Mastodon blew my fuck­ing mind for two hours last night. For the major­ity of the show I was in the pit. At one point I was pushed over a dude right as he fell down and received an elbow to the face that popped a lens out of my glasses. I found it after the show, but it was scratched to the hell I’d fig­ured it would be. This is the sec­ond time I’ve seen Mastodon, and they are so much bet­ter live than on-album. It was a hard sell to get me to be a fan, before I’d ever seen them live I con­sid­ered Mastodon to be naught more than excel­lent tech­ni­cal play­ers rock­ing out in the overly-pretentious Malmsteen-style.

I’ve cer­tainly changed my mind: now I think they do what they do in the man­ner they do as a nat­ural prod­uct their col­lec­tive cere­bral cor­tices. I recently fin­ished watch­ing Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Ter­ri­ble I and II, and totally wigged to see Mastodon use clips from that film in their video back­drop. I had to Ask MetaFil­ter for guid­ance regard­ing other films that were used in it.

When­ever I make it to a metal show, I just get a rein­forced sense that I will always fun­da­men­tally be a met­al­head. The surg­ing sea of human­ity inevitably drenches me in other people’s beer and other people’s sweat. The con­cept of per­sonal space is oblit­er­ated. Peo­ple tend to much more self-conscious at indie shows. Any­thing more than an arms-crossed head-bob seems vastly out of place.

Mastodon played the entirety of Crack the Skye and bits of Blood Moun­tain, Leviathan and Remis­sion. Here’s some video of the first song they played: Oblivion.

I finally made it to Blue Arrow Records on Sat­ur­day, and picked up two Bowie albums that I’ve been hap­haz­ardly hunt­ing for: David Live at the Tower in Philadel­phia and Aladdin Sane.

While I was in the store I deter­mined that Pete Gulyas doesn’t see his job so much as shop­keeper but as a cura­tor. This isn’t the place to go if you like dig­ging through hun­dreds of records look­ing for one gem hid­den among them. The chaff has be pre-winnowed at Blue Arrow, and every piece of vinyl you pick up will be a gem with its own par­tic­u­lar lustre.

Apart from spin­ning records, there’s a few spin­ning racks of pulp nov­els, some indie-Cleveland cloth­ing, cool jew­elry and sundry other items, none of which are merely gar­nish. There’s a lit­tle stage with some turnta­bles spin­ning store stock and I was glad to see that I made a good turntable pur­chase when I noticed that Blue Arrow uses an Audio-Technica. I even got a line on some places to hunt for speak­ers locally, and Pete said he hopes to broaden his stock offer­ings to include speak­ers, et cetera once Blue Arrow is a bit more established.

I for­got to ask him if he’s going to hunt for rare vinyl for peo­ple or stock stuff that might be slow to sell, like the 180g Nep­tune album I’m cur­rently lis­ten­ing to, but I’m plan­ning to lay more of my hard earned cash down on Water­loo at the 2nd Annual Record Store Day next Sat­ur­day. The two-hundred yards of Water­loo that holds the Beach­land, Music Saves and Blue Arrow Records is like a giant candy store for music junkies.

You can read and see a bit more about Blue Arrow Records here:

• Cleveland’s Blue Arrow Records and Books is all about vinyl: Shop Talk
• Meet Your Newest Neigh­bor on Water­loo: Blue Arrow Records
• Lou Muenz photos

Junior Boys kicked off their Amer­i­can tour the other night at The Grog Shop in Cleve­land Heights. This is the sec­ond time I’ve seen them and they put on a great show. That night was offi­cially the first time that any­one in the States had a chance to buy their new album Begone Dull Care, since it hasn’t been released yet. Of course it has been leaked on the Inter­net, and Jeremy Greenspan joked about that fact while encour­ag­ing us to go buy the CD. He also talked about how much he likes Cleve­land and recounted his first time vis­it­ing, when he was 12 or so, on a ‘Jew Camp’ field trip. He thought he was going to go to an exotic place like the Moth­er­land, New Jer­sey or Florida. Basi­cally the dude was hilarious.

I took some video of a cou­ple of their new songs. Here’s Hazel from Begone Dull Care:

Here’s Work from the same album:

Here’s a song off of So This is Good­bye called Dou­ble Shadow:

The night started off with the local band The Sleeps. They were pretty good, and had an inter­est­ing stage pres­ence using lots of black­light. They were hand­ing out tons of free copies of their demo. I think they were a bit off that night, as the songs weren’t as tight as they sound on the demo. Here’s a video of their song No More:

Max Tun­dra was the mid­dle band, but the dude didn’t do much for me. One cool song was when he asked us if we remem­bered old rave music (I’m assum­ing most of the young crowd didn’t) and then dropped an old school boodoop-badoop-boodoop-badoop-bop-boop beat down and impro­vised on top of it using weird hand­held instru­ments. It was the slight­est bit Clin­i­cal, if you get my drift. Must be some­thing in the water over in Britain.

One very strange thing about this show was the fact that all of the bands and a vast major­ity of the crowd was made up of short to very short dudes. It was almost as if there was one of those signs that said “You have to be under this height to watch the show.”

On Sat­ur­day I was at the Beach­land to see Gun­slingers:

and Ter­mi­nal Lovers:

Lou was there as well.

So was John G at NinePan­el­Grid, who just fin­ished a month-long poster-a-day marathon. I’ve col­lected a lot of John G’s work from shows I’ve attended over the years. Here’s his poster for the Gun­slingers show [click on it for high-rez, it is part of a trip­tych]:

I used MPEG Stream­clip to snag the audio from the bands I’ve recorded over the last two years. The hard part was putting all of the meta­data on the result­ing MP3s [Many of the songs have ‘Unknown’ as the title. If you know what the title is, please let me know]. I’ve zipped them up and now you can down­load them, if you wish. If you’re going to link this around, please link to this post, not the ZIP file. Every­thing was recorded in Cleve­land, with the excep­tion of a cou­ple of songs from Pitch­fork 2007. Not all the bands are Cleve­land bands, but most of them are. These are field record­ings, so expect to hear drunk peo­ple [includ­ing me] as well as the music. Included:

• (The) Giants of Gen­der [MySpace]
• Birds of Delay
• Chum
• Emer­alds
• Junior Boys
• Low Lamps [Brian Straw]
• Mastodon
• Muamin Col­lec­tive
• Nep­tune
• Parts & Labor
• Post­cards From For­eign Shores
• Pro­le­tar­ian Art Threat
• Ratatat
• Scarcity of Tanks
• Soft Spots
• Swayze All Over
• The V E RY K N EE S
• The Two Man Gen­tle­men Band
• The X Bolex
• Theodore Vril
• Toad­ies
• Uncle Scratch’s Gospel Revival

Rock on. \m/

I was lis­ten­ing to David Bowie’s cover from the 1973 album Pin-Ups of The Who’s 1965 song I Can’t Explain when the main riff caught me in such a way that it reminded me of another song. After much thought I came up with Fat­boy Slim’s hit Going Out of My Head.

Wikipedia con­firms. I’m not ready for The Breaks, yet.

On Wednes­day I went to The Grog Shop to see Toad­ies, one of my all-time favorite bands. They played all of their old hits and most of their new album, which, after a few lis­ten­ings, is quite good. The Grog was full of folks that looked like they hadn’t been to a con­cert since Cobain was alive, but Toad­ies RTFO™. They played I Burn:

Pos­sum Kingdom:

and it was Toad­ies drum­mer Mark Reznicek’s birth­day so the crowd sang to him.

My voice is still recovering.

Last Thurs­day I went to the Grog Shop to catch Cadence Weapon while every­one else was at the Beach­land see­ing Explo­sions in the Sky. I man­aged to chat with Rol­lie for a bit before the sets started. He said that their tour had been inter­sect­ing with EitS a few times already. He was also sick as a dog, but put on a more ener­getic set, despite obvi­ously hav­ing to put forth supreme effort to do, than most non-sick folks I see. DJ Weez-l was just as sick [slang sense this time] on the turnta­bles, as you’ll see if you watch the video, which con­tains two songs, “House Music” from After­party Babies and “Oliver Square” from Break­ing Kay­fabe.

His newest album, After­party Babies, came out last month, I picked up both that and Break­ing Kay­fabe on vinyl. After­party Babies came with a coupon for a free mp3 down­load of the album that doesn’t work. I sent the label, ANTI-, an email, and emailed Cadence Weapon’s site as well, but haven’t heard a damn thing.

I’ve been burn­ing up Immor­tal Tech­nique lately; dig­ging through a bunch of cov­ers by of Mon­treal, Down­load­ing the thou­sands of songs in the SXSW music tor­rents, the online-only release Over the Counter Cul­ture by Tim Fite [who was in my 2006 Best of CD] and this elec­tron­ica release by Fake Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­ica: You Are Not Dead, A Guide to Mod­ern Liv­ing.

I’m look­ing for­ward to upcom­ing shows in the Cleve­land area by O’Death, and Cadence Weapon [and the chance to pick up his newest release, After­party Babies. He was on my 2007 Best of CD]. I’m also eagerly await­ing the Lot­tery League show at the Beach­land this April.

In music lust land, I’m really want­ing to dish out some seri­ous bucks for the spe­cial pack­ages offered at the STOP SMILING store; most notably the Music Lovers Pack­age, the Jazz Lovers Care Pack­age and the Hip Hop Pack­age. I’m also lust­ing after their Two Super­fan Sub­scrip­tion BOGO offer they’ve got going; I just don’t know who to get to split the ticket with me. It is such a great mag­a­zine. I’ve already ordered The Scar­ring Party’s newest release Come Into the Light; they might be com­ing to Cleve­land in June so I hope they aren’t play­ing the night Deb­bie goes into labor. I missed the Divi­sion of Planes show last June because I was in Canada.

I talked with Rafeeq ages ago about start­ing a music site for Cleve­land musi­cians, and I’m get­ting eager to put some­thing like that together. I haven’t talked to him about it in so long, and it was his idea in the first place, so I don’t want to take off and give it a shot with­out his bless­ing. I have about n + 1 ideas for it, but I’d really need his net­work­ing and per­sua­sion abil­i­ties to get other con­trib­u­tors going for it.

If you click on the cover you can down­load the mix.

Jon Hicks has a show of his con­cert posters at B-Sides under the Grog Shop. Last night was the open­ing and a free show by mostly local bands upstairs. Mys­tery of Two, Paleo, Brian Straw, Chum and Blk Tygr all put on great shows. I really need to get a bet­ter low-light cam­era if I’m going to be tak­ing video of per­for­mances at these places. Pretty much all that turned out was Paleo and Chum, which you can watch below.

I ended up buy­ing Paleo’s DVD/CD which con­tains 365 songs that he wrote and recorded, one a day, for an entire year while tour­ing around the States.

Chum was Chum, with some sub­sti­tu­tions due to broke-armed band­mates. They rocked it well and truly.

This past Fri­day was an event that I’d been look­ing for­ward to for sev­eral months. Tower Con­trol Records’ CD Release Party for The X Bolex and Jerk. 12 bands, $5 cover and free food pre-show. It was super-well orga­nized, no chance to miss a band’s per­for­mance and just enough time in between them to snag a smoke if you swung that way. I def­i­nitely did my duty drop­ping bills on the local music scene releases. I had the intent of get­ting video of every band but many of the sets were too dim for effec­tive tap­ing. What I did man­age to cap­ture follows:

I’m a dum­b­ass and thought Shawn Flow­ers was Theodore Vril when I first started hang­ing out with these folks a cou­ple of years ago. Yeah. Dum­b­ass. This was a good open­ing set, but nec­es­sar­ily short due to the fact that 11 other bands were playing.

Low Lamps aka Brian Straw was a dif­fer­ent per­for­mance than I’m used to see­ing from him; but one well-appointed to this noise-oriented show. He does some crazy and inter­est­ing things with his gui­tar in this clip.

Par­don the worth­less­ness of view­ing this video, but the joy that is Giants of Gen­der shouldn’t be tossed aside due to lack­light. I don’t know much about this trio, but I’m guess­ing they’re con­ser­va­tory stu­dents. Improv sax/clarinet, vio­lin and vibraphone.

This is the first song off of The X Bolex’s new record, so it is called Mastodon. Their funky jazz-jam riffage and time-change col­lapses have made them a favorite around here for awhile and I was happy to pick up their disk, so I can have ‘em with me everywhere.

It was great see­ing Nep­tune again after last year’s recock­u­lous show at The Church. I bought their newest release, on 220g orange vinyl. They made the trip out from Boston for just this one show and hit the road back to play a Sat­ur­day show. Thats some seri­ous respect for them to make the trip for TCR. I’m even more con­vinced that Nep­tune is what heavy metal should have become.

Alto­gether a great night. I was sup­posed to go to Fear of a Black Planet at Touch the next night to see TMIBH, Muamin and The New Surah Orch­es­tar, but I fum­bled on that play.

I went to Pat’s in the Flats last night to see a cou­ple of bands. I know The Very Knees and like them muchly, and wasn’t famil­iar with Heart­warmer. Heart­warmer are from Ken­tucky and had some dance­able poppy tunes, a bit rem­i­nis­cent of Of Mon­treal sans the glam and nods to the orches­tra­tion of Arcade Fire. My only crit­i­cism is that they’ve got too much tam­bourine and not enough melody or har­mony. I’d like to see them add another gui­tar or let the girl sing along with the guy. Here’s the video I took of ‘em.

The Very Knees put on another rau­cous show and God saw it and said that it was good. They had a 16mm video to go along with their sin­gle and the video pro­jec­tor made me wist­ful, since I’ve been try­ing to find a func­tional one for the past lit­tle while. My 16mm film from col­lege is molder­ing mean­while. Not that it is any good in the first place. If I get a pro­jec­tor I might as well get a 16mm cam­era too, and it will all be down­hill from there. Oh yeah, Very Knees video:

Here’s the video in easy-to-see for­mat. It cracks me up in an inside-joke sort of way since I know about half of the peo­ple in it.

I was at the Pitch­fork Music Fes­ti­val this past week­end. I took the Megabus to Chicago on Fri­day after work, even though I still didn’t have my tick­ets. I’d called up Tick­etweb and had them hold the tick­ets at will call instead. Once I got there it seemed to be the case for just about every­one. No one had got­ten the tick­ets they’d ordered through the mail, no mat­ter how far in advance they were ordered, and judg­ing by the reams of paper they had to dig through to find my approval, I think my hypoth­e­sis was pretty much proven. I got in via will call with no prob­lem though.

I saw a ton of bands, came away with a few sam­pler CDs, a Menom­ena album and an of Mon­treal lim­ited edi­tion EP in addi­tion to a plethora of pins, stick­ers and lit­tle bits of nice design. I also got a sub­scrip­tion to Stop Smil­ing, which looks quite promis­ing. I took a few pic­tures and a bunch of video. It was hot, but there was plenty of water at non-gouging prices. I think that the fes­ti­val was well planned in gen­eral, but there were a few hic­coughs. The B stage was off in a tight cor­ner with lit­tle room to move and not poor access when it could have eas­ily been in a more open por­tion of the park that was occu­pied by merch booths. The B stage was also run­ning behind, pretty much the entire fest, they over­booked it. If all had gone accord­ing to plan it would have been quite easy to go from one inter­est­ing act to the next, but I ended up hav­ing to miss both The Field and most of Cadence Weapon in favor of the big­ger acts on the A and C stages.

Menom­ena was the big sur­prise for me. I really dug them. They’re one of those bands that I’ve heard about for a long time, but have never really got­ten around to lis­ten­ing to. of Mon­treal still doesn’t do a thing for me; they just seem far too con­trived. The MCing of Cadence Weapon didn’t knock my socks off, but the DJ was one sick moth­er­fuck­ing turntab­list. De La Soul was an inspired end to the fes­ti­val, after every­one is beat to hell they’re energy squeezed out every last bit of ours and then gave it back to us.

You can dowload 17 tracks from bands that were at Pitch­fork via eMu­sic here: Pitch­fork Music Sam­pler [You have to down­load each track sep­a­rately unless you have an eMu­sic sub­scrip­tion, but they are com­pletely free otherwise.]

It is video avalanche time. I’ll give a brief bit of descript after each one.

This video looks blue because I for­got to set the white bal­ance on my cam­era. Iron & Wine bore the crap out of me. The musi­cian­ship is great, but I seem to be cog­ni­tively inca­pable of pay­ing atten­tion to the lyrics or becom­ing engaged with any of it.

I’m also not a big fan of Mastodon. They seem like a metal band more inter­ested in using metal as the vehi­cle to show­case their tech­ni­cal exper­tise. This is the same argu­ment Chuck Kloster­man uses for Yng­wie Malm­steen in his book Fargo Rock City. I buy it for them too. Nonethe­less, metal is metal, espe­cially when Mastodon is the only hard rock­ing group on the bill. After this song I jumped into the pit. I’ve not been in a good pit for about 6 years. There is def­i­nitely a dif­fer­ence in metal mosh­ers and the things that approx­i­mate pits at punk shows. I feel safe in a metal pit. I was filth-city once I worked my way out of it. So thanks, Mastodon, for giv­ing me that opportunity.

Lou put me on the track of Clipse. They were good, but I wish it had been dark when they went on. Miami Vice and accor­dion break beats.

Junior Boys were my main excite­ment for the fes­ti­val, mainly because I’m in the right musi­cal mood for the shape of their sound. One set of speak­ers kept pop­ping out which marred their set a bit, but in my opin­ion, it is a tes­ta­ment to good musi­cian­ship, or a light hand in pro­duc­ing and mix­ing the record when a band sounds just as good live as they do on the disc. Junior Boys ful­filled that, alright.

The afore­men­tioned Cadence Weapon. Unpre­ten­tious, authen­tic. Watch for the DJ wig out.

of Mon­treal, glammed-out, let’s see how geek-weird we can be. If they stuck to their pop­pier stuff, I’d dig it, but their prog-indie-post-rock hoo-ha bores the shit out of me.

This delib­er­ately dis­mis­sive meta-ironic post brought to you by the real­iza­tion that I think the hipster-indie scene is played out. I’m gonna stick with my local bros, because that is where the heart is.

I took a break from pulling sta­ples and inhal­ing what might be lead paint dust to go to the Beach­land for a show. Just about every­one I know in the Cleve­land music scene was there, which is always a good sign. I’d even found my old “THE BOSSES YOU LOSE” shirt on my last visit home, so I could bust out my old high school con­cert t-shirt again. Self Destruct But­ton started out, prov­ing that bands in their vec­tor are always bet­ter live. They’ve nailed the “craft chaos that tum­bles to order” mar­ket. They played an unex­pected Rush cover “Spirit of Radio” at the end of their set which made every­one go nuts in its strange but effec­tive trans­la­tion into exper­i­men­tal punk. Unfor­tu­nately, I’m a jack­ass and didn’t get video of them.

I did get some video of Pro­le­tar­ian Art Threat, play­ing their last show ever. Old style punk rock, and appar­ently they’ve been around for over a decade, off and on but mostly off lately, so I guess it isn’t sur­pris­ing I had never seen them before. Lots of jump­ing off stage and beer spilled.

Parts & Labor wrapped up the evening with their 10th visit to Cleve­land and my 3rd time see­ing them. They said that they aren’t always received enthu­si­as­ti­cally else­where and that “there are few places like Cleve­land” which led to a few shouts of “Thank God!” which, I sup­pose, can be read in two dif­fer­ent ways, depend­ing on your mood. I was in a good one. They put on another fierce show, played some new stuff where the vocals got achingly melodic at times.

Dur­ing unend­ing hours in the back of a con­ver­sion van and brief respites on land in Canada I read Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City. This book was rec­om­mended to me by Nate Scheible dur­ing a dis­cus­sion out­side of Parish Hall while wait­ing for a noise show to start and over a few Com­modore Perry IPAs. He found out that I was a metal fan of old and rec­om­mended that I read it.

The book’s essence is how glam-metal [bands like Möt­ley Crüe, Poi­son and Cin­derella] gave Chuck an entrance into the wide world out­side of North Dakota. His point is, that no mat­ter how derided glam-metal was, is and prob­a­bly ever shall be, since it was an impor­tant part of the growth of a gen­er­a­tion it shouldn’t be. Now, this wasn’t the kind of book I was hop­ing it would be. I hate glam-metal. To me there is noth­ing really metal about dudes with with flam­ma­ble hair nanc­ing about in span­dex and singing about bang­ing. That’s fine, but it’s not metal. I’m more of the Iron Maiden, Metal­lica, Megadeth, Slayer, Ozzy fan for first-gen metal and Pan­tera, Anthrax and oth­ers for second-gen. I hate nü-metal, [Korn, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit] and technical-metal noodlers like Yng­wie Malm­steen and Mastodon don’t do much for me either.

So basi­cally, like every other metal fan, I’m a huge jack­ass about what I like.

Chuck’s book is good, although he men­tions fly-fishing for wall­eye, which I think, while not impos­si­ble, is utterly inef­fec­tive. ANYWAY, there are digres­sions, tan­gents, anec­dotes and the sorely desired lists and name-drops of ran­dom bands to dig for, but mixed in with all of this is some excel­lently pen­e­trat­ing com­men­tary on both metal itself and its place within the zeit­geist of the 80s and 90s. These are the best parts. The most inter­est­ing parts of the book came at the end for me; when he got away from the hair and Axl Rose and started talk­ing about what qual­i­fies a band as metal, what bands are car­ry­ing on the metal torch [still, for him, in terms of glam] and how grunge killed it off.

He’s good at putting things in con­text, giv­ing depth to what appears to be shal­low­ness and rub­bing his the­o­ries against pos­si­ble crit­i­cisms to see what holds and what tears. He does some straw-manning, but hey, he’s a jour­nal­ist. The book is often hilar­i­ous, as when he lists the kind of women each band likes to fuck, and geek­ily earnest, as when he lists his favorite metal albums and how much you’d have to pay him to never lis­ten to it again.

One area I think he missed out on was talk­ing about Euro-metal and its con­tin­u­ing mas­sive pop­u­lar­ity over there. That’s prob­a­bly a com­pletely dif­fer­ent book though. If you’re even a slight fan of metal, or a fan of 80s glam or some­what ana­lyt­i­cal dis­cus­sions about Tawny Kitaen hump­ing a Corvette, this is the book for you.

I first heard Divi­sion of Planes on MetaFil­ter Music. I told them to come to Cleve­land because I thought they’d go down well. One of the band mem­bers con­tacted me for more info. Well, they’re com­ing to Cleve­land, and they got the gig on their own gump­tion. If you check out their web­site they’re described as post-punk math-rock; but all I know is that I want to take off my head and scream at it when I lis­ten to the two tracks they have avail­able on their site. [Seri­ously worth downloading]

Now That’s Class
June, 8 2007
11213 Detroit Ave @ W112th
Cleve­land, Ohio 44102

Also play­ing:
The Vapids
Hol­ly­wood Blondes
Chrome Kick­ers

Unfor­tu­nately, I’m going to be out of town on the night of their show, which has me roy­ally pissed. Some­one needs to vol­un­teer to pick up a copy of their EP for me.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #100: Beastie Boys Video Anthol­ogy.

I have a dis­tinct mem­ory of danc­ing Inter­galac­tic stop-motion style at some dance or other with my high school bud­dies senior year. I was never a huge Beastie Boys fan, though I cer­tainly got down to their music. For a per­son my age, it is pretty much impos­si­ble to quan­tify the many ways their impres­sive career has affected the pop­u­lar cul­ture I was exposed to in my teen years. That’s pretty much Criterion’s rea­son for putting this col­lec­tion together. The main sell­ing point for the Cri­te­rion edi­tion is the wealth of extras that come with it, mul­ti­ple angles, remixes, spin­offs and other accu­mu­la­tions of music video loose ends are all gath­ered here for a Beastie feast.

The videos them­selves sort of run the gamut, from pure stock footage to height of their power pro­duc­tions to hand­held base­ment hijinks. The trade­mark low-angle fish­eye fronting is present in just about every video, and it is this, cou­pled with the fre­quent home-movie aspect of many of the videos, that defines the tech­ni­cal side of their video con­ceits. This is a good thing, since the rough-cut feel makes the Beastie’s seem like your friendly neigh­bor­hood MCs. Even their videos with higher pro­duc­tion val­ues have an air of delib­er­ate whim­si­cal­ity to them. I’d never actu­ally seen the video to Body Movin’ so it was with great delight that I pegged it as a spoof of the ultra-campy 60s spy flick Dia­bo­lik! which is prob­a­bly one of my favorite Mys­tery Sci­ence The­ater 3000 episodes as well. The hand-painted ani­ma­tion of Shadrach was also a sur­prise, and reminded me of Gondry’s Lego-animated White Stripes video.

My favorite video of the col­lec­tion was Three MCs and One DJ, mainly because of its effec­tive sim­plic­ity, it is a bit goofy, of course, but also prob­a­bly their most inti­mate as well, and you really get to see Mix Mas­ter Mike go nuts. I don’t really have a lot more to say about their videos, but the two-disc anthol­ogy is a choose-your-own-adventure romp through Beastie cul­ture that is worth any audiophile’s time and money. Check out the links below, espe­cially the Paul’s Bou­tique one and their anno­tated lyrics. And don’t sleep ’til B-lyn.

• Paul’s Bou­tique Sam­ples and Ref­er­ences List.
• Offi­cial Site.
• Beastie Museum.
• Beastie Mania.
• Mic to Mic weblog.
• Anno­tated Beastie Boys lyrics.
• Beastie Boys YouTube Group.

Blk Tygr was play­ing again at the Beach­land last night, so I went and heard one of their new songs. It was an odd bill for them, since all the other acts were rock­a­billy asso­ciates. I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed Uncle Scratch’s Gospel Revival. Their act is just as cog­ni­tively dis­so­nant as their band name. For instance, one of their songs is called “I Banged a Sin­ner;” and they would talk about Jerry Fal­well being in hell, read one of his ridicu­lous quotes and then sur­pris­edly say “Oh, but that’s true.” They reminded me a big of Fat Possum’s Bob Log III, what with their singing into CB mics and gen­eral duct-tape and gump­tion play­ing style. The drum kit was basi­cally a portable junk yard. At one point a hefty chunk of the cym­bal fell off.

You can lis­ten to a few of their songs here, but for some rea­son only the last one will down­load for me.

I also had a deep-fried PBJ while I was there.

Been Lis­ten­ing to:

Eccen­tric Soul: Twinight’s Lunar Rota­tion
Pacha Mas­sive — All Good Things
Ted Leo and the Phar­ma­cists — Liv­ing with the Liv­ing
Life­savas — Gut­ter­fly
Coco Rosie — The Adven­tures of Ghosthorse and Still­born
The Very Knees
Chum
PJ Har­vey
Char­lie Parker
Getachew Mekuria + The Ex + Guests

I was at Edison’s last night for some great music. First off was Blisse Anonyon Atu from a redi­rected show at Vis­i­ble Voice Books. It was just her, an iPod with her tracks on it, and an effects machine. The result was an ethe­real bit of indie-electronica, dancy and lan­guid at the same time. The only down side was that her set was too short.

Chum was next. I asked if it was Chum like friend, Chum like fish, or Chum like bucket of shark bait, but no one really knew. Shawn Flow­ers bangs on the drums all day and has a dis­tinct, intent singing style that hangs above their wall of sound. I got their Typhoid Mary EP awhile back. It’s good

I missed most of Akron-based The Library is on Fire’s set, but what I heard from the back room sounded like solid rock-making with a healthy dose of cre­ative complexity.

The Very Knees released their sin­gle “Poor Pour Moi” a few weeks ago and played a great show last night. They’ve got an amaz­ingly ver­sa­tile sound for being a two man guitar-drum combo. Great to rock out too. Punk isn’t dead yet.

I suck at music reviews. I just know I like it.

I went to a sparsely attended but good show at Pat’s in the Flats last night. Three NYC bands played for an audi­ence of about 7 folks, while every­thing wrapped up in about three hours, it was a good time.

The first group was The Two Man Gen­tle­men Band; a banjo, a bass, a rhythm boot and two kazoos with the occas­sional snare thrown in. They played mostly tra­di­tional songs, not a whole lot of their self-written stuff, but I still bought a CD. I liked their old-timey fla­vor; a back­woods decade-previous cousin to The Scar­ring Party’s neo-30s feel. They were also great to talk to after the set. You can down­load a few of their songs here and here. Here is a video of them play­ing one of my favorite songs: Summertime.

The Defibu­la­tors played next, self-described as Hee Haw on Mesca­line and extremely per­son­able. About half rock­a­billy and half blue­grass, lis­ten­ing to them was a foot thump­ing good time. You can give ‘em a lis­ten here and here. Or you can watch my video of them play­ing the song Dum-Dum.

Andy Fried­man and the Other Fail­ures pol­ished off the evening. The Other Fail­ures con­sisted of The Two Man Gen­tle­men Band and The Defibu­la­tors, and pro­vided back-up for Friedman’s citi­fied country-folk sound. I did take some video of him doing some talk­ing blues, but for some rea­son the sound qual­ity was ter­ri­ble, so there really wasn’t a point in post­ing it.

Last night was the first real night of sum­mer for me. Filled with music, famil­iar faces and late-burning eye­balls. Aster­isk Gallery had a fairly impromptu show fea­tur­ing Chiara Gio­vando and Daniel Higgs [lead singer of Lung­fish]. Ha Ha La was the first act, a sort of Daniel John­ston with a dash of Sigur Ros and [when-used] Jesus and Mary Chain gui­tar. Ted Flynn played next, a bit more stan­dard­ized rootsy sort of set. I took some video. My bro Wasco played next, his Scarcity impro­vi­sa­tional exper­i­ments remain intense. Here’s his entire set, split in two for YouTube. Part 1, Part 2.

Andrew Klimek was next, and he did things with bal­loons and gui­tars that are likely ille­gal in sev­eral coun­tries. Chiara Gio­vando and Daniel Higgs were last, and hope­fully enough dona­tions were given to help them on their way to Pitts­burgh. The duo was mind­blow­ing. I would have taken video but my cam­era wasn’t up to record­ing in the dim light. Banjo, vio­lin, a capella, mouth harp and what I think was a spring drum gave a world-folk vibe to their set, but this retro-hippie-ness was dis­tinctly jux­ta­posed with lyrics that showed a def­i­nite punk edge. It ended up being more mature than both, an affir­ma­tion of love in con­test with worldly expe­ri­enced cynicsim.

There were cam­eras [includ­ing mine] all over this show. Some­times I won­der if peo­ple are more inter­ested in imi­tat­ing Lou Muenz [includ­ing me] than watch­ing the show.

I hitched a ride over to Duck Island to see Seers and made it home close to 2, I think. I saw just about every per­son that I care to see in the Cleve­land music scene last night. We’re all anx­ious to get out and be some rock, I think. Maybe I’m just projecting.

I went to the Beach­land tonight to see Blk Tygr and ended up with a cart­load of local music. I either know enough peo­ple, or the right peo­ple enough to end up with stuff just get­ting handed to me. Of course, I also stopped by Music Saves and picked up three CDs I’ve been mean­ing to get. All told with the night over, I ended up with a Roué disc that I’ve been mean­ing to get for two years, Humphry Clinker’s first LP, the Land of Buried Trea­sure disc, the new sin­gle from The Very Knees, and a Henry James LP. Now that all of the vol­un­teer stuff I’ve been work­ing on is wrap­ping up, I’m ready to be free to go out at night to all the great shows that go on around town.

Dur­ing the sum­mer I’m going to revamp this site in order to focus more on my cul­tural nutri­tion, If what I plan goes through and I have the gump­tion to keep it that way, this might look more like a zine than per­sonal ram­blings. I don’t know if that is good or bad, but since O/M is over 5 years old, I think it is time for some sort of change.

I just down­loaded this awe­some iTunes plu­gin called iCon­cert­Cal. It uses the iTunes index and then searches for artists in your playlist and makes a cal­en­dar show­ing when and where they’ll be in your area. It isn’t fool­proof, since I imag­ine smaller groups aren’t going to be eas­ily found, but it is cer­tainly bet­ter than check­ing every venue’s site regularly.

I saw Ratatat for the sec­ond time last week­end. The first time was almost two years ago when they were tour­ing with Clinic. Stroud didn’t appear to be pound­ing whisky as hard as he was last time, but I wasn’t pay­ing much atten­tion, since the Beach­land was inun­dated with mid­dle and high school kids in an all ages showathon. Damn kids don’t know how to behave at a show. I don’t know how many times some­one whined at me “Why won’t you let me in front of you?” since I was pretty close to the stage and am tall. Damn kids should have showed up at 8:30 like I did to see the open­ing acts. They might have learned that the local Muamin Col­lec­tive is great. Despite the sea of greasy teenager­dom I enjoyed the show. Ratatat’s act is more pol­ished than it was two years ago [to be expected], but the best part is that I have a cam­era that takes video so I can share the love.

My favorite song off the new Air album is Napalm Love.

Winc­ing the Night Away didn’t do much for me, I think I’m out­grow­ing Shin­sish music.

On the other hand, Ratatat’s Clas­sics is finally start­ing to grow on me. Ratatat Remixes would be bet­ter if the rap wasn’t quite so gangsta.

I’m lik­ing Cat Sci­en­tist, although no one else seems to be.

I need to lis­ten to LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33 and see if it really is a great work­out tune or not.

Mastodon.

Sum­mer bet­ter show up soon, I needs me some nightly music fixes.

In the upcom­ing playlist: Jenny Lewis and the Wat­son Twins, Clinic, Alis­dair Roberts, LCD Soundsys­tem, Albert Ayler, Devotchka.

What is inter­est­ing about this post is that I tried to post it via YouTube’s Word­press API. After hit­ting sub­mit, I was given a notice that there would be a delay before post­ing. I fig­ured they meant a few min­utes. Appar­ently they meant two days. I won’t be using THAT func­tion­al­ity again.

Soft Spots

I saw Soft Spots, for­merly Friend, for­merly Lit­tle Songs at the Beach­land last night. In the short time they’ve been together, their music, which was good to begin with, has got­ten so much bet­ter. They might actu­ally have tied up the race for favorite Cleve­land band with TMIBH. The only rea­son I can’t make a deci­sion is because the types of music are so different.

In any case, the show last night was great, they asked the audi­ence to sit through the show blind­folded and many did, although I did hear a story about some dude get­ting groped by an unblind­folded woman after the set was done.

I had prime seat­ing, even though I was blind­folded, and I took this video of a song called “Flora”. They played my favorite song, Tess, but I wasn’t quick enough on the uptake to record it.

I saw Soft Spots, for­merly Friend, for­merly Lit­tle Songs at the Beach­land last night. They’ve quickly become one of my favorite Cleve­land bands, if not the favorite. They started less than a year ago, and their music, already good to begin with, has only tight­ened and matured with age. They blind­folded the will­ing last night and played their full set to a crowd of peo­ple who couldn’t see them. I was one, could only see a lit­tle bit from the bot­tom of the blind­fold; so it is amaz­ing that the video of their song “Flora” turned out as well as it did. They also played my favorite song, “Tess”, but I was slow on the uptake and didn’t get a chance to record it.

I’m not in a content-providing mood this week. Instead, for a change, I’m link­ing to oth­ers’ con­tent. Today I’ll post some links to mp3s you may or may not like.

Eric Satie: 1. Four Gnossi­ennes 1-Lent 3:34 [mp3]

— Satie was a French com­poser who lived in the late 19th and early 20th cen­turies. If you like this you can lis­ten to much more on Ubu.

The Scar­ring Party: Ocean Bot­tom [mp3]

— I found this song through Metafil­ter Music and liked the band so much I bought their CD. It is great and this song is one of my favorites for 2006. There are a cou­ple more songs avail­able at their site. Please visit.

Friend: Flora [mp3]

— Friend is one of my favorite local music acts. It is amaz­ing how the music can quiet down the rowdy indie crowd. This isn’t my favorite song which is called Tess, but this is another good one. You can hear more on MySpace.

This Moment in Black His­tory: Tape Don’t Lie [mp3]

— Prob­a­bly my favorite Cleve­land band. Great live shows. They’ve got a new album avail­able called It Takes a Nation (of Ass­holes to Hold Us Back). This track is from that album. Hear more on MySpace.

Bob Log III: Log Bomb [mp3]

— Phil over at Lead Singer Dis­or­der slapped me in the face with Fat Pos­sum Records the other day, and I’ve lis­tened to a ton of their free mp3s since. This fat blues jam comes from there.

Jonathan Coul­ton: Man­del­brot Set [mp3]

— This guy writes very enter­tain­ing songs about a vari­ety of things, includ­ing SCIENCE!. This one hap­pens to be about frac­tals. Many of his songs are free, or donation-based down­loads. His busi­ness model pre­dates the iTunes store by quite a bit. Go lis­ten to more by him.

Kansas Joe and Mem­phis Min­nie: When the Levee Breaks [mp3]

— All of the songs on this site are from the Web Archive col­lec­tion, but since they’re already culled and good bluesy stuff it might be more use­ful. This song is NOT a cover of the Led Zep­pelin tune, as peo­ple keep think­ing when I make them lis­ten to it. LZ cov­ered it!

The Up Ensem­ble: Belly Danc­ing [mp3]

— These Cleve­land guys do great free-form jazz as well as cre­at­ing some excel­lent fusions between var­i­ous world music styles. More at MySpace.

Enjoy!

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #12: Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap.

This will be short since I don’t know if I’m capa­ble of speak­ing crit­i­cally about a film that is so near and dear to my heart. In a sense, its exe­cu­tion was pre­scient, though rock­u­men­taries like The Song Remains The Same and the minu­tiae of the lives of ‘70s super­groups were com­mon when Spinal Tap appeared, there was no way to pre­dict that its focus and satire would be just as applic­a­ble a decade later when VH1 started mak­ing a This is Spinal Tap for every dude that’s ever tuned a gui­tar. This is so potent that every VH1 Behind the Music becomes a joke in its shadow.

Mak­ing a fake doc­u­men­tary that remains believ­able as a doc yet hilar­i­ous and heart­warm­ing is no mean feat. Where stan­dard fic­tion films can get away with leav­ing out cer­tain visual details, and true doc­u­men­taries have them sup­plied with no effort, a mock­u­men­tary must be planned down to the place­ment of the last pimento-stuffed olive and trampy, inco­her­ent fan. This is com­pletely nailed by the cre­ative tal­ent behind the film. From the drugged-out keyboardist’s exact place­ment always vis­i­ble on the periph­ery and included seem­ingly only as an after­thought, to the string of drum­mer deaths and unin­tel­li­gi­ble artis­tic blath­er­ings and rib­ald ado­les­cent lyrics of the cre­ative tal­ent of the band, a com­pos­ite is cre­ated that encom­passes the entire State of Rock of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Echoes of Led Zep­pelin, Queen, The Bea­t­les and psy­che­delia ring through­out and cou­ple with the des­per­a­tion and addic­tion to celebrity in such a way that the petty human­ity of these larger than life char­ac­ters is exposed. In this light, the achieve­ment of This Is Spinal Tap is ulti­mately more human­ist than comedic. The com­edy serves the human­ism. Christo­pher Guest and com­pany suc­ceed so well in their mock­u­men­taries because ill-intentioned mock­ery has no place in their films. They poke fun at what is most ridicu­lous because those are the very traits that they love the best.

• Cri­te­rion essay by Peter Occhiogrosso
• The Unof­fi­cial Spinal Tap site
• Spinal Tap mp3s
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

I had a full and excel­lent week­end, full of superla­tives. I had sushi at Pacific East because Kimo’s was closed for the Indian’s game, watched A Mur­der of Crows by Mac Well­man at The Lim­inis and had a Pisco Sour and Bour­bon Daisy at the VTR. A Mur­der of Crows [I’m prob­a­bly going to go see it again to make sure] may very well be my new favorite play. I didn’t really have an old favorite play, but this one fit right up my alley. I got a sweet ‘biner clip with built-in flash­light at the VTR too.

On Sat­ur­day I grilled some kebabs from the WSM and made the most deli­cious pork chop I’ve ever had. Yes, a few weeks ago I said the same thing, but this chop was bet­ter. Heir­loom toma­toes and roasted corn on the cob com­pleted the meal. I also put­tered around Mar­ket Square and the City Xpres­sionz [God I hate typ­ing like I’m l33t] spray-paintathon.

Sun­day I did my laun­dry and went to see Thee Sil­ver Mt. Zion and BLKTYGR at the Grog Shop. Rafeeq & Co. put on the best show I’d seen from them and Thee Sil­ver Mt. Zion made me think about the meld­ing of pol­i­tics and art. How all too often art is used in the ser­vice of pol­i­tics instead of the other way ’round. Thee Sil­ver does it the other way ’round and the music def­i­nitely ben­e­fits from it.

I should also men­tion that I made my first [and hope­fully last] visit to Crocker Park over the week­end. That place is the flag­ship of Amer­i­can deca­dence and moral bank­ruptcy. An enclosed sub­ur­ban “lifestyle cen­ter” [“mall” is too prole, appar­ently] designed to look urban, com­plete with res­i­den­tial lofts above the big boxes, speak­ers vom­it­ing top-40 muzak from the ‘80s hid­den behind the care­ful land­scap­ing and the whole place made my skin crawl. Seri­ously. Sub­ur­ban faux-urban loft apart­ments above a rich-person-only mall where you can buy a park­ing space so you don’t have to walk as far to the stores. I didn’t see one non-white per­son the entire time I was there. WASP city. The place made my skin fuck­ing crawl. More on Lit­tle Citadels.

My high school buddy Phil came in this week­end for a visit. We did a tiny music odyssey, went to a show at The Church, the Rock Hall, and the Happy Dog. Even though this wasn’t the best week­end to see a band [nobody par­tic­u­larly big was play­ing] we still rocked out to noise on Fri­day and blue­grass on Sat­ur­day. Prov­ing once again that no mat­ter what your musi­cal taste, there you’ll be able to find a place in Cleve­land play­ing it.

My bros Bo and Phil [who are bros] just started an mp3 weblog. Go check out Lead Singer Dis­or­der, bro.

Let me shoot straight with you. Boom Bip sucks. After hear­ing them play, I wasn’t sur­prised that I’d never heard of them and I fully expect to never hear from them again. In fact, that’d bet­ter hap­pen. Boom Bip [stu­pid name] is one dude, appar­ently, and if you took all the band mem­bers and squashed them together, you might have one dude who could play one instru­ment. The drum­mer beat the same damn rhythm on the high-hat and snare for their set, the bassist played the same two notes on the top two strings on his bass, the lead gui­tarist played the same chord on the bot­tom two strings of his gui­tar the whole time and, by far the worst, was the key­boardist, who had a mobile com­mand cen­ter of gad­getry and lap­top­pery, but seemed to only play a mid­dle C in every song. Beat-intensive instru­men­tal noise-rock is bor­ing. Unless you are Ratatat, lyrics are good, moth­er­fuck­ers. I’ve had more fun with cafe­te­ria food than watch­ing Boom Bip. I do not rec­om­mend them.

Inter­pol could have had the worst show of their careers last night, and no one would have noticed, not after Boom Bip [I mean, seri­ously, you can’t come up with a bet­ter name than that?]. Full dis­clo­sure: I didn’t like Antics at all, and still love Turn on the Bright Lights. Inter­pol in con­cert was what I had expected Inter­pol in con­cert to be like. My friend Phil said that he’d heard they are great live, and if you like your live bands to sound just like they do on their albums, Inter­pol is great live. They set down solid lay­ers in their rhythm sec­tion and the vocals are fraught enough to over­come any redun­dancy in the sound [Boom Bip, take note!]. So, Inter­pol plays like a well-oiled machine. And therein might be my prob­lem with them. When I hear a band live I like crowd inter­ac­tion and a lit­tle bit of improv, the lyrics sung a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ently, a gui­tar solo now and then; with Inter­pol it is almost mechan­i­cal, they are just com­ing out and doing their job, they keep them­selves too tightly reined in for me.

I had a pretty decent time, they played my favorite song of theirs, Spe­cial­ist, and my third favorite song, Roland, dur­ing their encore, but didn’t play my sec­ond favorite, Obsta­cle 2. They, expect­edly, played a bunch of songs from Antics, but I like their ear­lier stuff, which doesn’t bode well for a band with only two albums under its belt. The Agora is pretty sweet though. This para­graph has three sen­tences and too many commas.

Here ends this elit­ist music review, but I had no need to say it twice.

Yes­ter­day I went to Pitts­burgh and saw Gol­drush, a band I knew noth­ing about, at the Garfield Art­works. I sup­pose Gol­drush is clas­si­fied as shoegazer, which despite the emo-esque name, isn’t emo. [Thank Christ.] Also play­ing were Hopewell and a local band called Ennui [Their site appears to be down], that I didn’t stay to lis­ten to.

It was a strange set since the local band went on last. I got to Pitts­burgh a bit after 8, but Gol­drush hadn’t arrived yet, so I ended up down the street at Crazy Mocha, a cof­fee­house with free Wi-Fi and the best god­damn chai latte I’ve ever had. They closed about ten min­utes after I got there though. When I made it back to the Garfield Art­works, Hopewell had just started. The Art­works isn’t a very good venue for live music, it is long and nar­row, so the sounds get fun­neled and end up bounc­ing off of each other. Hopewell did a good job set­ting up the stan­dard wall-of-sound, despite this acoustic odd­ity, and had added bonuses of a high and quavery-voiced lead singer and some good minia­ture jam ses­sions. Gol­drush was very good; you could eas­ily tell that each of their songs was finely crafted, but they also weren’t bound to play­ing the songs in the same way. They def­i­nitely had fun doing their thing.

It is a shame, that with such good bands, the crowd was vir­tu­ally nonex­is­tent, about 5 peo­ple. More peo­ple showed up for the local band, Ennui [which for some rea­son played last, a fact worth men­tion­ing a sec­ond time] than lis­tened to either Hopewell or Gol­drush. I did get three free stick­ers to add to my gui­tar case though. My first view of Pitts­burgh, com­ing in on 279, was pretty awe­some: hills, hills, hills, hills, curve, Pitts­burgh! It was dark out too, so the sky­line was pretty groovy. I also found my first grey [actu­ally white] hair today. It is in my beard.

Link of the Day: Tons of free sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries, by good authors, thanks to MetaFilter.

We all have music that reminds us of cer­tain times in our lives. So here are my top five albums from High School, and the top five from Notre Dame. Also, what I asso­ciate them with.
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Emily Strand played at the Bark­ing Spi­der last night. It was a good show despite the fact that I was almost asphyx­i­ated by cig­a­rette smoke. I bought her CD for a cou­ple of fivers, found out she works for the Uni­ver­sity of Day­ton and sur­prised her [I think] by request­ing Voodoo Doll [mp3]. She played a bunch of songs, includ­ing a good cover of Huey Lewis and the News’s Power of Love. She is tal­ented and pretty and I hope she comes back to Cleve­land sometime.

Press Release: West Lafayette, Indi­ana. David Led­man, recently of the Prozak Kit­tens, releases Burn Through Me [2.7Mb mp3], and the world was never the same.

If you’ve noticed the appear­ance of a cou­ple of mp3 links up top, it is because my new host pro­vides me with 3Gb of trans­fers per month. I don’t come any­where near to using this much, so I fig­ured I might as well share some of my bandwidth.

“Guz­zle Greed” is a live track recorded at the Bark­ing Spi­der and is an orig­i­nal work by Cleve­lander Maura Rogers, a ris­ing star in the local open mic scene.

“Our Love is Weak” comes to you from the very heart of Man­hat­tan by the ever ver­sa­tile Bård Edlund.

I’ve heard other offer­ings by these two, and they do good stuff. So DL ‘em and give ‘em a lis­ten. I’ve room for one more. Phil.

Wednes­day evening was the annual com­pany ‘event.’ Since no one really knows if it is a Christ­mas din­ner or a fall party or what, it is just known as the ‘event.’ It was at the Craw­ford Auto Museum, so I pretty much only went to see the antique cars. I saw an elec­tric car from 1906 and a mag­netic car from 1912. Had a cou­ple of vodka mar­ti­nis and played about ten min­utes worth of black­jack before leav­ing. It was alright.
(more…)

I played live for the first time as a mem­ber of Sub­lim­i­nal Self last night. Got free Guin­ness out of it too.
(more…)

I read music pretty well, but some­times I think my gui­tar instruc­tor thinks I’m an idiot, because I read music strangely.
(more…)

Here are some ran­dom music thoughts.

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I woke up today to this on my weather page:

But I’m not going to let that get me down. This week­end is the Cleve­land Music Fes­ti­val, and while GWAR is no longer head­lin­ing, I’ll still get the chance to see The Mis­fits and avoid Mush­room­head. Tonight I’m going to see one of my ex-coworkers from VDS [Vene­real Dis­ease Ser­vic­ing] rap at the Wish Night­club. Tomor­row evening I think I’m going to be at Peabody’s/Pirate’s Cove [yarr] for the whole evening. Sat­ur­day I’m going to see the Mis­fits, and if I have any energy left I’ll see what is shak­ing on Sunday.

I also had a dream last evening that I was involved in a play that was being per­formed at my old junior high school. I found out open­ing night that my part was a speak­ing part. I also had no cos­tume and was run­ning around in box­ers try­ing to find a pair of pants to wear. To help me out, the set folks painted one of my lines on a hot dog shaped pil­low. The line was: ‘Do you have money for lunch? Her head is acook.’ I have dreams involv­ing stages from my child­hood often. Many times they have noth­ing to do with per­for­mances but stages have so many inter­est­ing places to move [trap­doors, cat­walks, guy wires, cur­tains, small lunar rovers, et cetera] that my sub­con­scious seems to like to use them in order to con­vey many mean­ings quickly and simul­ta­ne­ously. Ran­dom but cool.

I saw Ratatat and Clinic at the Grog Shop last evening. Ratatat was sur­pris­ingly good. Just two guys and their gui­tars, some groovy bells and whis­tles [and a cool pro­jected psy­che­delic accom­pa­ni­ment] and lots of jam­ming. They didn’t have any lyrics but since each song seemed like a blend of exper­i­ment, impro­vi­sa­tion and vir­tu­os­ity, words prob­a­bly wouldn’t have helped them much. The gui­tarist in charge was ham­mered and was know­ingly mak­ing lame com­ments to the crowd. He also invited peo­ple to come up on stage and dance around. Only one crazy [and I do mean crazy] guy took them up on it and he stayed up there the rest of their set and did weirdo robot move­ments. The drunk gui­tar guy sin­cerely thanked him afterward.

Ratatat is the kind of band that I would like to do the sound­track for one of the movies I’ve not yet made. Last night I couldn’t really think of some­thing off of the top of my head for the type of film it needed to be but after some thought I think that per­haps ‘Con­ve­nience Charge’ could be adapted to work with some­thing like it.

Clinic was much as I expected them to be. 4 Brits in sur­gi­cal scrubs and masks, jam­ming away. I was a bit sur­prised at just how much of The Beach Boys/surfer rock vibe that their gui­tars had. That never really came through to me on any of their albums. Inci­den­tally, I didn’t real­ize they released their newest album a few months ago. From what I heard live, it sounds promising.

We bailed a bit early because we had to get up early for work, and so I am a bit groggy still. In an hour I get a back mas­sage though. Ver’ nice. I also think that the overuse of the word ‘like’ in descrip­tion and con­ver­sa­tion is noth­ing more than an aborted attempt at metaphor. Per­haps if folks were a bit quicker on their feet and could come up with an appro­pri­ate metaphor, ‘like’ wouldn’t be so, like, annoy­ing. The schools must change! or something.

I was rum­mag­ing through my old sheet music last night in search of some­thing sim­ple enough for me to play on my gui­tar. While doing this I came to the con­clu­sion that eight years ago I was a damn good sax­o­phon­ist. Up until high school march­ing band killed my love of musi­cal per­for­mance [a love that had already waned since becom­ing involved in orga­nized ensem­bles in 6th grade] I was start­ing to play some Coltrane and learn­ing the art of jazz impro­vi­sa­tion. Then I up and quit. The upshot of this is that all of my sheet music is far too com­pli­cated for me to play on my gui­tar. For now at least. But some­thing as mun­dane as this did get me think­ing. [surprise!]

I am in a con­stantly strug­gling with my art. I have a well of cre­ativ­ity and imag­i­na­tion that I can’t quite ever fully tap into. I feel like I am stand­ing in front of a leak­ing dike with a bowl and just catch­ing drib­bles until I have enough to take a drink. I fig­ure this might be the typ­i­cal state for many artists, and the peri­ods of rapid pro­duc­tiv­ity and genius are when the levee breaks. Since all art [except for writ­ing*] is, by its nature, inef­fa­ble I think my dif­fi­culty lies in the basic con­nec­tion between trans­lat­ing the inef­fa­ble into some­thing. Which is a pretty damn big prob­lem. A fun­da­men­tal one in fact. A prob­lem that says, per­haps I shouldn’t be doing art at all if I can­not translate.

My prob­lem is that I’m not very good at any of the art forms I’ve been try­ing. I’ve avoided draw­ing and paint­ing because I don’t know how to do them and I don’t think my mind is arranged prop­erly to deal with that type of visual artistry. Film­mak­ing is the clos­est visual art to my mind­set because it is sig­inif­i­cantly eas­ier to make things look the way I want them to. My writ­ing breaks down because I always end up writ­ing about writ­ing about things. I want to tell sto­ries, not be a writer or film­maker. I want to be a poet, not write poems.

So I’m think­ing that per­haps music is an art I can be good at. With music I don’t need to describe the inef­fa­ble because I can make it myself. This strikes me as the reverse of what I have just talked about. Instead of inter­pret­ing that which can­not be fully inter­preted, if I play good music I can lead myself and oth­ers to a place where things can­not and do not need to be inter­preted. Because being there is enough.

So, because I have devel­oped a few con­nec­tions through my work and have started writ­ing music reviews for Urban Dialect, I have now had guestlist access to two shows that I would oth­er­wise had to pay for. Last night I waltzed in to the Grog Shop to see Wait­ing For Evan­ge­line, Mur­der By Death! and Rasputina. The evening cost me $6.25: I bought a Wood­chick and left a tip and paid metered park­ing. Not a bad deal for three and a half hours of music.

Wait­ing for Evan­ge­line is based out of Akron. They were bet­ter than Yel­low­card but I kinda got the feel­ing that they hadn’t set­tled down on their own par­tic­u­lar style yet. They had some really nice riffs but every time the lead singer screamed I wanted to laugh. It needs some work. They were all busi­ness though and the crowd seemed to like them well enough. I grabbed the band’s sticker after­ward to add to my gui­tar case. No gui­tar case is com­plete unless it is cov­ered with ran­dom band stickers.

Mur­der By Death! was the band my coworker is good friends with. They all went to col­lege together and she was at their first show ever and first road show. They had a cel­list and key­boards in addi­tion to the gui­tar, bass, drumkit combo. They were pretty good and they impressed the crowd. A cou­ple of times the sound mal­func­tioned slightly but it didn’t slow them down at all.

Rasputina was really good. I have come to the con­clu­sion from watch­ing the cel­list in MbD and the ladies of Raspy that the cel­los is a mighty sexy instru­ment when played by a girl. It is also capa­ble of being more metal than I’d thought cel­los could be. Melora intro­duced their songs with quirky lit­tle anec­dotes and then they would play and cre­ate wicked cool sound­scapes. They also cov­ered Led Zeppelin’s Rock and Roll, an amaz­ing ver­sion of Heart’s Bar­racuda and CCR’s Bad Moon Ris­ing. They also made every­one sit down so that every­one would be able to see them perform.

Look, you all know that I am a frig­ging doo­fus. The fact that you know this is prob­a­bly part of the rea­son you read this [if, in fact, you read this]. Thus, it might not sur­prise you that, in my typ­i­cal over­en­thu­si­as­tic way, I could pur­chase con­cert tick­ets that are not even worth using as toi­let paper [too heavy a bond weight and not absorbent].

Oh, The For­mat was good enough. I’ll give you that. Although the singing wasn’t nearly as good on the album they did have a nice healthy pop vibe and a fun atti­tude. Unfor­tu­nately they only played for about a half hour.

Here is where things get bad. Buckle your seat belts and make sure your tray tables are in their full, upright and locked posi­tion. You also might want to haul out the vomit bag because this could quite pos­si­bly make you hurl.

I picked up my friend Les and we got to the pavil­ion about a half hour before The For­mat came on. I didn’t real­ize just how close the place was from Lake­wood. As we approached the will call, I men­tioned to her that I was hop­ing this wouldn’t be full of Coo­ing Weteyed Emochil­dren™. I have since learned to fear another type of concert-goer alto­gether. The mid­dle school slash early high school MTV zom­bies [MSSHSMTVZ]. Girls that age are still fuck­ing scary. It is no won­der I was so weirded out by them when I was that age [christ, i sound like a geezer]. They are like evil magic aliens with cell­phones– flit­ting around hug­ging each other, grab­bing each other and point­ing at each other. They were like a cloud of gnats, or, as I was soon to find out, like the Con­struc­ti­cons. [nods to Patrick]

So the sheer abun­dance of this demo­graphic was trou­bling. I expected the poof-paint t-shirts but I did not expect the inap­pro­pri­ate use of every rock and roll crowd clich?. Who the hell crowd surfs to pop music? Dum­b­ass high school kids, that’s who. Who the hell moshes to pop music? Vil­lage idiot high school fratties-in-training, that’s who.

So frig­gin Yel­low­card comes on stage and Les and I fully enter into the Twi­light Zone. The crowd goes apeshit. A cou­ple hun­dred scream­ing MSSHSMTVZ girls sound like a ring­wraith with a toothache. Thank­fully the scream­ing went higher than my hear­ing reg­is­ter and was suc­cess­fully neu­tral­ized. These girls are like Con­struc­ti­cons because they are rather laugh­able and insignif­i­cant when taken alone, but when they join their pow­ers they are devastating.

Let me just get this over with. YELLOWCARD IS A TERRIBLE BAND. Dur­ing their first song I noted that they resem­bled less a band and more a group of frat boys who picked up some instru­ments in order to make MSSHSMTVZ girls get their panties wet. My ini­tial feel­ing wasn’t far off since each band mem­ber sounded like he was play­ing his own song in a dif­fer­ent key and time sig­na­ture and than the oth­ers. The drum­mer was like a mal­func­tion­ing robot. He played the god­damn same drum lick at the same tempo no mat­ter what the hell the other band mem­bers were doing. But it gets worse.

What the other band mem­bers were doing mostly con­sisted of skip­ping around stage and stand­ing on top of the speak­ers. Yes. I said skip­ping. SKIPPING. WHAT THE FUCK. SKIPPING! And any­time one of the ‘band’ mem­bers stood on a speaker the crowd went into orgas­mic parox­ysms at how rock star these guys are. Yeah, like no one has EVER stood on a foot high speaker before. Well, you would have thought no one ever had con­sid­er­ing how the crowd reacted. One of these flea cir­cus clowns played an elec­tric vio­lin. He must have been the ring­leader of the incred­i­ble suck­i­tude. He skipped the most, the girls got the wettest panties look­ing at him and he was also the dumb­est fat­faced goober I have ever been tor­tured by. He skipped the most and did a cou­ple of [i must admit] impres­sive back­flips off of one of the footh­igh speak­ers, but then he would start skip­ping again. Skip­ping is worse than jump­ing jacks and I didn’t think any­thing was worse than on-stage jump­ing jacks.

The For­mat struck me as a bunch of guys enjoy­ing being a band and hav­ing fun get­ting a crowd into their music. Yel­low­crap seemed com­pletely con­trived. The sunken-chested skinny-ass [not that I can talk] lead gui­tarist was so obnox­iously nasal-loud in his vocals that I didn’t under­stand a good god­damn word of any of the songs. Then, to my ever­last­ing hor­ror, he starts say­ing ‘Boo­bies! Show us your boo­bies.’ Ear­lier, when remark­ing on the ille­git­i­mate use of crowd-surfing and mosh­ing, I had expressed a deep con­cern that these thir­teen year olds would flash the band. And now, lo, yea ver­ily and behold, a few of the MSSHSMTVZ girls raised up their shirts and flashed the band. Thank­fully I was in the last row and only saw the back­sides of these raisin-tittied lit­tle girls, but Yel­low­crud seemed to enjoy it — frig­ging pedophiles. They thanked the girls and said ‘That is the most boo­bies we’ve seen on tour! Three! Thanks!’ Which either means that some poor girl in the crowd has only one breast or that some girl had three breasts or that Yel­low­carp [sorry for the insult carp] can­not count. My vote is with the last option.

It was like the worst crap ever but even crap­pier. My mind bog­gled, gib­bered and set­tled into a com­plete state of flum­moxed cat­ty­wam­pus­ness so we bailed early because it was so bad.

Then I had a tasty milk­shake.
THE END.

*UPDATE*
I kept Lesley’s $4 in change from the park­ing and for­got to thank her for show­ing me the won­ders of the Clifton Diner. I am an asshat.

This album is absolutely amaz­ing. I might have said that about some other albums some­time in the past but I was lying or under the influ­ence of some sort of mind alter­ing sub­stance. In fact I’m under the influ­ence of a mind alter­ing sub­stance right now. That sub­stance is, of course, this won­der­fully vibrant and unas­sum­ing band called The For­mat. They come from Ari­zona, a won­der­ful state that is full of intel­li­gent peo­ple very sim­i­lar to those from Indi­ana. This is proven by the sim­ple fact that, much like Indi­ana, Ari­zona doesn’t change time­zones twice a year.

The First Sin­gle is my favorite song on Inter­ven­tions and Lul­la­bies. Not only is the tune heart­felt and poppy, the lyrics speak to me like no other song I have ever heard, ever. This is no under­state­ment. For those of you who know me this lyric should let you in on just how weirded out I was to hear my feel­ings spo­ken with fer­vor and sin­cer­ity by some­one else.

The For­mat speaks the thoughts and feel­ings of all its band mem­bers, giv­ing lit­tle slices of each member’s per­son­al­ity in the lyrics. Nate and Sam are the main guys, but they have a bevy of other band mem­bers whose names you will become acquainted with once you go buy this CD. Nate’s [I think its Nate] clear tenor is friendly and likely appeals to coo­ing wet-eyed emochil­dren espe­cially with lyrics that could be inter­preted as quite melancholy.

For me though, the music and the lyrics aren’t melan­choly at all. Oh sure, many of the songs are about how dif­fi­cult life can be and have a feel­ing of weari­ness about them at times even cyn­i­cal… but the music and the way Nate sings remind me of me, or the way I think of me at least. Rogu­ish, wry, deter­mined and a sort of droll humor or sar­donic blitheness. Yeah I think that describes me pretty well, sar­donic blitheness.

Since I’ve made this review about me instead of about The For­mat I’ll kill it here. Just go get the album.

• WOXY Artist breakdown
• Offi­cial Website
• The For­mat: Livejournal

Tonight I’m going to see Sub­lim­i­nal Self at the Hi-Fi club. Five Dol­lar Beer is part of this musi­cal cre­ation so I expect most of the songs to be about world foods.

I was teamed up upon yes­ter­day by those who I thought were my friends. They tried to con­vince me that tonight’s show was also a cos­tume party. They did not have me con­vinced, but nei­ther was I com­pletely sure they were lying. [Of course they were lying] They wouldn’t give me a straight answer so I ended up find­ing out for my own self. Thank­fully I’m not any more gullible or I would have actu­ally believed it. They would have let me show up in my dol­phin suit too. Some friends. Bas­tards. I’ll be the one laugh­ing tonight when none of their equip­ment works.

Franz Ferdinand’s [FF] self-titled album is released tomor­row and is very antic­i­pated. I’ve been lis­ten­ing to it for about six weeks now due to cer­tain con­nec­tions I have. From what I’ve read they seem to get lumped in with The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and other neo-garage rock­ers. I think this is pretty spot-on but they thank­fully have their own twists that break them from the mold a bit. Being Scottish/British helps. The songs on the album are dis­ci­plined, dri­ven and catchy as hell. For all I know FF might be some sort of math-garage hybrid, since every­thing is exactly right.

Open­ing with Jacque­line FF imme­di­ately estab­lish a new mil­len­nium bohemian atti­tude with lines like ‘It’s so much bet­ter on holiday/ because we only work when/ we need the money.’ The album’s sin­gle is Take Me Out on track three. The main gui­tar riff in the cho­rus on this song reminds me of David Bowie’s Be My Wife with its twangy need­i­ness. The energy and ten­sion con­tinue with The Dark of the Mati­nee and takes another moment to reassert the free­dom of the first track with a smug and saucy ‘How I’ll never be/ any­thing I hate.’ Auf Achse gives me a very 8-bit RPG adven­tur­ous feel­ing, but the lyrics are accusatory and con­tinue with the sauce from Mati­nee but drop­ping the smug­ness for an almost snide feel. The next song takes this darker feel­ing and expands upon it, the energy and ten­sion are now of an embit­tered and rag­ing sort. The song is called Cheat­ing on You.

Darts of Plea­sure is a song from their EP release and got a lot of air time on WOXY prior to the gen­eral release of the LP to radio sta­tions. Its pretty fierce and quite in the right place track­wise because it pro­vides a great philo­soph­i­cal segue into Michael which, to me, is a John, I’m Only Danc­ing for the 21st cen­tury. The album’s finale 40 ft is a great way to end with a begin­ning. It is just as dri­ven and delib­er­ate as the rest of the album but it is a changed thing, some­thing that has moved beyond all the tra­vails of the pre­vi­ous songs. It main­tains the free­dom and deter­mi­na­tion that it has had from the begin­ning but now it needs to be applied to some­thing new. Hope­fully for FF more than ‘40 feet remain.‘

les cara­biniers is a Godard anti-war film that in typ­i­cal Godar­d­ian fash­ion cares not a whit for the rules of cin­ema. Jump cuts, repeated actions, break­ing the line, tiny gags, jokes about cin­ema, etc. This is a fairy tale about two guys who go to war for their King because they have been told it will make them rich, they com­mit hor­ri­ble atroc­i­ties and return home to find out that they get noth­ing for their work but dis­ap­point­ment. It seems very appro­pri­ate to my mind­set regard­ing all the mil­i­tary actions that the U.S. has been engaged in recently. It also reminded me at times of Harun Farocki’s Inex­tin­guish­able Fire because the dia­logue was stilted and some­what rid­dlish. It is def­i­nitely worth a watch. Don’t get bogged down by its appar­ent shod­di­ness. I think it looks that way because Godard wanted it to be hokey.

My musi­cal tastes change with the weather and sea­sons. I might have taken this down before but I’m doing it again. Just mark it up as a tes­ta­ment to the fal­li­bil­ity of human mem­ory. …anyway

The weather has warmed up a bit here in Cleve­land and that means I am going back into the dust­bin of my CD col­lec­tion and break­ing out the old stuff. This week in my CD case I have Stone Tem­ple Pilots’ Core, Lenny Kravitz’s Are You Gonna Go My Way, Clas­sic Queen, Pink Floyd The Wall, U2 The Joshua Tree, and David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World and Aladdin Sane. These are all albums that I asso­ciate with the onset of spring­time [Core also reap­pears in autumn]. In sum­mer­time I tend to lis­ten to Toad­ies Rub­ber­neck, lots of old Metal­lica and Billy Joel. Going from late sum­mer until the first snows I lis­ten to The Smash­ing Pump­kins almost exclu­sively, espe­cially Adore. Dur­ing win­ter I lis­ten to just about every­thing, but mostly in win­ter I find new music to lis­ten to.

Some albums I also asso­ciate with cer­tain events in my life. I can’t lis­ten to Cake’s Pro­long­ing the Magic with­out think­ing of the last few weeks of my senior year. I can’t lis­ten to Rub­ber­neck with­out think­ing about cross-country. I don’t really have any albums from col­lege apart from the first Shins release Oh, Inverted World that remind me of a time or a place. I sup­pose this is musi­cal taste wasn’t a fresh thing for me in col­lege, although I learned a lot dur­ing that time, I didn’t have the fresh­ness that lis­ten­ing to some ran­dom thing gave me back in the days of high school.

I just got back from a sweet night of the blues fea­tur­ing Robert Lock­wood Junior. Lock­wood is allegedly the only per­son to have actu­ally learned gui­tar from the king of delta blues, Robert John­son. The blues ensem­ble that played with him was quite good, but it was obvi­ous their style of blues wasn’t the same as Lockwood’s. They had a Mem­phis blues vibe, more…cosmopolitan than raw. Lock­wood def­i­nitely proved that less is more. It almost seemed like the gui­tar was play­ing itself. If he learned from Robert John­son, I can under­stand how peo­ple thought John­son had made a deal with the devil to gain his skill. Unearthly. He made it hurt and feel good to hurt. The whole band got me into their sets, I was ‘yeah’ing and ‘whoo’ing as the spirit prompted me.

At the end the alto sax­o­phon­ist came over and chat­ted with us, then Lock­wood him­self came over. I got to shake his hand and tell him how won­der­ful the per­for­mance was and asked him about his life. He said, ‘I never looked up to nobody,’ then paused and con­tin­ued, ‘but I never looked down on nobody either.’

That is a damn good way to live.

Mak­ing a Com­pi­la­tion CD [c-CD] is quite an affair. The process is described in detail in sev­eral places, some shal­lower than others.

I never make c-CDs for myself. The discs I burn that are com­pos­ites of artists, aren’t com­pi­la­tions. I just put them on a CD so I can lis­ten to them else­where. A c-CD must be made for some­one else, and with spe­cific intent. That is the over­rid­ing rule. Here are some others.

a] Each song on the c-CD must have bear­ing on the per­son it is being given to. If this bear­ing is pro­jected through your own doors of per­cep­tion, thats just dandy.

b] Each song must have bear­ing on how you see your­self or want to see your­self in rela­tion to the per­son the c-CD is being given to. If this per­son is a love inter­est, limit the sap songs to one or none.

c] You may not have mul­ti­ple songs by the same artist, even if the artist is a mem­ber of another band.

d] You may not put a song on the c-CD that refers to the per­son you are giv­ing the CD to.

e] Do not, under any cir­cum­stances, put on a song that you think is funny.

f] Do not, put on too many songs that sound the same. Vari­ety is necessary.

g] Break these rules at your own peril.

That is what I try to go by. I might add some once I think of them.

h] Each song on the CD must relate to each other song on the CD. This rela­tion­ship can­not be taken to a higher order such as, ‘all the songs relate to me or the per­son I am giv­ing the c-CD to.’ see a] or b] above. This way, if the c-CD washes up on shore of a desert island and some­one with a func­tion­ing CD player finds it on the beach, upon lis­ten­ing to the disc they will sense the theme of the CD, even if they are famil­iar with none of the songs. This is also pro­vided that the disc itself is not too sand-etched to be read by a CD player.

I won some Cash for Christ­mas and today I received it. I got the CD– Amer­i­can IV: The Man Comes Around and the DVD– Johnny Cash: A Con­cert Behind Prison Walls. I also received a cou­ple of stickers.

I had heard the album with Phil right when it came out and was impressed, so it was great to win it from 97x. I’m also look­ing for­ward to see­ing the DVD which is a musi­cal syn­op­sis and trib­ute to Mr. Cash. My men­tor at work has issued a list of demands from me, which includes a share in the Cash. She has also given me a nick­name, ‘Bones’ incon­gru­ous though that might be. I have no idea where she came up with that. The only Bones I know goes to ND and smokes up alot. She’s pretty cool though so I’ll let it slide.

I’m typ­i­cally not very excited when I am given a hypo­thet­i­cal ques­tion along the lines of ‘If you were on a desert island what five things would you want with you?’ My answer is always some­thing along the lines of ‘A Coast Guard ‘copter, fuel for it, a book on how to fly a ‘copter, enough food and water for two months, and Elsa Benitez.’

So the hypo­thet­i­cal you are about to read about, one that I assigned myself, is a bit unnat­ural. It does come as the result of some very deep pon­der­ing that I have been engaged in lately in regard to a list I am mak­ing of my all-time favorite songs.

Here is how it goes. You have been con­victed by a police state for a crime that doesn’t mat­ter since you didnt com­mit it. Before they strand you on a desert island with­out a Coast Guard heli­copter, a strange quirk in the legal sys­tem forces you into the fol­low­ing sit­u­a­tion: You have at your dis­posal a dig­i­tal library of all music and the means to burn it onto a CD. You only have one CD. You must fill it with your favorite songs, in a for­mat that can be played on the orig­i­nal Sony Dis­c­man that is in a bag next to your lone CD-R. [That means you can’t stuff the CD with mp3s, bozo]. You can­not have more than one song by an artist, or else you will be flayed by super­in­tel­li­gent mar­mosets and then dipped in salt. What songs do you put on the CD?

Here is what I would put on.

Plush [Acoustic] — Stone Tem­ple Pilots — 3:54
Down to the Water­line — Dire Straits — 3:56
Tin Pan Alley [AKA The Rough­est Place in Town] — Ste­vie Ray Vaughan — 9:08
Dan­ger­ous Mood — Joe Cocker and B.B. King — 4:54
Fool in the Rain — Led Zep­pelin — 6:12
Ziggy Star­dust — David Bowie — 3:13
Noth­ing Else Mat­ters [Acoustic] — Metal­lica — 6:23
For Martha — Smash­ing Pump­kins — 8:17
I Burn — Toad­ies — 3:31
The Soft Col­li­sion — Machines of Lov­ing Grace — 4:50
Spe­cial­ist — Inter­pol — 6:34
Have You Ever Seen the Rain? — Cree­dence Clear­wa­ter Revival — 2:39
Bohemian Rhap­sody — Queen — 5:59

Total Run Time — 69:20

So I just found out today that The Shins played in Cleve­land 3 days ago. I could have seen them for $15. Motherfucker.

Pow­er­man 5000’s lat­est LP, Trans­form, marks a tran­si­tion for the band from gothic space-rock to a niche between n?-metal and stan­dard hard­core. Its not as good as it used to be, but at least it ain’t Linkin Park or Limp Bizkit.

Deloused in the Coma­to­rium [DITC], the new seman­tic expe­ri­ence from The Mars Volta. Read my pompous review, but first go buy the album.

Hell, I’m always on the look­out for some good new music. Unfor­tu­nately my search often results in less than good new music. There are far too many bands out there with delu­sions of grandeur, weird gim­micks, and stranger sounds, all of which don’t par­tic­u­larly agree with my constitution.

Thank­fully, The Decem­berists album Cast­aways and Cut-outs does not fit this bill.
(more…)

I’ve been burn­ing up Inter­pol in my CD player lately. Theirs is a musi­cal expe­ri­ence that I have never had the plea­sure of lis­ten­ing to before. Turn On The Bright Lights is a very taut album. It goes through a series of anx­ious peaks and intro­spec­tive val­leys but remains rife with a feel­ing akin to what post-traumatic stress dis­or­der (PTSD) must cause. TotBL begins with ‘Unti­tled,’ a song that effec­tively brought me into Interpol’s unique vir­tual sonic world and set the ten­sion for the rest of the album.
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I saw Queens of the Stone Age and ZWAN last night in Nor­mal, IL. It was a pretty good show, with two very dif­fer­ent but capa­ble bands. QOTSA rocked out hard, ZWAN was more of a musi­cal odyssey than any­thing else. Billy didn’t talk to much, but it was obvi­ous he enjoyed the crowd. Paz Lenchan­tin, the bassist, has one hot body on her. and she knows how to move it too.

For April Fool’s Day I repro­duce a musi­cal review writ­ten by a friend of mine about a guy that lives in my sec­tion who doesn’t have a band. It actu­ally infil­trated its way into our daily stu­dent rag The Observer.

Bul­bous debut from Blouse Pup­pies By BJ STREW Scene Music Critic ——————————————————————————–

Lester Bangs said rock is dead. Dick Rorty said phi­los­o­phy is dead. Harvard’s Walt Gilbert said mol­e­c­u­lar biol­ogy is dead. Oth­ers have sounded the death knell of neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics, of tragedy and soon, maybe, rel­a­tiv­ity. And that’s all well and good because, thanks to the white knights of pop, medi­oc­rity is here to stay its fate is sealed.

But Chris Yanek cares lit­tle for fate and, God bless him, less for medi­oc­rity. It was out of the ashes of his A-ha cover band from whence this match­less artist cob­bled together per­haps the most bril­liant assem­blage of for­mer K-mart employees/musicians the world has ever seen. It was allegedly on a peyote-driven “spirit quest” that Yanek and ex-member Jay Mohr decided on the name “The Blouse Pup­pies,” an allu­sion to a campy, John Tesh B-side.

From their refresh­ingly post-feminist moniker to their curi­ous, eso­teric instru­men­ta­tion to their bul­bous Thin Lizzy-meets-Phil Collins sound, it is clear the Blouse Pup­pies have staked their claim as rock’s newest standard-bearers. Some have described the Blouse Pup­pies sound as the Bea­t­les, Jesus and Dolly Par­ton all rolled into one, so skilled they are in the nuances of music the­ory, in tech­nique, in Celtic folk­lore, in ground­wa­ter hydrol­ogy and so on. Clearly, few have yet suc­cess­fully described the band’s unique sound.

The band’s offi­cial debut album, Dere­licte My What, Capit n?, with its release delayed by Apple Corps Records until March 31 after Inter­net boot­leg­ging, fea­tures most of the Blouse Pup­pies’ found­ing mem­bers: ex-Merry Prankster Bones Walker on the stand-up bass, Ben Fer­gu­son blow­ing a mean sqinn flute, Nick Mar­tin on elec­tric piano and the imper­turbably cool con­tralto of lead gui­tarist and vocal­ist Yanek. Vet­eran per­cus­sion­ist Lund Drift­wood pounds sweet thun­der with the metic­u­lous author­ity of Art Blakey.

Tak­ing a page from techno group Prodigy’s play­book, the Blouse Pup­pies fea­ture the solo salsa dancer, Jason Cardella, tum­bling and frol­ick­ing in front of the group like some Chi­huahua on PCP.

And the world ought to thank pro­ducer Mike Panz­ica. Because then, after every­one thought the band had peaked, the big­wig Sicil­ian pro­ducer, in due course, had the whole band rock­ing dirty-blonde perms. Maybe a lit­tle over-the-top, per­haps a bit too retro, but believe it the gleam­ing, coiled ‘dos are heartrend­ing in con­cert, as those 23 high-schoolers lucky enough to wit­ness the Blouse Pup­pies last week in the base­ment of a Motel 6 in Min­ster, Ohio can confirm.

The title track opens with Yanek ulu­lat­ing like a Moroc­can wid­ower, accom­pa­nied by Bones’ novel har­mon­ics and Driftwood’s sonorous rum­ble, ques­tion­ing the exis­tence not of God, but of bad easy-listening. Many of the songs, such as “Prince Albert’ s Revenge” and “But It Ain’t Grey Poupon,” have a bouncy bass line firmly under­gird­ing the minor-chord melodies. The album ends with “The Rack,” a trib­ute to Janet Reno and her con­tri­bu­tions not only to the coun­try, but to coun­try music.

An avant-garde con­flu­ence of coun­try (Appalachian, not Nashville), free jazz, Brazil­ian trop­i­calia, klezmer and of course, clas­sic rock, their influ­ences range from Ornette Cole­man to Bob Dylan to John Tesh. Vicious par­ody? Maybe. Genius? Undoubtedly.

The lyrics’ con­tent span a vari­ety of top­ics, includ­ing Yanek’s Ice­landic boy­hood, the pit­falls of sobri­ety, Dadaism and whale lib­er­a­tion. It is dif­fi­cult to say where the irony ends and the earnest­ness begins, so cagily Byzan­tine is Yanek’s verse. What is easy to say, on the other hand, is that no one would have pre­dicted it would take a mix­ture of sqinn flutes and golden perms to upend the Lester Bangs Weltan­schau­ung and finally have a shot at redeem­ing a music world in decline.

So plenty of peo­ple think that The Vines sound just like Nir­vana. I can see what they mean. Plenty of peo­ple also agree that Creed sounds just like Pearl Jam. I agree with them. Why do I like The Vines and abhor Creed? Per­haps its because every Creed song sounds the same, or per­haps the fact that Creed is copy­ing a band that is still around. or maybe i’m a pompous ass and i don’t like them merely because plenty of other peo­ple do.

I’m fine with The Vines, as I’ve said before. Like, 4 sen­tences ago. Their songs are rec­og­niz­ably The Vines while explor­ing the dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties of their sound. You might have heard “Get Free” get­ting radio time as their sin­gle, but I like “Home­sick” personally.

Stu­dent Film Fes­ti­val was last night. ’twas excel­lent. leav­ing in a few hours to fence at OSU and kick some buck­eye ass.

The Fri­day mp3

I’m not too big on rap, yet I like Juras­sic 5. They rap with an old school fla­vor that in a way that is refresh­ing from crap stuff like Nelly or Nel­lie or eminem or M&M or Method Man or Red Man or Colostomy Man just to name a few. i haven’t done my research but i have a feel­ing they started out as a freestyle rap group along the lines of Free­way. It’s nice. Any­way, here’s What’s Golden.

I’m not a big one for japan­ese pop music, or even japanese-american pop music, or even pop music. but i’ll make an excep­tion for this song by Shonen Knife. It is called Jaka­lope. I find no end of inter­est in the fact that a some middle-aged japan­ese women were so fas­ci­nated with an ani­mal that lives in the mythol­ogy of red­necked tooth-deficient out­doorsy igno­ra­muses from the plain states and big sky coun­try that they wrote a song about it.

Down­load Shonen Knife’s ‘Jaka­lope’ here.

it is rather dif­fi­cult to get into the christ­mas spirit with finals/papers/projects loom­ing over me. every year i attempt it and every year i can­not seem to get excited for the hol­i­days until around the 20th, when school ends and i get to go home. i guess for me hol­i­days don’t exist with­out family.

The Fri­day mp3

this week is an exam­ple of one of the ways i go about try­ing to get into the hol­i­day mode. by lis­ten­ing to chirst­mas music. i have this CD called ‘Metal Christ­mas’ which is a col­lec­tion of var­i­ous Hol­i­day songs by obscure peo­ple from now defunct metal bands. Iron Maiden, Uriah Heep, Wings, FM. shit like that. but one of those songs isn’t the song of the week. instead you get a dou­ble dose, a song by the Smash­ing Pump­kins and a song by Sarah McLachlan.

Before we get to the mp3 i’ve got some news. my good friend Mea­gan painted me this sweet ass water­color from Lord of the Rings, Its when Sam helps Frodo out of the water after Old Man Wil­low has entranced them. Its fark­ing badass. I have one and you don’t so there.

also, here are some pics from my film shoots and from the trip to Penn State.

The Fri­day mp3

I’ve cho­sen a song by B.B. King this week. I’ve Got to Move Out of This Neigh­bor­hood (Nobody Loves Me but My Mother). If you know any­thing about the blues I don’t need to say any­thing. If you know noth­ing about the blues…listen and learn.

This Friday’s song comes from a band that kicks no end of ass: Jimmie’s Chicken Shack. They are funny, cre­ative, some­time polit­i­cal and always good to lis­ten to. They hail from the south­east coast of the US. Heav­ily influ­enced by reg­gae and the dead it is inevitable that they smoke up alot, but hell peo­ple have been smok­ing up for hun­dreds of years. it was ter­ri­bly dif­fi­cult to pick a song of theirs: I rec­om­mend Lazy Boy Dash, Do Right, High, Blood, Sit­ting with the Dog, in fact the whole album Push­ing the Salmanilla Enve­lope. today’s pick is my favorite song of theirs: Milk.

today’s choice was a no brainer. the band coin­ci­den­tally has the same name as my site, Organic Mechanic. you can sam­ple 4 of their mp3s on their site. but if you just want to grab some­thing now I rec­om­mend Life is Every­where. jazzy, poppy and catchy describe it pretty well. its obvi­ous these guys know a bit about musi­cal styles. it is also nice to lis­ten to a band that doesn’t insist upon a dom­i­nant instru­ment but instead lets ‘em all work together like a band should. They are from the Pacific North­west, it seems like them states out there like to spit out inter­est­ing music like a sow drop­pin’ piglets. most peo­ple i know of from ore­gon are treehuggers

Balls! tis been awhile. Here is the last week.

wednes­day: went up to Pur­due then drove with Phil to Chicago where we stayed with his brother Bo and his fiance? Kerri. played monop­oly. lost hor­ri­bly. i HATE that.

thurs­day: area2 con­cert fea­tur­ing Ash, Blue­man Group, Busta Rhymes, David Bowie, and Moby. all around good con­cert. but David mutha­fuckin’ Bowie, held me in thrall for the entire time he was on stage. I have wanted to see him in con­cert since for the past seven years and never thought i would get the chance. i can not find words strong enough to describe the eupho­ria that i felt watch­ing this 56 year old cock­eyed brit sing. he played the great stuff. Life on Mars, Fame, Fash­ion, China Girl, Let’s Dance, Heroes. he played some new stuff, Cac­tus, Hey Lou, 5:15 All the Angels Have Gone, and he played some old stuff that no one but Bowie junkies would have rec­og­nized. from the ’77 album Low he played Break­ing Glass and A New Career in a New Town. Ever since i first heard Low sev­eral years ago I have always thought of it as a prim­i­tive fore­run­ner, a pro­to­type of what house music is today. Not only did Bowie prove my right, but the review I read of the con­cert the next day agreed as well. to top it all off and rais­ing me to higher order throes of ecstasy, he played Ziggy Star­dust. shit. what an encore. it rocked the shit out of me. it was so frikin awe­some to hear it live. Bowie is like fine wine, improv­ing as he ages. Ziggy Star­dust alone was worth every penny i paid for the ticket. its the clos­est thing i’ve ever had to a reli­gious expe­ri­ence. know­ing the best Moby was capa­ble of wouldn’t even com­pare, we left (like many oth­ers) before he even came on. I have seen David Bowie in con­cert. I can die a com­plete person.

fri­day: Brian Rose, Matt Rose, Brian Miller, and Macal­is­ter Fahie (pro­nounced Foy thanks much) came up to cel­e­brate Macs 21st birth­day. they had a beer bong. we got 24hr passes for the El and headed down­town to eat at the ESPN­zone which was pretty cool but too expen­sive for the qual­ity of the food. Then we toured the Earth from Above exhibit pro­mot­ing solar power. very nice. then we wan­dered to Navy Pier and rode the bus back to Bos ‘hood. some dude on a street cor­ner was hand­ing out reduced cover passes to a bar so we went there and 5 bucks got us all we could drink until 11:30. 3 vodka ton­ics later it was 11:30 and Mac had con­sumed a rather large quan­tity of liquor. we stuck around till about 1 and then took off. Mac puked off the El plat­form all over some new­pa­per thingys. so we barely got him home, almost all of us list­ing ever so lit­tle to starboard.

sat­ur­day: we went shop­ping and got a day­light look at where Mac puked. (did i men­tion he is black? not that that has any­thing to do with him puk­ing on news­pa­pers) I bought two vin­tage tri­ac­etate shirts at this damn cool store for cheap. That night Bo, Kerri, Phil, and I saw Juliana Hat­field at the Dou­ble Door. totally dif­fer­ent venue than the Tweeter Cen­ter where area2 was at. only a cou­ple hun­dred peo­ple can fit in there. i wasn’t too famil­iar with Juliana but the show was very good just her on the gee­tar, Freda on the drums, and oh so cute Heidi Gluck on the bass. i enjoyed it much.

sun­day: 5 hour drive home. hadn’t shaved in over a week. com­pe­tent as a broke dick.

since: still haven’t shaved, work­ing on a beard, left my Bowie ticket stub at Bos. hope he saves it. vis­ited with friend Emily. In the home stretch of play­ing Baldur’s Gate.

Weezer, budd-y! Last night was a good con­cert night and could only have been improved if the Strokes hadn’t had to can­cel. Of course, there was the inevitable road­trip asso­ci­ated with attend­ing a con­cert in the mid­west but O My how fun it was. I got some free con­cert tix to a 12 local band show in Sep­tem­ber and a drum­stick. The first band Phil, Kyle, Cramer, and I saw was lou­d­er­milk. Apart from being rather small and effem­i­nate they rocked out pretty well. The singer had a good scream. Then we went in and got our seats.

The next band on was Sparta. They are good, punk rock mes­sage with a laid back con­trolled stage pres­ence. Next up on sec­ond stage was my pleas­ant sur­prise of the evening. Home­town Hero kicks lots of ass. They really got into their act and were goof­ing around quite a bit, but not so much as to pre­vent mas­sive gui­tar riffage and rock­ing out. I def­i­nitely rec­om­mend buy­ing their CD. Dash­board Con­fes­sional was next on the main stage and he was bor­ing as hell. Emo music just ain’t my thang, in fact, it makes me angry lis­ten­ing to it. All of the sweater­wear­ing thick­rimmed glasses wear­ing huggy pseudo prep-hippy hybrid sen­si­tiv­ity first Emo kids really dug him though.

Next on sec­ond stage was AM Radio. These guys were all about get­ting the crowd to have a good time. I enjoyed them but prob­a­bly wouldn’t buy their CD. They are the type of band that you go see live. At the end of their set, they had the guys from Home­town Hero come on stage and the Dash­board Con­fes­sional dude did as well. Once he walked out every­one started scream­ing as if he were Jesu Cristo him­self, which stole the spot­light from AM Radio who were doing a damn good job. After their set I got one of the drum­sticks (I was right up against the stage), and we went to see Weezer.

First song played, my favorite, Say it Ain’t So. Suh-weet. Next song Dope Nose, even bet­ter. What fol­lowed was happy rock bliss. They played Hash Pipe and El Scor­cho and of course Buddy Holly. They played Keep Fishin’ my favorite song off of their new album. It was good. They lit up the big bright W and even had pyrotech­nics. The encore was Death and Destruc­tion, which was a rather strange choice, but hey, they’re Weezer, and weird.

show was over by 11 we didn’t get back to Pur­due till 2, took us for­ever to get back to the inter­state. Then we ate at Denny’s and I had the lum­ber­jack spe­cial. Once we got to Pur­due, I crashed at Phil’s place for 3.5 hours, got up at 5:30 and drove back to ND to come to work at 8. I was only two min­utes late. so today I am a zombie.

In other news, I am also now using the yel­low bar for ran­dom links. thanks for shar­ing now shut up adam.

wish I could write like this:

Enough search­ing to know
that we’ve lost our­selves
in our slot machines, shot­guns, and strip­malls
baby your tech­nol­ogy
so slick and func­tional
and me with­out my nuclear arse­nal
And if I could kill with­out guilt or sin
there’d soon be a few less record exec­u­tives
and if I could kill and recieve for­give­ness
there’d sure as hell be one less president

there’s got to be a pill for for­give­ness
there’s got to be a trig­ger for hap­pi­ness
Auto­matic sen­sory remote con­trol
weather sat­telites manip­u­late your soul
effi­ciently with­out a mod­icum of grace
I want to go out with a smile on my face

Trig­ger for Hap­pi­ness Machines of Lov­ing Grace

i don’t want to write any­thing today. so here are some song lyrics. what do they make you think about or feel like or what do you think they mean? actu­ally just say any­thing about them that you want, i’m interested.

Soft now– the lips that dragged me down
Soft now– until I hit the ground
The night is soft
The light is soft
And i don’t want to wear this off– tonight
Sleep alone– seems to me
The virus bleeds

Soft now– she played her love scenes well soft now–
Should have sensed the sul­phur smell
Soften the blow
Fin­ger to tongue tongue to fin­ger
Honey smear
Fin­ger to tongue tongue to fin­ger
Soften the blow

“the soft col­li­sion” –machines of lov­ing grace

mom is show­ing up today for Junior Par­ents’ Week­end. I hope this is a great expe­ri­ence. We have porn­star seat­ing at table 1 and table 6 for the meals. i’m not get­ting any work done this week­end, i can already tell you. con­certs i have been to: The Beach Boys: I think I was 8. All I remem­ber was that there was a huge col­umn right in front of me that said “I (heart) Sum­mer.” Jimmy Page and Robert Plant: Fresh­man in High School. I went with some guys from Kmart. Totally awe­some con­cert. They played all the best Zep­pelin (but not Stair­way dammit) and stuff from their newest album. My seats were in the nose­bleed sec­tion and I had a con­tact buzz from all the ganja smoke which made me crave White Cas­tles after the con­cert. Any­thing that makes you want to eat White Cas­tles is a very dan­ger­ous sub­stance. The Smash­ing Pump­kins: Saw them for the first time at Pur­due with my bud­dies Brian and Phil. Dur­ing their Machina tour. It blew me away. I just wish it hadn’t been in an audi­to­rium so I could have jumped around all crazy­like. May­Day 2000: The 2nd best twenty dol­lars I have ever spent. Papa Roach, Three Doors Down, Blood­hound Gang and Gods­mack. All day. Papa Roach sucked, 3DD was ok, I saw so many breasts when Blood­hound Gang came on because they were pro­mot­ing their “Hooray for Boo­bies” album. Gods­mack was CRAZY. It rained just enough to make it inter­est­ing and we ripped up the sod from the lawn and were throw­ing it all over. A sea of mosh­ing. it rocked. Sum­mer San­i­tar­ium Tour: Sys­tem of a Down. Powe­man 5000, Kidrock, Korn and Metal­lica. Another all day thing. It got kinda old because I only wanted to see PM5K and Metal­lica. PM5K kicked a whole lotta ass. Metal­lica was…interesting. Het­field had fucked up his back and wasn’t there, so Jason did the singing, and the gui­tarist from Sys­tem of a Down played with them. Kidrock even busted out the turnta­bles. Once in a life­time event. I still don’t know whether I liked it or not… Metal­lica: They gave a free con­cert since James wasn’t there. THIS WAS TOTAL METAL. I got an extra ticket and took my friend Brian with me. Our seat were in the bal­cony directly across from the stage. The speak­ers tried to take off my head it was so loud. I think my ears bled and I rup­tured my spleen. I loved it. The Smash­ing Pump­kins: I saw their 2nd to last con­cert ever! Total tran­scen­dence. Touch­ing, mov­ing, exis­ten­tial bliss. Crappy seats though. The Toad­ies: The best 20 dol­lars I have ever spent. I wanted to get to Bogart’s early so we could get in good posi­tion. We did. I spent the whole con­cert hold­ing on to the grate and singing along at the top of my lungs. After­ward, I made us go around back and get their auto­graphs. It was well worth it see­ing as they broke up a month later. Xfest 2k1: I don’t remem­ber all of the bands but here is a good list… Linkin Park, Sta­tic X, non­point, Live, Ramm­stein, Our Lady Peace, and a bunch of oth­ers. Sta­tic X was intense as was non­point, Live is always good. I was in the mosh pit so long that i was soaked with my sweat and the sweat of oth­ers by the time I left. I got kicked in the head four times, pro­tected a hot chick from get­ting tram­pled, and helped some strip­pers over the fence because they prob­a­bly wanted to go get it on with the bands back­stage. Live brought me back from the dead. I was exhausted by the end, but that was well worth it.