Asian Man Records, 2000
Acquired: Asian Man Records Mailorder, New, 2002
Price: ~$.50
This is one of the 7”s I hung onto from a big box of Asian Man Records vinyl I
got for like $25 in like 2002. I forget exactly when it was, but I remember
coming home from high school and finding a heavy ass cardboard box from the Bay
Area on my doorstep. It was one of the most exciting musical moments of my
life. Having all this STUFF. There were a few records in that box that I really
wanted (see: the Broadways, the Chinkees) but mostly, it was a bunch of stuff
I’d never heard of. I sold bits and pieces of it off over the years, but this
one for some reason is still sticking around. Somehow, these four Japanese
fellows managed to fit seven songs of rapid-fire ska-punk on 7 inches of wax.
And I’d say that’s pretty damn admirable. Naturally, given that it’s ska-punk,
it’s totally good fun. High energy, the sort of music you apply the word
“blistering." The hardcore punk at hand is more tuneful than most, almost in a Kid Dynamite-esque way, with a little ska upstroking thrown in just cuz.
Sub-Pop, 2006
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2012
Price: $3
It’s a bittersweet experience listening to Band of Horses gorgeous first album
considering the steady decline in quality of their albums over the years. Sadly,
the best metaphor I can think of compares the band to film director M Night
Shyamalan, and while they haven’t made a record as bad as The Happening, the rote work quality of their latest LP Mirage Rock make me think there’s some
big sellout around the corner. They’ll find some way to water down their sound
to garner the largest possible audience share and then it’ll all be over. Good
on Ben Bridwell riding the wave of popularity to a deal with Columbia that lets
him run his own label and one can only assume a pretty comfortable life from
here on out (at least the royalty checks will keep rolling in every time “The
Great Salt Lake” gets played in some televised teenage melodrama). Certainly
not very rich, but you know, the sort of decent living that anyone wants. I
don’t fault Band of Horses for that, because it’s easy enough to just quit
listening to a band once they abandon all the things that made you like them in
the first place. It just stings when you’re hopes got set so high. Where you
looked forward to a solid ten or fifteen years of quality records and it didn’t
quite pan out.
The fundamental thing that makes Everything
All the Time work so well is that there is nothing at stake. Carissa’s
Wierd had recently broken up and Bridwell and Mat Brooke formed Band of Horses
seemingly out of inertia (granted, it was basically Bridwell’s band). There’s a
purity at work on this album that just feels so organic and loose. You can’t
fake that, and I feel like that’s what happened after this album became such a
huge hit. Brooke left the band after the breakout, which was terrifically sad
since his two contributions to the record “I Go Out to the Barn Because I Like
the” and the show-stopping closing track “St. Augustine” are two of the best
songs on the album. They add an emotional depth that’s not necessarily any
deeper than Bridwell’s own, but contrasts in a really fantastic way. I used to
like to cite Brooke’s departure as the reason why I lost interest, but that’s not
true. Bridwell’s songs are the reason this album works, and they’re really,
really goddamn good.
Pulling off an album with a distinct sound yet with enough diversity in the
songwriting is a trick in the repertoire of any great musician, and that is the
great strength of this album. There’s the almost spooky sounding rocker “Wicked
Gil,” the ethereal and instantly gripping opener “The First Song,” the grandiose
surefire hit “The Funeral,” the aforementioned TV staple that is also likely
one of the best indie rock songs of the 00s/a song that’s going to go right up
with Arcade Fire’s “Neighborhood #1” when they make the definitive list someday
“The Great Salt Lake,” the silly and joyous “Weed Party” and the emotional nail
in the coffin, Bridwell’s masterpiece penultimate track “Monsters.” And then
that duet with Brooke “St. Augustine” at the very end. It’s an album that
invites re-listening, one that all too easily found itself in my car stereo for
the better part of three months. And it holds up incredibly well.
I wanted to like Infinite Arms and Mirage Rock. I came at them with an open
mind, and the more I think about it the more I realize that Band of Horses
sophomore LP Cease to Begin was
actually pretty good (so was Unbreakable
following up The Sixth Sense). The
last two albums just lack the spark that drew me to their music in the first
place. It was sensitive beards-and-flannel-shirt rock and I could definitely
get down with that. And though Bridwell still rocks the beard, his band just
doesn’t rock. I’ll still hold out hope for a return to form because I know it’s
definitely not outside the realm of possibility.
“Honey” is a fucking WEIRD track, and I kind of like it because it is such a
blatant mishmash of genres and styles it’s admiral, even if the end result is a
totally incoherent mess. It’s piano rock and college rock and Jerry Lee Lewis
and then there’s some gospel-esque background singers and the song melts down
and trucks along for two minutes before collapsing in a heap on the floor. Naturally,
given the ubiquity of the band’s name, it’s been impossible to track down any
information about them. Which is sad because the B-side cut “Odette” is a quiet
and lovely mess that sounds like it was recorded in a shipping container on a
cargo liner but the core of the song shines through and it is quite nice. Upon
further investigation, I learned that this band went by the name Circle C
(though the artwork says “written and performed by Copyright”). The Canadian
band was formed by Thomas Anselmi, the frontman of the punk band Slow they had
a released a self-titled CD on Geffen in 1991 that sold poorly and were
consequently dropped. Slow are most famous for stripping at the Festival of
Independent Recording Artists at the World’s Fair’s Expo 86 in Vancouver and
leading to a bunch of stuff to get cancelled and the band getting arrested. The
negative publicity led the band to split, and shortly after that Anselmi formed
Circle C. I love the small histories of bands.
Wabana, 1995
Acquired: Love Garden Shotgun Room, Used, 2008
Price: $.25
Cobra Verde is best known as the band that replaced all the original members of
Guided By Voices from 1996-1997 (with Doug Gillard hanging around all the way
to the bitter end) They contribute one song to this split 7” and it’s OK. “Blood
on the Moon” is pretty straightforward rock n’ roll. Capable, but lacking
spark. It most definitely pales to the three tunes by Moviolia on the A-Side,
which are just the sort of excellent, hazy, singing-through-distortion indie
rock jams I adore. “Empty Ford” is a track that would easily find its way onto
the compilation I’m making in my head for the songs on all these random 7”s I
got that never made it to CD (most likely, I’m probably wrong and some of the
songs show up on CDs SOMEWHERE even if they were limited to like 500) and
definitely didn’t make it to MP3. Since I don’t have one of those USB
turntables or a tape deck, it’s a mental list, but at least I can mostly
remember which 7”s have the jams. There is so much heart in these three Moviola
songs that it’s kind of really tragic that they’ve been wasting away unheard in
my 7” collection for almost five years (and who knows how long they were
wasting away in the Love Garden Shotgun Room). The 7” I WANT is the split they
released the next year with Eric’s Trip. This link leads to Moviola’s surprisingly
expansive discography.
Die Slaughterhaus, 2007
Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2011
Price: $2
This Coathangers 7” actually precedes “Shake Shake” by a year, but is just as
grimy, just as ramshackle, and just as much fun. They’re the kind of band that
would really shine in a live performance though, as their whole concept is one
of those things that doesn’t 100% transfer to records. They’re good and fun for
what they are, but the Coathangers are a party band meant for the musty
basements of the world. You can SENSE the attitude on the recordings, but you
know there’s something missing. Regardless, there is always room for lady punk
bands and the more the merrier and the goofy joy the Coathangers bring to their jams is something that the punk rock world needs more of.
Def Jam, 1986
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2012
Price: $1.50
The first track on Licensed to Ill is
like a pocket of history: past, present, and future rolled in one. “Rhymin’ and
Stealin’” is the future of music and the same old shit all at once and that’s
why it’s fucking brilliant. I’m not a hip-hop head by any means. I wholly
admire and respect the genre, but when it comes to pick out a record to listen
to I veer into my indie rock comfort zone. And I wanna stop that. I wanna love
hip-hop because I know it’s lovable. And I know for a chalky white boy like me,
the Beastie Boys are a sort of gateway drug.
It’s feels almost taboo to acknowledge that fact. The Beastie Boys made it OK
for white boys to like hip-hop and not look like out of touch chumps. The
Beastie Boys do. Not. Give. A. Fuck. And that’s what makes it OK. And that’s
also what paved the way for the horrific rap-rock boom in the late 90s/early
00s with Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit and all that bullshit, but the aim of the
Beastie Boys was true. In college I wrote a 30 page paper about the white man’s
historical co-opting and commercialization of African-American music. It was
the one of two papers I wrote in college that actually bettered me as a person.
And it changed the way I thought about music. The crux of the paper was the
fact that the band TV on the Radio were considered an oddity since they were a
predominantly African-American band playing rock music. How the fuck did that
get to be weird? And somewhere down the line it’ll be weird for black dudes to
rap one presumes if history repeats itself (which it tends to do).
But then you’ve got “Rhymin’ and Stealin’” which borrows the riff from Black
Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” and yet has that rap-over-rock Rick Rubin production
that Jay-Z used way down the line on The
Black Album. Musical history is complicated.
Just like any relationship you’re likely to be involved in, things are never as
easily defined as you think they should be. So maybe it’s a moot point to
question the authenticity of white rappers since ideally, we’d live in a
colorblind culture but at the same time diversity is a highly prized attribute
of any society. So where is the line in the sand? And the answer is probably
just who cares as long as everyone is treated equally.
Licensed to Ill is as much of a
social document of the birth of white-boy hip-hop as it is a goddamn fantastic
record. I picked this up at work because it was so cheap and despite somehow
never truly listening to the Beastie Boys outside of the songs that had videos
on MTV, I knew it was an important album. It’s brazen as shit and really doesn’t
sound like anything else from the period. At least nothing that I can pinpoint.
I mean, all the notable songs are sequestered to the back half of the album WHO
THE FUCK DOES THAT?! The fucking Beastie Boys did it just because. You’ve got
songs that are ubiquitous in our culture—“(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to
Party),” “Brass Monkey,” “No Sleep Til Brooklyn”—and this album still sounds
fresh as shit. Wholly legit. Which is bizarre. It could so, so easily be a
fucking joke and it just manages to be everything at once without sounding like
a mess. I mean, sure it’s a mess. It’s cluttered with influences from all over
but it’s the sort of organized mess that is prized when it comes to albums
these days. A beautiful confusion that somehow reaches a greater truth we mere
mortals can only look in upon but never achieve (unless they try really, really
hard I guess. Don’t wanna rule it out because great, exciting, envelope pushing
music is being made every day and will be until people get sick of music which
will maybe hopefully not but maybe be sooner than we think). The cumulative
effect of Licensed to Ill is this:
The class clown is way smarter than you think, and while you never expected a
party album to be intellectually stimulating and groundbreaking, it happened
and the world is a strange, kind of fucking awesome place.
Oh yeah, and "Slow and Low" is probably the best song on the rekkid.
Atlantic, 1973
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2012
Price: $.25
About a month ago I became the record person at Half Price Books St. Louis
Park. I’d done a little bit of record pricing/grading/throwing away (seriously,
I’d go out on a limb and say at least 50-60% of what we get is
moldy/musty/dusty/fucking sickeningly gross and allergic reaction causing) so I
wasn’t I didn’t make like a fish out of water and I spent the last month
getting REALLY into pricing records. The whole process was almost therapeutic—a
welcome reprieve sequestered in the basement away from the psychosis of the
perpetually busy sales floor. Quite frankly, it’s a blast. There’s something
incredibly satisfying about pulling a $100 record out of a pile of crap. On the
other side of that, there’s me, a recovering record buyer faced with temptation
on a daily basis. HOWEVER, in that last month I dug out two John Prine records (this and his eponymous debut) which I no doubt would have missed out on had I not been running the section.
The copy of Sweet Revenge I dug up
has a ratty sleeve and a handful of scratches and I got it for practically
free. Which is great. Since I didn’t know if it would actually play.
But it plays! And though the sleeve is pretty fucked up, it features maybe my
new favorite album cover of all time. I can’t explain why this image of Prine
reclining in a convertible, denim clad with his cowboy boots propped up,
aviator shades and half a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. He looks like
Jeff Tweedy, and I’m sure Jeff Tweedy is aware of that. The back cover is the
inverse of the front—Prine reclined, boots up, staring out at the ocean.
There’s a real timelessness to it, which really melds with the timelessness of
his songs. There’s a little bit more of a sneer to Sweet Revenge than his self-titled debut (the only other album of
his I own and have listened to all the way through) and the politics are
absent. But the humor is there, and a dark cynicism that is just brilliant. The
title track (with it’s devastatingly great opening line “I got kicked off of
Noah’s ark/ I turn my cheek to unkind remarks.”) lives up to the album cover.
The swagger, the non-chalant badassery. The clever wise-ass at work. As a man
who has strived every single day of his life to subdue wiseassery, Prine is an
inspiration to me. Maybe I should stop holding it in (although at work I have
to, especially today when some woman couldn’t find books about angels and got
all sassafras when I couldn’t leave the register to point to the shelf with the
angel books and said “Well I guess I just won’t buy anything at your store” and
I SO wanted to say “You know being rude ain’t no way to get into heaven, ma’am”
in a southern drawl). Or maybe I should just keep my mouth shut and enjoy
Prine’s razor sharp wit and get through life a lot easier.
Other winners here are the heartbreaking “woman done up and left me” number
“Blue Umbrella” (“Just give me one good reason/ And I promise I won’t ask you
anymore/ Just give me one extra season/ So I can figure out the other four”)
and the silly and insightful live cut “Dear Abby” that plays out as a series of
letters the he famed advice columnist (“Dear Abby, Dear Abby… My fountain pen
leaks/ My wife hollers at me/ And my kids are all freaks/ Every side I get up
on/ Is the wrong side of the bed/ If it weren’t so expensive/ I’d wish I were
dead/ Signed Unhappy”). “Mexican Home” and “Onomatopoeia” are surefire hits and
the penultimate track “A Good Time” is a quiet tune I hadn’t heard on Great Days or the tribute album Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows. It’s
one of those perfect little songs that just shows up at the door all day and
you embrace it like a long lost brother. I feel like everyone has songs like
that, that’s why everyone loves music. There’s so much of it, and there’s so
much of it you haven’t heard that’s just out there, floating around, waiting to
crawl into your ears and then your brain and then your heart. That is
incredibly sentimental, a cloying assessment of loving music, but that’s the
sort of thing a good song’ll make you feel. Lines like “And you know that I
could have me a million more friends/ And all I’d have to lose is my point of
view” just kind of resonate to the point of rattling.
I’m getting kind of goofy about how good John Prine’s songs are. They’ve been
here this whole goddamn time and all I had to do was put the pieces together.
I’m feeling incredibly sentimental, something about the music you listen to
throughout your life being like a journey that mirrors the one you’re on. One
you can look back at later on down the road. Your record collection is like a
scrapbook or a photo album, a cumulative answer to the tired old question “What
kind of music do you like?” I look back at when I was a kid, when my brain was
just primordial stew, and the music I fell in love with when I was old enough
to fall in love with music (it was oldies, from the fantastic KC radio station
Oldies 95 which sadly only plays 50s and 60s pop songs on Sunday nights these
days). And then there was a 8-10 year stretch where I just listened to what my
friends listened to, or what was perceived to be cool. I embrace having once
legitimately enjoyed the musical stylings of Limp Bizkit and Korn and Linkin
Park and Slipknot though now I realize that was never something I would be able
to really enjoy on a personal level. It was like the stupid Russell-Crowe-in-Gladiator haircut with the frosted tips
that I had at one point in my early teens. Yet to disown the fact that I liked
those bands—to pretend I always had great taste—would be somewhat similar of a
Nazi officer fleeing to South America and pretending the whole “personification
of pure evil” thing had never happened. I’m not saying that there is anything
objectively wrong with those bands I listened to in junior high (well, except
maybe Limp Bizkit, which is the most embarrassing of them all but it doesn’t
really bother me because I know everyone I grew up with that also attained fine
musical taste feels the same way) they were just mistakes I had to make until I
somehow found the little inlet that led to punk rock (Blink-182, another band
that you could easily lump in with the Korns and Linkin Parks of the world but
I wholly appreciate their function as a gateway drug to pop-punk and I still
find pretty much everything preceding Take
Off Your Pants and Jacket to be really enjoyable, even the really terrible
gross songs) and then indie rock and then pretentious indie rock and then
somehow John Prine is here. When I was 16 I couldn’t have predicted I’d be
listening to some old dude from the 70s and really, truly loving the music ten
years down the line. I was going to be punk rock forever! To be fair, I was
also going to be Straight Edge for life (I think I had two Minor Threat patches
on my black hoodie) and I’m literally brewing five gallons of beer as I type
this so you can see how THAT turned out.
I feel sorry for kids nowadays who just get handed a copy of Neutral Milk
Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
with their cool haircuts and cool jeans and good taste once they turn 13. It’s
the Internet’s fault, and honestly, I’m mostly just jealous. Why couldn’t the
popular music have been cool and interesting when Greg Achey and I were
spending our early teens drinking obscene amounts of rootbeer and playing hours
and hours of NHL Hitz to the soundtrack of Orgy’s cover of “Blue Monday” ON
REPEAT. I used to get annoyed but now I feel like it’s the same shit and while
I feel like I’ve got more of a claim on the good stuff compared to these 14
year olds with better taste than they have any right to have, they’ll have the
same sort of identity crises we all had in our teens and it’ll all work out in
the end. And really, they’re the lucky ones because they never had a point
where they thought Nickelback was good. Everything that was cool is now uncool,
but the timeless cool stuff kind of just stays cool forever I suppose. Which is
why I wish I had a Vlogbrothers-sized soapbox to stand on so I could disseminate
John Prine mix CDs to the youth of America so they don’t think he’s just some
lame old dude. Actually, Bon Iver probably already did that with Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows, and
good on him for that yes indeed. As long as these kids aren’t just giving up
after picking up the latest Arcade Fire album (are they still cool or is it all
about glitch-house whatever now with the Skrillex and the Crystal Castles? Good
lord I now realize how out of touch I am with everything) and hear that and
want to listen to every single cool thing they can get their hands on. To mine
the influences of their favorite artists and mine THEIR favorite influences and
follow that dark spiral down into the heart of oblivion. Or into a music
director’s office at a college radio station where halfway through their tenure
they realize they’re totally out of touch with what it means to love music and
that reassessment is necessary otherwise the dark hand may never relent its
icy, tastemaking grip. The point is, there’s just so much good shit out there
that if you’re really trying to discover music you really have to go out of
your way to have bad taste in music (assuming you factor in the fact that
people who listen to Top 40 and actively enjoy Taylor Swift and Katy Perry and
the like aren’t really claiming to have good taste in music in the first place
and probably have bigger fish to fry). One of my big regrets in life was how
big of an asshole I got once I started working my way up at KJHK. I had
tunnelvision because in my mind, the station was in a state of crisis and
needed to return to where it was when I started. And I was really shitty to
some DJs whose taste I judged as “unfit for music staff” instead of trying to
shepherd them into the Promised Land. Those were dark times. But then again, I
was 22 and heartbroken and just an unpleasant person to be around and I feel
like I should say “that’s no excuse” but it’s mostly the excuse. But I was a
snob. I still am pretty much a snob but less now about other people’s tastes
and I feel really guilty ripping into bands that make music I hate so I think
that’s some sort of progress. Then again, it’s not like I don’t relish ripping
into a truly insipid an horrible album, it’s just that I save that stuff for my
wife when we’re listening to the radio on trips back to Kansas. She’s my sin
eater. My sin eater who cranks the Taylor Swift song when it comes on so she
doesn’t have to listen to me bitch about it and then starts singing along.
Atlantic, 1971
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2012
price: $1.50
The first half of John Prine’s debut LP has been the highlight of my year. In a
time when my life is in a sort of upheavel, filled with demands to find a real
job, prepare for child rearing, and generally figuring out what the hell it is
I want to do with my life, John Prine’s songwriting has put my troubled mind at
ease. Granted, I’ve got First World Problems, but then again, John Prine is
singing for people with those sorts of problems.
This recent discovery is naturally aided to the Justin Vernon curated Prine
tribute Broken Hearts & Dirty
Windows. That was the point, I suppose. The expose a generation of
youngsters who dig on Bon Iver, My Morning Jacket, the Avett Brothers, Conner
Oberst, Lambchop and a handful of other terrific artists who populate the
soundscape of modern Americana. Best of all, I was falling in love with this
excellent compilation at work. On the clock. Getting paid. Granted, I was
pricing a thousand CDs and LPs, but this one made the days that much brighter.
When I read Vernon’s liner notes, I noticed he made reference to a compilation
of Prine’s work called Great Days,
and I remembered I’d just priced the damn thing like a week prior! So I took
that home, ripped it to the computer, and then spent the next month immersed at
home, in the car, and at work in John Prine’s genius.
It’s an outrage that John Prine isn’t more famous than he is. I think that was
probably the point the tribute album set out to prove. A sort of “All of us
love this guy’s songs, why don’t more people know who the hell this guy is?”
It’s baffling, really. Especially after listening to the first half of this
album. About half the songs on this were on either Great Days or Broken Hearts
& Dirty Windows and the rest—like the brilliantly hilarious anti-war
song “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore”—are absolute quality
jams. He’s a brilliant storyteller, which is why his recycling of melodies and
chord progressions is wholly forgivable. Overall though, it’s the chorus for
“Spanish Pipedream” that really won me. Like heart and soul, made me a fan.
That moment where he sings “Blow up your TV/ Throw away your paper/ Go to the
country/ Build you a home/ Plant a little garden/ Eat a lot of peaches/ Try to
find Jesus on your own.” It’s solid gold, and even more golden that the words
are being delivered by a stripper delivers to a soldier on his way to Montreal.
In short: Get this record (Read: See if any of your friends have this album and
have them burn you a copy, but keep an eye out at used record stores). These
songs might have the most heart and wit of any songs I’ve ever heard. Notably “Sam
Stone,” the story of a veteran who returns from Vietnam and the only way he can
cope with civilian life is heroin (“there’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the
money goes”). That and “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore”
definitely date this album to the 70s, but like any great anti-war song they’re
just as potent today as they were for the wars they were written about. Dylan
said the times were a-changin’ but maybe they haven’t. Or maybe they are, we’re
just a-changin’ at a snails pace and either way, the stuff John Prine was
singing about on this album over 40 years ago is the sort of shit normal folks
deal with every single day in 2012 and to conquer timelessness in an album is
a little miracle these days.
A year and a half after the release of the last Mountain
Goats album—the magnificent All Eternals
Deck—John Darnielle and company are back with a brand new one that is, as
you’d expect, pretty great. Granted, I’m biased. I mean, I GUESS you could call
it biased, but when it comes to the Mountain Goats my rabid fanship is less of
a bias and more of a way of life. In terms of the Mountain Goats discography,
there are no bad albums. There are average ones, like Get Lonely and maybe some of the earlier ones which are too
disorganized to work as albums (and really, I don’t think they’re trying to
work as albums anyway), but most of them range from great (The Life of the World to Come) to really great (Heretic Pride) to heartbreakingly good (We Shall All Be Healed) to the greatest
thing I’ve ever heard in my life (All
Hail West Texas) and the other greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life (Tallahassee). I’m probably not the only
person who’s thought about writing a screenplay/opera/ballet based on Tallahassee. That’s how we roll, I
suppose.
So there’s a new Mountain Goats album, Transcendental
Youth, and I have accepted it with open arms. Like every new MTN GTS
release before it, this one took me a while to warm up to before I loved it. I
don’t know why that is. As if my expectations are being let down a little bit
and then song-by-song the whole thing comes together and it’s like YES! And
it’s business as usual here. A song-by-song breaking down of my heart. Where
Darnielle has been fixated upon survivor stories of late (notably “Never Quite Free” from All Eternals Deck and
pretty much the entirety of The Sunset
Tree, although there were some people who didn’t make it through on that
one) and they are here in spades. Fuck-ups, rejects, failures. The kind of
people who, in Darnielle’s words, “people who madly, stupidly, blessedly won’t
stop surviving, no matter who gives up on them.” It’s a messy, life-affirming
affair. But then again, what Mountain Goats album isn’t?
The opening line is “Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive,” for
fucks sake. I mean, seriously. And still, Darnielle & crew find ways to
diversify. The horn section courtesy of Matthew E. White adds something
fantastic and special and emotionally dissonant/triumphant to “Cry For Judas,”
“In Memory of Satan” and the title track. It’s a fun new side of the Mountain
Goats, but the most special collaboration is the one between Peter Hughes and
Jon Wurster who grow tighter as a unit each time around. One of my favorite
moments of any show ever was when some drunk ass girl talking way loud at the
very front of the stage at a Mountain Goats show at the Jackpot in Lawrence
years back almost got hit in the face by Peter Hughes bass and then immediately
after that (I think, in my head) was the part on “See America Right” where he
goes “Hey!” but in this version of the song he bellowed out “HEYYYYYYYY!” and
it was great. Though the Mountain Goats are John Darnielle’s thing—in the sense
that his lyrics are what draws people to this project moth/flame style—watching
them become a full-fledged band over the last five or so years has been so much
fun.
“The Diaz Brothers” is one of my favorite songs on the record, if only because
I spent like fifteen minutes trying to figure out the namesake of the titular
siblings (UFC fighters? I know how much JD loves fights, or is it just boxing?
Singers? Is it a metal thing?) until I realized pretty much every write-up out
there noted that the Diaz Brothers were basically the Rosencrantz &
Guildenstern of Scarface. And THEN I
fell in love with the song that much more. Darnielle always handles his
characters with a novelist’s grace. Even when they’re preexisting fictional and
non-fictional figures (Authors Sax Rohmer and HP Lovecraft, horror film villain
Michael Myers, and movie stars Charles Bronson and Liza Minelli have had their
own songs on the past handful of albums), drug addicts hold up in an apartment
waiting for “the guy with the angel dust” as in “Lakeside View ApartmentsSuite,” historical figures (like Billy the Kid on the psychotically great All Eternals Deck b-side “CatherineAtrim’s Kid”), and misfits. It’s Darnielle’s tributes to musicians that always
kill me. “Song for Dennis Brown” on The
Sunset Tree and “September 15 1983” from Heretic Pride (about the death of Prince Far I) are sad and
wonderful tributes to fallen reggae legends and here he pays tribute to tragic
doo-wop singer Frankie Lymon on the standout “Harlem Roulette.” Lymon’s death
by heroin overdose at the age of 25 is prime John Darnielle material. He
covered his own addictions on We Shall
All Be Healed and come to think of it, “Harlem Roulette,” “Song for DennisBrown,” and “September 15 1983” are all about singers who have died of
overdoes. If it haunts his songs, it must haunt him. I guess. Maybe that’s
where the joy comes from, because as depressing as any Mountain Goats song gets
there’s always a glimmer of hope lurking on the horizon.
Though Darnielle has openly stated that though he is a
recent father, this isn’t an album about being a father. It is however an album
about staying alive, and with a wife and kid in tow, you can tell that
Darnielle is just thankful to be around. “Every dream’s a good dream/ Even
awful dreams are good dreams/ If you’re doing it right,” he sings on “Harlem
Roulette.” There’s an appreciation of existence at work in his songs that
elevates them to a level of transcendence. And sure I’m biased, I’ve been a
huge fan of the Mountain Goats since the waning years of high school when I
heard Atom and His Package’s cover of “Going to Georgia” and followed that tip
down that long, tape-hiss laden rabbit hole and found a singer who made ever
little fiber of my soul vibrate with a sort of positivity I’d been lacking. And
I just don’t think Darnielle has ever let up. Every album is a treat and they’re
kind of beyond being assigned trivial ratings. And naturally, Transcendental Youth rules.
Annnd here's JD performing "Harlem Roulette" for Pitchfork. Absolute perfection. The way he looks like a possessed preacher, yeah, I'mma go ahead and be part of THIS religion.
Here's a heartbreakingly lovely solo-piano version of "In Memory of Satan."
And the spectacular opening track that I barely mentioned, "Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1"
Darnielle performed a number of songs from this record with the classical vocal quartet Anonymous 4 in New York months and months back, and here's what "Counterfeit Florida Plates" looked like. (Hint: If your math looked like "JD + Vocal Quartet = Lovely, kind of awkward but a fun twist on the Mountain Goats"then your math was correct).
Suicide Squeeze, 2008
Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2009
Price: $1
Here we have some sassy ass ladypunk from Atlanta. I remember getting a copy of
this on pretty white vinyl from Suicide Squeeze when I was music director at KJ
and REALLY wanting to keep it (since half the DJs didn’t know how to use the
turntable and another 25% were afraid to use the turntable, and seeing as the
other 25% were experienced DJs with special programs and didn’t have to play
rotation, well, it just seemed like a waste of time to put in a 7” that would
never chart because two people might play it (it sounds like I’m being mean or
something, but I’m not even shitting you when I say I knew DJs who told me they
were actually afraid of playing a record. “It’s not scary I promise, see you
just…” and then I got waved off so whatever). This one though, this one ended
going out because my assistant really liked it. I think. Something like that,
but it’s cool because I ended up finding a copy of it at Love Garden later on
down the line. Listening to it now, I wonder what made me like it so much when
now I’m like “it’s pretty good.” And then I remember how wrapped up in twee I
was in 2008 and this was very clearly right up that narrow little alley I
called “my taste in music circa 2008.” It’s extra good considering that this
band started as a joke. They’ve released three albums on Suicide Squeeze since
and I remember thinking the first one was pretty good. It’s not gonna win any
awards in the innovation department, but it’s good ramshackle fun and listening
to “Shake Shake” and the b-side “Dreamboat” I can see why this ended up in
rotation: these are the sort of songs you hear on the radio in passing, wonder
who it is, and then forget about it before you can check the DJ’s playlist (or,
you get home and find out the DJ isn’t logging music because A.) they’re lazy
or B.) the software doesn’t work, one or the other. Man, a lot of hate on DJs
but SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WITH THE NOT LOGGING MUSIC PEOPLE CHECK THAT SHIT!). I
don’t hate the DJs, I just want them to not look at a turntable and say “feh”
and instead look at it and be like “OH MAN I CAN’T WAIT TO PLAY SOME VINYL I
DON’T CARE IF I OCCASIONALLY FUCK SOMETHING UP BECAUSE THIS IS COLLEGE RADIO!”
Now I feel like I need to defend KJHK, which is awesome and though it kind of
crushed my soul, it was my fault that I let it crush my soul and once I got out
I missed being a DJ. Fortunately great souls like Wake Mitchell and Vince
Meserko are still spinning great shows and the eternal Nick Spacek found out
how to do what every KJHK lifer has wanted to do: He figured out how to work at
KJHK as a grown up. Kudos to Nick! Getting’ to work with the Toje and help
those young college kids steer the good ship KJHK into the horizon. Man, I’ve
been so nostalgic for Lawrence lately.
SO COOL! I love acoustic versions of crunchy punk songs. There's an X-Ray Spex/Raincoats/Runaways influence I totally didn't notice on full display here. LOVE.
