This Real Estate cover of the Strokes’ classic “Barely Legal” is breathtaking and after I downloaded and ignored it months ago, it’s lately taken ahold of my brain. The slow, shimmering, building brains bash is too much and elegant in a way that you would never describe.
[I had a funny facepalm moment writing this as I googled the term “barely legal” looking to find an image for this past…. yeah.]
I didn’t take no shortcuts I spent the money that I saved up Oh, Momma running out of luck Like my sister, don’t give a fuck
I wanna steal your innocence To me, my life, it don’t make sense Those strange manners, I loved ‘em so “Why won’t you wear your new trench coat?”
I should’ve worked much harder I should’ve just not bothered I never show up on weekdays Something that you learned yesterday
“Drive you to work; you’ll be on time These little problems they’re not yours and mine,” “Come on and listen to what I say I’ve got some secrets that’ll make you stay”
I just want to turn you down I just want to turn you around Oh, you ain’t never had nothin’ I wanted, but… I want it all I just can’t figure out… Nothing
And all together it went well We made pretend we were best friends Then she said, “Oh, you’re a freak” “They ordered me to make mistakes” Together again, like the beginning It all works somehow in the end The things we did, the things you hide For the record it’s between you and I
Oh, I didn’t take no shortcuts I spent the money that I saved up Oh, Momma running out of luck Like my sister, don’t give a fuck
I wanna steal your innocence To me my life, it just don’t make any sense Those strange manners, I loved ‘em so “Why won’t you wear your new trench coat?”
I just want to misbehave I just want to be your slave Oh, you ain’t never had nothing I wanted, but… I want it all I just can’t figure out… Nothin’
And all together it went well We made pretend we were best friends Then she said, “Oh, I can wait” They ordered me to make mistakes Together again like the beginning It all works somehow in the end The things we did, the things you hide And for the record, it’s between you and I
I have sort of specifically never given much of a shit about philosophy or philosophers before, but I do like a photo that can make me feel alive.
In poking through my iTunes for some late night time experimental electronic tunages, I discovered the Matmos Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth of a Beast record, all songs on which are “dedicated” to a certain famous-not-famous queer person. I recognized most of the names (including Valerie Solanas, William S Burroughs, Darby Crash), but not the dedicatee of the first track, ”Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein”.
From here I rabbit-holed on Wittgenstein—not a German king as I suspected but in fact a Jewish early 20th C philosopher—and, voila, discovered the striking image above. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but this photo blows me away in both Wittgenstein’s strikingly-attractive, ultra-modern proto-hipster look and in the way the photographer managed to capture him so perfectly and non-Germanly looking into the camera, as if he’s talking to you about his work (while knowing you aren’t getting it, though you should). Really fucking amazing, this photo.
As an aside, I’ve now listened to this whole Matmos record too and have been reminded of the challenging relationship I’ve had with these artists as a band that strikes a weird balance between “great, interesting, inspired!” and “pretentious, clinical, non-musical, boring”. The Ludwig track alas falls into the latter category but there are three great numbers listed below worth mentioning (in a feat remarkably appropriate for the man himself, the William Burroughs track manages to be both “interesting, inspired” and “pretentious, boring”):
I had a dream last night that I desperately needed to listen to the Wipers, and so while doing the old listen/read tonight I stumbled across this unexpected and totally-ripping Hole cover of the classic and heroically awesome Wipers song “Over the Edge”. Seriously, it’s great. Erlandson’s guitar rips, Courtney yips, and I smiled.
After downloading, I was also reminded that I had live Hole covers of the Nirvana songs “Pennyroyal Tea,” “You Know You’re Right” and “Old Age” hanging out on my laptop. The latter two came from an unreleased Hole recording of MTV Unplugged and were unreleased as Nirvana songs until the mid 00s. All of which are also actually decent, and the “You Know You’re Right” is possibly better than the mediocre Nirvana version (which can’t be said for the atrocious cover of “Hungry Like the Wolf” also on the Unplugged session).
If you are at all like you me, you might occasionally yearn for more “new” Jay Reatard to hear adn get into and wishing the dude hadn’t croaked. Or, frequently yearn.
Luckily, there’s actually a lot more music to get into beyond his solo output from ‘06-‘09 in case you haven’t actually poked around much yet. Number 1 starting point for anyone should be the debut records from his first band The Reatards, a series of noisier and more raw but incredibly fresh and kinetic garage-punk. Less melodic than his late 00s solo records but—it might just be their newness to me, having only started to listen to them last year—I actually enjoy them more.
But beyond the Reatards records, Jay also was involved in a ton of other Memphis bands and put out lots of releases with many of them (see Grunnen Rocks for a handy list of these many bands/projects). Of these many projects, one that fans of recent Reatard solo might appreciate most are the recordings of his “synth-punk” group Lost Sounds.
The “synth-punk” label I think is actually pretty misleading, because most of these recordings play out to me exactly in the same spirit of late 00s Reatard solo (even down to hooks and composition**), only if Jay was accompanied by the Faint and with extra lead vox shared with a woman. Really really good stuff and worth checking out.
** - Minus one hilarious extended metal solo at the end of “We’re Just Living” that is almost laughable
If you don’t typically listen to Built to Spill in summertime, you should really consider it. Here’s a sort of rare track from a 1999 play-each-other’s song split 7” with Marine Research, with Doug & Co. doing Marine’s “By The Way”. A pretty great tuneful blast of peak era Built to Spill.
Also, if you are in the mood for a summertime jamlist of Built to Spill tunes, here’s a mix I made a few years ago that rocks all the max heartcore they’ve put out. I promise it will help.
Inspired by last night’s discovery of Boxee and revisiting the 1997 Nine Inch Nails live-and-more film Closure, I’ve been listening to NIN all morning and enjoying myself mightily.
One thing that has been true with them for the past few years though is the fact that since I got heavily back into them again in 2008, after the release of their free (and incredibly awesome) record The Slip, I have listened to significantly more to the reincarnated and suddenly-prolific 2005-08 era Nine Inch Nails than any of the classics from ‘89-99 (I say “suddenly prolific” because they put out 3 records and a 2-disc instrumentals record in this three year period after putting out just three records and an EP from the ten years of ‘89-99).
I can’t really say that any of the three records they put out from 2005-08 (With Teeth, Year Zero or The Slip) have a chance of standing the test of time the way that The Downward Spiral has, but I also can’t argue against the fact that all of them are significantly more playable for me as a nearly 30 adult in 2011 than their angry ‘94 forebear.
With Teeth, the first record of these career relaunch records though, is probably the least strong of the three, however it’s highlights tease with the most promise of all. “The Hand That Feeds”, “Every Day Is Exactly The Same”, and “Only” are great singles and “Beside You In Time” is almost industrial-Radiohead, but most tantalizing of all, is the opening track “All The Love In The World”, an amazing track unlike anything else in the entire NIN canon.
This song is so good and so different and such a flirt as the lead track on the first new NIN record in what was six years… and yet it’s really like nothing else on With Teeth or anything else Trent ever did.
Beginning with just vocals, a simple beat, it just builds over and above itself slowly until suddenly piano breaks in and you can start to feel it building toward … a rave? And then, BOOM: at 4:15, 4/5 of the way into the song, the buildup just explodes as joyous and loud and wonderful modern R&B track, complete with vocal canons and solo piano cooldown. Unbelievable.
LISTEN: Beck, “Somewhere Far Along”, from KCRW, June 19, 1996
Again, some more Beck. Over the next year, I will slowly trickle out the hundred or so random singles, b-sides and radio outtakes of his output, some of which has come out with the Deluxe Edition re-releases of One Foot In the Grave and Odelay.
Here’s a not-quite finished version of a track allegedly from an aborted attempt to record a K Records follow-up to OFITG. It feels so contemporaneously mid 90s Beck and for that reason is sort of welcome and beautiful, even in its low-quality, unfinished form here.
Miss the time when I cared for and loved this dude.
Despite being a lover of both female-fronted rock bands and creative English post-punk / new wave, for whatever reason I’ve almost entirely managed to avoid listening to or even having awareness of the Siouxsie & the Banshees. Perhaps because they tended a bit more main-leaning (or not)? I’m not quite sure why Siouxsie and her bands have been such a blind spot for me given my general interests, but for whatever reason I’ve managed to make it 28 years without ever listening to anything she’s done except a few occasional spins of early single “Hong Kong”.
Which is a relatively reasonable; you can’t listen to everything. But I guess more weirdly is that I can still remember the exact moment I became intrigued by Siouxsie: Thanksgiving, 1994.
I was at my grandparents’ home in south shore Boston sitting in the basement watching MTV and a recap program of live music from the summer was playing. Going to my grandparents’s for Thanksgiving was an annual ritual and given that we didn’t have cable tv at my own home, I always spent much of my time there watching the amusingly exotic Nickelodeon and then MTV as I grew up. But it’s strange, because for whatever reason this particular normal-Thanksgiving tv-watching experience seems as fresh in my mind now as it did 17 years ago.
It was morning, around 11am, on I think the Friday after Thanksgiving, and I was watching tv in the basement. My mom came down and sat next to me as I put on MTV and saw they were running the highlight show, which included footage of Woodstock ‘94. My mom made a few standard old folks comments about “the original Woodstock” (she was too young to go) and then an edit of VJ talking and live performances began playing. The three specific memories I have are the Red Hot Chili Peppers (who I liked at the time) coming onstage in light bulb outfits and—as one of the first time I can remember hearing live musicians—I remember being astonished at how different (and worse) Anthony Kiedis’s voice sounded than it did on record. After that was Porno for Pyros, who I’d never heard of, doing “Pets”—which seemed like a strange song to me—and finally was a lilting, dark-circus of a song by a band called Siouxsie and the Banshees, who I knew of as being an “old 80s band” but otherwise knew nothing about.
I don’t remember even catching a song title—I just remember a dark-haired woman roaming the stage and shouting loudly,
“Heee-Eee, heee-eee-ho-ho!”
It was weird music but I was enthralled and decided I’d track it down and find out more.
But oh, those were the pre-internet days where you could only hear music you bought, borrowed or heard on the radio, and given that I was only 12 and with limited budget (reserved for higher-profile selections like Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins), it meant that I never bothered track any Siouxsie records or even this song down.
Until, flash forward seventeen years, today. I saw the name Siouxsie this morning and for whatever reason I decided that today would be the day i’d finally find this song.
Was it her most popular track? An early cut? Something contemporary to ‘94? After about 25 minutes of reference googling, discography reviewing and YouTube watching, I finally stumbled across a track title that made sense to the tiny shred of memory I had: “Peek-a-boo”.
“Heee-Eee, heee-eee-ho-ho! Heee-Eee, heee-eee-ho-ho!” went my memory.
“Peee-ee ee-eek-a-Boo! Peee-ee ee-eek-a-Boo!”
Sure enough, finally, after seventeen years, there it was. And here it is now: “Peek-a-boo”, from a post-heyday 1988 record called Peepshow.
I indulge in the onset of summer and the liberation it makes me feel. Every summer, the same fucking things happen: warmth and good vibes inducing late night cigarettes, cans of cold beer, basketball, lounging outside, southern rap music and late 90s-today J Mascis licks.
On the latter, it may be a little atraditional, but I realized at some point 5 or so years ago that I dramatically prefer the laissez-faire sunbright melodicism of J Mascis over the last 13 or so years than insular, secretly-serious sludge-chunk of his first 13 years of work. In a certain way, he’s taken an easier, lazier path toward comfortable warmth than challenging voidnoise but I think the way that J has honed his craft is so unique and special that it’s reached a point that for the last 10 years, there is literally no other guitar sound I would rather hear than a ripping J electric solo over a major-key pop tune. There is something spectacular about the understanding he’s developed of how to counterbalance his screeching, searing (but always melodic) guitar solos over a warm bed of pop chords. Early Dinosaur Jr records, while often awesome and inspiring always felt like they lived inside a chamber of murk and that his solos and lines were often just defined tripwires in the swamp… but the move towards utilizing them over warmth has created something else entirely, giving his guitar in an actual VOICE that I think no other guitarist in the world has, or has ever had.
Attached now is the track “Freedom”, opener of the 2002 solo effort Free So Free, a record which offers many examples of the above. When I say Mascis records of the past thirteen years, I’m specifically referencing the following:
2000 J Mascis + The Fog: More Light 2002 J Mascis + The Fog: Free So Free 2007 Dinosaur Jr: Beyond 2009 Dinosaur Jr: Farm 2011 J Mascis: Several Shades of Why
I won’t attempt to make a claim that any of these are his “best” records but—with exception of career-spanning comp Earbleeding Country—they are without a doubt the ones I most enjoy listening to, especially More Light and the Dino Jr reunion record Beyond. With Beyond I have a particular love, not just because I was happy to see them reunite but also that in doing so they embraced the new melodicism J had developed rather than returning to the “sludgefeasts” of the late 80s.
I’ll follow later with my favorite tunes from each of these records (and the rest from his career) but for now enjoy “Freedom” and if you’re curious, check out the rest.
