Listening • Ulterior Music

Relatively Clean Rivers, “Hello Sunshine” (download)

I’m not sure how many people recognized the reference to Relatively Clean Rivers in the stories a few months back about Adam Gadahn, the American who joined al Qaeda. Gadahn’s father, Philip, was the lead singer of the amazing, obscure psychedelic folk outfit from the ’60s that put out one all-around perfect album. I’m also not sure what it all means for the son of a freak-folk minstrel to go on a tirade against the United States, but my only worry is that it will mean bad press for the album, which desperately needs to be rereleased.

The Master Musicians of Jajouka, “War Song/Standing” + “One Half (Kaim Oua Nos)” (download)

Legend tells of the Hashishan assassins: men drugged to think they had died and were visited by virgins of the afterlife, then thrown into a dungeon and told they would not experience the same until they had completed their task (i.e., junkies). Although the followers of Hassan-i-Sabbah fell to the wayside in the 13th century at the hand of a less-than-mellow Mongol horde, the idea of drugged assassins still haunts people to this day (e.g., the conspiracy theories attached to Sirhan Sirhan and Oswald). Could any man be turned into an unwilling assassin through psychological manipulation? Well if there was ever a backup band to these would-be Manchurian Candidates, it’s the Master Musicians of Jajouka, who’ve been holding the number-one spot around Morocco for some 4,000 years. Better than Martin & Lewis at the Copacabana, deified by Brian Jones and William S. Burroughs, they drop a heavy, hypnotic jangling trance that’s hard to deny. They are the myrrh standard that all others are measured by. That sound of swirling chaos echoes out of the pan flutes is something to behold, and I’m sure it scared the living crap out of somebody in the 15th century, but nowadays we have flange pedals and Metal Machine Music, so it’s a bit old hat. Plus, nothing breaks the assassin’s creed like making a lounge remix.

E Pak Sa, “Dances the E Pak Sa” (download)

If I were to make a soundtrack to indoctrinate assasins to do my bidding, it would be pure E Pak Sa all the way through. Encyclopedia of Pon-Chak on repeat. That jittery madness that only comes with hearing “ba ba da do di da da brrreeeeeeeeeee” to a Casio beat box over and over that tells the unconscious mind: “You know what you have to do.” Ideally it would be played behind footage of foot soldiers training in some sort of Hello Kitty hellscape to fight imitation Pokémon cartoons.

Unknown Artist, “Curly Toes” (download)

The recently released torture playlist had a lot of people thinking, “You call that torture? I could make a better torture tape than that yodeling.” It’s all in the eye of the beholder. One man’s Deicide is another man’s Cannibal Corpse mid-stage banter. I find a number of the songs on this torture list to be decent. I mean, there’s even some Devo in there. If you want real torture, there’s more off-kilter warbling to be found in the Songs in the Key of Z compilations. Real unsettling sounds that make you imagine what sort of confused depression the originator must have been in at the time to try and attempt something like that.

Erkin Koray & Ter, “Hor Görme Garibi” (download)

I wish I were more of a historical geographer (geographical historian?), and knew why the Western influence of psychedelic music and random science fiction in the Middle East drops off after Turkey. In Turkey you’ve got Star Wars imitations, Star Trek imitations, and prog rock, but across the border into Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Bulgara, it drops off. Maybe it has to do with their sattelite cable provider. But the undisputed king of Turkish prog is Erkin Koray—a swarthy, psychedelic Ted Nugent. His combination of Middle Eastern melodies and electrified garage rock is hard to come by, which is hard to fathom considering the success Dick Dale had with an electrified version of a Greek folk song (“Misirlou”).

Portishead, Third (listen at Last.fm)

This new Portishead album, Third, is quite good. In particular, it’s good to know there’s popular music out there that’s not overhyped, overproduced schlock. There’s a few dangling references that are a bit too obvious (the one Silver Apples beat, the Joanna Newsom lilt in the voice). But in the end, it doesn’t matter too much as it all comes across well-intentioned. It sounds like what Portishead sounds like, and that’s just fine.

 —Llewellyn Hinkes, Apr. 30, 2008

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Listening • The Great Angry White Hope, or the New Loud Sounds From Way Out

Right now there are thousands—nay, millions—of disaffected youths out there yearning for a music that speaks to the anger welling up inside—but without devolving into something that’s just loud, screamy, and stupid. What I’m saying is that hardcore, that originally American Art Brut, like jazz or cartooning, has left a void. At one time it was the voice of the people, like an angry jazz, and nowadays it’s devolved into screamo, death metal, aggro thrashcore, and a zillion other variations on tempo that can be argued ad nauseum. (“We’re not metal thrash, we’re more metalcore.”) For me it had lots of great moments—seeing Avail in ‘98, that NYHC show in college with 20 unknown, amazing bands, or seeing the Rollins Band in 110-degree heat—but there were way too many low points: that band that brought a weight bench onstage, crowded mosh pits mainly used for fist fights, or the other band that walked the stage swinging baseball bats. There are glimmers of hope out there for people who aren’t eager to run face first into a wall yet could use a soundtrack for the burning contempt they get every time they hear McCain called a “maverick” for his pro-torture votes.

Wrath of the Weak, “Chapter I: A Leap of Faith Ends When You Crash Into the Ground” (download)

“Metal shoegaze.” When I say it now, it sounds like a random amalgamation of terminology, but listening to it makes me wonder what took so long for anybody to make the combination. A fast, churning, and violent My Bloody Valentine that could feel at home in the world of drones. So much metal is all speed, sound, and fury that lends itself to ironic detachment; this stuff actually has some weight to it. Something about them being from Buffalo gives me that glimmer of hope that something good is coming out of postindustrial upstate New York that might bolster their economy.

Warbringer, “Dread Command” (download)

For every well-meaning folk balladeer struggling to write that next anti-war anthem, maybe they should try writing a neutral-war anthem first, see what it sounds like, and work from there. Warbringer goes the full step of describing war in full, bloodletting detail, resulting in a great dichotomy of being a great song while reminding me of how I’d never want to live through something like that, like Waltzing Mathilda. It’s what CNN wishes it could have used during “Shock and Awe” footage.

Jay Reatard, “Always Wanting More” (download)

There’s lots of attempts to make a post-hardcore sound, maybe with a little more craft to it like your Mastodon; or just to make it math-ier, like Converge. Sometimes the basics work fine. Sped-up garage rock doesn’t sell the description that Jay Reatard deserves, but it is quick and vicious and good. Somebody will probably slow down his songs into their pop-punk detail and make millions to cater to the heathens that can’t take a faster pace, but for now he makes the original version with pure speed in flagrante delicto.

Immortal

From an overly intellectual viewpoint, there’s really not much analysis to be made about death metal. Just a bunch of dudes in makeup singing about entrails, but really, it is the inheritance of true folk art: those sorts of creations that come about with little to any direct influence of popular culture and are usually created in madness. It’s the same impetus that leads people to recreate the Battle of Hastings out of matchsticks. The unique part is that they know how to play their instruments. These aren’t hyper-religious outcasts that learn to play music from a broken zither and a recording of “The Old Gray Mare” they found in an attic. They know their chords and I would venture to say some of them have “chops.” They just insist on singing about eviscerating the weak.

Crystal Castles, “Alice Practice” (download)

Most people can’t listen to a whole album of screaming; it begins to downgrade the pathos, but a scream here and there makes for good variance. This whole Crystal Castles album is just like that; eight-bit sounds that go from limo-nodding minimalist techno and then digital emotional purge. It makes me feel like I went somewhere after listening. If you could write a whole album of the most brutal emotion, sadly, it would be hard to listen to. Intersperse it with the Moog version of “Spanish Flea,” and there you have your concept album.

Melt-Banana, “Chain-Shot to Have Some Fun” (download)

Has anybody stopped to notice how bad this state of affairs is? Besides the total and monumental collapse of the U.S. automotive industry that is only holding on by a thread to America’s lizard-brain need for giant cars, they seem to make speed metal 10x better. We make Hatebreed, and they have Melt-Banana. Nothing American about it since it’s actually good: a cartoonishly fast blitzkrieg of sound. No wonder heavy metal is left to the dregs, it languishes in the need to be angry, dark, and fast, and in the end succeeds at none of them.

 —Llewellyn Hinkes, Apr. 9, 2008

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Listening • South by Southwests of Yore

South by Southwest, that bastion of independent music, Web 2.0 crowdsourcing folksonomy panels, and drunken mid-level industry types, hasn’t always been such an established tradition. It took a good 20 years for that magnificent phoenix to rise out of the ashes of the late ’80s underground, through ’90s shoegazing rave-pop, then onwards and upwards to the festival behemoth we all know and tolerate today. It’s about time we took a look back on the last two decades of this tractor expo of music, movies, and interactives(?) and say, “Enough of that already.”


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Poi Dog Pondering, “Candy” (download)

To get through this wild, wonderful venture across the plane of 1990s alterna-rock, it took a few handfuls of silo-made LSD, some ill-advised dreadlocks, and a little band I like to call Poi Dog Pondering. I’m not sure any other band could represent the earlier days of the festival better. Mixing intellectual R.E.M. college rock and world music seemed like the thing to do at the time, there in your Doc Martens and a tye-dyed T-shirt. You might find Poi Dog on a compilation CD with Trip Shakespeare, Phranc, and maybe a Love Tractor song or two (all SXSW grads). As much as I’d like to write it off as disconcertingly innocuous, I’d never actually heard them.

Morphine, “All Wrong” (download)

There’s that old saw that the Velvet Underground were only seen live by a select number of people, but those people all went on to influence other bands because they were overwhelmed by the pure, unbridled, anarchic creativity they saw before them. Complete hokum. They knew Andy Warhol and he was a one-man marketing machine. Plus, the Velvet Underground played plenty of shows as evinced by the number of bootlegs available. It’s the same for SXSW. Bands don’t really break there so much as they are found by A&R reps and then hyped into position a few months later. I’ve heard it was big for Tapes ’n Tapes, the Octopus Project, Trail of Dead, Broken Social Scene; but really, there’s no accurate way to measure these things. All these bands’ success could be only tangentially related to them getting a record contract and actually having an album to sell. Or like Morphine, the show just happened to coincide with an already released album.

The Gin Blossoms, “Hey Jealousy” (listen at Can You See the Sunset From the Southside?)

For a select few, the festival has been both kingmaker and sloppy drunken prom queen. How else to describe its ability to bring an unknown band like the Gin Blossoms to such prominence? “Hey Jealousy” was that ubiquitous hit of the time that played from every speaker in the empty parking lot of family-friendly restaurants in the tri-state area as people walked to their car. Only to be followed by Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Mat Kearney’s “Nothing Left to Lose,” and any of the “three” bands: Three Doors Down, Third Eye Blind, Three on a Hill. If familiarity breeds contempt, “Hey Jealousy” bred something akin to toxoplasmosis. People tend to think that all modern radio is manufactured pop, but really some of it is authentic songcraft that’s been overplayed into derision. There’s an interview with Eddie Vedder in the great movie Hype!, where he laments the odd result of writing a popular song and then having people threaten to hunt him down and kill him for having it repeated so much.

“Arboga Teenage Riot” (listen at WFMU)

SXSW isn’t so much the Dionysian orgy, like your Burning Man or Rainbow Gathering, that people seem to expect. It’s more of a southern cotillion, where most events are highly organized, invitation-only formal affairs put on by magazines or record labels, with a strict social order that secretly wants you to get drunk and piss in the family urn. Most of the music is mainly straightforward rock and roll, and cue times are respected (as they should be). For every 100 bands out of a thousand, there’s only a handful of Atari Teenage Riots. I used to try and listen to Burn Berlin Burn while fumbling with a DOS prompt and think I was hacking into the matrix of a supercomputer. It lasted all of 10 minutes, or until the frustration of trying to concentrate with somebody screaming German insults in my ear became overwhelming.

The Reverend Horton Heat, “Psychobilly Freakout” (download)

Since these olden days, the scene’s fractured into a million different fragments, man. It used to be that you could sum up and dismiss all of the music being played there with the brush of a hand. Nowadays it takes two or three brushes. This year’s reunion shows alone are hard to shake a stick at: Simply Saucer, the Homosexuals, Half Japanese, the Slits, Roky Erickson. That’s like half of The Secret History of Rock & Roll right there. It makes Bonnaroo look like a poor man’s Coachella, a second-tier Lollapalooza, or a poor tier’s argle bargle. Gone are the days when the Reverend Horton Heat was the number-one attraction, and the fire marshals showed up on a regular basis. I can imagine what it was like back in 1987 based on episodes of Austin Stories, and it must have seemed so quaint.

 —Llewellyn Hinkes, Mar. 12, 2008

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Listening • Going Steady With the Singles

Richard Ayoade said it best on an episode of Time Trumpet as to why, every day, he was compelled to watch an ape being savagely raped on television because “he had to take the pulse of the nation.” Truer words have never been spoken. And right now the pulse of the nation is not so much forced gorilla intercourse, but mutual gorilla love. It is still our inclination—nay, our duty—to watch with fascination this modern dance called “entertainment” through a sampling of its finest hit singles—all for the social good. Like Jane Goodall, but not taking as many notes.


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Yeasayer, “2080” (download)

If there were a word or phrase I would use to characterize this period of hyperrealism and anarco-capitalism, I’d be a much better public speaker. But if I did, I’d have it read by a group of kids on a playground in a panoply of shouts and murmurs. And then maybe one of the kids would say, “Your butt smells like anarco-capitalism.” So precocious these young tykes. Someday they’ll grow up to be race car drivers or astronauts and learn how the preparations for space flight can consume their will to live. Months of training, physical stress, tests at the far ends of human endurance, and the possibility of death. All to fly up and fix some cable TV satellite. Better they get a steady job at the plastic flower factory.

Atlas Sound, “Oh It’s Such A Shame (Jay Reatard Cover)” (download)

When oil goes to $200 a barrel and China sells off the dollar, the financial apocalypse we all have seen coming will finally hit. It will make the Midwest ripe for plundering by damaged noise barbarians from the hills, who will ride through towns on metalloid elephants, electrocuting us with Tasers made from discarded TI-81s, and playing this song. Eventually a rebel leader will rise up and overthrow the cyborg-barbarians—or Cybarians—by using a magnet fashioned from coat hangers and static electricity. You can read this and many more MacGyver: Mechaverse titles by sending $5 to the same person over a long period of time, and eventually they will write it.

Religious Knives, “The Streets” (download)

Every religion needs a good church organ, be it a Southern storefront church with a Hammond upright, a Californian Universalist with a hydraulic organ, or a gilded German Severikirche. It needs to be able to belt out enough polyphonic sounds to wash over the heathens with holy-ghost power—aka a sustained G-chord. This is important to remember for all of you newfound atheists, agnostics, and practicing satanists. Religion has been around for a long time, so they’ve learned a few tricks, and judging by the numbers, they work pretty well.

Excepter, “Kill People” (download)

More evil dub please. I need a beat here and there to keep things up-tempo, but I can meet halfway in the realm of dark ambient sounds if the conditions are right. Maybe we can go back to before industrial music got off track into nu-metal and pass out the Chrome boxed set to high school kids in trench coats, then see what happens.

SSION, “ASAP”

If one were to present the oeuvre of SSION to the surliest of teamsters, I’d imagine they would have to give them their due respect for really pushing the limits. “You know, if you’re gonna go gay, you might as well be the goddamn gayest thing possible.” Why dabble in the middle ground? They seem to have taken it to a limit so far beyond comprehension as to have little to do with sex, but having more to do with some sort of alien power ritual. And they’re from Kansas City of all places! Very inspiring.

The Sea and Cake, “Coconut” (download)

A friend called this song “insidious” recently, as if the Sea and Cake were hard at work layering the tracks with inside jokes and hidden references. If nothing else, it’s straightforward in its quiet and genteel ways. Then I was suddenly hit with a momentary flashback of waiting for a train three days before while listening to the same song. Just one of those inconsequential dreams that really don’t mean anything and may not have happened at all but still seem important, but it was like a potent memory recall that had me rethinking how insidious it might be. Is there another word for “insidious” without the negative connotations? More than “subtle,” less intentional than “surreptitious.”

Aidan John Moffat, “Fuck It” (download)

Scottish cockney erotica. Need I say more? I do? OK, this album by Aidan John Moffat is just brimming with eye-watering, surly accented sexual bluster. Like Barry White after three days of no sleep. Powerful, potent, sloppy stuff.

 —Llewellyn Hinkes, Feb. 27, 2008

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Listening • Holes in the Year-End Best-of Lists

While everybody else was fighting for attention to get their year-end lists in by the 31st, I was lying in wait, culling the extremes, the ins and outs, to strain through the finest opinionated cheesecloth, so what’s left is only the purest top-10 filtrate possible before snorting it all up in a President’s Day fiesta. Then I realized how monumental a task it was. Do you know how many albums came out in 2007? A metric shit-ton. (Check the meniscus.) There’s no way anybody except the truly dedicated and masochistic could listen to them all and know for sure. I can only make a small sampling of noteworthy delegates (or “potent notables” as I like to call them in my new column appearing in the weekend Parade section of your newspaper), and hope that somebody else is doing their research too. Instead, I decided to look at everybody else’s and crib their answers.

First off, Pitchfork’s year-end list. Don’t get me wrong. I love my Pitchfork. Love it up and down the place. I look up at that neon diarrhea-sprayed background everyday for a good reason: They’re a trusted resource. What they say goes. They’re kingmakers, and rightfully so. They do their research, they know about these albums light years before anybody else, and then they shout it forth across the land with creative distinction. Then again, last year they thought that Knife album was the best thing since sliced cheese. For some reason they really hate Tim Kinsella and David Cross. That Sunset Rubdown album, which they previously said was the Best New Music, doesn’t make their best of the year, whereas an album of nerds yodeling makes the top 10. I don’t get it. Still, they’ll rule with an iron fist until The Wire gets its online act together.

» Listen to “And It Rained All Night (Burial Remix)” by Thom Yorke

Next up, your smaller gorillas in the room: your Metacritics, your PopMatters, and such. All fine publications up until I see an Amy Winehouse album on the list. In a year with Feist, St. Vincent, a great PJ Harvey album, and they go ahead and put a retro R&B singer in their top 10? Somebody’s gotten to them. I guess promo CDs don’t pay the server bill.

» Listen to “White Chalk” by PJ Harvey

I was going to do some straightforward quantitative analysis of trends based on all references made in the past year with Bayesian weighting over traffic sources, but we already know what the answer is: In 2007 people liked droney college rock bookended with dance albums and some mainstream rap albums thrown in to make it seem diverse. Knowing this, I can foresee a 2008 that eventually comes to terms with its ‘90s origins of drone, fuzz, gentle post-rock, and C+C processed dance music. I see people karaokeing to the Sea and Cake back catalog just for kicks while throwing raves in foreclosed suburban homes.

» Listen to “Sound & Vision” by the Sea and Cake

If there were any justice, 2008 would be a yearlong dedication to the Monks, whose guitarist, Dave Day, just passed away. There’s been plenty said about the Monks’ primitive proto-punk garage rock influence, plus the robes and tonsures, but it’s still bizarre to realize they were all ex-GIs singing anti-war anthems. The current equivalent of post-military rock probably sounds more like Eddie Vedder fronting Linkin Park or the Charlie Daniels Band on meth. I say “probably” because I have no idea. There’s so few well-known military or ex-military bands out there, either due to extended tours of duty or the catch-22 of trying to requisition an anti-authoritarian beat without the proper paperwork.

» Listen to “Complication” by the Monks

In the next few years I foresee the abandonment of music collections. The burden of each person being a librarian over terabytes of data will slowly seem meaningless now that most everything is attainable somewhere else online. The fetishism of 7-inches will die out. People will realize they have better things to do in life than cleaning up ID3 tags. The focus will move to mixes. There is a renaissance of college DJing waiting to happen, but until people realize the aesthetic qualities of mumbling and incoherent playlist reading over morning Zoo Crew banter, it will be an unrealized utopia.

» Listen to “Psycrunk Mix”

 —Llewellyn Hinkes, Jan. 16, 2008

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Watching • Video Digest: December 21, 2007

[ note: technical difficulties with some of these videos. all, however, run fine if push the play button.—ed. ]

If there’s one thing that I identify with the holiday season, it’s that sense of malaise of long car rides to visit family, only to sit down in cozy sweaters and watch TV. That much inactivity is not healthy for anybody, and thus the need for the holiday dance party. So instead of driving up to Wisconsin and talking about road conditions, just get out of the car and start dancing in the street when you get there.




Like the lyrics to a billion songs, it really doesn’t matter if you can’t dance, just as long as you get up on the dance floor and move. Only the daring take the chance to writhe in a fit of spastic convulsions. One note about this clip; I bet when Crispin Glover started dancing like this for Friday the Thirteenth Part IV, the director probably stopped the take multiple times to get him to dance in a bland, ignorable way. Now a few years later, it is the Dance of the Glover that is memorable, and the actual events of the movie are relegated to the dustbins. You too could be like this man and make your place in the pantheon of history with dance.




And there’s plenty of new moves available for those in the know. Some think that the days of songs that introduced dance moves, like the Mashed Potato or the Hucka Buck, to the uninitiated are long gone, but instead, I’d like to bring a bit of that back. Here then are the new dances for the holiday season, starting off with, what I call, The Consumption; a two-person dance, where one holds the other who is going through exorcist-like convulsions as the holy spirit moves through them.




The Candiru, like it’s Amazonian fish counterpart, is a Brazillian move that either replicates the feeling of something swimming the wrong way as you watch awkward avant-techno dances from the eighties, or it is that dance itself. Very dangerous. Only for the advanced.




The Dance of the Cossack has felled many an uncle at a Bar Mitzvah, but there are modern equivalents that may prove less trying on the sciatica. There’s the Ian Svenonious Double-Foot Kick, which is tricky in a small basement show, but much easier in a living room. Watch out for the bass player.




With enough room available, a good high-step can show yourself off as cock of the walk or lord of the dance, just as if you were breakdance fighting. This one is called The Drunken Nazi, wherein you wear binoculars and try to kick whatever might be near your feet. Imagine if you could, a marching band full of people in lockstep with this.




DJs want you out on that dance floor, as they’re paid by the satisfaction of the audience, so it’s in their best interest to choose songs that get people on that floor to “do the train”. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes you shouldn’t dance. Really, now is about when you should stop.




 —Llewellyn Hinkes, Dec. 21, 2007

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Listening • Those for Whom What’s Laudable Is All That’s Audible

Throughout the history of the written word and the recorded sound, there’s been a large discrepancy between what people listen to and what actually gets written about. Critics need something to write—there are columns to fill and ink to use, and two-word reviews are hard to write (e.g., “shit sandwich”). So reviews tend toward music with an interesting story or a detailed description, and songs without that depth can be left by the literary wayside—even if they’re being played at every college party, ad nauseum.

Take, for example, “Party Like a Rockstar,” the Billboard-charting, crunk anthem from the Shop Boyz. People listening to mainstream radio on a regular basis must be sick to death of this song. Though they may admire the production, the swing of the lyrics, and the irony, and relish the cross-cultural integration, at this point familiarity has bred contempt. The song is played nonstop at loud, overblown frat parties that leave you emotionally spent. It’s been remixed over and over with Chamillionaire, Guns N’ Roses, Spacehog, and some group called the Ham Burgaz. The “totally dude” chorus is no longer comically poignant, but an inside joke that’s run its course. On the other side, for someone like myself, who lives in a self-imposed cultural bubble, it’s the new thing. It’s that rising tension of fight music that breaks into a party, like when professional wrestlers make out.

» Listen to “Party Like a Rockstar” by Shop Boyz vs. Spacehog

Techno suffers from this issue the most. In its Detroit infancy, it was an underground convention, but when techno began reaching number-one spots on the charts in the ‘90s, rock critics didn’t know what to do. How many ways can you describe “oonsk-oonsk-oonsk?” They’re not making cultural shifts in the current paradigm nor were they creating new subcultures—and yet, kids seem to listen to it a lot. Now that mp3 blogs are widely available, it presents a new publishing format that doesn’t require words and words on top of words. You can simply create links and lists to promote bleeping-blipping electronica. Like here when I say that this band Cave is a growing psychedelic thud that trods its way into its own beautiful style of burgeoning chaos.

» Listen to “Annihilation Sludge Flow” by Cave

Without that recognition from the mainstream press, scores of dead subcultures continue to roam the planet. Retro rockabilly throwbacks and righteous Insane Clown Posse Juggalos have one thing in common: They feel their community never got its due respect; and for that, it gives them a sense of purpose as an oppressed majority, or large minority, to keep the social order alive. If the mainstream spotlights ever shine their way, I wonder what they would do? Would they embrace the attention? Or would they revert to yet another obscure group with a complete style ensemble? And then 10 years later take a trip to Japan to find a find a small Tokyo district devoted to screaming, psychotic ICP cover bands that do it that much better.

» Listen to Boris with Merzbow (Live) at Raven Sings the Blues

NPR just had a piece on Jandek, and while the piece didn’t offer much in the way of new information (the story of Jandek, an overview of the Jandek on Corwood movie), it was a step in a good direction. Maybe this is some sort of amends for trafficking in so much quaintness all these years. Now with the possibility of digital radio tripling the operating bandwidth in some markets, NPR has the opportunity to truly dive into some experimental niches. Just for starters, how about a Bobb Trimble hour? He has the same mysterious serial-killer-or-moody-guitar-strummer vibe as Jandek—but it’s actually listenable (minus Jandek’s Blue Corpse album, which has always been listenable). It would make a good transition from quaint to eerie via some mellow field strumming.

» Listen to “Premonitions—The Fantasy” by Bobb Trimble

As a better bridge, how about the new Thurston Moore solo album? It’s acoustic, warm, and friendly with the Nick Drake autumn sounds (mostly) so there’s no offending the old folks , and NPR already loves Sonic Youth. Or just something a little more unexpected? Because mainstream outlets fail in this regard. They create a filter, just as anybody does, that only allows in the same spectrum of music that every other critic lets in, independent of quality, even if the music is immensely popular. And if it weren’t for audiophiles with no literal interest to pick up the scraps that fall between, it would be the same best-of-the-year lists with the same albums everywhere. Yeah, that Vampire Weekend track is good, but what else you got?

» Listen to “Silver>Blue” by Thurston Moore

 —Llewellyn Hinkes, Dec. 12, 2007

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Listening • Long Live the File-Sharers

As the recent loss of OiNK sits heavy in our hearts, I’d like to take some time out to think about the other file-sharing applications that have come before us and made the world a better place. Not the cold and utilitarian Napsters or the sleazy-yet-reliable LimeWires that spit out giant lists of porn and pop songs, but the warm and friendly community-based ones that are filling in the gaps for what the record companies refuse or fail to do. They’re not there to pirate Britney Spears albums, they’re there to enlighten others about obscure musical oddities that you never even knew existed. I dare say they are largely responsible for the current renaissance in music historicism that has spread to mp3 blogs.

First and foremost, OiNK was a music-nerd haven. Esoteric sounds, most of them in high-bitrate FLAC files for the best in music snobbery. Too bad I can’t figure out how to play a FLAC file. Still, you could read the comments and realize they were on to something when they said T. Rex was better before he went glam. For them it was the logical conclusion, that to get the pre-glam, out-of-print stuff in a respectable quality, this is what you resort to. Like Crime and Punishment, but with the intent of realizing the Devendra Banhart-like medieval folk lyricism of Marc Bolan as the equivalent of murdering the pawnbroker. Except that they just copied some files. Big whoop.

» Listen to “Conesuela” by T. Rex


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It was Audiogalaxy that first introduced me to huge swaths of groups that I had no idea existed. If you weren’t feverishly collecting seven-inches in the ’80s, how would you ever find out about bands like the Desperate Bicycles? How long do you think it will take before they even appear on iTunes? Audiogalaxy must have been built by music nerds, because they had it fine-tuned to a better algorithm than any computer could provide. You’d look up a band you knew, and next to it they would serve up five others that were unheard of—and better. It was there that I found out about Simply Saucer: a gritty psychedelic band on speed singing about a future led by Nazi cyborgs. Not exactly a “Canadian Velvet Underground” as they’re usually called, but more like a filthy Devo mixed with Gang Green.

» Listen to “Electro Rock” by Simply Saucer


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Direct Connect wasn’t so much a large community, but a local chapter of the file-sharing fan club. You had to know the people sharing your hub—and trust them—or they’d drain your bandwidth. Once you got past the Cold War paranoia, you could establish a good family hub and realize that people you already knew actually had interesting things to listen to. And you could realize there was a side of them that appreciated some solemn Jack Rose guitar fingerpicking in between the unlistenable avant-garde drone compositions. They may talk about it in terms of Eastern spirituality by way of Appalachia, but it’s possible to drink a beer to it at the same time.

» Listen to “Kensington Blues” by Jack Rose


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There was also the golden era of Soulseek, where you could find good pockets of eclecticism here and there. Kazaa had a good, short run before it became smothered with advertising. And there are a few other BitTorrent sites that have managed to keep a low profile. I’m sure there are miscellaneous tape-traders, mp3 trees, and Usenet groups devoted to some unknown corner of sound whose members haven’t changed in 10 years (alt.sounds.electric-piccolo). Knowing there’s so much devotion to “illegal” music, it makes me wonder why music journalists devote think-pieces to the overproduced, compressed dreck that has caused the slow death of radio. They can’t very well plead ignorance to what else is out there. Bands like No Age are well-known and singing fucked up and photocopied Built to Spill post-protopunk to the widespread knowledge of many. Why not give them some more ink?

» Listen to “Get Hurt” by No Age

 —Llewellyn Hinkes, Nov. 14, 2007

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Listening • What’s in a Band Name?

What’s in a band name? A meaningless handle dreamt up after throwing enough random adjectives together, or some obscure drug reference/street name/sexual maneuver that will only mean something to the other band members? Or could it in fact be part and parcel of the overall pathos conveyed in the music? I originally assumed it was the last option, since it makes for a good taste filter—I could ignore bands like “Free Beer” or “The Jazzy Fat Nasties.” Then again, plenty of bands with seemingly terrible names make great music that doesn’t represent their moniker.

» Listen to “The Mending of the Gown” by Sunset Rubdown at Anyone’s Guess


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I’d love to be in a band named “Positive Disintegration,” “Brutalist Architecture,” or “Psychic Surgery,” but by the time the theme is created, the dream is dead. It’s already a concept band best left to the novelty bin. But we could all wear matching Russian military costumes. It sounded great on paper, but we were better off naming ourselves after the first piece of furniture we saw, and moving on.

» Listen to “Bees Bein’ Strugglin’” by the Octopus Project at Largehearted Boy


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Considering the recent trends in naming conventions (Wolf Parade, Wolf Mother, Wolf Eyes, Frog Eyes, Black Eyes, Black Dice, Black Lips, Black Keys, etc.), bands might as well be nameless. “Untitled Musical Enclave No. 3,934” works just as well. As tempting as it may be to write off these bands as unoriginal, trend-aping, idea thieves, not a single one sounds like any of the others.

» Listen to Blank Dogs at MySpace


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You can’t go wrong with minimalism here. Simplicity allows the listener to be the god of the gaps. If you can get that simultaneous word or phrase that represents the atmosphere and direction of your sound in one swoop, it’s a perfect allegiance. It’s as if you’re not even playing music but just representing a concept, like “inchoate,” and hopefully everyone would sit around afterwards and say “My, that truly was the definition of inchoate.”

» Listen to Phosphorescent at MySpace


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Of course it takes a good amount of control to go from concept to production in the ideal formulation of what that “it” is. The more likely result is that you create with whatever you have at your disposal, and at the end sit around and flip through the dictionary or bathroom graffiti for the best matching representation. And that my friends, is how the Polka Tulk Blues Company became Black Sabbath.

» Listen to “Bodysnatchers” by Radiohead at Can You See the Sunset From the Southside?

 —Llewellyn Hinkes, Oct. 31, 2007

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