- joiezabel in Scarlett Johansson - Anywhere I Lay My Head it really is brilliant, scott. i hate you.
- hotshotrobot in Scarlett Johansson - Anywhere I Lay My Head Goddammit, Borch, now how am i supposed to review this? I can’t top that!
- Borch in The Avett Brothers - House of Blues - May 14th Good Lord, that’s a beautiful song! The Avett Bros. were in Chicago? Why wasn’t I notified?!
I think I’d have approached this album with more hope if it hadn’t had a title that sounded like a bad pay-per-view event shown on some channel up in the 800s, between the “Adult Content — You Must Be 18 To Order” stations and the music-only channels that seem invariably to be programmed to play all Bob Seger, all the time. You know, “Only this Sunday! Undefeated Reality looks to defend his HEAVYWEIGHT TIIIIITLE against brash young contender THE OPTIMIST! Will Reality lay The Optimist SUNNY SIDE UP, or will he finally find an opponent with a HARDER BITE? *cue montage of various people punching each other and falling into some ropes* Order it now, only $39.95!”
At any rate, judging by the evidence at work here on Kiss Kiss’s first proper album, they’ve got exactly one relatively novel idea, which is to take your standard (scr)e(a)mo template and paste a bunch of art-rock time changes and violin parts onto it. It’s quite possible to make something interesting out of that combination, but sadly, at least on the basis of this album here, Kiss Kiss are absolutely incapable of doing so.
Instead, they put together tracks like the idiotically-titled “Shits In Suits,” which sounds like a third-rate klezmer band in serious need of some valium, and “Vagabond,” which starts out emo, randomly turns into a slow track that sounds like a karaoke Muse cover, and then ends with a minute or so of noise that seems to be cribbed from old Einsturzende Neubauten rehearsal tapes. None of the songs manage to rise above the level of “competent” — few even make it that far (”Sixth Sense” is probably the best, if you’re really interested) — and every time that lead Kiss-er Josh Benash switches his voice up into the “I’m so tortured that now I’m gonna screeeeeeeeeam” mode, my hand reflexively goes for the mute button.
The band’s current Wikipedia entry makes the following ungrammatical claim: “As vast as their influences, their music is appealing to a wide audience.” I dunno — maybe there are enough moody teenagers who need a break from their Fall Out Boy records and are too young to remember any other violin-wielding alternative bands (alas, that dog.! We hardly knew ye!) to constitute a “wide audience.” However, unless that last sentence describes you, this release isn’t likely to be of much interest.
Label: Eyeball
Release date: Feb. 6, 2007
Rating: 4/10
Ya know kids, maybe the big tent just ain’t that big.
It’s good to know the fine folks at Chunklet are setting a few parameters.
They’re still open to suggestions. Have a looksee, I’ve put some of my own up there.
islands’ brilliant 2006 release return to the sea was on a multitude of best of lists last year, including my own. it’s a catchy and infectious album, with a strangely playful yet messy tension, probably a side effect of the fuzzily reactionary drugs that are added to the water system in montreal instead of common fluoride like here in the states. what, you didn’t know? yeah, its main side effect is the awesome music coming from that city these days, some of which is made by ex-unicorns nick diamonds and j’aime tambeur, who started the band islands.
return to the sea is considerably more polished and has less of a silly edge than the more shuffly and scrambled unicorns stuff. islands mixes their slightly morbid lyrics with giddy, sugar-coated melodies that build in sections and incorporate interesting instrumentation like strings and and reeds and horns. they utilize a wide variety of talented characters to add these elements for their live show, including woody guthrie’s grandson…who knew?
anyway, to paraphrase my favourite song “volcanoes”….hello, i’m a demon. and i’m here to tell you that the world will end in 2007. this apocalyptic event could happen any time now but will hopefully hold off to let you read islands’ answers to superstarcastic’s famous 5 questions first.
1. when historians listen to your most recent CD 1000 years from now, what will they say?
they’ll say, “oh dear lord, i can’t believe that people are still listening to cds after all these years.”
2. if you could play a show with any band/musician living or dead, who would you pick and why?
I would say Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, only because i have a huge crush on jenny lewis.
3. what is the strangest band-related dream (one of) you have had?
I know people will think we’re spoiled because we rented a tour bus, but this one time when we slept on this bus, we were in california, and i guess it’s kind of known for earthquakes, or is that just me? i was sleeping and i woke up from a shake, freaked out thinking that we were in an earthquake. turns out the bus just turned on and was turning somewhere. that’s not a funny story. sorry
4. what do your fans look like?
they look like they want to say hi or throw stuff at you, but are too shy to do it.
5. what bullshit do you run into at most every show that makes you think “man, this bullshit again?”
it’s waking up in the morning and realising we can’t take number twos on our tour bus.
bonus question: why won’t you forget to tip your bartender?
to get to the other side?
I had written a nice three-paragraph, journalistic review of the new Jesu record. I couldn’t decide if I actually liked the review at all. While I spent the weekend waffling over it, Amber put up her review, and I liked it a helluva lot more than anything I’d written. I realized the problem with mine: I forgot to put in anything about how I felt about the music.
Duh.
When I was younger, I lived in a small town in Iowa, isolated from anything but the massest of media. Music was, even then, what I was doing with my life, even if it was just from a listening standpoint. I heard everything I could get my hands on, and I had figured out a lot about what I thought was “standard,” the stuff they always did in songs. When I was very young, I was pretty sure that every song had an intro, a verse, a chorus, another verse, the same chorus, a middle part, and then the chorus again. Maybe, if the songwriter was particularly adventurous, there was another verse before the final chorus, or even a key change. I knew this didn’t happen in classical music, so I figured it had something to do with the words. Luckily, I learned about other types of music and structure before I became Diane Warren, or worse, a poet.
Even still, there were biases I’d built up that were hard to overcome. Pretty music was quiet. Ugly music was loud. And never would they overlap. When pretty music got loud, it became triumphant, or rousing, or something like that. And I never heard ugly music that was quiet.
When I was fifteen, I’d moved to a somewhat larger city, with a decent record store. I was starting to get a whiff of what else was out there. Sonic Youth had opened the door somewhat, but when I was introduced to My Bloody Valentine and especially Medicine, everything changed. Here was the most pop, Beach Boys, sing-along-able melody, buried in this shrieking, howling noise. It was the most wonderful music I’d ever heard. By the time Mogwai came along, I was in college, soaking up Cage and Varese, and remembering how dynamics played such an important part in the Tchaikovsky and Beethoven I’d listened to when I was small. And when a friend at work passed me the self-titled Jesu album, I cheered as another genre from my teenage years entered the mix: metal.
Say what you want about Chuck Klosterman and his writing (and boy howdy, I have a couple of things to say about Killing Yourself To Live, you better believe it,) but in his somewhat pedantic way, he managed to write the most true-to-life book I’ve ever read. That’s me in Fargo Rock City, a teenage male in the late 80’s and early 90’s, unable to even ironically appreciate New Kids on the Block. So I grew my hair out as soon as my mom would let me, bought a lot of Metallica bootlegs, and waited to see where it was all going. Believe it or not, MTV provided the first signpost. One late night I saw a blurry, black and white video by some band called Napalm Death. But then! There was this band called Naked City full of jazz guys that was EVEN BETTER! From there, you could follow all sorts of paths, from the New York downtown ‘81 scene to the Melvins, even towards the ever-lovin’ Fair brothers and another band I’d become obsessed with in the future, God Is My Co-Pilot. But once I got something on my plate, it never really left, and I still liked metal as a genre as much as I liked anything else.
Jesu made sense right away. It was the loud part of early Mogwai songs, downtuned and with less midrange, and sad, sad vocals, delayed and reverbed to hell. You couldn’t make out many of the lyrics, but you could tell they weren’t about sunshine and pussycats. I fell asleep to it most nights on tour that year. When Silver came out last year, I liked it even more. It sounded like a My Bloody Valentine record at 16rpm. It was heavy, sure, but it was gorgeous, a sound you could really crawl inside. I tracked down every Jesu song I could find (for the record: Heart Ache is 40 minutes of dull, but the Japanese bonus tracks on Jesu and Silver are all worthwhile).
Conqueror strips even more metal out of the equation, but it’s certainly no loss. Songs like “Mother Earth” and “Conqueror” sound more akin to Codeine than anything remotely industrial or metal, and are pretty far removed from anything Justin Broadrick’s previous band, Godflesh, ever did. Broadrick is still one sad bastard; “Try not to lose yourself/I’m way past trying/I’m way past caring/I’m way past hoping” go the lyrics to “Weightless & Horizontal,” and they’re typical. But the overall feeling is somehow not hopelessness, but hope, earnest hope. Almost too much, in places; “Transfigure” features such heartfelt post-grunge riffage that the whole thing starts to feel a bit like a joke. The album succeeds beyond that little quibble (which might just be the jaded hipster in me talking, anyway) and is well worth your time, loudly or softly. Preferably with a good set of headphones.
Anyone else tired of the acoustic balladeer? The singer-songwriter with the sensitive side? Christ, haven’t we reached critical mass on these guys with an acoustic guitar and broken-hearted voice? Who’s this Elvis Perkins, and why should I be bothered?
Perkins’ debut Ash Wednesday doesn’t start out so promising, and the first two minutes of the opening track ‘While You Were Sleeping’ are indistinguishable from the work of the archetypal and nameless troubadour, but…
… the pedantry doesn’t last, thankfully. A shaky voice and acoustic guitar last for one verse and chorus cycle, but you’ll want to wait before you reach for your Zoloft; each verse picks up a new instrument before the song emerges into a lively second-half. The album follows in suit.
Aren’t we all tired of decent lyricists who feel they’re so misunderstood that they can’t be bothered to get a decent band behind them, let alone a paying audience? Not so w/ Perkins – layers of instruments don’t scumble the songs, but instill them with liveliness and joviality that is the record’s greatest strength. Tracks 2 and 3, ‘All The Night Without Love’ and ‘May Day!’ maintain the acceleration, and the latter is a romp with the energy of a roomful of drunks that don’t want to go home, and have one last chance to raise a glass before calling it a night.
Ash Wednesday has at least five exceptional cuts, all of which involve Perkins’ band (known as Elvis Perkins in Dearland), but solo numbers like ‘It’s Only Me’ and ‘It’s a Sad World After All’ do little to showcase Perkins talent, or to make much of an impression. The best cuts are dressed up with help from his band, and the album is buoyed by tracks like ‘May Day!’, ‘Moon Woman II’ and ‘Emile’s Vietnam in the Sky’ (suggestive of a Desire-era Dylan), which are far more fully realized compositions than the guitar-and-voice moments.
Perkins doesn’t cover much stylistic ground – and that’s fine - but he does pepper his songs with little surprises like a cornet riff that appears sporadically in ‘Sleep Sandwich’. Bits like that and the well-placed string section are the moments with the capacity for eliciting different reactions not only to each song, 
but also to the various parts within each.
‘Sleep Sandwich’ is also the highlight of the album, the payoff. The strings that have teased us finally gratify as the chorus repeats and ends at a state of ecstasy that is possible only because Perkins had heretofore refused put all of his cards on the table. There is enough listenable material in the first nine tracks to keep us listening, but he’s really been leading us on to the exultant reward in track 10.
It takes something special to set apart in the world saturated by singer-songwriters. It’s a very specific and contrived idiom for a musician – minimalist, literate, emotional and rootsy, and any deviation has to be w/in that small window. It takes a lot of nuance and subtlety to avoid scaring the folkies out of their torpor, yet having separation from the next guy with a guitar, a microphone and a story. Even when the local open-mic night at the Inner Town Pub leaves you feeling hopeless about the future of our generation’s songwriters, along comes someone like Elvis Perkins to inject some life into what would be a stale genre without contributors like him. I guess that’s why we’re not running out to buy music made by calculators and cash registers right now.
The nomadic psych-rock and spaced improv group Primordial Undermind has a new album Loss of Affect out on the Strange Attractors label. Although currently stretched out between Austin, TX, New York, and Vienna, Austria, the band is convening to tour the eastern US for Feb-March 2007.
February 2007
26 Cincinnati Skull Lab w/ Micah
27 Chicago Empty Bottle w/ Plastic Crimewave Vision Celestial Guitarkestra
28 Detroit National Bohemian Home w/ Graveyards
March
1 South Bend 2nd Sun w/ the Far Look, Pet Coffins
2 St Louis Off Broadway w/ Tone Rodent and Ghost in Light
3 Bloomington,IN Landlocked Music w/ Charalambides and 10,000 Things
4 Nashville tba w/ Magic Plants
5 Memphis tba w/ Noise Choir, True Sons of Thunder
6 Oklahoma City Conservatory w/ Anvil Salute and 31 Stab Wounds
7 Denton J&J’s w/ Oveo and Ethereal Planes Indian
8 Austin Room 710 w/ Temple of Bon Matin, ST37 and Ethereal Planes Indian
9 Austin End of an Ear
10 Houston Super Happy Funland w/ Graustark and Eugene Chadbourne
