Posts Tagged rock
Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear | Split LP
Split LPs create a unique problem in titling blog post reviews. But forget about that. I love the split LP as an object unto itself, but am annoyed by it when it comes time to organize. I just came across this split the other day in a folder marked “206”, the Kill Rock Stars catalog number. That’s how it came when I bought the download last year direct from the KRS site. Since then they’ve been moving their digital sales to bandcamp, except for the Bikini Kill stuff because they bought the rights back or whatever. This release gets unfortunately gets lost in the shuffle. To prevent it from getting lost again in my own collection, I’ve split the release up into the respective artist folders because it’s really just 2 EPs released together for convenience sake. Convenience as a sell-able item that is. It’s the kind of thing that makes sense as a physical object. Except it doesn’t of course if you like to keep your records in order. Then all you can do is put it with the other split releases, possibly by catalog number. It’s almost enough to make you not care about anything at all, ever. Why even buy records, or talk about them? Maybe it’s time to delete all your blogs, stop checking your email, there’s no goddam point to anything if you can’t even keep a record collection in order. A record collection? Why?
But then you get over that cause there’s not really that many of them. And you can always sell them. You don’t even have to review them. It’s all right. It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine and good. The mp3s can go in separate folders, it’s going to be ok.
Huggy Bear, come over here for a second. I just want to talk. I got this for you guys. I like Bikini Kill fine, but all the songs on their side are on their other records in better versions. The slower version of Rebel Girl is interesting, I can’t believe that started out as a slow song. Not much else to say about it. But the cover is great. Don’t really get what you were going for with your cover. It wasn’t posted on the site when I bought it. I like to think that the BK cover is the the real cover of the entire release but we know that’s not true. It’s ok. I remember the 90s. I wasn’t really “around” for the early Riot Grrrl scene, but I remember all the reactionary aesthetic moves that seemed necessary at the time. So, a lot of things about this release seem a little jarring compared to your comp album Taking the Rough with the Smooch, but not that much considering the context. That comp has a real timeless feel to it tho. It’s one of my favorite 90s punk albums (even if it wasn’t conceived as an album). I didn’t even know there was more, I thought you guys were like the Germs. I don’t know why it took that long to find you had more albums. I’m going to have to check out the later stuff. Anyway, I like how this stuff matches the sound of the stuff on the comp, but I can see why none of it made the cut. I don’t really get what most of the songs are about; seems to be some British scene-related fashion policing. And there’s non-politicized young romance stuff, complete with a Charlie Brown sample. THAT’S SO 90s. I just mean, it is. Maybe you just didn’t think of the band as having a real set in stone image but I thought of it as a super angry, kinda beatnik/anarchist thing. Those angry songs were also the catchiest. I guess I get it, with the cover and all. This is more real autobiographical stuff about just being young people in a band? And the other early stuff is the ultimate fantasy of Super Punks…unless you guys were really killing cops in the streets. I’m not saying you weren’t…it just seems like that would be more known. I didn’t research it if there’s some open cases there. If there is, don’t answer this. I mean, it’s a blog post. That would be pretty stupid to give yourself up in a blog post comment after all this time. Not saying you would do that. It’s just…ok enough of that.
☠☠☠☠☠
If you people out there want a legit copy of this thing you’re going to have to get the vinyl used from a 3rd party, which will get the bands exactly as much money as if you torrent it or whatever it is you do, but you’ll have that piece of vinyl that going to stare at you from whatever random shelf you put it on cause you don’t know what to do with it…for the rest of your days. You’ll want to put it on sometimes tho, it’s pretty good.
...apparently you will find another band that is like kiddie techno or something if you look for the mp3s on amazon (but they have the other albums).
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Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno| IAO Chant From the Cosmic Inferno
AMT is a band I have always respected more than listened to. No matter how great they are to experience live, I can’t find a record that changes this. I mean I think they’ve put out some good recordings of some memorable songs, but I don’t know any of their records front to back. Until now. I mean like right now. Because while writing this post I had to really listen to the song and pay attention to the parts of it and I’m pretty into it. I was going to go more with something like, “well, you have to be there”. “There” being in a crowd of people dancing inside a cloud of pot smoke illuminated by lasers. While that helps, this is hardly an aimless jam. (“This” is a single 51 minute track, not entitled “IAO Chant From the Cosmic Inferno” but “OM Riff From the Cosmic Inferno”.)
First, some words on “The Cosmic Inferno”: I can’t really tell the different incarnations of this band apart. I don’t really know why they do it, but I like that they do it. You can get more info about that some place else. What am I, gonna rewrite a Wikipedia article? I’m not. It’s just something that should be mentioned. I didn’t put it in the title of the post at first so it would fit in one line, but it didn’t fit in one line anyway. This really bothered me, so I put it in and now it fills out two lines very nicely. But maybe your screen resolution is different and it looks terrible. I’m trying not to think about it.
Also, this is basically an extended semi-stealth cover. I didn’t know this until I read the notes on this bootleg which I mentioned in the last meta post.
Om Riff *a musical portmanteau of Gong’s “Master Builder” and Steve Hillage’s “The Glorious Om Riff”. Also known as OM Riff, also known as Om (or OM) Riff From the Cosmic Inferno.
OR IS IT. Short answer: yes. That’s kinda it. Resorting to wiki, we find Om Riff is just Hillage’s remake of Master Builder. Hear both here (or not).
Alright, so they just remade it again and added the chanting part. Well they added some stuff and stretched it out, but the “chant” is from another version of Master Builder from the live album Gong est Mort, Vive Gong. It’s at this point I start to become concerned about my inconsistent usage of italics vs. quotation marks but I am resolved to continue regardless, but why? Why do I do it. Why does it keep—oh. Here:
AMT’s version adds sections of ambient monk-like chants at the beginning, end and part of the middle. It’s not until about 2:30 the the “IAO chant” and The Riff begin. Rhythm guitar sticks to that over a propulsive beat and among swirling synth sine sweeps while main man Kawabata Makoto embarks on a wild noodly solo that eventually becomes an open-ended counter-riff. Then around the 18 minute mark the beat fades. The synth and rhythm guitar relax into drony washes. The counter riff continues but recedes into the background. After a few minutes a slow beat returns for another long solo backed by a one note dirge on rhythm until we hit 30 minutes. Then both guitars lock in to a simple gradually accelerating crescendo figure which becomes a phasy bridge which leads back to the beginning: the beatless chant (but this time with bagpipes? Nope, it’s hurdy gurdy.) and the triumphant return of The Riff and all the rest of that. They ride that for another fifteen minutes, which is a bit much, and towards the end it’s barely the song anymore, it’s kind of a glorious mess that even the main riff is buried in, but, eventually (45:20) the keyboard comes through with the actual Master Builder melody. Which, if you have the liner notes you can sing along to. (They don’t.) But it’s a pretty good payoff once you know it’s coming. Without noticing these separate parts it seems pretty structureless. And if you come in at the middle (like if you’ve got in the car or an iPod) it seems to end too quickly, the chanting part and feedback as everything falls apart at the end is only a minute. But they already ended the song once at the halfway point. It seems like a logical compositional choice. Or maybe they were running out of studio time and overestimated how long they could pad out one song to album-length so it just turned out that way. I don’t know.
Btw you can see all the liner notes at this site.
And you know what, of course the entire thing is also on youtube. Sure it is.
But wouldn’t ya rather buy it? Because you can get it for a buck. I mean the CD is regular CD price but it’s only one song and these guys don’t give a fuck, clearly, about trying to charge you more just because they had some some fun with it. Support that! And yes, the track is mistagged as “IAO Chant From The Cosmic Inferno”. Why you gotta be so uptight about everything? You can change it if you want. You can do that. Go do that. Enjoy. Listen to it more than once. %
Yamantaka // Sonic Titan | YT//ST
Hm. According to…my own internet presence…I’ve gone completely insane as of a few years ago. I’ve just been looking through what is the backlog of records I should be in the process of reviewing, if I’m taking this project seriously, and uh…it’s not looking too good. But I know better. The truth is, I’ve been insane most of my life maybe until…today? I dunno, people can snap and go insane one day, not always traumatically, just a lot of little things build up sometimes. Why can’t it work the other way around? I’ve had a few good night’s sleep in a row and things have been generally ok…maybe that’s all it took. After…so many years.
So anyway, in Japan, it’s Buddha’s birthday today, or yesterday, since it’s already tomorrow there. Some people think it’s in early December. It’s not really important. But you’re supposed to spend the day in mindful reflection, I guess, which in what you’re supposed to be doing all the time, but it’s like every other religion pretty much in that most people aren’t taking it very seriously most of the time.
So here we are. I’m picking this one unrandomly out of the pile.
Hey, I’m glad I have a blog. I would not have remembered this album. I’m trying to reorganize my files and it would take years to get to this listening to this again. Goddamn mess. What the hell do you expect from a crazy person? It made my Best of 2012 (altho it came out late 2011), which should really be a best of albums I already reviewed, shouldn’t it. Well.
☸☸☸☸☸
First of all: could we just call this album “self-titled”? We could. It is. But you know what the deal with this band is? They’re fuckin’ cool. It’s a good thing. It’s a band. That’s why you start a fuckin’ band, to do something cool. Look, if you put some unicode bullshit in your name that has to be copypasted every time, you’re kind of a cock. Granted. Some would say double slashes are just as pretentious, but it ain’t. It’s just the right amount. So the name of this album just looks better in this format so I’m using it, but let’s be clear that it a self-titled album and we’re not going to say “why-tee-slash-slash-ess-tee” in conversation, if it comes up. Which it should. Also acceptable at this point would be “the album” or, in the future, “the first one”. OK.
This band has a whole live element I don’t know much about, it’s supposedly “operatic”. I only get this from the first track, Raccoon Song, which is the most forgettable. I had literally forgotten about it. This is definitely against the general common sense “rules” for new bands, which is to put your best song first. But another of those rules is to not make the cover some kind of incomprehensible artwork that does not even have the name of the band on it, but like, a picture of the band. That makes sense. But man, fuck making sense. This cover rules. There’s no way I could not listen to a record with this cover. I would be so bummed if it wasn’t great. What the fuck is that thing? Fuckin’ cool, that’s what.
Also, there’s only 7 songs that average out to average length, for a total of only about 31 minutes. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a full album, but how many songs do you need. More than 1 or 2? NO. It’s just about perfect. If you can’t say something in under 45 minutes, you don’t have anything to say.
And what are they saying? Absolutely nothing coherent or intelligible as a real message. JUST THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. (Or not, get off my back, I’m just not-crazy today.) The only words I can make out on this album are in Japanese, a language I don’t believe any of the members actually speak. They translate to “I AM STAR CAT.” YES.
This is the single I guess, Hoshi Neko. The big stand out with a with a phased intro and the catchy Japanese hook. These are Canadians, btw. I assumed at least one was J-Canadian but apparently not. The bandcamp page uses the tags “chinese” and “iroquios”, so it’s intentionally mixing things up. Seems like some of the references are Buddhist and some are Native American…maybe. Maybe they are just making some of the shit up out of thin air. You can totally do that when you work on something cool. It’s not like fucking fan fiction. There’s no canon!
The other songs are also pretty good put not as pop. “Operatic” outside of whatever the live show consists of is squarely within the concept and sound more or less of “rock opera”, altho this is usually a bad thing in my opinion. They make something that works. I think they achieve the effect by making music that is more like soundtrack music than part of a musical.
Reverse Crystal is like a more-rocking out/less Kraut Stereolab with those same kind of high-register, unintelligible, repeating vocal phrases, and even a long second-half pop drone coda but with a lot of cymbal bashing, and it’s got like an Iron Butterfly organ solo in there. Great.
A Star over Pureland is the only explicit Buddhist reference I can find apart from the name, which most people(?) will people recognize from the Boredoms’ Eye Yamantaka (it’s not his real name). Altho if you want to get into it, these are reference to competing schools of Buddhism. Yamantaka is mostly a Tibetan thing. Pure Land is a like a Buddhist afterlife which not all Buddhists believe in. No, there’s no way to prove I am not looking this up as I go along. Oh wait, there is Pure Land in Tibet. I did just look that up. Well, there you go. There’s some Tibetan cymbals and horns in there. I knew that. I know stuff. Guitar freak-out on this track is cool, but it’s clear the keys are more their thing. It’s definitely the climax of the show, but as far as songs and general moods go, they are best and building up the tension than actually exploding. Or resolving. But it all seems worth it for the parts that work.
You know what, Crystal Fortress Over a Sea of Trees could also totally be a Tibetan thing. I don’t know that much about the Tibetan stuff. But I do know it has another killer organ solo. The particular synth rhythm track they use sounds a little out of place. It’s like we’ve been in something like a 70s horror movie and now it’s like Knight Rider all of sudden. Doesn’t quite mesh. Ends with some vague chants. Maybe that is in Tibetan. Usually done by dudes of course so it doesn’t sound anything like the standard stuff, or maybe it’s not that at all. Questions, with answers, that I am not going to try to find out. It just doesn’t matter. %
Shonen Knife @ Johnny Brenda’s 2012.07.19
I left my last Shonen Knife show feeling a little over-philosophical. My writeup stops right before I walk out the door (naturally), but as I’m going back to my car in the community college parking lot, I roll up my autographed poster and think, “well, I guess that it.” You know, you follow a group for a long time…they get signed to a major and tour stadiums with legends, they have a series of their own tours in large-ish clubs…they never break up…eventually…they’re playing a local school auditorium for 50 people. Probably how they started out. It’s the circle of life or something.
So I’m glad I made this show. (Things have been kinda tight, it was close.) Back at JB’s where I saw them 3 years ago (when I was on blogging hiatus), they were right back in their element, and the usual crowd followed.
I walked in on the middle of Creem Circus‘ set. Visually, they immediately reminded me of kitsch-glam era Redd Kross but now that I think about it, I’m not sure this era of Redd Kross literally existed. They looked like what I thought Redd Kross looked like at some point but possibly never did. (The new Redd Kross record is pretty good, btw.) Sonically, they were were pretty straight up Rock with some really good twin lead stuff going on. Later I find out this is a local band led by Chris DiPinto of DiPinto Guitars. This guy is already a local legend (by name) for his guitar shop so it was cool to see him perform. (I thought he was a much older dude.)
Next was White Mystery. (I should have got pics of the openers but forget the memory card in my camera so I only had a few shots.) They’re a two-piece, kinda like a gender-reversed White Stripes but not so Blues-obsessed, just there to rock. And so they did. Really expected some part of the dude’s drum kit to break at some point and the guitarist is no joke. You’re gonna be seeing more of them if that’s even remotely your thing.
Last time at JB's the openers were Jeff the Brotherhood and (then duo) PO PO, who are both doing pretty well. I don't know if Naoko books the openers, but that some some pretty hip booking. They could be going out there with like, Johnny Poppunk & the Poppunkers, some generic whoever bands, ya know? Probably from switching labels so many times, they can make some more genuine hookups with different-type bands.
I thought I saw PO PO a/k/a Big Zeb (now a solo act) but I suppose that could have been any 6-ft tall long haired Pakistani gentleman. I did see Brian a/k/a Supreme Nothing but didn't get to talk to him. I see a lot of people I recognize at Philly shows, especially SK shows, that I don't talk to. They may or may not have bands or websites. I think I saw someone I knew from MySpace. How do you start that conversation in 2012? You don't. Well, I don't. Most of these people I don't know their names or anything, I just see them again and again. Nobody ever comes up to me and just starts talking (unless they're hustling something) so it's a mutual awkwardness. I don't think I'm recognized beyond being a regular, but I am visible. I have mass. I mean, I'm trying to watch my weight, but you can see me. I exist in physical space is what I'm saying.
Let’s move on… Uh, so Shonen Knife played some songs.
They come out on stage now to the own music, which you think they must get enough of, but there’s Naoko mouthing along to the first song on their new album, Welcome to the Rock Club. (But what does it really mean? You’re not here to think, you’re here to rock.) They launch into Konnichiwa, as they do. “Are you ready to rock?” Yes, of course.
Like, you expect all of this be get kinda old by now. But even if you’re planning to enjoy them 75% (it’s hard to compete with seeing the original lineup, in my mind), they get you all the way there. Ritsuko & Emi have totally won me over. Ritsuko is crazy headbanging everywhere, Emi looks like she winning the lottery at a surprise party with every other cymbal crash. It’s delirious.
They go through the usual stuff, the old crowd favorites like Bear Up Bison and Twist Barbie, some of the newer similar stuff like Pop Tune and Osaka Rock City, and Naoko seems to really like the Rubber Band song (some crowds must get into the chant part, I haven’t seen it) and Banana Chips (not bad songs, but they’ve got better…so many damn songs). And they did Devil House, a personal fave which was a Michie song that Ritsuko sings now. The beginning of BBQ Party almost makes me cry; I manage as the song soon veers into an almost out of control Thrash freak-out. A similar themed song on the new album, All You Can Eat sweetly cautions “not to overeat”, but live they substitute this older tune loudly insisting you PIG OUT PIG OUT PIG OUT. Despite a perceived flip-flop on record, it’s clear where Naoko stand on this issue. And they played some Ramones songs which was not really necessary but hard to argue with. There was some confusion with the setlist that was funny but I guess you had to be there, I’m not transcribing their broken english. Naoko really wants to play those Ramones songs. I used to get more upset of setlist omissions than I do now. They can play whatever. They did the crushing (for them) Cobra vs. Mongoose and then ended with the softer poppy tunes from the new one: there’s the Emi-led Psychedelic Life which I’m not going to question and the Ritsuko-led Sunshine, which is kinda like a Carpenters song that ends in a kind of Beach Boys counterpoint thing at the end they all sing. And they close with Move On which is a bit of a bummer, but then they do an encore of Antonio Baka Guy, which is almost the same song as Cobra vs. Mongoose but no one seemed to mind.
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Acid Mothers Temple@Johnny Brenda’s
Acid Mothers Temple must be seen live, obviously.
The afternoon of the show I started feeling nostalgic for all the times I have almost seen this band in the past because I almost didn’t see them again. (I was late getting a paycheck. It’s always something dumb.) But at the last minute things came through and off I went. I told myself it didn’t matter that much anyway—there was a moment of panic where I thought I would never see them now, what with them saying this is their last tour in America and all—but wouldn’t these guys be deep into the 2012 thing? It’s a psych band. Yeah, if the world is ending, this would be the last tour wouldn’t it. Sure enough, the tour poster has a Mayan calendar symbol right damn in the middle:
It was pretty much like this.
I do not think the world is ending, not this year anyway. But some people might disagree with me. The opening acts on this tour for example. The AMT set seemed typical, a mind-melting performance, but nothing that suggested impending retirement or cosmic extermination. No goodbyes, barely any audience interaction at all. But these other guys really set the mood for apocalypse. All shrewd marketing maybe, art even. Really you can’t ask for a better theme.
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