• teecomb in Pitchfork Leaks Some of the 2008 Lineup Animal Collective rocks so hard. It’s has great melodies and most people who hate on it have only heard one era of them that didn’t...
• Mark in SonicBids & CMJ 2007: Anatomy of a Scam? …Meh. Sonicbids is a total scam. Our band was stupid enough to fall into it to. It didn’t take us long to figure out that they keep...
• Matt K in Just a small complaint… Agreed whole-heartedly. Nice observation.

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 »

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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 »

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Today’s Roast: The Pixies

Imagine taking some of the more angular post- punk sounds to come out of the late seventies and early eighties, sanding all the angles off, and then attempting to color the neutered mess with boring, watered down surf/rockabilly guitar lines. There you have the sound of the emerging collegiate alternative nation, hyphen rock with all the hyphens removed, a bland sonic utopia of sensibilities boiled down and homogenized into a big puffy, pasty nothing. Don’t worry, at the very least, there isn’t much in the way of actual hooks to choke on.

I mean, has a band as boring and mediocre as the Pixies ever garnered as much high praise as they did?

First of all, you have one of the most uninspired, unspectacular rhythm sections this side of Foghat. Sure, it’s great not every bass player in the nineties was having a bwank- dikka- bwank- bwank thumb war with a tiny turquoise bass that, for a bass guitar, was conspicuously low of anything resembling low end. However, does this mean we credit Kim Deal and her monotonous, plodding basslines as some form of late century wheel reinvention? Jeez, it’s not like she did anything Micheal Fucking Anthony couldn’t do, including sing backup.

And David Lowry? Remember Homer Simpson’s remark about the COMPETENT drumming of Grand Funk Railroad’s Don Brewer? David Lowry could maybe dream his contribution to pop music warranted as much back handed flattery.

Frank Black? Big fat bald annoyance. Vocally and lyrically he functions as a broad, gaping irrelevance. I think his concept for being a sort of pear shaped Iggy Pop had been touched upon with a good deal more finesses by Dave Thomas (no, not the Wendy’s guy either you chuckling fucknuts). Maybe Black copped a few Dave Thomas moves in some buffet line somewhere, but his execution of them makes him a pretty sorry contender to the post- punk fat frontman throne. Granted, it’s a big, big seat to fill, and Black may have even been missing a good deal of the girth.

I’ll give Joey Santiago some credit. He had a thick, serrated guitar tone and could, every so often, squeeze out a memorable riff here and there. Unfortunately, he had to share this relatively minor talent with the above three. That’s like having to share a can of Van-de-Camps with two scraggly panhandlers and a fat guy, there just isn’t enough there.

Okay, I’ll be even fairer and say the Pixies had some solid moments. Surfer Rosa had the brief, catchy Broken Face and the seductively squalid Vamos. Trompe le Monde had UMass, Planet of Sound and Alec Eiffel. That, unfortunately, is about it. Doolittle and Bossanova…hell, the fucking singles are snoozers. Really, break it down however you want, but the Pixies had no consistently good albums and two consistently dull ones.

Still, post-Pixies careers have fared even worse. There’s Black’s pointless solo career and the Breeders, who were about as useless as a supergroup featuring Micheal Stipe and Flea.

Oh well…some fools swear by ‘em, so fuck it.

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Today’s Roast: The Ramones

Yes, it was sad when Joey Ramone died. And, furthermore yes, sadder still when Dee Dee and Johnny followed so closely behind. However, it was when Joey died that I realized, with some regret, I’d taken the Ramones for granted.

I then realized I’d taken them for granted for good reason; they’d only been making the same fucking album, albeit in increasingly toothless and hookless increments, for about over thirty years. Honestly, if death hadn’t cut them off, they’d still be doing it. Fuck it, I’m a dick anyway–Death arrived too late.

I mean, what kind of asshole was this any fun for anymore? Oh sure, as if the absolute and calculated denial of any form of creative growth wasn’t thrilling enough, there was always the pathetic spectacle of Joey having to breathe through an oxygen tank mid-set, or of Dee Dee King.

Granted, their fans and torch bearers have always been a better part of their problem. Appreciating the first few albums, sure, but attempting to reduce Rock N’ Roll down to a three chord novelty act and sneering at anything that doesn’t musically follow suit makes for as dull a time as an hour or two spent listening to Rush or Yes. It’s ironic that Ramones fans would refer to people who were opinionated about music, but not necessarily in favor of the Ramones, as “music snobs” when they themselves sneer at everything else in non- mainstream Rock circles as “indie” or “precious.” It’s become about as pretentious and ridiculous a costume as the mime- faced goth kid, or the bling dripping wigger. The Ramones were a shrewd bunch of Republicans who dumbed down to entertain, and a league of suburban kids took the cue and ran with it. Like every pop posture, it became an anachronism. Like every other anachronism, people who have spent an unhealthy portion of their lives defining themselves by it refuse to let it go. This means that some of us get the distinct pleasure and privilege of listening to some fuckwit go on and on about something along the lines of how “indie” ruined “punk” and how “punk” “saved” “Rock N’ Roll.”

You’d figure that, just a couple of summers ago, the sight of a bunch of sorority girls in pink and turquoise Ramones shirts (they did love their Von Dutch not so long ago), would have driven the final nail in “Da Bruddas’” coffin. Isn’t it about time we buried it?

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Hairstyles of the Damned 

The mix tape has, in the age of the iPod and the MP3, become an anachronism and a lost art. Granted, it was also always a bit of a selfish pursuit, anyway. The making of a mix tape was always more for the person making it than the person they’d intended to give it to. I know, because I’ve kept a few that I’ve made myself, thinking “fuck it, chick doesn’t dig me anyways so fuckin’ her loss in more ways than one,” which I guess works all the same for the iPod owners out there. Still, I doubt I’m the only one who feels some vague, hard to truly define loss in the technology at hand, though a good part of it has to with tangibility. 

Following the mediocre and overrated High Fidelity (yes, the book too), the idea of the mix tape became nothing more a sequencing of songs directed at a potential object of affection, the intended result being at least a little make out action for the effort. What’s forgotten is that, to anybody’s who actively listened to any sort of music, those varied songs by those varied artists on those little plastic rectangles of magnetic scroll are an exchange of identity. Especially if you’re young, and so much of your identity is defined by your tastes (more so than actual lived experience), those songs are carefully chosen and selected to display the varied (or maybe not so varied) facets of who you are, and who you could conceivably connect with.     

I discuss this because the mix tape- long, forgotten lesser art that it is- came back to haunt me as a catalytic character in a couple of books I’d read recently. 

Okay, Hairstyles of the Damned was published a good three years ago. It took me this long to read it for no better reason than it dealt with A.) Adolescence, B.) Punk rock and C.) Adolescents discovering punk rock, three things I find increasingly fatuous and tiresome in my advancing years. Even though I’d seen Joe Meno read segments of the book at local readings, and they were entertaining, I figured that had more to do with Joe Meno being an engaging and self- deprecatingly funny speaker than with the actual contents of his speech. I was expecting rhapsodic scenester romanticism, not unlike the puffy, decidedly insubstantial prose I’d waded through in that damned Bryan Charles novel. It maybe didn’t help that Meno is a frequent Punk Planet contributor. 

What changed my mind, I’m certain, was that I’d read Bluebirds Used to Croon the Choir and, Meno’s most recent novel, the Boy Detective Fails. Meno’s stories, and his novel, are strange and beautiful, alive and vivid with color, imagery and eccentric but recognizably human and vulnerable characters caught up in struggles that are simultaneously profane, prosaic and fantastic. All told, he’s just a great local writer, and the only way you’ll know how is to go and read his books yourself.  Read more »

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A Look at a Music Writer Whose Opinion Matters

Irreverent, acerbic, possessing of unique good looks and a sexy, nasal rasp, Jim DeRogatis miraculously overcame his affliction with Down’s Syndrome to become one of Chicago’s, and America’s, and the Whole Wide Fucking World’s, leading arbiters of musical taste.             

His passion for writing about music began early. When his mom found him scribbling on the walls with a crayon while playing with himself, she asked him what he was doing. The three year old, two-hundred and fifty pound, Jimmy told her, “I’m writing a record review, mom, of the sort of underground psychedelic punk that I love.” 

At eight years old, despite his developmental disability, his mother enrolled him into college. While flunking everything- which he might not have if he’d just conceded to being the Dean’s anal pencil sharpener- he’d had a fateful meeting when legendary rock scribe, Lester Bangs, spoke in the assembly hall of Columbia College. 

Lester Bangs arrived at the podium wearing a flowing, green velvet robe and a lush laurel atop his head. He said a bunch of things that didn’t make much sense and then stepped down to commune with the audience. He came first towards Jim DeRogatis. 

He looked DeRogatis in the eye and saw the promise of a beautiful savant. DeRogatis smiled goofily and wiped drool from his chin with the sleeve of his corduroy blazer. Bangs invited him to join him in the dining hall of the Marriot. 

The dining table was the length of the meeting room, which sported a high ceiling adorned with a mural of Chuck Berry entertaining a group of Klansmen, who were stripping off their white hoods and robes, cutting loose and dancing to Chuck Berry’s American post- war Negro music. A giant chandelier hovered over their table like a glass tornado and the table itself was adorned with white candles in long glass stems, placed in a pentagram at it’s center. The room was flooded with light.  Read more »

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