A children's treasury of albums discussed so far...
Minor Threat
http://www.mediafire.com/?neijymncdxr
Tokyo Police Club
http://www.mediafire.com/?9wd1ejnnddx
HEALTH
http://www.mediafire.com/?j3e0x2z1dmb
Antioch Arrow
http://www.mediafire.com/?lm9qcywdzcc
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
"I Got My Black Belt at Wal-Mart" or The Films of Phil Chambliss
Showed up at the Silent Movie theater with the whiskey already washing thoughts into quicker succession than usual and took our seats. Here to see films from a guy named Phil Chambliss. He's, lets be honest, an auteur, who has spent 30 years cranking out his own distinct brand of DIY film. He seems to average a little over one a year and, while they aren't beyond description, they're definitiveley beyond any easy classification. Think Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain & El Topo) if he'd evolved one shot at a time in the small towns of Arkansas.
First one comes on, Hatchet Man is the title. It's a murder mystery, invovling corrupt cops and and a couple on the rocks. None of the actors are pros and, since the film was put together without any "fancy" equipment (it's only the third film Chambliss used a tripod on) some of it's ragged charm cauterizes the edges of each cut. Actors start out shots out of character for a split second before they deliver their lines, making each shot feel like it's being pulled from real life to surrealist fiction in the span of fifteen seconds, like watching a painting fall in and out of focus.
However, despite the lack of technological intervention (During the Q&A Chambliss said that he had no intention of starting to use a computer for editing; he likes doing it his way.) the film gets by almsot soley by stringing together great moments. A match cut from a graveyard to a frame dominated by file cabinets foreshadows the killer's identity. A showdown between a man in a gorilla mask and a newly minted murderer provides the film's climax. A hatchet blow is matched with a murered woman's hand pulling open a cabinet door as she struggles for life, splitting open the geography below the countertop as the hatchet splits her open. There's some David Lynch in here, though The Supremes are the closest Chambliss comes to citing an esoteric influence. Simply put, the man is inspired and, because he couldn't explain any of it to you if he tried, thoroughly unpretentious. Even bad editorial descisions get a pass because, honestly, Chambliss only answers to himself.
Chambliss first bought a camera with $98 his wife had hidden away to buy a new refrigerator. He found the money, hoarded in the old refrigerator, while she was off at church one day over 30 years ago. With a different background, he'd be the equivelant of a graffitti artist or a garage band. He creates because something is brewing in him and, regardless of what it demands of him, he feels the need to see it exist. In the same way Guided by Voices made the fuzzines imparted to their music by their circumstances a part of their aesthetic, Phil Chambliss allows the chunky zooms and undulating pace imparted by the limits of cheap cameras and rudimentary editing to push the aesthetics of his vision. His visual vocabulary is heavy on surreal tableaus and static closeups, stuff that doesn't demand technicality so much as vision. He's become adept at hitting the median between his means and his ideas in a way that very few artists ever are. It's punk rock from a man who's probably never heard a note of punk rock.
The second film, The Devil's Helper, involves a pair of hunters who meet the eponymous character in the woods. The character in question sits a desk, trash can on his right and bottle of grape juice on his left. It's shot on VHS, giving every motion a zippily abraisive quality as the two men trade their souls for shots at ten point bucks. That's another fascinating aspect, while his films are often incoherent on a plot level, you can almost always see the outlines of a moral universe. Maybe it's just him defaulting to the homogenized, heteronormanative world of rural Arkansas; but there always seem to be scales to be balanced in each film, making them feel morally cohesive, if not always discernable or coherent.
The first half of the program came to a close with a film who's name I didn't get down (at least not legibly, I was writing 3 drinks deep in a dark room) but who's plot involved a farmer being harassed by newsmen. Eventually, he's interviewed and things turn dark and surreal, like the standoff between the hunters and The Devil's Helper. The farmer gets berated for stealing a riding lawnmower with Bill Clinton and eventually, he gets pissed and turns it around on the newsmen, robbing them as interviewer and interviewee rise to fight.
"I got my Black Belt in Karate."
"I got my Black Belt at Wal-Mart."
A tussle ensues as we fade out.
The Q&A was, in some ways, the strangest part of the event. The crowd was, and this is overstating the obvious, the kind of people who would turn out on a weeknight to see an almost deliberateley obscure filmmaker who's reputation, such as it exists in scattered raves and alt weekly writeups, is for strangeness, inventiveness, and authorial singularity far more than it is for accessibility or even really craft. In one question, he basically revealed that he can't really even fathom how self distributing a DVD through the internet would work. It's hard, and maybe this is just me, to not feel like there was some element of coddling or condescending involved between us and him. A good number of questions went totally over his head. Not in that "Douchebag-quoting-Godard-to-impress-a-date-way." Of all the Q&A's I've been to, this one left the most latitude for giving an artist shit while almost paradoxically consisting only of friendly questions coming from a place of genuine curiosity. It was like watching a bad algebra student who just can't make "x" equal "x." You'd be a fool to write Chambliss off, because there's such an intuitive brilliance to what he does. At his best, the man surfs the collective unconcsious. However, there's no way to really engage him at the level at which he works, since you almost certainly are going to leave him in the dark with even the most tempered artistic question.
The whole thing sort of makes me wonder what would happen if you were to show him his own work without him knowing it was his. I can't speculate how he'd react, mainly because I don't know him that well, but I have a feeling a good deal of his saving grace is his ignorance and lack of both commercial and critical ambition. If he had any motivations other than simply a desire to realize this whole universe he's carrying inside of his head, in whatever shambolic form circumstances allow, what would that do to my opinion of him? He's willfully ignorant, but how much can that be treated as a strength when it handicaps your ability to even share the art you've made with an audience that's already putting aside a lot of their notions of "good" and "bad" just to attempt to meet what you do on it's own terms? Last weekend, I saw the notorious Lindsay Lohan Torture Noir, "I Know Who Killed Me" at this same theater. Part of the fun of screenings like that is putting aside a few pretensions and reveling in the aesthetic weirdness of that kind of film. (It is, by the way, completeley crazy and highly reccommended.) The other part of the equation with "I Know Who Killed Me" is the raging camp element that nearly every review overlooked, focusing instead of finger-wagging over the exploitation elements. I bring it up because Phil Chambliss's films are even more thoroughly incoherent than "I Know Who Killed Me" and, instead of being nihilistically exploitative they're ineptly moralistic. If we weren't going in with the intention of cutting him miles of slack, or were, quite the opposite; going in with tabloid stoked bloodlust like the critics who saw "I Know Who Killed Me" were, I wonder if we'd have even noticed how many fucking killer moments are in Chambliss's work. Would we, instead, just aim our blue state bloodlust at him and have a Q&A that would devolve into us asking him things like "So, do you identify more as a Hick or Cracker?" and "Is ignorance or indifference a bigger factor in the work you make?"
The answer, then, is that Chambliss is great because he owes us nothing. "I Know Who Killed Me" created a certain expectation. It ended up falling wildly out of line with that expectation, huffing postmodernism like Reagan-era glitter glue to the point where part of the point of dizziness. Chambliss can by, by turns, frustrating and refreshing, since it's as much his perogative as anyone else's. His last film, the epic "The Deacon and the Hobo" might illustrate this most clearly. It's sprawling, ten chapters, 3 or four of which feel like they should be the end of the film. A man folds on himself, trippy ass funhouse mirror style, so he looks like a cyclops standing in a river before a hobo living under a bridge takes him prisoner. A con man escapes prison and kills the hobo with a BB gun that's supposed to be a real rifle. Justice is served.
The postscript to that scene, and maybe the answer to the critical conundrum Phil represents, comes after the Hobo has keeled over in a hail of canned sound effects. After he dies, the escaped prisoner fires off a few shots and we see the creek leap with the reports of bullets tearing through water. It's a "look at me" move, showboating a modestly competent special effect. There's no reason for it to be there. One a plot level, it's as frivolous as most Jerry Bruckheimer explosions. However, it's the kind of almost a-dramatic flourish that ultimateley makes up the charm of what Phil does. It's as much about playing God in the world of the film as anything else. He makes up his own conventions because he doesn't know the ones everyone else abuses. He's able to approach film as a tabula rasa in a way that most people never can.
During the closing conversation of the gilm, the dead hobo wakes up for a second to deliver a line before slumping back into death; Lazarus like a dead man's sneeze in a school play. At this point, I think I realized one last time that the best reason to approach Phil's work to enjoy the singulariy of logic and vision. Like the character in the third film, Phil Chambliss got his proverbial black belt from Wal-Mart. The reason that black belt means anything is because Phil, to extend the metaphor, reinvents film as his own martial art. The difference is that, from his perspective, he's inventing it for the first time. Check him out if you can. (Christ only knows when he'll come around to the tubes.)
---
First one comes on, Hatchet Man is the title. It's a murder mystery, invovling corrupt cops and and a couple on the rocks. None of the actors are pros and, since the film was put together without any "fancy" equipment (it's only the third film Chambliss used a tripod on) some of it's ragged charm cauterizes the edges of each cut. Actors start out shots out of character for a split second before they deliver their lines, making each shot feel like it's being pulled from real life to surrealist fiction in the span of fifteen seconds, like watching a painting fall in and out of focus.
However, despite the lack of technological intervention (During the Q&A Chambliss said that he had no intention of starting to use a computer for editing; he likes doing it his way.) the film gets by almsot soley by stringing together great moments. A match cut from a graveyard to a frame dominated by file cabinets foreshadows the killer's identity. A showdown between a man in a gorilla mask and a newly minted murderer provides the film's climax. A hatchet blow is matched with a murered woman's hand pulling open a cabinet door as she struggles for life, splitting open the geography below the countertop as the hatchet splits her open. There's some David Lynch in here, though The Supremes are the closest Chambliss comes to citing an esoteric influence. Simply put, the man is inspired and, because he couldn't explain any of it to you if he tried, thoroughly unpretentious. Even bad editorial descisions get a pass because, honestly, Chambliss only answers to himself.
---
Chambliss first bought a camera with $98 his wife had hidden away to buy a new refrigerator. He found the money, hoarded in the old refrigerator, while she was off at church one day over 30 years ago. With a different background, he'd be the equivelant of a graffitti artist or a garage band. He creates because something is brewing in him and, regardless of what it demands of him, he feels the need to see it exist. In the same way Guided by Voices made the fuzzines imparted to their music by their circumstances a part of their aesthetic, Phil Chambliss allows the chunky zooms and undulating pace imparted by the limits of cheap cameras and rudimentary editing to push the aesthetics of his vision. His visual vocabulary is heavy on surreal tableaus and static closeups, stuff that doesn't demand technicality so much as vision. He's become adept at hitting the median between his means and his ideas in a way that very few artists ever are. It's punk rock from a man who's probably never heard a note of punk rock.
---
The second film, The Devil's Helper, involves a pair of hunters who meet the eponymous character in the woods. The character in question sits a desk, trash can on his right and bottle of grape juice on his left. It's shot on VHS, giving every motion a zippily abraisive quality as the two men trade their souls for shots at ten point bucks. That's another fascinating aspect, while his films are often incoherent on a plot level, you can almost always see the outlines of a moral universe. Maybe it's just him defaulting to the homogenized, heteronormanative world of rural Arkansas; but there always seem to be scales to be balanced in each film, making them feel morally cohesive, if not always discernable or coherent.
---
The first half of the program came to a close with a film who's name I didn't get down (at least not legibly, I was writing 3 drinks deep in a dark room) but who's plot involved a farmer being harassed by newsmen. Eventually, he's interviewed and things turn dark and surreal, like the standoff between the hunters and The Devil's Helper. The farmer gets berated for stealing a riding lawnmower with Bill Clinton and eventually, he gets pissed and turns it around on the newsmen, robbing them as interviewer and interviewee rise to fight.
"I got my Black Belt in Karate."
"I got my Black Belt at Wal-Mart."
A tussle ensues as we fade out.
---
Phil comes onstage for a Q&A. Cinefamily (the organization that put together this screening, and puts on several screenings a month at The Silent Movie theater) had him flown up from Arkansas for the occaission. He's miles from being an impressive or insightful speaker. In fact, he doesn't really seem to understand the questions. One person asks him about the font he uses for the title cards in his film, a distinctive shamble that looks like a scale model of stonehenge imitating a horror movie with Impact (the font) as it's only tool. He asks to hear the question again and there's a little bit of patter as everyone realizes that, in fact, this man does not know what the word "font" means. I ask him what influences him outside of film. He responds that he's only read one book in his life and that we'd probably laugh at him if he told us what music he likes. I shrug, since I figure that most of what I like would just sound like noise to him anyways, and he says that he likes 60s stuff; The aforementioned Supremes. People seem to nod approvingly.
Phil comes onstage for a Q&A. Cinefamily (the organization that put together this screening, and puts on several screenings a month at The Silent Movie theater) had him flown up from Arkansas for the occaission. He's miles from being an impressive or insightful speaker. In fact, he doesn't really seem to understand the questions. One person asks him about the font he uses for the title cards in his film, a distinctive shamble that looks like a scale model of stonehenge imitating a horror movie with Impact (the font) as it's only tool. He asks to hear the question again and there's a little bit of patter as everyone realizes that, in fact, this man does not know what the word "font" means. I ask him what influences him outside of film. He responds that he's only read one book in his life and that we'd probably laugh at him if he told us what music he likes. I shrug, since I figure that most of what I like would just sound like noise to him anyways, and he says that he likes 60s stuff; The aforementioned Supremes. People seem to nod approvingly.
The Q&A was, in some ways, the strangest part of the event. The crowd was, and this is overstating the obvious, the kind of people who would turn out on a weeknight to see an almost deliberateley obscure filmmaker who's reputation, such as it exists in scattered raves and alt weekly writeups, is for strangeness, inventiveness, and authorial singularity far more than it is for accessibility or even really craft. In one question, he basically revealed that he can't really even fathom how self distributing a DVD through the internet would work. It's hard, and maybe this is just me, to not feel like there was some element of coddling or condescending involved between us and him. A good number of questions went totally over his head. Not in that "Douchebag-quoting-Godard-to-impress-a-date-way." Of all the Q&A's I've been to, this one left the most latitude for giving an artist shit while almost paradoxically consisting only of friendly questions coming from a place of genuine curiosity. It was like watching a bad algebra student who just can't make "x" equal "x." You'd be a fool to write Chambliss off, because there's such an intuitive brilliance to what he does. At his best, the man surfs the collective unconcsious. However, there's no way to really engage him at the level at which he works, since you almost certainly are going to leave him in the dark with even the most tempered artistic question.
The whole thing sort of makes me wonder what would happen if you were to show him his own work without him knowing it was his. I can't speculate how he'd react, mainly because I don't know him that well, but I have a feeling a good deal of his saving grace is his ignorance and lack of both commercial and critical ambition. If he had any motivations other than simply a desire to realize this whole universe he's carrying inside of his head, in whatever shambolic form circumstances allow, what would that do to my opinion of him? He's willfully ignorant, but how much can that be treated as a strength when it handicaps your ability to even share the art you've made with an audience that's already putting aside a lot of their notions of "good" and "bad" just to attempt to meet what you do on it's own terms? Last weekend, I saw the notorious Lindsay Lohan Torture Noir, "I Know Who Killed Me" at this same theater. Part of the fun of screenings like that is putting aside a few pretensions and reveling in the aesthetic weirdness of that kind of film. (It is, by the way, completeley crazy and highly reccommended.) The other part of the equation with "I Know Who Killed Me" is the raging camp element that nearly every review overlooked, focusing instead of finger-wagging over the exploitation elements. I bring it up because Phil Chambliss's films are even more thoroughly incoherent than "I Know Who Killed Me" and, instead of being nihilistically exploitative they're ineptly moralistic. If we weren't going in with the intention of cutting him miles of slack, or were, quite the opposite; going in with tabloid stoked bloodlust like the critics who saw "I Know Who Killed Me" were, I wonder if we'd have even noticed how many fucking killer moments are in Chambliss's work. Would we, instead, just aim our blue state bloodlust at him and have a Q&A that would devolve into us asking him things like "So, do you identify more as a Hick or Cracker?" and "Is ignorance or indifference a bigger factor in the work you make?"
The answer, then, is that Chambliss is great because he owes us nothing. "I Know Who Killed Me" created a certain expectation. It ended up falling wildly out of line with that expectation, huffing postmodernism like Reagan-era glitter glue to the point where part of the point of dizziness. Chambliss can by, by turns, frustrating and refreshing, since it's as much his perogative as anyone else's. His last film, the epic "The Deacon and the Hobo" might illustrate this most clearly. It's sprawling, ten chapters, 3 or four of which feel like they should be the end of the film. A man folds on himself, trippy ass funhouse mirror style, so he looks like a cyclops standing in a river before a hobo living under a bridge takes him prisoner. A con man escapes prison and kills the hobo with a BB gun that's supposed to be a real rifle. Justice is served.
The postscript to that scene, and maybe the answer to the critical conundrum Phil represents, comes after the Hobo has keeled over in a hail of canned sound effects. After he dies, the escaped prisoner fires off a few shots and we see the creek leap with the reports of bullets tearing through water. It's a "look at me" move, showboating a modestly competent special effect. There's no reason for it to be there. One a plot level, it's as frivolous as most Jerry Bruckheimer explosions. However, it's the kind of almost a-dramatic flourish that ultimateley makes up the charm of what Phil does. It's as much about playing God in the world of the film as anything else. He makes up his own conventions because he doesn't know the ones everyone else abuses. He's able to approach film as a tabula rasa in a way that most people never can.
During the closing conversation of the gilm, the dead hobo wakes up for a second to deliver a line before slumping back into death; Lazarus like a dead man's sneeze in a school play. At this point, I think I realized one last time that the best reason to approach Phil's work to enjoy the singulariy of logic and vision. Like the character in the third film, Phil Chambliss got his proverbial black belt from Wal-Mart. The reason that black belt means anything is because Phil, to extend the metaphor, reinvents film as his own martial art. The difference is that, from his perspective, he's inventing it for the first time. Check him out if you can. (Christ only knows when he'll come around to the tubes.)
Friday, April 4, 2008
Space Age Filler
I heard about punk rock before I actually heard any of it. (Aside from the scatalogically inclined Quincy Punx who were dominating radio during my mid teens, but that doesn't really count any more so than Orange Fanta counts as fruit.) Initially, it sounded like the kind of deliberately bad, cheaply nihilistic crap that I would hate. The fact that so many moronic skater bullies in my Jr. High and High school loved it's more skull-shirted permutations only added to the turnoff. This was clearly music for people who believed that "No Future" meant you didn't have to try instead of that you had the opportunity to make something better. That most of these aforementioned morons are now either going nowhere or going nowhere with kids in tow only props up this idea.
ASIDE: If there's no future, why the fuck are you assholes breeding?
So yes, Sex Pistols didn't do much for me when I got their lone LP from a CD club. Besides that, it didn't really even sound like the punk rock I had envisioned when I saw it described in an encyclopedia (even worse than looking up money laundering in a dictionary) so why even bother? It wasn't until I was at a summer camp in the summer of 03' that one of the instructors gave me a Minor Threat CD that I knew how wrongheaded my lazy dismissal of the genre had really been.
ASIDE: If there's no future, why the fuck are you assholes breeding?
So yes, Sex Pistols didn't do much for me when I got their lone LP from a CD club. Besides that, it didn't really even sound like the punk rock I had envisioned when I saw it described in an encyclopedia (even worse than looking up money laundering in a dictionary) so why even bother? It wasn't until I was at a summer camp in the summer of 03' that one of the instructors gave me a Minor Threat CD that I knew how wrongheaded my lazy dismissal of the genre had really been.
---
When I first heard "Filler" it was, as with a lot of great art, a blur. The song opens with a rumble like bullfrogs shedding their legs and sprouting teeth. Drums bubble up like a fuse. Then shit gets real...
I couldn't discern lyrics, but it didn't really matter. This was the punk rock I'd imagined and it scared me more than a CD that was 20+ years old at the time should have been able to. It was singular in it's commitment to a physical imperative. Power chords like bricks laid in an overcaffeinated silent movie. Ian McKaye's accusatory bellow, as much at you as for you. Particularly in the early work (which might be all that matters in punk rock) the band had two modes: On and Off. Melody was incidental, like a canoe being kicked through a merciless river. However, the brilliant aspect of Minor Threat is that they chose such perfect DNA to build that river from. One story (perhaps apocryphal, but in that case truthful in a way no true story could be) has guitarist Lyle Preslar taking the riffs from old Rolling Stones songs and simply speeding them up to the point where the only choice is to let everything bleed. By using innateley solid progressions, the band was able to focus on tightness and energy. There is no fat. There is no wanking. The closest thing you get to a solo is a noise burst at the end of the chorus, ghost notes biting stepped on squeals... Fuck, it might not even have been intentional
--
Once I started to figure out the lyrics, it all made sense; this was a band focused on stripping everything away until only the ineffable self remains. The person addressed in the song is all of us and none of us. There's an individualist politics, or at least a philosiphy at work and, while it's undeniably simplistic and judgemental, it has a clarity to it that only a very rational person who happens to be very young, very stupid, or an excellent actor can execute with such conviction
What happened to you?
You're not the same
You're not the same
There's something in your head
Made a violent change
It's in your head
Filler
You call it religion
You're full of shit
You're full of shit
Filler
Was she really worth it?
She cost you your life
You'll never leave her side
She's gonna be your wife
You call it romance
You're full of shit
Filler
Your brain is clay
What's going on?
You picked up a bible
And now you're gone
You call it religion
You're full of shit
Filler
This was, at 17, the punk rock I'd been waiting to hear. It wasn't nihilistic so much as it was negationist. If everything else was filler, then that meant there was a lot more room to manuever than songs running under 1:30 would suggest. It wasn't until another two years of exploration of underground hardcore/emo that I'd find the band that fulfilled that potential.
---
Antioch Arrow had a far shorter and less prominent existence than Minor Threat but made songs with a little less force and a much greater breadth of impact. The first song of theirs that really knocked me on my ass was "Space Age." It opens with a keyboard/organ line (some combination of my ignorance, bad hearing, and the recording quality has rendered it indescernible at this point) that sounds like it's heralding a DIY version of the monolith from 2001. The vocals drop in, threatening to swoon or explode.
Dipped in chocolate with a cobra design/My sign is a sign which is a sign.
Then things really do explode, the drums ricochet off of themselves. A guitar riff slides and pounds like a distant jet engine, further abstracting the fury that Minor Threat distilled for me so perfectly. I could dissect the lyrics ('Hmm, what archetypes does the chocolate, evoke? Is he talking about the Zodiac?') but that's missing the point of the song. When playing live, Antioch Arrow supposedly had to completeley retune after every song. Every bit of this song is about exhausting yourself while drilling into the spirit world and coming back with synaesthetic force. The surging riff is question is not quite atonal, but it's a concrete element much more than a melodic or harmonic one. The hook that it provides, such as it is, is like the predestined pounding of a piledriver. It feels automatic, like the riff has been brewing and has now escaped into the song like a firefly with a binary brain set loose in a black box.
We've gotta have time to stay, "WAH!"/ And if we soften, I drip all over the floor.
Notice what evocative nonsense the lyrics are (I mean that as a compliment.) Is meaning even relevant? The ineffable self Minor Threat seemed to be clearing the way for is totally on display here. When I listen to this song, I feel the words and the vocal delivery like an arthritic feels a descending storm. It's pure sensation, nerves unsheathed of any agenda. Where the accidental squeals of "Filler" implied the solos of an era that had already been written off, "Space Age" packs every indulgence into such a short span that, even when a note feels like a flubb or a misstep, it recovers into a cartwheel or a somersault so quickly that you would be a fool to try to tell what is or isn't intentional or, really; to even hold the misstep against them. Maybe it's all nervous spasms like stoned philosiphy riding the rails of an Attention Defeciet or maybe it's the keys to the kingdom. Either way, Minor Threat used hardcore as a way to boil their own concerns down to adolescent ammunition, Antioch Arrow treated the form as a chance to fill in the gaps with their own cosmology.
"While Pacific Time Zone says that litte girl's on time."
The organ bleats like a siren trying to scorch glue from painted mountains under the previous line, tracing the chasis of the vocal melody before throwing it all over the hill again.
Pacific Specific!
The singer lingers on the last line, repeating it four times with exhasustive intensity, jamming in a mini-monologue like a one-note solo, rasping out a post-verbal moan before sucking in a breath and flipping the phrase as the drums rev up:
Specific Pacific! Thirty-three feet below, the fish have a funny thing at thirty three below.This red cement I walk on, this broken glass song/ I wish us alligators would be so so very gone.
Then the organ comes back, same melodic chunk as before. Tag, you're it.
---
Two weeks ago, my ipod broke. This past weekend, I took an old tapedeck (rescued during a chaotic move-out) and set up a playlist that alternated between Antioch Arrow and Minor Threat. The tape I've been listening to is, then, a tape of that playlist. It feels nice to get back to synthetic warmth and spinning squeals, especially since both of these records came out before I even owned a CD player. Each presents an epic but equally galvanizing visions of what punk rock can be, volleying back and forth from tack to track. I decided to focus on these songs, mainly because they're the ones that probably embody what I love most about these bands, but both records ("In Love With Jets/The Lady is a Cat" and Minor Threat's "Complete Discography") are essential for anyone who got sick of punk when they realized how simple it was and wants to see that simplicity either rendered as a platonic ideal or blasted open like a Kinder Egg full of rust and ecstatic intent. Links coming up tonight.
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