2008: Wino - A Bottle Of Pills With a Bullet Chaser
Temporary Residence Limited, the now reputable purveyors of ‘post’-everything, was founded in Louisville, Kentucky in 1996. The first signing to the nascent label was Wino, a local noise-rock band with only a 7-inch to their name at the time. TRL went on to release several more 7-inches and one long-player from them, but the group disbanded in 1999, having undergone several personnel changes. After Wino’s dissolution, they seemingly faded into obscurity.
Recently, TRL released A Bottle Of Pills With a Bullet Chaser, the complete recorded output of the little band who, according to the press release, “inspired dozens of later Louisville bands.” Unfortunately, the amount and quality of the music presented here is largely unimpressive. Sure, in recent years, inexpensive home recording has skyrocketed in popularity, but even at the close of the century, having only created two hours worth of music in five years together (split among 36 songs) doesn’t quite merit a “Deluxe 2-disc set” or a compendium of any kind.
Wino didn’t really forge a sound of their own so much as assimilate aspects of popular bands of the ’90s. In nearly every song, singer Aaron Hodge’s wails and yells are muffled and buried deep in the mix, not unlike David Yow’s vocals on early Jesus Lizard albums. Most of the tracks are decent if not uninspired noise-rock songs, with overdriven bass lines, pounding drums, and cacophonous guitars. There are a few cuts that don’t adhere to the aesthetic at all; “Eon,” for instance, sounds nothing like any of the other 35 songs here, showing the group’s desire to expand creatively and push themselves. But immediately following it is “Fast Freddie,” a generic grungy punk number. Instead of hearing the results of a band following uninhibited creative impulse, we’re left with a whole lot of pretty basic guitar, drum, and bass work.
And it’s not like this band had a whole lot to say. Lyrically (from what I can discern), Hodge’s screams are about as profound as the brooding couplets scrawled into an angst-ridden high school student’s notebook cover. The absolute nadir of this collection can be heard on “Edward,” a track with (unintentionally) laughable vocals (at one point drenched in a chorus effect, the ’90s guitar staple), and lines as heinous as “Motherfucker, you’re so cool!/ Cause you drivin’ that BMW!/ Motherfucker!/ Motherfucker.”
It’s interesting to see just how far Temporary Residence Limited has come. There are many examples on A Bottle of Pills… that display the soft/loud dynamics and spidery guitar lines that the label would become known for. At best, the album serves as a curious document to contribute to the TRL archives and maybe even a collection that would have sufficed as a free (or maybe ‘pay-what-you-want’) download. Though this collection has a fair number of "good" tracks, there are far better noise rock bands from the ’90s more worthy of your two hours.
Disc 1:
1. Dutch Oven
2. Red Wings
3. Yam Hand
4. Dogs
5. Inspiration
6. Desperation
7. One-Eyed Willie
8. Glass Blower
9. A Minute Fifty-One
10. Burn Down The Brick Factory
11. *****
12. Attack Utopia
13. Eon
14. Fast Freddie
15. Make-Out Party
Disc 2:
1. Mountain River
2. Heaven
3. Winner Takes Nothing
4. Mensural
5. Johnny Deeper
6. Guns
7. What The Paper Said
8. Downtown
9. Truth Cigar
10. Spiked Heels And Leather
11. Blue Tree
12. Best Freind
13. Red Eye
14. Edward
15. Finish Line
16. Saturday
17. Searchin'
18. In The Light
19. Best Friend
20. Dead Bird Fight
21. My House
1979: Yellow Magic Orchestra - Solid State Survivor
Like the majority of bands that first played with electronics, it's hard to discuss Yellow Magic Orchestra without referencing Kraftwerk. However, to combat the homogenization and simplification of modern music's trajectory, one must try. The Japanese group, hugely successful and still influential in their native country, had only minor hits in the Western world during their late 1970s, early 1980s heyday. They're probably more remembered nowadays as one of the first projects of Academy Award-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (the 'Danny Elfman / Oingo Boingo complex'). Nevertheless, their music is worth reappraisal.
YMO's second album, Solid State Survivor, was released in 1979. Although they would release more ambitious (1981's Technodelic) and well-crafted (1983's Naughty Boys) works, it's here that their unique, left-field musical manifesto is best expressed. Indeed, despite the presence and implementation of mile-high stacks of synthesizers and other electronic gadgets, YMO's sound is rooted in composition and performance. Whereas their German counterparts were masters of minimalism, YMO layer and weave. The ‘robotik’ sound of other synth pioneers is tweaked with the inclusion of Sakamoto's classically-trained keyboard runs, Haruomi Hosono's bass stabs, and Yukihiro Takahashi's drum embellishments, as well as traditional Oriental instrumentation.
These contradictions are present on the album's most famous tracks: "Rydeen" is a giddy thrill of synth-pop bliss, with strong melodic lines performed like high-register wind instruments. This hyper consonance and carefree momentum is an unmistakable influence on early Japanese video game music. Equally, "Technopolis," for all its Technology TV Show Theme stylings, is importantly punctuated by a funky bass that rumbles and pops. "Behind the Mask," a psychologically paranoid ‘love song’ straight out of a Philip K. Dick short story ("Is it me/ Is it you/ Behind this mask?"), is almost sabotaged by Sakamoto's use of vocoder, which completely obscures his vocals. The song works -- though, the lack of a strong conventional vocal hook has given birth to horribly overwrought re-imaginings and covers of the song, the most successful of which was recorded by Eric Clapton during his mid-’80s Phil Collins period.
This sense that YMO are, at times, self-sabotaging their easiest bids for pop success is no more evident than on the cover of The Beatles' classic "Day Tripper." What is first a proto-hard rock song -- a prime candidate for the basic moog-and-arpeggiator makeover -- is transformed into an off-kilter mutant. It's almost post-punk in its convulsive rhythms and far ahead of its time in the use of intentional glitching. It could be one of the more prescient tracks on the album. Furthermore, the title track, placed right at the end of side two, is a straightforward New Wave song, containing the album's only full-bodied vocal performance from Yukihiro Takahashi. It comes off as a kinetic tribute to Roxy Music or David Bowie. Here, however, YMO show a mischievousness: the majority of the vocals are drowned out by scratchy, distorted samples in favor of, once again, an instrumental chorus hook.
Solid State Survivor presents all sides of its creator's complexity. YMO are at times synthetic, at times vital; they are frustrating, joyous; willingly accessible, yet defiantly stubborn. In the future, they would craft more one-dimensional, satisfying albums. Technodelic would take the experimental innovation to new depths, just as much as Naughty Boys would feature fully-fledged pop songs, with proper vocal performances from Takahashi to boot. Sakamoto would find better means of expression -- both in his solo compositions and in collaboration with other artists, such as David Sylvian, Alva Noto and Christian Fennesz (in a graceful, atmospheric mode represented here by "Castalia"). On this album, however, YMO display a smörgåsbord-like approach. They move away from Kraftwerk's clinical, futurist kitsch. Instead, they use the synthesizer as a composition aid. The result may not be as iconic as their Germanic contemporaries, but YMO's art shows a great deal more sophistication.
1996: The Kropotkins - The Kropotkins
Until Captain Beefheart’s brilliant Safe as Milk (1967), no one had paid such a respectful and original homage to the great bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta, whose names narrowly escaped the contempt and neglect engendered by Jim Crow laws. The Kropotkins may have spent more time on the New York avant-garde scene than in Memphis’ smoky bars, but they all maintain a personal, often passionate tie to the blues and other musical traditions the region directly or indirectly engendered -- jazz and hip-hop, soul and funk; they may not all have been raised in the rural South, the historical birthplace of the genre, but they all are, in a way, children of the blues.
Such is the case for the The Kropotniks' instigator, Dave Soldier, an avant-garde composer and violinist -- also a psychology and neurology professor at Columbia University -- whose string quartet used to perform microtonal arrangements of Muddy Waters’ songs. Similarly rooted is Lorette Velvette (The Hellcats, Alluring Strange, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns) a Memphis singer with an entrancing voice, brought up in the school of blues and rockabilly. And don't forget Samm Bennett (Tom Cora, Elliott Sharp, John Zorn), a subtle drummer fond of free-jazz, who has spent a good deal of time traveling around West-Africa, studying the traditional rhythmic patterns brought by Africans to the New World.
Born from a New York meeting of musicians from various backgrounds, The Kropotkins is a collective with a rotating lineup, a project that materializes from time to time rather than being a "group" in the classic sense. Started in 1992, they have only released two albums since, one in 1996, the other, Five Points Crawl, in 2001. Two records whose grooves offer nuggets of the pleasant smell of the old South, the slowness of farm work, the frenzy of East St. Louis bars, and, above all, the dusty roads and sparkling railroad tracks, the throbbing trucks and rumbling freight trains, the inhospitable road stops and dubious motels; in a word, the immensity of the landscapes, which the band’s most compelling songs drive up and down at turbo speed.
“Cold Wet Steel,” “Shake ‘em on Down” and “Everdream,” opening songs on The Kropotkins’ self-titled album, explode the musical quarries that the band exploits. The first tune is a classic one, an accurate and jubilatory interpretation of the Delta blues' best moments. A simple and efficient bass line, tirelessly repeated, with a rhythmically bouncing banjo and a violin providing the typical instrumental response to the hot and cheeky Lorette Velvette, who casts a spell on her audience from the very first line. Nothing is lacking, save Otha Turner’s fife, which appears on the following song.
“Shake ‘em on Down” marks the next phase of The Kropotkins’ interpretive work; the homage to Mississippi Fred McDowell is obvious, but irreverent. The urgency of the vocals and the guitar slide responses evoke an image of a train flying at top speed, constantly on the verge of derailing. A discomfort accentuated by Jonathan Kane (February, Swans, Rhys Chatham) whose drum shuffle, far from being monotonous, follows the guitar in jolts, introducing a radically different dynamic that truly gives new flavor to the McDowell classic.
“Everdream” is the ultimate step in the transformation that The Kropotkins impose on the old-fashioned arrangement of their idols; hip-hop beats, industrial sounds, and electronic loops compete with the hegemony of the classical banjo, violin, and fife, musically illustrating the nightmarish visions recounted by Lorette Velvette (“Momma gonna milk you/ or kill you dead”). We have come full circle; the traditional sounds now cheerfully collide with the recent ones, proving that the road from Memphis to New York was long, but without too many potholes.
The record drifts from respectful covers to audacious interpretations, from songs that purr like a big engine (“Coal Black Wind”) to bravura pieces that offer the musicians, Mark Feldman (John Zorn, Arcado String Trio, Pharoah Sanders) in particular, a chance to express their virtuosity. But the music is always pretext. Pretext for Lorette Velvette and Samm Bennett, whose vocals, sung with tender or ironic tones, outline scenes from outdated places and times, sketching the timeless failings of their fellow man, taking part in the constitution and perpetuation of a specific idea in the American myth.
1997: Pavement - Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Edition
I’ve always felt that Brighten the Corners, Pavement’s penultimate album, was a record with an identity crisis, though of a different sort than the preceding, incredibly eclectic Wowee Zowee. On one hand, BtC was another step towards rock “maturity” -- more nuanced production, a greater degree of multi-tracking, less of the gawky warts-n-all approach that made Pavement easy to root for. On the other, with the benefit of hindsight comparisons to the later Terror Twilight, Brighten the Corners is downright rollicking.
Perhaps not coincidentally, BtC’s songs are even sequenced like an adolescent growing up. The record’s funnest tracks are its first few, the much-beloved “Stereo” and “Shady Lane” -- “Stereo” in particular is so canonized that one can find several YouTube videos of hipster parents’ toddlers singing it. “Date with IKEA” remains a great power-pop song, and the sardonic “Type Slowly” is a worthy ancestor of Terror Twilight’s “Spit on a Stranger” -- a twinkling, smirky gem of a tune that actually merits its five minutes. “Embassy Row” tacks a lackluster preamble onto a bona fide barnburner.
And depending on who you ask, “Embassy Row” is either the last worthwhile track on a Pavement record or simply the band’s last true rocker. Either way, it’s hard to argue that Brighten the Corners' second half is as strong as its first, which is as good as anything the band ever recorded. “Passat Dream” and “We are Underused” probably qualify as filler for Pavement, but for nearly any other band they’d be lead-single material. “Starlings of the Slipstream” and “Fin” are pleasant enough, but together mostly represent an eight-and-a-half minute attempt to end the album.
If you’re reading this, though, you’ve likely already listened to Brighten the Corners and formed your own opinion. So what does Matador’s reissue -- dubbed the Nicene Creedence Edition” -- add? We’ve got the original album’s 12 songs, remastered (I can’t tell the difference, maybe you can). Then there’s another 31 tracks of B-sides, unreleased session material, and live songs to wade through, split over two discs. I’ll touch on some highlights:
- A jam session called “And Then (the Hexx)” that was apparently planned to be BtC’s first track. They made the right decision. (It appears in a different incarnation on Terror Twilight.)
- Three quality rockers from the “Stereo” single: “Westie Can Drum,” “Winner of the,” and “Birds in the Majic Industry.”
- A pair of lighthearted (if inessential) numbers from the “Spit on a Stranger” single: “Harness Your Hopes” and “Roll with the Wind” (the unreleased version of “Roll” is even better).
- An unfortunate honky-tonk two-step reinvention of “Type Slowly” (“Slowly Typed”).
- A cover of Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon,” which old-timers might remember from the classic What’s Up Matador compilation
- KCRW, BBC, and Peel sessions whose collective highlights are the Peel session’s playful cuts of “Date with IKEA” and Wowee Zowee’s “Grave Architecture.”
- Two silly themes recorded for an appearance on Space Ghost Coast to Coast
And that’s about it. Pavement were primarily a pop band, and great pop bands are also good self-editors. Thus it stands to reason that a reissue that tacks on stuff that didn’t make the first cut (from a band that had just knocked out the sprawling Wowee Zowee) might not be consistent. With a couple of exceptions, the Nicene Creedence Edition is the least essential of Matador’s Pavement compilations. But even with this caveat, the package performs the service of reminding us how good Brighten the Corners still is -- it bats well above .500, and if it wins the original album any new listeners, Nicene more than validates its existence.
1969: Morgen - Morgen
The cover of guitarist Steve Morgen’s first and only album anticipates the record’s mystery status. It features a monochrome reproduction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, an equally iconic solid grey background, and a single word, small enough to go unnoticed against the colorful merry-go-round of late-'60s psychedelic balloon lettering: "Morgen," which is at once the artist’s name, the album’s title, and the German word for “tomorrow.” 1969 was the year of Woodstock, but it was also the year of Altamont, where a fan's murder at a Rolling Stones concert sounded the death toll of daisy-haired euphoria. If excess had been the rule of the turning decade, Morgen signaled the throbbing hangover that would accompany its listeners into the new one.
“Welcome to the void,” sings Morgen on the album’s vertiginous opener. If Munch’s The Scream rose to German philosopher Schopenhauer’s call for a pictorial art capable of capturing the sound of a human howl, “Welcome to the Void” provides its acid rock counterpart. Amid plunging baroque bass lines, careering fuzz guitars, and a drum gallop capable of whipping a retirement community into a band of Samurais, Morgen opens his flirtation with emptiness -- not with a scream, but with a single, arching, razor-sharp laugh. Not a Black Sabbath laugh, not an “Oh look how evil I am holding my pinky up to the corner of my mouth” kind of cackle, but one that actually hails from the far side of the borderline. Listening to this song for the first time is as disturbing and exhilarating as watching these four Long Island musicians taking an amphetamine-driven joyride to the top of a cliff, looking out into the star-studded black-yonder, and slamming down on the gas.
Which is perhaps one of the reasons why Morgen crashed and burned the second it hit the press, especially considering the band’s pairing with the subsidiary of a major label. Maybe Morgen and his bandmates simply scared radio stations stiff. But for all its inebriated thrill-seeking, its existential head-scratching, and its overblown guitar solos, Morgen offers a gentleman’s share of softer, more delicate moments. “Of Dreams,” the album’s second track, reincarnates the opener's braying Steve Morgen as a kind of sweet-voiced, sexless nymph, recounting a series of bucolic adventures with a woman whose “hair caressed the air and made it sing.” Suddenly, and almost by a stroke of magical luck, the cantering drums of "Welcome to the Void" weave their way back into the mix, revealing the secret logic of one song in the backbone of another.
Women and narcotics are definitely the central pillars of Steve Morgen’s search for metaphysical meaning, and sometimes it's difficult to tell whether he's courting the perfect high or the girl next door. Fortunately, the lyrical skirt-chasing doesn’t stop at embarrassing one-liners like “I want to fill you with my fire.” On “Purple,” “She’s the Nitetime,” and “Love,” the album’s closing trilogy, Morgen returns to the fatal cliff of the first song, jumps aboard a square of windowpane, and shuttles off into the kaleidoscopic night. At first, he begins to lose his sense of time. Then, he begins to panic. Finally, the stars assume the outline of the young woman he's been pining after, and he realizes that she's been sitting beside him the whole time, there on the cliff, guiding him down to earth with a pat on the back and a water bottle.
After three-and-a-half minutes of major key, up-tempo hot love, Maid Marianne slips through Robin Hood’s fingers yet again, and the album finishes on the same note of ecstatic horror that it began on. Not with a suicidal scream this time, but a long and murderous one, as Steve Morgen fords a black riptide of ascending bass triads, climbs atop a bridge of tumbling drums, and promises to “crush [her] to [him] madly/ smother [her] in kisses/ and wildly proclaim [his] love.”
As its top-ten ranking among many a collector and a blogger will attest, Morgen is more than a representative slice of the heavier side of 1960s psychedelia. And it's more than a showcase of some of the most top-notch electric guitar playing that never made it to Woodstock-Altamont, for people who like that kind of thing. Although it is simply overflowing with ’60s rock stereotypes, it takes the sound of its time to a kind of nail-biting, adolescent extreme, perhaps even to its breaking point. Some people might call it the beginning of hard rock.
1983: R.E.M. - Murmur: Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition
It’s hard to believe a lot of things about Murmur. That R.E.M. actually made the album; that they used to sound this weird and original; that Murmur is now 25 years old; that it spurred listeners to toss around newfangled terms like “college-rock” as something new and distinct from the old punk-rock orthodoxy; that R.E.M. started out so right for an act that went so wrong. That, ultimately, this band and this album are the godfathers of so much of your favorite music, whether you’d like to admit it or not. But you know all that already from countless “100 Best Albums Of All-Time” lists that slot Murmur somewhere in the high 80s or low 90s -- every music hack seems to instinctively know it belongs in the ranks but can’t always remember why. So, let’s just talk about the reissue-ish parts of this package.
Disc one is the original joint straight, no chaser. The remastering job brings out the snap, crackle, and pop missing from the murky, mysterious original cut, especially in the percussion. The lack of bonus tracks may seem like wasted space, especially stacked up against, say, the forthcoming 10th-anniversary reissue of Pavement’s Brighten The Corners. One might think Universal would at least append the band’s Chronic Town debut EP. But the label was smart to stay away from repackaging odds ‘n’ sods. Everything from this era already showed up on the largely shitty old relic Dead Letter Office and 2006’s great best-of-the-indie-years And I Feel Fine. However, it would have been nice to toss in the Hib-Tone single version of “Radio Free Europe,” since, as they freely admit, it crushes the album version like a grape.
But that’s where the live set comes in: crushed grapes? Why settle for wine when you can have blood and whiskey? The previously unheard 1983 Toronto show that takes up the entirety of disc two has sharper teeth than any studio versions of the songs, drawn mostly from Murmur with a sprinkling of Chronic Town and some early takes on Reckoning’s best tracks. Who needs Chronic Town itself with such vicious versions of “Carnival Of Sorts (Box Cars),” “Gardening at Night,” and “1,000,000” in hand? Why isn’t the audience clapping harder for “Harborcoat” and “7 Chinese Bros”? Oh yeah, they’ve never heard those before.
If you want all the B-sides from this era, you’ll find them without too much trouble -- but you might wish you hadn’t. This concert is much more satisfying than any hoary old chestnuts from the studio archives, an exhilarating reminder that R.E.M. really did come roaring out of the (post) punk era with furious style (on par with contemporaries like Mission of Burma) and a reputation built more on devastating performances than through quietly confounding albums that didn’t fit into any nerdy sub-genres at the time. Block the last 15 or 20 years of R.E.M.’s sputtering output when you throw this on, and you’ll never need to ask what the frequency is again.
