Your Song / Album of the Week?

This week’s retro-purchase:

Love & Rockets - Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven. Continuing my program of rebuying all the stuff I had on vinyl as a teenager (but have long since lost) comes this, the first full-length from the second band to rise out of the ashes of Bauhaus. On this record and the follow-up, the brilliant Express, Daniel Ash and David J. trade in the glam-punk territory of Bauhaus for a lush, dreamy psychedelica, especially on the proto-shoegazer single “Haunted When The Minutes Drag”. Elsewhere, Daniel Ash’s self-important religion-tinged lyrics must have appealed to the sixteen-year-old Madkevin pretty strongly, but now they seem quaint if not out-and-out embarassing. Still, at least he had a better sense of humour than Peter Murphy.

the Talking Heads Brick.

Every studio album, remastered and lovingly packed with worthwhile alternate versions, extras. The remastered tracks are simply a revelation, absolutely no comparison to the previous CD versions, especially on the earlier albums.

And as if that weren’t enough, the whole package is in dualdisc format, so on the flip side you have a DVD with each album in a snazzy new 5.1 mix + video content.

Driving home from NJ yesterday i listened from 77 through Speaking in Tongues, then got home and listened to 77 through Fear of Music in 5.1. Incredible stuff, essential for any fan of the band.

Before this gluttonous period, I had been listening to Jens Lenkman’s you’re so silent, jens quite a bit “pocket full of money” will not leave my head. And anything I can get my hands on by Okkervil River.

[B]Fiona Apple Extraordinary Machine

[/B]This really is an amazing disc and this is the first time I have ever owned one of her CDs. I am very very impressed with it so far and I really do reccomend it. Its just got a groove to it that I cant explain just yet but after listening to the CD about 5 times this weekend I can say with out a doubt that I am now a fan ( I guess I check my testicles at the door? ). Anyways I highly reccomend giving this Disc a look because its just that good.
[B]

[/B]

I got that for my girlfriend, after we listened to it, she suggested that we give it to my grandma. She didn’t like it either.

Madonna - Hung Up

I love a pop song with a catchy hook and when she’s on top of her game, no one does it better than Madonna.

Maybe I’m a bit late in discovering him but I’m absolutely floored by Matisyahu
For those not “in teh know” he’s a 25 yr old Hassidic Jew who sings Reggae/BeatBox but makes it a bit more accessible in the same vein as Sublime (albeit with vastly different lyrical subjects).

He is already getting a lot of airplay on alternative/college stations and will probably break the top 40 at some point (If he doesn’t it’ll be a testament to just how badly the industry needs to get rid of the PR and money men). If you haven’t heard him yet, I highly encourage people to check out “King without a crown” which is his current single and the most accessible of the set list on the album.

Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun
Pearl Jam - Even Flow
Cradle of Filth - Nymphetamine
Lacuna Coil - Swamped
Arch Enemy - Nemesis, I am Legend, Hybrids of Steel
Lamb of God - Ashes of Wake

Too true. I have listened to Love Profusion more times than I can count. It’s just so damn catchy.

Porcupine Tree - Deadwing. I got this as a gift, and if I had sometime earlier in the year, I would have thrown it into the the best-of-year list. Good stuff.

“All Deliberate Speed” by Mae. I was recently introduced to Mae, and I guess it fits the “adult alternative” genre I seem to really enjoy these days…

Nick Drake’s - Bryter Layter…heard that Garden State song on Sirus the other night…remembered I liked that song, did a quick google/amazon search and Xmas gift certificated myself this album today.

Very groovy, good crossword puzzle music.

Just home from working another New Year’s Eve, and decided I’d play along. I wanted to pimp an album where folks would actually be able to listen to it online legally, and I finally found one.

And it’s a doozy.

Let’s set the scene, first off. You start off with four young Chicagoans, right around, say, 1988. That’d be about a year after these four folks released a self-titled solo album with 500 pressings, and the handful of people who heard it seemed to enjoy it, even if it was a bit “sterile” and over-produced. In the time since that record’s release, the band feel like they’ve really grown and developed a bunch of ideas that are leaps and bounds beyond anything they’ve even attempted to play live, much less record.

So this band, they’ve got at least an album’s worth of tunes written. Unfortunately, getting all four people together to practice these songs is sorta tough, and for whatever reason, this new material–while undoubtedly brilliant and truly a major step up for the group–doesn’t get rehearsed as heavily as it should be. To complicate matters more, the fledgling indie label they’re contracted to wants a new record ASAP. As a final complication: this band is pretty much broke…and studio time isn’t cheap.

Through some friends they hear of a guy named Wink O’Bannon who lives five hours to the south in Louisville. Wink likes the band, and can get them studio time and produce the new songs. On one miserably hot “pollution alert summer day” as the band would later put it, they recorded their 12 tunes from 11pm through 5 am. Recorded them in a hot, claustrophobically tiny studio, fueled by Old Milwaukee. Pretty much everything they recorded, they recorded live. The legend of Eleventh Dream Day (that’d be the band, and maybe you’ve heard of them) was born that night.

See, thanks to the lack of rehearsal time, the band found themselves with two lead guitarists, and both guys seemed to have zero respect for the other guy’s space. Thus, on songs that maybe should be more placid, or songs that should be straightforward guitar pop tunes Rick Rizzo and Baird Figgi’s guitars sound like they’re trying to beat the living shit out of one another–jagged lead lines come flying in outta nowhere, elbowing the other guitar out of the way, only to have the other guitar come squalling in and attempt to reclaim it’s own space.

Looking back years later, Rizzo and Figgi would recall that a big chunk of their six-hour studio time was spent trying to figure out how to get Baird’s amp to stop buzzing. Eventually, they gave up and decided that “amp buzz” was going to be the theme of their record.

They also never really expected to release this stuff at first. The thinking that drummer Janet Beveridge Bean had was that the songs were “reference” material, and they’d end up going back and cleaning the songs up, figuring out who played which guitar leads when, instead of having them falling around all over each other the way they did that hot summer night.

“Reference” material or not, when the band actually sat down and listened to the tapes of that night (with O’Bannon’s production simply burying the needles in the red), the rawness, the eagerness, the earnestness…hell, the claustrophobia, the beer, the heat…it all came together brilliantly, and kudos to Eleventh Dream Day for realizing it. The album, “Prairie School Freakout”, has reference points in Neil Young’s Crazy Horse days, The Velvet Underground, and X (thanks to Rizzo and future wife Janet Bean’s vocal interplay)…but sounds exactly like none of those folks.

There might be better rock and roll albums by better bands out there, but those discs are few and far between. Eleventh Dream Day still gets together to play the occasional show in Chicago (and Rizzo still tends bar at the Rainbow Room in Wicker Park), and still releases a very occasional album. Their newest label, Thrill Jockey, re-released “Prairie School Freakout” this past year with liner notes and a bunch of extra goodies. In a very cool move, the whole thing is available to listen to here. Sure, go ahead and click each track in order if you want. But if you’re on the fence, at least give the incredible “Beach Miner” a listen. And be sure not to miss the best song EDD ever did, “Go”. Hell, seriously. Listen to all of these. It’s so worth it. As former OPtion Magazine editor Byron Coley puts it in the liner notes on the reissue, “Fuck, they were good.”

Just got back from a major post-holiday shopping binge in Toronto, checking out some record stores I had always heard about but never actually been to. (I don’t get to T.O. much.) Picked up another Dead Meadows album, and my wife got the Fiona Apple and Kate Bush’s latest because, in her words, she needed to “girl geek out”. I, on the other hand, continued my quest to recreate the record collection I had when I was sixteen:

Meat Puppets - Up On The Sun. What I assume the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty was to hippies, Up On The Sun was to all those 80s underground-indie-punks back before “alternative” was a dirty word. This is the one where Curt Kirkwood becomes the guitar god that we only briefly glimpsed on Meat Puppets II. This, their third, is all about the little moments that turn a good song great, like how the title track has this nifty little arpeggio that keeps bouncing back between the overdubbed guitars in a way that gives me goosebumps, or how “Two Rivers” features a repeated harmonic figure that must drive Peter Buck insane with jealousy. In a few albums they would turn into ZZ Top, but Up On The Sun remains their masterpiece.

Wire - Pink Flag. Sure, Elastica totally ripped off “Three Girl Rhumba”, but fuck, who wouldn’t? Wire’s first album still stands as one of the great art-punk music bombs ever recorded. If punk stripped out that which was superfluous from rock, Wire goes one step further and discards everything that even remotely smacks of indulgence like, say, repeating a chorus twice. In it’s own way, it’s as cold and chilling as Joy Division, except that you can dance to it. Well, for extremely short periods of time, anyway.

Skinny Puppy - Bites. Probably not terribly well known outside of Canada - or inside Canada, for that matter - Skinny Puppy was a seminal second-wave industrial band, back before industrial fused with metal courtesy of Ministry, and were a huge influence on the industrial-dance bands that followed (your Front 242s, Nitzer Ebbs, and KMFDMs). This is embryonic Puppy, with lots of tape samples and distorted “spooky” vocals, although some of it strays interestingly close to early New Order. Mostly it’s mood music, although it’s a little disconcerting to discover that this album which sounded so Satanic and weird back in '84 now seems sort of… quaint.

The Subways - Young for Eternity
This is a really steller album for a début. Punkish indie rock. You can listen to the whole album here:http://www.thesubways.net/us/flash.php

Been listening to Abbey Road (especially the “You Never Give Me Your Money” medley) again lately. My admiration for the Side B medley continues to rise the more I listen to it.

Fuck ya’ll. I am still listening to the new KoRn CD. I buy way more Cds than I should, but have not bought a single one since this came out. I could not say that about the last few from these guys. Nope, its not brain surgery or cancer curing, but I sure as hell like to blast it while in the car.

Abbey Road’s a great album. I’ve been listening to a lot of the White album recently.

You never give me your money
You only give me your funny paper
and in the middle of negotiations
you break down

This week’s used CD purchase:

The Clash - Sandinista!
If London Calling was the Clash’s Sgt. Pepper, then surely this is their White Album. Originally a triple-album, the conventional wisdom is that Sandinista! records the moment the wheels finally came off the seemingly unstoppable Clash juggernaut. Well, conventional wisdom is for the birds, because some twenty-five years after the fact, what Sandinista! really sounds like is a band indulging in every musical impulse without any self-restraint whatsoever - and it’s a blast. Pushing the musical boundaries of the bands even further afield than London Calling, the Clash winds through some pretty strange territory, turning the raw matierials of dub, reggae, Irish folk, disco, big band, jazz and funk into variations of rebel music, with the just enough of the old Clash keraaaang! to remind you whose name is on the cover. Not all of it works, because honestly how could it? But the failure is part of the charm. Not everybody will like every track, but no two people will agree on what the bad tracks are and, in it’s own way, that’s an even more impressive achievement.

KT Tunstall. Eye to the Telescope

If you like acoustic guitar based stuff, it’ll be right up your alley.

I’ve totally lost it, it seems. I’ve been listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

[i]The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called ‘Gitche Gumee;’
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty.
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early.

The ship was the pride of the American side,
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin.
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most,
With a crew and good captain well-seasoned.
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland.
And later that night when the ship’s bell rang,
Could it be the north wind they’d been feelin’?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing,
And every man knew, as the captain did too,
T’was the witch of November come stealin’.
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the Gales of November came slashin’.
When afternoon came it was freezin’ rain
In the face of a hurricane westwind.

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin’.
‘Fellas, it’s too rough to feed ya.’
At 7 PM a main hatchway caved in, he said
‘Fellas, it’s been good t’know ya.’
The captain wired in he had water comin’ in
And the good ship and crew was in peril.
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the [/i]Edmund Fitzgerald[i].

Does any one know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searches all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay
If they’d put fifteen more miles behind her.
They might have split up or they might have capsized;
May have broke deep and took water.
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams;
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below: Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the Gales of November remember’d.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
In the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral.
The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the [/i]Edmund Fitzgerald.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call ‘Gitche Gumee’.
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early.