C & D: Two guys who will remain pseudonymous reason together about new records

C: [While rummaging through the teeming mail bin.] Hey, look at this. It must be from that new guy who’s always lurking around. What’s his dealio anyway? He’s what my gran would call a nosey nelly.

D: I think he’s here to like, streamline shit. [Reading aloud] To Whom It May Concern: “In my private meetings with Arthur staff and contributors, we have received many disturbing reports regarding the personal, professional and spiritual-energetic conduct of C & D, or as they fancy themselves, ‘The Arthur Music Potentate.’

“There is widespread unease amonst Arthur staff about C & D’s taste in mucic, which has been described to us as ‘bewildering,’ ‘psychedelic parochial,’ ‘arguably harmful,’ ‘contrary to the public’s interest,’ ‘more narrow than their trousers’ and ‘frankly vampiric.’ I don’t quite know what all that means but it’s interesting.

“Moving forward, I have been unable to confirm that C & D are receiving payola from 86 record companies and nineteen out of our fair nation’s top twenty coolmaking marketing firms, but verification of such nefarious activity is only a matter of time.

“I am also unable to confirm their membership in the ‘Brownie-Meinhaus gang.’

“However, in my own cross-examination sessions with C & D, in which, I am preparted to testify, we did not waterboard at all , I was able to determine that they have indeed ‘lost the keys’—their words—for two of Arthur humor/motorcycle advisor Peter Alberts’ Royal Enfield motorcycles; they have indeed borrowed Arthur contributor Paul Cullum’s all-region DVD player for an ‘increasingly indefinite period’; they confess to doing two cut-and-runs at Sugar Hair Salon in Silver Lake; plainly abused Mandy Kahn’s standing offer to drive them to and from various watering holes of ill repute; and, as you may have surmised, it was indeed they — or them? I can never remember ;-( — who affixed ‘Ex Libris C &/or D’ label-plates to all the reference books in the staff library.

“Furthermore, C & D have charged 38 parking tickets to the Arthur expense account since last June. Woe betide their decision to start chillaxing out in Malibu.
“C & D have presumptuously intercepted others’ mail, especially advance vinyls from the Holy Mountain label. They play the Carbonas self-titled LP at bicuspid-crushing volume everyday before lunch. They crack each other up at staff meetings by prefacing every statement with ‘You must learn, we are the Gods of this magazine!’ They are always ordering curry. Plus they’ve used up all the paperclips, and not, I am saddened to report, in a fashion that paperclips were designed to be used.

“The Editor-in-chief, art directors and even the printer have complained that C & D are always late with their copy, which in turns holds up production of the magazine and inhibits crucial cashflow, all for something that, quoting the Editor, ‘nobody really reads or cares about anyway.’

“In my many years of optimal-sizing firms, I have been forced to make many difficult and even gut-wrenching decisions. This however is not one of them! - C & D should be shown the door, and the sooner the better. We will call it a suspension of enduring duration. Now would really be the time to pull the trigger on this. I know people who can do it.

“JUST SAY THE WORD.”

D: [gulps] Doh!
C: I always told you we would are the men who knew too much. [puzzles] But how did they find out about the brownies? I told you to watch out for those new surveillance cams.
D: I thought they were fake. And chicken tikka is not a curry.
C: Ha! And neither is lamb biryani. Wait a second… Fake surveillance cams? That’s a GREAT idea.
D: I know a guy! Just say the word!
C: [cackling] Okay but first let’s get one more column in, shall we? “They” never read this so we can say whatever we like and they won’t know til it’s at the printer, hahaha! The funny thing is we REALLY ARE the potentate around here. But if our services are no longer required here, we’d like to say one thing:
D: SAYONARA BITCHES!!!
C: Because we are in control of the horizontal. We’re the last people that see this bad boy before it’s sent to the printer…
D: Oh yeah! Heh heh.
C: …which means whatever we type here gets printed.
D: Which means…

The Carbonas
The Carbonas
(Goner)
C: They come from Memphis, they sound like Wire and the Buzzcocks, nine songs in 22 minutes. You know what you have to do.
D: Wire and the Buzzcocks? More like attach a wire to your bollocks! [helpfully] And they have a song called “Assvogel.”
C: That’s not a song, it’s a movement. And I think you know what kinda movement I mean…
D: Ahem. It is on the Goner record label. Which is what we are now. Goners.
C: Memphis is the one place I’d be interested in moving to. Start the car, I’ll get my duffel. Here’s to life in exile after abdication!
D: [brightens] I’ve been a goner since the beginning.
C: Being a goner is a serious thing. Who do you think is the original goner?
D: Robert Mitchum, no question. Yeah, that’s it, the Carbonas are the Robert Mitchum of rock!

Dead Meadow
Old Growth
(Matador)
C: I’ve been into these guys since before everyone else!
D: Except for me. I invented these guys. I put a bunch of purple pills in a blender along with a soiled Led Zep patch from my older sister’s jean jacket. Shazam!
C: ‘Old Growth’ is on the shortlist for greatest album title ever, and it’s a pretty good description of the music.
D: Here’s a better one: take a grandfather clock made of diamond-cut crystal, fill it with molasses and drop in on your head!
C: I can’t believe they’re firing you, D. You just keep getting better. Woah, this song is some serious blues shufflage. It’s like a beer commercial for really stinky homebrew.
D: There’s something about this guy’s voice that hits me like a arctic wind. Pass me my mittens. And the b-o-n-g. It’s been a bong time since I rock ‘n’ rolled!

Graveyard
Graveyard
(Tee Pee)
D: Graveyard, eh. Must be a Goth band.
C: Actually they’re not Goth. They’re not even American!
D: [listening to first track, ‘Evil ways’] Right away you know that no matter what happens, you’re gonna at least hear good tone guitar. This is far too good to be American.
C: You are correct sir. They are in fact Swedish.
D: The world’s greatest mimcs. The arch-inhabitors.
C: He pitches his vocal a bit Danzig, a little bit Bobby from Pentgaram. A little bit Jim Morrison. A little bit of the mighty John Garcia.
D: And it must be admitted, a little Cornell.
C: A little bit’ll do ya. This is Ween-quality mimicry here! Reminds me of that band Witchcraft in that they’re going further out. [listening to “Lost In Confusion”] That’s basically the Doors, right there.
D: It is like Witchcraft, but this singer has more hair on his chest.
C: … So, what do you think of that drumming?
D: Kinda…jazzy.
C: Well you know, all those old rock drummers used to play jazz drums too: Ginger, Graham…
D: Keith, Charlie…
C: I listened to this album several times without realizing it. Just kept coming back. I keep coming back to the Graveyard, D.
D: That’s where you’re gonna end up. Might as well get there early and check it out.

Harmonia
Live 1974
(Water)
C: Vintage live recording from krautrock greats Harmonia, never-before-released!
D: How is this possible? Harmonia are some of the original electronic goners.
C: If you turn it up loud enough you can hear people talking—
D: I can’t hear anything except analog electronic perfection.
C: Frankly I am perplexed by the liners which talk that like this Harmonia are barely known, even to konfirmed krautrock fans. Says here, these guys exist somewhere out beyond the “how to buy Krautrock section in your local record shop.” Is this guy insane???
D: There is no local record shop!
C: No, I mean I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Krautrock section at a record store that DIDN’T include Harmonia. And there is a local record shop, actually. It’s not final for vinyl just yet, my friend.

Cloudland Canyon
Lie in Light
(kranky)
D: Oh ho-ho, here we go. Straight from Harmonia into their young disciples.
C: Steady pulsing kosmiche jam. two-man band from Memphis. Or Brooklyn. Or Germany.
D: It’s roadtrip music for a midnight drive on the Autobahn. I’d like to see these guys in a steel cage match versus Fujiya & Miyagi. Then we’ll see who’s the real king of next-gen krautrock!
C: Cloudland Canyon scores early by using “Krautwerk” as a song title. They’re certainly inhabiting a role.
D: I prefer inhabiting a roll, if you dig my way. Anyway, I dig their seriously skulled-out drone vocal dual harmony trip too. And, as a bonus, they appear to have put photos of their seriously babetastic girlfriends on the inner sleeve.
C: Don’t give up hope, D. Those may be their sisters.

Monade
Monstre Cosmic
(Too Pure)
C: It’s Laetitia from Sterolab’s band.
D: [definitively] Stereolab arranged by David Axelrod.
C: Axelrod would say he could make this 5000% better. And he’d be right!
D: I still think it’s pretty good.
C: Stereolab is one of those bands for me like where one day you realize you own 11 albums and you can’t remember how that happened. Like Tom Petty or something. They’re just there, they sound good all the time, never totally essential but always dependable.
D: Musical comfort food.
C: Not the deepest stuff but something pitched a bit differently—more steady, life isn’t so bad while we’re playing this rhythm.
D: It’d be a finer world if people hackysacked and threw their frisbees to this rather than to Umphrey’s McGee.
C: But would it really?
D [thinks]: Maybe it IS the hackysacking itself that’s the problem.

Clark
Turning Dragon
(warp)
D: I say heck no to techno.
C: I say turn it up! I love to rave as long as I don’t have to leave the house. Ooh, nevermind chocolate and peanut butter, I wanna know who got the crystal meth grit in my tub of Vick’s Vap-O-Rub! [leaps off couch and begins swinging arms like a baboon in heat] Does the Aphex Twin know that Clark is running away with his fanbase?
D: It’s like the saying goes: Last night a DJ stole my wife.
C: This album is immense, mind-melting, and has big digi-balls under it’s crushed microchip-covered bib. Phwwwaaaargh!!

Earth
The Bees Made Honey in the Skull of the Lion
(Southern Lord)
C: …And then turned my bones into gelatinous masses.
D: E – A – R – T – H: beautifully decaying, slow gothic western-toned dark time music.
C: I nominate this as the soundtrack to the books-on-tape version of that book The Pesthouse.
D: Great idea!
C: Let’s make it happen.
D: I know a guy!

Dirtbombs
(In the Red)
D: New Dirtbombs.
C: Sounds like old Dirtbombs.
D: Dirt don’t change.
C: Can you imagine ol dirty dirtbombs?
D: I can, actually.
C: A band that sprang fully formed, tupla-like from the brain of journalist and tchoupitoulian bear farmer Gabe Soria.
D: I believe Gabe Soria also is the original creator of the Felice Brothers.
C: But Staggerin’ Stan Lee always takes all the credit.

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
Real Emotional Trash
(Matador)
C: A blastmaster from the past, back again! Just when you thought the Malk had done already his best work, he returns with a masterwork.
D: He’s kinda like Roger Clemens in that sense.
C: Wellll…..I doubt Clean Steve is shooting HGH into his jugular. He did something way better and got Janet from Sleater-Kinney to play drums in his band. Now that’s playing with power.
D: If there was a Cy Young Award for drummers, Janet would have won it more than once.
C: [listening to the breezy fretwork of "Cold Sun"] Dude, where’s my hackysack!
D: [eyes pop out as the next track's choogle-blooz-boogie revs up] This is the best guitar playing, since, since, I, uh…
C: You are actually dribbling down your chin in disbelief!
D: Once the Malk was a preppy wiseacre, now he’s a sage-like poetaster. His music is heavier than it’s ever been, and I daresay he’s grown into his trousers. “Can’t be what you wanna be/ gotta be what you oughtta be.”
C: That’s pretty good, but how about this lyric: “He was dancing like a pit bull minus the meat.” The song’s called “Hopscotch Willie”—it’s like a dimestore crime novel with a dimebag inside.
D: Yeah a dimebag of high-grade Quicksilver riff pummelage! Listen man, this is just too good. We should call the Malk.
C: You sure he wants to talk to you? What about you hijacking his golf cart at the Dinah Shore open back in ’99?
D: The cart-jacking? That’s bongwater under the bridge, my friend. Here, I’ll call him… [dials on his cell phone while C looks on incredulous] Hey, Steve.
Steve Malkmus: Yo.
D: Um, Steve, first things first, I hope there’s no hard feelings about the golf…mishap…of some years ago.
SM: We’re cool.
D: But, I mean, what is it about you and golf courses?
SM: Well, golf courses and country clubs — which is what I wrote my thesis about — use all this iconography from old England. It’s an English game, in England it signified money, so you’re belonging to something older, like the Mayflower or something. Golf courses themselves… in America they’re kind of a perfect fit with Manifest Destiny, and with the idea of the West being this wide-open nature, this big American image in people’s minds, and a golf course is like a perfectly… it’s like nature, it’s wild, but it’s been refined by man a bit. You’ve conquered nature but you’ve just mowed it so it’s just right, so you’re sort of in the wild but it’s an American wild. Our golf courses are much different than English golf courses. How it started was the courses were just next to the beach. They didn’t refine them really. They were just flat hills, rolling hills that you played on. But we’ve made these ones that are just perfectly manicured. You can put a Hawaiian-style golf course in Minnesota.
D: Are there golf courses in Portland?
SM: Oh yeah. There’s a lot of water here. It’s not like Palm Springs. I went to Palm Springs there with my dad. They have these little tiny watering things, little black strips, for every little plant. There might as well be CIA bugs at every corner. You don’t even know, it’s so manicured and manufactured. But here, it rains a lot. All you need is a lawnmower, I guess, and good drainage. I’ve been with these sort of wild guys, they’re like contractors, almost Jackass-inspired, you know, they get a 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and drive around and gamble on every hole and be sort of like hooligans. They’re not really taking it back so much as getting a little rowdy within the system. But that happens on $27 public courses, so it’s not like they’re not sharing a locker with the oncologist or something.
D: “Sharing a locker with the oncologist”? Steve, you are a great man, and we thank you.
SM: No problem. I mean, you’re welcome.
C: Wait, before you go Steve, any endorsements?
SM: Amplifone guitars.
C: Political endorsements?
SM: Well, we’ve been told, and it seems it’s gonna happen, that John McCain… I’m not saying I like John McCain or anything but my dad’s friend is running for the Senate seat of that guy that got caught in the bathroom of Minnesota, and it seems like McCain is their guy, he’s not only gonna win the Republican thing, he’s gonna win the whole election and it’s already decided, you know? Like that’s how the Republicans think: four steps ahead. Even if it’s not true, they just believe the hypnotism. They really understand hypnotism. “It is because I say it is. Until it isn’t.” I don’t know. Giuliani tanked. McCain’s like the guy that’s at the golf course with guys like my dad. The white males relate to him. At least he thinks for himself, he’s slightly in that tradition of Goldwater, where being Republican almost blurs into liberal in terms of individual rights and stuff like that. We’re pulling for Obama here. My wife’s from Chicago. He’ll be our candidate til he loses. We’ll vote for Hillary if she beats him. I can’t imagine a president being named Huckabee but then again: “President Obama”? I’d probably be surprised by that too.
C: Thank for the real talk, Steve.
D: And for rocking our day!
SM: Bye guys.

Beach House
Devotion
(Carpark)
C: Great record for rainy days with your sweetie, if you have one. And if you don’t, you should!
D: [singing] “Because she’s a BEACH…house!”
C: And with that, we are out of here.
D: SEE YOU BEACHES!!!

C & D: Two guys reason together about some new records

AKRON/FAMILY
Meek Warrior
(Young God)
C: [Looking at publicity photo of band] I’m surprised these guys haven’t featured in Arthur magazine yet. They appear to meet many if not all of this magazine’s apparent requirements for coverage.
D: What, they have beards?
C: Yes. I think the magazine is pretty clearly a beards-only policy. It’s pretty clearly where the underground beard was re-born. Or should I say, re-grown. Remember Alan Moore on the cover of Arthur No. 4?
D: That was a beard to be reckoned with. No razors and shaving cream in the Moore household!
C: Total ‘Lord of the Beards.’ On the other hand, Alan’s finger armor stylings haven’t caught on yet.
D: I will keep an eye out for the beard as we check out these records today. I assume there will be ladies, too?
C: Yes, of course.
D: Who presumably are not of the bearded variety.
C: One never knows, does one? [arches eyebrow meaningfully] Anyways, Akron/Family not only have some beardage, they have four-part harmonies, great cascading drumflows, sprawling late Trane skronk, and that’s all on the first track! I saw these guys once in L.A., they were like a devotional Animal Collective…
D: [smiling upon hearing the refrain "Gone, gone, gone/gone completely beyond."] Ah yes. Beyond. One of my favorite places.
C: [ignoring, continuing] … in Oshkosh overalls, without the echo delays. Like Lubavitchers gone Sun Ra or Ya Ho Wha—
D: Say wha?
C: [snobbishly] Those who know, know. [continuing] They were awesome, in complete uni-mind synch. The audience made backward-and-forward ocean ripples and sounds at their command: ‘Shhh, shhh.’ It was beautiful.

BEACH HOUSE
Beach House
(Carpark)
C: Lovely—possibly perfect?—debut album from this girl-and-boy lovebird combo who sound like they’re living down by the sea on some magic moonlit beach that stretches from France to Baja to Bali.
D: [looks at biographical notes and photo] Actually they live in Baltimore. And there is no beard.
C: Waiter, get this man a beard, se vous plais.
D: [ignoring] But Victoria Legrand—
C: Is that a real name???
D: —is definitely a lady. A lady who knows how to wear an aqua dress.
C: [looking at the photo] And a big gold amulet as well.
D: I would say this is late summer music, recorded at the beach house after everybody else has gone back to the city.
C: It’s kind of minimal naturalismo—organ, drum machine, gorgeous female voice: Stereolab, minus le krautrock propulsion. Midway between Brightblack slow-to-stillness, Beach Boys “Pet Sounds” melancholism and Air and another Carpark artist, Casino vs. Japan. Also, what the heck, I’ll throw in that first Bjorn Olson record on Omplatten [Instrumentalmusik: Instrumental Music...to Submerge in...and Disappear Through, 1999]. Nordic beaches. As you can see, D, it’s a very particular, yet universal, mood. I see soundtracks in their near-future. [picks up phone] “Hello, Beach House? This is Sofia…”
D: Her voice reminds me a bit of Sigur Ros. Hey, whatever happened to those guys? It’s like they evaporated.
C: She can really SING, when it’s called for, which is in creamy middle of the album on the song “Auburn and Ivory.”
D: Is Auburn the new Ebony?
C: All the songs have some sophisto pop songwriting going on: bridges, key changes, et cetera. And the sounds… when the organ comes in on “House on the Hill,” it’s like Captain Nemo down in the Nautilus playing pipe organ for the octopi. Whew! Can you imagine these guys with a big budget…?
D: Ahoy! Captain Nemo: ANOTHER famous bearded musician.

MICK BARR & ZACH HILL
Earthship
(5RC)
C: New summit album by underground instrumental speed kings: guitarist Mick Barr of Ocrilim, and drummer Zach Hill of Hella. It’ll tighten yer wig!
D: Well, I won’t need coffee for the next five months.
C: They’re going in for the kill like two old ladies speed-crocheting. Mind the wheedlework.
D: They are the speed criminals who no doubt are under surveillance by the authorities of rock. There’s a NEW MOTHER IN THE TEMPLE if you know what I mean!
C: It does have that High Rise/Mainliner/Musica Transonic thing going a bit. Ah, Japan. Some people may also be put in mind of the Peter Brotzman Octet classic assault album, Machine Gun.
D: That’s a ripping title, “Earthship.” [considers] If you lived there, you’d be home by now.
C: Sometimes they’re against each other, sometimes they unify.
D: I must ask: is there a beard?
C: [looks at publicity photo] Have beard, will rock.These guys are the opposite of Sunn o))): they do as many notes and beats as possible per hour. It’s anti-void music, filling everything with sound.
D: Without the benefit of riffage.
C: There ARE riffs—you just need to adjust your attention to catch them. It’s condensed free rock. Like the instruments are too hot to handle. Except for this one song I keep coming back to… [plays "Closed Coffins and Curtains."]
D: Whoa! What…is…THAT???
C: It’s like some super-processed symphonic tri-guitar. Like what that weird Godley & Creme instrument was supposed to sound like, remember that? The Gizmo. They made a whole triple-album with it, and Peter Cook too. Bonkers stuff.
D: [playing the 30-second track again] I am totally spooked. [musing] Perhaps if Mr. Ocrilim slowed down and contemplated like this occasionally, he’d get to somewhere really rewarding.
C: Rewarding to you.
D: [laughs] Of course, me! Who else matters?

THE HORRORS
The Horrors ep
(Stolen Transmission)
D: [Reading song titles] They have a song called “Sheena Was a Parasite”? I worship them already.
C: Frantic organ and guitar-driven psychobilly freakbeat rock’n'roll by five sharply dressed’n'coiffed Dickensian Brits from the belfry.
D: They look like they live in chimneys and spend all day drinking red wine and listening to The Cramps, Tav Falco & Panther Burns…probably the Hives too, and the Birthday Party and Screaming Jay Hawkins (who they cover here) and Screaming Lord Sutch and of course the right honorable Arthur Brown. I think they like bourbon and some pretty nasty stuff.
C: [listening to “Excellent Choice”] They’ve got a good look and a good sound and they seem up for a good party. They’ll come to your town and help you burn it down. And then dance in the ashes.

PRIMAL SCREAM
Riot City Blues
(Capitol)
C: They’re been around approximately forever. And this is their once-a-decade “rock n roll is dumb fun” concept record, apparently.
[C & D cringe for 15 minutes]
C: Talk about the horrors.
D: Where’s the pooper scooper?
C: Rock n roll should be fun, it can be stoopid, but it should never, ever be tedious. One hates to witness someone failing at slumming. It’s embarrassing to all involved. Does [Primal Scream singer] Bobby Gillespie seriously think this band can boogie? Ha ha ha. Poor Mani…
D: [thoughtful] Every once in a while an object is mysteriously withdrawn from stores by its manufacturer shortly after its introduction. That kind of decisive action may be appropriate here.

THEUSAISAMONSTER
Sunset at the End of the Industrial Age
(Load)
C: You will recall that both members of THEUSAISAMONSTER are members of Black Elf Speaks, which is one of the great band names ever.
D: What did Black Elf have to say?
C: I don’t know, it was this kind of gibberish? But it seemed important. [sadly, as if narration] ‘And Black Elf spoke, but no one could understand what he said.’
D: [helpfully] Maybe he had something in his mouth.
C: ….
D: Or, he might have a speech impediment.
C: …
D: [looking at album cover] Naturally I am wondering, what kind of monster?
C: Probably some kind of troll. On PCP.
D: That’s pretty negative. … Um…. Idiocracy got you down again?
C: Yeah… Between seeing that and re-reading Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning last week, I guess I’m feeling more bleh about human life than ever. The idiots don’t know when to stop. And there’s more and more of them. They want war and fast food and spectacle. They’re bad at learning. We’re outnumbered, and it’s only getting worse because the herd never gets culled, since we lack exterior predators.
D: [considers] No more trolls.
C: What are we gonna do? I don’t see a way out. Ah, hell. Maybe that’s why the industrial age is going to end, as it says here on the album cover. [reading from the press sheet] “Of course The USA Is A Monster wants to turn the tide and prepare us for the time after the lights go dim on Western Civilization’s exhaust pipe party.” Sounds good to me! Let’s engage. [starts “The Greatest Mystery”]
D: YEARGH!!! THUNDERAMA!
C: Whoa. [45 minutes later…]Whoa.
D: A shining path indeed! Was that all one song?
C: Unbelievable, just ridiculous. The Who, Bruford-era Kid Crimson, Oneida, minutemen, Lightning Bolt, Liars, Rush. Homeopathic progrock with a lot of heavy spiritual-political truths and theories (“We are only holograms”) and jokes and accusations (“You’re a liar! And a CROOK!”) and digs (“My favorite subject is…me!”). That last song, the three-section “The Spirit of Revenge”…
D: What a giant marching groover that one is! These guys must be super-fit. I’m guessing it’s a lentil and walnut-heavy diet.

WOLF EYES
Human Animal
(Sub Pop)
D: [listening to “A Million Years”] This makes me insanely happy but I can’t put my finger on why exactly.
C: I feel like it’s 4am at the docks and we’re hearing the soundtrack to some new-millennium industrial-environmental horror show. To update Funkadelic: Mother Earth is REALLY screaming now. [listening to “Lake of Roaches”] Especially now that these noise dudes have a horn. Yikes.
D: I see scrapheap monsters vomiting spare parts and microchips.
C: Urgh, this is uncomfortable in a really good way, like a good ol’ Khanate death-slog through the bog. It’s the feel-nothing hit of the fading summer.
D: “Rusted Mange” sounds like somebody getting run over.
C: “Leper War” is more queasy listening. I’m thinking of torture gardens and animal abuse science labs. All the atrocities going on behind the curtain. Machines playing with their prey. Angry dogs chomping on kids’ talking playtoys. Trains full of prisoners.
D: [thoughtfully] This is music to blow up Monsanto to.
C: Wolf Eyes: for when you want to detonate your day.

THE THERMALS
The Body, The Blood, The Machine
(Sub Pop)
C: Melodic meat-and-potatoes punk rock trio from the Pacific Northwest. Two women and a beardless man. This is a concept album about being on the run from a Christian authoritarian USA of the future.
D: [in Chuck D. voice] Fear of a Christian Planet. Fear, baby.
C: In other words, it serves as science fiction adventure, prophecy and soundtrack for real life in half of this country. It’s okay—I like the sentiment and the ambition—but I’m bored.
D: None of the hooks go in deep enough. It’s probably good to drive to, though.
C: The guy’s voice reminds me of Lee Ranaldo’s, which makes me think I’d rather be listening to Daydream Nation. Ha!
D: That should be the new Arthur bumper sticker: “I’d rather be listening to Daydream Nation.”

Good God!: A Gospel Funk Hymnal
(Numero Group)
C: Here’s another shining path: Christian funk-soul music from the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, which, let’s face it, that period was insane in every genre, every medium.
D: The first two minutes of this album provide everything I need from music.
C: This makes me love Jesus a lot more than when they come to my door and yell at me. Another Grade AAAA reclamation project from Numero Group, America’s most consistently great record label. No one runs a dig like they do.
D: They live in the crates.
C: They were BORN in the crates.
D: [boogieing] I’m happy as a Christian on the pipe and there’s nothing Bobby Gillespie and the Thermals can do about it! [thinking] If Christian soul is so good why is Christian rock so bad?
C: Well, you know what they say: the The Lord records in mysterious ways. And nu gospel metal is one of the most mysterious.
D: Christian rock has more preservatives and additives and pesticides and weird chemicals in it, which gives it big hair and a nasty sheen. This, on the other hand, is organic soul. Black granola Jesus.

THE BYRDS
There Is A Season boxset
(Sony Legacy)
C: Four CDs and a DVD for you, the gracious few. Their sound really sounds good right now. It must be those harmonies. In the book McGuinn talks about how none of the three of them had a distinctive enough voice for pure lead—but together the three made one beautiful voice. Then you’ve got those great jazz drums, that guy’s got interesting stuff going on all the time, and is willing to stop it all when it’s called for. And the guitar solos are completely nuts. People always think about the Byrds and the chiming 12-strings, band there is that, but the guitar solos are these wonderful jagged raga/jazz stop-start-scatter runs, if that makes any sense. I guess I just never had ears to hear it before. Music for golden hours in the forest, by the river. Pretty good for cleanly shaven gents. They were always tasteful ‘til they got shaggy in the ‘70s—played folk songs, played contemporary stuff (Dylan covers), some beautiful originals.
D: [sings along to “5D (Fifth Dimension”] “I opened my whole heart to the whole universe and I found it was loving/and I saw the great blunder my teachers had made/Scientific delirium madness…” Still one of the best descriptions of the spiritual side of an LSD trip I have ever encountered
C: David Crosby’s extremely gentle three-way plea “Why Can’t We Be Three” is pretty astonishing in its brazenness. You want to know how it will be/me and you/or her and me?’ Etc. And their version of “Wild Mountain Thyme”—“we’ll go gathering mountain thyme across the wild purple heather”—with harmonies and orchestra is as goosebumpraising as that Ravi Shankar at the Kremlin album.
D: Live cuts on disk 4? Not so happening.

TRAINWRECK RIDERS
Lonely Road Revival
(Alive)
C: Really good cosmic country-tinged Bonnaroo-ready indie rock from San Francisco by dudes who can write hooks. Shit, I bet they can jam it out too.
D: I don’t know why I’m filing it under “guilty pleasure,” but I am.
C: No need to feel guilty. But yeah I can already hear the hacky sacks being hacked, or kicked, or whatever it is they do. Still, you can’t judge a band by who you think their fans will be…

THE BLACK KEYS
Magic Potion
(Nonesuch)
C: I guess their fan Robert Plant didn’t end up joining the band on bass after all. Maybe he forgot to file for his post-beard exemption.
D: Excellent! The Black Keys. They take this stuff so seriously. There’s axle grease on their denims at all times.
C: So, after their tremendous levee-busting EP of Junior Kimbrough covers, here’s their major label debut. Are diminishing returns setting in?
D: It’s already a cult classic with me! And that’s the only one who matters.
C: You know, I hate to say it, but this is really underwhelming material from an incredibly talented band. I’m not hearing a single one of those choogling grooves that they used to mine so effortlessly. Sometimes low fidelity does not equal authenticity, it just means it sounds like crap.
D: Well it’s good enough for me to want to fire up the grill and have a cookout.
C: I’m hungry for something more.

Ed Rosenthal’s Big Buds Calendar
(Quick American Archives)
D: The best month is the Dutch still life with the other herbs and stuff:
C: It’s called “after the harvest” of course. [laughs] They totally have this calendar hanging by the desk at all the farms up in Humboldt. [Reading] Ha, “Slacker Thanksgiving” on Nov. 23, that’s a funny one. “As the bud ripens.” Heh.
D: To paraphrase AC/DC: Ed Rosenthal has the biggest buds of them all.

BUFFALO KILLERS
Buffalo Killers
(Alive)
C: Trio from Cincinnati—stomping ground of Bootsy Collins and Afghan Whigs—with two lumbering looking beard brothers who make a sweet racket that recalls the Black Crowes, Mountain, Hendrix. Definitely some Beatles on the first two songs.
D: From the same label that first signed the Black Keys. They must have scouts all over Ohio.
D: My main concern is why don’t they call themselves The Buffalo Lovers. [suspiciously] Were any buffalos harmed in the making of this album?
C: I love an album that builds and starts hitting its stride by the halfway point. All “River Water” needs, if it needs anything more, is P.P. Arnold singing backup. Then they destroy you with the next tune…
D: [listening to “With Love”] Now THAT is a ballad.

BLIND FAITH
London Hyde Park 1969 dvd
(Sanctuary)
C: Well this is pretty cool. They’ve issued the DVD of this great film of this short-lived supergroup playing for free to 100,000 at London’s Hyde Park back in 1969.
D: It was so weird living through the decade called the ’80s and witnessing Steve Winwood wearing a leather trenchcoat and making sterile radio pop. And now to see Winwood here, looking so young. [The band kicks into "Sea of Joy"] He really was a great soul singer. Whoa check it out, they pan the crowd and there’s is Kenneth Anger himself in epaulets and sideburns and black lips waving his wand of joy.
C: Did you ever notice that every object or action is suddenly improved if you add “of joy” to the end of it?
D: Let’s see…I think I’ll grow a beard of joy. Shitbonger, you’re right!
C: Nice to see that bearded Ginger Baker brought along his handpainted drums on this occasion. Ginger in the ’60s was the equivalent of Gary Young from Pavement in the ’90s: a wild older dude who’s really good, but may not mix well with the others.

GRAHAM COXON
Love Travels At Illegal Speeds
(Parlophone/EMI)
C: Here comes the resolute ex-guitarist from Blur with just a corking great solo album, his best one so far.
D: Blur? I did not appreciate that bloodless dress-up party called Britpop.
C: Well between this and that Dirty Pretty Things single I’m ready to get out my Fred Perry shirts again.
D: Yet if you hadn’t told me about the Blur connection, I would simply be feasting on this short spiky guitar nugs. He sounds like a long lost friend of Wreckless Eric, which makes him a friend of mine.
C: Listen, Graham’s even written the essential tune addressing the new beard conundrum. Dig this song, where he’s watching a guy and girl get off together, it’s kind of an thematic update of Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” [puts on "What's He Got?" and turns up the lyric "He's got a lot of hair on his face and on his head/ So why I get my hair cut so short instead?"]
D: Apparently in cleancut Graham Coxon’s world, the beard gets the girl.

Ethan Miller of Comets on Fire onstage at ArthurFest, 2005 (photo by Jeremiah Garcia/IceCreamMan.com)

C and D: Two fellas reason together about some new records

C: We resume not far from where we left off last issue. Only without D, our lovable excitable German, who has vacated the rumble seat to return to Der Fatherland to observe the World Cup. In his place, quaffing D’s beers for this issue only, ladies and gentlemen of the court, may I present to you: F.
F: Happy to be here, C. Those are big shoes to fill.
C: Relax. After three beers and the proper auditory stimulation, your feet will swell to fit.

Comets on Fire
Avatar
(Sub Pop)
F: After five seconds of this record, I can confidently say: Comets on Fire, you made an excitable German out of me. Pummely stuff.
C: This blasts off from where their last record left off: frequent flyer acid rock mentality, virtuous verses and choruses, oodles of audible poem lyrics, spry jams, and serious assblasting. A couple songs are slow burners…
F: …that put the power back in balladry.
C: The album-opening epic “Dogwood Rust” slithers into a Hawkwind-Ash Ra Tempel-Stereolab-Oneida locked groove around the six minute mark, then ignite into dueling guitar spirals, then some Von Harmonson echotronix. Plus the kind of casual avant garde move that’s so natural you almost don’t notice it: the electric birdsong at end of “Jaybird,” a nice fresh-air breather.
F: A muscle-relaxer for the brain.
C: For me, this album plugs back into what their labelmates Sleater-Kinney did on their most recent album: laying sweet waste to the center of Ted Nugent’s mind by power tripping from the top of the randiest redwoods. This is the Comets’ answer record, at least in my personal universe.
F: I grok that. Fight fire with Fire! Those dark noontide chimes at the beginning of “The Swallow’s Eye,” and the chorus guitars on “Lucifer’s Memory”…it’s crystal clear: Cosmic soul rock kills pain dead.
C: And it arrives just two months after the Howlin’ Rain album. Howlin’ Rain, of course, is the new band spotlighting Comets on Fire singer-guitarist Ethan Miller’s songwriterly aspect, which leans to the Allmans/Dead/Faces side of the highway. And just a few months after Comets guitarist Ben Chasny’s latest Six Organs of Admittance pan-cultural acid-folk stunner, The Sun Awakens.
F: Not to mention Comets pianist/drummer Utrillo’s nuevo Elton John/Bill Fay song project, The Colossal Yes.
C: That one 11-minute song on the Colossal Yes album? Wow… [listening to “Holy Teeth”] But back to the album at hand. This is total High Rise/Acid Mothers Temple/Kiss destruction boogie.
F: A strange thing about “boogie” is it’s been Not Cool for a period about ten times longer than it was Cool. [standing up from the couch] But it never left my behind!
C: [averting eyes, mumbling] Christ, F. Boogie if you must but please do it where I don’t have to see it. This one [“Sour Smoke”] is like keyboard-driven Fela Kuti meets Television. Can a band be this good?
F: Felavision: I wish they had that on the Dish.
C: Call your cosmic cable company…
F: To paraphrase Foster’s: Comets on Fire—it’s American for rock.

Vetiver
To Find Me Gone
(diCristina)
F: The second album from San Francisco’s haziest, gentlest canyon-folk drifters, Vetiver.
C: There’s a bucolic feel to this I love.
F: True, but what’s up with the word “bucolic”? The sound of words should correlate to their meaning, and there’s something about “bucolic” that always makes me think of a baby with a wet, hacking cough.
C: Whereas this music would more likely cure a baby of such a cough.
F: Readers with babies might let us know how it works…
C: Vetiver’s music evokes all those little phases or episodes along a dayhike in the country: the initial entry into the wilderness…the part where you’re making serious headway, alone with your thoughts…the moment when the senses are overwhelmed by the nature stimuli, the dew and the sap, the sun’s heat and the insects’ hum…when you finally you stop for water by a brook, and take a nap in the shade. When Andy Cabic sings, “I climbed so high/the sky dropped down to teach me,” he’s tapping into the naturalist in all of us.
F: I heard somebody say you could call this kind of music ‘naturalismo.’
C: I also heard somebody say that the real reason music originating from the West Coast underground—all the aforementioned bands, Brightblack Morning Light, etc etc etc—is so beautifully gone right now is because of the high potency of the marijuana out here.
C: While I am not stoned at this time, I swear I just looked out the window and saw a burrito fly past.
F: Yeah, that’s Vetiver, working the California tradition: Flying Burrito Brothers, Neil Young, the Mac of course, the original Charlatans from San Francisco…
C: And of course the late under-lamented Beachwood Sparks, whose final EP had some of this same swooshy nature euphoria and next-afternoon melancholia. Not that this is mimicry. Cabic’s songwriting here goes beyond recidivist texture gesture. It’s a very subtle, tricky thing Vetiver does, mellowing the harsh but resisting the corn. They use violins instead of fiddles.
F: Whoa, this song ["Red Lantern Girls"] is amazing! It’s like a horse just trotting along, and then alluvasudden, this squalling and sustained one-note electric guitar solo [courtesy of guest Brad Laner (Medicine/Electric Company guitarist-composer)] kicks in and the band breaks into a gallop.
C: Vetiver: cures coughs, cleanses palates. Use hourly.

Awesome Color
Awesome Color
(Ecstatic Peace/Universal)
C: Whoa!
F: Yowza!
C: These guys get on that train and ride it back to Cincinnati 1969! Total Stooges in Iggy’s-Got-the-Peanut-Butter-Again mode…
F: Yeah, but even more than that— Sound of Confusion-era Spacemen 3, especially on this track “Dinosaur”: that’s the sound of a band refusing to learn more chords or grooves because they already found the best ones.
C: Concentrating on tone and psychotic drive, like all the greats, like our national treasures The Cramps and Tav Falco and of course the 13th Floor Elevators…Awesome Color are…uh…awesome.
C: I’ve got to admit that my inner adolescent thinks this is the coolest shit possible.
F: I hope they’re all under 18, and there better be some brothers in this band.
C: This song [“It’s Your Time”] features some actual choogle.
C: Which brings us to the question that has haunted many a rock fan: what, exactly, is the difference between the boogie and the choogle?
F: Would that be choogie or boogle?

Zizek! dvd
(Zeitgeist)
C: Dude, I’m trying to play this DVD, but you totally messed up my system while reconnecting the TV to the stereo so you could watch the World Cup in surround-sound.
F: I think that D, absent as he is, would’ve approved. Anyways, it was worth it to hear the Mexican TV commentators hollering so sonorously.
C: Okay, here we go… This is a documentary about Slavoj Zizek, the Solvenian philosopher who’s known as “a one-person culture-muncher” and “the Elvis of critical theory.”
F: He looks more like Klaus Kinski. Or Yakoff Smirnoff.
C: Blame it on the beard. Zizek’s basically this super erudite dude who is also a willfully contrary polemicist commentating on everything under the sun as he goes. As he says, “The duty of philosophy is to redefine problems, not to solve them.” Here he is on a tour of colleges…he sees a girl carrying some Evian and remarks, “Water in a bottle —it reminds me of socialism.”
F: This guy’s great! Reminds me of the biting, death-obsessed comedy of the late great Brother Theodore. I believe Zizek speaks as a friend although he expounds with fiendish fervor.
C: Fiendish fervor is right. Zizek is a pre-postmodern man. He was raised in Communist Yugoslavia, but when that all went to bloody hell, he became a Christian atheist.
F: I knew I dug this guy. He’s got some zingers, like when he talks about being “up to your shit in ideology.”
C: Zizek cuts through the tripe. Here he is watching an old televised broadcast of Lacan giving a lecture. Lacan is one of Zizek’s primary influences, but he is not in awe of Lacan: “I find his emphasis and gestures ridiculous…. I’m a total enlightenment person, I believe in clear statements.”
F: Like Zizek says: “I always tell the truth. Not the whole truth, because one can’t.”
C: My favorite part about this film is where Zizek proudly shows us that he keeps his clean laundry in the kitchen cupboard.
F: You’ve got that much in common…

Beavis and Butthead: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume 2 DVD
(Paramount)
C: Meanwhile, at the other end of the philosophical spectrum…
F: Beer me!
C: Y’know, there’s so much product that comes out these days, so many records, DVDs and CDs, but I still feel like there’s a void Beavis & Butthead left that remains unfulfilled.
F: Hey, Zizek’s doing his best.
C: Hard to imagine Zizek calling Lacan a “dillhole” though. It would be so cool if they made a new Beavis & Butthead movie, like, checking in with them ten years later…
F: In the meantime, creator Mike Judge is putting out these super-packed DVDs, and it’s amazing to watch the classic cartoons uninterrupted by erase-your-blemish commercials.
C: The titles alone are remarkable: “Wet Behind The Rears” — “Premature Evacuation”—”Here Comes The Bride’s Butt.”
F: “Bang The Drum Slowly, Dumbass.”
C: I love when the screen goes dark, right before the show starts, and you can only hear their immortal “hunh-huh-unh” laughter. Ohmigod, I love this one, where they go in to the plastic surgeon to get their “thingies” made bigger, but [uncontrollable laughter] instead the doctor gives them boobs! [falls off the couch]
F: Settle down, C. How many brownies did you eat?
C: I dunno. Is the baggie half full or half-empty, buttmunch?

Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan dvd
Directed by Robert Millis
(Sublime Frequencies)
F: Feature-length film about a weird three-day street festival in Thailand, sometimes referred to as “Mardi Gras from Hell.” Whoa. Talk about awesome colors.
C: You see, this is what America should have learned from pre-Katrina New Orleans. All this industrial technology and computer whatsits and the Intervoid is so much unnecessary fuzz. To coin a paraphrase, what the world needs now is less competitive work-laboring and more communal partying.
F: Preferably in blazing demon masks made from cocount husks.
C: Yes, decadence on the cheap. Whiskey drinking at dawn and total second-line parades featuring guitar-and-flute ragas on flatbed trucks, amps powered by car batteries, people waving hand-painted papier mache phalluses with strange tips. When the grid crashes, this is how I hope we’ll party. Of course we’ll probably have to wait til then. You’d never be able to get a permit for something like this in public in America, home of the so-called free.
F: I like the Sublime Frequencies approach. They stand in awe of this planet’s inhabitants’ strange beauty: they bear witness. They just say LOOK, they don’t even try to explain—well, not much—what’s going on. Their approach is, This shit is so deep you don’t even have to know anything about what it is you’re seeing to receive some its power. It’s that rich. They’re busy grokking. They’re feeling fascination.
F: They are the real human league.

A Visit to Ali Farka Toure dvd
dir. Marc Huraux
(Digital Classics)
C: I stand in awe of Malinese guitarist Ali Farka Toure. His death earlier this year was a tremendous loss: his playing was part John Lee Hooker, part original African dance blues, all sensationally blazing and lyrical and celebratory, as well as appropriately contemplative and entrancing, and he was notoriously…well, as they say, touched. I never got to see him play live, because I was very foolish in my younger years. And of course now that he’s gone, I finally get to see him…on DVD.
F: This is a feature-length documentary film made by a French film crew in 1999, apparently, around the time that Toure cut back on his international touring in order to work his farm, not far from Timbuktu. “My main concern here is to grow enough food to be self-sufficient,” he says. “Whatever you do in life, you need a full stomach. When you’re hungry, you can’t think about anything.”
C: The whole story is just so perfect you keep laughing in disbelief at each new revelation or claim—it’s your choice. He talks about being the tenth son (the other nine died), the word “farka” meaning “resistance,” living in a town called “Niafunke” (say it aloud), enduring a childhood of near-slavery (“I had to push a 200lb barrel of water all by myself”), speaking and singing in three languages but reading none, having a grandmother who could communicate with nature spirits, and his year-long stay with witchdoctors at age 11. Or when he says, “There are millions of things that can be explained but some things can never even be mentioned.” And there’s the performances, like the one where Toure says, “I have to tell you that tonight is different from other nights. It’s true. I’m with the devils tonight.” He’s totally sexy, abandoned, rocking, almost disturbingly unguarded.
F: One thing’s for sure: the guy had huge hands and beautiful clothes.
C: And he knew how to bend desert air.

Tony Allen
Lagos No Shaking
(Honest Jon’s/Astralwerks)
C: [listening to track 1] Okay, that’s it. I hereby rescind the dance ban. [gets up from couch] I gotta close these blinds.
F: Mr. Tony Allen is, of course, the brilliant drummer and co-creator with Fela Kuti of the Afrobeat sound. They say he played like four drummers, but that was a long time ago. I think now he’s up to six.
C: [air drumming wildly] If only all the songs on here were this good. Unfortunately half of them feature vocals that are just inappropriately slick singing with banal lyrics that borrow from Fela’s righteousness but not his wit, bite or joy in metaphor. But when Rolling Dollar sings, it’s a vintage Afrobeat clinic session that’ll make your feet weep.

Eccentric Soul: The Big Mack Label
(The Numero Group)
F: Talk all you want about digging in the crates, but first someone’s gotta dig up the crates.
C: And the Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul reissue series—of which this is the latest—is excavation par excellence.
F: I’d never heard of the Big Mack label, but apparently even if you lived in Detroit in the late ’60s and early ’70s you probably didn’t hear of it either.
C: [Listening to Mae Young's “The Man Put Sugar In My Soul”] Is this CD on the wrong speed?
F: Only if you can’t dance that fast. What incredible energy. I nominate it as One of the Best Songs Ever.
C: Big Mack—more than a burger.

James Hunter
People Gonna Talk
(Rounder)
F: For a moment here I thought this was a missing disc from my Charlie Rich box set, and this was 1962. But in fact this is new. It’s just got that sweet soul something, yet it’s got a rock’n'roll backbeat, but really he’s singing exquisite torch songs. I gotta say, James Hunter, a pompadour-sporting white British guy, reminds me of chiefly of Sam Cooke.
C: The fact that he recorded it at London’s noted bastion of analog purity Toe Rag Studios makes sense. Almost nobody does this kind of music in this style. Hunter’s craft is so fine, his commitment so total. Listen to “People Gonna Talk”—his guitar lick’s so tasty, the roll’s so sweet, it captures that swinging moment when ska evolved into rock steady but still bore the clear influence of American soul records.
F: I would say Hunter is brown bread to Edwyn Collins wry.
C: One more quip like that and you’re going straight into the pun-ality box.
F: I’ve been yellow-carded for wordplay.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
I Stand Alone
(Anti)
F: Original folksinger Jack Elliott is 75 and from the sound of things, he’s knocking on heaven’s door.
C: What a beautiful, perfect album. The songs here sound happy but the words—about favorite dogs, old trains, the suckiness of arthritis—are by turns sad and ruminative. He’s know what’s been lost, and he knows the ramble is probably nearing its end. But he’s not entirely sad about it, which gives the songs—and banter—a mischievous tone.
F: Jack’s just doing the ding-dong-ditch on ol’ Death, I betcha.

Loren Connors
Night Through: Singles and Collected Works 1976-2004 3-cd box
(Family Vineyard)
C: Slow chilling weird blues arcs carved by a graveyard guitar instrumental master. No ghosts, though—just a man before the Big Empty.
F: Dark, dark, DARK.
C: Definite dark night of the soul stuff.
F: It’s gorgeous, but I’m terrified.

Charalambides
A Vintage Burden
(Kranky)
C: Almost unbearably beautiful new album from this long-running co-ed guitar duo, now apparently based in Texas. [listening to the perfectly titled 20-minute instrumental “Black Bed Blues”] A warm breeze on a summer night, the windows’ curtain flutters. Outside the tall Texan grass sways. You’re sleeping with your girl in somebody else’s bed. The sunrise is cloudy, gentle…
F: Two people underneath the Unnameable Vastness, instead of one. Pure mutual longing.
C: My recommendation? Give this to someone you love.

The Golding Institute Presents Final Relaxation
(Ipecac)
C: Informed Arthur readers know that the Golding Institute is associated with with notable non-comedian Neil Hamburger.
F: [reading sleeve] “Your ticket to Death through Hypnotic suggestion.” This should go over well with the Doom crowd. Zizek will dig it, and maybe Ramblin’ Jack Elliot too!!! [puts CD in player]
C: Oh dear. I think if you slipped this into amongst every commuters’ positive reinforcement self-help tapes, you could really change some lives.
F: By “change” I think you mean “end.”
C: Give this to someone you don’t love.

C and D: Two fellas reason together about some new records

D: We have some severe time and space restrictions today because there’s 25 records to examine and I only brought four beers.
C: [disbelieving] I told you all week.
D: Yes, well. We’ll have to be efficient and precise, like the German defense.
C: Always with the soccer metaphors when he’s supposed to bring the beer.
D: [looks at stack of CDs] Hmm, I like this pitch. [smiles broadly, uncaps a Foster’s] Come on man! It’s time for kickoff.

MARVIN GAYE
The Real Thing: In Performance, 1964-1981 DVD
(Hip-O/Motown/etc)
D: Marvin Gaye, the sweetpeacelovevibetenormaster of all time.
C: Sometimes things really are essential, and this nine-dollar DVD is one of those times. Or things. Anyways, the reason I’ve been watching this all week long is pretty obvious. There’s nobody like Marvin, no one even close; it’s a blessing just to watch him lip synch.
D: [grabs DVD case] Give me that. Especially when it’s Marvin duetting with Tammi Terrell at something called “Swinging Sounds of Expo 67,” singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in a futuristic phone booth under a plastic dome with a people mover going by in the background.
C: Look at those Dentyne smiles. It’s like a commerical for some future utopia where they are the fertility king and queen.
D: [thoughtfully] A world where you’re not afraid to have a baby
C: Hey, you’ll like this: the a capella option lets you hear Marvin singing in the shower.
D: No it doesn’t.
C: Okay it’s actually just isolated studio tracks. Beautiful. He really can make you swoon with just a voice and a snapped finger. That’s all he needed.
D: Very efficient.
C: “War is not the answer/for only love can conquer hate… we’ve go to find a way/to get some understanding here today”—man, if you sing that today, you’re called a master of the obvious, and yet maybe it’s only a lovesinger who can bring the super-commentary that lasts. He reminds us there’s better things to do with our time.
D: [musing] Lovers and poets make the best peace advocates.
C: This is footage from the film Save the Children—
D: —which should be released on DVD immediately—
C: —which includes live renditions of “What’s Going On/What’s Happening Brother” from a 1972 concert where they did the whole album, and you get Marvin at the piano and the legendary James Jamerson on bass guitar.
D: [sipping beer] Unbelievable. Total butterland.
C: Total ethnographic film of Black America in the early ‘70s: broken windowed skylines and gang grafitti, soul food joints and black pride bookstores, men in dashikis, women in flares and kids in corduroys with spaghetti on their faces, street basketball and barbecue, balloons and checker pants and sweaters.
D: Excellent fashion!
C: He sings like his voice is a horn—and his voice actually has the grain of one. So amazing. Plus there’s multiple appearances on the Dinah Shore show—[notices puzzled D]—that was an afternoon TV show for bored housewives back in the ‘70s.
D: That was the time before they started making all the women work all the time too, in addition to the men. What happened?
C: [ignoring] He talks about What’s Goin On: “I don’t recall much about making it. I feel it was very personal, very divine. I don’t hardly remember writing the songs, it was like I was in some sort of other dimension when we did it, so I know it was a very spiritual.” We could spend weeks talking about everything on here: the polyester jumpsuit future-Chic-soul-P-funk—
D: Somewhere The Juan Maclean is crying.
C: —about getting down on the moon with floor fog that is the promotional video for “A Funky Space Reincarnation”— “COME ON BABY, let’s go peace loving and check out this new smoke/Naw this thing I got, it ain’t classified as dope/Smoke I got from Venus/Have had it all week, it’s getting old/come on and try this new thing with me baby….”
D: This song is my new national anthem.
C: And your new wardrobe, if the world is lucky.

GNARLS BARKLEY
St. Elsewhere
(Downtown)
C: This is a collab concept duo album by two geniuses-in-progress: Dangermouse, the guy who did the Beatles/Jay-Z album-length bootleg mashup, and Cee-Lo, the short guy from Goodie Mob with the voice and the lyrics and the concepts. Goodie Mob, those guys were part of that Georgia crew in the ‘90s, all of them interesting—Goodie and the Dungeon Family and Organized Noize and Outkast and Witchdoctor and Cool Breeze—
D: Who had a dream, he was in a place called Butter.
C: Here’s something bonehad obvious: this song “Crazy” is the song of the year—very apropos for these times, in so many ways that [looking at D opening his second Foster’s] we have no time to count. Three seconds and you’re hooked, three minutes and you’re done and ready to begin again. [looking at promotional photo] These guys are total half-bus refugees.
D: The revenge of the nerds is neverending. [listening to the song’s music] Somewhere, The Juan Maclean are crying another tear, alongside N.E.R.D. [repeating lyrics] “I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind/There was something so pleasant about that place/Even your emotions had an echo, and so much space/And when you’re out there ,without care, yeah I was out of touch/but it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough/I just knew too much/Does that make me crazy?” Whew. I’ve been to that place—I think I lost my mind there too once.
C: [laughs] Once?
D: [glares] SILENCE in the lower ranks!

RUFUS HARLEY
Sustain
(Discograph)
C: Philadelphian bagpipe-playing long-ago jazz dude with new studio record. Coltrane indebted. Whoa that’s a nice double-deep in the pocket beat underneath the drone on the second track. It’s weird how the bagpipe drone works, immediately.
D: It’s dronetime once again.
C: Sometimes I’m not sure he’s playing the same song as his band—
D: [singing that Gnarls Barkley song] Mayyyybe he’s crazy?
C: —which, according to these liner notes, includes his son Messiah, one of 17 kids?!? Is that right?
D: Could it be a misprint?
C: What, he had 1.7 kids? That’d be hard to do, then again it might not be hard for a guy that plays bagpipes in 7/4.

THE BLACK KEYS
Chulahoma
(Fat Possum)
D: I am very happy sitting in front of this speaker.
C: This is the Black Keys doing six Junior Kimbrough songs.
D: One thing’s for sure: Junior had a lot of riffs.
C: One other thing’s for sure: Junior had a lot of kids. 36, to be exact.
D: [The Black Keys’ singer-guitarist] Dan Auerbach is not one of them.
C: Not that we know of. But yeah, it is uncanny how his guitar tone, style and voice can all echo Junior’s so much—on “Have Mercy On Me” at first I thought it was Junior. Who knows why what pops up where. As they say in Africa, the wind blows the seeds. Nice to hear the Keys branching out on the track, by the way, with the organ and tabla—it’s a good sound for them. And that knotty riff.
D: Wasn’t Robert Plant gonna join these guys on bass?
C: He didn’t make the cut. Re: Zeppelin, it should be said: the guitar does have that tone and bottomlinenastiness that Jimmy Page could get sometimes. So good. Great, varied drums from P. Carney, his best work yet. And here comes another long snaking moan riff.
D: Junior’s music wasn’t done evolving, even if he’s gone.

THE RACONTEURS
Broken Boy Soldiers
(V2)
D: Yes meets the Eagles?
C: That’s a bit harsh. I know you’re a stict Megitarian, but come on: you’ve always liked both Jack White and Brendan Benson. There’s some good cuts on here, especially the Deep Purplish stutter funk on this one [“Store Bought Bones”].
D: [sagely] Sometimes when you split the difference, the difference gets split.
C: …

EAGLES OF DEATH METAL
Death by Sexy
(Downtown)
C: Another supergroup, featuring Jesse Hughes and his boomerang of love, plus Josh Homme.
D: Unlike the Raconteurs, this group knows what it’s doing.
C: And what it is doing is very simple: retarded Rolling Stones riffs that you can go-go to.
D: This music encourages sexual tendencies and is proud of it.

THE CUTS
The Cuts
(Birdman)
C: Quality high-fiber retro guitar-and-organ pop and ballads from Bay Area sweethearts.
D: That the Raconteurs would, uh… raconteur for.
C: Dude, you gotta stop ranking on the Raconteurs. You need another beer. [hands fresh Fosters to D with ridiculously gay(e) smile] As Marvin would say, ‘Here, my dear.’

FUTURE PIGEON
Future Pigeon
(RecordCollection)
C: Very nicely done modern retro-dub from the Arthur office favorites, with guestwork from Ranking Joe, Mikey Dread, Ras Congo, the Scientist. You can’t argue with a band that uses a six-foot-long papier mache electric doobie—with smoke machine and lights—as its onstage prop.

THE AGGROLITES
The Aggrolites
(Hellcat/Epitaph)
C: Very nicely done retro rocksteady, with just the right amount of grit and spit, from members of bands I don’t usually care about.
D: A pleasant shockah.

THE FIERY FURNACES
Bitter Tea
(Fat Possum)
C: Our favorite geniuses. Some may say this is the record they’ll be remembered by, but I say this is just them scraping the gravy off the ground. The endless Disneyland Electrical Parade keyboard squigglery and backmasked vocals and whatnot sure sounds to me this is a band trying to stay ahead in the weirdness sweepstakes.
D: [smugly] It’s not nearly as weird as Gnarls Barkley, and not nearly as good. And I bet you they know it.
C: Don’t they know competition is so 20th century? The key is to listen to the album in reverse order, last track first. That way you’ll listen to all of it, and you’ll be sure to hear the best song, “Whistle Rhapsody?”, which is also one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard.

ESPERS
II
(Drag City)
C: Okay, this is sadder.
D: I like these Espers. I sense naked hippies dancing around the maypole. After dark. Drinking the stuff from the milk of the frogs… [closes eyes]
C: It does have a certain Sandy Denny/Pentangle quality. I bet they get tagged with the New Wave of Ren Faire thing, but I bet they wouldn’t be caught dead at that party—they’re gloomy gusses and sad-lifed maidens who’d rather be in the woods than the castle, anyway. I’m speaking metaphorically of course.
D: [continuing, rhapsodic] Or they they may be playing in that town called ‘Machine’ in Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Which featues Robert Mitchum in his last performance. [opens eyes, smiles] One of this nation’s finest weedsmokers.

JOSEPHINE FOSTER
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
(Locust Music)
C: Okay, this is even sadder.
D: An American woman singing all 18th or 19th century German folk songs for children, in German, is the personification of melancholy. It might not be the right music to listen to when you’re deciding whether to live or die, deep at night in those grey hours.
C: As Marvin would say, That’s not livin’! But it sure is singing. Absolutely beautiful.

SCOTT WALKER
The Drift
(4AD/Beggars)
D: Excellent art-rock that doesn’t rock from a living legend, but I’m afraid this music encourages morbid tendencies. This is immense, this record. But what is it? The mood somehow implies a seriousness that might not have to do with worldly events. It is religious? spiritual? There is an urgency! Dreadstorms coming. I think of Japanese ghost music…
C: We’re running out of time, D. I think this is one we’ll have to come back to next time.
D: At least we let the people know that the mighty Scott Walker has returned.

FRED NEIL
Fred Neil
(Water)
D: The great freckled Greenwich Village folk soul who wrote “Everybody’s Talkin’,” which Nilsson had a top ten hit with in 1969 off the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack.
C: [puts on "That's The Bag I'm In"] Check out the morning he’s having: “toast was cold and the orange juice was hot.” There’s so much soul in his singing, this is an album for the dinosaurs.
D: Not the dinosaurs man, the dolphins!
C: It’s true, these are songs for the dolphins. Seriously.

BELONG
October Language
(CarPark)
C: I’ve been let down by NASA, what with the militarization of space and all, but this gives me some insight as to what it feels like to be launched into space. Beautifully fluttered and static-drenched, like those between-song passages of Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine.
D: [blissed out]
C: [blissed out]

BORIS
Pink
(Southern Lord)
C: Okay. One more beer, we’ll split it. This is the new Boris, the co-ed heavy guitar sludge march trio from Japan who in the last year have dropped the overt Melvins moves and become a band of varied powers—
D: [Stands on couch with bepuzzled-in-happy-way face] Majestic dry ice fog riffage that can’t be turned any louder!
C: A landmark record, a virtual catalog of extreme rock guitar strategy—Godflesh/Jesu ethereal rings and reversed dread, overdriven High Rise-style rhythms, post-Sonic Youth squall, Kim Thayil-style tone, Grand Funk/Montrose laying-it-out-there vocals—all on the first two songs. I don’t know if any of that makes sense but I’m trying to give people a general idea.
D: Unbelievable, neighborhood-destroying pummel drumming here [on title track].
C: [listening to ‘Woman on the Screen”] Wow. Reminds me of really, really good Nirvana-style punk/grunge, only somehow much huger.
D: [listening to “Blackout”] A mighty behemoth from the Far East is throwing mountains!
C: I think we are all in agreeance. Rock album of the year so far, easy.
D: [Dancing to “Electric”] You can lose fingers to this album.

HOWLIN RAIN
Howlin Rain
(Birdman)
C: One last supergroup: Howlin Rain, which is Moloney from Sunburned Hand of the Man on drums and Ethan Miller from Comets on Fire on vocals and guitar, working out their common interest in that seemingly lost-forever continent of great 1968-1973 American rock ‘n’ roll, when the hippies went back to the land and kept on rocking until the Man pulled all but a few back into his lame grip. Allmann Brothers, Creedence, Grateful Dead, Neil Young…
D: I sense benificent Jerry Garcia vibes coming from smiling visage of Ethan.
C: He is singing at the edge of his capability like Jerry —it’s a high, roasted voice. But, curcially, not shrieking. He sings like he’s losing his throat. One of those guys whose vocals get quieter the louder he sings. He’s got the goner’s high moan.
D: Like that guy in Canned Heat. [listening to “Calling Lightning With a Scythe”] Or Faces-time Rod Stewart. [laughs] I call this album Another Side of Ethan Miller, Workingman Rock Star.

C and D: Two guys bro down over some new records

D: I’m looking at the stack of stuff we’re going to talk about and I am noticing an absence this time round of certain records, or styles, that I am particularly fond of. I am worried about the lack of brash super-volume riff-monster guitar and backbeat.
C: Well D, the way I look at it is: We certainly can’t review everything that we come across—who has the energy for that? And we can’t even cover everything that’s obviously worthy—there’s just not enough space. So it’s a bit down to what most interests us at the moment. As Allen Ginsberg pointed out, “Mark Van Doren used to write book reviews for the Herald Tribune and almost every one of the reviews was intelligent and sympathetic; he was always talking about something absolutely marvelous. I said, ‘What do you do with a book you don’t like?’ and he said, ‘Why should I waste my time writing about something I’m not interested in?’” And anyways, don’t worry. There’s some riffs on the way.

Mountains
Sewn
(Apestaartje)
D: [Listening to “Sewn One”] Hmm… Could it be the mighty Growing?
C: Close, but no cigar. This is Mountains, a duo from New York who I only recently became aware of because Mr. Plastic Crimewave selected them to play at his 2 Million Tongues festival. Their second album. A nice electrical nature hum. I’ve also been hanging out recently in the mountains, so I feel a special affection for them automatically.
D: An orchestral shower with the warm drone reminiscent of Herr Klaus Schulze on the synthesizer.
C: And then, little acoustic guitar lines and horn tones, foregrounded, or deeply backgrounded. It’s pretty great isn’t it? Total mama nature kids in a low-wattage electronic garden. Reminds me of what Ginsberg’s “great peaceful lovebrain” would sound like, slowly comfortably spinning drifting slowly in eternal wombspace. An alternate soundtrack to Silent Running‘s opening sequence, or a lost instrumental Talk Talk aria…
D: You’ve been on quite a Ginsberg kick lately.
C: [smiles beatifically] Why bother to paraphrase already perfectly put words of wisdom? I say quotate away til we have something new to say… I like to listen to this at Arthur HQ with the windows and front door open, hoping birds will fly by or neighborhood animals will walk in, and we can all be at peace together, for once… Of course, it’s also useful to drown out the car alarms and sirens and lawnmowers and leafblowers and helicopters. It’s not sentimental flashy hot leftbrain human, not cold technical rightbrain robot: strictly ahuman, objective in a naturalist’s sense.

Citay
Citay
(Important)
C: Continuing in the rural mode…
D: Psychedelic canyon and meadow music such was made in ye olde ’70s! [starts air guitaring to closing ascending twin electric guitar line of "Seasons Don't Fear the Year"]
C: They’re really nailing that rich acoustic-electric rolling tabla honey harmony sound that all those heavy bands—Sabbath and Zeppelin, especially—used to do, back when all the best musicians were inspired by what the Incredible String Band were doing, and were still able (or willing) to express a feminine side to go with their preening barbarian or depressive wail aspects…
D: [reminisces] When the maidens were fair and wore flowers in their hair instead of covering themselves in tattoos and piercings. I am awaiting Sandy Denny’s entrance at any moment.
C: Total “Battle of Evermore” vibe, especially on “Nice Cuffs.”
D: Nice title. I also like this one: “What Never Was and What Should Have Been.”
C: More like “What Always Is and Will Ever Be.” This is an album without a sell-by date, with a song for every season.
D: [listening to "Shalom of Safed"] Monumental. Like the best parts of Deep Purple and the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd.
C: Making music for horse-drawn sledrides thru the driving snow to the lodge in the distance, where pale ale and a fireplace and friends are…
D: [10 minutes later] Was that all one song?

The Duke Spirit
Cuts Across the Land
(Startime)
D: [listening to “Stubborn Stitches”] Could it be Heartless Bastards?
C: Yeah, a little eh? It’s actually the first album from an English band, three blokes with a woman in front who does have a voice not too far from Ms. Bastards, or Ms. The Kills, or Ms. Polly Harvey, or here, on “Darling You’re Mean” …
D: Great title!
C: …which opens like an old Spacemen 3 or Spiritualized tune, she’s got that Hope Sandoval reverbian thing going on, but she doesn’t just mope-pout, she howls too. Pretty standard tunes but a great voice and an interest in building to liftoff, repeatedly. The band reminds me a little of their contemporaries and fellow Englishpeople the 22-20s here and there, which of course takes us back to The Gun Club and X. And I also hear, especially on “You Were Born Inside My heart”…
D: ANOTHER great title!
C: …the sound of Come, of the great Thalia Zedek, an underappreciated true believer voice of blues trauma/”I’m having an episode” rock & roll darkside… This music says: jeans and threads, fringes and belt buckles, whiskey and sunglasses, late nights and tough mornings.
D: They strike me as… promising.
C: What do they promise?
D: Dirty glares, at first. But later? [smiles] Sex with slapping.
C: ….

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
Ballad of the Broken Seas
(V2)
D: [listening to "The False Husband"] Well the obvious recent comparison would be that Nick Cave & Kylie Minogue song on Murder Ballads. Also Serge Gainsbourg and Ms. Bardot, or Lee Hazelwood songs, or Jimmy Webb, or Johnny Cash…
C: It has a classic vintage feel. There’s a real string section (which more artists should do instead of cheaping it out with the synthesizer), and a darkness and a ’60s country and western duet swirl to it, with an almost inappropriately sexkittenish breathy femme voice—
D: Julee Cruise. Or, Marilyn Monroe singing to the president—
C: She’s a better singer than that, but you get the feeling listening to this—
D: [smiling broadly, with raised eyebrows] I get many feelings listening to this—
C: I have no doubt that you do, but anyways you get the feeling that she’s holding back singing, doesn’t trust her voice so much as she should. But her reticence doesn’t hurt her here because the songs are so accomplished, and she’s got Mr. Mark Lanegan, probably our nation’s greatest wounded survivor voice, to harmonize and duet with.
D: And they’re all HER songs! Interesting…
C: Except for “Revolver,” a really spooky nighttime shortness-of-breath anxiety thing written by Lanegan, and a clever reworking of Mr. Cash’s “Ramblin’ Man.” Yeah, how often do you see women writing for men anymore? It’s great. Lullabies and laments, offers and pleas, thoughtfully arranged with appropriate decor: a fiddle here, reverbed tabla there, an instrumental intermission at just the right point.
D: Which could have been a track on the Citay album!
C: And the pop tune here — “Honey Child What Can I Do?” is pure singalong AM radio gold.The album closer—”The Circus Is Leaving Town”—is an all-timer for closing time.
D: This is the kind of heartsong Tom Waits used to write.
C: What a song, what lyrics, what a melody, what a feel. I wish we could run all the lyrics for this: “The party’s over now/stop howling at the moon/you need a different beat/you need a different tune/Remember that old song/we had when we were young/Life was an empty page/the world would write upon/Do you recall the meadow grass, we’d sit and watch the hours pass/ You were such a good girl then/Oh Ruby dry your eyes/The circus is leaving town/Oh Ruby, roll your stockings down…” When Lanegan sings, “You could make me think/the sun sets in the east” and then hums at the end? Whew!
D: That’s when you know a singer knows how good a song is. When he still wants to sing it even when there’s no more words to sing.
C: Obviously, hopefully, this is just the beginning of a beautiful, enduring partnership.

Beth Orton
Comfort of Strangers
(astralwerks)
D: Wow. Total laugh-cry masterpiece triumph to the 32nd degree. And I was never a huge fan. What happened?
C: Maybe a weekend at Esalen helped? Who knows. It’s a huge creative breakthrough, for sure, on every level. There’s more good words in the first minute of the album than most songwriters come up with in their entire career. And the music is tremendous, really dry and warm and thought-out.
D: It’s called craft at service to a group of great songs.
C: Maybe it’s down to the guys she’s working with—Tim Barnes on drums, Jim O’Rourke on other instruments and production—but it seems like they totally gelled creatively in a way where it doesn’t really matter how it happened. I mean, O’Rourke was involved with those Judee Sill records finally seeing the light of day last year, and I can hear echoes of her work here—that melancholy, that minor joy, those major choruses in spite of everything, that lovely canyon feel, etc. So it makes sense. Still… Man, every song is a hit. Listen to the breakdown on the chorus of “Rectify.” Amazing. Only a live band can do that. Same thing on “Shopping Trolley,” which is practically anthemic, with zero cheese content, and “Heart of Soul,” which she just BELTS. Amazing. Bare music, bare soul. I’m crying here!
D: Coffeehouse denizens of America rejoice, we have a new masterpiece to sip our lattes to.

Belle & Sebastian
The Life Pursuit
(Matador)
D: [singing along to "Act of the Apostle Part 1] “What would I do in Germany?” I find myself wondering that sometimes.
C: [smugly] I have no doubt that you do.
D: Enough with the sarcasm, you, or there may be damages! [listening to "Another Sunny Day"] Who is this?
C: Belle & Sebastian, from Scotland. Your friend Isobel Campbell used to be in this group.
D: I don’t recall them being this fun.
C: Yeah, it’s total record store pop, isn’t it? Almost like Ween in its variety and craft, when you think about it. Just a ton of styles they didn’t have mastered before: 12-string Byrds country-soul, Gary Glitter glam beat with Sweet-style melodies and harmonies, upbeat melodic Creedence chug rock & roll, a stylish Jam dance number, a Stevie Wonder Synclavier summer sunpop hit, all sung in choirboy stylee. Lotsa great music hall stuff, but it’s all perfect for a stylish afternoon-into-evening garden party.
D: Rufus Wainwright, eat your heart out.
C: Clever observational storytelling lyrics too, which they’ve always done well. “Sukie in the Graveyard” is Sly & the Family Stone-style organ riff funk with Kinks kharacter lyrics and long-line melody. “Funny Little Frog” takes me back to Pulp, who I dearly miss.
D: “For the Price of a Cup of Tea” is an undeniable number one hit in the harmony pop heaven of my inner music-lover mind.
C: …

Sparks
Hello Young Lovers
(In the Red)
C: [listening, slackjawed] …
D: [listening, eyes bulging] …
C: Talk about genius.
D: Talk about masterpiece.
C: How do you even start to talk about this?
D: I’ve never heard anything like it.
C: The best I can say is if you ever liked Sparks—any of their many, many startling inventive endlessly idiosyncratic innovator phases during the last 30 (!) years—this will destroy you. And if you never liked Sparks, ever, you need this, just to know that pop music, pop lyrics, pop personae could be so much…MORE.
D: They should be on the cover of Arthur.
C: Stop the presses!
D: I gotta say I didn’t see this one coming.
C: A surprise knockout in the 20th round! Or, in Sparks’ case, the 20th album.
D: [opens window, yells outside to passers-by] C and D are down for the count! [pause] Again!

C AND D: Two guys bicker about new records.

TV on the Radio
“Dry Drunk Emperor”
(Touch and Go)
D: I’ve listened to this probably a hundred times by now, and I still find it overwhelming. It’s a devastator.
C: For those out there who haven’t heard it yet, this is the song TV on the Radio released in the wake of Katrina, free to everyone via the Touch and Go website [go here]. This is what they said at the time: “we were back in the studio thinking and feeling again and made this song for all our everybody… in the absence of a true leader we must not forget that we are still together…. hearts are sick … minds must change … it is our hope that this song inspires, comforts, fosters courage,and reminds us… this darkness cannot last if we work together. let us help each other… heal each other …. look after one another … the human heart is our new capitol…. this song is for you…. us…..we….them… it is free. pass it on. TO THOSE AFFECTED BY HURRICANE KATRINA: NEW YORK CITY’S HEART IS WITH YOU… STAY STRONG! WE LOVE YOU.”

We don’t usually do this sort of thing, but this is a special case. Here are the song’s lyrics:

DRY DRUNK EMPEROR
baby boy
dying under hot desert sun,
watch your colors run.

what if all the bleeding hearts
took it on themselves
to make a brand new start.
organs pumpin’ on their sleeves,
paint murals on the white house
feed the leaders LSD
grab your fife and drum,
grab your gold baton
and let’s meet on the lawn,
shut down this hypocrisy.

C: The harmonies they get on this are just shattering. And the chorus…
D: This is soul, with zero retroism. That’s not supposed to be possible anymore and yet here it is. Pure righteousness.
C: I find this song overwhelming too. Not just for the song itself, but for the spirit in which was recorded and offered to the public, and the immediacy and selflessness involved. That’s what being an artist is about, in times like these. They get to something really tragic about the current situation: all those poor idiots who have been buying the Bush balderdash since 9/11… because they did that, now we are all paying for their mistakes, and will do for decades. And I’m broke, man. My pockets are empty. And I’ve got it easy. Think of all the unnamed, uncounted dead civilians in Iraq, all the dead and mistreated in New Orleans, all those detained in the secret torture prisons in Poland…
D: This song is so good I can’t believe somebody made it. The build and release, the chorus, the singing, the lyrics, the fife and drum…
C: It’s a call to imaginative action, for less talk and more walk. This is prime Fela Kuti-level stuff, seriously: talking truth directly to power, giving comfort and uplift to the powerless. I’ve never heard this song on the radio, yet it’s exactly the kind of song radio was made for.

Cast King
Saw Hill Man
(Locust Music)
C: Debut album from 79-year-old white fella. Recorded in a shack in Alabama.
D: Seniors rock. Look at this guy. I think our friend T-Model Ford might have some new competition!
C: He recorded eight songs for Sun Records in the ‘50s. He he had a touring country and bluegrass band, Cast King and the Country Drifters, but it didn’t work out and he never released an album.
D: Sweet baby Jesus, what is wrong with this country?
C: I find myself wondering that often these days…
D: The first line of this song is “I don’t care if your tears fall in my whiskey.” What more do you need?
C: The guy’s voice is so rich, it’s a pleasure just to hear his singing. The sadder the lyrics, the brighter the music. The songs are clever, catchy, simple. How could nobody care for three decades? This nation is so cruel to its artists.
D: There’s some Johnny Cash here for sure.
C: To our modern ears, of course. But I’m starting to wonder. Who came first? Not that it matters as much as, well, just how many other guys are out there still who are this good, who we’ve never heard? Maybe it’s a lot more than we think. People who got skipped over by accident of history or circumstance. That’s the lesson of the reissue culture that’s so strong right now—the Numero Group label’s releases, the stuff they talk about in Wax Poetics, all the rediscoveries of people like Vashti Bunyan and Gary Higgins and Simon Finn—all of this teaches us that actually the cream doesn’t always rise to the top. It often sinks to the very bottom.

Nina Simone
The Soul of Nina Simone dual disc
(Legacy/RCA/Sony BMG)
C: You’re not going to believe this, either. A new dual disc release: one side is a greatest hits run, the other side is vintage live footage. Deep vintage.
D: [looking at track listing] Whoa! None deeper vintage. Pure black power, 1960s. Look at this!!! [Reading aloud scrolling text on screen] “By the end of the ‘60s, the civil rights movement was in a shambles; its key leaders were dead, and race riots had erupted in several U.S. cities. ‘It felt like the shutters were coming down on anyone who dared to suggest there was something seriously wrong with the state of our country,’ said an angry Nina Simone. A ray of community hope appeared in the sammer of ’69, when the Harlem Festival—called ‘a black Woodstock’ by its producer, Hal Tulchin—came to Central Park. Crowds of up to 100,000 flocked to six free concerts. The stars included Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, Gladys Knight and the Pips and Simone. These excerpts from Simone’s performance have never before been shown in America.”
C: I’ve never even heard of this festival.
D: Me neither.
C: How is that possible? I thought we knew our shit. My god. Are they saying this footage has just been sitting there since 1969? Listen to her go. Listen to this band. Look at that set, look at this audience. Look at the songs she’s playing—“Revolution,” “Four Women,” “Ain’t Got No—I Got Life” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Look at the setting. Look at the situation is which this was performed.
D: This is right before she went into self-imposed exile.
C: She looks absolutely purposeful. There is a resolve in her voice, in her comments to the band and the audience, in that gorgeous face of hers as she sings that is just absolutely… She looks like a woman about to leave, because she’s been wronged. You know she’s gonna slam that door.
D: No whining. “My life has been much too rough,” she sings. [Listening to “Ain’t Got No—I Got Life”] Listen to the band swing! Unbelievable.
C: She’s holding back tears for the entire performance… She finally breaks—just a bit—on “To Be Young Gifted and Black.”
D: I think this is the greatest single live performance I have ever seen.
C: Especially when you consider the context. This is just extraordinary. Le Tigre and other no-skill apologists who say technique is irrelevant would do well to watch this. The reason people are listening to what she has to say is because she had skills beyond even her conviction.
D: It’s an absolute travesty that the American public hasn’t seen this footage until now.
C: Can you imagine what the rest of this festival must have been like? Look at that lineup. Sheesh. We’ve got to ask again: WHY HAVEN’T WE HEARD OF THIS UNTIL NOW? Where are our cultural historians? Why do we know about Jimi liberating the national anthem and not taking the brown acid and all that other Woodstock jive but not about this? It’s criminal.

Niger: Magic & Ecstasy in the Sahel dvd
by Hisham Mayet
(Sublime Frequencies)
C: And now for somebody who knows how to document and distribute important stuff immediately, rather than waiting for 36 years…
D: [spills beer in joy] YES! The mighty Sublime Frequencies strike AGAIN!
C: 70 minutes of footage of hot blast from the streets of Niger, one of the quote poorest unquote nations in the world. Oil can drum duos, one-stringed instrument maestros, harmonizing ululators, invocation dances. Divination ceremonies and informal nighttime initiation rituals, Taureg trance funk at the end.
D: Absolutely riveting.

OOOIOO
[Untitled]
(Thrill Jockey)
C: New album from project featuring Yoshimi who is in Boredoms. Don’t really understand the provenance of this album—recorded in 2000 but only released this year? Weird vocal calisthenics, big tribal drum thrusters, chimes and flutes and birds and trumpets, synthesizers, tablas, loopage and harmony chants, Sean Lennon and Yuka Honda amongst the guests, the best album booklet I’ve seen in 2005—it seems to illustrate a place directly midway mushroom wonderland of the Allmans’ Eat A Peach album centerfold and the post-toxic landscapes of Lightning Bolt—and check it out, here on Track 7: straight-up female Tuareg ululations!
D: Sometimes I think Bjork gets all the attention for trying to do what Yoshimi is already doing.

Pearls and Brass
The Indian Tower
(Drag City)
C: We really shouldn’t be reviewing this til next issue cuz it’s not out til January 24. But excuse me, I think I need to turn this up.
D: Cream covered by Kyuss?
C: Yeah, kind of, huh? It’s actually three dudes from Pennsylvania.
D: These are some pretty knotty riffs. Quite a brush. A hedgerow.
C: Thorny stuff, but they still give you a riff. Here, have one.
D: Why thank you.
C: Total air guitar and drum practice CD. “The Face of God” is the face they make when they play, I bet. And there’s the vocal harmonies, and the fingerpicked acoustic blues.
D: This is bigrig truck driving music.
C: Forty-wheeler stuff—for the poor dudes trying to forget about the price of gas as they drive the nation’s clogged freeways. If it’s time for a Convoy remake, then this is the soundtrack.

The Fall
Fall Heads Roll
(Narnack)
D: The Fall is now at its best since the ‘80s, and I can say that with some authority.
C: This is the kind of spare, rocking Fall we all want. I like the words—Mr. Smith’s is still a totally idioscyncratic lyrical approach—but sometime I think just hearing his caffeinated bark against a good beat is enough. It’s a very rhythmic thing—the words are almost secondary to the song’s breath. There’s something about that “ah” that he still does at the end of each line that just feels good when you imitate it. I know that sounds weird but try it-ah.

Tarantula A.D.
Book of Sand
(Kemado)
D: Classic early King Crimson sound. Excites one’s nerves, doesn’t it?
C: If Marc Ribot likes them, that’s all I need to know. But yes, this does get the blood racing down the alleyways, I must say. “The Century Trilogy II: Empire” is power metal Crimson, cello beautiful acoustic guitar, hugely romantic pastoral, hugely alarming screech and crunch. I don’t usually like something that has such a self-consciously stark, exaggerated dynamic. But both parts are pretty tremendously great in and of themselves, on their own terms. Maybe it’s those kinds of times now, eh, where the loveliness, the absolute beauty and love can exists side by side total horror. As the Irish philospher Mark Patrick Hederman said, “Singing is a way of proclaiming a better world, a refusal to give in to the grimness of the past.” [listening to "The Century Trilogy III: The Fall"] Whoa… like Jeff Buckley in his full, abandoned gypsy mode and his secret sisters fronting Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
D: They are equipped with maximal music range.

Mi and L’au
Mi and L’au
(Young God)
C: Taking it down a notch… Like old weird Tom Waits fairground songs sung by a Finnish waif in the key of air and a humble-voiced post-Nick Drake haunted gentleman from France. It’s closely recorded , delicate songs—that is there’s tape hiss and falling rain and throat-clearing—written to each other, based on a lived natural intimacy.
D: Reminds me of Mojave 3, when Rachel sang…
C: Mi and L’au apparently lead quite the reclusive, romantic life together in the Finnish woods. Life beyond electricity. This seems to be happening a lot lately: younger musicians and artists retreating, or withdrawing, to rural settings, refusing to engage modern civilization except when necessary. Little Wings and Brightblack Morning Light definitely. But nature is already providing the setting for more promotional films and photographs: see Cat Power’s live DVD, or Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, or Growing’s work, or Six Organs of Admittance and Devendra and Feathers’ album covers, and stuff from the New Energy movement people, or those photos of Pearls and Brass…
D: I think she’s whispering along with her singing. A secret recording technique that few know about. I think Jim Morrison did it sometimes. Or I like to imagine he did.

Bjorn Olsson
[untitled album with lobster on the cover]
(Parasol)
C: We’re almost out of time so we gotta make this quick. New album of vaguely Morricone guitar an et cetera instrumentals from Union Carbide Productions/Soundtrack of Our Lives co-founder. That first album on Omplatten was a keeper. Frosted goodness, magically delicious.
D: I think he has long ago retired from this world.
C: If this was the soundtrack to your life, what would your life be like?
D: More candles. More seaside town time. More fish. Probably more wine. More chopped parsley, more diced onion. More time riding horses and picking buttercups. Less inner rage…

Biff Rose
The Thorn in Mrs. Rose’s Side/Children of Light
(Runt)
C: Nicely done reissue of 1968 and ’69 albums by long-forgotten bright eyed groom of the psychedelic morning dew piano roll: Biff Rose, a white fella from New Orleans best known as the guy who wrote “Fill Your Heart,” covered by Bowie on Hunky Dory. He’s a Randy Newman, incapable of cynicism; a Beefheart for kindly eared folks, a goofball master punster writing advice songs about human and animal and god follies and foibles. A whimsical male Mary Poppins, singing at an anti-war saloon or a soup kitchen. Free to Be You and Me for adults.

Lavender Diamond
The Cavalry of Light four-song EP
(lavenderdiamond.com)
C: Lessons in harmony (of all kinds) from the love and peace actionists who stole the show at ArthurFest: four songs in the key of love, reviving the lost tradition of the uplifting psychedelic pop. All sung by one of the most charismatic women I have ever witnessed.
D: Supremely gorgeous music. I might not be at DefCon 5 all the time if I listened to this regularly…

REVIEWS BY C and D

C: I feel dutybound to advise you that we shall be reviewing many records today that have shall we say significantly progressive overtones.
D: It should be no problem. I came prepared. [smiles mischievously] With beer.

Jana Hunter
Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom
(Gnomonsong)
D: This is Cat Power covering Patsy Cline. After a plate of lasagna.
C: Are you sure?
D: I cannot be sure, but I feel it to be true. I am trusting my intuition. My blink-of-an-eye insight.
C: Looks like you got something in your eye. This is Jana Hunter, from Houston, Texas.
D: The home of Mike Jones?
C: The same.
D: I see. What would you call this?
C: I dunno. Downbeat lo-fi folk music with a touch of glum? But it’s more lonesome than depressing, and she tries a lot of different approaches in arrangement, texture and just general aesthetic.
D: There is definitely a deep longing at work here.
C: The album title hints at a sense of bleak but playful humor—you know the way it mimics doom metal phrasing, half believing it, getting off on how suited to these times this exaggerated language is becoming, what with all the war, pestilence and natural disaster. But sonically this is obviously not High on Fire, so you get a little wink there. Her guitar lines can descend towards doomland like Sabbath.
D: Sometimes I see where she gets the title from…

Vashti Bunyan
Lookaftering
(DiCristina)
D: Spectacularly beautiful.
C: Quiet English folk artist who made a single, slightly psychedelic album in 1970 with various Incredible String Band personnel and so on, and was then lost to the world. Championed by Devendra Banhart, Animal Collective and Four Tet, who’ve all collaborated with her during the internet era. I think some of them are on this but you just spilled your beer on the notes from the record publicist.
D: Sorry!
C: Anyways, her first album was re-released last year and here’s the follow-up. Next album is scheduled for 2037.
D: She sounds the same as last time. There’s an almost Burt Bacharach-like feel to this.
C: Yeah the orchestral hook is sweet.
D: They’re very shy, mellowcholic songs.
C: There’s more piano than one might expect. Very pretty, very modest. Quite a comeback, eh?
D: She saved a little…

M.O.T.O.
Raw Power
(Criminal IQ)
D: [instantly] I like this band. Make it louder!
C: [turning it up] Andrew W.K. meets Guided by Voices: power-pop played with Marshalls.
D: A melodic Fear. Big influence. [increasingly ecstatic] Perfect music for smart hooligans! You can quote me.
C: I am.
D: “Let’s Nail it to the Moon” is like Blondie’s first record. And “Spend the Night On Me” is full-on Lazy Cowgirls.
C: [quizzical look]
D: Aha, you don’t like them, but they have mighty hooks! “Teenage Frankenstein” is righteous rock, I’m telling you.
C: Who on earth would call their record Raw Power? At first you think they don’t know what they’re doing, then you think they’re just stupidly audacious, then you find out they’ve been around since like 1988 and so it’s just a great reverse inverse record-geek joke.
D: I never heard of M.O.T.O. But they have heard of themselves. They are their biggest fans. They’re like, ‘This is our Raw Power.’ And they’re right: it’s two giant balls on fire!
C: [looking at sleeve photo of mixing board] Notice that everything’s recorded at level Infinity. [calculating] The singer must be like 40 years old. Perhaps he is a schoolteacher too…
D: “Flipping You Off With Every Finger That I Have” is song title of the decade.
C: A good ol’ American fistfight. Those don’t happen too much anymore. What if fighting was in? I don’t mean Fight Club. But you know, hipsters going to other areas of town to get drunk and fight in public.
D: [repeating lyrics] “The moon in the sky/Kicks the ass/of the stars/they all fade.” This is true. Every song has a certain drunk-at-midnight, howling-at-the-moon-in-the-bar-parking-lot anthemic quality.
C: Their label has the best name in recent memory: Criminal IQ.
D: [confiding] It is said that there is a certain IQ where anyone who has it will eventually commit a crime. It’s like 116 or 115 or something.
C: Interesting. [listening to “Girl Inhale”] Anyway, this is an homage to the Beatles tune “Girl” that is so obvious it’s great. And is so great because it’s so obvious. It’s the folk tradition: this is how songs used to change over generations. The keyboard solo is a rip of “In My Life.” I wonder if every song is like that and we only are catching the most obvious ones.
D: I am saluting the mighty M.O.T.O. with every finger of my hand.

Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up
(Numero Group)
C: Another start-to-finish classic from one of America’s very finest record labels, the Numero Group out of Chicago.
D: They are number one!
C: This one is a collection of singles recorded between 1960 and 1980 in Belize. Amazing stuff, lots of covers of American soul hits, some reggae stuff too, all infused with this special feel. There’s a warmth—an ease—that’s absolutely seductive. You can just get glimpses of their accent.
D: [repeating lyric] “You can’t go half way, you got to go all the way/to have all my love.” Song of the third date.
C: Numero Group specialize in upending every notion you have that there is, or has ever been, a meritocracy in pop. They prove that human achievement on this planet is continuous and happens wherever people have time on their hands. It does not take place in the easily circumscribed times and places and sequences that VH1 or self-appointed music experts like ourselves—
D: [Snorts, beer comes out of nose]
C: —like to place it in. The energy is always-there-everywhere, it’s just a matter of whether you’ve found out about it yet. Remember M.O.T.O.? They’ve been going since 1988, they’re in our own country, and we only just found out about them. Think what’s been going on in other countries for decades! We don’t know anything! Admitting ignorance is the first step towards enlightenment.
D: [definitively] Numero Group are international cargo crate diggers of the first order. They should be awarded United Nations medals of honors for service to mankind.
C: Okay, time for a snack. [Offering a jar of tiny pickles from Gelson’s] Tiny pickle?
D: That’s what she said. Wait a second! That’s not what I meant.

Choubi Choubi! Folk & Pop Sounds From Iraq
(Sublime Frequencies)
C: Songs from our musically oriented friends in Iraq, much of it recorded in the Sadaam Hussein era.
D: I like this! You know, maybe we wouldn’t bomb them if we listened to their music.
C: Sublime Frequencies, who were spotlighted last issue in Arthur, also deserve special recognition and financial reward for service to humanity.
D: [looking at sleeve] It says here that this song, “They Taught Me,” is in the style of “1970’s Socialist Folk-Rock.”
C: Very helpful, D. Now, please pass the shisha.
D: [listening] This one sounds groovy… I am at a loss for words—
C: But not at a loss for beer—
D: [glares] Silence in the lower ranks!
C: It turns out that my favorite is the “Choubi” style, which sounds very Indian movie soundtrack to my untrained ears: odd rhythm, acoustic string instruments, orchestral strings, a woman ululating with a choir.
[listening to track 5] Is this one called “bee attack”?
C: No. Although there is an instrument being used called, which is Arabic for “wasp.” By the way, it says here on the sleeve that music was regarded as very important by Sadaam Hussein: he apparently called musicians the “seventh division” of his forces. But musicians themselves are not really highly regarded in Iraq. They aren’t really stars. Professional musicians are usually outsiders and outcasts, who play weddings and parties and illicit nightclubs, a recording is made to keep the artist going between gigs… gigs as income, recordings as low priority… songs are immediately public domained and any popular, locally pressed recordings are pirated… Is the music better or worse for existing in this way? I dunno. If you were to judge American music solely on the basis of each year’s 20 best selling albums, you wouldn’t say our system is outputting much to speak of. Could it be that music is worse in a corporation-ruled market system than in a dictatorship with zero intellectual property laws? If you were a musician and you’re being pirated and you’re not getting songwriting royalties and nobody is getting rich off your labor—stall merchants were just getting by, selling tapes, and in the process getting your name out there—would you care about piracy? You might be pissed off a little, but then again, chances are you built on what was there before you too. And anyways, you’re doing fine.
D: I would like to drink to this and swivel my hips. Generally just do that thing.
C: I don’t think you could get in a bar fight to this.
D: Or a war.

Radio Pyonggyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom
(Sublime Frequencies)
C: Paging Mike Patton, please come to the Lost & Found. We have your Mr. Bungle demo. But seriously: this is a whole record of North Korean stuff: “field recordings, television/radio intercepts and live performances” from 1995-1998. Album two in Sublime Frequencies’ Axis of Evil collection. I guess Iran will be next.
D: There is something special here but I think it takes a certain mind to appreciate it. [smiling] Which I have.
C: I dunno, this is a bit too schmaltzy for me. Where’s the funk? Sounds like that shitty Thai pop you hear sometimes. In the interest of peace between nations, I want to get to this but I can’t.
D: [musing] How can we hate them when they’re so awesome?

Residual Echoes
Phoenician Flu and Ancient Ocean
(Holy Mountain)
D: [explodes] Whoa! WHOA!!!! What have you let into this place?
C: This band almost caused a riot at Arthurfest when they played the first day downstairs in the theater. Socks were blown off. Heads were on their cel phones telling people to get over here NOW.
D: I can hear why. WHOA. Fuck me, this is some full-on majestic streetwalking cheetah thruster guitar rock in Satty-like collage. Man!
C: Year they’re like cousins to the Comets on Fire bros, spiritually speaking.
D: Another strike force from Santa Cruz!?!
C: It’s a question that needs an answer: What exactly is going on up there in the banana slug republic to generate this kind of Hawkwind power gazer goner stuff? I can hear some Dead Meadow blisswork bursts in there too—and Crazy Horse search-soling as well. And Acid Mothers Temple yawning-sound journeying, heavy Bonzo drumming. Amazing.

Lightning Bolt
Hyper Magic Mountain
(Load)
C: New riff-blat super-attack from the Providence, Rhode Island artcore guitar-drums power duo.
D: The cover art matches at least the first eight seconds.
C: [reading sleeve] “Humans chill out! There is no back-up planet!”
D: Cathartic art attack. They must be a ball to see live.
C: They have some definite hits here., like track 2, “Captain Caveman.” Reminds me of Unsane, Big Black, Helmet, Killdozer, Slayer: everything on that label Amphetamine Reptile used to sound like this. I guess that sound went pretty mainstream with more ink and noserings but there was always some infant-mind tantrum rapping on top of it. But this is more like the original stuff to me, more imaginative and nature-loving, and, as they say, “mastered for metal loudness.” You gotta dig the lyrics: “Health is all the wealth I need/birds and squirrels and bees and trees/all the things that ride the breeze/money makes the world go round/drags it down and burns it out/I am the caveman/I am the timebomb…”
D: Time for another beer. I’ll be in the fistfight in the other room.

We Are Wolves
Non-Stop Je Te Plie En Deux
(Fat Possum)
C: Another band with a wolf-related name. From Canada. They are Canadian wolves: hear them howl.
D: [Returning with two newly opened beers in hand, enthusiastic] I like this! It sounds like what doing really good coke feels like.
C: Um. I was gonna say these guys sound like it what I had hoped ARE Weapons or that second Faint album would sound like but that’s damning with pretty faint praise.
D: It’s almost like the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” Or Devo, even.
C: An agitated, slightly angry Devo. Or Fat Possum’s own gonzoid Bob Log III: churning stuff, guitar and vocals set to high-distort.
D: Canadians freaking out with a drum machine.

Boards of Canada
the campfire headphase
(Warp)
C: We are surely not the first people to say this but: bored of Canada. Dull down-tempo, melody-free, quasi-postrock beats for snoreheads. I’m sure they’re perfectly serious about what they’re doing but it all says soulless doom to me.
D: They need to move to Santa Cruz as soon as possible.

Danger Doom: The Mouse & the Mask
MF Doom & Dangermouse
(Epitaph)
C: MF Doom all over this doing funny, smart stuff. [singing along] “His name is Doom, they wonder just who is he…” And Ghostface is on here still rhyming like he’s got a number one album out.
D: The beats are knee-deep Dre-Tang. And the story-sketches are ticklish. [imitating] “East-sigh-hide.” Hip-hop album of the year, no question.

Fiery Furnaces
Rehearsing My Choir
(Rough Trade)
C: Fiery Furnaces one-upping Danger Doom, doing an album-length story thing. And no, that’s not Larry Bud Melman, that’s Eleanor and Matt Friedberger’s grandmother Olga Sarantas.
D: If that’s really her name.
C: It’s a family art project. You see, the Furnaces have the family values everyone else has abandoned. The family that records together stays together, D.
D: It’s a Friedberger Family Affair. It’s also obviously beautiful but I can’t tell you too much about it. I can tell you about some other things.
C: We all know that without a steady beat you are lost in the wilderness.
D: It’s true, I have to admit.
C: So you’ll like the disco hit here. And
D: Best dance song this year not made by the Juan Maclean!
C: My favorite other part of the album is when Eleanor sings, “Once upon a time there were two Kevins,” and Olga harrumphs, “You mean two jerks!” Perfect. Everyone loves feisty old women who take a stand. It’s a cool album—a record you actually have to sit and pay attention to, and you actually enjoy doing that for once because the music is unpredictable but never trying, there’s interplay between distinctive voices, the lyrics are fantastically evocative and funny, and of course there’s Eleanor.
D: Obviously a work of advanced idiosyncratic genii. Their fourth in a row. Unbelievable!

Van der Graaf Generator
Pawn Hearts
H to He Who am the Only One
The least we can do is wave to each other
(EMI)
C: Speaking of idiosyncratic genius: here’s three reissues of prime Van der Graaf Generator from 1970-1.
D: You warned me of the coming of the progressive rock, but…! [smiling] I can tell you one thing: we’re not in M.O.T.O. anymore, Kansas.
C: Totally visionary, harsh and beautiful stuff that never gets insulting or hairy dippy. They went for it.
D: They were always like the single prog band you were allowed like if you were punk, because Johnny Rotten mentioned them in interviews. Which meant it was approved with a capital A with a circle round it.
C: How great and defiantly, proudly varied Johnny’s taste was: he was talking Beefheart, VDGG, Can, dub reggae while constructing the snide glam that we call punk rock. It shows. Pete Hammill’s voice here goes all the way out to a sneer or cry in the same way that Johnny would eeenunnnnceeeaate. [thoughtfully] You could argue that punk was exciting to the degree that its makers allowed in something musically beyond the Ramones… That’s why of all the so-called punk rock to follow in the wake of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, almost the only good stuff came through SST, where the bands were extremely open-valved. Black Flag listened to King Crimson and the Grateful Dead, fer crissakes.

Unknown Instructors
The Way Things Work
(Smog Veil)
C: Speaking of SST: Zappa-essque California collab improv between vets George Hurley, Mike Watt and Joe Baiza and Dan McGuire. Baiza works out some knots on the guitar, given jamspace by minutemen/fIRESHOSErs Hurley & Watt with McGuire on the mircophone spouting the observational storytelling. “Metaphors unfurling… justice contaminated by sentiment!/shutting the drapes/I imbibe on quintessence from the skulls of old masters.”
D: It’s not SST 1986 but it’s close. And that means it’s very good.

Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom
The Days of Mars
(DFA/astralwerks)
D: [leaning back] And now, we journey deep into the heart of the Moog analog synthesizer and its universe of possibilities. Could this be Cluster? Tangerine Dream?
C: It’s actually a male-female duo—two visual artists who make music together too. They are two Americans alive in Berlin. [thinking] You know, I would like to be an American living in Berlin right now…Whoa: we are three minutes into the first track and it keeps getting louder.
D: Yes. It’s beautiful and hypnotic and changes slowly but when it does… Wow… [eyes closed, smiling]

REVIEWS BY C and D

Ween
Shinola Volume 1
(Chocodog/ween.com)
C: Ween, the house band of Arthur.
D: Not that they’d ever come to our house.
C: Coming through with an album of outtakes. But it doesn’t—
D: [singing along to opening track “Good on the Bun”] “Tastes! Tastes! Tastes good on the bun! Tastes! Good on the bun! Tastesssss…”
C: Another great Ween album. I mean, this is just a guide vocal, and a Miami bass drum pattern and the Deaner wanking away.
D: And we wouldn’t want it any other way.
C: Once I was talking to the singer of a band who shall remain nameless who went on tour opening for Ween. All the people couldn’t wait til Ween came on, and when they played a 20-minute version of “Push the Little Daisies,” people were in tears, just losing it. That’s when he realized his band was never going to make it.
D: Which is a terrible thing to realize.
C: [listening to “Boys’ Club”] “You can talk of the future/you can talk of the past/you can go find yourself a nice piece of ass”: What is this, a jingle for the Catholic Church? Amazing. And “Israel” is a Jersey Jew, perfunctorily giving a benediction, backed by the greasiest Sopranos saxophone possible…
D: It’s a one-man bar band at a bar mitzvah—
C: He just pressed the “pan flute” button on the Korg.
D: The cheese is frying on this one, that’s for sure.
C: I heard someone say these guys are one step removed from Weird Al—
D: Totally ridiculous.
C: Weird Al changes the words to popular songs. Ween write the best songs all of your favorite bands should’ve written. That’s a big difference, bro. “Gabrielle” is total Thin Lizzy action—
D: [spilling beer, exclaiming] Thinner Lizzy!
C: Please, D, contain yourself.
D: Like you’ve never spilled a beer! [muttering] So arrogant!
C: [continuing] And “The Rift,” which I think is “Roses Are Free” slowed down—is like the worst slash greatest Styx song possible. “I am the commander of time/in my vessel of god/I go through the rift/to the palace of ice … we may not come back from the palace of ice/because the rift is a door”—it’s prog written by the guy who got held back in eighth grade. I know I’m not saying anything new here but they’re the closest thing we have to Zappa, sending up everything they love, without mercy. These guys are a national treasure. And like Zappa, just as scatologically obsessive.
D: Pass the Shinola, bro!

Shel Silverstein
The Best of Shel Silverstein
(Columbia/Legacy)
C: Speaking of national treasures, here’s a compilation of stuff by Shel Silverstein.
D: I must confess, I do not know him.
C: Sure you do. He wrote Where the Sidewalk Ends and Light in the Attic, which is like required reading for the young and intelligent. Funny poetry for kids, he does these hyperdramatic readings of them here—
D: Sounds like Joe Cocker’s creepy uncle—without his pants on.
C: Plus, he wrote story-songs like “Cover of the Rolling Stone” and “A Boy Called Sue”—
D: I know that one, of course—
C: —and then there’s tracks like this “I Got Stoned and Missed It” and this one by Dr. Hook, the orgy ode “Freakin’ at the Freakers’ Ball.” [reciting lyrics] “Everybody’s kissing each other/brother with sister, son with mother/smear my body up with butter/take me to the freakers’ ball/pass that roach please/and pour that wine/I’ll kiss yours and you’ll kiss mine…”
D: Sounds like a pretty good time at the freakers’ ball.
C: “Well all the fags and the dykes/they are boogieing together/the leather freaks are dressed in all kinds of leather/The greatest of the sadists/and the masochists too/are screaming, ‘please hit me/and I’ll hit you’”… A funny guy into music, drugs, storytelling and kink—who drew gag cartoons for Playboy? He must’ve been the most popular dude alive in the ‘70s…
D: And looking at these pictures of him, I bet—
C: I know. Total human bonobo.

Devendra Banhart
Crippled Crow
(Beggars Banquet)
C: Devendra has a lot more hair on his head than Shel, but I think there’s a certain similarity in sensibility. Good times, weird times, you know he’s had his share.
D: He knows where the sidewalk ends.
C: So this is Devendra stretching it out in studio splendor, playing solo, playing with a band, playing a ton of acoustic guitar and piano songs. In English, in Spanish, in jest, in all seriousness, in duet…
D: [listening to “Now That I Know”] In the style of St. Nick Drake.
C: Such a range on the album as a whole, you can hear it in just the first five songs [out of the album’s 22]: whispers, tropicalia, a gentle piano protest lullaby, dreamytime-in-the-hash-den psychedelic-folk…
D: These songs… [listening to “Mama Wolf”] Every syllable is soothing, which is not something you hear done that often anymore. [seriously] Listen to me: Something magical is going on here.
C: Check out the singing, probably the best he’s ever done: that’s a guy who’s going for it in a heavy, trembling way—without losing it. He didn’t used to be able to sing like that. Incredible. And the lyrics, “Yeah when they come over the mountains/we’ll run yeah we’ll run right round them/we don’t have no guns/no we don’t have any weapons/just our cornmeal, and our children…”
D: I’m joining Devendra’s unarmed forces.

Silver Jews
Tanglewood Numbers
(Drag City)
D: [grimacing after a few seconds of the first song] I think I’m going to need three more beers. Immediately.
C: Don’t worry, I’ve got this one covered. [pulls out sheet of paper, clears voice] And to think this man formerly claimed he was nearly “hospitalized for approaching perfection”! Whatever D.C. Berman’s been smoking, his voice is shot. He once had a stentorian authority on par with Kristofferson and Robert Frost, now it’s lost. This might be a mere symptom of his decline —
D: Or the need for throat-coat tea and a personal trainer.
C: —or at least to mix the vocals up front—
D: Maybe he’s been freaking a bit too much at the freakers’ ball?
C: —but it dovetails with another problem, which is that since he is not a performing artist, he has never learned how to improve his craft by translating it live to an audience.
D: Which doesn’t help when it comes to making a record.
C: He now sounds as if he’s reading from a script rather than singing songs. His lyrics are great though, maybe as good as ever, like this choice couplet from “Sleeping Is the Only Love”: “I had this friend named Marc with a c / his sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV” altho’ his never ending quest for the ultimate bohunk cliche—”I’m getting back into getting back into you”—can be a little trying. There are a couple nice guitar moments, probably attributable to the Malk—
D: Who?
C: Steve Malkmus from Pavement, who’s on this album. [continuing] Otherwise the music is a detour-round-this junction of indie and bar band. Oh waitaminute, the seven-minute “The Farmer’s Hotel” is a sprawling gothic masterpiece: Breece D’J Pancake meets Stephen King meets Rick Brautigan in, apparently, a pernicious country inn where “there was no air of slumber/ there doors they had no numbers”…call it an analogue to being a Silver Jews fan: you can check in but you can never check out.

Sinead O’Connor
Throw Down Your Arms
(Sanctuary)
C: Sinead does an album of extremely faithful reggae covers, recorded in Kingston with Sly & Robbie. It had to happen.
D: [stroking chin, deep in thought] I believe Sinead was the first celebrity I’d ever heard of who checked herself into a rehab center for addiction to that demon weed. Sometime in the mid-‘90s, it was.
C: And didn’t she retire from the music industry a couple of years ago? So this is an interesting turn of events.
D: The main question is whether she has grown the dreads or not. The answer, thank Jah, would appear to be no.
C: I gotta say combining the stridency of the Irish with the righteousness of the Jamaican reggae artist doesn’t seem like the best strategy, and most of this album is the dull hybrid I feared it would be: too serious, too austere. Missing is the sense of playfulness.
D: She is just doing the songs she wants to do, without regard for what anyone else thinks.
C: Respect to her for that. It is weird to hear a woman with her range do songs that offer her so little room to exercise her pipes. You get the feeling that these are songs that she’s sung along to a thousand times…the versions are so faithful, at this point, she’s more of a mimic than an interpreter.
D: I think as usual you are being too hard. If you were sitting there and a girl across from you started playing “Downpressor Man” on acoustic guitar and singing, it’d be all over.
C: Her take on Lee Perry’s seduction ballad “Curly Locks” is certainly seductive.
D: And “Untold Stories.” And “Vampire.” Come on, man!
C: I’m just saying, when Sinead does an album of Ween covers, then we’ll really be getting somewhere.

Buckwheat Zydeco ils sont partis band
100% Fortified Zydeco
(Shout! Factory)
D: I am not what you would call an expert exactly, but I do not detect too much zydeco here.
C: It is pretty generic—I keep seeing John Belushi doing backflips down the center aisle. An authentic practitioner shouldn’t be caught delivering this stuff. Then again if I had an alligator po’ boy and a cup of Dixie Beer in my hand, I might have a different opinion.

Terry Reid
Superlungs
(Astralwerks)
C: The legendary Terry Reid gets a long-overdue compilation. A soul singer more than a rock singer, he came up in the ‘60s at the same time as Steve Marriott, Rod Stewart and all those guys. He’s best known as the guy Jimmy Page asked to front Zeppelin, who had to turn it down cuz of contractual obligations.
D: Doh!
C: They said Plant sang like a woman, and Terry Reid does too. Guess Page knew what he wanted. To paraphrase My Fair Lady,…
D: [singing] Why can’t a man sing more like a woman?
C: In that case, it’s a man singing like a woman singing like a man. In the tradition of Tina Turner and Mavis Staples or Inga Rumpf from German blues rockers Frumpy
D: This guy is a super-rocker. A mod-era master. He fucked it up, though.
C: Not as bad as Dave Mustaine. Better to have Led Zeppelin yelled at you on the street by the local smartcakes than Metallica.
D: [listening to “Stay With Me Baby”] Ian Gillan of Deep Purple totally took from his voice.
C: “Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace” is unbelievable—the propulsive, tuneful, template for Slade, and by extension Oasis.
D: But Liam’s not a soul singer.
C: It’s very Faces. “Tinker Taylor” is the same thing. Word to the Djs out there: this is the only album you need to keep the dance party going…

The 88
Over and Over
(Mootron/EMK)
C: Second album from The 88 from around Silver Lake…
D: Ha! That’s L.A. guys doing late-‘60s U.K. vision of California a la the Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies. I like it. This is MUCH more potent that that Paisley Underground revival stuff that was going down in ’84. Silver Lake, eh?
C: But it’s not just Kinks stuff. That’s a big Elton John roadhouse ballad on here, which they can do cuz that guy can really sing.
D: If you’re going to do this, you better be able to take on El Dorado.
C: [Listening to “You Belong to Me”] Such a good singer, great voice. Too bad about the completely unrepresentative album cover, which doesn’t do them any favors.
D: Surprisingly sophisticated, this shit. It’s like known puzzle pieces being put into a new revised order… Man, if this comes from Silver Lake, this isn’t such a bad area! Maybe I should come by every now and then on a Saturday afternoon to hang out with these guys? Because they’re basically hip-hugging mod-haired Sixties guys, on a mission to pull through the gates of rock. That’s what I am too.
C: …
D: Although I am a bit older.

Flamin’ Groovies
Shake Some Action
(DBK Works/Runt)
C: Weren’t they the band that made rock dangerous again?
D: Yes. This came out in ’73, can it be? They wore white shirts and black tailored suits — they were the best dressed band besides the Band. During the glam period. The good ol teenage rock band but played by some slightly older guys. Critics’ favorites who never had a hit. I think Shake Some Action was their only popular song, though they had plenty more worthy ones that got ignored.
C: [Reading liner notes] “Dave Edmonds, formerly of Love Sculpture, produced.” For garage rock, it’s pretty reedy and thin.
D: But it’s not garage, it’s…well, it was retro even back then. They were going for the high school hop sound. They were the conservatives of rock n roll. Which is not a very conservative thing to be.
C: While you are busy speaking paradoxically, I am reminded of the time I went to a Johnny Rockets with my father and he said “This is exactly what diners were like in the ’50s!”
D: Ah, so you see, retro can be a happy place to be.

Plastic Crimewave
Galactic Zoo Dossier No. 5
(Drag City)
C: New ish of Mr. Crimewave’s completely hand-drawn and hand-lettered magazine, great features as always on everything underground and psychedelic from all eras and levels of obscurity, plus tons of Acid Mothers Temple photos…
D: And best of all, these two CDs of Crimewave picks. This is some primordial freakbeat stuff! The Four O’Clock Balloon, whoever that is, covering Don’t You Need Somebody to Love.
C: It sounds like a live recording from a psychedelic cantina in Baja. I wish someone had the courage to record something like this now, with this trashed up fidelity…
D: [reading from magazine ] This song is from a battle of the bands in Ohio in 1967.
C: You don’t hear about too many battles of the bands these days.
D: This song is called “Pippi Longstocking.” It’s like in Spinal Tap, when the guy says “That’s pretty, what’s it called? ““Lick My Love Pump.” Only this is really ugly and primitive but has a pretty name.

The Time Flys
“Fly”
(Birdman)
C: 90-second Ramones party songs. Four-second solos. One of the dude from The Cuts.
D: Sounds like really early, VERY tuneful punk. Pre-Stooges DMZ without the amps. And like Wire on the drums. Tss-tss-tss.
C: [listening to “Jailbait”] Not just punk—bubblegum, too. 1974. Sweet and their kind. Or closer: Kim Fowley.
D: The mighty Runaways.
C: There should be a track on here called “Paging Rodney Bingenheimer.”
D: [looking at sleeve] Whoa, do you look at the protrusion in the pouch of this punk’s jeans? How do you like his cucumber?
C: More importantly, how does Jimmy???
D: You know what they say: Put your best something forward.

Big Star
In Space
(Rykodisc)
C: Well last issue we had the first Teenage Fanclub album in four years. And so, poetically, here is the first album in 30 years from the band that inspired them…
D: I am almost hesitant to put this on. Big Star were so special, they were Memphis digging London. To me they were always incredibly melancholy, to the degree that you couldn’t bear to listen to the words, it was too much pain. And there were these beautiful melodies and harmonies and then also this deeply layered Memphis beat soul music. That song “Holocaust” on Third/Sister Lovers cannot be listened to. That’s what Chilton must’ve felt after his mother died in the fire. The original drummer and the bass player died like a lot of them did in the ’70s, from heroin. They and Alex Chilton’s old band the Box Tops were criminally ignored just because they were from Memphis, and not from L.A. or New York. Or so they say.
C: Chilton and Jody Stephens, the band’s drummer and other surviving member, have been doing gigs with these two Posies guys form some time, off an on, under the name “Big Star.” But over the last 30 years he never seemed to into doing Big Star records again.
D: [Puts disk in] Well, here goes something.
C: [listens quietly for some time] This is the real deal. If you love Big Star then, you will want this now.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Howl
(Virgin)
C: [after listening to “Ain’t No Easy Way] You’ll never guess who this is.
D: Full-on Led Zeppelin. with the harmonica, slide guitar and the fucking Bonham stomp in the house. [looks at sleeve] Whoa. A double gold star surprise. Before they bored me to death with their one-two chord guitar bullshit, which is good for one song on the first record. But now they come back as the guys who stole the spear of destiny, a full-fledged rock ‘n’ roll monster.
C: It’s a pretty amazing transformation. I guess Spiritualized’s path is what they’re following, headed into gospel and blues stomps.
D: [starts waving hands around enthusiastically] Tav Falco says the blues was a howl before it became a song. People were hollering about their pain, in the kind of land where you hope a train will come through and take you far away. Music…music can be about the EQ, not the IQ. The emotional quotient is what’s important here. Here they display the will to break through the final door, which you have to do to be a good band. What the hell happened? I am floored again, in a good way.

Chris Cunningham
Rubber Johnny short film DVD and image book
(Warp Films)
C: We should let the people know that it’s a four-minute Aphex Twin music video—and a very good one, I’ll admit—with a minute padded to each end to make it a “short film.” For 12 bucks. And the revolting photos on the DVD cover and inside the books are not images from the film. So…
D: It’s Joel Peter Witkin meets Floria Sigismondi, but this stuff is ten times better. All this creepiness comes from this guy Gottfried Helmvein (shouting people with bandages on). It’s just the sort of thing that comes from being a lanky weird kid being permanently confronted by non-lanky weird-in-the-other-way kids. And probably suffering beatings from them.
C: Basically it’s The Elephant Man in a wheelchair shooting lasers out of his hands in time with the music, between snorting lines off a camel’s scrofulous rump. Unbelievable editing. But…yikes.
D: This is the alternate ending of Eraserhead. [thinking] Which it’s kind of like, in another way. They asked Lynch questions, and he always changed the subject. “What about the baby?” “What was that?” “Is it real, or is it not real?” “Did you kill it?” This guy Cunningham likes to leave things open like Lynch did. What are those photos of?
C: [looking at screen] Well, that’s definitely a chihuahua.
D: I think I just dropped my chalupa.

Bjork
the music from Drawing Restraint 9
(One Little Indian)
C: New one from Bjork, the soundtrack to the new film by her bugaboo Matthew Barney, who is at the art museum edge of the New Grower Cinema—
D: I don’t give an ant’s fart about Bjork—
C: Well I adore her, but I gotta say this one might be for collectors only…
D: Always the same thing: Starts low, goes high. Whoa-ohhohhohh-ah! Same trick she’s been doing since the Sugarcubes.
C: She’s barely singing on this one though. Just a lot of very musically simple interludes, a weird curiosity tune with Will Oldham that’s interesting the first time you hear it—
D: Excuse me while I yawn.
C: —and then a lot of grunting and what I guess is a holy man’s tuneless mewling and—
D: To quote Beavis: This sucks!
C: To quote the dad of Lars Ulrich: I would say, delete that.

Saturday Morning With Sid & Marty Krofft DVD
(Rhino)
C: The pilot episodes of seven Sid & Marty Krofft series. Original stoner television—not especially clever but deeply weird. Essential to understanding certain kinds of people. Some of these are pretty lame and kind of unrepresentative of what the series would be like later. But Lidsville and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters are wonderfully bananas and make you wonder how this stuff got on the air. And what were they smoking?
D: Whatever fell out of Sinead’s dreadlocks.

Birds
In the World
(Important)
C: Some 3-D Monsterism going on on the cover here. Good ol’ Peter Fowler.
D: Let me look at that. The Super Furry Animals designer guy scores again!
C: It’s Cotton Casino from Japanese cosmic freakout collective Acid Mothers Temple, with another dude from Iceland. Recorded in Osaka and Oslo.
D: What a package vacation that would be….
C: Yeah, lots of people booking that one. This reminds me a bit of the Boredoms’ latest record, in that it opens with a woman doing a lengthy a capella piece before going into something totally different.
D: Although this isn’t a drum circle in a hurricane.
C: Naturalist psychedelia without special effects: just nature and her voice. Like they recorded it in the nude.
D: I dig this song but it might be one of those over-the-edge things. It’s music that you play after a catastrophe with stuff that’s lying around. The lost souls are still flying around trying to find out what happened to them.
C: Yep, I know that feeling.

August Born
August Born
(Drag City)
C: Another duo collaboration between people at long distances from each other. This is West Coast guitarist-singer Ben Chasny from Six Organs of Admittance and Comets On Fire, in quiet, experimental mode, working with the Japanese guy named L, who was in Ghost at one point and has been involved in other cool stuff through the years.
D: Difficult music.
C: There’s a song here where there’s three melodic lines going along and they shouldn’t work together— they sound so separated—and yet it all works.
D: It’s like tuning your ear to accept unusual signals from the old psychedelic music man up on the mountain, hanging out above the fog clouds with Popul Vuh.

Coco Rosie
Noah’s Ark
(Touch and Go)
C: Pretty much same as the first Coco Rosie record: two gifted American sisters making music box speakeasy music that’s part Billie Holiday homage, part experimental ageless whatsit. Sublime to some, unbearably mannered and pretentious to others. I go back and forth, honestly.
D: I do not enjoy this style of music, but “Beautiful Boys” with Antony is a sad knockout.

Modey Lemon
The Curious City
(Birdman)
D: A facemelting beast machinery soundtrack. Like Suicide, the band.
C: Oneida’s march-thrust crossed with Fiery Furnaces’ unapologetic quirk factor five.
D: With some of the driest singing not by a band called Om.

The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons
(Shout! Factory)
D: Sly & the Family Stone live on television in 1970? A full hour of performance and interview with an extremely nervous David Bowie in 1974? Stevie Wonder in 1970?!? A full disk of Janis Joplin… Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, Paul Simon, Jefferson Airplane?
C: Whoa, look at Grace Slick! Her spray-on tan seems to eerily predict Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke. But I would buy this whole thing just for the Sly Stone segment, where, after showing up late—of course—he and his band put on the funkiest bar none live television performance I have ever seen. They make it look effortless. The greatest band of all time, even when Sly has a cold. And when he tells Cavett he writes music in the mirror, well… I won’t ruin it, except to say this DVD is a good argument in favor of television.

Sonny Sharrock
Black Woman
(Water/Runt)
C: Reissue of vintage Sonny Sharrock, a mighty out-there jazz guitarist in the ‘60s. He wanted to play jazz like Coltrane but he couldn’t play a horn cuz of asthma. So he got a guitar. Here he’s with his wife Linda, who’s just singing her soul out. He’s playing these weird drone chord progressions that cloud out into clusters-clots…
D: I couldn’t even begin to find words to try to describe this. When everything is so constricting, you need a place to be where you’re allowed to expand into these sorts of orgasmic explorations. She uses her voice like a hawk. Does anyone dare to sing like this today?
C: Do you know any couple that dares to get this gone in public, today? With this naked go-for-itness? Just mindblowing. Coley says “they were ready to collapse the universe” here in the liner notes.
D: Sounds accurate to me.

Earthless
Sonic Prayer
(Gravity)
D: This is the Kyuss shiznit.
C: Two songs, fortysomething minutes, totally instrumental like a more straightahead Ash Ra Tempel. One song is called “Flower Travlin’ Man,” a homegrower’s nod to the Japanese Sabbath-Zeppelin chopper-riding groop the Flower Travelin’ Band.
D: They’re holding the torch again. New blossoms in the desert…
C: They’re actually from San Diego but I know what you’re saying. They’re jamming it out and they keep going, he just keeps riding that groove—
D: Yeaaaaah. you can run but you can’t hide from the wall of thunder! [thoughtful] I’d like to review this record every month.
C: Who knows? We just might…

REVIEWS BY C and D

Sleater-Kinney
The Woods
(Sub Pop)
D: Before we begin, I would like to say that today I am in the mood to rock.
C: Well, my friend, you have come to the right place.
D: [first song starts, D leaps out of chair immediately] Is this one of those Japanese bands? With a girl?!? Who is this singing?
C: That woman is not a girl—she could show you a thing or two. [dramatic pause] It’s Sleater-Kinney, produced by Dave Fridmann.
D: [Jaw hits floor] Really?!? SLEATER-KINNEY?????!!!!???? Fuck, man! [shakes head] This is a MAJOR statement of psychedelic riot woman super-rock power! Rock ‘n roll album of the year! God DAMN!!!!
D: I know. Maybe the decade. Superfuzz-heavy in the Northwest tradition of Blue Cheer-Nirvana-Mudhoney, expansive like Neil Young with Crazy Hors…Hendrix… Built to Spill? There’s stuff on here that is out as Comets on Fire, possible even further. Who’s going to top this? Absolutely gigantic sounds…amps out of the red and into the black… a 14-minute song at the end that goes as far out as Comets On Fire, even into Les Rallizes Denudes and Ash Ra Tempel territory…
D: I have to admit I would never have thought these three women would make a record that’s this relentlessly face-melting.
C: I don’t know if they’d thought it possible either. There’s some precedent in Babes of Toyland, or early Hole, maybe, but this is just so much further… Well, I’m not sure that they’d call it psychedelic but it’s definitely psychoactive in an urgent kind of way.
D: [musing] There’s a bit of Jefferson Airplane in here, that’s for sure.
C: There’s a structure to everything but there are these void spaces, too. And then there are straight songs too, which rock in this tight, urgent way and then blow into something else via a drum charge or a panned guitar solo or I don’t know what. I know I’m going Beavis here but I don’t know how to [clears throat] …ahem… properly articulate the sensations I am feeling as I listen to this album. For a long time I didn’t like Corin Tucker’s voice, but here? It’s like this is the setting it’s always been looking for.
D: And that’s some hotshit drumming for sure.
C: [dancing] I can’t believe it, but seriously, one must acknowledge what is happening here. This is higher than High on Fire. They are Queens of a more stoned Age!
D: An unheard of power monster, that singlehandedly, forever eradicates the notion that women have no balls.
C: [Gives puzzled look at D, then continues] I cannot account for what I am hearing. Cannot assimilate. How did this happen? Seriously. It’s a lidflipper, a real wig-frier. Can you name another band that seven albums into their career, supernovaed into this kind of territory? This is so rare. It reminds me of something that Michael Moorcock was saying the other day: “In the ‘60s, Dylan, Beatles, Beefheart et al. were all thinking on their feet, if they were thinking at all. While Dylan remained a Guthrie sound-a-like he had no real credibility (although he did bring Guthrie a wider audience, I’d guess). As Dylan dumped the Guthrie cloak, especially when he went electric, he gained authenticity. The less like Buddy Holly the Beatles sounded, the better they got. Eventually, you went into a studio not knowing what you’d come out with.” I think that may be what’s happened here with Sleater-Kinney. Maybe this record just happened. Maybe we are witnessing the joy of unplanned, no-thinking, no-rules spontaneous creativity, of these three amazing women following and trusting their muse, confident in their abilities and each other to give it a trust that most other artists cower from giving these days? In any event, it’s an extraordinary creative breakthrough record made at precisely the right time by artists working at the peak of their collective rock power. That they are women in a stupid, male-centric culture doing this makes the whole thing even more important and inspirational. I want to go door-to-door like an evangelist for this record: “Hey sisters and brothers, have you heard the Good News?” But the old doors don’t exist after this album. They’ve all been blown open.
D: Word to your moms, Sleater-Kinney drop bombs.

Oneida
The Wedding
(Jagjaguwar)
C: New one from New York underground trance/art-rockers Oneida: a favorite around the Arthur offices for years now.
D: [Listening to “The Eiger”] They’re using strings?!?
C: Yes! This sounds amazing. The songs are catchier, there’s more dynamics in the structure, the arrangements are more varied. And the production is just nuts. This is another huge artistic breakthrough. Damn…
D: Something is in the air… Something good. A new scent.
C: Shit! Listen to how the keys get sucked out of the soundfield [on “Lavender”]… Listen to the almost-Espers psych-folk that is “Run Through My Hair.” “High Life” is an optimistic vocal over a total Kraftwerk/Cluster/La Dusseldorf electronic bed that changes into something more organic… “Did I Die” is like Wolf Eyes without the noise, [chuckles] whatever that means. Wow. I can’t believe this album…
D: It’s true, it’s beautiful.
C: Listen to how massive the drums are on “Spirits” and “Heavenly Choir,” and how majestic the guitar is. These are their “Kashmir”’s, their “When the Levee Breaks,” and this album is their Physical Graffiti…
D: We are in the presence of genius, manifesting itself.

Angels of Light
The Angels of Light Sing “Other People”
(Young God)
D: Who is this? It sounds like Johnny Cash with the Up With People choir or the Beach Boys singing backup.
C: It’s the new album by Angels of Light. You know, Michael Gira from Swans’ new band. Well, if you can be on “new” when you’re on your fourth album.
D: The most brutal, dealing-with-ultimate-things band ever?
C: None other. He moved away from that a while ago, but this one is sort of the moment when it all comes together for him. [listening to “Destroyer”] Listen to how amazing this: is that a mellotron, or strings? [Skipping through the record] And glockenspiels? Shit! This whole record is soaked in the most resplendent bittersweet textures, never getting sappy or fruity or corny in any way. Not an easy thing to do, for anyone. And for it to come from the man who wrote “Raping a Slave”? Fuck…
D: [smiling beatifically] I am shocked, once again, in a pleasantly happy way. He’s aging well, into something elegant and striking in his own way. Kinda like Nick Cave.
C: It is really beautiful, and represents the third risky, radical creative breakthrough THAT SUCCEEDS we’ve heard this session. So exciting to be in the presence of artists when they’re going for it like this.

Boredoms
Seadrum/House of Sun
(Vice)
C: And now…would you believe…? NEW BOREDOMS! Yoshimi sings a capella…and then this…[wave of drums crashes in]
D: [musing] We appear to be living in magical times.
C: 45 minutes, two tracks, completely different from each other. It says one thing: “Fuck off (in a good way). We are Boredoms. And we cannot be denied. We will now share this with you.”
D: Please place this on infinite repeat while I unclog every stuck nerve ending in my elderly body. Music…music…music…Boredoms… Boredoms… is…life.

Brain Donor
Brain Donor
(MisterE/Revolver)
D: I don’t whether to pump my fist in the air or punch myself in the face.
C: Who would have guessed that Julian Cope would be making this sort of rubber-burning rock’n'roll what, 25 years down the line?
D: His head is out on the highway. And he’s stuck in sixth gear.
C: Julian calls them a stupor group. Doggen, the guitarist, plays in Spiritualized, as does drummer Kevlar. They wear neon facepaint and have empty thought balloons over their heads. They’re like the Rutles version of the Stooges: songs that are just as good, with better lyrics. Dig the song titles: “My Pagan Ass,” “Shaman U.F.O.”
D: [shimmying] My pagan ass! My pagan ass!
C: This is a compilation CD, selections from the Brain Donor’s two previous discs that were only released in the UK. Now America can welcome Brain Donor with open heads.
D: If these gentlemen are really donating their brains, I need to go to the brain bank and get one.

Turbonegro
The ResErection DVD
(MVD)
D: Aha, Turbonegro! “IT’S DEATH TIME!” They ARE rock ‘n roll! In the gay sailor style of Norway!
C: I will explain D’s outburst of Turbonegroist passion to the gentle readers of Arthur.
D: [muttering] So arrogant!
C: I heard that, D. And I will remember. Oh yes. I will remember.
D: [muttering] So smug!
C: Shut up and let me do the thing that needs to be done. [to tape recorder] This is Turbonegro’s Some Kind of Monster, the story of “how the bandmobile went off the road in 1998,” it says here, and what happened next. Could Hank von Helvete recover from heroin addiction and other assorted mental problems and don the black cape and Alice Cooper makeup again? Could the Absolut-guzzling band of self-professed “death punk” godfathers successfully re-buddy after four years apart? Would anyone care? Would—
D: OF COURSE PEOPLE CARE! This is Turbonegro! [singing] “Whoa-oh-oh/I’ve got ERECTION!”
C: The other difference between Turbonegro and Metallica is that Turbonegro seem quite comfortable being gay. I do not know if they are actually gay, but they play a gay band onstage and on camera with a great deal of affection and commitment and sense of humor. Fear of a Gay Planet is the general concept.
D: [Watching Hank show off a vat of cod liver oil outside the local maritime museum where he worked for a couple of summers.] Look at this! This is better than A Mighty Wind!
C: We visit Hank’s seaside sanctuary, where he lived for four years, rebuilding his life. “The only thing that kept me alive were my grandparents and my belief in God,” he says, then compares himself to Napoleon in exile: “I was supposed to be emperor of Europe, but I’m kept prisoner of reality.” We do not know if he is joking, which is how the entire film is, it’s as outrageously straight-faced as comic atrocities like Alan Partridge or The Office or League of Gentlemen or—I’m feeling generous—Neil Hamburger in his most sublimely awful, banal moments. That kind of rare, supergenius thing. I don’t know if I’m doing it justice…? [looking on screen] But Hank is now showing us around his hometown: “Let’s stroll in the realm of dry fish…”
D: I still think they based their entire sound on the Dictators!
C: Ha! You’re right! Hank’s real stage name should be Gruesome Dick Manitoba.
D: They are like the Hives’ evil reverse twins.
C: The Hives give 1000% every time, but as Happy Tom says here, Turbonegro give 50, maybe 60 percent. The interviewer asks if they may get 80% this time? “I don’t think that’s ever happened,” says Tom.
D: It’s a cracker! A classic! [Thinks hard.] It’s This Is Spinal Tap—by Chris Morris!!!

BBQ
Tie Your Noose
(Bomp!)
C: Now here’s a one-man garage band, do it and doing it well. Makes the two-piece garage band seem passé.
D: Does that mean he practices in a one-car garage?
C: Fire up the grill, this is a fatback slab of that raunchy, rib-rocking goodness. It’s like Bob Log III and Doo Rag in one.
D: Yes, in one big barbecue pit! Which he probably dug out behind his garage.
C: “Don’t Hold Out On Me” is the hit.
D: I think it sounds like someone singing the Hives in the shower. Really, it’s that good.
C: Nice to see such a fine release on the Bomp! imprint, furthering the cause of Bomp! honcho Greg Shaw, may he rock in peace.

Radar Bros.
The Fallen Leaf Pages
(Merge)
C: One of Los Angeles’ subtle treasures, and group that explains the pastoral side to LA that only residents really know about. This music has a calming, benign presence.
D: It gives me the feeling I get from “Dear Prudence.” Or my very favorite song, “Something In The Air” by Thunderclap Newman.
C: The Radars absolutely own this gentle shuffle tempo. But I think they’d loan it out to anyone who wanted it. Although sometimes the lyrics are darker than you’d expect…
D: I believe he just sang, “I am the stable in which the ass has laid his manure.”
C: Walk, don’t run to pick this up. Or better yet, lope.
D: Yes, amble on.
C: There is something about this that puts me in the mindset of lightning bugs in a jar. And the most wistful of Muppets songs. You can always count on Jim Putnam to take one great whistling solo per album, and he comes through here again.
D: This truly Floyd-ian, I mean Mettle-era Floyd. The dreaminess of it, it’s positively molassesfying.
C: David Gilmour is on the phone, says the Floyd is playing the Pyramids again, and will the Radars kindly open? Could happen.
D: Should happen.

Lee Perry
I Am the Upsetter four-cd boxset
(Trojan/Sanctuary)
D: “Satan is public enemy number one.” You know, this may be my favorite music have to do with organized religion.
C: Sweet soul singing by Max Romeo. The production on these… it’s like all these sounds aren’t allowed to exist anymore, I can’t imagine a contemporary producer getting anywhere near this. Anyways, since Lee Perry was rediscovered about ten years ago, there’ve been a lot of re-releases and vaultpilations…including the Arkology three-disk set which was a big hit with a lot of people. But this is really special—it’s digestible, it’s got all the great shit on it, it covers everything from the obvious Bob Marley and the Wailers stuff to cuts even dedicated Scratch diggers may never have heard before—like “All Over” by Eccols & Neville, which is actually Clancy Eccols and Bunny Wailer. Spans 1968 to 1978, so much went by, the world changed so much. So many artists went from next-level to the pits, but Lee Perry maintained this wonderful, playful energy…
D: I am a great admirer of the well-played unison horn line.
C: [listening to "Black Panta"] I mean what’s going on here? There is a spatial distance in dub music, a relationship between the listener and the music that’s just completely, profoundly different from any other kind of music.
D: It’s like growing a third ear from the center of your forehead.
C: Seeing a stretch of the color spectrum that you’d never been shown before. I love that there are all these skank songs on here. [Looking sternly at D.] Ahem. The ORIGINAL meaning of skank, which just means Lee is gonna scratch a certain rhythm that’s gonna make you dance the Jamaican version of the funky chicken…
D: [with eyes closed] The echo makes the music sound like it’s talking to itself. For someone who uses so much delay, he certainly was on time.
C: I always thought Lee Perry’s physique, short and lean, so much finely toned power in his arms, was represented in his music. I always think of him as the producer, working the board, making compact energetic music. Totally dynamic. Full presence, just infusing everything. All sides of him are there: the playful side, the mischievous side, the judgmental side, the father side where he puts his child in there, crying. Wailing. Pleading. And mixing that in to a song that says “for god’s sake give more justice to the people”? Amazing.

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti
Worn Copy
(Paw Tracks)
C: [listening to opening instrumental] This sounds like one of those cheap John Carpenter scores, recorded underwater. In the wrong kind of water.
D: Cheese is not a virtue, except in certain hands.
C: These are not the right hands. [listening to “Jules Lost His Jewels”] Although…you know, some of this is actually pretty catchy. If only Mr. low-budget Wings here weren’t so stuck on recording underwater with such tragically awful sounding instruments.
D: So judgmental, you are. I think this might be a grower not a shower. [grabbing the CD out of the player] I will examine it more at home and report back next issue!

Animal Collective and Vashti Bunyan
Prospect Hummer EP
(Fat Cat)
C: Playful, rules-less, suffused with love…. Vashti and the AC boys harmonizing on these quiet little melodies… Whistles and phased waves of glowing acoustic guitars and… Is that a steel drum? Whoa. These guys are on such a hot streak right now. So wonderful to hear Vashti’s voice again, last year’s duet with Devendra wasn’t enough. This is a wower. You could play it for anyone: children, grandparents, sullen teenagers even…
D: [listening to title track] I think the oompa-loomas are coming.
C: Unbelievable dub-like production—there’s a real unique sense of space and place here too. Where do these people live? Somewhere in Sweden, Lee Perry awakens from his slumber…
D: [blissed out] It’s womblike. Feels like coming home from the greatest picnic ever.

Colleen
The Golden Morning Breaks
(The Leaf Label)
C: …And this is what it feels like when you’re in REM sleep, later. Music in miniature.
D: Mini-minimalism. Beatless.
C: So still. Satieists. A phased, handcranked music box. If a Joesph Cornell box had a sound… Wind chimes, plucked guitar figures.
D: Very cinematic. Makes me think of Bjork, Kubrick, City of Lost Children, Jeunet/Caro.
C: Colleen are (is?) Aphex Twin’s ambient grandchildren. Like Eno was for a while, Aphex Twin is no longer a man, he’s an adjective.
D: This is what I always hoped ambient music would sound like. Don’t throw the baby out with analog bubblebathwater!
C: … [pauses] Can I have some of whatever it is that you are on?

The Geto Boys
The Foundation
(Rap-A-Lot)
D: Who is this?
C: You know who this is.
D: The Geto Boys! Scarface, Willie D, and Bushwick Bill, together forever. Unless my mind is playing tricks on me, which is has been known to do.
C: You were right the first time, D. You may now take off the blindfold.
D: After all these years, they certainly are keeping it gangsta.
C: And yet it’s soul music. From the soul, of the soul, and the slower songs on here are actually sweet soul music.
D: You know, when I’m feeling homicidal, this music calms me down.
C: I appreciate that. More than you know.
D: Well if I didn’t know, now I know!

Neil Hamburger
Great Moments at Di Presa’s Pizza House
(Drag City)
C: On the other hand, when I’m feeling suicidal…I think of Neil Hamburger, self-proclaimed “TV comic” and “American funnyman.” [Listens to CD for a few minutes.] Well, this is a new low. Which is what you catch yourself thinking every time there’s a new Neil Hamburger album, but by now it’s clear that there is no bottom.
D: What is this? [to stereo] Tell some jokes already!
C: Heckling a CD is not the same as heckling a performer, unfortunately. One thing you can say about Neil Hamburger is he’s remarkably consistent. No matter where he plays—an expat nightclub in Malaysia, a greyhound racing park in Tempe, Arizona, a pipe organ-equipped pizza parlor in Northern California—he’s always just terrible, just desperately unfunny. You know what you’re getting with Neil Hamburger. The only surprise is how much worse he’s managed to get since the last time you heard him.

Yellow Pills: Refill
(Numero Group)
C: 33 power-pop 45s by super-obscure one-shot artists, compiled with mindblowing meticulousness and liner note cleverness by an obvious labor-of-lover: this guy Jordan Oaks, who used to do a zine called Yellow Pills. I gotta cop to it, I never heard of the zine, never heard any of these songs.
D: Man! A lot of these really should have been hits. Especially the Toms? As Dr. John and the Meters would say, They were in the wrong place.
C: This drawing of Jon Brion is incredible, when he was like 14 and a member of a band called The Bats.
D: I don’t know about this one…
C: If you don’t like one song, another will be along in two minutes. You’ll be able to find a seat on one of them. [pauses] You know D, we’ve received a lot of letters asking why we are called C & D…
D: We choose to remain anonymous.
C: I bet these bands didn’t want to be anonymous.
D: Well… life’s like that, sometimes.

The Ponys
Celebration Castle
(In the Red)
D: Must be The Ponys. Cuz it sounds like Voidoids and Television.
C: Yep. Less Hellish than before, though, I think.
D: [listening to the chorus of “Glass Conversation”] Now they are rocking!
C: And check out this guitar sound. It doesn’t matter what they play on their solos—although what he’s playing is cool—the sounds they are getting are enough for me. Yes! The solo on “Discoteca” is really simple but it SOUNDS wonderful. That’s like their second signature, after the dude’s voice. [listening to “Today”] Wow this goes into a blues thing in the middle, very cool. No wonder they were on that Junior Kimbrough tribute record, it’s all making sense now.
D: [philosophical] This is more like the first album than the first one was… [listening to “We Shot This World,” shaking head like a tumbler.] The difficult second album is not so difficult for the Ponys!
C: Our little Ponys have all grown up.

Spoon
Gimme Fiction
(Merge)
D: Sounds like the Kinks in a troubled mood.
C: But look they pull out a chorus—a melody like what the Walkmen wish they could do, and I don’t mean to damn with faint praise there.
D: Great album opener.
C: It’s like they’re gonna confront the Kinks Klone critique head-on and then go from there… This is their best shit ever, and their shit has always been fresh. The songs are better put together… listen to the counter-melodies and harmonies… even strings… Like the Left Banke, except not so fussy, or even SF Sorrow-era Pretty Things… Tight psychedelic-tinged upbeat soul rock. This song [“I Turn My Camera On”] is total disco! When he does falsetto, he sounds like what Beck tries to do. If they has strings swoop in we’d have Chic…
D: Maybe they’re saving that for the next album, which I am already eagerly awaiting.
D: [listening to “My Mathematical Mind”] Another cinematic record. There is a hint of John Barry in the air. I picture Oliver Reed in 1965 on the prowl, on the way to a party, or the scene of a crime, whichever he reaches first. Americans are making great English music again!

Weird War
Illuminated by the Light
(Drag City)
C: In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Weird Warlord Ian Svenonius is an Arthur contributor.
D: That guitar tone sounds straight from a robot’s butt. Is he playing one of those keyboard guitar things?
C: It’s called a keytar.
D: I don’t know if I can take anyone playing a keytar seriously. I believe this is supposed to be funky but it does not swing.
C: Svenonius output always divides the crowd. I dig some of this album, but the real undeniable gemwork here is the album art, which is like a Neapolitan version of what Pedro Bell used to draw for Funkadelic LPs.
D: Yes, keep the great artwork, but maybe they should head in a different direction musically.
C: I’ve heard they’re going to do a Grateful Dead tribute called Weir War.
D: …
C: Sorry.

Death in Vegas
Satan’s Circus
(Drone)
D: New Death in Vegas? Excellent! That song with Hope Sandoval and the Indian violinist on the last album was a high point global civilization.
C: No guest vocalist this time.
D: It’s very krautrockian. And Human League. And Gary Numan, the guy that we all hated, because he had bad teeth… always trying to combine the robotic and emotive. He had that pretentious super-serious look mixed with looking like a yuppie. It was bound to fail. Now he’s a cult hero. Just goes to show that every shit you throw against the wall might come down as gold. Write that down!
C: [Writing it down] Very Cluster. And the second track here…listen to this…
D: THEY ARE COVERING KRAFTWERK’S ‘TRANS EUROPE EXPRESS’!?! Unbelievable! That’s balls!
C: These guys have got to be total stoners. They are just fucking around, having fun. You can hear how much they’re digging this.
D: Roedelius, Harmonia, all those guys… I can hear this being played in a German countryside on a nice Sunday afternoon. Very evocative, simplistic—I love it. There’s a track called “Heil Xanax”? Another one called “Sons of Rother”? I give up. They are the victors.
C: The record is so committed to the style.
D: To me, this could be played in a stadium. “Reigen” is a German word for the old-world, Middle Ages a come-together, a joyous come together where you dance around the maypole, so there’s a Wicker Man aspect to it. This shows insane respect and love for a very specific genre. They are saying, Excuse us while we pay tribute to our love.

Josephine Foster
Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You
(Locust Music)
C: Speaking of Wicker Man.
D: Speaking of Jefferson Airplane.
C: Speaking of genius.
D: Speaking of…speechless.
C: She’s been in Arthur before, but… Damn. This is my favorite work yet by one of my favorite voices in the world. Her most conventional songwriting, really, with fantastic arrangements and playing. All by Josephine herself. It’s not harsh like Born Heller could be, not as histrionic as last year’s Supposed album was… I think people will now find out what the big deal is…
D: So many big deals right now, most of them female!
C: I know. Feels like a new dawning, a new birthing, a new burst of feminine energy is going on, doesn’t it?
D: Yes.
C: I can’t wait to hear what happens next…

REVIEWS BY C and D (and E…)

THE GRIS GRIS
The Gris Gris
(Birdman)
C: Okay D, we’re gonna start this one off with something I know you will dig—the debut album from San Francisco psych-rock three-piece Gris Gris, who are led by that kid Greg Ashley, whose solo record we dug last year.
D: Yes I remember Mr. Ashley well! He is the new Syd Barrett and [listening to keyboard run] he is advising us to join him on an interstellar overdrive magic carpet ride.
C: The carpet’s in the garage, and it’s kind of greasy. It’s not used, it’s vintage.
D: Rock bands were doing this in garage basements in the Bay Area of ‘60s, after they got their first Yardbirds records. And all across Milwaukee in 1987. Mister Ashley is singing his ASH off! I also like the simplicity of the drumming.
C: …Milwaukee?

THE BLACK KEYS
Rubber Factory
(Fat Possum)
C: Third album from Akron’s finest, once again produced by themselves.
D: [listening] I am not sure if they needed to make another album on their own. There’s not enough progression here.
C: It’s more mellow than the last one. But I like it. Listen to the solo here on “Desperate Man.” And this one on “Stack Shot Bully.”
D: Hmm, definite burning there. This is a 7.5 moving up to 9.3…
C: And this Kinks cover, “Act Nice and Gentle” is great, really blissed out, reminds me of going down to the river in the summertime. I didn’t think I ever wanted to hear another take on “Summertime Blues,” but…
D: That’s a rocker with extra thrusters, baby! It still is summertime and yes I still have those blues! Even though it says “do not duplicate,” can I duplicate it?

THE FAINT
Wet From Birth
(Saddle Creek)
C and D: [blank stares]
C: Um… Pretty belabored electro dance new wave blah blah.
D: I am in Berlin getting down with the transvestites.
C: I see 16-year-old girls dancing poorly.
D: Who are they? I wish he woulda left the transformer effect at home.
C: They come from Omaha. This is their second album.
D: Really??? [listening more closely] They’ve finally written a song good enough for Victoria’s Secret commercial. Congratulations!
C: Maybe we just don’t have an ear for this stuff, but, sheesh, this is painfully shitty. Crap new wave is a joke that didn’t need to be told, ever again.

MOUSE ON MARS
Radical Connector
(Thrill Jockey)
D: This is so bad in such an obvious way. They don’t even number their tracks! So inconsiderate.
C: What, you’ve never heard of glitch in Milwaukee or Berlin?
D: Yes yes, but this… Mouse on Mars have lost it. This trying-to-be-funky-and-clever thing is not working in their favor.
C: You are not happy with the Mouse’s progress.
D: They are progressing to a place where nobody wants to dance. And I am a dancing kind of fellow!

TWILIGHT SINGERS
She Loves You
(One Little Indian)
C: An album of covers by Greg Dulli’s Twilight Singers project. He used to lead the Afghan Whigs, about four decades or so ago.
D: Never heard of ‘em. I am not a fan of the ‘90s.
D: Really? [listening to cover of “Hyperballad”] This sounds like U2. Agh, can’t stand it. Even the guitar is ringing! Can we please listen to something I might like?
C: Dulli does sound like Bono when he tries to hit those trailing Bjorknotes.
D: Is that her voice in the background? [sarcastic] Are they holding hands? This is ghastly! [listening to cover of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”] Now he sounds like Marianne Faithful. I’m getting a drink. Okay, maybe three drinks. [heads for kitchen]
C: I only like the songs where Mark Lanegan sings, really. This version of the blues “Hard Killing Floor” where Lanegan sings lead is all nice and charcoal and moonshine… But basically, I like this album more in concept than in execution. The world doesn’t need an easy listening MOR version of “A Love Supreme,” in my humble opinion.

THALIA ZEDEK
Trust Not Those In Whom Without Some Touch of Madness
(Thrill Jockey)
C: [to tape recorder] D’s in a bad mood, again! Sheesh. Okay, guess I’ll keep going here. This is the new album by the sublegendary Thalia Zedek, who lead the great lost rock ‘n roll band Come for many years. Unforgettable voice, jointly sponsored by Jameson’s and some devilry, I think. Like later Marianne Faithful, actually. Anyway, this is pretty straightahead sad-eyed twilight rock ‘n roll, with some violin on it, which of course sends me back to another lost-‘90s-rock-n-roll-band-with-a-great-female-singer: the Geraldine Fibbers. They also had a violin. Yep.

MIKE WATT
The Second Man’s Middle Stand
(Columbia)
C: Mike Watt from the minutemen and fIREHOSE and current Stooges bassist doing his first album in six years, a total concept piece about his near-terminal illness, plus Dante and one thousand and one other layers of meaning, played by a storming organ-drums-bass three-piece. 9 songs, with eight of them over 5:30, which means this earns Prog certification. Like a particularly smart Deep Purple, subbing out the ponderousness for some art-punk new-beat spastics, splatter and stutter. Do you need a lyric sheet to make sense of it? Yes you do.

PAUL WESTERBERG
Folker
(Vagrant)
C: One of the worst album titles in recent times, but let’s not hold that too much against it. Continuing in the ‘90s-semistar series here, the new solo album from the former singer of the Replacements, who were also doing traditional American rock ‘n roll when that wasn’t exactly called for by the times. Never really dug his solo work, but this is ridiculously good at what it’s doing: really melodic mid-tempo rock ‘n roll that you listen to at the gaspump and then hum the rest of the way home: kinda Oasis, actually, and kinda Tom Petty. And “Looking Up In Heaven” is gorgeous perfection. Yep.

RICH ROBINSON
Paper
(Keyhole Records)
D: [walks back into the room holding big coffee mug, mumbling to himself] People can’t tell you’re an alcoholic if you drink it out of a coffee cup…
C: [oblivious] Solo album from the guitarist for the Black Crowes, who are on some kind of trial separation. Very in-the-pocket, and lovely harmonies, just solid rock ‘n roll songs for longhairs washing their VW bus on a Sunday afternoon.

THE WHIRLWIND HEAT
Flamingo Honey EP
(Dim Mak)
C: This is the new EP from the Detroit band Jack White called the closest we’re gonna get to a Devo in this generation.
D: Hmph. I will be the judge of that!
C: 10 songs, 10 minutes, each song almost exactly one minute.
D: [listening to “The Meat Packers”] Sounds like when the White Stripes covered all those Beefheart songs on that Sub Pop 7-inch.
C: You’re totally right! Good call
D: These guys sound a little too smug to me. They’re just good enough that they’re getting laid.
C: I like conceptual limits, generally. Sometimes it gets you out of a creative jam, makes you go into a new space you wouldn’t’ve otherwise thought of. It necessitates invention and problem solving, keep you from getting too set in your ways. Standard John Cage theory, right? Brian Eno…
D: These guys should work with Eno!
C: He did produce Devo’s first album, didn’t he? Hmm. Perhaps it can be arranged.

COLONEL CLAYPOOL’S BUCKET OF BERNIE BRAINS
The Big Eyeball in the Sky
(Prawn Song Records)
C: Okay, I think I’ve had enough Primus for one lifetime but this looked interesting. It’s Claypool on bass, Bernie Worrell from P-Funk on keyboards, Buckethead on guitar and Brain on drums. Like one of those old Axiom jams that Bill Laswell used to put together back in the early ‘90s with Bootsy and all them.
D: I used to listen to Primus. They had one good album, I don’t remember what it was called but it certainly wasn’t Pork Soda. That was the worst.
C: [cracking himself up] The wurst, you mean, ha ah ha!
D: …
E: [entering room] Hey guys, what’s going on? This sounds great!
C: Whoa. The notorious E dares to enter Arthur’s inner sanctum.
D: We have not seen a woman here in sometime.
C: But your presence here has been foretold.
E: You guys might have more company if you guys didn’t lock the door all the time!
C: Sorry… So, you really like this, E?
E: I love Les Claypool’s voice. I admire his integrity. And can you say “Pork Soda” without laughing? I think not.
C: Er… I believe no one should imitate Zappa. Well not like this, at least.
D: I do like things that are circus-y. It’s like a Fellini movie, you’re waiting for the transvestite to pop out of the tent…
C: I think I’d like it more if I was 16 and playing Nintendo.
E: This is great. What’s your problem, C? If it said “Ween” on the box, you would totally dig it. They’re clearly incredibly smart and having fun.
C: Hmm. Okay, maybe if I was 14.
D: This is totally late Residents and is making me want to get very high right now. I could get a lot of cleaning done to this.

ANTIBALAS
Who Is This America?
(Ropeadope)
E: Fela? Tony Allen? This is cool, of course.
D: Is this from Nigeria? If I had to DJ a wedding, I would definitely play this. You can do any kind of dance to it, there’s so much going on. You can meringue to it.
C: But it’s not Fela Kuti, it’s Antibalas, that group from New York trying to bring back that original Afrobeat. They’re so good now, I can’t tell the difference, really.
D: Don’t they have like 86 people in their band or something?
E: [dancing] More like 20! It’s between them and the Polyphonic Spree for largest band in the Arthur world…
C: I have to say that as good as they are, their lyrics still aren’t there. Fela’s was always really biting and clever. Most of this is too straightforward, there’s none of that really cutting, mordant wit.
D: [dancing with eyes closed] Who cares, this is phenomenal! It makes me want to put my ass into it!
C: [to tape recorder] He said he was a dancing fellow, and now he is proving it.
E: Hey, did you guys hear that Rick James died today?
C: A lot of people owe him big time.
D: Especially those guys who had girlfriends who became superfreaks!!!

MELVINS/LUSTMORD
Pigs of the Roman Empire
(Ipecac)
E: Now for something completely different.
D: Fudgetunnel?
C: Is it Godflesh?
E: It’s actually the Melvins with Lustmord.
C: Awesome dark sludge from some creepy condemned industry at the edge of town.
E: [listening to “The Bloated Pope”] I think this music is really erotic! Much more than easy listening or slow jam, because it’s dark and there’s an element of mystery.
C: And the fifth song is called “Pink Bat,” which is almost as good a title as “Pork Soda,” eh, E?
E: [smiling] Yes, exactly.
D: It’s not my favorite kind of music, but I could scrub the walls to it.
E: Hey D, what are you drinking in that coffee cup? It doesn’t smell like coffee…

LUCIFER RISING
Original soundtrack by Bobby Beausoleil
(Arcanum Entertainment)
C: Speaking of dark and mysterious, here is the original soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s legendary Lucifer Rising. The original composer was supposed to be Jimmy Page, but Anger ended up using this score by Bobby Beausoleil, an old Manson associate who recorded it in the ‘70s while in prison…
D: UNBELIEVABLY black! Black turned to 100, with lizard eyes. But subtle and beautiful, somehow. This is a high point of human culture.

WOLF EYES
Burned Mind
(Sub Pop)
D: Throbbing Gristle!!!
C: Yeah kind of, right? It’s actually Wolf Eyes, who we reviewed last ish.
E: [reading song titles] “Black Vomit.” “Urine Burn.” And of course, “Stabbed in the Face.” I think they need to get some grooves going. That’s their problem.
D: I used to go see a lot of bands like this. Then I stopped.
C: You have to see it in a small space where the sound of just overwhelming and crushing and inescapable and you are just being confronted with it. I can’t really picture listening to it at home—
E: Me either.
C: —but maybe that’s my problem?

HOPE OF THE STATES
The Lost Riots
(Sony)
D: [disgusted] Is this the new Billy Corgan album?
E: Ouch.
C: It’s Hope of the States, young band, they’re being hyped as the greatest thing since buttered bread and bangers by the British press. One of the guitarists hanged himself in the studio before they finished the album.
D: [listening to “Don’t Go to Pieces”] I have a theory about the suicide. Maybe he did it because he heard the singing on this song!
E: [groans] Double-ouch. No need to be so callous, D. You might want to lay off the vodka a bit… But yes, this singing is really awful.
C: I thought I’d like this because they’re supposed to be dark and political and grand but it just sounds like the dreary precious bits of Radiohead. No thank you.
E: Hype of the States!

SIGNER
The New Face of Smiling
(Carpark)
E: My Bloody Valentine plus post-rock.
C: One of those doesn’t belong. And My Bloody Valentine always had good melodies.
E: I’d give it some more spins, but yes, this is one for the connoisseurs of shoegazism or whatever it’s called.

THE DELGADOS
Universal Audio
(Chemikal Underground/Transdreamer)
E: Reminds me of Belly. Or Suzanne Vega. “Oh woe is me, I’ve got a spot on my blouse”-type stuff. [in teenage girl voice] “Tori Amos was the one person who could understand my heartbreak.”
C: I think it’s sort of pretty, but yeah it is another record from these Scots who never change their mood from guarded pessimism.
E: This gives women a bad name. Let’s listen to that RTX album so I can feel better about women in rock.

THEE SHAMS
(Fat Possum)
C: [digging around in CD pile] I can’t find the RTX. That figures. It’s already been stolen from the Arthur offices.
D: Hey man, don’t look at me.
C: So anyway here’s thee Shams. Young band on Fat Possum label.
E: Sounds like the Standells, recorded with modern equipment.
D: Finally something I can dig here, I’ve been going NUTS!!! New garage rock to smash your beercans too!
E: They’re not doing anything new, but they’re doing it very well.
C: [thoughtfully] Seems like that’s what we’ve been saying about everything lately.

CRIME
San Francisco’s Still Damned
(Swami)
E: Vintage punk rock from ‘70s San Francisco.
D: “Baby you’re so repulsive!” If you don’t have it, buy it, this is awesome American history. It’s not that stupid staccato punk of the last 20 years, it’s closer to original rock ‘n’ roll. [spills drink] Coffee cups aren’t made to drink ice cubes out of.
C: Would you like a bib?
D: Only if I can have some lobster too!
E: This is really good shit, man. Why can’t people sound like this anymore? Oh, when punk was young.
D: You know why? Cuz now if someone gets punched in the face during a show, they have to quit! For a month! [everyone nods, sadly]
E: Okay, I’m outta here, guys. No more nostalgia for me! Tra la la.

THE LIBERTINES
The Libertines
(Rough Trade)
C: New one from the Libertines, England’s most troubled band. Somehow they made another record.
D: It’s pretty good for 1981. I just hope the next song is about his happy knickers.
C: Sassy! But seriously, this is good stuff, English beyond belief of course. Poetic skiffle mod punk rock n roll rockabilly with good riffs and close harmonies by young guys living the bohemian dream in the Old Smoke. [dreamily] It’s all very romantic…

MUSHROOM
Glazed Popems
(Black Beauty)
D: I can’t put my head around this. The cover makes it look like it’s a compilation of ‘60s Italian psychedelic softcore porn soundtracks.
C: It’s actually this band out of the Bay Area… Somewhere around Miles’ more out-there stuff in the ‘70s, when he was playing a keyboard.
D: Nervy. There’s a fine line between experimental and self-congratulation.
C: I dig it. There’s a lot of fine contemplative electric piano stuff on here too. More music for Sunday afternoons, drifting off into siesta after a couple of mint juleps…

FESTIVAL IN THE DESERT DVD
(World Village/Harmonia Mundi)
C: A full-length documentary about what may be the music festival in the world—out in the Sub-Saharan dunes in Africa, in Mali, near Timbuktu. Besides the nomads who live in the area, the only people there are people who’ve made a real effort to be there.
D: Look at those robes! The greens and blues really pop. [definitively] This is what people are supposed to do – sit around fires and talk and make music.

REVIEWS BY C and D

Fiery Furnaces
Blueberry Boat
(Rough Trade)
D: [extremely puzzled] Is this the Residents?!?
C: It’s Fiery Furnaces. Second album in one year. Usually when you say “difficult second album,” you mean it was hard for the artist. But this is actually hard on the audience!
D: [grimacing] I am not sure if I like this much.
C: It’s… it’s… it’s completely nuts. But: interesting nuts.
D: I remember them now! They were interviewed in Arthur. Brother and sister. But I thought they were blues-rocking New York people? What is all this synthesizer-ragtime stuff?!?
C: It’s like low-key prog. [looking at CD player] We’re in the ninth minute of the first song here… 13 songs, 75 minutes… The whole thing is a wigged-out concept album, man. I dig it.
D: [irritated] I do not have time for concepts! I am a ramblin’ man, that’s what I am.
C: Don’t spill your Dr. Pepper, Popeye. There’s a lot of good stuff on here, it’s just sorta tucked away in pockets within pockets in a large spangled coat of many prog colors.
D: This is too wacky and too wordy. [Brightens, listening to riff midway through second song] I like that, though. I think these guys may be too smart for their own good.
C: A singles-only edit of this album would be nice for the Short Attention Spanners out there…

Comets On Fire
Blue Cathedral
(Sub Pop)
C: The new one from Comets On Fire, full-on super-rock five-piece from the Bay Area. They keep the demons at bay.
D: Yes! Big super-blaster balls-nailed-to-the-wall heavy power rock from a space cannon!
C: Amazing, visionary wizardstuff. And they give you a break in the middle of songs—there’s these lighter sections, they’re even choogling here and there, mellowing the crunchy harsh.
D: [listening to keyboard-heavy “Pussy Footin’ the Duke.”] There is a taste of the prog here, too! But I don’t mind because the riffs are deep canyons and the singer is a yowler and the drums are mighty!
C: It’s like the best of Japanese power-rock plus Quicksilver Messenger Serivce or Meddle-era Pink Floyd plus Kiss. Album-of-the-year contender.
D: I am going to make a pilgrimage to this Blue Cathedral.
C: Which is right next door to the Acid Mothers Temple, no doubt.

The Reigning Sound
Too Much Guitar!
(In the Red)
D: The Reigning Sound! Mister Greg Cartwright! Long may he reign. I doff my beer in his general direction. Heartfelt thrashing songs with a zest for life!
C: [nodding head] The is one of those records that gives garage rock a good name. Which is pretty hard, considering there’s like 45,000 bands out there who are trying to do the same thing over the last three decades.
D: I am getting old. But I will get out my leather jacket for these guys. And stitch their name on it, as is my duty.
C: They’ve got actual songs, it’s not just the two-chord mono-grind smear. And listen to this ballad [“Funny Thing”]. If you’re not a connoiseur of this sort of stuff, it sound like something between the Stones and the Hives. And the Hives are taking them on the tour, so there you go.
D: Giving them that big Swedish stamp of approval!

The Concretes
The Concretes
(Astralwerks)
C: Speaking of the Swedes. A girl band…
D: They have the big Spector beat. A little Mazzy Star, don’t you think? [the chorus comes in on “Say Something New”] The Ronnettes! It cannot be! I am 9 years old again…
C: Yeah. A little Cardigans, perhaps: she doesn’t have the most unique voice, she’s not the greatest singer. But it’s pretty. A lot of this is pleasant music for cleaning house or driving with no traffic and the windows open on warm summer nights… And by coincidence “Warm Night” is my favorite song. It has a waltz rhythm and all these harmonies…
D: [listening] It has a sea chanty quality. Beautiful and SUPER-romantic. Ah, what goes on in the Swedish woods…
C: If there had been an ecstasy scene in the The Muppets Movie this is what it would have sounded like, and I mean that with all respect and seriousness.

Martina Topley-Bird
Anything
(Palm)
C: This reminds me of Morcheeba, and I know that isn’t fair, cuz Martina was with Tricky and they were first, but… Lady can sing okay, a hint of blues pain, acoustic guitars, brushed drums, ‘70s keyboard, lush strings. Yep, this is ad agency music.
C: Totally! I see the car commercial now. Volkswagen?
D: BMW, maybe.
C: Okay, let’s skip to the track with Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age and Mark Lanegan.
D: [listening] Eh. It’s Okay.
C: Well, at least this song has more energy…
D: [thinking deeply] I must say, I always preferred Portishead.
C: The texture of trip-hop stuff is just…worn out. Do we need another record of this stuff? Even Beth Gibbons has moved on.
D: That album she did last year was the most…
C: Yes! Out of Season, Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man, on Sanctuary. Arthur readers, just buy that instead. I weep openly when I listen to that record. But here…
D: I yawn openly.

The Obsessed
Incarnate
(Southern Lord)
D: [Looking at High Volume track listing] Stoner rock, but no Kyuss…? Hmm…
D: Gas Giant are gaseous. Hello, Monster Magnet?
C: They’re not on here either. But Clutch and Orange Goblin and Nebula are, and a ton of other longhaired stoner rock lifers.
D: [looking at the sleeve] Hidden Hand and High On Fire are on here!!! Let’s skip to those. High On Fire march on like warrior kings of peace!
C: Some of it’s like speedmetal but then there’s these weird chord sequences and that six-limbed drumming the dude does. Everything they do smokes. [smugly] And where there’s smoke, there’s High On Fire, ha ha.
D: You make yourself laugh. Now for Hidden Hand, “Falcon Stone.”
C: Your basic Hidden Handiwork. Solid riffage, a firm construction.
D: Wino’s new band, bringing the master pummeller once again! [opening record sleeve, with picture of girl with clothes falling off] Hmm, I like this centerfold, I mean record sleeve.
C: There’s some cool stuff on here, like the Suplecs track, but…
listen: Stoner rock lyrics are like the male versions of girls’ bad high school poetry. It would be cool if they’d trade lyric sheets. Then we’d get stoner rock with lyrics by Jewel. And adult contemporary with lyrics by Bad Wizard.
D: [distracted, gazing longingly at record sleeve] I really like this centerfold. I’ll be right back, I’ve got to to take care of something. [leaves room, taking sleeve with him]
C: Oh geez. I don’t believe this. Anyways… If Arthur readers want some classic heavy rock, the kind of stuff that begot this High Times comp, check out Incarnate, the new Obsessed archive job that compiles a gobload of ‘90s Wino & Company stuff that went lost or mal-released. Music for driving a bulldozer down Main Street to. Heavy is as heavy does…

Wolf Eyes
“Stabbed in the Face/Rat Floods” 12-inch
(Sub Pop)
C: [to tape recorder] Well, we’ve lost D to…um… Let’s just say… Um… Pornography claims another victim. Erotic imagery. [yelling] Tits ‘n’ Buds, bro! Whatever. Fortunately I am prepared to solider on alone. Arthur readers will recognize Wolf Eyes as a Bull Tongue perennial—well, they’ve somehow made it on to Sub Pop despite being pretty brutal and weird and just generally artfuck. For some reason I am reminded of Killdozer. Anyways “Stabbed in the Face” is angry vampire rock on a disco tape loop. Forget the Dead, this is the real skullfuckery. Beware! There’s blood in the grooves of this 45rpm record, which is why on Side 2 the thing locks into a repeater groove, sending the listener down the Wolfhole into a negatory dimension where one is bed-fed codeine by the leering nurse-corpse of Ronald Reagan.

The Fall
The Real New Fall LP…Formerly Country on the Click
(Narnack)
C: There’s little to be said here besides: the Fall are on a full-forward-rock mission again and your surrender is imminent. The guitars are propulsing, broken hip priest Mark E. Smith sounds wonderfully surly and declamatory, almost drifting into dreamtalk sometimes, the other cats in the band are singing some refrains and choruses and this is very important: you can dance to almost every song. It’s full of WFMU-world hits! You people know what I mean. If this were a young band, rather than one that’s been around since 1848, this would be the now-shit of rockcrit and fashion magazines and art schools across the planet. This is as much a return-to-form as Wire or Mission of Burma have done in the last few years: these original post-punk artniks are back on the trail, it can’t be rationally explained. [listening to “Sparta 2”] Shit’s positively magestic! [sighing] We are Fallstruck, once again.

Black Dice
Creature Comforts
(DFA Records)
C: Never really dug these guys and their electro-spazz-randomonica-epic trip before for some reason, although it sounded good in theory. This, though, I dig. I am a digger. I mean, “Cloud Pleaser” is a great title. People who dig early Tangerine Dream, and I mean very early, will dig this. Also some of the more out-there Popul Vuh stuff. It’s a strange mix of electronic stuff and abstracted organic noises with forward motion, enough rhythm for you to keep it on while you’re doing dishes, but enough weird noises and soundfloods and collagework for you to pay attention to it. Kinda meditative, actually… [To D, who has re-appeared] So, everything work out okay?
D: Yes, yes. [irritated, listening to “Treetops”] Do people get paid to do this?

M83
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
(Mute)
C: Mostly instrumental compositions with occasional sighs. Big and grand and emotional and beautiful. Sounds like it was fabricated by Tokyo-made cyborgs with tearducts, on vacation in France.
D: Like a darker Air… Dark Air should be their name!
C: Reminds me a bit of Casino Versus Japan, and Spiritualized too. Really lovely, hugely evocative, cinematic stuff.
D: Somebody alert Sofia Coppola!

Legendary Pink Dots
The Whispering Wall
(ROIR)
D: Hmm. Creepy creepy! Music for creepy crawling in dismal English towns.
C: Sort of a psychedelic haunted disco thing, yeah. Very stylish, but melodic too. They’ve been around forever but somehow I’ve never cottoned to them until now.
D: [listening to “A Distant Summer”] I like this. Such a strange, dislocated feel.
C: It’s ominous, sinister pop. Again, something that very much has its own feel. Crushed velvet, light rain, spooky carnivals…
D: A new record for all the pale people.

SUNN O)))
White2
(Southern Lord)
C: [reading the sleeve] It says here, “Maximum volume yields maximum results.” We better turn it up.
D: [smiling] Ahh. You can always count on SUNN 0)) for that maximum slow throb ambient guitar doom. They are the legendary black dots.
C: The first track is 14 minutes long! No drums, no vocals… Sonic qualudes. It’s so slow it isn’t even there. Totally enveloping.
D: It’s doom-bliss for your needy skull!

Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Label
(Numero Group)
C: 19 tracks from an an obscure Columbus, Ohio soul record label who put out a dozen 45s, one album and had a few regional hits during the early ‘70s. Normally I wouldn’t care, there’s got to be a zillion compilations like this out there, right? But…
D: [listening to Bill Moss’s “Sock It To ‘Em Soul Brother”] This is really something. This is as good as the JB’s!
C: When you hear stuff like this, it makes you realize how much luck plays a role in what songs make it into general public’s consciousnsess. Some of this stuff, you can tell why it didn’t go beyond being a regional hit—the voice isn’t unique enough, or the lyrics are prosaic, or whatever. But there’s no reason that most of these songs weren’t big hits, other than that they were recorded and released in Ohio rather than Detroit or New York or L.A. It’s tragic that this is all we’ll ever hear from these folks, because of an accident of geography and timing. Just listen to this: Ronnie Taylor’s “Without Love” is a stone cold church-organ classic from the opening second. What a riff, what a voice.
D: [listening to “Hot Grits!!!” by Elijah & the Ebonites] Incredible! Instant dance floor groove sensation! [very seriously] Listen to me when I tell you this: This is the best soul compilation I’ve heard in 20 years.
C: [dancing] I know what you mean. Damn!

REVIEWS BY C and D

Eagles of Death Metal
Peace Love Death Metal
(Rekords Rekords/AntAcidAudio)
C: [singing along to “Kiss the Devil”]: “Who’ll love the devil?/Who’ll love his song?/I will love the devil and his song!”
D: Ha! This is party-starting rock n roll music! They should’ve called it, “There’s Beer in the Fridge.
C: No doubt. Doubtless. No doubt about it. Doubt-free. [sings along:] “I will kiss the devil on his tongue!”
D: He is the male Peaches!
C: The singer-guitar player Jesse ‘the Devil’ Hughes has the best moustache going in rock, and he knows it. I can hear him now: “C & D, you’ve been rocked by The Moustache.” Have you seen his cape?
D: This cannot be. What year is this? It’s like Mick wearing the Omega at Altamont. Totally Rolling Stones.
C: Jesse is Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Josh Homme—he’s the guy from Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age—is just here to do Beat Number Three on every song and help shift some units. They say it’s “Canned Heat vocals with stripper beats” and you can’t beat that description so let’s not even gonna try. It’s a pretty raw recording, sounds like a rehearsal tape with all the talking.
D: We will have to subtract points for that.
C: Yeah, all that between-song tech talk is the rock equivalent of skits on hip-hop albums. Funny the first time, maybe, but after that?
D: Eagles of Death Metal, you were rocking the party, and then you’re talking amongst yourselves about when to come in on the beat?!? Thanks for fucking it up!
C: “Speaking in Tongues” is the coolest song. Can you hear that sound?
D: Is that a car honking?
C: It’s the CD! They mixed it in! Totally brilliant! [singing along] “Toot scoot! Boots! Scoot scoot!” I have no idea what he’s saying but I like it, I like it. I said, I like it.

Pink Grease
This Is for Real
(Mute)
C: Okay, let’s get this party started again…
D: It is the Cramps. Wait, it can’t be the Cramps. Is this that “Fire in the disco” band?
C: Not it’s not Electric Six, it’s Pink Grease. Which sounds like a nightmare lubricant. Really good name for this band…
D: [hearing the riff kick in o “Fever”:] Whoa! They’re the house band for a creepy kind of party.
C: This is music for the wasters, and their married friends who are tying one on again, just this once.
D: In the right circumstances, this could finish somebody off. This is music for that kind of party where you do something you regret for weeks. [musing] Possibly even for the rest of your life…
C: They’ve got a cool thing going on—garage rockin’, good drums, new touches when you don’t see it coming: saxophone, a good chorus, some slide guitar, an out-there keyboard solo. [dreamily] They should tour with the Dirtbombs and Eagles of Death Metal and Peaches and Ween…
D: Could someone tell me why there are so many good-rockin’ dance bands right now?

John Wilkes Booze
Five Pillars of Soul
(Kill Rock Stars)
C: Then again, there’s this.
D: “John Wilkes Booze”? Terrible name.
C: I know. I gave it some time on the hi-fi cuz of the booklet. I mean, how bad can a band that salutes, in text, at length, Albert Ayler, Marc Bolan, Yoko Ono and Citizen Tania be?
D: Very, very bad, from the sound of it!
C: Is this a Make-Up and Jon Spencer parody band? Talk about putting the high back in high-conceptualism.
D: ‘Five pillars of soul”?!? Fake soul is the worst!!!
C: I’m embarrassed for these people—they have some cool inspirations and ideas about what they want to do but they don’t have the chops or the instincts to pull it off yet. Maybe they’ll get better…
D: They’re from Indiana? HA HA HA HA HA !
C: I’d like to see them try this in New Orleans.

The Thermals
Fuckin’ A
(Sub Pop)
D: [Definitively:] Guided by Voices. But harder, with more of that old piledriver beat.
C: It’s actually a whole different band, a trio called the Thermals. I like ‘em. It’s urgent. Reminds me of Lee Renaldo from Sonic Youth, bashing away in his garage with the neighborhood teenagers cutting school. Oops, dude just knocked over the ten-speed.
D: [shaking head furiously] I just spilled my beer!
C: This guy’s got one of those voices where you don’t care if he doesn’t really sing. 12 songs, 28 minutes. No solos, but it’s not hardcore or screaming emoters. Just cool. He’s determined, he’s holding on.
D: These are high-energy super-tight anthems! Where’s the towel?
C: [singing along] “Anything you break, you can probably mend/Anything you can feel, you can feel again/Hold tight, remember today.” Shit, those are words to live by.
D: Wisdom from a man called Hutch Harris. Thank you, Thermals! Yo don’t have a moustache but you have rocked C & D!

Mission of Burma
ONoffON
(Matador)
C & D: [stunned silence]
C: How can it… How did they…
D: How can it be this good?
C: They haven’t made a record in 22 years… Some of the people in this issue of Arthur were born and grew into adults in the time between Mission of Burma albums.
D: They sound hungry and creative. [singing along] “Now I live inside the circle!”
C: Inside the circle, but still outside the box. How to describe the pleasures of Burma for the people…hmmm.. well, it IS guitar rock, it has melodies and punch and strange flair, and again, like that Thermals record, there’s a sense of no wasted breath, no gloss, no glamour, just direct intention-into-thought.
D: It’s like a greatest-hits record from the last 22 years, except not only were these songs not hits, they weren’t even released!

The Icarus Line
Penance Soiree
(V2)
C: I saw these guys last year. Their singer reminded me of Richard Ashcroft in the vintage Verve days, when they were at their most cosmic and loose and desolate and swaggering… 1995… Skinny dude with cheekbones, just GONE, going for it—
D: [hears guitar break in on “Up Against the Wall”] YES!
C: —amidst the maelstrom. This one is called “Spit On It.“ Okay, this is what you call RIGHTEOUS SQUALL. Mixed by Alan Moulder, who did stuff with My Bloody Valentine, so there you go…
D: [laughing] Alan Moulder spat on it! That’s holy spit. The old Moulder grease…
C: [listening to “Spike Island”] See, and just when you think it’s all shaped noise, here comes a song with a solid, almost disco rhythm and a guitar refrain—something to pull you, something to grasp onto.
D: They’re an L.A. band. There’s a little Jane’s Addiction in them, isn’t there? Especially in the vocals!
C: That’s true. But Perry always had something interesting to say, I don’t know about these guys, I can’t understand a single word he’s singing.
D: He’s hiding behind the Wall of Squall.
C: Then again… [listening to the beginning of the 9:07-long “Getting Bright at Night”] Well, here we go.
D: They bring it down to earth so they can go back into space!
C: I just want to tell the people that at 6:15 in this song, this simple thing happens that makes you love rock n roll turned up to overwhelming. I know we were talking about finishing people off earlier, but maybe this is the real Finisher right here.
D: Right now, my ears love me.
C: Searched, destroyed. Now let’s see if they can write a song on an acoustic guitar.

The Secret Machines
Now Here Is Nowhere
(Reprise)
C: Well, they’ve got a good drum sound, that’s certain. But…um… Is he going to do that same tempo for 9 minutes?
D: Sounds like it. I think I’ll be needing to smoke some more of those special cocktails for this one. [Leaves room, returns happier.] Ah, now it’s changing. This is good. They’re originally from Texas, this really takes me there, out to the nudist lakes, drinking some Shiners, laying back in the sun with your girl, nobody around, music coming up over the sand from the box, lookin’ up and just tripping out to the great big… big I don’t know..
D: The big Big.
C: Yep…
C: [repeating lyrics to “Road Leads Where It’s Led” ] “We communicate by semaphore/No language/We’ve got flags of our own.” I like that.
D: They’re so laidback, they’re almost out of the pocket. A big cinematic sound with lots of air between the different sounds…
C: They’ve been watching Zabriskie Point, I‘m guessing.
D: They’ve definitely been visiting the dark side of the moon. Especially on this song [“Pharaoh's Daughter”].
C: You know it. “Breathe, breathe in the air.” [listening to the concluding/title track] There’s the Neu/Can/Kraftwerk motorik rhythm, done right–this is like Flaming Lips used to sound sometimes, back when they’d let it out a little more when Ronald was in the band… [listening to the song explode around 7:00] Yes!
D: Big but not pompous, psychedelic but not goofy. Yes! I nominate these guys to do a co-headline tour with The Icarus Line.
C: Good stuff from secret machines and special humans. Thank you again, Texas.

The Veils
The Runaway Found
(Rough Trade)
D: Echo & the Bunnymen?
C: Ha! He DOES have a bit of the Ian McCulloch in him. This is a 20-year-old fella from Australia. There’s some real beauts on here, D… [clicks ahead to “The Leavers Dance”]
D: Radiohead. Starsailor.
C: Yeah, I guess… But listen to those strings come in… it’s so gorgeous. I think sometimes people like us get too caught up in “spot the influence.” It’s one thing when you’re hearing straight, passionless, contrived mimicry—plagiarism—but it’s another when folks’ voices are just…similar. What are they supposed to do? Not sing at all cuz that voice is taken already?
D: [thoughtful, agreeing] To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: “A good song is a good song is a good song.”
C: Anyways, I think it’s beautiful stuff. There’s some vintage Britpop rave-ups, there’s ringing guitars. There’s some middling tempo numbers, which are hard to do, when you think about it… And there’s these autumnal, oceanside ballads. [listening to “Vicious Traditions”:] You can see how it could get all histrionic and spittle-flying, but he reins it in just right.
D: [quietly] So young, and so anguished already…

White Magic
Through the Sun Door EP
(Drag City)
D: At last, a female voice!
C: [listening to opening track “One-Note“] This is one of favorite songs of the spring.
D: Charging piano!
C: It’s serious, but not Tori Amos melodrama. “Some-thing is a-bide-ing!” Hmm…
D: “White Magic.”
C: Best name since Comets On Fire. Lotsa witchy stuff going on right now, eh? [Listening to “The Gypsies Came Marching After”] Wow here’s another stormer. This is probably referencing Fairport Convention or Incredible String Band or Pentangle but I just don’t know that stuff well enough… I guess you’d call it folk-rock—it does swing, you can move to it—and they use traditional acoustic and electric instruments and so on.
D: I like her voice. Strong, feminine, with hints of tenderness and loss.
C: This song [“Apocalypse,” the EP’s final track] is a sorta blues groove—it’s like Heart, if they were amazing.
D [musing]: PJ Harvey, with flowers and beads in her hair.

Espers
Espers
(Locust Music)
C: More really lovely, absolutely spellbinding boots-over-pants modern two girls-one boy psychedelic chamber folk-rock for you…
D: [eyes closed, rapt] My, my, my.
C: Reminds me of Damon & Naomi and Ghost. Very, very pretty, and not at all dippy or precious, which is the way these things can so easily go. [listening to “Meadow”] See, cuz they can write actual songs, they’re not just inhabiting a texture or a form…
D: It cannot be possible. What woods are all these people coming from?
C: They come from the Shire, sire. Actually they come from Philadelphia.
D: [listening to “Voices”] There’s no drums, there’s no backbeat, but, [quietly, seriously] I can dig it anyway. Listen to me when I say this: This is music that lifts the veil.

Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O.
Mantra of Love
(Alien8)
C: Speaking of lifting the veil: here’s the new Acid Mothers Temple studio album, two very long tracks. The first is a traditional vocal, with Miss Cotton Casino singing, that goes…
D: [6:25 in] There it goes now, off into the universe… Happy trails everywhere.
C: For those out there who don’t know, the Acid Mothers are a Japanese psych outfit known to the acid cognoscenti for volume, trance and hair frizz. They’re on a serious far-out trip and they’re gonna do it, sometimes on the turn of the dime, whether or not anyone else is interested. I’ve seen them play a 100-person room like they were playing for the galaxy…
D: This is the best-recorded AMT album I’ve ever heard!
C: You can actually hear the bass beneath all the Hawkwind psych-bleeptronics and Acid Mothers “super guru” Kawabata Makoto’s super-guru-guitar guru-ifying all over the place. A proper mix, finally. [listening] Aaaaand then back down to the central melody. This is humanity at its finest: dignified—cooperative—transcendent.
D: So good! I must nominate the Acid Mothers as this planet’s ambassadors to the Galactic Council!

Merzbow
Last of Analog Sessions 3-CD box set
(Important Records)
D: Ack! What the???? Something’s wrong with the needle!
C: Oh, D. So easily confused. This is Japanese noise artist Merzbow, that’s what the stuff sounds like…at first. Then you get into it. You have to listen closely.
D: I will NEVER get into this!
C: Well, that’s your problem. For the non-philistines out there in Arthurworld, I want to say that his packages three Merzbow albums—Catapillar, Medamaya and Springharp—recorded from ‘97-99 by Masami Akita, in his final analog tantrums before he went digital. As it says on the back of this beautiful silver-on-black package, “Akita plays Self-built junk—”
D: Yeah this is junk alright—
C: “—with contact mics, various filters and ring modulators, various effects pedals, EMS Synthi A synthesizer, EMS VCS3 Synthesizer, Moog Synthesizer, GR-500 Guitar Synthesizer, Tapes, EXD, Drum Machine and Oscillators.” It’s good stuff, although a little of this goes a long way and I couldn’t tell you what my favorite track is. You’ve got to be in a very certain and very open mindset to listen to this stuff, but it’s worth it. Shit is meditational, bro!
D: Listen, I get this when the DVD isn’t connected right to the stereo, and that’s free of charge.

Loren Connors
The Departing of a Dream Vol. III: Juliet
(Family Vineyard)
D: Much better. Lonesome guitars sounding occasional hopeful notes in the desert.
C: It occupies its own unique space. Not quite ominous, but not settled either. Restless, haunting. Just one man doing “guitars, tapes, sounds.”
D: This is what that Daniel Lanois guy wishes he could sound like.
C: It’s only 30 minutes, but I swear it feels like six hours. This will slow you right down, just like yoga or a good bath or chopping vegetables… Wow.
D: [asleep]

Thee Silver Mountain Reveries
Pretty Little Lighting Paw
(Constellation)
C: Four tracks, thirty minutes. “More Action! Less Tears!” is a great title: it’s like Godspeed You! Black Emperor gone early Spiritualized, with a sense of humor. [Listening to “Microphones in the Trees”]: Now we’re getting down to the REAL anguish of the evening. Guitarist-vocalist Efrim is Wayne Coyne realizing all hope IS lost, actually and death is no comfort. But there’s this ease at the end of the song, a moment of brightness. Epiphany? Or maybe it’s just the street lights buzzing on, like in Antonioni’s L’Eclipse…
D: [stirring deep into the 10-minute “Pretty Little Lightning Paw”]: What is this…? A choir from the dark stars…

Craig Taborn
Junk Magic
(Thirsty Ear)
C: Future jazz from nowtime. Reminds me a bit of Carl Craig’s Innerzone project from a few years ago. Whatever happened with that, anyhow? Jazz and digital electronics: a treacherous and therefore unexploited frontier? Tonight at 10!
D [drifting]: …Cinematic Orchestra….
C: This is heavier, swings a bit more, and goes further out, leaving the drums behind altogether. A little more intense. These are compositions, not jams, you have to follow it along. It’s cool in a tough situation.

Vetiver
Vetiver
(DiCristina)
C: This is my other new favorite record. Really lovely folk stuff from some San Francisco cats, led by Andy Cabic on vocals, guitar and banjo.
D: He sings so nakedly. There’s some Nick Drake here…
C: It reminds me of that third Velvet Underground album. Or any Velvets when they’re quieter: that sort of foggy country-folk that Lou would do then. Kind of hushed and candlelit, away from the streets and the squall and the squalor, in a bohemian garret in the city or a tent in the woods. It’s a balm, like that last Six Organs of Admittance record.
D: There is a gauzy, dreamy feel to this.
C: The songs are really well structured and arranged–there’s cello and violin all over the album. [looking at the CD booklet:] And gaze upon this centerfold, it looks like a vintage Satty image! That’s Joanna Newsom playing harp on “Amerlilie,” and of course that’s the ubiquitous Mr. Banhart sings and plays guitar on a couple songs that are almost hoedowns. Colm O’Ciosoig, from My Bloody Valentine and Hope Sandoval’s band, plays drums on a couple of tracks… and then there’s Hope herself, singing backup on “Angels’ Share.” Goosebumps…
D: There is a real Mazzy Star thing going on here! It is Mazzy Star with a sensitive boy singer.
C: They both go back to the Velvets, don’t they. Oh, the Velvets! I’d give this to the people in the coffeehouses of America digging Cat Power and Beth Orton. Such beautiful songs.
D: These are modern songs, but these are not modern world people.

Blanche
If We Can’t Trust the Doctors…
(Cass Records)
C: Another stylish country-folk softie, with a distressed cover, and banjo and quietish voices by people less than happy with the present day and their present circumstances.
D: A little bit Lyle Lovett, a little bit Buck Owens…
C: They’re from Detroit. This first song has Brendan Benson singing backup, and there’s a perfect little Jack White guitar part…
D: This is nuts. How can there be so many good bands coming out of one city at one time?
C: It does boggle the mind. It’s not just the music, though, which bypasses the alt-country tedium you might be fearing and heads for that stately old country bluegrass thing, it’s good lyrics too: “Who’s to say that I’m obsessed with everything you do/just because it seems my schedule seems to shadow you/who’s to say that tired cliche, there’s more fish in the sea/I don’t mind treading water, you’re the one for me.”
D: And male-female duets — always good, rarely done, rarer still done well.
C: [reading lyrics] “Life once again is carefree/where we tiptoed, now we waltz/past the black cats and the mirrors we cracked/without our fingers crossed…”
D: They are admirers of the old ways, but they are not worshippers.

Los Lobos
The Ride
(Hollywood)
C: What can you say? It’s the new Los Lobos. Fucking buy it already.
D: One of America’s greatest living bands.
C: They’re the house band for America. They can do everything, and they do everything with taste, and they’re not afraid to venture out. Always. Year after year! I mean, what do you call them, how do you categorize them? A jam band? Okay but they’ve got SONGS! A rock n roll band? Sure, but they’ve got so much soul, they can do traditional Mexican folk stuff, and they can flip into so many musical spaces and styles, for all the occasions of life: carnivals, barbecues, funerals, weddings, lonely drives. They’re the ascended masters, they’re our nation’s poet laureates. They should be on the radio all the time, on Leno and Letterman ever week. The true music fans know this, the true musicians know this. This album is like a testimonial to Los Lobos—it’s the band with a ton of guest stars doing new songs, some covers, all over the map stylistically. I’ll just list em: Cafe Tacuba, Willie G, Dave Alvin from the Blasters, Bobby Womack, Tom Waits & Martha Gonzalez, Ruben Blades, Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello, Mavis Staples…
D: Wow. Somebody call NPR!
C: That’s some heavy hitters, but I’d be buying this anyway, bro. I found an amazing quote from Mickey from Ween the other day on Los Lobos. He said, “I love Los Lobos, that’s a band that’s out there that really does it for me that I’ll go see. I don’t know why people aren’t really hip, because Los Lobos, to me… Like people say that Phish filled in a void for the Dead when they were gone, for a variety of reasons. You know, they played long sets, they jam a lot, they changed their set list every night. [But] Los Lobos play a very long set, they change their set lists all the time, it’s as much good, quality guitar that you could want. They’ve been doing it forever and they give off the vibe on stage that they have. They have that telepathy going.”
D: So true, so true.
C: When I hear David Hidalgo’s voice, I tear up, just automatically.
D: Like War said, the world is a ghetto. But the world is a barrio too, and I want to be there.

Toots & the Maytalls
True Love
(V2)
C: Let’s wrap this up with another celebrity testimonial album… Toots Hibbert—
D: Toots & the Maytalls!
C: —joined by a bunch of folks doing some of his old songs, and some new stuff, with a constellation of stars. There’s some total sheened-up clunkers on here, but damn, any time there’s a chance to hear Willie Nelson singing reggae, I’m there.

REVIEWS BY C and D

Guitar Wolf
Red Idol DVD
(Narnack)
D: Hey, I can’t make this DVD work.

The Von Bondies
Pawn Shoppe Heart
(Sire)
D: This is the Detroit garage guy who had his face bashed up by Jack White.
C: Right. Jason Von Bondie is apparently the town asshole, or so I’ve been told. But, do you know that song, “Pablo Picasso”?
D: Of course! Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers! They were the best! [singing:] “He could walk down your street/And girls could not resist his stare/Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.” But this doesn’t sound like Jonathan Richman…?
C: [sighs] Okay D, I’ll spell it out for you: Pablo Picasso was an asshole. But he also made some great paintings.

Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand
(Domino)
D: This is what the Strokes and the Rapture should have done on their last records. But they were incapable.
C: Every song is a sure-hit on the dancefloor. Plus the guy can sing. And check out what they do on this track (#3), 55 seconds in…
D: Whoa….
C: The tempo slows down… And listen to that guitar playing! Then here comes that descending disco bassline again.
D: This is ridiculous. Can I use your phone? I’ve got to call my financial advisor. I’ve got to buy stock in this band! They are the new kings!!!
C: I know, eh. It’s like all the those other bands, including those Interpol guys, were all just warm-ups for the Ferds. Amazing stuff. Album of the year so far, easy.

The Walkmen
Bows and Arrows
(Record Collection)
D: Ah, I see what you’re doing…
C: Yes, I am Clever Man.
D: These guys, they’re good, they’re kind of like the Ferdinand and the Strokes and…
C: Dude’s got a bit of the crooner in him. And he’s a more interesting lyricist than Julian Casablancas. Then again, just about everyone is.
D: Watch it.
C: Oh right, sorry, I forgot about your inner 14-year-old girl self.
D: …
C: Um… Okay, sorry, that was uncalled for.
D: You can be so ARROGANT sometimes… [listening] The sounds they get are so cool.
C: Organs, guitars, tacked pianos. But check out this next track, you’re gonna lose it.
D: [listening to “The Rat”] It’s the Strokes with their pants on fire! That guy’s mad!!!!
C: Madder than Jack White. He’s fucking going for it, damn, and you know, when a crooner spits blood, you better look out. Anger always means more when it’s coming from a guy who usually .
D: This shit is banging. “You’ve got a nerve to be asking a favor/You’ve got a nerve to be calling my number/I’m sure, we’ve been through this before/Can’t you hear me, I’m beating on the wall.”
C: I’d pay $15 for this song alone. And you know what? There’s ten more songs on the album!!!
D: And they’re good too. Shit. This is gonna be some year.

Oneida
Secret Wars
(Jagjaguwar)
C: You wouldn’t know this–
D: Again with the arrogance!
C: Well, you wouldn’t–
D: Wouldn’t what?
C: Wouldn’t know what the title is based on.
D: Well…
C: ‘80 Marvel Comics. Which I read. And I bet you didn’t.
D: …
C: So fuck off! [laughter] Big battles between superheroes and the main guy who summoned them to the “secret wars” : The Beyonder.
D: [wistful] Ah, the ‘80s…
C: Or it’s based on something else! Anyways. I dig this.
D: [Listening to “$50 Tea”] It’s frantic. Hypnotic. Like strobe lights for your ears.
C: But it stretches out too, and there’s melodies. It’s a lot like that last Primal Scream record, Evil Heat. Difference is that Oneida won’t let the machines do any work.
D: The Beyonders is the name of my new band.

Weird War
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Bite ‘Em
(Drag City)
C: From Secret Wars to Weird War, get it?
D: You are so clever. Almost too clever to bear. I cower before your cleverness.
C: [laughs] As you ought. Now check this shit out…
D: [listening to “Grand Fraud”]: Is it supposed to sound like that? Listen to all that hiss.
C: Yes, it’s nice and raw and funky and kinda fucked up. They used some old mixing board that Sly Stone and later the P-Funk guys used. Um. I guess it’s possible…
D: [2:45 into “Grand Fraud”]:WHOA!!!!!
C: That’s the shit right there. That’s IT.
D: Who is the singer?
C: Ian Svenonius, Arthur astrologer, on vocals. He’s been around forever. Nation of Ulysses, Cupid Car Club, Make Up, Scene Creamers… The Make Up split up just when they were getting good! Now I think he’s got it going on again, especially with this new guitar player, that guy has some tasty chops, as they used to say back in the day. Do you remember, back in the ‘90s, when it was a point of pride to be less than competent?
D: Stupid indie rockers, I never liked that stuff. Weird War is a weird name.
C: You’re right. Like, what do you call the people in the band?… Weird War-ers?.
D: Weird Warriors! [Ears pop up as female voice rapping begins on title track breakdown] Is that Peaches????
C: It’s Jennifer from Royal Trux.
D: Whoa. I think she can quit her dayjob! And Peaches should call her lawyers.
C: Always with the lawyers, this guy.

TV On the Radio
Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
(Touch and Go)
C: Another band with a difficult name.
D: “TV on the Radio”? What does that mean? What are they thinking? This is crazy talk.
C: Just listen to the music. You can’t judge a band by its name! The Beatles is the stupidest name ever, right?
D: Yes, okay. [listening] What do you call this kind of music?
C: I have no idea, but I like listening to it.
D: It’s dance music, but it’s got all this…
C: All these weird elements, used in weird ways. Horns. Backing vocals. Dance grooves.
D: He’s got a voice like Peter Gabriel. There’s something kind of scary about this stuff.
C: It seems like they’re holding it together in the face of something. [Quoting song lyrics:] “You were my favorite moment/of a dead century.”
D: This is really good. It’s genuinely new—I can’t say that I’ve heard something like this before. And I want to hear it again.

The Paper Chase
What Big Teeth You Have EP
(Southern)
C: Speaking of scary.
D: Super-tension crisis music!
C: Drills. Angst. Space. Rolling bass. Piano stabs. Guitars at angles.
D: It’s like a soundtrack to a murder.
C: Reminds me of Jesus Lizard. Drive Like Jehu… But there’s an almost… symphonic, I guess…component to it. They’re from Texas, they thing big.
D: Violins too. Genuine horror movie stuff! But not in a cheesy way. No organ grinder.
C: You should see the video that‘s on here: it’s like low-budge Lynch meets Cunningham. Okay, onto the next track, which is a Brel cover…
D: Of course. “My Death.” Scott Walker did this!
C: The drums are so big on this record. I think it’s a Texas thing. Those guys love the big Bonham drum thing down there. Lift to Experience, Secret Machines, these guys… Maybe it’s from all those years of Flaming Lips coming down to Austin from Oklahoma, that dude is an epic drummer. So is this guy.
D: The guitar is now being strangulated. It’s almost too much. Psychodramatic, just at the edge of being too much.
C: Yes. This last song is a Roger Waters cover from The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. It’s massive.
D: Whoo-ee. We need to keep an ear on these guys!
C: Their next album is gonna be on Kill Rock Stars… A label with a violent name for a band with a violent streak as wide as a Texas mile.
D: They are the new Texas chainsaw murderers, only they use guitars. Murdered by music.

Casual Dots
Casual Dots
(Kill Rock Stars)
C: Speaking of Kill Rock Stars, here’s a record on the label by a new band.
D: More angularity.
C: Angularity is the new strumming.
D: A female voice, finally! Why do we always listen to men records?
C: That is a very good question to which I don’t have a very good answer. Anyway, in case you were wondering, this sounds to me like Stereolab meeting Deerhoof with, oh, Poison Ivy from the Cramps on guitar. It’s indie rock vets from bands like Autoclave and Bikini Kill, but they can play their instruments.
D: Progress has been made. Miracles, they never cease.
C: This song, “I’ll Dry My Tears” is a cover, right?
D: It must be. Very nice, so different from the rest. We can ask the Internet about it.
C: Poison Ivy is so underrated… This whole record sounds like a tribute to her guitar playing.
D: Cool stuff on record, now I wanna see ‘em live. Women rock!
C: …

Hella
The Devil Isn’t Red
(5 Rue Christine)
C: Instrumental mathcore by men.
D: Excuse me while I yawn.
C: I’m sure it’s all very difficult and very intense, but why should people listen to this when they could listen to, oh, King Crimson or Magma?
D: This is so difficult. Oh so very difficult. The nerds of rock, shredding away. Maybe it is fun for them.
C: The drumming on this bugs the shit out of me, it’s busy beyond belief. For what? I don’t get it.
D: Off it goes. Bye bye!

Deerhoof
Milkman
(Kill Rock Stars)
C: Speaking of Deerhoof, here’s their new one on…Kill Rock Stars.
D: Which rock stars do they want to kill exactly, that’s what I always wondered.
C: Of all the people to advocate killing, why rock stars? Why not…um…first-world capitalist greedheads? If you’re going to go down that route, I mean… Not that I’m advocating anything.
D: We are peace people.
C: But rock stars? John Lennon was killed. Are these John Hinkley sympathizers, then? That’s pretty fucking stupid.
D: Disgusting!
C: Hey anyway, guess what? This sounds like the other Deerhoof records! Cute dreamy vocals in the same key by Japan-born singer Satomi Matsuzaki, I don’t know what she’s saying but it good, and lotsa riffs glued on, stomping and stopping and starting.
D: They’re supposed to be amazing live.
C: Yeah, I can see that. But they still don’t quite do it for me on record.
D: Well, that’s your problem. I am digging it. Next!

OOIOO
Kila Kila Kila
(Thrill Jockey)
C: Continuing on from our “kill” theme, and also on the Japanese theme, here’s the new record by the band that Yoshimi from the Boredoms leads…
D: This is boring twiddling thumbs music. Where are the drums? I need some drums.
C: You may get your drums. Just sit still and listen for a second, will ya? Patience is a virtue.
D: Hey what about that Guitar Wolf DVD? He’s Japanese.
C: Oh yeah. Lemme see if I can make it work. [tries to make it work] Nope.
D: This is getting better, but it’s taking too long. I am a busy man.
C: Okay, okay. I just want the Arthur readers to know that this is an interesting, minimalist art-trance-experimental record that rewards multiple listens by the genuinely curious. I mean, shit D, this song is 10 minutes and 40 seconds, you gotta let it develop. It’s like the opposite of Deerhoof. Deerhoof is for people who need it NOW and OOIOO is for people who can wait.
D: I am definitely a cannot-waiter. I apologize to Yoshimi, but that is how I am!

Ghost
Hypnotic Underworld
(Drag City)
C: I have prepared a statement regarding this album, that I wrote while in what we shall call ‘alternative consciousness,’ which I will now read. [clears throat] “Pure, total towering all-encompassing humble acoustic-electric-Mellotronic psychedelic-pastoral-rock-art-prog-outre accomplishment, the summation of a career, a flowing highlight reel that takes every angle that Batoh’s Ghost band (who come from Japan) have ever explored during the last decade and a half and multiplied the richest parts by a factor of 48. (It’s like The Love Below, in a way, right?) The band is sympathetic, tremendous, stunning: the electric guitarist Michio Kurihara deserves particular recognition for his restraint, his launches, his trails. Lower the lights, turn on the fog machine, put a candle in the wine bottle, turn the stereo up loud and gaze lovingly at the gatefold. I want to tell you something: my friends, whoever you are and whatever language you speak, This album is why Music exists.”
D: Yeah, it’s pretty good.

The Coral
Magic and Medicine
(Deltasonic/Columbia)
C: New album from the Coral.
D: Liverpool young guys that sound old!
C: Yeah. This is a solid record, pleasant. More lightly psychedelic folk-country-rock-I dunno.Melodic. But…
D: There’s nothing urgent about it.
C: Exactly. It’s kind of timeless, but not in a cosmic-eternity Ghost way, it’s more just timeless in an England way. You get the feeling these songs might’ve been written at any time in the last few hundred years, but whenever they were written, they never meant much to anyone.
D: They don’t draw blood—they suck it!
C: [laughs] Well…there’s just this distance to them. They have such a warm, welcoming sound, but…well the singer’s kinda flat, it‘s like he never breaks this character he’s playing. Safe but harmless. He’s no Shane Macgowan.
D: The Pogues!
C: Shane had bite, even when he was gumming it. You wanna be a poet, you can’t just sit by your fireplace all the time. You gotta get out there and take some blows for the home team, soak something up, whether it’s your own experiences or what you witness. I always get the feeling these guys sit around playing records and watching flicks. That don’t do it.
D: You could be wrong, though.
C: Well… As T-Model says, that’s true now!

Greg Ashley
Medicine Fuck Dream
(Birdman)
D: Is this new? It sounds like early Pink Floyd or…
C: It’s new. It’s Greg Ashley, he’s from Texas, used to be in a band called Mirrors down there (not the Mirrors of Cleveland), and he’s got a band in the Bay Area called Gris-Gris, who are supposed to be really good. Reminds me of Flaming Lips’ Hit to Death in the Future Head…Sparklehorse, too… Brother JT…Same sources, I guess!
D: Lonely desperate guy singing after hours in an reverbish spooky carnival funhouse about adult fears. I listen to this and I see in my mind’s eye scenes from Fellini’s La Strada. It’s beautiful…
C: There’s sadness here, but it’s not full of dread or angst—the guy’s just trying to get through something by singing, he’s not holding his situation against anyone. [Listening to “Deep Deep Down”:] The songs have this really solid folk-blues-country foundation, very simple, very hard to do. And there’s optimism here too. The dude’s got a flair.
D: [musing, eyes closed] …Gelsomina would listen to it every night as she took off her clown makeup. Maybe she’d dance a little, in the shadows, with the leopard man…

Mr. David Viner
Mr. David Viner
(Dim Mak)
D: Basically it’s all traditionals. He does a version of “Corrina, Corrina,” which make me want to own this immediately. Just saying those two words aloud makes me warm.
C: It’s a romantic record: a romantic idea of music, of folk-blues music, done without flash or glamour or tongue. He’s a nice singer: he sings just enough, it’s like he’s not even there sometimes. It’s perfect. Reminds me a little of that John Lurie Marvin Pontiac record, or Robert Plant’s last record [2002’s Dreamland], only it’s more straightforward, of course.
D: I miss John Lurie!
C: I know. You can see why the Soledad Brothers are basically the backing band here. This is their shit, too, so it makes sense.
D: When you’re playing songs this old, songs this good, they can take you over, even if you’re English!
C: Let’s see if he can push it forward, now.

The Black Keys
The Moan EP
(Alive)
D: New Black Keys!?!
C: Not really… This is on their old label. Looks like odds and ends.
D: It’s true, I’ve heard all of these songs before, I think.
C: According to my calculations, this is what you get here. A version of the the lead track “The Moan” was on last year’s Fat Possum “Have Love Will Travel“ 3-track EP, taken from a John Peel session; another live version of the song was released on a spilt EP with The Six Parts Seven put out by Suicide Squeeze Records. The Peel version is the best. “Heavy Soul” here is an alternate take of a song from the first album The Big Come Up, on Alive, which was released on vinyl but not CD. The third track is the Stooges cover “No Fun,” which also was available on the vinyl of The Big Come Up, but not the CD. The last track is a cover of “Have Love Will Travel,” a later version of which appeared in a different, superior form on their Fat Possum album, thickfreakness.
D: …
C: My head hurts.
D: Here, have a glass of water.
C: I feel like The Seth Man. Record labels can do cruel things to fans.
D: That is your problem, AGAIN! I think it rocks in the low-down bluesy throaty way that they always do, and it collects a bunch of stuff in one place for the freaks in the audience who need everything. And I am one of those freaks who lives in the Secret Vaults of Rock!

Rocket From the Tombs
Rocket Redux
(Smog Veil)
C: Speaking of vault-digging in Ohio. Or crypt theft. Here’s another band from Ohio.
D: I know this! “FRUUUUUSTRATION!!!!!” Rocket From the Tombs!!!! But what is this CD?
C: That part on the second song “So Cold’ is a straight rip off Alice Cooper’s “Sixteen”…
D: What is this CD?!?
C: It’s a new studio recording of the original RFTT repertoire by the surviving members.
D: Because they never made an album.
C: Yeah, I don’t remember the whole story but yeah the band split in two, into the Dead Boys and Pere Ubu… Who each released versions of most of the songs on here, blah blah. And one of the major guys, Peter Laughner, died.
D: These are STILL amazing angry poetic thrust-rockers from the TENSE heart of CLEVELAND, OHIO IN AMERICA IN THE MID-‘70S!!!! “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” “Sonic Reducer,” “Final Solution”!!!! This is the super-shiznit!
C: It DOES sound awesome. You got David Thomas on vocals of course, plus there’s Cheetah Chrome on guitar, and then there’s Richard Lloyd from Television also on guitar, filling in for Laughner… [Listening to “What Love Is”:] They’re doing the same rhythm-riff thing as “Communication Breakdown” but then it goes OFF.
D: So, this was just recorded recently?
C: Yeah. Timeless shit, again, but here it seems like it actually meant something to people at the time. There’s a real passion and intellect at operation here, at the same time. Plus air pollution and dead-end jobs and random sex and amphetamines and desperation and all the other necessary stuff.
D: Those timeless twentysomething kicks.

DMZ
DMZ
(Sepia Tone)
D: Unbelievable! DMZ!!!!!! How can all of this be coming out now, in 2004?
C: We live in a golden era, my friend. All praise Sepia Tone. Speaking of old punks, we were supposed to talk about the new Mekons record [Punk Rock, Touch and Go], too, but I can’t find it… [leaves room]
D: [close up to tape recorder:] Mighty super-power…aggressive garage… freakbeat rock that pummels your balls!!!
C: [Returns to the room, empty handed.] 11 songs, 28 minutes, produced by Flo & Eddie of the Turtles, originally released by Sire in 1978. Their only studio album.
D: It puts everyone to shame!!!! Everyone else can fuck off and die hard! Goodbye!
C: I think only the Hives might come close to the tight dynamo fury of this stuff right now, and they had to practice really, really hard for years to get there. But these guys…
D: The breakdown on “Don’t Jump Me Mother” when it comes back?!?
C: Unfuckingbelievable, the song just keeps getting more intense.
D: 28 minutes of genius. Incredible production! Sharp and bold and tough! Play it next to the first Ramones records and you will have a revelation-revolution of the brain and heart.

Metal Urbain
Anarchy In Paris!
(Acute Records)
C: Here’s another archive release from the late ‘70s. Punk rock in French with a drum machine. 24 songs, 71 minutes, really good liner notes.
D: It’s cool, aggressive, chantalong stuff that you can wash dishes to, or put on at a party, or turn up real loud and put your head through the wall. The machine stuff doesn’t sound so good, but whatever. That was always going to be a problem.
C: It’s a little like… You know what? This is what that Wire record that came out last year, this is what that Wire record sounds like, only 24 years earlier and in French.
D: In my opinion French should only be sung on record by young women, with certain exceptions.
C: Every time I hear these guys use the word “bourgeoisie” or “fasciste!” or whatever… I think of the guys in powdered wigs and aristocrat costumes who do those AC/DC-type songs, what‘s their name?
D: [quoting a song from memory:] “Boudoir!”
C: Yes! Upper Crust! The best band without a deal in America? Maybe!

Probot
Probot
(Southern Lord)
C: Oh sweet dark god of brutality. Lemmy, Wino, King Diamond from Mercyful Fate, Tom Warrior from Celtic Frost, Eric Wagner from Trouble plus Cronos!… Dave Grohl did all the music. He calls it metal fantasy camp. And the camp counselors were…ritually sacrificed on the first night, from the sounds of it.
D: Unbelievable! Unrelenting, joyous, full-on METAL UP YOUR ASS, as we used to say in the olden days.
D: Beavis and Butthead will rise from their MTV graves, bow down slowly and then stand on the couch and hurt their necks for an hour listening to this.
C: Dave Grohl did it. He didn’t have to, but he did. Somewhere, Kurt Cobain is cackling with glee.
D: [singing along with Sepultura’s Max Cavalera:] “Red war will follow my enemies!!!!! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!
C: There’s a song called “Dictatosaurus”? I rest my case: we are in the presence of the metal gods.
D: [still singing along:] “Red waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar! Red waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!”
C: This could be the soundtrack to the Republican convention in August…

XBXRX
“We Hate the President” single
(Narnack)
D: …or this could.
C: Four tracks, one-sided clear red vinyl. Hardcore with a guy doing a high-demonic screech vocal. The cover images shows a very young girl child kneelingon the sidewalk…on the ground are the words “Fuck it or fight it… It does not matter. While kids die of hunger, you get fat.”
D: Yes! Fat fucking Americans need big SUVs to drive around in cuz they can’t fit in normal-sized cars cuz of their fast food lardasses! Then they need more oil for their precious Hummers…so they go to war to steal it from people! Fuckfaces!
C: I don’t usually like this kind of stuff but: well, nice one, fellas.
D: I hate the president too!!! RAAAARRGH!
C: Dear Narnack and XBXRX, please release this in a format so that everyone can play it all the time on their big mobile stereo speakers in August in New York for the Republican war pigs. I am sure they will appreciate it. Folk music’s not gonna cut it, people. We need extreme music for extreme occasions. And yes, the music SHOULD be one-sided!

All Night Radio
Spirit Stereo Frequency
(Sub Pop)
C: And now for something completely different, because you can’t be angry and aggressive all the time, you have to let the sunshine into your heart and allow for just pure aesthetic beauty in some part of your life. Otherwise, why go on?
D: This is a preview of springtime. Of Utopia.
C: And you don’t mean the band.
D: Ha! [smiling] Maybe I do.
C: It’s a side project from the Beachwood Sparks guy. Or guys? I’m not sure. Lookit up on the internerd. Super-melodic layered orchestral gauze-pop with harmonies and melodies and solid riffs and soaring George Harrison gentle-ness. Musicboxes, echoes, forgotten vintage sounds. This is what all those Elephant 6 bands wanted to sound like but didn’t have the talent for, in the end. A Magical Mystery Tour for 2004? Possibly. Kind of like Mercury Rev’s first three albums too, especially See You On the Other Side.
D: So beautiful. I will be listening to this radio station all night long. What is the word for this? Oh yes: Sublime.

REVIEWS BY C and D

Unicorns
Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?
(Alien8)
C: Who?
D: Who what?
C: Who, Sir D, will cut the Unicorns’ hair when they’re gone?
D: Ah, yes.
C: You don’t really care, do you?
D: Can’t say that I do, no, not really. These guys are wacky.
C: Sub-Ween wacky pop.
D: Helium-sucking stoners.
C: Queasy synthesizers.
D: A Rephlex artist gone Dr. Demento.
C: [puzzled]
D: This is like hearing someone you’re not interested in taking drugs. Boring drugs.
C: Maybe too much Flaming Lips for them…? There’s some talent here… “Child Star” sounds like a Radiohead parody…. You know, it’s not easy providing comic relief.
D: This whatever-it-is is not one of my cups of tea.
C: And you have a lot of china.
D: Indeed I do.

Eugene McDaniels
Outlaw
(Water/Runt)
D: [reading] “Eugene McDaniels – the soul anarchist.” Then it says here, “Under conditions of national emergency , like now, there are only two kinds of people — those who work for freedom and those who do not… the good guys vs. the bad guys. — mc d.”
C: [singing along to opening track “Outlaw”:]“She’s an outlaw, she don’t wear a bra.” Um, yeah…I don’t know if it’s me, but this doesn’t seem to have aged well.
D: This came out in the early ‘70s.
C: The guy has cred, supposedly he gets sampled a lot. And you can hear why… there’s a nice feel to these songs. Ron Carter on bass, from Miles’ group…
D: But the lyrics are terrible! And his singing is totally affected. “La la la smoke a joint” blah blah.
C: Yeah I don’t get what the big deal is either. None of these songs stand out…in a good way, at least. [laughter]
D: The cover looks amazing, though.
C: Talk about badass, there it is in front of ya.

The Starvations
Get Well Soon
(GSL)
C: We haven’t got off to a real positive start here…
D: Who chose these CDs, anyway???
C: The editor.
D: Hmm… Hey, I like this one. Very Gun Club! Do you remember “cowpunk”?
C: Yeah. [shudders] Actually I think this is better than, say, the Bo Deans or something.
D: The Bo Deans! Now there is a name from the distant past.
C: These guys are from L.A… Kinda makes sense. Countryish rock, some punk aggression… slide guitars…walking bass…throaty singer…
D: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
C: Yeah, that’s true. There’s some Birthday Party in there too. [looking at the lyric sheet] I can’t really understand what he’s saying…
D: He should practice his enunciation.
C: He sings in a tough key a lot of the time but he hits it. [reading from the lyric sheet] Yep…lyrics about graveyards, ghosts, voodoo, burgundy wine, rebel angels…and a guy called Rat Boy. Folks, we have ourselves a bona fide Romantic.
D: A bohemian.
C: But anyways, you can totally hear the L.A. heritage: not just the Gun Club but also the Blasters and the Geraldine Fibbers…
D: Nice to hear an accordion too. This is good!

22-20s
05-03
(Astralwerks)
D: Whoa! Who is this?!?
C: They’re like 20 years old, from England. It’s like the Starvations, yeah?
D: But more banging. Blues-rock with punk balls!
C: Yeah the hooks are bigger, the playing is better. Hard to believe they’re not Americans. They’ve got the Gun Club in there too…
D: That solo is like that stuff the white guy who plays with R. L.Burnside does!
C: Kenny Brown. Yeah you’re right, I hadn’t noticed that. He totally does slide solos like Kenny.
D: You can dance to this stuff.
C: Yeah that’s the R.L. influence maybe, I dunno. This track [“Messed Up”] is a march but it’s also real soulful… That’s hard to pull off. The dude’s voice reminds me of a non-fucked up Shaun Ryder, a little.
D: “King Bee,” that’s an old one.
C: Big Chicago blues stomper. This is something. Pretty good for a debut EP–there’s not a weak track. I see why there’s such a fuss about these guys. Too bad we missed em when they opened for Jet and Kings of Leon last month. Oh well.

Sun Kil Moon
Ghosts of the Great Highway
(Jetset)
D: What’s going on here? Are we reviewing for Some Depression now?
C: No Depression, you mean.
D: Whatever… all of this so far is roots-ish.
C: [looking through CD pile] Yeah, and there’s more on the way. Must be the season or something.
D: So, who is this?
C: Mark Kozalek’s new band. He used to do a band called Red House Painters. Pretty popular with the NPR crowd.
D: Never heard of ‘em.
C: Yeah, well… What a voice, eh?
D: It is a pretty voice… This kind of music reminds me of seaside towns. Long sad afternoons in the winter.
C: Yeah, it’s sad but it’s beautiful, it’s not depressing. Long, droney folk songs… ooo, lookit that, here come the drums 3:45 in to the first song. Always a nice touch.
D: I would say there’s a bit of Neil Young to him.
C: Yeah, fer shure. This song “Salvador Sanchez”…fantastic electric guitar. Listen to that simple riff and then the endless solo… People should turn in their copy of Greenville and get this instead.
D: Greendale.
C: Whatever. When he puts the strings behind his falsetto, whoa. This is almost too intense to listen to in sequence. You know what? This is what Jay Farrar from Son Volt wishes he could do…
D: It is bittersweet music.
C: Stunning, really. On first listen, I gotta say I’m stunned. That doesn’t happen too often.

Jolie Holland
Catalpa
(Anti/Epitaph)
C: She sounds a little like Karen Dalton.
D: Is this new?
C: Yeah. She was in this group the Be Good Tanyas for a little while, I guess. It’s good, huh. Acoustic guitar, ukulele, and what a voice.
D: Sleighbells!
C: Yeah. Country-blues-folk… Very pretty, kinda spooky. She’s got that white-girl Billie Holiday thing going for her, just like Karen Dalton did. [listening] Did you hear that? She sang “3 a.m.” like “three-eye-am.”
D: She must be American…
C: She is.
D: There’s a song on here credited to “Holland/Parton/Syd Barrett”…?
C: Ha! How appropriate for this ish of Arthur… [reading the sleeve] “The Littlest Birds.” I hafta admit, I don’t know exactly what she’s doing here…I guess this is a medley?
D: It must be. [repeating a lyric:] “The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs…” That’s true, you know.

Mark Lanegan Band
Here Comes That Weird Chill (Methamphetamine Blues, Extras and Oddities) EP
(Beggars Banquet)
C: Here’s another distinctive voice. Brought to you by Marlboro…
D: Mark Lanegan! He’s in Queens of the Stone Age. That guy who comes out in the middle of the show and hangs on to the microphone for dear life!
C: Right, right. Used to be in Screaming Trees, did a bunch of solo records on Sub Pop, blah blah. Amazing artist that not enough people check on, for some reason.
D: This is pretty rough stuff.
C: Yeah it’s kinda grimy. Machine rock, at least this first track.
D: Nightmarish drone…
C: I gotta say I prefer to hear his voice unfiltered… [checking credits] Oh right, okay so this is the session they did with Chris Goss, Dean Ween and Josh and Nick from the Queens and so on. With that lineup you could probably call it Desert Session 8.5 or something. Only in happened in the Valley, not the desert.
D: [listening to “On the Steps of the Cathedral’]: What is this…?
C: Pretty, eh? Like a rondolet… And the next song is a Beefheart cover, “Clear Spot.” It sounds like they’re using a drum machine, really tinny and flat. This stuff has a Tricky feel to it. Very disorienting.
D: Reminds me of that song at the beginning of The Sopranos… [singing] “Born under a bad sign…”
C: Yeah, I can hear that. Listen to that solo…it’s all high up, like one of those solos Jack White does on Elephant. Only this was recorded before that came out… This track “Message to Mine” sounds like a demo for a really good Screaming Queens song… can you hear that organ? Nice. And a little bit of the bubblegum pop on the chorus, which is appropriate since Lanegan’s album coming out next year is called Bubblegum…
D: I like it…
C: Spoken-word here… tacked piano… “Skeletal History,” wow listen to that… he’s crooning with a swagger.
D: The bass is covered in fuzz!
C: Yeah. Good stuff. Sounds like Laney gone beatnik… [repeating words] “Girls stare in dead-eyed wonder”… Yikes.
D: And this last one is a dub?
C: Yeah. It’s like a country dub, right? 6am comedown music… This is a strong EP.
D: 8 songs, 26 minutes.
C: Thanks for the stats, D.

Califone
Heron King Blues
(Thrill Jockey)
C: Uncategorizable …dark country…banjo…electronics… a lot of the ol’ kling-klang.
D: I like his voice but I can’t hear what he’s saying.
C: Yeah it’s always like that with these guys, you just catch weird phrases here and there… I like this, this might be my favorite Califone yet…
D: There’s a bit of a Tom Waits Bone Machine feel here. The Lanegan record had that, too!
C: Mmm, you‘re right. Kind of rustic, kind of futuristic. Vintage futurist. It reminds me some of that Medicine album that came out this year too… Apparently this is something of a concept record.
D: What is that on the cover?
C: That would be the heron king, I guess. Kinda got that witchy Lord of the Rings-Mercury Rev-Guy Maddin-Svankmajer vibe, doesn’t it? And then, check this out… I was gonna say Califone is like Radiohead and Wilco stripped of the pretension and pop sense, but then there’s this track… [skips ahead to “2 Sisters Drunk On Each Other”] It’s actually funky. They’re bringing in that Sly Stone stuff.
D: There’s a Riot Goin’ On…
C: Exactly. This is a proper jam band. Sounds like some of this stuff was improvised, but it really works. I’ve seen ‘em do it live. Totally underrated.
D: They played at All Tomorrow’s Parties at UCLA! We saw them–
C: That’s right…
D: Incredible.

Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult
edited by Richard Metzger
(Disinfo)
D: So we’re reviewing books now, too?
C: Yeah, and DVDs, if we have time.
D: Which ones?
C: We’ve go the Guitar Wolf DVD here from Narnack, if we have time.
D: Nice.
C: So, this certainly keeps us on the witchy path, don’t it?
D: Yes. [looking at the list of contributors on the cover] But for a book about witches and magick…why are there no women here?
C: [taking the book away] Give me that. Lemme look. Hey, you’re right…. [reading further] Oh geez. From the editor’s introduction: “For some reason, I have always considered myself to be a warlock. Even when I was very young, I don’t know why, really but it is true … [W]hen I was a little kid I really loved Bewitched.” I mean, is this guy serious? “It works on a lot of levels, metaphorically speaking, for me to consider myself a magical businessman, if you see what I am saying.”
D: Oh god.
C: Yeah. Richard Metzger, he’s that guy who’s on all the Disinfo book covers, smirking. [still reading] Then he ends it with some talk about an emerging mutant race and asks “Which side are you on?” I mean, come on, these are Grant Morrison ideas here…
D: …who is in the book.
C: Yeah, well… Gotta admit there is a lot of good stuff here, although I have no idea how useful it is… Lots of excerpts from books by Robert Anton Wilson, Daniel Pinchbeck, Gary Lachman, Terence McKenna, Julius Evola and so on… Tons of stuff about Gysin and Burroughs and Crowley and Genesis P-Orridge and so on. The usual subjects, in other words.
D: This could be a good introduction, then.
C: Yeah, I suppose, if you want to be introduced to this stuff via a book that‘s title ‘Book of Lies‘ and published by someone called ‘Disinformation.’ I mean, those aren‘t exactly names that inspire confidence on the reader’s part in the authors’ accuracy, you know? Hey, wait! I just found a woman author: Tracy Twyman is in here writing about “Hitler and the Occult.”
D: Oh.
C: Yep. Remember she’s the one who’s in with Boyd Rice on all that Cocteau-conspiracy crap. Losers. Anyways there are some women as subjects in here—Cameron, Ida Craddock and Rosaleen Norton—so it’s not completely Magic Boys’ Club. But it’s close.
D: How many women musicians have we reviewed so far today?
C: Ulp.

Bobby Conn and the Glass Gypsies
The Homeland
(Thrill Jockey)
C: Speaking of conspiracies…
D: Speaking of terrible is more like it. What is this shit?
C: “Franchised Jesus Christ/Organized paradise/Clear Channel, bargain priced/We’re not very nice/We’re taking over the world”… Yeah… Dude means well, but…
D: Turn it off now.
C: Oh, come on, we have to listen to more than four songs.
D: I am exercising my veto power!
C: [turning the CD off] Okay, well what do you think of the cover.
D: Nice pyramid and the eye, okay, I get it, I get it. Masons blah blah. Off! [Throws CD out window.]
C: Hey bro, you need to get another beer and settle down.
D: I will get another beer but I will not settle down! [exits]
C: [to tape recorder] Man, he’s totally losing it! He’s been useless today, useless… D’s falling off…

U.S. Maple
Purple on Time
(Drag City)
C: Okay, I’m just gonna do this myself then. [puts CD in, looks st jacket] US Maple? I hate these guys. People say there’s some Beefheart in there, and maybe there is, but all I hear is a lot of dry wank and no humor or beauty or whimsy, which the Cap always had. [listening] Hm, this is alright. Like AC/DC, simmering. Blasted. Not exploding, just…simmering, yeah. The vocals are low. A Dylan cover too? [pockets CD] I’m taking this home, don’t tell D…

Skullflower
Exquisite Fucking Boredom
(Tumult)
C: The mighty Skullflower! One album, one riff. Talk about jamming econo! It’s a good riff, fortunately. Somewhere around Sabbath’s “Supernaut.” No vocals, just riff and maybe a drum machine and now there’s loads of texture and stuff coming in and out…. Gets kinda crazy with the electronics towards the end and the riff is buried. But the riff doth remain. Well, it’s a mind-narrower! Definitely could be used as a meditation aid, what with the propulsive rhythm and the repetition of the guitar riff. If you’re into that sort of thing.Better than one of those fucking Enya/Mickey Hart catastrophes. Anyways. “Exquisite“? Yeah. “Boring“? No way!

Pelt
Pearls From the River
(VHF)
C: Gotta say I never listened to these guys before. Hearing this, I have some definite catching up to do…[reading from the sleeve notes by Coley] “Join Pelt in celebrating the ecstatic joy that results from refusing to accept the alleged primacy of shit-culture. It does not exist if we do not believe in it. And we must refused it on all levels always. The proof of its surrender is at hand. Yr hand. Right now, motherfucker!” Well amen to that.
D: [muffled sound from kitchen]
C: Now he’s talking to himself. Great. Okay, so it’s YET ANOTHER instrumental record we’ve got here.. three longish acoustic pieces… Like Godspeed, I guess, but with some Indian raga flair to it, and there‘s no percussion. Three guys, including Jack Rose on guitar… Really beautiful, haunting, kinda dramatic, out-there woodstuff… Some slight menace on this second track. Music to hold hands too, late at night… Actual playing here, this isn’t abstract experimentation for the artists’ sake a la some of those No Neck Blues Band records I got which totally blew. This last track is gorgeous, reminds me of McLaughlin’s Shakti a bit, only not so fast. I’d love to hear these guys with a decent tabla player… Yeah, so… Man, where’s D? [yelling] Dude, you should check this out! [mumbling] I dunno, we might need to get E in here soon, at this rate…

Audra Kubat
Million Year Old Sand
(Times Beach Records)
D: I was ordering Indian food.
C: Oh, right on. Perfect.
D: What were you playing?
C: Skullflower, that shit is awesome.
D: Well, put it back on, you scum-suck!
C: “Scum-suck”…? Dude, chill out. Listen to this record here…
D: This is nice, who is she?
C: Audra Kubat. I think this is her first record.
D: Kind of like Beth Orton.
C: Yeah. And Joni, and Nick Drake. And Miss Cat Power. This could be very big in the college-town coffeehouses of America. For sure. She’s a good singer but she doesn’t over-do it like those Lilith Faire buskers. So nice to hear music like this coming up now…

Polmo Polpo
Like Hearts Swelling
(Constellation)
D: We are not listening to too much rock music this time around, are we?
C: 22-20s and The Starvations were pretty rockin’.
D: [drinking beer] Yeah, you’re right!!! But this is not rocking, although it is something very good. What do you call this kind of music???
C: Well it’s from the Godspeed You! Black Emperor camp, or at least from the label that they do. I’ve lost track of who’s in whose band doing which project. It’s like Parliament-Funkadelic up there now, and Polmo Polpo is Parlet or something. But who is the George Clinton of the Montreal disastercore scene? That is the question…
D: [thoughtful] This is very scary music, very cinematic. It’s like something terrible is just about to happen, something I don’t want to know about…
C: And then the next track skips to after the event, doesn’t it? It’s like build-up and aftermath, but no actual event. They circle it, skirt its edges… [dreamily] This stuff makes me want to drink wine and light some candles. Or go down to the train yard and look at the stars and maybe hop a train out of town…
D: …And there’s some slide guitar! This is the best! Man… [doorbell rings] And there is our food!

Double Leopards
Halve Maen
(Eclipse)
D: This is not eating music.
C: You’re right… Why don’t you go in the other room and I’ll finish this. [D exits.] He is useless, totally useless. We have a job to do here! For the Arthur readership! Okay… Ambient haunted house stuff, no real instruments or tunes. Scratch that: more like a whole haunted city. Reminds me of Coil, a bit. Amazing cover and sleeve. Like that “Aumgn” song on Can’s Tago Mago—if you dig that, which we all have at one time or another, right?, then here’s two records’ worth. Hums. Buzzes. Very cool stuff for the headphones I bet, and good music to end a party with. This is some seriously dark mystery shit. Whoa…

REVIEWS BY C and D

The Hidden Hand
Divine Propaganda
(Meteor City)
C: This is Wino’s new band…
D: From St. Vitus! And the mighty Spirit Caravan!
C: This is prime Wino. Very focused. Full-on Sabbath power trio. Political eco-stoner stuff. “I feel the sky cracking/I feel the ice melting/I feel the world dying.”
D: Track 8 is an unstoppable beast!
C: “The Hidden Hand [theme].” Yeah, this is solid shit. Kinda conspiracy-minded. I mean, just look at the name of the band—
D: As we said in the days of old, these guys can carpet a good chair!
C: He put a suggested reading list in the CD tray, you don‘t see that too often with metalish bands. Edmund O. Wilson, The Future of Life… Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy… Wait a sec. David Icke?!?
D: Who is this guy?
C: That’s the British dude who sez that the world’s political and economic leaders are not humans, they’re actually reptiles from outer space working in a conspiracy together. Very V. I think he’s saying that 9/11 and its consequences were predicted in the pages of Alice in Wonderland. Obviously he’s onto something.
D: ?
C: I’m joking. But I wonder if Wino is in on the Icke joke. Seems like he’s taking it seriously…?
D: Wino is the best. But he looks totally different with a beard. I don’t know if I approve.

The Raveonettes
Chain Gang of Love
(Columbia)
D: Is this the new Jesus and Mary Chain album?
C: No, it’s this Swedish band called the Raveonettes.
D: Why don’t they just call themselves the Raveisionists?
C: Who do you think you would win in a rumble between these guys and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club?
D: Agh! I hate those Black Rebel guys! So boring live.
C: Their second album is terrible. I think it could be the end of the road for them. But who cares. The Raveonettes have a six-foot chick singer, I think she could take them out.
D: Swedish precision! There’s a Spector back beat jangle here.
C: Melodies and distortion, it always sounds good. You gotta cop to it, there’s some good stuff on here.
D: Yes, this song [“That Great Love Sound”] is good. But it’s nothing that will make you spill your ice cream on the floor.
C: …?

Ween
Quebec
(Sanctuary)
D: Incredible. Who is this?
C: Ween.
D: Each song? No, it can’t be. They are all so different
C: Yes. That’s what they do! I’ve been trying to get you to listen to them for years—
D: Every song is a population of musical influences of the last 20 years. It all sounds familiar but beautifully deranged. You don’t know where the sound comes from, it’s written down in the backpages of your brain and heart but you can’t locate it.
C: This song “Zoloft” is fantastic.
D: Zoloft—that’s some good stuff there. The doctor’s medicine is working. I’m seeing different colors in a different way. Yellow even is starting to look good.
C: Listen to this one [“Transdermal Celebration”]: it’s like an Oasis song except it’s really good.
D: None of those Anglo-Saxons can rock like Americans! [Listening to “So Many People In the Nieghborhood”] These guys are like the Residents, some of this stuff. But it’s also very melancholic. This song [“Among His Tribe”] cuts straight to the bone.
C: This one “Captain” is my favorite. Very Pink Floyd. Listen to those drums. He’s stuck on a spaceship and they WON’T GO BACK!
D: “Tried and True”—this is middle American melancholy. Another weightless psychedelic Byrds song. Record store clerks rejoice. They’re the best. They’re too good for me. It’s like Ian Curtis said, I looked behind the doors of time, there was nothing there to see.
C: ???
D: [still listening to “Tried and True”] …Is that a sitar?!? No.
C: Yes it is.
D: It cannot be.
C: They’re putting the India in Indiana.
D: Ween are a jukebox. One way not to disappear up your own ass is to disappear up others’.
C: Right… I guess that’s one way of looking at it.

Terry Hall & Mushtaq
The Hour of Two Lights
(Astralwerks)
C: This should be the soundtrack for that hookah place on Sunset’s sound system.
D: Yes! Exactly!
C: It’s the Specials guy. They sound like melancholy gypsies.
D: Dignified, beautiful.
C: Class, yeah? Two cultures, maybe three.
D: I like it! Let me look at the box.
C: It’s like a new kind of traditional music.
D: Yes… [thoughtful] Can we order some Indian food now?

Brant Bjork
Keep Your Cool
(Duna Records)
C: Brant Bjork from Kyuss and Fu Manchu and Mondo Generator’s new record.
D: Is that him singing?
C: [Nods 'Yes.'] He’s playing all of the instruments too.
D: [Thumbs up.] Vintage ‘70s rock! And Thin Lizzy too! Wow. The reggae bass on “Searchin’”… scary. Reminds me of David Bowie. Or Blondie.
C: This is kinda Foghat, yeah? Plus the Cars… Here he is in falsetto… “Sister’s got the inside infoooooh!” He should do that more. Michael Jackson, almost. Very cool. This is really good, such a good feel, laidback. Compare this to that new Nebula album, ech. This is the good shit here.
D: I always liked him, Brant Bjork! Thanks for the Red Sun, Mr. Bjork.
C: Check this out: dude is putting the album out only on 12-inch vinyl. No CDs!

PFFR
United We Doth
(Birdman)
C: Bad Ween.
D: Sick.
C: I dunno, dude.
D: I love it. How did they get Snoop Dogg for this?
C: I think one of the PFFR guys is a South Park guy or something, that’s the word on the street. I don’t what street that is, but whatever, there you go. This sound like bad acid trip music. Very bad acid trip.
D: I love it.

The Rapture
Echoes
(Universal)
D: I know this. This is the Moving Units.
C: No, this is the Rapture.
D: They do the same thing.
C: Yeah, well… The Rapture have been going for a while longer, but yep it’s the same influences… Gotta say this is kinda disappointing. That one single on here from two years ago [“House of Jealous Lovers”] is cool but after a while…
D: It’s good but COMPLETELY unoriginal. Birthday Party. Pop Group. Gang of Four. They love that music.

Erase Errata
At Crystal Palace
(Troubleman Unlimited)
D: Same thing! I’m already sick of this. All of these people love the Pop Group. They love this music to DEATH.
C: It does seem pretty little limited on record. But you gotta admit it’s well done. This reminds me a whole lot of that amazing band Lilliput, you remember them? From Switzerland. Some of this stuff seems almost directly ripped. Well maybe they’ll get more interesting on the next record…
D: Lilliput, call your Swiss lawyers!!!

Pretty Girls Make Graves
The New Romance
(Matador)
D: (sighs) More of this stuff? Everybody likes the Pop Group. They like them too much.
C: I dunno, I think this is pretty good. I’d be curious to hear the next record, to see where they go.
D: Whatever. Can we listen to the new Kraftwerk again?

High Llamas
Beet, Maize & Corn
(Drag City)
C: [singing] “Orange crate art/is where it starts.” Oh wait, wrong album. This is pretty shameless Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks, sheesh.
D: Take it off the CD player now.
C: All arrangement, no hooks… Beach Boys without harmonies or melodies–what’s the point? Nice wallpaper stuff, though. I think he could do good soundtrack music. Maybe with Alison Anders, this is her type of shit.
D: This guy should move to Nashville or go back in time to the Brill Building. ENOUGH! Turn it off NOW or I’m leaving.

Festival in the Desert
(World Village/Triban Union/Harmonia Mundi)
C: This is my favorite album out of the whole bunch.
D: This is Malian stuff, right?
C: Yes. This whole CD was recorded live at this festival in the desert, as you might’ve gathered from the title. Pretty amazing stuff.
D: [Listening to “Buri Baalal” by Afel Bocoum] So beautiful. Listen to how the women sing!
C: Yeah, see? This music has everything: melodies, chants…incredible rhythms… all those stringed instruments, I don’t even know what they are. Guitars, I guess.
D: Beautiful.
C: They’re doing a DVD of this, that should be amazing. Sand and candles and this music: what a setting. Tinariwen are on here, they’re amazing.
D: Those are the guys who sound like Junior Kimbrough right?
C: Exactly—the electric guitars are just like his, but I bet they never heard each other’s music. Makes you wonder how far back Junior’s music really goes… Ali Farke Toure’s on here too. And this Native American rock group Blackfire, they have this old guy singing all through it. The Robert Plant song is great.
D: [Listening to Tartit’s “Tihar Bayatin”] So hypnotic… This is the deep stuff, man. The deepest stuff. I’m serious.

House of Low Culture
Edward’s Lament
(Neurot)
D: Dark night music.
C: Yeah, this is really good stuff. Desolate. Subtitled “An Account of Salvation and Redemption in 9 Movements.” So there you go.
D: No moon!
C: Just an electric hum.
D: And vampires!
C: It is pretty spooky. This first track reminds me a lot of Thomas Koner, in a bat sanctuary. The second reminds me of Begotten…
D: So good, so good.
C: This third, with the guitar? Very Gira. Also reminds me of that one vampire film, actually. The Addiction? The Abel Ferrara one. This whole album is soooo evocative. Dark, trippy, but not silly—there’s no stupid trance beats.
D: You better get the candles ready!
C: File next to Coil. I’m definitely gonna be spending some late winter nights listening to this…
D: Do you know that artist Ernst Ffolks? His sense of apocalypse I identified with totally. I have incredible books at my house.

The Dirtbombs
Dangerous Magical Noise
(In the Red)
D: Yes! This is the BOMBER! Who is this?
C: Dirtbombs. From Detroit.
D: Weren’t they more R & B?
C: Yeah, they were I think, and they still are. There’s some of that stuff on here but mostly it’s like this. Aggressive, MC5ish. But there’s good slower songs too, like this one [“Sun Is Shining“]. That guy is such a great singer. It’s hard to do this stuff well these days but here you go.
D: Rock ‘n’ roll from the True Garage!
C: [laughs]
D: [listening to solo on “Don’t Break My Heart”] Scorching. This must be burned IMMEDIATELY! Thank you Dirtbombs!

Dufus
1:3:1
(ROIR)
C: I don’t know about this one.
D: Chattery.
C: They’re kinda wacky, usually not a good sign. Low-rent Beefheart?
D: Listen to me: this is annoying.
C: Sez here on the sticker that they are “direct from NYC’s anti-folk scene! Adored by the Strokes, the Moldy Peaches & Jeffrey Lewis.”
D: I hate the Moldy Peaches!
C: I’ve got to listen to this some more… This is one of those albums where there’s probably some great stuff lurking somewhere… There’s a communal vibe going on here, which I dig…
D: I HATE all of these funny voices.
C: Hey man, you like the Strokes, and they dig this stuff…
D: Yes! I like the Strokes! Okay! But this is stroke-off stuff! I do not want to hear someone’s masturbation. Total self-indulgence. They are in their own world and they should stay there!

James Blood Ulmer
No Escape From the Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions
(Hyena)
C: Blood is a total jazz-fusion guitar legend. This is pretty straightahead for him.
D: He has a great voice. Reminds me of that Fat Possum guy, the one with polio…
C: Yeah, Cedell Davis. I hear that too. This is a real showcase for Blood’s vocals, which are just perfect: weary but determined. Vernon Reid produced this, he’s all over it. I like him like this, when he’s not doing that Living Colour crap.
D: They were the WORST.
C: Yeah. Two generations of black avant garde guitar giants working through some blues. Listen to the guitar work here [on the cover of Earl King’s “Come On (Let the Good Times Roll)”? Awesome, listen to that!
D: Solid.
C: Hendrix fans should be all over this like gnats on a fat cat. This is what they should be playing on those classic rock stations instead of that Clapton and B. B. King stuff for the 8,000th time. People would dig it if they only got the chance to hear it...

Robert Wyatt
Cuckooland
(Rykodisc)
C: Another legend from a more adventurous era..
D: I liked the Soft Machine, the early stuff. Then they got all jazz-fusiony stuff.
C: You need a melody or a backbeat.
D: It’s true, I do.
C: Well this is another kettle of fish.
D: Very atmospheric. Ghosty.
C: Only Robert Wyatt would dedicate a song to Richard Dawkins, the evolution theory guy.
D: [looking at booklet] Brian Eno is on here, singing!
C: Great song, listen to how it swings. Yeah, they’re old pals. David Gimour too… Paul Weller, Phil Manzanera from Roxy Music… Great drumming. This is an album to spend some time with, like all of his records. No one like him.
D: Such a unique voice.
C: He has more soul in his voice than anyone else in England, I think.

Debashish Bhattacharya

C: We meet again.
D: Indeed. [goes to fridge, returns with chilled brownie]
C: Okay? We are ready to begin. D, I wish you clarity.
D: Yes. Focus pocus.

Kool Keith
Global Enlightenment Part 1 DVD
(MVD)
C: I thought this was gonna be Keith being oh-so-weird but actually it’s him being clever… He’s talking philosophy.
D: He’s talking seltzer water.
C: He’s talking about theft, it’s a favorite subject of his. And this is about how he dealt with that: by doing something that is unstealable. Listen to what he’s saying…
Kool Keith on screen, talking about what he keeps in his refrigerator: “I learnt that people like to steal your sodas. Seltzer water, people don’t like it. You could send a big jug of seltzer water around, and nobody would touch it… But people taking my Hawaiian Punches, people drinking all my Tropicana. That happened for weeks, and months. I really learned that seltzer water keeps people away. It’s like a twist: I really don’t like it myself, but I like it because people don’t like it. You have to do it that way. But you have to learn how to like it, like it’s so good to you: it’s SO GOOD to have a glass of seltzer water.”
C: That’s the way I’ve felt about Keith’s last, uh, five records. They’re hard to like! But now I gotta listen to them again, because they were hard to like on purpose!
D [musing]: Hmm. I have to admit I did not even hear those records.
C: Keith is brilliant even when he’s talking about being weird as a conceptual survival strategy. This is funny: watching Keith on Tour. It’s a sustained critique of status-obsessed modern hip-hop. So, he’s supposed to be showing how large he’s living, that’s what hip-hop stars do on their DVDs. But here he’s living in a hotel, he’s eating at Popeye’s. He’s got no hot women on his wing so he follows one around buys her some shorts. He hangs out with music stars friends, that is, the streetbusking guitarist. He has trouble finding liquor. The whole thing is done straight….
D: Even straighter than the Turbonegro film.
C: Which is saying a lot, when you think about it.
Kool Keith on screen, walking through Manhattan’s streets: “I’m always touring, even when I’m walking…. Am I above the streets? I am above the streets at my mentality level. Everybody now raps behind the microphone and a couple of bodyguards and they say they’re the streets. You see a lot of rappers, they walk around with a lot of people with ‘em, with headsets? Their reality is not even reality. It’s a fantasy. I don’t sit in an SUV, doing my documentary, ride around and talk about ‘I was in the streets, I live the street, I am the streets.’ You mean you ride through the streets. Ha. You know what I’m saying?”
C: He’s goofing like Sun Ra. Everything has at least two and a half meanings.
D: Thirty-five minutes of new stoner comedy-philosophy.

Little Freddie King
You Don’t Know What I Know
(Fat Possum)
D: [looking at cover, reading the album title] “You don’t know what I know?” I have a feeling he knows the same thing Kool Keith knows. Which it is I do not but I am trying to know.
C: It’s obviously a Fat Possum production.
D: Which means it’s thick enough to eat with a fork.
C: Raw John Lee Hooker feel, without sheen or Clapton cameos.
D: John Lee Hooker would never have a song called “Crack Head Joe.”
C: It’s about time someone paid tribute to a crackhead.

Blowfly
Fahrenheit 69
(Alternative Tentacles)
C: Blowfly is an old R & B songwriter dude who’s been running the crude parody game for 75 years. Wears a cape and mask to protect his secret identity. Totally classic if you’re in a certain mood.
D: We have to give him some major credit to the cover picture, which is a takeoff on the Bad Brains’ first album cover, only Blowfly is doing a urine lighting strike on the Capitol building.
C: Blowfly has to be experienced live, he’s a comedian provocateur goofball. (You can see why he’s on Jello Biafra’s label now.) I saw him opening for the Pixies and Soul Asylum once at a half-empty Universal Amphitheatre, and I know this is damning by faint praise Blowfly blewflied them off the stage. And get this: his ENTIRE band was wearing GIANT…RAINBOW….AFROS!!!!
D: [looks at sleeve picture of Blowfly with his middle fingers extended] I like his fingernails more than his new record.
C: To update George Clinton: Smell my fingernail.

A Band of Bees
Free the Bees
(Astralwerks)
C: There are songs on here that are as good as the originals they’re styled after– whether it’s the Zombies, or the ballads, the Afrobeat stuff. The writing is great, the spirit is there, the production is definitely there, but… Could it be that they are the men who know too much? With the internet and Mojo every phase of Western pop music is now available to kids, and it’s all presented with this sexy, dramatic gosh-wow. What does that mean for young smart musicians? Are they perhaps over-educated in music history?
D: Maybe you are an over-educated listener!
C: Could be true. I’m sure if I was 12, I’d listen to this one record all summer. But back then, you did listen to only one record all summer because that’s the most that you could get your hands on. You had just enough money saved up to buy a new record. Do kids even do that anymore, listen to one record for a whole summer? This one record, with all its styles and the sheer rich quality of the writing and playing, would keep me going. But now…
D: Now you are becoming an old man. Which is sad for you, because for me this is wonderful stuff. It’s not just vintage décor, the innards are top-notch too. And as my good friend Gertrude Stein said, A good song is a good song is a good song.

HAL
Hal
(Rough Trade)
C: Another high-quality retro band from across the Pond. A fruity harmony pop mix of everything from 1974: Elton John, The Raspberries, Supertramp…a splash of BTO. All that’s missing are Flo & Eddie. You wouldn’t say they scorch.
D: I would definitely deny scorching here.
C: If they could just rock a bit—is that too much to ask?—they could be the new Pooh Sticks. Cuz even I have to admit it’s good stuff. But pianos and high male harmonies? I can only take so much before I reach for my revolver. I need some gee-tar, D, come on.
D: You are becoming impatient and whiny in your old age, with each passing minute. May I suggest that you have one of these chilled brownies?

Teenage Fanclub
Man-Made
(Merge)
D: I heart this record from the first second.
C: You know how some people say ‘I’ve liked that band since the beginning’? Well, with Teenage Fanclub, I HAVE liked them since the beginning! And this is great. Critics have for years said all they were doing was the Byrds and Big Star, from the hair and the style of songwriting and so forth. Now they’re like the Byrds in another way: they just keep on putting out records, long after they have a chance at having a hit. This is their sixth album, they’ve now got an undeniable body of work. And they have someone named Frances playing drums, who I at first thought was Frances from fellow Scotpop stars the Vaselines, but I am now discovering that this is an altogether different Frances.
D: They march to the beat of a different Frances.
C: Yes. Anyways at this point you listen to a Fannies album and since each member gets to write a few songs, you get to see how they’re each getting along in life: who’s married, who’s divorced, who’s been single too long. Each album is an update on their domestic life. Which is cool, when you’ve grown up with them.
D: You’ve grown up with them, singing along with them from a distance.

Orange Juice
The Glasgow School
(Domino)
C: The Scottish band from whence it all issued: Orange Juice.
D: Is there something wrong with the singer? It sounds like a weak Morrissey.
C: But this is before the Smiths! And not nearly as solipsistic. I think when you’re Scots and you like Otis Redding, this is what your singing ends up sounding like. This is a great band, totally innovative. Check the song “I’ll Never Be Man Enough For You.” They crated that fey indie rock boy thing, which was basically scandalous after punk made stuff hard and aggressive.
D: What about New Wave?
C: But this is guitar based, not keyboards. They loved the Byrds, not glam. It’s even here in the lyrics: “I wear my fringe like Robert McGuinn.” It does sound thin; it’s more of a treble sound. But that’s the aesthetic.
D: I can hear their significance, even if I’m not donning a turtleneck and scarf to listen to it.
C: This is the real source of Franz Ferdinand, not Gang of Four. Along with Josef K and Fire Engines and other records store clerk specials. This is a great collection, all the singles. [pauses] I’d also like to say here: Best wishes for a speedy and complete recovery to former Orange Juice mainman Edwyn Collins, who’s been struck down by a brain aneurysm. Get well, Edwyn.

Vetiver
Between EP
(DiCristina)
C: Speaking of fey, the new EP from Vetiver: a coupla new songs, a Fleetwood Mac cover, a live version from the album last year. “Been So Long” is another humble Cabic classic.
D: I like Vetiver, and I like this, and I’m not even into the new folk thing!
C: You always talk about ‘the new folk thing’ like there’s a private club and the members all speak in code and have badges on their bongos.
D: [getting up to go to the kitchen] Anyone who I can imagine having a flower or curl in their hair, I call them “new folk.”
C: New folk? New fey.

Gary Higgins
Red Hash
(Drag City)
C: Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance has been covering Higgins’ “Thicker Than A Smokey.”
D: This is music to burn one to.
C: To burn out to. It’s a reissue of a record that is an underground collectors’ favorite. Some of it’s in that vein of folkdream—check the Vetiver-like acoustic guitar-and-cello-and-sensitive-male-voice thing here. But this record came out in 1973. It’s some heavy country-folk soul-rock with an acid edge…that got buried in its birthyear, I guess by sensitive singer-songwriters laying a lot thicker stuff on the same surfaces. The dude articulates that really pretty subtle mood, when you’re just generally down, feeling vaguely doomed, when destiny becomes clear for a second, and paths seem to have narrowed, and the one that’s opened isn’t the one you wanted…
D: He sounds like he might not make it to the studio tomorrow…
C: Yeah. Or, he did make it to the studio, but everyone else had already gone home, and he was just there, alone.

Judee Sill
Dreams Come True/Hi I Love You Right Heartily Here
(Water)
D: Judee Sill! I have her first two albums. California crystal stream radiance of the first order.
C: This is the Jim O’Rourke-supervised presentation of the‘lost’ final album and other recordings made by another underground collector’s ‘70s soft-rock-folk-pop hero, the strange and beautiful and sadly late Judee Sill, a beloved-by-some woman-artist-cosmic freak of the universe who wandered to the edge and didn’t make it back. The biography as told in the booklet here is amazing; one husband says Sill “was convinced she was a genderless angel with a message and cross to bear and she called us ‘donors’ because she said that I had the same karma or similar karmas.” But… Well, I can see my mom putting this on between Carpenters sides. There’s just so much joy but sometimes it’s just too AOR for me: tasteful, honey crystal Cheerios for the soul type stuff
D: I love it. It’s almost too wholesome to bear.
C: I can’t associate any of the music here with what usually comes out of a heroin addicts. [pauses] Then again, Jerry Stahl wrote Alf.

Diana Cluck
Oh Vanille
(Important)
C: Finally this record is being made available to the general public, not just those lucky enough to encounter Ms. Cluck at a show when she had some handmade copies on her. It’s good stuff, more of this sort of soulful folk thing that’s out there right now: a sadness that is more on a spiritual than personal level? Musically it’s pretty bare.
D: Somewhat Cat Power, a bit.
C: A banjo. A guitar. Cluck’s beautiful voice. Brooklyn. “Did you receive my love across the telepathic desert? A million signals sent…”

Marissa Nadler
The Saga of Mayflower May
(Eclipse)
C: Dark folk-country concept album edging Nick Cave-ward, but of course much more mannered. Which may be where she still comes up shy for me: it’s all so beautiful and chorale-like, and from that way Enya and a thousand New Age Witch extras beckon.
D: Blixa is not slashing his guitar around on a Marissa Nadler record.
C: So we get lots of Espers-ish acoustic guitar and flutes and very pretty, haunted wintry singing. If only she spread her wings a bit more, and tried for different vistas once in a while, instead of the fog and forest and sea.
D: She could look to India…

Debashish Bhattacharya
Calcutta Slide-Guitar
(Riverboat/World Music Network)
C: He plays traditional Indian ragas on steel guitar. Of course it’s amazing. Joyous and contemplative, barely there and totally intense.
D: [looking at the sleeve] He’s got four instruments and he’s hugging them all.
C: [Quoting] “A thousand-year tradition of music.” And we were complaining about the effects of 40 years…
D: Might need to do a re-think on that one.

Gang Gang Dance
God’s Money
(Social Registry)
C: New album from New York’s Gang Gang Dance. Sounds like Yoko Ono collaborating with Sun City Girls, all music sourced from the 4ad catalog with a few Savage Republic guitars thrown in. And I mean that in a very positive way.
D: This sounds like really early Residents. I could have totally gotten laid to this in ‘84. I would be really embarrassed if my friends caught me listening to it. Unless there were naked girls and ecstasy involved. Then everything is acceptable.
C: It’s such a weird mix, the songs feel like they, or the album as a whole, could go anywhere at any moment, into a chorus, off to another continent, into another time. I think they’re only limited by their budget.

Boris
Akuma no Uta
(Southern Lord)
C: Now for something completely different.
D: WHOA…. This is like ice age man thawing music… He thaws out, walks to his guitar, plugs in his amp and this is what he plays.
C: It’s a death affirmer, alright. An apocalypse summoner.
D: Who is this?
C: Boris, a trio from Japan, been going for a while. Holy shit. I was all set to sit through an entire album of the introduction drone and was happy about it. I didn’t expect this…
D: ROCK ONSLAUGHT!
C: I needed some guitar and this is the free-flow I.V. Okay, I hereby call this meeting of Facemelters Anonymous to order.

The Psychic Paramount
Gamelan Into the Mink Supernatural
(No Quarter)
C: I think we are required by our Arthur oath to like this, but I just want to say that were I not bound by those rules, I would still stand up and be counted for these guys. It’s amazing isn’t it? The first track is like where My Bloody Valentine would’ve gone if they’d continued after Loveless…
D: What an explosion of sound.
C: And it’s not just another needless projection of power. This second track is like Led Zeppelin doing chase music, in a Michael Mann cop film, circa 2009. Instrumental trio from back East.
D: I don’t know what to say except excuse me while I scrape my brain off the wall with a spatula.

Residual Echoes
Residual Echoes
(Holy Mountain)
C: This is Residual Echoes, from Santa Cruz. Feedback warriors who like to wig out into grooves and then back out into the old hyperspace. Bless ‘em.
D: This is the good stuff!
C: Can meets Chrome, and things gets rough.
D: Another double-banger. So many new bands blowing it into interstellar overdrive right now…

Growing/M. Evan Burden
Firmament/“10/24/02”
(Zum)
C: [listening to Growing’s 20-minute track] Reminds me of early Tangerine Dream or Fripp & Eno. Clean, kind of cold, a million miles deep.
D: Sounds from the slowly rotating electric chrysalis.
C: That guy stuck in the ice? This is what he heard for those 70,000 years he was frozen…

Jane
Berserker
(Car Park)
D: There is nothing berserk about this one.
C: An excellent Animal Collective-related project that continues their good works, humming along through some electric fairieland. They’re on a roll right now, creatively.
D: It’s very visual music. Spherical chorales… celestial Cologne… minimalist landscapes…
C: … and now there’s swarms of birdnotes—birdwords—like Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus. But also like a lot of recent albums, it seems…
D: The birds are singing more these days, haven’t you noticed?
C: …

The Juan Maclean
Less Than Human
(DFA/Astralwerks)
C: I’m going to dance to this, the finest straight-up dance album I’ve heard in years. I’m not sure how a guy from Six Finger Satellite ends up making an on-the-one pulsing joyride of New York electro-funk that this is…
D: [calling a rhythm] Talking Heads!
C: Yes. And sped-up Aphex Twin. And I don’t know. There’s something really wonderful about this. I can’t put my finger on it because it’s too busy moving. This guy has an extra finger, maybe he can make music that other people can’t…. In any event, looks like I will be dancing for the rest of the summer in private and in public. You have been warned.
D: As long as you don’t do the Crackhead Joe, everything should be fine.
C: Two fingers up.

Originally published in Arthur No. 15/March 2005

Nina Simone
Baltimore
(CTI/Legacy/Epic/Sony)
D: [to tape recorder] Hello. We are back!
C: [very formally] It is time to exchange views once again, after our brief vacation from these pages. A vacation, I might add, that was not entirely voluntary—
D: But we will speak of that some other time.
C: Everything was going well until they caught you putting the potato in that Hummer’s exhaust pipe in front of the military recruitment center.
D: I told them I was removing the potato that I had just witnessed some crazy anarchist put there. I was actually de-vandalizing their truck—
C: But, strangely, they were not convinced. Especially after they found the grater in your jacket.
D: Yes, well…
C: [Yawns.] Please remind me to forget to call you next time something is going down, because I can’t afford any more of these “vacations.”
D: Soooo, Nina Simone’s 1974 album Baltimore has been reissued.
C: Apparently she didn’t want to make this record. She didn’t like making the record. She didn’t like the finished record. And it’s such a good record!
D: The title track is the greatest Randy Newman cover of all time. I mean, Randy Newman done in a loping funk mode? If you’ve ridden the Amtrak through Baltimore, the route it takes gives you an unobstructed view of a horribly blighted ghetto, and her voice here really captures that sadness.
C: I’m guessing she thought the more pop-orientated /songs were beneath her, that it was somehow undignified for her to sing Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl,” and maybe she was right on that count. But this is really a unique Nina Simone album, and frequently magnificent.

Antony and the Johnsons
I Am a Bird Now
(Secretly Canadian)
D: Give me that. [looks at sleeve] I was happier when I didn’t know what he looks like.
C: Hey man, everyone looks like something.
D: It’s like if you heard Pavarotti singing and then turned out he looks like Pee-Wee Herman!
C: Well, how hard is it to just listen to the music? My goodness.
D: I’m just saying.
C: This guy’s voice is known to have moved Lou Reed to tears. I might be wrong, but I don’t think Lou Reed cries very often. The tracks of Lou’s tears…
D: …could not extinguish torch songs this strong. So very beautiful. [towards end of album] Yet here we have instance number eighty-seven-thousand-four-hundred-and-two of a greaseball, cheeseball Saturday Night Live style saxophone solo ruining another otherwise faultless song.
C: Clarence Clemmons, so much to answer for.

The Kills
No Wow
(Rough Trade)
D: They still don’t have a drummer? Another incomplete band…
C: That means that each get an entire half of the proverbial pie! Great opening salvo, it’s the drum beat equivalent of a strobe light in the face. They have a song about asking if you got the real good cigarettes from the store like I asked.
D: A frequently posed question around my house.
C: There’s that chugalug thing they do so well, on the chorus of “I Hate the Way You Love.” You can ride that into the sunset. By taking instruments away, rock’n’roll has reminded us that at it’s core it’s dance music. Fewer instruments means the sound has room to breathe. And breath plus beat equals boogie. Even if the beat is that of a machine. See? Drum machines do have soul.
D: I am more enamored with their human qualities. Speaking of which, I’d like to give a hearty salute to VV for being that rarest of regional species: the untanned Floridian.
D: [end of “Rodeo Town”] That is so Velvets! She is fearsome yet vulnerable, a potent combination.
C: The fella in the group goes by the nom de rock Hotel. I think Motel would be more appropriate. Someplace where rooms can be rented by the hour.
D: [Listening to the three note piano riff on “Ticket Man”] They should use piano on more songs. And they should use more of the piano, period. I think there’s 85 more keys to be precise. It’s like the music has been shaved to an inch of its life.
C: I’ve always said there’s two types of people: the shaves and the shave-nots.
D: Not as catchy as the first album, but The Kills aren’t dead yet.

M. Ward
Transistor Radio
(Merge)
D: [listening to “One Life Away”] He actually says, “I’m visiting my fraulein”! An inspired approach to breaking into the hofbrau circuit. How sweet is this…you could whistle or hum along to this entire album without feeling stupid once.
C: This guy seems unassuming. I’d like to hang out with him in an Airsteam trailer crossing the country. Easygoing, but clever. He’s making lyrical origami out of the sad history of rock on “Fuel For Fire”: “I’ve dug beneath the wall of sound/the song is always the same/I’ve got lonesome fuel for fire/And so my heart is always on the line.” This album is genius. For fans of Dylan, Red House Painters/Sun Kill Moon, even Chris Isaak aficianados feeling frisky.
D: I have seen M. Ward. He has curly hair. And if the hair is curly outside your head, it means there is something curly going on inside too.
C: This song “Big Boat” is the dis track of the year! All about how this guy who says he’s got a big boat really only has a tiny dinghy! HAHA!
D: “I’ll Be Yr Bird” – a bird reference, just like Antony. The whole lot are ornithology-crazed.
C: What do you think the M in M. Ward stands for?
D: Megamensch. Obviously.

Fiery Furnaces
EP
(Rough Trade)
D: Ween covering Kraftwerk?
C: It’s like they’re playing the zaniest parts possible. Zappa plus Sandy Shaw plus Miami bass plus Peter Frampton talkbox plus “Da Funk”-era Daft Punk. [as song builds] You can hear why this band has such a good live rep. And there’s the Disneyland Electrical Parade. Geniuses, pushing it forward: a band mashing itself up. And dig those fistfulls of piano notes!
D: Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger, I salute you. Or I would, except I am sitting on my hands in an effort to behave.
C: Somewhere, Neil Hagerty doesn’t feel so lonesome anymore.
D: Todd Rundgren looks up, with interest.
C: Friedberger & Frampton has a certain ring to it. The law firm that rocks!
D: That’s very similar to an Echo & Bunnymen song, “Killing Moon.” [tries singing along]
C: You can’t sing along with this record. How you going to do “fireman Frank friendly fed fee-free/daznk dusty doughnuts den da dribble drank”? Can you imagine Fiery Furnaces karaoke?
D: Only after multiple pitchers of margaritas.
C: Pace yourself, please.
D: You may call me Margarita Friedbergerhead from now on.
C: I may not.

Louis XIV
Illegal Tender EP
(Pineapple/Atlantic)
C: More complex melodic pop, lotsa cool elements. One song goes into a violin and horn shuffle! Uptempo, Fall-Stones swagger.
D: “Are you ready Steve?”
C: Especially the garage-glam stomp here. I love the theatricality of these guys. Brian May type clipped, melodic, strutting guitar. What a tone.
D: You know, it cannot be coincidence that Brian May and Louis XIV, I mean the historical figure Louis XIV, have the exact same hairdo.
C: There may be something to your curly hair theory after all.

Kings of Leon
Aha Shake Heartbreak
(Atlantic)
D: I can’t understand a word he’s saying but I like the way he’s saying it.
C: Hawaiian washboard, dub reggae bass, tropical storm strumming… Prince Valiant takes a holiday in Waikiki. Then it goes into a Strokes/Beefheart/Talking Heads thing, taut’n’funky.
D: These guys appear to be cooking up something in the shack in back. Remember that time we were driving through Llano, Texas in search of Cooper’s Pit BBQ, and suddenly there was so much smoke in the road we had to pull of?
C: And we pulled right into Cooper’s parking lot!
D: Yes, well, Kings of Leon have a compellingly smoky sound that make me think of that. Big britches and brisket.
C: This band is like, all brothers or cousins or both. And Fiery Furnaces are brother and sister. How come my siblings were never that cool?
D: I’m sure they feel just as highly about you.

Wolfmother
Wolfmother EP
(Modular)
D: This rocks! Straight outta the penal colony commonly called Australia. “Purple haze is in the sky/See the angels wink on high!” I can understand and appreciate every word.
C: For fans of Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath. Of which we are two.
D: When I was last in Australia, I drank beer made from Tazmanian water. It gave me special insight into the psyche of the Tazmanian devil. And, I believe, into the dark hearts of Wolfmother.
C: Dude, they have a song called “The White Unicorn”!
D: See, if they were from Brooklyn, that would be irony. But Australians rock unrepentantly and irony-free. This is the way for me.
C: Break out the two-hitter.
D: It’s a no-brainer.

Parchman Farm
Parchman Farm EP
(Jackpine Social Club)
D: [listening to Mirror Spirit] “Heyyyyy something’s burning/Again.” I know that feeling.
C: Cool screecher gnome there, doin’ the bluesy shouter vocals. But he’s got that yowl that echoes.
D: Some of the Grand Funk/Cactus/ZZ Top boogie woogie oogie.
C: Harmonica. Roadhouse! Makes me wanna pour some Jameson’s in my latte. I’m still waiting for some piano or the proverbial blazing lead guitar. Like Dickey Betts, she takes a while to get into it but then—
D: She?
C: Yes, she. Guitar mixed too low. They really foreground the vocals and hi-hats.. [listening to “Too Many People” still] When she soloes…she has a real good solo flow going, it’s non-rushed, just thoughtful melodic lines. Hardly anyone plays like that anymore, it’s a lost virtue, being able to jam it out without going all melismatic on the fretboard. I am digging it, I just wish they’d turn it up more.
D: [listening to chant that starts midway “Chosen Child”] This is for the people who want to mellow their harsh.
C: Another Bay Area band. Shit! This and Comets On Fire and High On Fire, all from the same bioregion. Unbelievable.
D: The West Coast is in the roadhouse again! [looking at sleeve] Another EP??? First incomplete bands, now incomplete records…
C: I like how their songs can switch direction hard in the middle, or in the final third. There’s a loosening of the song structure rules. They need a deeply psychedelic ballad with all the trimmings—Mellotron, phased vocals—and so on here somewhere.
D: That’s the flaw in the flow.

Heartless Bastards
Stairs and Elevators
(Fat Possum)
C: Another chick guitarist playing rock n roll. Cool voice, she can really siren-ate when she wants to, nice Nirvana chords, catchy vocal turns, not the best lyrics especially “New Resolution.”
D: I resolve to skip this song.
C: Her name is Erika Wennerstrom.
D: Kind of a country voice.
C: I picture her hand on her hip on “Runnin’”—awful song titles by the way—scarf on her head, in a heat-fogged kitchen at the stove, kids running around, telling off her husband, at the end of her rope… “I hope there’s a higher ground/Cuz I’m going steadily down.”
D: Sounds like there’s a piano under there, I’d love to hear her without a rock band, away from the plodding bass, although I kinda like the plod on “The Will Song.” It does have a nice tug to it, that groove she’s riding.
C: When it starts stomping on “Swamp Song”….look out. That’s her tempo.

Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough
(Fat Possum)
C: Featuring Heartless Bastards doing their righteous shitkicker stomping on “Done Got Old” – weirdly defiant given its sad lyrics, so maybe that doesn’t work on the conceptual level – why would you be so proud that you can’t do what you used to? – but it sounds awesome. In a way it’s the Led Zeppelin treatment.
D: I’d buy this just for the Spiritualized track. That’s a brainstormtrooper.
C: The Stooges, doing two versions of the same song, one of Junior’s cruelest.
D: Hey it’s the Black Keys rocking. Hey it’s our friends the Fiery Furnaces, man listen to that fleet fingerwork. That’s like hillbilly Mahavishnu Orchestra stuff right there.
D: Birds of Fiery Furnaces!
C: Thee Shams’ track is a stomper too. Stomp is the tempo of the year! Queens of the Stone Age, Kings of Leon, Louis XIV…
D: I gotta get some new boots.
C: More Stooges here at the end with Watt. Iggy is saying frankly unsayable things. And the band is getting down into the meat of the monster. Lock up your daughters. And your sons too.

Love’s a Real Thing: The Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa (World Psychedelic Classics 3)(Luaka Bop/V2)
D: Not sure what’s specifically psychedelic about this.
C: …Other than it might expand some people’s consciousness to listen to electric music from Africa. We always forget that there are kids who haven’t yet lucked into hearing King Sunny Ade or Fela Kuti or Ali Farka Toure or Tinariwen, yet…
D: These guys shoulda been on the Junior Kimbrough tribute album instead of Mr. BUH-LOOOZE Explosion, who is, after all, the worst kind of novelty artist: a failed humorist.
C: Mmm that’s true, now!
D: “Better Change Your Mind” by William Onyeabor is the coolest homegrown soul-funk I’ve heard in some time. Like a home demo of a bitter-but-still-sweet-singing Curtis Mayfield giving a word of advice.
C: There’s a Fela cover on here—I think, I could be wrong—“Ifa,” by Tunji Oyelana & the Benders, what a monster groove that is.
Hey that’s the beginning of theme song for The World on NPR!
D: “I’m Lisa Mullens.”
C: “And I’m Korva Coleman!”
D: “Let’s do the numbers!”

The Chemical Brothers
Push the Button
(Astralwerks)
D: Push the “off” button.
C: Drugs help with this kind of music, but not as much as they used to… So much machine repetition, like a child’s TV program. If I’m going to live in a loop, I want it to be organically played, not by robots.
D: If I am not mistaken, and I seldom am, Keyboard Money Mark already had an album called Push the Button. Mark’s button was better.
C: They always are lifting off other people. Remember when they started out, they were calling themselves the Dust Brothers? Bizarre. You can’t sample someone else’s name for your own name!
D: Unless you have good lawyers.
C: Let’s at least salute them for “Left Right,” an antiwar electro-stomp song featuring American rapper Anwar Superstar. “What’s the difference between Bush and Saddam?…If it’s so important for us to fight for mankind/Why don’t I see any of they kinfolk out on the front line?” Sounds like your standard-issue late-’90 know-nothing No Limit rapper, except he’s pissed off and he’s aware.
D: Maybe I’m a misty-eyed optimist but this could be an anthem. Somewhere, poor Soulja Slim is still crying.

Ian Brown
Solarized
(Sanctuary)
C: Speaking of aware. I think Mr. Ex-Stone Roses singer here has been reading his Galeano. This little chant at the end of “Upside Down” (which is the tile of Galeano’s book of fury): “Seven percent own 84 percent/Of all the wealth on earth/Oil is the spice to make a man/Forget man’s worth.” That’s some pretty heavy stuff. I always get the feeling that the music Ian Brown is most into is really rasta reggae, because that’s what his political perspective and lyrical approach resemble, even if the music doesn’t always.
D: [Listening to “Time Is My Everything”] Ladies and germs, you are witnessing the cheesiest horn recorded in the last four decades.
C: That really is outrageously bad. That’s the kind of thing that people usually get disciplined for. Lose their jobs, no severance, future wages garnished by court order…
D: [listening to “Destiny and Circumstance”] I like his voice but this music is just embarassing. That guitar work is just [haughty voice] dreadfully dull. I can’t be bothered to listen to it. You bore me, Ian Brown musicians. [listening to the title track] It’s better when it’s more tripped out like this.
C: Yes, but…
D: [“The Sweet Fantastic “ starts] There’s that horn again!?!
C: All this electronic stuff is the wrong approach for him. He’s so close to the earth, he should use as few electrical appliances as possble. Just natural human energy playing drums and guitars, and for goddsake real horns. Street musicians in Morocco, or Cambodia, or Brazil. Anything but this.

Kasabian
Kasabian
(RCA)
C: British band, hot over there. Live in a barn.
D: Let’s do the numbers. Obvious inspirations: Happy Mondays, Regular Fries, late-period Primal Scream.
C: Lads on LSD, into raves and comedown music, but enamored by rock n roll’s inherent mystique and power.
D: Plus Air.
C: [belches lightly] Pretty decent for a first record.
D: Yep.
C: They could write an anthem or they could become something embarassing. We shall see.

Coyote
Inside EP
(Birdman)
D: Based on the evidence before the court, the piano is really making a comeback in music…
C: This reminds me of the guy who shows up at your party and you have to figure out a non-confrontational way to make him leave. Sounds like Drive Like Jehu or the Rapture or Entrance at a full-moon piano recital at an iceskate rink. They’ve already got the organ there for these guys.
D: Reminds me of the circus scenes in Wings of Desire.
C: Always back to the German filmmakers with you. Well, I’d rather hear some Vincent Price narration than this guy’s Crime and the City Solution impression. But the music’s pretty good.
D: This last song [“Sharing Your Soul With the Group”] has a nice gothic flourish to it. And a decent chord change.

Mirrors
Another Nail in the Remodeled Coffin
(ROIR)
D: Cleveland band. The legendary Mirrors!
C: [listening to “If I Swear”] Very angelic voice, like if Peter Cetera was fronting the Feelies. I have a theory that all music that comes out of Cleveland reflects that state of its sports teams at the time. I bet this was from the era when World B. Free was playing for the Cavaliers. And Super Joe Charboneau was having his one and only big season hitting home runs.
D: Wasn’t he Snoopy’s favorite player? I think Snoopy wrote letters to Super Joe that went unanswered.
C: No, I think it’s Charlie Brown that wrote letters to Super Joe. Anyways I bet this was created the year the Indians had 10-cent beer night and there ended up being a riot. It was music made on the cheap for everyone to have a good time to, but things got a bit out of control and everything went up in flames in the end.
D: I think this stuff is just as important as Television, but of course Mirrors were not from New York City so nobody talked about them then, or now. Except for themselves. As frontman Jamie Klimek writes in the sleeve notes: “Dedicated to all the people I’ve worked with whose names I can never remember. You know who you are. I sure as hell don’t.”
C: One gets the sense that the feeling was mutual.

Jennifer Gentle
Valende
(Sub Pop)
D: Michael Yonkers?
C: No, it’s some varying-fidelity weirdbeard Italian psych band. At first this sounds like Animal Collective, without the dizzyness, alittle more twee. But you know, I’m not into sped-up voices.
D: Smells like Demento. “Fish heads, fish heads…”
C: But this [“Circles of Sorrow”] is gorgeous. Intimate, slow-dawning rural psychedelia.
D: Whispering is underrated, under-used. Morrison used to do it all the time, there was a reason for that. I once heard Bjork whispering some Anais Nin erotica on the radio and I almost fainted. When your instrument is your voice, you gotta use every thing it can do. The ears will respond.
C: And beautiful birdsong here at the end of this song, beginning of the next one, entitled “The Garden Pt. 1.”
D: Now they are birds. Please, gentle Arthur readers, stick with this album, its riches lie near its center, like a luscious basil-mint blow pop.

Bird Show
Green Inferno
(Kranky)
D: Everyone’s gone bird-crazy. Ornithologists all.
C: Birds, flute drones, gamelan, bells: meditative. Reminds me of Kraig Grady’s false ethnographies. And Jon Hassell’s fourth world records too, of course. And Holger Czukay. And late-period Talk Talk. Anything David Toop wrote about in Ocean of Sound, you know?
D: And like that other drone-unit on Kranky that we adore: Growing. Wonderful, brilliant lifebuzzing stuff. Birds taught humans to sing, but since then humans drowned them out with their own voice and instruments. That was our loss. Perhaps it’s time for us to start listening to their song again.

C & D: Two guys “reason” together about some new records.

D: Christ on a crutch, it’s hot in here.
C: [winces] Uh yeah, I guess I forgot to mention the “air conditioner, lack of” situation we’ve got going over here.
D: It is going to be difficult for me to do my work in these conditions.
C: [guffaws] You call listening to records “working”? Ha! That ain’t workin’! You get your money for nothin’ and your chicks for free.
D: Where have I heard this before. What money? And I don’t see any chicks around here.
C: I regret that my hosting skills are not what they once were.
D: Yes your place is not only a sweat lodge—it’s sexist. I cannot work in these circumstances.
C: You can do it if you put a beer into it.
D: Okay. Beer me.
C: Of course! [Heads to the kitchen, ceremonially] Come! Let us drink beer and reason together.

ALAN VEGA
Station
(Blast First/Mute)
C [returns from kitchen with a sixer of St. Pauli's, starts CD at medium blast]: So for some reason I thought it was a good idea to kick things off with the darkest, most negative thing possible. Alan Vega from New York City electro-rock-minimalist legends Suicide, talking about the condition of this nation. Analysis: dark. Prognosis: bleak to terminal.
D: [listening to "Freedom's Smashed"] Turn it up! This is the ’80s back with a vengeance! [listening to lyrics: "Smashing down freedom / Smashing our freedoms / Wah! / Smashing our freedom / Freedom's running scared/ Freedom's running out of time/Freedom's gone!"] Shit! I’m flipping out here. I could live inside this sound.
C: The rhythm is really amazing, it’s like John Henry hitting a punching bag—and Alan Vega is the ringside coach talking to himself about how they’re gonna lose, the fix is in.
D: Yeah baby! Freedom’s going down. It’s terminal idiocy, nobody’s paying attention. But Suicide always knew what was going down in the negative times.
C: The vocals really are astonishing in their range, very actorly. Repeated phrases in different intonations, suggesting different moods, different meanings—shock, resignation, despair, hope; and then there are all those Goblin-esque shrieks and gurgles in the background.
D: This is America at its most violent, self-flagellating. [Repeating lines from "Station Station"] “There was a TIME/ When you could dream /Now—NOW / It has become a crime/ to dream! / It has become a CRIME/ to dream.” Talking about the dream losers. Doing a deeper analysis of American society. Sometimes there’s something at work in the culture that normal journalism can’t decipher. And right now is not normalcy, my friend. One thing’s for sure: this won’t be giving comfort to the neighbors.
C: Hey, Springsteen has been doing [Suicide song] “Dream Baby Dream” live lately.
D: [pause] Little Steven was pretty good, but I always thought Alan Vega and Martin Rev should have had characters on The Sopranos.
C: Especially with those world’s biggest sunglasses that Alan Vega always wears.
D: It’s his signature. They belong in Cleveland in that Rock N Roll museum.
C: Yes, right next to all the other sunglasses of rock ‘n’ roll: Stevie Wonder, Bootsy Collins, Ray Charles, Velvet Underground, Elton John, Sly Stone, Yoko Ono, Roy Orbison. Only, Alan Vega’s would be behind cracked glass with bars in front and you’d hear someone yelling at the television in back.
D: [in Alan Vega voice] “Freedom’s smashed!”

MAGIK MARKERS
Boss
(Ecstatic Peace/Universal)
D: More ominosity.
C [handing D another beer]: This is the new Magik Markers album, and it’s much more straightahead than you’d expect from their reputation as improv poet noise-stars. These are recognizable drums-guitar-vocal duo songs with relatively melodic chant-singing by Elisa Ambrogio and surprisingly in-the-pocket drumming by brother Pete Nolan. There’s even a pretty good stab ["Empty Bottles"] at a piano ballad.
D: “Body Rot” and “Taste” remind me of the lest-we-forget great dark mystical ’80s Californian band Opal—
C: Respect to Kendra Smith.
D: —and that band the Kills who made one really good album and then….
C: Yeah there’s a similarity—in a driving, on-the-edge-of-something-intense, and she has a similar voice to the Kills singer V.V., but this seems more committed to um, murder, or something. “Last of the Lemach Line” has that good ol’ grimy looming-catastrophe-in-a-dying-factory-city sound… like Godspeed!, or Kim’s Sonic Youth jams. Patti Smith in her freer, less barroom moments. This is not beer music. [looks at band photograph on CD] But you could drink bottles of whiskey to it on a hot Saturday afternoon, which is apparently what they did when they were made it!
D: [in own world] Hmm… What did happen to the Kills?
C: Being confused with The Killers would probably be enough to cause any band to do themselves in. But my best guess is they were killed by a drum machine WITH NO SOUL.
D: That never would’ve happened if they’d used Suicide’s drum machine. Early ’70s SoHo soul, baby! [looks at empty beer bottle, bellows in Jim Morrison voice:] Beer me madly/Beer me one more time today!
C: Life: enjoy it while it lasts!

BLUES CONTROL
Blues Control
(Holy Mountain/Revolver)
D: [looking at CD spine] “Blues Control”?
C: I know, sounds like a pimple commercial. “Son, we know you’ve been having a hard time lately. Maybe you should think about using…BLUES CONTROL (TM)? It wipes away those hard-to-kill blues in a matter of minutes. “Control your blues today with Blues Control.”
D: I think my current blues control is a beer with a German girl on it. [pauses, thinks] They are hard at work on something, but I’m not sure who’s at the controls.
C: It’s a di-sexual instro duo on guitars and keys, with a drum machine. Lea Cho and Russ Waterhouse. Seems like they have two major modes: brute force monstrosity trudge in the cloudsmashing style of the mighty Blue Cheer…
D: And impressionist, introspective space and electronic plant music on that subtle plane visited by Eric Satie and Popul Vuh, with the subaquatic melodica of Sir Augustus Pablo…
C: [chuckles] That’s a team-up to be reckoned with.
D: These other songs are some pretty heavy duty stuff! It’s music you hear when you dig a hole deep enough to listen to what’s going on inside the earth. Troglobite rock, baby. And I am a troglophile!
C: [carrying on] If they put this out on vinyl, and I think that they did, it should be on coated 540 gram for the needle’s sake.
D: It should be on shellac. [finishing another beer] Analog all over your face! Ya heard?
C: Maybe I should put something else on before things get any more out of control…

CELEBRATION
The Modern Tribe
(4AD/Beggars Group)
C: …
D: Well, here’s our first obvious album-of-the-year contender.
C [listening to “Pressure” and “Pony”] The singer’s totally going for it. It’s like Johnette Napolitano … fronting a shit-hot psychedelic-funk-dance band on an electro-church run to the dub castles of Jamaica. And yes, I just made that up.
D: The singer is not holding back. Fuck me…two times!
C: [ignoring C’s outburst] Like a more passionate, more organic and more, dare I say ‘soulful’ LCD Soundsystem, fronted by a belter of a singer, who is a woman. [rhetorically:] How badly do we need this?
D: Women are DEFINITELY where it’s at right now.
C: [quizzical] And maybe always…? But yeah, so awesome. Produced by Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio, and those guys sing on it too but you can tell that. Reminds me of Moonshake, or Laika, only more muscular, funkier.
D: There is a certain Eurythmics-soul quality apparent here. [pauses] But she may actually be undermixed. Underrepresented. I want to hear the words.
C [listening to “Hands Off My Gold”]: You were right at the top, this is the album to beat, there’s hit after hit here.
D: [self-righteously] But of course, music is not a competition!
C: [smug] Oh yeah, of course not.
D: …
C: …
D: So, interested in a friendly wager?

FAUST
Faust IV
(Caroline/Virgin/Capitol)
D [listening to the opening track “Krautrock”]: Well, this is pretty clearly the source of Spacemen 3’s “Revolution,” even down to where the drums come in And there’s that Can-Hawkwind motorik rhythm. It must be… FAUST! What is this, 1973?
C: Yes and yes and yes again—sir, you are the sweepstakes winner!
D: Thank you veddy much, ladies and gentlemen. [pauses] Whoops, I mean no ladies and one gentleman.
C: Yeah well, if there were ladies here, I’m sure you’d be to busy checking your blackberry instead of actually talking to a live female human being.
D: [snorts] Silence in the lower ranks!
C: …
D: Ahem.
C: …
D: So, I never listened to Faust, they were always a big question mark for me.
C: Me too.
D: They might have been one of the most radical, political bands in Germany. Then again it was a very political time in Germany. And it’s not anymore. There’s no nail bombs anymore, just police teargas…
C: The bass sound on “Jennifer” is amazing is insane, timeless. It’s Syd Barrett inside deeply abstract bass sound, that’s essentially, basically electronic. The mix is so daring. What else sounded like this, ever?
D: This [“Just a Second (Starts Like That”)] is what we’re talking about. That certain pulse that only the Germans and Hawkwind could do.
C: Yeah, and, um, remember this band called Creedence Clearwater Revival? “Suzie Q”…
D: —is pretty much the template for everything. Highest praise to John Fogerty, one of the last surviving Great Americans of the Golden Age. You better recognize! [four minutes into “Giggy Smile”]: But—did Creedence ever dare to get this far out…into giddiness? And electronics?
C: The La Dusseldorf guys were pretty goofy. But, yeah this kind of multi-genre hopping —folk, motorik, drone, psychedelic pop—in such good spirits, so fearlessly, so without a care. Zappa? Mutantes? Amazing that there was some kind of audience for this, enough for them all to make careers. What a time that was… [drifts off]
D: By the way, I have an addendum to make. No one had cooler sunglasses than Om Khalthoum. Egyptian Moderne will always be the number one fashion look.
C: ???
D [mysteriously]: Those who know, know…

WHITE RAINBOW
Prism of Eternal Now
(Marriage vinyl/Kranky cd)
D [jaw agape]: I feel like I’m listening to the soundtrack to the truly great cosmic film Ralph Bakshi was never allowed to make.
C: [also gone] Wow…with super guitars and tablas and some seriously Steve Reich maneuvers on the vocals…
D: [at end of seven-minute first track] This is what Strawberry Jam wishes it could sound like.
C: And it’s all one guy. Remember? He did that “vibrational healing chamber” at ArthurBall a year and a half ago.
D: [one minute into third track] Serious pedal-oriented vibrations on this one. This will take a long time to investigate properly.
C: It’s like half Fripp/Eno “Swastika Girls,” half Terry Riley “Poppy Nogood.” Multi-tracked guitars riff away over a bed of raw synthesizer grooves. Incredible!
D: Massive!
C: I think we may have just left the beer portion of the evening.
D: Which can mean only one thing: Bring on the papalolo!

DEVENDRA BANHART
Old Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
(XL/Beggars Banquet)
D: Ah, not this guy again. Every single record of his, we have to review. Why?
C: Well, those at the controls of this operation like to keep tabs. See how things grow. See how the organism evolves.
D: [takes a tug on the pipe] This is Devendra’s White Album. Or the truest Tropicalia tribute album.
C: He took a longer time to make this record, really took the opportunity to stretch out and go for it with his band. The whole thing is a sprawling beauty, but there’s two kinds of songs, basically: some party goofs – reggae, doo-wop, Doorsish epics, Crazy Horse workouts—and gorgeous quiet slow-goers. A band, a talent, in full-bloom.
D: Plus Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs on here? It can’t be true!
C: And yet it is. Another album-of-the-year-contender.
[E barges in through door out of nowhere]: Agh! This slow breakup shit is killing me! [grabs beer, sits down on couch]. You know you’re in trouble when you’ve been staring at a pulsing Apple logo for three days straight! Agh! It’s slow torture, everything I’m doing right now. [chills out] Hey, what is this?
C: The new Devendra.
E: The do-what now?
D: The new Devendra!
E: [listening to “Seahorse”] This is actually pretty good. I thought I didn’t like this dude, Mr. Defreaky McWeirdbeard, but…
C: It’s those canyon vibes. Chill out…

DANIEL A.I.U. HIGGS
Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot hardcover book with cd
(Thrill Jockey)
C: New album of extended instrumentals by Daniel Higgs, housed in a hardcover book of paintings and large type text.
D: [Reads from book] ”Our actions are God’s food.” Whoa. “Devils Establish Absolute Truth Here.” “Grief Obscures Delight.” I don’t understand any of this but it is clearly a major artistic statement.
C: The first letters from each word in those phrases forms another word. So—
E: Give me that. [Reads from book] These paintings are beautiful, like Miro on a serious hermetic trip. “TERROR: Tirelessly Extending Rays Reaching Our Reality.”
C: Maybe I’ve been unadventurous, but Daniel Higgs the spookiest performer I’ve ever seen who’s not named Diamanda Galas. With black candles and a fog machine, this could send you into that void for sure.
D: He is clearly on his own path into the big infinity void, telling it like it is.

The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family book with cd
by Isis Aquarius with Electricity Aquarius, foreword by Erik Davis
(Process Media)
C: This is the long-awaited group autobiography/history of the Source Family, an early-’70s cult in Los Angeles led by super-charismatic older dude who called himself Father Yod, or as he was known later, Ya Ho Wa. He had 100-plus followers, including 14 wives.
D [piping in]: And Sky Saxon from The Seeds!
C: [puts book’s accompanying CD on] They had a rock band that recorded studio albums and played daytime shows at schools. They had a big mansion, VW buses and Rolls-Royces, lived in Los Feliz. The whole thing was funded by the super-organic restaurant they ran on Sunset Boulevard that all the celebrities ate at.
E: Yeah, right. Give me that. [grabs book, reads caption of photo of Father in a pool surrounded by naked women] “Teaching water aerobics?” This guy… This is some weird fucking white pimp shit is what this is. What the heck is this, man? I guess in California, if you look like God, you are God.
C: He was a practicing Sikh and they don’t cut their hair. And he says on the CD that it’s hair that gives your body vitamin D, so the more of it you have…
E: Hey there’s some great breastfeeding shots in here.
C: It’s one of the cults that ended well.
E: What, they were the one cult that didn’t kill people or themselves?
C: He died after a serious hang gliding crash in Hawaii, he refused hospital treatment.
E: [reading] “His pain was so intense that YaHoWha wanted anything to relieve it, and he took what we had on hand to help him through it: Darvon, aspirin, champagne, Sacred Herb, Sacred Snow, and nitrous oxide.”
D: Well, that would do it.
C: And not long after that, they split up.
E: “Sacred Snow”?!? With capital S’s?!? [cackles] “The word of God cannot be copyrighted.” This is the most classic shit ever. I’ll take it. [Runs out the door, cackling] Hahahaha!

ANGELS OF LIGHT
We Are Him
(Young God/Revolver)
D: I know that voice. Swans!
C: Yeah, it’s Michael Gira’s new album. It’s got quite a sound—the Akron/Family dudes are all on here, but so are the old Gira hands like Bill Rieflin and Christoph Hahn. Layers of stuff, perfectly arranged: guitars, banjo, piano, flute, strings, accordion, melodica, hammer dulcimer.
D: [listening to “Promise of Water”] Still menacing and grand after all these years.
C: It’s…ceremonial, melodic, yearning. [“The Man We Left Behind”] is like a slow Johnny Cash waltz, just beautiful.
D: [Listening to “My Brother’s Man”] And he can still punish at will.
C: “Not Here/Not Now” throbs with life; and this (“Joseph’s Song”) has the most unexpected Gira move ever: it goes uptempo into a trombone-led jamboree.
D: A Giramboree!
C: [laughs] Like the Devendra album, this his opens up so much new territory. Unbelievable, wonderful to hear, especially coming from a veteran artist. Another album of the year contender that demands further examination…

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM
Two Hunters
(Southern Lord)
D: [looks admiringly at black album cover with a single wolf’s skull on it in gold.] This is the best cover tonight! This is what awaits. [maniacally] As Brother Theodore, said: “Friends flee. Lovers leave. Worms wait.”
C: I might be headed back into the metal direction again. It makes the most sense when you loathe what’s around you and want to block it all out. And this is huge, majestic. Like Mogwai with a power drummer—
D [interrupting]: I think the drummer may have had some interaction with Sacred Snow.
C: —and a black metal wraith on vocals. This song is now in its ninth minute.
D: This is the one! This is heavy work in the dark metal machine. When he sings, no human entity can be identified.
C: This could be the end of the wolf bands.
D: They’ve killed them all and are roasting them on the barbecue. Where are they from? Sweden?
C: What does it say on the sleeve?
D: I can’t make out a single word. [Third track, with angelic female vocalist, starts] This has the stamp of truly obsessed.
C [reading “Artist Statement” from band’s website] “Our project is based in the forests of Olympia, Washington—
D: The land of the mighty Thrones!
C: “Our music is a reflection of the land in which we dwell; it draws its power from the long, dark winters, the perpetual mist… Our philosophies are anti-modern, romantic and anti-human, a musical expression of an emerging eco-black metal consciousness that has taken root here in the Pacific Northwest.”
D [dazzled]: “Eco black-metal”?
C: “We are unique in that we express a deeply underground ideology on a larger stage. Our Black Metal is highly local and personal—not beholden to the expectations and demands of any scene. Our music is rooted in the traditions of Black Metal, but we subvert the aesthetic and ideology to remain true to our personal manifestation. To us, Black Metal might be understood as the Death card in the Tarot or the number 13, which represents not an end to life, but the shedding of an old and outmoded way of being: death and rebirth, transformation and enlightenment. Our music is perhaps what happens after the initial, necessary, hateful burst; after the psychic explosion that is Black Metal wipes away that which came before: the sick and twisted “truths” of our modern condition. For in Black Metal, we see great truth, transcendence and power. Black Metal is the cleansing fire that frees us from the bondage of rationality, science, morality, religion, leaving us free to choose our own path.”
E: Well, there you go.
C: [musing] Does Daniel Higgs know these guys?
D: This band should curate the next Wagner Ring Cycle. They need it, the young edge, some new blood. And they have extreme people doing extreme Rings all the time, like Schlingzief is going to do the new one. He’s the biggest cultural star of Germany. He made Freakstar 3000.
C: Is he the Matthew Barney of Germany?
D: In a way, maybe. He’s a total anarchist.
C: “Thank you Cremaster, may I have another?”
D: You know that’s where all the old Nazis come out of hiding, at the annual Ring Cycle. It’s the biggest cultural event in Germany on this old-scale, old-school level. That’s where you see all of them together. [shivers] Everybody knows about it but it’s not talked about.
C: What can I say but: Send in the Wolves!

MARIEE SIOUX
Faces in the Rocks
(Grassroots)
D: What can I say? A beautiful voice of nature, singing about nature, in nature. Contentment and beauty. Forest-folk.
C: [listening to “Friendboats”] Gorgeous. She’s another one of these amazing folks from the Nevada City area in California. Terry Riley, Gary Snyder, Joanna Newsom, Noah Georgeson, Alela Diane, Dream Magazine… Something is going on up there.
D: Maybe it’s the same thing as what’s going on in the woods outside Olympia, only…
C: No two forests are alike. I am picturing her singing next to the Yuba River on a summer afternoon, everyone’s high on old-growth oxygen and riverside blueberries…
D: [Listening to “Flowers and Blood,” closes eyes] Ah. Please do not interrupt my serenity.

Two dudes, who remain pseudonymous for their own protection, reason together about new records. They are joined this issue by Melvins’ BUZZ OSBORNE, pictured below at Arthur HQ with his pick o’ this issue’s litter…

ENDLESS BOOGIE
Focus Level
(No Quarter)

D: [listening to opening bomber] He’s inviting us over to smoke “figs” in his yard. Is that a misprint?

C: [pointing at band photograph] They’re in the backyard because these guys are too old too be smokin’ in the boys’ room. Another in a great history of smoking location songs.

D: That could be a Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour!

C: And invitation songs. Remember that Paul Wine Jones song? “Me and the boys/gonna have a good time tonight/Gonna play some poker/Pork chops.” I miss Paul Jones. That guy rocked and had velvet hats to burn. Not that you should ever burn a velvet hat.

D: [musing over band photo, especially the longhair] What does that guy do all day?

C: When not masquerading as a hick savant guarding mama’s moonshine still? Apparently he’s one of the deepest psych record collectors on the East Coast.

D: [looking at band picture again] I would say he’s one of the top hair growers on the East Coast!

C: Endless hair never ends. Seriously though, a band like this only needs one True Believer. And this guy definitely qualifies, let me tell you!

D: [listening to singer squeal, squawk, mutter and grunt on “The Manly Vibe”] Brings back fond memories of Hasil Adkins talking about hot dogs and doing the hunch.

C: Yeah, if Hasil dug the Nuge instead of the King. This album is for everyone who’s ever thought George Thorogood didn’t finish the job.

D: [abruptly] Or that the Kings of Leon aren’t old enough!

C: … Anyways, I saw these guys play last week.

D: Well of the course the question is, Can they boogie endlessly?

C: Yes, they are quite capable, these Endless Boogiemen. And after the first song, which lasted about two and a half hours, the singer asked “Do I seem taller? I got some new shoes!” Where’d you get ‘em? somebody yelled. “He took a few seconds, and then answered: “I bought ’em at a store!” They’ve got cool t-shirts: just an infinity sign on black.

D: Can you understand what he’s singing?

C: He’s singing in tongues. This song is called “Steak Rock.” Which is about right. I bet the song is timed so that you can cook a steak in the amount of time it takes to listen to it. So where’s the barbecue at?

D: Not in my backyard, sadly.

C: This record should come with an order of peach cobbler.

D: [helpfully] And napkins!

C: …

D: [doorbell rings] We have a guest.

[Enter Melvins vocalist/guitarist Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne]

Buzz: Gentlemen.

C [to himself]: Speaking of singing in tongues…

D [jumps up, joyful, and bows]: All hail King Buzzo.

Buzz: [ignoring, cheerful] I brought drinks. Diet Coke and Lemon Perrier for everyone! What are we listening to? Seems good.

C: What do you think about the vocals?

Buzz: [considers] Pretty Humble Pie-sounding.

C: What about…Black Oak Arkansas? You guys ever listen to them?

Buzz: I like some of that stuff, yeah. Simply for the weirdness factor alone. I always thought that [Black Oak Arkansas singer] Jim Dandy was getting ripped off endlessly by David Lee Roth, and moreso, Axl Rose. He sings EXACTLY like Jim Dandy. You know who else is really into Black Oak Arkansas is Jello Biafra. Heavily! That’s why Biafra has that star belt. He’s happy to admit it.

C: Didn’t Black Oak Arkansas buy land and live communally at one point?

Buzz: I don’t know the history. Jello [Biafra—of Dead Kennedys, Alternative Tentacles label, and an occasional collaborator with Melvins] knows more about any band than anyone I’ve ever known. His mom was a librarian and he has that kind of mentality built in. This friend of ours who was friends with Jello in the early ’80s had given him a cassette demo of ours. Well, Jello gave me that demo back recently. He still had it! Are you fucking kidding me?!? CASSETTE! It’s insane. He’s got every demo, every CD, every T-shirt that’s he ever gotten sent to AT, he’s got catalogued. It’s crazy. I was with Jello once when he found a mono one-sided 7-inch of “TV Eye” that the Stooges put out. I just gave up. His collection is all just from him digging and digging and digging. Ah, what is this again? It’s pretty good.

D: Endless Boogie!

C: They are not men.

D: No—they are record collectors! [C and D crack up]

Buzz: I don’t know that I’d buy it but I think it’s pretty good. I don’t fault them…

C: I don’t think anyone expects anyone to buy this. It gets further out as it goes on, like a long modern trance/raga record a la Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s “East/West.” Abstract Beefheart, going for long walks wandering round the desert instead of holing up in a trailer and weirding out.

ARP
In Light
(Smalltown Supersound)

C: It’s a guy holing up in San Francisco and weirding out. He calls the project Arp.

Buzz: Like the Arp synthesizer?

C: Yep. As far as band naming goes, vintage gear is the new “Wolf plus noun.”

D: Sunn o)))!

C: I hear the influence of the Moon too. I went up to Big Sur before it burned and saw Arp play at night outside the Henry Miller Library. I had a few sasparillas and they blew my mind, making moonglow soundwebs around the trees.

Buzz: This stuff is alright. I’ve heard a lot of stuff like this before. It all sounds like people are trying to do soundtracks for the Mario Brothers. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That’s cool. I don’t know if I’d buy it. It’s good! I wouldn’t turn it off if it happened to be on.

C: What kind of mood?

Buzz: Music for cleaning your house. There’s a few Melvins records that we’ve described as “music for vacuuming.” You know? Sounds better with the vacuum running! Crank it up with the vacuum?!

D: When is that, when you’re doing chores at the Melvins house?

Buzz: We woulda quit a long time ago if we had to live together. But I don’t even play loud music in my house. Most of the time I want to be able to hear a pin drop.

C: Do you check out a lot of new music?

Buzz: When it’s in front of me I do, definitely. I don’t go to a lot of live shows simply because we play a lot of live shows I can’t stand the idea of going to another fuckin’ club on my off-time. The car’s the best place to play music, I think. [listening to Arp] Yeah, this is good.

AL GREEN
Lay It Down
(Blue Note)

Buzz: This is new? Wow. I would not have known.

C: Ahmir ?uestlove from the Roots knows and respects how the old, good stuff got made, he’s always had a good ear…

Buzz: Al Green—he’s off his rocker, that’s for sure. You ever heard one of those interviews with him? Hahaha. The other guys in Fantomas, Mike [Patton] and Trevor [Dunn], are really into him. Fantomas used to do a cover of his song “Simply Beautiful.” It was about as straight a cover as we ever did. This is nice! [laughs] He’s a minister, isn’t he? That’s cool. It doesn’t sound like he’s ready for the insane asylum just yet! That sounds like good driving music, for nice long drives straight past Sedona or something. Do not stop for gas. Take a right at Flagstaff and just keep going.

DENNIS WILSON
Pacific Ocean Blue – Legacy Edition
(Legacy/Columbia)

D: Speaking of being outdoors…

Buzz: Beach Boys?

C: It’s actually the solo album that drummer Dennis Wilson made in the mid-’70s, remastered and all that, first time it’s been on CD ever domestically, second disk has unfinished recordings for his second album, Bambu, which was in progress when he drowned.

D: [spookily] And he drowned in the Pacific Ocean.

Buzz: I’ve never heard this. Sounds like he’d been listening to a lot of Jesus Christ Superstar. I think they should’ve added more low end on the reissue. There’s also this high end, it’s almost a hissing sound, that’s all I can hear now. I mean, I appreciate the Beach Boys’ insanity but I would question whether he’s even on this, even singing.

C: It’s him.

Buzz: Well, you never know. This is nice…

D: Imagine being the kid brother of a genius, what that would be like.

Buzz: Which means he’s probably insane too. Have you ever read that book The Dark Stuff, where Nick Kent tries to interview Brian Wilson? That’s my favorite part of the book. [considers] That’s my favorite rock book, actually.

C: What about this book? [Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks, 2007]

Buzz [looks at book jacket]: I wouldn’t even pick that up.

C: It’s by a neurologist talking about weird disorders. Like people who get a song stuck in their head, and in trying to figure out why that happens, we learn something about how our brain works…

Buzz: It’s always a horrible song! If I’m going to hear a song over and over in my head, it’s going to be a fucking Rick Springfield song.

C: Right, so the book is about well, why does the brain do that?

Buzz: I’d imagine it’s the same thing that motivates dreaming. Why does that happen? We have no control over that either.

C: Actually—

Buzz: You like to think you could.

C: You don’t know about lucid dreaming?

Buzz: When you slightly wake up and be aware that you were dreaming? Okay, but it’s not like you could SET UP the dream prior to doing it.. You can’t lay down and go ‘Okay I’m going to dream about hanging out with Raquel Welch.’ No way.

C: People have been dreaming for zillions of years. There’s been plenty of time to develop—through trial and error or whatever—techniques. There’s dream yogis…

D: You know once I was in New York and I got on the subway and this lady was standing there saying “My favorite Beach Boy is Al Jardine.”

C: Was it the little old lady from Pasadena? Anyway, yeah, there is some cheese factor here, but a few of the songs are gorgeous, like Brian Wilson songs if he was more spiritual, less troubled. Obviously Dennis wasn’t nearly as creative, but: so what?

D: Creativity ain’t all it’s cracked up to be! You just need…higher focus.

BUFFALO KILLERS
Let It Ride
(Alive/Bomp)

C: Trio, two brothers, burly bearded bass and guitar, harmonies. Ohio. Second album, Let It Ride.

D: [to himself] Lay it down, let it ride: all these album titles are highly suggestive. Buzz: Production-wise, I would like to have heard more kick drums. I can’t hear it at all. Which I think is a mistake for this kind of music, first off. Can you hear it? I can’t hear a kick drum, not at all. Seems like it needs it, would really push the song along better. Seems like they’re good players… [listening] Ah! There is some kick drum.

D: This and the Howlin Rain album, in the same year? American rock is rolling again!

C: It just has a nice…feel. Everything is working for this band: melodies, riffs, harmonies, rhythms, guitar tone…

Buzz: If you’re gonna start a band and play this kind of music, you’re setting yourself up for a pretty hard row to hoe, you know? So much of this stuff has been done. In order to stand above, you really have to do something extraordinary. That’s tough. That’s like becoming a famous opera singer, you’ve got your hands full. But this seems good.

C: You’ve got to stand against the canon.

Buzz: Yeah. Forty fucking years of it! That’s tough. See, I wouldn’t have the guts to try and do that. Doing stuff like this, I would just feel like I was up against the masters and it would be hard to… I’d rather do something that’s a little bit more a hybrid, a little more my own. These guys seem like they’re pretty good. It seems well produced, well executed, they seem like good players, their heart’s in the right place. I believe them when they’re doing it, which is always important in music. You have to believe it. If the people doing it don’t seem like they believe it, why should I?

C: It doesn’t matter what they’re doing as long as they believe it.

Buzz: I think so. I’ve always thought you should pretend like you know things you don’t. It’s the most important thing.

HERCULES AND LOVE AFFAIR
Hercules and Love Affair
(DFA/Mute US)

Buzz: Is this NEW?!?

C: DFA makes a disco album with Antony singing. You can’t lose.

Buzz: Sounds nice. They look like a bunch of weirdos, that always helps. It’s always good to be peculiar. Being peculiar is never going to hurt you.

D: You ever listen to disco?

Buzz: No not really. Depending on what you mean by disco. Blondie? Yes. Donna Summer? Not really, no. I just didn’t pay any attention to it. None of my friends were into it, I didn’t go to dances. Although I guess I always liked the way those chicks looked. But I was 14, and I was into pretty much the way any girl looked at that point, you know? Just such a mystery, you know? That I’m still figuring out. Hopefully, I’ll never figure it out! That would be totally boring. There’s so much you CAN’T learn, you know?

D: [getting in the philosophical mood] Do you know less now than you did then?

Buzz: I wish I knew then what I know now. That would’ve made it a lot easier. I wouldn’t have worried so much.

C: Really?

Buzz: I didn’t have any idea really of what was gonna happen to me, you know? There was a short period in my life when I didn’t really care, but generally speaking, I didn’t have a whole lot of high hopes. Now, I’m a lot more relaxed. We kind of have it figured out, as far as Melvins are concerned. As long as we don’t pretend that we’re gonna be dusting off five number one gold albums, then we’ll be fine. But then, I never did pretend that. Nothing’s changed…

C: The internet isn’t killing Melvins?

Buzz: [laughs] I timed it: our new album [Nude With Boots, out now on Ipecac] was available on the internet within 48 hours of the advances going out.

C: Do you care? Has the internet made music better or worse?

Buzz: I think it’s much better than it was! I was ordering Sex Pistols records out of the back of Creem magazine back in ’77-8. I was really into Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, all that stuff when I was about 12. Creem always had weird looking bands. I saw a picture of the Sex Pistols, I thought This looks interesting. That was it. Same with the Clash, the Damned… Solely on the way they looked, the pictures. Some mail-order thing, they’d have a list of records you could buy. It took weeks for them to arrive. I lived maybe 150 miles from the nearest record store that would have had had anything of that nature. When you’re between 12 and 15, for me anyway, 150 miles might as well have been 150 million miles. Right now you can sit down with any cheap computer and figure out histories and what’s going on, it’s GREAT. Tremendous.

C: We had Sam Goody and Warehouse.

D: Now they have the Internet and Hot Topic, and all they want is emo!

Buzz: [laughs] So much for that argument!

C: They have the Internet, but still, they do not understand.

Buzz: They never did. That’s not going to change. But, information-wise, it’s way easier. Look. When I started out going to see a band play, I would have to drive to Seattle to buy a ticket for a concert. That was a 150-mile one-way trip to get up there and have em tell you, ‘Sorry, it’s sold out’? No, no, no! I would’ve happily paid a Ticketmaster fee so I could have got my hands on a ticket as opposed to driving up all the way to Seattle to have them tell you, Nope, the Motorhead show’s sold out, sorry! No no no no. It’s way better now. Waaaaay better.

KING DARVES
The Sun Splits for the Blind Swimmer
(de stijl)

[Silence, listening to “Oh I’ve Come A Ragin Sun”]

Buzz: Who’s this?!?

C: This is his first record.

Buzz: This the first song on it? Always interesting how bands decide what the first song’s going to be on the cd.

C: What’s a good strategy?

Buzz: No idea. That’s the tricky part, you know?

C: [listens to “What for the Stables”] Reminds me of Michael Gira, from mid-Swans and Angels of Light eras.

Buzz: Yeah. Leonard Cohen, possibly. Seems good. He seems pretty scary.

C: He’s a weirdbeardie for sure. A baritone Will Oldham?

D: [musing] “Baritone Will Oldham” should be Bonnie Prince Billy’s new stagename.

C: It does have a nice roll to it, doesn’t it?

Buzz: [“This Ivory” begins] This one doesn’t sound as scary. This is the fourth song? This is what he has batting clean-up on the record. This is gonna drive the rest of them home?

D: He’s gonna drive them home, but not too fast.

Buzz: This is pretty good! It’s really weird. Interesting, definitely. Where’s this guy from?

C: It’s really striking. You don’t hear guys sing like this too often, cuz the bar actually is so high. So when one does, we should pay attention. Noah Georgeson’s songs are like this too, really beautiful music sung in a lower register than we’re used to hearing. Someone told me Stephen Meritt from Magnetic Fields sounds like this? [listening to “Fishhook”] This one’s almost Johnny Cash.

Buzz: I can hear that. It’s a really ambient recording. He’s not right in your face. The mic’s ten feet away or something, recorded the whole thing at once. That’s what it sounds like to me, a total live recording. Where’s he from?

C: I’ll look it up—[sad]—on the internet, of course.

D: [out of nowhere] The internet was introduced to the public prematurely! It should’ve been developed further so that it wouldn’t have become so jammed with stupid shit. It’s making the whole culture dumber, right when we needed everybody to get smarter. The country that first embraced the Internet—the United States—is the same Western country that’s shifted the furthest towards militarism and authoritarianism in the last 40 years! That is no coincidence! [leaves for kitchen]

C: [explaining to Buzz] D has been bitching about the internet a lot lately.

Buzz: ….

C: What do you think? Is the Internet making us smarter?

Buzz: Who knows. Probably to some degree. It’s helping somehow. Has to! [Thinks further] I guess it’s debatable. People have always been stupid, I suppose. [Thinks further] Well, it’s better for me. I love it. I’m hoping our friend King Darves is from Modesto. [cackles] Or San Diego. A beach community.

C: It’s great this way, but I can also imagine him singing with a choir, or a string section…

Buzz: yeah. He could definitely be a little more adventurous in his production, no doubt about, which would be really amazing. He’s got a lot of potential. But if it doesn’t get any better than that for him, this is still really good. [laughs]

FREE KITTEN
Inherit
(Ecstatic Peace)

Buzz: Who’s this?

C: Kim Gordon and Julie Cafritz, and Ikue.

D: How can they call themselves Free Kitten without Ibold?!?

Buzz: Nice letterpressed promo.

D: This is serious! It’s not Free Kitten without Ibold!

C: Not too many duet albums from electric guitar playing female singers in their forties and fifties.

Buzz: Nope, not too many of those. I would say…never? The Shaggs, maybe? I didn’t know Julia was still doing music.

C: I think it’s the first time in a long time that she—

D: What?? Who gives a fig about Cafritz? Where’s Ibold!

C: Buzz, you ever see Julie in Pussy Galore?

Buzz: We played with Pussy Galore. I loved them, thought they were great. The lineup I liked best was without her. Three guitar players. But my favorite record of theirs was probably the Sugarshit Sharp EP. We even did a cover off it, a b-side on a seven-inch a long time ago. ‘Industrial rockabilly’ was the way I described it. Which I thought was really cool, you know? They were on our wishlist for [December 2008’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” festival in England put on by All Tomorrow’s Parties, and curated by Melvins with Mike Patton].

C: That’s never gonna happen.

Buzz: I know, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Yeah we played with them in ’89 I think. Real good. I think [Jon] Spencer [from Pussy Galore], once again, fits into the ‘peculiar’/weirdo category. Definitely peculiar. He’s one of these guys that writes music, that he probably perceives as being more commercial sounding than it really is. The way he looks at it. He doesn’t see it.

D: Free Kitten are now Number 1 on my official shitlist! This is bullshit, man. WHERE’S IBOLD?!

DAFT PUNK
Electroma dvd
(Vice)

Buzz: [Film starts] Death Race 2000 mixed with Way of the Gun… with the cops from THX. Is it supposed to be this quiet?

C: Yup.

Buzz: Weird. I don’t know anything about these guys really.

C: French techno electro guys who always appear in helmet and costume.

D: Like Kiss! Buzz: This obviously wasn’t filmed in France, or at least not any section of France I’ve ever been to. Looks like the set of Star Trek. Or New Mexico. I love driving through areas like that, one of my favorite things in the world to do. Especially touring, that’s what’s so great about it. You get a lot of this kind of stuff. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that sort of stuff.

C: Not enough. You don’t want to live out in the desert, though?

Buzz: I’ve done my time in the sticks. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather live than here in L.A. Where would you go? Connecticut? Texas? [Returning to the subject at hand] This is cool so far. I’m hooked. [The license plate for the car that Daft Punkers are driving shows on the screen. Buzz reads aloud:] “HUMAN.”

C: That’s one of my favorite songs of all time! It’s Todd Rundgren—

Buzz: I’ve never listened to him.

C: It’s from A Wizard A True Star. Not exactly a record, or an artist, in fashion right now, so it’s interesting to see it so prominently featured in a film by guys that are appearing at the Grammys with Kanye West.

C: The weird thing about this film, I don’t think Daft Punk even put their own music on here…

Buzz: Weird! I really admire that. [continues to comment on action on screen] Is there going to be an Indian casino in the middle of nowhere? … Uh oh, this is where it gets dangerous, with the manure spreaders… Another guy with a helmet! Whaddya know. Well, safety first as they say… Hmm. So they’re just one of many now… Does the baby have a helmet on? Looks like it…Uh, speaking of helmets, I gotta go.

D: What, you got a hair appointment?

Buzz: I wear it natural. Laters…

AWESOME COLOR
Electric Aborigines
(Ecstatic Peace)

C: New full-lengther from Iggy’s three-headed stepchildren.

D: Less Stooges this time ‘round, more… I’m not sure.

C: Alison may be America’s most exciting young drummer. But: I’m really more into the Awesomes’ other projects right now: Red Dawn II! Weirding Modules! Arthur readers should investigate on their own, using the power of …the internet.

D: Doh!

SEUN KUTI & FELA’S EGYPT 80
Many Things
(Disorient)

C: Well, here we have Fela’s second son, playing original numbers with members of his father’s group Egypt 80. He’s not his father. But definitely his father’s son. I can’t wait to see Seun at Felabration in Lagos in October, with [older brother] Femi—and Egypt 80—AND TONY ALLEN AND GINGER BAKER!!!! This is great. It’s afro, it’s beat…

D: It’s blazing! Who could not want to listen to this? Whazzup Shawn Cooti!

C: It’s pronounced “Shay-oon Koo-ti”…

JEX THOTH
Jex Thoth
(I Hate Records)

C: …and this is “Jecks Toe-th.”

D: Jex Thoth? [muses] This is the name Lovecraft would give to a female superspy. Thoth. Jex Thoth.

C: Spooky music for spooky times.

D: My favorite thing about impending doom is this type of metal. I call it, impending doom metal. Is Jex Thoth her real name?

C: I believe it’s her nom de doom. Jex’s voice reminds me of Ingha Rumpf from German blues rock thumpers Frumpy. Beckoning from the back of a shadowy cave. This one’s called “When The Raven Calls”! Evoking ashen streets where even urchins no longer dare. Foreboding axe leads straight outta Slab City, CA….and yet…there’s a shuffling bop step to the drumming that makes me almost start to snap my doomy fingers. Instead I shall pump my doomy fist!

D: Y’know, I wish Buzz was still here.

C: Yeah. How bad do you miss him?

D: Pretty…I dunno. Whoa, I mean I think Buzz would really like this!

C: It’s metallurgy, paganomics and rhapsodomy rolled into one bewitching rock package.

D: Call it kohl rock.

C: Shall I show you a picture of the girl who is singing?

D: Oh I can picture her in my mind very well… Like if Ozzy had a daughter who looked like what I’d want Ozzy’s daughter to look like.

C: …

This C & D session was originally published in Arthur No. 13 (Nov. 2004)…

C & D
Two confirmed schmucks grapple with the big issues—and an unexpected female visitor.

PICK A WINNER dvd
(Load)
C: You’re not going to believe this.
D: Try me.
C: [delicately loading DVD] Like an hour’s worth of charmingly bonkers/whimsical low-tech animation to go with homemade psych-crunge by the usual Fort Thunder-plus suspects… [Reading the sleeve text] “Dual formatted, double dipped and extra-whipped. Technicolor-laced acid flakes are on the table. Dig in! 18 trips of sound & sights are poured into K-Holes of dubious dimension from tonz of Load bands and video tribes with this new DVD/CD powered pellet.” Amen to all of that.
D: [looking at screen] Whoa.
C: Lightning Bolt, Black Elf Speaks, Wolf Eyes, Neon Hunk, Pink & Brown…
D: [eyes pinwheeling] I don’t believe it. I mean, I do believe it. I am believing it very hard.
C: Party video of the year. People are gonna be getting mandala’d all winter long to this thing, man. Plus there’s a CD in here too.
D: Do you have any mushrooms?
C: No.
D: I’ll take a spray paint can and a plastic bag at this point…

TOM WAITS
Real Gone
(Anti/Epitaph)
D: He really knows his Cuban rhythm, after all these years. You have to dance like David Byrne to this music.
C: Ribot sounds so good. This is the best one since Bone Machine, and you will notice that there was no Mr. Marc Ribot on guitar on the others in between.
D: I feel too close to Tom Waits to talk much more about this.
C: Really?
D: Yes, his armpits are kind of moist. He’s about as cool as you can get for a humid individual.
C: The most important music is for making out, cleaning and cooking. This music is for—
D: Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it late at night.
C: —I want to walk at night to this music. This is quintessential Californian music – in the redwoods and towns like Bakersfield
D: And Capt. Beefheart…
C: If he wasn’t a musician, would he be this level of cool?
D: [musing] He could be a gas station attendant.
C: ….

THE CRAMPS
How to Make a Monster
(Vengeance)
D: This was recorded in the ‘60s.
C: Sort of. Except it was recorded in 1977. It’s the Cramps, my friend!
D: Hmm. 1977? Wow. Possibly better than the Sex Pistols. Tribal psychobilly, proto-blues!
C: Two solid CDs full of early Cramps for the diehard fans. Live stuff, demos, more stuff from the early ‘80s. It’s a clearing out of the Cramps garage, after all these years.
D: And that garage floor is covered in the goo goo muck! Forget Songs for Bad People, C. This is Songs for Worse People. And I am definitely a worse kind of person.

THE HIDDEN HAND
Mother Teacher Destroyer
(Southern Lord)
D: Whoa…. This is so heavy, I think I may be experiencing some pulmonary problems shortly. Ack…
C: New album from Arthur No. IX cover star Wino, legendary godfather of doom metal, stoner rock, whatever you wanna call it. He’s always been a bit beyond those niche-holes.
D: [listening to “Black Ribbon”] Black Sabbath is back AGAIN, my friend! This is music to endure a tragedy to…
C: It is a pretty amazing record. The kind of doomish, expansive rock record that… well, it elicits dripping monosyllabia from the listeners. Or at least from us, I guess.
D: We are on a doomed flight into the sun on a heroic mission to save humanity, and this is the music we will hear right before we explode!
C: The closing track is entitled “The Deprogramming of Tom Delay”!
D: Excellent! A profound title and some heavy helicopterage and sub-buzzsaw guitar for my least favorite congressman! Wino strikes ONCE AGAIN with his iron-falcon guitar of justice!

BLUES EXPLOSION
Damage
(Sanctuary)
E: [Entering with a six-pack of Optimator] Hey fellas, what’s the commotion?
D: E! You grace us with your female presence once again.
E: [ignoring] What is this?
C: [looking at sleeve] It’s the new Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, except they’ve shortened their name to deal with the shortened attention span of today’s audience.
E: Well for once, it doesn’t suck.
C: [listening to “Crunchy”] Alert the media! Jon Spencer is singing.
E: I always thought Jon Spencer took a special pleasure in subverting his own genius.
C: Look, there’s even a bridge here!
E: I don’t think irony goes well in blues, this hipster irony value. I think he does it because he’s embarrassed about going all the way like Jack White does, all-out all the time.
D: [out of nowhere] BUH-LOOZE EXPUHLOSION!
C: Er. I think he does what he has to onstage because he doesn’t know how else to be in public.
E: He is his own worst enemy. [listening to “Hot Gossip,” a duet with Chuck D] This is pure cheese.
C: I think it’s pretty good. Mista Chuck gets my vote! I wouldn’t demand my money back.
E: Orange kicked ass, they’ll never top it, and that’s the problem.

FELA KUTI MIXED BY CHIEF XCEL
The Underground Spiritual Game
(Quannum)
C: This is a whole bunch of old Fela songs mixed together in one long jam by XCel from Blackalicious.
D: [Dancing] I didn’t know what this was, but I could tell it was cool.
E: It’s hard to talk about stuff that’s so good.
C: You guys are just putdown artists. Just listen to this. It’s like a K-Tel Afrobeat record, and I mean that in the best possible way.
E: K-Tel XCel. Words are redundant when faced with something this good. It’s like Tolstoy said, all the happy families are happy in the same way, the unhappy families are all unhappy in different, interesting ways.
D: [Stops dancing for a minute to ponder] If Tolstoy had lived in Africa…
E: I’m just saying, if you want to stimulate discussion, it’s better to give us something sweaty and imperfect.
C: But we already had the Cramps.

AFRIKA BAMBAATAA
Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light
(Tommy Boy)
C: New album by the legendary Mr. Bambaataa, who seems to be on a Detroit trip. He’s obviously working on a computer from some kind of bank of sound samples.
E: If a kid was break-dancing to it this at some subway station, I would definitely check it out, but that’s the only context I’d listen to this.
C: This song “2137” has a distinct 227 feel.
E: [looking at sleeve] There’s a song on here actually called “Electric Salsa.” [makes negative face] Not very enticing.

TIM HECKER
Mirages
(Alien8)
C: This reminds me of the in-between songs on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.
D: It sounds like what an electric shaver would hear if it had ears.
C: Pink noise, where no one frequency is dominant. Instant cancellation.
D: It seems like the circuits are burning.
E: It’s contemplative music. Not music for airports, but music for landing strips in the desert. It’s Mogwai without the guitars…
C: He’s obviously interested in melody, it’s got that dislocated-yet-sensual warm/cool feel of certain films: The Man Who Fell to Earth, Demonlover… It’s a few degrees warmer than, say, Godspeed You Black Emperor. This is the opposite of death metal: life metal. He uses tones that the avant garde wouldn’t touch.
E: [drifting] It’s very womblike….
D: Exactly, and everyone should be able to like this, because that’s where we all come from!
C: It’s really inspiring and makes me want to buy multiple copies to give to all the young people I know. Imagine being 13 years old and getting this as a gift…

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN
New Roman Times
(Vanguard)
C: New concept album from Camper Van Beethoven. There’s always been a Zappa quality to Camper, I think they’ve achieved that here.
E: Yeah, that and, um, “Riverdance.” This is truly ridiculous, this song.
D: At my high school they would have called this Camper Gaytoven.
C: I dunno, I like it. The thing holds together. Listen to this Cubanic waltz klezmasm! And the lyrics…
E: Did he just say “Half-baked and high on Scientology”?
C: And come on, [singing] “Yeah, might makes right/Might Makes right/They say that God is on our side/and made us mighty”…
E: [disdainfully] I’m not convinced. Tesla, I think they sound like this, right? Next!

THE FUTUREHEADS
The Futureheads
(Sire)
E: Cool and refreshing, let’s dance. If I played this at the office, everyone would like me more…
C: Wonderful concise songs, totally XTC, Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, the Jam…
D: Don’t forget Haircut 100!
C: Harmonies bring a lot to a group. Good new New Wave. Newer Wave.
E: [gets up and takes CD] See you guys later, I’ll be going door to door and replacing copies of Hot Hot Heat and the Faint records with this, in order to make the world a better place. [exits]
D: [wistfully] New ripples from old waves, making the ladies smile on the subways of London and helping people dance at the office parties. [exits]
C: They are the Hans to Ferdinand’s Franz.
D: …

THE VERVE
This Is Music: The Singles 92-98
(Capitol/EMI)
C: Here’s the career retrospective, bang on time for the holiday gift-givers. [in generic announcer voice:] “From the spaced-out rock with dark-ocean riffs through to the comedown ballads, ladies and gentlemen, we give you, direct from Wigan…the Verve.” [listening to previously unreleased song “This Could Be My Moment”] Sounds like [Verve singer] Richard Ashcroft fronting the Black Crowes.
D: We must initiate the [Black Crowes guitarist] Rich Robinson-Richard Ashcroft connection!
C: It’d be good to have a different kind of Anglo-American collaboration – something better than Bush/Blair.
D: I have to admit I never really got into these guys.
C: Having seen—experienced—them, I am forever converted. The Verve were a heartening phenomenon… an unafraid frontman inviting you from the stagelip … they were travelers from the psychedelic wilderness at the bonfire, singing their own stoned soul hymnals.

PATTY WATERS
You Thrill Me: A Musical Odyssey 1962-1979
(Water/Runt)
C: A collection of rarities from a very feted female who recorded deeply deeply soulful stuff for ESP back in the ‘60s. Foreword by Batoh from Ghost, an essay by Arthur’s own Bull Tonguer Byron Coley, and a short textpiece by Waters herself. What more can you say? It’s beautiful overcast music from a deeply soulful white woman working in that folk-soul-jazz-art idiom that’s so hard to master.
D: It’s devotional music to her man.
C: As Mr. Coley says here, “Rarely has longing-as-pain-as-art been created in such a massive way.”
D: [examining CD booklet picture of Waters completely naked, seated in a bohemian living room chair, her head tilted, gazing out a sunburst window] I do like the naked ladies.
C: I say, good for her for being naked. You can’t get any more naked than her music anyway. The Jax Beer commercial at the top must be noted.
D: [dreamily] I can almost imagine her, naked down by the water, singing, accompanying the piano playing from the other side of the lake…
C: …
D: Hey, where’d the Optimators go?

HANDSOME BOY MODELING SCHOOL
White People
(Elektra)
C: I’m going to play us only one song off this album, which is “I’ve Been Thinking,” sung by Chan Marshall of Cat Power.
D: How is the rest of the record?
C: I have no idea. I pretty much just keep coming back to this one song, which I think may possibly be the best thing she’s ever done. Easily the sexiest.
D: [listening] Reminds me of Sade or Lauryn Hill in a way that I am deeply appreciating in this moment, even without an Optimator. [clears throat] Can I see the sleeve?
C: What, are you gonna check for more boobs?
D: I am not saying that is not be true.
C: Well we don’t have the sleeve here, so you’re gonna have to keep making do with that Richard Avedon shot of her in The New Yorker. [Listening to Marshall sing “slip, slide/slippity slide”] Total babymaking music. These guys are geniuses to be able to convince her to sing like this, to finally coax the coy flirt out of her that we all knew she had. She should do her next record with them, in my humble armchair A & R opinion.
D: [speaking into tape recorder] I hereby prescribe this track once a day to every human on the planet. That, plus two Optimators. No negative side effects, I assure you. Ladies, take two and call me in the evening.

MARISSA NADLER
Ballads of Living and Dying
(Eclipse)
C: Debut album of winsome ghost-folk on the increasingly estimable Eclipse label. Music for tending a candle to.
D: Reminds me of Cowboy Junkies.
C: I think it’s a lot closer to Mazzy Star, with that kinda noir psychedelia sound. Not quite as depressive/sedate, though. Which makes her Hopeful Sandoval. [laughs]
D: …
C: I hear some Joan Baez in there too. Some of it’s incantatory, like some Spanish-Jewish-Irish hangover folk remedy. This is hangover music, for when the agave and cactus nectar don’t work.
D: I usually just grunt and throw up.
C: I bet someone in this band makes their own stained glass windows.
D: This is good music for hanging linen in the country… [face lights up] especially if you’re a naked woman!
C: [sighs] It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, D?

ENTRANCE
Wandering Stranger
(Fat Possum)
D: When I was in college there was a coffeehouse where you could hear music like this. I desperately want this to explode into something interesting.
C: But this isn’t Led Zeppelin, it’s solo lonesome blues, it’s supposed to be contemplative. Stop pounding the Optimators and have some whiskey for once, it’ll all make sense then. You gotta get in the spirit.
D: [listening to “Make Me a Pallet On Your Floor”] I gotta admit his voice is getting better. I thought he could only hit four notes.
C: And you’d be bored by R.L. Burnside if that’s your criteria. He’s doing lots *within those notes. And the guitar work is cool, subtle. The songs don’t explode, but there is some build and tension and then the guitar arches up and over and it’s just devastating. You just gotta have some patience bro. It’s not always gonna be a beer commercial. I can’t wait to see where this guy goes next.

WILLY MASON
Where the Humans Eat
(Team Love)
C: Same thing as Entrance, in a way, with some swamp country. But kinda dull.
D: I can imagine No Depression magazine people and Ryan Adams fans listening to this.
C: I keep thinking it’s gonna turn into a Richard Hawley thing, but his voice just isn’t that rich. Obviously the kid’s got talent, you can hear it in the songwriting. But the whole thing is just…studiofied. Well, it’s his first record, maybe he’ll get better later.
D: Can we watch that video again?

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
Abattoir Blues / Lyre of Orpheus
(Anti)
C: Meanwhile, this guy keeps getting better. He’s opened like this before, on Henry’s Dream, but this is better because it’s got the gospel women singing. This is going to be unbelievable live. “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” is almost Spiritualized with a real preacher.
D: “Woke up with a frappucino in my hand”? He’s not concerned so much with southern gothic anymore. But this is good, really good. It’s obvious on first listen.
C: You have to go with his metaphor like Julian Cope is always telling us—he’s working in this weird idiom of over-the-top, almost maniacal surrealism sometimes, then there’s all this humor. He’s heading in Dylan’s direction, I think, by way of…Flannery O’Connor or something. This is his most American-sounding record: blues, gospel, roadhouse rock n roll, lolling funk. And what a beautiful closer vocal on “Carry Me.” Damn! He should be playing the Gospel tent at JazzFest.

BROTHER JT
Off Blue
(Birdman)
D: [singing along] “Everybody was/somebody’s baby once/Little lumps of clay/waiting to be shaped into…”
C: Gentle living room sofa psych-folk lucid lullabies from Brother JT, one of underground America’s gentlest and most open-hearted souls. Wonderful stuff, as always—and album title of the year.

NAGISA NI TE
The Same as a Flower
(Jagjaguwar)
Download: http://www.scjag.com/mp3/jag/bramble.mp3 (mp3, “Bramble”)
C: Continuing down the quiet-time path…
D: The cover picture perfectly describes what you’re going to hear.
C: A Japanese man and a woman and a flower and the sky, yep. Like the more stately Japanese folk melodies that you might hear on a Ghost record. Some songs stretch it out, there’s even one where something explosive happens, D. The mellotron enters at minute eight, it’s just mind-staggering…

GROWING
The Soul of the Rainbow & the Harmony of Light
(Kranky)
D: Warm buzz… Womb music… Drones of the gods by Eno descendants…
C: These guys are doing something profound, sublime.
D: All is right in the universe…

Above: artist’s representation of longtime Arthur music reviewers C and D by Pete Toms. C and D have been absent without leave since August, 2008, when they were last spotted driving a cloudy ’95 Ford Aspire around Atwater Village, wearing rainbow capes [unconfirmed].

HAVE YOU SEEN THESE “MEN”?
PLEASE POST ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THEIR CURRENT WHEREABOUTS IN COMMENTS…

Longtime Arthur music reviewers C and D, as depicted by Pete Toms

This C & D session was originally published in Arthur No. 31 (September 2008)…

C & D
Two confirmed schmucks grapple with the big issues.

C: Our work continues.
D: Or at least our drinking does. Ahahaha.
C: [frowns George Will-style] Let the record show that whatever we say from this point forward about any of these records that the Arthur staff have so carefully assembled will invariably be colored by what we’ve just been listening to: Born to Be with You by Dion, 1975, produced by Phil Spector, downloaded off the Heat Warps blog. We are basking in its rather substantial afterglow.
D: A stone gem beaut of an album…which, by the way, has never been released in America! What is wrong with you people?
C: Have some pity on a country in decline. And you full well know it’s (apparently) Mr. Spector himself that kept the record from ever being released here. But keeping to the point: the readers should know that not only did we just listen to it, we just listened to it three times in a row. We are smitten by this version of “(He’s Got) The Whole World In His Hands,” which just sorta echoes all over creation in a melancholy way…
D: [muses] It is strange to feel so instantly nostalgic for a record you’ve never heard. And yet I have been having that distinct feeling for the last hour and 25 minutes as we have been watching the sun go down over the Manhattan skyline while listening to the wonderful, stirring, heartfelt, heretofore unheard-by-these-ears work of the incomporable team of Mr. Dion and Mr. Spector. I guess it’s what they call that old deja voodoo, eh?
C: Ha, yes I suppose they do…

FELA! A New Musical
at 37 Arts in New York City
Book by Jim Lewis & Bill T. Jones
D: So you went to a musical?
C: Yes, I did.
D: How did you like it? Did you laugh? Did you CRY?
C: From the first minute when the actor playing Fela sauntered by, two rows in front of me, on the way to the stage in his pink jumpsuit, led by his dancer/singer/wives, as Antibalas played the opening to “Everybody Scatter,” I was weeping openly.
D: I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It is said that dancing by yourself in your living room to Fela Kuti music is the only known cure for depression.
C: If it is that good, imagine what it must be like if you dance with others to it in public! The collective righteous joy is unbelievable. This thing broke me out of my post-David Foster Wallace suicide negative power zone.
D: So it was a full-on simulation?
C: Well… It’s not simply a tribute/costume concert, it’s an extremely brilliant musical-fueled biography of the man himself. The piece is two hours, 40 minutes and is set inside Fela’s club in Lagos, the Shrine. It’s 1976, I think, and he is onstage performing, and preparing to leave Nigeria. He’s had it with the ongoing corruption and idiocy in Nigeria. The government has arrested him, the military has stormed his commune, beaten and raped his wives and thrown his mother out of a second story window, leading to her eventual death. So he’s in and out of songs and monologues, reviewing his life to that point, smoking his big marijuana joints, laughing and crying and leading this band and this dance troupe, putting on this two-tier Afrobeat performance of… It’s spellbinding, just awesome, and I gotta say… As somebody who’s watched every second of available Fela Kuti footage out there, I thought I’d understood, as best I was gonna be able to understand in 2008, the man and the music. Well, I was totally wrong.
D: Wouldn’t be the first time!
C: Quiet. It’s one thing to see the pictures, to see the video, but to actually BE there, with the whole force of the music and the costumes and the VIBE in your face, at full volume, done with such love and care and attention to detail, with so much thought put into it… I don’t really understand how they did it, especially the guy who plays Fela, this brilliant actor named Sahr Ngaujah. Who inhabits him, completely, scarily. It’s enough to make you weep.
D: Which you did.
C: I should report that there is one major inaccuracy: the size of Fela’s rolled joints of Igbo, here it’s like a cigar but really they were more like torches.
D: Like a baby’s arm?
C: More like a bodybuilder’s.
D: That’s something they can fix when it goes to Broadway.
C: All the shit Fela talked about, it’s still true. More true. Bankers, government officials, colonial-minded lackeys, cowards, fools. Vampire Weekend? If only. It’s been a Vampire Millennium. And I can’t think of an artist alive today with the balls, and the trickster humor, and the anger, and the appetite for pleasure, and the gift for performance, and the raw charisma, the undeniable conviction, that he had. Did you know how musicians and other artists are not allowed to express views of the world in America? And if they break the rule, it’s cause for alarm and outrage and Drudge-shaming and record-banning and harassment and slandering and worse from the well-funded right-wing authoritarians. Don’t be political at the Oscars! Now is not the time! Nor at the Emmys. Oprah shouldn’t endorse! And so on. Because apparently they sometimes confuse the message from the government and break the entertainment moment that the viewer was anticipating, and indeed had every right to expect, given their school training and subsequent mediated experiences. The timing of Fela! is impeccable. He couldn’t believe the public would fall for this shit that the people in power were pulling.
D: But we do.
C: Over and over again.

HACIENDA
Loud Is the Night
Alive/Natural Sound Bomp

D: Well, another oldie but goodie. Or oldie but moldie as they used to say.
C: Actually, this is new.
D: You say that every issue.
C: Well, it happens to be true sometimes.
D: Let me see this. [grabs cd sleeve] Aha! I should have known by these golden tones—it’s another Dan Auerbach production.
C: He of the Black Keys.
D: Yes, I know. The bearded bandana-wearing one.
C: I’m talking to them, you idiot.
D: Who?
C: The readers.
D: What readers? [laughter]
C: Yeah well… So, Hacienda are from that hot gateway to the great southwest, San Antonio, Tejas. Three brothers with a last name of Villanueva plus a cousin with the last name Schwebel.
D: [Repeating lyrics of “Useless and Tired”] “Never want to work in the day/no reason for it any way/any troubles I sleep em away.” I resemble that remark, as they used to say.
C: Who is this “they” that you keep referring to?
D: [Repeats lyric and melody] What is that? “When you’re awake you’re out of your head”?
C: Ah! Nice nod to Los Beatles.
D: [sips beer] This is very sweet, warm music, but there’s something else. Like that moment during summer when you realize autumn is around the corner.
C: Beauty tinged with mortality. But not death-haunted! It’s like when you forgot to eat your ice cream cone fast enough and now it’s melting and you make a move. The good times were right there, but time kept on slipping…
D: …into the few-chah!

GANG GANG DANCE
Saint Dymphna
The Social Registry

D: I believe this is a concept album but I am unsure what the concept is.
C: Internet says: “Saint Dymphna is traditionally held to be the daughter of a pagan Irish chief and his Christian wife in the 7th century.”
D: So she is the saint of miscegenation! Cross-fertilization! Pairing of native and invasive species!
C: But Dymphna ends up being beheaded by her would-be incest-minded widow pagan father.
D: Oh.
C: “Her feast day is May 15 and she is the patron saint of those who suffer from mental illnesses and nervous system disorders, epileptics, mental health professionals, happy families, incest victims, and runaways.” Well, there you go. The fact that St. Dymphna’s is also a the name of a bar on St. Marks Place is simply a bonus. Would that we were there, indulging in libations.
D: What I hear is a post-Animal Collective/Black Dice loop daze with zero interest in melody.
C: A rather reductionist assertion, sir. She’s singing but I can’t understand a word she’s saying. And admittedly I can’t find the rhythm either. And yet I must admit that I kind of dig it.
D: Perhaps it is your infamous fondness for weird Greek mystic chicks?
C: Silence in the lower ranks! Once I saw this Gang Gang Dance perform at the Hollywood Bowl. It was like Euripedes interpreted by New York Eye And Ear Control. Firmly in the recombinant tradition of Adrian Sherwood, Jon Hassell, Bill Laswell…
D: “Inner Pace” is like advanced Casio atomic dub, but I can’t find something to grab onto. My fingers itch. There’s no groove, no bassline to lay back in. They do everything I don’t want a group to do!
C: Perhaps we should discuss your unrealistic expectations.
D: Okay, “House Jam”—this is the jam.
C: Kate Bush’s goat-song!
D: The whole album should sound like this. The rest is just clippings and trimmings. Not that I have anything against trimmings and clippings.
D: Yet I take it you prefer more jams.

KASAI ALL-STARS
in the 7th moon, the chief turned into a swimming fish and ate the head of his enemy by magic
Crammed Discs US / Amazon

C: This is third in the “congrotronics” series of albums by various contemporary African artists who utilize..um…
D: ‘tronics.
C: It says “Kasai Allstars draw their songs from festive and ritual music played in the bush before being banned by the Europeans, who considered the highly erotic dances and the pagan trance ceremonies as “satanic.” Based in Kinshasa, DR Congo—
D: That’s like the Compton of Africa!
C: “—the Kasai Allstars collective revolves around 25 musicians originating from five different ethnic groups, each with their own language and musical tradition.”
D: And judging from the title, I believe this is a concept album.
C: Great title. It’s like a caption to a comic book panel.This sounds like the music Jack Kirby’s “Forever People” would’ve made, up in their electronic trees: gamelan thmb piano chantdown on babylontronix with classic eternal North African guitar circles. This is what I thought psy-trance would sound like from the way everybody went on and on about it. What they really meant was advertising agency music.
D: They’re on some serious ritual witchdoctor shit. Like a tribal Funkadelic.
C: Trans-ethnic, five traditions…. I wonder who’s going to protest here regarding non-native species invasion?
D: While they argue about that, the real predators circle.
C: I want to know more. they’re so elaborately done up, it’s beautiful.
D: Other bands draw their record covers. these guys draw themselves! African glam!
C: Is the stuff traditional or new fashion or—remember that book that Alia was talking about, Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa (Hans Silvester, Thames & Hudson)….? You know with some bands, the more I know about them, the less I want to know. But these guys? Gimmie.
D: “Mbua-A-Matumba” is the jam to beat.
C: You could play this right next to Panda Bear.
D: Those guys should collaborate.
C: Can you imagine AFRIKA COLLECTIVE???

NATACHA ATLAS & THE MAZEEKA ENSEMBLE
Ana Hina
World Village/Harmonia Mundi/Amazon

C: Talk about erotic. I believe you Europeans would probably outlaw this too.
D: [ignoring the jibe] At last: printed lyrics!
C: Ha, like you’re gonna sing along.
D: [ignores]
C: Just relax! You always need to know what you’re listening to, what kind of music it’s called, how it’s regarded, what you can expect to hear.
D: Yes, yes, yes… I am cursed with the need to know more.
C: Well, I feel the need to sit on a rug. Recline on the pillows. Have some red grapes.
Pass the pipe.
D: I am the pipe-passer.
C: I suspect this is a concept album.
D: [reading from sleeve] “…East and west musical collision for the Natacha Atlas acoustic project.”
C: Calling St. Dymphna!
D: They do a take on Nina Simone’s “Black is the Color,” which it says here is based on a Scottish folk song!
C: “Hayati Inta Reprise (Hayatak Ana)” sounds more like Stevie Wonder “Higher Ground.” This is Arabic gypsy cabaret music. And “El Asil” is Egyptian swing. I wish an interzone nightclub existed where I could hear this all the time…

EL GUINCHO
Alegranza
XL Recordings/Beggars

C: Is “El Guincho” Panda Bear in Spanish?
D: They say he comes from the Canary Islands.
C: I say he comes from… Chants and loops gradually getting guitars layered… Steel drums. South American soccer hooligans. M.I.A. and Diplo are the gateway for el guincho. But.. [listening to “Antillas”] Wait, is the CD stuck?
D: I don’t hear enough melody. The hooks are too simple.
C: We should mention that we are listening to this on stereo when perhaps it is best appreciated on los headphones… “Cuando Maravilla Fui” brings on the bhangra. This may be Le Jam.
D: El Jammo.
C: Thee Big Jam.
D: One jam, large please. With some dub on the side.
C: “Buenos Matrimonios Ahi Fuere” is awesome. Eternal schoolyard kid chants.
D: You can’t lose when you sample schoolkids, everybody knows that.
C: The Canary Islands, eh? I look to the South for hope these days. USA and Europe are descending into dumbness on a mass scale. They’ve completely crushed the left and the indigenous. Only in the South is there anything like successful uprising. Venezuela, Brazil, Chiapas, Bolivia…!
D: Forget the Third Way! Bring on the Fourth World.

MEGAPUSS
Surfing
Vapor/Amazon

C: This is a side project recording by Devendra Banhart and the guy from Priestbird—
D: The new Pink Floyd! But nobody realized it…
C:—who drums in his band. That guy can write songs, but I don’t know about his bands’ names. Tarantula A.D.? Priestbird? Megapuss?
D: There is a time and place, and yes name, for everything. And right now I am saying to you this album, which features at least 12 novelty hits by Dr. Demento Banhart and Sir Priestbird, is the exact reason why I for one am going to enjoy the Forthcoming Depression. Surfing is not my idea of a good time. I am not an advocate of voluntary physical endangerment. I am, however, happy to watch from the safety of my beach chair.
C: With a Jimmy Buffett tape on no doubt. I just want to say that if it’s going to be about goofballing and bad clothes, can we switch back from Jimmy Buffett and Les Claypool and the truly unctious Infected Mushroom to, oh, how ’bout Frank Zappa and the Fugs? Thank you. This is good stuff: some more of those great upbeat afrobeat/reggae/tropicalia party jams that Devendra’s been pumping out in the last few years that sound so deep in the pocket live, I think this is the first time he’s caught that on record. And some true goofery. And hey hang on, there’s some spooky stuff on here at the end.
D: A dark undertow?
C: Watch out for riptides while Surfing.
D: And jellyfish. And tar spots on your back.
C: Some serious haunted canyons vibes on this record, I’m serious. Loooook out, lovers…
D: Tell me there is not a band that is called Infected Mushroom. That can’t be true.

LITTLE JOY
(no title)
Rough Trade/Amazon

D: [listening to “The Next Time Around”] It’s the Strokes’ beach party album!
C: Ha! Actually this is a new band called Little Joy, named after Joe McGraw’s spot in Echo Park. It’s the Strokes’ drummer Fabrizio Moretti, also on guitar here, and Rodrigo Amarante, a beardo from Brazil who’s been playing with Devendra lately, on vocals and the guitar, and guitarist/composer/arranger/Devendra associate/man-of-hair Noah Georgeson, producing.
D: And introducing the mysterious Binki Shapiro, right here on the lady reggae vocals.
C: Gotta admit I didn’t see this one coming from down the coast.
D: It sailed right in when we were watching the surfers.
C: Rodrigo has such a great voice. But on a track like this one [“Keep Me In Mind”], it must be recognized that the similarity to Mr. Casablanca is uncanny, but Rodrigo has a bit more color, more tenderness. What a great pop song. I’d listen to this on a bistro on a beach. Heck I’d go to a beach to listen to this. I would apply super-SPF 300 cream to listen to this. Every song is good! And there are actual ballads.
D: Samba. Bossa nova. And what do they call it?
C: MPB! Música Popular Brasileira.
D: But the question remains, who is this “Binki Shapiro”? That’s suspicious nametaking there, that one. Reminds me of all those pseudonyms on the old Desert Sessions records…
C: [listening to “Play the Part”] Perhaps I am going overboard here, but this—and “Evaporar”—is reminding me of modern Jobim, my amigo. But I am not an expert.
D: [lost in space] And Jobim and Jim Beam are secret brothers…
C: [listening to “Don’t Watch Me Dancing”] The Doors…! Wow. 11 songs, 30 minutes. I think we can issue a joint statement, or a communique as we said in the old days, stipulating this as darkhorse album-of-the-year contender. First class work, gentlemen.
D: And that includes you, Binki Shapiro!

MERCURY REV
Snowflake Midnight
YepRoc

C: You know when you make a wrong turn and then instead of correcting it, you make another wrong turn which is even worse because this time you don’t even realize a mistake has been made and you go 90 miles in the complete wrong direction?
D: Oh come on, it’s not that awful… [reads from promotional notes] Did you know that on this record Mercury Rev experimented “with laser harps, ad hoc computer programs and random note generators?”
C: What? To mathematically determine that this was the worst possible music they were capable of? To quote Greil Marcus, What is this shit? Former members of this band have grounds for a class action suit based on dereliction of aesthetic duty. And I volunteer to be their expert witness!
D: Whew! Beware the wrath of the betrayed longtime fan!

DESOLATION WILDERNESS
White Light Strobing
K Records

C: Ah, bliss. Pure balm from these young dudes out of Olympia.
D: Is this what they called “shoegaze” in the olden times?
C: I suppose. But it’s more like that one little moment in time—’88-‘90???—when there were all these modest late-afternoon psychedelic folk-rock guitars-and-organ-and-reverbed vocals bands floating and swooshing around… the Rain Parade, the Cocteau Twins, Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, ultra vivid scene, then Mazzy Star, Pale Saints… Ah, “college rock.” More recently, I would say BEACHWOOD SPARKS.
D: That’s right. I am getting a very benevolent salvia essence inmpression from this.
C: “Come Over In Your Silver Car” is song title of the month. “Turquoise and Gold,” “Horizon Star”…these are like Brightblack Morning Light song titles.
D: White Light Strobing, eh? [Listening to “Forget Everything”]: I feel like I’m watching Stan Brakhage, even though my eyes are closed…

GROUPER
I’m Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
Type/Amazon

C: Speaking of sleeping… Here’s the new album by the lady who calls herself Grouper, which she recorded in her sleep. She’s upstairs from Beach House, mixed by Belong into into-the-red, into-the-fog reverb absinthia. Which means it sounds like home demos for a new My Bloody Valentine album. You know what I’m saying.
D: Not really, but um… Where’s a fog machine when we need it???
C: Funny you should mention that. Ladies and gentlemen…

C: [Pushes button on remote control; fog shoots out from behind chair.] The Antari Alpha F-80Z!
D: Exxxxxxxxcellent! So, um, what year is this fog?

MATT BALDWIN
Paths of Ignition
American Dust

C: About five minutes into the lead-off track “Weissensee,” which is a Neu chestnut Rother/Dinger cover, it’s like Randy Holden crashing into an ashram where Sandy Bull was having a hip jam session.
D: That’s some serious stormbrewing guitar! Matt Baldwin! Who is this lightning bringer.
C: I think it’s the first record from the dude. He’s Bay Area and he’s over six feet tall.
D: Clearly this is a keeper. In fact [D runs to CD player]—I’m confiscating this CD for personal use.
C: It figures. Ah well. We should tell the people out that that there’s four more songs, including one entitled “Eulogy and Dark,” [in Jim Sjveda voice] which I am guessing is some sort of homage to Funkadelic’s classic “Eulogy and Light” off Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow. Talk about a song recorded at the edge of sonic legibility—a prayer over backwards tape. 38 years on and people are still responding to that album… You know why people are still responding to records from 38 tears ago? Cuz the music was so much better then. The vibe was COMPLETE. Look on the CD tray for “Free Your Mind”—they reprint the Best Selling Soul LP’s from Billboard Magazine for week ending December 12, 1970…
D: [reading chart] “1. Third Album by Jackson 5 2. Sly & the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits 3. Curtis by Curtis Mayfield 4. To Be Continued by Isaac Hayes 5. Abraxas by Santana 6. Sex Machine by James Brown 7. Temptations Greatest Hits Volume 2 8. Still Waters Run Deep by Four Tops 9. Chapter Two by Roberta Flack 10. Everything Is Everything by Diana Ross 11. Free Your Mind by Funkadelic 12. Indianola-Mississippi by BB King 13. Spirit in the Dark by Aretha Franklin 14. We Got to Live Together by Buddy Miles 15. The Last Poets 16. Pocketful of Miracles by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles 17. New Ways But Love Stays by the Supremes 18. In Session by Chairmen of the Board 19. Signed, Sealed, Delivered by Stevie Wonder 20. The Isaac Hayes Movement 21. Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) by Delfonics 22. I Am My Brother’s Keeper by Jimmy & David Ruffin 23. Booker T & the MG’s Greatest Hits 24. Workin Together by Ike & Tina Turner 25. Burning by Esther Phillips 26. I (Who Have Nothing) by Tom Jones 29. Shirley Bassey is Really “Something” 31. Led Zeppelin III 37. Grand Funk Live 39. Cosmo’s Factory by Creedence Clearwater Revival.” Whew.
C: Well, there it is. All civilizations have high points, some so high that they reverberate for the rest of the civilization’s life, however long that may be. It’s shadow of the colossi, dude.

JONAS REINHARDT
(no title)
Kranky/Brainwashed

D: Electromental …pardon me, electonic instrumentals… [coughing]
C: Sorry about the fog.
D: It’s okay. I’ll survive. Is this the new Klaus Schulze???? Or early Tangerine Dream
C: It’s like he’s got the same drum machine and keyboard. Serious vintage gear. Recorded at “The Equinox.”
D: Probably an Antari in there somewhere!
C: Have you seen the Z-800II? Wireless! Anyways.
D: I believe this music was made without laser harps.
C: These are basically covers. Throbbing electro-orbs float by with John Carpenter at the helm.
D: “How to Adjust People” is my pick to click. And you can take that to the bank, baby!
C: In my ideal town, there would be a geodesic juke joint at the edge of town where they play this music four nights a year—on each equinox.
D: Is it possible that it was easier to program soul into analog equipment than it is into digital? That digital is not really for humans, it’s for machines. Can we reverse digitalism? That is the question.
C: Here’s to vintage solid-state equipment!
D: The old ways were the wise ways!
C: I think the fog may be getting me high.
D: Waiter, I’ll have two quarts of fog juice, see vouz play!

RAGLANI
Of Sirens Born
Kranky/Brainwashed

C: Here comes another super-quality analog guy. He’s a little bit further out there, but you can still see him. Employed on this record: “Sine/square wave generator, analog modular synth, melodica…”
D: [“Jubilee”] It’s going like flute-style Jajouka! This is some kind of new shiznits. I’m confiscating this one as well.

APSE
Spirit
ATP

C: Impending doom music for fans of Godspeed and Silver Mt. Zion, Mogwai, Radiohead, Sigur Ros… I think it’s a concept album, but…
D: “In the 7th moon, the chief turned into a swimming fish and ate the head of his enemy by magic…”
C: “It’s not dark yet / but it’s getting there…” This is very good as far as it goes, and maybe I’m being totally unfair, but it might be past time for the wordless dread. Maybe now we need something more explicit about what’s going down. Does that make me old?
D: [thoughtfully] No. But it might make you a little bit wiser…

ZACH HILL
Astrological Straits
Ipecac Recordings/Amazon

C: Moving from A to Z. Zach Hill is the powerhythmic drum half of hard art chargers Hella, who have been known to rock the show.
D: I shook hands with someone once who’d shaken hands with Zach Hill. There was a residual charge.
C: Considering his serrated cymbal work Zach must have hands like a camel’s backside!
D: But sensitive. Apparently Zach met Jimmy Page at a show once and told him, “I should play drums for you.”
C: C’mon, imagine how many drummers must say that to Pagey.
D: The thing is, Zach Hill is actually the man for the job! He’d take Pagey to a whole new power grid!!
C: Yes indeed, Zach’s got a rad attack, as proved by this here double album. This jam ["Keep Calm And Carry On"] is like Zeppelin, Zappa, and Zorn rolled into one.
D: The guy is a total thrash jazz assassin. [cranks the volume] Check this out out, it’s called “Necromancer”… a thirty-three minute epic beginning with Marnie Stern reciting an original fable in the Brothers Grimm/ Henry Darger mode, followed by Zach on drums and Marco Benevento on piano playing a deranged duet like Dave Lombardo versus Duke Ellington.
C: I’ve got blisters on my earlobes!

EAGLES OF DEATH METAL
Heart On
Downtown/Amazon

C: Moving from the gnarly to the nasty… This is the third album by Eagle of Death Metal, who are led by handlebar mustachioed Jesse “The Devil” Hughes on guitar and vocals, with Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age on drums and whatnot. Basically it’s a caped male Peaches doing “Brown Sugar” variations, and it’s a hoot.
D: Eagles of Death Metal—they have always rocked your mustache pretty hard.
C: Not many Americans know this but Eagles of Death Metal played possibly the coolest gig of all time: a women’s-only show in London at a place that’s usually a strip bar.
D: I think that’s what you call an “everybody wins” situation.
C: [Listening to “Anything ‘Cept the Truth”] Not sure about this one. There’s not supposed to be bridges on Eagles of Death Metal songs! Then again “Now I’m a Fool” is something they’ve never done before—an acoustic guitar, mid-tempo, melodic toe-tapper song-of-yearning—and it totally feels right. It’s PRETTY.
D: Old eagles can learn new tricks.

Originally published in Arthur No. 27 (Dec 2007)

DAN DEACON & JIMMY JOE ROCHE
Ultimate Reality dvd
(Carpark)
C: State-of-the-art psychedelic film with music composed by electro-dance party joker Dan Deacon and visuals by Jimmy Joe Roche, two guys from Baltimore’s Wham City operation. It’s constructed from clips from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career—Conan the Barbarian, Terminator, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, Predator, Junior—collaged and layered and doubled together into something altogether overwhelming at 35 minutes in length.
D: This is Arnold’s mind on drugs. Arnoldelic, baby!
C: Absolutely gorgeous, seriously funny, weirdly poignant and possibly seizure-inducing. This is a landmark work. It’s the first time someone has taken the stuff those Fort Thunder and PaperRad dudes were (or are) doing—bright color-saturated, warped psychedelia incorporating pop iconography—and thrust it forward into a new realm of…of…beauty, really. Watching this right now is for me like seeing “Wonder Showzen” for the first time, or Chris Morris’s “Blue Jam”: a breakthrough on many levels, by somebody pretty much out of nowhere.
D: [reading from Arthur Magazine office rolodex] Or Baltimore…
C: [mischievously] Hand me that. Let’s make a phone call. [Dials on red phone…] Hello? [In Howard Cosell voice] Yes, this is Arthur magazine. We are seated here drinking kratom-powered smoothies having just watched “Ultimate Reality,” and we had a few questions for the filmmakers. [turns speaker phone on] So, Jimmy, what exactly is Wham City and you guys must know the Fort Thunder guys, right?
JIMMY JOE ROCHE: Wham City—the space—was a dingy, insane warehouse, then another one. Me and Dan and Dina and Adam and some other kids lived together at SUNY Purchase, all graduated in 2004, and we had this sort of unfigured-out energy. We knew we wanted something, we had a vision undulating out of control, and those guys wanted to move to Baltimore, because it’s cheap as hell. It seemed like it was a potential void where someone could come in and do art, totally fresh.

Fort Thunder was totally an inspiration. We wanted to take what they’d done in Providence and see if we could apply it here. We’d all seen Lightning Bolt back in the day, six years ago, we were all geeking out on them, and my friend DJ Dogdick, who books shows on Baltimore’s westside used to live with Brian Chippendale. We’re all fleas on different dogs. So yeah, we knew we wanted to do it DIY and we knew we wanted to create an environment for our own art to thrive in rather than look for someone to put it on where art was already happening. Wham City is just us trying to navigate this whole thing and be able to do what we want. You know, $5 shows and fine art galleries and so on…
D: So, for Ultimate Reality, why Arnold Schwarzenegger? Who, by the way is our governor here in California.
JIMMY JOE ROCHE: I grew up on Schwarzenegger, he was always there every year with a new blockbuster. He’s sort of this figure of our time, presiding over this phantasmagoric interweaving of narratives that all bleed together for me. I’ve always thought that the day he becomes president, aliens will invade and reality will fold in on itself. But yeah, when I was a kid I would have dreams sometimes where I would dream new spaces for the films that had drilled themselves into my mind, like Total Recall or Terminator 2. So Ultimate Reality is kind of that—these huge narratives becoming fan fiction in my mind. When you look at them all together, it just seems so bizarre. And I thought we could use this shared iconography that’s everywhere, to make new mandalas. But you know Dan Deacon is definitely a whole part of this, it has part of its lineage in working with him…
D: How did you guys get permission to use all the clips?
C: I don’t think they need permission, it falls under fair use.
JIMMY JOE ROCHE: We also believe that it falls under fair use. Suing young broke artists would be a low pointless thing to do. Also we’re hoping because of the level that we’ve reinvented the material, all parties will see it for what it is: a new piece of art. We’re not rehashing plots, everything’s been manipulated to a large degree. It’s been a real labor of love. We’ve been cutting this thing for over a year and a half. And I think that if anything we’re turning new people on to some of these films, we’re certainly not taking money out of any pockets, in fact I believe the opposite is true.
D: I for one feel a need to put Junior after seeing a pregnant Arnold in Ultimate Reality. Not sure how I missed that one…
C: So this is all done digitally, right? But it has the feel of some of the classic American art filmmakers—Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, James Whitney, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage. How did you do it?
JIMMY JOE ROCHE: Well, that’s my secret, that’s my mojo. It’s not rocket science, I’m sure anybody who knows about this stuff could figure it out. I’m definitely interested in Bruce Connor, Bruce Bailey and of course Brakhage—his layering technique, the lushness of his colors. And Kenneth Anger and Alejandro Jodorowsky, the color palette of those films, and that film “Daisies.” People who were doing making something psychedelic, in a social context: using found footage, or collage, and using narrative to their own advantage.
D: There’s a lot of symmetry.
JIMMY JOE ROCHE: Yeah, mirrored footage. There’s an aspect to that symmetry and layering that gives an inward dimension to the narrative—a vortex, or road or platform where you can begin to see inside it. That’s what the best psychedelic art does. It’s what mandalas are. On a conceptual level, I feel like there is a cultural need or desire on the underground art scene warehouse/DIY/travelin’ band scene… It’s everywhere. You’re seeing a lot of symmetry in art, and I think the reason is that we’re all over the place right now, and the symmetry harkens back to a totem-like urban tribe relationship. Trying to center or have more of a mantric, mirroring effect that Tibetan and Himalayan art have. And there was a lot of that idea in the psychedelic art of the 60s and 70s, that new mandalas were being built. I mean, a piece that Dan and I both love, conceptually and aesthetically, is Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air. [muffled] What? Hey I gotta go. You should talk to Dan too. [Gives C and D the phone number for Dan Deacon, hangs up.]

A few minutes later…

C: So how did Ultimate Reality come about? I assume the music was made first…
DAN DEACON [on speaker phone]: Well, we were doing crazy dance shows at Wham City but there was also this very long drawn-out song that we were doing that was just focusing on repetition. We were rehearsing it one day and Jimmy was into it, said do you mind if I make a video for it. This was before [Deacon’s 2007 album] Spiderman of the Rings. Seemed cool. He showed it to me in progress. I wanted to do something that was getting more psychedelic like Terry Riley instead of just party music or whatever.
C: And you guys have done it live.
DAN DEACON: Yeah at galleries and museums to far. We project it and there’s live drumming by Kevin O’Meara and Jeremy Hyman and I do some stuff. A lot of it is sequenced, but we’re figuring out ways to make it more live, like having someone on glockenspiel. We’re gonna tour it in January.
D: Sincere full gratitude from the Westsiiiide, for making possibly the greatest thing ever!
C [hangs up, inserts fresh DVD]: Not so fast. This may be the greatest thing ever…

AC/DC
Plug Me In triple-dvd
(Columbia)
C: I present to you seven hours of AC/DC live footage from the very beginning to the very end, or at least 2003.
D [ecstatic]: AC/DC! The midget barbarians—the hobbits of rock—who tower over us all.
C: It’s true, those guys are about four and a half feet tall.
D: But not an inch was wasted! Just like their music. Only enough, never too much. They are the perfect mechanics of rock. And this DVD has Bon Scott-era AC/DC! Listen to that super-tribal rock thump, from back when true showmen still roamed the planet. [pauses] I am approaching ecstasy.
C: Television lip-synchs on Australian and British television, professional European concert footage, open-reel black-and-white performance footage from high school auditoriums. [pauses, looks at screen] Wow, Bon Scott is duckwalking with a bagpipe, on live television.
D: Surrounded by adoring females of varying pubescence! They are the Ur-rockers of them all. Bon Scott was a goofball cock of the walk, with sailor tattoos. A shirtless lewd winker in sneakers and tight pants. You can see why he had to die. He was just too much.
C: Where is Angus at, really, when he’s playing—it is like he has no brain –his whole being is a representation of pure sound. Is he the most visually expressive guitarist ever? He’s certainly the most relentlessly acrobatic with all those kneewalks on pinewood. This is the closest you’ll ever see to a white fella being possessed.
D: White man being rode by the rock gods!
C: This DVD has you doing some of your best air guitaring in years.
D: Angus should make a rock ‘n’ roll fitness video.
C: I heard he sucks on the oxygen machine between songs now.
D: Waiter, I’ll breathe some of what he’s having.
C: [pauses] Okay. Now for something that should put things in perspective…

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES dvd
Directed by Jennifer Baichwal
(Zeitgeist)
D: [Viewing silent 10-minute pan across silent, neverending factory, full of silent workers] What is this? It’s not going well with my beer.
C: It’s a full-length documentary film about how photographer Edward Burtynsky works. He makes really beautiful photographs of some of the most depressing stuff ever: mile-deep mine holes near Salt Lake City, giant quarries in Vermont and Italy, rivers of iridescent rust leading to tailing ponds of iron oxide in Canada, a pile of 40 million tires outside Modesto that eventually was struck by lightning and burned for an entire year. Horror shots of a wounded planet. This film emphasizes his recent work shooting all of these nightmare scenes inside China.
D: Well one thing’s for sure: China is really doing its part to end the world.
C: These factory scenes are totally horrific. Humans made into uniformed silent robots who work in lifeless factories, then go back to their gender-segregated dorms.
D: I guess it is possible after all to have a society no rebels or class clowns.
C: Slacking is punishable by death in China. Or worse: being sentenced to live in an “e-waste town,” where everybody hand-scavenges recyclable material from dead computers shipped from all over the world.
D: Amidst the fumes of a thousand burning circuit boards.
C: Beneath skies that are never, ever blue anymore because of all the coal mining and burning going on, all those smokestacks without scrubbers. China will bury us all—not through bombs but through reckless industrialization. They took our example, but the scale they’re working on…
D: Horror film of the year. Excuse me while I kratom myself into oblivion. Please stop this film, I want to go back to the way I was!
C: We gotta keep this DVD handy to remind ourselves that we’re living on the slave labor of others, all the time.
D: [sputters] Slaves?!?
C: What’s the difference, really? I know it’s not USA-style slavery, cuz there’s no racism, or at least none that I can see, but it sure looks like forced labor to me. The smart urban bureaucrat party wizards of China’s government are using force, economics and superior technology to make the poor rural folks move en masse to nightmare factory towns as part of this new capitalist-communist industrial hybrid model they’re using to grow the economy. Humans are becoming standardized.
D: This is like an infomercial for Hell. I’m glad I’m not in their shoes. I mean…
C: Actually, shoes are key. Burtynsky claims that it was Nike’s move of manufacturing to China that really started the whole cascading trend of moving American manufacturing and assembly offshore. The factory they show here makes a billion shoes in a year.