songs that suck tremendously vol. 2

That's pretty topical, right there.

It's time for this again. Y'know what? I'm thinking the songs themselves may not be what teeters me to the edge of sanity, but, in fact, the atmosphere I often experience them. See, I occasionally dabble in the "not eating properly before work" school of thought, and as such, I experience bouts of extreme lethargy, as well as soul-scorching apathy gurgling up through me like magma, all to the toe-tapping bullshit excreted through the PA system. Don't get me wrong - I dislike these stupid fucking songs without pause - it's just the days at work in which I replace literally every word in said tracks with unreproducible tirades of profanity that truly drive me to writing these stupid lists.

Also, I find it funny, I guess. This is no exorcism.

1.) fun. - Some Nights

What the fuck is this. This sounds like something Disney curated Phil Collins to write for The Lion King. I thought the world was finally safe from white people's colonialization and defaming of world musics in 2012, but well, here's this - detached exoticism and all. I can barely remember fun.'s debut from the single time I spun it, but I remember it floating around in the baroque pop revival/neo-pop psychedelia realm, not this horseshit.


2.) fun. - We Are Young

Okay, so this doesn't really deserve to be on here. I mean, I certainly don't like it, but it's not something that cleaves the hemispheres of my brain with an un-lubed penis of rage. What IS notable about it, though, is that I was destined to never like it by some unselfconscious dude working at this anarcho/commie cafe-bookstore in Tucson, AZ. For close to 2 hours, he scrawled over the delicate nuances to the vocal lines with a fat, xylene-reeking black marker of a voice that could've passed for Roscoe Holcomb without talent. I sort of wanted him to die at the time.

3.) Nickelback - This Afternoon

This is the last Nickelback song I'm ever going to post, as there's really no need to further the mind numbing nadir of placing this band at the crux of all things foul in rock music. Sure, Nickelback are vapid balladeers postured as the limpest final incarnate of grunge in the mainstream - the last "movement" offered even a sliver of credential from the hipster cognoscenti. On the other hand, you have an eternity of knowledge, wisdom, and opinion at your fingertips via the information age. The mainstream's bastardization of genre X shouldn't mean squat if you're not a total luddite. Chirality, motherfucker.
That said, this is the first song I've heard by them that treaded from "painfully inoffensive" territory to "aurally gruesome". Y'see, it's Nickelback's "fun" song, free of all the melodrama but none of the cheese. The video is actually even tackier than the song, surprisingly enough, full of eye-rolling sex appeal and cringe-worthy cliches. I remember someone on the 4chan music board describing this as "music for people who re-shingle roofs in the white lower class bracket". I suppose that's kind of offensive, though.

4.) Matchbox 20 - She's So Mean

A while back, I listed some cheesy solo Rob Thomas ballad alongside a bunch of other stool in a facebook post. Since I keep everything totally public, some contrarian a few degrees separate from me responded that I was way off the mark in not recognizing Thomas as the Sinatra of our generation. To this day, this comment stands as the least correct statement ever uttered in my presence.
I'm not sure where this temptation comes from, but there's literally an overwhelming desire to decree this "dorky". I mean, I get it - it's supposed to be kitsch. I still get the notion that if I were forced to dance to this in a public setting the embarrassment-turned-self-loathing would be too great for my being to withstand. Those drum fills proceeding the verses may as well be played with ladles full of velveeta fondue.

5.) Culture Club - Do You Really Want To Hurt Me

I'd make a lazy comment along the lines "yes, I do", but it seems likely the human race issued a moratorium on those sort of comments after the noxious fumes of a trillion stale jokes subsumed the planet 20 years ago. This is just synthy, bloopy nothingness. I don't know if I hate it as much as I'm baffled that it attained any sort of profile. Where are the hooks? Are they just in the wAcKy antics of Boy George that illuminated the band? 'Cause fuck this.

I think I'm gonna keep these posts down to 5 songs from now on. Doing 10 would probably reduce the quantity of bitching unsatisfactorily.

Came Out Swinging

First of all, give this song here a listen:

I literally knew nothing about this band prior to stumbling upon this song, excepting one lurid notion that they were spearheaders of that depressingly lousy "easycore" subgenre kicked off by mainstream luminaries New Found Glory circa 2000-something. If you're not "in the know", easycore is essentially a hi-fi, spotlighted pastiche of the gnarliest, most consumer-friendly bastardizations of pop-punk, melodic hardcore, and to varying degrees of misfortune, metalcore (for the pinnacle of this misfortune, see Chunk! No Captain Chunk). While I can't yet speak to the quality of The Wonder Years as a band, I have to admit, this is an incredibly solid track I've found stuck in my head for a week. While the sound is as full-bodied, high end and claustrophobically compressed as any given easycore staple, aside the brief flirtation with hardcore's gang chants, I see no real parallels to the Four Year Strong/Set Your Goals book of songcraft. In fact, this strikes me more as convergence point in which the stylistic progenitor's have finally clashed with the mainstream plunderers of said style, and honestly, it works really well.
That said, what most surprised me here was the relative depth of the lyrics. I realize the following sentiments are a redux of another recently disclosed sentiment of this blog, but I've observed the parameters for what I truly relish in pop-punk restrict notably over the past couple years. Much of the "guilty pleasure" shit I indulged in has been shaved down to sweet nothing, and almost every early classic has been all but phased out from the annual album rotation. Why the latter? Mostly the nauseating archaism of the lyrics. I don't need to hear boring sub-Ramones profundities about wanting to take a girl on a date, being a "lame-o" in the high school hierarchy and other caricature-esque encapsulations of youth culture. Who the fuck relates to this shit? I generally seek out pop-punk that can deliver an emotionally coddling, cathartic experience, so pretty much everything dancing about the universe of The Queers, Smoking Popes, Beatnik Termites, Ramones, Green Day, The Exploding Hearts, and The Mr. T Experience fall out outside my reach presently. This isn't to say these bands are entirely devoid of merits, but here's the deal: if music doesn't reverberate within me on a viscerally emotional level*, I likely frequent it's wares due to its fascinating anthropological/historical posturing, psychic usefulness, and out-of-time sound. Pop-Punk just generally doesn't interest me on that level, so I better curl my toes, throw up my fists and bite my bottom lip to it. It might be an embarrassing admission, but lines like this do me in:

I spent this year as a ghost and I'm not sure what I'm looking for
I'm a voice on a phone that you rarely answer anymore
I came in here alone
Came in here alone
But that doesn't scare me like it did seven months ago
I spent this year as a ghost and I'm not sure where home is anymore

I came out swinging from a South Philly basement
Caked in stale beer and sweat under half-lit fluorescents
I spent the winter writing songs about getting better
And if I'm being honest, I'm getting there

(*if you're getting hung up on the term "emotional" here i.e. "all music is emotional" then try to focus on the context - a cultural niche where "emo" is a subgenre of music)

On an unrelated note, have you heard the new Gaslight Anthem single, "45"? I've strayed pretty far from the band since 2008's The '59 Sound put me in a coma (yes, how controversial), but I ended up hearing this a number of times whilst slaying minutes digging for unlikely gems in the local FYE, of all places. While the song is certainly solid and devoid of that shitty, reverb-on-fucking-everything Springsteen/Replacements production style, the greatest gift it gave was reminding me how great Tilt was. How? Listen to the chorus. Wouldn't it sound way better with an upward lift in the vocals?

You hear the similarity there, right? No? Then I guess that was drawing a long bow, but it is where my brain guided me. Somehow I imagine re-igniting interest in Tilt wasn't the band's intention here, but I'm glad it did. I should cover this troupe here; they wrote a ton of amazing, bass-heavy pop-punk anthems that go relatively unheard nowadays, perhaps due to their lackluster 3rd and 4th LPs.

Yeah, actually, listening to them back-to-back sort of invalidates this entire section of the post.

Dammit, I never know how to end posts.

songs that suck tremendously vol. 1

The rewards I've reaped from servicing you at the local grocery store for the past 7 years have been great, but there is one thing I've earned that trumps them all: a refined, ever-developing loathing for popular music. But see, I'm not that guy who argues the vapidness of radio pop, taking a mere distaste for it into the territory of socio/psychoanalytical critique. I mainly just dislike being spattered with rank, wet feces whenever I step into my own dojos, let alone the dojos of others. To combat the interminable aggravation whenever Enya's "Sail Away" or Natasha Bedingfield's "Pocketful Of Sunshine" decided to catch a ride on my mental Möbius strip, I started collecting these fuckawful songs for quarantine list. 

HERE IS MY STORY:

1.) Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know

I just discovered this one today and already my hatred for it could sink continents. I don't know what this shit is supposed to be, but it has all the art & atmosphere of New Age FM pop radio. 
2.) Adele - Rumor Has It

Holy shit, fuck this earsmegma. Worst chorus I can currently think of.

3.) Bruno Mars - Grenade

Whenever I'm blessed enough to have this flaccid penis brigade marching through my head, I like to extend the severity of the sacrifices he describes to vile heights. "I'd skullfuck an infant to death" and "I'd pull off my face and eat it until I died" are my favorite additions, thus far, but we'll see where the road takes us.

4.) Train - Drive-By

I guess "Hey Soul Sister" wasn't just a fluke in a canon of otherwise listenable songs.

5.) Train - Hey Soul Sister

Which reminds me...

6.) Daniel Powter - You Had A Bad Day

No one on earth needs to hear this song again, even if they liked it at some point.

7.) LeAnn Rimes - How Do I Live

FUCK YOU LEANN RIMES PT 2

("Fuck You LeAnn Rimes Pt 1" was "Can't Fight The Moonlight")

8.) Sheryl Crow - Soak Up The Sun

I don't even know why I hate this song so much, but fuck, man. Also, I can only run it through my head as "Iiiiii'm gonna soak up the cuuuuummmmm". People generally don't exchange currency for semen, either, so the lyric still suits the song's theme. I'm pretty awesome.

9.) Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe

This is probably the most hatefuckingly effective hook I've ever heard. That keyboard line is like psychic assault. I want to take a dump on her face and not in a fetishistic way. No one should hit 26 years of age and still find it in them to write something this tween-y unless they're relegating their career focus to making money off of children.
Actually, that's not an unrealistic assumption.

10.) La Bouche - Be My Lover

The sound of erect penises being struck by lightning.

TUNE IN WHENEVER I POST MORE FOR MORE.

revisiting Sunny Day Real Estate in 2012

Sunny Day Real Estate were a 4-piece from Seattle, Washington who were "the first emo band, along with Weezer", you state, embarrassingly. Actually, though, if you're looking for the source of ahistorical claims like the preceding, this is probably where you'd start. Prior to this troupe's arrival on the mainstream landing pad circa '94, music termed "emo" (endearingly or not) was pretty much exclusively relegated to dingy basement shows and channeled through bands burnt out on the pogo-thrash of the early 80's. I probably don't need to give you a history lesson (since you're on the internet), but essentially, Ian Mackaye and co. decided the genre they helped establish was becoming too much of a warzone for dumb, chipped-shoulder pit warriors and went on a mission to become the cool, damp rag patting the forehead of worked-up suburbanite white dudes everywhere. The hardcore scene, not knowing what to make of bands like Embrace, Rites Of Spring, and Dag Nasty, split them off from the catalyst with the mocking term "emocore" - a signifier that these bands often employed emotions, unlike hardcore punk, which was like listening to a home appliance user's manual.
Okay, and I guess they were also prone to utilizing more rock-oriented tempos and guitarwork, as well.
 Around the dawn of the 90's the post-hardcore sound began to evolve frenetically and diverge into several disparate styles, embracing and expounding upon different facets of the style while drawing from surrounding scenes. From here, alongside the chaotic, shredding violence of bands like Honeywell and Heroin, and the epic, dynamics-laden approach of Moss Icon, Native Nod, and Hoover, came a smoother, much more accessible brand of emo that straddled the line between post-hardcore and indie rock. The most influential (ie mercilessly looted) example being Sunny Day Real Estate.
...like, Hot Water Music levels of imitation. Fugazi tier mimicry. It's probably grammatically incorrect to expand an aside hidden between parentheses like this, but the world is a crazy place.
After a couple EPs firmly footed in the underground sounds of the day, the band enlisted their friend Jeremy Enigk for guitar/frontman position, effectively clubbing the band's rawness into submission with a mace of distinctive mellow weenie vocals. Such is written in the Book Of Speculations. They went on to release two excellent LPs on Sub-Pop, the second of which sounds surprisingly refined for a snapshot of the band disintegrating in the immolating light of God's love. Unfortunately, they then released two more following Jeremy's conversion, replete with singing lessons, a faux-British accent, and a glaze of putrid alt-rock shellac.

That was what they call in "the biz" "an introduction that's too long to bother reading". This exists beyond my usual snooze-inducing self-depreciating tirades, as I literally only began writing this to point to share my current opinion of the band after some much needed time off. Like Rites Of Spring's s/t LP, I flogged their Diary album next to constantly for close to 6 months before it finally passed on due to a shattered will to live. That was a joke because I used the term "flogged" as a hyperbole for "listened to". Oh, ritualistic, prolonged torture jokes and their hilarity. Anyway, I just recently gave their debut and self-titled follow-up a re-review and I couldn't help but notice that despite how solid and effective they remain, Diary has a completely bizarre quirk to it that I totally overlooked back in the day.
Okay listen to this song:

This was probably my favorite song back in 11th grade. I still love it a lot. But hey, did you ever notice that at almost exactly halfway through the song, THE SONG STARTS AGAIN ALMOST EXACTLY AS IT BEGAN? I was going to italicize that last bit, but comedically timed caps lock seemed more appropriate. As you can tell, I'm entering a "painfully ironic" phase for everyone to revel in. But seriously, it's almost perfectly split into two near identical halves. What's even more bewildering is the fact that almost every song on here does the exact same thing. Go listen to "Seven" next. After that intro, the same EXACT verse is repeated, note for note, word for word, 3 times. Why? The structure is this:
1.) Intro
2.) Verse 1
3.) Bridge 1
4.) Verse 1
5.) Bridge1
6.) Chorus
7.) Verse 1 (really)
8.) Bridge (also identical)
9.) Chorus (and such and such)
I don't even mean this as a dig on the band, necessarily... I just don't know what to make of it. The more I listened with this principle in mind, the more I began to see it - near savant-esque rigidity and repetition. "Round" is exactly like this. "47" is exactly like this. Actually, from what I can recall (I don't have the album in front of me right now), nearly every song is structured like the band wrote a bunch of different song components and piled them up in the most logical progression. There's no room for improvisation, looseness, or ad libbing whatsoever. "But Steve", you might be saying, "aren't most pop song structures like this?". Well, yeah, but most of those songs aren't 5 minutes long and have no crescendos. In essence, Sunny Day Real Estate were pretty curious/awful editors at this point, but the chunks of music they comprised their songs from were all pretty spectacular.

LP2 (aka Sunny Day Real Estate aka "The Pink Album") is generally better but doesn't quite crush my heart/tear ducts with the nostalgia/tension-release vice its predecessor employs. It doesn't sound like a new, emotionally terse galaxy being born, but the songwriting is a lot less "what the fuck" and the dynamics aren't as obvious. I think I need to give this a few more spins before filing it back away, but I can say this: for what is essentially an odds 'n' flgqwads collection-gone-proper-album, it's an amazingly consistent and understated album.

I just realized why I don't update here as much as my old blog.

No amphetamines.

(frowny emoticon)

slag post #2

The Broadways' Broken Star is easily my favorite album of all time, and hasn't budged from that position since my friend introduced me to it back in 2005. Released in 1998, Brendan Kelly (previously of Slapstick), Chris McCaughan (previously of Tricky Dick), Rob DePaolo, and Dan Hanaway (also of Slapstick, but only on trumpet & vocals) created what stands for me as the high water mark of 90's pop punk, then dissolved pretty much immediately after.
I don't think I ever wrote about it in depth on any of my previous blogs, but only for the fact that reducing my relation to this band to a single post is an enormously daunting task. At this point, every song they ever wrote has been scorched into my psyche permanently, and despite that, I still feel an emotional need to give their discography a spin every couple months. To put that in perspective, oodles of bands I fucking obsessed over throughout my late teens have become like dulled swords to me at this point - still anchored to me by respect and sentiment, but very low on emotional usefulness and thus, not in regular rotation - but not The Broadways. I couldn't even tell you the last time I spun Indian Summer's discography or Defiance, Ohio's Share What Ya Got on my own whim, and I fucking hinged on that shit back in the day.
Somehow Broken Star and the swag of EPs collected (incompletely) on the Broken Van compilation still sound fresh to me as the day I first heard them, and I feel legitimately sorrowful that I missed their reunion last year at the Asian Man Records anniversary show. There's just something about the band's approach that I never tire of, and while I've grown to find some of the lyrics to be somewhat overstated, the conviction gets me every time. I've never felt any need for tattoos, but I still swear I'll get a tribute to them on me someday in the distant, rash decision-making future. Likely the namesake of my previous blog, in fact. Alcohol mandatory.
Shortly after, I arrived here:

I feel like all of that might create a frame of reference and qualify this largely disagreeable opinion:

The Lawrence Arms might be the most mystifyingly lame and disappointing bands I can think of in the entire pop-punk spectrum.
Lemme first say that I've been listening to this band above on and (mostly) off for years. During the earliest stages, I was utterly convinced that the folly was on my part when I didn't orgasm violently over Chris McCaughan and Brendan Kelly's current project. After all, how could two of the four members of a band that blew my skull open like a pipe-bomb-hidden-in-a-birthday-cake let me down so hard? Clearly, I was just setting the bar too high and/or treating them unfairly as an extension of their previous unit - one whose sentimental attachment and affection for could do nothing but hamper my judgment.
Still, I sauntered on, and eventually made my way to their 3rd and 4th LPs, Apathy And Exhaustion and The Greatest Story Ever Told, respectively. While the band certainly adapted a more discernible style here, they amazingly sounded even more pathetically limited and riff-less, this time glazed grotesquely with cheesy, sterile production and a shitload of wimpy, auto-tuned McCaughan ballads. On top of that, TGSET's namesake is one of my favorite books, so it was pretty disheartening to hear it's inspiration ringing through that limp stool of an album. Regardless, my wishy-washy nature kept these 4 discs spinning a few times a year, hoping one day I'd "get it" and be able to jack off to this shit like everyone else.
Finally, just a few days ago, I made a realization after not touching a single Lawrence Arms track for over a year: I wasn't off the mark at all in treating the band's first two LPs as extensions of The Broadways - their approach was almost exactly the same. It wasn't the familiarity, though, that did these guys in for me, nor the sentiment - it was the fact that the material was soggy and weak. Why?
Probably because Dan Hanaway made The Broadways as great as they were.
I had somehow overlooked this glaringly obvious connection for years, likely in lieu of not quite digging Hanaway's Honor System project (and thus, having not heard it since 2006). Upon hearing Tricky Dick's discography a few weeks ago - of whom Hanaway guitar'd for - it finally made sense. While the point is only really applicable to the first 7 or 8 songs compiled (their final recordings, I think), the guitarwork is fucking fantastic, and while it doesn't exactly clear boundaries in pop-punk, it textures the songs perfectly and delivers killer hooks with a tons of proto-Broadways lingo. This isn't to say that if he had joined in on the trio (or even took McCaughan's place) they would've necessarily been as amazing as the preceding unit, but it definitely makes me wonder. It suddenly doesn't feel like such a shock that The Lawrence Arms
didn't deliver the goods...
In Conclusion:

A Guided Tour Of Chicago and Ghost Stories sound like well-meaning, but unsatisfying outtakes of Brendan and Chris' previous band. Every time I wind up listening to them I find myself altering that line in Wayne's World and looping it compulsively:
"The Shitty Broadways? Are they any good?" "They suck."
That's actually less of a joke than it sounds. I tend to get plagued with thought loops. As for Apathy And Exhaustion and The Greatest Story Ever Told, it sounds like they finally got comfortable moving away from the sub-Broadways-isms of the past and saw the ticket to the kingdom in the form of a bunch of damp, sound-alike ballads and blinding high-res production.

 In Conclusion Pt 2:
I realize this post is pretty harsh and that my opinion means zip to anyone. Fortunately, I still like writing and voicing my opinion.

In Conclusion Pt. 3:
This song was the first piece of traveler-lifestyle ephemera that sparked my forays into the minimalist and risky. It's also one of my favorite songs ever:

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.

3 things

 
1.) Otomo Yoshihide - Night Before The Death Of The Sampling Virus
Seeing as Ground Zero have a pretty spotty catalog, I kinda went in to turntablist Otomo Yoshihide's solo work with the same assumption. Yeah, it's a shitty way to approach anything, but right of the bat, the pessimism has proven just. Have 54 minutes to kill? Like things that are of no potential interest to anyone? Then this is probably right up your alley. I have no idea how I've listened to this disc enough times to come to this conclusion, but it's not simply that I don't like this album, it's just... unlikable. I realize that the quality of music is primarily subjective (arguably, of course, but always to some extent), but with 77 tracks, almost all of which are untreated samples of people speaking in Japanese, I can't really see two ways about it. At one point, I speculated that this works best regionally, and is somewhat lacking when a non-Japanese speaker listens to it. Nope. If there's an overarching "storyline" or theme present, it doesn't really matter - you're intended to listen to this on shuffle. Admittedly, the idea of allowing chance to construct a new piece of music each time is pretty interesting. Unfortunately, the components are made up from the dull-as-fuck spoken samples I mentioned before, as well as a handful of semi-intriguing loops and manipulations (including Yamatsuka Eye making puking sounds) and even fewer cosmic-sounding harsh noise pieces. After hitting shuffle and listening to an incidentally constructed 10 minute block of calm Japanese voices, I figured throwing this to the wind wasn't necessarily the biggest mistake I've ever made.

2.) Aye Nako - Demo 2010
Occupying the same universe as Superchunk, Discount, and J Church with Go Sailor-esque vocals courtesy of guitarist Mars, Aye Nako are an awesome gender-boundary-crushing 3-piece pop-punk unit from Brooklyn who I know pretty much nothing about. I saw them about 6 months ago in support of P.S. Eliot's farewell show at Death By Audio, and they drilled their hooks deep enough into my head that I recognized every song on the demo when I gave it a spin a month later (much like The Sidekicks, who I also saw by chance a few years back). The first few seconds of "The Rind" make you think there's something immaculate going on, production-wise, but it flops down into punk-demo mud thereafter. It's nothing that'll saw your eardrums in twain, but I figured I should mention it since my ears have been forged by years of goregrind endurance, and thus, aren't the greatest judges of tolerable production. Either way, the songs are great, and the hooks are "a'plenty", as someone might say unironically. Check out some tracks at their ridiculous ASCII site: http://ayenako.org/. I can't wait to hear these guys record something new.

3.) Pearls Before Swine - One Nation Underground
For some reason, even though I've owned hard copies of the first 4 Pearls Before Swine LPs for the past 4 years, I've never really absorbed them properly. I guess now's just as good of a time as any to rectify that, starting with their 1969 debut, One Nation Underground. I've always loved a handful of tracks on here, especially the opening number, "Another Time", which is probably one of the prettiest songs I've ever heard. Reading the lyrics, I'm not entirely sure I understand how it relates, but apparently this was not only the first song Tom Rapp ever penned, but was also written in memoriam of an awful car crash he walked away from unscathed. I know when I had my car accident, the first thing I'd asked myself was whether or not I had seen myself "deep inside the velvet pond" after I followed "the crystal swan". The embarrassing "Playmate", on the other hand, takes the lyrics and structure of the Saxie Dowell song (notably plagiarized from an old Charles L. Johnson number) and slathers it in a chintzy, keyboard theft of both Bob Dylan's nasally whine and the hook from "Desolation Row". Luckily, the rest of the album is more in line with the opener, and floats around outside the Cringe Dimension, with a remarkable amount of variation at that. Check out the angry protest folk on "Uncle John", the weird, drone break in "I Shall Not Care", and that fucking rad hook in the hippy-cliche "Drop Out!". This is a great album, and while its not quite as "out there" as other psych-folk I love, the songwriting is pretty fantastic across the board. At this rate of Pearls Before Swine album exposure, I should be familiar with all 7 items in their catalog by 2036, so I'll let you know what's good by then.