Author Archives: jms

When I’m thinking about my music, I occasionally worry that it’ll make a difference. I’ve come to understand how important music works, most of the time: unless it has the industry and the marketing heads behind it, it will end up being seminal. What a fate! Maybe I’m weird for thinking this, but I’d rather not consider the idea of not seeing the fruits of my own work for decades, if ever (my life plan doesn’t expand past 34). So the respect that some bands for being seminal always seems lost on me, because it’s not really relevant to the creators, and seems like a precursor to reunions. Not that there’s anything wrong with reunions. It’s just that not everyone can be Mission of Burma about it.

This is one of many reasons I respect Omar Rodriguez, for knowing without certainty that he doesn’t want to relive all the ‘important’ music At The Drive In made through the 90s. It’s all well and good that it’s important in 2010, but they’re older men now, and rock and roll is a young man’s game. I’ve come to see their post-breakup compilation as their best album because of this, since it’s such a primer on a band that’s critically important to where radio rock went in the last decade. They are somewhat responsible for emo, but this was before that meant “super produced white boys singing about how much they hate their dad.” There’s a little bit of that in earlier ATDI (the lyric “Daddy taught well at the end of his belt” appears frequently in Picket Fence Cartel) but the distance away from it’s initial release gives it a weird capsule property, a moment in time the same way a lot of early emo feels before the sideways white belt and shitty haircut phase.

Of course, the more notable break in ATDI is the movement away from what we know as emo now into much more surreal matters. The songs from Vaya and Relationship of Command show the direction the band was moving in before the break up, which seemed destined for some kind of incredible new frontier of surrealist hardcore. And we return to this idea of seminal music; Relationship of Command is the best rock and roll album of the last decade, and it remains unchallenged and without a successor, from band members or not. So it would be a natural transition to listen to this and then Relationship of Command.

After Non-Zero Possibility, there’s a heavier focus on oddities. Bonus tracks, singles, remixes and such. It’s a still further exploration of where they were going, in a heavily more experimental direction, with two odd sticking points of Smiths and Pink Floyd covers.

Here’s my point; you should familiarize yourselves with At The Drive In. It’s the music the last decade was, but also should have been, and there’s still a lot to learn in there. Maybe someone’ll be able to understand and answer them in this decade.

WINNER: John

WHY: Well, if they’re seminal, and they influenced me, I guess that makes me more important.

So we’re thinking about doing a podcast, in the case of albums that are basically too big to actually write about in any coherent fashion (for example, if we were to do one this week, it would be on “The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire.) So we might have more news on this later in the week. Maybe that news will include a big link to a podcast and RSS feed information.

With all this Wavves, Best Coast, chillwave talk going around it’s making it really fucking hard to live in California and be happy about the music coming out of here. It’s certainly all got a pretty lazy beachy quality to it, but it’s also not any good at all. So here are five albums that more honestly resemble California than god damn King of the Beach. I’m going to go ahead and leave out anything involving drug usage, as the desire to get fucked up is a basic human drive which is not uniquely Californian.

-Pet Sounds, by the Beach Boys

Well come on, now. Of course this is on here. It’s not on because it resembles California at current date. This album is best thought of as the symbol of California’s image of peace, good times, and pretty girls. It’s also a pretty good collection of songs. I don’t know if you know this, but that Brian Wilson guy’s got a good ear.

-Self-titled album by HEALTH

I prefer to use this album to illustrate learning about California first hand through the people. Starts nice, suddenly unsettling, violent and off-putting while simultaneously pleading for sorely needed attention, lashing out, warped by the leftovers of overdevelopment, unbalanced, and just growing more and more and more, leaving only the dread of finding the tipping point. In other words: noise rock.

-Straight Outta Compton by NWA

An honest confession: I’ve only made it through this album once, and I don’t have plans to do it again. The reason it’s on here, though, is that it only felt right to use the album that is the birth of gangsta rap to use to represent the gang riddled image of Southern California. It’s a vicious, biting thing that happens here, serving as the most recognizable symbol of a culture I’ll never know first hand.

-Evil Empire by Rage Against The Machine

The college student culture is vital to Californian identity in 2010, what with vague outrage and general inaction. Rage Against The Machine is probably one of the better ways to channel that young outrage since they’ve chosen their specific targets, and have their own exposure and mystique. That way, people don’t have to go out and find things that really bother them when they can listen to Zach De La Rocha scream at them over admittedly great music.

-Ice Cream For Crow by Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band

Not the Beefheart album everyone’s heard of, but the most useful for expressing the most natural influence on Californian behavior: the desert. Nothing quite fucks up a mind like persistent heat, and born of people who live their life in that heat is a biologically made dialectical tension, of human needs of belonging with the solitude of the desert. Sooner than later, the heat becomes welcoming, and the mind starts warping bit by bit that oft results in a collection of totems in tribute of the heat. What I’m saying is, the desert does bad things to people, but it’s the kind of beautiful warp of human nature that most great art comes from. It permeates this record start to finish, in it’s tightly composed bizarre nature and rambling storytelling.

This is the vulnerable album. Not to imply that Menomena’s been about a whole bunch of macho self-confidence, but there’s a decided difference in how they’ve addressed their topics. “Friend And Foe” was externally directed, almost a collection of fables and attacks in how disconnected they were from introspection. The late album series of “The Pelican,” “Air Aid” & “Weird” is the best example of this; worldly rampage followed by a meditation on the history awaiting this place in time, and closed with a venomous spike at an anonymous antagonist. It’s “Weird,” though, that was able to give a bit more perspective on what was coming from Mines: there’s a decided self-depreciating side to it, where it’s admitted that it could just be him feeling inadequate.

Mines is very much about inadequacy and the struggle against it. Opener “Queen Black Acid” is an abused relationship hymn, complete with the disconnect with life after it finally comes to a close. Brilliantly, it’s followed by “TAOS,” which is the closest thing to swagger that such a band could ever achieve. It’s self-depreciating but in a charming way, bold and playful while subtly desperate.

It’s really tempting for me to just gush about what every song on this album is, and how brutally open all of these songs get, but that’s just rude, so I’ll pick one more to spend time on: “BOTE.” It’s likely my favorite song on the album, as it’s a great display of the album’s character arc, for lack of a more appropriate term. After whatever crushing event precluded the album, the songwriter seem to be growing stronger and stronger. A confrontation with the seas that caused such dread earlier are now met with full attention, and fought with everything he’s got. The catastrophic storm overtakes him, but at least not peacefully this time.

The reason that I’m not talking about the actual instrumentation to go with these songs is because they are so well paired with their lyrics that it’s almost redundant. At no point in the album does the music clash with what the singer is trying to say, and similarly do the vocals not overshadow the actual music. It’s a unified front, like a… a band, or something.

Huh.

WINNER: “Mines” by Menomena

WHY: It’s as much worldbuilding as music.

I think any good movement adopts a song to go with it, and I’m thinking of starting a movement. An anti-retro movement.

Earlier this week, in conversation with a friend over Pere Ubu and how fucking great they are, this friend expressed surprise that I listened to anything that came out before I was born. Thought-provoking. I’ve amassed a decent amount of music from the 40s on, but it’s apparently odd to consider the thought of me listening to anything old. Well, I know exactly why that is; it’s because I only recommend newer music, and because I actively shit on music that tries to act like old 70s jams.

What I want to talk about today is the start of anti-retro, and the retro song we’re going to use to shit on the Black Keys of the world, who have taken their wanking material and shown it to earth like they’re so proud of what they can do. All the Black Keys comes down to is an old cummy rag taken with a digital camera, and they’re not the only act rushing to photobucket with the slick socks they grabbed from their dad’s dresser. Something has to be done.

Captain Beefheart is one of those figures that these shitheads claim to like, understand, want to emulate, et cetera. The reality of the situation is that they say that to try and convince themselves that his desert breakdowns have relevance to them in the year 2010. They don’t. However timeless the music may seem, it’s ultimately rooted in that origin, and it’s aging more and more every day.

The issue I have is not the act of listening to old music. It does have what it has to say, and there are certainly little points of interest. Where we start pissing me the fuck off is when you don’t take a look around in the world you live in and just go deeper and deeper into this old cult. Here’s reality: If music is a living thing, that music is dead. It’s had a good life and it’d probably be happy to know they were remembered, but they can’t know, because they’re fucking dead, and the fucking dead’s time has passed.

So I say we repurpose “The Smithsonian Institute Blues” as a fucking bile-filled shout at these “old is new” doofuses. It’s a caveman stomp that sounds like the shit they wish they were making. Now their only connection to that music are museums and archives of music. It’s not happening. They can dig through old record after old record, but the fact remains that it’s dead music, old bones they’re dragging up. So if you see someone you know digging up some bone and their gym sock, swat both down and tell them that it’s just fucking old bones and they should really look around the world they’re in right now.

WINNER: John

WHY: Because 2010 is the year you are alive in, not 1970.

disclaimer: Jon Spencer Blues Explosion is off the hook.