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Monday, August 18, 2008
I'M A ROCKET
Spinout
Delicious Vinyl : 1991
Spinout
[Buy It]
ROCKET TO NOWHERE
Mike Rep and The Quotas
Rocket to Nowhere/Quasar 7"
Moxie : 1978
Out of Print
SEVENTEEN
Rocket From The Tombs
1975
Available on The Day The Earth Met Rocket From The Tombs
Morphius Records : 2002
[Buy It]
ROCKET USA
Suicide
Red Star : 1977
Suicide
[Buy It]
STARSHIP
Spacemen 3
Space Age Recordings : 2003
Forged Prescriptions
[Buy It]
ROCKET MACHINE
Opal
SST : 1987
Happy Nightmare Baby
[Buy It]
SPACE COWBOY
Spinout
Delicious Vinyl : 1991
Spinout
[Buy It]
NUCLEAR WAR
Sun Ra
1982
Available on Nuclear War
Atavistic Records : 2001
[Buy It]
"Rock n roll comes from outer space." I woke up this morning with this refrain, from an unknown scuzzy garage-rock song, cycling through my head and thought...so it does. Doesn't it? Ziggy Stardust, Sun Ra, the Mothership. These are pieces of a familiar iconography, an iconography of a familiar strangeness. Insofar as the history of rock music is parallel to that of teenaged alienation, the trope makes sense. Shy kids put on feathers, platforms, glitter masks. They announce themselves as stars, collapse thermodynamic and nihilistic power into their very band names, perhaps even declare themselves, like Herman Poole Blount aka Sun Ra, extraterrestrial. They exaggerate their awkwardness into an advantage. Except maybe there's another reason, maybe the history of rock music also parallels that of modern hysteria. Tell me those people screaming for, or at, the Beatles at Shea Stadium were doing so on the basis of music alone. (If so, surely Duke Ellington--say--was exciting enough to prompt a similar response, although he didn't.) That particular frequency, that shrillness splitting the stadium air, has always seemed to me a Nuclear Age, a Cold War-era response. Now that the Cold War's ended, maybe, the screaming continues since the menace never really went away. But I was always a space cadet, myself, ridiculed as such when I was a teenager, obsessed with planets from a much younger age. And I might never be a star, in my own field or any other, but I remain attached to the iconography. And to the sound, forever dirty, that goes with it. Listen to the hopeless pulse-n-throb of Suicide, say, or the lunar grind of Opal. Fly me to the moon...Labels: Matthew, punk, space
posted by Matthew
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Tuesday, August 12, 2008
GOOD, BAD, NOT EVIL
BAD KIDS
COLD HANDS
The Black Lips
Good Bad Not Evil
Vice : 2007
[Buy It]
From: Matthew Specktor
Subject: Veni Vedi Vici
To: Alex Abramovich
Date: August 12, 2008
Damn, this Black Lips is kicking my ass just now! It's fucking great. Yet...why? I have all the Chocolate Watchband shit, the Remains, Nuggets & Pebbles comps out the wazoo. I never had much patience for, say, the Lyres (OK, the first record's great), the Chesterfield Kings, the Cynics etc.
So why, why, why is this record so good?
STRYCHNINE
The Sonics
Here Are The Sonics
Etiquette : 1965
[Buy It]
MONK TIME
The Monks
Black Monk Time
Polydor : 1966
[Buy It]
I GIVE YOU AN INCH (AND YOU TAKE A MILE)
The Mods
Peck : 1966
Available on: Teenage Shutdown vol. 10
[Buy It]
HELP YOU ANN
The Lyres
On Fyre
Ace of Hearts : 1984
[Buy It]
STORMY WEATHER
The Reigning Sound
Time Bomb High School
In The Red : 2002
[Buy It]
I'LL CRY
The Reigning Sound
Too Much Guitar
In The Red : 2004
[Buy It]
From: Alex Abramovich
Subject: Vedi Vici Veni
To: Alex Abramovich
Date: August 12, 2008
Let me just preface this by saying, I saw a fifty-something guy, in a Range Rover, on 6th Avenue the other day, blasting the Sonics....
I don't mind the Lyres. I love the Monks. (ie, the first white band to turn their entire white band into a rhythm instrument - please watch this video and write me back an actual letter explaining that the Monks are not actually doing Sonic Youth shit while Sonic Youth are still in short pants?) I'll put my Reigning Sound up against your Grizzly Bear/whatevers, anytime. So I think can answer this:
TBL came up in the post-industry-collapse world, where bands have to prove themselves live - stayed on their grind night after night for years and years - and got tight enough to play loose as fuck.
They're smart, and they're funny ("Bad kids/Product of no dad kids"?!?). Their songs are better than we have any right to expect them to be. They're from Atlanta, which is not Boston (which is not LA). They're not fetishists, like the Lyres, and they seem young enough to not have the anxiety of influence thing which makes curator bands like the White Stripe so annoying. I've seen them live, twice - unlike, say, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, they're fucking great - and they've got the whole Beatles-head-shake down. Their original lead singer was killed in some sad-as-fuck drunk driving accident, so they're not untouched by life & other, ensuing tragedies.
They would never link to something they wrote for Slate....Labels: alex, garage rock, Matthew
posted by Alex
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Thursday, August 07, 2008
I WALK BY YOUR HOUSE
The Individuals
Plexus : 1982
Available on: Fields/Aqua Marine
Bar/None: 2008
[Buy It]
SHAME, SHAME
Sloan
Twice Removed
DGC : 1994
[Buy It]
FOR SHAME OF DOING WRONG
Richard and Linda Thompson
Pour Down Like Silver
Hannibal : 1975
[Buy It]
SHAME, SHAME, SHAME
The Harmonettes
Til Dalight
CES : 1975
Available on: Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up
Numero Group: 2006
[Buy It]
ASHAMED
Black Merda
Chess : 1967
Available on: The Folks From Mother’s Mixer
Funky Delicacies: 2005
[Buy It]
IT'S A SHAME
Alton Ellis
Studio One : c. 1975
Available on: Studio One Funk
Soul Jazz : 2004
[Buy It]
SHAME
Lewis Taylor
Stoned
Hacktone Records: 2005
[Buy It]
I was fifteen and in love with a girl who couldn't have cared less. She offered me a cough drop and I swooned. I folded the wrapper in quarters and kept it for years. We'd been thrown together at my high school for the performing arts: I'd written a one-act play and she'd been chosen to direct it. Which meant hours, weeks, months of stammering torture, of suppressing any evidence of feelings I didn't want to have insofar as they simply weren't cool. I wasn't cool either, though I think I feigned it successfully. If nothing else, I had the best record collection of anyone I knew. This grotesque bit of overcompensation--it was mix-tape heaven, the mother of all audio love letters--was itself embarrassing. Sure, I had some fabulous Bowie bootleg no one else knew existed, but it was always with a vague sense of shame I dropped the needle for my friends, since owning the record in the first place meant I'd spent sweaty-palmed afternoons prowling for vinyl all by myself. Time I might've spent otherwise, had I been socially able. Certain songs, however, mitigated this. I may have been a glam-rock obsessive, may have papered my walls with pictures of Eno and Bowie and the New York Dolls--anodyne androgynes who didn't need to own up to anything, least of all their true sexuality--but when I heard The Individuals' "I Walk By Your House," I recognized a kindred expression immediately. Those flatted harmonies, glottal monologue in the middle ("sneak out the backdoor...run down the block"), that morse-code guitar solo in the middle that says what the singer's too tongue-tied to. I dropped it on a tape, for that girl and later for others. If there's a less cool record in my collection, one that gives cleaner articulation of that particular hopelessness that makes one feel most alive, I'm not sure what it is.
Of course, the older I got, the more I craved records that would out me in just this way. I lost (or at least tempered) my interest in glam and turned to punk rock instead, what was too heated to be cool, and then to soul music, wherein cool was largely beside the point. Sure, there was Wicked Pickett and the thick mantling of titles that lay upon Soul Brother Number One's Atlas-sized shoulders--pop music was never any cooler than that, really--but even these men ended up, sometimes all too literally, on their knees. So maybe rock-n-roll's true function was to encode embarrassment, that feeling I've seen described (in Anatole Broyard's excellent Kafka Was The Rage) as "a radiance that does not know what to do with itself." I don't know much from radiance, but I've spent all too much of my life feeling ashamed of one thing and the next, from the expected stuff--social and sexual ineptitudes--to the very things that have attempted to remedy those conditions: literacy, record collecting, film snobbery (really, why any of these things appeared even for an instant as possible social promotions is beyond me)...it's been one hideous embarrassment after another. Far worse than knowing too little, the pain of knowing too much. Once, the telephone rang and on the other end was a producer from Comedy Central, wanting to know if I'd be willing to audition as a regular for a show they were putting together, which he described in the wooly summer of 2001 as "Iron Chef for trivia enthusiasts...We understand you know quite a bit about music." I winced as he served up the evidence: my high score on the recently-administered Rhino Musical Aptitude Test, that Woodstock for record snobs that used to happen in the parking lot of Tower Records on Sunset. "What's the show called?" I asked him. "Beat the Geek," he said. I hung up the phone on the spot.
Hence a cluster of songs about--or somehow enclosing--shame, that most rock-n-roll emotion, the one I spent my early life avoiding but which I have come (somehow, almost) to seek out actively, since it suggests I am near something worthwhile. Even those old Bowie records (and how I loved the most lunar, the chilliest of them best: Low, and so on) are dear for evoking so thoroughly an adolescent terror. A heterogenous grouping of songs to be sure--gawky Nova Scotian power pop, tropical disco and various stops in between--but I like to think these are all clued in along the same lines: naked we're born and naked we feel, with only a wrapper-sized fig leaf to hide behind. We mightn't need it anyway.Labels: funk, Matthew, power-pop, reggae
posted by Matthew
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