I can only assume that associating an album with a particular moment of time is a collective experience. Sleater Kinney's The Hot Rock encapsulates the fall of 2000, Creeper Lagoon's Take Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday will forever trap me in the winter of 2002, Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News might as well be a bona fide transporter stuck on the spring of 2004. Setting aside the apparent affinity for seasonal album association in even-numbered years, the formula for this phenomena is pretty damn predictable - obtain an album and play it relentlessly, almost to the point of physical dependence. Whether because of the ipod, the emergent tendency to download songs or merely a sustained period of insulation from new music (there was something of a dark ages for me between, say, Cat Power's You Are Free and The Kill's Midnight Boom) , it had been a while since I'd experienced that kind of obsessive temporal association with a record, until this summer's Rearranger from Mates of State. I adore this album. It's cohesive, it's uplifting without being sappy and there's a mythology to the production of something pretty but not (totally) simplistic that maybe makes you think married couples can consist of two intensely creative people in a way that provides a helpful alternative to the Sartre-de Beauvoir model that I personally find so unlikely. Or intimidating. Or debilitating. So thanks, Mates of State, for providing a model marriage and producing an album that I can presumably use for some time to transport me back to this past summer, which is becoming ever-more necessary as the cold progresses and the temptation to cocoon myself in Elliott Smith's From a Basement on a Hill (winter 2004!) threatens to ensure a low-level melancholia. Rearranger goes on the list of temporal transportation, which consists of records that matter not so much because they're brilliant (although some of them are) but because they illustrate, for me, the extent to which a relationship to an album (or band, or song) is so malleable over time. I wasn't ready to love Kid A when it came, but now I'm much closer to getting it. My affection for Pretty Girls Make Graves was much shorter than I would have thought, given my initial wave of obsession. Like books, musical artifacts come in and out of your life in weird and unpredictable ways. But even when an album that is perhaps not so great comes to be entwined with a particular period of time, it is perhaps more useful as a (psychological, emotional) time capsule, even if not as a representation of musical mastery.
Girl In A Coma are the greatest band to enter my world in many years, and have provided me with the most transcendent concert experience I’ve felt in nearly a decade.
What? How? I will answer that question as simply as possible in a minute, but let me first start off this piece by reminding you of how I don’t review bands in the traditional sense, but rather I’m eternally on a quest to find the heart of this thing we call music, and why exactly it does for us what it does. Go here.
Aside from being completely moved by their music, what I love most about GIC is that they know exactly who they are and perform as such, unabashedly. They are one of few in this day and age who truly get it. And by getting it, they are doing just about the opposite of every other new “great” or “successful” band that continues to roll out, only to be forgotten for the next fad. You see, each and every time I hear about the “next great band” I delve in, only to enjoy, but not feel completely moved by it – eventually to simply forget about them. This is a pattern that has been going on for too long. So many bands that impress, but fail to come full circle: Yeasayer, Battles, !!!, Black Kids, Fleet Foxes, TV on the Radio, Fiery Furnaces, Cat Power – all the hipsterati, albeit the dated ones. (You get my point?)
So why do you continue ignoring them? From the onset, I believe it is because you hear their Moz meets Joan Jett sound and immediately categorize and shelve them. Sure, this comparison cannot be ignored – it was Joan, after all, who signed them to Blackheart records upon hearing a rehearsal, and Moz did indeed hire them to replace an opener. I’m also seeing the trends – popular music is currently controlled by the most futile, formulaic bullshit since Limp Bizkit. Even on the metal end, this emo-thrash that dominates MTV2 is quite awful. What we’re eternally left with is the hipster world, which clearly focuses on either bands that have an unheard sound that prevent them from coming full circle, or an uber-hip aesthetic of something retro; sincere without being sincere. That said, you’re still missing it.
“And I will save - and I will save all my words for someone who speaks my language so clear.”
Perhaps this explains everything properly, as Nina exclaims in their tribute to Jeff Buckley, “Vino”, from their current release Trio B.C. I am quite the Buckley admirer, yet I had no idea they felt the same when I first stumbled into GIC some time ago - in an odd, random shout-out by Latina magazine, the equivalent of a Spanish Marie Claire, yet nonetheless I owe it so dearly for changing my life for turning me onto these women. I’ll never forget that first moment I plugged into “Clumsy Sky” from their first album Both Before I’m Gone, the moment I heard the perfection of pure blood reincarnated; the moment I was reminded I was not alone in this world, as being someone who “speaks the language”, if you will…
We continue to search out for this unknown thing that we found within the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, even Amy Winehouse, the latter being a ‘lost one’ – yet we continue to refuse to understand or embrace it. The years that have followed have created this eternity where it is so avoided that we’re left attempting to worship Bon Iver and the like, yet deep down when we look in the mirror we know the sad truth. This thing all of these life-changing bands have in common is their absolute nakedness; their unashamed attack, right in the face of the world that would normally laugh at them, yet now worship them. To delve into this would take an entire book, but it is quite indeed the exact thing that causes these same geniuses to melt down and possibly commit suicide (Buckley, Cobain, Winehouse?) and/or put up the blinders to save themselves (Yorke/Vedder).
Purity. Nakedness. Bleeding.
Think of them as early Radiohead. “Creep” - I watched them encore a punk-rock version of Creep that was much better than anything I'd ever expect of Thom, considering the steps he’s taken to distance himself from the MTV years. When Radiohead came out, I honestly saw them as a tawdry imitation of U2, despite loving “Creep”, and honestly, that's exactly what they were, which is probably why Bono still hates them, as well as why they all spend so much energy attempting to distance themselves from the fact, never playing anything from 'Pablo Honey', albeit rarely at best.
So here we are with Girl in a Coma. The hipsters will write them off, perhaps because they have major label support, perhaps because they don’t understand their specific brand of cool, but honestly because they’re being true in a false world. They're not trying to be cool, they are simply doing what they do. More importantly, and the very same reason we’re in a void of great bands nowadays, they’re coming from the true depths of love and pain, just like the greats you remember that no longer exist. While there are a few bands that come to mind presently on the same tip – most notably Regina Spektor, the Arcade Fire and the Twilight Sad – all of these bands are quirky, to say the least. And they also (Regina excluded) seem preoccupied with fitting into their hipster acceptance.
I realize the jaded would automatically place them into the "all-female" category. Here is where they differ:
my problem with the majority of "all-female" bands is nothing more than agenda. For too long, here is how "female-fronted" has played out - psychologically speaking, something atrocious happened to you, and you’ve never been able to overcome it - to the point that you start your all-female band. You become political and serious, eventually spending much of your time on why men are the inherent evil in the world – how women can do just as well, if not better. I don't disagree. Look, I love a lot of bands like this, but not in the same way; they’re simply hung up on their own agendas, missing out on the ultimate beauty in life. As important, creative, and inspiring as it may be, I simply can’t fully embrace the ultimate fault that is their specific hatred toward the world, as I cannot understand it. Apologies riot grrls, but I'm a sweet guy that loves women and doesn't fit into your 'schism', so to speak.
Call me the hopeless romantic. It sucks to be here, but I am.
This is where Girl In a Coma rise above everyone. There are no agendas, no ostracizing, nothing of that sort – they don’t preach, it’s as simple as that. They simply are the real deal, doing what they love, as themselves. Perhaps this is why they’re not the biggest band in the world today, although if I ruled they'd be up there...
I’ll be painfully honest with you all. I’ve only ever been completely moved to tears by a live performance twice in my life. Never having seen Buckley or Radiohead, but then again, I’ve never seen almost all of my ultimate heroes. The first time I ever cried during a live performance was back in 2000, at Carnegie Hall. The young man I was there to see was none other than Pandit Ravi Shankar, and within several minutes his notes were reshaping my entire existence.
Not to insult those who understand Ravi, but I cannot begin to put them in the same realm, but that’s not the point at all. The point is that they alone brought it out in me again, several weeks ago at the Knitting Factory. Yes it is a different level, but it is the same principle – that of the absolute. The pure, naked bleeding I mentioned above. While Jenn and Phanie rock the fuck out in their own distant worlds – never attempting to strike a pose or look cool – there is Nina, in a trance, reminding me of a cross between Kurt, Jeff, and Mike Patton – that soul which is entirely possessed and encapsulated within herself, emitting the beacon of absolute truth we all possess, all the while emitting it as an angel from above with the voice she’s been blessed.
This young woman rips my entirety to shreds with every breath, as she should with you. The tragedy in it all is simply in the fact that I had to hide this, as I noticed that a few of the spectators nearby, in the largely gay crowd, were indeed making fun of me, which raises an entirely new set of questions to be asked at a later date. The fact that I broke down transcended weakness - it owed much more to pure beauty and hope than anything I've felt in recent years.
Allow me to draw another comparison, if I may. GIC are the modern-day Misfits. Yes, I said it, the Misfits – simply without the aesthetic need to impress you.
What were the Misfits, really? They were simply a group of true misfits, never fully appreciated until their demise. They embraced the angst of punk rock, that of being true outsiders, yet could not shed Danzig’s painful reality of the absolute – he was so infatuated with his versions of truth – those being the likes of Elvis, Roy Orbison and such - yet they were torn between the two worlds, in the exact similar manner as GIC. To embrace beauty, despite being so pissed off for being so misunderstood. This remains the ultimate quest, it seems. It remains entirely too complicated to fully embrace what is within, so we must mask it with at least a hint of abrasion. What everyone who loves the Misfits or Danzig realizes, yet never embraces, is the simple fact that he is indeed pouring out his soul, or 'crying', if you will. This is what all of the greats do, yet we're incapable of accepting or embracing it - always to shielded in protection, in avoidance, in fear of being hurt.
Yet being hurt is what 'it' is all about. Asi Vida.
These women are the perfect example of something we all believe to be dead, and that is the hope for the future. They are my current hope for humanity in this world of short attention-spanned idiot technological snarkers.
They are so good you must embrace them on your own, with an open, vulnerable heart - as these words cannot begin to bring justice to how I am truly impacted by them.
Maybe the important thing is not happiness, but peace—not to feel joy, but calm, comfort. Maybe when we’re overwhelmed, the mission should be to simplify rather than to cheer up. Maybe it doesn’t really matter, at any given point, whether we’re happy or sad.
I just moved from a fairly central and bustling part of the city to a quiet neighborhood several miles north. I used to be thirty seconds away from coffee and Gatorade and breakfast, and now I walk ten minutes just to catch a bus. This was not by design. The move was strictly out of financial necessity. It was not an easy decision, but it was an important one—and a depressing one. It was depressing because the very necessity of it made me realize the structure of my life, the schedule by which I must currently abide, is so prohibitive of my ideal that it almost makes free will seem like a joke. But then I started walking around my new neighborhood in the wee hours, and even though it’s only a few miles up the way, the sky seems bigger. There are cottage-decibel crickets and midnight birdsongs and cool, breathable air and, yes, that great and imposing celestial blackness. I’ve never known a better way to imbue myself with sadness than to stare at the night sky, and I mean that in the best possible way. I cannot bring myself to feel even slightly significant when I place myself within the context of a wholly indifferent planet and universe, and that, too, is a good thing. Not indifference like the Free Market model, but indifference like the way you feel when you find yourself in the ocean, and you realize all you can see is water—no humans, no mountains—and you realize you are at its mercy, and that your only choice is to yield to nature. It’s a profound and consuming sadness, but life is also probably never simpler than in those moments. You roll around in the grass with your dog and it occurs to you that if you’re both lucky, he might live another ten years. You wake up next to your girlfriend with the sun in your eyes and you realize that, for whatever reason, all the love in the world won’t keep you together forever. These are the things you remember, not because they make you happy, but because they don’t.
Sun Kil Moon’s Ghosts of the Great Highway is probably the saddest album I truly love. It is, on one level, an album about a bunch of boxers who died young, long before their respective times, but really, it’s about the ways in which we deal with pain—painful memories, pain we caused, literal physical pain. The first song, “Glenn Tipton,” opens with a series of scattershot childhood recollections:
Cassius Clay was hated more than Sonny Liston Some like KK Downing more than Glenn Tipton Some like Jim Nabors, some Bobby Vinton I like them all
Kozelek’s acoustic finger-picking dances in the background while he muses on the similarities between himself and a father he may or may not have known, and remembers a long-dead coffee shop owner named Eleanor, and laments the first girl he ever loved who broke his heart. (The latter earns the title of his “first victim.”) This is all vapor, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of a song. These are the changes that haunt you, but that you can’t let yourself forget, either.
“Carry Me, Ohio” is a murderer—a love song in which a man out of love pleads for the woman he’s disappointed (and maybe even destroyed) to, somehow, be taken care of. (Which is to say, it’s not that he doesn’t love her, but that he can’t love her back.) “Salvador Sanchez” comes out of the gate fuzzy and goes through the aforementioned litany of dead boxers, gifted fighters, all of whom “fell by leather,” each and every one a tale of promise and life wasted, and yet who, when considered together, form a sort of fraternity that would be enviable if not for the initiation rites.
The centerpiece, though, is “Duk Koo Kim,” each of whose fourteen minutes weave and swirl and break and crash in a mirror of the fourteen rounds it took for the American Ray Mancini to kill the South Korean boxer for whom the song is named. Kim had a tough time making weight for the fight, but managed nonetheless to control Mancini for several rounds, opening up some brutal wounds before delirium set in and Mancini started working him over. Mancini finally dropped him in the fourteenth round and Kim almost immediately fell into a coma, dying four days later. A few months later, Kim’s mother killed herself. Less than a year later, so did the referee, who many thought a failure for not stopping the fight sooner. The song, of course, is not explicitly about the fight and its aftermath, but it still manages to encompass what one would imagine to be the emotions of all involved, the guilt and hopelessness and longing for the dead and gone. And still, after some sort of lifetime in which every sticking memory is an assassin, the song ends with the pastoral:
Birds gather 'round my window Fly with everything I love about the day Flowers, blue and gold and orange Rise with everything I love about the day
Walk with me down these strange streets How have we come to be here So kind are all these people How have we come to know them
You live with sadness. Sometimes you earn it and sometimes you’re saddled with it, but it’s the life you build around it that determines whether or not it’s a punishment. The album ends with “Pancho Villa,” an acoustic reprise of “Salvador Sanchez,” just to remind you one last time that there’s an eternity to be a ghost to others, but there’s only so much time to have the good fortune to look back sweetly on the ones that you have known.
Summertime is when I get all sorts of nostalgic, and break out all of my 80s Hardcore shit. Why? Because those records - every last one of them - hold some memories that are buried underneath all this "Adult Responsibility" crap I have to deal with now. And most of those memories are of the "Get Your Grin On" variety, the kind of memories that cause a chain reaction inside of a cat like me that makes me want to start another band and rock the shit out of some skulls.
Thanks to the Magic & Glory of The Interwebs, all of those out-of-print records CAN be found - you just have to know how and where to look. I've found stuff I never in my life thought I would hear again. A lot of the bands I grew up on in those hazy 80s summers have reunited, touring the country much like they did back in the day, although the crowds now are much older, balder, and not as apt to go off into a slam-dancing feeding frenzy (which, when you really think about it, was part of the appeal of those shows back in the day - Total Release).
Fuck it, enough talk.
This is precisely what I'm riffing on right here:
Seriously, now - what band can top the Bad Brains? The intensity. The tenacity. The feral and visceral reaction. The chaos. You cannot resist them. The fury with which they attack their instruments has never been surpassed or even replicated. Masters of The Craft.
I'm pretty sure the only band that has ever come close to what The Bad Brains were capable of were The Cro-Mags, who I was blessed enough to see live when they toured with Motorhead and Megadeth(although, Megadeth played a very abbreviated and angst-ridden set, and were kicked off the tour that night) at an indoor soccer arena on the west side of Phoenix. They fucking leveled my punk ass. Hell, it's been over twenty years, and I still haven't seen a band that created as much energy and movement as these motherfuckers did. They did more than push air - they vaporized it.
Another band that knocks the wind out of me every time I throw on their album, is Swiz. They were a monster of a crew - Shawn Brown is probably the most underappreciated and unheralded vocalists/lyricists from this era of hardcore. Swiz was a DC/Arlington area band, made up of kids who used to skate and go to shows together. They wrote terse, staccato jams that blast right into your mind, with melodies you'd never think would stick, but they certainly do. Brown was the original vocalist for Dag Nasty - another band that stirs the Memory Pot.
And, seeing as how I've already touched on the DC area...
Minor Threat brings about a flood of halcyon memories for me - driving around on a Friday night in the middle a carload of Xavier girls(Phoenix's Catholic Prep Academy for girls, and my main source of teen action in the 80s), singing along to these massive anthems of Youthful Rebellion of The Highest Order. What could truly be more rebellious than a group of kids who disavowed alcohol, drugs, and casual sex? Obviously, I wasn't grabbing hold of that Straight Edge lifestyle/ethos* - but the band surely did kick out the jams, as evidenced by the clip below.
One of my funniest/oddest/warmest memories from that time period involves Minor Threat coupled with the use of "drugs." I was in a band called Grave Mistake, and we used to rehearse at my house, because my mother was awesome and supported me in whatever I wanted to do. We were a bunch of goofballs who wanted to be as punk as we possibly could, even though not one of us ever went hungry or wanted for much back in that era - hell, our drummer's father was the President of a growing national airline at the time.
We were rehearsing for some warehouse show that we somehow got on the bill for. It was like our third or fourth show, with our first being opening up for Social Distortion at a VFW Hall. We had a habit of picking a cover song and destroying it as our intro - even at house parties. We thought it was funny, and sometimes we would pick a song from one of the bands we were playing with/opening for - just to spite them. I had been huffing ether all day off of the bandana I kept in my back pocket(White Trash!), and our singer, Iraj, decided he wanted us to play "Straight Edge."
Let's just say that it ended up morphing into something totally different and retarded, with me falling all over myself and knocking over some amps. Iraj realized that we weren't going to be covering any Minor Threat anytime soon, and all was well with the world of Grave Mistake. Good times.
ANYWAYS...
One of the bands we really loved a lot was R.K.L.(Rich Kids on LSD) - these fuckers were retardedly adept on their given instruments. Their album, Rock And Roll Nightmare is still one of my favorite records of all time. We would always try and emulate what they were doing, but we were such fledglings that we couldn't pull off all of the nuances and intricacies of the shit they were playing. I never got a chance to see them live, which still bums me out to this day.
A band that I did get to see live was SNFU. These Canadian madmen came barreling through Phoenix in the summer before my senior year of high school, touring behind their If You Swear, You'll Catch No Fish album(if you don't have it, you should get it - trust me). I had only heard a couple of their songs before seeing them, and they completely blew me away. I'm not sure if there is any way to explain what makes them so special without explaining that their frontman, Mr. Chi Pig, has to easily be one of the most charismatic and dynamic cats to hit a stage. This dude was all over the place, making faces, jumping around, and looking like he was having the time of his fucking life.
And really?
Any band that can pull off a song about losing one's memory in the fashion shown below should be in heavy rotation on everyone's portable Jam Device.
I'll probably be posting more of this "Memory Lane" type of shit this summer, as every time my iPod lands on something that causes my heart to jump back in time, I feel an urge to spew about it.
I'll admit to being someone who has difficulty admitting to liking country. I usually lump it in with hip hop and polka as a genre that is probably okay for other people to enjoy and support, but starkly uninteresting, perhaps even inapplicable, to me. This is partly because like a lot of post-punk retired riot grrls, I have trouble separating enthusiasm for music from identifying with a community, and I just don't much identify with street life, polka parties or cowboy culture.
Nevertheless, I've found myself utterly obsessed with the music of Jessica Lea Mayfield. I suppose it's also possible to categorize Mayfield as folk. Or ambient. Or soul. Or bluegrass. But rather that get into a debate on the pros and cons of music taxonomies, I'll get to the part where I talk about how much I like Mayfield's music. First things first, she's as cute as a button, looking like a woodland sprite gone hay field. In the midst of getting to know music by the Black Keys, I found that they'd worked with her on her album, which instantly appealed to me because it has a kickass name: With Blasphemy So Heartfelt. Mostly though, I like her because her voice just blows me away. It's twangy and fallow and heady. It's true that her lyrics sound like a 19 year old girl dealing with heartbreak for the first time, presumably because she's, you know, 19 and maybe dealing with heartbreak for the first time. But I think setting aside a place for simple music, especially when it's pretty, is a worthwhile thing, because simplicity is by definition protected from pretension. Partly for this reason, I think, I guiltlessly hum and sing (and occasionally belt out) her lyrics for weeks at a time. Her song "I Can't Lie to You" was at one point so embedded in my mind that I realized I'd been singing it continuously for the better part of an hour while cleaning my apartment. Maybe because she's been performing since she was eight, her live shows are delightful. During last year's CMJ, I saw her play at Maxwell's, and she plays some songs live on NPR , which, in addition to containing some stellar solo songs, includes the revelation that she plays shows with her dad's guitar, which may or may not be the cutest damn thing ever.
So maybe liking Jessica Lea Mayfield doesn't count as bravely branching out into new musical boundaries. She's not so far away from certain songs by bands firmly entrenched in the femme punk lexicon (Fuzzy is the first band that comes to mind, but there's also a raft of musicians who love to reclaim country songs for their own uses, like the Dollyrots) and I don't think she'll haul me away into a raging enthusiasm for Lee Ann Womack or Dolly Parton. But there's something about her unapologetic cuteness and authenticity that makes it easy to be unapologetic about liking her songs, even if it strays from a general preference for angrier, more complicated music.
I'm not going to lie - as much as I am a product of the ethos and community aspects of the punk/hardcore scene, I motherfucking love me some metal.
For real.
When talking about metal, it is important to know the source, right? Like, Conan knew Thulsa Doom had stolen his father's sword - hence, why he was determined to destroy Doom, and reclaim the sword that Crom had helped his father forge. Conan WAS metal.
This is why my initial post about metal shall be about Black Sabbath, arguably THE SOURCE for all kinds of different types of metal. Gods of The Almighty Riff, you can trace almost every memorable "heavy" riff of metal right back to them, if you've paid enough attention.
I remember the first time I heard them - my father had an old worn-out 8 Track tape of Paranoid, and I accidentally slapped it into my little portable player I had, thinking it was my Beach Boys' tape. I think the first song I ever heard was "Hand Of Doom" - which is still probably one of my favorite songs of all fucking time. Such an eerie intro, all slow and spooky, with Geezer Butler's loping and teetering-on-the-verge-of-madness bass line, coupled with Bill Ward's clicky little drum thing he did so well. Imagine being all of 10 years old, sitting in the garage and hearing every ounce of what your future sounds like when the rest of the song comes crashing in around you - Tony Iommi's monolith of a riff, and Ozzy Osbourne screeching his incantation about the evils of heroin abuse...which I knew fuck all about at the time - I just thought to myself "ohmygodthisisnotthebeachboyssssssss!!!"
I've been a fan ever since.
Instant Karma:
BLACK SABBATH - HAND OF DOOM (LIVE 1970)
ANYWAYS...
When trying to decide on the Black Sabbath album to expound upon, it took me nary a nanosecond. I am very fond of every Black Sabbath album during the Ozzy Era - the band was just fucking monstrous and the tension within their ranks comes out beautifully in the recorded output. But one record stands the fuck on out for me -
Sabotage (released in 1975) is a fucking masterpiece.
The album kicks off with the loping and spacey drone of "Hole In The Sky" - a song with some of the most biting and gorgeously doubled Iommi guitars on it, so much so that you can hear the strings being ground into the frets by his plastic-covered fingertips(Iommi lost two fingertips in an industrial accident at the age of 17). Ozzy sounds like he's ready to rumble, kicking out lyrics with an acerbic twist like this couplet- "I'm living in a room without any view, I'm living free because the rent's never due," setting us all up for the record's overall theme - the group's terrible struggle with the pressures of their own fame and the deterioration of their musical union.
Then this glorious album does a quick shift into a pretty little Iommi Spanish-styled guitar-type thing, "Don't Start(Too Late)," for all of forty-nine seconds before the roaring multi-tracked guitars of "Symptom Of the Universe" come blasting out, probably birthing the chugging madness of thrash/speed metal in its wake (we can argue that one until I die - for me this riff is Patient Zero for the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, Thrash Metal, Speed Metal, Power Metal, Stoner Metal, and whatever else fucking type of metal you want to conjure up to talk about). The song just fucking pushes air, a tornado of calliope riffs, pounding drums and Ozzy, whipping up a frenzy until yet another beautiful little half-time acoustic interlude comes easing into the middle of the maelstrom. And as soon as you find yourself nodding your head along with this tiny oasis within a sandstorm, Ozzy starts sweetly begging you to "find happiness together, in the summer skies of love" - Goddamn these motherfuckers were at the top of their game.
Up next, is the slow-burning madness of "Megalomania" - a song that lyrically indicts the entire fiasco of fame. The song starts off all dark and moody, and by the time Ozzy spits out "I sold my soul to be the human obscene," it's pretty evident that he's over all of us, and he just wants everyone to back the fuck off and let him be a freak on his own terms. As soon as the song shifts, Iommi's guitar pulls an auditory shapeshift and starts to sound like a fucking hissing snake - riffs swirling and building to a crescendo as Ozzy continues to beg for his solitude and sanity, singing lines like - "Why doesn't everybody leave me alone now?"
"The Thrill Of It All" comes rolling on in afterward, opening with a chiming and madly-distorted Iommi intro before it's main rhythm kicks in - a chugging piece of metal with plenty of room to breathe between Bill Ward's kick drum. Almost bordering on being a rap-metal song (1975, bitches!), Ozzy starts singing about feeling like Jesus himself needs to come correct and call off his dogs (Black Sabbath was a band that was obviously hounded by religious nutcases, which, when coupled with maniacal fans - you'd write songs like this too, my friends). Hell, he even calls The Man out himself with "So come alive, you know you're magic to me." Yet another in a canon of songs following the band's theme of wanting to know why, as English lads forging everlasting metal, they still had to suffer from Catholic Guilt.
Tying things back to Conan The Cummerian, the instrumental "Supertzar," can easily be synched up to any scene in Conan The Barbarian in which Conan is either crushing his enemies, seeing them driven before him, or hearing the lamentation of their women. This is a great song to roll another joint to while grooving, or even a nice slow jam to make sweet love to. Trust me, as I have been digging this album for many moons now, and I know what I am talking about.
"Am I Going Insane? (Radio)" (The title of which caused some confusion due to the "(Radio)" part, which lead people to believe the song was a radio cut or radio version. However this is the only version of the song. It should be noted that the term 'radio-rental' is rhyming slang for 'mental' - lifted right off Wikipedia, suckers) starts off with a little bit of a synthesizer riff, and then goes on galloping off into the loony sunset of Ozzy's simmering sanity (or lack thereof). There are buried guitars in the mix, snaky little leads that are almost mocking the cadence and timbre of Ozzy's crying out ("If I don't sound very cheerful, I think that I'm a schizo brain"). When the song starts to peter out near the end, crazed laughter starts to come to the front of the mix, reiterating the fact that Ozzy has indeed lost what was left of his mind.
That crazed laughter leads us right into the album's closing track, the scathing and angry "The Writ," a song that I sometimes hear in my head when trying to navigate my way through The Great Unwashed Masses here in The City on any given day. As the laughter fades, we get a brief little bass line from Geezer before we get our faces melted off when the rest of the band kicks in. You can taste the disdain in the riff; another snaking and distorted beast that feeds back and hisses during the rests. Iommi must have had a ball in the studio cutting this record (Ozzy reportedly tried to quit during the recording of Sabotage, citing Iommi's dicking around in the studio as a waste of time that drove him insane), because there are guitars all over the place on this song, doubled and tripled in places where you would never think to do such a thing - AND IT WORKS. And again - the band pulls yet another sneaky little interlude out of their hat, with this one sounding as innocent as some lost piece of soundtrack to some weird 1940s film with a girl singing about how she's lost her way in the world, only to kick back in with the heavy riffing and a rideout that beats any other rideout on any album, ever.
So there you have it. My favorite Black Sabbath album, blow by blow. I'll cop to the fact that in my youth I smoked a fuck-ton of reefer and listened to Sabotage - not that there's anything wrong with that. This album certainly played a huge part in my understanding of music in general, and if you've read this far - you might as well go out and pick the fucker up.
Ladyhawk came to my attention in a way that pretty much guaranteed I would investigate their music with the utmost interest: they were recommended by Carrie Brownstein on her NPR blog Monitor Mix. If Carrie Brownstein were to recommend that her readers change their names to Schnarfflepopper and move to an island populated by obnoxious Yorkshire Terriers, I'd probably look into it. Continuing my surrender to modernity's methods of discovering new music, I hopped over to their Myspace page to check out what Ladyhawk had to offer and I was almost immediately won over. "I Don't Always Know What You're Saying" is essentially my definition of a clutch rock song - simple but compelling lyrics, vocals that parallel some stellar guitar bits and lots of heartfelt yelling. I am a sucker for heartfelt yelling. I promptly went out and purchased their album, because despite my visits to blogs and band websites, I'm still of the opinion that when you like a band, you should support them by buying their albums. Somewhat unpredictably, my favorite song on the album is their finale, "Ghost Blues." It isn't often that a nine minute song winds up my heavy rotation queue, but "Ghost Blues" is slow and pretty and sad and although there's not out-and-out yelling, there's enough of a desperate drawl to meet my quota for songs that imply wrenching angst. Shots, their second album, is a much more well-rounded, thought-out album and since it's only their second effort (their self-titled first album has "Drunk Eyes" and "The Dugout" to recommend it, but overall doesn't measure up to Shots) I'm definitely looking forward to any future works from them.
I'm about to make a statement that might shock/disturb/freak out anyone who grew up on a healthy diet of punk rock/hardcore. Some might even consider what I am about to say to be sacrilegious, but I urge you to put down your torches and allow me this much, okay?
There are bands within the construct of punk rock/hardcore that are completely untouchable. Bands that, no matter what anyone says, will always - make up part of some punk's Musical Mount Rushmore, a foundation upon the likes of which all other bands will be judged. This is a natural occurrence, really. We're all guilty of doing this, especially when it comes to our own feelings about artistic things - subjectivity be damned, we all have our Sacred Cows.
It took me a while to get into Black Flag.
As much as I love and appreciate Black Flag now, another band altogether helped me to understand them more back in the day. Black Flag really fucked up my perception of music, most notably Greg Ginn's often grinding and off-kilter guitar murdering and rhythmic beatdowns - the shit was just off-time and caused my internal metronome problems. Lyrically - I was down from the get-go. I grokked what they were on to. But it took a little nudge from some other cats from California to turn the lights on in my head...
The Power Of Expression, released by the mighty BL'AST! in 1986(originally released on Wishingwell Records - SST Records reissued it in 1987 ), might possibly be the most complete and definitive California hardcore album, from the opening note/intro to the closing silence.
The first time I ever heard The Power Of Expression, not only was my mind fucking blown clean, but I finally understood Black Flag. Unfairly tagged as nothing more than "Black Flag Jr.*" - this band just fucking lays waste to everything. I had read about them in Thrasher(partly to blame for the label), and I'm pretty sure my friend Brian Engel had told me he had heard them, and that they were right up my alley.
Sure as shit - he wasn't lying. BL'AST! sounded like a violent car crash - all twisting metal and heaving chunks of machinery. BL'AST! connected the dots immediately, as if they were a hybrid form of early Corrosion of Conformity, Black Flag, & Black Sabbath. The guitar sound was murderous - Mike Neider(great interview with him over at Double Cross Webzine) was using a similar set-up to Greg Ginn's, but instead of single line-style riffs, he was pumping out huge-sounding overdriven chords, which totally spoke to me as a fledgling guitar player.
The guys in my band at the time(Grave Mistake) were bugging out on me, because I totally started aping BL'AST! when we would try and jam on new material. We were just kids, so thinking they would be able to follow along in that vicious, herky-jerky manner ended up being really disappointing for me. The Power Of Expression was totally one of those badass albums that flipped a gang of switches in my musical brain. Even now - 20 years later - when I throw the fucker on, it just juices me up.
STIMULI
BL'AST! - 1987-2001(from a documentary that I have yet to track down or see...)
Look Into Myself - Live @ Fender's, CA 1987
*A claim even Henry Rollins made in his book about his years on the road with Black Flag, Get In The Van.
When I think of bands as a vehicle for something more than just the music, the first band that pops into my head is really the one that matters the most - The MC5.
I wasn't even born yet, but Norman Mailer pretty much encapsulates exactly what hearing The MC5 for the first time felt like for me -
"For one of the next acts it hardly mattered~a young white singer with a cherubic face, perhaps eighteen, maybe twenty-eight, his hair in one huge puff ball teased out six to nine inches from his head, was taking off on an interplanetary , then galactic, flight of song, halfway between the space music of Sun Ra and "The Flight of the Bumblebee," the singer's head shaking at the climb like the blur of a buzzing fly, his sound an electric caterwauling of power corne out of the wall ( or the line in the grass, or the wet plates in the batteries) and the singer not bending it, but whirling it, burning it, flashing it down some arc of consciousness, the sound screaming up to a climax of vibrations like one rocket blasting out of itself, the force of the noise a vertigo in the cauldrons of inner space - it was the roar of the beast in all nihilism, electric bass and drum driving behind out of their own non-stop to the end of mind."
The 5 were not even on the same planet with the other bands of their era. I mean, for sheer visceral magnificence, The Stooges(who also cut their teeth in Detroit, Rock City - playing shows with The 5) were around to help them push the envelope a little. But The 5 had fucking chops, whereas The Stooges would just pummel you over and over again with a riff until your heartbeat synched up with it.
I remember the first time I heard them - I was wearing the shit out of The Damned's Machine Gun Etiquette, which has a smoking cover of "Looking At You" on it. My friend Chris Karch(who was deaf, but knew way more about punk rock than anyone I knew back in 1985 - he would blast his stereo so loud your balls would shake. I finally adjusted all his EQ levels for him once, since he had everything set all throaty and mid-range. Once that bass was set right, he just laid on his floor soaking everything in with a huge fucking grin on his face. It was the least I could do for the guy who introduced me to the glory of so many bands I'll be writing about on this here site.) pulled out this record(Kick Out The Jams) and handed it to me. All he said was "you gotta go to the source, Sean."
I took that record home with me, put it on my turntable, plugged my headphones in, and was immediately and utterly destroyed.
The now-famous opening invocation/testimonial, asking the assembled peoples if they were "gonna be a part of the problem, or a part of the solution" was a sneaky set up for what was about to blast right into the core of my brain. This was the most glorious shot across my musical bow - a band as a musical unit, unified as one being, all limbs flailing, soaring distortion, crazed soul-like harmonies and rhythmic beauty. This record kicked my ass all over the place. I had never heard a live recording where it sounded as if the amps were about to burst into flame before. I had never heard a band pushing through chord changes like they were going to drown. I had never heard anything like The MC5 before.
Obviously, I immediately sought out everything they had every recorded. This was long before the interweb, so I invested a lot of time hitting up every record store, asking stoned clerks in Ramones shirts if they knew where I could get my fix of The 5.
I tried to find books and whatnot, but there was nothing really out there. In 1986, it was as if they were a ghostly thing that nobody wanted to discuss. I was starting to think it was some kind of conspiracy, where all the cool kids were keeping me locked out of the clubhouse until I learned the secret handshake or some shit like that.
Eventually, I found a really warped and fucked-up copy of Back In The USA at a garage sale. The woman was shocked at how elated I was, and gave me the fucker for free. It would barely play on my turntable because it was so fucked-up, but I took in each note like communion.
At this point, I was able to find some shit out about The 5 - they had their own political agenda, The White Panther Party, started by their manager(John Sinclair), which was billed as "a total assault on the culture by any means necessary." These fucking guys were the real deal. Under surveillance by the FBI, harassed and beaten by local police - it didn't matter to The MC5.
They were going to bring the music to the people no matter the cost.
I'm not going to go too much further into their history and their inevitable downfall. There is plenty out there to read up on all that shit. To me, The MC5 were the initial spark, that first flickering of a band on a mission - torchbearers for others to follow, like At The Drive-In, The Nation Of Ulysses, and to an extent Refused. These bands learned the blueprint of what they became from The MC5, even if they were unaware of it - no doubt about it.
My suggestion to you, is that you seek them out for yourselves. If they don't move you, you ain't movable.
Everything you ever wanted to know about The MC5 is over at The Gateway.
STIMULI:
Friar's Club Aylesbury, U.K 2-11-72
Clip from Sonic Revolution(A documentary about The MC5)
This one is brought to you by none other, than my BrotherFromAnotherMother, Rob DeWalt. Roberto hails from the glorious Santa Fe compound of disenfranchised AmeriKKKans. He is an all-around bad mofo, who somehow conned the good people of The New Mexican to let him write subversively under their banner. Enjoy -
It was the summer of 1982. I was a 12-year-old, skinny, shy kid sitting in the back of my grandfather's Chevy Impala. Circumstances beyond my control (divorce, let's be honest) found me on the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I spent the next 5 years living with my father and his new bride — a wealthy artist with deep ties to American political history and the darker side of upper-rank Catholicism.
My brother was already in Santa Fe, stabbing at his own identity in the usual ways young teenage boys tend to: defiance; ignorance; and MUSIC. The hardest thing I had to add to the sibling music repertoire was Joan Jett & the Blackhearts' "I Love Rock 'n Roll" and TOTO's "Rosanna." I went from eating brisket on Sundays after church in a modest brick house, to slurping up tofu burritos in the comfy cradle of New Mexico's creative elite. That first year was an eye-opener, to be sure. I was exposed to a plethora of new music, but one particular album made a lasting impression on my psyche — and my taste in music — for decades to come. And it wasn't even a full-length album. Far from it.
The "Nervous Breakdown" seven-inch EP (SST Records) by Cali punk outfit Black Flag was originally released in 1978, and carries the distinction of being the VERY FIRST release for that ramshackle-cum-revered label. Singer Keith Morris, guitarist (and primary EP financier) Greg Ginn, bassist Chuck Dukowski, and drummer Brian Migdol blew my mind with an explosion of angst and raw instrumental power, with the longest song — the EP's title track — lasting just over two minutes.
Perhaps sliding from a devout-Christian environment to one that encouraged individuality and creative exploration was just what the psychiatrist ordered, but to be sure, after a few years, the punk aesthetic began to wear on the hippie parental units — and hard. But I cherished that record, and thank it for opening my eyes to a DIY movement that sparked a generational surge in "owning one's own shit." I hope that's something the new generation of punkers deems suitable to explore.
My "Nervous Breakdown" EP was stolen from my bedroom in 1984, while I was off at summer camp developing a taste for queer culture and boys in Ocean Pacific corduroy shorts. I was smart enough to take a cassette of "Nervous Breakdown" with me to summer camp that year, and to quote Lance B., a fellow camper who also ended up on the right side of hardcore and e-mailed me in 2006:
"Dude, who knew you could say so much in so little time? I wish my parents had that filter … you know, the one that lets everything through, and doesn't judge? Fuck, to be young again, and knowing that…"
One of the cool things that will eventually pan out for this here site - is that we'd love for people to write guest posts about records that changed their lives. Because that's really what the site is all about - sharing with people the glory of the music we hear buried deep in our heads/hearts. The records that changed our perception of what music is/was/could be. The records that inspired us to unleash whatever we hold inside of us. The records that kill us, even after not hearing them for ten years.
The following is the first in a hopefully long line of guest posts. This one comes courtesy of Adam "The King" King, a dear friend of mine from Phoenix. Enjoy...
Songs About Fucking changed my musical life. Highlights of my (embarrassing) musical awareness leading up to my discovery of the 1988 Big Black masterpiece include: Weird Al Yankovic, MC Hammer, Blink 182, NOFX and the Locust. It was at this Locust-peak that I first came across Songs About Fucking.
There is one record store in the metro Phoenix area that specializes in "abrasive" music. I asked an employee at this store (Eastside Records, in Tempe) to recommend something along the Locust --> Swing Kids path, following that direction. He suggested Steve Albini's output in Rapeman and Big Black.
I bought Songs About Fucking, listened, and Aldous Huxley knocked on my third eye and my doors of perception opened up to a brave new world; one where the walls between (unorganized) noise and music (organized noise) became windows separating the two...
Contrived metaphor and allusion aside, Songs About Fucking is, simply, a brilliant record. From the way everything is distorted on every song (except maybe the kick and toms, maybe) to the way they introduce vocal effects into punk-scene music in '88 to the way the album opens with the (arguably) most "complex" track to the noise-brilliant guitar antics of Albini, there is no arguing that this album changes things for (some) people.
