the only release of the band you'll ever find, seeing as it was re-released on a split with Drogheda a few years back.
LONGEST HIATUS: Finally, the craziest gap of all - it's been TWELVE FUCKING YEARS since Avagoyamugs came out, and these guys aren't even split-up! They just updated their BigCartel, as a matter of FAQ.
UPDATE: Apparently all of their albums have been re-released and you can pick them up on their BigCartel account. The new cover to Avagoyamugs is a nice touch.
Okay, so there's some crop-cream right there. If you take to this like an entitled rainbow kid to a bumfeed, I was going to point you to No Escape Records, but then I remembered that they've been corpsey for the past 5 years. Prior to that, though, they were the equivalent of the Czech Republic's hit factory, Bizarre Leprous Productions - a primarily regional heap of the best bands in the entire scene. In the wake, though, it seems that Blastasfuk's picking up the rad Oz-core slack, so get on that.
Here's a list of additional sweeties to pick up, though, if you need some help sifting out the diamonds: Vaginal Carnage, Roskopp, Agents Of Abhorrence, Doubled Over, Garbage Guts, Undinism, The Kill, & Die Pigeon Die. I've never been too big on Warsore or Blood Duster, personally, but they're also pretty huge names in the scene, too.
Did I miss any new, awesome bands? I've been sorta out of the loop for a few years, so if anyone wants to throw some recommendations at me, I'd really appreciate it.
"Wouldn't it be just a chuckle riot if I totally denounced everything I said here in a future review of the band? Ho HO."
- me in the review of The Menzingers' Chamberlain Waits you totally read
I've written a [hilariously oblique unit]'s worth of reviews since I entered the "blogosphere" back in 2009, and tbh, I'm pretty impressed that I almost uniformly agree with every summation I've published to date. I mean, sure, the writing itself may curdle milk and cause me to cringe so hard the muscle tension collapses my skull, but hey! that consistency! It might sound fucking bonkers to be proud of myself for continuing to agree with myself, but consistently & publicly opining on new/new-to-me music for the sake of generating fresh content is actually pretty difficult. I don't know about you, but I don't naturally osmose a banquet of acerbic, articulate stances and commentary solely from spinning an LP a few times - that shit gets sorted out on the "compose post" screen, mostly.
Weirdly enough, the only post I completely don't get anymore is that review of The Menzingers' debut, A Lesson In The Abuse Of Information Technology. I mean, if you read it, you don't really get spattered by the strings of saliva launching out of the corners of my frothy, hype-spewing mouth, but I was definitely a little tumescent in the genitals over it. Minor tumescence. But then I'm pretty sure that - for whatever reason - I immediately lost interest in it entirely the exact second I hit "publish". Maybe through some insane improbability tied in with quantum mechanics or something. I mean, it doesn't suck the peen/amount fellatio with something degrading, but it sounds about as emotionally resonant (when not boring) to me as if they were playing unaccompanied scales at this point. CONCLUSION: It's Clash-y, phlegmy pop-punk/punk rock with a few folk numbers, sterile production and groundbreaking, iconic, plastic brain melting social commentary courtesy of the10th grader-discovering-CrimethInc artwork.
Chamberlain Waits was a pretty big step up from the debut and the stronger follow-up EP, Hold On Dodge, and traded in much of their grating, braying sing-scream vocals, gang choruses, and other orgcore sundries for stronger melodicism, songs that don't lose their zing after 10 listens, and lyrical clarity via less mucilaginous cadences. I was about to say something all smarmy and shit like "remember that quote at the top? LEMME FULFILL THAT PROPHECY LIKE AW YEAH" but then I relistened to the album and realized that, while flawed, it's still pretty solid. The real enemy here, though, is the fact that I (again) never ever feel like giving it a full spin. Sure, trax like "Times Tables", "Male Call", and "I Was Born" are all super solid tunes (mostly "Times Tables", which is fantastic), and even though there are only 3 weak tracks, nothing about this album beckons me back for more than the tri-monthly "I guess I could put that on" spin. Nice stuff, but yeah. CONCLUSION: It's Clash-y, slightly less congested, alternative rock-influenced pop-punk with warm production and nostalgic artwork that brings a tear to the band members' collective eye.
And all of this boring backstory bullshit brings us here:
'Cause it seems The Menzingers are just too deep for me to qualify (big_dog.jpeg), you might wanna take this with a grain of my ass, but I'm pretty sure I actually love this album. Like, as a whole album, and with a lasting love as deep and real as Steve Albini's annoying, "edgy" opinions on everything. Prior to fully embracing it, though, I'd been on an untouchable, super-posi, LYF IZ WUT U MAKE IT kick from March up to June, all up in this shit like "Latterman isn't very boring" and "I'm going to take steps to improve my life because I'm worth it - L'Oreal". Of course, having spent most of my life in crushing depression, I'm still prone to relapses, and that's both where the last few months of potential posts and this album come in.
This may not make sense to a lot of you well-adjusted, non-damaged types, but when your vitality is near-constantly snuffed by the sheer weight of simply being awake, you tend to get nostalgic whenever you relapse
back into sadness after long spells of feeling functional. I had been enjoying the shit out of this album for a few months prior to the moment it finally "clicked", and a heap of existential, stress-cigarette pain proved to be the key.
Over the past few days leading up to our glorious alignment of souls, my being was slowly crushed into a little frowny diamond by trigger after trigger, and the fibers of my whole new Patti Labelle attitude started to fray considerably. Finally, a pot-luck/party featuring an unfortunate meet-up of my recent ex-partner and a farm intern I'd become involved with drove the final nail into my coffin of Good Times, and as I drove home that night alone, reunited with the nostalgic shades of despair I'd been in the throes of my whole life, I put this on at a whim and it draped an army blanket over my throbbing psyche.
On The Impossible Past is essentially where the transitional leanings of Chamberlain Waits were heading: the sound is less raucous, with greater reliance on space and melody to make an impact rather than the aforementioned orgcore cliches, and while a largely a lyric-focused release, the melodies have never been stronger. On top of that, the fairly consistent mid-tempo approach makes this one far more appealing for a wider variety of moods, but the anthemic power per square inch is still prevalent as ever. As the title suggests, this album is beautifully caught up in a nostalgic sense of sadness and reverence for the past, and I for three (ha HA! DEFYING EXPECTATIONS) am pretty weak kneed over trite shit like that. Maybe you could tell, though.
Like all prior Menzingers albums, this one has a few weak links, but for whatever reason, it sticks with me far more as a whole than anything they've ever done. I'm uncertain whether the songwriting is split Alkaline Trio/Tegan & Sara-style,
but I'm going to assume as much considering nearly every great song on
here is fronted by Greg and every underwhelming one is Tom. Either Tom's simply a lesser songwriter, or he drew the short straw consistently, because while "Sculptors And Vandals" is a great track - a highlight, even -
"Ava House" and "Freedom Bridge" are both pretty clumsy and lack the hooks necessary to justify their weird anti-climax and non-building repetitiveness, respectively.
Greg's tracks, on the other hand, are uniformly fantastic, from the simple, addictively sparse opener, "Good Things", to the fist-clenching balladry of "Gates", the mid-song reinvention of "I Can't Seem To Tell"'s central riff, and the best song the band's ever written, "Mexican Guitars". Also particularly interesting is the quasi-cover of Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel No. 2" from New Skin For The Old Ceremony, entitled "Sun Hotel". If you track down (or youtube) the demo version released on the acoustic cassette, On The Possible Past, you can hear the track evolve from what was essentially a tributary, fairly straight cover with altered lyrics to an entirely separate, full band-performed entity. Unfortunately it's not about Greg ouija board-ing Janis Joplin's ghost into existence for fellatio purposes, though.
I suppose I need to mention the lyrics, though, considering I spent a whole paragraph rambling about the way they affected me in my time of deep, young, important-looking anguish. While there's no cohesive storyline overarching this album, the theme is prevalently backwards-in-time-looking, and recalls minute, but ever-important details of (relatively) hard living and great, fleeting beauty. I know that sounds like every navel gazing pop-punk unit's M.O. in today's climate, but The Menzingers have that something that separates the unpretentious, relatable prose of Dear Landlord and American Steel from the regurgitated nothingness of your Elways and Arms Alofts. For the most part, these are all colorfully illustrated snapshots of grief, significant faces, old friends and the like, and while, admittedly, I could see this sort of sentimentality causing some of you more jaded fucks to cringe, I love lines like this:
It's not hard to fall for a waitress
When you both smoke
Smoke the same cigarettes
You'll get seated as diners or lovers
You'll get the check as friends for the better
You'll carve your names into the Paupack Cliffs
Just read them when you get old enough to know
that happiness is just a moment
and
Well I sat and thought about you
On the long ride back to Philly
From the way that you'd wear your hair
To the way that you'd laugh when you drank too much
Before the plug was pulled, the fires burned out
And all the parties grew bored
You waited tables
I waited for your shift breaks
And Gin and Casey
Used to dance inside of me
And I bet I sound like a broken record
Every time I open my mouth
I want to wander around the city with you again
Like when you waited tables
And I waited for your shift breaks
This is the kind of stuff that simultaneously inspires me and makes me wonder if I'm doing myself a disservice by idealizing nostalgia and sadness so heartily. I can't say I'm feeling much remorse though, considering how fist pumpingly anthemic this kind of sentimentality is. Sweet anguish riffage, too.
CONCLUSION: It's still Clash-y, but also a nostalgic, beautifully emoted (albeit Greg's warble can seem a bit overstated sometimes), pop-punk/punk rock/alt-rock hybrid with tons of memorable moments and strong enough songwriting and overall flair to keep me hooked. There are weaker moments, but even those are worth listening to, for once. No "Alpha Kappa Falls Off A Toilet"s or whatever. For once, I really doubt I'll be retracting any praise I've heaped on this band. But MAN! WoUlDn'T iT bE wAcKy If ThE nExT tImE, I ngsjdhssd3r3r
So I'll level with you: I've dranketh a few beers.
You know, the funny thing about sex dreams is that they're almost always frustrating. Sure, when you're young and utterly inexperienced it's like "hey, whoa there that was" and revel in the untimely amazingness of this blooming frontier. But then, sadly, you get old and jaded it becomes just an annoying middle-of-the-night thing you don't wanna bother with when it jars you awake.
THE POINT, though, IS THAT wait I dunno. I feel like I'm supposed to be writing some shit about music, right? I still do that, don't I? Even though no one reads it?
But anyway, sex dreams. When sleeping next to a strictly platonic friend, they're somewhat uninvited. On the other hand, here's what happened: I was hanging out in a bizarre, impossibly lit, labyrinthine mess of a building complex with a friend I see yearly, and blah blah blah we ended up in a dining hall far too schmaltzy to be ever contain the people I was imagining (crusties in suits aerating wine in crystal chalices) and one of them begins relaying to me a sexual encounter with a young musician I've had a crush on 4ever. Sweet guy that he is, he initiates a flashback sequence to illustrate said hook-up, and anoints me to star as the roll of him making tender love to [name withheld because common decency] with great gusto and subliminal detail. The moral of the story is hell yeah and high five, brain.
Which brings us to the music albums full of songs you hear:
Waxahatchee is the singer-songwriter name (and recently, full band title) of Katie Crutchfield, previously of The Ackleys, P.S. And The Eliot Tones and sIhshjaksjka. Okay, so I may have mentioned this before, but P.S. Eliot's first LP, Introverted Romance In Our Troubled Minds is one of my favorite albums ever. Like, probably number two on the list between The Broadways' Broken Star and Band's Album. Prior to Katie's debut with Waxahatchee, I'd already become familiar with the bedroom tapes she recorded under the Guided By Voices-referencing title King Everything, so I felt somewhat prepared for what was about to drop.
HOW DEVASTATINGLY WRONG I WAS.
But no I kinda was prepared. That said, both the split with (bleah) Chris "The Clavicle" Clavin and the LP American Weekend are quite a bit darker than any of her previous outings, with a crackling ambiance brought on by the cassette-found-in-an-attic recording quality.
“to anyone who had woke up and realized their identity is blurry, has
had to clumsily get to know themselves, has hit a bottom, has felt
self-deprecating and vagrant, and to anyone who has ridden out a
shitstorm.”
This summation - which she prefaced American Weekend with - seems to shed some Litebright pegs on why this album hits me like a truck. SEE, I've been in all these stupid places a lot, and perhaps so much so that nearly all of these songs move me to tears every time I hear them (which has proven inconvenient). The sparse, nostalgic production and wordy, beautifully articulate lyrics set to such a raw performance are incredible, and tracks like "Luminary Blake", "Bathtub", and "Grass Stain" may actually dethrone a good deal of my favorite P.S Eliot songs for their pure emotional resonance. SRS BIZ, HERE. God I'm tired.
Since this release, Katie's gone on to record with a full band under the same name (which I wrote about who cares fuck you), and while that album is similarly fantastic, the aesthete here kills me. I imagine it's the backdrop of her career that primarily enticed me to giving this a chance, but this is a total stand alone. Pick up a copy at Don Giovanni Records and stuff. Tell 'em some blog asshole sent 'ya!
Also, and irrelevantly:
I've actually been keeping an ear more on the avant-garde side of the pretentiousness spectrum lately, but here's my impression of me writing about that sort of stuff after a zillion year break spent word pooping about Blink 182 or whatever the fuck it is I write about now:
"This is liek 3 hours of plinkety plink piano shit. I dunno if it's all performed or written by Aki Takahashi 'cause there's all these names on the front but it's some good shit, brah [tokes on a marijuana cigarette of weed]. I think it's considered "modern composition" but there's defz an Indeterminacy bend or maybe it's Serialism? I dunno. I have a hard time identifying parameters on that sort of malarky with all it's "tone rows" and "equal pitch weight and frequency" and Schoenburger and fries stuff. REC'D HARD!"
Several days later, and far more sober:
There is remarkably little information online about this album, but from what I can tell, this is a triple LP from 1973 of Takahashi performing her own interpretations on the works of her Japanese contemporaries (Joji Yuasa, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Toru Takemitsu, etc) on the first two discs, and a number of well-known European composers on the third (Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen, etc). Admittedly I've only really dabbled in the classical and modern composer realms, since the "academic" side of the avant-garde has never held a great deal of interest for me. After listening to this, I doubt I'll be losing my shit to some John Cage anytime soon, but this kind of thing does generate a weird experience. Piano Space is an extremely minimalistic, dark and abstract work performed entirely through uncomfortable clusters of notes, silence, and some vocal improv. There's always been something extremely disquieting and morbidly fascinating to me about utter abstraction - in music or otherwise - and this definitely nails the head on the hit. I doubt I'll be listening to this a great deal, but stuff like this, Don Cherry and John Applegate's Human Music, Chamberpot's s/t, and other formless free improv units are things I like to visit the same way as I do with French New Wave horror films and other brutally disturbing, humorless bunk like that: more as an experience than something to put on repeat.
Okay yeah, so I might actually be less trite talking about this stuff drunk.
