Finished listening to the Astor Piazzolla 10 CD box set, then went back, put the CDs out of order, and listened to the whole thing again. The lyricism he gets out of a bandoneon is simply incredible, of course, but the second time through, I listened more to the other players, some of whom are listed on the back of the CDs, some not. Lots of swooping, sharp violins, strangely reverbed guitars, very sparse percussion that veers, like all the pieces here, from primal to ultra-sophisticated in the space of a few bars. If I didn’t have to get on with the rest of these CDs, I might listen again!
Please order my new book! It’s cheap! And if enough people pre-order, it might get released sooner than late December…
Also, I have started a net label: fubar bundy presents. Please go have some free music, though we’ve only one release up yet.
I have a new book of poetry set for publication in December, from the Main Street Rag Publishing Co. If the release date is in December, why am I writing this now, in August? Because if 100 people pre-order the book, at a discount, it will be released earlier. I will keep a running tally of how many are ordered, so please go to one of the above links and order one! With the discount, the book is only $9, which is less than a pack of cigarettes here in NY….
and now, more CDs, as I continue listening to all the ones I own:
297) The Pixies: Surfer Rosa
There was a period of 9 months or so, in the late 1980’s, when you couldn’t step into a bar, party, or friend’s car without hearing this CD. Classic rock in a blender, noise rock with the rough edges sanded off… and poppy as hell. Still great fun.
298) The Breeders: Last Splash
Odd that this one was right next to Surfer Rosa, bit of synchronicity there… it also seems odd that this came out in 1993, and Surfer Rosa in 1988, were the Pixies really only around for 5 years? Guess so. 2 or 3 great songs here, 1 big hit (“Cannonball”) that was good but not great, and a bunch of goofing around. I liked their first ep a bit more, if only because it was more economical (and had “Safari,” my favorite Breeders song).
299) The Birthday Party: Junkyard
What a great, scary album. Roaring, discordant punk noise, rockabilly riffing, a little Nino Rota here and there, and Nick Cave bellowing about big-jesus-trash-can. I cheated and listened to this one 3 times, twice because I wanted to and once to wash out of my ears this thing:
300) Glass Hammer: The Middle Earth Album
I have no idea who gave me this, but they made a copy of both CD and CD cover, so they must have been pretty impressed. I can’t figure out what they are trying to do, but it scares me; it’s music for the Renaissance Faire, but not as fun as all that, there’s no Faire or turkey legs or muddy wenches or jousting… and just when I thought it couldn’t get more scary, the musicians lapse into really limp prog rock noodling, which made me long for the fake medieval crap. Nice trick. According to Wikipedia,
Glass Hammer is a progressive rock band from Chattanooga, Tennessee. They formed in 1992 when multi-instrumentalists Steve Babb (then known as “Stephen DeArqe”) and Fred Schendel began to write and record Journey of the Dunadan, a concept album based on the story of Aragorn from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. To their surprise, the album sold several thousand units via the Internet, TV home shopping, and phone orders, and Babb and Schendel were convinced that the band was a project worth continuing.
Or not. Now I get to listen to a box set, Astor Piazzola, I think…
Please buy my book! Thanks!
Years ago I had a job working for a fat little man who drove a huge, very shiny cadillac. One day I pulled into the lot in my dirty, beat up nissan sentra just as the boss was getting out of his car. He looked at the car, looked me up and down, and said, “you know, the kind of car you drive says a lot about the kind of person you are,” to which I replied, “yes, I know, and my car says I think that’s a stupid way to live.” I’m not sure why he didn’t fire me. Maybe my existence validated his view of the world? You’re welcome, wherever you are, little fat man with a big car.
291) Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: Cornology
Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. This validates my world view, that’s for sure. They even make funny instrumentals, which is not as easy as it sounds… and often, the jokes here verge, as most of the best humor does, on something creepy:
292) Artful Dodger: It’s All About the Stragglers
2-step skitty pop, twitchy without being glitchy, modestly fun and danceable, a snapshot of a time and place. Also, largely responsible for Craig David.
293) Los Amigos Invisibles: Zinga Son
More of the best invisible friends a music aficionado could ask for. Somewhat more burnished than their earlier releases, but not to the point of being over-produced. Viva!
294) Bonnie Prince Billy: Master and Everyone
Whoa, there’s a sudden shift in mood, from Invisibles to Will Oldham. Oldham has written some good songs, but also has written some really forgettable things that are mood pieces and nothing more. Pleasant enough CD from an overrated artist, good for playing in the background while you paint the ceiling.
295) Talking Heads: Naked
Half a dozen excellent songs (“Mr. Jones,” “Blind,” “Cool Water,” “Nothing But Flowers,” a few others), and the rest are sketches that don’t come together as songs, but are still moderately interesting. This is the sound of a group of musicians going their separate ways…
296) Graham Parker: Imaginary Television
I listened to this one out of order, since I just bought it. Ye gods forgive me! Parker is one of my favorite songwriters, and the conceit here is that each song accompanies a treatment for an imaginary TV show. Well, all except “More Questions Than Answers,” which is a cover. I only wish there were more songs, as the interplay between the written “treatments” and the listening experience really works. Inspiring.
The Western land, nervous under the beginning change. The Western states, nervous as horses before a thunderstorm. The great owners, nervous, sensing a change, knowing nothing of the nature of the change. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes. The causes lie deep and simply — the causes are hunger in the stomach, multiplied one million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied one million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied one million times. The last clear definite function of men — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is man. To build the wall, to build a house, the dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take heart muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you say is man — when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the marketplace, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, and the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live — for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live — for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. In this you can know — fear the time when manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of man self, in this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.
Cannery Row is certainly more fun, but reading Grapes while watching our would-be corporate masters struggle to maintain control is quite resonant….
285) Status Quo: The Complete Pye Collection
Like many people in the USA, I only knew Status Quo from “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” but I picked up this 3CD set for 10 bucks and found out they’re quite an institution in the UK. I also found out that a lot of there songs, at least from this period, aren’t very memorable; it seems like every time they wrote a good song, they then tried to copy that song 3 or 4 times. There are, for example, 3 other songs that sound A LOT like “Matchstick Men.” Donovan did much the same thing, I think. But, worth checking out if you have something else to do while listening….
286) Pere Ubu: The Story of My Life
Pere Ubu gets back together to record a CD? Could they have mortgages to pay, nostalgia to indulge in? Crap product to crank out? Nooooo! And, well, no, this isn’t just crap laurel-resting, though it’s not as prickly and experimental as their best stuff, and though they “disbanded” in 1982, they rebanded in 1993 for this recording and have produced stuff ever since. Now, if I could just find the version of Ubu Roi David Thomas did with the Quay Bros… oh, here is some of it.
A while back I listened to It’s A Wonderful Life, my favorite Sparklehorse CD, and wondered why M. Linkous hadn’t made a recording that good since. A few days later, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest with a rifle. If you live long enough, these coincidences start to pile up. Anyway, this is also a good CD, not quite as good as It’s A Wonderful Life, but nearly so; this was Sphorse’s debut, so the seeds of It’s A Wonderful Life are everywhere, some very good dissonant noise alongside the hushed baby voice songs.
Sorry the shit got too rough, Mark, rest in peace.
288) Gong: You
I never heard Gong, heard lots about them: hippy space rock stuff, like Hawkwind for people who though Hawkwind were too punk. And yep, that’s what this is:
Now I know.
289) Cowboy Junkies: The Nomad Series Vol 1.
An interesting direction for the Junkies to head in: grafting some Chinese sounds (literally–samples of people working, etc) onto the bluesy spooky groove, keeping the arrangments sparse; the title makes me think this will be the first of a few releases with the same theme, but with different countries and cultures visited. Good stuff.
290) Townes Van Zandt: Live at the Old Quarter
Such an underrated voice. Townes in known for his songwriting, but the way he sang them was incredible too, like a man so used to being ridden that the rider becomems part of him… CDs like this are exactly why I hate the band America.
I’ve started a novel, and need to spend the next several days in a marathon writing session. I’m shooting for 10,000 words a day, no idea if that’s feasible, but what the hell, it’s a nice round number. The added benefit is that I will get to listen to plenty of CDs, and perhaps get to #300 soon; so, 10k and 300, here we go.
273) Carl Perkins: Go Cat Go!
A collection of Perkins tunes, most of them duets: Perkins and Willie Nelson, Perkins and Tom Petty, Perkins and Bono and Willie Nelson and Tom Petty; a few songs featuring Carl by himself; and then, not sure why, 2 covers of “Blue Suede Shoes,” one by Jimi Hendrix and one by John Lennon. A strange project, but very listenable, since the songs are uniformly great.
274) Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose: Classic Masters
Yes, they had more songs than “Treat Her Like a Lady” and “Too Late to Turn Back Now,” and some of them are excellent, like “Since I Found My Baby” and “Let Me Down Easy.” Their version of “Ain’t No Sunshine” is good too… but some of the others are buried under schmaltzy K-Tel strings. Oh well, it was the 70’s, after all.
275) Etta James: Her Best
And her best is awful good, throaty and powerful, reaches down into the belly and lifts the listener out of the chair by the bowels. “I’d Rather Go Blind” makes me weep:
276) Los Amigos Invisibles: Arepa 300
Highly contagious dance/rock/samba/funk/acid jazz and etc. From Venezuala, where they eat lots of Arepas, which are a bit like pupusas but fatter, and boy are they yummy. Eating while listening to the Amigos is not recommended, as you are likely to drop the Arepa because you are dancing uncontrollably.
277) Tom Waits: Real Gone
I wasn’t so crazy about this CD the first time I listened to it, and then forgot about it. Now I think it’s pretty fantastic, it’s very subdued but also kind of noisy, and features Waits doing beatbox on more than 1/2 the songs (!). Lots of looping, some scratching, and apparently a lot of instrumentation by various Waits children. Some of the lyrics seem phoned in, but some are the equal of the best Waits stuff, and the whole thing is a reminder of how willing Waits is to experiment with his formula–a valuable thing in the era of art-as-market share.
Works of art, ideas about art (which are kinds of art), “come in families, lineages, tribes, whole populations, just like people. They have relations with one another as well as with the people who create and circulate them as individual objects. They marry, so to speak, and beget offspring, which bear the stamp of their antecedents” (Alfred Gell). A fine metaphor, though apparently Gell did not mean it metaphorical, but rather that works of art were living beings; I’m not sure I buy that, I’ll have to read more of his work, but the metaphor above helps explain what depresses me about so much modern, internet-influenced art: all artistic objects emerge from other works, all works of art are “mash-ups” to some degree, but when the aesthetic focus is on the mechanics of the collage, then of course the content needs to be familiar and immediate: a mash-up of LaMonte Young and Mahjoub Sharif would be fascinating, but not as a mash-up, because it would not stimulate the average listener with juxtapositions of the familiar. The cliche is that we live in an ocean of information, and so slapping together a few aesthetic bits in a way that draws attention to the fact that they are a few aesthetic bits slapped together is supposed to reflect the state of living in said ocean. We don’t live in such an ocean, however; we live in something more like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vortex of mass-produced iterations of cultural junk, and so the same junk gets slapped together in more or less the same way, and we get to pretend that we’ve seen something new, something stimulating, like Iron Man 2 or Lady GaGa. One reason pastiche is so popular is that it’s is simple to produce, there is a formula, and since those in charge of distributing art have a vested interest in consolidating power and because the formula is not very interesting (especially for producers!), the distribution itself becomes a kind of elite art form (just ask Will.i.Am). Many US poets have been lost in the same mess for decades, except that instead of talking about generating multiple income-streams and Real-Time Personalization, they talk about “poetics” and schools of poetry… and boy is it getting long in the tooth, as witnessed by such desperate attempts to maintain institutional genealogies as The New Thing.
270) Tom Waits: Orphans
3 CDs worth of odds and ends, some fabulous (versions of “What Keeps Mankind Alive” and Daniel Johnston’s “King Kong,” and 2 Ramones covers!), some just interesting (the song about Ants), some not really fabulous or interesting, but groovy nonetheless…I’ve met a lot of people who hate Tom Waits, which baffles me, but then I’ve met lots of people who really like Pizza Hut, so there you go.
271) Little Feat: Shake Me Up
I’ve heard lots of Little Feat over the years, and the only song I remember is “Mojo Haiku,” because I like the title. I know the Lowell George stuff is funky and well-written, and that this CD is not from that era; it is: bland, MOR flailing with the occasional capitivating guitar break.
272) Fishbone: In Your Face
That the Red Hot Chili Peppers became B-list glitterati and Fishbone did not is just plain wrong. But then Fishbone are black, and political, and like to make songs about their testicles…
My lovely wife expressed some envy about the way I read, that is, the way I read 7 or 8 books at once, bopping back and forth between them. I have always done so, I like how they books often talk to one another, and I have books assigned to different times and places: my read in bed book (currently: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal), my downstairs bathroom book (currently: The Pelican History of the World), my upstairs bathroom book (currently: Run With the Horsemen) my waiting around book that I keep in my car (currently: On Bullshit), and then the 3-4 others I read when not in bed, the bathroom, or waiting somewhere… my wife reads many things each day, as we all do, but prefers one book at a time, which I find just as puzzling as she does my multiple book habit. I suppose my reading habits also mean I am not the target audience for eBook readers, since I would have to chain it to a pierced nipple of something so I was sure to have access to books at all those times and places…
267) Linda Thompson: Fashionably Late
The story of Linda Thompson’s crippling stage fright (hysterical dysphonia) is fascinating, she couldn’t sing for 17 years; I’m certainly glad she found her way out the other side, as she is a wonderful vocalist and also a fine songwriter, as is clear from this recording. And Richard even shows up to play a bit, which is somehow comforting.
268) The Neville Brothers: A History of the Nevilles
Such a weird double CD; the cover is a weirdly drawn picture of Cyrille Art and Aaron, smiling away, and the tracks alternate, one after the other, between Neville Bros tracks and Meters tracks. Great songs, of course, but a strange package… and this is odd, too, though also cool: a fan-made “Hercules” video mashed up with scenes from Meanstreets:
269) The Be Good Tanyas: Hello Love
I first heard these women while driving through Kentucky and Tennessee, up and down the foothills, desperately searching for something that was neither glitter-country crap nor classic rock nor wackadoo preachers, and lo, I found it, though I’ve still no idea what station it was, because they played 4 songs by The Be Good Tanyas, minimal, delicate, raw country folk, and then the station broke into static. I may have dreamed the whole thing, and could in fact be laying in a ditch on the side of Route 65 even as I am dreaming of writing this… but probably not.
Hmmm:
The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.
–Ivan Illich
That sounds familiar, though Illich wrote it in 1971. He also wrote a lot about substituting “webs” of learning for “funnels,” meaning the learn-to-work training mission of modern education. Unfortunately, management shamans have got hold of things even more than they did in 1971, assessment and accountability and other such empty buzzwords drive curricula, and students learn to toe the line or else. Same as it ever was. I teach in a college, and can’t ever quite tell if I’m helping people learn and explore and find meaning, or if I’m just another fool who thinks they can “change the system from within,” otherwise known as Jerry Rubin syndrome. And I guess I won’t ever know, and it’s probably not as bleak as it seems, there are good people teaching here and there, I’ve been taught by some of them… ah well. Sometimes it’s reassuring to know you are too far gone to ever be properly assimilated.
264) Kool Keith: Black Elvis/Lost in Space
Lots of great, funny songs, and I’m a fan of the pre-grime production beeps and fuzz bass wobbles on here, some is Sadat X, some is other folks… and he drops Stretch Armstrong, Chairhead Chippendale, Argonauts, Ringling Bros, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and the Vulcan Neck Pinch in one verse, for god’s sake.
265) Loudon Wainwright III: Attempted Mustache
Loudon and Kool Keith, that makes sense somehow, they should do a song together. I like watching Loudon on M.A.S.H., but all the clips of him from that show on YouTube have been taken down, so instead, the first song on this CD:
266) The Kinks: Muswell Hillbillies
One of their best, most consistent recordings; even the fluff (“Have A Cuppa Tea”) is inspired, and the band sounds tight and bluesy, and, and, and, well, even if it only had “Complicated Life” and 10 versions of “Louie Louie” I would buy a copy. Really:
I must post more CDs, I am getting behind again. Reflexive update: I am listening to all the CDs I own, in order, because my wife challenged me to do so and, well, why not?
260) Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: Freak Out!
Freak out indeed, an early Zappa recording, Suzy Creamcheese and so forth, “Help, I’m a Rock!,” “Wowie Zowie,” it’s Zappa, great if you when you are in the mood, and luckily I was when this one’s turn came…
261) Prince: Sign O’ The Times
I thought “If I Was Your Girlfriend” was the greatest pop song ever for about 2 months after I heard it; I still think it’s a great song, but the spoken word goofiness in the middle part is a little too Prince-peculiar. But wow, what a consistantly great collection of songs, stunningly, uniformly of a quality most songwriters could only dream of…
262) Cabaret Voltaire: The Original Sound of Sheffield ‘78/’82
Very lo-fi electronic weirdness, not nearly as poppy or danceable as their later stuff (which is saying something); interesting in parts, dull as hell in other parts, might be fun to chop up and remix.
263) Astor Piazzolla: Tango: Zero Hour
I think I will listen to the Piazzolla box set when I hit #300. I can’t say enough about Piazzolla’s compositions, which would be stunning even if he were just a bandleader, but good god, be plays this stuff on a bandoneon…
As is wont to happen on the internet, several of the threads I was following got snarled together. Many people mistake these snarls for braids, or even weaving, but usually they are just snarls. So, while listening to Shogun Kunitoki, a Finnish electro band, I check out their website and find a brief statement of intent:
Shogun Kunitoki is a band from Helsinki, Finland, with a mission to help electronic music regress back to a more human state, the time of the tube organ and the ring modulator, the spring reverb and the test oscillator.
They sound a lot like Philip Glass, actually, but driving rather than meditative. In any case, they want to regress humanity back to a more human state, and through the use of moderately old electronic instruments; we were more human back in the 1970’s and 80’s, apparently. A common enough trope, the idea that we were closer to what is essentially human “back then,” though usually people cast back further… like, before electricity was readily available, for example, or, for Socrates, before the accursed new technology “writing” ruined humanities’ ability to know things:
At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. (from Phaedrus)
This suggestion of a pre-technological Golden Age has a lot in common with the post-apocalyptic trope so prevalent today, be it the “cosy catastrophe” where we are returned to a more pure age of naked power (supplanted with canned goods and rifle caches, of course) or a more bleak portrait, like C. McCarthy’s cowardly piece of titillation, The Road. In both cases, a desire to escape the anxiety of culture and other people is manifest, but if our very fragile civilization were really to crumble, our dependance on other people would very rapidly intensify, especially after we were herded into protective camps (because, my wee patriots, the folks behind stuff like the Joint Operating Environment report (PDF) have many more guns than you could even dream about, and the will besides). Certainly, this blogging shit would be right out. I recall reading somewhere that the post WWII generation were the first to grow up under the threat of total annihilation of the species, which almost seems quaint, or at least tidy, when you consider that more recent generations hae to live under the threat of the gradual, messy, tortured annihilation of the species. So, what to preserve, and how? “Why” is a questions for another day. James Lovelock:
We have confidence in our science-based civilization and think it has tenure. In so doing, I think we fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of our species. In fact, civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years. Humans are tough and will survive; civilizations are fragile. It seems clear to me that we are not evolving in intelligence, not becoming true Homo sapiens. Indeed there is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through the 5000 years of recorded history. I prefer sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s view of us as unfortunate tribal carnivores that have acquired intelligence. Our evolution is more like that of social insects; the advances in knowledge and understanding that we prize are more a property of the human nests we call civilization than of its individual members. The nest is always more powerful than a collection of individuals. Who dares disturb the hornet’s nest? Small bees easily destroy the huge and powerful but solitary Japanese hornet when it invades their nest. They cluster around it in a ball and cook it to death at 50oC. A large brain offers no protection for the sperm whale when attacked by possibly less-intelligent human hunters.
As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. How many of us, alone in a wilderness, could make a flint knife? Is there anyone now alive who knows even a tenth of everything there is to know in science? How many of those employed in the electricity industry could make any of its components, such as wires or switches? The important difference that separates us from the social insects is that they carry the instructions for nest building in their genes. We have no permanent ubiquitous record of our civilization from which to restore it should it fail. We would have to start again at the beginning.
And so, some projects for preserving a record are collected here, and they are all infused with sadness, and not a little naivete; the door to the Crypt for Civilization, buried at Ogelthorpe University in GA, USA, has the following inscription:
We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.
Sportsmanship of poserity, indeed. As Lovelock notes elsewhere is his essay, “we live in adversarial, not thoughtful, times,” and sportsmanship has no place. It seems funny to even contemplate that there was a time when sportsmanship seemed a foundational notion, a part of how we conducted ourselves. And then I think about Georgia in 1936, and I realize I have fallen into the golden age trap myself. Sportsmanship my ass.
Guess I’ll keep doing my little part of preserving the species, pathetic as it is: everything we produce as a species in ephemeral, but the internet makes that quality more pronounced, everything you read on the web is electricity…
256) The Lustre Kings: Mark Gamsjager Rocks and the Lustre Kings Roll
Serviceable rockabilly, a little country swing, but way too steeped in self-consicous retroism; the liner notes say “this is that mythical American music. This is that walk, that talk, that look and that car. Bowling shoes and sharp shirts…” and it goes on from there. Talk about worshipping a golden age. Ah well, I’m sure they’re fun to see live.
257) Bebel Gilberto: Tanto Tempo Remixes
Unusual in that the remixes are uniformly good, but different enough to make the whole CD worth owning; the original CD is a nicely written collection of sleepy samba and bossa nova songs, and is well worth owning, but this one stands on its own as well.
258) The Flaming Lips: Transmissions From the Satellite Heart
This CD is right about when the Flaming Lips’ sound began to jell into something more than a Led Zep/Butthole Surfers hybrid. “She Don’t Use Jelly” was the hit, and still is a fun pop recording, but there are a bunch of well written songs here, usually with goofy titles: “Chewing the Apple of Your Eye,” “Pilot Canat the Queer of God,” and such like.
259) Magma: Udu Wudu
Some Magma fans hate this record (Julian Cope, for one), and it does twinkle with assorted annoying jazz-rock phrases, but there’s plenty of hearty weirdness and interesting melodies, too. And come on, it’s an hour of Christian Vander playing drums…