The Raveonettes: Interview/Feature (Boston Phoenix, 1/09/09

Kicking the habits: The Raveonettes change (for a change)

I can't be the only one who, asked to name the most face-melting guitar moment in the last couple of years of recorded music, would point to the 1:57 mark (and onward) of "Aly, Walk with Me," the opening track on the Raveonettes' 2007 release Lust Lust Lust. It's a loud, soul-shattering, noteless vortex of feedback that multiplies and divides like the edge of a fractal as viewed through a thousand tiny mirrors, and it occurs in what is an otherwise baleful and Nick Cavey funereal trudge.

"I'm just so happy that we were able to capture that sound with that take," explains guitarist and songwriter Sune Rose Wagner. "We used to have a lot of songs back in the days before we recorded that were very dissonant, but I think we felt that we wanted to be more of a melodic band and to have a nice melody that would create tension with the noise. I don't think that we can make a more harsh noise than the one on 'Aly, Walk with Me' — it's kind of a pinnacle, for us, of the whole noise thing, that's going to be a very hard one to top. I don't know if we want to try it again. But it's a beautiful sound."

Anyone familiar with Wagner's œuvre with the Raveonettes (who come to the Paradise next Thursday) should be surprised by the idea that, having created something awesome, he's ready to move on to something different. His successful and brutally stylish rock duo exploded out of Copenhagen in the early naughts, armed with tasteful worn-on-sleeve influences that highlighted both his switchblade six-string Jesus-and-Mary-Chain-isms and vocalist Sharin Foo's Nico-esque ice-queen charm. They proceeded to churn out record after record of high quality and consistent sound. Has he become unstuck?

"I think we have done a lot of — well, I don't want to say the same things, but I think that we have taken a lot of our early influences, like '60s girl groups, Buddy Holly, Sonic Youth, and used them a lot. And I don't really know if it's interesting to keep going down that same road. I mean, I'm just as crazy about a band like the Doors as I am about Buddy Holly, even though they're completely different things. And you know, I love a lot of music from the '70s and '80s — influences that normally wouldn't show up in our songs."

Early on, the Raveonettes put self-conscious constraints on their work: their first EP, 2002's Whip It On, is, as it says on the album cover, "recorded in glorious B-flat minor," and their follow-up LP, 2003's Chain Gang of Love (the cover of which features Wagner and Foo done up in '50s Wild One gear), is "recorded in B-flat major"; neither record offers any song that surpasses the 3:15 mark. As with the Dogme 95 movement of filmmaker and fellow Dane Lars von Trier, these limits were imposed to focus the duo's creative energies. "Without constraints, you run the risk of having the whole thing fall apart. It's more of having creative constraints on yourself — and that's what we wanted. We always strived to be something other than an ordinary rock band."

Over time, however, the ordinary caught up with them. "I think that in the beginning we did an incredible amount of touring, and it was very unhealthy. We ended up playing a lot of shows that we didn't really care about, and I think that, you know, people could see that! I guess now we have to rebuild our reputation as a live band. Fortunately, we're totally into touring now, and getting a lot better. I'm enjoying it now, but for a while when we were on tour all we wanted to do was sit at home and write pop, you know?"

Wagner isn't kidding about sitting home writing pop: the band's current bicoastal set-up means that "I'll write songs at home, and when I have songs that I think are good for us, I'll send them to her [Foo] and get her opinion on them, and she'll say what she likes about it and what she doesn't like about it." While he's writing the songs alone in New York, Foo is raising her newborn baby on the West Coast. It's proved to be their greatest challenge. "To make the new album, first off we need to have discussions," Wagner continues. "Discussions help Sharin and me come up with something interesting. I do miss, sometimes, being in the same city, because you can resolve things much faster face to face."

The four EPs they released in 2008 showcase a looser outfit willing to experiment not just with noise but with dancebeat tropes (as on the Sometimes They Drop By EP) as well as trance and synth work (as on the Beauty Dies EP). "Yeah, it's nice — doing the EPs, we felt like we could pretty much do whatever we wanted to do. Like this song called 'Young and Beautiful' [off Beauty Dies], which is very much an '80s song with a keyboard line in it. The good thing about that is that you don't have to have 10 or 12 songs that have to be consistent together. You can write whatever comes to mind, whatever you're in the mood for. I like both things, though: the freedom of the EPs and the challenge of making a proper album."

Those shifts to moments of pure psych on Lust Lust Lust were a turning point in Wagner's getting back into the swing of playing live again. "For that record, I used the same set-up that I always use, but it's all how you work it. It's just the way that the guitars play, it comes out different every time, and I love that. It's what's so great about playing live. When you're playing loud, you never know what it's going to sound like. The way the room is, the way you stand — I love the way you just never know."

THE RAVEONETTES | Paradise, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | January 15 at 8 pm | $16.50 | 617.562.8800 or www.thedise.com

Crooked X: Interview (Boston Phoenix, 1/09/09)

Your New Favorite Teenage Rock N Roll High School Metal Music Machine

Before I climb onto the enormo tour bus of Oklahoma modern rockers Crooked X to conduct an interview under the watchful eye of their management, I meet up with them at a Dunkin' Donuts, and witness their drummer, Boomer, ask his road manager, with a straight face, if they have Egg McMuffins here. Now, I suppose you could be rolling your eyes here at Spinal Tap excess and common-man-out-of-touch-ness and whatnot, but keep in mind that Boomer (and the rest of Crooked X) are all 14 years old -- so pardon them for their child-like naivete. Because really, what did your freshman-year high school rock band sound like? And had you done tours with Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper before you were Bar Mitzvah-age? Like I said, management (and parents) were in the room when I talked to the band, so I couldn't get the skinny on any illicit tour activity -- but honestly, these kids seem way too focused on rocking the world and making it big, in that order, to really be distracted by the high life. They've been doing this since they were 8 and 9 years old (!) -- so while other kids their age are playing Rock Band, they're recording songs that get on to Rock Band. And rocking the nation one auditorium at a time.

DB: Tell me how the band started.

FORREST (vocals, guitar): Me and Boomer knew each other since we were in the womb. We've grown up together: we played on the same football team, and we hadn't won a game all year. Both of our dads coached the team, and they were talking and they were like "Well, my son plays guitar, does your son play drums? Let's get them together and let them have some fun." So we went back to Boomer's garage and learned some Metallica and AC/DC songs.

JOSH (bass): The whole thing slowly built, and we didn't know it while it was happening. We were just having fun.

JESSE (guitar, vocals): We weren't really thinking about, you know, getting songs on the radio, when we started. We were just getting together, on the weekend, you know-- I don't know, man, we just love it, we love playing together.

DB: What was your first show like?

FORREST: Our first show was my sister's birthday party, four or five years ago, I think it was fifth or sixth grade. After the show, we thought we did awesome, we thought we were the stuff. Then we saw the video and we were like "Oh, we have a lot of work to do."

JESSE (guitar, vocals): We've definitely grown together as a band -- we practice now four, five, six days a week, three to four hours a day. The longest we've ever taken off is 10 days in the last four years.

DB: Tell me about your first single, "Rock And Roll Dream": it sounds a lot different than your other, more metallic tunes.

FORREST: That song, that's kind of our singalong song. We have a lot of heavier stuff on our album, kind of Southern metal, but we needed some song that would give us some leverage, and "Rock and Roll Dream" is kind of the song that all the little kiddies will sing along to, so that's what that song's about.

BOOMER: We wrote that song needing, like, a hook, because every big band out there needs a hook in their song to at least make it on the radio, so I guess you could say that that's our radio song.

JOSH: We're hoping that song will get our other songs out there, you know?

DB: You guys are 14 years old and you do this band full-time: what was the decision like to take the band seriously at such a young age?

FORREST: It was tough because we had to sit down and say "Is this what we really want?". We knew that there was gonna be a lot of sacrifice, and there are a lot of things that we're not able to do that most kids do, like have a social life at school! But on the upside, we're doing things that other kids may never do, so we're growing up in a different way.

JESSE: We're very fortunate to be in our position.

BOOMER: When we were first starting out, my dad and Jesse's dad told us "Alright, if you guys want to get serious, do it now and we'll book you shows and stuff; if not, you can be a garage band and make it like that." And we all agreed that this is what we want to do, this is how we want to make our living.

Factory Records: Communications, 1978-92 (Boston Phoenix, 1/06/09)

Whether it's the martial beat of Joy Division's "Transmission," the drudge rock of A Certain Ratio and Section 25, or the industro-sample ranting of Cabaret Voltaire, the whole Factory Records stereotype of thin, earnest men in long raincoats complaining about the cold and the damp to absolutely no chicks whatsoever over frenetic machine-made beats is with us for a reason.

But somewhere between 1978 and 1980 (or between disc one and disc two of this useful and illuminating compilation), something happened at Factory to loosen things up — whether in the E-damaged party insanity of Happy Mondays, the soaring and anthemic vision of New Order, or the baby-step bliss of (gasp) early James, you begin to hear young, uh, proud Brits having fun and consolidating an increasingly powerful new-wave æsthetic.

This particular collection is worthwhile not just for the single versions of the classics but for the way it shines light on the lesser lights of the Factory roster, from Crispy Ambulance's motorik mope punk to the languid romantic swing of the Railway Children to the worldbeat proto-glitch of Quando Quando. And the absence of American proto-electroclashers ESG (licensing issues are cited) is more than made up for by the one-song-on-each-disc spotlight glut of sad-sackers Durutti Column, who remained, from the beginning to the end of the Factory saga, the label's flagship act.

Year In National Pop: New Attitudes (Boston Phoenix, 12/22/08

Are we fated to pretend?

Music is a drug, as they say, distorting perception and shaping reality into æsthetically appropriate patterns and themes. In heady times like these, it can be a real trip to look back through the past year and see what our musical idols were telling us about ourselves all along — whether showing us our most craven inner id, or echoing the cynicism that grows in our hearts as we react to the madness around us. As MGMT said in one of the most beguilingly mind-bending pop moments on record this year, "We're fated to pretend."

The interface between reality and fantasy is almost always a war zone in contemporary rap, but this year it felt as if the fantasy were ready to snap. Rap's sonic frontier shifted radically, as the legal hazards of sampling meant that most rappers had to get by with synths and beatboxes. Whereas KANYE WEST's new digital sobfest 808s and Heartbreak faltered, other rappers were able to make spare production work. "It ain't frontin' if you got it" is a line uttered in two Top 10 rap tunes this year: LIL WAYNE's "A Milli" and T.I.'s "Whatever You Like," both straightforward odes to being rich and getting laid, in that order. T.I.'s song is particularly epic and seductive, if only because its brazen fantasy is so tawdry and false: when he offers to "gas up the jet tonight and you can go wherever you like," he seems to forget not only the then-$4-a-gallon gas tariff but also his own ankle-cuffed house arrest.

"Whatever You Like" was eventually dethroned from the #1 spot on the Billboard "Hot 100" by another T.I. smash, his duet with RIHANNA, "Live Your Life," a song equally obsessed with the twin goals of reaching for the stars and making that paper, with, at the beginning, T.I.'s somewhat contradictory spoken exhortation to "stop lookin' at what you ain't got and start bein' thankful for what you do got." T.I.'s success here hinges on his understanding that the goal of a pop song is to put the zeitgeist in a blender and hit "puree." "Live Your Life" does that with gusto — did I mention that it's dedicated to "all my soldiers over there in Iraq"? Of course, it doesn't really matter what you're singing or rapping about if you have Rihanna. Which may explain why "Live Your Life" was one of three #1 hits Rihanna had in a year where she didn't even put an album out. The 20-year-old Barbadian is the bellwether of a trend in superdivas where the ability to get a tell-tale sing-along hook on the radio is more crucial than the ability to display a multi-octave voice or manufacture lyrical introspect.

If there was one constant in 2008's pop sweepstakes, it was the rapid ascent of female solo artists willing to toe the line between pop diva and electroclash queen. The ubiquity in 2007 of Daft Punk and Justice seems to have emboldened a new generation of producers to harshen up the beats of dance pop and add some grit to tween pop. How else explain the jolting dance rock of, say, MILEY CYRUS's "Fly on the Wall" (on the otherwise turgid Breakout), or BRITNEY SPEARS's über-catchy "Womanizer"? The thing about diva pop is that as pop music (somehow) becomes more flagrantly sexual, the hand tips toward female artists who know how to channel that sexual energy into a dance vibe. Which means that even an ode to being cheated on (like "Womanizer") or a diatribe against an ex who couldn't commit (like BEYONCÉ's tribal detonator "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)") can be a banger if there's enough sass and 'tude thrown in.

This new attitude also opened the door to newcomers (with the right producers). I was particularly impressed with a number of production jobs by French electro-shocker SPACE COWBOY, who worked magic for ennui-laden British tartNADIA OH (with her offhandedly slut-tastic "My Egyptian Lover" off her Hot Like Wow album) and especially rising starLADY GAGA(whose album title The Fame could be prophetic if enough people hear glam-slam-thank-you-ma'am smashes-in-waiting like "Starstruck," "Just Dance," and "Poker Face"). Of course, the story of the year in terms of sassy chicks being provocative isKATY PERRY, who turned her back on her strict religious background just long enough to pen her ode to making out with another girl as long as her boyfriend doesn't mind, "I Kissed a Girl."

Meanwhile, the more accessible acts of the underground seemed intent on reanimating the corpse of the '80s. M83's lauded Saturdays = Youth whooshed listeners back to their respective proms with its John-Hughes-soundtrack-that-never-was. New Zealand oddball Pip Brown a/k/a LADYHAWKE put together a stunning pastiche of invented '80s-isms, creating anthemic dance pop that rocks hard and mopes harder — like Bananarama fronting Depeche Mode. And São Paulo players CSS continued to party all over the world on Donkey, with their increasingly sophisticated synth/guitar rock/pop carried aloft by lead singer Lovefoxxx's mix of innocent ineptitude and charming viciousness. Brooklyn'sGANG GANG DANCE departed from their formless morass of wordless space jams to merge sparkling washes, weightless euphoria, worldbeat-inflected gaiety, and sex-starved dance-floor whump on Saint Dymphna.

When pop music is at its giddiest, heavy metal can be depended on to bum everyone back down to earth, and the newMETALLICA record would do just that if it weren't so thrilling to hear these dudes defiantly back in the saddle again. Sounding like the by-product of a series of stern talkings-to, Death Magnetic sees Hetfield, Ulrich, and company return to the Black Forest guitar romanticism so painfully missing from the ugly-sounding records they've pumped out over the past two decades. If they're still coming at you with songs about suicide, war, depression, and anger, at least they do so within the confines of tightly arranged jams and unbelievably gratifying waves of rockitude. But whereas Metallica got real, the rest of the metal world continued to get more unreal.AMON AMARTH and the SWORD continued in the vein of 2007's top metallers, High on Fire and Mastodon, constructing elaborate mythologies to deepen their prog-metal labyrinths. The result is accomplished stoner thrash with song titles you can barely pronounce (e.g., the Sword's axis-shifting single from '08's Gods of the Earth, "Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzepherians").

And whereas metal has become more knotted and complex, so much of what used to be called "indie rock" has become contemplative. The patience required of metal fans in recent years to make it through tedious works by Sunn O))) and Earth has now beset the not-quite-rock world. Plodding gorgeousness permeated new works by indie luminariesBEACH HOUSE,PORTISHEAD, and the BUG, to name a few. Meanwhile, the runaway success this year of newcomers FLEET FOXES — with their winsomely anachronistic CSNY-meets-Appalachia — was a resounding victory for the twin indie virtues of preciousness and perceived authenticity. But I was most impressed with the back-to-nature lushness ofMERCURY REV's Snowflake Midnight, wherein the band used programmed beats and a myopic obsession with the natural world to shed their previously annoying Flaming Lips–isms and discover an X'd-out bliss. It's like catharsis on tape.

Katy Perry: "Excuse Me, But What Was Going Through Your Mind When You Bought That Ringtone?" (Boston Phoenix, 7/16/08

Last week I interviewed a woman named Katy Perry. In late June her single "I Kissed A Girl" was the #1 song in the country, I think: I mean, there are now so many different charts and whatnot, who knows what the real #1 is. Plus, I never saw the cassingle for the song anywhere, so I couldn't tell you what physical presence the song has. I do know that in prepping for my interview and doing some research, I realized that a lot of people on the internet think that she is satan incarnate, which I can almost understand (although she was super nice and I think her new record rules).

A review I found of her new album on allmusic.com ended with the following kiss-off: "She sinks to crass, craven depths that turn One of the Boys into a grotesque emblem of all the wretched excesses of this decade." Whoa! Personally, if I was managing an early-20's female pop singer, I would encourage her to do things to further represent the "wretched excesses of this decade", if only because doing so usually means that you've hit a cultural zeitgeist vein and that would, I assume, mean $$$$, right?

A day after interviewing Ms. Perry I was at a drive-in theater in Central New York's Leatherstocking Region, in line for popcorn behind a gaggle of 12-15 year old girls, when one of their cell phones rang: and guess what the ringtone was?



I suppose a grumpier dude than myself would probably at this point go on a tirade lamenting the inevitability of the ringtone as the ultimate format of musical product in the future-- but really, is there anything more tiresome than endless discussion of musical formats? What I find funnier is that I almost stepped in to say "Hey, I talked to that woman that sings your ringtone yesterday, imagine that!"-- but it occurred to me that besides the obvious letch factor that would be involved in such a move, I would imagine that the girls would probably be pretty non-plussed anyway: who cares? Does anyone really want to know who sings that song, or what she's like, or what her musical ambitions are, etc? Do people really care about that sort of thing any more? I'm generalizing here, but still.

In talking to Ms. Perry, I asked her about her cover of The Outfield's "Your Love" (which appears as "Use Your Love" on her UR So Gay EP which preceded the actual album). My asking about this song was kind of a trap, in that I had seen a few interviews where she discussed why she covered the song: sure enough, I got a pretty canned answer that was almost word-for-word the same as this one here:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dmzmspt4_CM

I like the part where her label told her that she had to do a cover, and I really like that she is blunt and honest enough to just tell us that her label told her that she had to do a cover. *And* that she just wanted to do a song with some kind of mass appeal. Her cover of "Your Love" is pretty awesome, she definitely makes it her own, and I can see why she left it off the album: since she considers herself a songwriter first, putting this song on the album proper would pretty much torpedo the record, since its awesomeness smokes the rest of the rekkid.



I'm sure an essay could be written about how her 80's recidivism here is in line with that decade's echoing of the "wretched excesses of this decade", but a decade ain't nothin' but a number, right.

Achieving "Satori" (At 192 kbps): Flower Travellin' Band and the slow overturning of the classic rock lexicon (Boston Phoenix, 7/09/08)

Is it just me, or has the classic rock color guard been going into over-drive with the Top 100All-time 500 Greatest Guitar Songs Riffs Lists of Awesome Bob Dylan Awesomeness moves lately? Don't get me wrong, I loved I'm Not There as much as the next guy who came of cultural age in the post-1984 classic-rock-is-everything rockist landscape,but I mean, come on. I can't be the only one who senses a certain desperation at work here: The Man can roll out all the Scorcese-directed Stones/Dylan bullshit they want in order to mythify the 60's, but good luck getting people to continue buying the re-re-re-re-remastered catalog of these old vets, esp. in the internet age. And *especially* when Web 2.0 means that blog after blog after blog rolls out, pulling the blindfold off the classic-rock-addled newb.

I mean, seriously: do you have any idea how much awesome shit came out in the 60's and 70's alone? And on major labels? And in, say, Japan? Somehow while we were forced to watch the 40 bazillionth media genuflection towards The Beatles and Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin (all awesome, don't get me wrong), due was never given to a whole world of insanely incredible music that was, say, made on major labels during the 60's and 70's but has never made it onto classic rock's15-song-a-day playlist. Or to put it another way: why is it that I've never heard Dark of Sir Lord Baltimore on ZLX, but I heard *this* 10 times a day?

Aaanyway, the point here is that if you go to google, type in a genre of music you are interested in, and follow it with "blog" and "download", or something like that, and surrender a few hours of your life, you will soon realize a) that there are more incredible albums made in decades past than you ever had any clue, and that b) you can very easily *shhh* listen to them for free, if you want to and you are open-minded enough. For myself, that meant not only finding out a shitload about so-called "world music" (which prior to the web I only knew as "Peter Gabriel music"), but also continually mining for 60's and 70's prog/psych/proto-stoner records.

And what I found was that, in a perfect world, my childhood obsession with Led Zeppelin should have led me to unearthing Flower Travellin' Band's Satori, or Elias Hulk's Unchained, or Buffalo's Volcanic Rock. I dunno: it seemed in the 80's and early 90's that, Velvet Undergound aside (for some reason they were the one "obscure" act that one was allowed to know about), a typical music geek was supposed to burrow downward into the Dylan discography instead of sideways to find more and more awesomeness. And that inevitably led to side projects of famous classic rock bands (see: Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, that sort of shit), or bands that were composed of associates of famous classic rock artists (see: you know, Gram Parsons, that sort of thing). Again, all well and good, except that it would have been nice to know that if I liked Black Sabbath, I might have liked Lucifer's Friend and Necromandus.

Well, luckily for the budding music dorks of tomorrow's today, none of this is true anymore. So my misspent youth caring about the Traveling Wilburys won't be repeated by today's more intelligent children, who can so easily get into the real deal stuff. Why wasn't there someone there when I was younger to tell me "Look, I know that 'The Loco-motion' gets old really quickly, but trust us when we tell you that 'Sin's A Good Man's Brother' from Closer To Home proves that Grand Fund Railroad were one of the most righteous rock bands of all time"?

Anyway, to put this in terms that fit with the Rolling Stone hegemony, here's what I would consider the Top Eleven Albums Of Righteous 70's Rock I Discovered Within The Last Couple Of Years On The Internet That Proved To Me That I Knew/Know Absolutely Nothing About Music:

1. Flower Travellin' Band: Satori (1971)

I've said about all I have to say about this album here, but seriously: maybe the greatest rock album of all time.

2. Buffalo: Volcanic Rock (1973)

In college I had a cd promo single by the Screaming Trees that contained a hidden track (typical 90's alterna-CD-move in retrospect) that a 12-minute long jam that sounded like it was probably called "Freedom". What I didn't know until recently was that it was a cover by 70's Australian rock gods Buffalo. What I further didn't know was that the album that it comes from rules hard front to back, and that instead of wasting my youth listening to, I dunno, whatever CSN album "Southern Cross" is on, you know, the one with the incongruous space aliens on the cover, I should have been rocking out hard to this. Also, "I'm a Skirt Lifter, Not a Shirt Raiser" from their next album, 1974's Only Want You For Your Body, is as awesome a song as it is a song title.

3. X: Aspirations (1978)

The rest of the stuff on this list is somewhat, how shall I say this, "hippie music". Not this record. And no, this isn't the band fronted by Exene Cervenka featuring Howdy Doody on guitar; this is a band from Australia, and they released this masterpiece whilst that other (arguably inferior) X was getting all the headlines in the Northern Hemisphere. Two things that rule here: 1) the first ten seconds of the first song, "Suck Suck", wherein you have a rhythm section that makes the Jesus Lizard sound like slackers led by a guitarist who makes Andy Gill sound like a well-mannered session dude, and 2) penultimate tune "Waiting", a dirge time-bomb with a mid-tune scream that, IMHO, beats "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" for best rock scream ever. Seriously, where was this album all my life. Proof that punk hegemony is just as crusty and lame as classic rock hegemony: how many times do we need to hear a rundown of how great the Ramones and Blondie were, while records like this and The Wipers' Youth Of America are left out of print and unloved?

4. Groundhogs: Thank Christ For The Bomb (1970)

One of the most truly anarchic rock albums I've ever heard: although rooted in some kind of blues/folk idiom, when this thing runs off the rails it makes "out" bands like Hawkwind sound tame by comparison. The title track is one of the most frizzling anti-war anthems ever.

5. Left End: Spoiled Rotten (1974)

Mid-70's Cleveland yobs who awkwardly straddle a line between hard rock theatricality and what-would-become-punk ferocity. If you like this you'd probably like Sir Lord Baltimore, and that sort of thing. They are absolutely ridiculous but so nasty and awesome. Album opener "Bad Talking Lady" is just retarded, in the best possible way.

6. Cargo: Cargo (1972)

This record is all instrumental, sort of prog-meets-jazz-y, and made by Dutch people. Oof, sounds awesome, right? But it is! Seriously, this is an amazingly smoking album, just some incredible guitar workouts that never veer into cheese. It's closer to Curtis Mayfield than it is to, say, Weather Report, if that makes any sense.

7. Elias Hulk: Unchained (1970)

So many of these bands/albums I find myself describing as "retarded", is that a musical turn-off? I dunno, I don't find any of this stuff any more lunkheaded than "The Lemon Song", you know? Right? Anyway, this record is fucking retarded, in the best way. Drum solos. Riffs on top of riffs. Ugly British dudes back then must have felt like they were on top of the world or something. This sounds like if the dancer from Happy Mondays went back in time and cloned himself and formed a metal band in 1970, or something like that.

9. Dark: Around The Edges (1972)


Okay, I'm fudging a little here, since this one I didn't discover through a blog recently, but through a friend that found this on cd years ago. It blew my mind then, because it was so incredibly great, and so weird, with such incredible guitar work, and I had never ever ever heard of it. And all I could think was "There must be ten hundred zillion records out there like this, but they just aren't on cd or anything". And I was right. But seriously, "Maypole" on this is the fucking jam. Who names their band "Dark"? So fucking genius.

9. Luv Machine: Luv Machine (1971)

Imagine if a band today could play something even a zillionth as insane as "Witches Wand", from this album? The rest of this record has its dated moments, but holy shit when this band hits it. The guitar playing is so weird and rumbling and inept-yet-slaughtering.

10. The Nazgûl: The Nazgûl (1976)

In the days of my youth I thought that Robert Plant knew how to make an effective LOTR allusion; of course, it hadn't occured to me then that 15-minute doom/gloom/dread ambient epics by a band called The Nazgûl was about a zillion times scarier and more awesomer. Listen to this record on headphones in the dark, if you dare...

11. Elektriktus: Electronic Mind Waves (1976)

One spends so much of one's 20's looking for music as mind-frying as possible (well, "one" does if "one" is "me")-- if only "one" had been able to find this record earlier on. Track 3, "Power Hallucination", is pretty much the pinnacle of music-as-nightmarish-entrances-to-hell. No drugs necessary. The mystery of this band is somewhat diminished when you find out it's just some Italian guy from the 70's, I had an image of ten or twenty dudes in cloaks recording this in a chapel whilt wearing wire-rim glasses and slowly stroking their fu manchu beards. Oh wait that's Tangerine Dream except they are only three dudes.

P.S.:

I intended this piece as a post-script of my sidebar on this Boris article, where I listed some indispensible Japanese rock albums of the past 40 years or so. I had to leave a lot of awesomeness off, of course--especially from the 70's, where there is a literally limitless batch of awesome records: the most painful cuts I had to make were definitely:

1. Flied Egg: Dr. Siegel's Fried Egg Shooting Machine (1972)

2. High Rise: Live (1994)

3. JA Caesar: Kokkyou Jyunreika (1973)



4. Blues Creation: Demon & Eleven Children


Also, you should definitely check out Julian Cope's Japrocksampler site, where I cribbed so much science from.

The Concept Band: A Boston Tradition (Boston Phoenix, 7/02/08)

Ah, it's summer, the time when school is out and Boston's rocker-aged population puts down their books and starts dreaming up hypothetical bands with crazy gimmicks that will take Boston (or at least PA's Lounge) by storm. Having trouble coming up with a High Concept project that will, maybe, perhaps, join the vaunted ranks of The Bentmen, The Upper Crust, Kaiju Big Battel, and a million other Boston Idearock pioneers? Here's a few to get started:

EASTER ISLAND
- band members all wear 3-foot styrofoam Easter Island heads on their heads, and ever song is a heavy metal testament to the power of Easter Island
- hand out those hawaiian flower necklace thingys
- acquire opening slot on Slipknot tour

MNML
- 10-member band all play songs that consist of single notes repeated forever with no build or anything
- all posters, album covers, websites, etc are all black with any text in courier font as small as possible

BOOK CLUB
- every song is an Iron Maiden-esque Cliff Notes adaptation of a book into power metal
- new song every week, play song live, discuss themes afterwards in musical rounds
- first song: "A Separate Peace"
- first gig: Newton Mobile Book Fair

THEME PARK LAND
- put together 4 or 5 bands, and instead of them playing, say, the Mid East Up one after another like a bunch of trad rock dudes, they all set up in different corners of the club, with sound partitions, and play at once
- each band's repetoire is themed around, say, ADVENTURE, or PIRATING, or FOREIGN LANDS. admission to the show gets you a map
- oh, audience has to wait in long lines
- "You must be x inches tall to enter"

TRDNGSPCZ
- skinny dudez press play on their laptops and then in fast-motion remodel the stages of boston's most famous local bar band dives
- first gig: TT's

THE BOSTON OIRISHES
- band comprised of paper-mache replicas of america's favorite irish stereotypes, fronted by the lucky charms guy
- at mid-set audience gets to spray band and everyone else with beer**
- set-closing singalong to the song they do in the middle of "Titanic", you know the scene

**not real beer

On second thought, don't steal my ideas, kid!