This Seattle band played in New York the other day, and I didn’t go to see them. I’d never heard of them, but the review in the Times was enthusiastic, so I’ve been playing them. The band is great, the songs are inviting, the arrangements are clever with dynamics (if not exactly air), but the singing is a mystery. Why?
I’m not sure what should take its place, of course, but it wrecks these tunes for me.
Of course, we get back to the issue of live music, which brings different expectations. Just watching their heads on this one is fun. Almost. Stop singing!
I know we had some Bad Reputation chatter here recently, but I’d never seen this video until tonight.
It’s not a great video, but it does take on EMI and Virgin, the way the Sex Pistols did. What’s more important is that this is a fantastic song, burnished in my head from watching Freaks and Geeks (you should!).
I’ve founnd myself in conversations with friends over the past few weeks talking about how things are worse now than they’ve ever been. It feels that way, there is lots of dark stuff coming out right now, but I grew up in the 70s. There was dark stuff then, for sure. I think the amount of dark stuff is always the same, it just isn’t always in our faces the same way.
And there is some notion that what is in our faces now will help us address the problem of institutional bias, and find ways to diminish it’s effects in the future. Probably wishful thinking, but a goal worth pursuing.
At dinner tonight our host was spinning a new Bill Laswell record, on vinyl! It sounded great, and was in keeping with Laswell’s lifelong attempt to mix up all the genres of music. There was some techno, reggae, and ambient on the disk.
Which reminded me of Laswell’s production of Afrika Bambaataa’s World Destruction, which features Johnny Rotten on backup vocals. This is crazy early 80s hip hop, end of the world punk hop, so I’m sure you’ll grok it.
There is much more to be said about Laswell, but for now, let’s agree that the world sucked in the early 80s, too.
It’s been a while since my last post. I know you’ve missed me and my young people music. The band I want to share with you all today is Tame Impala. When my friend first showed them to me about 4 years ago, he described their sound as “psychedelic Beatles.” I could definitely hear that in their music, though it is much more modern with use of synthesizers and such on top of their instruments. What I like most about them is probably the lyrics, though the music sounds really good to me as well.
She was the guitarist in the Slits, and now has a very nicely reviewed book out about her days in punk, hanging with the Clash, sexing it up with Johnny Rotten, joining the Slits. I haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds like she tells a compelling story without using a ghost writer.
There is another song called Love Is All Around, probably more famous than the Mary Tyler Moore show theme. Written by the Troggs’ Reg Presley, it has a somewhat different sound than their other big hit, Wild Thing.
This clip is an early example of an MTV clip, some 13 years before MTV started.
I was playing the album this tune is on recently, and my teen daughter got a little weirded out (Dad! Why are you playing that?) by this one.
It is weird. And obviously and cravenly catchy, but I came upon this video today and it strikes me that while it is as sordid as the song, it is also at the same time as sincere as when Rick says, That girl’s alright with me. That’s a strong message of acceptance, for folks to do/be what they want/are, which seems like a good message (even if you’d prefer your daughter grow up to be someone their fella would take home to mother).
A friend of Josh Homme’s was playing him tunes from a Polish metal band called Vader, and was making the argument that Vader fell within the classification of death metal. Homme said if that was true, that Vader was the Eagles of death metal.
He later thought, with his friend Jesse Hughes, that it might be fun to start a project that combined the Eagles and metal. This one was the first EoDM single.
