It took me a really long time to get into the music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and there were a few reasons why. First of all everyone that I ever came into contact was absolutely ecstatic about them and would insist repeatedly that I listen to them. That’s strike one. The other thing that I couldn’t get my head around was why the songs had to be 20+ minutes long. I didn’t have the patience. Get me to the loud, fast parts and then let me be on my way.
Obviously a lot has changed, and after seeing them live I finally “got” it. It’s really about the journey. Not the Wind, Not the Flag are crafting songs that are just that: about the journey.
Things are considerably freer here than on anything that you would find on, say, a Godspeed album. The sound is rawer, more exciting, more alive. As you listen you can hear the songs coming into focus, taking shape and continuing in a logical trajectory. Just listening to the gradual buildup of “many monsters stand between us” as it grows louder and more active, full of distortion and just about to boil over with feedback I’m waiting for the guitar to just break away and soar into a solo. When the short burst of virtuosic guitar comes to the front it’s heavily shrouded in the noise and feedback atmosphere from where it came. And just as gradually and organically as the song grew, it returns to the somber, echoed and chorused guitar chord swells that began the track.
This is a duo that makes a lot of noise, and they definitely know how to fill a space. It’s almost equal parts Lightning Bolt and free-jazz freak out. The next track takes a much different approach, adding saxophone to the mix for a lot more of a melodically driven composition. That song, “in the province of the mind, there are no limits” is a whole other beast completely.
Definitely worth checking out. Listen above or head over to their bandcamp page. There are some other releases on there for you to listen to, though “the starmaker” from last year is their most recent. Keep an eye out for them if you are in the Toronto area.
I’ve already written about my love for all things that come out on Already Dead Tapes, so now it only seems appropriate to continue reviewing everything that I’ve heard from them. Maybe my mission is to keep listening to their output until I find something that I don’t like. We’ll have to wait and see when that happens.
Today we’ve got Video Daughters, out of NYC. Their latest, “Whiteness Where the Water Was” from this past October, is a blurry amalgam of no-wave sensibilities that find a way to combine noisier elements of avant-garde performance with psychedelic pop songs. Take, for example, their track “Winter Skies Smell Like June” with its weighty bass line slogging through the intro while guitars explode in every direction, barely harnessed. “January Sun” continues, with a persistent warped looped effect underneath a denser layer of guitars that slide in and out of key without making room for the vocals. Everything is sliding around by half-step, creating a really unsettling backdrop. There are instances where the anarchy breaks down between sections where the song hints at an obscured hook that never quite materializes.
Video Daughters is Mike Green and Scott Townsend covering all the instruments, and samples with vocals that cover a lot of ground from atonal screams to singing reminiscent of Tim Kinsella in the track “No Hot Coals.”
The tape is currently available on Already Dead Tapes limited to 50 copies, as well as from the band’s own Bandcamp as a download or a CD-R with handmade packaging. If you head over to the bandcamp page you can find some earlier releases from the band as well.
WOAH! This was a good find, and a complete accident to boot. I think this marks the first time that a site has said “you may also like…” and gotten it right.
Last night, as I was writing while listening to a track on soundcloud, after which the site decided to start playing things it thought were similar. Though this isn’t similar really at all to what I was listening to, it sure is a damn good find. And it gets better too, as the band, Sun Angle, is from Portland. Close enough.
I only wish that I could have somehow come to know about this band earlier, as their debut album was released back in November. Better late than never.
Somehow the mix of jammy tendencies with psychedelia and a surf-rock vibe makes complete sense. It makes more than sense, it works incredibly well. I’m picking up a distinctly Akron/Family influenced sound. Title track, “Diamond Junk,” could fit on Akron’s “Meek Warrior” for sure. The sound is perpetually in danger of going into the red, and everything is just ringing and feeding back, creating a beautiful, energetic sound that is exploding with ideas. And that one note in the opening ascending guitar line that becomes somewhat of a motive; that note just sounds so shockingly wrong upon first listen. Listen for about 5 more seconds, though, and it sounds so very right.
“Raspberry” places the jam band-type sound up front at the very beginning with it’s bass groove and sharply echoed guitar. Though, it isn’t very long before the distortion comes blasting to the surface, obliterating everything in its path. “Time Snakes” similarly starts out with the understated bass, a complete fake out before the surf-rock/Bow-Wow-Wow guitar comes in, drums rumbling behind at breakneck speed. It’s got that ramshackle quality, where it sounds as though the entire thing might fall apart at any second, that I wish more bands would embrace. These guys are really putting themselves out there on a tight-rope and taking chances.
I know that there are only 3 songs here, but I am still just sitting here listening to them over and over trying to figure out which one is my favorite. I think that the only answer for me is going to be to buy the album. It’s out now on vinyl, CD and cassette at New Moss Records. Come to find out, their lineup is pretty great. But, more on that later. And, on a side note, I’m wondering if this album is a response to that one Supergrass album…
Frontman of Thee Oh Sees, John Dwyer, is releasing a solo album entitled “Hubba Bubba.” You can hear the synth heavy (more like exclusively synth) track “Eggs at Night” below.
Last month Thee Oh Sees announced from the stage that “This will be the last Oh Sees show for a long while. So dig in.” I learned about it on twitter and quickly started to feel panic set in. It was impossible for me to fathom not having a few new albums by Thee Oh Sees coming out at the steady clip that they have been for the past several years. I see them as the lynchpin that holds the San Francisco scene together. When we all heard that the band was going on a break at first we all went to the worst cast scenario, which would be that we would never hear from them again (though that seems absolutely ridiculous thinking about it now. There is no way that John Dwyer could be away from music for any length of time, let’s be honest. So even if there weren’t any Thee Oh Sees shows he would still be creating music in some form, either solo or with Ty Segall. By the way, why hasn’t that happened yet? That seems like an obvious matchup…but I digress) and then we all came to the realization that a “long while” for a band like Thee Oh Sees, that have been touring non-stop for the past 5 years, is probably only a few months.
So I’m not intending this post to be a send-off to Thee Oh Sees by any stretch. I just want to take a minute and maybe get some other people interested in the band that may only have a passing familiarity with them. Thee Oh Sees are probably the last band that I have gotten really heavily, obsessively into, after seeing them only one time I was hooked. Their live show is amazing, and I can’t even begin to imagine how tiring it must be for them to do it over and over and over again. Not just tiring from the physical standpoint, but also add to that the fact that they are typically playing a very similar set night after night. It’s become noticeable of late that the jammy extensions of songs are getting jammier, which I think might be a way for the band to try to find new ways to keep things interesting. I’m assuming that this time away is just going to result in throwing all of the old songs out of the set-list and starting over again. Clear it out and start again.
With that in mind, I’d like to give my top 10 tracks by Thee Oh Sees. Sure, some of them are in regular rotation on their (former) set-list, but I don’t think that their live show really gives an idea of the band’s range.
1. “No Spell” off of their most recent album, 2013’s “Floating Coffin.” Now, it is really hard to choose a song from this album, there are just so many great tunes. “No Spell” sits toward the middle of the album, tucked away between songs that are more typical Oh Sees fare. I think that what really does it for me is the textless “chorus.” It’s just different enough from anything that they have ever done, and just has a great emotional grab to it. It’s not the typical structure that one would come to expect either.
2. “Tidal Wave” from a 7″ b/w “Heart Sweats.” Short and sweet and right to the point. The clipped guitar style in the verse with the slap-back echo that bursts into another textless chorus with John’s yell. It’s just catchy as hell, and may go unnoticed by some because it doesn’t appear on an album….though it has probably been heard by more people than any other song of theirs thanks to it being used in Breaking Bad.
3. “Enemy Destruct” from “Help.” There are few bands that know how to open an album as well as Thee Oh Sees do. This is definitely a set-list staple, and for good reason. The guitar stomps through each beat with great intensity. Noisy throughout, and heavy.
Enemy Destruct
4. “Stinking Cloud” from “Castlemania.” This album just doesn’t fit in with any of the others. It’s experimental for them. John sings in an affected croak, saxophones and flutes appear on many of the songs, there are acoustic tracks that trot out a distinct Kinks influence. This track in particular is a bit of a slow burn, with some oddly insightful lyrics.
5. “The Dream” from “Carrion Crawler/The Dream.” This album is the one. If you need to know where to start with this band, this is it. And this song is maybe their best live. You have to imagine this songs going almost twice as fast when it’s played live. And as soon as those opening chords start to ring out in all their open-stringed glory, all hell is about to break loose and you had better hold on.
6. “Lupine Dominus” from “Putrifiers II.” This one let’s the not-quite hidden krautrock come out, sounding closer to something that Cave would release, but it still makes complete sense. Psych-krautrock.
7. “I Was Denied” from “Warm Slime.” Another anthemic live staple. How could you even go wrong with a song that has a line “I got fucked up, suffice to say. la la la la la, lalalala la, lalalala la, lalala la…” Bonus points for the brief freakout toward the middle of the song.
8. “Toe Cutter-Thumb Buster” from “Floating Coffin.” Amazing opening. The last time that I saw them live this is the track with which they opened. The piercing squeal of feedback followed by the bone-crushing low end distortion is something that can’t be beat and will never not be effective.
10. “The Coconut” from “The Master’s Bedroom is Worth Spending a Night In.” I picked this one just because it is another one of those songs that show the band stretching out and trying new things. It’s moody, a bit slower, and focuses a bit more on vocal harmonies and lengthier, more legato melodies in the verses.
Supposedly, despite the hiatus (JPD insists that the band is not breaking up), there will be a new album released within the next month or two. I will definitely be covering that as soon as I can get my hands on it. Until then, enjoy these, and enjoy the solo track.
Brutal Truth/Bastard Noise – “The Axiom of Post Inhumanity”
It is no secret that I am a fan of noise music. I’ve written on the topic morethanafewtimes and I often find myself listening to varying levels of “noise” at home. For some reason I never think of it as anything other than something that is pretty experimental, and therefore in a genre of its own. I never have thought about the implications that noise music may have as a way of reinterpreting a genre, or as using those implications to align itself to a genre. It’s understandable that this could be a next step, having noise stand in where other older forms and music/semiotic indicators have grown tired and been wrung dry of any meaning.
Sure, it is experimental, and it is always going to be fairly experimental to present noise as music in and of itself. But if we are to re-imagine noise as yet another degree of abstraction (something I have also already talked about on here) then why can’t noise fit into the genre of, say, metal, instead of just being something that only comments on itself, or is merely interpreted as a challenge to everything else?
Late last year, on November 11th, two bands, Brutal Truth and Bastard Noise, compiled a split album entitled “The Axiom of Post Inhumanity” and it works to do exactly what I described in the last paragraph. Noise, on this album, stands in for brutal de-tuned guitar crunch and growled, grind-core vocals. I think that presenting music this way brings a whole new depth to both noise music as well as metal. The noise, for lack of a better term, means something before it’s even heard. And, presented in this context, the album is free to explore all of the many possibilities that noise has to offer, much in the same way that a metal album might be shaped. From all consuming intensity to sound that echoes across barren wastelands, the abstraction of sound is starting to bring itself back around to the point that it’s not heard merely as that abstraction. This is an interesting, and exciting, step in the evolution of metal.
There is definitely a lot of stuff to grab onto with this album. Many of the tracks are over 7 or 8 minutes long, but each of them is a gripping and intricate display of experimental noise as metal, or maybe it’s metal as experimental noise. Either way, this split is worth a listen. Check it out above.
[Ed: January 9, 2014: I love when a site gives you something to share and then almost immediately takes it down.]
For those of you that do, or even those of you that don’t celebrate Christmas, here is a collection of songs put together by Burger Records that is sure to get your holiday party off to a good start. This 3+ hour compilation of Burger Records artists is perfect for any year end get together. Just start it up and let it play all afternoon.
And as a bonus, check out the Christmas themed track by Sonic Youth, “Santa Doesn’t Cop Out On Dope.” Give a listen below, then go get drunk on egg-nog (try it with Malort) and try not to pay attention to anything that your racist uncle is rambling on about.
As I continue to play through all of my favorite releases of the year, trying to put together some sort of end of year compilation, the release that I come back to almost every day is Twin Peaks’ debut LP “Sunken.” I think that I’m going to have to say definitively that that is my favorite release of the year. My one complaint about “Sunken,” though, is that it’s way too short, but I guess that this tiny little single can tide me over until 2014 with its expansive 4 minutes and 17 seconds of material. I’m just going to consider these two songs as “Sunken” bonus tracks.
Both “Flavor” and “Come Bother Me” are considerably more poppy, and considerably less washy/reverbed out. You can take a quick listen to both the tracks above, and then you can head over to the bandcamp page to drop $1 on a download, or send it as a last minute gift.
According to the bandcamp site the single was released on cassette via Tripp Tapes this past Friday, December 20th with a 7″ via Jeffery Drag Records coming soon.
You can buy “Sunken” over here on CD, vinyl, or as a digital download. Check out the video for “Stand In the Sand” off of that album below.
Murderedman is another band that can slide between experimental rock to metal quite easily without changing anything about their sound. Just by focusing on an element and bringing it out, highlighting it slightly they can completely change the context that their music may be heard in. Referential sound, and by that I mean that they are using their own style and keeping everything within that sound to make allusions to a genre that runs parallel to their own. But, at the same time, this makes Murderedman a band without a genre.
Their sound already comes pretty close to metal, which can be heard in the track “Shadow Survived” especially well. The band describes themselves on their bandcamp page as “a mixture of gothic love songs and hard rock death songs that are sure to leave you breathless.” But, when I think of gothic I usually think of The Cure, or a band that tends toward the equally moody. Murderedman is nothing like The Cure, though the gothic tag is apt in the overall dark and foreboding sound of the vocals that reverberate somewhere in the background, under the sharp sound of the guitars.
Murderedman’s “Love in Danger” release (is it an EP? Is it an LP? Does that even matter anymore?) starts out with the aforementioned dark and foreboding atmosphere in the track “Sleight of Hand,” with spastic energy and crazed vocals. Sudden guitar blasts punctuate the vocals before everything loses its footing and collapses under its own weight into a noisy pile of rubble. “Sleight of Hand” is the perfect opener, as it pretty much sums up their entire sound, setting up the template off which those delicate shifts can allow for genre jumping.
“Halve the Mind” is another demonic, dark song with distant vocals and a minimal, cyclic guitar line. The sound in general is reminiscent of The Wipers, while the extreme leaps of range in the guitar remind me of another band that I wrote about just recently, Bbigpigg. When blastbeats are added to the mix, such as in “In Love While Sober,” an element that you don’t even realize is missing until it happens, manages to catch you completely by surprise one second and then making total sense within the overall aesthetic the next.
Short bursts of odd time signature off-kilterness as in “My Catastrophe” complement some of the more fleshed out tracks. Though, in my opinion sometimes the shorter tracks seem as though they work better than the 3+ minute tunes. The shorter tracks showcase one idea and don’t include any development where they really don’t need any. Sometimes, though, the sound of the band, because it is so singular and characteristically original, it begins to come off as a bit redundant. That’s why the shading of the sound is such an important aspect, it allows them to experiment within their structures, to find a sound, to try out a bunch of different things.
I always enjoy hearing albums such as this that show a band that is exciting and willing to try new things while being able to present these exploratory albums. You can head over the their bandcamp to hear the whole thing, or check it out above. And according to the band’s website though they are on a break for the Winter, they will be back in the Spring with some new tracks. You can also head over there for some other downloads.
It’s safe to say that 2013, as far as music is concerned, is over. For the better part of a month every music blog has been writing about their favorite albums of the year, producing list after list after list of best song, best album, as well as separate lists for every genre under the sun. I’ve done my best to avoid it, choosing instead to do full album reviews of albums that I feel are worth talking about and that I had missed during the year. I thought that a better thing to do might be to write about some of the albums that I am hoping to see in the year ahead. There are a lot of artists that were silent in 2013, some of which haven’t produced in album in several years, which could be surprising depending on the artists. Here’s what I hope to hear in 2014:
Spoon
When “Transference” came out in 2010 Spoon had felt like that reliable band that churned out album after album, with solid results. It’s not that they were predictable, per se, as much as they were completely dependable. Going back as far as “Girls Can Tell,” not just a classic Spoon album, but a classic album in general, Brit Daniel and Jim Eno have been turning out unshakably poppy, tuneful albums. From what I remember “Transference” seemed to take a step back from all that, not reaching to the heights of their previous, fantastic, ridiculously named, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.” Though I think that “Transference” is a fine album, it’s not necessarily my go-to when I pull a Spoon album off the shelf. Brit went off and did an album with a newly formed band, The Divine Fits, which was actually really good catchy retro-synth pop (can we consider music that is reminiscent of the 80’s retro now?). Here’s to hoping that Spoon returns to the fold in 2014 and that their nearly 4 years away from the studio allowed them to rest up and re-group to record some great new tracks.
Titus Andronicus
Speaking of indie-rock stalwarts, Patrick Stickles’ New Jersey based punk rock band has three absolutely perfect albums under their belt. “The Airing of Grievances” is about as good as a debut album can get, and then they put out “The Monitor,” one of the best albums that I have ever heard. “Local Business” stripped back some of the high concept of those first two albums and delivered some straight ahead riff-based rock that shows the band easily churning out a full album’s worth or singles. Seeing the band this past September and accosting Stickles at the merch table (ok accost is a strong word, but I did talk to him when he clearly did not want to talk) he said that they would have a new album “ready to go in 14 months.” I remember this specifically because that was a strange number. Anyway, I hope that’s true, and I look forward to a new Titus album in November 2014.
Shellac
I’m a huge Shellac fan. I’ve written about Albini’s casual mention earlier this year of a new album being ready to go (and then I went on to write about something completely different, but trust me it’s in there somewhere). Who knows what the hell will happen though. It’s not like the band needs the money, or is even in it for that reason. Whenever they put it out they’ll put it out and then probably tour a little bit behind it and then lock themselves in the studio again to work. I know that this is probably an unpopular opinion, as their fans are pretty fanatical and unmutable in their view of the band, but I really didn’t like their last album “Excellent Italian Greyhound,” so I’m especially looking forward to the next one. Here’s to hoping that it is closer in sound to “At Action Park,” or whatever.
Japandroids
If you’re going to release albums that are barely a half hour long, I’m going to want more than one every few years. I know that they have said repeatedly that they hate being in the studio, but unfortunately it’s a part of life. Both of their releases have been stellar so far, and I’m sure that whatever they come up with next will not be disappointing, so I hope that they get on it.
Twin Peaks
My favorite album of 2013. But I have the same complaint as with Japandroids. I mean, the album was EP length at best. I hope that this group of young kids has another great album in them because “Sunken” was an enviable debut and if they can pull off another album that good I think their status will be solidified as a force in the music world, whereas right now they are just hopefuls.
of Montreal
Of course I’m going to say of Montreal. I’ve loved everything that they’ve done, and sure “Lousy With Sylvianbriar” just came out barely a few months ago, but Kevin Barnes has been on a good run, releasing a lot of music year after year and constantly taking his writing to new and exciting places. With every twist and turn I’ve been on board, so let’s see how much farther he can take it.
That just about sums up what I am hoping for in the coming year. Of course I’m also looking forward to the unexpected, the bands that haven’t released anything yet and therefore aren’t on the radar. That is always the most exciting part of writing a blog, the getting new stuff dropped into the mailbox, or linked to on soundcloud. So here’s to another year of new sounds by bands new and old, the expected and the unexpected.
Sonic Youth – “Experimental, Jet Set, Trash and No Star”
“Experimental, Jet Set, Trash & No Star” was the first new album that Sonic Youth released since I had started listening to them a few years before, or maybe it was just the year before. Anyway, for that reason I still think of it as a “new” album of theirs even though it isn’t really a new album at all. It came out in 1994, which means almost 20 years ago. Great, if I wasn’t feeling old already, now I definitely am.
More importantly I think of this album, still, as their “acoustic” album. I know that this isn’t true by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that I got this idea stuck in my head based entirely on the first track “Winner’s Blues,” which did feature heavily acoustic guitars, bright sounding, clear, acoustic guitars, with Thurston singing through one of those bullet mics that are usually used by blues singers. It just had this whole different sound to it than I was used to from what I had heard from them up to that point.
I feel like to a certain degree that album is a bit of a lost relic or something. And, now that I think about it, I feel like maybe “Dirty” is too, though “Goo” manages to hold on to some status as an iconic album, if for nothing else because of the album art and the fact that it was the band making the leap from indie status to a major label. But this “lost relic” idea is something that I experience myself foisting onto the album. I don’t often think of listening to this one, and when I do – because it is usually a long time between listens for me – I always get this overwhelming feeling of hearing these songs for the first time all over again.
Again, when I had this album I had it on tape, and I remember the “run-out groove” sound bite that comes in at the end of the album always (and still does) caught me by surprise and scared the shit out of me (it still does that too). If you aren’t familiar with it, go and listen to the last song on the album and then just sit back and wait and tell me that that doesn’t make you panic for at least a few seconds.
This album is a little bit less balanced than anything they had previously done. First of all, throwing off the balance completely, is that this is the first album to not have any tracks by Lee Ranaldo. There are some straight ahead rockers like “Waist” and “Starfield Road” as well as the blues based “Screaming Skull” and the surprising radio “hit” “Bull in the Heather.” If any band was going to take extended guitar technique and turn it into a pop hook, what better band to do it than these guys?
The point is, basically, that there is a division here. It’s a point of departure. Sure there were noisy parts on the album, but overall the production is crystal clear. Songs are starting to get stripped down a bit, the band is getting more comfortable working in slower songs and letting the silences speak for themselves. This is an element that will come into even more play when they release “Washing Machine” another couple years down the road.
I guess that today I am really writing this post for myself because I need to remind myself that this is an album that is worth going back to and spending more time with. This album is worth knowing better than I currently know it. I’m attaching the video to “Bull in the Heather” below for a few reasons: first reason is that it is very painfully of the time. Kathleen Hanna dancing around and clawing at Thurston, jumping all over the band, the fashion, the attitude, all very 1990s. I also remember seeing this video quite a lot on regular MTV rotation, and of course on 120 minutes, not to mention the number of spins that it got on local independent radio station 90.5 WBER. Take a listen, and then go back and relisten to the entire album. It’s amazing how much a band can change their sound and keep things consistent.
