And I Fly to a Place Called Reality

In a quarter of an hour I depart for reality.  No one will have these fantasy conversations in my surround, these “Cover me in eyeballs!” conversations, these conversations which are really only the pomp mentioned in association with the circumstance of the pointless changing of hands of untold monies that occur in the industry of attention-getting.

Monies told, tallied, and kept dear and near the boardroom gents and lady-gents, of course.  Pardon me for talking day-jobs.

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At times words and phrases turn of their own accord, thank God.

Art Brut, “slap-dash for no cash”, as it were, plays day four of their Mercury lounge residency tonight.  Yours truly will be in attendance, and I alight from my perch in the mud to peak above the rim of the towering lotus.

Rock ‘n roll, please, all powers that be.

Some sweet-ass edits:

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Think like Us

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The very simple structure of this final song on Solvent‘s 2004 backwards-looking Ghostly International release “Apples + Synthesizers” propels the listener toward a place more uneasy than that occupied by the rest of the poppy, happy, or wistful tracks on the record.  It contrasts strongly “My Radio”, the much-remixed lament for the dear departed radio of Solvent alter ego Jason Amm’s past that first brought the artist to my attention.

At the heart of “Think like Us” is the dark and untempered monomania of a post-Depeche Mode Alan Wilder.  Wilder lacked the benefit of group input on his subsequent Recoil releases, but his fat synthetics were the filter-envelope modulated repetitive backbones of the best late ’80s-early ’90s DM work.

Amm’s use of the vocoder has a modulated, hands-on-the-knobs style and sound that is specifically his own, but his choice of a thin-sounding synthetic drum kit, as well as the very krauty use of them on one or two lead-up tracks, leads one to believe that his approach is informed in large part by Kraftwerk.  This is not to say there was any way not to have been influenced by Kraftwerk working in this genre of music.

I should make one disambiguation: There is nothing whatever thin about the kick drum on this track.

The Beginning of the End

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The larders and the panties have all been raided, and the master of the house has suffered the indignity of having his liquor reserves ransacked by the help and the riff-raff and imbibed out of doors, on the street, away from properly rich mahogany.  The empty bottles of The Macallan 12 year litter the streets.

Mayor for Life Elected in Landslide

Chicago’s Mayor for Life continue becoming more amazing.  Posted here is a video from their April 25 show at the previously mentioned (and in that mention not nearly sufficiently fêted) Union Rock Yards.

Three guys whose displays of confidence and technical skill as they play are only rivaled by the amazing sound they produce.

This is music by tone freaks for panic-inducing play in enclosed spaces.

Imagine a universe that makes sense.  In that universe you enter an office building after hours, uncertain of the exact time or the calendar year.  You arrive puposefully at a piece of office furniture under which is installed an ergonomic chair.  You do not hesitate.  You move the chair to one side.  Crouching, you find the small lockbox in the dark without needing to look to know that it is there.  The box is either impossible to move or impossibly light, and this piece of information factors into your decision not to attempt to make any alteration to its location.  You know the combination to open the box.  However, the box will not open.  With every turn of the dial whose printed characters, though you cannot see them, you are absolutely certain would frustrate all attempts at recognition, a music begins to rise in amplitude.  You become aware that the music is coming from inside the lockbox.  You try to open the box for much longer than night should last, but the sun does not rise and no one who works at this office reports for duty.  Eventually you lie on the floor with your head upon the box and your arms about it and fall into an exhausted slumber.  You are weeping.  YOU CANNOT FUCKING OPEN THE BOX.  Meanwhile the muscular punctuation of the rock only gets louder.

This is noise with a visual grain, so get your eyes in your ears and hit play.
http://www.viddler.com/player/8447b179/

Re-feeling Oats, Reeling in Years

I visited NPR’s site today and was surprised to see a Swervedriver song posted as part of NPR’s Song of the Day feature.  There it is.  “Rave Down” off of the recently re-released Raise.  And here I had only recently listened to the band for the first time after a friend suggested I check out Mezcal Head.

I did check out Mezcal Head, and I am happy to report that I enjoyed it.  It didn’t stay in my rotation, but it was a nice rough-edged addition to the pretty noisiness of that era.  It’s good they get to catch a second wind while we ’90s come-uppers settle into our wistful reveries of times when all new things just didn’t sound so derivative or precious.  Check out Mezcal Head for yourself below.

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Lest Ye Wear Ye Pants too High

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An early Vince Clarke-penned Depeche Mode bell-ringer, “I Sometimes Wish I was Dead” was not included with the original American release of Speak and Spell in ’81.  It’s a sparse and shockingly happy little song about clubbing… and shame?  If he had been referring to shame over dancing with the lead singer of his band it wouldn’t be far off for anyone to say that, yes, dancing with Dave Gahan all the time was a crime.  This only because it probably just encouraged him to keep dressing like Ed Grimley.

Observe, via the miracle of VHS, DM in Amsterdam in ’81, just before Gahan’s pants finally got the better of him and he had to be escorted to Reed Richards’ FF laboratories to remove the evil alien slacks symbiote that was devouring him.

The Record-buying Public Shouldn’t be Voting

“How am I supposed to sleep at night when no one likes the music we write? The record-buying public– we hate them. This is Art Brut versus Satan.”

This is a band after my own heart.

The new Art Brut, produced by the Pixies’ Frank Black, is absolutely deserving of the hype currently dripping off the tines of the forks of the avant pop devourers.

“Slap-dash for no cash- those are the records I like”, lead vox Eddie Argos recounts, describing his own recording’s aesthetic while poeming dithyrambs for the hot, rough and tumble recordings that were championed and lovingly given nativity by slop rockers like The Replacements. In their track with that band’s name in the title, the chorus is the flabbergasted rhetorical “How have I only just found out about the replacements? Some of them are nearly as old as my parents. How have I only just disovered the Replacements?”.

Fucking brilliant.


“Art Brut vs. Satan” (Art Brut)

In Summary, I Like the Walkmen, Too.

Tepid Rock Shite
Tepid Rock Shite

Last night the Subjects played the Bowery Ballroom, opening the set as part of their ongoing February tour with MPLS’ Tapes ‘n Tapes.

Here we have a band that practices a lot, a band that has respect enough for their audience to put on a flawless set, and a band whose members are endowed with enough virtuosity to effortlessly exchange duties on guitar, keys, and vox. Seriously- they even all sing in the same voice. It’s like watching that movie where Denzel Washington is chasing a disembodied killer who jumps from body to body possessing new people in order to commit his crimes, except these guys aren’t all that dangerous. Therein lies the crime.

They bring an energy and a subtle flair and imagination into those interstitial places in the music where an unexpected flair is most important (a higher note here when you expected a lower, an extra keening Isley to the vocals there when the lyric could have been dropped), but this we’ve heard, and it is still, right this very instant, in fact, called The Walkmen. OK, so these guys sing better.

The terrific set was comprised in large part by new songs from their as yet unreleased, recently finished record. It was punctuated by moments of brilliance like when the bassline and the Strokes- strum opened up “Hounds of War”, a track from their 2007 record With the Ease Grace Precision and Cleverness of Human Beings.