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Shoegazer metal.
Oh yeah. It exists. It’s pretty much the best thing that happened to me last year.
I’m on a constant and never-ending mission to soundtrack my own life. Even if you won’t admit it, I’m pretty sure you do it, too. Our lives have eras - eras dictated by events, break ups, moods, cities, health, drugs, friends, mistakes, whatever. You know what I mean. If you’re like me, you make it your business to score your “film” with the appropriate soundtrack. You seek out what you need; it’s an art form. Haven’t you ever watched a movie with shit for a soundtrack? It ruins everything. If I’m going to live, and apparently I am, then I’m at least going to be listening to sweet music.
My coherency may be breaking down now, but my point is: Jesu’s (pronounced “yayzu”) Silver EP and the previous self-titled Jesu carried me through last year. It’s just what I wanted to hear. It was my mood put into melodies. Just so you know - last year sucked for me. The hardest and most emotional year of my life. Loss, addiction, divorce, bankruptcy, broken heart, medication, repossession, poor health, the works. (I’m better now, thanks for asking.) And I couldn’t even buy any motherfucking records nearly all year. It was super lame. I can’t even explain it, but I can tell you that shoegazer metal is the auditory epitome of it all. But in a good way, because I love this band so much.
I’ve always been a big fan of drone and shoegaze. I like to lie on the floor and turn that shit up, put my ear next to the speaker, and drift. I want the key more minor, I want that note dragged out for 5 minutes, I want muffled lyrics, I want the saddest synth in the world, I want a wall of sound. I want some sludgy drone doom. Jesu has it all, plus more stuff I can’t find any descriptors for. There is just something highly cathartic to me about this type of music. It’s not that it’s “depressing” or “glum” or “dark” - I despise it when bands are labelled so simply. Nothing is that simple. Jesu is emotional and loud; it’s a perfect blend of shoegaze with harder elements. It’s like your metalhead neighbor who cries every time he watches The Wizard of Oz. It’s just right.
Justin Broadrick is the key member of the band and also an ex-member of Godflesh (oh how I love metal band names…), a group that definitely pioneered the industrial metal movement of the late 80s. Those elements are still there in Jesu’s music, but things are much more layered, far more drone, and for me, much more emotional than Godflesh. If you like Mogwai, then you’ll love Jesu. Jesu is far heavier, but that same mood is consistent between them. I once stated that listening to Jesu is like sludging through sludge wearing sludge shoes to buy a bottle of sludge to drink. But mmm, sludge is tasty. You should probably draw the blinds and listen to Conqueror right now.
And hey, maybe you’ll get lucky. Jesu is supposed to be touring with Isis right now, but apparently they are having trouble with their work visas and won’t be let into the country. I would have seen them play this upcoming Thursday. Maybe they’ll be identified as non-terrorists by the time they make it to your city, and you’ll have the honor of seeing them. Lame.
Release Date: February 20, 2007.
Label: Hydra Head Records
Rating: 9/10. They rock.
so anybody who’s anybody knows that nine inch nails’ new album, year zero, is scheduled to be released april 17, 2007. what you may not know, however, is that it is going to give me a brain aneurysm, people. i know this even though i haven’t listened to all the tracks yet, but the ones i have heard…wow!
per my mysterious friend axelblazer, who has the hook up and knows things: “I’m adding this to the Year Zero hype craze. This is the deal - a flashdrive was found in a bathroom stall in Barcelona containing the third leaked track of this album, called “Me, I’m Not.” The flashdrive also contained some random 4 minute track with crickets chirping. Apparently, if you put the “chirping” track into a spectrogram, it’ll tell you to call the number 216-333-1810.That phone call is basically scary shit. Like WTF type of shit…listen to it here.”
brill use of viral marketing for album promotion purposes or warning of a new world order in an alternate future? you decide.
If you’re a fan of college radio then you need no (or little) introduction to Long Beach’s Bikeride. If you’re not aware of them, imagine the band Beulah on a trip to central America while dropping Prozac as their drug of choice.
A brave concoction of instruments and influences come together on each song to create something completely derivative and yet completely new. There is no better example of this than their latest effort, “The Kiss”. It’s not officially released until March 6, but official releases be damned - it’s already available on iTunes and CDBaby seems to be selling out of copies on a weekly basis.
It’s not just the new album that’s kept Bikeride busy as of late. They recently appeared performing “Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite” on a Mojo magazine compilation commemorating the 40 year anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonley Hearts Club Band. They’re the feature in the premier issue of the video magazine Ground Control and despite a history of rare live performances (the only official date in support of the last album, 2002’s “Morning Macumba” was at a festival in Japan), Bikeride is taking the stage again with a home town gig on March 3 at Di Piazza’s.
Their revamped website is launched today (full disclosure: I’m heavily involved with this site in many aspects. -TJ) at Bikeride.info and the blitz has begun. What would a blitz be without answering Superstarcastic’s Five Questions? Or offering a free MP3 off of the new album for download? Here, for your pleasure, are both.
Download Hideaways from “The Kiss” - released officially March, 6. (2.8 MB)
1. when historians listen to your most recent CD 1000 years from now, what will they say?
“Take this off and put on that Justin Timberlake CD again.”
2. if you could play a show with any band/musician living or dead, who would you pick and why?
Probably The Beatles. It would only last for a couple minutes though because I’d probably try to take over. I’m worse than Paul.
3. what is the strangest band-related dream (one of) you have had?
I dreamt Sean worked for Heidi Fleiss and he was the biggest male prostitute in LA. That’s why he was so busy on the weekends. This may or may not be true actually.
4. what do your fans look like?
Usually short and Asian but really everybody. Bikeride represents all colors and creeds, all languages and lands. We are Internationalists. Mostly short Asians though.
5. what bullshit do you run into at most every show that makes you think “man, this bullshit again?”
That’s easy- they always forget to remove the green M&M’s from the bowl in our backstage catering.
bonus question: why won’t you forget to tip your bartender?
My bartender lost his arms in Nam so what the hell is he gonna do with a tip?
In was a mere three years ago that Call Me Lightning’s debut, The Trouble We’re In, was unleashed on an unsuspecting, and ultimately unaware populace by “hardcore” (i.e. metal) label Revelation Records. A rollicking minimalist post-punk tilt-a-whirl of shimmery Chicago-style guitars (think Shellac minus Albini’s metal guitar picks) and a rhythm section tighter than the Donnas circa their first record (you know, when they were underage? Get it? Ha! God, i’m sorry), Trouble was a sure-fire indie-rock phenomenon waiting to be discovered. Two problems though: 1) The recording didn’t quite capture the arena-rock bombast of the band’s live sound (particularly Shane Hochstetler’s thunderous drums–the not-so-secret weapon of the band), and 2) It’s quite possible that Revelation wasn’t sure what to do with the record in the first place.
What’s strange about the era of downloading and filesharing is that, for good and bad, record labels still mean something. A fan of Touch & Go Records, for example, can be assured of a certain aesthetic and level of quality when the label’s logo is emblazoned on a release (as long as they stay away from the !!! albums). On the flip, it means that if you’re on a label known for one thing (screamy metalcore) and are very much not that thing (thank god), you tend to get overlooked.
Flash forward to today, which sees the release of CML’s latest disc, Soft Skeletons, on the infinitely more appropriate French Kiss Records. This time, the band tracked at Electrical Audio and Hochstetler’s home studio, and the trademark EA Huge-Ass Drum SoundTM is in effect immediately in the opening seconds of leadoff track ”Meet the Skeletons.” As a result, the record sounds bigger, bolder, and overall more badass than the last. The single “Billion Eyes,” as well as the title track, boast moments of epic grandeur that call to mind the band from which CML swiped their name. To sound this huge with three people and minimal guitar effects or layering is just, well, fucking rad.
A lot of talk is being made about guitarist/vocalist Nathan Lilley’s evolution from “shouter” to “singer” on this record, but really, the change is slight. There’s still plenty of bark in that voice. Instead, what demands attention are the same key elements that made their first album a winner:
1) Lilley’s lyrics, which are chock-full of “we ares” and “i ams” and other gratuitous sloganeering. In “Billion Eyes,” Lilley declares “we are, we are the shattered truth/the broken pieces,” and if you don’t find yourself compelled to sing along, well, then Gene Simmons was wrong when he said that people identify more with lyrics in the first person (which is why he wrote “I wanna rock and roll all night” instead of “you wanna rock and roll all night”), and we all know that Gene Simmons is never wrong. It’s more likely that you have no soul.
2) That tight-assed (*smirk*) rhythm section. Listen closely to any song off Soft Skeletons, and you’ll notice that the bass and kick drum are perfectly in sync–neither makes a sound if the other isn’t. It’s a dedication to minimalist precision you often won’t find outside a Shellac album.
If there is a criticism to be leveled here, it’s that the record starts to run out of gas just a little by the end. The verse-chorus-verse-bombast-chorus formula starts to wear a bit on tracks like “Shook House Shakedown,” and in the moments where the band scales back the huge (”Beaming Streaks”), the songs get stuck in second gear. Still, it’s a minor quibble on an overall winner of a disc.
Milwaukee tends to be overlooked on occasion in favor of that slightly larger metropilitan area to the south with the shitty football team, but Call Me Lightning have taken the Windy City’s formula of serrated guitar riffage and minimalist, pounding rhythms and honed it into a fist-pumping exercise in anthemic indie rock that manages to be dissonant and, dare i say, accessible at the same time. And they’re doing it better than a lot of today’s Chicago bands that are striving for the same sound. They’ve found a label that won’t overlook them this time; let’s hope geography doesn’t keep them hidden for long either. I doubt it will.
Because your average rock critic is nothing more than an entertainment journalist.
The Hold Steady- Great. A generation of horn-rimmed indie kids have their very own John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. Yes, Eddie Wilson lives, he’s been reborn as a paunchy, bespectacled, hungover lit professor who “sure did party in college,†even though he sounds like the blowhard from the forgettable, and mostly forgotten, eighties classicist pomp- rockers the Call.
The Decemberists - Featuring the worst, most indulgent tendencies of Supertramp, solo Peter Gabriel, and every other collegiate fuckwit with delusions of grandeur. Not like their gay, early Americana costumes are gonna do much to endear me to them either.I’ve tried to make it through a single song in it’s entirety, I really have, they might not even be that long. But the opening notes, chords and/or strums turn my stomach so violently that I’d have to be sitting down with a pail between my legs to listen any further.
I should probably take this time to mention that Stephen Colbert and his whole shtick is wearing on my fucking nerves too.
TV on the Radio- Like Prince, except not as horny and more prone to shoegazing, navel gazing, some oblique leftist choir preaching and other forms of cerebral masturbation. I saw them open for the Fall a few years ago. They were boring.
Band of Horses- You ever wake up from a nap sometime in the early evening, when it’s started getting dark, knowing you’ll never fully wake up but you’ll also never get back to sleep? And does this feeling of existential dread and nausea ever take over, and you start entertaining notions of suicide because your bio-clock is now so fucked you can’t help but see everything as ugly and pointless? If not, and your curious, just give Band of Horses “Everything all the Time†a whirl. Just remember, your fun is my hell. Read more »
Today’s Roast: Wire
Yeah kids, we all gotta suck it up sometimes.
About five years ago, I too was excited about their recent reunion. The moment the tickets hit the booth I plunked down my hard earned American Andrew for the privilege of catching one of the most important, influential musical outfits in my particular margin of righteous rock snobbery.
Granted, I had mixed feelings about the Read and Burn EPs they’d just released. The songs weren’t bad, but they were somewhat marred by questionable recording decisions, such as the chunky, tinny, Ministry distortion that rattled through the better part of them. Either way, it was maybe a little better than the techno stuff they’d been toying with in the mid-to-late eighties (which, looking back on it now, really wasn’t that bad) even if not as memorable as anything off of the grand trinity of Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154. Still, it was fucking Wire, and judging by interviews I’d read at the time, they were at least partially reforming in response to the interest in them that had been renewed by a young generation of bands that included Erase Errata and Interpol. This meant that they would be bringing the rock, the singularly inimatable Wire rock, or so I thought.
This was in Austin, at a gaudily corporate rock venue known as La Zona Rosa. I’m sure you know places like it, goony bouncers and titty dancer bartenders shilling overpriced Miller Lite. It’s not a fucking fun place to see shows, so my mood was already a tad somber. I soon found out that would be the mood prevailing mood of the night. Read more »
