Note: I wrote almost all of this post on July 2nd.
Note 2: The title of this post is a vinyl etching from the stunning "Columbus" 7" by one of my favorite bands, the Church. I found it here years ago and made myself memorize it. See, the band Caspian is named after the Caspian Sea, and... uh, yeah, you knew that. Did you know that seas are smaller than oceans? Ah, you did. Moving on then...
I've seen this rock band three times in New Orleans. They played "La Cerva" the first two times (as their opening song in March 2010 at the Dragon's Den; at an unknown part of their set in April 2011 at the Howlin' Wolf), but alas, they did not the third time (February 2013 at Siberia). Hopefully it's still in their setlist from time to time. Right before Caspian went on at that Dragon's Den show, I helped to save a guy who was overdosing outside on the Esplanade median. I then bounded up the winding staircase as "La Cerva" rained down upon me, just as it is about to rain down upon you.
I first heard this song after on a split Caspian / Constants 7" (upper left in pic above) that I bought at a Constants show in New Orleans in Oct. 2009. I highly recommend this single, as you could imagine. Constants are badass as hell.
Lots of so-called "post-rock" / "post-metal" bands get (justly) criticized for just relying on climax after climax, but son of a bitch if it isn't awe-inspiring when done right. Caspian wastes no time frittering around before getting right to the heavy stuff in this track. I bet even Beavis and Butt-head would've lost their shit over this one. The jazzy drumming (à la Tristeza, Dif Juz, Tortoise) gives this track a certain cool swagger that most furrow-browed "post-rock" bands fail to achieve. The cello playing is credited to a guy named John Rogers.
LIVE PIC (2013) [coming tomorrow]
Planets with similar climates: Trans Am - "Trans Am" (1995), Metallica - "Orion" (1986), Mogwai - "Mogwai Fear Satan" (1997), Sonic Youth - "Death To Our Friends" (1986).
(DeSoto Records / Pacifico Records, 1998; Modern City Records [France], 2001)
This song really has it all: A ridiculously long, atmospheric intro, cool guitar textures galore, rocket-propelled drumming, a tsunami of psychedelic axe-mangling, and of course a monster climax to end all climaxes. And only four lines of of lyrics in ten minutes. And three guitarists. Do the math. You can see by the genre tags I used that this band was not exactly easy to pigeonhole. I've always wondered where that word came from.
Due to the stealthy escalation of tempo, there is an 85-90% chance that you'll get a speeding ticket if you listen to this on ye olde American highway, so it's better to listen to it at bingo nite or any other time you need a quick pick-me-up without caffeine. In order to stave off insomnia, I avoid caffeine after noon. Juno covered DJ Shadow's "High Noon" on a split EP with DeSoto labelmates The Dismemberment Plan.
I first heard about Juno in a Jade Tree Records mailorder catalog in early '98, and almost ordered a 7" by them. I read reviews of this album, This Is The Way It Goes And Goes And Goes, around the time it came out in '99. But I didn't buy it until spring '03, when the Wherehouse Music (formerly Blockbuster Music) on Tchoupitoulas St. had a going-out-of-business sale and I snagged dozens of used CDs. (That's the only time I've ever seen this CD for sale in the used bins in the 13+ years since it was released, since almost no one who buys it is dumb enough to sell it. If you ever see it used, do not hesitate to open your wallet.) Articles about the band always mention singer Arlie Carstens' former career as a pro snowboarder, and the grisly accident he sustained which forced him to focus solely on music. His loss, our gain. The review of the album in CMJ by Kelso Jacks said "Juno crafts its music slowly. However, the brilliance of this album more than compensates for Juno's less-than-prolific nature. The band relies on the powerful interplay of three guitars to churn up an expansive whirlpool of textures. Juno's blasting, six-string complexities mimic everything from airplanes to waterfalls to banjo plucks. Unfettered by convention, these Northwesterners follow their sonic muse without paying mind to the clock, allowing sweeping, 10-minute epics such as 'Leave A Clean Camp And A Dead Fire' to unfold with the kind of passionate aggression that makes potentially self-indulgent duration a moot point. The brutal rhythm section adds to and controls the thunder using carefully measured accents and punctuations. This raucous din is topped off by guitarist Arlie Carstens' intelligent, surreal utterances, which are processed through a fuzzbox to complete Juno's wall of intensity. Truly worth the wait." That's basically a clinic on how to write a compact and informative review, by the way, though he should've mentioned more than just one specific song. (I omitted one discography-related sentence near the beginning.) It concludes: "Marketing Data: A summer tour is possible, though Carstens is currently recovering from spinal cord injuries, the result of his severely being injured in a snowboarding accident, earlier this year."
Great live clip at an unspecified venue in an unspecified year:
Also check out the sublimely haunting murder ballad "A Listening Ear", featuring co-lead vocals from Seattle chanteuse Jen Wood. It has some of the coolest slide guitar I've ever heard. A band called The Sea, Like Lead named itself after the album's closing song, "The Sea Looked Like Lead."
This Is The Way It Goes And Goes And Goes was not originally released on vinyl, but in 2001 a European tour edition on double LP was pressed on a French label called Modern City Records. Juno's live shows are the stuff of legend. They never played in New Orleans, sadly, and believe me, I sat around staring out my window for several years, pining for them to come by and Junoify my city. I guess Europe was a lot more inviting to them. The only other three-guitarist band that I actually listen to on a regular basis is Band Of Susans.
2001 gatefold double LP with two different colored records; pic courtesy of discogs.com
Juno's stature in the indie rock community is such that a documentary film was made about their recent comeback, but I don't know if it ever came out, and its website appears to be in mothballs.
Fri. Oct. 5: Despite having some sort of sinus infection or cold, saw Merchandise and Glish at the Big Top. It was kickass, and each band played the songs I wanted to hear, though it was evident that Merchandise's (very charismatic) singer was wasted off his ass. More on this show in an upcoming post! Oh yeah, I donated a book called For The Vegetarian In You to the NOLADIY / An Idea Like No Other guys so they could add it to the Iron Rail library. And I requested that they order me a copy of the new Possession EP by this Portland band called Arctic Flowers. Wandered around Frenchmen St. afterwards, mainly to catch the end of a photography exhibit called Velado by Melissa Stryker at Scott Edwards Photography Studio & Gallery. The photos had naked ppl and were printed on huge aluminum sheets, but in my opinion were not as racy or scandalous as the artist probably thought they would be. Here's the front and back of the postcard that made me decide to trek to the exhibit:
No, that's not Stryker in the pic. I saw a few songs by a crazy funk / party band called Yojimbo that was playing at Maison. Their singer / trombonist is a super-energetic, bespectacled redhead, and I was stunned to see she was wearing this bootleg Sonic Youth Sister t-shirt that is commonly sold by shady sellers online. I got mine on eBay about a decade ago; I think I gave it away to my internet girlfriend Michelle, whom I am no longer internet dating.
I took some video clips of Yojimbo, if only as proof that the singer had this shirt on. I didn't go inside due to it being packed and me being sick, but the open door and huge glass windows made it easy to see & hear inside. This girl, Carly Meyers, will be a superstar. In between jumping up and down as if on a pogo stick, playing her trombone pointed up at the ceiling, and laughingly wiping sweat from her face with a towel, she guided the crowd in holding up a blanket and urged them to "Get in the love tunnel!" I found a great Merchandise show poster (a big one, different from the small one shown above) on Frenchmen, so my night was complete.
Sat. Oct. 6: Went to the Bridge House thrift store and bought some sweet books and NIN's The Downward Spiral on CD ($1), then played hoops at that Annunciation Street court. One of the dudes was LSU's point guard in the late '80s / early '90s. He was a stocky redhead who could fill it up from outside. I mentioned that I went to LSU basketball camp in 1990. Watched some of the #4 LSU vs. #10 Florida football game with my sister, then we tried to go to the Botanical Garden. She was impressed by the raw power of "I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart" by A Place To Bury Strangers on the drive over there. NOBG was due to a wedding, so we walked around City Park and did some obnoxious stuff. Came back and watched LSU lose in pathetic fashion. I had lost track of my The Downward Spiral CD long ago, and was blown away by how fresh and visceral it still sounds. I still have the promo postcard that Interscope sent me when the album came out, and my friend Warren and I listened to it all the time in the mid-'90s. I had kind of swept the album under the rug of my mind as I got into better music over the years, but songs like "Reptile" and "Mr. Self-Destruct" are just inimitable and stand up to any sort of highbrow scrutiny.
Sun. Oct. 7: This was a pretty interesting day. A cold front blasted through, bringing the temp. down by about 20º from the previous day's high. I helped to stake some Chinese pistachio trees on Metairie Rd. with some Parkway Partners people. I was wearing my red Drew Brees practice jersey since he was gonna try to break Johnny Unitas' streak of 47 straight games with a TD pass that night, and the NFL wisely made sure it was against the team that let Drew go, the Chargers, a team that is so inept that it actually got the name Chargers from the fact that it was founded by a credit card ("charge card") magnate. Then Em and mom and I went to the zoo; Em said "Oh my God" so many times that mom and I had to tell her to limit it to one time per exhibit, but she couldn't even do that. Then we ate at this pizzeria called Slice next to Whole Foods, then went to Whole Foods, then went home to watch the first half of the Saints game. Drew got the record early with a pass that literally hit Devery Henderson on the numbers and in stride. That means "The ball flew through the air and hit the receiver on the chest, and the receiver did not have to alter his running motion." Found out that the Godspeed show already started, since the dumb promo postcard and poster had the wrong start times on them. So Em and I drove over to Tip's, knowing that we had missed the opening act, G String Orchestra. Luckily Godspeed were in peak form, beginning with a long (10-minute?) ambient drone, the one at the beginning of "The Dead Flag Blues" but unfortunately omitting the ominous dude talking about cars on fire, a thousand lonely suicides, etc. Minimalistic film clips (sometimes just words) were projected behind them throughout the show; they also did this when I saw then in March '03 at TwiRoPa. I was disappointed at a few downsized elements: The band was down to only one female member, and no longer had any cello; the venue was smaller than last time; the merch table was way smaller, with only the (brand) new album for sale (and only on vinyl), plus some t-shirts. These are minor complaints, because it was a really challenging and uncompromising concert, the kind most "post-rock" bands wouldn't even dare attempt. Even by GYBE's standards, the buildups were extra-long and the climaxes were done with a great flair for layering. Mom texted me to say the Saints had won; I texted back "Fuck yeah." Near the middle of the show a dude passed out and hit the ground with a huge thud right behind us, and had to be escorted out. (This was nowhere near as cool as when a guy slashed his wrists outside a Humpers / Neckbones show that I caught in '97 at Monaco Bob's. That show continued after only a brief pause, by the way.) The finale was just incredible, with two of the greatest pieces of music I've ever seen, set to a backdrop of a factory on fire. I'm pretty sure the last thing they played was "World Police And Friendly Fires." There was no encore, despite lots of cheering. Efrim didn't say a word to the crowd, despite the fact that he was practically a stand-up comedian at the A Silver Mt. Zion show in Feb. at One Eyed Jacks. To celebrate the fact that her computer had not been stolen, despite being parked with one window totally down, we went to this bar called Ms. Mae's up the street. It was as lame as my sister told me it would be, though I played two Interpol songs and Catherine Wheel's "Black Metallic" on the internet jukebox. Some guy in a just-bought Godspeed (or G String Orchestra) shirt juked some Pelican and Russian Circles. Uhh... No comment, Beavis. A charismatic 59.9 year old art teacher at Tulane sit right down at our table and hit on Emily right in front of me, and kept claiming he had met us before. So we had to eventually make a daring exit, which prompted him to desperately ask us "Are you guys on Facebook?" "No, sorry." We were, as the saying goes, so done with that.
I stupidly trusted the door time on the postcard rather than the door time on the ticket, hence why we missed the opening band
Sorry for all the pics in this post.
Planets with similar climates: Plexi - "Peel / He" (1995), Catherine Wheel - "Ferment" (1992), Kitchens Of Distinction - "Blue Pedal" (1992), The Sound - "New Dark Age" (1981), "Missiles" (1979) & "Whirlpool" (1985), The Church - "Chaos" (1992), Unwound - "For Your Entertainment" (1996), Pantera - "Hollow" (1992).
It's reverb time, motherfuckers. If you are so unpatriotic that you don't know what reverb is, you will learn after a few seconds of this song have elapsed. Though it's mainly used on guitars and keyboards, reverb is also used pretty frequently on vocals; e.g. the singer from My Morning Jacket. This song from their album Secret Life Of Machines, whose title is of course based on a curious Stevie Wonder album which was a soundtrack to a film about plant life.
Doldrums are what seafarers call areas around the equator with little to no prevailing winds, where a sailed vessel can easily get stuck. Wind is actually "born" here. No, seriously: I've seen footage in a world climate documentary (I think it was that one called Planet Earth) of someone standing on a beach near the equator who simply held up a leaf and let go of it, so that it fell towards the sand. It hung suspended for a few moments, and eventually floated up and away into the æther. The word is also used to describe sadness, but I don't know which term came first. Doldrums is a band that grew out of the Virginia experimental band Rake.. Whereas Rake. (it's always spelled "Rake." with a period after it) were prankster-ish, iconoclastic, and kitchen-sink, Doldrums were more atmospheric and mysterious, at least on this album. The cool thing is that they didn't use synths and other electronic gizmos, which most ambient musicians rely on. They just plug in their guitars and basses and crank up the ol' reverb and delay to create vast washes of sound, like blue whales sighing or a desert of opals melting. They did a good job of putting the ghost in the machine with this song. The airy, crisp, jazzy drumming is the ideal counterfoil to the spacious brushstrokes of guitar. It's really difficult to describe what genre this song is, as it blends ambient, space rock, post-rock, and dream pop. Man, this song makes me so proud to have been born in Virginia, birthplace of 14 of our nation's 44 Presidents. It should seriously be the state's anthem. "Weird Orbits" segues seamlessly into the album's second track, the 15 minute instrumental opus "Colossal Scissors". (Great potential band name alert...) I would say Lustmord's creeptacular ambient classic Heresy is the only album I can think of that uses reverb as prominently / boldly as Secret Life Of Machines. Slowdive and Low used it to great effect on their early stuff, Windy & Carl made a career out of it, and The Orb used it in some of their "ambient house" soundscapes. So yeah, go buy a reverb pedal and play a guitar through it and you'll hear entire new worlds unfurling before your eyes. My amp, a Fender Prosonic, has allegedly the largest spring reverb tank of any amp ever made, hence I don't need a reverb pedal.
Doldrums' next album, Acupuncture, had song structures based more on krautrock / prog; that was the first Doldrums album I bought, on promo CD in '98. They apparently broke up after their 1999 album Desk Trickery on Kranky.
I found out there's a band named Secret Life Of Machines, but I dunno if they're named after this album.
This CD's artwork features some beautiful photos of our avian friends:
Speaking of orbits and space rock(s), here's one of my favorite thinkers, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:
A few weeks ago I finally went to Tickfaw State Park on a 95º day. Nabbed two seedlings: a Callicarpa americana (American Beautyberry) and a Saururus cernuus (Lizard's Tail). Played basketball at an indoor court for a few hours. Had a semi-slumber party with my sister and her friend Ashley last week. Missed a concert by The Weeknd (House Of Blues, June 12th) because it sold out online literally as I had just reached for my wallet to whip out the credit card. Flaming Lips / Grimes (June 28th) tickets also sold out right before my wallet-reaching, but I think we have a source for free tix to that one. My sister is now addicted to Grimes, so missing that show is not an option. Speaking of Grimes, the Doldrums in this post is not the Doldrums that appears on her latest album. The one on her album is a techno dude from Canada.
Also recently: Saw some movies, including Boy A, The Dinner Game, American Heart, a Rodriguo y Gabriela tour documentary, Vitus, Skin, and The Brooke Ellison Story.
Planets with similar climates: Slowdive - "Albatross" (1991) & "Losing Today" (1990), Windy & Carl - "Undercurrent" (1998), Bark Psychosis - "All Different Things" (1989), Bowery Electric - "Coming Down" (1996).
Just a kewl instrumental shoegaze / post-rock voyage, with one of the sickest basslines ever (starting right after the 4-minute mark). The bass also has that nice round, "fat," undistorted sound that I prefer. Other examples of bands with this bass sound include Bark Psychosis, Hovercraft, Unwound, Bleach, and Poem Rocket, which coincidentally happen to be some of my all-time favorites; as in: bands to whom I'd donate a kidney with no questions asked if they ever needed one.
I bought this CD, I Fall To Pieces, used in the $2 or $4 clearance rack at the Mushroom in the early '00s, partly due to it being on Bedazzled. The packaging is very artsy, with translucent, vellum-esque paper and a definite Factory / 4AD aesthetic, which is not surprising, since Bedazzled always wanted to be the U.S. 4AD or Factory.
While doing some research for this post, not expecting to find much, I found out about a 5-song demo tape UlVi released in 1992, which someone is currently selling on eBay. Cool find. But I was more amazed to find out about the long, strange tale of their drummer, Danny Ingram. Read all about it here. Summary: He met the Clash at a '79 concert in Ontario and was urged by Joe Strummer to form his own band; was in some D.C. harDCore bands in the '80s, most notably Youth Brigade; co-founded gothy post-punkers Strange Boutique (and Bedazzled Records); briefly joined Swervedriver on drums after their drummer fled at the Canadian Border on their '91 tour; appears in their "Never Lose That Feeling" video (as I've mentioned before, it's my #2 favorite song ever, and my #1 favorite shoegaze song ever); co-founded Ultracherry Violet; played in some other bands.
I'm printing everything he says about UltraVio here for posterity, just in case that A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed blog ever goes kaput without warning, like so many music blogs do: "I started playing in Ultracherry Violet with my friends Dan Marx and Dugan Broadhurst shortly after the demise of Emma Peel. I loved this band. It was very much an extension of the sort of shoegaze thing that I'd been doing in Swervedriver and it was very much in my musical wheelhouse. I really thought that we had some great, original songs. But I quickly became really frustrated that the band was gaining no traction. It was either late '93 or early '94 and we were playing a show at The Black Cat. I think there were maybe 30 or so people in attendance. My frustration reached critical mass and I pulled a Keith Moon on stage. Throwing my drums at Nick P., the sound man, and threatening bodily harm to anyone who came near me. I'd had it with drumming. I made up my mind that night that I was done with it. And to make sure I would have no second thoughts, I did my best to demolish my poor, beautiful Gretsch drum kit. I was convinced that was it. I was in a new relationship, my life was starting to turn around in different ways, and I wanted to make a break with the past. That lasted about a year. I didn't touch my drums from that night until about 11 months later. Steve Willet called -– he had taken over Bedazzled records (the label that Monica and I started to release Strange Boutique music). He decided he wanted to release a CD of Ultracherry Violet. I'd mellowed out quite a bit in the intervening time, thanks to my new partner and future wife, Sally. Dan, Dugan, and I talked it over and decided to do it. We lugged our gear up to a dilapidated warehouse in a run-down part of Baltimore to record our CD. It had been so long since I'd played that my hands quickly blistered and started bleeding. I polished off nearly 3/4ths a bottle of Jack Daniels to try and steady my nerves and dull the pain of holding the sticks. We recorded all the songs in one day, but by the time we got to the last two -- "Mexico Song" in particular -- I could barely grip the sticks. My blisters kept bleeding and they kept slipping out of my hands. Still, we did all the songs in one take. There are 3 or 4 songs on that CD of which I'm really, really proud. The production is all over the place, but you can really tell that Dugan wrote some great songs... and Dan was really imaginative on the bass."
Indeed, the bass grooves and radioactive guitar tones on this album could be called seminal in the history of U.S. shoegaze... if anyone had actually bought the CD, that is. I believe Bedazzled Records went out of business a few years after the album came out, and the Violets never made any music videos to my knowledge. Note that Ingram doesn't even mention the demo tape in the interview. The one song I've heard from it, "Wayve", is pretty gothy and primordial.
UnFun Fact: According to UlCherVio's guitarist, tracks 3 and 6 are the same song ("Losing My Friends") because of an error by someone or an error at the CD pressing plant. So apparently, the only place to hear "Remember" is here, where said guitarist left his comment.
Pic taken from the website mentioned above; photographer, venue & date unknown
I always feel the need to explain my post titles for instrumental tracks. This one is a line from Faith No More's classic "Falling To Pieces", which I thought of when rolling around the album title I Fall To Pieces inside my head for a few million nanoseconds. (That video is very important to me, since it's one of a handful of songs/vids that got me into rock / "alternative" rock music in '91/'92, when I was strictly a rap head.)
Thurs.: Saw The Hunger Games in Houma, despite having only read about a third of the book. Felt the campy overtones of most of the adult male characters detracted from the film's impact. Played for a while at a basketball court I found, in 90º heat, in my Reggie Miller jersey which I recently dug out, yet dudes still called me "Larry Bird." I think one called me "Reggie Bird," which I found quite creative. The Pacers blew out the favored Heat that night.
(Thrill Jockey Records [U.S.] / City Slang Records [Germany], 1998)
Note: I wrote most of this last September, but couldn't post it because that was California Month, so here it is. One of the reasons I'm doing it now is that I recently stumbled upon & bought a 1976 movie called FutureWorld at a thrift store. Another reason is that I realized the bassline starting at the 4:30 mark was probably inspired by / stolen from the opening guitar chug in This Heat's "Horizontal Hold." (See previous post.)
After a few unassuming retro post-rock / deconstructed-metal LPs with sarcastic synth splatters, Trans Am reprogrammed their algorithms to finally allow for vocals and true song structure. Their recipe came to terrific fruition on their 1999 album Futureworld, whose title was, I assumed, a reference to CAN's album Future Days. But like I said above, I'm now pretty certain it referred to that movie. This one goes out to Joey Buttons & Kathi. I bought lots of cool CDs from their booth at the Record Raid in March, and it turned out they were also at the '99 Trans Am concert I will be talking about below. [Update: Oops; only Joey was at it.] This album came out in early '99, so I dated the song 1998, the year it was recorded. This is the most effort I've ever put into a post, so I hope somebody gets something out of it...
The song's greatness is pretty self-explanatory, so there's not much to say here, other than to point out that it's a song about the isolation that people will feel as we become more bogged down by gadgetry that supposedly allows us to stay more interconnected. Sound like 1999? 2012? Well, imagine how it'll be in 2050, 3000, or 5000. (5000? Yeah right... I'll give you a million dollars if humans even make it past 2200.) Sebastian "Seb" Thomson is simply one of the best drummers in history. You can tell he's heavily influenced by Jaki from CAN, yielding that style that is uniquely choppy & funky, yet sleek & robotic. He probably wears a shirt less frequently than Dave Navarro or Matthew McConaughey. When the song slows down at about the 4:20 mark and shifts into a sinister, "prowling" mode, it's just the coolest thing ever. I think Nathan sings "the falling snow" during the second half, but the vocoder is much more heavily used in that half, so your guess is as good as mine. The music video was edited down by 2.5 minutes, omitting most of the ending, and sucked in many other innovative ways too:
Fun Fact: Yes, that's Ed Helms, later of The Daily Show, The Office, and The Hangover, in a cameo appearance on banjo.
As far as other tracks on this album are concerned, "Television Eyes" (whose title is a reference to the Stooges' "TV Eye") and "Cocaine Computer" (please, folks, no jokes about Whitney Houston's Facebook account) are unquestionably the best. In fact, I struggled for a long time deciding whether to post "Futureworld" or "Television Eyes," and had to look to my orb for guidance.
The early '99 Thrill Jockey mailorder catalog has this very succinct sales pitch for the album: "Can you say vocoder? Sure you can – VO CODE R. Lawful evil beats, nature documentaries, car chases and rock and roll anthems."
Jonathan Bunce of Eye Weekly gave the album a 5-star rating, and said"The world's most forward-looking rock band has created the definitive millennial document. Forget the false hopes and fears surrounding the three big zeros -- this is the sound of technocracy collapsing into banality. 'Sitting alone in my future home / Fax machine, telephone / Phonograph, gramophone,' sings Nathan Means on Futureworld's drone-rockin' title track, with a gentle melancholy that would sound alienated even if it wasn't processed by a vocoder. Yes, the fourth Trans Am disc is the first to feature vocal stylings and embrace pop melodies -- which enhances, rather than dilutes, their conceptual electro-rock assault. On first glance, the trio seems to have turned into Kraftwerk, with Teutonic titles such as 'Am Rhein' and the motorik melodics of 'Runners Standing Still' -- one imagines them waiting out Y2K in a Berlin bunker with only Six Finger Satellite for company. But there's accessibility, depth, humor and chaos colliding here, from the more-bounce-to-the-ounce bleepery of 'Cocaine Computer' to the aggressive fuzz-bass destruction of 'City in Flames' to the lighter-in-the-air finale of 'Sad and Young.' Just as last year's The Surveillance had the final word on urban paranoia, Futureworld says more about the sci-fi dystopia we live in than any Hollywood blockbuster ever could."
My Trans Am timeline:
First read about them in Nov. 1996 in a Thrill Jockey mailorder catalog
Got their debut album Trans Am on vinyl in March '98
Missed them live a month or so later at the Mermaid Lounge in New Orleans due to having to cram for a test that night; swore I'd catch them the next time out
Read a glowing review of Futureworld in Mar. '99 in Spin*
Finally got to see them in May '99 (with lame openers Pan Sonic and The Fucking Champs) at the Mermaid
Got Futureworld on vinyl in 2005
*I also bought Moonshake's Dirty & Divine that day at that store
Note: Local instrumental prog / post-metal band Weedeater (not the stoner metal Weedeater from North Carolina) were for some reason replaced on the bill by The Fucking Champs.
I never got to see "our" Weedeater; check out this clip (probably from '94 or '95, based on the Dead Eye Dick video teaser at the end) of them. Trans Am's first album sounded a lot like this.
At the concert, they played a couple of vocoder-ed songs, hence they played "Futureworld" and "Television Eyes," the two best songs on the album. And I remember someone in the audience shouting out "Illegal Ass!," which I later learned was a song from one of their obscure EPs. Here are pics from that show, taken by me and Andrew Mister on my Kodak disposable camera; sorry for the small file sizes:
A Loyola student was filming Trans Am and projecting the images in real-time onto a screen behind them while they played. This must have been a digital camcorder, because the images were being altered in various ways to make the band look like computer-animated drawings and/or robots. Unfortunately this did not show up in the pics because the flash drowned it out. As you can imagine, I would give anything for a video of this gig! Nate was sporting an all-gold basketball uniform for some reason... Coincidentally, the Washington Bullets/Wizards briefly changed their main jersey color to gold several years later. For good measure, here's a pic of Finnish minimalist techno "band" Pan Sonic (f.k.a. Panasonic) playing their "music" while standing behind lots of expensive equipment:
I never saw Trans Am again, even though they came through here a few more times. They toured arenas(!) opening for Tool in late 2007, and I actually almost went to see one of those dates, but I had not paid any attention to either band for about five years, so I skipped it. Futureworld was reissued on LP with remastered sound and free digital download (containing two rare tracks) in late 2011.
Monday, Apr. 30: Saw Dayna Kurtz at the Hi-Ho Lounge; got there late and only saw the last 30 or so minutes. There were only about 20 people there. Like most folk singers with an affinity for New Orleans (Ani Difranco comes to mind), she has allowed NOLA's music to influence her recent music for the worse.
Tuesday, May 1: My dad had knee arthroscopy, so we helped him with icing it, etc. Dropped off a few trees at Parkway and had an impromptu conversation with Haley (sp.) for around 2 hours. She works for that organization and I just volunteer there; she recently put in all the native trees around the "Big Lake" in City Park by the art museum. I showed her a separate farming plot a block away that she had never been to, which kind of blew her mind. She signed me up to do a long-term project with her that will involve us designing and planting a fruit orchard for some new school in New Orleans East. It's kind of a thrill when an attractive, much younger lady follows one around and writes down one's botanical musings on her notepad for a few hours, but I didn't let it go to my head. Okay, I did, but who wouldn't? It was one of those "I've got the brawn, you've got the brains" kind of things.
Afterwards, went to Home Depot a few blocks away and saw a very rude older white lady verbally accosting a black male H.D. employee (and a white male one, who soon walked away and left the other guy to fend for himself) for a long time about something he had no control over. Specifically, light bulbs. Sample gripe: "You people who work at Home Depot are almost as bad as the ones who work at Lowe's nowadays." Reported her b.s. to a store manager, and mentioned that if it were my store, I'd kick her out. Shot hoops at the Annunciation St. court, and then, for the first time ever, at the NOPD station's court on Magazine. The latter was a bit difficult because the rims are a little too high (some courts do this to discourage dunking, which damages rims) and were double-thickness (which makes the ball bounce wildly on even a slightly-errant shot). Got dad some chocolate with bacon in it at La Dulce Vita. Had New Girl Night with Em, mom, dad, Vanessa.
Wed., May 2: Despite a sudden rainstorm, I stopped off at a small nursery on the Westbank that I almost never go to. Ended up talking to the employee for about an hour about tons of stuff after she asked me "Want a free tomato plant?" in the greenhouse. Let's see, we talked about cacti, tomatoes, mushrooms, music (she used to have punk bands play at her apartment), tattoos, asparagus ferns, atheism, Russian sage, etc. I showed her that the white petals of the Pineapple Guava tree look, feel, and taste like marshmallows, which she was pretty impressed by. Definitely my dream girl, and I think she spoiled me for all other females in the future... (And of course, the rain magically stopped right after I walked in.) And to top it all off, the last song I heard on the radio (WTUL) right before turning my car off and going in was a song that I later found out was "Endless Summer" by this Aussie band called The Jezabels. Kind of a mash-up of Kate Bush, U2, and Sunny Day Real Estate. My point is that it's a really dramatic song that seems tailor-made to lead into something great, kind of like the boombox scene in Say Anything. So overall, it was like a scene out of a movie: I hear that song in my car while it's raining; something impels me to go into a plant store; the rain stops to make way for the "endless summer"; I meet The One and we hit it off. And knowing my luck, I probably never see her again... But for me, a great convo is better than sex, and probably less grueling than a marriage. She's a big fan of mushrooms and '70s psych music, so I made a mental note to give her a CD-R of Amanita by Bardo Pond.
Later that day, I planted my Mayhaw tree in Vacherie during another bout of rain as the sun went down. Watched a bunch of videos by EatTheWeeds, which are always fascinating, until the wee hours.
Over the past few days, I've planted a Viburnum dentatum (Arrowwood) and Lyonia lucida (Fetterbush), as well as those free tomato plants. Deciding if I want to accept some free tickets to Jazz Fest today from my sister; the only good act is the Foo Fighters, but they're playing for 2 full hours, and I recently became obsessed with their song "Best Of You." Saw them in '97, and that gap of years would usually preclude me from seeing the same band nowadays; but they've had a ton of good singles since then. Dave Grohl's semi-ironic "metal warrior" posturing really sticks in my craw, though, and it's gonna be 95º heat index today with possible rain. Decisions, decisions...
In honor of heat, humidity, my dad's knees, and film cameras, here's me, Em & dad on a pier on the Mississippi coast in mid-1990. The fam was tagging along with him en route to one of his many triathlons that he did ca. 1990-92. He's 38 in that pic. I was wearing my LSU Basketball Camp t-shirt which I had just gotten weeks earlier. Shaquille O'Neal signed the back of it at the camp right after a breathtaking LSU intrasquad scrimmage. That's the only athlete autograph I've ever requested or received; unfortunately I never took a pic of it before throwing the shirt away a few years ago.
Yes, we threw them back
Planets with similar climates: Simple Minds - "70 Cities As Love Brings The Fall" (1981), Add N To X - "Metal Fingers In My Body" (1999), Satisfact - "First Incision" (1996) & "Triple Deck" (1998), The Horrors - "New Ice Age" (2009), Mocket - "Un-Man" (1998), The Sound - "World As It Is" (1984), probably some stuff by Tubeway Army.
(Piano Records, 1979 [recorded between 1976-78]; issued / reissued by ~7 other labels)
Well, it took me 170-something posts to finally dip into the '70s. I remember reading an early-'90s interview with Piotr Fijalkowski, singer of the great band Adorable, in which he said that music from before 1980 (he then specified pre-Echo & The Bunnymen) was worthless to him, and for the most part I have to agree. Most of the songs I've posted on this site simply couldn't have existed pre-1980, yet your typical casual music fan will always aver that the '60s were by far the best decade for music, dude. I first heard this song on a mix tape made for me by, I kid you not, a girl whom I had lent a Plexi promo poster. I only knew this girl, Suzy Grimes, online, and for some reason just had to show her this amazing poster. By 1999 I resorted to threatening legal action if she didn't send it back, so she did, and included a mix tape. If you don't know what the title of this song means, you've never owned a VCR. I didn't know what to title this post, since the song is an instrumental, so I chose a strange n' unsettling lyric that popped into my head and seems to fit "Horizontal Hold"'s feel. It's from The Church's breezy jangle-pop classic "Already Yesterday."
Joy in repetition... All Music Guide gives the LP 4.5 stars and says "Their angular juxtapositions of abrasive guitar, driving rhythms, and noise loops on the opening cut, 'Horizontal Hold,' preempt much later activity in the electronica and drum'n'bass scenes." Okay, I think we can all agree with that. The reviewer then goes off into some pretty ludicrous hyperbole, such as "There are very few records that can be considered truly important, landmark works of art that produce blueprints for an entire genre. In the case of this album, it's clear that this seminal work was integral in shaping the genres of post-punk, avant rock, and post-rock and like all great influential albums it seemed it had to wait two decades before its contents could truly be fathomed. In short, This Heat is essential." Oh.
Trouser Press gives a much more level-headed summary: "This Heat covers two years of the band's history, with both live and studio cuts. They use guitar, clarinet, drums and keyboards, permuted with loops, phasing and overdubs, breaking down patterns into only faintly connected musical moments that include artificial skips and looped end-grooves. Though insolent and withdrawn, the music is adventurous and, in its own peculiar way, engrossing."
The most recent review on rateyourmusic.com at the time I began writing this post consists simply of this sentence: "This album is more revolutionary and significant to the aesthetic evolution of music than the complete works of Stravinsky and Stockhausen combined." Ohhh. Well that explains everything. All in favor of lifetime internet bans for trollers please contact me.
On Thursday I finally started reading The Hunger Games, and I believe it's gonna be too bleak / barbaric for me to finish. The writing is very succinct and Raymond Carver-esque, so I'm writing this paragraph in RC's style. I planted my huckleberry tree and the saddest thing happened right when I was crouching down finishing up: A dragonfly that had no abdomen at all landed on a branch a few inches in front of my eyes. I guess it had been bitten off moments before by a bird or anole. So it could still fly around, but had no ability to digest food, hence it only had a few minutes or hours to live. But it sure seemed calm and content on that little branch. Man, the world sucks. Also planted a Juniperus chinensis 'Blue Vase.' I unfortunately missed one of the best live bands of this era, White Hills, at Siberia in New Orleans. (I saw them at that same club a year ago almost to the day.) I skipped this show because a fairly lame band called Sleepy Sun was headlining, and another lame one, Dirty Ghosts, was on the bill.
Worst new trend: People vying for the title of longest video on YouTube, e.g. this one.
Current crush: Rebecca Blumhagen of the show The Girl's Guide To Depravity.
Since I have amassed a backlog of great or interesting links, I'll just use this post as a clearinghouse for them:
Tortoise are one of the best-known bands in indie history, so I shouldn't have to say much about them. I would post their genre-defining classic "Djed," but it constitutes about half of the album's running time. "Glass Museum" is no slouch, friends. It lives up to its name with elegant pacing, a waltz beat, and a shimmery, sun-dappled overall feel. There's also a jazzy, subdued, impressionistic guitar solo at 1:13, and a pretty dramatic ramping-up of intensity at the 3-minute mark that always catches me off-guard. I'd probably play this song for someone who has never heard this band before. Before Tortoise went on autopilot and became Bonnaroo darlings, they were pretty great, at least on their 2nd and 3rd albums. (I dislike their bafflingly overrated debut album.) I think one unintended consequence of early Tortoise was that the vibraphone / xylophone became so ubiquitous that later post-rock bands disassociated themselves from it and tried to up the "intensity" levels and make lots of "climaxes" at the end of every song, which eventually spelled the downfall of the genre as it was once known. (Though bands like The Six Parts Seven, The Mercury Program and The Dylan Group based their entire sound around hypnotic vibraphone.) As All Music Guide said, after raving about "Djed," "The other songs on Millions Now Living are hardly afterthoughts, though; highlights 'Glass Museum' and 'The Taut And Tame' display the band quickly growing out of the angular indie rock ghetto with exquisite music, constructed with more thought and played with more emotion, than any of their peers."
In 1997, I was getting into this post-rock thing that all the zines were talking about. I had first read about it in the Feb. 1996 issue of Guitar World magazine, which ran a long article on the genre, with a heavy focus on The Sea And Cake, Laika, Pram, and Long Fin Killie. It didn't mention TSAC's sister band Tortoise at all, though. Anyway, I bought Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die CD (in apparently-rare paper gatefold packaging) that summer as a birthday gift for my dad. But I got antsy and opened it to listen for myself, which turned out to be a wise decision. (Keep in mind there was no way to preview songs online back then.) I also did the same for Jale's So Wound, and eventually gave him Guided By Voices' new CD. That fall, I remember developing photos in Loyola's darkroom for my Fine Arts Photography class, and I heard "Djed" coming from a radio inside one of the private darkroom booths. So I knocked on the door and he opened it and I asked if he was a Tortoise fan. It turned out that his radio was playing WTUL, which is the radio station of the college right next door, Tulane. I don't know if the guy in the room, Brad, was impressed when I told him the name of the track, but we ended up becoming something like friends, and we saw Macha in '99. He later put out a solo CD-R under the name Sad Smile or SadSmile, which I have somewhere. By late '97, anticipation amongst bespectacled indie rockers was building to a fever-pitch for Tortoise's next album. To tide fans over, Option magazine even ran a two-page article about the recording process of it. In the interim I bought Isotope 217º's stunning debut album The Unstable Molecule, simply because it was a Tortoise side project. In March '98, I ordered and received this new album, TNT, a few weeks before it even hit stores. I then saw them live, as mentioned in my previous post:
I bought a Tortoise shirt and tour-only 7" there, and there was a hip-hop / dub afterparty DJ'ed by a person or persons from WTUL's "Below The Basement" hip-hop show, but I think I only caught a little bit of it while milling about at the merch table. I sold the shirt to my friend Andrew a few years later.
Fun Fact: I recently learned that Millions Now Living Will Never Die is a Jehovah's Witness slogan, but I always thought it was a reference to the school of fish on the cover. (The school continues to the back cover when you open the paper case.) In any case, it's a brilliant merging of title and artwork.
Fun Fact 2: After composing this post, I was pleasantly surprised to see that "Glass Museum" is Tortoise's second-most-downloaded song on iTunes; I had thought it was one of their more obscure cuts.
Fun Fact 3: I saw Modest Mouse & Califone the night before at a Baton Rouge club called The Bayou, where all the bar scenes in Sex Lies And Videotape were filmed. There were a few dozen people who were specifically there to see the bands, whereas most of the crowd was apparently frat boys who were there to play pool and try to hook up. The club burned down several years later and is now a Reginelli's Pizza.
The only thing I can say about Whitney Houston's death is that I'm still mad at her for derailing Bobby Brown's career trajectory, and I hope Maya Rudolph will still dust off her Whitney impersonation from time to time. Please, folks, no jokes about the band Krackhouse that I mentioned a few posts ago.
I showed the above disques to my family before we watched the Grammys, and my dad mentioned that they must be worth a lot of money. I didn't have the heart to tell him I got them all at various thrift stores for around 50 cents each. My mom almost died when her favorite band, The Civil Wars, performed. The only other collections of 7"s that I own that rival this one are probably of Madonna, Unwound, Janet Jackson, and The Police, with Simple Minds slowly gaining momentum.
After trimming some palm trees on a gray, drizzly Monday, I took this cactus I've had for 14 years to a few plant nurseries to see if they could diagnose what its orange spots meant. (Probably a fatal fungal disease.) I ended up stopping by Sunrise Trading as a last-ditch effort. This is the local grower of most of the cacti & succulents that are sold in the New Orleans area, and my cactus was presumably grown by them long ago. It's supposed to be only a wholesale operation, but I asked if I could look at the greenhouses, and the guy, Steve, said sure. (Note the coincidental relation to the concept of "glass museums.") So I went in and had my mind blown for about 2 hours, picking out kewl plants. He said he didn't think my cactus would die, but I believe he just said that to make me feel better. He told me some fascinating anecdotes about varieties of plants that are named after people he knew, and some of the lengths to which he has gone to ensure the survival of some of his specimens.
Tuesday was a pretty strange day. I went down to Houma to exchange a Mammillaria hahniana cactus, buy this space-saver rack at Bed Bath & Beyond, buy a mini pitchfork for my mom, and play some basketball. My Beyonding wasn't successful, but I did snag Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul on CD for only about $5. They also had the latest Liz Phair dud, among other random albums. Who knew? While sizing up a photo of four birds in a bare tree, I noticed lots of chemtrails in the sky. Two of the birds flew away when I turned the music in my car off, so I decided to aim upward and take a shot mainly of the sky instead:
Taken facing NE at 2:52 PM
These long streaks are each probably 20 or so miles long; regular-old vapor contrails from planes are only a few hundred yards long and evaporate quickly, whereas chemtrails stay suspended in the sky for hours on end. Then I went and shot hoops about 10 miles away literally right under some chemtrails that I had just seen being laid down, kind of as an experiment to see if I would feel ill effects from them. There was a helicopter making lots of suspicious trips back and forth through the area, presumably to check on the concentrations of the chemicals.
I was unable to part with the cactus, so I brought it home with me; at least it got to go on a fun field trip in my center console cup holder. I shot threes at Gray Park for about an hour, then hit Rouse's in Thibodaux. They were out of Guinness and Murphy's, so I settled for some Killian's Red, which I had never tried before. That night at 9PM, I made a literally last-minute decision to drive to NOLA to see A Silver Mt. Zion, or Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, to be more exact. I had bought their debut album at a Godspeed You Black Emperor show in 2003, and an EP in 2006, but otherwise had never paid much attention to them. I was holding a cup of coffee (instant coffee in Lactaid milk) in my hand at the aforementioned time, and said to myself, "Well, if you drink this, you have to go, otherwise you'll be up all night for no reason." So I chugged it and went. By this time I had a massive headache and some brain functioning problems, but I couldn't figure out why; then I remembered the Houma chemtrails. "Better living through chemistry," I said, and popped a Tylenol Extra Strength. Zion is not the kind of band whose music I listen to very much, and their sample clips at online vendors' sites don't impress me, but I had a feeling that they would have a certain vitality live, and I went by the rule of "It's better to go to a concert and have it suck then to not go and wonder for the rest of your life if you missed a great show." With my head exploding and right on the verge of falling asleep, I did the 50-mile drive in to New Orleans. Getting stuck in standstill traffic for half an hour was the icing on the cake. About a block from the club I noticed a restaurant called Vacherie, so I stopped in. The bartender guy told me they were closed, but I asked for a menu and said "I'm from a city... well, town, called Vacherie." I walked into One Eyed Jacks as the Zions were doing their first song (there was no opening act), so I had to chuckle a bit at my good fortune. They turned out to be just as endearingly annoying and pretentious as I had expected, but in a good way. The dual violins and upright bass made for an excellent sonic bed over which singer Efrim Menuck could yelp about various abstract problems and existential musings. Efrim did some funny banter with the crowd during two Q&A intermission sessions. Example: Someone in the crowd asked him his name. He very casually said "Jack White. Ask me again." So the question was asked again. "The Edge. Ask me again. I could go on like this all night..."
I took this during the encore, an extended rendition of "Horses In The Sky."
I just noticed that the people up front were pretty nattily-dressed, whereas towards the back and middle there were lots of anarchist types with face tattoos, leather jackets, dreadlocks, etc.
Man stricken eating 'Triple Bypass' burger - "'It was no joke,' said Jon Basso, who promotes himself 'Doctor Jon,' his scantily-clad waitresses as nurses, and customers as patients."
Planets with similar climates: Tristeza - "City Of The Future" (2000), The Mercury Program - "Fragile Or Possibly Extinct" (2002), Isotope 217º - "La Jetée" (1997), The Dylan Group - "Running In Pairs" (1999).
After doing approx. infinity posts last month, and with the otter-rich coast of California fresh in our minds, I'm giving myself a planned semi-sabbatical this month. So here's the first of a few well-placed monster smash hits to close out the year.
Twin Sister - "The Other Side Of Your Face"
(Infinite Best Recordings, 2010)
This band formed in Long Island and soon moved to hipster mecca Brooklyn. My first thought when I heard them was "Cat Power for chillwavers." I think this song is up there with Film School's "TIme To Listen as one of the best songs of 2010. SInger Andrea Estella coos her way through some obliquely undulating guitarscapes, while a metronomic drumbeat pounds away surgically. It's long, but it could go on for another hour and I would still be transfixed, so hopefully some intrepid remixer will take me up on that.
When Rhino puts out a chillwave box set in 20 years, this song ought to be on it. Twin Sister played this song when I saw them open for Memoryhouse at One Eyed Jacks in Aug. 2010. I filmed them doing an amazing performance of this song, but my sister can't find the clip on her camera, nor can she find the clip of Memoryhouse doing "Lately." For now, check out the music video for another song they played that night, the shoulda-been-hit "All Around And Away We Go":
AE is a brunette in that video, though she was blonde at the concert, a few months before this video was released. (I read her say in some interview that she's Hispanic.) Not sure who the blonde in the video is, but she bears a lot of resemblance to AE. I never knew AE had such dance moves inside her, since she pretty much just stood still during the concert. My point is that a band has to be pretty versatile to make a catchy pop song like "All Around" and a meandering song like "Other Side," and both were released on the same EP, which my sister bought at the gig. Memoryhouse were better overall, but "Other Side" was probably the highlight of the evening for me. A local synth-goth band called Kindest Lines played first; they recently opened a leg of Xiu Xiu's tour.
I like how Infinite Best Recordings is a pun on the inscrutable book Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. So inscrutable, in fact, that I have it but haven't even started reading it. They returned this June opening for Beirut, but you couldn't pay me enough to go see that damn band. In 2011, Twin Sister have become such Pitchfork favorites that I have to assume that money has exchanged hands between the two parties. I can all but prove that that has happened in recent years with Pitchfork and the following acts, all of whom get a breaking news bulletin on P4k if they so much as lose a sock: Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, Wilco, M.I.A., Wavves, Drake, White Stripes, Arcade Fire, Flaming Lips, Kanye West, Bon Iver, and of course Radiohead / Thom Yorke. Note that three of those are on Merge Records, a (one-great) label that advertises heavily on Pitchfork.
I went to Blue Cypress Books on Oak St. today for the first time, after seeing a photo of it a week or two ago in the newspaper. I asked if they had anything by John Biguenet, and the girl mentioned that he is her English teacher at Loyola, so I mentioned that his daughter Nicole was in my grade in high school. I was pretty impressed by their selection. I then shot some hoops at this covered basketball court on River Rd. at the foot of Broadway, instead of riding my bike in Audubon Park. Tonight is Saints vs. Lions, and I almost scored a ticket from my dad's friend Jay.
Planets with similar climates: Curve - "Cherry" (1991), My Bloody Valentine - "Soon" (1990), Sonic Youth - "The Diamond Sea" (1995), Long Fin Killie - "Valentino" (1996), Cocteau Twins - "Road, River And Rail" (1990).
Bought at Blue Cypress Books today: Daniel Scott - Pay This Amount; Wallace Stegner - Collected Stories; Charles Baxter - Through The Safety Net; Alain Robbe-Grillet - Topology Of A Phantom City; Ellen Lesser - The Shoplifter's Apprentice; a "Reading is sexy" bumper sticker. (All the books are short story collections except for Topology.)
.jpg)
2012.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg){kind=spacer}
.jpg){kind=spacer}
.jpg){kind=spacer}
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
