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These are some new releases some dudes sent me. They’re so good you’ll never be able to hear them, not ever, because you’re not the Mayor of Rock N’ Roll, and I am.
If you try to find or hear them on your own, you’ll get a brain tumor, go crazy and die. So, do yourself a favor and content yourself with my apt descriptions of these otherwordly sonic offerings. Â
Craigslisp- Mist Connections CD- (Rhineherd Records)- These guys are wallowers in cotton candy, pansexual romanticism. They sound like a trip on a hot air balloon in the early days of spring, equipped with only a naughty daydream should the horn of a wayward unicorn puncture your craft.
   Yes, it’s easy listening, but easy listening in the way a really hot chick is easy to look at. Of course, she’s offset by her tart side when she catches you glassily eyeing her and says, “Whynt’cha take a pikcha, honey? It’ll last longer.â€
   And then you respond, “such a pretty girl, and yet your voice sounds like a braying hyena.â€
   Then she says, “yeah, but that’s just cause I’m good that way.â€
   This, of course leads to mutual lust fulfillment, and a post- coital smoke while listening to the Mentors’ classic Up the Dose.
   It’s all good that way. Shit’s just like that in Rock N’ Roll.
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Mantelope- Pumpkin Undercarriage CD- (Everyday You Suck Records)- Rum fuelled Viking songs as imagined by tweedy tax attorneys. A day at the office turned Bacchanalian orgy as paunchy cubicle hamsters in candy colored pinstripes go all sailor on each other.
This is the sound of all men’s love of distance, distant sea, and the mustiness of one another.
Pricks Ahoy!!! Read more »
Rock N’ Roll’s logical extremes have reached institution status. Debut albums by Napalm Death, Discharge and GISM- the earliest purveyors of grindcore, long considered to be the most brutally, blurrily abrasive conflagration of punk, metal and hardcore- have all reached their twenty year mark. Surrounding that, there’s been every brand of industrial, experimental and noise music, all on the fringes- never fully partaking in, but never completely separate from- pop and rock music and culture. Just hang on to that thought for a moment.Â
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I’d recently acquired a copy of The Enchanters Vs. Sprawlburg Springs, Brian Costello’s novel concerning the brief rise and fall of exurban Florida punk contenders. I got it by drunkenly answering a couple of trivia questions about Upton Sinclair (I knew he ran for office on the Socialist ticket and that one of his heroes was Jesus.)Â
 I’d also recently read Grab On To Me Tightly As If I Knew the Way, Bryan Charles’ novel about a disaffected adolescent Midwestern indie rocker and his portensious self conflicts. It’s probably at your local public library, if you care. You should probably visit your library sometime anyway.Â
 Finally, I didn’t see the Coughs at the Empty Bottle during the Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music festival, nor have I heard their new album, though it can be downloaded. However, I’d seen them before, and had read a review of the show in the Reader, and in essence this is more of a review of that review than it is of the Coughs. Also, it fits, albeit loosely, into what I’m getting to.Â
 Again, I’ll tie this altogether. Just hang on, okay? Read more »
In the latter years of my high school career, Decline of Western Civilization II: the Metal Years, had started making the rounds on home video. At the time, I was a budding music snob, as were most of my snotty dickhead adolescent cohorts, and the running joke had been the grand irony of Decline coming out after Spinal Tap, because Decline was exactly what was being parodied.
This was the late eighties, keep in mind, and that era of hair metal, though fading, had yet to die. The airwaves continued to provide my buddies and I with a whole slew of Real Life Spinal Taps to laugh at and feel superior towards. There was Dokken, Crue, Krokus ,Autograph , Ratt…the mind fucking reels. Even respected vets such as Priest, Ozzy, Motorhead (look, I gave due respect and got laughed at) earned our snarky cackling and derisive eye rolling.
What my friends and I failed to realize, in our callow youth, was that every band playing any form of Rock N’ Roll is somehow, to some extent, Real Life Spinal Tap. This includes the bands we did listen to, whose records we’d swear by and fight over over the way an acne riddled metal kid with feathered hair and a pubic moustache would throw fists over fuckin’ Priest. This includes Sonic Youth and NoMeansNo, Minor Threat and Husker Du. Seven Seconds were every bit as real life Spinal Tap as Krokus. …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead is as real life Spinal Tap as the grotesquely waxen comeback action figure that is Axl Rose. To a good degree, the Stones, the Beatles and other yardsticks by which rock’s credibility are measured by, aren’t free from inclusion into the Law of Spinal Tap.
  Do you ever get sick of good taste? Yours and others? I would hope so, you smug bastard, after shoving an Abraham into your local hipster dives record machine. Of course you soon discover, to your dismay, so many others have already deposited their fivers into it, an investment in sharing their knowledge with everybody else in the room, for their iPods offer no such opportunity and listening to one in such a social atmosphere looks weird and kinda rude.
The jukebox is the soundtrack to your drinking. It’s the mixtape you make for all the other bar patrons and the mixtape they make for you, for better or for worse. It’s the ultimate scam of the bar owner, especially in a bar that caters to up and coming hipster neighborhoods where a good number of it’s patrons consider themselves music geeks. Everyone’s an expert, and, while waiting for your own superior music selections to come on, you get the opportunity to sit through everyone else’s expertise, knocking back drinks the whole time.
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I don’t have any good reason for bringing this up, except to point out a contrast between original intent, usage and what it’s become. Jook was an African word meaning to dance, oftentimes dirtily. In the South, jute pickers would hang out in makeshift, fly by night bars and dance halls, called jute joints.  Granted, you probably all know this already, having had a lesson in Delta blues taught to you by Ralph Macchio.
Now, however, it’s time to drop a few names and dates, for specificity’s sake. The first electrically amplified multi selection phonograph, created by the Automatic Music Instrument Company, started hitting the circuit around 1927. This is around prohibition, speakeasy’s often couldn’t afford a house band and, with the possibility of your illegitimate business getting raided any minute, a live band probably would’ve meant little more than a few more busted heads at the end of the night anyways. Any base of customers was reliant on the presence of the record machine. Read more »
(for band links, check out DJ’s Survival Guide)Â Â
Touch and Go Records, love it or hate it, has managed to exist twenty- five years. In that time it’s ushered in the standard bearers that would help define the soundtrack to a few eras of independent rock and roll. If you’re the type of punk puritan who sneers the word “indie†and thinks the only music listening to is Ramones Rehash ’06, you’ve probably always hated it. And, if that’s the case, it sucks to be you.
As any number of nobly like minded indies have come and fallen, Touch and Go has survived numerous financial, legal and personal setbacks, proving that yes, a handshake deal and fair treatment of your artists, all of whom are your friends, is a legitimate model of how business- at least the business of Rock and Roll- can and probably should be done.
In conjunction with the always locally anticipated Hideout Block Party, Touch and Go celebrated its twenty- fifth with a weekend of acts spanning its roster since its humble beginnings, in the eighties, as a label that might’ve disappeared with most of the rest (i.e. Boner, Alchemy, Mordam, notably SST, recently Lookout, etc. etc.) Like Ron Burgundy, it was kind of a big deal.
Having had the good fortune to volunteer all three days, I was there. However, volunteering meant I had to miss sets by The Ex, Killdozer, the Didjits, Negative Approach, Three Mile Pilot, Enon and the Black Heart Procession as well as short sets by Sally Timms, PW Long, Mekons sidebar Jon and Kat and Returnables, Silkworm memorium Tim and Andy. That’s just too fucking bad, but I saw Big Black, so there’s no complaining.
Anyway- a kinda brief recap of my weekend:
A look at the sendoff album and the artists who thankfully denied us an encore:
Smart is the aging, wizened rocker who knows when to call it a day and surrender those glorious things of youth. After all, even the best of them can only take their initial inspiration and motivation- usually unrequited lust- so far before there’s not much to do but embarrass themselves, and their fans, by trying to squeeze their middle age into the rock n’ roll costume du jour. Or, worse, they could keep churning through their old hits, recycling hooks, revisiting all those shining nuggets of former glory and being a one- note revival of themself. Either way, you’re another casualty in the mess of misguided comebacks and painfully protracted careers, all clogging up that cult of youth we call Rock N’ Roll. Sometimes, old man, you don’t have sense enough to die on your own and we’re just itching to pull the plug on you. Granted, we know that if we did it wouldn’t shut you up. You’d go acoustic.
The following bands, for whatever reason- be it creative differences, money issues or the inadvertently shared girlfriend- said their piece and left. They may have left us wanting more, and wondering what could’ve been, but it’s probably to our benefit that we never know.
Government Issue- Crash
This album marked the end of a storied near- decade long career (and, in the eighties, almost ten years was a long time to be a hardcore band.)Their preceding album, You, was much better, but that in itself makes Crash a near perfect goodbye, the sound of a band stepping down after reaching their pinnacle. Read more »
