Pajamas Media's Generic Punk List

"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.

C for effort. F for execution.

There's Actually a Band Called We Were Promised Jetpacks

Magnet's long-delayed print issue arrived today.

Their letters page was blank (get it?), but in the Spin-esque mini-review section I found that We Were Promised Jetpacks has been around for 10 years.

Suddenly this decade seems entirely different.

It's Like Christmas 2: Filter Gives Us Another Fucking List of Records They Like

Double-thanks for not even doing it at the year's proper midpoint, you whores.

Let's see what they picked:

1. Fleet Foxes -- Helplessness Blues. "I gave my love a cherry that had no stone...."
2. Paul Simon -- So Beautiful or So What. The latter.
3. Battles -- Gloss Drop. Coming Soon to an Ice Capades near you.
4. Explosions in the Sky -- Take Care, Take Care, Take Care. You Suck, You Suck, You Suck.
5. James Blake -- James Blake. James Blake.
6. 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.
7. Other Lives -- Tamer Animals. The White Stripes died for this?
8. 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.
9. Iron & Wine -- Kiss Each Other Clean. 'Natch.
10. 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?
11. 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.
12. Shabazz Palaces -- Black Up. Because what Hip-Hop needs is a lounge act that gives its songs Fiona-Apple-Style names.
13. Beastie Boys -- Hot Sauce Commitee Part Two. OMG Remember Back to the Future?
14. 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.
15. 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?
16. 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.
17. The Dodos -- No Color. Especially when there are perfectly good real folkies, like these guys.
18. Bill Callahan -- Apocalypse. Or this guy.
19. 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!"
20. 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.

Remember Blender?

Yeah, I know it folded two years ago, retreating to an online presence that hasn't been updated since March.

But I found this Mad-esque mockery of a real Blender front page I did almost exactly six years ago, and I felt like posting it.

I'm pretty sure "The Nuttiest Hair in Rock" was real. The rest I thought moderately pithy back in 2005. Your mileage may vary.

Black Keys, Danger Mouse Working Together

They worked together before, on Attack & Release, and according to Spin, on Brothers as well.  So I don't know why Under the Radar thinks this is news. But a record in the vein of the Clash & the Cramps sounds wicked tasty.

The New Raveonettes Sounds Awful...

...and I haven't heard a note.

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.

Magnet Sucks

It is official.

Nothing if not a model of consistency, Buffalo Tom has been making the same decent-to-great music since 1992’s Let Me Come Over. Actually the Massachusetts trio’s third album, Let Me Come Over feels more like a debut, as it zeroed in brilliantly on the group’s strengths, namely the earnest, imagery-laden, acoustic-gone-electric songwriting of guitarist Bill Janovitz and bassist Chris Colbourn and the propulsive punk undercurrents supplied by drummer Tom Maginnis. Judging by the band’s latest, Skins (Scrawny), it’s a formula that still has legs. Skins is the group’s eighth album and second since reuniting after a 10-year (sort-of) break, and its world-weary lilt and been-there/done-that themes make it the perfect grown-up companion piece to Let Me Come Over’s reluctant coming-of-age angst. It may be the best thing the band has done since that LP. Buffalo Tom will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.

So how'd you like to read that five times on a web site's main page? Which is what happens every time they let people guest-edit the mag: the same by-line advertisment appears over and over again (because Heaven Forbid we have to click on an anchor link to discover who in Hades Buffalo Tom is, if we happen to give a moldy crap).

This is what they've devolved to. No Over/Under since September. No Put Up Your Dukes for a year. No Where's the Street Team? since January 2009. I may have slagged these regulars before, but I like them much better than giving indie-bands and has-beens (anybody out there really hungry for the B-52's political outlook?) a platform upon which to wallow in their self-assurance.

Do these clowns actually have anything to say about music? Because right now they could achieve the same results by liking things on Facebook.

Under the Radar Denounces Blog Hype, Slags Pitchfork

I love it when they fight.

It’s a story that has repeated itself far too often, and for every Arcade Fire or Bon Iver that translated blog momentum into near unanimous acclaim, there was a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Midlake, Voxtrot, Sound Team, Cold War Kids, or Tapes ‘n Tapes that received a strong push from the blogosphere and found that by the time their second album was released, a lot of people had jumped off the merry-go-round. Without the opportunity to develop a fanbase that would invest time and money in them, those bands found that the same listeners and writers who had championed them had either moved on or weren’t interested in watching a band go through growing pains.

The internet expands, but human memory does not. There's only so much room for so many bands in our hearts or our wallets. I haven't listened to any of those bands, because my music tastes are a lagging indicator. It's very rare for me to get into a band on their first disc; I usually wait until they've been around and have learned to grow. That way, I don't have to sit around waiting for the next record to drop.

The only time I stepped outside of this rule was in 2002-2004, when I made a point of jumping on the Rock Revival bandwagon. This led me to purchases as diverse as the White Stripes and the Vines.

If blogs were the gatekeepers for the indie rock kingdom, Pitchfork were and are the undeniable kingmakers, having essentially launched the careers of Broken Social Scene, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, and others with one glowing review. The blogs might discover a band, but if that band is going to move beyond the blogs into the larger bloodstream, Pitchfork needs to officially confirm it with a “Best New Music” review.

They do? They are? Why Pitchfork particularly? Why not Spin or Magnet or CHARTattack or that plucky little Under the Radar? Is Pitchfork the hit-king?

We Don't Hear a Single...

Under the Radar reports that "Swedish twee-stars Acid House Kings" (just nod and smile) are going to prevew a handful of tracks from their upcoming album and let their fans vote on the single. This is either:

1. An awesomely awesome marketing move, which will soon be copied by everyone who's anyone!, OR
2. A sign that they have no idea if any of their songs are good enough to be a single.

Only time will tell. They look nice and non-threatening in the picture, though:

Dude? The Upturned Phallic Guitar? Could you BE more Rockist?

The X Most Blah of Whatever

I've made it this far without taking note of anybody's Top Ten of 2010 Lists. It's not that I find such exercises completely useless; it behooves to take stock of what has passed and what can be considered favorable and unfavorable. I just find them over-used: a cheap device to garner attention and controversey (which is to say, more attention).

Filter's Top 10, however, spares us no exhaustion. Not only do we get the Official Magazine Top 10, but the Top Reviewed Albums, the Publishers', Editor-in-Chief's, Associate Editor's, Layout Designer's, writing staff's and Guy Who Sleeps on Our Couch's individual Top Tens. By the time you're done, LCD Soundsystem would have implanted itself as a self-regenerating meme in your mindhead.



This totally changes my mind about irony.

Anyway, I thought I disliked Top Ten's because they were thoughtless and non-authorial, but it turns out I liked them even less when they're detailed and transparent. Maybe I only like the funny kinds. Let me know if you see any.

I'd Like to Feel Bad for Creed...

...I mean, it's 2011, and the hip still won't miss the opportunity to bash them, even for things they had nothing to do with.

According to Germany's Der Spiegel newspaper, little Walter Eikrem was walking home from school in his hometown of Rakkestad when all of a sudden he found himself on the same path as a pack of wolves.
Instead of crying wolf and running away, Walter did what seemed to be the only logical thing to him: he pulled out his cell phone, took the ear buds out of it and turned Creed's "Overcome" up full blast while screaming and waving his arms.

And the wolf ran away. GET IT LOL C WUT I DID THR?

Then I remember how skull-scrapingly bad Creed's music is, and I'm more or less fine with it.

Irony is Boring.

I liked the first two editions of Pitchfork's Why We Fight, but I've missed every one since. I've read #3 and #4 just now, and while I thought #4 was an okay walk through the perils of MIA's playing with politics, I got three quarters of the way down #3 and was suddenly, un-utterably bored with the entire enterprise:

This idea of knowingness, though-- our relationship with it can get complicated. Right now, one of the internet's most successful bastions of knowingness is a blog called Hipster Runoff, a performance that's almost nothing but knowing: It shrugs, it takes an arch, pseudo-scientific tone, it puts every other word in scare quotes. Here you go, it seems to say: Here is your weird market of hipness and cool. The end. You can take it as withering satire, if you want to, because its skewers are dead on target. Of course, if its pseudonymous author really thought the market of cool were that pointless and vacuous, why spend so much time thinking about it-- why know it well enough to be savvy? It's not so much a satire as a whole performance of knowingness. And even if I don't often have the stomach for it, I can't pretend the performance isn't an immaculate one: it's knowingness raised to the level of poetry, free of the burden of "intent" or sincerity or any point beyond what the reader reflects out of it. It goes beyond "the author is dead" and turns the author into some kind of zombie.

When I was in college, REM had a rather large hit song with the line "You said that irony was the shackle of youth." At the time, I disagreed, saying that irony was the weapon of youth. We were both right, I suppose, but I don't care to examine the matter much further than that, because Irony, capital "I", is not that interesting. It's not really a thing, it's an act, a choice. That's why an analysis or discussion of Irony will always feel overblown. And it's why Family Guy will always be less than its competitors.

I say that because the article namedrops The Simpsons. But The Simpsons, however arch it seemed, always leavened its snark with a sincere heart. The show actually cared about its characters; even, or especially Homer. Homer Simpson serves the show as the butt of most of the jokes, but if something really really bad happened to him, fans would be heartbroken. Because Homer is not really a bad guy, just flawed and limited, like all of us are.



Family Guy, on the other hand, doesn't really care all that much. About anything. The show's evolved from an even arch-er version of The Simpsons to an endless On the Road movie with a drunken hipster dog and a gay baby standing in for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. It's breezy and stupid and fully aware of its breeziness and stupidity, and works them like Stevedores for every laugh. At the root of every Family Guy gag is the thought, "This is so completely retarded that I have no choice but to laugh."



And while such cheap absurdity is a well that may never run dry, it's a good distance away from the archness and intellect of The Simpsons, and light-years away from its great rival South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's show is a lot of things, but almost never ironic. Rather, it's bone-cuttingly satiric, to the point of being mad-dog mean:



The humor here comes from saying the unsayable, and while that sounds knowing, it's not irony, because it's meant with deadly earnestness.

My point is that irony is not worth the effort of hashing out, because it's by no means as central to our cultural narratives as people who wallow in it, or fuss about it, think it is. There's a time when we all love it, and think ourselves superior for being aware of it. It passes.

Robert Pollard is a Dork.

I don't care about Robert Pollard, or Guided By Voices, or any of that. I just don't. It's Stuff I've Heard of But Never Listened To. And I'm sure that his new disc, Space City Kicks, unleashes just as much awesomeness as Under the Radar says. I like that title so much, in fact, that I'm willing to listen to some samples on iTunes. But the cover...



Dude...


Why is he standing there like that? Is this some kind of kung fu position? And why isn't there anything spacey or city-y, or even kick-y (unless Robert refers to his badass two-tone shoes as "kicks" as the kids do these days)?

I mean, it's possible that some dippy photographer came up with this, and the record label went with it sans Pollard's approval, but this is out on Pollard's own label, so that answer's stupid. No, he thinks this picture is cool, from the understated tiny red heart on the king's-blue shirt to the guitar just hanging out next to the whatever-white building in the vacant lot down the street from the Bob Evans. Robert Pollard this the whole thing, including the "punch me in the jimmy! Do it HARD!" stance, is just too ineffable to be effed.

Ergo, he's a dork.

Xan McCurdy Preaches the Gospel of Bass

At Magnet, the Cake multi-instrumentalist talks up the importance of the low-end:

I’m not talking about these chest-pain-causing bass-frequency fanatics, but the subtle melody-enhancing, rhythm-keeping, ass-caressing bass-guitar sounds. Put on any Marvin Gaye and turn up the low frequencies on your home or car stereos or your mp9 player (or whatever) just a tad, and I promise it’s a little bit better. And kiss your local bass player. He works a lot harder than you think.

This is all true. As I've said, I used to play the bass, and it may be an easy instrument to fake along with, but it's truly difficult to play well. And if you do, people are unlikely to notice.

Even punk bands need good bass players. My favorite punk bassis? Paul Simonon of the Clash:

Who is this Kate Moss Person?

In the process of getting the news out that the Kills will have a new album hitting the shelves in April, Pitchfork lets out this piece of fatuousness:

In the time since the Kills released their 2008 album Midnight Boom, the oozing blues duo have been busy with other things. Alison Mosshart has been kicking it with Jack White in the Dead Weather, and Jamie Hince has been racking up low-grade tabloid fame as Kate Moss' boyfriend.

Ignoring, for the moment, the gee-golly-goshers aspect of being told that musicians do other things when not in the studio or on tour, why in the name of all things holy am I supposed to give a snowball in hell about who James Hince has been fornicating with? Are they really trying to coat this trivia with some kind of lovers-reunited meme?

Blue and Pink Sets Indie Hearts A-Flutter, Wallets A-Open

Scrolling through Pitchfork, I find the following two album covers, right on top of each other:

Title shortened from "Gimme Some Plastic Surgery,
For the Love of God."

Irony and fatuousness mix in one complete package.

What happens when the collective unconscious becomes self-aware?

A Lament for "Forced Consumption"

Album-a-Week laments the fall of music magazines, as represented by the end of Paste:

Let's say you bought an entire album just because you liked one song. After listening to that one song on repeat for days, you ventured into the rest of the album. After listening to the entire album, you ran across the best song of your life. Well, that would never have happened if you hadn't bought the album, now would it? If you just bought the single, you would not have learned about any other tracks on the album. Forced consumption in the magazine format is the same. It leads you through a maze of possible favorites; whereas, online only leads you through what you already know.

He's not wrong.  But the mags need a better tag line than "Forced Consumption: Because We Know Better, Sheeple!" Maybe ConsumptionPlus?

INCOMING!

My plan is to have not one, but two, new reviews up by tonight.

Until then, savor the awesomeness of this:

Jazz is the new black, y'all.

I Just Can't Quit You: The Goodnight Loving Redeems Itself

Boy, Brokeback Mountain really slipped down the memory hole like a greased pig, eh?

I was prepared to hate this. The Goodnight Loving is the kind of band name that makes me contemplate violence. It's nonsensical, fey, and dull at the same time. And their description hardly improves the impression:

the Milwaukee quartet takes on a musical time warp to beachy ‘60s garage pop, with twangy guitar riffs, psychedelic organs and vocal harmonies.

In other words, they sound like the Beach Boys. Which is good, as its been several minutes since I reflected on how the Beach Boys are easily the least interesting Important Band from the 60's.

And true to form, most of their mix-tape selections are irretrievably middlebrow. Linda Ronstadt belongs nowhere outside of my mom's dusting record collection. Thin Lizzy is Rush for meatheads. Thomas Function has a name that causes the phrase "bowel movement" to appear in my head, and surprise, surprise, the song is called "Filthy Flowers." As the kids say, FAIL.

And yet. When he sais that people who don't like Born In The U.S.A. are terrorists, I'm with him. When he shouts out Link Wray's "Hidden Charms," I salute. And their songs?

Their songs are pretty damn good, actually.

Perpetua Sticks it to M.I.A.

At Pitchfork:

The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade. It aims to capture a technological and cultural zeitgeist in its over-stimulated, digitally degraded sound, but the songs are too flimsy to carry her bold conceit. Without compelling tunes, the obnoxious public antics, dubious political messages, and thin voice that had grated on her naysayers have become impossible for even dedicated fans to ignore. It's as if everything that was great about M.I.A. has been stripped from this music, leaving behind only the most alienating aspects of her art and public persona.

I should probably stop wailing on the girl. That "Born Free" video really got under my skin somehow.