July 2005 Archives
If you would've told me a few months ago that an album that can easily be described as a somewhat sophmoric baroque electro preset pop opera about love and self help would be my favorite album of the year I would've called you a "Son of a Vadruke" and immediately ordered you out of my very very nice office. Life's funny that way, you know? You're (you meaning me) just sitting there in your dark cherry wood and hard oak office just enjoying a Ruby Red Squirt and then BOOM Kevin Blechdom's Eat Your Heart Out hits you like a ton of bricks. Alright, enough jokes, lets get down to brass dudes. Kevin Blechdom aka Kevy B has a real name like Kristen or something and she lives in Berlin or Tallahasse (this is what it says in her bio, I think it is really Berlin). She was a huge part of the late 90s/early 00s frantic anti IDM/yet still IDM Bay Area music scene. She was part of a band called Blectum from Blechdom with Blevin Blectum. They put out an album called The Messy Jesse Fiesta that became a big deal and won awards at weird electronic music events and the stuffy uptight electronic music dudes got all p.o.'ed because their music was all weird and messy and silly and awesome. So, they became a big deal, but really didn't put much else, and then brokeup. Blevin put out an album in 2002 called Talon Slalom that I really wanted to like at the time because I had heard a lot about Blecdudes, but was really sorta boring and kinda idm-y in ways that B from B had sorta revolted against.
In mid 2003 Kevin Blechdom dropped Bitches Without Britches and it freaked me out. It was maybe the weirdest music I had ever heard, and I liked it, but was a bit resistent. It was just so bizarre. Kevin was singing now and she has this wonderful, vulnerable, and mildly squeaky voice. Banjos met 80s saxophone and twinkly keyboards and brash drum patterns on Bitches Without Britches. The album had so many different styles and tones it was somewhat hard to get a handle of, and the very silly lyrics exacerbated that.
Now, Kevin has just released Eat My Heart Out and it totally addresses any problems I had getting deep in with Kevy B previously. The operatic theme/consistent lyrics about getting over a nagging love and self help through a situation like that are so much more interesting to me than just the raw crass silliness of having sex with aliens and animals like was the previous tendacy, even though some of the lightness and joyous over rhyming remain. Some of the raw novelty and deep irony of her past efforts have been eschewed for a slightly more subtle approach, which might make it harder for some to get into this effort because before it was so painfully obvious that it was a fun goof, now what remains is a more dense emotional product. The dark reality of trying to get over a heavy love is really powerful on Eat My Heart Out and it appropriately doesn't always sound pretty, but just when things get too deep Kevin saves you with a beautiful melody and some positivity, but just when things seem bright and you are over it something drags you back into those familiar easy to fall back on dependent feelings.
In a lot of the writing about Kevin or her albums there are warnings that this music isn't for everybody, but that's just a cop out. It is weird music, and it doesn't sound like things you've heard before, and it takes some getting used to, but almost all rewarding experiences make us take on some sort of challenge, and I don't think that listening to weird music is that hard of a challenge. She is honestly on some "5 years before her time" kinda tryyp. So, as I sit here in my gorgeously decorated office, I find myself mildly humiliating myself by pleading with you dear reader to take a chance and take some time on Kevin Blechdom. I would only humilate myself for The Greatest Band of All Time.
When young me looked an Ad Reinhardt painting and saw that big black square it was just so savage so 'BANG! BIG BLACK RECURSSIVE RECTANGLE!' that you just had to admire the power such a thing had. Getting hazed by 12th graders or being in circle pits are all kind of the same thing--macho minimalism. Who can deny that the perfect arc of a grade 9 thrown into a bush resembles the swooping arches of Eero Saarien's buildings, undoubtedly it was the similarity of circle pits to the swirling CACHUNGACHUNGACHUNGA of Steve Reich's 'It's Gonna Rain' and 'Come Out' that really sucked the inner me into the idea of contemporary composition in the first place (i would probably never have admitted this at the time). These pieces by Reich were pieces that swept confused young people off to an angry and political land of tribal repetition. Yet, it's not the nearly sado-masocistic art of Ad Reinhardt that still sticks with me most from those days but that of Agnes Martin. The personal uncertainty and gentleness that inhabits Martin's faded and washed out grids, the combination of absolute and abstract form and intense physical and personal connection with the work through it's creator's own vulnerability. So now, here, it is gentleness that I'd like to praise, the gentleness that teenage me knew about but couldn't access in recorded form until i was actually in a position to like such a thing fully, the gentle music of *America's #1 Composer of Music
*Alvin Lucier.
Lucier's gentleness is austere, yet still humorous and touching. It silences any claims that minimal work is too cerebral, too conceptual to be personal. In fact it silences most things since silence is the only response possible when first you confront the most incredible fact that music can offer: the fact of sound. No music can be more breathtaking than the music that shows you the wonder of actual hearing, the gift of ears brought home, the physical tangible force that is sound. There are lots of people who are into this kind of phenomenological thing, but most, like Panasonic, use facts to stun. Instead of "sound: the pulverizer", Lucier give you "my friend: sound." Lucier's deft use of the personal and the conceptual leaves all similar sounding musicians in the dust, while quietly dismantling the mind/body dichotomy that started with Plato and hasn't ever stopped giving us grief.
Blessed with one of the most ridiculous stutters known to all mankind Lucier has incredible problems communicating. Yet he does, to the extent of offering lectures and teaching, all things that presumably a debilitating stutter would make quite difficult. I saw a video about John Cage once where they interviewed Lucier about how he met Cage. It went like this:
[Prof. A. Lucier, looking like a New England version of John Cleese, and
Interviewer are seated in a TV studio, facing each other at a slight
angle and sitting on bent metal chairs]
Q: "So, when did you first meet John Cage?"
A: "I
fff....fff....fff....f.....fffff......f.f.f........fffrrrrrrrrrrrr.......[etc]
[the camera cuts to show John Cage setting up a concert on a street
corner somewhere, a piano being moved in, the sound track remains as
that of the interview with Lucier continuing to stutter, camera returns
to the studio]
A: ....fffff.fff..ffff... I first met John Cage in..nnn.n 19 53*.
[end]
*I forget exactly when this meeting was said to have occurred, I'm just putting it in there to make a point about the stutter.
This stutter, makes its way into Lucier's most famous piece, "I am sitting in a room" and in so doing reveals a graceful, elegant and touchingly simple way for work to be highly personal without making it
all about 'you', without tripping in front of the oncoming truck that is irresponsible expressionism. The music of "I am sitting in a room" consists of Lucier speaking a prepared text, slowly, comfortably and with only one audible stutter. He then plays the recording of that spoken text back into the same room he spoke it into while recording it again on another tape player. This process is repeated several times until the resonant frequencies of the room expand certain frequencies in the recording of his voice and remove certain others, the end result is a harmonious wash of sound (obviously, the room had some quite pleasing resonant frequencies) not unlike a microstoria album or the sound of
your room mate listening to a gamelan record in the next room. The goal he gives for this entire procedure is "not to demonstrate any facts or acoustic phenomenon, but to eliminate any imperfections his voice might have". The strange thing is that the only feature of Lucier's voice that
remains detectable after its final transformation is the rhythmic throb left by his stutter, all else has been removed. Think of it, here is a man showing us in a very revealing and vulnerable way what he is like in a place where he is (and for the piece he actually has to have been there). Yet, despite only really stuttering once, despite completing an almost perfect performance, it is through his "imperfections" that he is at all able to separate himself from his context, his flaws are all that
the room leaves to him of himself. You could either see this as a victory for Lucier's self, as the ugly duckling stutter growing into the beautiful and assertive rhythmic swan, or alternatively you could see it as a sign that it is only our failings that make us distinct, that keep us from being truly what we are (which is to say just prideful people in rooms somewhere).
It is so much more powerful to show than to tell, and Lucier never gets on stage and yells: "HEY THIS IS ME! I AM LIKE THIS!" he just gets up there and does stuff that shows you what he's like, or more often he just shows you what its like to be you where you are. This is what appears time and again in Lucier's work, i think of it as a kind of variation on "direct action gets the goods", and while some pieces aren't as well rounded or as moving as "I am sitting in a room" there are still tons of gems out there in Lucier's work. One piece, "Vespers," is written entirely for Soundols, which are these devices that simulate dolphin echolocation clicks and features a group of performers charting and demonstrating the acoustic nature of the place it is performed. Another, perhaps one of Lucier's more frivolous major works, /Music for Solo Performer/ features a 'performer' with ECGs mounted on their head monitoring their brain waves. The waves are then turned into signals that are then used to activate a roomful of passive percussion instruments. So while brain waves possess a generalized regularity (if they don't you're having a seizure) their action is still unfathomable and random-like. pieces like this tend to say relatively little, or have large weird gaps between the two elements being investigated (it is interesting to show, not to talk about, what is going on in your head, but what does that have to do with a room full of drums? what is interesting about the room where these Sondols are being used? Why do that here?) these kind of works succeed completely in aesthetic terms.
Yet don't meet the conceptual highs Lucier's best work achieves so effortlessly.
Alvin Lucier teaches at Wesleyan University. He said my friend's tape editing assignment looked like it was done by a three-toed sloth (it looked like shit apparently) and he likes to start his lectures off with
a joke. Last summer he was on the cover of the Wire and it made me feel so proud of him (it's weird, because I'm sure he doesn't care if I'm rooting for him or not). Although not strictly a band, I would definitely call Alvin Lucier my favorite composer ever. Of All Time. His only competition is Schubert and even there, Schubert wrote a lot more filler.
Beneath all of the schizophrenic song structures, expansive membership, and mountains of instrumentation, Architecture in Helsinki is not a neo-psyche band, an experimental folk collective, or even a chamber pop orchestra. No, what Architecture in Helsinki is, at heart, is a twee pop band. Let me repeat that for accurate emphasis: Architecture in Helsinki is a twee pop band. Got it? Cool.
Now that all the assholes have stopped reading, the rest of us can get down to brass tacks: An Australian band composed of eight regular members and countless contributors, Architecture in Helsinki twist twee pop conventions in ways that completely transcend the genre's preconceptions--a ploy that essentially amounts to dragging twee's quaint, antiquated corpse of a sound into the 21st. Like any pop band paying airfare for eight bodies, it's fair to expect that Architecture in Helsinki would cover a pretty wide sonic palette, but most would hardly anticipate the kind of stagger-stopped saccharine sensitivity the Aussies deliver. The band has released two masterful records to date--the first, Fingers Crossed, is a radiant debut that somehow makes eight voices and dozens of instruments sound like a whispered lullaby, with a sound that's modern, precise, and precious without feeling a lick cloying. Fingers Crossed is deceptively simple, but with enough clutter to nearly justify the amount of stage space they take up.
After a debut stuffed with enough subtle manipulation to fill out the 7" discographies of a dozen lesser bands, Architecture dropped this year's In Case We Die, a 12-song prog-pop opus that's as bloated as it is concise. Though still perhaps a little behind the experimental curve, In Case We Die feels like some serious next level shit in terms of twee-pop--with ground covered including confident dance pop, touches of playschool Morricone, an Anglo-island sound occasionally reminiscent of Orange Juice, a triumphant war cry chorus now and again, and maybe even a touch of off-Broadway musical--all with an average running time of about three and a half minutes. Fact is, AIH effortlessly shoves as many ideas into three and a half minutes as it takes the Fiery Furnaces a clunky nine (which, I guess makes sense--there are only two of them)--a sugar-high sort of pace that though occasionally oppressive in its theatricality, never feels forced or contrived. There is certainly precedence for this sort of elaborate, mega-faceted pop palette (Of Montreal come to mind), but few do so with either the sincerity or subtlety seen throughout In Case We Die--a record that, unlike a lot of Technicolor pop, feels thoroughly modern in it's fiber. That said, Architecture in Helsinki's blissful bombast certainly isn't for everyone--its cute and cluttered compositions are enough to give the dourest among us a crippling sugar migraine. For the rest, Architecture in Helsinki might just enliven the hope we've long since abandoned: Twee-pop for those convinced we have outgrown twee-pop. And with In Case We Die, they've succeeded in an undertaking adventurous enough to make twee-pop seem relevant again. A feat only the Greatest Band In the World could possible accomplish these days.
Oh man, I think I may lose some friendships over this one. I will for sure be losing any respect I had as a record label man, but the thing I'm most worried about stemming from this entry is deaththreats. Why in the world would I decide to write about one of the 90s greatest gifts to the fraternity party? How could this blatant stoner rock band that can't decide whether it is punk or dub/reggae or ska or a jam band or rap music be the Greatest Band of All Time?? Beats me, but I'm gonna talk about them.
Now, Sublime became known to most everyone after lead dude Bradley Nowell died of a drug overdose and their major label debut, Sublime, produced some big hits like "What I Got" and "Santeria." Well, that album is by far the weakest of their three proper albums, so forget all your misconceptions. Actually, your misconceptions probably aren't too far from correct, so just like be prepared to mildly adjust those (mis)conceptions.
So, the deal is...Sublime is the most quitensential Southern California band there ever was. Forget about The Eagles, or X, or Suicidal Tendencies, or Social Distortion being that most SoCal, it's totally Sublime. The band is made up of three dudes (the aforementioned Brad Nowell, Eric Wilson, and Bud Gaugh) who are some of the bummiest dudes you have ever seen in your life. Dudes who are always avoiding jobs, but sometimes have to get one to afford their somewhat expensive weed habits. White dudes who hang out with Latino gangsters. Dudes who can sorta surf, but are kinda too lazy to do it. Poor dudes who like to party. The thing that makes these guys so amazing and so SoCal is the weird hidden dignity that lies behind their excessive and indulgent facades: wonderful mucianship, openness to all kinds of people and influences. Sublime's music is this weird mish mash of everything that they liked, everything they saw around them, and it's not really filtered and cleaned up. They wore their influences on their sleeve, which many times is a fault, but in Sublime's case is a plus as it added to their raw energy and very youthful naivity. Their songs will go from straight up hardcore LA punk circa 84 style, to a 6 minute dub jam, into a love song for KRS-One, into a ska track, followed by a Grateful Dead cover, and instead of being confusing and scattered it all works to paint this great picture of Sublime and where they were in this time period, the early 90s in Long Beach.
The band's first show was on the 4th of July in 1988 that show caused a riot, legitmately. That was the thing...every Sublime showed seemed to cause a riot. In 94, my best friends and I went to a Sublime show in San Pedro (you know where Watt is from, it's just north of Long Beach, south of LA), and Sublime never played that night. The show was shut down. Maybe one of the openers played, but it was mostly people milling around waiting for hours, but somehow the evening was amazing, the vibe of a Sublime show was incredible. Every one was there to have a wild time, and their crowds were incredibly diverse...punk dudes, surf/skate dudes, vato/gangster dudes, crusty stoners. It was crazy. Every show was sorta insane, something weird always happened.
40oz. to Freedom, the band's first album, was released in 1992 on their own label Skunk records, and it is a SoCal classic. It's over an hour long, and is maybe like the most perfect album to put on at a party that is taking place in one of those apartment buildings that has a pool in the middle of the complex. The album starts with a sample of someone saying "punk rock changed my life" which is followed by a dog (which i always imagined as a pitbull) barking pretty intensely and then rolls into the first song "Waiting for My Ruca," which is basically just one bass note with Bradley crooning over the top, and it's a absolutely a brilliant intro to the band and for their career. I can hear my friend Allison Kahanamoku singing "On the Eastside...that's where I met my Ramona," (the first line Bradley sings) to our friend Mona Perez as we sat in and around a car at some hidden party spot. It's seriously deep for me. 40oz. to Freedom has 22 songs and of those 6 are covers. The covers are "Smoke Two Joints" (reggae song), "We're Only Gonna Die For Our Arrogence" (Bad Religion), "54-46 That's My Number" (Toots & the Maytals), "Scarlet Begonias" (Grateful Dead), "Hope" (The Descendents), "Rivers of Babylon" (reggae traditional). It doesn't feel like they are over doing it with the covers. They make the songs their own and it also says "this is the vibe where we are coming from." The album ends with Bradley thanking people and giving shout outs for 6 minutes, which is very telling of the band and their vibe.
Sublime's second album, Robbin' the Hood, was released in 1994 and is just as epic as their debut. It was all recorded on a 4 track in their house, and it feels like that, i mean it has a beautiful looseness, it actually sounds incredibly well recorded for living room 4 track vibes. Robbin' the Hood is arguably a better album than 40oz. to Freedom but a bit of a more difficult listen with the main obstacles being the "Raleigh Sololiquy"s that are interspersed in the album which are recordings of a delusion man bantering on with himself and others. They bring a darkness to the album, which can be rough at times. This album really shows the band's versatility though, going from upbeat almost proggish punker style songs with so many weird parts to acoustic ballads where Bradley's vocals are shockingly soulful and powerful.
Around this time, KROQ (SoCal's mega alternative rock station) randomly starting playing "Date Rape", a song from 40oz. to Freedom, and it became a big hit, at least locally. Shortly thereafter, Sublime was signed to MCA. They recorded Sublime, which sees the band tightening up, and going for a less scattered sound and becoming more song oriented, which in my opinion mostly doesn't work for the band. Sublime has a few great songs, but overall feels a bit stifled and Red Hot Chili Peppery for me. Well, needless to say, Bradley kicked the bucket a couple months before the album came out. The album was a big hit. The other guys made some other bands (Long Beach Dub All Stars, Eyes Adrift) that didn't seem interesting.
Los Angeles is known for its high speed car chases and the glitz and plastic surgery, but underneath that there lies hard working areas like Echo Park, San Pedro, Venice, Torrance filled with hidden humans who work hard jobs to pay the high cost of living in that area. Sublime on the surface has Bradley's sometimes insipid, stupid lyrics and wanky solos or maybe a dumb skit, but underneath there lies this man thanking KRS-One for teaching him everything he didn't learn in school or singing very frankly and honestly about being addicted to drugs and how "one day I'm gonna lose the war." For one band to encapsulate such a massive and important region, to actually BE Southern California, they must be The Greatest Band of All Time
Last week I saw the Unrest reunion show, which was probably a high point of my life. Listening to "West Coast Love Affair" with your best friend from high school? Seeing an ex-boyfriend pogo in the corner? It really doesn't get any better. But in the days after, I started to feel kind of like a loser. Or like my mother. You see, my mother really only listens to music made before 1973, the year she graduated from college. I graduated from college in 1998 and a cursory glance at my itunes proves my point: I am becoming my mother. Except obsessed with the nineties. It's sad when all of your favorite bands are broken up. How often is Unrest gonna reunite? Not very often.
But then salvation came in the form of Televise. My friend Nicki, who is addicted to MP3 blogs, told me I had to hear this band founded by the former drummer of Slowdive. Former member of Slowdive! Dude, she had me at hello.
And then I read their bio and really fell in love. I quote: "Jamie Armstrong was added on guitar in January '04 to complete the lineup after writing an imaginary soundtrack to NASA's space exploration videos." Imaginary soundtracks to NASA space exploration videos? That's what all music should sound like! I want them to be my new best friends.
After deciding that they were my New Favorite Band, I decided it was time to listen to their music. It did not disappoint. They claim to draw upon the bands of 4AD, Thrill Jockey, and Creation. All I have to say is, Sigh. There are only two songs available stateside, via their website, "If I told you" and "Smile", but both are unbelievably awesome and go perfectly with snowy weather, though I imagine they'll be a nice soundtrack to any season.
With Televise, I can conveniently feed my unquenchable shoegazer fixation/nineties nostalgia trip while at the same time resting assured that the band is both current and somewhat obscure. I guess the question remains about whether a band whom I've only heard two songs can really be GBoAT-quality. The answer, I believe, is found in their bio, where they say "music is limitless, endless possibilities of sound, no restrictions or guidelines, freedom is found." I prefer my bands to sound like their main activities include smoking pot, reading Siddhartha, and watching nature movies. These are also confident words, words that can only come from the Greatest Bands of All Time.
"There is only one Nation of Ulysses: the seriously unserious, reverently irreverent, amoral moralists whose iconoclastic assault on the received pieties of America place them in the front ranks of social critics. What went into the making of the legend? There was their erudition, their stock of language, their lore in urban sagas, their ransacking of every literature, their knowledge of archaeology and racial history- of kitchen midden and skull measurements. There was the precision with which they knew the homely and workday details of culture as well as the big abstraction, the ease with which they moved about in history from neolithic times to the report of the latest congressional committee."
Ulysses the idea versus Ulysses the band: is it more difficult to unite the two disparities than it is to separate them? Ulysses the idea is one of teen angst as class struggle; of impenetrable missives about the Ulyssean Jihad, the Party of God, Al-asifa (the Storm), Cupid Car Club, the Organization of the Oppressed, the Soundtrack to Revolution; of worldwide conspiracy in an ever evolving underground, involving members of the Children of the Revolution, the Facilitators of Metamorphosis, The K Internationals, the Fugazi Nation, The Jigsaw Underground, and countless other faceless organizations.
Ulysses the band was all of these things and none of them. An impossibly well-thought conceptual vision/marketing campaign for one of the greatest bands in America's post punk (read: no hyphen) cannon. To the uninitiated, N.O.U. could easily be misconstrued as gimmicky--their brilliant, elaborately self-mythologizing literature obscuring the true and shining brilliance of the Sound of Young America.
Over the course of two proper albums and a handful of other propaganda outlets, James Canty (Minister of Regional Planning, and brother of Fugazi's Brendan), Steve Gamboa (The Lamb of Ulysses), Tim Green (Minister of Public Works), Steve Kroner (The Lord High Executioner), and Ian Svenonius (The Min of In and The Spiv of Ulysses) mapped out a coheasive, post-modern soup of '60s/'70s Revolutionary culture (See: Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, etc.), universal teen culture references (Girl Group lyrics, teen revolt flicks like Over the Edge, etc), and an absurdist mythos that celebrated legal stimulants like sugar, caffeine, aspirin, and expedients, maintained that hickeys were signs of allegiance to the movement, and strove for something called "P. Power." It sounds like a thick pill to swallow, but in the end, the general excellence of their blistering, post-hardcore spectra sonic sound made the stew generally palatable. With it--between the Spring of 1988 and the Fall of 1992 at least--the Nation ruled the free world.
"While some would mistakenly approach and even embrace Ulysses as merely a musical or aural phenomena, and other others would restrict it to a political and economic realm, Ulysses emphasizes now that its scope is all-inclusive, 'a wild kingdom of sweeping broadsword concerns and the trivial aspects which comprise and illuminate them...' Its all-inclusiveness is self-evident in this proclamation by that most righteous barometer of and spokesgirl for youth's heartfelt angst and powerlessness, Winona Ryder, who pouts: "the Nation of Ulysses; I have steeped myself in their views and, for me, their method has reduced all others to beggary. For me, where the Ulysses dialect is not at work, there is no thought, no hope of truth."
Often imitated (see: (international) noise conspiracy), never duplicated: Ian Svenonius is unquestionably the most under-appreciated frontmen in all of rock music--and never was his urgency more felt than as the Spiv of the Ulyssian Jihad. Slobbering, screeching, and showering saliva through his yet-entirely discernible lisp, the Spiv seems hardly able to move his fat tongue fast enough to spit out all of the undeniable truths of the movement. P. Power was soon to give way to the death-at-all-costs philosophy of Cupid Car Club, the Gospel Yeh-Yeh theology of the Make-Up (both of which also featured Canty and Gamboa--Green went on to form The Fucking Champs), and the quiet revolutions of the Scene Creamers and Weird War; but even in those triumphs, Svenonius would never again sound so completely inspired on record as he does with the N.O.U.
"Despite fiery condemnation by both liberals and the right, and a virulent campaign waged by the media and by parents' groups, their aggressive campaign seems undaunted, and schoolyards now more than ever chime with the chant: "Ulysses, Ulysses, little flower, beloved by all the youth."
With the possible exception of Shudder To Think, N.O.U. are, in my humble and incredibly controversial opinion, the greatest band to ever grace the Dischord roster. As part of D.C. notoriously humorless hardcore scene, Nation's vision seemed to parody the very political militancy that their local contemporaries held at the root of their vein-bulging agendas--a seemingly effortless facade that plays out beautifully over the course of their two completely essential propers (13-Point Plan To Destroy America and "Plays Pretty For Baby"). The Nation lives on in the hearts and minds of the faithful--today maintaining their place as the greatest insular, five-man political movement of all time.
