Second Edition: Music Reviews

First Installment: Micro-Reviews of Current Artists

2011-05-08T10:15:00.000-07:00

In case you're wondering, yes - I'm ripping off Mark Prindle by doing this. Completely, and totally, without reservation. The opinions and writing are different but the idea is the same.

So, here we go!

First Installment -

A Place To Bury Strangers - I remember hearing their album and really liking about half of it. Not exactly original, yeah, but TONS of fun for people who like tons of distortion and heavily reverbed gothic postpunk.

AIDS Wolf - Listen to the real Arab on Radar you fucking assholes. Godawful.

Algernon Cadwallader - I have a few friends who love this band. I have a few friends with questionable taste in music too. This band sucks shit out of a dog's asshole.

Arctic Monkeys - Dreadfully overhyped, but they seem to be getting more solid with time. Plus, their drummer is a fucking beast. He tears shit up. Really, bands: all you need to be halfway decent is a good, or really good, drummer. Drummers are underrated.

Art Brut - I liked Bang Bang Rock & Roll a lot when I heard it, but I'm not really sure I need to hear it, or the band, again. That album seemed like a great one-shot to me. Argos' lyrics on it were really funny and the songs were catchy. A lot of fun.

Avenged Sevenfold - Among the worst music imaginable. What "modern rock radio" has sunk to.

Awesome Color - Great band! Seen them twice live! The drummer is a true monster who is going to make herself deaf from bashing that crash cymbal so often, and the guitarist's a great player. Electric Aborigines is a real good time album for people who like the Stooges, garage rock and Spacemen 3. "Eyes of Light" is a heck of a great song.

Beach House - Beyond overrated; a drowsy, boring, really shitty imitation of Galaxie 500 - except with an organist, a female singer, a drum machine, and absolutely no good songs whatsoever.

Black Dice - Lame hipster imitation of grindcore turns into hipster noise music. I fucking hate them.

Blitzen Trapper - Saw them live and loved it. Very consciously Neil Young in rocker mode-esque in places (which is a really good thing for me), and I'm not sure there needs to be six people in the band, especially when the lead singer/guitarist kind of lords it over everyone else, but they're really good. Great songs, great lead guitar playing (from both the singer/guitarist and the real lead guitarist), and to top it all off their drummer is very nice with a few beers in him.

Bon Iver - Horseshit. Can't stand his vaguely unhappy falsetto acoustistrum twaddle. Some of the worst lyrics I've read in a loooooong time. Leonard Cohen should stomp him in the nuts.

Broken Social Scene - My ex-girlfriend loved them. I thought they were completely unmemorable. And indeed I can't remember any of their songs.

Brokencyde - The worst music ever made. Let us never speak of it again.

Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein is one of the best hip-hop albums made in the last decade - hard to listen to all the time, but an amazing piece of work. A great album.

City of Caterpillar - My friends loved them but I never really got into it. They really relied on that "build to a massive heart-wrenching EMOTIONAL CLIMAX" technique too much for it to be all that effective.

Coachwhips - TONS OF FUN. BASH BASH BASH BASH BASH BASH BASH BASH BASH BASH *INCOMPREHENSIBLE GARBLE* BASH BASH *GARBLE* BASH BASH *GARBLE* RIFF RIFF RIFF RIFF RIFF RIFF RIFF RIFF SLAM is how every one of their songs go and I don't give a fuck. If more bands had this insane amount of energy I'd be happy. Man, what a great band these guys were. They broke up before ever delivering a real masterpiece, but their catalog is still a huge hyper ball of unbelievably fun garage riffs, lo-fi distorted organ (which RULES), quirky incomprehensible funny distorted vocals and stomp-stomp drum smashing.

Coheed and Cambria - Geddy Lee called, he wants his right to influence rock groups back.

Cold Cave - Their early stuff might be pretty great, I don't know - some people say it sounds like Sheffield industrial, which means early Cabaret Voltaire and would mean a happy reviewer. But I've heard their newest record and it is outright laughable. I'd expect to hear twentieth-rate goth dance ripoff hog slop like that played at a Tehran disco with no cover charge.

Coldplay - Dogshit.

Comets on Fire - They're okay. I really loved them on first listen but never got that sense of exhilaration with them again on subsequent listens.

Crystal Antlers - Took a listen to their album and disliked it. I like '60's' garage punk music a LOT, so I should be some kind of target audience, but no dice. It just didn't click with me for whatever reason.

Dan Deacon - Go ride the short bus, asshole.

Death From Above 1979 - My bandmate loves them. I think they're okay off the little I've heard of them. Nice energetic music. They do a good job with making the bass/drums-only lineup sufficiently interesting from a musical standpoint.

The Decemberists - Godawful hipster faux-pirate music puke. Music that is so nauseatingly proud of itself for being wimpy, shallow and surface-level smart (the worst kind of fake intelligence) that it makes Beat Happening look dangerous. Among the worst bands I've ever been unwillingly exposed to. Plus they had the gall to rip off the "Lust for Life" rhythm once and made it as terrible and weak as everything else they've ever made. FUCK THIS BAND.

Deerhunter - Cryptograms is one of the best albums the 2000's ever produced. I genuinely believe it's a frightening, beautiful, atmospheric, tentatively hopeful, enormously evocative masterpiece, and that the following EP, Flourescent Grey, is nearly as good. Unfortunately, as they've progressed they've increasingly lost the sense of darkness and despair that informed everything on Cryptograms. The music correspondingly got happier and much more standardized. Every release has had less and less for me to hold on to, personally. I hope that life has gotten better for the band members, because I genuinely care about this band and hope they keep succeeding, but they're not making music at this point that really speaks to me that much anymore. I'll always have Cryptograms, though.

Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca is enough to make me want to feed David Longstreth to a killer whale.

Drunkdriver - Fantastic, insanely musically violent band that broke up in the worst way possible. The List of Profound Insecurities 12" EP with power-electronics/noise artist Mattin producing, and the self-titled LP, are some of the best and most unbelievably bludgeoning punk recordings of the decade. No, songwriting wasn't really the point, but then with music this brutal it doesn't matter. Fucking punishing.

Easy Action - Seen them live twice. John Brannon is as close as we've got to a living embodiment of rock and roll these days. Easy Action do blistering Detroit rock and roll the way it was and the way it ought to stay. Huge early Alice Cooper influence, as well as Stooges and MC5. Great chord sequences, effective songwriting, blisteringly hard playing and Brannon's paint-stripping howl, which hasn't lost one bit of intensity. These guys should be fucking worshipped by the "independent" music scene and John Brannon is still flipping burgers in Detroit between shows. Fuck indie rock fans for buying the motherfucking Decemberists instead.

Erykah Badu - I am not as well acquainted with her music as I'd like. I should change that sometime very soon. Badu has one hell of an interesting and moving voice. She actually DOES have soul, unlike 99% of most people who pretend they have it these days. That is one of the biggest compliments I can possibly give any artist.

Fiery Furnaces - This band sounds like the result of Todd Rundgren hiring an arrogantly shallow female hipster to sing over him recreating tenth-rate A Wizard, A True Star outtakes with a broken Speak and Spell. You get one wild guess to figure out how much donkey dick they suck.

Flight of the Conchords - Nowhere near as funny as they think they are.

Florence and the Machine - Get some sun and stop yowling, bitch. Dogs write better songs than you do.

Franz Ferdinand - I played Josef K's song "Chance Meeting" to a Franz Ferdinand fan once, told him it was a new single of theirs with another band member singing, and his jaw dropped at the best song Franz Ferdinand ever played. Then I told him the truth.

Fucked Up - The only thing that's fucked up about this band is how everyone worships them for making mediocre hardcore-influenced music. All right, that is too harsh. I mean, they're OK, but they're not great or anything. The lavishness of the praise kind of mystifies me.

Future of the Left - My bandmate LOVES them. A lot of Mclusky fans do. Some people actually say Future of the Left is way better than Mclusky. I personally don't get a thing out of their music, but more power to them. I just might not get it.

Gnarls Barkley - "Crazy" was a wonderful single. Cee-lo has a hell of a talent for singles at this point.

The Go! Team - Most of the first album is great, and "Ladyflash" is just an absolutely astounding single. I never paid attention to them afterwards, and the songs I heard after that were dishearteningly crappy.

Gorillaz - Please go away, it wasn't funny the first time. One of the many things that's made me hate Damon Albarn.

Grizzly Bear - "Hey, let's rip off the Beach Boys and put it together with prog-rock! Aren't we CUTE?" Booooooooring. Plus, to rip off a joke, Ed Droste is the one man in history who's actually gone to Hooters for the wings.

Grouper - The EP she made with Xiu Xiu was dreadfully boooooooooring. But her own music might be great, for all I know; the EP certainly didn't inspire me to seek more of it out, but I could be making a mistake in not looking for more of her stuff.

Homostupids - Could and should be better than they are. Not that great.

James Blackshaw - All Is Falling was one of my favorite albums of 2010. A very, very talented musician. It does start to get samey after a while, but the music is genuinely beautiful and takes unexpected turns.

Japanther - A lot of fun when I saw them live (my friends ADORE them), but the records don't do much of anything for me - plus they apparently moved from making dark, creepy noise-rock to what's basically idiosyncratically arranged bubblegum punk. Fuck that.

Jay-Z - Overrated, but damn good. No rapper in history has swagger like that. And his flow is unique. His earlier material, when he was hungry, is much better than most of his recent material.

Joanna Newsom - She's made sensitive, smart, and perfect contributions to one or two excellent records by other artists that I really enjoy. Her own music has the remarkable power to drive me out of any room I'm inside of in under five minutes.

Kanye West - He has some great singles. But he's the living definition of the phrase "erratic." The thing that's really weird about him is that he's either very good or actively dreadful; there's no middle point whatsoever.

Kings of Leon - How a band with a singer this unbelievably, godawfully, pitifully wretched got popular, I will never know.

Lady Gaga - The most anonymous popstar ever to exist makes, appropriately enough, music with no real emotion other than the loathsome pursuit of fame as some abstract, nearly religious ideal. I hate her music and fucking despise her public persona with a burning passion, but even I have to admit that it's clear she actually does know how to sing and does know how to play an instrument. I just wish she'd fess up to the facts that she's A) stealing Madonna blind and B) she should just shut the fuck up when talking about issues and concepts that she doesn't know anything about. She makes bland idiotic pop music, rips Madonna so hard that Ms. Ciccone should sue for wholesale theft - for Christ's sake, what is the flame-throwing bra but an extension of the conical one that Madonna wore? - and what she is not is a cultural critic. She is, in fact, part and parcel of the status quo, and she's hurting America by leading uneducated teenagers to believe that she is in touch with some kind of deeper meaning when all she does is cheapen it to the point of parody. Go the fuck away.

Laura Jean - She's okay. I thought she would be much colder and sadder than she was. The music's fine but it wasn't what I was looking for. That said, she's undeniably talented.

LCD Soundsystem - I really liked This Is Happening on first listen, but then never listened to it again. So I don't know if they're really going to matter that much to me. That said, James Murphy has some real talent.

Lil Wayne - Weezy's one talented individual, but talented individuals frequently overcompensate and make mistakes. His mistake is that he just doesn't - or doesn't want to - realize that he's really, really, really good at one thing and one thing only: bizarre, free-associative hardcore hip-hop. While no one in the world equals him at that pursuit, he won't stick to that. So he experiments with bizarrely warped and abominably tasteless versions of modern pop and rock, and gets some horrifically awful music in return. His hip-hop material is often absolutely fantastic, though. "Six Foot Seven Foot" is like "A Milli" on crack.

Liquor Store - Their astonishingly untogether and mentally destroyed live shows are the stuff of legend. I have a friend who calls them the last true rock and roll band alive. I don't agree with that. Hilarious but not life-changing. Plus, pretty much everyone's heard the riffs before, and they're not played with enough... whatever it is that makes rock and roll so astonishing.

M.I.A. - Talented, but her pretensions, hypocrisy and media manipulation drive me away. Which is a shame, because, like I said, she's talented.

Madlib - Shades of Blue is a good album. But I don't think Madlib's all that great on his own. He's mostly okay but he needs someone to play off of. Like MF Doom.

Magrudergrind - Brutally intense live, without question the most violent pit I've ever been in. You haven't lived until you've been tossed around by a 300-pound Misfits fan with a septum pierce who looks like an overgrown second grader. Lots of fun live, but I'd never buy an album of theirs because the songs are indistinguishable from each other.

Matt and Kim - CANNOT FUCKING STAND THEIR HAPPY AIN'T-LIFE-A-BAG-A-LIFE-SAVERS-N-SKITTLES BULLSHIT SYNTH MUSIC. My friends love them.

MGMT - One of the worst singers I've ever heard in my life gargling over extremely irritating dance music that went out of style in 1990. They later progressed to one of the worst singers I've ever heard in my life gargling over extremely irritating attempts at fruity psychedelia that goes out of its way to tongue the asses of its superiors. This band needs to die.

Mika Miko - The exposure I've had to their music didn't do much for me. Sorry. It's okay, but certainly nothing more than that, to me. That said - again, I have friends who love, love, love them. So maybe I just don't get it.

My Chemical Romance - If you like this shit you need to get kicked in the balls, hard, many times. Or the vadge. Either way groin-kicking is involved. An insult to New Jersey.

N.E.R.D. - Their early material was great, but man did they fall off quickly.

No Age - I once heard a kid do a cover of "Eraser" once that sounded like "1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts"-era Half Japanese and it beat the ever living fuck out of the original. This should be an indication of what I think about No Age.

Well that was fun, wasn't it? It was! Look for Part 2 soon!

Hey Kids! This blog is not dead

2011-05-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

Hi,

Just wanted to post a quick note saying the blog isn't dead, I just update really sporadically.

Hope someone is following and enjoys The Reviews.

For the next installment, I'm going to put up Micro-Reviews of Popular New Groups that Everybody Loves.

So, watch the blog, the 2 or 3 people who know the fucking thing even exists.

Honey, I Can't Choose Between The Prozac or the 12-Gauge: Harvey Milk, "Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men"

2011-02-10T03:16:00.000-08:00

Harvey Milk's Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men is an album from 1996 that is so genuinely tormented - and so bizarrely experimental - that to call it, at heart, a metal album seems completely inaccurate, in a sense. But it is unquestionably metal, albeit what seems to me to be a re-imagining of it.

Let me be perfectly clear. Metal is not a genre I have much experience with. Sure, I adore the first six Sabbath albums with pure brainless ardor and regard anyone who dislikes that glorious music with skepticism. Sure, Motorhead is God's own rock and roll band (and death to all who say otherwise). Sure, I've heard Metallica's first four albums and like most of that music quite a considerable amount. Sure, Slayer lays waste to everything you can conceive of. Sure, Megadeth has a few great songs. Sure, Judas Priest is hilariously gay, ridiculously catchy and totally awesome. Sure, Saint Vitus crushes your mind. Sure, early Venom made some of the most ridiculously awesome sub-sub-Motorhead racket known to man. ("Sons of Satan" is a fucking jam.) Sure, Mark II-era Deep Purple is extraordinarily distilled ass-kicking music. Sure, Eyehategod is, on the whole, pretty decent. Sure, Napalm Death kick obscene amounts of ass while making me laugh my ass off. I even dig a few Burzum songs, though not anything else about that lousy murdering sociopathic son of a bitch. But Dio? Maiden without Paul Di'Anno? The versions of Deep Purple that aren't Mark II? I can't stand that stuff - it all sounds either like it's unbelievably corny incidental music from an unreleased World of Warcraft movie (Dickinson-era Maiden, a lot of Dio), or really awful cock-rock (some Dio, but mostly I'm thinking of the Coverdale/Hughes version of Deep Purple, which admittedly almost nobody with taste likes). In general, I like metal, but I'm not really a connoisseur, because a lot of the blastbeats and the Cookie Monster screaming sound the same as themselves after a while, and because I'm really much more of a punk in terms of taste and philosophy. (Punk according to the D. Boon definition - learn it, son, it's the gospel.) Also, as much as I hate to say it... with the exceptions of Sabbath, Motorhead, and maybe a few Saint Vitus songs, none of these bands make me feel much of anything besides the "THIS KICKS ASS!!!" emotion. Even Motorhead just take that emotion and multiply it by 50. Sabbath can occasionally make me feel the fear of God, and pure sheer joy, but Sabbath was always a special case anyway. There isn't much emotional connection that I make with metal - and while that's fine, it means that I don't listen to it as much as I listen to other music. My listening mindset w/r/t metal framed for you, let's move on.

The comparison that many people make when trying to describe Harvey Milk is the Melvins, which is understandable - the Melvins are also extremely slow, extremely heavy, extremely experimental, and have also shown an increasing fascination with '70's-era hard rock and proto-metal as the years have continued. But the Melvins, as great as they often can be, connect even less with me emotionally than the rest of the other bands - they never excite any emotions in me other than the "THIS KICKS ASS!!!" emotion and the "uhhhhhh...ok" emotion. And in that way, Harvey Milk are fundamentally different - I would almost say that they are fundamentally different from every other metal band because of this.

Harvey Milk's great innovation, to me - the innovation that puts them ahead of so many other great metal bands - is that they are all about making emotional connections with the listener. They seem to be contrary enough personally that they might deny it; but if they did, they'd be full enough of shit to give septic tanks competition. This album is an eleven song, 70-minute behemoth of often insanely heavy experimental metal that initially seems to jump randomly between different, often wildly opposed genres and offers almost no concession to the listener.

The first time I listened to Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men I got very nonplussed, confused and turned off - and, speaking as a man who listens to early Swans albums while eating lunch at work, that's at least some kind of accomplishment. The band sounded like it was either working according to some internal logic that I didn't understand, or that it simply had no idea what the hell it wanted to do musically and thought that confusion meant they were making art.

"Pinocchio's Example" is the first song on the album: it's a slug-paced, ten-minute near-instrumental that begins with a discordant piano chord being repeated again and again, then seems to consist of a bunch of ear-splitting, detuned full-band stops and starts repeated, ad nauseum, for up to eight and a half minutes. At one point, a voice roars like a Tyrannosaurus only to be cut off moments later. It is absolutely torturous to listen to it for the first time. I remember that I kept thinking "When is the song going to start?" - and then when it did, I was shocked to discover a soft ballad, sung in a soft, rusty, high-pitched voice that neared a croon, with poetic, pained lyrics detailing Geppetto's love for his new wooden child Pinocchio.

Clearly, this was something out of the ordinary.

The entire album takes the schizophrenic nature laid out in those ten minutes and spreads it out for the remaining hour. It seesaws between indescribably heavy, crushing dirges like "Brown Water," "Plastic Eggs," and "My Broken Heart Will Never Mend" (which are all placed next to each other on the album, just to press down on you that much more) and experiments that are utterly removed from metal. Many older metal albums have spaces for unaccompanied electric guitar solos that are usually designed to show off what a finger-flashing badass the guitarist is as he wanks at 3000 miles an hour. But metal albums don't make room for calm, clean, contemplative electric guitar pieces that don't demonstrate incredible technique at all, much less guitar pieces that seem to take more influence from the type of feelings John Fahey offered than the ones Eddie Van Halen presented. This album does. And the guitarist of the band isn't even the one who plays it - it's the bassist.

Metal albums certainly don't make room for unaccompanied, polyrhythmic drum solos played on conventional sets and industrial percussion, or wracked, unutterably painful piano dirges and solo covers of revered singer-songwriters. But this album definitely does. "The Lord's Prayer" is the emotional heart of the album, and while on paper it's nothing more than a man with a shredded, parched voice singing "Our Father, who art in heaven" over solo piano that is slightly out of tune, in practice it is one of the most despairing and gorgeous recordings I've ever heard. "Heartache" doesn't come close to capturing it. The same goes for the moderately well-known cover of Leonard Cohen's "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong," where guitarist and vocalist Creston Spiers, after groaning his way through most of the song, lets loose with some of the most torn-apart howls anyone can hope to hear in the coda (which itself was originally furnished with Cohen's own agonized and desperate vocalizing). There's even a seven-minute dirge on this album that does away with tune completely, giving the listener a roiling mass of oblivious electronics, extensive tape manipulation, atonal, killing guitar distortion and drum smashing instead - that happens to borrow it's lovely acoustic introduction from a KISS song.

Highlights abound on the album - though anyone who reads this must be warned that this is an album you'll either love, loathe, or get totally confused by - but one of the best songs here is the closing track, "The Boy With Bosoms," which balances heroically anthemic lead guitar lines, buried and quivering yet haunting singing, detuned, full-band metal chord-pounding, and gorgeous, stately melodies from what sound like a set of bells and a church organ. It sounds unwieldy and completely ridiculous in the description, but the band somehow manages to pull it off.

This band thumbs their noses at metal conventions, and even has a sneaky but satisfying sense of humor too (indicated at least by the KISS borrowing and frankly hilarious song titles like "The Boy With Bosoms"). But all of that helps to contextualize an album that seems like it was made for absolutely no one but the three band members in Harvey Milk at that time. Albums like this abound and frequently suck, because the people who are making these albums for themselves often have little to no imagination and make standard music that doesn't tap into human emotion in any deep way. Harvey Milk made enormously imaginative, difficult, exorcising music and didn't seem to care all that much about whether people followed it or not. An audience that even exists for music like this should have been a nice bonus.

Final Verdict: Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men is probably one of the best albums of the '90's, but don't say I didn't warn you - frequently, this is an extremely challenging listen.

Crunch, Sproing, Twang, We're Talking About The Apocalypse: The Ex, "Catch My Shoe"

2010-11-30T19:35:00.000-08:00

Difficult, lengthy, uncompromising, sparse, martial and brilliant, the Ex's sound on 2010's Catch My Shoe has now streamlined into a unique three-guitar and drums lineup, with longtime member Andy Moor and founder Terrie Ex trading off on baritone guitars as required. Now that there's no permanent bassist (Rozemarie, the band's last bassist, left in 2005; the last Ex album, Turn, was from 2004, so this version of the Ex has been a while aborning), and an odd, crunching, often chordal and mid-ranged low end, the ensemble sound has become so dry, harsh and angular that it's almost like boards rubbing on sandpaper, with Katrin Ex's astonishing, idiosyncratic and totally distinctive drumming more than ever the engine and heartbeat of the band. While enjoyably African-tinged horn parts add some needed spice to a few songs early in the album, most noticeably on opener and viciously complex, catchy single "Maybe I Was The Pilot," mostly it's three snarling guitars and drums all the time.

Lyrically, the album is as political, outspoken, and astringent as ever; "Cold Weather Is Back" is the clear highlight on this front, depicting a possible apocalypse in a way which typically manages to be insightful, plausible, witty, despairing, chilling and overwhelmingly defiant all at once. Perhaps most staggeringly, it isn't at all cliched. Most native speakers of English couldn't put together a lyric this well-written, never mind this smart. The Ex's mastery of a language that isn't their own is one of their least-remarked upon strengths as a group. For a band so truly political, they are almost never preachy, and they never fail to make their points deeply understood. The happiest song on the album, pointedly, is the one song that isn't in English - "Eoleyo," a cheery, thorny and infectious interpretation of an Ethiopian song sung wonderfully by Katrin, who always gets one turn at the mic per album and never, ever disappoints.

Arnold de Boer, on vocals and guitar, replaces founder singer and frequent lyricist G. W. Sok on this album. As lead singer, Sok embodied the Ex as much as Terrie, Andy and Katrin did; while de Boer just isn't as marvelously caustic or charismatic as Sok always was - in short, he's not his equal as a frontman - he demonstrates a similar facility for winning the listener's respect through sheer force of intelligence and has a similarly punkish though much more note-oriented vocal approach. de Boer almost never shouts on this album, which is something Sok did really, really well - instead, he sings with an impassioned, slightly strained but on-key voice that imparts nothing so much as commitment to the material. Instrumentally, he proves himself time and time again, which is notable for a new player making his debut with such a well-oiled instrumental unit - then again, it's almost impossible to tell who does what with guitars on this record, as the parts are all so intertwined and knotty that to pick out one part for praise would be entirely against the point.

The Ex's classic albums always depended on fearsomely smart instrumental interplay, but this one in particular takes that approach to places that even the Ex haven't charted before; at some level, it sounds the same as they have since the mid-'90's, but it's even more distilled than many of those albums were. This is an album made by people who have developed a simultaneously intuitive and strictly disciplined rapport with each other as musicians, and they have taken their craft to master levels. Though the album is so unforgiving that making it all the way through can be quite hard, Catch My Shoe is the type of album most bands could not ever even conceive of making - especially this late in the game. At a time when The Ex could conceivably rest on their laurels - it's their latest album in a career that has consistently amazed since 1978 - they seem to discard that possibility with increasing force as the years progress.

Final Verdict: Catch My Shoe is an undoubtedly hard, but extraordinarily rewarding listen.

Total Bomb: Clockcleaner, "Nevermind"

2010-11-28T09:14:00.000-08:00

Let me be perfectly clear: I ought to be the target audience for this album. I love noise rock and nasty hardcore punk with a passion that could make me a candidate for the insane asylum. I am a person who believes that the Crucifucks' first album and the Cows' Daddy Has A Tail! are two of the best and most absurdly enjoyable albums of the '80's. I believe Flipper's debut, Generic, is one of the most profound, hilarious and powerful musical and philosophical statements to come out of the latter half of the 20th century. As intentionally repulsive, grotesque, reprehensible, horrifying, amoral, stupid, banally shock-oriented and completely without lyrical value as G.G. Allin was, he actually wrote quite a fair number of really catchy, trashy, musically enjoyable, shitkicking rock and roll songs. Hell, I love almost everything Pussy Galore ever released - Live In The Red is my particular favorite. So, keeping that in mind, you should understand why it honestly and truly pains me to say this about a group who a few of my friends really liked, told me many things about, and actively advocated for, a group that I really wanted to enjoy:

Why is Nevermind such an awful album?

More importantly, why did people lap up an album which I can't see as anything other than aimlessly unpleasant, poseurish provocateur bullshit? Are they that desperate for ugly riffs? Cause these are ugly riffs, no doubt.

They're also boring, unmemorable, and excruciatingly dull riffs. I can't imagine why anyone would want to play these songs, much less compose them. They're all directionless, overlong, and sound as if they've been specifically engineered to irritate the listener. I wouldn't have minded the last point if the ugly riffs had also been catchy, intelligent, hilariously warped and fun - or if they had been intimidating, frightening, cruel, and unbalanced. However, the riffs feature none of these wonderful qualities, and as it is, I'm left in the dark as to how anyone could like this schtick dreck. Nevermind features the same terrible, unvarying, shitty formula throughout it's truly amateurish 39 minutes. You have a palm-muted, distorted stinging guitar playing awful, gutless, incoherent and painfully unappealing minor-key riffs. They're just not catchy. And I have a fairly loose definition of what can be catchy (Throbbing Gristle, Captain Beefheart, Swans, Crossed Out). Given all of this, I have a fairly hard time believing that these riffs don't fail on every level - because they do.

There's also rumbling, muddy, all but inaudible fuzz-bass, played by guitarist and vocalist John Sharkey under the ha-ha cute pseudonym Nale Dixon (literally the one clever thing about this album, aside from the few lyrics that are audible). Is this what people meant when they said this band was taking influence from Flipper with this album? If that's true, then that must mean, oh I don't know, Napalm Death takes influence from Flipper as well - they have a distorted bass too. Say what you want about Flipper, but they made sure their bass lines were audible, catchy, and had the impact of a battering ram to your solar plexus. Do I have to say that the bass lines on this album don't do that?

Nearly every song, possibly every song, features unspeakably irritating delay pedal abuse in the middle, when Sharkey can't think of anything else to do musically. I made those same noises within two hours of first getting a delay pedal - they're fun noises to make, but it loses it's luster after those two hours, and I certainly don't need to hear them over and over again for 39 minutes. Another sore point is the thumping, powerless, draggy drumming, which is consistently at half the speed it ought to be - for Christ's sake, an album that's clearly influenced by hardcore shouldn't feel almost as pokey and sluggish as a Kiss studio album. And Sharkey gives every song sneering, hateful vocals that would be really great if they weren't thoroughly and annoyingly obscured by a ton of murky, bad reverb. The lyrics are actually pretty good when you can understand them through the cloud of aural gunk; "I saw your girlfriend leaving the abortion clinic with another man" is simply a killer opening line. Unfortunately, that's almost it for decipherable lyrics. Also, who decided to segue all these crappy songs together?

This album is a parade of bad decisions.

I hear that Sharkey nearly recorded it on his own under less than ideal circumstances, which could certainly account for why this album is so substandard. It really may just be a bad case of the My War syndrome, where a band has to record but doesn't have a full lineup, and therefore the performance suffers. And indeed, their next album, Babylon Rules, was clearly, and happily, a massive improvement on just about every front. There was a full band, the bass lines were upfront and nicely fuzzed-out, the riffs had made a quantum leap in quality, the vocals were much more clearly recorded and just as bilious, and the songs were faster and much more powerful. They hit just as nastily and cruelly as they wanted to there. But the great reviews this one got makes me wonder about how completely desperate people must be for good old-fashioned violent independent music with guts if they think this slop is worthwhile.

Final Verdict: This album doesn't come within five miles of being as entertaining as an amateur standup comic bombing on stage, though it's just about as embarrassing.

Take Five: Miles Davis, "Get Up With It"

2010-08-19T15:52:00.000-07:00

"Get Up With It" is the kind of album that most people cannot produce. They can't produce it because their artistic inspiration is not superhuman enough to spout out 120 minutes of the kind of music that makes Can, the German group who would regularly jam and utilize ferocious noise and tribal rhythms for four hours, seem almost tame. This is paranoid, frightening, intensely rhythmic, intuitive and emotional music that overtakes any room it's playing within. It is often so intense that the use of the word in its' context seems like a clinical diagnosis: intensity in this music is a way of life and nearly a disease. It is instrumental music that builds staggeringly complex structures out of a few simple themes (and admittedly, dizzyingly complicated rhythms) and ever-shifting emotional content.

The recordings here come from between 1970 and 1974, and often feature different personnel. The invaluable bassist Michael Henderson is the one constant player throughout, aside from Miles himself. Some would also consider Teo Macero, with his absolutely crucial mixing and editing skills, to be as much a player as anyone else in the band, and I would not disagree: the presentation and sound of the music is as creative, alien and fearless as the music itself. In the strictest sense, this double album is a compilation; however, the recordings also go so well together that it works fearsomely well as an album. Both discs start and move through musical terrain that often feels completely alien, and just as soon as you get used to where you are, it cuts off, almost contemptuously.

This is not music for easy listening. It is not background music. "He Loved Him Madly" starts the album off with a 32-minute essay on meditative despair. Ostensibly a requiem for Duke Ellington, the piece sounds nothing like Ellington at all. Lester Bangs said, in his late '70's dismissal of Davis's '70's material, that it sounded like death. But it doesn't sound like death to me, personally. It sounds like grief. It's not the kind of showy, restrained grief that actors utilize to win Oscars, and it's not the kind of histrionic howling that my great-grandmother engaged in on the fresh grave of my great-grandfather, which has gone down in family legend as nothing so much as an Italian version of "Sanford and Son." (The phrase "I'm coming to join you" was used, just so you get the full picture.) This is the frozen, arctic sound of emotional devastation - a dreadfully numbed, hollowed-out feeling. It's the sound of a person, already in pain, who is too overwhelmed to process all his feelings at once; who sits for hours after receiving the news, remembering all the different things he did with the dead man, never shedding a tear.

That's what "He Loved Him Madly" sounds like. Drenched in wet, almost oceanic reverb, the atmosphere is tomblike and somber. After ten minutes of formless conga rolls, isolated bass notes that boom through the mix, guitars strictly limited to background atmospherics, and two fully looped musical passages, both featuring Miles' unnatural, Stockhausen-influenced organ playing as the catalyst, the piece finally coheres together into an immensely appropriate skeletal backbeat. Dave Liebman's funereal flute playing must qualify as some of the best playing he ever did: he provides immensely lyrical and restrained lead lines that are never, ever out of place. But singling any one person out for good playing is almost ludicrous, since everyone here is plugged in to some other musical plane. Since it goes on for 32 minutes (itself longer than more than a few hardcore albums I've heard), you can lose yourself in the sound: Miles and his musicians create an entire musical landscape. Speaking of Miles, his trumpet playing is, as always, up to the rigorous emotional standards he sets for himself. "He Loved Him Madly" originally took up an entire side of vinyl - 32 minutes is a lot of music to squeeze on one side - and is one of Davis' late masterworks. It is genuine art.

The rest of the side mostly lives up to the ludicrously high standards that "He Loved Him Madly" set: first, "Maiysha" gives forth for nearly fifteen minutes, combining a top-class groove that somehow manages to sound vaguely Latin, extraordinarily sensuous, and light as a feather with a totally different, heavily greasy organ-driven slow funk beat Sly "The Greatest of All Time" Stone would have killed for. It all gets topped off with what sounds like a slightly flanged, heavily distorted solo from Pete Cosey that's so brain-fryingly scorching and so legitimately Hendrixoid that Eddie Hazel would have creamed his jeans three times in a row if he'd ever heard it. Polite shit this is not. "Honky Tonk" is my least favorite track on the side, but it's still really good; at the time, some people had a tendency to focus on the fact that this was an outtake from the Jack Johnson band (Billy Cobham, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock and John McLaughlin are all on the tune), and hyped it up accordingly. I like the tune a lot (Miles plays some wonderful, clear, cool and witty blues lines on top), but I have this nagging feeling that Billy Cobham's drumming just fucking carries the song. His drumming is so precise, so effortless and so there at the right time that he can't help but overshadow everyone else on the track except for Miles.

"Rated X" ends Disc 1 and is one of the most sincerely terrifying tracks ever laid to tape. Not even the Brainbombs can compete most of the time with the inconceivably malevolent loathing that permeates every second of this nearly seven-minute long experiment in diabolical organ noise. Everyone says Miles' playing on organ was influenced by Stockhausen, but I don't remember Stockhausen straight-up killing shit like this. The only comparable performance I can think of is John Cale on "Sister Ray," and as far as I'm concerned this cuts him at the corner. On "Sister Ray," there were certain points where it seemed like Cale understood the humor of what the Velvets were doing in those 17 minutes: four nasty little jackoffs in a room with the amps on 10 irritating the hell out of every stuffed shirt in the nearest vicinity. Who doesn't see that as funny? I mean, the engineer walked out on them while they were recording the song and later dissed them on Zappa's We're Only In It For The Money! That underlying humor to the performance fit the song. In contrast, absolutely nothing is funny about "Rated X." This is demented, boiling, white-hot hateful noise tied to a funk backbeat so ominous, repulsive and repetitive that the entire backing band sounds almost like they're locked in a negative feedback loop, continually chasing their collective tail, continually backbiting and sabotaging themselves. It's every guilty feeling you ever had about looking at porn amplified to 10 and fed through Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music PA system. I think you get the idea.

"Calypso Frelimo" is another 32-minute monster that sounds like Ege Bamyasi-era Can jamming with the JB's; in other words, it actually deserves that overworked term "epic." Drummer Al Foster, who really deserves a MVP Award for his work on this album, constructs the most head-spinning groove with percussionist Mtume that you may ever hear: it's a tornado of tom and conga hits and cymbal wash that never lets up for the first 10 minutes. Then, the great unintentional comedy moment of the album commences: Michael Henderson begins playing the most massive, enormous bass guitar-only rendition of the theme from the second stage of "Super Mario Bros." that you will ever hear... and eventually, it becomes a mantra. There is a deeply felt-out, searching power in this music, and the different sections of it all seem to fall together with a logic that is more emotional than anything else - and it flows perfectly. Miles' playing throughout is as intense as an acetylene blowtorch, and the guitars stay strictly in the background, providing incessant, deeply funky commentary. To say this is an essential, mind-warping track is only to state the obvious.

The fourth side of "Get Up With It," in comparison to the parade of drug-induced, almost hallucinatory genius that precedes it, pales slightly in terms of quality; but that's not a problem. After all, anyone would have trouble following up a solid hour and a half of such visionary, challenging, terribly focused and intense music. Primarily the problem is "Red China Blues"; while it's a much-needed moment of humor, and a respite from all the deranged, marvelous intensity that came before it, it also suffers from intrusive Wade Marcus horn charts that do nothing to enhance the song whatsoever. But, taken on it's own merits, it's a wonderfully sardonic blues number where Miles, his personality heightened through his electronically enhanced trumpet, impersonates an electric guitarist to clipped, knowing, and pretty hilarious effect. In the context of this album, it's a real head-scratcher; after all, what could be stranger in the context of all this boundary-pushing than a straight electric blues with Cornell Dupree and Bernard Purdie playing along?

"Mtume" is fifteen minutes of predatory desert music; incessant, roiling conga rhythms played by (you guessed it!) Mtume predominate at first and then direct the flow of the music. Impossibly choppy, precise and aggressive wah-wah guitars keep biting at the heels of the music, driving it forward mercilessly. And the drumming whirlwind from Al Foster may well be at its most intense. The intensity is unflagging and, after all the intensity that came before, you may well find yourself getting tired of the mania. It's happened to me a few times, even though I love the piece. It's a brutal one. "Billy Preston," which ends the album, is a twelve-minute funkfest built on an unfortunately undermixed, but incredibly loose and relentless open hi-hat drumbeat. This one, too, isn't as compelling as the others were before it - but it's a wonderful way to end the album. Miles especially shines on it with some warbly trumpet lines, and Al's drumming is good enough to keep your attention held and your ass shaking for all twelve minutes.

Get Up With It may be the pinnacle of Davis's studio fusion work, for me; the only real competitors are Jack Johnson, of course, and the intensely spiritual, moving meditations of In a Silent Way - though I have to admit that my analysis is nowhere near complete, and may change after hearing Live-Evil, not to mention Big Fun. Bitches Brew has always seemed flawed to me; unlike this album, it always feels overlong, and unlike this album, it's never heavy and flat-out terrifying, even at it's most brooding and foreboding (the title track, which admittedly has an incredible Davis performance gracing it and one of the all-time classic bass lines). Lester Bangs described it as being "a little too airy," and that nails it for me. On The Corner is a minor, fairly flawed classic - though it's farsighted, uses mind-boggling studio techniques, and predicts remixing and hip-hop techniques years before they were conceived of or came into vogue, it's also far too repetitive, working a theme that sounds like it got nicked from the Isley Brothers' "It's Your Thing" far past the point of interest. A trippy listen, for sure, but it's also not as funky as it's cracked up to be, and the entire 54 minutes - 18 minutes spent on a limited two-note funk break, and the entire rest spent jamming on the "It's Your Thing" riff - is just wearisome by the end.

Get Up With It is also exhausting, but it's the kind of exhaustion you get from doing something worthwhile. And listening to this music is, at the very least, worthwhile.

An Appreciation: The Cows

2010-08-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

The Cows are a band that really, really, really do not get much respect. Almost nobody has ever heard of them. Almost all of their albums are out of print, and none are easy to find on CD. Your best recourse to hearing any of the songs is on mp3. They spent years playing in scummy clubs and never got close to any type of stable success (though after their breakup, the band's insanely creative bassist, Kevin Rutmanis, had a distinguished and fairly long tenure as probably the best bassist to ever be in the Melvins). They are a band that gets disparaged regularly because they are not understood. A smattering of random press quotes yields cute one-liners like "I really never saw Shannon Selberg as the poster boy for anything, aside from maybe one of the nastier forms of mental illness" and "[They] couldn't have sounded worse if the studio had been underwater." I'll grant that it isn't terribly easy to get into the band, but it's not as hard as it seems, either. All you need to be is a little bent and goofy yourself and willing to hear a bunch of very creative if not necessarily ear-friendly sounds.

People hear what sounds like a bunch of oddly structured, ear-splitting, horrifically annoying noise with some rednecky idiot yelling and playing a bugle at random over the top. People do not hear a bunch of hilariously damaged melodies played at brain-melting volume with a funny, charismatic showman telling you messed-up stories over the top. The Cows weren't really a band that was about trying to resonate with the listener's emotions. They just wanted to completely kick your ass, melt your brain, explore the limits of what amplified stringed instruments can do, make you laugh and maybe creep you out along the way. And, may I remind you, music today needs many more bands like that.

They were an exceptionally cartoonish band, for the most part. But "cartoonish" is not a term that I use as an insult. There is a kind of Merrie-Melodies-for-Teenagers-and-Hobos viewpoint in much of their work, where a kind of witty intelligence runs through what would otherwise be astonishingly brutal and nasty descriptions of life at its worst. Shannon Selberg, the lead singer and occasional bugle and trombone player, holds himself at a slight distance from the lyrics much of the time, and that helps enormously in conveying the band's ideas. (Some people will start guffawing at the proposal that this band even had "ideas," but lemme tell you I'm just getting started.) This is a group that is about examining why seemingly rational people fall victim to their worst impulses time and time again. These are rants from the bottom of people's psyches, rendered with a bleakly caricatured, satiric touch - and while cartoons often depict incredibly harmful, terrible things, they make us laugh against our better natures. I am the type of person who believes that the 1953 Chuck Jones cartoon "Duck Amuck" is one of the most effective examples of depressive surrealism ever created, and an easy match for some of Beckett's works. You may laugh now, but think about it. Throughout the cartoon, Daffy Duck is at the mercy of a pencil-wielding God. That's exactly what Bugs Bunny is in this cartoon. This God is an amoral prankster and tormentor - who erases him, belittles him, tortures him, and makes a fool of him at every turn. There is no rhyme or reason to Daffy's life here: he loses his cool, pleads, screams, writhes around, but there is no way for him to get loose - because he is trapped in existence, and existence has gone wrong. And, yet, we laugh at him. We know, at the end of the cartoon, that God turns out to be Bugs Bunny, who laughs at the audience at the end. We still laugh, but what we've been laughing at is a worldview that makes nihilism look conventional. It's as existentially bleak as anything I can think of. Cartoons like "Duck Amuck" equate to us helplessly laughing at despair and folly. And helplessly laughing at despair and folly is what this band was about from day one.

In contrast, Shannon Selberg is no existentialist, and he's not anything like overtly sophisticated. But he comes up with stories no one else would ever think of ("3-Way Lisa" is a hilarious song about dating a girl with multiple personalities simply because one of the personalities is a nymphomaniac), and makes us laugh at things that are often awful. And while we laugh, he never takes the easy way out and removes the fangs from any of his lyrics. He also has a good feel for details, and occasionally, especially with the band's last songs, he acquires a pitch-black tone that crops up in the most despairing pulp novels. "Finished Again," on the band's last album, is a simply put expression of complete resignation:

What's the use of talking, I'm finished again

Everyone already knows what I am

Everywhere I go everything looks the same

And everyone says that I'm finished again

I have no more message to send

I have nothing left to defend

I can't keep my mouth shut and pretend

Cause I'm all done, I'm finished again

Put Tex Avery together with Jim Thompson (well, okay, more like an exceptionally smart and offbeat Midwestern punk most of the time, but that's neither here nor there) and you have Shannon Selberg's view on life. It's not for everyone. But Bon Iver and David Longstreth, for example, are not for everyone either.

Thor Eisentrager, the guitarist, plays like he's a professional blues guitarist who's never touched a guitar before in his life, and who needs to use the guitar to lay waste to a few small villages in his way. The kind of seamless, ear-splitting, stomach-turning noise Eisentrager effortlessly conjures up is like nothing I've ever come across in my life. I've heard a lot of guitarists make a lot of noise, and I've made a lot of noise myself as a guitarist, and I can say with a good degree of certainty that neither I or anyone else sounds anything like Thor Eisentrager. Making the kind of noise that, say, Sonic Youth makes is fairly easy in comparison - what you need to do there is hack away at the instrument and make sure that your hacking has harmonically interesting overtones. What Thor's doing is much harder, because he integrates semi-tonal and completely atonal noise in between the often bluesy/classic rock-esque riffs he's playing without ever separating riff from noise. Sonic Youth's songs are often structured like this: "intro riff - first verse - chorus - second verse - chorus - AWESOME-SOUNDING GUITAR FREAKOUT BECAUSE WE DIDN'T WRITE A BRIDGE - third verse - outro." Thor operates more like this: "riffnoiseriffnoiseriffnoiseisthatachorus?riffnoiseriffnoise." And it's completely seamless. There's never a break in the sound - it's continual, flowing, and always perfectly in tune with what the song needs. And, since Thor wasn't a fan of noise-rock to begin with - he's apparently a big blues fan, genuine Chicago blues from the 1950's, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf et al. - you have what are a bunch of often somewhat standard if often really catchy riffs punched through, submerged under and thoroughly coated with a overflow of howling noise.

This band KNEW what they were doing instrumentally. The thing that is often so infuriating to read about the band is that they were incompetent instrumentally - that they didn't know what they were doing and making a bunch of repetitive noise. They had punk chops, but they handled their instruments like literally no other band I've ever heard. Since most music writers don't play instruments and therefore have literally no idea what they're talking about when they say that so-and-so can or can't play, I feel like a little more of an authority when I say that, as a guitarist, I have only ever managed to figure out a few of the songs the band has played. I spent three years on and off trying to figure out how Thor Eisentrager played "Chow" - itself a song, with a genuine progression based around Kevin Rutmanis's rhythmic detuning of his low E bass string, that wipes the floor with just about every noisy rock band you can think of - and I still think I'm not quite up to it. There's much more precision in it than it seems.

My passionate refutal of the charge of incompetence doesn't mean the band didn't start out from a fairly rudimentary place instrumentally: Taint Pluribus Taint Unum, the band's debut, is a badly recorded slop of hyperactive, gratuitously noisy punk that is rough and amateurish, and not really up to the standards the band would set with every successive release. But even there, you can hear the band beginning to coalesce and mold song structure into something genuinely new: "The Pictorial," the album's highlight, is distinguished by a catchy distorted bassline in the Tracy Pew/David Wm. Sims vein that repeats again and again while the drummer bashes out a mean, wonderfully driving punk beat and the guitar produces a few howling notes that repeat again and again - which makes for a thrillingly unorthodox and interesting punk song. And even their attempts at standard punk work a few times: "Mother (I Love That Bitch)" is a washed-up bum's hilarious ode to his mother over a churning riff and a great pounding chorus.

Daddy Has a Tail! and Effete and Impudent Snobs were breakthroughs. Simultaneously far noisier and more purposefully coherent than Taint, they redefined what noise-rock could be. The first side of Daddy Has a Tail! still may be the best side of an album the band ever put out: from the careening, train-wrecked destruction of "Shaking All Over" that starts it out, to the brutal hardcore of "Camouflage Monkey," to the nauseatingly loud, creepy, long and bizarre "Part My Konk," to the indescribably warped, crushing blues of "Bum In The Alley," to the unfathomable brain-bomb that is "Chow," I'd be hard-pressed to name a better and funnier sequence of songs in the band's discography. Effete and Impudent Snobs streamlines the rampaging, ridiculously enjoyable cacophony with far better production and more structural coherence; songs like "Memorial," "Nancy Boy Cocaine Whore Blues," "The Emigrant Song," "Whitey In The Woodpile" and "Cartoon Corral" refine sleazy bass lines, ear-detonating blues-punk, catchy hardcore with magnificently tuneless bugle honking plopped on top, and slightly countryish melodies into a recognizable, unique and deafening personal aesthetic.

Peacetika (named after the combined peace symbol and swastika that's splotched on the front cover) is a transitional effort; it's the halfway point between the teeth-gritting, head-banging rhythmic noise overdoses on the first few albums and the more standardized, but darker, heavier and more coherent blues-indebted noise-rock they forged afterwards. The production here is not up to the standards that Effete and Impudent Snobs set for the band, and the album barely cracks the half-hour mark. Add the short running time to the somewhat sketchy material on display at times ("Can't Die" is particularly weak), and you have an album that is, well, transitional. But no Cows fan should be without the opening track, "Hitting The Wall," which is easily among the five best songs the band ever did: a marvelous punk number distinguished by fabulously raunchy riffing and Selberg's insanely high-pitched shrieks during the verses, along with an easily hummable vocal melody during the chorus. The catchy cowboy punk banger "Good Cop," the catchy as all hell "3-Way Lisa," and the semi-instrumental title track are also eminently worthwhile.

1992's Cunning Stunts was the album that gave the band it's peak of (relative) popularity. It featured extremely clear, hard-hitting, almost gleaming production from the master underground rock engineer Iain Burgess, who'd work with the band for their next few albums as well. Also, the band, as an ensemble, had all become sharper instrumentally by this time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's the band's most conventional, lighthearted and consistent album. There are tons of great songs here, from the opening one-two punch of "Heave Ho" and "Walks Alone" to the crunchy bass-driven paranoia of "Mine" and "Everybody." In addition, a few of the songs are even weirder than some of the things the band did before: "Contamination" and "The Woman Inside" are two of the strangest, funniest and greatest songs the band recorded. There are even two songs that could pass for ballads here: the cover of the theme from "Midnight Cowboy" (Faith No More wasn't the only band who did that) and "Mr. Cancelled," which has one of the most accessible melodies the band ever wrote. Yet, I can't help but feel like the album doesn't capture the dark undertones that make the Cows feel dangerous, and therefore it isn't my personal favorite. For the most part, however, this album is probably the best introduction to the band that you can get, and newcomers probably should start here.

The follow-up, Sexy Pee Story, was a 180-degree turnaround in mood from Cunning Stunts. Oddly, for an album with a title that stupid (it sounds like a third-grader made it up), it's extremely dark, heavy, uncompromising and frightening, though Selberg never loses the sense of humor that runs throughout the band's work. There's also the beginning here of a tendency to work more with the studio and place honest experiments on the albums: "The Ouch Cube" would never have worked live, but on disc it's a mesmerizing melange of noise, beats and random voices that holds attention even when it stops for no reason in the middle. And the uninterrupted, unrelieved psychological barrage of songs on Side 1 go so far beyond normal conceptions of rocking out that it's almost ridiculous; it's not ass-kicking, it's ass-curbstomping. "Shitbeard," in particular, ranks as one of the greatest, most unfathomably heavy and sleazy songs the '90's ever produced. Side 2 adds themes of being cheated to the lyrical portraits here, and does have a ballad to relieve the darkness on display, conveniently titled "Mrs. Cancelled" and graced with a gut-bustingly laughable vocal that sounds like a heartbroken, tone-deaf bum in a bar mourning his latest breakup after about eight too many Scotches. The album closes with one of the band's catchiest and heaviest anthems, "Sugar Torch." Sexy Pee Story is my personal favorite Cows album; it's dark, creepy and compelling, yet funny and (in a quite warped way) very fun, and there are not many bands who pulled that mix off.

Orphan's Tragedy was a falloff for the band, producing a dearth of worthwhile tracks and a whole lot of idiotic material: however, even here there were a few great songs with unorthodox approaches (in the introduction to "Cow Island," the bass activates a vocal sample every time it's hit), and good riffs (the great bluesy "Pickled Garbage Soup"). I still find it enjoyable a fair amount of the time anyway, but there's no doubt that it's one of the band's least essential releases. The band must have realized that they were starting to creatively stagnate in the style they'd developed, however, because their last two albums are quite concerted and honorable attempts to develop and expose different elements of their style.

Whorn, while somewhat flawed, showed another side of the band. It was mostly recorded live in the studio with a murky, thick sound (in total contrast to their last three albums with Iain Burgess). This, coupled with the material the band wrote, gave them a very different sound than they had before. Whorn sounds like the band transmogrified themselves into a sick, sleazy, warped and jazzy group somewhat more akin to the Birthday Party than to the way they'd previously sounded. Not many of the songs here are rockers. While all of them are very loud, very few of the songs "rock out." Instead, many sort of simmer in the speakers, with pounded, magnificently raw drums laying out in the background and wah-wah'ed noise-guitars boiling in the foreground. Often, Selberg and Rutmanis carry the songs by themselves, which actually works with the style they're aiming for: good bass lines are essential for this music, and Rutmanis always delivers. Selberg also steps up to the plate instrumentally, playing more horn here than on any other Cows release. Overall, Whorn is a fascinating and original departure for the band, though it's sometimes rough and not quite as good as it could be: "Tropic of Cancelled" and "Massa Peel" are both awful songs, and the slug-paced "The New Girl" could have been a lot better than it turned out to be. But any album featuring songs as off-the-wall, yet great, as "The Warden" and "Organized Meat" is an album that I'm going to enjoy, and I really like it when a band knows it needs to take a chance, and takes it fearlessly.

Sorry In Pig Minor, produced by Buzz Osborne of the Melvins, is an archetypal final album in some respects: it's often weary, cynical, angry and exhausted lyrically, but possessed of a last-ditch energy and a coherence in ensemble playing that only comes from years of being together. It's not a typical final album in the fact that it is a genuine left-turn for the band to take: not even Whorn was this much of a stylistic detour. An apt comparison to draw is to Flipper's wonderful, extremely underrated second album Gone Fishin'. Like Gone Fishin', Sorry In Pig Minor is a controlled, emotionally understated and quite experimental art-punk record that confidently advances the band's basic aesthetic into newer, calmer, and much artier musical territory. Loud guitars often predominate, but the mood is not often thrilling. It's careful, considered, and thanks to Osbourne's bizarre production job, often a fascinating studio-based listening experience. Odd mixing decisions are rampant on this album, but they all fit together and work in the context of the album, which is something rare these days. The album serves as an unexpected, but wonderful goodbye to a drastically underrated and misunderstood band.

Well, my work here is done. Fans of noisy, groundbreaking music owe it to themselves to listen to this group. You'll laugh, you'll headbang, you'll wince and you'll laugh some more. Everyone needs low comedy and tuneful noise in their lives, and you might as well buy what the Cows are selling because you'll be better for the experience.

Instant Replay - Pick of the Week: Cat Power, "American Flag"

2010-07-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

Sampling the Beastie Boys was a good idea here: the reversi-beat-loop that pulses throughout the opening track on 1998's Moon Pix is what keeps this otherwise fairly sketchy song interesting, and indeed elevates it into the realm of a really good song. I'm an endorser of the theory that, if nothing else, the rhythms of songs ought to be fairly interesting, and this song kind of proves it - while the main riff of the song is decent and definitely catchy, it's the percussive interplay between the sssh-ssshsssh-shump loop and Jim White's filling-around-the-edges drum style that really makes the song come alive for me.

I don't much like Cat Power, to be perfectly honest. Moon Pix is quite a good record, and the dirgey, terminally depressed, half-overheard sound and atmosphere of Myra Lee is really interesting (even though the songs aren't really there for the most part), but You Are Free is aural Ambien and The Greatest is pretty much bland-out runofthemillindeepedentsnoremuzik aside from the gorgeous and painful title track. Plus, well...they're all slow. Has Chan Marshall ever recorded a song that was uptempo and didn't sound dragged down by the weight of her own problems? Are people who are hardcore fans of hers getting a kind of morbid thrill out of her?

But, this song...I could listen to that drum loop all day. I pretty much have already. It's just so catchy! It's...

Hell - it's my Pick of the Week!

Instant Replay - Pick of the Week: The Fall, "Dr. Bucks' Letter"

2010-07-08T14:21:00.001-07:00

The massively distorted, percussive loops that cycles throughout this bizarre, wonderful song might come from floor toms and a digitally-meddled-with bass guitar, but who the hell knows: it's pure Fall. It repeats and repeats until your brain has no choice and accepts the crunching noise as catchy. I have no idea if the band (or whatever incarnation of it that was responsible for it) ever performed the thing live.

The song builds an entire atmosphere from those loops: restrained rimshot percussion appears in and out of the mix, and a lot of atonal bubbly synth noise coats the edges of the sound, turning around and around in different places. Every so often a twangy, C/W guitar line pops up out of nowhere, adding what initially sounds like a nearly unrelated melody. And occasionally, everything cuts out except for a heavily treated guitar that hacks away at an unplayable, digitally-mutilated chord.

Over this constantly shifting and rather cold, forbidding soundscape, an ancient-sounding Mark E. Smith resignedly grumbles his way through what sounds like an incomprehensible list of different peeves, regrets, in-jokes, and digs at other people - including the last part of the song, where he pokes gentle fun at British radio DJ Pete Tong. No one meaning comes out of the song - like nearly all Fall lyrics, it's all too fragmented to convey one thing - but in the first part Smith regrets alienating a friend ("mocked him and treated him...with rudeness") and by the end of the song has talked about putting a radio on, reading a magazine, and at random, mentions Dr. Bucks' letter. It's just there. That's all.

I won't hear a catchier song all week.

Concert Reviews: Adventures with Xiu Xiu - The Hate Is On, Yet Fun Is Had By Most

2010-06-28T22:18:00.000-07:00

April 18, 2010

I drove to Mocad tonight to go see Xiu Xiu live. The word is that they are better live, so I went.

What I did not realize was that there was an opening band, and that Xiu Xiu had been paid to play Cranbrook's graduate art exhibition. In retrospect, I should have expected it; but nope.

I park in the lot, and walk inside. It is crawling with people. I look around. I see a dude with a peach-fuzz child-molester mustache, a sidechop haircut, thick glasses, Mr. Rogers sweater, corduroy jacket, skinny jeans, high-tops and a shoulder bag. Uh oh.

I have never had a worse preshow experience or been around so many lameass, pasty white motherfuckers who needed to bleed to death slowly. They almost all looked like they'd either been taken straight from the American Apparel catalog, the "Look at this fucking hipster" blog, or had just been constructed out of a cookie-cutter assemblage of artiste stereotypes, dressed like they'd been out on a five-day binge in a Berlin disco in 1990. To be vapid and revel in it was to flourish in these surroundings. They were a collective advertisement for birth control and the banning of cocaine. These shitbags defined the phrase "lost in art" and should have been blowjobs instead of people. Oh, the hate was intense. Rarely have I had so many hackles raised at once. I looked at them all socialize vacantly amongst the godawful art and occasionally sneak me a disdainful look, and felt the hate rise and rise. A nice pure wave of unutterable loathing. It was kind of a pleasurable sensation. To an exhibit, the art was all absolute bullshit - completely and totally disappeared-up-your-own-ass conceptually impotent dreck that would have been better off sprucing up a scrap pile somewhere. You name it, they had it - trying to art up advertising slogans and utterly failing, impenetrable statements about James Bond films, someone's truly dumbassed "Dollymentary" which attempted to examine gender identity/Dolly Parton and flopped like the average Michael Bay movie. Fuck not "getting" it - I got it all and still thought it was a total puddle of fuck. I began to yearn for a gas can and a matchbook.

I eventually found a few fellow record nerds who'd also come for Xiu Xiu and could talk to them well enough, but it was trying for a while there. About the only good thing besides that was getting served beer instead of Coke. It wasn't great beer but at least it was beer.

The opening band played. They were called Glass Rock, which should tell you everything you need to know about them, but I'll describe them anyway. Chick singer who was dressed like a librarian (a hip librarian! Tee hee hee! *retch*), had nothing that could be considered a personality or an interesting voice and strummed inaudible acoustic guitar through an AC30. Guitarist who loved him his reverb and delay and hookless lead lines. Bassist and drummer who were slow, competently anonymous and played every song at the exact same tempo. I'm amazed that they managed to remain awake to play their enervated, innately unmemorable and truly shitty songs. If I had to describe this blurry, unbelievably boring music with a genre name, it would be "comagaze." Or "snorecore." They sucked more dick than a Republican congressman. And, of course, hipsters and artistes alike stood solemnly in place and nodded along, digging the moozic...just digging it...nodding along...oooh yeah...

Finally Xiu Xiu came out and started setting up. The band was surprising from the start - I thought Ches Smith would show up on drums, but no... Two people came out instead. Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo were doing this show on their own. They came out and started setting up their gear. Assemblages of random percussion? Check. Little noisemakers? Check. Drum machine? Check. One synthesizer? Check. One Nintendo DS? Check. One guitar? Check. A plethora of effects pedals? Check. Two amplifiers/a few cabinets? Check. Tiny sequencers? Check.

That's it?

Yeah. That was all they needed.

I have only recently come to like most of Xiu Xiu's records (and still dislike a few), but that concert was proof that Xiu Xiu are, conservatively, about 500 times better live than they are on record. All the songs made sense, and even the one that was just tuneless noisemaking (I blank on the title) was actually interesting tuneless noisemaking. The intensity level was ratcheted about 5 times past the albums. Stewart's more out-there vocal mannerisms worked for the most part, and if they didn't they were mostly drowned out by the pounding drum machine and the synth. Angela Seo is a really good keyboardist and fills the Caralee McElroy role about as well as Caralee McElroy did, even if she isn't quite the multi-instrumentalist Caralee was, which basically only means Angela Seo doesn't play flute. (Side note: She is really short. But ferocious. Or fierce, if I was Christian Siriano or Beyonce Knowles, which I am most certainly not.) Most importantly, it was very loud and had way more guts than you would expect from a band consisting of two people that played a bunch of avant-garde distorted synth-pop. The set list was mostly focused on Dear God, I Hate Myself and the earlier songs were often really revamped. "Apistat Commander" opened, was stripped down and sounded like a distorted synth-pop classic. "Grey Death" and "Dear God I Hate Myself" were ear-splittingly loud and sounded like real rock songs - distorted rhythm guitar, no less. "I Love The Valley Oh" was guitarless and entirely synth-driven and surprisingly sounded totally punk rock - it was ear-splittingly loud and Stewart had to practically howl over the music to be heard. "Chocolate Makes You Happy" was another synth-pop song that did not sound cheesy (probably because of how loud it was - nothing dinky about it at all), and "Boy Soprano" blew the roof off - Jamie has a guitar pedal that sounds like a theremin. Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Then they didn't do an encore. Bummer. Still, they did play for about an hour, and other people who'd seen them before said this was, easily, the best they'd ever seen them. So, better superattenuated and superconcentrated than long and unfocused. I suspect they just didn't have enough electronic memory in their little electronic devices to do more than an hour. I met Jamie Stewart as he was taking the equipment apart, thanked him for the interview he gave for my senior thesis, and gave him a burned CD as a thank you for basically doing his part to help me graduate from college. He gave me a hug. Aw. Thanks, Mr. Stewart, I hope I didn't alienate you. (Nerves. God knows why.) Angela Seo was also very sweet, as were the few record nerds I managed to socialize with. (Me: "I don't know...I guess I started talking to you because you seemed - " Record Nerd: "Sane?" Me: "Yeah! Yeah that's it.")

Preshow = SHIT.
Opener = SHIT.
Headliner = AWESOME.

(Note: Originally published elsewhere online.)

Obligatory Mike Listened to a Hip-Hop Classic Moment: Scarface, Mr. Scarface Is Back

2010-06-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

There are many distinguished crime writers in hip-hop, and while there are a few who stand as some of the best artists working in contemporary music today, there are none, as far as I know, who have compared to Scarface, aka Brad Jordan, over the long haul in terms of consistent, quality output. (Ghostface Killah seems to be the only true contender.) While calling Scarface the Jim Thompson of hip-hop would probably be a little far-fetched, I'm not quite sure if a comparison of that nature is all that inaccurate. Scarface's narratives are undoubtedly much more coherent and far less surrealistic, over the top and experimental than Thompson's, but there is something of the same kind of extraordinary bleakness. Both Scarface and Thompson seem to have an understanding why someone would commit a crime, and certainly possess a bone-deep fear of going completely insane. There is also the same way with one hell of a confusing, nonplussing, ultimately brilliant ending. When I first started reading Thompson, about two weeks ago, I immediately thought of Scarface and this album.

Scarface creates a persona of a Houston coke dealer throughout the whole album. The character is conveniently named Brad, Scarface, Mr. Scarface, and occasionally Akshen, pronounced "Action" and Scarface's original nom de rap. Scarface creates someone who is someone you would never, ever, ever want to mess around with. I mean, this is not some idiotic, cartoonish Supa-Gangsta Drug Lord - this guy is a cold, damaged nutjob whose tortured conscience won't keep him from shooting you to death in five seconds.

Of course, he shoots tons of people, fucks bitches, deals coke and does all the things that a gangsta rapper does in song. In that way, this album is the same old story.

However, the difference between your violent, run-of-the-mill clumsy dumbass gangsta MC and Scarface is that Scarface simply does it way the hell better on all fronts.

His eye for the telling detail is remarkable, and he manages to craft his lyrics so that they flow seemingly without any effort. But all the while, they keep building until he pretty much has you reeled in by the time the first verse is over. The effect is like a verbal film: like all true storytellers, Scarface sets the scene like a master director. Lyrics like this sound like every gangsta manifesto and tough-guy threat you've ever heard, except that this time...you know the guy means it:

Boy, you should've known not to fuck with me, bitch
Brothers like me are making mortuaries rich.
So if you got something that you think you wanna prove,
You better prove it now, cause you don't get a second chance, dude.
One chance is all you get,
And if I beat you to the draw, that's it...
Get your momma's black dress and call your family -
It's gonna be a murder, my reason:
Insanity.

I don't know about you, but those are some of the most fatalistic, truly scary lyrics I've seen that still manage to stay out of the realm of parody. As rendered in Scarface's paranoid, coldly contemptuous Southern bark of a voice, the effect is authoritative.

If the lyrics haven't completely hooked you yet, the beats will. The beats on this album are monotonous, but not monotonous in the way that most modern rap is (e.g. that unspeakably irritating rat-a-tat-a-tatatatatatatatatat digitized click pattern that seems like it appears in every fucking radio hit these days). Rather, they work together to achieve a style. This was made in 1991, and so sampling practices weren't quite as insanely stringent as they later became. This allowed the in-house producers at Rap-a-Lot Records (Bido, Crazy C, etc.) to create and maintain a signature sound for this album. '70's chicken-scratch guitars, thudding, insanely catchy lo-fi rhythms and loops, and rich, tasty Hammond organs that sound like pure Southern soul define a lot of the instrumental textures on display here. As constructed by the Rap-a-Lot guys, the beats are almost all upbeat, swaggering, smoky, thick and really, really funky. The secret of the album is that, combined with Scarface's amazingly convincing, relentlessly nasty and cruel yet totally smooth delivery, the beats find their context and fill out his narratives. It's one sound, but it's a great one. Basically, this album takes you to a Houston ghetto, and while it's obvious your lily-white ass wouldn't want to live there, the parched, sandy sourced-from-vinyl sounds and Scarface's fluid, sneering drawl can make you imagine what it's like to be in that tense, scorching, dry and dusty environment. It's genuinely cinematic.

Another reason the album works so well is that the sequencing of the album tells a loose 45-minute story of sorts. It's not quite a concept album, and I doubt it was intended to be one, but that's the effect.

With "Mr. Scarface," Scarface explains that he's back after laying low for a while; then, he gets involved in a shootout after getting burned, and gets involved in another shootout that he survives just after screwing some unfortunate lady. The next song is devoted to a few verses sketching out what he thinks of as his sexual prowess: it's the weakest song on the album, but an unparalleled (and really, really funny) description of macho-man misogynism, and it provides some needed comic relief on one extremely bleak, unpleasant album. The next three songs are riveting lyrical bloodbaths with strong undercurrents of insanity throughout. Then there's the famous, if slightly too repetitive classic "Diary of a Madman," which leaves Ozzy and the Gravediggaz where they belong at the drive-in and takes the listener straight to the mental ward instead.

Much of the rest of the album continues on like this, though it is slower, more reflective and more laid-back than what came before on Side 1. Some of the details here on Side 2 blindside you with their clarity and fatalism. "Good Girl Gone Bad," featuring the much-sampled drum loop from Funkadelic's "Good Old Music," gets to the point of all drug deals with two lines: "Now it's the time for the testing of the dope, to see if it's flour, sheetrock, or some powdered soap." The same song features Scarface's tale of how he came to adopt another man's son - through shooting the father. Here, too, the lyrical tone and detail are simply astonishing: "Took him to the bayou. 'Your ass has got to go for that bullshit you tried, bro.' 'But what about my son?' 'I got him. He's in real good hands.' He closed his eyes - then I shot him. Now his son is calling me dad..." And "Money and the Power" features the most telling lines on the album, where he mentions working at McDonald's. It may be gangsta-rap, but this is about as far away from glamour as it gets. It's touches like this that make the album feel all so much more convincing than most other examples in the genre. The reflective moments, too, always excel: "A Minute to Pray and a Second to Die," intelligently placed as the penultimate song on the album, cycles through loops of Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues" and "What's Going On" while Scarface quietly tells a story of ghetto violence circling in on itself in unspeakably cruel and absurdly pointless ways.

There is also one hell of an ending. The last song, "I'm Dead," is as close to O. Henry as any gangsta rapper got, which is notable enough. It closes the album on the most bewildered, but resigned note possible. Scarface wakes up one morning, observes a neighborhood fight, tries to call his mother, and then gradually realizes that he's dead. It ends with him seeing his mother softly kiss his corpse in the coffin.

This album is a classic - hard, scarred, paranoid, furious, funky and brutal. It has its objectives and achieves them.

Final Verdict: Scarface will always be a complete professional. This album is harder-core than a thousand generic '80's punks and it is much more of a genuine artistic statement about gangster life than that ridiculously terrible shitball Brian de Palma movie everyone loves so much.

Retroactive Turkey Shoot: Neutral Milk Hotel, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

2010-06-08T19:36:00.000-07:00

Come round here, kiddies, and I'll tell you a little story!

When I was in a joke band about two years ago, an idea for a song I came up with was titled "The Indiestry," and it went a little something like this...

Gmaj Em Cmaj Dmaj (Strum-A-Struma-Strum-A, etc.) *repeat*

"How many minds can I claim
With albums as lame
As In The Aeroplane Over The Sea?
All these bands should stop
Making shit indie-pop
Stuffed full of awful high-school poetry
Syrupy sweet
Though the song blows I made it in
Theeeeeeeeeeeee indieeeeeeee-stry..."

And we never really got past there with it and the band broke up after that semester.

Obviously it's more than a little sophomoric and it's certainly a mean little cheap shot, but the point still stands. I've never understood how this album became so worshiped - almost deified - amongst certain kids of a certain generation. I knew at least a few people who quoted lyrics from this album for their high school yearbook pages, and know of other people who have spoken of being looked down upon for "not getting it," which means that people who have Seen The Light will stare and say to them debbil unbelievers who have not heard The Gospel According To St. Mangum: "You have no soul."

Well color me soulless and lemme preach the Litanies of Satan, children: This album is astonishingly overrated! It is lionized beyond all reason! The manic drooling that has taken place over this hunk of plastic makes the love for Forever Changes look like a companionable hug!

The music reviewing website Nude as the News has this to say on the matter: "As of this writing, Mangum and NMH have yet to follow up Aeroplane, releasing only a collection of solo live recordings by Mangum. This is understandable, as the album may never find its equal in the realm of modern music."

To put it bluntly, who the hell do you think you're kidding, you pretentious, mouth-breathing assholes?

I realize that, in recent years, this is not all that uncommon of a viewpoint to have. Some people basically say that this album is made up entirely of godawful horseshit, which isn't even close to being true. On the other hand, it's pretty obviously flawed in a variety of ways. Basically, criticizing this album is difficult. Everyone says that you have to either Go All The Way With It, or Leave It At The Door. No ifs, ands or buts.

Well, again, I say no to that. I go some way with Aeroplane, but I'm not taking the entire trip. (Intentional.)

The problem with Aeroplane is that it's just got too much baggage. (Unintentional. Really.) Seriously, this album is just weighted down, even without all the ridiculous Jeff Mangum = indie-rock J.D. Salinger mythifying going on all around it. It's overkill. What haven't we got here? To start with (because it's the first thing you'll notice) there are desperate, drawn-out, wavering, pained and REALLY, REALLY LOUD sung vocals. There are also dense, wildly surreal, wildly emotional and wildly self-indulgent lyrics that go on and on and on and on about wonderfully cheery subjects like Anne Frank, the awkwardness of teenage sex and - at worst - the mixing of the two subjects, which I've always felt was in very bad taste. There's also multi-tracked, piled-on bizarro instrumentation that often feels somewhat unnecessary - horns, accordions, elbow pipes, singing saws. This album alone is responsible for the prevalence of high school horns in certain strains of overwrought indie-rock. The Arcade Fire, call your office.

While this album takes tons of chances with the arrangements and the lyrics, the songs themselves feel pretty much like pretty standard singer-songwriterisms. The structures are verse-chorus-verse or verse-verse-verse reliable and feel very same-old same-old. And, granted, it's a little hypocritical for me to critique Aeroplane for using same-old same-old chord progressions when I'm a punk rock fanatic, but therein lies the difference: a band can use the most cliched chord sequence in the world - let's say, E5 G5 A5 G5 repeat repeat - and turn it into pure gold by slamming the shit out of it and screeching some inspired lyrics over it. The greatest music, in general, can do that, whatever genre it's in.

Basically, I want to feel compelled to listen. All music, even if it's terrible and a total abomination, has to fully compel me. (If music is so bad that it fills you with a sense of horror in the face of a yawning black hole of vapidity - brokeNCYDE comes to mind - then that feeling can only be described as "compelling.") Music has to make me feel something besides boredom, the "meh" feeling; something besides middle-class white-nerd drudgery, and the feeling that indeed, I will never feel any better than this, and that I'm living my life for basically nothing - that your awful early-20's is as good as it gets. Some of my favorite music has literally not let me go until I sat down, stopped everything and listened carefully to it, even if I thought it was absolute dogshit at first. And this just doesn't feel quite compelling. It feels overworked - mannered - trimmed in all the superficially correct places; like Jeff Mangum, Robert Schneider, Scott Spillane and Co. were shooting for a masterpiece. And the best way to get a masterpiece is to not go for one. Do you think that Bob Dylan spent more than five minutes thinking about the deep meaning of "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands"? I don't, because Bob Dylan was probably bleeding at the eyebeads from all the speed he'd taken before sitting his ass down to write it. And please, I'm not preaching that retarded sermon about drugs and rock and roll. But maybe it's best to just write a song, lay it down with all your guts and then think about the Meaning of It All. Or maybe it's just best not to overarrange everything. Sometimes I feel like this album got a nasty case of Pepperitis 30 years too late.

I guess a lot of Aeroplane depends on Jeff Mangum's vocal performance and how riveting you find it. The man sings like he's on trial for his life throughout, but for whatever reason his trials don't grab me, shake me by the throat, and imply "LISTEN UP!" threateningly. They just kind of irritate me instead. I don't understand what he's talking about half the time and don't want to the other half. And of course, I wouldn't give a shit if Mangum was as good lyrically as Bob Dylan/Lou Reed/Leonard Cohen/Neil Young etc. and sold a song as well as any of them did - but needless to say, Jeff Mangum is not Bob Dylan, or any of the others. It's as if Mangum expects his dense, suffocatingly symbolic verbal screeds to encapsulate everything in the world. I doubt that was actually the case, of course. But that's how it comes off, and it's extremely distracting. It often feels like Mangum is pushing his sensitivities and feelings on the listener instead of letting them empathize naturally - which might not mean that he's so sensitive after all. Because, really - how sensitive can you be if you're making someone else feel bad for you?

I guess this is the whole question of pop music, though: Isn't every artist, at some level, manipulating the listener into feeling something - into making them feel something besides the "meh" feeling? And does that all depend on what you're making them feel? Do Lady Gaga's fans feel anything at all when they listen to her music? Do the Black Eyed Peas' fans feel anything? Is it all just distraction in a world that is increasingly based upon technological distraction and narcissism as a way of life - as a means of deflecting feelings that go deeper than the surface? Or does their music and its' acceptance and endorsement by so many people mean that their music speaks for how people feel? (Which, in those cases, would mean most people feel best when they feel absolutely nothing, which makes sense considering the increasing raft of signs saying that Mother Earth has had it up to here with us mere mortal bacteriums.) Or does it all just lead to the easy criticism that people have had really bad taste during every period of history? Does Aeroplane's (relative) mass endorsement lead to a place other than white middle-class solipsism for superficially sensitive kids who want to feel "different, like everybody else?" Dick Clark thought the kids in the early '70's were "a carbon-copy generation," I believe - and now here we are a generation or two later, where Aeroplane stands for something for a variety of people.

The thing that makes all of this so frustrating is that it's obvious Mangum has talent. Sure, I said earlier that he wasn't Bob Dylan/Lou Reed and all the rest before, but no one is. Even Bob Dylan isn't Blonde on Blonde-era Bob Dylan anymore - he hasn't been that version of himself since 1967. I wouldn't be waffling like the proverbial House in Atlanta if I thought Mangum was talentless. The guy can put a song together. The guy can sing. And when he isn't figuratively dropping 16-ton anvils on me I can feel his emotions without getting sick. But he has not made his masterpiece yet. I root for him to do so, perversely (just to see if people who adore Aeroplane would see it for a masterpiece or not), and actively hope he makes another album. I get the feeling that the status of Aeroplane has been pushed upon him as well as me.

In short, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea shouldn't be taken as some definitive statement for a generation when it doesn't even make for a solid listen all the way through. Sure, "The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One" is a nice, intensely melodic and folksy opener. Sure, "Holland, 1945" and the untitled instrumental are great fuzzed-out rock songs. Sure, "Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two" is probably the one solo-acoustic ballad on here that is truly, genuinely moving. And, sure, "Communist Daughter" is an extremely beautiful low-key ballad with wonderful use of subtly hooting and shifting white noise. But the eight-minute solo dirge "Oh Comely," even though it features a quite interesting and non-standard combination of major-key guitar chords and minor-key vocal melody, is basically a bloated, draggy, overlong rewrite of "Three Peaches" from On Avery Island, Neutral Milk Hotel's first album (which is a more interesting, varied and adventurous listen than this). "Two-Headed Boy, Pt. One" leaves you with nowhere to hide from worked-to-death chord progressions and Mangum's overbearing oversinging, and "The King of Carrot Flowers, Pts. Two and Three" and "Ghost" suffer from the same problems. ("Ghost": "Deeeeee dee-dee deedeedee! Deeeeee dee-dee deedeedee!" Jeff, was that really necessary?)

I guess I'll end where I started, with the title track, as it kind of sums up everything that's good and bad about the album at once. Your dog could have played that progression and probably has, but he couldn't have played it so steadily and he certainly couldn't have made up that vocal melody. Your dog also couldn't have written those lyrics, but that leaves open the question of whether or not he'd have wanted to. The instrumental combination of horns, singing saws, and fuzz-bass are legitimately interesting for the first minute and a half; then they get kind of samey. The rhythm is, strangely and fascinatingly, an oddly modified shuffle; but it doesn't have much energy. And throughout Mangum sings, and sings, and sings, and sings... This kind of onslaught (and I do use that word deliberately) just leaves no room to breathe. After all, a wall of distorted guitars can be used to exorcise emotion - I believe that distortion can purify emotion if it's deployed in an artful and intelligent manner. In contrast, a wall of self-expression, self-conscious instrumentation and un-self-conscious wailing vocals does nothing but reduce oxygen in whatever space I'm in.

I'm sure that part of my problem with the album stems from having to endure it played loud in snooty art classes at 9:00 in the morning, when I was barely awake, struggling, and in one of the worst situations of my life thus far. I remember that the classmate who loved Neutral Milk Hotel best told me repeatedly that I would fail the class. (I did.) I was not accepted at all there. And it may just come down to that: Every time I listen to Aeroplane, I know I'm an outsider.

Final Verdict: It's generally a bad idea to go for the Universalist Jugular, especially when no one shares a universal opinion about anything.

Retroactive Turkey Shoot: The Clash, Combat Rock

2010-06-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

This ridiculously overrated, incoherent, pretentious, messy shitplatter is the type of album that seems "progressive," "innovative" and "interesting" at the time of its release and then ages in a completely unflattering manner over time. It is one of the most dated albums I've heard come from a widely-respected rock band.

There were, of course, extenuating circumstances. Drugs at this point were plaguing the band, particularly Mick Jones and Topper Headon, and there was a fungus of the type known as "artisticus differentius" growing on the rotting tree that (in this inconceivably tortured analogy) represented the future of the band. Joe Strummer wanted to move back to basic chunka-chunk punk rock, while Mick Jones wanted to move the band even further out on the White Dub/Worldbeat/Hip-Hop/Bohemian Pot Riddim Bloop-a-Lot musical direction that Sandinista! had previously explored for three straight albums' worth. Originally, Combat Schlock was planned as a double album with the provisional title Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg. This was in keeping with the Clash's ideas in that it was really fucking pretentious and a military reference.

Many of the songs were in much lengthier versions than the ones that eventually appeared on the LP. (The master takes of "Sean Flynn" and "Straight To Hell" are apparently both in the seven-minute range unedited, and there were about four other lengthy songs cut.) With Mick Jones installed in the producer's chair, what could go wrong?

In the slightly modified words of that great philosopher, Alfred E. Neuman: "What, them worry?"

No one except Jones liked the versions of the songs he came up with. They thought the recordings meandered too much. Keep in mind - this is the band that put out Sandinista! a year or two before. You know you're in trouble if this drugged-out pretentious buncha fools thinks that it lacks focus. So they dragged in classic rock engineer supremo Glyn Johns (so much for punk, but - of course - the Clash hadn't been punk since the first album), and had him edit it down into a single 45-minute LP. Jones didn't take to this very well, thus kicking off the long-overdue demise of a band that gets regularly and mindlessly deep-throated by the Rocque Critical Establishment way too often.

Just in case you didn't get it yet, the idea of a double album this clueless makes me shiver. No other widely revered punk band lost the plot quite as hard as the Clash did, and this album is Proof Positive that the Clash, at this point, needed to break up. (Actually, they probably should have broken up after London Calling, but that's a different story.)

Don't come here expecting punk. I certainly didn't, and I'm glad I didn't, because I can't imagine how nonplussed I would've been if I had. I went into this expecting it to be a nutty, scattershot cauldron of ideas and stylistic attempts, but I was expecting a messy, but fascinating album that had interesting polyrhythmic grooves that supported well-thought-out, intuitive musical ideas that somehow coalesced into classic songs. There are albums that are wonderful, in part, because they are messy. And I was hoping this album would be one of those albums. But this album is simply haphazard, and only one song on this album fulfills that promise of Crazy Polyrhythmic Grooves Turning Into Classic Songs.

"Know Your Rights" is, I guess, supposed to be some kind of attempt at a punk song...but the Clash hadn't played or written an honest-to-goodness punk song in, what, four or five years by this point? ("London Calling" was the last one, as far as I can tell.) It's awful, cliched garbage without a riff. The other two honest-to-goodness rock songs here are a dumbass "Louie Louie" ripoff everyone likes for whatever reason ("Should I Stay or Should I Go"), and a catchy if quite dated song enhanced with amazing piano playing (you oughta know this one). Who let off the cell phone in the middle of "Rock The Casbah," though?

The other songs are a crapshoot. Some songs sound like an attempt to fuse the blip-blop Cockney-Ganja-Mon pseudo-reggae and funk styles that they'd developed on "Sandinista!" with more accessible melodies ("Car Jamming," "Atom Tan," "Inoculated City," "Overpowered By Funk"), but every one of those songs are either underwritten or dated. "Car Jamming" is just a bad song, full stop. "Overpowered By Funk" has a very complex groove, but the white-as-computer-paper doofus trying to rap over it needs to get his mouth taped shut. "Atom Tan" and "Inoculated City" are both okay - at least they aren't really actively offensive - but they're nothing really memorable either. Other songs are much more overtly experimental, pretentious, and just plain bad. What the hell is "Red Angel Dragnet" even trying to convey? Who thought that letting Paul Simonon run off at the mouth about idiotic bullshit while letting another asshole quote "Taxi Driver" at random over incompetent, retarded attempts at New Wave was a good idea? "Ghetto Defendant" and "Death Is a Star" are both unfocused, pointless crap, the former disgraced with an awful Allen Ginsberg recitation, the latter sounding like a dumb, half-sung poetry reading spliced with random attempts at jazz. You will also be pleased to discover that none of these wastes of tape have anything close to memorable melodies, structures or lyrics.

Weirdly, I actually quite like the song that everyone seems to dump on: "Sean Flynn." For once, the groove actually supports the vocal and the out-there instrumentation and echo unit abuse actually feel like good ideas. It doesn't have anything close to a melody or structure, but it is actually pretty evocative.

If you have to have one reason to get this record - and you really shouldn't - "Straight To Hell" is it. This song is probably one of the ten best songs the band ever recorded - hell, maybe one of the five best. Considering that, at the end of the day, this is still the Clash we're talking about - who wrote "Janie Jones" and the most brilliant song about liberal ego-stroking ever recorded, "White Man In Hammersmith Palais" - that's not too shabby an accomplishment. (Seriously, "White Man In Hammersmith Palais" is about Joe Strummer being proud that he was the only white guy at a reggae concert in Britain. How is that not a ridiculously arrogant statement of cooler-than-thou self-importance? The genius of the song is that he manages to make you think it's about the political apathy of late-'70's punks in the UK.)

Let me put it this way: if the rest of the album was at the level of "Straight To Hell," I would have considered calling this the best album the Clash ever did. Since nothing else on here comes within a thousand miles of the quality exhibited on this song, I can't. This song, though, is flooring. The lyrics are wrenching: the song is about, alternately, immigrants getting laid off, and illegitimate abandoned babies that American soldiers fathered in Vietnam. The lyrics connect both types of abandonment in an astonishingly sensitive and insightful manner.

And the musical background is like nothing else in the Clash's discography: Headon and Simonon lay down an extremely complex and polyrhythmic, but somehow catchy groove that's like nothing I've ever heard before (and on its own makes a case for Topper Headon being one of the best rock drummers to ever pick up sticks: how does he play that drumbeat?). A violin that sounds like it's been reversed alternately screeches and lilts out a downbeat, depressive, but lovely melody that establishes itself as one of the best the band ever came up with. Strummer's vocals are absolutely key: his singing is restrained, beautiful, and incredibly sad. Perhaps most impressively, the track somehow manages not to be preachy. (The best moment: When Strummer sings, "And Mama-san says," and the entire song seemingly starts over again.)

This is an awful album, but the band did manage to hit it absolutely out of the park once. Get "Straight To Hell," and maybe "Sean Flynn" and "Rock The Casbah" if you're really curious, and leave the rest to the trash can.

Final Verdict: More like "Rock The Gasbag." This album is a wet fart.

Concert Reviews: Welcome to Lansing on Grindcore Night, Part 2

2010-06-01T13:49:00.000-07:00

Fri, Feb. 26, 2010

The 1000-RPM a second blastbeats and insane, chainsaw-through-a-subwoofer guitar tone roar out.

Magrudergrind has landed.

The crowd explodes.

The earplug in my right ear gets ripped out in the first second of the first song. I never see it again. The crowd is so violent that I really start to wonder how bad it could get. This is fucking CHAOS. We are slamming the absolute living shit out of each other. There are various failed attempts at crowd-surfing that begin with people hoisting some poor geek up and end a second later with the kid crashing down in a tangle of arms and legs. The Misfits fan is wreaking havoc on everyone who gets near him. He could seriously do some damage. I receive about ten elbows to the head during the first and second song and do my best to shove the shit out of every motherfucker coming at me. There are a few problems with this approach, namely that there are so many of them slamming, so many of them are bigger than me, and so many of them are far, far more energetic than I am. Nevertheless, I feel the rage build and break and I screech incoherently. I lash out. This is what I had waited to do for these last few months. It's brutal, scary and exhilarating, not to mention more than a little painful. Finally, I make an exit from the pit and wait through a song, maybe two, to get a replacement earplug out of the bartender. It's good, because I am seriously getting beaten around in there. Then again, so is everyone else. Replacement earplug in, I get back into the crowd. It is still just as intense. Maybe even more intense. By now everyone is fucking each other up hardcore. I get beaten around. Finally, I get tossed over and collide into someone.

I look up.

It's the 300-pound Misfits fan.

BAM.

I go flying and sprawl out into the ring of people who have formed around the makeshift pit. They haul me up and shove me back in again but I walk out. That's enough for me, for now. I later find out that he put his thumb in my friend Justin's eye. He didn't do any true damage but it apparently hurt like hell, which ranks about a 25 on a scale from 1 to Unsurprising. I hear later that someone gets a bloody nose - not one of our friends, but apparently the blood is flowing pretty nicely. He took a tumble when he tried to crowd-surf. Generally, it’s a good idea to hold off on the crowd-surfing when the stage isn’t tall enough for it. You might think a bunch of Michigan kids tweaking on adrenaline would figure this out, but you would be wrong.

Magrudergrind finish up. The crowd yells for another song. They play another song. I slam again but not too hard and stay off to the sides. I'm tired out.

Misery Index are up next but by now I'm totally finished. So are most of my friends. So we sit and listen to them. They're okay, but compared to Magrudergrind they're nothing special. Still, they work the crowd (who were also completely tuckered out after Magrudergrind and didn't really mosh too much) and seem to be really happy to be there, so more power to them. The really drunk bearded guy in the Steelers cap and the blue-and-white shirt from before, who is still just as shitfaced and still just as frighteningly happy, is doing his same routine to Misery Index and having himself a grand old time. Not many people are still moshing at this point, though obviously the Misfits fan still is, running around in a circle in slow motion. He looks like a overgrown second-grader and probably is.

I look up at the TV while Misery Index kick out the left-wing deathgrind jams. There is some astoundingly tasteless exploitation movie playing on the TV's. It's so aggressively degraded and disgusting that it becomes somewhat interesting to see from a detached, analytical standpoint, though it probably helps that there is no sound to be heard. There is a naked woman impaled through what doctors and cops would refer to as her rectum, covered in blood and filth, with the stake coming out through her mouth. Vlad Tepes would be proud. The subtitles tell us the impalement is part of a strange sexual ritual the restless natives have out here in the jungle. I later find out this PC, family-friendly film, which ends with, among other things, a white woman getting stripped, gang-raped, beaten to death and beheaded by them dastardly ol' debbil natives out in the wilds of some exotic and uncivilized tropical place (where, of course, no white people live - I believe it is somewhere in the savage jungles of South America), is called Cannibal Holocaust. I later find out there is supposed to be supposed to be some sort of message in this film about the media's insane pursuit of sensationalism. Keep it classy, Italian horror directors.

Misery Index finally finish up (the second-to-last song is great) and we head out to the 24-hour diner next door, Thieo's. As befits a 24-hour diner, it’s grimy, incredibly greasy and cheap, with people who would rather be anywhere else providing the service. My father described it once as “ptomaine city” and it’s a fitting description. It’s a great Lansing institution. We all get a long table - there are probably ten or eleven of us - and benefit the potato industry, ordering lots and lots of fries. I get a seat last and start talking to Rachael and James again. I try on James’ glasses and note a similar look to Elvis Costello. James says there is a little bit of a resemblance. There is talk around the table of the wasted bearded guy. It seems that he went up to random people all night, drink in hand, and practiced an amateur mime routine in which he said "I," pointed at his chest, and said "you" and then smiled. It is unanimously agreed upon that it was truly creepy. Rachael says something to the effect that she is so glad he isn’t around here. I agree, and then look up.

Through the glass, I see a shadow out in the winter night point at his chest and then point at me.

Oh dear God.

“Shit. Shit. Holy fuck, it’s him.”

“What?”

“It’s him, he just fucking pointed at me!”

Rachael's eyes widen.

“WHAT?”

He knocks on the glass and the entire table sees him. We wave. He then takes his cock out and tries to piss outside on the diner. He fails. The entire table is dying laughing – because really, what else can you do in a situation like that? He walks in and asks how all us fuckers are doing. We generally assent to feeling fine. He says, “Man, I can’t piss when y’all are looking at me – you remind me of my fucking probation officer!” The entire table is possessed by gales of laughter, because we sense that will keep this random happy. An older woman working at the restaurant comes up to him and tells him he can’t piss on the restaurant. He argues for a little while with her, saying that “it’s outside” and “it’s part of nature.” The waitress isn’t having it. He then ambles over and tells us a story about a candlelit dinner with a lady of his that I don’t entirely catch, but it ends with hot candle wax on his legs and him nearly burning down an Applebee’s. More laughter. Matt in particular is nearly choking on his salad, which gets him the nickname of Captain Salad from the drunk guy, which makes us all laugh more. The drunk guy, who we later found out was called Steve but who will hereafter be referred to as Drunk Guy for the rest of this piece, then says that he made it all up and he was glad we all laughed. Drunk Guy thinks he ought to be a standup comic. Sure, right, whatever you say sir. Drunk Guy wanders off somewhere else in the restaurant, presumably to take that piss he wanted to take so badly, and everyone breathes a little more easily, but not too easily. He’s still here in the restaurant. The fries, and my hash browns, are served and we all dig in as Drunk Guy comes back to ramble more. He tries to take a picture of us with his camera, but only succeeds in filming us, and then, after getting it fixed up correctly, takes a picture or two of the entire table grinning and laughing. I wonder if the nervousness is all over our faces. Maybe it is. Maybe he’s too drunk to notice. Or to care.

Drunk Guy sits at the table and looks at me. “Hey, uh…listen. I have to ask something. A favor.”

A favor?

A favor?

“OK.”

“It’ll involve…uh…monetary compensation.”

My paranoia level is about five times higher than it usually is at this point. It is ringing off the charts. Does he want me to go burn down another Applebee’s with him? Actually, I might not turn him down if he asks me to go do that.

“Can you give me…uh…a ride back to my place?”

FUCK NO, YOU WASTED CREEPER.

“I didn’t drive here… I don’t have the power in the decision.” (This is entirely true.)

He turns to Rachael and asks the same thing. She comes up with the inspired and plausible lie that we all got here by bus. He believes it and walks away to bother other people. Later we find out he found a friend to give him a ride home. (Thank Allah, Buddha, Krishna or Christ.) Finally, we all get our shit together and get out of the diner. It’s about 2:20 or so at this point. I hop into Matt’s car with some other people and start to drive away from the snow-covered parking lot of Mac’s Bar. Only we’re not going anywhere, and the smell of burning rubber is saturating the car. We are stuck in the snow.

A guy with Misery Index comes out and gives Matt tips on how to get the car out of snow. Amongst other things, you need to get your wheels straight, and not rev the car as if you were auditioning for the Indy 500. The car starts going, people who were helping to push the car get in, and the car begins to drive off. Only the door is still open and I’m not in the car. I run for the car. “HEY, I’M NOT IN THE FUCKING CAR YET!,” I yell as I try to get in. “Well, you’re in now so CALM THE FUCK DOWN!” says Ryan, who has Snidely Whiplash facial hair and runs left-wing political clubs on campus. I apologize briefly and we mostly sit in silence as Black Flag’s 1982 Demos play away on the stereo. It’s on “Slip It In.” I say that Henry Rollins has mommy issues. No one says anything. We’re all too tired to speak and I have the feeling the last outburst of mine might not have been too politic. Whatever. I wasn’t in the car and you were about to drive away and leave me in the middle of Lansing at 2:30 in the morning with Drunk Guy on the loose. You could be more understanding of my paranoia. Ryan and his girlfriend get dropped off and soon, I’m back at my dormitory as “My War” finishes playing. I go up to my room, play guitar for a while, and sleep until 12:30 the next day.

(Note: Published elsewhere online.)

Concert Reviews: Welcome To Lansing on Grindcore Night, Part 1

2010-06-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

Fri, Feb. 26, 2010

We all get to Mac's Bar at around 8:00. There is a large group of us. The place begins to fill up before drums have even been placed on the stage. Tons of longhairs, crusties and big tattooed macho-punks are milling all around along with us college punkers. Drinks are being served and House of 1000 Corpses is being played on the TV as New Day Rising blasts out of the house speakers. As always, Mac's is filled with smoke, and I bum a cigarette off of Rachael. I'm feeling pretty good. We all talk about random shit for as long as it takes for the bands to set up. I hang out with Matt and David and talk about how fucking awesome Void, Husker Du and Killdozer are. I order a gin and tonic and drink up during this time. It tastes good.

The first band is an unremarkable, bog-standard metal band. There are hundreds of these bands across the U.S. They're competent and play reasonably well for metal, but it's nothing at all special. I headbang a little but it's obvious no one's really feeling it. At this point it may as well be Friday night in your local metalhead's basement, and not much of a Friday night at that. There is one man who is bearded, wearing a Steelers cap and a blue-and-white shirt. He is a really big dude with a sloppy and somewhat frightening grin on his face. He is absolutely obliterated drunk. "FUCK YEAH YOU GUYS, I'M DRINKING!!! AND IT FEELS FUCKING GREAT!!!" He does slow dance moves to the standard metal band and laughs. People are getting a little wary. He seems to have the aura about him of a man who is having a good time so wholeheartedly that the slightest provocation would make him go off in a terrifying rage, presumably collecting all of our heads as bowling balls after massacring the entire bar. The first band ends and takes forever to get their stuff off the stage.

The second band comes on.

(If you want to experience this band for yourself - which you should, if only to get an idea of what we saw - then listen to it here: http://www.myspace.com/dagonmetal. Don't say I didn't warn you. You should hear it before I give anything away. Really. Trust me on this one.)

Ok, you've listened? Good. Continue reading.

There are danger signs immediately. The bassist warms up by doing Eddie van Halen tapping on his six-string Ibanez, and the kick drum is boosted to levels that make it sound like someone clubbing a seal in rhythm through a PA system. The guitarists start firing up their PRS (left guitar) and Jackson (right guitar) through their stacks. Dweedleweedleleooooooo.

Oh boy. We all look at each other and wonder what's going to happen.

"HELLO LANSING!!! ARE YOU READY TO ROCK!!!"

Oh God.

Halfway through the first song we are all laughing so hard and so loud that we are bending over wheezing. The shit is every metal cliché you could ever imagine tossed into a blender and hosed into your face. The drummer is shrieking like an angry cat in heat and the bassist growls like an EVIL DEMON OF PURE UNADULTERATED METAL or sings certain key lines in a horribly cheesy Dio falsetto scream. The guitarists play ultra-processed shiny metal jigga-jigga chords or solo all over the fretboard for minutes. The song lengths are epic. It is so incredibly bad that no one knows what to think. The first song finally ends. The next one starts: "THIS SONG IS CALLED "OCEAN METAL!!!" It goes on like this and when the crowd finally figures out the band's concept and the joke during the third song, people start going nuts. This is like Dethklok without the props and more of a focus on technical wanking. It's so incredibly funny that everyone gets in on it - throwing devil horns all around and combining hands to make even bigger devil horns, grabbing at the sky as if they were playing Shakespeare in hell, playing air guitar and moshing. The moshing gets more and more intense. By the next to last song, nearly everyone is going nuts. "THIS SONG IS ABOUT THE CHILDREN OF POSEIDON!!!" The crowd starts really pushing each other around and the floor is already slippery from someone spilling beer. I lose my footing more than once but don't go down. At this point people have started to notice the Misfits fan.

The guy is huge. It's not just that he's big. It's that he towers over everyone else there. He's even bigger than the wasted bearded guy. He must weigh at least 300 pounds, and he has a big cutoff Misfits shirt on and a huge septum pierce. He is running around in a circle shoving the shit out of anyone in his way, using the standard HC-meathead mosh tactics. Everyone gets shoved by this guy at least once. He has a lot of strength and a lot of stamina. We're all beating the tobacco juice out of each other as the song ends.

"ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE!"

Dagon do one more song. "THIS SONG IS ABOUT CANNIBAL PIRATES!!!" The crowd goes insane. Elbows and punkers fly around everywhere along with enough full-body smashing and cross-checking to make the MSU hockey team proud. The Misfits fan wipes out twice on the filthy, beer-and-dirt-encrusted floor and gets back up to mix it up with everyone else. (Up the punks! YEEAHHHH! Fucking asshole.) This is a good energy level. It's safe to say no one expected that from this band. Now the crowd is fully warmed up for Magrudergrind, who were technically opening for Misery Index. But everyone had come for Magrudergrind. It was obvious.

It's a break at this point. I talk to a five-foot-tall punk with two little rattail dreads and a Charles Bronson shirt on. I bum another cigarette off his friend. I say I like Charles Bronson a lot. Any band whose entire discography of 80+ songs can get summed up on a disc that's just over 70 minutes is pretty awesome to me. He agrees and recommends I try and find Crossed Out.

Magrudergrind sets up. Vocalist, guitarist, drummer. No bassist. I wondered how much ass they could kick without a bassist. The guitarist's stack is huge, but is that really enough to deliver the needed punch for grindcore?

Everyone's gathered up at the front of the stage. We're all waiting for something to happen.

(Note: Published elsewhere online.)