July 31st, 2008
Scott Towler has spent the last few months at the Canadian Grammar Rodeo and catching Andy Williams shows while talking to Samson in Branson, Mo.
Don Mclean was never a hippie, but I was. At least I thought I was. I wore patchouli oil. I had patchwork pants and parkas. I tried to turn my hair into dreadlocks. I even partied with a friend named Ginsberg. OK, so Allen and I weren’t that close, but I was there man. I was part of the revolution. The only problem was the fact that I was born in the generation of neo-hippies, where the word ‘revolution’ was merely a song by the crappy frat-band O.A.R.
In the summer of 1995, when I was in 7th grade, I got offered tickets to see the Dead on what would be one of their last shows before Jerry died. My parents wouldn’t let me go and it’s irked me ever since. Sure, I hadn’t heard The Grateful Dead at the time, but I was familiar with the culture, and had a general sense of how it much it affected me.
Yeah, that’s me on the left.
A few years later, I attended my first Phish show and got hooked, eventually going on to see 22 of their shows, not like it matters. What does were the discoveries that occurred a little later on, when I finally plowed through my Dad’s record collection to discover the roots of the music I loved. Hendrix. Led Zepp. The Doors, The Dead, The Who. The good drugs. The now-canonized stuff that went down before the deluge, when any punk kid with garage band and a knowledge of q-base or pro-tools could put out a record.
Do you smell that? Damn, It’s Just Me.
It’s different today obviously. Every show is brought to you by Supafly Productions. And they want you to know that. It’s branded, polished, and no glass is allowed (oh, save for all the crystals and bongs and pipes). There’s been like 12 Bonnaroos now. Like, are you kidding me? I went to the first one thinking it would mean something, and even that one wasn’t good enough to merit a second trip. These festivals preach going green and saving the Earth. Then everyone leaves the campground, and there’s more trash there than the city of LA produces in a week. Seemingly no one has a job, but everyone has drugs to sell (hey, some things never change). You ask someone about peace, and they say “Sorry, all I got is papers.” The point is, it’s all fake. It’s candy land. And I finally had enough.
So I came to a realization recently, as the last traces of MDMA and psilocybin left my system: for me, it’s over. No more poser-hippie bull shit. No more five-year-old kids in Dead tee shirts, running around barefoot while mommy tokes a doob. I’m done. I just can’t look at those people anymore. And you know, for the longest time I’d been trying to figure out why. When did I shift from being a tree-hugging wanna-be to some button down version of my father?
I guess it’s just part of getting older. After a certain amount of time, we give up on the idealism of our youth. We make decisions about what we want in life, and then we go for them. isn’t about the music. The music never stopped. Even when Jerry died, the band played on. And maybe that’s just it. I’m grounded here. My life is ramblin’ on with no end in sight and I couldn’t be happier with the direction it’s going. Hippies, on the other hand, have no where else to go but on the road. They spend their entire lives searching for meaning through music because they never really knew what they wanted to begin with. And I’m not saying that I don’t want that feeling back. I do, very much so. If Phish were to come back and tour, I’d fly half way around the world to see them play again. This time though, I’d stay in a hotel, bring more than one change of clothes, and shower. Maybe.
Download: (Because even if you hate Phish, you might like these songs, the ones that Phish fanatics hate to admit are their favorites because sober people actually sometimes like them too).
MP3: Phish-”Bouncing Round the Room” (From Live Phish 19)
MP3: Phish-”Fee” (From Live Phish 19)
Posted in Great Scott | 6 Comments »
July 31st, 2008
Probably in bad form to post a 20-minute MP3, but this is just one track and let’s just presume that you download it, you love it and you go see Seun Kuti. Everyone wins, it stays in the family, etc. etc.
Honestly, I haven’t been able to go three hours in the last week without listening to “Coffin For Head of State.” (Read album backstory here).The obsession’s almost strange and I’d like to explain it properly but this is the sort of song that you either need to write 10,000 words about, or just post it and shut the fuck up. I’ll choose the latter for now.
Download:
MP3: Fela Kuti-”Coffin For Head of State” (Left-Click)
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 2 Comments »
July 30th, 2008
The first fifteen seconds of “Council Estate,” the lead single off of Knowle West Boy neatly recapitulate the past decade of Tricky’s maddening, mystifying career. For those few seconds, the eccentric strings and clattering home-baked percussion out of which Tricky constructed his most enduring work fumble out of the speakers, but before tension takes hold, a phalanx of guitardrumbass arrives and tramples any trace of oddity. The lockstep two-note turnaround, Tricky’s strict adherence to the flat meter, the sheer naked exposure of his feral-tom growl leaves nothing to the imagination, and not much else at all besides. The song is not bad; it’s just unsurprising, which from someone as obdurate, cranky and strange as Tricky is an exquisite form of disappointment.
Tricky got tenure as the reluctant Chair of Trip Hop with an impossibly strong string of albums running from his debut Maxinquaye through Angels With Dirty Faces, whose unremitting grit-beneath-the-fingernails gloom was like digging a coffin out of a sandpit with bare hands, scratchy grains skittering across varnished wood. After dramatizing his departure from major labels in confrontational, Princely fashion on “Divine Comedy,” Tricky was diagnosed with candida – a kind of yeast allergy with serious effects on mood.
Adjusting his diet accordingly, the exorcised Tricky started trying to make records that appealed to people, in the process alienating almost all of the people that cared about his music in the first place. When Blowback came out, marking his return and newfound amiability in a fit of ill-advised media accessibility, Tricky went on the mercifully short-lived Doritos Sessions to be interviewed by a SoCal wannabe toothpaste model. The interview was fantastic entertainment, a muddling of accents and universes seldom surpassed; the album, with guest slots by various Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cyndi Lauper, Ed Kowalczyk and, ahem, Alanis Morissette, paled in comparison.
Tricky Spotted in North Kilt Town
So, without turning a yeast allergy into Samson’s hair, there are some bona fide circumstantial reasons for Tricky’s tendency to color within the lines. Tricky will never find an alter-ego as supple, as sphinx-like as Martina Topley-Bird: fey where he was witchy, melodic where he was gruff, coy where he was, sort of, coy. His Bristol peers went and turned trip hop into the name to drop while Tricky maintained he didn’t know what they were talking about. No one should hold a bid for the music-purchasing viewership of the Doritos Sessions against the guy. But three albums into Tricky’s pop period, it’s sometimes hard to remember why the rest of us once cared, and still do, about his particular species of whimsical, bespoke paranoia, which suggests not so much that they are out to get you as that you are.
Knowle West Boy’s popism is not without its perks: the cover of a certain Miss Kylie Minogue’s “Slow” is sleazily arch, Tricky slurring his come-ons like a well-hung drunkard. “Veronika” nails a Rihanna-esque curve of melody to a gated, fractured rhythm with all the tenderness of blades in a meat-processing plant; it sounds like the soundtrack to a GTA snuff film easter egg. But picking those cherries requires wading through a daunting quantity of bombast that never quite comes down on the side of tongue-in-cheek nor genuine threat. When Tricky traced the span of his glowering whisper to a ragged roar on Blowback’s “Bury The Evidence,” it was as though he’d decided, for once, to screw together all the disparate elements he used to scatter around songs into a cohesive whole, one turn at a time. By comparison, “C’mon Baby” is weak sauce, a knock-kneed knockoff stuck in third gear.
The lurking question in all late-period Tricky albums is whether he’s lost – or abandoned – the sonic curiosity that made for legitimate comparisons to Tom Waits, another gravelly-voiced auteur. And Knowle West Boy – whose cover obscures the glowering headshot which adorned Angels with mask that is part carnival, part blank white mime – does little to compete with the genderbending meta-games of his peak. Contrived rather than composed, a clutch of songs held together by little more than the idea that they refer to Tricky’s childhood in a Bristol slum, the gestures are depressingly empty – the pathos of the “Council Estate” refrain “Remember, boy, you’re a superstar” seemingly unintended – Knowle West Boy slides worryingly close to rote, something Tricky seemed incapable of only a couple of albums ago.
So forgive me if I invest rather a lot in “Coalition,” the unassuming best track nestled obscurely at the heart of the album. The lyrics are flat-out silly – “Would you go on and on like… Duracell? / Durex? NoFX? Yeah, sex on sale” – but Tricky’s lyrics are simply a means to an end. The seamless grunt at the song’s base has the same DNA as the undistinguished rawk on the rest of the album, but this time Tricky layers on a swell of increasingly panicked strings, blending and swooping like a school of cornered fish that finally turn carnivorous. Tricky stumbles and fidgets with his words, never quite fitting the cast of the simpleminded groove. In the end the song sort of peters out, Tricky unable to finish his lines, as though he’d reached the edge of a cliff. What happens next depends on where his curiosity takes him.
Written By Andrew Iliff
Download:
MP3: Tricky-”Council Estate”
MP3: Tricky-”Coalition”
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
July 29th, 2008
Credit Stephen Colbert’s least favorite band, Grizzly Bear, for intuitively understanding the nature of the Internet better than nearly anyone else after performing brilliant new cut, “2 Weeks” on Letterman last week and then immediately posting it for free download on their website. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s some savvy ursine hype-stoking scheme,* but like “While You Wait for the Others,” another new and similarly transcendent track that the band performed in April on Morning Becomes Eclectic, “2 Weeks” has already managed to appear on most of the major music blogs and magazine websites.
So consider the fact that this post even exists a testament to how anxiously I’m awaiting the band’s next record, reportedly not even supposed to drop until next April. In the meantime, there’s these two songs, which are hard for me to distinguish from one another, not because they sound similar (which they don’t) but more because they’re the first time I’ve heard the recorded material match the richness and complexity of the band’s live sound.
While I loved Yellow House, some tracks felt more like song sketches, pretty and fragile outlines that the band hadn’t figured out how to color in. Yet both “Two Weeks,” and “While You Wait..” seem almost suffused with light: airy harmonies elevate, Ed Droste’s voice stretches infinitely, warm keyboards bounce like little kids walking home from school. Both cuts feel powerful and substantial yet retain that delicate homemade vibe that made the finest moments of Yellow House so special. There’s something comforting and familiar here, not through some cliched derivation, but as though Grizzly Bear absorbed that poppy Brill Building brilliance via last year’s cover of The Crystals’ “He Hit Me.”
The words for the day: even if Colbert’s right and Grizzly Bear are in fact “soulless, godless, rampaging killing machines,” I’m willing to overlook it if they keep on making songs like these.
*Though if if is a cynical hype-stoking plan, it’s an outstanding one.
Download:
MP3: Grizzly Bear-”Two Letters” (Performed Live on Letterman)
MP3: Grizzly Bear-”While You Wait For the Others (Live on KCRW)
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 6 Comments »
July 28th, 2008
Since it’s rare that I post something that hasn’t already been shared by at least a half dozen other blogs, the fact that I’ve got the new Knux single first has me running around my apartment doing my Best DJ Clue impression. Granted, there are probably a few other places the song has already appeared and really, all I did was play “Exclusive New Shit,” a couple times, but hey, its a good song.
So is “Bang Bang,” the track that pretty much confirms what I had already suspected: The Knux are very much for real. I’ve long thought that you could cleave the good rappers from the great by judging how they fared on bad or un-rappable beats. So when I heard the first 35 seconds of “Bang Bang” with its Studio 54 drums, Gnarls Barkley chants and sub-Bloc Party guitar churn, I feared for the worst. Then the Knux start rapping.
The effect is something akin to Stankonia-era Outkast. Big words sure, but it’s almost impossible not to hear the influence of “Bombs over Baghdad,” in the Knux’s tangled but perfectly paced raps and Crescent City accents. It’s a little jarring at first but catchy and when you listen to it enough, you realize that all three of the Knux’s first three singles rank among the year’s catchiest and best rap songs. Save for the fact that Krispy uses the phrase, keep it poppin’ like Reddenbacher which was played-out when Wayne used it earlier this year. Personally, I’m just waiting for a rapper to use the phrase, “keep it poppin’ like John Popper.” Because Blues Traveler is funny. Inherently.
Download:
MP3: The Knux-”Bang! Bang!”
MP3: The Knux-”Cappucino”
MP3: The Knux-”Cappucino Remix”
Bonus (I Mean Why Not?):
MP3: Nature-”Exclusive New Shit”
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 14 Comments »
July 28th, 2008
Thanks to an intense campaign filled with blackmail, bribery, intimidation, coaxing and more than a little wheedling, my LA Weekly essay, “Soulja Boy: Cranking the Chain,” was chosen for this year’s Da Capo Best Music Writing Anthology. Needless to say, I’m very excited and have already begun to compose a thank-you speech big-upping the academy, God, Soulja Boy and most importantly, his boy Arab. (Who were he to ever change his name to Ahab would maintain a serious shot at having my favorite rapper name ever.)
If you’d like to buy the book, you can pre-order it at Amazon. Not like you’d buy it for my piece per se (obviously….that whole milk for free from cow thing) but the anthology also features articles from some very fine music writers including Carl Wilson, Ann Powers of the LA Times, Brandon Perkins of Urb and Oliver Wang. This year’s guest editor is Nelson George, a renowned journalist/author/filmmaker, who co-created CB4 with Chris Rock, which had already automatically made him him ripe for canonization in my book. And now without further adieu, I give you what you really want, Jim Jones,”Straight Outta’ Locash,” and of course,”Sweat of My Balls.”
Download:
MP3: Jim Jones-”We Fly High”
MP3: CB4-”Straight Outta’ Locash”
MP3: CB4-”Sweat of My Balls”
Posted in News | 17 Comments »
July 27th, 2008
While New York has gotten rocked by thunderstorms all day long, our weather in Los Angeles is picture-perfect. 80 degrees, spectacular sunshine, fulfilling every cliche you could ever conjure about the SoCal summer. Unfortunately, while my friends are headed to the beach, I’m on deadline furiously attempting to finish a Rock the Bells preview for the Weekly.
Naturally, consolations are scarce, but Prafit’s “Nice Weather” has been one of the finest I’ve found this afternoon. It’s produced by my good friend and sometime PoTW contributer, Barry “Disco Vietnam” Schwartz, so take the praise with a dose of skepticism. But nepotism aside, this track is ideal listening for these sun-soaked , late July, bread basket summer days. Highly recommended with the three B’s: blunts, BBQ and beer.
Download:
MP3: Prafit (prod. by Disco Vietnam)-”Nice Weather”
Posted in Weekend Song | 1 Comment »
July 25th, 2008
This is why they call him the Genius. (No Leaping Lanny Poffo). On “Alphabets,” the first single off Pro Tools, Gary Grice goes in hard off the haunted soul loop from True Master, who imitates early Rza probably better than Rza can at this point. Consider me cautiously optimistic for the record, considering in my opinion, GZA’s never really come weak (long pause).
Granted, Beneath the Surface was merely okay, but Legend of the Liquid Sword and the Grandmasters joint with Muggs are sorely undervalued gems within the Wu discography. And if you don’t believe me and because it’s Friday and I’m feeling good, I’ll throw in “Silent,” from Legend, featuring Starks and Street Life, who presumably was allowed 16 bars for rolling the blunt.
Download:
MP3: Genius/Gza-”Alphabets”
MP3: Genius/Gza ft. Ghostface Killah & Street Life-”Silent”
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 13 Comments »
July 25th, 2008
For the last six weeks, I’ve spent my drive time cloistered within the soothing cocoon of Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit/He Miss Road. Accordingly, few contemporary albums have battered through that hermetically sealed, parallel universe where I smoke acres of trees at the Kalakuta Republic circa 1975 while inventing a plethora of dance moves, including the Roger Rabbit, the Cabbage Patch and the Wop.
One of the rare exceptions has been Karl Hector and the Malcouns’ Sahara Swing, released earlier this month on Stones Throw subsidiary, Now-Again Records. Information about Hector is scarce, with his only previous recording experience being one 7-inch that he recorded a dozen years ago as the leader of an ostensibly aviation-themed outfit called the Funk Pilots. But his influences are clear: Fela’s slick, seraphic swing and James Brown’s filthy pigpen funk.
Other cited inspirations include Mulatu Astatke of Ethiopia,Jean-Claude Vannier and Can, the latter being particularly prominent, no doubt partially because of Hector’s Krautrock-weaned German backing band. It’s no Expensive Shit, not even close, but it’s a fun, graceful ride, with both crisp jazzy jams and disco-inflected dance grooves. In fact, here’s a video of me moving to it. Yes, in case you were wondering, the sport coat is C&R.
Buy Karl Hector + The Malcouns-Sahara Swing
Download:
MP3: Karl Hector + The Malcouns-”Nyx”
MP3: Karl Hector + The Malhouns-”Rush Hour”
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 3 Comments »
July 24th, 2008
Things I am a sucker for.
1. Stoner prog-rock.
2. Cool animated music videos.
3. The Besnard Lakes.
Henceforth, I really like the video for “Devastation” from their sorely-slept on, 2007 LP, The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse. Plus, it features an actual animated dark horse, one ostensibly named Buttercup who likes funions.
Spotted via Surfing on Steam
Download:
MP3: The Besnard Lakes-”Devastation”
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
