Pure Bathing Culture >> You know it's your time, you're the one

Pure Bathing Culture - "Pendulum"

(Partisan Records [U.S.] / Memphis Industries [Europe],  2013)

It's a huge honor to present this song.  I first heard it in summer 2k13 on Sirius' XM U station.  I was immediately floored that an unknown new band could barge out of the gates with such a masterfully-crafted song.  (Though I secretly wondered if Pure Bathing Culture was Memoryhouse under a new name...)  And the opening jangly guitar chords made me think it was a cover of the Go-Betweens' brilliant "Streets Of Your Town" (see video embedded below), but luckily it turned out to be an entirely new song by an entirely new band, and it blew me an entirely new mind.

This truly should've been a massive radio hit.  If you're a fan of production like I am, you'll revel in every little detail of this song as it leaps out of the speakers with unmitigated authority, and it will truly be stuck in your head for the rest of your life.  I'm sure the band's manager or publicist is a nice person, and was smart enough to choose to work with such a talented band, but he or she needs to be replaced immediately.  In America's current musical climate, in which completely hookless, soulless songs by the likes of Vampire Weekend, Arctic Monkeys, and Arcade Fire are becoming hits or semi-hits left and right, it should be pretty easy for any trained squid to finesse this song onto playlists nationwide.  Obviously it did get onto Sirius, which is quite a taste-making entity, but the only times I've heard it on WTUL were when I requested it.  In fact, a DJ last fall played it back-to-back with "Streets Of Your Town," at my request.  I also got KLSU to play it last fall at my request.  It was on some sort of regular rotation on Sirius XM U, because I heard it several more times there.  In fact, Sirius was so devoted to this band that they hosted a live in-studio performance / interview session in September.  I recorded some of it, mainly because the lyrics to "Pendulum" were a lot easier to make out in the live version.  Watch it here.

Here's the Go-Betweens song I mentioned above.  Check out how similar the opening guitar part is to that of "Pendulum":

Note: That's the "big-budget" version of the video; there was also a more low-key original version that focused more literally on the streets of an Aussie town.  So, if the Go-Bees were able to get TWO videos made for their killer song, how come Pure Bathing Culture didn't even get one? Refer back to the criticisms I had for PBC's management...)

Download an interesting remix of this song called "Pendulum (Women's Hour Edit)" for free here.

Stairway left after bombing of Aleppo, Syria by the Assad regime. This reminded me of a pendulum.
(Posted by Tumblr user miymintimatmazel; photographer unknown.)

Planets with similar climates: The Go-Betweens - "Streets Of Your Town" (1988), Puro Instinct - "Slivers Of You" (2010), Cocteau Twins - "Heaven Or Las Vegas" (1990), Memoryhouse - "Heirloom" & "Sleep Patterns" (2011), Spiritualized - "Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space" (1997), Wild Nothing - "Through The Grass" (2012), Slowdive - "Alison" (1993).

Wild Nothing >> The past was folded up and in the twinkle of an eye everything had been changed

Wild Nothing - "Paradise" (feat. Michelle Williams)

(Captured Tracks, 2012)

Yes, this is the "video version" of Wild Nothing's shoulda-been-a-megahit, featuring ultramegafamous actress Michelle Williams(!).  M.W. recites from Iris Murdoch's 1975 novel A Word Child in the middle of the song, which is just a spacey instrumental passage in the album version.  This Michelle-fortified version is not available anywhere, and believe me, I looked high and low for it, so this is certainly a Blowtorch Baby exclusive.  The place I ripped it from rhymes with MooCube.

Counting days

The opening synth wash sure reminds me of the melody in Slowdive's best-known song, "Alison".  I first heard this song in my car while parked in a thrift store parking lot in Terrytown in summer of 2012.  Its amazing bassline and breezy overall feel prompted me to immediately text my sister to tell her to check it out.  I wasn't yet obsessed with WN, but it happened fairly quickly.  It ended up being a no-brainer to name Nocturne my favorite album of the year, and I think most followers of this blog would agree with me on that.

Last October, I finally got to see Wild Nothing live, opening for Local Natives at Tipitina's, and thankfully they played "Paradise."  Yes, the bassline is just as huge & badass live as it is on record.  Still amazed / saddened that they weren't headlining.  And next month the headliners are opening for Kings Of Leon at the N.O. Arena(!).

Mon. Mar. 10: Went to the Circle Bar to see Weekend + Nothing + AAN (pronounced "On").  AAN's singer has a beautiful voice, not unlike Wayne Coyne's, and the band cranked out multifaceted, Yo La Tengo-esque indie rock. The guitarist with the white Jazzmaster was almost a dead ringer for Damon Albarn, so I expect a strong female fanbase with this band.  Ashley had to leave to get to sleep.  I wanted her to see Nothing, who sound like a recreation of Slowdive / MBV on record.  Much to my surprise, they sounded more like Slayer live, so I was actually kind of glad she missed them.  They played five songs from the new album, and one from their 6-song EP.  Weekend were as streamlined and muscular as I had anticipated they'd be.  After the disappointment of no "Spiral" from Wye Oak the previous night, I had to deal with Weekend not playing the song I wanted to see, "Mirror."  Their singer seemed a bit drunk and angry, swinging his bass into the crowd at one point.  He got rather forcefully pushed back by them.  And each band only played for about 30 mins.  But overall it was a good night, and the highlight was Weekend's "Just Drive," which I got a full video of.  Nothing's bassist (also in Whirr and Death Of Lovers) was really engaging and we recommended shoegaze bands to each other.  Drove down Bourbon St. blasting "It's Alright" on Weekend's album Jinx, as I had just bought the CD at the gig.

Fun Fact: I sat next to local jazz drumming icon Johnny Vidacovich during Nothing.  Not sure why he was at this show...  Also met a guy who flew to L.A. just to see a recent reunion of the band Failure, so we talked about our love of Failure for quite a bit.

Tue. Mar. 11: Went back to the Spanish Moon to catch Weekend and Nothing again.  Right before this show, I stopped at F.Y.E. and got the latest CDs by Chairlift, CHVRCHES, and Danny Brown.  Seeing these bands on a stage in a much larger venue with a better sound system made quite a difference.  (Not dissing the Circle Bar at all, by the way.)  The crowd was only about two dozen souls.  No flyers for this show were spotted around the area.  You do the math...  Nothing played the same basic set again; one of their singers told me the previous night that they do the same 35-minute set each night on this tour.  And yes, just like the previous night, they sounded more like Slayer than Slowdive.  Traded more shoegaze recommendations with Nothing's bassist and merch guy.  Weekend's set, on the other hand, was quite different from the previous night.  They started with "Just Drive" (said the drummer, though I thought it was "July"), ended with "Coma Summer," and did a killer "Mirror" in between.  (The singer introduced that song by saying it was about his mom... then, after a short pause, said it was about his dad.)  Overall, they did more krautrock-y, jam-friendly songs than the previous night.  Afterwards I shot some pool upstairs by myself, then talked with Weekend's awesome drummer.  Some of the bands we touched on included CAN, Moonshake, Heat Dust, Belong, and Glish.  I didn't buy a drink at any of these three shows... Sorry, bartenders!  Had to spend a lot on gas and merch, and booze is very low on my priorities list.

Some of the excellent music heard on the club's PA on this night included lots of weird hip hop, The Cure's "One Hundred Years" (seguing into Nothing's first song), some Prefab Sprout, Flipper's "Ha Ha Ha," and the Chameleons' "Don't Fall."  I got a particular kick out of the Chameleons song, because I had just posted "Swamp Thing" on my Tumblr a few hours earlier, and I leaned over the second-floor balcony (this venue used to be a fire station) during the aforementioned game of pool while singing the phrase "donnnn't fall."  Kinda rad.

Sat. Mar. 15: Bought some plants at the annual Parkway plant sale @ DIllard University.  At Bed Bath & Beyond that night, I walked right by the first person I ever got a New Year's kiss from and she didn't recognize me.  In the twinkle of an eye everything had been changed indeed...

Planets with similar climates: Catherine Wheel - "Flower To Hide" (1992), Slowdive - "40 Days" & "Alison" (1993), The Smiths - "The Boy With The Thorn In His Side" (1985).

The Sea And Cake >> Water breathing warm and heavy

The Sea And Cake - "Choice Blanket"

(Thrill Jockey Records [U.S.] / Rough Trade Records [U.K.], 1993)

Few songs immediately make me feel summer's warmth deep in my bones like this one, so I had to post it to kick off the summer.  I think I've told this story before, but in October 1996, I heard a stunningly strange and joyous song on WTUL while stuck in traffic on Jefferson Hwy. driving to a dermatology appointment.  It turned out to be "Lamont's Lament" by a band called The Sea And Cake.  I couldn't even hazard a guess as to what year it had been made, what city the band was from, what ethnicity its members were, etc., which is usually a good sign of a unique work of art.  It bewitched and bewildered me so much that I immediately sent some money to Thrill Jockey Recs. and demanded that they send me whichever TSAC CD had "Lamont's Lament" on it.  I got the CD, Nassau, a week or so later.  It came with a Thrill Jockey catalog full of stuff I would soon obtain, by groups with intriguing names like Trans Am, Tortoise, and Oval, all of whom have recently been Blowtorch Babied.  Brad Wood recorded this album in early September 1993, fresh off of becoming indie rock's producer célèbre after twiddling knobs on Liz Phair's Exile In Guyville.

Archer Prewitt shows why he is the thinking jazzbo's guitar hero on this song, unfurling effortlessly cool licks as though the bloated and/or macho genres that marred the music scenes of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s never happened.  Sam Prekop's creaky vocals are unmistakable, and his falsetto near the end is the perfect closing touch.  It's worth listening closely to his lyrics, which are cryptically beautiful and naïve in almost a beat poet kind of way.  Even the maracas are perfectly shaken on the off beats.  The baffling cover art deserves mention, since it is a guy's afro made up of around a hundred cotton balls.  There's also a painting of Charles Mingus by TSAC's bassist, Eric Claridge.  I should mention he's one of the best bassists ever, period.  The combination of that one particular shade of sky blue with that one particular shade of corn yellow just works perfectly, and puts me in the perfect mindstate to listen to the music.  See all the artwork (of the U.K. LP, to be exact) here.  As for me giving this the tag "should've been a #1 hit," well, I'm not necessarily referring to the '90s; in the '50s or '60s it could've made serious inroads on AM pop radio, and I bet the band would've been fighting off major label offers left and right.

AllMusic Guide's 4.5-star review succinctly said "The Sea and Cake's buoyant debut is a breath of fresh air, an utterly distinctive and innovative work that expands the scope of frontman Sam Prekop's work in the great Shrimp Boat to incorporate a new fascination with Afro-Caribbean rhythms and textures. Recorded by Brad Wood, the album simply glows -- Prekop's dry vocals and free-associative lyrics skip along a shimmering and lushly pastoral backdrop that nimbly fuses pop, soul, jazz, and even prog rock; tracks like 'Jacking the Ball,' 'Flat Lay the Water,' and 'Showboat Angel' are as seductive as they are elusive."

This summerrific image is used on the back cover of the CD & LP, as well as on the LP itself

My TSAC timeline:

Jan. 1996: Read about them in a long article about this new-fangled scene called "post-rock" in a guitar magazine.

Oct. '96: Hear "Lamont's Lament," immediately buy their sophomore album Nassau. (See above.)

Mar. '97: Hear a few songs from their brand-new album The Fawn in my car and am blown away.

Spring '97: Buy The Fawn on LP at Tower Records in New Orleans.

June '97: Buy The Sea And Cake CD for my dad. (See above.)
Mar. '98: Got a free The Fawn promo poster from mailorder; promptly put it up on my wall for almost a decade.

Mid-'98: Buy Two Gentlemen remix 12" from Thrill Jockey mailorder.

Early '99: Borrow The Biz and Sam Prekop's debut solo CD from hip friend Andrew Mister.

Ca. '99: Buy Shrimp Boat's CD Cavale, since Prekop fronted this band before TSAC.  (Claridge and Wood also did time in the Boat; a very incestuous scene there in Chicago.)

Late '00: Somewhat disappointed by new album Oui after sampling it on the listening station at Borders; lose faith in band for a few years.

Mid-'03: Download Glass EP from eMusic; "An Echo In" restores my faith in the band's prowess.

9/23/03: After waiting 7 years for TSAC to come to NOLA, I sell my stereo to a pawn shop for $35 to buy a ticket to go see them play at TwiRoPa.  An incredibly boring band called The Kingsbury Manx opened.  TSAC were loud and used lots of distortion, which disappointed me, since I wanted a quiet, crisp, nuanced show.
Ca. '06: Buy a beautiful neon green Nassau promo poster on eBay.
Early 2009: "Jacking The Ball" is used in a commercial for the ultra-evil criminal enterprise* known as Citibank.  (In this live clip of the band's first-ever gig, Sam says the phrase means "Bring out your firearms and ammo."  I had only been wondering for 15 years!)
Early 2010: "Parasol" is used in the R. Patz "I'm-not-just-a-brooding-vampire" drama Remember Me.

I would say that, along with "Lamont's Lament," "Jacking The Ball" and "Parasol" were The Sea And Cake's two best-known songs, even before they got the aforementioned exposure recently.  The band's recordings since then have been pretty spotty, essentially treading water, though few bands are skilled enough to tread water like TSAC can, and fewer still are even allowed in the same pool.  Overall, Nassau remains my favorite album of theirs, with The Fawn and The Sea And Cake tying for second.  Buy all three.

Tue. June 19: Saw two garter snakes mating below my parents' neighbor's doorstep.  Later was called upon to help extricate a baby raccoon from her enclosed swimming pool room / greenhouse.  Stayed up all night talking to Drea online.

Wed. June 20: Finished up with two weeks of house-sitting for my parents while my mom was in Japan & other parts of Asia.  Realized I might be slightly allergic to dogs, since I always seem to get sinus problems when I stay there too long.  I've also banned my favorite food, blueberries, from my diet since I think I might have a sensitivity to them.

Yes, that's a Prince CD

Thurs. June 21: I got into one of the most HILARIOUS and rewarding incidents of my life.  I'm driving down Hwy. 20 to Thibodaux when some psycho person starts tailgating on me, while combing his/her hair, and weaving side to side on the road, nearly going off it a few times.  It's a narrow 55 MPH road with nowhere to pull over.  So I maintain my speed and take a film clip in my rearview mirrors using a little digital camera that I often bring with me, making sure to periodically show my speed, as well the time & date, on the dashboard display.  Down in Thibodaux, after being tailgated for over 10 miles, a cop pulls me over.  I'm trying not to laugh as she walks up to my car on this 90º day, since I know all my shit is up-to-date and on point and I will put my 20 years of driving up against anyone's.  She tells me that someone called the police and said I was photographing them while driving.  I say "Yes, and I have video of that person tailgating me right here."  HAHAHAHAHAHA.  LOL.  She watches the clip and decides I'm right, since she can see/hear that I even tried to wave the person around me at one point.  (FWIW, she was short, blonde, cute, and slightly chubby, with a gigantic, staggeringly vicious pink scar in a semicircle under her chin / on her throat.  I seriously was amazed that anyone could even survive such a wound.  A bite from the lower jaw of an alligator?)  She even gives me a business card with the Lafourche Parish police dept.'s phone #s on it so I can report tailgaters in the future.  So this was fun and all, but a few minutes later, I start to think what would've happened if I hadn't taken that video, if it was just my word against the tailgater's.  Would I have been ticketed?  And since two cop cars were dispatched to intercept me, and the cop declined my offer to burn a copy of the video for them to use against the tailgater, that meant the tailgater probably got away scot-free.  Not so funny.  But this did remind me of the power of video in clearing up a dispute, and coincidentally it came a few days after the death of Rodney King.
Continued on to Hebert's Nursery and labeled a bunch of their cacti for them.  At Rouses, being a huge Guinness fan, I took a chance on an amazing beer by Guinness called Foreign Extra Stout.  It's almost comically full of flavors like coffee, chocolate, honey, toffee, etc.  By far the best beer I've ever had.  The cHeat won the NBA title.

*Citibank received $45 billion in federal bailout money in late 2008, with which they immediately, brazenly, bought a $50 million corporate jet and then teetered on the edge of insolvency for a while as people like me gleefully waited for them to fail.  According to Bloomberg in 2011, "Citigroup paid back $20 billion of its bailout funds and the Treasury converted the remaining $25 billion into a 27 percent stake in the bank, which it began selling last year. It sold the last of its investment in December, realizing an overall gain for taxpayers of about $12 billion."  It is clear that that groovy Sea And Cake song singlehandedly revived the bank's fortunes and hence really paid off for the taxpayers in the end.  America.

Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat - A fascinating, disturbing, and oft-humorous video

Beirutopia: Could Lebanon's capital become a garden city?

Man sees his stolen bike on Craigslist, steals it back - "A spoke for a spoke, so to speak."

Planets with similar climates: The Promise Ring - "A Picture Postcard" (1996), Luna - "California (All The Way)" (1994), The Sundays - "Summertime" (1997), The Cardigans - "Carnival" (1994), The Police - "Bring On The Night" & "The Bed's Too Big Without You" (1979), The Church - "Already Yesterday" (1986), The Smiths - "This Charming Man" (1983).

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).

Puro Instinct >> The picture becomes more complete

I can't believe it's still California Month, tremor #45:

Puro Instinct - "Slivers Of You" (re-recorded version)

(Mexican Summer Records, 2010)

Under their original name Pearl Harbor, this band of sisters, Piper Kaplan (vocals) and Skylar Kaplan (guitar, backing vocals) released this song on a 7" single and a 12" EP in 2010.  Then they had to change their name, so they chose Puro Instinct, and re-recorded this song that fall for their debut album, Headbangers In Ecstasy.  They made it more punchy and radio-friendly, while keeping its dreamy, blurry DNA.  Both versions are great, but I just prefer the second one.  It always feels like it's about to spin out of control or get too pretty, but the centrifugal force of its dark undertones holds it all together.  You have to face the facts that the sibling vocal harmonizing here is pretty spine-tingling, even if you're not into this kind of music.

The vocals can be very hard to make out, so here are some of the lyrics:
"Jaundice blondes in blue chiffon"... "Soakin' up the midnight sun"... "I'll take my time hangin' you out to dry"... "Slivers of you comin' through; the picture becomes more complete"... "Invidious and insidious; on a warpath with no remorse"... "She wears their rags like a bodybag and lets her life run its course"...
Male voice: "You never know who's got it"


Here is a remix posted about a week ago by some guy named Secret Circuit.  It starts to get dark and trippy at about the halfway mark:

 

A site called The Agit Reader asked Piper: And working with your sister, what’s the process like when you write songs? Are these collaborations more than one person writing everything?

Piper: It’s all pretty arbitrary. For instance, on “Slivers of You,” I came up with the bass and the beat, the keyboard part, and the vocal melody. I played everything I had recorded for Skylar and told her to come up with a fucking shredding hook and see how it goes. She probably toyed with it for 10 or 15 minutes. I left the room and all of the sudden I hear [mouths guitar lead]. I ran back in and said “That’s the one.” She fucking nailed it. That’s usually how we work.

I have to agree with her about the guitar riff, which is just so cool and surfy and jazzy.  Johnny Marr would've been proud to have come up with it.  In that interview, she also said Pearl Harbor was more or less a satirical coup to poke fun at the whole “beach bonanza” that was going on.  She's referring to all the recent beach-themed band names like Beach House, Best Coast, Wavves, etc.

Puro Instinct's secret weapon is its deep, funky basslines, such as the one in "Stilyagi," which is Russian for "Style hunters":

As I mentioned, way back in 2010, when the band was still called Pearl Harbor, "Slivers" was released as a limited-edition (300 copies) 7" single, but only in Japan.  This was the original, slower, more somber version of the song, which you can stream here.  An early, slower version of "California Shakedown" was the b-side.

Japanese "Slivers" 7"

L-R: Skylar, Piper

I decided to go see them in July.  First up was the extremely entertaining Kate Bush acolyte Geneva Jacuzzi.  Then the very hyper John Maus, but I left for a while and saw only his last song.  Puro Instinct began with "Slivers Of You," which got me really psyched.  Due to the low turnout (only a few dozen people), she seemed a bit annoyed as the show went on.  At the end, after getting no applause for an encore, she said pretty loudly off-mic to no one in particular, "Let's get the fuck out of here," then made a beeline out of the room through the remaining crowd.  So I of course decided she was kind of a brat, or was maybe just upset that half the crowd left after the John Maus set.  (Pitchfork had run a glowing review of his new album that very day.)  I should mention that she was evidently very drunk all night.  Outside the club, she was crouched on the curb talking to someone.  I told her that crowds tend not to ask for encores in New orleans for some reason, and hence not to take it too personally.  She seemed to appreciate hearing that, and gave me a big drunken high five, and then when I mentioned I had driven an hour to see them, she just about bugged out.  She asked me what I wanted from their merch table, so I mentioned the "Slivers" EP, then she darted back into the club and came back out and gave it to me, informing me that it was their last copy.  (It still had a piece of torn notebook paper saying "$10" taped to it.)  As if that wasn't nice enough, she gave me an even bigger high-five before handing it to me.  I was like... "Huh?  Someone is high-fiving me for taking some stuff without paying for it? Isn't that backwards?"  I asked her if they had any of the Japanese "Slivers" 7" left, and she kind of laughed and said nope, and mentioned that she had never even been given a copy for herself.  Later, she seemed excited about the concept of sneaking into one of NOLA's famously creepy cemeteries, but I pleaded strongly with her entourage not to let her / them do it.  Hence, I saved Puro Instinct's life on July 8th, 2011... You owe me, world.  To make up for my karmic depletion after being given the 12", I went back in and bought a nice white t-shirt with gold ink for $15.  I had already bought Headbangers on CD at the merch table earlier in the night.  (This album is definitely a grower.)  The 12" turned out to be warped and essentially unplayable, due to bouncing around in their tour van for weeks, but I think it's a great souvenir and I'd never sell it.

Important note: I'm not telling this story to try to seem cool or a scenester, etc., but rather to give a slice-of-life vignette about a relatively obscure touring band, and to show how one's perception of a person is sometimes way off.  There's a fine line between name-dropping and merely recounting events, and I try to never ever name-drop.  Some people try to avoid meeting musicians because they're afraid they might be dicks in real life, but in this case, it was the exact opposite, and hence the picture became more complete. Anyway, I'm doing this for the benefit of someone who's reading this in 10 or 100 years, or for someone today who may be thinking about going to see them live.  Obviously, you should.  And I love reading about people's experiences with seeing / meeting obscure bands in the '80s & '90s.  I especially try to chat up bands when the turnout has been really low, to show a band that they do have fans and that it was not a wasted trip.  This can help convince them to return to your city in the future.  Then again, there can be other reasons why they'll return:

Piper and PI's roadie / merch guy getting sloshed on purple drank and ketchup in the French Quarter before their show on 7/8/11.

I will add that if you read through Puro Instinct's (and Pearl Harbor's) dizzying array of blogs and other websites, you'll learn that their wit is second to none.  I could be wrong, but it seems to be Piper who is mostly responsible for doing all the writing and photo-posting on their sites.  Check out the strange things offered on their Kickstarter page.  Their TwitPic page has some occasional gems.  Okay, that's enough.  This has to be the most links I've ever put in one post, and I hate reading anything with too many links.

I made an impromptu trip to see Jessica Lea Mayfield in Baton Rouge last night, and it was good and all, but I'm not sure why I did it.  No, that's not true; my specific thought process was: "What if she becomes the next Cat Power and I could've seen her for a few bucks?"  (I missed Cat Power in Baton Rouge in '98 and am still upset.)  I was on the fence until I stumbled onto JLM's cover of Nirvana's "Lounge Act" and realized her voice is pretty remarkable when she actually projects it.  Most of the time she seems catatonically depressed, though, both live and on record.  A bad thunderstorm, the first significant rain here in two months, kicked in literally right before JLM started playing.

Planets with similar climates: Velocity Girl - "Crazy Town" (1993) & "Finest Hour" (1995), Juned - "Hearts To Bleed" (1995), The Church - "Columbus" (1985), Liz Phair - "Supernova" (1994), The Posies - "Dream All Day" (1993), Lush - "Nothing Natural" (1992).

The Orange Peels >> It's dangerous to fly a kite when it's raining

California Month, tremor #16:

The Orange Peels - "I Don't Mind The Rain"

(Minty Fresh Records, 1995 or '96)

The album cover says "recorded in 2-dimensional california sound."

I got this album, Square, in '97 or '98 for about a dollar on promo CD at The Mushroom or Underground Sounds, and instantly fell in love with this song, despite not normally being into this kind of thing.  I probably bought it because I was really into the Cardigans' First Band On The Moon, and I knew they had been on Minty Fresh.  The co-ed vocal harmonizing is so beautiful that it could theoretically melt the heart of someone as cold and callous as Simon Cowell, Lindsay Lohan, Clarence Thomas, or Anthony Bourdain.  This band was/is fronted by a guy named Allen Clapp and once known as, I kid you not, Allen Clapp And His Orchestra.  According to Wikipedia, "The Roland [RE-201] Space Echo would become an important part of Clapp's production of musical soundscapes, helping him achieve a cool, coastal sound."  The album was released in 1997, but was recorded from '95 to '96 at two very cool-sounding studios: The Terrarium in Minneapolis, MN, and Mysterious Cove in Campbell, CA.  Rain is always a great lyrical topic; the Peels' next album even had a song called "The West Coast Rain."  And their website even has a page about how great California life is!  Way to rub it in, guys.  Leave it to a geeky Cali band to tell us not to fly a kite during a storm.  Like it ever rains in California.  I think I remember one drop of rain in the six years I lived there, and it was probably just morning fog condensation.  It took an East Coast dude, Ben Franklin, to have to guts to do that, and that's how he discovered cable TV, and now we all benefit from it.  For example, we can use the Weather Channel to tell us when a storm is coming and thereby know when to avoid it.

The Japanese edition of Square had totally different & better cover art than the U.S. one did:

Japanese front cover

Japanese back cover

Fun Story Time: A week or so ago, I was at my parents', watching the Saints-Packers game with my mom & sister, and for some reason I felt impelled out of the blue to show my sister one of my all-time favorite videos/songs on YouTube, "Only A Memory" by the Smithereens:

My mom even overheard it and said she liked it.  I think she was pretty surprised when I mentioned they were: a.) from New Jersey, and b.) from the '80s.  (She was born and raised in Philly.)  Then this past Sunday, my sister and I went to The Mushroom in order to show her boyfriend it for the first time, and while I was at the bottom of the long stairway that leads up to the store, located on top of popular frat bar The Boot a few feet off of Tulane's campus, I realized they were playing a Comsat Angels song!  It was "My Mind's Eye" from their 1992 "comeback" album of the same name.  (Remember "I Come From The Sun"?  Well, that was the very next song that came on.)  I just about fainted.  It turns out this guy had brought some of his Comsats CDs over to the store that night, not to sell them, but just to have the store play them while he shopped.  I think he was about 50-ish.  The first I told him was "I have all the Comsats' albums."  So we talked for about an hour until they closed at midnight, and they practically had to kick us out.  He had grown up in England and had seen all the cool punk and post-punk bands of the late '70s / early '80s, such as the Comsats, The Sound, Simple Minds, Cocteau Twins (I think), Siouxsie & The Banshees, Wire, etc.  He said he grew up in the Banshees' city so he saw them a lot.  And later on he saw My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, among others.  We briefly talked about Miles Davis' The Birth Of The Cool after my sister showed me a live Miles DVD from that era.  (I swear, this all has a point, so read on...)  I found some cheap used CDs on the racks and instructed him to buy them.  These included The Death Of Cool by Kitchens Of Distinction, The Back Room by Editors, a CD by Celebration (blatant Banshees clones), and Green Thoughts by the Smithereens (the album that houses "Only A Memory").  Amazingly, I also found "Only A Memory" on 7" in a big box of used 45's!  I had been wanting this damn thing for many years...  I informed him (his name is Brian or Ryan) about the greatness of Film School and told him about my blog, the last three posts of which were coincidentally about said band.  

Then today, my sister excitedly texted my from Holland to tell me she heard "Only A Memory" on XM radio over there.

To summarize:

1.) Sept. 8: I show the video to someone

2.) Sept. 18: I recommend the song/album to someone else at a record store

3.) I find & buy the song on 7" that same night

4.) Sept. 21: The person from step 1 hears the song on satellite radio on another continent

And the circle gets completed.  I guess this is what Jung or Sting would refer to as synchronicity, or what others may call kismet or just plain old fate.  Whatever you call it, it's pretty cool when, after focusing on something and attempting to spread the word that thing, you are swiftly rewarded with something pertaining to that entity.

If a tree falls and no one hears or sees it, did it really fall?  If you like something and don't spread the word about it, do you really like it?

Planets with similar climates: Eleventh Dream Day - "After This Time Is Gone" (1992), Jale - "Despite" (1996), Over The Rhine - "How Does It Feel (To Be On My Mind)?" (1991), Papas Fritas - "Smash This World" (1994), Cornelius - "Star Fruits Surf Rider" (1996), Tommy Keene - "Places That Are Gone" (1984/86), Matthew Sweet - "We're The Same" (1995).

The Black Watch >> I won't skip over anything

California Month, tremor #5:

The Black Watch - "Terrific"

(Doctor Dream Records, 1991)

I got into this song via a 1992 Doctor Dream Records (yeah, I had never heard of that label either) compilation CD called Doctor Dream Records Super Sampler.  I bought it in a pawn shoppe in Laplace for 50 cents in late 2007.  I'd already owned the band's '94 album Amphetamines for around a decade, but had only listened to it once or twice.  It has the awesome single "Come Inside," but not much else on it has grabbed me.  You can find it in almost any used CD bin, since Zero Hour apparently pressed up an enormous quantity of them, thinking the band would hit it big.  So they erred on that, but at least they had faith in the band, unlike Doctor Dog.  (Read more about this below.)
"Terrific," from their sophomore album Flowering, didn't do much for me at first, until I grew to anticipate the huge shift from jangly lite pop to urgently passionate intensity, specifically at the 2:30 mark, and then an even more dramatic shift at 3:10.

Like R.E.M.'s "The One I Love," it comes off as a love song, but is actually quite a bitter breakup song.  Or maybe it was written in two parts to illustrate how the mind works when it realizes it can't have the object over which it obsesses, and resorts to looking for every bad thing about that object in order to convince itself that it doesn't really want that object.  Violinist and occasional backup singer J'Anna Jacoby delivers some really inspired playing, and the evolution of the John Andrew Fredrick's singing over the course of the song is impressive too.  According to the interesting bio page on the band's website, he has a Ph.D. in English from U.C. Santa Barbara, and later received an award for Lecturer Of The Year while briefly teaching there, before they laid him off.  (Which makes me wonder if the lyrics of "Terrific" were aimed at UCSB rather than at an ex.)  And he has written two books, The King Of Good Intentions and The Knucklehead Chronicles.

I forgot where I found this; presumably on someone's Tumblr page

The song really has that "California feel," with effortless chordal propulsion and easygoing melodies, making it ideal as a car song.  I read something about how TBW really believed in this song, and quite rightly wanted Doctor Dream to push it heavily to radio and release it as a physical 7" single or CD single.  When the label refused, the band got really ticked off, and I think that's why they left the label, signing to Zero Hour Records.  Of the album, one of my idols, Jack Rabid of The Big Takeover & AllMusic Guide, said:
"Right from the brilliant opening song, "Terrific," the listener is clearly in good if familiar hands -- a brisk, clipped power pop / U.K. new wave rocker that eschews feedback in favor of a clean punch, all topped by the lovely violin work by Jacoby, showing why she's been in demand as a side person on a number of other recordings, and a sweet-and-sour lyric sung by both Frederick and Jacoby."

Option (the best music mag of the '90s, in my opinion) said:
"Often the group sounds English, sometimes recalling The Cure's poppier moments... Flowering works best when Frederick's winsome voice is dragged fiercely along by Jacoby's endearing fiddling and the twin strum of acoustic guitars."

(Note: "Terrific" can also be found on the band's 2000 album Lime Green Girl, which for some reason has seven of their early songs tacked onto the end of it.)

That's my grandparents, Paul (Pop Pop) and Marcie (Mom Mom), with their kids: my uncle Tom in blue shorts, my dad Steve in green shorts, and my aunt Kathleen.  My uncle Mike, the oldest of their four kids, took the pic, according to my dad.  The back of it states "This Is A Kodacolor Enlargement, November 1959."  Yes, I had to take a photo of this photo, since I don't own a scanner... sorry.  This was likely taken in Hawai'i, since Pop Pop was stationed on O'ahu, presumably at Pearl Harbor, at around this time.  I think my dad said that the family lived in 15 different places by the time he (my dad) was 13, including Germany, Savannah, Albany, and of course Hawai'i.  Pop Pop is my idol, by the way, and my middle name is Paul.  He and Mom Mom were married for about 50 years until his death in 1994.

That's a photo I took in the French Quarter of some women (I believe only two or three), using a long shutter speed, from my car, probably on Royal Street facing west or Bourbon Street facing east.  The file is dated 11/25/04, but I'm not sure if that's the exact date it was taken.  I rarely go down there, since the Quarter is mainly a tourist destination that locals avoid, so it might've been on the night I went down there to see Cat Power, which was on 9/20/04.  I can make out the word "Bistro" on the yellow sign, and the Stop sign means it was at an intersection, if that helps anyone to ascertain exactly where this is.  Despite the poor resolution / quality, this has always been one of my favorite photos that I've taken, maybe because of how the multi-tiered building right behind the women sort of looks like it's a kaleidoscopic extension of them, and it melds with the refraction from the big white light at the top.  Overall, it just has a good sense of motion and mystery.  The Quarter is one of the best places to do nighttime "drive-by" photography, since all the neon lights really blur well when using a long shutter speed, and there are always drunk m.f.'s doing stupid or entertaining stuff, because they feel they are obliged to do so the second they set foot in this city.

Planets with similar climates: The Smiths - "This Charming Man" (1983), Felt - "Penelope Tree" (1983), The Lotus Eaters - "The First Picture Of You" (1983), R.E.M. - "The One I Love" (1986), The Go-Betweens - "Streets Of Your Town" (1988), Film School - "Nothing's Mine" (2010), Sand Rubies - "Goodbye" (1993), Matthew Sweet - "We're The Same" (1994).

Felt >> Nothing seems to matter when I'm on your side

Felt - "Fortune" (re-recorded version)

(Cherry Red Records, 1984)

I'm not a huge fan of this band, but this song is exceptional, and should come pre-loaded onto every iPod / iPad / car stereo / boombox / etc.  It originally appeared on Felt's 1982 debut album Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty, and was re-recorded for an '84 single, albeit just as a b-side.  Yes, one of the greatest songs of the '80s was just a b-side.  I took it off of the Felt retrospective CD Absolute Classic Masterpieces, which I downloaded from eMusic in 2003.  The original version is tentative and mumbly, whereas this one is more energetic and dayglo, while maintaining its mysterious melancholy undercurrent.  The opening guitar note and bass note are each just so perfect, and things just get better from there.  I heard that Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins does the backing vocals at the end, but I'm not sure if that's correct.

Back cover

The last two lines of the lyrics are great.  Guitar prodigy Maurice Deebank's jazzy, bright style was quite influential on the whole '80s U.K. indie jangle pop / rock scene, most notably on Johnny Marr of The Smiths, and probably David Gavurin of The Sundays.  Singer Lawrence (just Lawrence) was quite indebted to Lou Reed, but added this weird sighing technique that made his vocals unique.  He was quite a strange dude, forming Felt with the sole intent of releasing exactly ten albums and ten singles in a span of ten years, after which he would break the band up.  He did just that, and then promptly formed a group called... Denim.  L... O... L.  The word "Felt" is great because it has several different meanings (touched; had an emotion; a type of fabric).  Like I said, I don't like most of Felt's stuff, though the surging "Penelope Tree" is pretty great.  Too bad it has to have a girl's name in the title, my biggest musical pet peeve ever, but I think I mentioned that at least once already.

Cool little things that have happened since I've started doing this blog:
¬ A few days after the Hex post, I found Game Theory's Lolita Nation double LP in a thrift store for $3.  (Donette Thayer was in Game Theory before becoming the singer of Hex, and I'd been wanting this album for many years.)
¬ On July 14, I found A.C. Temple's Blowtorch LP for $4.  (Its song "Chinese Burn" contains the lyric "Blowtorch, baby," after which this blog is named.)  I never thought I'd find that one on vinyl, and in fact it was my first time seeing anything by A.C. Temple in person.  It was filed under the "T" section of the store, which kind of made me crack up, but kind of made me sad, since if this really hip store (Domino Sound Record Shack) doesn't know who they are, then who does?
¬ A few minutes before getting my speeding ticket in April, I was holding Adina Howard's "Freak Like Me" cassingle, deciding whether or not to buy it.  (I didn't.)  Then in late June, I heard the song "I'd Rather Be With You" by Bootsy Collins on the radio and realized Adina stole the entire melody of it for "Freak Like Me."  I called the station and told the DJ about Adina's song, but she'd never heard of it.
¬ Compare the random photo I used in the Honeyburn post to this now-infamous photo of disgraced Oregon congressman David Wu:

This dude had to recently resign due to his bizarre behavior, likely the result of mental illness; I had no idea about this photo until last week, though it technically did come out before the post I made.

Today (well, technically yesterday, since it's a little after midnight) I went to a Saints practice for the first time, from about 4:30 - 6:30 PM.  I mention the time of day because the sun was in full splendor, casting a 97º glow on us mortals, but it was totally worth the heat, and it was free.  Newly-acquired weapon Darren Sproles, Reggie Bush's replacement (upgrade), repeatedly stunned the huge crowd into gasps with his slippery breakaway runs.  Like, seriouisly, I had never heard anything like that from a crowd at any sporting event.  This little dude is legit.  And rookie tailback Mark Ingram (yes, the Heisman winner) is a wrecking ball in the mold of Deuce McAllister.  Someone mentioned to me that all five of the Saints' offensive linemen are Pro Bowlers.  The hitting was pretty fierce, with lots of after-the-whistle contact.  There were 11 wide receivers listed on the roster sheet, so I guess about half of them will have to be cut in the next few weeks.  I believe this squad is far better than the one that won the Super Bowl two seasons ago.  I parked my car directly under a weeping willow, so it was cool when I got back to it, and my Skywave 7" ("Don't Say Slow") did not warp.  I then drove down to Houma and bought that greenhouse that I mentioned last month.  The music in the car fir the last several days has been Warpaint's Exquisite Corpse EP and Puro Instinct's Headbangers In Ecstasy.  I missed the NFL Hall Of Fame induction ceremony, and I forgot to wear my Marshall Faulk jersey.  He's from New Orleans, if you didn't know.  I followed him pretty closely in college starting in '92, when he was dominating college football.  After his first game as a pro in fall of '94, I put up a black & white newspaper photo of him on my wall, and it stayed there for many years.

Planets with similar climates: Simple Minds - "Someone Somewhere In Summertime" (1982), U2 - "Love Comes Tumbling" (1984), The Lotus Eaters - "Set Me Apart" (1984), Plexi - "Change" (1996), The Feelies - "It's Only Life" (1989), The Sundays - "More" (1992), Pearl Harbor (Puro Instinct) - "Slivers Of You" (2010), The Durutti Column - "Never Known" (1981), Hinterland - "Dive The Deepest" (1990), The House Of Love - "Feel" & "Yer Eyes" (1992).


Currently trying unsuccessfully to: Stop reading Natasha Vargas-Cooper's blog.

The Cleaners From Venus >> Some of my dreams weren't really worth saving

⍟ The Cleaners From Venus - "Follow The Plough" ⍟

« (Man At The Off License [or RCA Records], 1986; Tangerine Records, 1993) «

The Cleaners From Venus were an '80s English jange-pop group, essentially the mastermind of a guy named Martin Newell, who is revered amongst circles of people who revere this type of music.  I'm not sure if this song is from their 1986 cassette-only album Living With Victoria Grey, or from their 1987 (recorded in '86) LP Going To England.  Maybe those versions are the same?  All I know is it's taken from their best-of compilation called Golden Cleaners, put out by Tangerine Records in 1993.  Man, it's just so beautiful and intense.  "I followed you like a seagull follows the plough" refers to the way seagulls flock behind plows [ploughs], shrimp boats, etc., looking for scraps of food that have been stirred up by the commotion.  One of the most bizarrely romantic things I've ever heard anyone say about someone else...  He just keeps hanging around a person due to force of habit, even though he knows it probably isn't going to lead him anywhere in the long run.  The line "Live in a world of violence and danger, finding myself a comparative stranger" is open to many interpretations, especially since he seems to be singing from the standpoint of himself as a child in that part of the song. "You are before me, you are behind me / It was predestined that you would find me" is another line that sends a chill up my spine for some reason.

The guitars chime along (using a picking technique called harmonics, used to spectacular effect in the second half of "How Soon Is Now?" by The Smiths) in an urgent manner as Newell's vocals swell with passion in the choruses, while a truly sick bassline provides the undertow.  The way he sings the "And I can't remember how..." line in a descending manner is just too cool for words.  I'll admit to not knowing much about this band, but I kind of don't want to investigate much further, since I can't imagine they have a better song than this one.  It's not surprising that a major label, RCA, snatched the Cleaners up immediately after hearing this song, but I think most of the band's music was too quirky to reach a larger audience.  Their lyrics also contain lots of references to obscure facets of British culture, most of which wind up going right over the heads of non-Brits like myself.  The Cleaners are apparently best known for their cult hit "Ilya Kuryakin Looked At Me".  It will never cease to amaze me how most bands are beloved for a song that is nowhere near their overall best song, but that's a whole 'nother topic.

L-R: Martin Newell & Giles Smith, ca. 1986

This will probably interest absolutely no one, but I like to always tell how I got into a song, so I was in a Goodwill thrift store in Houma, LA in summer '07 when I saw an LP by Gerry & The Pacemakers, which had a song called "Girl On A Swing."  I made a mental note to check out whether one of my favorite songs, "Girl On A Swing" by Lions & Ghosts (a song which presages the band Morphine's entire aesthetic), was a cover of that one.  So when I got home I typed in that song name on iTunes and lo and behold, found a song called "Girl On A Swing" by the preposterously-named Cleaners From Venus, on one of their (other) greatest-hits albums.  I clicked on the 30-second sample clip of "Follow The Plough," was immediately stunned, listened to it over and over, and eventually got an internet buddy to track down the mp3 and send it to me.  So there you have it.  All three "Girl On A Swing"s are different, for what it's worth...

Well, a few hours ago the Mavericks just won their first NBA title over the choke-a-riffic Heat, as I predicted in my post on May 8th, in what was definitely the most interesting NBA Finals I've seen.  Big ups to those old dudes, especially to Dirk for somehow managing to avoid the dreaded Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx.  Jason Terry is probably my favorite player in the NBA now.  The Mavs' run had lots of parallels to the Saints' Super Bowl season, and I've adopted them as my secondary basketball team, since the Hornets will never win one.  (Until tonight, only six teams had won the last 27 NBA titles.)  The grind of playing seven-game series means that fluke teams never make it through to the Finals, as often happens in one-and-done formats like the NFL, tennis, or March Madness.  And the current craze for assembling an expensive "Big Three" means that small-market teams simply have no way of being competitive, and must live off of other teams' scraps.

Planets with similar climates: The Smiths - "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" (1986), The Go-Betweens - "The House That Jack Kerouac Built" (1988), The Church - "Shadow Cabinet" (1984) & "Tantalized" (1986), The Sound - "Golden Soldiers" (1984), Tears For Fears - "Broken" (1985), Kitchens Of Distinction - "What Happens Now?" (1992).


Still chuckling at: The couple in front of me in the line to get into a show by This Will Destroy You on Friday night in Baton Rouge.  They were casually improvising some nonsensical stuff in a British accent, which I thought might be some lines from Monty Python.  A few hours later I ran into them at the merch table, so I asked them what they were talking about, and they told me they were imagining what Morrissey would say if he were making an order at a fast-food restaurant.  Also, upstairs next to the pool table, some guy next to me quoted one of my favorite Ahnuld lines: "Get to the choppa!"

Surprisingly, it was the first time I'd ever heard anyone quote this legendary line in the field.  (Though it was cancelled out by his clichéd request to opening band The Nighty Nite to "Play some Skynyrd," for which I almost threw him over the railing.)  So overall, it was a pretty entertaining night, though I hate driving home for an hour every time I go to shows there, especially since they always seem to end at around 2 AM.