"So You Think You Hate Punk Rock? 5 Bands That Will Change Your Mind" sounds promising. It has precisely one band that most mainstream music fans haven't already heard of and associated with Punk Rock: Radio Birdman. The rest are the Damned, The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash. All of which are fine (with reservations on the Clash that I'll go into later), but hardly a fresh look at the (non) genre. I would have added instead:
The Voidoids
Television
The Misfits
The Buzzcocks
All of which are second-tier bands of slightly less renown, and all of which bring a slightly different element. And as Glen Reynolds points out, there's a lot of good ground to be covered in Proto-Punk like the MC5 or the Stooges. That may not be Iggy Pop in the picture atop the article, but it's someone actively copying him.
Okay, so Lou Reed and Metallica are doing an album. Fine. The guy behind Metal Machine Music hooking up with LarsCo should surprise no one. The album covers looks like something Tool left on the cutting-room floor, but whatevs. Good for them. Maybe it won't suck.
But Jack White cutting a song with the Insane Clown Posse? The news made me a little sad inside. And it's not because I consider ICP unworthy of the Hipster Sage of Nashville. The White Stripes are hardly cultivated. And it's not because I find ICP so repellent and loathsome that the very mention of their name inspires violence. Fat kids who can't read need music, too.
No, I find the ICP's self-conception completely at odds with what they actually do. If they were just another (c)rap-rock band from the sticks, then there would be nothing specifically objectionable about them. At the very least, they don't consider themselves sex gods like Fred Durst clearly does.
But ICP seems to think of themselves as artists, the leaders of a movement of the dispossessed, and speakers of a primal truth. They think that every thing they do, from their juvenile name on down, is terribly terribly clever. That annoys me more than any goofy makeup or sprayed Faygo.
But if you listen to the song, and you don't laugh, then there's probably something wrong with you. Because it's a cover of a Mozart song called "Leck Mich am Arsch" ("lick me in the ass," the German equivalent of "get stuffed"). Underground classical ditty about nothing? How can ICP not be perfect for that?
Fleet Foxes -- Helplessness Blues. "I gave my love a cherry that had no stone...."
Paul Simon -- So Beautiful or So What. The latter.
Battles -- Gloss Drop. Coming Soon to an Ice Capades near you.
Explosions in the Sky -- Take Care, Take Care, Take Care. You Suck, You Suck, You Suck.
James Blake -- James Blake. James Blake.
Panda Bear -- Tomboy. As a rule, I hate any record that anyone uses the word "lush" to review. It invariably promises lame techno tricks disguised as deep feeling. I wonder if you're legally required to present your removed testicles to Filter before they bestow the moniker.
Other Lives -- Tamer Animals. The White Stripes died for this?
Gang Gang Dance -- Eye Contact. Oh, dear. Someone seems to have murdered Florence + the Machine and then resurrected them with some kind of voodoo ceremony into the bodies of Sailor Moon characters. My wife will be so unhappy.
Iron & Wine -- Kiss Each Other Clean. 'Natch.
Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi -- Rome. I loves ya, DM, honest I do. But why you brought Jack White in for his singing voice on an orchestral record like this defies my imagination. Also, where the hell is Penfold?
R.E.M. -- Collapse Into Now. Grampa done woke up, and he wants him some loud git-tar before his afternoon constitutional. But don't keep it up too long, or he'll start a-mumblin' agin.
Shabazz Palaces -- Black Up. Because what Hip-Hop needs is a lounge act that gives its songs Fiona-Apple-Style names.
Beastie Boys -- Hot Sauce Commitee Part Two. OMG Remember Back to the Future?
Floating Action -- Desert Etiquete. I got bored listening to the samples and went and listened to Vincebus Eruptum by Blue Cheer for the first time instead. Now I have to decide if I want it on iTunes or CD.
Black Lips -- Arabia Mountain. Do you think that if these guys step into the same room as the Black Angels, the fabric of Space-Time will rip? Or will they just cancel each other out?
J Mascis -- Several Shades of Why. Yet none explain why everyone decided midway through the last decade that everybody has to pretend to be a folkie.
The Dodos -- No Color. Especially when there are perfectly good real folkies, like these guys.
Bill Callahan -- Apocalypse. Or this guy.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. -- It's a Corporate World. The band name isn't funny. The album name isn't funny. What's funny is this guy singing "We Almost Lost Detroit" with sincerity. Like, "Whew! The Motor City Sure Dodged a Bullet That Time!"
The Sea and Cake -- The Moonlight Butterfly. This isn't a bad band. They play the same indie-folkie-pop as everyone else on this list, but they play it well. But this album represents the nadir of post-modern musical packaging. To wit: the band is called "The Sea and Cake." Two things that, in most circumstances, have nothing whatever to do with one another. What does this mean? What does it evoke? NOTHING. The album is called "The Moonlight Butterfly." Not "The Moonlit Butterfly," which would create a specific, and lovely, image. No, it's "The Moonlight Butterfly," which means NOTHING. And what's the cover art? A pencil drawing of an elephant on yellow.
The name's a leetle precious, and their write-up doesn't do anything to downplay that reaction ("the Factory Records"?)
But they're offering their whole debut record, Philosophy (which is a good album name), for free at their web site.
And they don't sound bad at all. They add just a touch of power-pop cheer to the general post-punk moodiness, and it works. A real Joy Division, you might say.
And by this I mean care about any of McCartney's post-Beatle work. Among certain rock snobs, of course, McCartney's status as a pop tunesmith means certain of his records require respectful consideration. But while I respect the talent, I can't put myself in McCarney's audience.
This is good; this is well-crafted. But I don't care about it. It doesn't move anything in me. I can nod my head at it, but if I never heard it again, I wouldn't feel the poorer for it.
I don't know if that's my deficit or Paul McCartney's, but there it is.
For some reason, my post-zeppelin L's are full of 50's stuff: Little Richard is next, and then Jerry Lee Lewis. I didn't plan it this way, but there it is.
The radio show I write for, Rock'n'Roll Archaeology, is linked at the top of the next column. We "explore the musical mysteries of the Rock'n'Roll era," which means we drop knowledge on the heads of fools who don't know anything about anything before the 1970's. We can be heard at midnight on Saturdays on 88.1 WYPR in the Baltimore/Washington area.
For those of you not so fortunate as to live near these Meccas of culture, here's the link to the podcast of our first episode. What is the first Rock'n'Roll song? There will be a test.
Over at Fast N' Bulbous, Fester makes a strong argument for putting proto- and 1st generation-punk, early heavy metal, early 70's funk, and a few other hard rock noise merchants into a super genre called Heavy Rock. Not only did Lester Bangs and such use the term back in the day, but it moves away from having to slice finer and finer microgenres for each subculture. It would be unifying.
Plus, the first album on the list is Fun House. What's not to love?
Give the album a chance and you’ll be converted. By the time Let Them Talk has played out in its full glory, you’ll have forgotten this is a blues album by an actor. It’ll be more “where’s this guy been all these years?”
I always wondered why House always had guitars on the al of his apartment. I thought it was just good TV writing.
I like Andrew Earles a lot. He's funny, and he's forgotten more about popular music than I'll ever know. But I can't pretend that I have the slightest idea what he's talking about in this piece, because he's forgotten more about popular music than I'll ever know. And I'm pretty sure I'm older than he is. Hell, I still think it's kinda funny that the Feelies covered "Everyone Has Something To Hide 'Cept for Me and My Monkey." My record collection is abysmal compared to the "perfect" one he's been building. Here it is, in it's entirety:
Actually, I think the whole song is pretty funny...
So I can't claim claim the kind of authority that's necessary to denounce other people's tastes as objectively ridiculous. And I'm not sure I even want to. Sure, damning the folly of others hasn't stopped being fun, and there's certainly a fair bit of pretentious hipsterism that I will hold as a sacred task to slap around like the proverbial red-head stepchild. But I can't possibly say that the stuff I review here is truly, objectively, good. Or bad. Or indifferent. This is all about me, and what I like. I will never be an expert. Just a fan.
the revealingly titled Raven in the Grave is rife with the somber, gossamer 4AD mannerisms of yore. The dreamy longings of “Forget That You’re Young” decisively call up the specter of Cocteau Twins, while “Apparitions,” with menacing gallop and funereal atmospherics, has Clan of Xymox’s mournful markings all over it.
The Raveonettes need their Surf Riffs. It's what makes them interesting. Poor fools, they peaked with their first EP.
To be blunt, I lacked the courage to respond with Andrew Earle's tart invective. The experience pole-axed me, and I still can't express my reaction in anything like critical terms.
No, I'm not going to link it. You know how to use the Internet.
Looking at their arc from a purely musical perspective, you could divide their career in half at the midpoint of that decade-- at some point between 1994's Ill Communication and 1998's Hello Nasty. Their first four full-lengths came in less than eight years, and during this stretch, they were hungry and on the move, restlessly searching for new avenues of music expression. They're just now getting to their third proper album (fourth, if you want to count 2007's instrumental LP The Mix Up) in the 17 years since.
I think that's just about right. Hello Nasty is good, but not great, and they've only gotten older since. Every critic's desperate attempt to plump them up as "Beastie Men" or "engaged post-wiseasses," has failed to cover up the fact that they've lost their spark and are basically decaying into a Beastie Boys cover band.
