June 2009
66 posts
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The Static - Don’t Let Me Stop You
The Static is Glenn Branca’s band that followed the Theoretical Girls. It’s a nice piece of no wave. The final couple minutes find a middle ground between the noise-making of the Theoretical Girls and the guitar-fuckery developed on Chatham’s “Guitar Trio” and Branca’s later ‘lessons’ for the electric guitar. (via masochisticopposite)
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Handsome Furs - All We Want, Baby, Is Everything
Handsome Furs is comprised of Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner and his wife, Alexei Perry. More relevant to our purposes, this song is an homage to New Order’s “Temptation”.
What's your favorite album name?
Mine right now is Counting Crows’ greatest hits collection called Films About Ghosts which comes from the song Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby and the line “If dreams are like movies then memories are films about ghosts.”
And yourself?
Let’s get some great album names people! (Granted, I already won with Devo.)
Musicophilia Daily: Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers – “Affection” (1979) →
musicophiliadaily.wordpress.com
In honor of Fathers’ Day, today I’m sharing one of my Dad’s favorite songs (at least of those I’ve shared with him over the years). It’s one my faves, too. I’ve known Dad to play this song several times in a row–and it deserves it. Jonathan Richman is one of the few people I’ve ever seen who seems genuinely imbued with real, unadulterated kindness and an openness to the goodness of the people around him; and in that way he’s a lot like my Dad…
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Interpol - Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down
In high school, I made the mistake of consulting Song Meanings about this song, so I can’t shake the idea that Stella going down is about fellatio. Just listen to the second half: So good, oh yeah, right on. Well, as good for me as it must be for Paul.
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Quadrant Six - Body Mechanic 12”
« Move your body to the beat, make your motor over heat. Leave it overnight, I’ll get the job done right. »
Early electro vocoder hip hop italo madness produced in part by Arthur Baker’s associate John Robie with an edit by Jellybean Benitez. Right up there with Soul Sonic Force, Cybotron, and the Jonzun Crew, this one pulls out all the stops and proves it doesn’t take a lyrical genius to make robots sound dope as f***.
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The Gadgets - An F.T.
Flexipop Friday: The discogs page for this album lists “illbient” as a genre. That is basically all I know about this band. (via mediumtedium)
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Liars - There’s Always Room on the Broom
This is somewhere between PiL and a broken dial-up modem. I suppose I need to spend more time with Liars albums that aren’t They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. [via planettampon]
Musicophilia: ‘The Church of Latter-Day Can, Book One’ (1975-1979) →
musicophilia.wordpress.com
If you’re listening here at Musicophilia, odds are you’re a devotee of Can’s early records. But the ‘received wisdom’ says that the later Can is vastly inferior, perhaps not even worth listening to, and so many people have never looked past the first few albums. I know it took me years before I explored beyond ‘Soon Over Babaluma,’ and a little while further before it could hit me on its own terms. It’s true, the later albums are not what their early albums are, as so little is; when Can began, they were essentially inventing a whole new sound and aesthetic almost from scratch. But if later-day Can were a separate band free to create its own legacy, I believe ‘Can II’ would be held in equal esteem alongside the “Krautrock” bands that rate just behind early Can, like Faust, Neu! and Cluster, certainly up there with Harmonia, early Kraftwerk, Agitation Free and La Dusseldorf. And as much as post-punkers no doubt loved their copies of ‘Ege Bamyasi‘ and ‘Tago Mago,’ the truth is this music sounds more post-punk, as it’s tapping into the same diverse sounds–funk, dub, reggae, Afrobeat, sundry “world musics,” and surely not least disco–as the best post-punk would do a couple years later. So give it a try–just please support the artists, do yourself the favor, and buy the albums you may have missed.
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Mission of Burma - Youth of America (Wipers cover, live)
On that note, here’s a spectacular little cover from an October 2004 Burma show at Cat’s Cradle in North Carolina. Note the “Bush go home!” chant around the four minute mark.
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Depeche Mode - Master and Servant
DAY 13
BDSM always seemed like a topic destined for pop chart success, didn’t it? But for some strange reason bands avoided it. That is, until Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.” With the pulsing synth groove and whip crack sound effects, it’s not too difficult to imagine the scene…
Most simply, the song supports BDSM, but there is a second layer that your average audience misses. The primary issue with releasing a song that has anything to do with BDSM to the general public is that many people listen too passively to understand the full picture the lyrics paint. In this case, Depeche Mode is making a statement about the stringently hierarchical order of society. Individuals return home after interacting with such a society loathing their superiors and feeling abject, bitter, and undervalued. With that in mind, this verse explains how BDSM is better than real life:
Dominations the name of the game / In bed or in life / They’re both just the same / Except in one you’re fulfilled / At the end of the day
BDSM pain and feelings of inferiority are apparently much more bearable than regular servile daily experiences because you know you’re getting a happy ending. Can’t argue with that logic.
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Walter Jones - Living Without Your Love
Walter Jones is one of DFA’s newest artists which instantly makes me intrigued. I trust in Tim, James, and Jonathan’s insightful, often romanticized choices.
The above track is a slow, late-night dance jam and is smooth in its delivery. The most surprising bit is the fact that the track is at least contemporary in its actual year of production. It is not the usual post-punk gem but more reminiscent of the early Chicago house aesthetics that Hercules and Love Affair (as well as Lovelock on a lesser scale) re-introduced to a much larger audience of new fans last year.
Smooth, yes, and a little sultry. It borders on a Lindstrom space-out, but that might be night sky. I should mention I’m a DFA fanboy.
Sub Pop Cybersex Digital Sampler →
subpop.com
Look at this fucking webpage.
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The Raincoats - No Side To Fall In
It’s one of their folk tracks, but it’s simple, short and a little abrasive, as great punk music is. The final 30 seconds resolve with a great harmony.
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Alien Sex Fiend - Dead and Buried
via marychrist
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Big Black - Fish Fry
via raptoravatar
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Quando Quango - Love Tempo
Manchester, England new wave dance project formed by Haçienda dj Mike Pickering, Hillegonda Rietveld, and Reiner Rietveld, self-described as Fela Kuti meets Kraftwerk somewhere between Manchester and Rotterdam, part of a new wave of post-punk electronica, with a whole lot of Mike Pickering’s admirably broad knowledge of soul, disco, reggae and pop to stuff the gaps.
A little British mutant disco courtesy of weekend records. Starts slow but once they lock into a groove, the band tries every trick in the book. The sha sha synth squeal is hot shit.
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Drive Like Jehu - Luau
A couple of recent Jehu posts compelled me to buy their second album Yank Crime, and “Luau” is the highlight for me. The song chugs along for ten minutes, coming in blasts of unadulterated noise and screamed Hawaiian. I’m certain no one rocked harder than Drive Like Jehu in 1994 because frankly, that would make my head explode.
Fun while it lasted
I’ve really loved doing this blog but lately I’m feeling stretched too thin. Between this blog, my other tumblr, and of course the blog I still laughingly consider my “main” blog—despite posting there the least—not to mention writing a book, working a full-time job, and trying to have some semblance of a real, offline life, it’s all just a little too much.
I’ve been weighing which of my blogs to discontinue, and this is the one I’ve ultimately decided to give up. Between this and the Slint book I’m just consuming way too much 90s indie rock and I don’t want to burn out, especially not until the book is done (which is a long way away).
For those of you who are following me on tumblr, I hope you’re following me at Incidentals & Accidentals. A lot of the “content” (I use that term loosely) here will be folded back into that blog, just not so stringently bound to one decade.
Well, thanks for introducing me to Yank Crime.
“It seems like a simple idea, but, you know, the bicycle’s only a couple hundred years old, even though the chariot’s thousands of years old. They had two wheels for a long time, but they never thought of putting one in front of the other. That’s what Wire did. A simple, elegant idea—but nobody ahd stumbled onto that shit before.”
—Mike Watt, of the Minutemen. (via bmichael)
