Bell Hollow >> And you have lost the perfect jewel of the sky

Bell Hollow - "Storm's End"

(Five03 Records, 2007)

I got into this band a few years ago, right after they had broken up, as luck would have it.  I had them confused with all the other "Bell" bands of the era (Bell Tower, Howling Bells, The Belle Stars, etc., and later the Broken Bells), so I unfortunately missed them when they played in NOLA in '08 with local Interpol acolytes The Public.  This song is from their sole full-length, Foxgloves, named after the plant from which the heart drug Digitalis is made.  The vocal performance is just stunning, with singer Nick Niles effortlessly assuming all sorts of voices, like a 4AD-ified version of Mike Patton.  Singing along to any Bell Hollow ditty is like the Vocal Olympics, but at these Olympics, everyone wins a medal.  Two members of the band were in the mid-'80s goth band The Naked And The Dead, so this is a type of music they have felt deeply for several decades, and hence they were not just some younguns trying to cash in on the post-punk revival of the '00s.  Guitarist Greg Fasolino is a massive Chameleons fan, not surprisingly, and on this song he nails The Cure's loping, watery, slo-mo, reverbed, surf-rock-stuck-in-molasses Disintegration-era guitar sound.

Lyrics here & in the CD booklet.

Note: This post was originally going to be about the ultra-jangly, Smiths-esque "Copper Crayon", but I rewrote it after having a change of mind.  Another stunner on this album is the acoustic, mournful "Eyes Like Planets".

From the German magazine Gothic Chronicles (issue #63), July 2006.  The last sentence is all that matters to me.

A band called White Lies came along with pretty much this exact same sound but little to no discernible songwriting talent, and are now semi-huge stars touring big venues across Europe.  Go figure.

Correction: My mom just hit the big 5-9, not 6-0.  On the night after we went to the Pelican Club, my sister and I took her to a Mexican place called the Velvet Cactus on Harrison Ave. and had lots of tequilas at our table outside.  I got her a mini jigsaw puzzle, one that is billed as the world's smallest wooden jigsaw puzzle, in fact, earlier that day in Slidell.  It was made in Sweden some decades ago.  I found it in an antiques store that had mainly trinkets rather than actual antiques.

I somehow made myself watch both of the Shins' songs on SNL last night.  It's sort of mind-boggling that a former member of Bare Minimum made it to what could be called the top of the pop culture mountain, albeit by joining one of the suckiest, most derivative bands in history.  His drumming was really the only interesting thing about the first song, and the second song was so boring that I literally can't remember a single detail about it.

If you want to be really depressed about the current state of music ("indie" or otherwise), just check out this concert listing page from exactly 20 years ago, March 11th '92.  It's from the 3/14/92 issue of Melody Maker; click here to view it full size:

Toni already had her existential Robert Smith impression down to an exact science, right down to the floppy hair strands, eyeshadow, lipstick color, & head tilt
...not that I'm complaining.

I personally have no idea which of those gigs I would've gone to on that night, because I would give my left hand to go to about five of those shows.  Which would you have gone to?  You can see that the previous owner of this rag was so excited about that night's gig bonanza that he/she actually BLED ON IT.  Or maybe the blood came later that night during a rough session of something or other, or maybe it's pomegranate sorbet, but the point is that people in England in the early '90s were spoiled beyond belief when it came to music.  And all they ever really did was bicker about which band ripped off which other one, blind to their good fortune, to the point where most of these bands changed their sounds dramatically just to get some respite from the constant critical drubbings coming from all sides.  Another interesting thing is that all of these shoegaze bands seemed content to play locally at this time, which was their all-time peak of commercial popularity / exposure, rather than touring to far-flung corners of the world.  (Although that "Rollercoaster tour" mentioned on the front cover did criss-cross the U.S. and helped to establish shoegaze over here.)  So I guess it really was as insular of a scene as people make it out to have been.  And I think Bell Hollow would've fit into that scene quite effortlessly.  Maybe they would've toured big theaters across the pond rather than dingy clubs over here in America.

I will not be pinkwashed: Komen's race is for money, not cure - "Susan G. Komen for the Cure is a multimillion-dollar company with assets totaling over $390 million. Only 20.9% of these funds were reportedly used in the 2009-2010 fiscal year for research 'for the cure.'"

Komen Foundation offers pink handgun, "Hope Edition":

Atheist billboard goes up in NJ Muslim neighborhood

Planets with similar climates: Kitchens Of Distinction - "Aspray" (1990), Asylum Party - "Play Alone" (1989), Pale Saints - "Thread Of Light" (1992), Echo & The Bunnymen - "The Killing Moon" (1983), Film School - "Two Kinds" (2007), National Skyline - "Air" (2000), The Comsat Angels - "Independence Day" (1980), Band Of Susans - "Blind" (1993).