A Plague Of Miniatures

Newish Home

2008-06-25T22:20:00.001-07:00

So, I'm using tumblr for bloggier things now.

http://raptoravatar.tumblr.com

Otherwise, I'm doing essay-ish/maybe half-cooked insights here.

OMGZ, new Hold Steady Song!

2008-06-11T12:55:00.000-07:00

"Moves In The Mourning"

VERSE 1 (opens with AC/DC + Social Distortion riff)
My dad was a CFO
now I'm headlining with MIA
I turned my problem into a persona
then trotted it out onstage

CHORUS (Riff makes room for piano and busier bassline)
Now I can't hold my hand steady
before the first drink of the morning
She slouches up from a stranger's couch
and moves like she's in mourning

VERSE 2
He listened to the LFO
but the kids called him Diamond Dave
He shuddered like Dustin Diamond
when the drugs made the whole party look like a sex tape

CHORUS
Now he can't hold his hand steady
before the first drink of the morning
She's bolt upright on a stranger's couch
screaming like an early warning

BRIDGE (with either prominent Piano or handclaps)
she starts to lurch
like she was back in church
or just a stoned celebrity

she could'be looked worse
in a half mast skirt
then she stared back at me

CHORUS 2x, with with either backing vocals or a descending minor key version of the piano line, then we're out

PS: This is an homage/parody, appropo of the AV Club thread on the new album. Feel free to lie to your friends that it's real though...

For those of you following along at home

2008-04-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

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

"I Got My Black Belt at Wal-Mart" or The Films of Phil Chambliss

2008-04-09T14:37:00.001-07:00

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.

---
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.)

Space Age Filler

2008-04-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

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.

---

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

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

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.

From a Project in Progress

2008-03-30T15:53:00.000-07:00

That's Why It's Called A Police Club

2008-03-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

I saw Tokyo Police club at the Troubadour the other night. Great band. Perfect name. If you don't know them already, think Television if they stomped harder and bounced shamelessly. Although, to be fair, they could've never heard of Television and ended up making the same music. When I first heard of them, the name struck me as hipster irony and the music struck me as being what I always had hoped The Strokes would evolve into.
---
Neither of these was accurate. Let’s start with the name and work our way back to why this band is great rock and roll as opposed to an imitation of great rock and roll. Police Club sounds like a joke, a hyperstacked inverse oxymoron that covers a couple of levels of order. The fashionable club in a fascist institution. They're from Newmarket, Ontario; and thus the Japanese city appended to the front comes off as a joke. On one level it is. However, when you realize that their first EP, "A Lesson In Crime" is actually threaded together under the narrative auspices of a robot takeover that happens in 2009, it makes sense that they'd take the name of a cultural capital associated with brining the terrifying sci-fi aspects of futurist consumerism into the present.

Jump to their concert. Three loud fucks beside of me are raising their glasses to their digital cameras like its heaven. One is cute, one thinks of the cute one as a sidekick, the guy is slightly too high grade of steakhead to be taking them seriously, but he's enjoying the ride. They're at a "happening" indie rock show cause it's fashionable without bothering to really dress the part. If you're gonna stick your taint in my face at least do it while you wear American Apparel. Every word is wrapped around an old school "Oh My God" so it rises and falls like an abject chirp. They scream something about robots intermittently. They've spent more on drinks than I made at work that day. I don't know if they actually seized on the robot motif or if it's just another lame meme like zombie ninjas fuck-fighting werewolves on a pirate ship.

However, my innate venom aside, we're all here an enjoying the same band. We're picking up on the same currents, whether we mean it or not. Tokyo Police Club's appeal derives from the same authoritarian motifs that surface in their name. Shouty backing vocals. Invitations to clap along. Moments you hum for days. However, these same motifs end up subverted in consistently interesting ways. For instance, at one point on "A Lesson in Crime" handclaps are actually used to suggest the march of a robot army.

Music starts, these guys have gotten better since the last time I saw them. Confidence, precision, and a more earned swagger from the guitarist. Singer is on point, makes all the melodies seem natural. This is a band that knows how to serve the song first and themselves second. Their latest LP, "Elephant Shell," due in a few weeks confirms this. Guitar tones are less barbed, keyboard feels more like champagne. Bubbles and waves. Not as much like an unfinished pot of coffee percolating in accidental heat. Lyrics have both more economy and more depth.

As far as performance, everyone is great. The keyboard player, in particular, is amazing. He looks more like a blogosphere refugee than an archetypical rockstar. He's manic, often airborne. Every lesson you never listened to about white people dancing, you can see here. The keyboard on either side almost seems to be fencing him in, backing him into a corner. He plays like he's defusing a bomb but somehow yields effortlessly compelling hooks and melodies. When he throws in backing vocals, you can hear his voice shred, lending an edge of anguish to proceedings, ironic because the shout along parts of the band's songs aesthetically evoke sports cheers, making them almost perfectly opposed to any kind of angst. As with the aforementioned handclaps, an authoritarian motif shows up, draws everyone in, and then gets subverted. Fucking brilliant
---
"Your English Is Good" was my favorite song of last year, maybe rivaled by LCD's "All My Friends" but somehow more connected to eternity. It came out on a 7", which made it harder to push as any kind of archetypical example. Fortunately, it shows up on "Elephant Shell," kicking off the third act of a stellar album. They play it tonight, and it sums up everything I love about the band while also revealing nearly everything that makes them interesting. The rhythm is this kind of 1-2 1-2 1-2 1-2 thing that reminds me of an unremitting pencil tapping a desk in a post lunch lull. Fidgety, but worn into consistency. Everyone shouts, like they're rallying for hegemony (or wailing as the screws get deeper in the flesh of everyone who won't go along):

Give us your vote!
Give us your vote!
If you know, what's good for you!

It fits with the robot motif, summoning the audience to mechanically clap along even as it backhands the notion that anything is even worth voting for. The guitarist and keyboard player take up tambourines, leaving the bass, drums and vocals to carry the opening. We're all on the same page, all rooting for the same lost cause, even though we don't know what it is. That's when the rest of the band jumps in, rapturous but precise. Just as a pit comes to fruition, things settle down for the verse:

These are the lines
That we straighten every year
But it's the second time
They mapped the constellations
So we search for you by night
In the Deptford Gravel Pit
The tale of tramp finds Christ
Injustice is my middle name

I could explain these ten different ways and still come up short of the feeling they create. Hell, I couldn't even tell you whose perspective they're from. Some elements are at play though. Aesthetic militarization, straight lines, dark places, exhaustion. Something lost in a misunderstood trade. A cross or a crossroads.

My office building is across the street from another building, which has a row of flags from various nations across its facade. Back when I would go out there to smoke, the rusty taste of the cigarette would bite me back for killing myself a little every day as I listened to this song and watched the rush of air funneled between buildings tousle the flags. I felt, and even more so now feel, a kinship with this song. When I listen to it on the bus, the LCD monitors broadcast news in both Spanish and English. I don't know if it could have been written ten years ago because, while we talked a good game about everything that makes it feel so great right now, we didn't understand the game yet.

You don't need to change
Your future's with us

I looped this song back in August while cutting my hair for a job interview. Re-learning how to be an adult, pumping the volume and dodging the wires as I culled stray hairs with a borrowed set of clippers.

Your English is good
We can see it in your bones

In the chorus, when everyone shouts along, it works as both an affirmation of and an indictment of the dominant order. When the line follows, it's like watching the nature-nurture debate piss itself in protest. Maybe none of this was intended, but given that 1/6 of Newmarket's population immigrated to Canada from other places, its miles from being a happy accident that this particular song approaches cultural assimilation with both so much empathy and so much cynicism. This band has tuned into something profound:

You look a wreck,
Left your key inside the door
And my rook will check
Across this black and white chessboard

It's a more concise statement of the first verse, half the words and twice the impact. All the motifs are there. Crosses, lines, games, aesthetic binaries, exhaustion. There's a weary but wry inevitability to the whole thing, combined with a hope that maybe everything can be affirming instead of crushing which is precisely why this band and this song in particular are so essential. Whether they know it or not, they've spun together a whole post-teen cosmology that manages to feel entirely familiar and friendly, lived in in the best way possible, while having an effortless depth that keeps any of it from feeling academic. Like Elvis Costello, they work just as well in an apolitical context, but manage to feel righteous and collective in the way that great political music does. I love this band as much because it invites analysis and exists so comfortably at such a high level of craft as much as I love it for being musically generous enough to even encompass people I can't stand.

New Plan

2008-03-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

Shit is getting too slept on. I was afraid of fucking up in public. Then I realized that was the point. Besides, in a few more years everything is going to collapse and all this will get lost in a global war between Google and Wal-Mart. The only literate survivors will be Indian tech support guys who probably speak better English than I do anyways. Hopefully, they'll have the good sense to read someone who remembers how commas and semicolons are supposed to work instead of my shit.

---

"I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette." --Lester Bangs

Abe Vigoda/ Xbxrx/ AIDS Wolf/ HEALTH @ The Smell 11-16-07

2007-11-24T13:09:00.000-08:00

---
I first saw Abe Vigoda in 2004. I liked them because, as with the similarly exhilirhating Capn' Jazz a generation before them, their music seemed to be rooted in the joy of discovering something. The aggressive aspect of their sound wasn't fundamentally angsty or pained, it felt closer to the thrill of learning a new swear word and trying out all the different permutations of it. Since then, they've evolved through two full lengths and a string of 7" and compilation tracks to arrive at their present sound, described on their myspace as "tropical punk." While I can see where that designation comes from, they chime and float much more than they used to, I think that the tag ultimately sells them short. The guitarists, instead of favoring raw nerve blasts, now trade crystalline phrases like shots in a newly invented form of tennis. The drums and bass alternately egg each other on and call each other back. While their earlier songs felt like a zipper being rended from the bottom up, heavy on momentum and intense enough to leave loose teeth in its wake, their newer songs are more settled and refined, content with a more tightly shared kind of exuberance.
The highlight of Abe Vigoda's set came when they debuted a new song. It started off with usual energy, refractive and fidgety. Halfway through, they broke from their usual volley of notes and began to crescendo, picking up momentum. When the song broke, bouncing even harder than before at the end, I got chills. A band that got through my skull the first time I saw them had now gotten under my skin.
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Xbxrx came out in matching uniforms, looking like they'd been called away from some post millennial hybrid of BASE jumping, ethnic cleansing, and small engine repair. The outfits should have seemed lame, but this is a band that titled their recent LP “Wars,” so dressing like they’re all part of the same militant faction makes a lot of sense seen in that light. They tuned, and then tore into an almost impossibly energetic set. A pit formed almost immediately. It was dry and roiling for a few seconds before turning into a sweaty simmer of friendly aggression. Bodies were flung back and forth, making everyone both a projectile and a target. After a few songs, my shitty fitness caught up with me and I had to back out of the pit and watch from the wall.
Onstage, the two guitarists threw themselves back and forth, rollercoastering acrobatic gestures into staccato assaults on their instruments. Both spit notes and chords like mutilated punctuation from a failing assembly line. They traded off singing as well, reeling off yelps and snarls, native noises of the merciless landscape hewn by the guitars. The drummer was excellent as well, concise and forceful but giddy over the chance to hit something.
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I really wanted to like AIDS Wolf, in fact; a certain facet of my worldview demands that they be the best band on the planet. However, they didn't really manage to do anything other than pile on aesthetic contrivances and tossed off coolness. Musically, there was nothing memorable about them. They made somewhat catchy noise, which is not the same thing as playing genuinely good noise, and I was sick of them after the first song ended. Played well, noise is like visiting another planet; readjusting your mind to a new kind of gravity, finding your footing, and surrendering it just as quickly. It feels Promethean, synaesthetic, and cathartic in ways that other genres can only imply. AIDS Wolf was none of these things. Instead, they felt like an Internet meme first, a dress up game second, and an attempt to actually express or explore something beyond cheap transgression third.
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Touring the US and the UK in the past year has turned HEALTH into an incredible band. All those shows have helped them fully assimilate the apocalyptic energy that initially made them great. They’ve fermented it into a stage presence that maintains a certain distractable menace while being all the more frightening for how much control they now truly have.
At this show, the quieter sections of their songs were defined by a coiled intensity. The band a pitched and reeled, leaving just enough slack to snap the audience’s collective neck when the heavy parts came in. Like Xbxrx, HEALTH has a full contact approach to their instruments. The guitarists and bassist lunge and thrash, stopping short of throwing themselves into the crowd only to blast out barbed siren noises like gnashing teeth. The drummer hits with authority, you can almost hear the skins yielding during the less dense moments before everything becomes a precision blur.
During this past summer’s “Nothing Will Change What You Mean To Me” concert series, headlined by HEALTH, there was a real sense of danger; the chance for ambitious (unlucky?) punk fans to take a headstock in the face with the right kind of (intentional?) lapse in caution during the band’s chaotic floor shows. While this performance didn’t feel as confrontational, the thrill was the same. I’ve spent the past week listening to HEALTH’s full length, which I picked up at the show. I’ll write something about it one I have something worth saying about it that I haven’t already covered here.

Preamble (Contains At Least One Made-Up Word)

2007-11-12T23:58:00.000-08:00

You could make an excellent argument that every bit of ink spilled over a piece of music detracts from it, infecting an abstract realm with declaration and reduction, clawing at the emotional agency of the reader and; ultimately, cheapening the whole enterprise by reducing it to a mere exercise instead of an exploration. At it's worst, music writing yields a string of reference points and descriptions that fail to evoke anything other than a queasy knowledge of either how badly the writer needs you to approve of their record collection or how lukewarm their future thesis proposal needs to be.

"It's like Wire with swirling guitars."

"It references Bowie's ambition (circa his more conceptual period), but with the dub-inflected rhythms of Fugazi."

"...the East Coast four-piece, fronted by a singer with the soul of Muddy Waters, the lungs of a Gazelle, the body of a man, and the heart of a hero."

The core of this project is passion and intelligence. I'm not here to flatter your pretensions with esoteric jive ripped off from people you'd never want to meet in real life. Conversely, I'm not here to string together bro-isms like I'm composing an ad for a body spray that impregnates your skin with both Red Bull and the scent of date rape. I'm really not even interested in stabbing at hipness by shoveling competently mediocre bands into the hype cycle, secure in the knowledge that they'll either live up to everyone’s expectations or be sluffed off like a fleet of skinny-tie-wearing dead skin cells within a few months.

My purpose here is exploration and expression. I’m going to write about music as something you live with as opposed to music as a lifestyle accessory. I’m out to corner every inexplicable force that moves me. I want to help document and perpetuate the sort of moments with art where you and the piece are like mounted butterflies laid face-to-face, able to bask in a bone deep knowledge of each other like some shared inertia. I want to pass on what I’ve gotten from the things I love.

Everything here is offered for promotional purposes. If you like it, buy it. With the exception of stuff that's out of print, I own everything that I post here and think you should as well. To that end, grab everything and keep it around. It took me 3 years before I realized that I loved "Emergency and I" by The Dismemberment Plan and bought it. It took me almost as long with "We Are The Romans" by Botch. Requests for deletion will be followed up on immediately. If a link disappears in the night like a South American dissident, I'll take the hint.

If you've made it this far, I figure you're probably in. I'll try to update a few times each week. Sometimes I will lag. Sometimes I may update every day. Some month I may write nothing other than a 9 part generational manifesto connecting "Wonder Showzen," Orthrelm, and the aesthetics of PTSD. This project is about scratching itches, not creating "content." Content, not that a lot of it really contains much, can be found by the yard elsewhere. Writing can be found here.