The Exploding Ticket- Empty Black Boxes

Genre: Electronic Lo-Fi Slowcore Spoken Word
Year: 2010
download here

Placebo- Once More With Feeling: Singles 1996-2004

download here

If you don't already have some Placebo in your music collection, you are late to the party. And this isn't just any party, this is an androgynous Ketamine ridden S&M extravaganza. Placebo has been described as “the glam Nirvana” or something like that, as music critics of the 90s understood all music involving electric guitars and punk-esque rhythms to be some sort of rip-off of Nirvana.

The thing about Placebo is they tend to make very,very strong singles. However, most of their albums, with the exception of their Self-Titled are not all that strong overall, they just have a few amazing singles. This album take all those tracks you would skip too on each of their albums and puts them one after another. Now to be fair, there are plenty of really strong Placebo songs I would have liked to see on here that aren't. That being said, this is definitely an “if I was stuck on a desert island with just a few albums” album for me. Every song in this collection is fantastic. It's Placebo at their mopey bisexual skinny art-kid best.

Why Some Guy Named William Bowers Can Suck It

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5455-we-shall-all-be-healed/

Every time I read a Pitchfork review of an album I like, it makes me want to kick the reviewer's teeth in. This goes for both positive and negative reviews; even when they give an album a thumbs up it's always for the wrongest reasons. But sometimes, some pompous indie philistine who's never actually created a damn piece of art in their life rises to trash a great artist for petty and pretentious reasons. For instance, some lovely fellow* by the name of William Bowers wrote a scathing review of The Mountain Goats album We Shall All Be Healed. Everyone else who's listened to that album have better let out a horrified gasp just now.

The reasons for his disdain are primarily something about how great it was when only the hipsters like him had ever ordered Mountain Goats tapes through the mail. But he periodically reels that in to give basketball-coach like advice as to what the artist should have been doing.

Take this gem-
Linda Blair Was Born Innocent" proves to be a tease of a title, and fails to analyze how her most famous film was about the church's demonization of female sexuality; it's a ho-hum ching-a-linger about being "hungry for love" and "going downtown."

He's mad because he had an idea for a non-ho-hum ching-a-linger about Catholics that cleverly references the actress from the Exorcist. This song is not that song, nor does it have anything to do with that concept at all. What does that have to do with anything? Here's an idea, you clever, interesting and mega-referential hipster: Make that song. Consuming art does not make one an artist. No matter how much you know about obscure 70s television shows or whatever is hip these days, you ain't shit unless you actually, y'know, produce something. This guy may have made some shitty art of some kind along the way. I hope not.

I'll move elsewhere with this roast/troll shortly, but I'll leave you with this passage. Picture that kid from the front row of your Philosophy class who'd smugly raise his hand and have some “very interesting conversation” with the teacher reading this:

The rest of the album wallows in similar okayness (I am forgetting the name of the critic who wrote, inFull of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, that television's success rests in its ability to provide 24-hour partial satisfaction)

Whooooah, I couldn't remember what obscure boring-ass tome on critical theory it was that I drew this exact quote from! And it totally has everything to do with the rest of his review! I promise I'm not trying to be cool and referential.

When I started writing this I planned on scouring Pitchfork for more reviews to support my thesis, but that would require burning my eyes more on their puffed up nerd of a website. But I really can't expect to post this with only one piece of evidence. I got a better case than that, Privates.

Well, I just scoured their searchbar thing for a good ten minutes, and I have to do things like take care of my daughter, and you know, go to work at five in the morning and whatnot. I couldn't find anything that landed a KO punch quite like I wanted. That's okay, it doesn't mean it's not there, I know it is. I can smell a group that needs to wash it's mouth out with buckshot from a mile away. I just ain't got enough ammo to come in for the verbal kill right now. I'm regrouping my forces in the woods like Mao after the Long March. (OH MY GOD, HE CAN READ OBSCURE STUFF ALSO!)

So I'm not coming for the full on kill yet. The original title of this piece was going to be “Why Pitchfork Can Blow Me”. But I know better than to bite off more than I chew. Because, trust me, I know from very, very firsthand experience what kind of reptilian turd writes for a blog about obscure music that 2 people in the world care about. I'm going to have to bring my lyrical Kung-Fu for the sake of the world. The Gauntlet is down, bitches. I will crawl up your asses and shit on your brain, Privates.

PS. In regards to his smarmy opener:
Those of us who have long pursued John Darnielle's bronze crumbs will head down to our record stores today in our scarves and messenger bags, expecting an opus, but we will leave nonplussed.

I have no idea what the fuck bronze crumbs are. Maybe some sort of clever thing about leading us along with his early releases or something? But you hipster individualists may be down at the record store in your hipster uniform scarves and messenger bags, like the 12 year old goth chicks you are, but I will be there with my Drill Sergeant hat waiting for your asses so I can smoke you until I'M tired! Is this bullshit leftover from Gen X or Gen Y? I'm guessing Gen Y, as in Y the fuck weren't you all killed at birth? But, it's okay, I don't blame you. I blame your parents. You fuckin' Privates.


PPS.
I slept with William Bowers' now ex-wife. I gave her a 6.9 rating as well. Hehe.

Godspeed You!Black Emperor - F# A# Infinity

download here

GY!BE is a band that I desperately want to hate. They're pretentious, and their whole gimmick is riffing off of the same situationist-y/dada vibe that has been done over and over for basically the entire 20th century. They are the Thomas Pynchon of music. It's also worth mentioning that their frontman is exactly what you would imagine a frontman of a band like GY!BE to be like. Yep, he's a sneering hippy douche, the kind of self-satisfied slimeball who would have been a Maoist at Harvard in the 60s before selling out and becoming a yuppie lawyer. The dad from SLC punk minus twenty-five years, maybe? But I digress. But the thing is, I can't bring myself to dislike them. I also will freely admit that my scathing appraisal of their lead-guy is based primarily off of a Google Image Search and libel that I made up just now. But come on, you know I'm probably right. Can you really see Montreal loft-dwelling white-kid artists not being like that?

I am like half a zillion other uber-referential overly-read dweebs that mask some sort of nerd self-hate and/or swaggering undeserved academic snootiness by feeling an initial wave of revulsion at “pretentious and/or art-faggy things”. Let me be clear and honest right now: I only hate loft-dwelling art fags because I am very, very jealous of them. I don't want to work 12 hours a day in the sun and be poor,exhausted and yelled-at all day. I don't want to have to go to Afghanistan and live in a tent for a year. I want to live in a metropolitan loft in Paris or New York(or Montreal?) and drink coffee and blather on about post-this and that and hand-roll my own cigarettes and have sex with attractive university students with low-self esteem who lack the life experience to know that guys like me are assholes. I want to play in an apocalyptic post-rock band based out of my Montreal loft. I don't want to work for a living. I am serious as an abortion right now.

Now that my extended hipster caveat is out of the way, onto the album! If I was being exiled to Siberia tomorrow and could only bring five albums with me, this would be one of them. The Beach Boys are to California what F#A#Infinity is to empty Vancouver train yards after the bombs have wiped the slate clean. If you've ever found yourself lying on your back thinking about how awesome it would be if we all nuked ourselves to extinction, and you then became frustrated by lack of soundtrack...Well, you're troubles are over! This album does this perfectly, and I need that particular soundtrack quite often. This album is a perfectly composed drifting audio journey through a horrible alienating post-industrial world, full of desperate people, empty train-yards, used needles, rusting cars...well, basically the real world for a lot of us. I think it's interesting that all the critics immediately jump to the “future apocalypse” thing, when it's really pretty plausible that this is about the real, current world. Anyone who's done any sort of stint as a lumpenproletariat can tell you that the world doesn't sound like bubblegum, it sounds like this. The ranting homeless man, the cars whizzing along dark streets, the trains...this album could be as much a soundtrack for homeless in Detroit as it is for some fantastical “post-apocalyptic” masturbatory fantasy. I really wish there was a good synonym for post-apocalyptic, the phrase is starting to annoy me.

This album does a very certain thing and does it very,very well. If the idea of listening to dark artsy tape-loops appeals to you, you will love the hell out of this album. They do what they do better than anyone else in the business. Also, it's very worth getting the vinyl. This is a great album for vinyl nerds,and the packaging is full of sweet little gimmicks like a penny flattened by a train. I like this album on vinyl because it definitely is not intended to be listened to “track by track”. At this point, I am required by law to tell you that the first note on the album is F#, the first note on the B-side is A# and it ends with a never-ending loop.

There is a reason this album populates best album lists of critics all over. I'll spare you the witticisms and get to the point: This album fucking rules. Download it now and then go buy the vinyl from your local record shop.

Off With Their Heads - From the Bottom

download here

I wrote this a year and a half ago when I first wanted to make a music blog.

The site Go sleeveless! has a good review that uses the words misery/miserable in reference to this album 3 times in 4 sentences, which seems about right. It reminds me of Blake Schwarzenbach talking here about his new band Thorns of Life:

You mentioned the other night at the Hemlock that all of your songs are about suicide and unrelenting misery. Is that actually true?

Kind of! It’s surprising, yeah. I mean, they’re pretty joyous tunes, but they’re pretty dark lyrically.

Actually, anyone familiar with Blake's work should not be surprised. (Expect posts about Jawbreaker and Jets to Brazil eventually.) But while Blake's bands have often approached misery obliquely, artfully, and yes, joyously, Off With Their Heads is about as direct as you can get. For proof, read this comic strip about their Hospitals EP.

From track one of From the Bottom, vocalist Ryan Young's anguish is openly autobiographical. That first song, "I Am You", includes the lines: "I'll tell you why I fucking hate my life and I'll tell you why I can't seem to get it right. I'll tell you why I entertain the thought of dying all the time." Simple, straightforward, no frills: fuck everything. Though the album concerns a failed relationship, it is more broadly about a failed life.

But what elevates the lyrics above empty griping is Young's crooning and the bouncy basslines. By making these songs catchy, inclusive singalongs, Off With Their Heads invites the listener to a funeral for hope in his/her own life, and constructs a public monument to boundless misery. It loves company, after all.

The Mountain Goats - Full Force Galesburg

Pointless Conversation #34512-b
Full Force Galesburg


download here

K: So I think one cool way to think of Full Force is that it's all stories of the same couples in different forms, species and incarnations. Hence the Hindu-ish cover art. And animal songs like "Masher" and "Snow Owl."

S: If what you say is true, then the line "On the day that I forget you, I hope my heart explodes" from "Twin Human Highway Flares" has new meaning, since the speaker will inevitably forget with each subsequent death (when the heart stops) and rebirth. Are there any common threads running through the songs that would hint that these are the same people in different circumstances? Also, does this mean that the line "It's you, it's you, it's you" on "Original Air-Blue Gown" is saying that one of them is actually incarnated as "the young Cassius Clay"? Oh, why not.

In any case, if a single couple wants to visit all the places mentioned on your average Mountain Goats album, it would take several lifetimes for sure. There are a lot of lines that suggest dimly remembered better days. Hard to tell whether that's the typical Alpha Couple feeling of nostalgia and regret, or shadows of literal former lives.

I think animals in general come up more than on other albums. As symbols, more than imagery for its own sake; quasi-religious symbols, even, if you want to run with the Hindu thing. Dogs in Galesburg, etc.

It seems like we should address the title. Come to find out "Full Force Gale" is a Van Morrison song, so that's cute.

K: It's very true about the animals, and I wouldn't put it past John Darnielle as a songwriter to be so referential as to up his anthropomorphic animal content to further some sort of Hindu thing. I mean, you've heard the man talk. The presence of some god I'm too lazy to look up on the album art makes the suggestion of themes of eternal cycles of life and death and that these particular set of beings have been circling each other over and over forever, constantly surrounded by faint wisps of memory from this constant traveling, but never getting to that destination. There's constant allusions to a sort of content feeling of dread, or contented anticipation of doom. The two of them have been bouncing off of each other for all time like some sort of pendulums with paths that transect. In "Original Air-Blue Gown," I imagine one of the two in old age following the others death watching "the young Cassius Clay" and almost chuckling at catching the other in a forgotten lifetime.

But I definitely do not want to run this conversation strictly along such "Dude, think about it! Pink Floyd is TOTALLY about the Wizard of Oz" type lines. So feel free to take the ball and run in another direction.
(I like the John Madden vibe this is taking)

But,consider the text from the back of the album:

"Small red potatoes in the rich black soil. Green young trees sucking up the river water. Oranges from Spain. Rain-chute running down the side of the trailer. Islands. Paper mills all the way out in Roaring Springs, Pennsylvania. New banjo from Nashville. calandar from De Smet and Van Diest showing April on the wall, all wrong. Heading North though France for days, but never getting out. Old barn, strange sounds. Gin. Sunlight. Almost broke my own heart down there in Vicksburg. There is always an anchor somewhere. All that was left later was the vision of the two of us crossing the parking lot toward the blazing room off the interstate half an hour past Iowa over on the other side of the Mississippi. These songs are about what made that moment either possible or inevitable, depending on how you look at it."

S: Your theory reminds me of Vanilla Sky when she says, "I'll tell you in another life, when we are both cats." But I'd take any song from this album over that movie.

I want to decode the usage of wind: various songs mention "wind whistling" , "wind in your hair", "hot wind coming off the water", "floating down the slight breeze". The wind comes from somewhere or does something. It's active and effectual. Unlike the characters, it isn't tied down by geography. Maybe it binds all these separate places and in so doing gives them some higher importance. That Van Morrison song says, "Like a full force gale I was lifted up again by the Lord." It's like how the Holy Spirit descends on people as a "rushing mighty wind" in Acts.

As for the text on the back, that all-important moment in the parking lot is pretty clearly the subject of "Twin Human Highway Flares." What the fuck happened at that motel?

K: In regards to the omnipresent wind, perhaps it is like the constant cycling of life, or something to that effect? I think you're dead on with your note that wind is one of the few things one really encounters that isn't attached to a geographical place in any way. But, the wind still goes through them, and then goes elsewhere. I think your Van Morrison find pretty much proves that something like that was intended by the artist.

In "Twin Human Highway Flares"... perhaps everything all came together, and they finally saw themselves as they are and always will be. One of those very few moments in life where you realize, "This is love, and this is literally the most complete and whole as a person I will probably ever feel in my life, before it all crashes down."

I think "Twin Human Highway Flares" is the high-water mark as far as the entwined lives described in the album, and that the album ends with their rebirth in Brownsville on the final track. In fact, it's almost implied that one of the souls is complaining, "Damnit, why do we get born here over and over again?" They become individualized to find each other in the next life after "coming apart again." And that's where the album fades out. It's a pretty sentimental notion as far as a concept album, but with JD behind the wheel...Well, of course he executes it expertly and with great poetry.