August 2005 Archives

Though it works against most of my preconceptions about the nature of music snobbery—that is to say, it is in some respects my very definition of snobbery—there is very little in this great big musical world that I enjoy more than the classically acquired taste.

Here's the thing—for as narrow and critical my pop world view can be sometimes, I feel like I'm generally pretty open to appreciating new sounds and ideas in the music I consume. Because of this—and because for the past year or so I've been buried in mediocre CDs by bands that insist they sound like "If Brian Wilson had a one night stand in a cantina with Edward G. Robinson, and their gay love child then had a child with the corpse of Ennio Morricone's mother, [insert band name here] would be that child's mid-wife" or some bullshit—I am generally one to take records at face value. If I don't like something the first time, I don't force myself to like it, no matter how much it irritates my friends. Learning to like something seems in many ways antithetical to all that which makes pop music so joyful—if it takes a lot of work to have even the slightest inkling of appreciation, than I figure my time would be better spent just to listen to Louder Than Bombs again.

I say this, of course, acknowledging the fact that the vast majority of my favorite musics could have been at one point considered an acquired taste. The difference is that, over the years, I feel as if I've come to understand just which largely indefinable traits in a music that I will someday, if given time, warm up to tremendously. And after about five years of this sort of vague acknowledgment, I can happily say that the Moles are finally one of my favorite bands.

Formed in the late '80s in Australia, the Moles were one of the main proponents of the oft-revived but never really fully embraced Orch/Chamber-pop movement—a scene for which their fabulously bizarre Untune the Sky is one of the primary articles. After releasing a few singles in the very early '90s, the Moles up-rooted to New York as soon as they completed Untune in 1992. The record was a sort of awkward mix of Go-Betweens styled Aussie-rock and Spacemen 3 tripp-age, but do to the talents of head songsmith/law student Richard Davies (no relation) and the band's general fascination with sonic oddities, Untune often outshines both. The band released a couple of additional singles while in New York before uprooting for London. Following the tradition of most misunderstood pop bands of the era, the Moles drew a great deal of critical attention (read: no money) before breaking up in 1993. In 1994, Davies released Instinct—a solo album for which he maintained the Moles moniker. At nine songs in about 23 minutes, Instinct has been less critically heralded over the years than Untune the Sky—it's considerably more bizarre and disjointed than it's predecessor, and in my opinion a great deal more compelling. Heavy on the horns and strange atmospherics, Instinct was my Moles introduction—and though it took a great while, there's little else I'd rather be listening to these days.

Davies' next project was the mega-nerdily-acclaimed orch-pop project Cardinal, with then unknown (and later controversial) Portland instrumentalist Eric Matthews. People love the shit out of the single, self-titled record they mustered in 1994 before they bitterly split ties, but I've yet to really absorb the magic in it—it sort of just seems like Moles-lite. Davies has released three solo records post-Cardinal: two on Flydaddy—who released the Moles' stuff in the states, as well as Cardinal—and one on Kindercore. (The first solo album was apparently toured with the Flaming Lips as his backing band). Both labels are now defunct, and as most of the material is out of print, I've yet to hunt down Davies' proper solo albums. A label called Wishing Tree recently released a two-disc, Davies compiled compilation of band-era Moles material called Out on the Street, featuring a bunch of stuff from Untune and the early singles, as well as a bunch of "rare and weird" supplementary recordings. It's a good comp, but sort of an awkward introduction for a band with such excellent proper albums. Davies apparently now lives in Massachusetts, where he practices law. He was supposedly supposed to release his fourth solo album in 2004, but for whatever reason—perhaps Kindercore's folding—it's yet to come out. But that fine—'cuz the Moles will always be the Greatest Acquired Taste of All Time.

Earning his teaching certificate in the early '70s British Columbia, former struggling rock musician-turned elementary teacher Hans Fenger took a job at Belmont Elementary School in the semi-remote, "Canadian Bible belt" rurality of Langley, B.C. By 1975, Fenger was assigned by the Langley School District to shuttle between three very small rural schools: Lochiel School, which had an enrollment of about 50 kids; South Carvolth Elementary, a four room school house in the country; and Glenwood School. Fenger, a deeper hippie in the traditional sense, instructed fourth-through-seventh grade students with little regard for music theory—teaching the children to play modern pop music "organically," with arrangements taught orally. After several months of classes, the three schools (about 60 students in all) came together in the Glenwood Gymnasium for three rehearsals before Fenger brought in his buddy's 2-track and a couple of Shure 58s to document the cavernously echoing mess. Recording nine songs—The Beach Boys' "You're So Good To Me," "Little Deuce Coupe," and "Help Me, Rhonda"; Phil Spector's "To Know Him Is To Love Him"; David Bowie's "Space Oddity"; Herman's Hermits' "Into Something Good"; Paul McCartney's "Band On the Run"; Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon"; and the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night"—in one take, Fenger collected a small sum from the kids and pressed 300 LP copies of Lochiel, South Carvolth, and Glenwood Schools in 1976.

The next year, Fenger was assigned to Wix-Brown Elementary—also in Langley—where with roughly 180 children (and an interpretive gymnastics squad) he recorded a second album's worth of songs—twelve in all—including four more Beach Boys songs ("In My Room," "Good Vibrations," "I Get Around," and "God Only Knows"), the Eagles' "Desperado," and "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft." With a couple of stand-out soloists to set the to sessions apart, this group was pressed as Wix-Brown Elementary in 1977. And then—or so the legend goes—the recordings were promptly forgotten for about a quarter century.

Oh, right... I almost forgot to mention: the Langley Schools Music Project is perhaps the single most haunting sonic experience ever recorded. Terrifyingly so. Beautifully so. Crushingly so. Beneath a nullifying wall of elementary school gym reverb, dozen of pre-pubescent children singing in startling unison—crashing off-beat percussion, eerily echoed xylophone, tremeloed lapsteel, and coke-bottle slide guitar into something so transcendent and perfectly otherworldly it almost comes off like a put-on.

Rediscovered by DJ, outsider music historian and Songs In the Key of Z author Irwin Chusid (who credits himself for the Esquivel resurgence of the 1990s), the two records Fenger produced in the late '70s had, due to their tiny press run, virtually disappeared. Chusid—after hearing Lochiel, South Carvolth, and Glenwood Schools' rendition of "Space Oddity" on a mixtape submitted to his radio show—hunted down Hans Fenger, who, along with the Langley School district and the Basta Audio-Visuals label, assisted the author in his effort re-release the recordings to a wider audience. Compiled in 2001 under the umbrella of the Langley Schools Music Project, the two original records became Innocence and Dispair (the way Fenger described nine-year-old Sheila Behman's vocal solo on "Desperado"—released to a great deal of critical acclaim, and apparently spawning a VH1 reunion special.

What sounds like little more than readymade NPR fodder—and to be fair, the Langley Schools Music Project has gotten it's fair amount public radio time since its rediscovery—is actually a surprisingly listenable oddity; transcending the sort of novelty status this sort of project seems inevitably doomed to languishing in. It's beautiful, haunting, and incredibly powerful. Were I not so exhausted at present, the preceding description would no doubt be a good deal more evocative, but as it stands, I'll leave you with the obvious: the Langley Schools Music Project was—for at least a couple afternoons in the mid-70s—the Greatest Band of All Time.

In 1991, the biggest album of the decade was released, Nirvana's Nevermind, as well the endlessly lauded Loveless by My Bloody Valentine and also big albums from The Pixies, REM, Slint. So, what album did Spin Magazine pick for its best album of 1991? Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque. It's true. Look it up. They were this mega buzz band. They performed on SNL with Jason Priestly hosting. Magazines called them the next big thing. Pitchfork would've said they were "Best new Music" if Pitchfork would've existed. Alas, Pitchfork didn't exist, and alas Teenage Fanclub was not the next big thing. They continued to make albums that I loved, but critics didn't. They sorta slowly faded away like a old photograph. They put out a quality record every few years, and each time it features at least a few brilliant pop songs. I think that critics sometimes get bitter at dudes who are dependable and not rock'n'roll enough.

It pisses me off, though. Teenage Fanclub is such a special band. It features 3 songwriters who all provide at least 3 tracks per album of amazingly crafted pop music. They are like the Scottish Crosby Stills and Nash but less burnt out and lesbian impregnating and TFC actually have more good albums that CSN. The thing is, if you don't pay very very close attention you wouldn't realize that it is 3 different people penning the music and 3 different people singing the songs. In other cases like Pavement or Guided by Voices where the songwriting was shared, the difference between the writers is very obvious and there is quite a quality difference between the songwriters, but in Fanclub all three dudes (Gerard Love, Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley) are incredible pop music craftsmen. Flat out, there has never been a more ignored and underrated band ever.

They started in Glasgow in the extremely late 80s as the Boy Hairdressers, becoming Teenage Fanclub in 1989. They released their amazing pre grunge debut disc A Catholic Education in 1990. It put every one into a tizzy with its thick guitars, swirling sludge mixed with pop sensibilities. The band was almost immediately scooped up by a major label. Within a year they released the best album of 1991, Bandwagonesque. It was a perfect album, sad and sharp and a little snotty but also forlorn and beautiful. The album opener, "The Concept" absolutely sounds like the early 90s. It's a song about being cool, which sounds trite, but really that's all what we want to hear sometimes. These first two albums Teenage Fanclub was truly "cool." It's really bizarre and intangible, but it exists there in those albums, and ever since then they haven't had that cool....only the amazing songs.

Two years later TFC released Thirteen, which is named after a Big Star song. It was panned and dismissed immediately by the critics. I don't get it. I think it is my favorite TFC album. The emotion on Thirteen run deeper. They lost that snot (which is maybe what made them "cool" but certainly not what made them "good") and brought a deeper sincerity and heaviness. Grand Prix was released in '95 and was met slightly more warmly than Thirteen and was hailed with terms like "concise." It, of course, has a few mind blowing perfect pop songs, but it's second half is a little lacking.

Like the dependable fellows they are, TFC retruned exactly 2 years later with Songs From Northern Britain an album that saw TFC lose the crunchy guitars for the most part, and they showed their 60s pop influence much more than before, especially in production. The album is a beautfiul tribute to their homeland of Scotland, and the art for the album was filled with beautiful pictures the band took of rural Scotland. Another brilliant looked over album that without fail makes me feel so good by just listening to its very precise and personal pop music.

Howdy! was released in 2000 after much label difficulty, and it was an album that never stood out to me, but listening to it now it sounds better than it ever did. TIMELESS MUSIC, PEOPLE! I'm telling you. Just this year the Fannies have released their 7th proper studio album, Man-Made, and it is another very enjoyable album. It's remarkable how they keep doing it. I'm sure the band has been pressured to make some drastic change to their sound to get the critics buzzing. People thought that due to the fact that they were recording with Tortoise's John McEntire that Man-Made would sound like Stereolab or post rock or whatever, but it doesn't, it sounds like Teenage Fanclub. McEntire did a great job and there are a few touches that you can tell are McEntire, but he did not alter the band. It's also not that TFC sounds stale at all, the sound slowly changes. All the records do sound different, but in the fickle world of independent rock music people want to see artists make bold moves that are possible genius or career killers. It's just people wanting a good drama/trajedy and not being happy with amazing music.

I might have missed my chance. I have seen lots of shows, and I have seen almost all my favorite bands. I feel pretty fulfilled as a music fan, but just last week I missed a show by Teenage Fanclub which was only 3 hours away. I feel stupid. I have never seen them play. TFC and Willie Nelson are the only two bands that I still need to see to feel like I have seen everything I need to see in my musical life. I BLEW IT! I blew my chance of seeing a band that has so many great pop songs in the last 15 years I'm giving you a full albums worth today (sorry for the overwhelming amount, I just can't say no to sharing these beauties). I blew my chance at seeing the Greatest Band of All Time.

There are moments on the Gris Gris' self-titled debut record in which tape hiss is the loudest discernible instrument. It could simply be that the sound of magnet on plastic is the only audible element that's not completely obscured by a hollow cavern's worth of echo, but I'd like to imagine the Gris Gris' tape hiss-as-instrument aesthetic as something considerably more deliberate than that--a consistency that unites the muddily mired disparity of the band's vision. At first listen, the Gris Gris has an eerily voyeuristic quality; its sound so distant and remote that it almost feels as if taped surreptitiously at a linoleum hallway's distance--a sensibility only enhanced by the glaring irregularities that occasionally blemish the tape. Which isn't by any means to suggest that the Gris Gris are a band of the traditional lo-fi intention--and in spite of how much the technical fidelity of their music seems to play a role in their sound, the Oakland four-piece seem about as far away from the bedroom as one could possibly image.

Formed from the ashes of a solo project surrounding Houston native Greg Ashley, the Gris Gris of their hazy 2004 debut could be accurately described as a garage band--though such an assessment would probably prove grossly misleading. By the same token, it's nearly impossible to hint at the essence of Gris Gris without evoking a dangerously ambiguous qualifier like "psyche"--but again, that's not really it either. There are so many ghosts between the listener and the dank, yawning cathedral from which the Gris Gris seems to echo that the sounds can't help but melt into one another. Galaxie 500 evaporates into Roky Erickson, who in turn fuses with moments of Cale-era Velvet Underground--but with air so heavy, such plain influences do a good deal to obscure one another. And somehow, through this wash of disparity, the record's squelches and swells bond together in glorious, syrupy cohesion.

I have to start off by apologizing to Zac, Marisa, all guest writers who have contributed to the Greatest Band of All Time, all readers who enjoyed and up until this point maybe even trusted this place. I killed it. I just HAD to go there. I have ruined any credibility we had. I'm sorry.

RIP GBoAT.

Yet, I'm totally serious. This is not a joke in any way. At some point, for some reason The Grateful Dead became the most stigmatized band in the world in the minds of independent rockers the world over. I had the very same negative connotations about the Dead for many many years myself. At some point a little more than five years ago I just decided that there might be something there for me. Well, this isn't exactly true. Jake Longstreth and I had a talk about how the Dead are so stigmatized, and we both held these conceptions to a certain degree, but also were supremely curious. At that point it was declared the summer of 2000 would be Grateful Dead summer.

Grateful Dead summer was filled with mockery, exploration, shame, giggles, arguments, and total inspiration. We soon became these Dead Disciples trying to explain to all of our friends how all the preconceived notions about the Dead are wrong. A lot of our arguments were based on this concept that the Grateful Dead was very similar to Pavement and had totally inspired Malkmus. Jake and I would go on and on about this drawing correlations between Pavement and Dead songs and albums. People were not buying it. We went so far as to ask Malkmus whether he really liked the Dead at a "secret" Jicks show that summer. His answers to our question were not as enthusiastic as we had hoped. So, this whole entry might be in vain. I might not change any one's mind or get anybody new into the Dead, but I need to put it out there. The opposition voice must be heard. No more musical tyrannies.

Many taboo bands or genres have become accepted in the last few years (disco music, the band Yes, being a freaky folker) but the taboo on The Grateful Dead does not seem to lessen. What makes this band taboo? Is it the jamming? This is confusing because this is something that indie rock and underground music has really embraced in the last few years (Black Dice, freakier folks, freer/spacemins like Yume Bitsu). Is it the trips/silly/weird artwork and visual stuff?? This can't really be true because the Grateful Dead art style has totally inspired the raddest and deepest of new art like Paperrad dudes. Seriously. Look at stuff like this, or the amazing animation that opens The Grateful Dead Movie(which is my favorite concert movie of all time). Is it the Deadheads?? Okay, it might be the Deadheads. One does not have to be a cliche to enjoy a band, though.

I'm not gonna give a long history or discography of The Grateful Dead, not that I don't know, because hey I have read a Jerry Garcia oral history biography and it was totally killer. I just think that it might be a tad boring. Let's just say these dudes started playing music together as a bluegrass band in the early 60s. Then they turned into a trippy rock band. They did stuff in SF. Acid Tests. Free shows. Known for "powerful" live shows. Was not able to make that translate to studio albums for a while. Made two country folk rock records in one year, and they were both amazing. Played music for 20 more years.

The Grateful Dead had a period (around 65 to 75) that is really unparalleled by any band in terms of creativity. They made social history. They made very weird experimental records that fused live recordings with studio recordings in a very amazing way (Anthem of the Sun). They made two of the best albums of the 70s in one year (American Beauty and Workingmans Dead) after having been called big dissapointments in the studio for their first three albums. Their hit records (Beauty and Workingmans) were complete departures for the psychidelic rock band. They were focused on concise song craft and recording, and not on explorative performance, and they have some truly lasting songs on them. They toured more than any band in the world and have the most extensive recorded live catalog to show for it and this is the period where they built rabid their fanbase that employed hundreds for decades. They built the largest sound system in the world at the time called the Wall of Sound. They tried very hard to make something different and new and special for every album (which led them to wildly go into debt to record companies for deeper studio experimentation time), every concert, and every thing they did in general. I may never be respected by my peers again, but I'll be damned if The Grateful Dead aren't the Greatest Band of All Time.

For me, The Cramps start in Ohio. I don't know if history supports me on this, because creation stories are alluringly murky at this point, but it my belief that The Cramps formed in 1972 in Akron, Ohio. This is plausible, as Lux Interior nee Erick Purkhiser grew up in Akron, but legends conflict enough to indulge theory. Was it Akron or Sacramento? Was it hitchhiking or art class? Although true evidence suggests that Poison Ivy Rorshach and Lux Interior physically met in California, in my heart I know that their spirits' union---the holiest of all unholy unions--occurred in Ohio, the land of my own maternal home.

There's something about Ohio that brews some of my favorite creation. It's an often overlooked state, but it has quietly bred some of the greatest popular figures in our time-off the top of my head-Devo, Dean Martin, Gloria Steinem. Yeah, so that's a mixed bag, it does demonstrate a certain fecundity. But it's like magic happens when you mix low brow, Midwestern, and working-class with indian and the underground railroad. If you are born weird in Ohio, you have to forge your own way to what seems cool to you with scraps and cut-up bits, whatever happened to filter through the trees and burial mound hills. For Erick Purkhiser, this was Ghoulardi, a local late-night horror host, comic books, and rock and roll music.

It is this stuff that The Cramps are made of. Culling all that is trashy, demented, and rejected, Ivy and Lux formed an aesthetic of dime store junk and the cheapest of thrills. Their true genius is not in their originality, but in the rough aping of the lost culture of pulp camp and trash. They are librarians of Americana's dregs. TV horror emcees, mid-century poster princesses, crudely drawn comic zombies--whatever bore a B was thrown into the wash unsorted, and what came out of the dryer smelled like cigarettes and was made of spandex. Ivy wears it in promotional photographs and album covers, a cheetah-woman in fishnets and patent stilettos. When Lux wears it, it looks like leather pants and scratches on his chest.

But for all the posturing and the sex, The Cramps aren't even that cool, at least in the traditional sense. They're too clever to be cool. As much as Lux looks like Iggy Pop's evil twin when he's cut and bloody on stage, he lacks the dreamy vacancy that makes a dumb ruffian beautiful. The Cramps are self-caricatures, smart alecks, wiseacres. You can put sunglasses on that and it's hot, and it's simpering, but it's also just dorky. Their predilection towards corny jokes and kitsch makes it hard to know where to put them in punk history, even though their 70's New York arty punk resume would seem to put them at the top of everyone's must-have list. An example: in some of my research, I came across a "psychobilly" website whose Cramps write-up attempted to justify its inclusion on the site in such a way that made it obvious that the site's author did not realize that The Cramps themselves had coined the term. It seems like the band missed this fame and cruised straight into infamy. It's as if they didn't know that the party was over, and the now-sober revelers are looking upon their seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time antics with embarrassment.

So, the music. The band's 4-piece lineup shifts with the tides, and only Ivy and Lux have remained constant. Their sound varies with the change, but it's typically a stripped-down drummer, Lux on vocals, and a second guitarist to drone, buzz, and feed back Ivy's plucky, more sauntering licks. Drummer-beast and second guitar-beast have too many aliases to list, but they seem to effectively understand the party for the time being. And let not your notice slip that Ivy is not relegated to the bass, that eye candy's trifle, but a capable musician in the heavily manned world of rockabilly-garage-punk, making her 1-note call as lead. And she's eye candy, Poison Ivy, plain and slim beneath kohl and leotard. She stoically two-steps in her role as the ultimate bad girl vixen, somewhere between a smirk and a sneer.

Lux is more plainly obscene in his role as the sinistral. He plays a mascara-smeared wino with his pants around his ankles, prancing and writhing and he cusses and spits out lyrics so stupid they're brilliant. An Elvis croon gets lost in an animal's guttural slobbing and extended sexual hyperventilations. A microphone is blowjobbed, and a stage floor is thoroughly humped. But beneath it all, you are aware that all of this is parody, a front for the kind of witty theatrics that far pre-date rock 'n' roll. "Can Your Pussy Do the Dog" is about fucking, right? No. Oh, no. It's the courtesan's dry humor in another era when men wore high heels. It's like if Momus fell in love with Ricky Nelson instead of Japan.

I'm really not ready to provide you with an album-by-album chronology, or to highlight the finer points of their low-light career. I appreciate The Cramps as a broad, sopping mess of decade's worth of material, all of it throbbing snarky on basically the same note--funny, weird, and beautiful. But even that, though true, might be too much to say, because in the end, they are just a simple rock 'n' roll band; and maybe The Cramps are just Lux and Ivy's elaborate homage to the greatest bands of all time. But either way, I am glad they are from Ohio.

My tentative love affair with the Kim Deal began over ten years ago, under the sweltering August sun of George, Washington. A fairly heavy day for me: my first concert proper was to expose me to many a wonder, not the least of which would be my first Nick Cave and Smashing Pumpkins performances. I was 13 years old, and had made the mistake of wearing sandals--a slip up I came to regret the second that a then-fledgling major label band named Green Day opened the day-long crash course in alternative rock, causing the sudden disappearance of my footwear from beneath me. Kim was 33.

Sure, I'd heard that rolling radio phenomenon "Cannonball," and had just barely borrowed my friend's Bossanova cassette, but the Breeders were little more than a footnote in the spectrum of performers at alt-rock's alter--Lollapalooza 1994. That was until I saw Kim. From that moment on, we were inseparable.

The truth of the matter is, as a person who grew up largely without the careful hand of an older sibling guiding me patiently through the annuls of college rock's mystical history, it generally took me a little longer than some to fully develop my musical aesthetic--my spongy, ill-formed critical perceptions percolated on matters for a great deal longer than was often necessary, as a great deal of what I responded to didn't fully make contextual sense to me. Which is to say that Last Splash--one of the alternative rock era's true and total works of art--didn't exactly make sense to me upon first listen. Or second listen. Or for about two years. Still, there was always something there... and as the cracks began to fill in--Pixies discography, Pod, etc.--my understanding of Last Splash continued to grow, to the point now that it seems so much a part of my vernacular that it may as well be the Beatles or something. Strange that it all seemed so foreign then.

Still, Last Splash is a really weird alt-rock record, when it comes right down to it--sonically, very little else from the era sounds anything like it. Kim's beautifully layered, often totally obscured vocals singing siren songs in a style so singular and distinct that they should be patented, the stutter stopped and sludgy beauty, the crazy number of instrumentals, and one of the weirdest hit singles of any era (seriously, have you ever listened to "Cannonball"? 'Kay, first of all, shit starts out with this weird, super distorted "check, check, check," followed by multiple voices doing some kind of primal chanting, which suddenly give way to some soft rim-and-hardware hits on a drumkit. Then into the most infectious two chord pop song of all time--underneath which we hear the Deal sisters cracking their shit up for the first verse, like it's all some sort of caustic joke they've just played on us, drilling us with a melody that will never, ever leave our heads completely--then into one of the least memorable choruses of ever. Then there's the three solid seconds of silence in the middle.). No wonder it's quite possibly the most common record at every pawn shop I've ever been to (next to R.E.M.'s Monster, of course)--it's an altogether impossible sell to teenage kids who were at the time just trying to round out the Columbia House orders.

But enough about Last Splash for now--what I really want to talk about is Kim.

Beginning her career as Mrs. John Murphy (later divorced)--bassist and very occasional songwriter for that band that won't fucking stop touring these days--Deal silky, husked voice was always the butter on the Pixies' otherwise (palatably) caustic howl. I've always been a fan of the writing of Everett True, and I distinctly recall that the first piece of his that really connected deeply with me was a snarky dismissal of the Pixies catalog--which stated first that the band only had two good records, and second that "Gigantic" was by far their greatest song, and that Frank Black was an idiot for not exploiting Kim Deal's talents more often. This stupidity was set in stone with the mid-Pixies release of Pod, the Breeders' first record.

As previous stated in the annuls of GBoAT, Pod is something like the perfect counterpoint to Frank Black's self-titled solo album, together defining the two most distinct halves of the Pixies. Needless to say, Pod is totally brilliant.

Initially a collaboration with Throwing Muses' Tanya Donnelly (who went on to bore us all with Belly), the Breeders soon became largely Deal's... well, deal by the time her twin sister Kelley joined the band to record Last Splash. We've already talked about Last Splash, so let's move on to my second rendezvous with the lady Deal--this time one year later touring behind Pacer, the one and only album released by her poorly-received Breeders side-project (formed while Kelley was in one of her frequent rehab stints) called The Amps. Now 14, my love for Kim had matured a great deal of those months--enough for me to see past the awe-inspiring youthful beauty of openers Bikini Kill (who earlier that year I had learned I was supposed to like), and patiently await more womanly wiles. Like most people in 1995, I was pretty bummed on the Amps, but the ten years that have past since have really done wonders for Pacer--though it never really jumps out at you like the rest of the Deal catalog, it has a lot of subtle charms, not the least of which is the largely overlooked single "Pacer," I song which I've probably listened to more than any other in the past year, "B.Y.O.B" included.

After the Amps fiasco, the Breeders, for all intents and purposes, disappeared for the better part of eight years--living high on royalties from Prodigy's uber-hit "Firestarter," which samples a chunk of "Cannonball." In that time, Kim dropped a couple of memorable guest spots--most notably on Sonic Youth's "Little Trouble Girl," which may very well (stupidly) be my favorite Sonic Youth song.

In the mean, I secretly began harboring the fear of near-inescapable disappointment married to such high expectations.

After countless false starts trying to record a follow-up to Last Splash with a bunch of different line-ups, the band finally mustered Title TK in 2002. (TK is a shorthand copyediting placeholder for "to come"--a grinning reference to the record's long delay.) It's a little indulgent, sure, and by no means worth the years of production that went into it, but any record that can withstand eight years (!) of expectation, has got to be doing something right.

In awkward conclusion, I'd like to solidify for you, dear reader, not only my overwhelming obsession with Kim Deal's music, but also my generally inexplicable physical attraction to her to this day. This obsession is so deep, in fact, that some years ago had a rather involved make-out dream that revolving around Kelley Deal, and when I awoke, I was really disappointed with myself. And they're TWINS. So maybe she's a little manish, and, like, 20 years my senior. So what? She also the Greatest Band of All Time, and that's gotta count for something, right?

An englishman who started a prog-ish rock band at the age of 16 (in 1967) went on to play in bands named Uriel, Khan, and Gong then had a solo career that included both blazing amazing prog albums on the level of Yes that were all about fish and made incredibly beautiful soft ambient pre new age music, produced Robyn Hitchcock and Simple Minds records, and then formed an electronic dance music "collective" called System 7 (that also featured members of The Orb and Paul Oakenfold) that was powerful a forerunner of progressive house and trance is clearly the Greatest Band of All Time. Steve Hillage is this man.

Before going solo Hillage was known as a powerful warrior of the weapon known in the biz as "the axe," for all your laymans, that means guitar. In Gong, which was a pretty big prog band Hillage was revered for his "blazing solos" and "mind melting licks and riffs." Hillage could not be so easily defined as only a "guitar warrior" or "guitarrior." He had much more in him, and after Gong's triumphant Randio Gnome Invisible trilogy of albums Hillage left Gong and recorded his first solo album, Fish Rising in 1975. The opening track "Solar Musick Suite" is an epic 16 minute prog romp that really sets the creative tone for Hillage's solo career. The music is incredibly complex, but not just wanky and pompous like some prog music can tend to be. Fish Rising is a really excellent album that shows Hillage slightly shying away from the shredding solos and focusing more on the band as a whole and the songs shifting and the different parts, even though there are a few wicked rippers.

Hillage's next album, L, is a bit of a conundrum. It was produced by Todd Rundgren and features some rad guests like jazz great Don Cherry. It is much more eastern influenced than Fish Rising, which can be cool at points, but at times feels a little slapped on there. To further deeper the confusion factor, the album opens with a cover of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man," and closes with a cover of George Harrison's "It's All To Much," which ends up being a lot of covers on an album with only 6 tracks. Speaking of Donovan, doesn't Hillage look like Noah Georgeson of The Pleased and Devendra Banhart's band. L has some really sublime moments though, like "Lunar Musick Suite" (a sequel to "Solar Musick Suite"). Overall, L is a bit lacking.

Hillage made a few more solo album becoming less Yes-y and more Pink Floyd-y, but also not as consistently powerful as the first two. In 1979 Hillage took a sharp left turn and released Rainbow Dome Musick. With only two tracks, "Garden of Paradise," and "Four Ever Rainbow" the album clocks in at about 43 minutes. You do the math. Rainbow Dome Musick is gorgeous. Near rhythm less, and completely voice less the album is an ambient classic. All Music Guide says about the album "Rainbow Dome Musick is too avant-garde to be classified as a new age album and too sleek sounding to fit into any progressive rock subgenres, but no matter how it's categorized, it's an excellent example of Steve Hillage's adeptness and vast musical background." The album opens with the sound of water flowing softly and is joined then by layers of rising and falling keyboards that somehow sound like pyramids. Hillage brings the perfect guitar work to the album giving you the exact amount of note movement that is needed. The album also features these bells that are Hillage's signature all the way back to Fish Rising. They appear at the start of a track sometime and they set a tone of clarity, and sound most appropriate on Rainbow Dome Musick .

Hillage never made another album quite like Rainbow Dome Musick. In the 80s he mostly produced other bands, but when Rainbow Dome Musick was refound by some influential music makers at the time (Alex Patterson of The Orb) Hillage got back into creating himself. He formed System 7 which alternated between making blissed out electronic ambient music and making proto progressive house/techno/trance. System 7 became leaders and grand old dames in the electronic music scene releasing records every 3 or 4 years.

Steve Hillage may have had some silly lyrics, and he may have made a prog album about fish, and he might not have always been consistent, but he made an album called Rainbow Dome Musick and he made the album amazing enough that that title actually made sense and that makes him The Greatest Band of All Time.

I moved from Cleveland Ohio suburbs to Grand Rapids Michigan in fall of 1999. My first year there, I was bitterly disappointed, having imagined that everyone's move to college brought cascades of new discoveries and strange new refined/unrefined culture. I learned to love it eventually, but my new home didn't have an art house theatre, a record store to speak of, or a video store weird enough to rent Antonioni movies. I mean, at this point it totally makes sense that I wouldn't feel excited about Michigan. I had't driven across the state to see Lovesick yet.

October of 2000, a dude a year younger than me I had just met asked me if I wanted to drive him to Ann Arbor that weekend. He was all like, "dude, flashpapr is playing the Pirate House and Lovesick is playing the Detroit Contemporary!" These names meant nothing to me, but I kind of knew from his enthusiasm for these shows that I needed to go. So I did. Aside from a couple tracks from a weird dorm room record player, I showed up that Friday night at the Detroit Contemporary almost entirely cold. All I knew was that both Lovesick and flashpapr starred this dude named Fred Thomas. The bands sounded nothing like each other.

It sounded crazy to me, the scene we were traveling to. I felt like I was peeling back the tent flap on exactly the kind of circus I wanted to see. This little town with a thousand bands and shows every night and the rock stars wrote diaryland entries and drank Mountain Dew with all the rock kids.
Just like everytime I ever went to see a show at the Detroit Contemporary, no matter how late I thought I was for the show, I would walk in and the first band would be loading in their equipment. So, my friend and I just kind of cooled it, and I tried to pretend that I wasn't trying to look so much cooler than I was. A dude who looked just like Basquiat came in. I thought he was high.

Then Fred Thomas bounded in the venue. He was super psyched to see my friend. He seemed like a 10 year old kid who is almost crying from excitement to go climb trees because he is very sickly and usually he is laid up with rheumatism all summer : maybe like Robert Louis Stephenson in his Counterpane days. I'm mostly not kidding. That's the way I can explain the kind of desperate happiness that Fred had. He had an old camera strapped around him that he said his boss just gave him as a going away present. He was moving to New York City. He took portraits of everybody he knew at the show. He told us that he had gotten his wisdom teeth out that day. His junk looked all swollen.

An hour later or whatever, Lovesick took the stage. I seriously wasn't the same after they did. I really actually was not the same after they played. You can look at a picture of them. A picture is worth a thousand words. right? That's really not true about pictures of punk bands. Nikki Margosian on bass. Do I have to let you know that I had a crush on her for a couple years? Do I? Michael Troutman on guitar. They stood there in that way that people in fast bands can stand there if they have a frontman that would steal any spotlight that would have been on them anyway. Who stood there like that? The bassist from The Who? John Entwistle? Totally. Same thing. Because Fred Thomas entirely "TAZZED OUT" on the drum kit.

It was one of those delicate balances of violence type of deals that always seems falling apart. I think he's a tall guy, but at the very least he's a lanky guy, and he played a pretty minimal drum kit like he was flailing trying not to sink in water. FRANTIC. These kind of drummers are always fun to watch. The Deerhoof guy and the Lightning Bolt guy. But Fred SANG too. He was the singer in Lovesick, and to be able to, he wore the jankiest little frail headset mic you have ever seen; the kind that comes with a shoddy tank video game at CompUSA. So as Fred flailed, the headset, with the combination of all the herky-jerky and all the sweat, would start creeping for the edge of his head. In those rare fleeting moments of silence in their songs, he would grab for it and set the world to right. But in between he would be leaning back in his seat to keep it from falling, the microphone dangling into his mouth like a fish hook. In one of these moments that night, I could see the blood splattered against the back of his mouth. I could see the wounds left in his body by that day's carnage.

This brings me to the other remarkable thing about Lovesick shows. The talking. The dang monologues. The verbosity and ferocity with which Fred Thomas attacked between song banter. It wasn't like those rock show moments where whichever drunk guy yells "Play a SONG!" either. The talking was part of the Lovesick show. They had 2 minute long songs, and half hour sets, and half of that was Fred gasping for breath, getting up and pacing, and giving manically rambling monologues. He explained, and more often expounded on the songs. The themes were almost always about screwed up communication and hearts on fire hurting each other and not meaning to (or meaning to), and not going to the parties and going for walks instead, or just going to the parties and hooking up and feeling horrible about making a problem worse.

Here are some lyrics from the latest record Fred has put out (with his band Saturday Looks Good To Me) that fit in with Lovesick monologues a lot.

"By the drum kit in the basement I was trying to get to sleep. I heard your voice come through the floorboards on my answering machine. But by the time I reached the phone's ring, the only thing still singing was the dial-tone."

Missed chances, foiled communication, the frailty of young hearts. That's what Fred shrieked about in every Lovesick song, and in the audience I don't see how you couldn't feel it. The shows took you to a place it's hard to get to. And Fred acted like such a hopped up shaman that you started looking at everything like metaphors. The wrecked drums, the disastrous mic, the vocals that warbled and spiraled out of control; they all fit into Lovesick as a package. And I looked at it that way consciously at the time. Like a couple paragraphs up when I was talking about seeing his bloody wisdom teeth mess? I remember looking at that and saying "I can see the wounds left in his body by today's carnage. That is just like the songs he is singing." Who thinks that?? What? Not me! I'm not that corny of a dude to be thinking stuff that sounds like My Chemical Romance lyrics in my head or anything, but that's what Lovesick did. They made the late teens and early 20's feel like tragedy we were coming together to mourn. No. That's totally wrong. I think it's more like we were celebrating the speed and passion of young adulthood, but mourning the fact that it can be so derailed.

"WORDS RING FOREVER. YOUNG HEARTS DON'T LAST. YOU MUST MOVE FAST."

Here's a short part of a zine interview with Fred about Lovesick

Music should be an expression of something. Music is something inside of you that has to get out for whatever reason. Music is something within oneself

I could say this about whatever music I'm playing, and it would probably be really dumb. Lovesick is the only band I've ever seen play where I could completely trust that they weren't playing music because they were bored college kids. The music they played was inside them. It NEEDED to get out for whatever reason.

The music that lovesick makes is a complete and exact expression of the times that we are going through right now. Lyrically for me it's about things that are happening to me and what has happened to me for the past 20 years. Musically it is an expression of what is happening to the three of us.

Again, this was so apparent. There wasn't a conceit to Lovesick. It came out exactly how it felt.

[music] is communication. It's about people talking to other people. Not like I am on stage and its some mystical thing. I just want to communicate everything that is possible. People should listen to things they don't like and read books by people that aren't like them. People should try to have as many cross cultural, cross racial, and cross gender experiences as they possibly can. So they can become better people and understand people better. This is what we are trying to say in our band to do.

And this seems to be the most important part. Lovesick yearned for communication. Heart to heart with every emotionally scarred kid in Ann Arbor.

So it was like that. Two minutes of spazz out, and two minutes of hearing a guy dangerously out of breath write his generation's diary page in front of you. Exhausting. Before the last song, Fred decided to thank every band they had ever played a show with. People started yelling stuff out like "LED ZEP!" and "SALT & PEPA!" and he would repeat everything that they yelled out. He went on, alternating between real punk bands they played with, and the joke bands people suggested for a couple minutes. Then he grabbed his camera and took a picture of the whole audience, saying he wanted to remember all of us forever because it was the most important time in his life. I don't like to say "heady" a lot, but it was "heady stuff". Lovesick was one of the shows you left looking at your friends wide-eyed like, "I can't believe we just saw that."

And I guess there's no way I can even get into the Lovesick discography. Their first self titled 12" was amazing and excactly what it needed to be. Their second full length was a self titled cd on Makoto records. The songs and the performances on it are amazing. They put out splits with Aloha and a band called Emergency and a couple other bands. It's all good. The sad part is, I don't know if Lovesick records would have ever snagged me like they did if I had never seen the Lovesick show. Maybe it doesn't matter that much at this point, though, since I can't find a single one of their releases to buy online.

Fred Thomas has a bunch of other projects; his Phil Spector sounding studio thing called Saturday Looks Good To Me, the mystical avant-folk band flashpapr which is basically done or on hiatus forever, the afro-pop band he helps out in called Nomo, and his solo records, which sound like Bob Dylan or something. They're all really amazing, and Fred Thomas, overall, is one of my favorite people making music, but Lovesick was my first, and the most shocking, and the most heart rending, and for these reasons, it's no exaggeration when I describe them as The Greatest Band Of All Time.

There are bands whose genius inspires me to want to create something lasting and great and moving and relevant and personal and beautiful--one perfect thing that will make all of my futile toiling on this planet seem remotely worthwhile. There are other bands whose greatness just infuriates me to the point that I never want to touch an instrument again. And then there are bands like The Curtains, who walk a line between these two extremes so thin that only the Greatest Band In the World could possibly traverse it. Because Curtains--at their best--create the music of my dreams, and that I could never dream to make.

Initially a partnership between Californians Chris Cohen and Trevor Shimizu (then called Dynathought Imagination Band), The Curtains took shape in earnest sometime between 2000-2001 when the duo absorbed drummer Jamie Peterson into the fold. This line-up dissolved almost entirely following the limited release of the LP Fast Talks, leaving Cohen--then also a member of Natural Dreamers--alone to his own devices in pursuit of the project. It was roughly around this same time that Cohen was asked to join a little band by the name of Deerhoof--this immediately following the release of that band's critically acclaimed breakthrough, Reveille. It's at this point, of course, that--in spite of chronology--Curtains immediately became relegated to the status of Deerhoof side project, an appraisal only aided by Deerhoof founder Greg Saunier's new-found membership in the band.

With drummer Andrew Maxwell (L.A.'s Open City), the new lineup recorded "Flybys"--a 23 song LP of jumpy, playful, largely instrumental half-thoughts that clocks in at just over a half hour; nine songs not even cresting the nine-minute mark. "Flybys"--which seems to limit the band largely to Cohen's single guitar, Maxwell's stammering percussion, and Saunier's hiccuped blurts from a Radioshack Moog--is stuffed painfully full of dissonant, careful conceptualism that, in spite of a great number of overall successes, never seems to gel quite right.

Following the release of "Flybys", Curtains took a brief West Coast jaunt with Japan's brilliant Maher Shalal Hash Baz (which, by the way, was one of the most inspiring shows I've ever had the fortune of attending), whose joyful pop experimentalism seemed to have a profound effect on the band's creative process. Following the release of Deerhoof's stellar Apple'O, the band cranked out Vehicles of Travel--an absolutely brilliant record which finds Curtains diving headlong into pop waters in 23 beautifully melodic vignettes. As far as experimentalists go, Curtains had always been surprisingly buoyant, but with Vehicles, the band hits a virtually perfect semblance of intentionally clunky experimental composition and nostalgic pop craft. Contextually, the songs often ring with a sort of wistful PBS jingle purity, with singing on roughly half of the songs--perhaps a turn off to fans of the band's previous, more challenging work, but a boon for bored pop obsessives like myself. Vehicles is a great deal more of a proper album that the band's previous recordings--unlike it's predecessors, who were mostly just recorded representations of the way the songs were performed live, the album's textures and layers a composed in large part during the recording process--a working method that, though apparently very taxing on the band, works to great effect.

At last I checked in with Chris, Curtains are on an indefinite hiatus as Deerhoof continues to dominate the free world--but if Vehicles is any indication, I can only pray that it's not the last we hear from the Greatest Band Of All Time.