The Sheila Divine >> I'd rather have a fatal than a life unstable

The Sheila Divine - "Back To The Cradle"

(Arena Rock Recording Co. [U.S.] / Rykodisc [Europe], 2002)

Sorry for neglecting this site yet again, but I'm back in the fuckin' saddle, baby, and all it took was thinking about this song.  The lyrics are about someone who is on life support due to being in a coma or persistent vegetative state.  (In the class on medical ethics that I took in college, the difference between a coma and a PVS was one of the most frequently discussed topics.  See the famous Terri Schiavo case.)  "If you were sent to prison, [and] prison was your mind, would you try escaping or would you do the time?" is a boldly chilling way to open a song.  For what it's worth, this song is similar in topic to Metallica's masterpiece "Fade To Black" (which is of course based on the book / movie Johnny Got His Gun).  The delivery of the line "WAAAAKE UPPPPP!" at the end of this song is the most stunning thing I've ever heard in music, singing-wise.  Singer Aaron Perino could've tried to end it with some sort of pretentious bit of phrasing, but the fact that he chose just those two primal words really makes his sentiment hit home.  He summoned up his internal passion and just let loose.  I'd pay to see video footage of him laying down this song's vocals in the studio.  One would never guess that Perino is a blond guy in a suit and horn-rimmed glasses.  Frank Black is rightly considered the gold standard for the shrieking style of vocals in indie rock, especially in the Boston scene, but I'd say Perino swiped his crown with this song (especially the very ending).  Though hardly anyone knows about it, of course.
This song gives me the energy of 7 PowerBars and 3 to 4 cans of Jolt cola.  And it is my personal fuck you to all the shitty imagecore "indie rock" bands of the '00s like the Strokes, Spoon, Arcade Fire, the Hold Steady, etc.  Those bands and most of their fans should pretty much be slaughtered after being sent to dig ditches for a few decades in Siberian prison camps, but that's another topic.  Search out better music and you shall find it.

I downloaded the EP Secret Society from eMusic in 2003, and was immediately knocked out of my chair by this song, especially since it comes a few tracks after the very cool, restrained and elegant "The Swan".  I had read about TSD going back to '99, when their album New Parade was released to somewhat frenzied acclaim in the music mags.  In fact, that album predated the whole Interpol / Editors suave Britpoppy post-punk revival thing by several years.  (Makes you wonder if Paul Banks & Co. ever caught any gigs by TSD in Interpol's formative days...)  Of course, the Sheilas broke up the same year I finally heard them, which was the same year that Interpol became international icons.  Not picking on Interpol, by the way.  TSD never played in the New Orleans area as far as I know.

AllMusic Guide's terribly-written review starts off by comparing the band to Weezer, then mentions "politely anguished vocals" and John Hughes soundtracks.  And of course, the author doesn't even mention "Back To The Cradle."  (Guess he was busy answering the door or hosing off his latte machine in the backyard when that song erupted onto his hi-fi.)

Fun Fact: The band's name is Aussie slang for "faggot."

Image I found on Tumblr that has been weirding me out / cracking me up for weeks

Some more songs that end with alarmingly tortured screams like this one does:

You Am I - "Embarrassed" ("Gonna tear it, you'll forGETTTTT ITTTT!")
Pixies - "Tame" ("TEHHHAAAAAAME!")
Nirvana - "Territorial Pissings" (A better WAAAAYY!")
Unwound - "Feeling$ Real" ("The world starts coming DOWWWWN!")
Helmet - "Murder" ([some yelling])

If you hate amazingly tortured screams, go to this concert on Thursday:

Planets with similar climates: Black Flag - "Room 13" (1981), Hole - "Violet" (1993), The Sound - "The Fire" (1981), Buffalo Tom - "Taillights Fade" (1992) & "Summer" (1995), U2 - "Like A Song..." (1982), Catherine Wheel - "Chrome" (1993).

Dub Sex >> Before things started spiraling down

Dub Sex - "Then And Now"

(Skysaw Records, ca. 1987/1988 / Cut Deep Records, 1989)

I got an excerpt of this song in the mid-'00s somewhere online, and quickly became pretty obsessed with it, then bought the actual 12" EP (self-titled) in 2008 on eBay.  This band was a favorite of John Peel, recording a whopping four Peel sessions despite never releasing a full-length album.  In fact, this song was performed on his show as early as January of '87, so it was surely written in '86 or earlier.  If I remember correctly, one band member did some time in The Fall, which would explain Peel's affinity for Dub Sex, since he had an inexplicable allegiance to Mark E. Smith's abominable band.

This song later appeared on a compilation of the band's material called Splintered Faith, which I have on vinyl rip and CD rip; the LP version has 15 songs, and the CD version has 18.  I'm intentionally uploading the crackly vinyl rip so that folks will be inspired to seek out and purchase the actual LP or CD.  Both are long out of print, so you'll have to buy secondhand, hence the band won't actually see any profit from your endeavor, but at least you can say you have something by a band called Dub Sex, whose sound is not remotely dubby and is definitely the polar opposite of sexy.  The singer's voice is one of the most unpleasant things I've ever come across, but I can't imagine anyone else singing "Then And Now" other than maybe Henry Rollins.  I also couldn't imagine the EP without its arrestingly unforgettable cover pic, credited to a photographer named P. Hoare:

I have no idea if Unwound were ever fans of Dub Sex, but their early, manic stuff sure seems to be in a very similar boat.  Early Swervedriver had some musical and geographical similarity to D.S.; coincidentally D.S. had a song called "Swerve," replete with a bare-bones, but professionally-shot, music video:

They had a slightly cooler video for "Time Of Life" in 1989, which shows bassist Cathy Brooks more clearly.  She had some pretty sweet basslines in many of their songs, such as "Voice Of Reason," "Man On The Inside," "Every Secret (That I Ever Made)," "The Underneath", and "Caved In."  So you could say she was the only one who contributed anything remotely resembling dub music to their sound.  Some interesting YouTube comments from "The Underneath": "I saw Dub Sex supporting the Stone Roses in 1989 at the International just after the Roses had released their debut album...two great bands" and "what happened to these guys? they are at least as good as Fugazi."  Your only chance to see the band members in living colour is probably this performance of "I Am Not Afraid" on Tony Wilson's TV show The Other Side Of Midnight.  (Wilson ran the club The Haçienda and co-founded Factory Records.)

Last week, after I loaded about half a ton of these white landscaping bricks into my car in 95º heat; note the chest sweat:

Best live bands I saw in the first half of 2012:
!!!, School Of Seven Bells, Whom Do You Work For?, A Silver Mt. Zion, Kindest Lines, The Neville Brothers (Jazz Fest), The Flaming Lips, Grimes (w/ Born Gold as her backing band), Tatsuya Nakatani + Helen Gillet + Rob Cambre, Tineke Postma (two shows in one night), Foo Fighters (Jazz Fest).

Good but nothing to write home about:
Alcest, EXITMUSIC, Shabazz Palaces, Magnetic Ear (French Quarter Fest), Dayna Kurtz, Sasha Masakowski (French Quarter Fest).

Ones I should've seen:
White Hills, The Weeknd (show sold out literally as I was about to buy tix online), Chairlift, Twin Sister, Har Mar Superstar (missed him twice so far this year; have still never seen him), No Joy, The darkness, Thurston Moore, Nautical Almanac, etc.

Atheist wins right to wear "religious pasta strainer" in i.d. photo

Speaking of the lyric "I used to live in this town before things started spiraling down," check out this YouTube video and/or this one.  Disclaimer: I'm a full-spectrum atheist, meaning I don't believe in any god(s) and am against all religions.  I have the least problem with "Far East" religions, since they're mainly centered on introspection and personal discovery.  I think any reasoned survey of the facts will show that Mormonism, Islam, and Scientology are cults, not just religions.  I like lots of aspects Arabic / N. African culture, and in fact I have over baby 100 date palms outside my window, have owned a Mali uromastyx lizard for 15 years, just noticed a CD called Moroccan Spirit on my desk, get chicken shawarma at a Metairie restaurant called Byblos on the regular, have The Kite Runner on DVD on my rack about 6 feet to my right, bought a copy of the Qur'an last year at a thrift store on a whim, etc.  And this is all despite having some Jewish blood on my mom's side.  I know that might come off as a "Some of my best friends are [black / Jewish / etc.]" type of rationale.  My point is just that I have no problem with Arabic people or culture, I just don't care for Islam, e.g. the fact that kids in the region are forced to join it from a very early age, that drawing Muhammed is punishable by death, that Jews are a mortal enemy, and other inhumane aspects.  From a broader perspective, I've long said that white people are the illegal immigrants in this country and that Native Americans and Mexicans have much more right to this land than we white people do.  I just don't know if this country can survive another wave of militant immigration, since the white influx of 1492 tore it apart pretty quickly.

Planets with similar climates: Venus Beads - "One Way Mirror" (1990), Unwound - "Lucky Acid" (1993), Prosaics - "Teeth" (2004), Hüsker Dü - "Lifeline" (1983), Live Skull - "Fort Belvedere" (1986), Quicksand - "Lie And Wait" (1992), Helmet - "Murder" (1990).

Bare Minimum >> Marking the unmarkable pristine sea

Bare Minimum - "Night We Streak, Divine Failure"

(Sub Pop Records, 1995 / Rx Remedy Records, 1996)

Here's one of the most intense songs I've ever heard, by a band that is tragically unknown.  As you can imagine, there are a lot of bands with this name, so be sure to demand the real one (born in Cali, raised in Seattle) at your best record store.

The intensity is ramped up masterfully over the course of the song, with a fairly astonishing ending section.  This song was recorded in March '95 by Barrett Jones and released as a 7" single by Sub Pop later that year:

Mediocre pic taken from an eBay auction; evidence of olden days when indie labels were apparently not prohibited from using black vinyl by arcane guild rules.

Amazingly, this single didn't turn them into the new Nirvana or even the new Dickless or Cat Butt.  Despite this, Sub Pop obviously dug the song, because it was included on the band's Night We Streak EP the following year, on a short-lived Sub Pop imprint called Rx Remedy.  I think this label was some sort of minor league where Sub Pop's less-commercial bands could develop for a while, but none of them ever gained any notoriety.

I once read an interview with Bare Minimum in which they talked about being the Foo Fighters' opening act in summer or fall of '95.  (This is possibly related to the fact that Barrett Jones also produced the Foos' early stuff, and previously had done some production for Nirvana.)  The thought of a few thousand teen grunge fans being subjected to Bare Minimum's angular chaos when all they really wanted to hear was "Big Me" or some Nirvana covers is really amusing.  I would kill to hear some live recordings of B-Min from this tour.  Props to Dave Grohl for taking them on the road.

I first got into this B-Min when I bought a promo CD* of their proggy opus Can't Cure The Nailbiters in January '99 at the Mushroom on a whim.  (I'm pretty sure I also bought my promo CD of Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime there on the same day.)  I then tracked down all their other stuff, including a very rare self-titled EP from '93 that I recently downloaded.  But I have yet to corrall the "Night We Streak" 7", or the split 7" with post-hardcore icons Angel Hair.

Bare Minimum had some quirks: Singer Brian Speckman sang about eyeballs a lot, e.g. "Cursed with black widow eyes" in this song.  Their two guitarists are credited as "left guitar" (Brian Speckman) and "right guitar" (Mark Pinkos).  Their song titles were generally complex and impenetrable: "Star Raise Iodine Failure Drainpipe To The Bottom," "Substitute Genius For Jesus And Poke His Eyes Out," "Zero Discuss", "Waterfight Or Firefight, Sand Or Baking Soda," "Swim In Anxious Moment," "A Dime's Body Makes Him A Diver," "Platinum Eyes Three Quarters Open."  Definitely one of the artiest and most oblique of all the so-called "post-hardcore" bands of the '90s, often treading into abstract realms that their apparent idols like Unwound, Fugazi and Sonic Youth seldom did.  Their dense, dueling guitars have been was compared by All Music Guide to those of early Glenn Branca orchestras.

The lyrics from the Night We Streak CD booklet:

They are mostly accurate, though he does not actually say "on the outskirts of" or "when I've sunk back into the sea"; I think he says "emotional" instead of "motion"; and he substitutes "their" for "black widow" near the very end.  And the line "marking the unmarkable pristine sea" is ominously intoned by a different, lower voice while Speckman shrieks "Marking! The pristine sea!"  It's probably Speckman doing both voices via overdubbing.  After about 10 years of thinking this song has something to do with drowning or dying, today I realized it's pretty obviously about sex and the guilt related to it.

Drummer Joe Plummer went on to play in mediocre-to-dismal pop bands like The Black Heart Procession (mediocre), Modest Mouse great to mediocre), and The Shins (dismal), and participated in the Boredoms' 88-drummer performance in 2008.  Of course, his shoddy Wikipedia page makes no mention of the words "Bare" or "Minimum."  I don't know what the other members have been up to, but if anyone knows, please leave a comment.

Discography:
Angel Hair / Bare Minimum - split 7" EP (Titanic Records / Gold Standard Laboratories [GSL], 1994)
"Night We Streak, Divine Failure" 7" (Sub Pop, 1995) ✇
Bare Minimum CD (Rx Remedy, 1996) ♨
Bare Minimum LP (Rx Remedy, 1996) (alternate cover) ♨
Night We Streak CD EP (Rx Remedy, 1996) ☠
No Cure For The Nailbiters (promo CD) (Rx Remedy, 1998) ✈☂
Can't Cure The Nailbiters CD (Rx Remedy, 1998) ☂
Can't Cure The Nailbiters 2xLP (Rx Remedy, 1998) ☂

Incredible Notes:
✇ - Translucent paper sleeve
♨ - Recorded in '95
☠ - Mostly recorded in '95; one song in '96
✈ - The promo CD for their last album is titled No Cure For The Nailbiters and has slightly different titles for several songs
☂ - Recorded in '97

How bots seized control of my pricing strategy - "...a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read."

Video clip of a mind-boggling collection of Mammillaria cacti in Russia:

Due to their small size, toughness, abundant flowers, crazy spines, etc., Mammillaria is the main genus of cacti that I, and most other cactus fanatics, collect.  But this collection rivals that of any big-time botanical garden, and this clip proves there's a new Cold War, or dare I say a new Hot War, brewing.  So we need to develop a nuke that can kill all the male citizens of Russia, but spare all the women and cacti.

Planets with similar climates: Unwound - "What Was Wound" (1993) & "Petals Like Bricks" (1995), Bleach - "Headless" (1991), Fugazi - "Sieve-Fisted Find" (1989), ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - "Homage" (2001), Drive Like Jehu - "Here Come The Rome Plows" (1994), Helmet - "Murder" (1990).

A Place To Bury Strangers >> You make my dreams complete and then crash them down

A Place To Bury Strangers - "I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart"

(Self-released, ca. 2006; Mute Records, 2009)

The band first put this song on a self-released CD-R EP, recorded in 2005 or 2006, and then re-recorded it for their album Exploding Head on venerable Mute Records.

Original 2006 version:

2009 re-recording:

The re-recorded version is over a minute longer and has much clearer vocals, sacrificing little of the feral intensity of the original version, so I think most people will favor it.
As I've seen some other astute fans point out, this song is heavily indebted to both of the songs ("Beach Song" and "Take Me Down") that comprise Slowdive's 1992 flexi 7".  (Yes, Slowdive used to rock pretty hard for a brief while.)  And it even brazenly has the lyric "I want to take you down," and they also have a song called "Missing You" which is not a cover of Slowdive's song "Missing You."  If you want to hear the lyrics very clearly, go listen to the synth-y Broken Spindles remix on the "I Lived My Life..." remix single (Mute Records, 2010), which has the vocals mixed up high and has most of the pesky guitars removed.  There's also a nice choppy industrial remix on there by Secret Machines.

Front cover of 2006 EP

Back cover or inner booklet of 2006 EP

2010 remix maxi-single cover art

I've seen APTBS perform this song live twice, in Oct. 2008 in Baton Rouge at Chelsea's Café and in Sept. 2009 in New Orleans at One Eyed Jacks.  They are known for doing an extended noise bridge during the middle of the song (starting at the 2:20 mark), like My Bloody Valentine infamously do during the middle of "You Made Me Realise," and believe me, it's amazing live. The first time was amazing, mind-shattering, etc.  The second time was actually even better, maybe because the sound system was much better and there were a lot more people there, and because I was amped up to go on that rollercoaster again.  They play live using lots of fog and strobe lighting, like all bands should.  While singer/guitarist Oliver Ackermann is obviously the main focal point, drummer Jason "Jay Space" Weilmeister is an absolute monster.  I mean, holy shit, he was killing it, in a savage-yet-jazz-informed vein not unlike, say, John Stanier of Helmet.  The bassist is no slouch either.  They launch immediately into each song without even a millisecond of pausing, which takes a ton of rehearsal and ears a band the title of being "tight."  They have absolutely no time for between-song banter.  If you want that, go see fucking Guided By Voices or Lil Wayne or Elvis Presley or something.  When people talk about great power trios, let there be no doubt that APTBS is right at the top of the (my) all-time heap, along with Bailter Space, Unwound, Poem Rocket, Hovercraft, and a few others.  Listening to an entire APTBS studio album, on the other hand, can be a bit difficult, due to all the distortion and the relentless sonic overload.  Ackermann also makes guitar pedals guitar effects pedals under the name Death By Audio, and is sometimes overeager to show off his wares on record rather than backing off and letting the songs breathe a bit.

Speaking of breathing, I was able to overcome steady waves of toxic fog to take this pic of them at Chelsea's Café on 10/16/08, using a long shutter speed to get intentional blurs:

As Plexi once sang, "When I was looking at you, I didn't mind your foggy weather"

I unknowingly got into APTBS by hearing about a band called Skywave all the time on the Blisscent mailing list circa 2000-2001.  The main people talking about Skywave at this time were apparently members of Skywave.  I got kind of annoyed by this, but bought their "Don't Say Slow" 7" in the mid-'00s, and later got their full-length CD.  APTBS emerged out of the ashes of Skywave, with a very similar sound, albeit with less (or zero?) synth.  (Skywave's album was titled Synthstatic, and I remember getting a chuckle when someone on Blisscent erroneously transposed a few letters and called it Synthtastic.)  Some other dudes from Skywave went on to form the Joy-Divisionally-monikered band Ceremony.

Anyway, here is the original (ca. 2006) video for the original version of "Shadow Of Your Heart":

The inferior 2010 video for the 2009 re-recording:

That second video was shot by the guitarist from Sian Alice Group, who were the opening act at the APTBS show I saw in '08.

The Joy Formidable + APTBS spring tour, guaranteed by Blowtorch Baby to be the best live show you see all year or else you pay me $20:

03/12/12 - San Francisco, CA - The Independent
03/13/12 - San Francisco, CA - The Independent
03/14/12 - Los Angeles, CA - The Music Box
03/17/12 - Denver, CO - Bluebird Theatre
03/19/12 - Minneapolis, MN - Fine Line Music Cafe
03/20/12 - Madison, WI - Majestic Theatre
03/22/12 - Bloomington, IN - The Bluebird
03/23/12 - Cincinnati, OH - 20th Century Theatre
03/24/12 - Atlanta, GA - The Masquerade
03/25/12 - Asheville, NC - Orange Peel
03/26/12 - Washington, DC - 9:30 Club
03/28/12 - New York, NY - Terminal 5
03/29/12 - Philadelphia, PA - Union Transfer
03/30/12 - Boston, MA - Paradise
03/31/12 - Montreal, QC - Cabaret Mile-End
04/02/12 - Toronto, ON - Lee's Palace

Apparently, hipsters are taking hints from the Amish now

Romney tax plan adds $600 billion to deficit, analysis says - "Though the Tax Policy Center said Romney’s tax plan would 'reduce federal tax revenues substantially, the budget hit isn’t as severe as some of his competitors. The same group previously said former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s tax plan would increase the deficit by $1.3 trillion and that Texas Governor Rick Perry’s proposal would boost the shortfall by $995 billion."

The final sentence. - A blog whose ambitious goal is to post the last sentence of every literary work ever published.  Good luck.  Speaking of books, I bought one the other day (My Brother's Gun by Ray Loriga) because it had a blurb by Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo on the back cover reading "Like the rush of an electric guitar riff charging up your spine, Ray Loriga's voice angles, beautifully desperate, to grasp our place in these chaotic times."  Here is the book's final sentence: "It was nighttime now, and then it would turn into day and all the planes in the world would continue passing through that very same spot."  That's translated from Spanish, so it's not his actual words, but it's pretty good stuff.

Planets with similar climates: Slowdive - "Beach Song" & "Take Me Down" (1992), My Bloody Valentine - "You Made Me Realise" (1988), Plexi - "Fourget" (1996), ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - "Ounce Of Prevention" & "Prince With A Thousand Enemies" (1997).

Knapsack >> We're not who we might prefer

California Month continued, tremor #39:

Knapsack - "Decorate The Spine"

(Alias Records, 1996)

I almost went to a Knapsack / Trunk Federation gig in early '97, right around the time I heard Knapsack's excellent "Courage Was Confused" on a Magnet magazine sampler CD.  (See the post on Starflyer 59's "The Boulevard" a few weeks ago for a pic of this CD.)  I bought this actual Knapsack CD, Day Three Of My New Life, sometime in the '00s.  For all these years I thought the singer was defiantly asking "Who makes the rules?  Who makes the rules?"  But I just found out the other day that it's "I begged to reverse the roles, reverse the roles."  Man.  I still have no idea what the term "decorate the spine" means, though it's very reminiscent of Archers Of Loaf's indie anthem "Web In Front", which has a cryptic "All I ever wanted was to be your spine" chorus.  And don't forget Ween's touching ballad "Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)".  On the topic of spines, I fractured my 5th lumbar vertebra (a.k.a. the L5) while playing football in 7th grade.  I had to wear this fucking corset thing 24/7 for over a year, and the doctor told me not to play football again.  But I was able to go on and play four more years of football (and five more years of basketball) after that, so what do doctors know anyway?  "God knows I'm not sure," as Knapsack would say.  Haha, that was great.

Buckley & Molly in Metairie Cemetery on Sept. 8th, about an hour before the Saints-Packers game which kicked off the NFL season.

Planets with similar climates: Foo Fighters - "Best Of You" (2005), Unwound - "You Bite My Tongue" (1992), The Sound - "Fire" (1981), Sunny Day Real Estate - "Seven" (1993).

Best article title found this week: Violent Birther Gun Nut Also Massive Fan of Tranny Porn, Dildos
Runner-up: Morgue turns away cupcakes from Lohan