The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are best known to the masses for their 1997 hit, “The Impression That I Get,” (also known to many as the ‘Knock On Wood’ song), from their platinum album “Let’s Face It.”  You younger kids may know them from their song “Where’d You Go?” in Rock Band 2, or their cameo as the band playing in Clueless.  However you may know them, or even if you don’t, you should know that they have a new album out called “Pin Points & Gin Joints,” which reflects the band’s progression from young kids melding ska and hardcore in the 80’s Boston music scene, to their current status as grownups who still have the passion to put together an album despite being a part-time band, being scattered around the country, and holding down other jobs, like frontman Dicky Barrett’s current gig as announcer for late night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live.  I had the chance to reconnect with saxophonist and original member Tim “Johnny Vegas” Burton, who I haven’t spoken to since the heyday of ska music in the late 90’s, when I hosted a ska and punk rock radio show in New York.  We talk about the current state of the band, future plans, and cover the Gunaxin.com 6 questions.  Check out the band and their new album at www.BosstonesMusic.com.  Yes, I know this is Simply READ, but here is a special MP3 interview not available on our show feed, so Simply Listen.  (WARNING- Audio is not the best due to circumstances beyond my control.)

Posted by Jay from the Masters Of None podcast.  Follow Jay on Twitter.

 
Last week The Magnetic Fields released an album, Realism, to almost universally “meh” reviews. Fitting, since it’s an almost universally meh album. It really highlights what’s been Stephen Merrit’s Achilles heel for a long time—his voice. It’s just not a voice you can take seriously.

This had been fine in the past since his career has been built on lyrics so firmly planted in cheek, he looks like he’s miming a blowjob. Realism strips away the humour and the wit, which leaves some pleasant but boring ditties with a voice suited better to musical comedy than popular song. It’s the kind of disappointing offering that might make one question Merritt’s reputation as one of the top songwriters of his generation.

The last album of his to geniunely back-up that reputation up was probably 2004’s elegantly titled, i.

After an artist has released an almost universally acclaimed tour de force like the tripple-disc concept album 69 Love Songs, what do they do to follow-up that accomplishment? Well, if 69 Love Songs was indeed the album they were following, and the artist was Stephen Merritt, they might simply write another 14  love songs for an album that could almost be disc #4 of that set.

The only thing that really sets i apart from 69 Love Songs is its unique concept of each song’s title beginning with the letter “i”. Otherwise it really is just love songs 70 through 83. But don’t be put off by that. It’s a welcome thing.

What made 69 Love Songs great was Merritt’s wry, sarcastic take on the ironies of love and life. “I Don’t Believe You“, “I Wish I Had an Evil Twin“, “Is This What They Used To Call Love?” all tug at the heart strings while pulling the corners of your mouth upwards. As a single disc it might actually be a stronger album than any of the three 69 Love Songs discs on their own, but in the production and performance Merritt is showing what might be a touch of boredom with himself and his schtick. Or perhaps it’s just a case of too many edges being polished off in the studio. Regardless, and issues of a slightly muted enthusiasm aside, this is the last time we hear him playing to his strengths on record.

After this album Merritt focuses on increasingly eccentric side-projects (a Limony Snicket related Gothic Archies album and a fake Victorian vaudeville/opera under his own name) before returning to the Magnetic Fields with Realism’s predecessor, Distortion—an alleged tribute to noise-pop, which frankly sounds like the distortion was later added to the mix in an attempt to distract from the glaring lack of the brilliant songwriting expected from him.

At his best Merritt is a sort of tin pan alley Leonard Cohen with a more focused and cutting sense of humour (no small feat!). Or perhaps he isn’t, really. Perhaps that’s just a character he plays on certain albums. Judging by his work since 2004, it’s a character he sadly retired after i.

This out-of-print, limited edition three-way split put out by micro-label Folk Waste features Hat City Intuitive, Rocks In My Pillow and Imp(s).  A fair introduction to this free-folk/free-jazz/free-noise  imprint, it’s a shame this material isn’t (yet?) available to a wider audience.

The set opens with long-running free-jazz/improv unit Hat City Intuitive debasing dixieland with the upbeat, ramshackle mess of “Saint Marty D” before completely changing gears with “Newtown Etc to Greg“. The second track is as much wafty psychedelic exploration as the first is skronktastic jazz, yet Hat City manage a through-line between the two compositions. Perhaps the through-line is both would have been better off without the guitar. 

Rocks In My Pillow’s two contributions are simultaneously less engaging and more successful overall. Restrained in comparison to Hat City Intuitive’s unhinged free-for-all, their creepy soundscapes pack in a lot more atmosphere and considered playing. Almost like a soundtrack to an imaginary film about post-apocalyptic beatniks, these tracks come off a mellower, jazzier version of Godspeed! You Black Emperor. Bowed instruments and minimalist percussion drift like a radioactive dust storm through an abandoned city. Not as immediate as their counterparts, but easily the best moments on the disc.

IMP(s) finish off the set with “Open Space/Closed Space“. The five member collective check almost every box on the free-psyche checklist with this pairing. Bells, check. Plinky stringed instruments, check. Warbly vocals approximating all manner of ethic tradition, check. Yet unlike the contrived nature some acts in the scene check-off those boxes, IMP(s) do it with passion and authenticity. The twenty-four minute long “Closed Space” is, I suspect, a live recording of a performance and, though fantastic, was probably more successful seen as well as heard. Similar to the latter-day experimental and more theatrical work of Einsturzende Neubauten, there’s an element of theatre, spoken word performance, and chanted ceremony which feels merely hinted at on the recording. You get the feeling you’re only privy to half the picture here. It’s still a fascinating half and suggests IMP(s) are well worth experiencing live.

As I mentioned earlier, this split release is a fair introduction to the Folk Waste label. Fans of the above described sounds would find it well worth their while to check them out. And not delay since the extremely limited runs of their albums sell out very quickly.

Making good on the promises made by their debut, A Catholic Education, Teenage Fanclub created one of the few timeless classics of the 90s alt-rock heyday. Aptly—and cheekily—titled, Bandwagonesque has weathered better than many of its trendsetting counterparts. Time and distance set it apart from the glut of  post-Nirvana bandwagon jumpers revealing it to be a truly enjoyable set of fuzzed-out, Big Star and Byrds-inspired pop-rock ditties in its own right.

I remember being lukewarm on the album at the time of its release. I was a bit of a Cohen/Dylan snob at the time and the idea of a song repeating the one line “what you do to me” offended my lyrical sensibilities. I also found the feedback noise of tracks like “Satan” to be contrived and half-assed. I now think both are, if not brilliant po-mo statements on popular music, excellent examples of what a melodic-leaning rock’n'roll record should be. Infectious, rawkus, sloppy and finely crafted, it’s perhaps the definitive time-capsule of alternative rock circa 1991.

Over the years my “meh” feelings towards the album have slowly transformed into a begrudging appreciation and then into respect and even awe. Where Nevermind, Copper Blue and Dirty have started (or some time ago began) to sound like dated relics of the era, Bandwagonesque keeps getting better. It has even somehow remained relatively fresh sounding.

It could be due in part to their devotion to their classic-rock influences. Most of the songs on the album wouldn’t sound out of place played by a Neil Young or an Alex Chilton but with Kevin Shields snuck into their backing band.

I think that’s really the secret of the album’s success. Though it’s called Bandwagonesque, Fanclub aren’t really bandwagon jumpers. They didn’t write songs to specifically fit the alt-rock format, they wrote timelessly great, sticky, pop-rock songs (“The Concept“, “Alcoholiday“, “December“) which just happened to be produced with enough feedback, fuzzy distortion and washed-out noise to fit in with the day’s fashions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Put in human terms, Bandwagonesque is like that wallflower in your freshman French class you ignore, who blooms in senior year, becomes the queen of the prom and you spend the rest of your life secretly devoted to. Only I’m not secretly devoted to this album, I’m quite public about my love for it. In many ways this is the “first love” I judge all new noise-pop records against.

 
The danger with odds’n'ends collections is they tend towards half-baked experiments and an overall incohesive listening experience. Aggravatingly, there’s usually at least one of the band’s essential tracks on the thing. Can’s 1976 rarities compilation, Unlimited Edition, is no exception.

Expanded from a fairly solid 1974 album titled Limited Edition, the ‘76 version is an unwieldy beast which covers pretty much every aspect of the adventurous and influential krautrock band’s ever-evolving sound. That’s not necessarily a good thing from an “album” perspective.

The disc gathers up the band’s orphans from the years 1968-75 which might not be a problem if the songs were arranged purely chronologically, but they’re not. I haven’t been able to discern why.

By 1975, Can were almost an entirely different band, with a different approach to making music. It would be like compiling a Brian Eno retrospective and tossing in some early Roxy Music in the middle of his later ambient work. The contrast might be interesting, but it wouldn’t flow.

Of course, in the technological golden age in which we gloriously languish, sequencing quibbles can be rectified by programming your CD player or, even more easily, editing out the bum tracks in iTunes (or your mediaplayer of choice). Which is what I did.

For my money, it’s the early nuggets which make this disc worth while—my personal cut-off date for Can is 1972. “Doko E.”, “LH 702“, “Mother Upduff“, “Connection” and a handful of others are excellent examples of their early period art-rock (many of these are available on other, perhaps more rewarding, Can compilations).

The early material is not all gold though. The 18 minute “Cutaway“, a surprisingly pointless and unlistenable collage of sounds and grooves from 1968,  didn’t make the cut. Nor did a sequence of short pieces call the “Ethnological Forgery Series” which, in the context of the album, serve to be no more than irritating clutter. They are also a little too accurately titled as they sound exactly like white guys committing world-music forgery. Though one appreciates honesty, it might have been a good idea to distract the listener from this flaw.

So, as it is with many b-sides and rareties collections, Unlimited Edition houses enough treasures for the dedicated Can aficionado to make it worth picking up (at least to rip a few gems off), but for casual or new listeners it’s far from essential.

 
The award for most CDs by a band I hate on my shelf goes to AC/DC. The total is a whopping three titles by the audaciously long-running Aussie rockers. I should qualify my use of the word “hate” here. What I mean when I write that I “hate” AC/DC is that I absolutely loathe them. That is I loathe them, and the weak parody they’ve become, now.

But AC/DC circa 1975/76 were one of the best rock’n'roll bands to ever have their glorious, grimy, debauched, sleazy lunacy committed to wax. High Voltage combines the the best of their first two Australian platters (one confusingly also titled High Voltage) to serve up as perfect a set of gutter-rock as you could hope to find this side of the first two Stooges albums.

To me AC/DC will always be synonymous with gravel-pit parties, cheap beer, stale pot smoke, the fear of getting beat up, struggling to jam through Zeppelin’s “The Ocean” without ever having listened to the whole song, older girls with teased hair, skull earrings, tight jeans, rusted-out cars, my psychotic cousin’s martial arts magazines strewn over his water-bed as he lies to me about stuff he’s done with girls, wispy moustaches on guys who can’t really grow them, Judas Priest back-patches on denim jackets, poor kids, trailer parks, not understanding, not belonging … being 15 in a small town.

Highway to Hell, Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap and, to a lesser extent, High Voltage were the soundtracks for my middle- and high-school years as a headbanger. AC/DC was the one band everyone could agree on or at least tolerate. Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath were too dark for some people. Dokken and Ratt were too glam and people weren’t quite sure yet what to do with Slayer, Metallica and Venom, though we had an idea that was where we were headed.

But no one argued when you put on some DeeCee from Back in Black or earlier. It was party music, it was driving music, it was playing cards music, it was hanging out in the parking lot music.

The music was simple. Older kids grew up on it and it’s not so heavy younger kids couldn’t get into it. There’s no twin-guitar leads or time signature changes, there’s no sword and sorcery imagery. There are double entendres about testicles.

Their universal appeal was very much due to, before they jumped the musical shark, the purity of their music. High Voltage in particular showcases all the traits of a perfect, undiluted, unpretentious rock’n'roll record. It seethes with genuine disdain for the establishment. But not in an intellectual or political way; in a “don’t look down on me because I’m going to drink myself to death, fuck you, let’s rock” way.

AC/DC’s world is tiny on this record. It stretches from the stage, across the bar, to the back of the tour bus. This world is only populated with themselves, underage girls and the assholes standing in their way they’re going to have to plow right through.

They’re punks. They’re rocking. This record is, though it’s rarely thought of in these terms, one of the true early punk rock discs. It’s more punk rock than many bands who intentionally tried to make punk rock. By comparison intelligentsia-core bands like Hüsker Dü and Dead Kennedys come off like Fleetwood Mac.

High Voltage captures the raw, reckless, unruly, adolescent and even naively innocent spirit of rock’n'roll in a way that’s been lost. There’s no polish, there’s no fat, there’s no play-acting. This is a truthful artistic statement from a band of young dirtbags who don’t give a shit about anything but the sex and drugs mythology of rock’n'roll.

You really can’t ask for anything more.

 
With their first five albums, King Crimson precariously balanced a tightrope between progressive rock and that four-letter-word, prog. In 1974 they finally lost their balance and their sixth album, Starless and Bible Black, proves what many had always believed. King Crimson were total wankers.

From the get-go Robert Fripp used Crimson to push the pretension envelope. Their 1969 debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, blends jazz, metal, folk and classical into an audacious melange that was—and remains—truly progressive. It was also rock.

Over the next four albums, even in the songs featuring mainly strings, Mellotron and flute, there is a revolutionary fire that burns underneath. No matter how skilled the players or meticulous the arrangements are, it’s still rock’n'roll somehow.

If this creative fire was already beginning to diminish by 1973’s Larks’ Tongue in Aspic, it’s all but extinguished with Starless and Bible Black.

This isn’t to say the album doesn’t technically ”rock” in places. The opening track blasts in with a juggernaut of a groove and “Lament” does its best to shake the speakers. But everything on the album is stripped of its passion, replaced by inhumanly tight synchronized phrases which feel planned down to the last nuance of every note.

Though musicianship had always been a centerpiece of what King Crimson was all about, this is the first time the musicianship takes precedence over the music. Previously the players seemed to be mere conduits for a creative and inventive expression with a life of its own. Starless, on the other hand, feels as if it’s being played by joyless machines with a clinical exactness both impressive and nausea inducing.

This is the kairotic moment where progressive rock becomes the loathesome prog. When you can’t honestly call it rock anymore and the whole becomes less than the sum of its parts.

Fripp would remedy this later the same year with the kraut-rock and (sometimes collaborator) Brian Eno influenced Red, but Starless remains a milestone truly terrible album in the Crimson catalogue signifying the end of their genius, warning the listener to pass no further.

Simply put, Starless and Bible Black is unlistenable in its pretentiously cloying sterility.

I was beginning to doubt my 1d4 was ever going to roll a four. I’m glad it finally did because CD tower #4 is where all my jazz, world music and hip-hop is located and it’s nice to write about it for a change. Now that I think about it, my CD filing system kind of smacks of segregation or apartheid or ghettoization. Well, I tried to mix my CDs in the past and it didn’t really work. That doesn’t make me a racist. Just a little OCD.

But themes of ghettoization and segregation are fitting for this review. The last recorded live performace of John Coltrane (before succumbing to liver cancer in 1967) was captured at the newly opened Olatunji Center for African Culture in New York. Here, Coltrane’s “second quartet” are in their prime and they’re playing as if the sheer force of their music could raise every black man, woman and child up from under oppression across America and the globe.

It should be noted part of the “heat ” on the disc is created, not by the musicians, but by fledgling audio engineer, Bernard Drayton, recording everything too hot. It’s easily the one of the rawest, dirtiest Trane recordings in existence. His sax is in the red for most of the set and, where this might have been a disaster at another point in his career, it adds a ferocious fire that is suitable to the album.

Drummer Rashied Ali’s cymbals are compressed into a glaring white noise and at times Jimmy Garrison’s bass sounds like it’s being run through a Fuzzface stompbox. These are good things in the context of the music.

Again, if the performances weren’t so impassioned, this might not be a virtue. Microphones drop in and out, creating odd, intermintent panning and phasing effects. From a technical standpoint the recording is a fiasco. It’s doubtful, if this weren’t the final live testament of John Coltrane, that these recordings would have seen the light of day outside of the bootleg circuit.

On the other hand, at this point in his career, Trane was still pushing his music further and further into the cosmos. It would have been interesting to see where the 1970s might have taken him. Maybe fuzz and wah-wah pedals would have become part of his gear as they did for Miles Davis. Or would he have mellowed and reverted to a more traditional jazz approach, perhaps akin to Wynton Marsalis?

The latter seems doubtful, at least in the immediate future, as the records his wife, Alice Coltrane, issued after his death were adventurous and innovative. One has to wonder what further collaboration between the two giants might have spawned.

Something wonderful judging by her piano solo starting at the ten-minute mark of “Ogunde“. It’s one of the highlights of this disc. Fluid and scorching like a river molten rock, it twists and flows over the next six minutes, burning everything in its path. Perhaps the only thing hotter on the album is Pharoah Sanders‘ skronking tenor solos which sound especially brutal here against Trane’s more finessed improvisations.

The Olatunji Concert certainly isn’t the best of the many Coltrane albums produced in his final months, but it’s a wonderful document of where the second quartet was at and hint at where they might have gone. Technical flaws in the recording really only add a visceral immediacy to the listening experience. Unlike with a Bob Thiele or Rudy Van Gelder recording, you won’t be able to close your eyes and imagine you’re there. But you’ll feel like you were when it’s over, scorched eardrums and all.

The beginning of the decade saw everyone was trying to sound like Gang of Four, New Order and PIL. I was pretty happy until wagon-jumpers started cloning the clones and the genes got too diluted.

Then the ‘00s seemed to hit a dry spell for indie rock. Free-psyche took its place for a while but by 2007-08 it seemed like everything was hitting a drought. I’m not sure I’ve been able to scrape an end-of-year top five together for the last three years much less a top ten.

This year I was able to jot down 13 titles without even thinking about it. Was it a strong year? Was I just more receptive to new music? Is it just that once again, like 1999-2003, one of the kinds of music I like (this time it’s noise-pop) is back in style and is being given a dust-off and a fresh coat of paint? Perhaps.

I’ve written about some of these albums already, and not all fall under the “noise-pop” umbrella, but here is, by my reckoning, the Top 13 Albums of 2009 in No Particular Order.

Japandroids: Post-Nothing — This duo from Vancouver remind us all that when you blend “pop” and “punk” it doesn’t have to sounds like Blink 182. It can sound like pop-punk was meant to sound like. Superchunk meets Husker-Du in the rec-room of The Replacements’ mom’s house and no one remembered to take out the trash.

Girls: Album — I like the idea of Elvis Costello. It’s a great theory, but in practice it’s somewhat of a disappointing experience. Especially that first album. Girls found a way to put the theory into practice and make it work. All it took was a little more of Johnathan Richmond’s wry nihilism and some lo-fi garage-punk aesthetic. After all this time, someone figured it out.

The xx: xx — Ex-ex or double ex? I don’t know. I do know that they sound a lot like Stars. Just as well since the Montreal storytellers seem to have suddenly stopped putting out brilliant pop records with their last few EPs of boring drivel. So while The xx aren’t even aping a band from 25 years ago (like most acts this decade have), they at least have the foresight to pick one of the best and have the chops to pull it off. They even add a little bit of surf-guitar twang to the breathy girl-boy vocals, catchy hooks and a nice beats. Nice die-cut cover too.

The Drums: Summertime EP — “Don’t Be a Jerk, Johnny” could be a sequel to “Johnny Are You Queer?” only it’s better. Drums are almost like a cuter, happier version of Magnetic Fields. Infectious three-chord party-pop for roof-top parties in the… well… summertime.

Crocodiles: Summer of Hate — “I Wanna Kill” sounds so much like a Psychocandy b-side you’d swear it’s Jesus and Mary Chain. That’s a good and bad thing. Zero points for originality, ten points for awesomeness. It also sets the listener up for a little bit of disappointment the whole album isn’t quite so reverential to JAMC’s television-static bubblegum. Still, even if the noise-pop that rounds out the disc is more “noise” than “pop” it’s still pretty great. Perhaps greater.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart — The best album Slumberland forgot to put out in 1992? Almost contrived in the perfect way they blend of early 90’s American dream-pop, a little brit-pop and shoegaze, these kids come off sort of like a Superchunk/Velocity Girl side project where they put on fake British accents. That’s the second time I’ve name-dropped Superchunk in this article. Actually this is shaping up to be a string of comparisons to bands from when I was young. Anyway… The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are as cute and infectious as any band, anywhere at anytime.

Woods: Songs of Shame — These freaky folksters eschew the Bolan-esque airy-fairy imagery of the Banhart school of eccentricity for a more CSNY approach. If Pavement had been trying to emulate America or CCR, they might have sounded like this. That’s a good thing, by the way. Lo-fi folk-rock hasn’t been this catchy and exciting in years.

Sonic Youth: The Eternal — A return to the more organic, psychedelic flow of A Thousand Leaves but with the punky punch of Goo and the noise experimentation of NYC Ghosts & Flowers. A true return to form by alt-rock veterans.

Crystal Stilts: Alight of Night — If Magnetic Fields’ Distortion had been good instead of embarrassing, this might have been that record. That’s my second name-drop of Magnetic Fields. Let’s drop some more. Stick Violent Femmes, Joy Division and JAMC in a blender, hit “frappe” and drink down this reverb and despair rock’n’roll smoothie.

Raveonettes: In and Out of Control — While I’m tossing-out names like plates at a Greek wedding, let’s drop JAMC one more time. If John Hughes got to produce a JAMC album, this might have been it. I’m almost suspicious this album is actually a mash-up of M83’s Saturdays=Youth and Barbed Wire Kisses. It’s that good.

James Blackshaw: The Glass Bead Game — There are no names to drop in this review. Well, maybe John Fahey. Maybe Jack Rose. James Blackshaw is a free-folk 12-string virtuoso. Well, “virtuoso” might be stretching it. But he sure is some kind of good. I usually get a bit sickly from this kind of wankery but James manages to make some gorgeous, gorgeous music that makes me forget he’s playing too many notes and vegan girls probably throw their diva cups on stage when he’s playing.

Tune Yards: Bird Brains — I feel a bit dodgy including this one on the list since I’m still new to it and I haven’t internalized it fully. I’m pretty confident it may end up being one of my all-time faves. It may not, but at the moment I’m really impressed with it’s fresh blend of abstract indie-folk meets 8-bit trip-hop. And that bluesy voice! It reminds me of a lo-fi, folky Tricky at his weirdest. I’m looking forward to getting to know this lady better.

Akron/Family: Set ‘em Wild, Set ‘em Free — Not too many bands from the original “New Weird America” outbreak are still making good records. Is this one of the Family’s best? Yes and no? Maybe. No. Yes. Kind of. It was much better than just “better than I expected.” It’s pretty great, really. They finally got all their influences corralled and lined up to be deployed effectively instead of their previous free-range approach. Breaking free of M. Gira’s gravitational pull probably also did them in good stead. They still sound like they wish it was 1972, but that’s what’s great about them.

Also rans: A Place To Bury Strangers: Exploding Head; Pet Shop Boys: Yes; The Big Pink: A Brief History of Love; Jonsi and Alex: Riceboy Sleeps; Mirah: (A)spera; Sufjan Stevens: The BQE

After the Jesus and Mary Chain hot-rod sputtered to rickety halt in 1998, the brothers Reid popped up here and there in a few projects. In 2005 Sister Vanilla saw their sister Linda on board as a singer for probably their best record  since Honey’s Dead. Yet it wasn’t so good a record as to inspire anybody notice or care. Too bad because it’s a great slice of poppy rock’n'roll (aptly titled Little Pop Rock). Though a bit smoother and shinier than JAMC ever tried to be, the chrome finish is still a little rusted, dusty and scuffed. Of course, if Scarlett Johansson (who’d sang with them at their Coachella reunion show) had been the vocalist, then maybe things would have gone differently. Perhaps in the worst possible way.

You really cannot make a case for much of Finbegin (2001) being anything other than bedroom demos for the JAMC completist. Usually just an acoustic guitar and a vocal with a second guitar overdub, the tracks generally have that compressed, slightly fuzzy sound of a cassette four-track which can be charming enough.

Still, the first three songs really come-off like unfinished JAMC cast-offs, probably recorded in one take. Intriguing for the fan, but not much there to hold interest over repeated listenings and the casual listener might mistake it for unearthed demos by a particularly strung-the-fuck-out Lou Reed.

Perhaps an appropriate soundtrack for a week defined by uncertainty, fear and a general mood of doom and gloom here at Simply Syndicated.

One of Skinny Puppy’s most celebrated albums, VIVIsectVI (1988) always flew a little under my radar being sandwiched between two of my favourites (Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate and Rabies). As a nihilistic teen, it was rarely the one I’d select from my cassette rack before heading downstairs to spend my Saturday working in my father’s machine shop.

Come to think of it, Skinny Puppy was actually the only group he banned me from playing on the shop’s ghettoblaster. That’s beating out the likes of Slayer.

It might have had something to do with the Puppies apparent ability to play five separate songs at at the same time, layered on top of each other like a steaming hot pile of audio nachos with the works.

This was enabled by their early adoption of samplers and tape decks as part of their gear in an entirely diabolical way. Unlike other bands who pioneered the use of samplers in the 1980s, Skinny Puppy didn’t splice together coherent grooves from segments of existing songs or use samples as complementary embellishments.

They used the sampler as a tactical weapon, strafing the listener’s brain with a rapid fire of aural information sourced from television, movies, radio and, by the sounds of it, hell itself.

Mind you, this is all on top of a bed relatively benign synth and drum-machine rhythms. Strip away the bedlam of samples, and Nivek Ogre’s demonic vocalizations, and what you’d be left with wouldn’t be that far removed from Depeche Mode.

Revisiting VIVIsectVI, I admit I’ve been neglecting a jewel in their catalogue. Though it lacks the ”catchy” numbers (can you ever use the word “catchy” with SP?) found on other albums, it still boasts a bevy of strong tracks. “Testure“, “Harsh Stone White” and “Who’s Laughing Now” are all classic Puppy, blending horrific imagery with strong electro-beats and warped keyboard flourishes.

There are a few mis-steps. “VX Gas Attack“, a cheerful ditty about Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran, contains a laughably cheesy monologue which might actually have been partially responsible for my original lukewarm feelings towards the album. Also, the CD edition has a slight case of b-side-itis. The bonus tracks frankly drag down the quality of the final third of an otherwise strong program.

There’s always been something unfathomable and impenetrable about Skinny Puppy’s music, but for those looking for a door to knock on, VIVIsecVI is as safe a bet as any. But be warned: it’s the rusted, pock-marked steel door of an abandoned abattoir.

Apparently this review is timely as Ned’s Atomic Dustbin are scheduled to revisit their cuh-lassic 1991 album, God Fodder, for one night only at Shepherd’s Bush Empire this Saturday (Dec. 19th, 2009). To be honest, I saw them perform the album in ‘91 (or ‘92) and I can’t really recommend anyone attend this “historic” reunion show.

John had an annoying habit of saying “cheers” after every song. And they we just kind of sloppy, boring and horribly dressed. Maybe in the last 18 years they’ve learned some showmanship and acquired a new wardrobe—It should be noted, I dressed like them for years (and maybe still do). 

But lackluster North American tour tail-end concerts, tragic fashion-sense, puns and terrible typography aside, God Fodder is a masterpiece.

The summer after I finished high school, the cassette of God Fodder was virtually welded into the tape deck of my brown ’85 Chevette. I dubbed that car Boba Vette and she and I would cruise the beach communities of Parksville and Qualicum looking for a good time. These good times usually involved being too shy to talk to girls at McDonald’s or Dairy Queen, then playing role-playing games in my friends’ basements.

But in-between these two levels of humiliation, Ned’s was the glorious teenage soundtrack. Every note, every plinky lead bass riff, every frantic drumbeat has been processed and internalized in my brain for instant recall in a way few albums are.

My first taste of the Ned’s was in the basement of another friend. Keith was on the other side of the nerdy spectrum from role-playing games. He was an underground music nerd. A year older than me, he played the time-honoured role of surrogate older-brother, bringing new sounds back from his first year of college. I’m not sure what his grades could have been because he must have spent all his time reading Discorder and Off-beat.

Pre-internet, these magazines, and the college radio stations that published them, actually mattered—they were literally the voice of our generation. Copies didn’t always make it to the central Vancouver Island region so I relied on Keith to scour these rags and impart his wisdom on me. He seemed to know everything about every important breaking alternative rock act before anyone else and introduced me to innumerable bands (Pixies) I’d never have heard of until much later. I didn’t like all of them (never “got” Rollins), but I lapped up anything he had to say about music. In my junior year, I even began dressing like him. Imagine a grunge version of Morrissey.

But it was there in Keith’s basement I was first exposed to Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. We were watching The Wedge (the underground music show on MuchMusic) and this song “Kill Your Television” came on. It hit me like a lightening bolt. There’d been videos by Pixies and Mudhoney on already, but it was the Ned’s that mad an impact that night.

In hindsight, the lyric is simplistic and juvenile and the song describes an abusive parent/child relationship I couldn’t relate to on a personal level. Yet, it speaks to a that universal adolescent archetype we all feel within us at sixteen. It’s “Fight the Power” and “Parents Don’t Understand” rolled up in suburban white-boy rock’n'roll angst.

They also had a unique sound. Unique in that they’d taken the pop-punk of Buzzcocks, added a bit of funky Madchester psychedelia and stuck Peter Hook styled treble bass-lines over top. It’s a killer recipe. But apparently a tricky one as earlier singles and later albums failed to come out of the oven quite right.

And though I maybe only wished I could relate to the abstruse, proto-emo lyrics, they somehow resonated with me. “Grey Cells Green“, “Happy“, “Trash” … every song on the album is an anthem of youth, despair, hope, joy and pure teenage abandon. Heck, it still resonates with me. God Fodder is one of the only true “desert island discs” in my collection. I could still listen to this on repeat and never tire of it.

Part of me wishes I could see them play the album once again on the 19th. When Keith and I went to the concert back in the day, I remember watching him disappear into the mosh-pit while I stood at the sidelines too afraid to join in. Part of me always wished I hurtled myself into the fray. Part of me is glad I’m too old to make up for it now.

Perhaps the only nu-gaze band to incorporate prog into their music—was I the only one who heard Peter Gabriel all over Ágætis Byrjun?—Iceland’s Sigur Rós have created some of the most achingly beautiful music of the past decade. They may have also been responsible for the re-popularization of the glockenspiel, later ruined by Arcade Fire and a million other indie bands with eyes to capture the same faery-like magic. Ba Ba/Ti Ki/Di Do is, however, a bit of an odd-man-out in the Sigur Rós discography, yet one of their more intriguing listens.

A roughly 20-minute EP of music composed for the modern dance performance Split Sides, by Merce Cunningham, Ba Ba/Ti Ki/Di Do isn’t the majestic, soaring rock one normally associates with the band.

In fact, you might suspect this is probably be more of a solo work by Jonsi or Kjarri as the sounds are mostly created on keyboards and glockenspiel and the rhythms are electronic and glitchy. 

The first movement, “Ba Ba”, actually sounds a lot like Tubular Bells slightly reworked by Philip Glass or remixed by Richard D. James (the EP really has Pro Tools and Macbook written all over it). I’d be curious to know if Cunnigham wanted The Exorcist evoked because, though ”Ba Ba”  is some what prettier than Mike Oldfield’s composition, it still evokes nightmarish visions.

Over the course of the next two pieces, a sense of hidden malice steadily increases until a collage of vocalized syllables (Ba Ba/Ti Ki/Di Do) swirls into a rather glorious cacophony of speaking-in-tongues gibberish and white noise.

According to Wikipedia, all three pieces can be played in sync to form a fourth composition. I haven’t tried this experiment myself due to the slight hassle involved, but I’d be curious to hear the result. It seems slighly dubious since you could really make this claim about any three pieces of music—the result just might not be remotely listenable.

Overall Ba Ba/Ti Ki/Di Dois an interesting listen in the context of Sigur Rós, but explores a lot of the same territory covered by other artists (Aphex Twin) earlier and perhaps better. It’s not bad by any means but it’s not quite great and has the feeling of being a little out of its depth. It’s ambient-leaning glitch/IDM for fans of Sigur Rós who aren’t fans of glitch/IDM.

Bottom line: it’s a good starting point for this kind of music—both pretty and challenging by turns—and being a mere three tracks is probably dirt-cheap in iTunes and not a risky investment. Recommended but not essential listening.

Jakob rolls 1d4, 1d12 and 1d20 to select a CD from his collection to review.
Today’s roll: 1 – 2 – 14.
Result: In The Flat Field by Bauhaus.

» Jakob, co-host of Nerd Hurdles.
nerdhurdles.com | Nerd Hurdles' Twitter | Mr. Dapper's Splendid Online Diary]]> http://www.simplysyndicated.com/bone-rolling-reviews-09-bauhaus-in-the-flat-field-omnibus-edition/feed/ 1 http://www.simplysyndicated.com/canadian-content-the-tragically-hip/ http://www.simplysyndicated.com/canadian-content-the-tragically-hip/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:09:46 +0000 Kennedy http://www.simplysyndicated.com/?p=2586

I didn’t roll any dice to land on this band. And I know that if Jakob rolled his weird-looking D&D thingies, he wouldn’t land on The Tragically Hip, either. I doubt he has any Hip in his storied music collection. I’d actually be more inclined to believe he’s in the market for an SUV.

The Tragically Hip are a rare stay-at-home Canadian music success story. Since the mid-1980s, the five-piece band from Kingston, Ontario has cranked out album after album, tour after tour, hit single after hit single, without losing a member or succumbing to any serious scandal.

The Hip (as Canadians call them) are Gordon Downie, Bobby Baker, Gord Sinclair, Paul Langlois and Johnny Fay. They’ve been together since they were teens, when they fell into a laid-back roots-rock sound anchored by working-at-the-steel-mill instrumentation and writing-in-a-notebook-at-the-football-game outsider poetry. Their songs are grindy little rock numbers that appeal to guys who wear their clean baseball cap to the bar on Friday night, with cryptic, poetic lyrics. Most people ignore the lyrics. The people who like the lyrics tend to sniff at the three-chord crunch of the music.

Some of the lyrics are here. If you can figure out what the hell Downie is talking about, let me know.

Here’s your challenge: If you happen to be in Canada, go find the nearest watering hole (it has to be one with a neon beer sign in the window). Walk in and look around. I guarantee you will find:

• (a) A person wearing a Tragically Hip T-shirt or hat
• (b) The Tragically Hip playing on the stereo
• (c) A person who cheers when you ask the bartender “Got any Hip?”

If you don’t find any of these things, you are accidentally in Seattle.

The Hip are about as Canadian as a rock band can get. The five members never left their hometown. They run the band as a business, with members earning salaries, showing up for work on time, following schedules, that sort of thing. I have met and/or interviewed three of them, and they are very, very nice. And, in proper stay-at-home-in-Canada style, they’ve made little headway in the U.S.

I like a lot of their songs. So why do they fill me with such a feeling of ick?

Maybe it’s the saturation. There was a time — early 1990s to about 2002 — that you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing at least one Hip song an hour. And a lot of those shouldn’t have been played in public. I liked their first EP, which had a song called I’m A Werewolf, Baby. And I liked their first album, Up To Here, with great songs like Boots or Hearts, New Orleans is Sinking and Blow at High Dough. But as the years went on — and I saw something like eight arena concerts — I just found a slow descent into sameness: the same guitar tones, the same rhythms, the same vocals.

If you were to look through our music collection here, you would find every Tragically Hip album. I don’t apologize for that. I also have a lot of Dave Matthews discs, too. That I apologize for. But the Hip? Whether I enjoy their music or not, I always felt it was my obligation to listen to them at least once per disc.

And, to be perfectly fair, they sound pretty good on a cheap boom box, especially if you’re sitting on a Muskoka dock with a few bottles of Keith’s in a cooler.

So do I like the Hip or not? Hells if I know. I’m Canadian.

Jakob rolls 1d4, 1d12 and 1d20 to select a CD from his collection to review.
Today’s roll: 1 – 5 – 19.
Result: Treasure by Cocteau Twins.

Upon rolling the bones, I realized it’s been ages since I’ve listened to a Cocteau Twins album and it struck me that I might actually be done with them. Which is a little sad since they’re one of my all-time favourite bands. They’re sort of a security blanket held over from my quasi-goth youth I keep around to wrap myself in whenever I need something to pick me up and send me soaring into the stratosphere. But I now feel could live quite happily never hearing their painfully beautiful, shimmering, icing-slathered music ever again.

As I listen to it now, I even feel a slight anxiety. As if the music is going to slink down my ear canals like rivulets of mercury and give my teeth cavities or perhaps I’ll conflagrate from the sheer ecstasy of it all. Maybe I simply still adore Cocteau Twins’ music too much. This feeling of anxiety isn’t helped by the fact I’m listening to one of their best, Treasure.

Those wishing to dip their toe in the mirror pool of Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Frazer’s music might find themselves unsure where to start. They’d do well with almost any of their nine albums, but the third album, Treasure, is widely considered the Twins masterpiece. And for good reason.

Treasure highlights all of the band’s strengths. By this time, Guthrie had perfected his unique sparkling guitar sound and Frazer had likewise honed her unparalleled vocal styles to a gossamer thin edge. Guthrie weaves waves of silk for Frazer to sprinkle her cherubic, yet unintelligible, pearls upon. It’s one of those pop music miracles that two spectacularly unique and complementary talents would converge to create such achingly idyllic music.

But besides the Twins coming into their own here, the album also boasts a warm intesity—mind you, a very languid intensity—which their other albums tend to eschew in favour of an icy fragility. Guthrie’s guitar is crystalline as ever, but you can feel behind it a fire somewhat missing from later albums. The result is an enchanting, otherworldly experience.

Treasure simply is just what the title claims it is—a treasure.

Jakob rolls 1d4, 1d12 and 1d20 to select a CD from his collection to review.
Today’s roll: 1 – 3 – 14.
Result: Motion to Rejoin by Brightblack Morning Light.

There’s always a scene in a blaxploitation flick where the hero wanders into a shooting gallery or opium den. There’s a lot of red light and a slow Rhodes electric piano jam playing in the backgroud. If that happened to be the first scene, and the hero never left that room, Brightblack Morning Light would write the soundtrack album.

These New Mexico uber-hippies (they live in tents in the desert and recorded this album using four solar panels) trade in a sort of slow-motion psychedelic soul. Their sound is almost exactly that of listening to Curtis Mayfield records at half-speed, through a wall, while dosed on Nyquil. They themselves sound like they’re equally dosed on Nyquil as tempos range from no more than about 60 to 85 BPM and their reverb-drenched voices barely break a whisper. Their melodies are slippery as smoke, never giving you much to grab hold of and their two-chord vamps are seductively lulling. I generally use their records as sleep-aids. There should be a warning about not operating heavy machinery printed somewhere on the CD booklet.

These are all good things, in case you were wondering.

Motion to Rejoin, their second widely distributed album, matches pretty much identically the baroque minimalism of their self-titled debut. Since it’s unfathomably difficult to remember one of their songs five seconds after it’s played, or even distinguish between two compositions, it’s somewhat of a moot point comparing the sophomore release to the debut. If you like their sound, either album will do you in good stead.

This album, though, is perhaps a little more refined in its execution. It feels like a perfect balance of elements. The tremolo of a guitar blends into the gentle moan of a horn guided by the steady, bassy pumping of a Rhodes piano with all the edges rounded off. One is almost thankful for a lack of discernible lyrics or melody because those would ruin the spell and tear away the fuzzy, warm blanket it wraps you in.

For what the album aims to be—the aural equivalent of an opium-laced bong hit—it’s perfect.

Jakob rolls 1d4, 1d12 and 1d20 to select a CD from his collection to review.
Today’s roll: 3 – 3 – 6.
Result: Amnesiac (3 disc box) by Radiohead.

When I started this project I assumed, apparently wrongly, the dice would serve me up a random selection of vaguely obscure titles and not veritable classic after classic. It’s not that my collection is an esoteric wonderland of arcane crate-digging delights, it’s pretty standard, but it’s not all pop stars like Morrissey and Radiohead. And what does one write about  Amnesiac that hasn’t been said? And who even cares at this point if something hasn’t been said about it?

Luckily this is the 3-disc expanded boxed edition of Radiohead’s 2001 masterpiece of urban alienation, so there is a question to answer. Is it worth upgrading to if you already own a copy?

That all depends. If you own all the various Knives out and Pyramid Song EPs, then there is only a handful of tracks, recorded live at Canal+ Studios, on the second CD which haven’t been issued before.

The best of which is a stripped-down and beefed-up rendition of “Pakt Like Sardines…” which shines a whole new light on the song. Gone are the drum-machines, synths and gamelan-like percussion riff, replaced with distorted bass guitar and Phil Selway’s always impressive drumming. It’s not a revelation or an improvement per se, but it offers you want you want from a live version of a pretty heavily produced studio track—a new angle. The similarly intriguing re-envisioning of “Like Spinning Plates” as a piano ballad, though, was previously available on I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings.

Still, it’s great to have all the B-sides on one disc as they make a collection of songs with almost equal impact to Amnesiac and Kid A. It actually acts as a decent would-be third album in a trilogy with some standout tracks ( ”Fog”, “Worrywort” and “Cuttooth”).

The DVD contains the four promotional videos from Amnesiac, already included in their Best Of compilation DVD plus their Top of the Pops and Jools Holland appearances. Both are decent performances but the Jools Holland session being slightly more entertaining with Thom Yorke’s manic, slow-eyed tambourine playing and Humphrey Lyttelton’s band joining them for “Life in a Glass House.”

It’s a decent—not spectacular—set of extras on their own, but what makes this edition a treat for fans and collectors is the packaging. It’s boxed in a cloth-bound box simulating the original rare ”Library Book” limited edition of the album. Included inside is also a reproduction of the bookplate with library card and the “hidden” booklet which came with early copies of the jewel case edition. Material trifles, perhaps, but the kind of thing that makes trading-up to an expanded collectors edition worth the investment.

If you’re into that kind of thing, that is.

Jakob rolls 1d4, 1d12 and 1d20 to select a CD from his collection to review.
Today’s roll: 1 – 11 – 18.
Result: Halber Mensch by Einstürzende Neubauten.

By 1985 German industrial music progenators Einstürzende Neubauten had made some devastatingly challenging music. Their third studio album, Halber Mensch (“Half man”), displays an evolution in the sophistication of their compositions, but not a lessening in the relentless assault of their sound. Neubauten will will forever be famous as the band that uses scrap metal and power tools for instruments (along with the more traditional guitars and bass), but their legacy is that of fearless social and political commentators—though sometimes the commentary is  incomprehensibly buried under a mound of art-debris. By the time Halber Mensch rolled around, they were clearly intent on expanding their horizons, the results are mixed.

The album opens with the electronically enhanced a capella title track, a churning chant which rolls like a collapsing juggernaut over your senses. There’s something disconcerting about the pitch-shifted chorus of voices which evokes a wrongness in the soul of the listener while at the same time demanding its cooperation. Its a ritual induction into life in an industrialized society, beckoning the listener to be enfolded in an iron blanket. It’s not easy listening, it’s not even pleasant listening nor is it truly enjoyable listening, but it’s effective.

The album then takes a few, in hindsight, missteps. I say “in hindsight” because the use of drum-machines and samplers in “Yü-gung” and “Z.N.S.” might have been cutting-edge in 1985 but now sound like what they are—the blueprint for stereoyptical 80s EBM and 90s techno-industrial. “Z.N.S.” especially sounds like an early Revolting Cocks (or perhaps Pigface) track. If the reversed “clank” samples hadn’t become a staple of every industrial band’s tired rhythm sequences, these tracks might not sound so dated and silly today. Now they come off as slightly hackneyed. It’s unfortunate because they’re highly successful at achieving their goal. It’s just a goal that would be scored far too often in the following ten years.

The album hits its stride on track five with “Seele Brennt” and a  return to a more live approach which carries through, much more successfully, for the rest of the set. Percussionists N.U. Unruh and F.M. Einheit are allowed to really explore textures and turn in some inspired performances.

Blixa Bargeld, as well, steps to the fore as a dynamic vocalist. Never one to be accused of crooning, or perhaps even singing, Bargeld whispers, screams, shrieks, bellows, mutters and intones with the arresting expression he’s known for.

Neubauten had always been as much a performance art piece as a band, but here they bring an added sense of theatre to their art. The sister film to this album, shot at an abandoned industrial site in Japan (and well worth tracking down), highlights this theatricality with Butoh dancers in some truly disturbing image sequences.

The music here is also beginning to sound tighter, more restrained and  composed. It ventures away from pure noise and feedback, towards the work of minimalist composers. It’s not surprising since modern composers had been using industrial machinery in music long before Neubauten picked up their first power drill. The progression feels natural, one the band is more suited to than the techno flavours earlier in the album, and it’s a direction they’d continue to explore more in the future.

This CD edition contains a handful of bonus tracks including the essential “Das Schaben”, a nine-minute epic of, as the title suggests, scraping metal. The live version of the track in the film is perhaps one of the most relentlessly visceral and rewarding experiences you will ever endure, should you choose to. A truly bizarre cover of Lee Hazelwood’s “Sand” is also tacked on as well followed by an even more dated-sounding (though perhaps more listenable because of it) Adrian Sherwood remix of “Yü-gung.”

A bit of a mixed bag in the Einstürzende Neubauten catalogue, showcasing some of the best, and worst, music of their career.

In which Jakob rolls 2d10 in order to select a CD from his collection to review.
Today’s roll: 50 – 96 – 11.
Result: Your Arsenal by Morrissey.

Morrissey is one of those artists where, if asked, I wouldn’t hesitate to name as one of my favourite singer-songwriters. Yet when pushed I would find it had to name an album of his I actually enjoy. Barring the five masterstrokes he recorded with The Smiths, since 1987 Moz has put out some great singles (“Suedehead”) but pretty patchy albums—some downright boring (Southpaw Grammar). Upon rolling the dice, I discovered the only solo album of his I own is 1992’s Your Arsenal. And what a delightfully incendiary little album it is.

From the opening riff of  “You’re Gonna Need Someone One Your Side” you know this is going to be an album that offers something different from the mopey Mancunian. Namely this is the only time Morrissey has truly rocked, thanks in part to Mick Ronson’s ferocious production. Boz Boorer and Alan Whyte’s psychobilly-tinted guitars are as far removed from the Johnny Marr-lite jangle of Moz’s previous (and later) solo work as granite from marshmallow. It’s an entirely new canvas for his witty, wry and cynical lyrics and one that suits them well.

The Link Wray-esque chords of “Glamorous Glue” are the perfect backdrop for the nihilistic refrain of “everyone lies, everyone lies” and the rockabilly shuffle of “Certain People I Know” hints at his roots in The Smiths, but if that band had been more dockyards than liberal arts college. There’s something grimy about the whole record which has always been saddly missing from his work.

Not only does the album step up its game sonically, it’s one of the only Morrissey sets where every song—barring the merely decent closer “Tomorrow”— is a winner. From the beautifully crooned ”Seasick, Yet Still Docked”  and “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday” to the poppy “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful” and “You’re the One For Me, Fatty”, no other Moz album is as listenable, head bop-able, sing-alongable and air-punchable.

His recent albums, such as Years of Refusal, have tried to recapture some of Your Arsenal’s rock’n'roll magic but lack the snarly, youthful vigour this album has in spades (the phallic placement of his microphone on the beefcake cover shot says it all, really). Truly, a high water mark in his career, if not alternative rock in general.