A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning, unfortunately: the fragmentary bits of NWA’s “Gangsta Gangsta” I can remember. I think that’s because I spent part of yesterday reading Bellen!, and I’ve always wondered what the hell Dre is rhyming with “yellin” in the bridge in that song. Straight Outta Compton is still a favorite of mine, but some of the songs are not the kinds of things you want chasing themselves around your brain, you know?

Stuck in my head this morning, after a long spell of waking up with a head cluttered with thoughts of moving or cleaning or unpacking or working: “Vampira” from Synchestra by The Devin Townsend Band. I had a little Devin Townsend festival last week while I was finishing up the onerous process of packing up and cleaning my old apartment, from which I was moving after 13 years of continuous occupation. It was a lot of work, but now all 5,500+ CDs and 3,000+ books have been relocated to my new place, where I will spend the next 30 years gradually unpacking them all.

Listening to random Belgian musique concrete will only get you so far when there’s serious scrubbing to be done; sometimes I need to bust out something with little jabs of adrenaline to it, and in those situations, Townsend is my man. His twitchy, neurotic attention to detail and unparalleled command of the vocabulary of extreme metal and 80s cheese balladry are a dynamite combination when there is work to be done. His songs are cascading floods of melody and hooks and sparkly bits of cleverness that catch the ear and engage the brain: cf. ref “Vampira” popping up unbidden, over a week after I last heard it (and with much music in between).

Townsend is one of the most unregulated forces in music, a twitchy, prolific, undaunted, Canadian heavy metal version of Kevin Shields (who, it must be said, has now dragged My Bloody Valentine out of the wilderness; I have tickets to this fall’s show in San Francisco, and am feeling an uneasy mixture of nostalgia, fascination and dread about the whole thing); he seems to constantly be bouncing between furious gouts of precise, perfectionist activity and exhausted burnout. After the first two Strapping Young Lad albums (which are among the best heavy metal albums ever made) and his astounding, magnificent, endlessly creative first few solo albums (in particular Infinity, which I consider a genuine work of sui generis heavy metal genius) he had an actual nervous breakdown, in the wake of which he briefly institutionalized himself. That impulse to ride the ragged edge of ability and endurance clearly manifests itself in his work: I’m listening Physicist right now, and it is an album that lives on the redline, occupying some impossible hyperspace between Ministry, Def Leppard (there’s more than a little Mutt Lange in Townsend’s production style) and the Neverending Story soundtrack. It is cartoonishly, freakishly oversized in its ambition, and I absolutely love it, as I (very obviously) love all of Townsend’s work.

Townsend’s recently calmed down a lot: he and his wife Tracy have a kid, and a lot of the mania that drove him has abated over the years (or has been brought under control through meds and therapy – his intensity was pretty obviously eating him alive). He shut down Strapping Young Lad, feeling that he’d pretty much done everything he could with that style of aggressively obnoxious songwriting, and he’s cut loose the rest of the Devin Townsend band for now. That said, his first proper solo album from a year or two ago, Ziltoid the Omniscient, is a completely deranged pulp sf puppet-show prog rock opera about the importance of good coffee, and it is both totally bonkers and deeply engaged in a discourse with his previous work, with melodies and lyrical snippets liberally quoted from his old work.

I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be possible to scale back Devin’s ambitions without killing him, but I’m also pretty sure that I like his ambitions just fine the way they are. He fits in the line of irrepressible geniuses in rock, like Frank Zappa and his old mentor Steve Vai, who just need to be left alone to do their own thing. I hope he keeps doing his thing for a long time.

Stuck in my head this morning, last night, and most of today: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Genetic Engineering” (off their largely unheralded 1983 Cold War concept album Dazzle Ships). A bouncier bit of toy-piano / Read’n’Spell fluff I cannot imagine. “Genetic Engineering” exhibits that puzzling tendency manifested in early 80s pop where the music is upbeat and full of cheer while the lyrics are fathomlessly cynical (think Heaven 17’s “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing” with its cartoonishly frenetic bass fretwork and sneering disdain for Ronald Reagan). This song has one of those 4-note arpeggiated major-chord melodies that jackhammers itself inextricably into your skull. Back when I used to do a lot of long-distance cycling, I’d get this exact kind of song stuck in my head during long slogs, and would want to never, ever hear them ever again by the time I finished the ride. Under less extreme conditions, though, it’s a super-fun companion to have for a day or two, and a useful counteractive to the bleak and dour stuff I’ve been listening to lately.

For indie rockers with very long memories, one of the only covers of this song was released by Washington, DC’s Eggs on a TeenBeat 7” in 1995. It’s faithful but sort of ramshackle and unravelled, but that was what Eggs were about in the first place, so it’s endearing, if nowhere near as charming as the original.

Stuck in my head this morning: Mozart’s “Sonata in C Major” K545, as played by an Apple //c. I even found myself whistling bits of it in the shower. How dorky is that?

It’s a huge improvement over last night, though, when I had Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady” looping its way through my noggin. The studio version is basically old Tangerine Dream with Genesis P-Orridge mumbling vaguely over the top; live, it turns into a truly disturbing portrait of trauma and pathology. Latecomers to Throbbing Gristle can be forgiven for thinking they were kind of tame or overrated, because on record they’re basically just a strangely diverse synth-driven noise unit. Live, though, everything take a back seat to Genesis’s insistently chanted / shrieked / growled vocals, and the darkness at the heart of the project becomes manifest. “ASSUME POWER FOCUS” live is a totally different animal. They remain strangely diverse.

Stuck in my head this morning: a vague montage of material from Michael O’Shea’s self-titled solo album on WMO, chopped and reconfigured by my dreaming mind to sound vaguely Chinese. I was dreaming about the NPR affiliate in Portland changing to broadcast all in Chinese, and my mom tuning all the radios in the house to it, you see. Which is weird inasmuch as O’Shea played mostly traditional Celtic folk drones, albeit on an instrument of his own devising (one that sounds like a hammer dulcimer with a built-in flange pedal).

O’Shea’s music sounds like a cross between John Fahey and Roy Montgomery, which is my way of saying it’s great and weird, and I’d like to find more material by him. Too bad for me! The only other record he released is a desperately out of print LP from 1982, all of which is included on the WMO release. Also, the WMO release itself is completely out of print (as are most things on WMO, the private label of Wire’s fan club). I heard this in the first place via Mutant Sounds. You can too, if you like.

Stuck in my head this morning: “Metal Dance” by SPK. Or, as the incredibly pretentious woman who sang it says, “Metahhl Dahhhhhnsz!” SPK is a perfect example of a group whose quality and credibility went straight off a cliff very early in their career (in fact, SPK neatly recapitulates the entire evolution of industrial from transgressive noise into po-faced clanky dance-industrial into Middle-Eastern tinged coldwave into Delerium-style synth cheez in one tidy package), and songs like “Metal Dance” are why. So cheesy! Yet so pretentious!

It’s hard to believe this is the same band that recorded “Slogun”, one of the noisiest, meanest songs recorded in the entire industrial era. Of course, the later songs are catchy, too, hence waking up with this stuck in my head.

Stuck in my head this morning: …I really don’t want to say. It’s embarrassing.

No, seriously. I’ve been bitching about these guys for years!

…

Oh, all right. I had uh Step On by Happy Mondays playing in a relentless, remorseless, jackhammer loop when I woke up this morning. MAN did those guys suck, but I guess that song had sorta a catchy guitar line.

Anyway, I did not wake up in a great mood.

But seriously, man, fuck Shaun Ryder. Just fuck that guy. His voice makes baby Jesus want to die.

Stuck in my head this morning: nothing. I’m not sure whether it’s because my sleeping patterns have been sort of strange lately, or because I’ve been listening to such a large volume of new and unfamiliar music, or if that same music’s relative lack of tonality or tunefulness makes it less earwormy, but I’ve been waking up without music in my head for the last month or so. It’s weird, and it means the day feels unstarted until I put some music on. But I’ve been spending a lot of time concentrating on work lately, and have also found myself in an unusual (for me) mental space where I need quiet to figure out the things I’m working on. It feels oddly grown up, and not in a good way.

Cold Sun’s Dark Shadows does not do what it says on the box. The band and album names suggest some kind of kohl-eyed coldwave from the late 80s, not an amalgam of the Grateful Dead, Pavement and Built to Spill, full of sinuous, meandering guitar lines and aggressively Aquarian lyrics drawn from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It was apparently recorded in 1969 but not released until 1989, and even then on a tiny little label. It’s not precisely an overlooked gem, because it’s definitely a creature of its moment, with the stilted vocal delivery (which really does seem like an awkward hybrid of Jerry Garcia and Stephen Malkmus’s styles) and the somewhat overfamiliar psychedelic doodles draped all over the songs, but there’s something about its aggressive oddity and potentially laughable earnestness that got it deeply enough wedged in my head that I woke up this morning humming it.

And you can check it out for free, so if that sounds like your sort of thing, you should check it out.

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.

Stuck in my head this morning: Danielle Dax’s “Pariah”, from Pop-Eyes. “Cat-House” may have been the song that got me into Dax, but “Pariah” has long been my favorite, because it’s so ridiculously over the top. Everything about it – the vaguely voodoo-inflected lyrics, the menacing, flat way Dax delivers the lyrics, the brittle electronic production – screams 80s gothdom. It is not a subtle song. (Which is what makes it so easy to get stuck in one’s head.)

Sometimes a song will get so deeply ingrained in my head that it goes wrong. A catchy pharse will get stuck in a loop, and through sheer repetition will gradually degrade from a clever and bright bit of fluff into blockish and hateful sludge. This can be at its worst when, for whatever reason, I have to put the music on hold for a while and concentrate on something. Which, unfortunately, is what happened this week, when a routine upgrade of Mac OS X on my laptop went disastrously wrong. Whenever things go completely haywire with one of my machines, I’m more or less incapable of concentrating on anything else until it’s fixed, so I spent this week with bits of various old Cardiacs songs chasing each around my head, until it had all simmered down to a toxic residue of the “power pop bridge” from “Pilf” that had started out so delighting me at the beginning of the week.

On the other hand, I did pick up some awesome new stuff, about which I will post shortly; and my computer is restored to functionality without me losing anything important, so I can’t complain too much. Still, I’m ready to not listen to Cardiacs again for a little while.

Stuck in my head this morning: “Pilf” by Cardiacs – who, I must once again stress, are the best band in the world – from their early cassette-only release The Obvious Identity. “Pilf” is an unusual song in a fathomlessly weird catalog, largely because it has a pitch-perfect late-70s power pop song – complete with a swaggering hard-rock guitar solo – dropped into the middle of another, much more typical (of Cardiacs, at least) prog-punk song that alternates between 4/4 verses and 7/8 bridges and sounds vaguely like the Buzzcocks. Cardiacs songs rarely finish anywhere near where they start, with the various bits strung together with a logic that owes more to dreams than traditional songwriting. I think that’s one of the keys to understanding the band’s hallucinatory intensity: they’re completely unafraid to violate traditional notions of structure in order to keep songs interesting, and they have the instrumental chops to make pretty much anything and everything work.

If downloading dodgy rips of even dodgier cassette-only releases from 28 years ago is not your thing, and you live in England, where there is some remote hope you might find Cardiacs records in stores, there is a flawless live version of this track, along with almost the entirety of the early Cardiacs catalog, on the two Special Garage Concerts CDs. There are maybe 3 not-so-great songs out of 32, and the rest are the sort of brilliant, convoluted pop genius that gets stuck in your head for weeks on end.

Stuck in my head this morning: “Check It” by Skream!, perhaps the most irritatingly bright’n’cheery track currently popular in dubstep, with its martial rhythms and major-key plastic synths. It sounds like a particularly uptempo dancehall track from about 20 years ago and is brutally infectious. It would be unbearable were it not for the vocal break, with its combination of tough drumline percussion, rapidly stuttering bassline, and Warrior Queen’s MCing (which, like a lot of dubstep vocals, blurs the line between grime chanting and dancehall toasting). Skream! is mostly known for his “Midnight Request Line”, which is famous both on its own and a frequently-used grime riddim, but I think I would be much more likely to reach for “Check It” (which seems to pop up in mixes under a variety of different names) if I were still a DJ. “Midnight Request Line” has the catchy synths and is a much more traditional dubstep roller, but “Check It” is glossy, tough dance music of the highest order.

Stuck in my head this morning: “Who Say Me Done” by Cutty Ranks, from the more or less unique Soul Jazz compilation Nice Up the Dance. There’s a long history of crossover between hip-hop and dancehall, and the ongoing hype explosion of reggaeton is just a newer, more Spanish-tinged version of something that’s at least as old as Boogie Down Productions. What makes Nice Up the Dance different and effective is the way it emphasizes both the dancehall and the hip-hop parts of the equation. “Who Say Me Done” is a pitch-perfect example of this, as the beats seesaw between stripped-down hardcore hip-hop and dance-hall idioms in alternating phrases. A friend recently asked me for recommendations for similar sounds (which is probably what got it stuck in my head this morning), and it was tough to come up with anything too similar off the top of my head. There’s lots of hip-hop with dancehall influences, and lots of dancehall with nods towards hip-hop, but nothing else I know of that really has the same blending of flavors from the Five Boroughs and Kingston.

Stuck in my head this morning: two things, actually. At first it was Severed Heads’ “Kittenette” (from Op 2.0), with one of the winding, sinuous melodies Severed Heads have specialized in since Rotund for Success. It’s delicate and fey and I like it a lot.

Of course, by the time I made it to the shower, Turisas’s “Battle Metal” (from the album of the same name) had rambunctiously elbowed its way into my frontal lobes, and there it remained for the rest of the day. Turisas make cheesy, self-consciously epic Viking metal – it is utterly bereft of any awareness whatsoever of irony, and I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s desirable or not. I could have handled something a little less generic sounding, myself.

Stuck in my head this morning: Dan Deacon’s “Okie Dokie”, the fourth song to get stuck in my head from Spiderman of the Rings in the last couple weeks. Now that I’ve had a chance to hear his older work, I’m even more impressed by what a wide-spectrum achievement Spiderman of the Rings really is. I like his older stuff, albeit in a much calmer way, but it comes from a much more academic / heady place.

While showering, some sort of monster complicated techno song barged its way into my noggin, and it took me a few minutes to figure out it was something from the new Clark. It stayed stuck in my head, too, even after I put on Autechre’s Untilted. I kept wanting Untilted to be beatier, like the Clark, but it wasn’t. Listening to it did lead me to wonder, though: why do Autechre bury all the pretty tracks at the ends of their albums?

Stuck in my head this morning: “Wham City” by Dan Deacon. At least it’s a different song, and one that’s durable enouth to bear being in a fragmented, self-remixing loop in my head through showering and shaving and whatnot. Here’s a video on YouTube of Dan performing it live (skip past the first couple minutes of Videohippos footage).

Stuck in my head this morning: Second verse, same as the first. “I’m So Gay With the Boner” for Dan Deacon!

This year is shaping up to be a major trip, music-wise. Either it’s been a great year for new music, or writing this blog has made me hyperaware of what’s being released, but whichever it is, a bunch of my favorite bands either have new things out, or are about to:

• Season of Mist just released Anaal Nathrakh’s brutal, unrelenting and majestic latest, Hell is Empty, and All the Devils are Here in America, finally. The UK’s had it for four whole months already!
• The unpredictably brilliant grindcore / IDM hipster assault unit Genghis Tron have a new album out next month. Their first full-length was one of my favorite records of whatever year in which it originally was released. (H/T to Tomas.)
• Autechre have emerged from their laser cocoons, sound swords smoking, to unleash Quaristice, their latest bit of tortured Max/MSP mangling. Maybe it’ll be better than Confield and Untilted. Maybe. I think I’m gonna get that one on digital (which is available now – the physical edition’s out in a weekmonth or so, although if you wanted the laser-etched steel cased limited edition, too bad! You snoozed! You lost!).
• I was able to download my copy of Clark’s newest, Turning Dragon, finally. One of Bleep’s servers slipped a disk. I am very excited to finally have it. I was so excited about “Volcan Veins”, I bought it off iTunes to tide me over until I was able to get the album. It has not gotten old yet.

You know what would be awesome? If Autechre and Radiohead co-headlined a tour, with Dan Deacon opening. Dan could get the party started, and then Autechre and Radiohead could take turns confusing the shit out of everyone. I think that would be a lot of fun.

Stuck in my head this morning: Dan Deacon’s “Trippy Green Skull” and “Snake Mistakes”, both from his much-lauded Spiderman of the Rings. Both songs are incredibly poppy, bright and electronic, with childish Dada lyrics, and both have unexpected catchy bits near the end that get lodged in your head and just will not come out. I’m about six months late to be bringing up Mr. Deacon and Spiderman, but the album is just as fresh, charming and mildly brain-damaged now as it was when it was first released. Jess Harvell (whom I was abusing here just last week) wrote a great, perceptive review of Spiderman of the Rings over on Pitchfork that I endorse wholeheartedly.

Deacon’s faux naïf act works, paradoxically, because he’s got a master’s degree in composition and takes a deeply serious approach to his very silly songs. The dude can put together a 3-minute pop song like nobody’s business, but his command over his (sometimes self-made and often very primitive) gear is impressive, and – especially on longer, more elaborate songs like “Wham City” and “Jimmy Jay Roche” – there are obvious influences from the classic minimalists – Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass – as well as an odd kinship with new wave schmooptronica acts like M83 and Ulrich Schnauss, even as his lyrics ramble a lot closer to Devendra Banhart’s childlike psychedelia or a particularly gentle version of Ween. I find the combination of minimalist restraint and sugar-addled weirdo pop super charming.

UPDATE: I have got to see this guy live.