Sunday, July 31, 2011

40 Songs, 40 Days (2011 Edition), Day Twenty Four: Moon Knight by Adam WarRock featuring Tribe-One

And we return again to a member of the geekcore movement I truly enjoy, Adam WarRock, and another song from the West Coast Avengers mixtape I wrote about a while ago.

And just like with that Iron Man song I wrote about last year, this song works because Adam doesn't rely solely on name dropping. Yes, Adam and his guest star Tribe-One (who starts out the track by doing the equivalent of a station ID, telling us what we're listening to before assuring us he'd give us a cupcake and a hug even though he's a villain) do rap about Marc Spectre, making oblique references to Moon Knight's status as a minor hero, but they also make connections between Spectre's status as a mercenary with the tradition of the regulator...which they then use to compare the present materially-obsessed strain of popular rap with their own personal status.

This song only strengthens my own feelings about how Adam uses his geek tendencies as a departure point. Unlike so many other geekcore acts, Adam is unafraid to admit that he's interested in other things than comic books. And while it may not be among my favorite tracks of his, like the utterly amazing 'Top Wobble' (which summarizes Inception in roughly five minutes) or 'Fantomex (Weapon Plus)' or 'I Never Watched An Episode of Doctor Who' (about the 'all or nothing' snobbishness of geek culture), it's still eminently listenable.

Given how Adam has gone on to release mixtapes inspired by other 90's teams like X-Factor and The New Warriors, I'm looking forward to see what else he has up his sleeve. I hear he's about to drop a mixtape based on, of all things, Firefly. I may be the only geek in the world who can't stand that show, but you better bet I'll be downloading it when it drops.

You can learn more about Adam WarRock here, his blog. He frequently posts free music, so what's not to love?

Friday, July 15, 2011

Radio Radio: The End Of The NY Rock Experience

This morning is the first morning New York City is without WXRP.

Right now, 101.9 FM is beginning its new format under Merlin Media--the sale is still pending FCC approval, but the organization is operating the station via a local marketing agreement--on Monday. Randy Michaels, the brains behind Merlin, has yet to reveal what he has in store for the latest attempt at an alternative rock station in the largest media market in America, but the common belief is that 101.9 will introduce an all talk/news format (the first on the FM band in NYC) with an emphasis on female listeners.

WXRP built its programming around Matt Pinfield and
Leslie Frann's morning show..I was Not A Fan.
I still don't understand how this city, which still can boast one of the greatest rock and alternative scenes in the country, cannot support a radio station that plays current rock music. I mean, we support three Top 40 Stations of varying annoyance, four urban contemporary stations, two spanish-language music stations, two light music stations, and an oldies station...surely we have enough fans of contemporary guitar-based rock and related popular music in this great metropolis to support a single station that plays current rock and alternative music. Oh sure, as far as I know we still have 'QRock' a little further up the dial from 101.9, but that abomination manages to combine all of the worst aspects of the classic rock format in a way that makes it impossible for anyone not stuck in 1979 to appreciate it.

I have loved alternative rock since I stumbled across a faint signal from 92.7 WLIR back in 1982 while looking for something to listen to while I took a bath. And yet, ever since WLIR--which became WDRE, then WLIR back again as it switched hands over and over again and weathered legal battles left, right and center--finally faded away in 1996, the city has never quite been able to hold onto an alternative rock station. And it frustrates me that once again I have no place to go to listen to music I can tolerate, where the DJs don't have to work off a computer generated playlist of sixteen songs every hour (or, in the case of WXRK, the dance-oriented top 40 station that replaced the last great alternative rock experiment--an experiment that collapsed when Howard Stern finally took his ball and went to his new home of Sirius Radio--five songs every half hour).

This, however...this was a great attempt to bring a college
rock feel to the early evening shift....
(And for those of you--and I know you're preparing to say it right this moment--who will start singing the praises of WFMU...well, I can't get a signal from that station and I'm not willing to carry my laptop back and forth to my store, so shut up...)

WXRP wasn't perfect. I quite frankly found their morning team of Matt Pinfield and Leslie Frann really boring, and their refusal to acknowledge that certain artists had more than one or two well-known songs infuriating. But I enjoyed such OAPs as Brian Phillips and Nick Carter, loved their respect for music history via such features as their 'This Day In Music History' segments, and enjoyed the fact that they rarely repeated current hits in a five hour block. More importantly, I appreciated that they actively sought out and supported newer acts, including local bands, and gave them publicity. The station really tried to create a community feel for its audience, which was something I missed ever since WLIR/DRE was handed over to the Pheonix Media Group in the mid-90's to become something a little less freeform in its programming. I felt I was listening to a living, breathing entity and not a computerized pre-programmed piece of luncheon meat forced down my throat by marketers.

And then there's Rich Russo...who managed to do a weekly...
gasp...freeform radio program every Sunday!
I guess this is partially a further reflection of how FM radio has bled out its audience so that only the very young and very old remain to consume its product. Doesn't make it hurt any less that I lost a station I grew to claim as my own.

Doesn't mean I have to like it.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

40 Songs, 40 Days (2011 Edition), Day Twenty Three: When You Come by Crowded House

This is a live performance from a concert given in Koln, Germany in 1993, when Crowded House was about to enter the end run of its first bout of existence. And Crowded House, of course, is perhaps the single most popular phase of the colorful career of the Finn Brothers, Tim and Neil.

And to be fair, even though I didn't twig onto what made Crowded House so good until they were at the end of their lifespan--well, kinda, as we'll see later--I always had a soft spot for the Finn Brothers. I really grooved on their original band Split Enz's work, and not just 'I Got You,' the song that marks them as one-hit wonders in the eyes of the uneducated. I also really, really liked Tim's solo work. But for a long time, I looked upon Crowded House as a sort of soft-boiled version of the Finn's work with Enz, a sort of rejiggering of their power pop sensibilities to appeal to a baby boomer, MOR audience.

It wasn't until much later, when I started coming across their lesser known output, that I appreciated them not as a sell-out, but as an evolution. And it wasn't until I decided to listen to this concert--offered by the  Popdose Music Website as part of their Bootleg City series--that I realized the true strength of this iteration of the Finn Brothers' pop genius lies in those song's live performance. In Crowded House, The Finns translate the energy of their Split Enz work into pure passion--romantic, sexual, optimistic--which results in songs that sound perfect being played to an audience. Just listen to how this song, with all its imagery about voyages and the sea and the great outdoors, and imagine how it must sound in some outdoor venue, where it can coax your own yearnings for a voyage out of you. It prolly explains to me why I found so much of their studio work so lackluster--these are songs not meant for studio composition.

Crowded House has splintered, reconfigured and broken apart numerous times (which is why I choose to look at it in the context of the Finns' career as a whole)...and they're back together. A new album, Intriguer, dropped last year, and I'm sure the band will splinter and reform at least twice more before it's ultimately done.


Monday, July 4, 2011

30 Songs, 30 Days (2011 Edition), Day Twenty Two: Addicted To Me by The Click Five

And here we have a band that I thought was dead and buried, another carrier of the power pop banner, another band from Boston, who I originally wrote off because I found their biggest hit loathsome.

You see, when I first started working in the store, there was this one employee I came to know as 'The Penguin' due to his longish torso and stubby legs. The Penguin always insisted on putting on his own mix of music from the moment he arrived to the moment he left, and his taste in music was hideous. Generic techno and that modern sludge the record labels try to pass off as rhythm and blues, bands like Train led by doofuses who obviously wrote their lyrics in college to get into the pants of freshmen girls and bands like Guns and Roses who equate loudness and brashness with importance...and most importantly, bands with a certain type of vocalist.

It was from this last category that I threw The Click Five due to the fact that The Penguin only played their one hit, 'Just The Girl' in his rotation. 'Just The Girl' is one of those songs which falls apart once you listen to the lyrics--when you realize what I total sadistic jerkhole the woman the POV singer is talking about, and what an even bigger jerkhole the singer is for putting up with all this terrible abuse with a smile on his face, the song stops being fun. This isn't like, let's say, The Offsping's 'Self-Esteem,' which presents us with a POV character who recognizes his inability to leave his abuser as pathetic, or Fountains Of Wayne's 'I'll Do The Driving,' where the POV character stays with a desire to lead his girlfriend out of her small-minded habits...this is a guy who seems to crave this abuse with a smile on his face and open arms.

(Imagine my surprise, incidentally, when I learned that 'Just The Girl' was co-written by Fountains of Wayne maven Adam Schlesinger, and that the FoW had a hand in convincing Atlantic to sign The Click Five.)

Eventually, The Penguin moved on, and I went about my life...until the Music section of the excellent Popdose website ran a story about The Click Five and their struggles with their original label Atlantic (a struggle apparently built around their desire to move away from their original proto-Mod gimmick) and their search for a new label. The article came with a rather generous sample of songs from their two Atlantic albums, so I downloaded and sampled them...

And they're good. They're damn good. Great harmonies, excellent melodies that sometimes evoke the classic new wave of the 80's, sometimes the overproduced-on-purpose denseness of the Phil Spector school...and even though their canon contains songs similar to 'Just A Girl,' they show a greater deal of self-awareness and wit than that song I hated so much.

This song is from the new wave end of the Click Five pool; that skronky keyboard is definitely from the early days of MTV. And it's about a classic power pop delimma--namely, the boy who wants the girl who is attracted to him but embarrassed by his un-coolishness. And unlike the willing victim in the cycle of abuse that is the singer of 'Just A Girl,' this POV character is taking the high road...he's acknowledging how he's been used, how his lack of status is what's keeping them apart. But, he warns the object of his affection that he's under her skin, that even as he lets her go off on her own, he knows she'll return to him...and he won't sit in a corner by the phone, but he will be waiting. And the song has so closely melded the vocals with the melody that it's hard to separate them.

Apparently, The Click Five has been quietly touring New England and cultivating their big followings outside of America...and unbeknownst to us, a new album, TVC, is out and waiting for our purchasing....

Sunday, July 3, 2011

30 Songs, 30 Days (2011 Edition), Day Twenty One: (I Know You) Shake It by The Elvis Brothers

Okay, we're over the hump...so let's move on with this amazing number by an amazing band you've prolly never heard of.

I first encountered this Illinois trio when they opened up for Big Country during their Crossing Tour at the Roseland Ballroom. They had just released Movin' Up. the first of two albums from Epic subsidiary Portrait, and this was an early date I had with a woman I was involved with briefly. She wore a red dress that night--and oddly enough, the first single off the album was called "Red Dress." I loved pretty much everything about these guys, from their rockabilly-meets-power-pop music to their Retro 50's dress...hell, I may actively have liked this band more than the one we had originally come and seen.

I haunted the record bins of St. Marks Records to uncover vinyl versions of both Movin' Up and, two years later, their follow-up, Adventure Time. And after that...

Nothing. They were dropped by their label after a regime change and that was the last I ever heard of them until recently, when I discovered a blog that posted not only these two long out of print albums, but a third the group made for indie label Recession in 1992.

I wonder why this band never got any bigger. I suspect part of it is because they might have been lumped in with the other Rockabilly Revival bands and--as such--got overshadowed by The Stray Cats and, later, The Reverend Horton Heat. It's a shame, because this is a great, meat and potatoes pop band. "(I Know You) Shake It" may not be a groundbreaking piece of music, but it does successfully capture what made rockabilly so great--a danceable beat, an upbeat set of lyrics and a sheer energy that makes you want to move. That this trio were also able to produce more nuanced work like "City on Fire" only made them all the more valuable.

The three albums that comprise The Elvis Brothers' discography are now ultra-rare...even the two-in-one reissue of Movin' Up and Adventure Time can go for upwards of a hundred used on Amazon.com....but if you go to the excellent blog Power Pop Criminals and know where to look, you might find some samples.

Here's the video made for this song for the Now See This Video EP the Brothers put out...

Friday, July 1, 2011

30 Songs, 30 Days (2011 Edition), Day Twenty: Killing An Arab by The Cure

Okay, we're at the halfway mark....

And we mark this moment with a classic song--one I really like--from The Cure.

You know, I can understand some people who look askance at Robert Smith and company, still putting on the facepaint and black clothing even though they're well into middle age, their doughiness becoming more and more of a problem. But me, I have to give them credit for walking that very thin line that lies between being stuck in the past and evolving past your fanbase. If you listen to the last few Cure albums, you will see a steady-but-slight progression in their music; the Robert Smith who sang this song couldn't sing the stuff on Disintergration with a straight face. And because the evolution has been such a slow, slow crawl, I wonder if some of their hardcore fanbase even realize it's happened.

And there's another thing I have to give them credit for--when they want to write a song about a novel by Camus, they write a song about a novel by Camus. This song hit some time before that brief craze in the 80's for naming songs after famous works of fiction--that right, I'm looking at you, Motels--and unlike those songs, which were unconnected to the actual novels they were supposedly inspired by, this song is a concise, Cliff Notes version of the main action of the novel on which it is based. And it grasps the fact that The Stranger is about power, and feeling something in the face of nothing. All in all, this is a much deeper song than its length and simplistic lyrics give it the right to be. Even such a simple thing as using an Arabian arrangement for this two-and-a-half minute number creates a tension a lesser, dumber band might not think to provide.

Of course, that simplicity also allows other people to look at purely as surface. I'm old enough to remember how a student was expelled for playing this song on his college radio station because it was, like, racist and stuff. Those school administrators should have turned in their badges right there and then, as they displayed a severe lack of understanding of how colleges are about ideas and debate. I'd rather hear this song, which is actually about something than the stuff that passes for popular music these days, which is apparently about nothing but having money and having attitude.

Wow. I went a little off the reservation there. Anyway, here's the video for the song.....

40 Songs, 40 Days (2011 Edition), Day Nineteen: Toxic by Uncle Monsterface

Okay....this is just...weird. And it makes me sad.

Uncle Monsterface is apparently a rock band composed of sock puppets. Don't take my word for it; got to their website and see how I'm sooo not joking about this. And if sock puppet rock bands are your thing, you can get the album this cover of Britney Spears' hit single comes from just for signing up for their mailing list.

Given that this is a...sock puppet rock band, Uncle Monsterface's take is a little peculiar. Musically, they seem to be a bit of a mash-up of several 'geekcore' concepts--the melody line seems to be done in a way that emulates 8-bit video game cues (an earlier ep of theirs featured songs inspired by classic Nintendo games), the vocals seem influenced ever-so-slightly by the mannered-but-dorky stylings of such Geekcore bands (and geekcore pioneers) as Lemon Demon and They Might Be Giants, and they utilize unusual instruments for a rock band, like a banjo. It's not entirely unpleasing, although it does come off as overmannered; I can only imagine what watching these guys live is like. And a quick walk through their discography reveals the typical geekcore subject matter--video games, comic books, breakfast cereals, the sort of things other rock bands wouldn't think twice about.

There would have been a time several years ago where I would have looked at something like Uncle Monsterface and went nuts for it. But the problem is this--take away the geeky crap from a band like Kirby Krackle or a rapper like Adam Warrock, and you still have legitimate music. Adam Warrock in particular has made it clear that the music comes first, and he only gets geeky with it when a geek theme is evident within. But strip away the 8-bit psuedo-midi bullcrap and the sock puppets and the silly vocals from Uncle Monsterface...and you've got nothing. It's this sort of project that makes me worry that Geek Culture's time in the sun is approaching faster than we realize. Popular cultural trends end when the also-rans and the not-very-goods rush in to get all 'me too' about that culture. When the crap to gold ratio increases beyond a certain point, the casual fan just moves away, ready to embrace the next trend. And Uncle Monsterface--while not as terrible a band as, let's say, Hungry Mouth (a 'grunge' band that CBS tried to force down our throats towards the tail end of that movement), it's not that great and is bound to strike people with ennui. Being weird just for weird's sake is guaranteed to plummet us back to being a niche.

(And need I remind you of how the end of grunge and britpop led to a popular music scene that embraces the emptiness of 'Am I A Man Or A' Lady Gaga, Ke-Dollar-Sign-Ha, Kanye 'I Loves Me Some Autotune' West, and the concept of the 'feMC'? If that doesn't put a chill in your bones, I don't know what will.)

So, ummmm, yeah. Sock puppet geekcore. I think I'll pass....

Here's a live performance of this cover, sans the sock puppets, which makes the concept seem even sadder still....