Thursday, February 7, 2013
My Conundrum with the New MBV
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| image courtesy of walrusmusicblog.com |
So I just ordered the vinyl package for the new My Bloody Valentine album. Said package came with the 180 gram vinyl, CD and the digital DL. So the tracks are in my possession, and I'm dying to listen to them, HOWEVER, here's my conundrum.
From the MBV website:
"This vinyl album has been recorded as an analogue album. It was recorded on 2 inch 24 track analogue tape and mixed onto half inch analogue tape and mastered with no digital processing involved. The vinyl is a true analogue cut, i.e. it hasn't been put through a digital process during the cutting process unlike over 90% of all vinyl available today."
Okay, so do I go ahead and listen to the tracks as digital entities, or do I wait (the vinyl/CD's aren't being shipped until the 22nd due to manufacturing) and let such a beautiful and meticulous record find my ears the first time the way it was meant to? It's been fairly easy avoiding the tracks thus far on youtube and pitchfork and whatnot (which is why I've nto posted any here), but now that they're on my computer?
I'm going to attempt to wait, but brothers and sisters, as they say in hell, it ain't gonna be easy!
Mr. Bungle Full Show 1992
For the other side of the coin from that 2000 show I posted earlier. Of special note would be their cover of Billy Squire's The Stroke at about 41:00 minutes and the truly disturbing set-closer, a ten minute+ version of Everyone I Went to High School with is Dead. On that one, the sometimes-shoddy video work and intermittent all-black screen help combine with the improv/noise element of the song to produce one of the closest things to a nightmare captured on film I've ever seen. This wasn't the exact show I was looking for, the one where Patton gets pulled into the crowd by a fan then hits the guy in the head with the microphone, finally toweling off the blood as he sings... I don't remember. I'll have to find that...
Mr. Bungle Full Live Show ~2000
Wow. A professionally shot Mr. Bungle concert from the 2000 California tour. I saw them three times for this album and I'd forgotten just how much of a workout each one was for the band. Props for BrainPhreak to posting this.
Barry Adamson - If You Love Her
If you're not familiar with Barry Adamson, former bass player for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave and the Cave Men, Magazine and for a short time the Buzzcockss, and you dig any measure of the stuff I toss out on this page, go get 1996's Oedipus Schmoedipus. An anthological record that features Adamson's jazz/noir musicality and style plus a number of great guests (Carla Bozulich, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker to name a few). If you're a David Lynch fan you'll recognize track number two on the record, it had a pretty memorable moment in Lost Highway. Mr. Adamson's soundtrack to Carol Morley's 'Dreams of a Life" which will be aired in the UK tonight, Feb 7th. Said ST can be purchased here on iTunes.
All of the man's albums are fantastic, especially my favorite, 1998's As Above So Below. Atticus Ross assisted with some of the programming and produced it and Flood's on hand for a couple of tracks as well. It's fantastic; a dark, jazzy descent into a noisy, ionic hell where the kiss of an angel waits mockingly just out of reach. Overdoing it? I don't think so. You don't know Barry.
Adamson's earliest records (Moss Side Tory, Soul Murder) are fascinating because they are soundtracks - complete with dialogue snippets - to movies that never existed outside Mr. Adamson's mind. The genius displayed therein put him on Trent Reznor's map back in the early 90's. Reznor used a few of Adamson's tracks and the influence of his MO to put together the Natural Born Killer's ST and then a few years later of course the aforementioned Lost Highway. Two years ago Adamson - a "Cinematic Soul" by his own admission, wrote, directed and released his first film - a 'novella' entitled The Therapist. The film is a heavily-influenced first film but it is good, strong in tone, and it points to even better things to come from this man whose work I love so much. A friend and I saw him live last year in an intimate show at LA's Hotel Bar. Just Barry, minimal accompaniment. It was awesome.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Soundgarden - Into The Void (Sealth)
I was lucky as hell to get this as a teenager sometime around the time it came out. One year for my birthday my Aunt Dotty gave me a bunch of Coconuts gift coins and I used them to purchase four albums on CD (the only time I'd ever bought more than two at once at that point): Slayer - Decade of Aggression, Skinny Puppy - Last Rites, Pink Floyd - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and SoundGarden - Badmotorfinger. With Badmotorfinger I was able to find a copy of the two-disc version where the album proper is complimented by a second disc, SOMMS, or Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas. The second disc starts with a cover of Black Sabbath's Into the Void, a song that I believe has one of the greatest riff-structures of any heavy music anywhere. Soundgarden handle the material VERY adeptly and definitely manage to add something to it. The day I first heard it I was at long-gone Red Tower Records in Orland Park, IL. I asked the clerk what it was (I'd actually never heard either Soundgarden or that particular Sabbath song at that time, I guess this was sometime in '92) but of course didn't have enough money to afford both it and whatever I'd come in for originally. Luckily I was able to find that later copy - the last I ever saw (I always looked).
New Man Man in 2013!!!
Yes!!! Apparently the band is trying for a summer release after recording the record in three weeks and beginning mixes now. There's a great interview with Honus in Paste here. They've been trying songs out live so I set to scouring the old tubeU but haven't found anything yet. However, despite The Life Fantastic not leaving my CD player or iPod from about the time it was released in April 2011 to Autumn of the same year I somehow had never seen this video for Piranhas Club before now. Careful - this made me smile up and down for quite some time after first watching it (like the song doesn't do that enough. Great video). It's not going to play here, just follow the link - Anti seems overly protective of this but hey, that's cool.
HBO Films: Phil Spector Trailer
I'm no longer really a fan of Al Pacino's work in cinema. Everything up to and including Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way and I'm in, Carlito's Way especially, as I feel it is a modern crime masterpiece, a tear-jerking love story and it features outstanding performances by not only Mr. Pacino but Sean Penn as well. It is a shame though, that the Carlito Brigante character has slightly been ruined for me by the fact that it became Pacino's ONLY persona after that. Some have corrected me and said that Al put a slight mod on Carlito for Scent of a Woman and that is in fact the character he's been in EVERY movie since. Either way, it's wore out its welcome. The one exception to this is HBO's 2010 movie You Don't Know Jack where Pacino turned in a fantastic role performance as Jack Kevorkian. Honestly up to that point I didn't think I'd ever see another great Pacino performance again.
Now HBO is giving us the above - a film where Pacino portrays enigmatic looney tune Phil Spector, possibly the greatest record producer in human history (which he reminds up of in the trailer) and convicted murderer. I gotta say, I'm excited again. From what we see in this trailer I'm thinking we're not going to get another fine-tuned, wonderfully-nuanced performance out of Mr. Pacino, but honestly in this case I don't care. Spector fascinates the hell out of me, and to have someone who can get all HOO-HA bugfuck crazy at the drop of a hate playing him makes me even more excited (as long as we don't actually have to hear him yell Hoo-Ha that is). There's a documentary about Spector on my Netflix cue - it's been there for a few years and last I checked it still hadn't been released, so this will have to do for now. Besides, I've a feeling the whole story is probably so disturbing that it'll be good to break the ice with some larger-than-life fiction before getting into the real nooks and crannies of the story.
Wherever you fall in the Spector polarization, let's not forgot what he did give us, before he started taking things away from people.
Hot damn that's a fine song and one of my favorite recordings. Ever.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
The Smiths - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
BIG pull back to The Smiths lately. Rounding out my (hopefully) last night of feverish delusion (oh who am I kidding? The fevers been gone since yesterday and I'll always be delusional) with a huge Smiths bender complimented perfectly by beginning to re-read Neil Gaiman's Sandman in anticipation of next fall's new Sandman series.
(and in the still for this video, doesn't Morrissey look kinda like David Patrick Kelly, best known as Jerry Horne in Twin Peaks? LOVE IT)
The C-Building Kids - PTA Gangbang
Okay, in the high school that Mr. Brown and I went to there were, at the time, three buildings. It was all one big structure, but they'd been adding onto it over the years I guess, connecting each new building via long hallways that looking back on it now were more than a little reminiscent of airports. If you've ever been to the Phoenix, AZ airport you will no doubt know what I'm talking about. A building was purely academic, B building was a continuation of that with something else thrown in, I don't remember exactly, and C Building was for the stoners and special ed students (one and the same in some cases - and I'm saying this as a graduate of that school's stoner program).
Anyway...
About two years out of high school Mr. Brown and I were in a band called Wink Lombardi and the Constellations. We weren't twenty-one and at that time I was really more of a pothead, so we spent most of our spare time in our practice space, recording with every available instrument, microphone and concept our drug-addled brains could come up with. This past time was not limited to just the five of us in the band* but most of our friends. One of those friends was the now-departed Jake. The dude was awesome, but he was a fucking hurricane of insanity waiting to blow free at any given moment. Jake had no musical ability per se - although he sure could sing - but that made his contributions that much more heartfelt and unique.
And insane.
Brown and I decided to start a band with the three of us and whoever else - something where we'd just set up stuff and play and see what happened. Usually for these sessions I played bass, Mr. Brown did some form of vox or keys and Jake did everything we could think of that he didn't know how to play but that might benefit from his fresh approach. He'd play guitars run through five different types of distortion pedals. He'd play drums (again - for being untrained, not bad). He sing. He'd read bizarre passages from his or Mr. Brown's high school notebooks, he'd play a keymonica. Whatever. Our main method of recording at the time was a Tascam 464 - hey this was 1996, there wasn't any home digital equipment yet. No youtube, nothing. So anyway, we decided to call this band - what else - The C-Building Kids. Now you can appreciate the reference.
Most of those tracks sat on moldering casette tapes for a few years until circa 2002 when I was in the band The Yellow House and the singer and I bought a Pro Tools rig. Not the super professional one, but a Digi001. We were recording our debut album and that was how we'd chosen to do it. In the downtime from recording that band - and because for years I clearly did NOTHING exception become inebriated and make music (not a bad thing) - Mr. Brown and I spent many a long night going through those old C Blding tapes, transferring the material track by track. Jake had passed away a few years between the original project and this re-mastering so it was important to us.
Still is.
We managed to make one album out of the most usable of that material. Pro Tools is a non-destructive, digital recording environment and it enables you to have a hell of a lot more tracks than a Tascam 464 does. After transferring all those old songs we added tons of stuff to link all the tracks and basically make the whole thing flow like one giant, diseased clusterfuck of a record. We named it The C-Building Kids: Shitting in the Urinal and never released it because... well, again, there was no youtube still at this time and just who were we gonna send this to?
The above track actually doesn't even have Jake on it. Most of it is one single track - I remember the night perfectly, Sonny and I walking up into the old practice space during the Wink days, seeing Brown sitting there with a small Casio keyboard in his hand, plugged into the Tascam. He played us what he had just created - again on ONE TRACK - and we were just like whoah. I never knew how to add anything to it, when we transferred it I strapped on my guitar and running it through my handy-dandy effects pedal and did some crazy, off-the-cuff hoo-doo that really actually worked. Then we added our roommate Two Foot making some weird humping noises inspired by the title (which Mr. Brown had recorded the initial track based on) and the rest... well, while it might not be history, it's certainly our story.
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*Mr. Brown, myself, Sonny D., JFK and fifth member that rotated between several different people, none of which were Abe Vigoda but one of which carried the unusual surname of Crackrockski. Polish?
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Cocks 'n' Asses
Great B-side I re-discovered while going through my listening preparations for Push the Sky Away. Reminds me a little bit of "Three" on Seventeen Seconds by The Cure. Has what I always think of as the "Vertigo Comics Vibe". I need to post a list of other stuff with that vibe and an explanation - I think it's an interesting theory.
Alice In Chains - Sea of Sorrow
The summer of '91 I attended my second concert ever: Operation Rock and Roll!!! Now I ask you, with a moniker like that, how could it be anything but awesome? It was, if I can do this from memory - Metal Church, Dangerous Toys, Motorhead, Judas Priest (Painkilllllllleeeeerrrrr tour no less) and Alice Fucking Cooper. Holy Old Crow, right? My buddy Zak lived a stone's throw from the (then) World Music Theatre in Tinley Park, IL. He had the obligatory cool uncle who chaperoned us because he himself was a fan of Mr. Cooper. So we had a good old time.
Anyway... On the way out that night they were handing out a casette. Just a simple thing in a cardboard slip-sleeve with a canon on the cover and one song by all the band's that had played the show and a bunch that hadn't. Alice In Chain's Sea of Sorrow was, I think, the third song on the first side. It was the first time I'd ever heard Alice In Chains. You may have noticed, I've been a fan ever since.
I've always liked this song because the use of the piano makes it stand slightly apart from the rest of their catalogue, but without really deviating from their "sound". That sound largely being made up of Cantrell's dark and lush songwriting and the unique harmonies that resulted from his voice with Layne Staley's. Even though Layne died I do believe Cantrell has cracked the code a second time and in a respectful way with what he has going now as Alice In Chains. I don't really care too much for the group's newer video, which I posted and talked a bit about here, but I love the song and can't wait for the record (which, as far as I've been able to ascertain, still does not have a definitive release date).
I also don't care for a lot of the elements of the above video for Sea of Sorrow. I've said before, videos where the band 'plays' irritate me. I get it, why it's done, but THEY'RE NOT PLAYING so it just seems dumb. Be that as it may, in the 90's you couldn't throw a frog without hitting a video with the band playing, unless maybe that frog was aimed at TOOL. Regardless, I love the song, love some of the B&W imagery, and LOVE seeing a young, healthy, LIVING Layne Staley.
DAYWALT HORROR: Jack
Kudos to my friend Tori for turning me on to this. Lots of cool stuff here from The Daywalt Fear Factory
Monday, February 4, 2013
Pulp - Seductive Barry
Probably the next most seductive song (of course, check the title mate). Both on the same album!
Pulp - This Is Hardcore
Apologies for the ad - the others I found were shit dubs. Is this not one of the most seductive songs ever?
Psychocandy - The Jesus and Mary Chain
A friend inspired a JAMC binge today. I'm fortunate enough to have a copy of Darklands on Vinyl (my wife's I believe) and The Peel Sessions on disc, but I had to go to youtube for this one.
There's something smoky and disturbing about JAMC. When I first heard the band's name, somewhere around the time of the first ever Lollapalooza concert,* I felt as though I had heard the name of a secret society. It seemed hush hush. Very occult. The band ended up not sounding anything like I thought they would (though I couldn't tell you what that was) but that was good, very good. Years later I'd have a slight interest in and then a small aversion to The Raveonettes based on a perceived imitation of JAMC's sound. And yeah - there are A LOT of similarities, but The Raveonettes have become one of my favorite bands EVER and have retroactively helped me realize even more of the pure sonic beauty of JAMC.
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*No - unfortunately I was not old enough or savvy enough to have attended the first Lollapalooza. Being in my early teens at the time this kind of thing was only slightly on my radar. The second one I think I probably didn't have the money for, so it wasn't until the third one that I attended a 'palooza, and then probably only after Mr. Brown prompted me to. It was the only one I ever did and ever will. It was great to see the bands I saw there but I am NOT a festival person. Unless it's in England. I'd go to ATP or Minehead in a freakin' second.
New Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Video - Jubilee Street
Starring Ray Winstone no less. Push the Sky Away is getting closer (Feb 18th)
Patrick Wensink's Broken Piano For President
Everything I'm into in one neat little package. It's like he wrote it just for me!!!
Pascal Marco - Identity: Lost
How cool is this? I just received a phone call from thriller writer Pascal Marco. The author of the acclaimed Identity: Lost called me on my cell phone to give me words of encouragement and ideas pertaining to getting my manuscripts published. He gave me some great advice and generally just inspired the hell out of me.
Now, you may ask how it is he came to A) know of my existence, and B) had my phone number. Well, a friend of my Father - who is a big fan of Mr. Marco's - is a friend of the author's. He passed on my info on and asked if he'd be up for a cold call to an inspiring writer. I'm thinking a lot of folks would have blown such a favor off. After all, it's not easy to just call someone you have never met before, especially when you are in a position they aspire to. Things could be... weird. But Mr. Marco did indeed call and talked to me for about fifteen minutes. I may be weird, but I'm not the kind of weird that impositions folks who lend a hand. I asked questions and took his advice and as I said earlier, was inspired by hearing another author talk about "his path".
I've always had faith that my manuscripts will be published, this just serves as a reminder.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
How To Destroy Angels - How Long?
I'm liking this new record more and more. The surging, glitchy rhythm section we've come to recognize as Reznor's recent muse but with a - dare I say it - almost Justin Timberlake-esque pop approach to vox. Interesting
Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages
Back in '05 or so my wife bought me the Criterion Edition of this marvelously produced documentary about Witchcraft. William S. Burroughs does narration.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
My Bloody Valentine New Album
I Love Brooklyn Vegan.
Eli Roth's Goretorium
So December 21st is my anniversary (8 years!) and this year we drove out to Las Vegas. My wife is on some magic list to get suites at Luxor a couple of times a year for like thirty-eight bucks or something and we love to drive in for two days and then drive out. I always make an attempt to procure mushrooms for the journey but failed this time, which was a bit of a let down but hey, I was with my baby AND we got my good friend Mr. Brown to meet us out there, so I was in the best of company. Probably the best thing we did this time was the above - Mr. Roth's Goretorium is fantastic and well worth the price of admission (somewhere around thirty bucks). It's basically a haunted house with Hollywood-grade special effects and I loved every minute of it despite being a fan of pretty much only one movie by Mr. Roth to date - Cabin Fever. Hostel was, simply put, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. AT one point it had made me seriously dislike Mr. Roth (how do you apprentice/intern to David Lynch and then make a movie that bad?) but I have high hopes for Thanksgiving and just the amount of time, money and effort the guy puts into undiscovered talent and producing worthwhile projects shows he's a stand up guy.
Next time you go to Vegas, Mr. Roth's Goretorium really is worth a visit.
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