Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Pacific Ocean Blue - Dennis Wilson So what if it just came out on Tuesday. Pacific Ocean Blue is not only the best solo Beach Boys record it stands toe to toe with Brian Wilson’s best Beach Boys material and fights it to a draw. You will never and have never heard a song like River Song in this or any life. What a tremendous release this is. I had been trying to buy cassette and vinyl copies of this off of ebay for years but have always come up short. The new two disc legacy edition makes me so glad that my first experience with this record is with some of the best remastered sound i have ever heard. Everything just jumps out of the speakers and sounds like magic. I am only up to record #5 on my list but this is by far the oddest record you are going to see. I dont mean odd as in unlistenable but odd in that it makes me like boogie rock. Odd in that i takes these ballads that are almost vomit inducingly cliche and turns them into gut wrenching musical confessions. Odd in that it would sound even more odd if it were not so completely over the top. I was hoping when i saw that they were finally re-releasing this record after being out of print for 20 years that it would be as amazing as it is. I went in with as high expectations as i could make myself have and it does not in anyway disappoint. The second disc, his unfinished 2nd record titled Bambu, is even weirder than the first but it equally lovely and Taylor Hawkins, of the Foo Fighters, perfectly catches the essence of Dennis Wilson when he sings over the track Holy Man, a track which Dennis Wilson never got to sing vocals on before he died. I really cant say enough about this record except get it and live it.
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Thursday, March 27th, 2008
The Doors - LA Woman
Sometimes, friends, the universe lines up all of its necessary components and you are listening to the perfect record at the exact perfect moment doing the exact perfect thing. Thus begins the story of album #4 on my list of my Top 15 favorite records of all time, LA Woman.
June 2004. There we were, my cousin Len and I cruising in my already laboring 2001 Corolla, down Route 40 through New Mexico on our way across the country to San Diego. We had just stopped at a ghost town’s gas station to fill up our tank, gas was about 1.40 back then. At that point we had been driving for about 28-30 hours straight, the reasons why are important to me and my family but not to this story, when whatever disc we were listening to finally ended and we had to find something else to listen to. I dont know if the sun sets slower out west than it does in the North East but it seemed like it started setting the minute 12:00 turned to 12:01. The speed limit out there is 75. I think we were probably doing 85 or 90 the whole way. We encountered a minimum of cars, maybe there were more but we didnt notice. We were in what they call “The Zone” and I must have known instinctively that the record that would make this particular moment of our trip one of the most memorable would be if LA Woman was blaring out of our windows and mixing with the New Mexican sunset.
I am planning a longer more involved post about the Doors but now is not the time to start Thinking about the Doors. I will just say that i enjoy some Doors music, specifically the first album and the last album, LA Woman. The quality of everything in between falls somewhere between terrible and ridiculous, but they make up for it with the two great records.
Back to the story…LA Woman is the album the Doors were created to make. It is greazy, its loose, its funky, Jim Morrison at this point is just a drunk with a white bluesman’s growl throwing his inane ‘poetry’ around like a monkey and its feces. But Oh man, when you are flying down the highway through the desert, two thousand miles away from home, trying to make sense of an atlas but in reality not really caring as long as you are going west, there is nothing like that moment when the band kicks in with The Changeling.
To me, three years removed from that moment, every song on the record blurs together into a mass of dirty blues and boogie rock but like i always say, if the songs aren’t tremendous then it doesnt matter when or where or with whom you are listening to it. It wouldnt hit the same way. If The Changeling wasnt followed by Lover Her Madly, If the record didnt end with Riders on Storm and revlove around the title track like our solar system around the sun my recollection of that moment as total perfection and joy, which was needed greatly after only three days before feeling nothing but sadness, loss and anger, would have been either greatly diminished or would cease to exist at all. At that moment i knew that i was doing something that i was going to treasure forever.
Len and I always called driving cross country the one stupid thing we always talked about doing but never did that we actually did do and it didnt hit me that i was doing it until those first snare drum hits of The Changeling.
Hours later, while cruising through Albuquerque, I put on Raw Power by the Stooges and then Superunknown by Soundgarden. At that point we had been up and driving for 36 hours, were driving on super unkown highways, in total darkness, hallucinating and most certainly high from all the red bulls we drank while stopped for gas and food. i think it was one in the morning. Those were scary times. Im not sure how we managed to survive. we stopped for the night at a hotel and when we woke up we found the hotel was literally in the middle of the desert. We had no idea what the landscape looked like because it was so dark and our minds and bodies were so wrecked by the time we finally stopped.
We listened to the Meat Puppets that day.
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Monday, March 17th, 2008
Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
A message to all of those kids out there who want to be indie rock stars: its all about the songs. Dont worry about singing super goofy or writing songs with insane chord changes that dont make any sense or having the drummer play in a funky time the song doesnt deserve. and dont worry about cutting your hair in a crazy way or wearing low rider jeans with studded belts. dont worry about any of that stuff. Just worry about writing a good song, worry about writing a GREAT song. If you need an example of how this can be done within the vein of indie rock, a place where the actual song generally comes second to what the song means or what you were trying to accomplish sonically in the studio, look no further than Pavement’s second album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the greatest collection of indie rock songs ever compiled on a vinyl or plastic disc.
There is something so simple about Pavement songs that makes you want to form a band just to play them but half way through the intro to Silent Kit, the first song on Crooked Rain, you realize that you and youre band are in no way cool enough to try and play a Pavement song, which is not your fault. They dont mean to be so cool they just are. Their lyrics make no sense and some of their songs have five or six distinct part some lasting whole minutes some lasting mere seconds its all there in a Pavement tune. Considering they invented the indie rock cliche if not the genre itself it is surprising that they are able to turn those cliches; feedback fests, sloppy guitar play, atonal singing, obvious self consciousness, into 6 classics of not just indie rock but all rock that was composed and performed in the 1990’s. Im talking about Silent Kit, Elevate Me Later, Stop Breathin, Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz, and Range Life and each in their own way grants you access to a little known place called indie rock heaven.
If there is one thing that sucks about being 26 its that i was born in 1982 which would have made me 12 when Crooked Rain came out in 1994. I dont remember if i was listening to something specific when i was 12. i think by then i may have invested my Dads money in that 12 cds for a penny scam that BMG and Columbia music clubs used to run in Spin and Rolling Stone. If this was the case then i was listening to the first Weezer record, the Who’s Tommy, Core by Stone Temple Pilots, things like that. I certainly was not listening to Slanted and Enchanted which would have been the only way for me to have even known that there was such a bands as Pavement. My age is a travesty in this case friends. Oh how i wish to have been born in 1980. Then i might have been able to say i was aware of Nirvana and if you werent born in 1982 or after, then you might not know that the subject always comes up at some point, when engaged in conversation with a peer, whether or not you were aware of Nirvana before Nevermind came out. I can honestly say i was not and i am happy to say that because Nevermind is not a great record. it is no In Utero.
Do i think my life would have been different if i had discovered Crooked Rain in my teens rather than in my 2o’s? Yes. I would have had a far greater exposure to a lot of similar music if i had known about the Pavement. Chavez, Guided By Voices, the Pixies, Sebadoh, Archers of Loaf, Superchunk. These are all need to know bands that I immediately feel in love with after having taken my first mind bending, face melting taste of indie rock.
My favorite flavour? Pavement.
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Monday, March 10th, 2008
Nothing much to report today so were going to take a look at album #2 on my list of Top 15 favorite albums of all time. And the winner is…
Belle and Sebastian - If You’re Feeling Sinister
I remember vividly the first time I heard this record. The year was 2000. i was managing a mall record store at the time and I was going through my Led Zeppelin phase. We had a 6 disc changer at the store and me and my co-workers would fill the changer with Led Zep, hit random and those would be our stores listening selections for the day. Before that i was opening the store every morning with Black Flag blasting out the doors for the mall walkers to enjoy and right before that i had just discovered the Black Crowes. so you can see where my head was at when a middle aged woman walked into the store wearing a long green trench coat, her face marked with old acne scars telling me all about ‘indie rock’ and that her favorite record was by the group Belle and Sebastian. I told her that that was the stupidest name for a band i had ever heard and she just laughed and told me her husband agreed with me but that i should listening to it anyway. I told her to have a good night when she left having made several purchases but when she was out of ear shot i cursed her stupidly named band and cranked up the ‘Battle of Evermore’ which isnt lame in any way.
As it ended up I grabbed the record she was talking about, If You’re Feeling Sinister, before i left for the night with the intention of listening to it on the way home. the fact of the matter was that Led Zeppelin was kind of getting on my nerves as was the entire genre of ‘ROCK’. I find everything after Houses of the Holy a little terrible and I can only listen to the Rain Song so many times before Jimmy Page’s huge 12 string open tuned chords start to grate on my generally very short and very already grated nerves. Robert Plant had no voice after Houses of the Holy and it is almost impossible to listen to his stupid little breathy squeal on Kashmir and and everything on ‘In through the Out Door’ and ‘Presence.’
Basically i needed a change in the music i was listening to. I had been drowning in alternative/hard rock for as long as i could remember and the lady in the trench coat came into my life at just the right moment.
I spent an hour that night driving around listening to If you’re feeling sinister and i suppose you can say that my life changed, if ever so slightly. It made me aware of different kinds of music and different ways that songs that would normally be rockers or folky rockers could be presented so that they conveyed a different message and brought about different images and feelings. I doubt that Belle and Sebastian do this to everyone and frankly i dont think that any of there other records are really all that great but by August every year i am longing for the days to grow short and the nights to get cold so i can drive around with the windows open listening to the wind blow leaves off the trees which most of the time is louder than Stuart Murdoch’s vocals.
The first thing that grabbed me about If You’re Feeling Sinister was how amazingly weird the lyrics were. Why were they singing about track stars and Bob Dylan and hookers and girls who are torn between religion and S&M? it didnt make any sense then and because i never bothered to research it it doesnt make any sense to me now but they make me laugh and i still havent heard very many new artists who are as adept at telling as detailed as story in a song as Belle and Sebastian is.
The magic on this record is from the total lack of electric guitars. An acoustic guitar is so much more expressive and effective at portraying emotion than an electric guitar and they use that to great advantage on this record. Imagine how different “Me and the Major” would be if they were banging out those bar chords on a well amplified Strat rather than a warm acoustic instrument. Its the same reason I love the Pogues, the instrumentation just exudes so much warmth its hard stop once you start listening to it. At the time this seemed like a big deal. now it just seems ridiculous that i was so in love with the sound of a sustained distorted E chord.
The center piece of this record is the title song. It most certainly has a spot on my Top 30 tunes of all time. With its introductory sounds coming from a recording of children playing on a Scottish play ground and the round tones of a Harmonium this is the quintessential Belle and Sebastian song. it is the song that defines them as i mixes soft almost Nick Drake-esque guitar strumming with a light propulsive shuffle from the drums. The song tells the story essentially of two people whose quest for answers just leads to more questions and more frustration and boredom and pain. In the end its decided that youre probably better off if you dont even bother. Its my ultimate Autumn song and gets me every-time.
If You’re Feeling Sinister opened me up to a whole world of music outside of the crap that is played on WPLR and on any classic rock station or mainstream ‘alternative’ music station across America. Since then i am a loyal purveyor of Pitchfork and Magnet magazine and there was a point, before I started quitting job and needing to sell my reocrds to live, that i had maybe 1,000 records most of them ‘indie rock’ and most of them sounding nothing like Led Zeppelin.
Thank god.
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Monday, February 25th, 2008
I sat through the entire ceremony last night, including the nauseating Enchanted songs, and i feel pretty good about how the whole thing went down. I liked most of the nominated films and performers so i was rooting for everyone unless you were associated with Juno. Good Work everyone!
Moving on…
One of the things i’ll be doing, when there is nothing else i really feel like writing about is commenting on my list of Top 15 Favorite albums of all-time. This is a pretty eclectic list but not frustratingly so. My taste tends to swing in a specific direction so there wont be any gangsta rap or bone head county music on here. I will unveil my list one record at a time and hopefully if you havent heard this particular record you will get yourself a taste. So, entry #1 (in no particular order, unranked, im just going to list them as they were when i originally jotted them down) belongs to:
Elvis Costello and the Attractions - Blood and Chocolate
The last album he did with the Attractions until All This Useless Beauty is also the best Attractions record since Armed Forcesand where that record may not have been made by a group of guys that loved or even liked each other they at least had momentum on their side and obviously cruised through that record like a rock and roll knife cutting melted butter. Not only that but the songs on Armed Forces could have been carry overs from This Years Model making that exact period Elvis’ most successful in marrying his two favorite things, hating people and writing the catchiest melodies since the Beatles were holding your hand and taxing the pennies on your eyes. Those records were easy. When the first song on Blood and Chocolate, the title track, kicks in with its bare E chord you can imagine him struggling somewhat to come-up with a decent guitar line before finally deciding to just bang on one chord for 4 minutes loathing the thoughts running through his head making it impossible to concentrate. the whole record stinks of this kind of anger and frustration. His band, the best backing band in the history of rock, this is arguable im sure but in that argument im taking the Attractions, was freaking breaking up, mainly because he hated his bass player and the cherry on top of the already too cherry laden sundae is he gets divorced. These songs specifically, Home is Anywhere you Hang your Head, I Want You, Battered Old Bird, and Crimes of Paris, sound like they were wrenched out of Elvis against there will, thrown on a recording console and stapled and nailed down with pneumatic air guns. Is there any other reason for Home is Anywhere you Hang Your Head to be so slow and his vocal performance so mannered and so off key on occasion? doesn’t it sound like the songs are fighting their own existence? In Battered Old Bird they use a reverse tape loop to lead into the bridge and kiss my grits if it doesnt sound like the record has finally decided it just cant take it anymore and come hell or high water its going back to the dark pool it had been swimming in inside Elvis’ head. Fortunately, it didnt and we have this amazing record to listen to. This is the first Elvis record I ever bought. at the time those Rhino reissues were a big deal (it has since be reissued again by Hipp-o but unless i finally wear out my copy I will be avoiding spending another couple hundred of dollars replacing records that need not be replaced) and i made sure i bought each one the day it came out. I poured over Elvis’ newly composed liner notes watched him get fat and bearded, weird and then back to normal, ive heard him be great and not so great all within the space of track 1,2, and 3 on the same record, but this record front to back is fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. I think in away, it ruined my life. Anyone that knows me knows that i have a slightly cynical side to myself. Am I totally blaming Elvis? No but did he and this record play a major part, i have to believe that they did. Its the record where you can hear Elvis loose his faith in marriage, his band and himself, and when something like thats going down, even the jauntiest acoustic coffee shop pop tune, like Crimes of Paris, is going to sound like you are singing through a smirk while poking people in the eyes with the head of your guitar. Fantastic!
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