Scenic >> Get in the boat

Scenic - "All Fish Go To Heaven"
(World Domination Recordings / Independent Project Records, 1996)

I was lucky enough to buy Scenic's sophomore CD Acquatica in late '96, thanks to reading a glowing review in Rolling Stone, by David Fricke, I believe.  That was a really key summer & fall for me, because I also got stuff like Loveless (My Bloody Valentine), Cheer Up (Plexi), Confusion Is Sex (SY), Isn't Anything (MBV), Nassau (The Sea And Cake), Blue Bell Knoll (Cocteau Twins), Hi Fi Way (You Am I), Bakesale (Sebadoh), Scum (Napalm Death), Psycho Candy (JAMC), some Modest Mouse (I know... but they were actually good then), etc.  Scenic evolved out of the L.A.-based tribal post-punk crew Savage Republic.  I guess the short story is that a couple of the members moved to Arizona, ditched the vocals, and concentrated on evocative, wordless soundscapes befitting the vastness of their desert locale.  (Someone should send a copy to Muammar Gaddafi to see if he agrees; I read that dude brings around a huge tent in which he holds all of his speaking engagements worldwide, so that he will appear truer to his region's Bedouin class, which is misleading because he never belonged to it.  I did a report on Bedouins in 6th grade, which was my first real exposure to Arab culture, and now I'm kind of obsessed with it.)  The album is filled with mysterious ebbs and flows, and a tasteful, nuanced instrumental prowess.  The animated flute on this song is what really gets me right in my soul, and as an aspiring marine biologist, the title immediately grabbed me.  The whole album is an understated tour de force, though maybe too ambient and minimalist over long stretches, so it might not please today's "post-rockers," who tend to demand a lot of aggression and/or metal influence in their "post-rock."  Well, a flute is made out of /MetaL\, bro, and having a flute in your band shows that you have more cujones than the latest Mogwai or Isis clone*.  Anyway, Acquatica was one of the flagship releases in the post-rock invasion when it came out, in my opinion is still at or near the top of that heap to this day.  By the way, Scenic's first album, Incident At Cima, is kinda boring.


*Yes, I know Mogwai had some flute on their first album, when they were still relevant for about 5 minutes.  Bardo Pond has also used lots of flute, played by their singer Isobel, and of course there's Yusef Lateef.  So flutes can be cool.


Some press quotes from the sticker on my promo CD (I also have the regular CD) for Acquatica:

"A vivid mind-photo of the Mojave Desert in all its sun-baked wonder, rendered with peyote-dream guitars and sparse, elegant percussion." - Rolling Stone

"If Nick Cave had spent his childhood in the Southwest, this is the kind of music he might've made - a sweeping, swirling, somewhat Stereolab-ish drone that's full of both darkness and wonder." - huH

Update, Aug. 2011: Here is a show flyer and a ticket that may shed light on the origin of the phrase "All Fish Go To Heaven."  It was apparently the name of a series of annual festivals in Arizona of bands in AZ's "Beautiful Noise" scene, which I guess was a take-off of the shoegaze bands that was known as "The Scene That Celebrates Itself" in the early '90s.

Flyer

Ticket

Planets with similar climates: Dif Juz - "No Motion" (~1982), Juned - "Sisters Of The Red Sun" (1995), 7% Solution - "Your Kingdom, Your World" (1996), Tortoise - "TNT" (1998),  Southpacific - "E10 @ 182" (1999).

I don't like fishing, which makes me an anomaly here in south Louisiana, where you pretty much just have to take a boat out on any body of water and then duck as fish try to jump into it, some of them even bringing their own charbroil seasoning along, as though they are happy to fulfill their one duty in life at any expense.  I took down my mini 10-gallon reef aquarium a few months ago, which means that for the first time since about 1986, I'm aquariumless.  Well, I was for about a year after Katrina, which killed my 90-gal. reef tank, but not by choice.  I now think that keeping living things in a little enclosure for my own amusement is not all that nice, though they are kept free of predation, so it's a pretty good tradeoff for them.

The Emerald Down >> I feel like the sun, I feel like a wave

The Emerald Down - "Stars"
(Honest In Secret Records, 2002)

The Emerald Down were a shoegaze band from Olympia, WA who later relocated to Columbus, OH for some inexplicable reason.  Their only album is called Scream The Sound.  Some hipster doormat at Pitchfork ravaged it, so you know it's amazing and sounds nothing like Animal Collective or Neutral Milk Hotel or Daft Punk or Robyn.  This song comes from their 2002 or 2003 EP Aquarium.  The band seems to have fallen off the earth after that.  T.E.D. are obviously very indebted to Lush, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and other bands of that ilk & era, which is a very good thing.  I used to think the phrase "scream the sound" was taken from the beginning of Lush's song "Sweetness And Light," but it turns out I was wrong about that Lush lyric.  Singer Rebecca Basye is in the same league as Rachel Goswell (Slowdive) and Miki Berenyi (Lush) for breathy and seductive vocals with an icy edge.  I can't make out a single word she sings on this song, unfortunately, so I couldn't use a lyrical excerpt in the title of this post.  She was previously in the Olympia, WA-based punk/screamo band Mukilteo Fairies, which strangely enough also begat ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead.  I should post T.E.D.'s track "Heavier Than Ether, Lighter Than Air," for which T.E.D. even released an official music video, though it didn't actually show the band members, just some atmospheric shots of rippling water run through a color filter.  It's practically a Zen Buddhist experience watching it, so someone please add it back to YouTube!

Planets with similar climates: Slowdive - "When The Sun Hits" (1993), Band Of Susans - "Estranged Labor" (1991), Colfax Abbey - "Once In A While" (1996), Pale Saints - "Featherframe" (1992), Sonic Youth - "Becuz" (1995).


I got a chip on my windshield repaired for free under warranty down in Houma today.  In the waiting room at Safelite, they had the year-end issue of Vibe magazine with Keri Hilson on the cover which I bought last week (for the... articles), as well as this creepy ultra-right-wing pro-gun-and-"liberty" magazine whose name escapes me, though I think it had "Liberty" in its name.  I listened to two mix CDs that I had made in '04 and recently rediscovered, one of which was in my "Imaginary Soundtracks" series.  I walked around this outdoor store that sells statues for yards.  They had some sick Venus de Milos (replete with no arms) and some unimpressive swans.  The Oscars are this weekend and I haven't seen any of the nominees for best picture, though I did see Waste Land, which was nominated for best documentary.  I just don't like seeing movies in theaters, since you walk out of the building with no actual object in exchange for your money, just a memory of a film which is the same film that everyone else in every theater nationwide/worldwide saw.  Seeing a live performance is much more immediate and fulfilling to me, since no one else in history will see the same performance you saw on that day, so I prefer to go to concerts instead.

Sleepers >> I love to listen to the mirror break

Sleepers - "Let Me Free"
(unreleased, 1980; Tim/Kerr Records, 1996)

Last night I rescued about 30 ladybugs from my bedroom; they somehow get inside via the foam weatherstripping along the window A/C unit and huddle up for warmth during the winter.  They also hide in the black rubber weatherstripping on my car, since I guess it absorbs heat.  The Sleepers were a mercurial San Francisco punk / post-punk band with artsy leanings and cool basslines.  Singer Ricky Williams was a notoriously strange guy, known for keeping various amphibians as pets (hey, I did that for over a decade and look how I turned out) in his dark living quarters, as well as more bizarre and destructive drug-induced activities.  He was also the original singer of Flipper and the original drummer of Crime.  This funkily-propulsive, yet eerie and hypnotic, song can only be found on their compilation CD called The Less An Object.  (It's not on the LP version.)  The album has one of the strangest album covers I've ever seen, and fascinating liner notes.  This is one of those rare occasions when one of the previously-unreleased tracks on a disc turns out to be the best thing on it by a mile.  Unfortunately, most of the band's other songs sound almost nothing like this one, but their 1980 7" ("Mirror" / "Theory") is pretty remarkable.  Williams died of an apparent drug overdose in 1992.  As for the title of this song, maybe it came to him after one too many nights of staring into his newts' misty terraria and wondering what they were trying to say to him?... though it's probably about his own mental illness.  Coincidentally, one of my memories of living in San Francisco as a kid in the early '80s was bringing a little toy rubber newt to a Golden State Warriors game and playing with it incessantly rather than paying attention to the game.  That was my only Warriors game, though we went to a bunch of 49ers games when they were winning all those Super Bowls.  Here's a punk newt with a mohawk:

Planets with similar climates:  CAN - "Mushroom" (1971), Sonic Youth - "Master-Dik" (1987), Shady Crady [later called Mercury Rev] - "Clamor" (1988), Talking Heads - "Once In A Lifetime" (1980), The Church - "Shadow Cabinet" (1984).

Francis 7 >> My heart began to splinter

Francis 7 - "Red Roses"
(unreleased[?], ca. 2003)

For my first song post, here's a gem by a Miami band named after a character in the 1976 post-quasi-erotica dystopian escapism fluff-noir movie Logan's Run.  (No woman in history will ever be more gorgeous than Jenny Agutter was in that flick, which I hear is unfortunately being remade.)

I downloaded an mp3 excerpt of this song in '03 or '04, and have played it an alarming number of times over the ensuing years, always wondering what the rest of the song would sound like.  Being a New Orleanian, the fact that they were a band from the Southern U.S. in the '00s, rather than one from, say, England in 1992, was very intriguing to me.  I talked to the lead guy from F7, Omar, in an AOL chatroom for an hour or two one night back then.  The main thing I remember him saying was that John Lever of The Chameleons was his favorite drummer ever.  I asked him about some other Florida bands, like Swivel Stick and Stella Luna, and maybe Whirlaway.  We mainly talked about shoegaze-related gear stuff like delay and reverb, and he was super-talkative and extremely knowledgeable/passionate/perfectionist about the whole thing, not unlike a Kevin Shields or a Scott Cortez.  Someone on RYM sent me this mp3 the other day, after I had given up hope of ever finding it.  Apparently it's only available on a compilation CD put out by the (defunct?) website Auralgasms, called The Beat Of Discontent. And much to my shock, I found out today that the band is still around, and on their Facebook page, they say "Well, it looks like "Red Roses" is a song that just won't die. Kind of appropriate! Version 3 to be recorded soon, or Raf may kill me..."  So apparently the one I'm posting is version 2, and my excerpt mp3 (with a different vocal track and other small differences) was version 1.  TMI, I know.


Update, 3/29/11: Here is the original mp3 excerpt that I got in '03; I just recently found it on an old mix CD that I made, dated 8/17/04.  I love how it charges out of the gate with that drum roll and synth wash, which is why I was so surprised to hear the long, subduded buildup in the full-length version: 

If you like this song, check out: The Douglas Fir - "Unwelcome" (1999), Kitchens Of Distinction - "Railwayed" (1991), The House Of Love - "Feel" (1992), National Skyline - "Some Will Say" (2001), Antarctica - "Absence" (1999).