A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning: “The Sideways Man” by the Digital Dinosaurs, a throwback to 60s-era Kinks disguised as a late-70s DiY tune. The bit that gets stuck in my head is the “ba ba ba ba bababa baa” backing vocals, which is also the bit that reminds me of The Kinks. You can find this song on the Angst in my Pants compilation or on Messthetics’ Greatest Hits (which I highly recommend). It’s less catchy than the usual stuff that invades my head while I sleep, but is insidiously accessible all the same.

Hyped 2 Death has more on the Digital Dinosaurs.

Like I promised, I tracked down those two Ganglion records. It wasn’t that tough; I just had to find their MySpace page and then follow that to their Interpunk page. Interpunk’s price schedule for shipping is kind of jacked for small orders, so I hunted around and ended up picking up a few other things (including a Drowningman album I didn’t have, with its requisitely smartassed song titles – one of which, in turn, provided the title for this post). They included a free label sampler, as is their way, but I’m not very hopeful that anything other than the No Trigger song will be any good.

While I was at it, I bought this album I discovered through Mutant Sounds, because I was really enjoying it and the MP3s linked from Mutant Sounds sound like crap. And I grabbed two more Dan Deacon releases, which I may end up regretting (song titles like “Shit Slowly Applied On Cock Parts” do not prefigure happy fun-time easy listening), but I love Spiderman of the Rings, and maybe naming things just isn’t his strong suit: another song is named “ksjfhgljkhertykjlehgskjhkjvhda”. (I bought these three using Amazon’s MP3 store, which is scarily easy to use, in case anyone’s curious.)

Finally, I grabbed these crappily encoded MP3s of Steve Albini recording demos for Fugazi because Cosmo’s description was interesting.

So here’s the newest grist for the mill:

• Dan Deacon: Meetle Mice (Carpark)
• Dan Deacon: Silly Hat vs Egale (sic) Hat (Carpark)
• Fugazi: In on the Kill Taker [Steve Albini demos] (bootleg)
• Ganglion: Of the Deep (self-released)
• Ganglion: As Steel Takes to Flesh (self-released)
• Drowningman: Don’t Push Us When We’re Hot (Thorp)
• Last Perfection: Drawing Conclusions (United Edge)
• Shizzo Flamingos: Years Passed By 83-85 (Fuego)
• Supermachiner: θριαμβος της μεγαλης μηχανης (Undecided)
• v/a: New School Records: Summer Sampler 2007 (New School)

I take an unseemly amount of pride in the breadth of my eclecticism, as well as my fondness for an inordinate amount of crap that nobody else has heard of. At the same time, I recognize that as music weirdoes go I’m actually pretty middle of the road. For example, I have nothing on the crew behind Mutant Sounds, a group MP3 blog. Of the MP3 blogs I read, they’re the ones I think are least likely to ever run into trouble with the law, because of the total obscurity of the music they post. Every so often they’ll post something I’ve heard of (a Brad Laner (Medicine, Electric Company, Savage Republic) project, the utterly fabulous Haruomi Hosono (Yellow Magic Orchestra) & Tadanori Yokoo record I’m listening to right now, the ill-starred final releases from Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa, a Wobbly 3” I could have bought at Aquarius if I’d been on the ball), but for the most part these are releases copied from old private pressings, out-of-print CDs from tiny indies in random corners of the globe, and more than occasionally from cassettes, which were the lingua franca of the international music underground before CD-Rs took over.

The posters are driven by a genuine love of the music they post, and while there’s no way I can keep up with the endless flood of their posts, the quality of the stuff I do recognize or have downloaded is exceptionally high. It can be a little intimidating to be confronted with so much completely unfamiliar stuff, but they’re conscientious about providing enough context to help you figure out if it’s your kind of thing or not, and just blindly downloading is likely to get you something good more often than not. Check them out. They’re not out to rip anyone off and they have amazing taste.

Likewise, Guy Picciotto has had a long and varied career with the DC hardcore scene and is also well-represented on Twenty Years of Dischord Records. There are tracks from Rites of Spring, One Last Wish and Happy Go Licky (and, of course, Fugazi, the reason anyone under the age of 25 knows who Guy Picciotto is). Happy Go Licky were interesting. They put out one single, and De Soto Records released a compilation of live and demo material long after they broke up. There’s lots of pointless experimental wankery with the 4-track, but there’s also “Twist and Shout”, which is spooky, tense and restrained. It’s more like a lost Factory b-side than anything from the DC punk scene. I could listen to it all night.

Of course, Twenty Years also features “Blueprint”, which is still probably my favorite Fugazi song, along with being one of the three or four I can play when I feel like screwing around with one of my guitars.

Man, this compilation is just packed full of goodies. And I haven’t even gotten to Slant 6 or Autoclave yet.

I’m listening to Twenty Years of Dischord Records, and since it’s, like, the DiY label Ian Mackaye started to release his own music, there’s a lot of his stuff all over it. Dude was in a lot of bands (Teen Idles, Minor Threat, Skewbald, Egg Hunt, Embrace, Fugazi, etc.), and his evolution was pretty linear, but there’s stuff like The Snakes’ “Snake Rap” popping out of the mix with a very high WTF?! factor. Hearing Mackaye and his friends rapping about snakes is, of course, extremely silly. The backing track is still some pretty convincing funk, though.

Following on from my earlier post, Citizen 23's "Janie's Got A Black Eye" is another brilliantly catchy snippet of rock and roll, packing social observation, a great (if muddy) post punk guitar solo, and a very catchy hook into a minute and a half. I can't believe it took me so long to pick up the Hyped 2 Death catalog. It's as essential in its way as the Anthology of American Folk Music, and just about as ground-level and vernacular.