I Like Max Tundra...

...and until Fluxblog quoted this from his Twitter...: (I'd re-tweet, but everything here goes to my twitter anyway)

Lady Gaga should perform a concert of wildly unpredictable, dazzling, psychedelic music whilst wearing drab, conventional clothing.

...I'd never heard of the chap. Now I think I shall check his music out.

MmmmmmmmFree Vinyl...

Having slagged poor Pitchfork and Magnet enough of late, I thought to return to Filter and see what suckitude I could find there. Instead, I find serendipity: a free giveaway of turntable & records.

I mean, I've already got a turntable (two, actually), and already have It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back on CD, and am not super interested in any of the rest save Pavement and Bad Brains, but still. Free. Expletive. Vinyl. I'm so excited, I'm creating an all new blog tag.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Killed and Revived.

This is what I mean when I talk about the music industry double-helix:



Eight years ago, when the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion released Plastic Fang, Pitchfork had these words of encouragement:

In response to those failures, Spencer & Co. have returned to the basics for Plastic Fang: two guitars, a bag full of riffs, and frequent interjections of "Blues Explosion!" Never mind the tiny fact that the band's gimmick, if tired in the mid-nineties, is downright comatose these days. Nobody seems to have informed JSBX that the world's music warehouse has become overstocked on pale-faced blues, with the White Stripes, etc. improving the sound by keeping things quick and raw while dispensing with the ironic wink.

And now that they've got a greatest hits out, the kings of consistency appraise it thusly:

Dirty Shirt Rock 'n' Roll surveys the years between their 1992 debut and 2002's Plastic Fang. Unlike the consistently name-checked and beloved Pavement, another Matador band with a new retrospective in stores, the Blues Explosion seem ripe for re-evaluation. The early-2000s garage rock revival and the success of the White Stripes have given us a new context to hear these disarrayed blues-rock excursions, which similarly peel back the layers to get to rock's core elements.

 Now, I could go through a few more paragraphs of dudgeon, explaining that I always rather liked Plastic Fang, but I'm saving that for my CD ratings. So I'll give Pitchfork the same shrift I gave Spin: They're a Bunch of Whores.

The Third Man is a Fire Hose.

I didn't get the last Dead Weather album, even though I'm a fan of Jack White in general and Alison Mosshart in particular. I did, however, buy their first single on 45 on Record Store Day, and I have dug it on repeated listenings. So when the news comes down the pike that There's a new album, I am both impressed, intrigued, and slightly worried.

Impressed, because White just keeps pumping out the product. This is the lesson Beck learned to climb his way back to relevance: three albums in three years. You're a musician, make music. Keep throwing it out there and the public is bound to like some of it. I concur.

Intrigued, and slightly worried, by the concept and cover art. I do hope that White hasn't decided to go political on us, or if he has, he's going to be slightly more nuanced than musicians usually are. But the Klan-ish imagery suggests he's going to go all Olbermann on us, and then I might have to stop being a fan.

This may not bode well, either.

Rating My CD's: Dream Brother

9.  Jeff Buckley -- Grace 

Whatever I was doing in 1994 (graduating high school, working at Taco Hell, beginning college, etc), I wasn't listening to Jeff Buckley's Grace. Or much of anything else, to be honest; I approached the rhapsodized early-90's music scene with equal parts attraction, confusion, and mockery. My big purchase that year was Green Day's Dookie (on cassette, so it won't appear in this retrospective). I never even heard of the guy for nearly twelve years; when Spin put him on their Top 100 Albums of the 20 years they'd been in existence. I liked the cover art, which reminded me of a more grownup Sid Vicious, I liked the name, so I checked it out. And I didn't know what to make of it.

Every time I've listened to it since, I've had the same reaction. It certainly defies categorization, or even adjectivization.  I want to call it Operatic Rock, by which I mean nothing like Rock Opera. I want to call it Dream Pop. I want to call it the Perfect Album to Take a Nap To, but I've never taken a nap to it.

Rating My CD's: WOO-HOO!

8. Blur -- Blur

The first time I heard Blur was sometime in college, during their Parklife phase, and I responded to them with active nausea. For some reason "Girls and Boys" was the most irritating song I heard that year, and I had no problem with making my feelings on this subject well known to any of my friends who were Blur fans. I'm still not a super-fan of the song; there's something in that rubber-band bass that just triggers the gag reflex, to say nothing of that wretched "always should be someone you really love" line, which can't decide if it's being cheekily naive or ironic. But where once was loathing has come now a kind of quiet understanding, if only because I endured far worse in the long dark rut of late-90's glam-disco sloppy-seconds.

Guess Who's Still Alive, Part II

The following artists have Top 25 CD's on Amazon as we speak:

• Jimi Hendrix
• Sade
• Johnny Cash
• Jeff Beck
• K.D. Lang
• Peter Gabriel
• Ry Cooder
• Drive-By Truckers
• Gorillaz
• The Black-Eyed Peas

The last few are the only evidence that the last decade even happened. Unless you count Susan Boyle, and I don't want to.

Indie Hits the Wall

Because I'm not that into "indie" music, I don't know much about Joanna Newsom. I've heard the name, sure, scattered about the mags like so much hipster detritus, but never bothered to listen. The name does not excite me and I've other things to do.

So it's something that Nitsuh Abebe, inaugurating Pitchfork's "Why We Fight" feature, draws me into an analysis of the elbow-throwing and hyper-criticism of the music world that centers on Newsom. The theme runs universal, I think, fandom puts pressure on artists to meet ever-rising expectations while limiting the range in which the artist can act on them. A typical band fan wants every record to sound like the one he/she fell in love with, and yet be different. The impossibility of this diminishes its ubiquity not one jot.

Besides, we want pop stars to be oversized and perverse-- often we want them to think they're more special than us. My question, though, is this: Don't we want the same level of imagination and confidence from indie acts? And if so, why do a lot of us seem slightly wary about the possibility? Why celebrate pretense and bold gestures in pop music, but get weirdly skeptical of them in the indie world? It's as if we've reached the point where one long-running indie value-- the idea that the performers are a lot like the audience-- has started eating up a much more interesting one: that indie can be a realm that embraces oddity and strangeness. This is the funny predicament of a lot of talk about modern indie. It's as if the audience doesn't think of itself as very interesting, and is skeptical of any band that comes out of its midst thinking it's any better. (Especially if people, somewhere outside of the indie world, seem to agree.) Successful, self-conscious strangeness in the mainstream is a triumph; the same thing in this fringe genre is, for some reason, sometimes considered pretentious, self-satisfied, laughable, overstepping one's station.

This sounds exactly like the problem that punk rock had/has: the grooves are so well worn, the visual and audio expectations so determined in the word "punk" that it's impossible to push the envelope without becoming something else, and thereby losing the audience. I'm as guilty as anyone else; most of what gets called "melodic punk" sounds overwrought and dull to my ears, while what gets called "77-style" sounds like a tedious copy of other bands work. There's something of inevitability to this process; rock music is deliberately amateurish and there's only so much you can do with 12-bar structure and pentatonic solos.

So maybe the answer is recognizing the un-originality of this and embracing the repitition, or at least, not being surprised by it. I'm rather moving in this direction myself; there's no pleasure in telling people "This was better 20 years ago, when it was __________" except as sharing _____________ as something cool. We don't need to reject the Raveonettes to save the Jesus & Mary Chain.

Overall, though, I'm intrigued by this series. Music meta-criticism is rather long overdue.

Pitchfork Alerts Us

New Label Alert: Tri Angle

Tri Angle will exist to perform a genre with the working title of "drag" What's "drag" sound like, you say? Well...

It's like a witching-hour vision of Cocteau Twins dream pop, meshed with the roar of early-60's British skiffle and the soundtrack to a particularly angsty Gregg Araki film full of Gen X shoegazer atmospherics and industrial beats, sieved gently through Ukrainian disco-folk, the good kind, brought bang up to the date by the influence of raw hip-hop mutations like chopped and screwed and juke, at which point we take these bits, these sonic doodles if you will, and we play them raw over muted clips of old Laurence Welk or Sonny & Cher clips, while we strap the listener in and make him watch, Clockwork-Orange style. We're not joking about that. We've got the basement all set up, and there's a user-agreement that comes with the download, CD, or LP. The effect is a major drag, and the great thing about the name of the genre is that we're not intending that ironically. Irony is dead anyway.

That's not actually what the person said. I added a bit. See if you can guess where.

The Greatest

Lists are tedious. They just are. Whatever you include is wrong. Whatever you disinclude is wrong. It's why I don't write them. The X most Blah of Whatever format will never ever appear on the Notion. Unless I change my mind.

That said, sometimes it can be done right, and over at Big Hollywood, Ben Shapiro show the best way to write a list feature: extensively. First, he issued a 10 Most Overrated Directors of All Time that had a few directors I quite like (Scorcese? Really?). Then in response to the obvious response, he put his money where his mouth was and gave us the Directors He Liked, including explaining why certain guys (it's a sausage-fest in here, ladies, sorry) didn't make the list. I don't know that I'm about to go rent the movies of William Wyler, but I'm appreciating the fullness of his thought.

Opinions are Like Rocks. They're Everywhere, but You Can't Eat Them.

Andrew Earles hates Spiritualized and all things Jason Pierce, as he makes abundantly clear:

Jason Pierce was a 32-year-old man when he decided it was a novel idea to present a limited number of 1997’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space CDs in fake prescription-pill packaging. An 11th-grader blasted on Lortabs for the first time doesn’t have ideas like this; he has better ones....For some reason, telling the ugly truth about this aggressively mediocre outfit is the music-criticism equivalent of telling dead-baby jokes in a Planned Parenthood waiting room.

Matthew Perpetua, on the other hand, finds him damn fine:

Is there anyone else who can self-flagellate with as much elegance, wit, and grandiosity as Jason Pierce? “Come Together” is a masterpiece of over-the-top self-loathing, a thunderous mass of shrieking guitars, blaring fanfare, and gospel bombast all at the service of a scathing lyric sung by Pierce in the first person, tearing himself apart for being a junkie.

And me? I'd have to listen to the guy to make a descision, and I don't want to, because I hate the band name. At some point I'm going to have to go into the logic behind my band name contempt process, but for the nonce, I'm just going to make a tag out of it.

Get Rythmn in your Melody

The author of this article on rythmn, melody, and pop music knows a hell of a lot more than I do. Or for that matter, most people who consider themselves "music" journalists. And he makes the argument that music is a moral force, that it is the expression of the soul. And as such, it ought to be submitted to judgment.

And even if we don’t forbid musical idioms by law, we should remember that people with musical tastes make our laws; and Plato may be right, even in relation to a modern democracy, that changes in musical culture go hand in hand with changes in the laws, since changes in the laws so often reflect pressures from culture. There is no doubt that popular music today enjoys a status higher than any other cultural product. Pop stars are first among celebrities, idolised by the young, taken as role models, courted by politicians, and in general endowed with a magic aura that gives them power over crowds. It is surely likely, therefore, that something of their message will rub off on the laws passed by the politicians who admire them. If the message is sensual, self-centered, and materialistic, then we should not expect to find that our laws address us from any higher realm than that implies.

I cannot argue. I freely admit that most of the music we listen to is deliberately primitive; it appeals to the animal instincts and not to the heart. Most of the music that appeals to the heart, in fact, bores me. For me, music is not a complement to my life, but a vacation from it. What that means about me, and modern music, will require serious thought.

Rating My CD's: Things Ain't Like They Used to Be, They're More So

7. The Black Keys -- Attack & Release

In 1970, under the auspices of reviewing Fun House by the Stooges, Lester Bangs emitted a prophecy that I have quoted several times, including somewhere on this very blog:

Personally I believe that real rock n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we will have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

While the argument about whether that "new free music" ever arrived (hip hop doesn't quite seem to qualify) may continue until the seven seals are opened, the rest of the prediction has turned out to be cannily accurate. Every decade rock finds a way to re-invent itself, and every decade it does so by picking up and polishing off an older style and gussying it up with some more reworkings, until its hard to tell what era a band really hails from.

Let's Get this Bloc Party Started

Nothing dies a crueler death than trends. Bloc Party was hipped to the nines back in '05 by the cognoscenti, and has now all but vanished from their consciousness (who here remembers the laudatory reviews of Intimacy?). Which means it's now perfectly fine for me to get into them. Post-Punk revivalism may have had its hour in the moon already, but the techno-waves ridden by Lady GaGa and the ease with which Yeah Yeah Yeahs have souled their soul to electronica mean there's always a place to go, and go back to.

So I'll probably thank my friend that reminded me of them come easter time if I end up liking them.

The Tunes Roll On...

My next RMCD is in the pipe, but the busy has descended on me. By tommorrow I should have time to blog again.

The Third Album Hump

poptartssucktoasted makes a good point about third albums in their review of a band I'll probably never listen to, and certainly not in the next month or so (gave up extraneous spending and video games for Lent):

The third record is an absolutely pivotal time in a band’s career. For two records you have steadily attempted to define yourself and build up an audience for you music and that third record is when bands tend to make it or break it for good. Either you become a lifer and get to make music for the rest of your life or you fall into reclusion resurfacing only when there is a call for a reunion.

A fellow might take an opportunity to look at third albums in major bands over the last twenty years or so and see if this rule works out. This would take a lot of work. I'm probably not up to it. But it's nice to think about while I get around to my next CD review.

Magnet's Over/Under: The Over/Under

Just about weekly, Magnet Magazine considers the seminal artists of alternative/underground music and picks five of their more well-known tunes to call Overrated, and five others to call Underrated, in a feature they call the Over/Under (due to the well-known connection between music and gambling). These picks are usually thought-out and well-argued, with what should be more than enough self-directed irony to make the medicine go down, and the invariable effect on the magazine's readership is analogous with pissing in their faces and telling them its raining. Below, the Over/Under on the whole enterprise.

::The Most Overrated Part of the Over/Under Feature
1. The Overrated Songs (Whatever Year This Started)
The essential argument goes like this: the most popular songs of hip artists are rather more liked than they should be, because they obscure other songs through the insidious practice of  -- stay with me now -- being more popular. That such can only be underlied by one of two premises: 1) music fans, a.k.a "sheeple," know fuck-all about what is good; or 2) music critics are confused by the meaning of the word "popular"; is lost on the writers, and they must go to greater and greater apologetics every time they slag a beloved track. The poor fellow who penned the  Nirvana Over/Under, bowed under with the obviousness of putting "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at the top of the Overrated list actually utters the words "What am I supposed to do here?" (I don't know, write something you don't desire mercy for?) Way too much agita derives from these selections, which, as the editors point out, are inherent to the nature of the feature. I mean, it's not like some obscure song that failed to grasp popular imagination but was relentlessly hipped by the music literati could ever be considered overrated.

::The Most Underrated Part of the Over/Under Feature

 1. The Underrated Songs (Yadda, Yadda)
About half of the objections to Over/Unders in the comment section are vengeance upon the writers taking the form of telling them that the songs they offer as better are in fact crap.  A typical example, from the aforementioned Nirvana Over/Under:

And seriously, Marigold? Give me a break. That song was terrible. Why not pick some other totally obscure song that no one ever heard unless you were me at age 16 buying bootlegs for $49.00 from) the local head shop.

This attitude strikes me as wrong for a couple of reasons. For one, obscure and neglected songs are the reason we have music critics. It's the same reason you flip through your friend's record collection. If I didn't occasionally let my one housemate try to turn me on to the Dandy Warhols back in 1999, I never would have rented Dig!, never heard of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and never would have bought My Bloody Underground upon Filter's recommendation, and would thus not have what has become one of my favorite albums. Turning away knowledge, any knowledge, is inherently stupid and self-defeating. And while nothing is easier for a critic to write than "Hey, check out this deep track!" (except, of course, "your favorite songs suck"), there's also nothing as potentially rewarding to heed.

"King Rat" better than "Dance Hall"? Poser!

Ace Reviews "It Might Get Loud"

Slapfight in comments over which guitarist is the best ensues... I pretend to be above it all and then proceed to engage in it.

Rocking out with The Pope...

The Official Vatican Newspaper releasing a Top Ten Albums List is bizarre, and it is not bizarre. It wasn't an official pronouncement of the Pope, it was some editors at the newspaper with space to fill, something fun to brighten up a section. In my days as an editor of a college newspaper, this kind of thing happened all the time. And I can't really fault them for putting Revolver at the top slot. Still, one can't shake the impression that this is worlds colliding, which seems to be happening a lot around the Vatican these days.

80+ years old, and takes a tackle like a champ. Best Pope ever.

But, as the video shows, everything will go on as before.

Nikolai Broke the Zoom...

But apparently the Strokes will keep him anyway...



Here's hoping after four years everyone's willing to give them a chance again.