THE HIVES: The Black And White Album (Weekly Dig, 11/07/07)

Swedish rock is such an odd thing-the records arrive on our shores made by handsome men in dapper suits with slick covers and immaculate production, almost as if to say, "Fuck you, America! Our socialist machine has ingested your rock culture and spit it back to you to mock you with our Teutonic perfection." There are a thousand screaming magpies rocking the fjords, but the Hives are perhaps the most successful, both in terms of popularity, and in sheer purity of intention. Forget about the talk that this record is "experimental" and features hip-hop production; this is a record that delivers dependable rock product of a high quality. What does it mean? Why all the bragging? Is it all a big gag? It doesn't matter-this is a record made to be blasted loudly in a car produced by a people who put more-than-adequate bike lanes in every town and village. Bow down, America, you are not worthy.

GENRE | TEUTONIC ROCK

VERDICT | GREYCORE

RELEASE | 11.13.07

LABEL | A&M/OCTONE

THEHIVESBROADCASTINGSERVICE.COM

Monster Magnet: 4-Way Diablo (Weekly Dig, 10/30/07

You know what they say about the tears of a clown when no one's around? Dave Wyndorf is a misunderstood rock clown, although it's all his fault: When you get down to it, he's a crooner who alternates tales of woe-is-me-i-am-passed-out-amidst-a-thousand-strippers with exultations to his own rock godliness that you can tell even (especially) he doesn't buy. Using stoner rock bluster as a subterfuge for pity-me bottoming out is a strategy as old as Stone Temple Pilots, but Wyndorf is undeniably the "real deal" if only because he is a real down-on-his-luck scumbag, and on MM's seventh full-length and Wyndorf's first post-overdose record boy is that ever true. I recommend traipsing carefully over MM-by-the-number bombs like "You're Alive" and "No Vacation" to get to the emotional core: the opening title track, with it's mix of Nuggets-era psych crunch and Eastern modality, contains this couplet, clearly sung by a naked Wyndorff, 25 tabs into a trip to infinity, staring himself down in hard judgment: "I see you kissing yourself in the mirror now/And I can tell that you like what you see/I caught you sucking the life out of me"; and the final track, a plaintive tune called "Little Bag of Gloom" is one of the most compellingly brutal songs ever written to yourself about what an idiot you are for overdosing. Most MM fans will hate this album because it has acoustic guitars in the background and is produced to be halfway listenable, and no one else will care because they've all had it with Wyndorf's shit by now. Too bad, because this record rules.

GENRE | WALLOWED ROCK

VERDICT | GETTING OVER HIMSELF, OR NOT

RELEASE | 11.6.07

LABEL | STEAMHAMMER US

MONSTERMAGNET.NET

Neil Young: Chrome Dreams II (Weekly Dig, 10/24/07)

Neil Young is a difficult man and with every new release you don't know whether you are going to get eyeball-melting fuzz guitar solos or a cringe-inducing piano ballad album with sketchy accompaniment or a play about a small town and its small town values. Chrome Dreams II is an album that does not really benefit from explanation: A lengthy album front-loaded with some very old songs that is ostensibly a sequel to a bootleg. Huh? The record also contains some tracks recorded almost 20 years ago, thus explaining why one track makes a lyrical reference to Lee Iacocca. But getting into lyrical preoccupations and all that other stuff isn't answering the question that Neil Young fans really want answered when a new CD comes out: Is there a 15-minute-long jam with Mr. Young's trademark guitar scuzz splattered all over it? Answer: yes. "No Hidden Path" doesn't have the guitar-as-grim-reaper-scythe dark majesty of "Cowgirl In The Sand" or "Cortez The Killer," but that's because this is a pretty upbeat album from a man who has, temporarily, already emptied his barrel of bile (on last year's Living With War) and is ready to contemplate the world around him with the stoned reverie of an old man persona that he continues to grow into.

GENRE | BURNT OUT ROCK

VERDICT | WHERE ALL THE COWBOYS WENT

RELEASE | 10.23.07

LABEL | REPRISE

NEILYOUNG.COM

M.I.A.: Kala (Weekly Dig, 8/15/07)

M.I.A.'s debut, Arular, was the quintessential post-9.11 pop album, in that the sexy swagger of post-electroclash diva pop was mixed with elements of Third World anti-war/pro-guerrilla sentiments, with sounds of explosions edging into the beats and vague allusions to the PLO mixing in with otherwise lighthearted fare. In other words, the mood was light but intentionally/unintentionally confused, as though assimilating these things was no big deal. In this sense, Kala is a radical shift: Whereas Arular was recorded in her London bedroom, M.I.A.'s new album was tracked all over the world, and it lends the album a darker, more serious tone. How serious? There's something about the use of gunshot effects in this record that isn't played for laughs or empty braggadocio the way it is in, say, an N.W.A. or Biggie tune. And although it was anyone's guess what the titular "$10" represented on the Arular track, Kala's "$20" is, as the song goes, "the cost of an AK in Africa." That particular tune throbs with a bassline lifted from New Order's "Blue Monday," with a chorus break from the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind." Oddly enough, the result doesn't sound like a Pitchfork-reading magpie job so much as the sound of the end of the world, where moments from the world's pop culture just float by and meet up as odd bedfellows.

GENRE | HOTT ENDTIMES JAMS

VERDICT | BONERS EVERYWHERE RISE IN PROTEST

LABEL | INTERSCOPE

RELEASE | 8.20.07

MIAUK.COM

INTERSCOPE.COM

Turbonegro: Retox (Weekly Dig, 8/08/07)

Comedy in rock isn't easy to pull off, but Turbonegro have walked the fine line between the darkness and The Darkness for 20 years, with surprisingly stellar results. Their secret weapon is not portly frontman, Hank Von Helvete, nor hotshot lead guitarist Euroboy -- but rather bassist and chief songwriter Thomas Seltzer, aka Happy Tom, whose impeccable songwriting and bizarre mix of influences and references make the high points of Retox so unassailable. The Cheap Trick/Van Halen/Dead Kennedys hat trick of opener "We're Gonna Drop The Atom Bomb" is perhaps the guitar rock track of the year; "Do You Do You Dig Destruction" mixes a new wave flanged rocker with touches of the Stooges' "Search and Destroy," flamenco, "Leader of the Pack"; and "Boys From Nowhere" is Turbonegro at their straightest (so to speak). The problem? Happy Tom's day job as a comedy writer for Norwegian television means that humor stays in the foreground, leading to songs like "Hell Toupée" (oof), "Stroke The Shaft," "Everybody Loves A Chubby Dude," and execrable album closer "What Is Rock?!" Still, even the worst Turbonegro tracks have little gems thrown in, if you're the kind of Scandinavian rock fan that enjoys sleuthing for what riff is stolen from who -- sort of a punk/metal version of being a Sloan fan, I suppose.

GENRE | SCANDINAVIAN RAWK

VERDICT | A RARE OPPORTUNITY TO LAUGH WITH NORWEGIANS

LABEL | COOKING VINYL

RELEASE | 8.14.07

TURBONEGRO.COM

COOKINGVINYL.COM

Ron Asheton (Weekly Dig, 4/9/07)

In his seminal rockist bible Rock And The Pop Narcotic, Joe Carducci states “Rock is rock and roll made conscious of itself as small band music.” It is pretty unarguable that no band did more, at least in its infancy and early rise to power, to wave the freak flag of “small band music”, or “Rock”, as Ypsilanti, Michigan’s The Stooges. Carducci also posits that an artist like David Bowie represents the “Pop Narcotic”, or the way that the biz steals the soul of the band of rock cretins by introducing them to fame, money, and blow the way that, say, 2001 introduced the monolith to prehistoric man. Bowie-damage definitely altered the course of Stooges history forever, for better or worse (both, I’d say); regardless, the original Stooges are back to re-write history and restore order and all of that nonsense. I caught up with Stooges guitarist and co-founder Ron Asheton (“You don’t know him? Shame on you!” – a rockist) on the eve of their impending US tour supporting their new album The Weirdness.


Stooges, circa 2007, left to right: Ron Asheton, Iggy Pop, Scott Asheton

DIG: What was it like getting the band back together, playing again with Iggy and your brother?

RA: For this reunion, I was a little nervous meeting Iggy – I hadn’t seen him in, I don’t know, 25 years. It was like going to meet your ex-wife to talk about your son’s graduation. Or imprisonment. But once we talked and then had some food and wine, it was like all the years disappeared, and it was like “Remember the time we did this!” And that was cool – all the stuff we did together back then really made it easy for us to reconnect now.

DIG: Has it been difficult or odd to revisit a band that so perfectly encapsulated not only your youth, and the youth of so many fans, but essentially the youthful arrogant phase of rock’s third wave?

RA: No, it’s been easy, because now everyone’s caught up, it took the world all that time to catch up! I mean, you know, back then, we didn’t really sell a lot of records. We had some fans, but… well, here’s a good Boston story for you: we opened up [in 1969] for Ten Years After at the Boston Tea Party, and I’m going “Well, it’s an odd bill, but you know, it’s music, and people are hip”, right? So we go on, and we play, we do two songs back to back, and then there’s that little pause, and it was dead quiet. Well, except for three or four people applauding, and those people came from Philadelphia, and they were the president of our fan club and her friends! So we didn’t go over very big – but now, today, all the years have caught up, people are familiar with the songs, etc. It’s really the best of all times, now.

DIG: It’s interesting that you say that, because it seems that when you were at your “heyday”, it was more of a confrontational thing, I guess, but--

RA: Yeah, the world was stiffer then. The 60’s were interesting times because it was still that us-against-them attitude, the rockers against the establishment sort of thing. But still, I mean, at the time, the Funhouse record got dissed! Now, people say “Oh, it’s a classic record”, but back then, not too many people were saying good things.

When we started, we just flubbed along, doing the best we could. We kind of just lived our lives day-to-day back then, see what happens, and everyone hopes to be successful. But you know, in the back of our minds, we knew, you know, that we weren’t Linda Rondstadt. We weren’t really going to score any commercial success. But at the same time, in the beginning, when we started, labels were just signing anyone, everybody got a shot. It seemed pretty easy to get somebody to listen to you and wind up with something.

And then somehow, it became more of a business, in the Raw Power era – Iggy’s management, they had Bowie, they had Mott The Hoople, and that was their little trip, that was Iggy’s deal. Iggy never treated us like we were employees, but we all, James Williamson also, were hired employees of Iggy’s management to be Iggy’s band, and I was like “Wait a minute, that’s business”. [Raw Power] was actually his first solo album. But now, everything’s so bizzed out, with manufactured boy bands, girl bands. There’s just so much business now.

DIG: To me, The Stooges represents, so perfectly, the ideal of a rock band as a democratic populist entity, so of course the rock and roll machine had to come in and pervert it and destroy it. Raw Power is a pretty undeniable rock album – but at the same time, it almost represents a certain fall from innocence.

RA: That’s a good way to put it – I like the record, but seeing the slow agonizing death of the band, being dumped by management, going through managers who just took our money, living on $15 a day, etc. There was no pot of gold, no pay day on Friday. I’ll go back and listen to the album, I like the song “Search and Destroy”, but it’s very bittersweet.

DIG: It seems like for most Stooges fans, you are either a Funhouse fan, or a Raw Power fan; this reunion, for obvious reasons, is for Funhouse fans. Is this reunion a kind of re-conceptualization of The Stooges as being all about the first two albums, the pre-Williamson period, kind of making *that* the definitive Stooges?

RA: This is the *good* Stooges, the *fun* Stooges.

Turbonegro: Vagabonds of the Western World (Boston Soundcheck, October 2003)

To anyone who heard it upon its stateside release in late 1998, 'Apocalypse Dudes' by Oslo, Norway's Turbonegro was clearly nothing if not the greatest rock album of the 90's a searing combination of glam-catchy choruses, punktastic full-throttle motion, Frehley-esque lead guitar work and an over-all shimmery studio sheen that did it's best to hide the incredibly sleazy, dark, and quizzically homoerotic lyrical subject matter in a package that the band labeled 'deathpunk'. It was strange, it was new, it was bold, and when the album was done you needed to hear it again. And again. And again...

Too bad, then, that the band was already broken up, and would never tour or record again. Lead singer and chief mojo rising Hank Von Helvete went MIA, amidst reports of insane asylums, drug addiction, and paranoia. A dark period set in for the rock world as Turbonegro's majestic work was soon forgotten as it became covered by the sands of time...

...Except that the rock world would not let 'Dudes' die. As word of mouth spread, the band's popularity, even posthumously, soared. And now, over 4 years later, in what can only be seen as a wave of the wand of the grand architect herself, Hank has re-emerged, Turbonegro has re-convened, and with their new album out now ('Scandinavian Leather', on Epitaph) and their last two masterworks re-issued, finally the world can witness the resurrection of this incredible rock force.

I caught up with Hank by phone at his lair in Norway...



BSC: It's been a long time since 'Apocalypse Dudes' and in the meantime, especially in America it's amazing the kind of cult following you guys have amassed. What are your thoughts on that?

HVH: Well, I'm amazed, actually. I never expected that. And of course it's cool to have a following and it's quite unique. This hasn't happened in at least 20 years, a band getting a following like that. And I just hope it will last for a while so we can come back and play more shows. I just hope we can outgrow the cult stage, to have a cult following is not necessarily a good thing, it would be cool if we could be a bit bigger than that.

BSC: Yeah, I saw you guys at the show in Hartford, CT., and one thing I was struck by was how you, on the one hand gave the audience what they wanted in a rock sense, but also were very confrontational.

HVH: Yeah, well, it's kind of confrontational, but in a friendly way. The audience has this masochistic attitude towards us - they want to be intimidated but in a safe, secure way. They trust us a lot. I think it's like making love to a virgin that really loves you a lot. She's giving up all control because it's rough to do it. It hurts a bit, but it's a good hurt. It's kind of vulgar, the stuff we're doing. And it's this huge sleazefest, but it turns out to be very pure and clean, so I guess the way we're presenting the sleaze is kind of non-oppressive.

BSC: Yeah, it was a real trip for me to see a large crowd of really normal, straight American guys with their fists in the air chanting 'I Got Erection'.

HVH: Yeah, well, it's cool to see that people can let loose and go with the flow, even for a second, and no one has to feel intimidated. I think it's the security, the safeness, the trustworthiness that we present together with the sleaze. We manage to guide them through their own dirty sexual landscape very safely, with us it's all safe, everyone will come.

BSC: How much of what you guys do is serious?

HVH: It's all serious, everything. I have this motto that if you don't see the joke in seriousness, and if you don't see the seriousness in the joke, you haven't understood anything. And that's the like the motto, the mantra we work under. So, it's not irony and sarcasm, its labeling darkness. And it's omnipotent, the things we're labeling, everybody's had the sentiments, we're just putting names to them. People are uniting themselves in the stuff we sing about.

BSC: What's 'deathpunk' all about?

HVH: We grew up with metal, heavy metal, and punk. We were consumers of the 70s and 80s rock culture that was filled with lots of glam and also the punk scene and the heavy metal scene so we were digging bands like Kiss and Sex Pistols when we were children and when we became older it was bands like Black Flag and Dead Kennedys on the one hand, and Motley Crue and W.A.S.P. on the other. When we started to play in bands ourselves, it was punk bands and hardcore bands. After a while, we realized that we had forgotten the metal thing from our childhood, so we tried to play punk with heavy metal-sounding guitars, so in the beginning we called it 'metal-punk', but that became like a really stupid label for it. So we have that Slayer aspect in it too, lots of industrial and black and death-metal sounds we mix that together in our music, and we called it 'deathpunk', because it became quite unique, there's nothing like it, it's not punk, it's not metal, it's not glam, but at the same time it's all of them, it's a very including kind of rock. We have lots of references to our idols, and we actually manage to play a bit better than our idols too. But now we have been thinking of renaming 'deathpunk' to try to call it 'rainbow rock', because that will be like a more positive name. You know, 'punk' has a lot of aggression in it, and 'death' is very dark-sounding. If we rename it 'rainbow rock', it will be more positive.

BSC: In a lot of your songs you have very dark or vulgar topics but the music is so catchy and memorable; there have been times where I've been listening to songs like 'Rendezvous With Anus' from 'Apocalypse Dudes' on my walkman on the bus and I have to fight the urge to sing along out loud! What do you think of this dichotomy between dark or vulgar subject matter and the accessibility of your music?

HVH: I think you're correct, it is dark, the stuff we're singing about is dark, but it's not negative, and the stories we're telling always have a happy ending. David Lynch has the same philosophy: describe darkness, label madness, but always make sure to have a happy ending. The suns always sets in the pacific, you know?

BSC: You guys broke up in '98, and were essentially not a band for four years; what brought about the res-erection?

HVH: I think that to look at Turbonegro's history, and to let it all end with 'Apocalypse Dudes' and the band breaking up is not a very interesting story to tell. If I would live to become 50 and see that that was the end of Turbonegro, I would feel an unfulfillment. I think we're just fulfilling our destinies here, and it was always lying in the cards that if I survived my drug addiction, we would make another album. And I think everybody in the band was just waiting for that to happen.

BSC: Okay, the album is called 'Scandinavian Leather', what does it mean to you guys to be Scandinavian? What about Turbonegro could only happen in Norway, what's different with what you do than what an American band would, because you guys are definitely a Norwegian band, a Scandinavian band!

HVH: Well, I guess some parts of the American consumer culture have been ignored in America the last 20 years, but kept alive in countries like Norway, a society that is very Americanized in a way, and some things that have been embarrassing for Americans have been kept alive here, and looked upon with respect, and when we come back to America with a band that is so glamorous, and actually very Americanized, we're hitting a nerve with the Americans, and we're bringing back something to the Americans that they have forgotten, or tried to forget. I think when Americans listen to us they become a bit proud of belonging to a rock nation, because America is in fact a rock nation, and the best rock has come from America, I think. I prefer American rock and American punk to British rock and British punk, and we play our rock in the Scandinavian/American style. I see Americans, people in the American rock scene, becoming proud of their own icons.

BSC: Interesting, especially because a lot of the most recent American rock revival, if you want to call it that, seems to have gotten its cues from what was happening in Scandinavia a few years before, like it had to be handed back to America.

HVH: Yeah, we're handing it back. I think it's good that the American rock has been interpreted from my people from the outside. We've been standing on the outside looking in, while the American rock people have been standing on the inside looking out for something better, but there was nothing better out there. American rock is the best. We are taking American rock culture seriously, and we think it's an excellent culture, and it's an excellent cultural phenomenon and it's one of the best things in the modern western world, I think, in itself.

BSC: You guys wear your musical influences on your sleeve, which is pretty bold; a lot of bands seem to try to see what they can get away with. What's the line between homage and rip-off for you guys?

HVH: You know, a writer for The Independent, this British daily, told us he thought we were unique because we're a band with lots of references without being a retro band, and we were always, in our references, paying tribute to our heroes, and we ended up being better, playing better than our heroes, and that was a compliment that I cherish. Coming from him, that was really cool. I think that we're not looking back with our references, we're actually aiming forward. We're kind of distilling the good stuff, we're not bringing anything back to the past, we're taking stuff from the past and conserving it for the future.

BSC: Yeah, I can see that; the music on 'Scandinavian Leather' is almost a rock history lesson, cramming the best hard rock moments of the last 30 years into one album. I'm also impressed with some of the musical territory you guys go into on this record on a lot of songs a real punk or metal-sounding song will veer into more sensitive territory, and for me this shows off that you guys have a real breadth of musical knowledge, that you're all real music fans.

HVH: I think what you're saying now is right on. I have no other comment than 'Yes, you're right'. That's exactly! you said it so good I don't want to say it in any other way. Right on! That's what we're trying to do. It's not only a tribute to our heroes and a tribute to the past, it's a tribute to rock as a culture - a refined culture, a beautiful part of our culture. We should be proud to belong to the western world.

BSC: Is that what you think that rock is really all about, when you boil it all down? What's this whole rock thing getting at?

HVH: Yeah, I think that's what rock is all about, because especially here in Scandinavia, in the rock scene, a lot of artists are not actually paying enough respect to what they're doing! They say stuff in interviews like 'Uhh, well, yeah, I play in a rock band but what I really want to do is write a novel.' They use rock as a springboard to making a career in other cultures, like other parts of fine culture. And they're using rock as a kind of intellectual and social slumming. They say like 'Yeah, I'm really into kitsch and irony and rock, and I'm like rebelling against my fine cultural parents by rocking in the weekends, but really I'm a social anthropologist.' And I think that's so disrespectful to a very cool culture, you know? Rock is cool in and of itself! And not only is it cool, it's a fine culture, it's refined and it's good, and it is culture!

We like music, we like that stuff, we dig everything in that culture! That's a culture we belong to! if we were living in the 18th century, we would probably be Mozart freaks or baroque freaks, and that would be our culture there. But rock is not some trashy kitschy irony trip for upper class kids to do between their ballet and opera careers. Rock is something you need to do full time!

BSC: What do you think rock culture represents, then? What's its purpose?

HVH: Well, it's a contemporary interpretation of our society, you know? It's a result of the commonwealth countries freeing themselves, of the slaves freeing themselves, and working class kids educating themselves, and the result of an open society consisting of all the cultures of the world gathered in one society.

BSC: You were talking earlier about 'rainbow rock', and how you guys are trying to get away from the whole 'deathpunk' label, which to me makes sense when you compare the somewhat nihilistic 'Apocalypse Dudes' to 'Scandinavian Leather', which in tone is much more of a rock celebration!

HVH: It is a celebration and it's a celebration of the genre we're playing that allows a band to disappear for four years and come back even more welcome. Not many genres of show business allow you to do that, you know? It's a celebration that I survived drug addiction, it's a celebration that we could come back together again, you know, it's a celebration of our fans, that they were so loyal and that they really believed in us, and it's a kick in the ass to the ones who were dissing us all the time, who were laughing when we broke up, who were celebrating in '98 that we broke up. We're celebrating now!