Category Archives: John

I know it’s not relevant.

I know it’s my second straight review involving Cedric & Omar.

I know there’s a big hate-on for The Mars Volta.

I’m not here to argue against disliking them.

Every complaint is legitimate towards most of their recent work. I would even go as far as to say that liking “The Bedlam In Goliath” is a sign of almost fanboyish appreciation of the TMV approach, and also for “Amputechture.” These two albums are in contrast with what is now the larger amount of their work: “De-Loused in the Comatorium” and “Frances the Mute” are two albums that strike a careful balance between psychadelia, salsa, and obtuse storytelling and do so well in their own ways- the dizzying ambition of “Frances” vs. the arrival qualities of “De-Loused.” What I am here to suggest is that perhaps we were all unfair to “Octahedron” when it surfaced last year.

The reception to “Octahedron” rang of dismissal and disappointment, the former from those turned off by “Bedlam” (me) and disappointment that it was not even faster and crazier (the Comatorium). The one thing I will say in favor of “Bedlam” is that it was in many ways a return to earth for Cedric as a singer and lyricist, as well as Omar’s sense of melody. These developments were eclipsed by Thomas Pridgen, who I am quick to say fits every negative stereotype I have about drummers. The reality of the situation is that Omar’s production style worked excellently for one album- “Frances”- which was grounded in a very, very tight rhythm section between Theodore and Alderte.

They lost that grounding for “Bedlam,” and instead set a young prodigy in front of a drum set, and told him to play as if the song was just him. It ended up being oppressive and obnoxious, leaving perfectly good songs in tatters underneath cheesy overdrumming. Goliath is a particular offender here, but I am partial to Omar’s solo work, and I thought Rapid Fire Tollbooth was one of the best songs he’s yet put together. It’s just not a song that fits with stadium drumming.

Alright, actually talking about “Octahedron” now. Where “Bedlam” was Omar and Cedric coming back to earth, “Octahedron” has the rest of the band joining them. The album is as a result a lot less out of control. I wouldn’t call it calmer, even if it is for the most part slower, as it’s just as intense as earlier work. The difference is that with the slower pace, it builds over the whole album as opposed to each individual song being a wild prolific panic. It makes “Octahedron” a lot more approachable as a result, and it’s ideas are more easily communicated as they grow in complexity.

“Since We’ve Been Wrong” is the most human Cedric has appeared in five albums, and is an exceptional intro to the album. It reads as an ode to a bad relationship, the vulnerable yearning for salted scorched earth. It’s vulnerability sticks out as it establishes one of the three basic themes for the album, a tragic sympathy for humans. The other two themes are established within the other two initial songs- “Teflon” mediates on the evil of overtaken institutions, while “Halo of Nembutals” considers what nothingness is going to eventually imply, as well as the humor that comes from those realizations.

The strongest aspect of Octahedron is that it is a complete album. It’s a collection of songs that exist and rely on each other for that existence. This isn’t an easy album to pick tracks out of and put on mix tapes, as they breathe each other’s air more dependently than prior efforts. It’s an album that feels alive, an incredible accomplishment given the discography of The Mars Volta.

WINNER: “Octahedron” by The Mars Volta

WHY: It’s good to see them back down here with us.

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.

Let’s talk about albums as a whole for a second. Talk about what an album implies to me, just so we can establish a common vocabulary and an understanding of what I mean when I say album. Music is alive, I believe. Music is a living, breathing thing. An album can represent any living being and can transform along with you as time passes. It would be easy, then, to understand an album as a person, and a song as a conversation. It’s a helpful way for me to understand music.

Here’s my point: if albums are people, then one can have relationships with albums. Maybe not in depth relationships with every album you ever hear, but there are certainly some that are going to have long lasting effects on each other. The first two Pere Ubu albums are two of my closer friends, and they’ve been mentors for me. “Dub Housing,” the second one, is a thickskinned old soul, is a free thing as much as it can be without losing all semblance of sanity, and is the host to ten of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had.

The album actually reminds me of an old high school friend in that way. Earth happened around them, and they just chose to take the bits and pieces of it that they were interested in. “Dub Housing” is a collage of a cityscape glued to a proud alley cat. Certainly aware of how pop is supposed to work, how the world is supposed to work, but disinterested in favor of it’s own little continuum.

It’s an album that could resonate very powerfully these days, given the exclusive tendencies of referential humor and in jokes, of self-constructed worlds. What Pere Ubu built here is a fearsome act of western individualism built with second hand tools and no manual.

WINNER: “Dub Housing” by Pere Ubu

WHY: Timeless, hostile, and otherworldly in the ways rock ought be. Have “On The Surface,” but know that the album is a snake pit that’ll get stranger further inside.

Oh yeah we do individual song reviews. No I didn’t just decide this. Shut up.

This is usually the answer I’d give to any sorts of goofy questions like “what’s the best song of the decade” or “what’s your favorite song,” or even “if you were a wrestler, what would your theme song be.” Well, this or “S.O.S.” by Lightning Bolt. Anyways, the point is that it’s probably my favorite song.

When I bought “Shine A Light,” I went in having only heard this song, and was initially really disappointed. I had listened to this song basically nonstop, and was completely in love with it. I was too young to understand the power it had, but I could see the demonstration of that power, and I felt like I had to own it. Eating a man to gain his powers and such.

Of things that have not changed as I’ve aged, the power this song holds over me is one of them. It’s hard for me to listen to it and not drop everything I’m doing, and not convulse as it courses through me, and not burst into howls along with Bry Webb. It’s hard not to surrender.

The song itself is everything I love about art rock or whatever you want to call this. There’s more than power chords because the song is worth more than that, and the intricacy of the song is meant to fit in with the power the song has over the songwriters. I wonder if they knew how incredible this song is when they were starting to put pieces of it together, because every part of it is perfect. It’s beautiful in the same way films of predators are, and brutal like the empty streets of modern cities. The savage build, short release, and return to the cacophony of pure goddamn rock music is lifelike in a way only a song can be. This song makes me want to fuck something in half and scream through glass, and all of the other feats rock and roll should make you want to do.

So I guess the song is okay.

WINNER: “Nighttime/Anytime (It’s Alright)”

WHY: It’s perfect to my aesthetic.

So today happened. Have pictures. Continue reading →