Tiny Mix Tapes | Music Reviews

Music Review: Steve Gunn-John Truscinski Duo - Ocean Parkway

Clifford Allen — Fri, 25 May 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Steve Gunn-John Truscinski Duo
Ocean Parkway

[Three Lobed; 2012]

by Clifford Allen

Rating:

One can imagine that a combination of North African-inspired modes, folk guitar, and open jazz drumming would have turned more than a few heads in the New York coffee shop scene of the early- to mid-1960s. Guitarist, banjoist, and oud player Sandy Bull recorded a couple of sessions with drummer Billy Higgins for the Vanguard label in 1963 and 1965, and apparently they performed together frequently, sometimes with the addition of Higgins’ frequent confrere, trumpeter Don Cherry. Although perhaps too much could be made of a comparison, Philly/Brooklyn guitarist Steve Gunn seems like the heir apparent to Bull’s introspective, seeker’s legacy. Ocean Parkway is his second album in duet with drummer John Truscinski for Three Lobed (after 2010’s Sand City) and follows in the footsteps of a plugged-in Sandy Bull, perhaps re-imagined with wiry, noise-rock grit. Research including Moroccan music, punk, Sun Ra, psychedelia, and his own overdubbed inventions has brought Gunn to an interesting place within modern guitar music, and with chops to spare.

As a duo, Gunn and Truscinski are strikingly unadorned, and while the music is extraordinarily nuanced, it’s the result of a plug-in-and-play simplicity. The opening title piece begins in a rumbling alap of free-time cymbals and glassy, droning santur-like overlays, before splaying out into a country-rock raga. Gunn’s electric guitar is swathed in a dusty midrange, twangy but reveling in a haunting swirl of overtones and bent notes. Truscinski’s percussion work is metallic and anchoring, providing a robust, insistent swing to a network of psych-rock chords and modal exploration. (The drummer’s Sunny Murray-like wash on “County Fair Getaway” is especially indicative of his keyed-in-ness.) “Banh Mi Ringtones” is gorgeously slinky, blending fuzzed minimalism, Fred McDowell, and ornate circularity with a muted, tom-heavy undertow. At times reverent, at other times almost shit-kicking, Gunn’s improvisations tread a delicate line between seemingly oppositional aesthetics, both down-home and otherworldly.

“Don’t Lean on Door” is the only acoustic number in this five-tune set, positing a different level of detail in its lush six-string reverie. While certainly echoing the acidic tones of the electric raga-like pieces, this track also has a bright, sashaying urgency that, combined with Truscinski’s spare mallet work, renders Moorish scales with sunny intricacy. The closing “Minetta River” finds the duo ensconced in a noisy free blues, Truscinski elaborating on a controlled thrash against Gunn’s folksy wallow. Ocean Parkway presents an urbane and often tense variant on the timeless “guitar raga” tradition, shot through with post-punk efficiency and regular nods to free improvisation. In fact, Steve Gunn’s music — and that of this duo — is entirely too personal to be accurately called “folk” music. Sure, it’s been carved from various strains of popular expression, but the essence is prickly and decidedly his own.

01. Ocean Parkway
02. Banh Mi Ringtones
03. County Fair Getaway
04. Don’t Lean On Door
05. Minetta River

Links: Three Lobed

Music Review: Drudkh - Eternal Turn of the Wheel

Birkut — Fri, 25 May 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Drudkh
Eternal Turn of the Wheel

[Seasons of Mist; 2012]

by Birkut

Rating:

For 46 years, the Ukraine remained firmly tucked away behind the Iron Curtain. It was a country afflicted with great turmoil and suffering, while it was subject to the grim and punishing Soviet arm that stretched out across Eastern Europe. From an outsider’s perspective, this gave the country a rather peculiar and mysterious allure, perhaps more so than any other Eastern Bloc country due to the deep, significant cultural ties it shared with its neighboring Russia. However, once the Iron Curtain started to crumble as a consequence of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, the Ukraine began to develop more significant ties with the West and was finally able to shed its Soviet shackles in 1991.

Geopolitical shifts might not play much of a role in the music that Drudkh release, but the mystery and depth that surround both their albums and their online persona are as impenetrable and seductive as the Iron Curtain that was once wrapped around the band’s homeland. However, the major difference in this analogy is that the regime-empowering concrete architecture, gilded Orthodox churches and authoritarian statecraft of major cities such as Kiev and Kharkiv (the city from which Drudkh hail), are worlds away from the moody gallantry and enchanting rural landscapes that the band conjures in its exquisite folk-tinted black metal.

This is a niche genre that Drudkh have had years to master. Indeed, Eternal Turn of the Wheel is their ninth album and sees no rapid departure from what they have released in the past. The band creates atmospheric music through sketching a canvas of rural recordings, adopting brush strokes that leave unsettling gusts of wind that swell behind a backdrop of acoustic guitars and birdsong before the band plunges its listeners into a dark and isolated woodland, propelled by crushing black metal.

What makes Eternal Turn of the Wheel so captivating is not so much the band’s furious blend of rural sampling combined with their consistent prowess as black metal musicians, but the enchanting manor in which they craft the tracks. Once the babbling brook fades to black at the end of “Eternal Circle,” the mighty stride of “Breath of Cold Black Soil” ignites the album’s tremendous stampede of rampant percussion and shredding guitars, which remain at the forefront of the listener’s mind even as “Farewell to Autumn’s Sorrowful Birds” comes to a close and we are left alone with the sound of footsteps crunching through soft and crispy snow to a beautiful crow call. The album’s centerpiece, “When Gods Leave Their Emerald Halls,” which clocks in at over nine minutes, is a bewildering midway point along the enshrouded and sorrowful journey that I find myself embarking on every time I listen to this album. It signifies a clearing, surrounded on all sides by the grip of dense and enrapturing woodland, as mysterious and strangely alluring as any Iron Curtain might be to the next curious explorer.

01. Eternal Circle
02. Breath of Cold Black Soil
03. When Gods Leave Their Emerald Halls
04. Farewell to Autumn’s Sorrowful Birds
05. Night Woven of Snow, Winds and Grey-Haired Stars

Links: Drudkh - Seasons of Mist

Music Review: Daughn Gibson - All Hell

Elliott Sharp — Thu, 24 May 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Daughn Gibson
All Hell

[White Denim; 2012]

by Elliott Sharp

Rating:

I was recently listening to All Hell, the debut album by Daughn Gibson, and queued up right after it in iTunes was Lil B’s The Basedprint 2. As the last track of All Hell segued into the opening track of The Basedprint 2, I thought it was the same damn album. That’s ’cause All Hell has a somewhat similar cloud-rap sound — without the rapping, of course, but the music’s something like a Clams Casino instrumental. But as soon as B’s voice kicked in a few seconds later, that dream ended. I replayed it and realized that “NYU” sounds much glossier and sunnier than All Hell, an album that’s covered in gorgeous mystery and ominously slow-drizzling doom.

Like Elvis and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, Gibson has a powerful baritone voice. Also, like them, Gibson pulls from a profound darkness and is capable of molding a three-minute pop tune out of a messy history of random dread. All Hell begins with “Bad Guys,” a short, twangy country-western song that introduces the album’s themes: the frailty of goodness, the dream of redemption, agony, the road, the return of forgotten nightmares and ghosts, wrestling with one’s former selves, (the absence of) God. “I met a lot of bad guys along the way,” sings Gibson. Like the nine songs that follow, “Bad Guys” is grounded on a looped sample, and then Gibson adds guitar, keyboard, and percussion parts.

The vinyl static and looped piano phrase on “In The Beginning” sounds like a less suicidal Leyland Kirby piece due to its shuffling beat and delayed guitars, and Gibson quickly complicates the trajectory of his protagonist by going back in time: “It wasn’t me, I’m not the same guy,” he claims, seemingly returning to the period before it all went to shit. The blurry, screwed vocal sample on “Tiffany Lou,” a song about a girl tormented by a recurring episode of Cops in which her dead father gets arrested, borrows chillwave tropes but makes them much more chilling. “A Young Girl’s World” is a drunken, country-lounge track, and on “Rain,” the song that sounds the most like an indie chamber-pop number, Gibson sings like what’s-his-name from Crash Test Dummies. On “The Day You Were Born,” Gibson resurrects Johnny Cash above what sounds like a mbira sample or a clip from Señor Coconut’s El Baile Alemán.

The current musician most similar to Daughn Gibson is Alex Hungtai of Dirty Beaches. Both bring Elvis up to speed, positioning the King’s bleak crooning in a more contemporary sonic context. But while Dirty Beaches tends to lean toward a nasty, though fairly traditional, rock ’n’ roll framework, Gibson’s music is far more unique. Both use samples, but Gibson slows his down and makes them sinisterly resonate. His sample-work recalls both cloud-rap producers and ambient artists like Kirby and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. But most striking is that he somehow manages to introduce country music, and a more traditional singer-songwriter approach, into this equation. And while this combination seems like a train wreck waiting to happen, Gibson makes it work.

Popular country music prides itself on reproducing tradition; its lack of innovation and inability to evolve with shifting trends is one of its virtues, both musically and ideologically. From Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, Sr. to Keith Urban and Jason Aldean, not much has changed. Sure, there are electric guitars, pre-ripped jeans, and hair-stylists now, and Miranda Lambert packs stadiums with revenge-songs about setting her lovers’ trailers on fire, but the basic songwriting themes and instrumentation have not evolved with the times. And this is what makes All Hell so refreshing and special: It wipes away the dust and brings fresh ideas into the room. Finally, a musician whose record collection, or iTunes library, sounds as if it could contain albums by Cash, Conway Twitty, Elvis, Balam Acab, The Caretaker, Portishead, and Washed Out created music that synthesizes these diverse influences. It was only a matter of time before fans of country music got their hands on samplers and began integrating contemporary techniques and sounds from other music communities into traditional country music. Daughn Gibson’s All Hell proclaims that the time is now.

01. Bad Guys
02. In The Beginning
03. Tiffany Lou
04. A Young Girl’s World
05. Rain On The Highway
06. Looking Back On ’99
07. Ray
08. The Day You Were Born
09. Dandelions
10. All Hell

Links: Daughn Gibson - White Denim

Music Review: Josephine Foster and The Victor Herrero Band - Perlas

Joe Hemmerling — Thu, 24 May 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Josephine Foster and The Victor Herrero Band
Perlas

[Fire; 2012]

by Joe Hemmerling

Rating:

Despite her prolific and varied career as a singer/songwriter, Josephine Foster’s enduring reputation might rest most heavily upon her skill as an arranger and interpreter of other people’s work. From her mind-bending re-visionings of German lieder in 2006’s A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing to her most recent solo album of Emily Dickinson poems set to acoustic guitar, Graphic as a Star, Foster has demonstrated a talent for taking songs and poems that are brilliant in their own right and putting her own unique stamp upon them.

A notable entry into that body of work was Foster’s collaboration with Spanish folk artists The Victor Herrero Band on a reinterpretation of Federico García Lorca and La Argentinita’s Coleccion De Las Canciones Populares Espanolas. Perlas finds Foster and Herrero joining forces once more, this time on a set of Spanish-language songs and poems chosen by Foster herself from a variety of traditions. As with Anda Jaleo, there is very little (if anything) in these songs that would give them away as being products of the 21st century. The live, analogue studio recordings give the tracks an earthy physicality, and, of course, Foster’s trilling alto remains as enchantingly anachronistic as ever. It’s an album that would sound equally at home piping through the tinny speakers of an old AM radio as through a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.

Yet Perlas is a very different album than Foster and Herrero’s previous outing, and a gentler affair in comparison to the sharper-edged flamenco of Anda Jaleo. The variety of the source material, which was derived from Castile, the Basque, Santander, and the Costa Brava, allows for a broader range of textures. It opens the ensemble up to the rousing harmonica solo that floats through the majestic “Cuando Vienes Del Monto” and the dizzying country waltz of “Dame Esa Flor.” It also leaves room for more expansive songs like “Puerto De Santa Maria” to unfold at a more leisurely pace. What is most notable about this collection, however, is the extent to which the artists themselves seem absent from it. Popular music, more than almost any other art form, is one built upon the cult of personality. Contemporary songwriters perform songs that help shape their image, and in turn mold their image into the likeness of their songs. Yet, historically, the folk balladeer was more a craftsman than an artist, a conduit for ancient cultural artifacts rather than a Promethean titan handing down the sacred fire of some NEW IDEA to the masses. Foster and Herrero are working in this older, more reverential tradition. One can appreciate their skill and talent in bringing these songs to life, but ultimately it is the songs themselves that matter most, with the performers existing simply as a means to an end.

The ego-void at the center of Perlas poses its share of challenges to the contemporary listener. While Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing was a far more experimental and, perhaps, a more sonically difficult record, there was something comforting in its lunar soundscapes (to borrow an expression from our own Chizzly St. Claw). Sure, it was a weird record, but it was a weirdness that the millennial indie rock kid could understand and relate to, a weirdness that gave us some ownership over the Germanic traditions to which she was paying homage. In the absence of an Artist, these humble, reverent reproductions leave us only with the beguiling, alien sounds of a far-off land to grapple with. I could describe those sounds, talk about the sensual beauty of the Spanish language and about Foster and Herrero’s intricate guitar filigrees, but I can’t really get inside of them, because they were not made for me and nothing in my cultural formation up to this point has trained me how to listen to them.

Despite these inherent barriers, there is a natural grace to these compositions that’s difficult to deny. Foster and Herrero’s continued efforts to mine Spain’s rich musical heritage and to make its treasures accessible to a broader audience is an admirable one, and their humility a fitting tribute to the countless poets, songsters, and performers who have kept that music alive for so many generations.

01. Puerto De Santa Maria
02. Sangre Colorada
03. Cuando Vienes Del Monto
04. Cuatro Pinos
05. Peregrino
06. Dame Esa Flor
07. En Esta Larga Ausencia
08. Perlas
09. Brillante Estrella

Links: Josephine Foster and The Victor Herrero Band - Fire

Music Review: Aufgehoben - Fragments of the Marble Plan

Matthew Phillips — Wed, 23 May 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Aufgehoben
Fragments of the Marble Plan

[Holy Mountain; 2012]

by Matthew Phillips

Rating:

Silence is terrifying. Nature is never silent except at its most hostile: outer space, the motionless abyss, windless deserts, solid blocks of ice, bedrock. Silence is either the onset or the effect of something horrific. Silence happens after a bomb explodes, and a silence precedes the firing of a gun. If the soundtrack of a horror film cuts out, it means ‘prepare yourself.’ Aufgehoben’s mastery of tension on Fragments of the Marble Plan fills every open space with anxiety. Each fragment proves the destructive potential of the next, and each void contains the threat of future violence.

This violence is not of the physical sort, though perhaps there is some danger to the eardrum at high volumes. Aufgehoben’s violence splits into a dialectic: conceptual violence aiming at musical forms, ideals, and expectations; sensate violence, which disrupts the listener’s ability to process ideas or conceptualize; and finally silence itself, the culmination of this process and its container, the absence of both real sensation and ideal form. The title Fragments of the Marble Plan suggests that a fracturing of stone laws has occurred; what is left of the former whole floats on the black void of its cover, like a blasted puzzle missing most of its pieces, lacking even a semblance of its former sense.

Each instrument plays a significant role in this movement. One thing is clear across Aufgehoben’s six-album output: they are a complete band, a machine that works together, each piece respecting the necessities of negative space or contributing to the controlled chaos. The dual percussion assault, most clearly in cymbal blasts and snare distortions, fills space and buries rhythms in the mix, or, more likely, generates an image of rhythm where the listener seeks it, though actual forms rarely appear (see “Fruitsofcouncils_shrewd (362b)” and “CuriosityVanityExpediency” for more “rhythmic” tracks). This is rhythm in the sense of concatenating sound and silence; in this way, Aufgehoben’s two drummers are gatekeepers of this violent synthesis. There are two other instrumental elements: guitar and electronics, each of which covers Fragments in dense static textures. Static, too, is a meeting of sound and its opposite, just on a barely audible scale. Timbre and texture define where amplitude occurs within a waveform, but also where it doesn’t. In this way, Aufgehoben’s instrumentalists act as sculptors: They cut away to make each form complete. The final element in Aufgehoben’s structure is production, which consists in the control of volume: the final say as to where silence must occur.

Aufgehoben’s compositional process (or “no process,” as their former band name suggests) violently undermines notions of musicality, paying no heed to traditional phrasing, tonality, and barely allowing a melody to slip through the speakers. But the process of listening to Fragments presents a violence of a different kind: sensory overload, a scrambling of psychic communication, the frustration of the cerebrum. This is not to suggest that there is no pleasure in listening to Aufgehoben; in fact, forcibly abandoning one’s own desires for order contains a strange but powerful pleasure within it. But when the chaos ejects the mind into silence, we are left reeling on two planes. The mind spins its wheels in search of conceptual data, anticipating future blows, and the senses beg for the ocean of static and in its transgressive excess. This effect, however, runs a significant risk: desensitization, which leads to boredom and a breakdown of the listener’s possibilities for the experience. But this is a small caveat. Fragments of the Marble Plan’s strong statement, in all its exhausting vigor, presents us an ordeal of transformative violence that terrifies, excites, and destroys.

01. ActsRoman(s)
02. Whataboutwhen (med3)
03. Ethicsisanoptics (TI23)
04. Fruitsofcouncils_shrewd (362b)
05. CuriosityVanityExpediency
06. Interruhig
07. Thatwealldothatwedo (1102s2-3)
08. MeOn
09. Scholium159

Links: Aufgehoben - Holy Mountain

Music Review: Joey Ramone - ...Ya Know?

Alex R Wilson — Wed, 23 May 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Joey Ramone
…Ya Know?

[BMG Chrysalis; 2012]

by Alex R Wilson

Rating:

Joey Ramone represents something to me that I know is far removed from what was probably the reality of the person: a cult member of a cult-like band that fostered the idea that you didn’t need to know how to play your instruments (in the traditional virtuosic sense) to form an amazing band. I remember the first Ramones song I both heard and learned to play on guitar: “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” As a young’un who had held a guitar for about a month at that time, playing the descending power chords into a “one two three four five six seven eight” was something I would do over and over again until my sister would yell at me to stop.

I would like to distance myself from Ramones purists who find only significance in their early work. Admittedly, I have a soft spot for the pop structuring and bell/chime sounds that nuanced and signified their post-Phil Spector production, and although albums like Brain Drain don’t have the same strength as Leave Home, there are are a couple songs I’ve grown very fond of. Even so, …Y’know?’s production is about as alienating as production can get. Speaking of Brain Drain, the song “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight)” from said album reappears on …Ya Know?, and it acts as a signifier for the whole album: a collection of semi-rehashes and very basic outtakes cut, chopped, and Pro-Tooled into something that lacks any personality of Joey Ramone himself. Rather, it seems more like a product of those around him. The very obvious “duh” quotient in this equation is that Joey Ramone is dead; both of his solo albums (2001’s Don’t Worry About Me) have been released posthumously, and both lack any personality other than that of the producer.

Lately, pop music has been showing the worst side of its obsession with the untimely dead (making them say shit they never said before, like “What’s up Coachella!”). A little research into …Y’know?’s process revealed (though an interview with producer Ed Stasium) how much editing went into making the record out of 4-track demos from Joey Ramone’s last days. The result of such a process is in the sound, something dragged through modern ability that showcases the worst parts of what music production technology is capable of.

To show a better illustration into the effects of editing the dead and the past, I have decided to conduct the interview I always wanted to do with Joey Ramone, but never could. All responses are lyrics taken directly from …Y’know:

(This interview is conducted via telepathy to the “other-world.”)

I have kind of a fan boy statement: We share a birthday. We also share it with Pete Townsend and Malcom X.

Joey Ramone: You know I do, you know it’s true.

Sure is! Where you gonna be spending your birthday?

JR: East Village, West Village, Uptown, Downtown, ’round and around.

Damn, that’s a lot of Manhattan to cover in one night.

JR: New York City, I like New York City.

What spots you thinking of hitting up?

JR: The Ritz and the Cat Club, Pyramid, Limelight, Paul’s Lounge, Save the Robots.

Oh… you know that a lot of those places are closed now, right? Or… wait, you’re in the afterlife! Are all those old New York spots open in the eternal? You think that we can hang out at the eternal Save the Robots when I get there?

JR: We’ll go bar hoppin’ till the break of dawn, yeah.

Awesome! So, how about this new album you got coming out, …Ya , Know? How do you feel about how it turned out?

JR: Everything is going wrong.

Really? I was wondering that. I was a little shocked myself listening to it. The record company that released it, BMG, released the song “There’s Got To Be More To Life” as a promotional/Record Store Day thing, the B-side to “Rock N’ Roll is the Answer.”

JR: Yeah.

Yeah, that one. I can’t tell if it’s wacky harmonization or Auto-Tune, but it seems very edited. Isn’t stuff like Auto-Tune the sworn enemy of your brand of rock ’n’ roll? I mean, it seems pretty terrible to be slapping on post-production stuff just because you can’t go in and redo your parts.

JR: I’ll never be happy.

I don’t blame you! It sounds like they did all sorts of weird effects on your vocals on “Rock N’ Roll” and other songs on the album.

JR: Loopin’ the loop.

Kinda, like there wasn’t enough of your vocals to fill the four or five minutes of big dumb guitars, so they just cut-and-paste your track over and over. How does that make you feel?

JR: I’m goin’ insane.

No doubt! Let’s talk about the afterlife. Where are you right now?

JR: Here in my room.

You get a room in your afterlife? Kind of like your old bedroom or something like that? What’s it like there?

JR: My parents are always lecturing me.

Whoa, is that purgatory? I’ve read a little Dante, but I’m still not clear on it. Can you give any better descriptions of purgatory to the rest of us?

JR: Seven days of gloom here in my room, if it wasn’t for sushi my life would be ruined.

Seven days? But you’ve been dead for about 11 years? And you get room service sushi in Purgatory? I mean, if you have ambivalent feelings about sushi…

JR: If it wasn’t for sushi my life would be ruined.

Sorry, I should have picked up on it the first time, my bad. So it sounds like Purgatory is where you live out your teenage years again for an undisclosed amount of time. That sounds terrible. What have you been thinking about there?

JR: Thinkin’ ’bout Metallica.

Really? What are your feelings on that horrible LouTallica album? Did you hear that one?

JR: I was flippin’ I was floppin’.

I feel like that’s more of a chance than most other people gave it. I read somewhere that Lou Reed wanted to work with Metallica because they were the heaviest band he could think of, which goes to show how out of touch old rockers get. What if he picked someone like Morbid Angel — or even better, sunn 0)))? There’s a lot better options out there, if you’re looking for “heavy.”

JR: You know that you drive me crazy.

Oh… uh, sorry. I didn’t mean that as an insult, just criticism. After all, I am a critic.

JR: Ya better listen to what I’m sayin’.

Okay, listening.

JR: Rock ’n’ roll is the answer.

That’s cryptic. I don’t really know what that means. Personally, I feel like rock ’n’ roll rhetoric is almost empty now, with all my rock ’n’ roll heroes doing stupid things.

JR: What did I do?

Well, you didn’t do anything. But this music on your album is the kind of music that drove me to start listening to The Ramones in the first place, to get away from all this big, dumb stuff.

JR: You’re going nowhere fast.

Wow, that coming from you is like saying this idea that youth is trapped in a repetitive motion of rebellion, kind of an aging punk version of Harold Rosenberg’s Tradition of the New-type thing, maybe? I might be pushing it, but that’s heavy dude. Oh, uh, my girlfriend wants to say hi.

JR: An axe-murderess I bet.

Whoa, okay, chill out.

JR: She’s dark and twisted like me, a creature of intrigue.

I mean, she’s a big Ramones fan too. And yes, she’s definitely an incredibly interesting person, but I wouldn’t call her dark.

JR: I want her.

No, you can’t have her.

JR: That’s the way it’s got to be.

Alright dude, it’s up to you how this is going to turn out.

JR: I don’t want to fight tonight, with you.

Me neither. You know, I though this interview was going to be enlightening. I mean, I feel like this new record being released under your name is a way for BMG and some other people to make money off you. It sounds like this might be some sort of cathartic or grieving process for your brother, but in all honesty the whole record seems, like I said, a sort of pathetic attempt at making money from some leftover recordings. It makes me sad.

JR: Don’t be sad.

But I am! That guy from The Sopranos (Steven Van Zandt) wrote that this album is “sanctuary for all you future freaks.” I feel like that’s bullshit, pandering and marketing. God I’m so mad.

JR: DON’T BE SAD AT ALL.

Oh, I’m sure I’ll get over it. I’m just feeling a little dramatic. I think our connection is starting to fade — anything you wanna say to the living before you fade away?

JR: Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas to you, Joey Ramone. Merry Christmas to you as well.

01. Rock N’ Roll Is The Answer
02. Going Nowhere Fast
03. New York City
04. Waiting For That Railroad
05. I Couldn’t Sleep
06. What Did I Do To Deserve You?
07. Seven Days Of Gloom
08. Eyes Of Green
09. Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight)
10. 21st Century Girl
11. There’s Got To Be More To Life
12. Make Me Tremble
13. Cabin Fever
14. Life’s A Gas

Links: Joey Ramone - BMG Chrysalis

Music Review: El-P - Cancer 4 Cure

Brent A — Tue, 22 May 2012 05:01:00 +0000

El-P
Cancer 4 Cure

[Fat Possum; 2012]

by Brent A

Rating:

El-P doesn’t give a fuck about you. His disdain for you, spewed forth in a torrent of righteous fury and hyper-articulate wrath, is the lifeblood of his music. His verses, when you can keep up with them, can read like pages torn from the grimiest chapters of the Old Testament and rewritten by post-apocalyptic road warriors who breakdance for water rights; when he spits them on the mic, you’re reminded that rap was born as a competitive game — and you’re reminded why that used to matter so much.

Which could seem like so much empty hyperbole, except that El-P was, as a matter of fact, there. Born in Brooklyn around the same time as the members of Wu Tang, James Meline grew up in the same climate that produced rap as a genre and most of the genre’s early greats. He’s spent a busy life playing virtually every position that matters in the rap game and excelling at each: emcee, producer, and with Definitive Jux, record company founder. With such an impressive resume, you might have been forgiven for expecting Cancer 4 Cure, El-P’s latest solo record and his first away from Def Jux since 2004, to be something less than mind-blowing. A late career holdover record; something to pay the bills and feed the kids. But then, El-P has exactly as much respect for your expectations as he does for everything else about you. Which: none. And he went and made an unabashedly ambitious neck-snapper of a rap record so he could tell you all about it.

Cancer 4 Cure is as hard and vital as anything El-P has ever released, and that’s no light praise. The production might not quite reach the glorious heights graced by Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein (2001), but it exhibits a gritty savagery and restless experimental spirit that is never less than thrilling — and sometimes astonishing. The percussion on tracks like “True Story” skitters, pops, and even falls off completely, only to be refolded into beats even more jagged and unhinged. And El’s synths are wielded alternately like power tools and firearms, except on “Drones Over BKLYN,” where they come drunkenly together to evoke a dystopian future made frightfully present: urban sci-fi for 2012’s socially conscious rap fan. A “fresh start on a new world,” indeed. Meanwhile, the eight-minute closer, “$4 Vic/FTL (Me And You),” is every bit as ambitious and convoluted as its title, and would be a daring last act for any record; the fact that it feels fitting and justified here is a testament to the true breadth and scope of the sonic vision on display throughout Cancer 4 Cure.

As an emcee, El-P leaves most of his contemporaries in the dust; his rapid-fire delivery, complex rhyme schemes, and savage charisma feel mercifully out of a place in a rap market dominated by Auto-Tuned nothings and the aimless, lovely mumblings of the cloud rappers. He’s an old school battle-rapper, both soldier and and entertainer: a guy who’s not afraid to throw out a good keytar boast while otherwise inventorying the army he’s going to kick your ass with (in “The Full Retard”). He’s smart, but not “socially conscious” in the naïve sense that phrase has taken on. He brags, but doesn’t need to make up shit about drugs to be respected. He can call a song “For My Upstairs Neighbor,” and you’ll know exactly the kind of decimation in store, but he’s also loving and grateful in the latter part of “$4 Vic/FTL (Me And You).” He is, basically, whatever he wants to be. And I’m okay with that. I’ll “tell him what he wants to hear” and sign where he wants me to sign. As long he keeps putting out records like Cancer 4 Cure every few years, I’ll soak up his disdain like so much freely-given sunshine.

01. Request Denied
02. The Full Retard
03. Works Every Time
04. Drones over BKLYN
05. Oh Hail No
06. Tougher Colder Killer
07. True Story
08. The Jig Is Up
09. Sign Here
10. For My Upstairs Neighbor (Mums the Word)
11. Stay Down
12. $4 Vic/FTL (Me And You)

Links: El-P - Fat Possum

Music Review: Black Tambourine - OneTwoThreeFour [EP]

Alex R Wilson — Tue, 22 May 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Black Tambourine
OneTwoThreeFour [EP]

[Slumberland; 2012]

by Alex R Wilson

Rating:

These days, everybody seems to be getting back together. Whether it’s something in the air, this current generation’s infatuation with yesteryear (late 80s/early 90s reboot, now with less Skidz), current project purgatory, reconciliation of feuding members, or boredom, there is little to indicate exactly why everyone is giving their old projects a second (or third) go. Maybe it’s for money; maybe it’s a way to reinsert their place in history — the case varies from band to band.

None of these reasons really fit the recent Black Tambourine reunion and recording of OneTwoThreeFour, a four-song double 7-inch of Ramones covers. All members of the band have tended to downplay their role in both noise pop’s and twee pop’s history. They played very few shows during their first time as a band and made very few recordings. They called it quits rather ambivalently and unremarkably. Yet despite all this, they’ve been cited as an influence by bands like Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, and The Crystal Stilts. They’ve been placed by critics into twee pop’s canon alongside Tiger Trap and Beat Happening. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart absorbed their twee-est aspects so densely that it garnered them a spot on Black Tambourine member Mike Schulman’s label (Slumberland) and a mixdown on their first record from another Tambouriner, Archie Moore. Black Tambourine’s sound, a furious wall of noise juxtaposing the sweetest of pop sentiments (made indelibly so by vocalists Pam Berry’s reverb-y, sweetly-buried vocals), as well as their blend of influences, clicked into later consciousnesses. Still, there’s been much reluctance for any member to either admit this or embrace their historical place. As guitarist Brian Nelson (who also played in DC bands Velocity Girl and Whorl during that early-90s timeframe) said in an interview:

It’s very flattering to think that we are — at least in the conscious of the critics, if not the bands — part of the stepping stones along the way. Although I definitely think that a lot of those bands are more influenced by the same people we were, rather than by Black Tambourine. We share the same aesthetic. I don’t necessarily think that we were some pivotal group…

Although the above could be accurate (as it’s obvious that Dum Dum Girls are as enamored with girl-group doo-wop as Black Tambourine were), the members of Black Tambourine seem to downplay what exactly influenced these bands. One of Black Tambourine’s most remarkable abilities was how they channeled their influences. Their songs can be easily picked apart for their love of The Jesus and Mary Chain, the C86 set, the early Motown thread, and a band they shared with their D.C. punk counterparts (to separating degrees): The Ramones.

So what is there to add to this Black Tambourine growth with their semi-reunion OneTwoThreeFour some 20 years later after the band called it quits? Not much other than to restate why people find this band so incredible. Their sound is much more unique than the respective bands that other Black Tambourine members were involved in, a combination of what was the poppy-ness of Velocity Girl and the noise wall of Whorl. Their signifying sound translates the songs and spirit of The Ramones better than any dogmatic punk rendition could. Not only that, but they specifically picked the love songs out of The Ramones’ early catalog, which makes more sense considering where they’ve been critically placed. “I Want You Around” is bombast, but still a love song, and works much better than something like “Beat On The Brat” or “Pet Cemetery” would.

Maybe one could say the same of The Ramones that Black Tambourine seem to consider of themselves: that their influence extended more out of the influences that made The Ramones than The Ramones themselves. But that would be silly, like saying that the guitar influenced music more than the people who played it, understating the importance of execution. It’s a combination of Black Tambourine’s sound and ability to present what they liked about their influences that makes their own influence so ubiquitous in the modern garage/psych/noise pop/whatever scene, as well as what makes us critical folk so keen to draw Black Tambourine in the same circle as other twee formulators.

OneTwoThreeFour is not necessarily an indication that the band intends to reunite and make a giant ordeal of their reunion, but it does show that all four former members were at least willing to put their energy back into creating the record and playing a few shows for some friends and super-fans. (The album coincides with some shows Black Tambourine recently played (funding their airfare to bring Berry from London and Schulman from L.A. to play their shows in D.C. and NYC with a Kickstarter page) as a 20-year celebration for chickfactor magazine, which was co-founded by Berry.) The album holds to the unambitious qualities deemed upon indie pop and twee pop, exploring no new territory while doing just enough to make it sound like themselves. It’s an incredible feat that the band was able to come together and sound like this after not playing for 20-some years, not to also restate that this was a band that didn’t dedicate themselves to practice during their heyday. The addition of backup harmonies from Dee Dee (Kristin Gundred) from Dum Dum Girls, Jenny Robins from Honeymoon Diary, Linda Smith, and Rose Melberg of Tiger Trap (performing under the chorus moniker The ’Rinettes) pushes the Shangri-Las influence only so high, keeping themselves buried underneath Berry’s distinctive vocals.

Basically, there’s nothing new going on here, but that would be an awfully large and somewhat unreasonable demand to expect from a band 20 years out. It’s enough having what they’ve given; in both their own vein and in line with The Ramones, the songs are noisy, loud, pop-driven, and short; it will probably take you longer to read this review than it would to listen to all of OneTwoThreeFour. While it’s hard to critically asses an album that was more or less made for fans and close friends, it provides a great opportunity to talk about a band formed on reluctance that didn’t bother trying to be more than something else to do. If anything, Black Tambourine provides a great case for the importance of documenting. OneTwoThreeFour doesn’t exist as a part of the band’s previous history, and as I stated above, it definitely doesn’t sound like an attempt by the band to create a new one. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe there will be some form of reunion some time off. I would be happy to see them play, as I’ve been happy to see a couple of reunited bands play excellent shows within the last couple years. But even with OneTwoThreeFour being as great-sounding as it is, I would be okay to have only what Black Tambourine left us. Their career is just like that of any great pop song: short, incredibly sweet, and masterful at creating the desire for more.

01. I Want You Around
02. What’s Your Game
03. I Remember You
04. I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend

Links: Black Tambourine - Slumberland

Music Review: Mount Eerie - Clear Moon

Ed Comentale — Mon, 21 May 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Mount Eerie
Clear Moon

[P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd. ; 2012]

by Ed Comentale

Rating:

“The music-lover experiences, in listening to a concert, a joy of a different order from the joy given by natural sounds, such as the murmur of the brook, the uproar of a torrent, the whistling of the wind in a forest, or the harmonies of human speech based on reason rather than on aesthetics.” –Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913

“I meant all my songs/ Not as a picture of the woods/ But just to remind myself/ That I briefly live.” –Mount Eerie, 2012

It’s not easy to write about Mount Eerie. For one, there’s the music’s iconoclasm. Phil Elverum’s songs do not lend themselves to easy categorization. While each track might momentarily cohere as a form of “folk” or “chamber pop” or “black metal,” they just as quickly sink back into a fog of noise and distortion. And then there’s the music’s majesty. Elverum the lyricist might by preoccupied with the destructive forces of nature, but his sound — its intensity, its dynamism — simply mocks human expression. As a reviewer, you’re not wrestling with the question of whether or not the music is any good. Rather, you’re confronted with the problem of writing about music that seems to demand nothing less than silence. Speaking about the music of Mount Eerie feels like dumping your trash in the woods.

Elverum himself has wrestled with the immediacy of nature and the need for its expression. On his most aggressive albums — Mount Eerie and Wind’s Poem, for example — he has staged this drama via noise and sound. “Let my voice bellow about you,” he sings on “The Universe,” his voice barely rising above the squalling noise, “And let my voice echo out from caves and mines.” Clear Moon, his latest, certainly continues in this vein. As the first part of a two-album cycle, it pits moments of stunned clarity against dreary noise, exploring a tension that is both sonic and existential. And yet one detects here a new sensibility, a new approach that is both more humble and perhaps more honest. On Clear Moon, Elverum comes across less the heroic Viking and more like a lost boatman of suburbia. He’s given up the barren wastes of fire and ice for the more humdrum but no less existential threats of everyday life in the Pacific Northwest. Most notably, Elverum — “struggling sideways” — can no longer maintain a distinction between human life and natural life. He’s relinquished the romantic agon of his earlier work and instead stalks a surreal boundary-land that is neither fallen nor pristine. Throughout, he confronts the messiness of his relation to nature and the very unnaturalness, the sheer artificiality of his work of as an artist. “Dark smoke fills the air,” he sings on the first track, “Some from the fire in my house/ Some from me driving around.” The world of Clear Moon is a world of both “mountains and websites,” a destabilized world, a discontinuous world, for sure, but one world nonetheless; “There is no other world,” Elverum sings wearily, as if finally relinquishing his idealism, “and there has never been.”

There’s much to be said for this new ecology, despite its weary delivery. It suggests a more fluid continuity of civilization and nature and thus a more subtle sense of responsibility. As importantly, for Elverum’s fans, it also signals an interesting leap forward in sound and sonic production. Before all else, Clear Moon is the work of a studio artist. It was recorded over a 14-month period in a “de-sanctified church,” a more or less self-contained space dedicated to the production of (un)holy sound. More than any other work in Elverum’s canon, the album approaches the condition of sound art; lyrical drama recedes into the background to make way for wide swathes of synth and droning organs, motorik beats, and large celestial chimes. “Over Dark Water,” for example, utilizes the resonating church space to create a soaring anti-hymn to night and nothingness; a lone electric guitar riff is joined first by an angel’s howl and then a chanting choir and screeching organ, all of which resonates louder and louder on a single note until the whole unholy assemblage falls to pieces. “Clear Moon” is held together by a single basso hum; drums pummel, voices chant, bells chime, but the sound hangs in the eerie air without climax or relief. With this attention to sonic textures and tapestries, I believe, the album seems to cut a fine line through the ‘black metal’ bombast of Wind’s Poem and the delicate chamber hymns of Lost Wisdom. If anything, it seems most invested in the synthesized surrealism that Elverum pursued previously on songs like “Through the Trees” and “Between Two Mysteries.” The influence of Lynch and Badalamenti is unmistakable. Elverum uses sound here to capture the unnerving unreliability of everyday life; the tedium of the civilized world gives way to the violence of nature gives way to the grace of the supernatural.

Another way of saying this is that Clear Moon marks a significant transition from visual space to acoustic space. To me, Elverum’s most interesting music is concerned not with nature per se, but with horizons — the anxious relation between human consciousness and the bewildering spaces it inhabits. His best work deals with the terror of being perceived — or worse, not being perceived — within an alienating landscape; “See me squint my eyes,” he sings on “The Sun,” “See me learn to live without my loved ones/ See me scan the sky/ And see the flock of birds goodbye/ And turn to go inside.” In his preoccupation with the relations between identity, perspective, and horizon, Elverum shows deep kinship with the American transcendentalists, such as Thoreau, Whitman (think Pip at sea), and, most of all, the landscape painter Asher Durand. At the same time, though, he’s always come across as a visual (nearly cinematic) artist, projecting his personal crises across the vast vistas of, say, Norway or his native home of Anacortes, Washington. With Clear Moon, though, the studio-bound Elverum seems to take a more fully sonic approach to the construction of space, and the results prove both strange and exciting. Two tracks here, “the Place Lives” and “the Place I Live,” work brilliantly together to demonstrate the sheer dynamism and malleability of this new sonic space. The first carries the black metal blitz of Wind’s Poem to new evil ends, but the real thrill of the song lies in the way it ceaselessly opens up onto new sonic depths, the ear tumbling vertiginously over a void, but nonetheless held aloft by fuzzy draughts of noise. On the second track, a series of shifting strings — some low and throbbing, others light and ethereal — set the same place into woozy motion; the voice drifts in and out of an airy sonic terrain, lazily noting the shifts above and below him. As a whole, the album is full of disparate textures and tempos, at once rock-solid and incredibly fluid — “The landscape/ A blanket on stone/ Land waves are rolling,” sings Elverum on “the Place I Live,” as if he’s finally figured it all out again.

In this, I’m reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s account of the difference between visual space and acoustic space. For McLuhan, visual space is an artifact of Western civilization; it is space perceived as logical and coherent, at once homogenous and static, organized according to a linear vanishing point and thereby constrained by sequentialism. Acoustic space, which McLuhan equates with primitive societies, busts open the limits of visual space; both multi-centered and reverberating — “gyroscopic,” McLuhan claims — acoustic space dissolves the civilized borders of perception, “everything happening at once, in a state of constant flux.” For McLuhan, sound, the GPS system of the human body, establishes as it dissolves one’s place in the world, and, as song, sustains the possibility of other landscapes altogether. Clear Moon meanders gorgeously in this way; it is much less coherent than any Mount Eerie effort (which always seemed to suffer slightly under their own conceptualization), but it claims for itself a new openness in the process. Nothing expresses this better than the bewildering structure of “House Shape.” Here, as sound seems to rain around the house’s walls and windows, the dwelling takes new shape over and over again, inside and out, “lost in an unfolding.” Its sole inhabitant — a seemingly entranced Elverum — appears caught in a “separate world of seeing,” a “lost world separate from the usual,” until the song ends and his real eyes crack open again. Again, one can’t help but think that this strange space — part psychological, part naturalistic, fully acoustic — exists on the same map as the Red Room, Winkie’s Diner, or Club Silencio.

I’m generally suspicious of narratives of maturity, especially when applied to artists and the trajectory of their work. But while Clear Moon announces itself as a step forward (“I’ve held aloft some delusions/ From now on I will be perfectly clear”), it locates this new-found grace in both incoherence and insignificance (“Tossed on the waves/ Missing/ From moment to moment of being/ Carried wherever”). The album is wonderfully uneven and mysteriously unfinished, and while we might look forward to its second half for a sense of balance and completion (Ocean Roar is due later this year), I’m content enough to dwell amidst its own jagged remains. Sure, there are a few missteps along the way. “Lone Bell” is built on a bass line so damn catchy that it tends to overwhelm the more subtle constructions that surround it; it’s the one riff you’ll be humming long after the album ends. Also, I must confess that the last three songs fail to make much of an impression on me; while I appreciate the tension-and-release dynamism of “Clear Moon” and “Yawning Sky,” their drama pales in comparison to the sonic experiments that define the rest of the album. And yet quibbling about these acoustic spaces is like quibbling about natural spaces. As I said, there’s a place where saying anything at all seems like a disgrace, and Elverum’s found it once again.

01. Through The Trees pt. 2
02. the Place Lives
03. the Place I Live
04. (something)
05. Lone Bell
06. House Shape
07. Over Dark Water
08. (something)
09. Clear Moon
10. Yawning Sky
11. (synthesizer)

Links: Mount Eerie - P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.

Music Review: Big Blood - Old Time Primitives

Ben Rag — Mon, 21 May 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Big Blood
Old Time Primitives

[Dontrustheruin; 2012]

by Ben Rag

Rating:

The first thing that people tend to mention about Big Blood is their prolificacy. This is the duo that released five excellent albums in 2007 alone while also participating in part of the larger groups Cerberus Shoal and Fire on Fire. But what’s more impressive than their frequency of output is just how consistently high-quality that output is (and that they’re so willing to share it online for free).

Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella, who as Big Blood refer to themselves as a “phantom four piece,” use the alter egos Rose Philistine and Asian Mae respectively to round out the supposed four members, and at times it does sound like there are four of them. These are for the most part busy songs, full of densely-layered instruments, apian murmuring, and frenzied vocals buried deep in the murk of the mix.

Old Time Primitives ventures further away from the acoustic strumming and male/female harmonies of their earlier work, continuing the electric sound they began with 2011’s Big Blood & The Wicked Hex. For the most part, this suits their brand of eccentric experimentation; they’d be hampered creatively, especially considering the frequency with which they release material, if limited to only acoustic instruments. This allows for some of their more interesting music to date: the hypnotic, placid “Leviathan Song pt. I,” which would be incongruous on an older album, is one of the stronger songs they’ve written, floating gracefully in the current of mid-album air.

The only missteps are a few of the longer droning songs, which falter when they begin to feel monotonous in ways that many of their previous lengthy tracks, like the 14-minute “Water” off The Wicked Hex, don’t. Album closer “Shadows of the Land” is half the length of “Water” but feels longer, while the static “Sirens Knell” doesn’t quite justify its length, building over nine minutes to amount to little.

Perhaps the album’s most interesting feature is its continual a capella renditions of truncated country classics sprinkled among the original songs. The title track begins with a tinny male voice singing Don Williams’ “She Never Knew Me” and finishes with David Houston’s “Good Things;” both sound like they were recorded over the phone. “Shadows of the Land” ends the album on a similar note, shifting from its weary gloom into an a capella snippet of Jerry Reed’s “A Thing Called Love” and then transitioning with what sounds like a tape-deck click into “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” which abruptly ends. These selections of country ballads with accompanying clicks (along with the self-referential inclusion of recording-process outtakes) seem to be Mulkerin and Kinsella inserting their authorial presences, showing us the musicians from which they’ve taken inspiration and nudging us expectantly. Despite their experimentation with music boxes, pitch-shifting, and electric instrumentation, their respect for traditional folk music remains prominent; even the title Old Time Primitives suggests they’ve allied themselves with their roughly hewn antecedents.

01. Away pt. II
02. Old Time Primitives
03. Out of Turn
04. Mark the Spot Spot
05. Leviathan Song pt. I
06. Sirens Knell
07. Sounder
08. Away pt. I
09. This Is How You Record pt. II
10. Awake Too Long
11. Shadows for the Land

Links: Big Blood - Dontrustheruin

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