slag post #1

What do you get when you cross "My life is directionless" with "I am apathetic to challenges because I have a near paralyzing fear of failure and growth due to a damaged psyche"?

A THREE MONTH HIATUS FROM THIS BLOG.

Oh the laughter and sides splitting like a watermelon slugged with a metal bat.

But anywaifer, I've been doing some settling down after a literal year of living nowhere for more than 2 months at a time (including a full 5 months spent somewhere new in the country every night), and I'm somewhat in shock. There are a load of nauseatingly graspable comforts abundant - comforts that kick pursuits such as this here blog's dick into it's torso - and as such, it's been a huge struggle trying to balance personal projects, work, and getting myself out of the house. I'm pretty down.

BUT HEEEEYYY, HOW ABOUT THEM TUNES?

I'm going to hesitate to call this a sign of maturity, but its occurred to me as of late that I'm becoming pretty sick of pop punk. Actually, "embittered" might be the better word for it, as there's still a great deal of music in that field that I'll likely take with me to the grave. Like, the master tapes. And all existing copies of the albums in question so the last remaining artifacts will be gradually deteriorating, lossy mp3s copied across generations. I don't think I can use cliches anymore without summoning a tidal wave of extended mockery. Anyway, here's band number one of many that adequately summarize my current gripes:

This was a slowly broiling pot of contempt. Really slowly. I even made an effort to see this band live a few months ago. Here's what you need to know: they're a 4 piece from Minneapolis who take influence from Jawbreaker, The Lawrence Arms, and Dillinger 4. They're signed to Fat Wreck. They're ex-Off With Their Heads and Rivethead. They play fewer chords than Screeching Weasel at half the tempo. Their song structures are about as complex as a map drawn in crayon from "here" down a squiggly line to "X", but drawn out into infinity. Their lyrics are actually pretty decent.
Everyone loves them.
It's that last bit that actually kicked off the musical purge I'm currently experiencing (if you couldn't guess by the dramatic paragraph break). I've admittedly spent a lot of time doubting myself when it comes to debasing critically hailed bands I'm not particularly fond of. For whatever reason, it's hard for me to trust my response outright, and I end up revisiting garbage like this again and again and agayne, typically under the pretense that I'm "missing something" or "haven't given them a fair chance". Of course, recently this waft of horseshit has battered my sinuses into fighting back, and here I am, laying a blow down on a band just because.
Well, not "just because". Writing a music blog is obvious ego masturbation. Also, Banner Pilot aren't really horseshit, but they certainly are boring and stupefyingly same-y. Like, really.
Make a mixtape featuring the three aforementioned influences and pop it in a teeny, shitty stereo. Then lay a king-size mattress on top and hit play (assuming you jerry rigged this so that you could somehow operate the stereo without being beneath the mattress). That's pretty much what this band sounds like - like a cover version of the muffled surface noise of those three bands, almost completely castrated of nuances, originality, and hooks you haven't heard ad infinitum. Originality's not the issue, though. I like lots of bands that aren't re-inventing the wheel (...wheel made of little solid music notes and instruments...). I mean, The Broadways are probably my favorite band ever, and they're pretty clearly indebted to Jawbreaker. It's the songwriting that bores up the joint. No one needs to hear the exact same mood repeated 10-13 times in a row with the same speed and delivery. Similary, no one needs to hear a 3 minute song with almost nothing in it 10-13 times in a row. It's the I was about to say their main problem is their adherence to pop song structures, but then I remember the song "48 Double Stack":

This song is just as predictable and pop-formatted as nearly every song Banner Pilot song bassist Nate Gangelhoff's written to date, and yet it's a fist pumping, catchy-as-some-virus-or-something, great fucking song I'll probably end up listening to for years. Something tells me the same thing happened to Nate as Chris McCaughan and Brendan Kelly of The Lawrence Arms - they remained stylistically stationary and blew their song-crafting loads on endless re-writes of the same handful of tracks.
That's the real problem with Banner Pilot - they're faceless. They have a likeable sound, but nothing about them really grabs me like the band's they stemmed from. Dear Landlord included. It's kind of a shame, because if you noted that incongruous statement in the first paragraph under the logo, I happen to enjoy Nick Johnson's lyrics. Sure, they're kind of overstated, and the perspective is that familiar white, middleclass manchild prose, but well, I'm a 23 year old white male from a lower/middle class upbringing.
That was probably obvious, though.

Lemuria

I've actually covered Lemuria already a while back on my old blog, but since it's a particularly stunning example of spreading an eyedropper's worth of content over a mile radius, I'm back for another round. Lemuria's a 3-piece from the 2nd worst place in New Yawk, and have been pumping out a hit-or-miss indie/pop-punk hybrid for the past 8 years. Not that anyone has it in them to give a shit, but contrary to what I wrote last time, I actually first heard Lemuria's wares way back in 2006, when my friend Anna put the track "Trivial Greek Mythology" on a mixtape for me. I ended up downloading the EP, hating it, and forgetting they ever existed. To be fair, I was also in the early stages of transition from an all death metal/grindcore/powerviolence diet. To be fair, also, that EP is pretty disgustingly cutesy. Somewhat embarrassingly, it wasn't until late 2008 that I garnered any exuberance for bands that didn't specialize in billions of BPM, penning cold post-punk-funk nonsense, or dull-as-dick grunge/pigfuck bullshit. Around that point, I rediscovered Lemuria through their First Collection compilation, and they finally made sense to me. Sure, through months of flogging their goods I acquired a permanent vomit-trigger mechanism to "The Origiamists", but the rest struck me as decent-to-top notch, with emphasis on the first seven tracks.

I suppose that's strike 2 for my original coverage, as there was no legitimate reason that I didn't provide more props to "Hours" through to "Sophomore", the tracks making up the split with Kind Of Like Spitting. The 12", entitled Your Living Room's All Over Me, is easily the most consistent and greatest run of songs the band ever recorded, and completed their transition from the somewhat stomach churning twee-ness of their demo and self-titled to a more polished-yet-idiosyncratic sound. All the odd time signatures and non-standard song structures hinted at in their earlier catalog become the cornerstone here, layered with a thick glaze of left-field pop sensibility that give the band an incredibly mature and relaxed sound. Sheena's vocals are as soaring and crystal clear as they've ever been, but where Alex Kerns used to employ a warbly, gratingly tuneless yell is now a deep, Calvin Johnson-esque faux-baritone that compliments the lead vocals (and the music, for that matter) far better. I'm not wan to bore people to gruesome suicide with track by track descriptions (I prefer monotonous/pointless personal accounts), but fortunately there's not much temptation here, as every track is equally awesome. That said, "Bristles And Whiskers" is easily the highlight for me, and is a perfect blend of the most oblique and dark song structuring the band's utilized to date with enough warmth and poppiness to gel it together. Thematically, it's pretty hard to beat, as well:

He doesn't price his paintings before the canvas dries
His life is living colors like the ones in the sky
On the fourth of July, on the fourth of July
You can keep the closet door cracked
Look outside and dodge accusing eyes
And be yourself for the first time
Bristles and whiskers and a broad jawline is the prize
Enjoy it now because at sunrise
Your friends and family think you're a pervert contaminating their lives
He hides his dirty movies
He kisses his wife
She has a suspicion of his filthy desire
They don't make love, they fuck
They don't make love, they fuck
And he assumes it's enough
They both pretend to come
With a common image of another man man filling them with love
He lives his life
Shaving the whiskers that prickle his wife
She's sitting in a pew praying to a father:
He better purge that closet before the canvas dries

Unfortunately, I've never really found the same kind of quality anywhere else in their catalog. Get Better is a fairly decent extension of the material present here, but as with it's recent followup, Pebble, it's lacking in consistency and often sees the band dragging out songs way past the point they would've cut off in the past. I suppose it's been a while since I've listened to either of those discs, though, (a reappraisal might be in order pretty soon) so pick them up for yourself to figure it out. One last note: despite what impression you might have from my commentary on their earlier releases "cutesiness", they're still well worth your time, especially if you can stand the K Records stable and the less shock-tactic based riot grrrl bands.

Okay, another final note: definitely pick up the First Collection, but if you're solely interested in the split I just described, just send me a message and I'll shoot you an upload.

Alright, dammit, a third final note: I've never heard the Kind Of Like Spitting half of the split. It's probably pretty okay. I dunno.

Fushitsusha and youtube and junk

'Sup.
I've decided I'm done exclusively using the single album review format I had curbed all of my posts on in previous blogs, and because of that, I'm now slightly intimidated as to how I might begin. Regardless, I'm going to try to set the standards a little lower for myself, and try to promise at least 2 entries every week. Time and laziness permitting, possibly even 3. Oh, and of course, just because I won't be posting links anymore doesn't mean you can't acquire tunes from this blog. I'm going to put my email on the left hand bar, and if you're in need of a particular album, I'd be happy to send you a copy. After all, most of what I'll cover here will probably be obscure as fuck, and procurable solely through house-cleaning collector dorks on discogs.
Oh hey, but before we begin, how about a long-winded personal account aimed squarely at no one?
Or actually, check out this youtube uploader here. I admittedly haven't had the time to browse the entire library, but there's some prime cuts of quality obscurities, here, such as the fucking awesome proto-metal of High Tide, the hard rock informed psych of Schizo, the Shimmy Disc nonsense of B.A.L.L, "progg" unit Baby Grandmothers, completely "underrated" A.R. & Machines (whose Echo album is an incredible, spacey krautrock epic), and the dark, free form, P.S.F-stable psych-rock of Okhami No Jikan.

Speaking of P.S.F, to the left's an album I've been torturing myself with quite thoroughly over the past few weeks. If you've ever dabbled in Japan's avant-garde or psychedelic scene (or read The Wire somewhat regularly), you're probably familiar with the name Fushitsusha, the wide-ranging improv/psych/drone 3-piece helmed by infamous guitar strangler/banshee Keiji Haino. From '78 to their indefinite hiatus in '01, the band have gone through a number of lineup changes (Haino being the only constant), but have consistently laid down some of the most abrasive, difficult (sometimes even "impossible"), and darkly psychedelic "rock" you're likely to encounter. To give you an idea of how heavy this shit is to ingest, I've spent the past 4 years listening to these dudes, and have only now gathered the patience/threshold to give their 4th LP a go. You might be wondering whether I'm just kidding myself at this point. To be honest, I have no fucking clue where I initially garnered the patience to get into this band, but my persistence might have something to do with the blooming of my huge-ass fandom for their second album, known as 15/16, or Live 2. Live 2 is a monstrous, 2-something hour event, and I've yet to find another album that rivals its suffocating density, creaky ambience, and bizarre, contemplative-yet-noisy "songwriting" style. This album on the left (known as Hisou and occasionally Pathetique) while about as exhaustive and taxing on listener as Live 2, is a pretty different affair, and essentially isolates the noise pinnacles of the aforementioned disc and multiplies the intensity by (arbitrarily assigned number).
The first two tracks are almost hilariously loose and rickety, as if the band are desperately trying to scotch-tape a somewhat simplistic rock song back together with in-the-red amps and horrific ADD. The result, of course, is a gloriously noise-laden carwreck that sort of establishes itself towards the middle of the second track, but ultimately skids off into oblivion again. The 3rd track might be one of my favorite Fushitsusha tracks to date, and sort of reminds me of prime early Skullflower, as Haino hammers one fucking awesome, obtuse riff into the ground for 3 cycles and 15 minutes, consistently heaping on noise and ugliness until it devolves into a shrieking, tuneless, decidedly un-rock solo. The 4th track is definitely one you have to, uh, be in the mood for, as with any "song" consisting of 44 minutes of excruciating feedback torture. But hey, sometimes it's just about mindset. Case in point, when I'm down to ebb on the tinnitus, this sounds like staring into a void of incomprehensible depths, petrified by the sheer immensity, when suddenly, everything is enveloped in blinding light around the 29 minute mark. The other half of the time, the experience is more like sitting in the front row of a Fushitsusha concert when Haino suddenly props up his guitar against the amps, and wanders off with the bassist to take a 30 minute shit while drummer Kosugi bops around aimlessly until they get back. Fortunately, I'm more swayed to the latter, but there's your warning.
I don't know if I'd put this up there with the first two live discs the band put out, but on days when I'm down for nearly a solid hour of eyecrossing free-form noise, this disc's a pretty fucking awesome thing to behold.

If you're interested in getting your hands on a download for this, email me, and I'll hook you.

contraceptron@gmail.com