Saturday, December 21, 2013

This Is Your Song For...December 21st, 2013: I’m Ready by Snow Patrol

"That's right...we're, you know, sensitive and stuff."
Well, I guess this is a pretty appropriate song for today...if it wasn’t so warm out!

No, really.  This is appropriate for personal reasons.

And yes, I like Snow Patrol.  Sue me.

This song originally appeared on  Fallen Empires.  This is a very subdued song, very much in keeping with what most people think of when they think of Snow Patrol, with its pared down near acoustic arrangement and its plaintive reading of the lyrics.

Maybe it’s where I am in my life right now, on the precipice of a decision similar to the one being explored here, but I gotta admit it speaks to me.  This is a song about that moment of nervous, frightened anticipation when someone--notice that we assume that this is a man simply because the vocals are male; there’s no true indication as to the singer’s identity--commits to someone else.  The reference to the island at the beginning represents not a physical place but the state of mind of the singer, that state of isolation the truly lonely get used to....and then this path to the outside world opens up, and you stumble for it, glimpsing someone who could guide you out.  The question then becomes who that person is--'are you wolf or are you lamb are you too scared to choose?’  The question then becomes do you follow the person, even if his/her ‘cold hands feel good,’ even if the possibility warms you like a star that bathes you in a ‘dark red heat that burns’....do you give in, or listen to what you’ve learned in the past?

I could be reading too much into this song.  For all I know, Snow Patrol is pointing at me and laughing.  But given where I am right now in my life, the situation I am in, I am taken with this song.  I am a strong believer in signs and portents, and I believe that somewhere, someone is trying to tell me something.

Sorry this one got kinda metaphysical.  I promise I’ll do better next time.

Here’s the song.


Wednesday, December 11, 2013

This Is Your Song For...December 11th, 2013: Bing Can’t Walk by Stan Ridgway

In the darkest alley in town, he's got a story to tell...
This time out--an ultra-obscure track by a man who didn’t understand the way movies get made.

Stan Ridgway is, of course, the very distinctive voice behind Wall of Voodoo, an alt-rock band who formed from the ashes of Acme Soundtracks, a company formed by Ridgway to provide scores for horror films.  However, the story goes that Ridgway didn’t understand that songs got commissioned for films waaaay before release, so the songs he wrote (like ‘The Passenger,’ a song obviously influenced by Airport ‘77) ended up being performed by Ridgway and his pals at The Masque, an L.A. punk club across the street.  Their lively performances there attracted the attention of IRS Records, which led to their recording two albums, which led to the surprise hit ‘Mexican Radio’ on their second album, Call of The West.

The thing is, you could tell that Ridgway’s sensibilities--all spy movies, westerns and film noir--were different from his band mates, which is why I wasn’t surprised he split off on his own after an appearance at the US Festival in 1983.  His first solo album, The Big Heat, pretty much cemented my love of him as a solo artist, as these were story songs firmly in the Warren Zevon mode.  Ridgway wasn’t content writing fluffy pop songs or quirky alt anthems; no, each of his albums are little short story collections straight out of the hardboiled crime era of the 50‘s, tales full of desperate men, duplicitous women and lots and lots of alcohol.  Stan Ridgway is Jim Thompson with a guitar cruising the honky tonks of the southwest.  He’s Charles Woolford with a rhythm section waiting for his chance to play the Grand Ole Opry.  He’s a pulp story teller at heart, and I love him for that.
Yeah, with that dress, you might forget
a kick-ass song at the start...

This track was originally from the disappointing attempt by Wayne Wang to merge punk rock with film noir, 1987‘s Slam Dance (a film perhaps more well known for putting the lovely Virginia Madsen in a slinky black, low-cut dress than anything else), and it’s the first of his solo works to be done specifically for an American movie*.  It’s one of my favorite tracks of his, and for a long, long, long time I couldn’t find it anywhere, as the Slam Dance soundtrack went out of print and it wasn’t represented on any of Ridgway’s albums.  Luckily, he released Holidays In Dirt, a b-sides and rarities collection in 2002 that contained the track in its full glory.

And what a glorious song it is--pure Ridgway noir, a song about a really, really bad man looking for his next job and utilizing some Hollywood history to create the killer of a chorus.  Right from the crunchy synth riff, ably abetted by the woodblock-y persussion (Ridgway is well known for using Latin instruments on his tracks; one night I saw him perform at Maxwell’s on my birthday, and he called me up to play do the flute riff on 'The Big Heat’, which made it one of my best birthdays ever), there’s a sense of menace to this song.  And then Ridgway’s whiskey-rough voice comes in promising us that if we know somebody we want messed up, he’ll do it for us--but don’t cross him.  Even if you remain friendly with him, ‘it’ll be one punch for my patience/and a drawer full of dirty shirts/we’ll find out just who hurts.’  He doesn’t let up on the menace of this song, even when we get to the lyrical bridge--a trademark of Ridgway songs of this era--and that menace is left in the air long after we get to the fade.  This song crystalizes Ridgway’s hardboiled sensitivies...plus there’s that amazing image of the chorus (‘Bing can’t walk/Bob broke both his legs’), an image so strong that there’s a story rattling around inside me that I still intend on returning to one day.

Stan Ridgway, bless his soul, is still out there performing.  He recently released a new collection on songs, Mr. Trouble.  With my beloved Warren Zevon gone, he may very well be the primary purveyor of musical short fiction alive today.

Here’s the song:




*--Truthfully, there were two songs with Ridgway’s involvement that precedes this one.  ‘Don’t Box Me In’ was a Stewart Copeland composition with Ridgway on vocals made for Rumble Fish.  And he also wrote the theme song for the French science fiction film Terminus.  This is the first song that’s all his own written for an American feature.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

This Is Your Song For...November 20th, 2013: Labeled With Love by Squeeze

"Yep...put one over on all of them...except that
Deja fella..."
I know what you’re thinking--Tom’s about to go raving about another of his songwriting heroes.

You would be wrong.

This is, of course, the single every one forgets from Squeeze’s East Side Story, and one of a number of songs done by British artists about WWII war brides (Sure, it’s great, but I still prefer Elvis Costello’s ‘American Without Tears’).  The thing that makes this song remarkable is that it, like the rest of that album, reflects Difford and Tilbrook’s experimentation with American pop music styles; this is at its core a country song with a slow twangy shuffle.

I would go on, but this is not the version from East Side Story, but the version from Spot The Difference, from the latest version of Squeeze that is basically Difford, Tilbrook and whoever happens to be on tour with them at the time....and that’s why I’m pissed off by it.

Maybe it’s me, but the nostalgia-grabs that seem to pass for new albums from vintage artists--you know, where they re-record their old material either by themselves or with flavor of the month artists to give them a patina of hipness--bug the crap out of me.  They’re the inverse of creativity.  They represent the artist being too lazy, or too disinterested in his craft, to create new material.  Every time an artist ‘revisits’ his old material, he or she is counting on our nostalgia to line their pockets because, let’s face it, we’re going to eat it up so we can relive our own glory days--and it’s a surer sales juggernaut than putting a collection of new pieces out into the aether.

And while there are a number of people who bother me with their taking this route, Squeeze is amongst the worst offenders.  Since Difford and Tilbrook brought this version of the band back into existence in 2007, the only new material they’ve produced has been available only at their concerts or as bonus discs to concert DVDs available only at concerts.  And what they’ve released commercially is...Spot The Difference.  This is a whole record of re-recordings that are such slavish recreations of the orginal tracks it’s impossible to tell the difference.  This isn’t like Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut, where she transformed the originals into new configurations; this is a K-Tel-like soundalike act that made me wonder why I needed these versions when I still have the originals.

I love Difford and Tilbrook, who are amongst the greatest songwriting duos in the history of pop music.  I love their solo efforts--I frequently wonder if they’ve revived Squeeze solely as a nostalgia act to generate funds so they can pursue their solo work without interference.  But this version of Squeeze, and all the tracks from Spot The Difference, can go dangle from a rope for all I care.  If you want a great version of this song, find the original.

Here's a video of them performing the song.


Tuesday, November 5, 2013

This Is Your Song For...November 5th, 2013: Sunday Papers (Live) by Joe Jackson

Portrait of a misanthropic crumudgeon as a misanthropic
firebrand.
Sorry I’ve been quiet for so long...but I’ve brought one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists with me!

This is a live recording from 1979 Los Angeles show I got from a sadly long-gone blog devoted to archiving all those bootlegs us music fans used to get from Music Stores of Questionable Means.  Here in New York, there were a number of record stores in and around Bleeker Street that would have this one cabinet in a corner somewhere with stacks upon stacks of cassette tapes with monochrome construction paper covers of badly photocopied pictures of the star contained within.  While I never got this particular concert, I did get a number of Robyn Hitchcock and New Order ‘rarities’ from these stores that I listened to until the emulsion wore off.  There was something about having this forbidden fruit, even if the sound levels were, well, lousy, that made them all the more special.

I love this song--I used to sing it a lot at karaoke until my good friend Vinnie Bracco started using it as an ‘icebreaker’ song (i.e. the song that a karaoke DJ uses at the top of each rotation to loosen up the crowd and convince them to participate)--and it fascinates me how the practices of the English Press that Jackson is criticizing in this song have become prescient for the American press.  This performance begins with Jackson gleefully reading out random headlines from a British newspaper, and they’re no different from some of the stuff I can see being printed in The Daily News and The New York Post.  This was meant as satire when Jackson wrote it, and now it’s reality for me in one of the most literate cities in this country.

This particular performance is also interesting because it gives us a glimpse of Jackson’s misanthropic nature back when, in that moment in time when punk and new wave were the king of the musical heap, it was not only acceptable but welcome.  Listening to the bootleg straight through, you can’t escape that Jackson has a bit of a contempt for his audience.  Oh, he appreciates them on some level and is grateful they’ve come out for his show, sure....but there’s a surliness to some of his banter that serves as a hint of some of the greater ugliness to come.  Sure, this misanthropy will wax and wane with his musical periods--when I saw him live during the Big World Tour, he was positively charming--but I can’t help thinking this was one of the times he didn’t feel the need to hide the monster inside, and probably took pride in mocking his audience while basking in its praise.

It’s not my favorite song of this period; I still hold the title track for I’m The Man (another song that seems erieely prophetic here in the Age Of The Tentpole), and contend there are moments of ‘Is She Really Going Out With Him?’ that threaten to make it the most perfect pop song ever.  But it’s a great number, and a great little captured moment in the career of this man.  Now he seems to have once again retreated into his jazz-o-philic tendencies, but hearing this track reminds you of how he once was one of the nastiest, surliest, pop star ever....

Here is a live performance from 1980 of the song--probably from the same tour as the one this recording is taken from.


Tuesday, September 24, 2013

This Is Your Song For....September 24th, 2013: Set Me Free by The Kinks

Picture of a dysfunctional band in younger days.

This time on This Is Your Song--it’s back to Ray Davies!

And if you recall, the last time I endeavored to talk about Mr. Davies--a man I have both the utmost admiration for and a large amount of frustration with--I was met with the anger of a number of his fans, who thought I was committing sacrilege by implying that he could be a lazy songwriter.

And to be honest, the song we’re discussing right now could be accused of being lazy. It’s from one of The Kinks’ earliest albums, and it’s fairly simplistic. You would think I would go off on it.

But I’m not going to...because, especially in this world of pop music being overdubbed and autotuned and multilayered to death, there’s something refreshing in a song that’s under three minutes that presents its idea, takes its bow and leaves. This is what pop music is supposed to be--a great hook (and if they knew nothing else--and believe me, they knew lots more--the Davies Brothers knew a thing or two about writing hooks), a great melody and some lyrics that are easy to sing along to. Unlike when Ray gets older and he tries to be meaningful, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, he’s tapping into one of the Primal Themes Of Teenage Angst and hits a bullseye.

Now don’t get me wrong; if the Kinks had not evolved beyond this stage, I’d be sneering at them the way I sneer at The Rolling Stones after Tattoo You. And I’ll be the first to admit that Ray had to get the manipulative, playing-to-the-lowest-common-denominator sludge of ‘Celluloid Heroes’ and ‘Superman’ before he could get to the sublime wonder of State of Confusion and Word of Mouth. But there’s a reason these earliest songs of his work--they’re near perfect little nuggets of guitar-oriented pop rock, the embryo from which one of my favorite musical genres spring from. They deserve their calcification into the playlists of every single classic rock station in the world.

Here’s a video.




Wednesday, August 28, 2013

This Is Your Song For....August 28th, 2013: Still Alive by Jonathan Coulton (Live in Toronto)

Sometimes, The Internet IS Your Friend!
Well, I see we’re back to Geekcore this morning.

And I have to admit, as much as I look at so much of Geekcore with askance, I rather like Jonathan  Coulton.  I first came across him on Brian Ibbot’s excellent podcast Coverville, which featured an adult contemporary-ized cover he did of ‘Baby Got Back’ as part of his Thing A Week Project.  You may remember that cover, as it became the center of a controversy when the folks at Glee decided to steal its arrangement (down to the use of a duck noise to hide a curseword) for one of their episodes and not give him any credit because, well, they're jerks who care nothing for the artists they're inspired by.  Spurred on by my love of that cover, I investigated his site and liked a lot of what I heard.  When I did my first podcast, Other People’s Toys, I used--with his permission--a different Coulton song to play me in.  I’ve continued to follow his career, and have not been disappointed a bit by what he does.

Coulton may very well be the first musician to use alternative media to get his word out.  He made it clear very early on that his work was considered Creative Commons, meaning anyone an share or remix his work as long as it wasn’t for commercial use.  He did a lot of outreach via the internet--his Thing A Week offered people who visited his site a free MP3 for an entire year, and there’s a number of them still free for the asking.  He was a frequent guest or contributor to a number of podcast.  The end result was that he was already making money off his music before he stepped out from behind his home recording equipment for his first studio album, Artificial Heart.  He’s an internet success story, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other geek musicians like Adam Warrock and John Anealio didn’t get some inspiration from his career arc.

This is a live recording of the end credits song he did for the video game Portal.  I have no idea what the game is about, not being a gamer, but it is indicative of Coulton’s sensibilities--the nerdish subject matter, the phrasing of the lyrics, the asides that effortlessly slide into the main song that are gone before you realize what happend.  And through it all, Coulton’s warm, expressive, very Brooklyn-esque voice is holding your hand and guiding you through even while he’s talking about death, dismemberment and mad science.  I find it kind of appealing that the fans are singing along at certain points, as if Coulton is a major stadium rock star --but then, to the right audience, every musician can be a stadium rock star, right?

Coulton still lives in Brooklyn and still makes music, although he doesn’t seem to make as much as he used to--since the release of Heart, he’s only released a Greatest Hits package and a scant few original songs--being busy with such concerns as the JoCo Cruise Crazy and a comic book featuring the hero of one of his most popular songs, ‘Code Monkey.  But I’m sure when the time comes, new Coulton songs will emerge.

Here’s a video.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

This Is Your Song For....August 14th, 2013: Smoke by Kacie Williams

She'd like to tell you what she knows about God...
Sorry for the delay.  To make up for it, here’s a pretty folk song about the impermanence of life from a Texan singer/songwriter.

This is from a live performance she gave at the English Teahouse in 2010.  On this recording, Kacie mentions that she was inspired to write this song after reading Ecclesiastes (she also shills for the EP she’s got on sale in the back; you don’t get this sort of thing on live albums from other acts), and that statement says a lot about who she is.  This is a very religious woman who chooses to witness her faith through her art, but doesn’t do it in the chest-thumping way some of these ‘Christian Pop’ acts do.  She makes her case, gives us her view of things, then lets us come to the conclusions we want to.

On the very brief bio she includes on the website for her new project, Neighbour, she mentions that her ‘heart home’ is Nashville.  I can certainly see a country influence in the song, but there’s an even stronger whiff of the sort of female driven neo-folk that was a big deal in the early 90‘s.  You can certainly see Ms. Williams fitting in on a Lilith Fair bill around that time.  But what I do like is that the pseudo-religiosity that drove much of Sarah MacLachlan’s stuff of that period is replaced with genuine piousness, which I think gives it a different texture, a slight ring of the genuine.

Apparently, Kacie Williams is touring with Neighbour (at least as of April of this year), still being true to herself and her DIY aesthetic.

No video for this song, so here's a video of her singing two songs....


Wednesday, July 10, 2013

This Is Your Song For....July 10, 2013: Beat.It by The Link Quartet

It's Hammond-rific!
Today...it’s Hammond Organ based instrumental rock!

Yes, that’s a thing.

I didn’t know myself until this morning.

Technically, the proper term for it is ‘Hammond Beat,’ and it refers to groove and rock based instrumentals where the central instrument is a Hammond organ.  The brainchild of Paolo Negri, the Link Quartet was formed in 1993 and has been putting out these slightly spacey, slightly surfy tunes ever since--save for a three year break in the oughts.

I’ve been getting into a lot of surf music lately, spurred on by my love of Los Straitjackets to explore both the pioneers of the form and more contemporary practitioners.  Because of the uniquely artficial sound of the Hammond, the Link Quartet seem similar but apart; it’s almost as if Negri and his bandmates have found the crossroads where surf rock and the exotica lounge crowd meet, creating a fusion that gives us something akin to a jam band for hipsters--more controlled, less meandering, but with that spirit of improvisation still very much alive.

I don’t know where I got this track from--my guess is it’s another one of those mp3s I lucked into through my weekly download of the Revolution Rock radio show--but what I’ve heard has intrigued me enough to investigate this heretofore unknown-to-me subgenre of music a little more.

Here's the song, so you can decide for yourself if it's for you....


Sunday, July 7, 2013

This Is Your Song For....July 7, 2013: In My Garage by Kim Fowley

You're never too old...
Today....a little something from the guy who brought us The Runaways.

Kim Fowley wrote and produced this song as a single in 1978.  By that time, he had already had his fingerprints on the face of rock and roll in his position as a producer, songwriter and manager.  Amongst the long list of people whose career he had helped along or revived are The Soft Machines, Kiss, Helen Reddy, Gene Vincent, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and Kris Kristofferson.  Hell, he would be honored by me solely for his role as a co-writer on Warren Zevon’s first solo album.  Perhaps his biggest claim to fame was seeing something in five aspiring female performers and putting them together as The Runaways.  Now don’t get me wrong--Fowley didn’t create the fivesome of Jett, West, Curie, Ford and Fox out of altruism; he had already been looking to form a female band to be his mouthpiece and was unsucessful until he met Joan Jett, but the impact that little act had is undeniable.

Given how this is the guy who wrote songs for the prototype for Riot Grrl, it’s surprising how gentle this song is.  In this song, Fowley is pretty much trying his hardest to channel Bob Dylan with his kinda wavering vocals and simple acoustic guitar composition; I have to wonder if the opening lines ‘The King of The Gypsies is on my radio/he said goodbye to rock and roll and I kept saying no’ is a direct reference to Dylan himself.  And to be fair, there are a couple of moment where those vocals border on parody.  But the song itself, probably written as Fowley was contemplating the move he was going to make to Australia to search for the next Beatles, is kind of a cool mission statement.  He talks with some passion about how the future of rock is happening right now somewhere out there, ready to be discovered.  It’s a hopeful song in spite of its mournful pace, as he says that he can hear the new heroes of rock  ‘who I’ve never heard of/and who have never heard of me’ in his garage.  I just get this picture in my mind listening to this song of Fowley sitting back in his office popping cheap cassette tapes one after the other into his deck, leaning back and marveling at some of these new sounds coming from these small spaces all across the country.

Fowley is still out there--he was integral to bringing the story of the Runaways to the big screen in 2010--hosting a radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio.

You can here the song here.


Saturday, June 15, 2013

This Is Your Song For....June 15, 2013: Empires Ending (B Sides) by Koko And The Sweetmeats

I...I got nuttin'....literally.
This week, kinda dreamy garage pop from Seattle...if you can call it garage.

I don’t have a lot on Koko And The Sweetmeats--I got Sacrifice, the album this cut is from off of their Bandcamp page, where it was offered for a brief time for free, and is now available for a dollar--and it seems like these guys like to experiment. Sacrifice is composed of six songs that are interpreted twice, an A side and a B side version.  This is obviously the B side version.

They’re a four piece (although most of the publicity photos only feature two members, and the most I’ve ever seen in any photo is three), and they have enough of a following in their hometown to be named ‘Best Garage Band of 2011‘ by Seattle Weekly.

It’s odd to me that this band is considered ‘garage.’  When I think of a garage band, I think of something much punkier than this.  Koko and The Sweetmeats seem to owe a bit more to the layered sounds of 4 A.D and the head-down-low esthetic of Lo-Fi than the DIY anarchy of garage rock judging from this song.  They seem positively laid back, with a slight blown-speaker fuzz giving the guitars a decay that adds some body to the melody itself.

To be honest, there’s not a lot I can find in listening to this that I can take away from it, or that I can remark upon...sometimes, unfortunately, that happens with a random exercise like this.  It’s decent music, and the price can’t be beat. I know I have some readers from the Seattle area; maybe you guys can write in and tell me more about them in the comments space?

Apparently, Koko And The Sweetmeats announced an ‘indefinite hiatus’ earlier this year.

Here's a live performance by the band.  It was the only Youtube-y video I could find.


Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Signs Of The End Time: Maxwell's of Hoboken Is Fading Away

It didn’t look like a club.  It looked like a corner restaurant (because, in fact, it was).

It wasn’t really accessible, as every trip I took to it required me to take the PATH train into Hoboken, then walk about a mile to almost the very end of Washington Street.

It wasn’t easy to get home from, as a return from a show usually required a half hour or more of my sitting in that cold, funny smelling PATH train.

And yet, Maxwell’s was my favorite venue during that long, long period where I was going to see live music three or four nights every week, stumbling home at three or four a.m. to get about two and a half hours sleep before heading off to work.  I loved the fact that the performance space was roughly the size of a largish den.  I loved the fact that--at least during that period of my life--it was the only venue that was air-conditioned.  I loved that if you showed up early enough, and I am one of those people who is perpetually early, you could position yourself in a certain corner of the dining room and listen to that evening’s headliner doing their soundcheck.  I loved the intimacy of the place sometimes resulted in one of the acts interacting with you before or after the show.

And now, as of July 31st of this year, it joins such landmarks of my misspent youth as The Comic Book Art Gallery, Pinky’s, The 59th Street Forbidden Planet, The Continental, The Ritz and CBGB’s as a thing of the past.

To be fair, I have not been to Maxwell’s in a very, very long time.  I think the last time I was in its hallowed halls was when, for my birthday, I ventured out to see Stan Ridgway perform in support of his Black Diamond album.  Somehow, my friend got word to Stan that it was my birthday, and he pulled me up on stage to play that flute-thing on ‘The Big Heat,’ signed a set list for me that I have posted above my work station to this day, and invited me to be his guest for his second New York City area show a few days later.  That big night was close to twenty years ago....

But that was just the most recent of memories.  A lot of them are about the people I got to see in a much more intimate venue, like being literally two feet away from Lloyd Cole as he did an acoustic set one absolutely frigid Thursday night in December.  There was going on a first date with a woman to see the Boston band Orangutan one Sunday night and ending up with what pretty much was a private show, as we were the only two people who showed up (the band, who knew me, played anyway).  There was the time Jersey natives The Melting Hopefuls were celebrating the release of their one and only album, Space Flyer, by handing out toy rayguns.

And there were the memories I made at Maxwell’s due to my musical journalism. There was the time my friend Vaughn gleefully tore apart the hipster doofus veneer of a certain 4 AD band spokesman by quizzing him on the comic books he claimed to love.  There was the time I was invited to interview Pat Fish of the The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy over a dinner, a dinner that resulted in us bonding over our love of Hammer horror movies (it turned out Hammer stalwart director Terence Fisher was related to Mr. Fish).  And then there was the strange and wonderful not-quite friendship that grew up between me and one of my musical crushes Tanya Donnelly, which I chronicled here.

I’m sure you can gather from some of my war stories that Maxwell’s hey day was in the early 90‘s, during that time when the success of Nirvana (who played Maxwell’s) briefly saw an overwhelming interest in independent music.  It’s a credit to the owner Todd Abramson that he kept it open as long as he did, but the changing face of the neighborhood, with the gentrification wave hitting it hard in the last decade, has made running this legendary venue to difficult.

So now one of the most legendary, intimate venues in the tri-state area is about to disappear into the mists of history.  And that is why we are living in the End Times.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

This Is Your Song For....May 1st, 2013: Dandy by Los Helldandys

Viva Le Rockabilly!

Happy May Day, Communists!  Here’s some instrumental Mexican rockabilly to celebrate with!

Utilizing my limited Spanish, I can determine that Los Helldandys was founded in 2006 in Tijuana and try to mix their rockabilly with touches of punk, blues and surf.  And in the tradition of surf rock, this is an instrumental, but it’s unmistakable in its fusion of rockabilly twang with the beefier, more heavily countrified twang of some of the traditional Mexican pop.  In particular, there’s a time change that to me seems alien to other forms of rockabilly, as if our musicians decided to shift their attentions.  I’ve always appreciated and been fascinated by how American pop music gets filtered through foreign eyes; looking through the playlist on my Sansa Fuze right now, you’ll see Swedish, French, German and Japanese versions of rockabilly and garage rock.  There is something about how something that was designed to be so uniquely Amurrican becomes warped and altered by a pair of eyes from Somewhere Else that frequently results in something delightful.  Hell, it might be why I became such a devote of second and third wave ska, since the bulk of that is a mutation of the Jamaican original through English and American eyes.

I obtained this song through an episode of the rather cool Portuguese radio show Revolution Rock Radio, although further samples of Los Helldandys’ work can be found at a number of places.

Here's a live video of the band so you can figure out if they're for you.



Wednesday, April 24, 2013

This Is Your Song For....April 24th, 2013: The Rascal King (Live) by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Back In Plaid....

I guess it’s appropriate, after what happened last week, that my randomizer comes up with a track from one of my favorite Boston bands playing one of their bigger hits at a legendary show.  And it’s a track about one of the most notorious Boston politicians who ever lived, an example of the sort of graceful-but-tough-as-hell sensibilities we all saw on display during that horrific experience.

Let’s Face It, the album where ‘The Rascal King’ first appeared, was as big as the Bosstones would ever get.  Partially bouyed by one of those periodic surges of interest in ska music that hits the cultural zeitgiest every decade or so and bolstered by the eminently hummable lead single ‘The Impression That I Get,’ the album gave the band extensive exposure on alternative rock, AOR and--to my surprise at the time--Top 40.  This was just as the creep of the dance sludge that passes for Top 40 was gaining a foothold, so Dickey Barrett and his crew hit at the very last moment where pop music was open to alternative styles, and they exploited it like their life depended on it.  The success of Let’s Face It prompted the Bosstones to release a video compilation, appear on Saturday Night Live and--God Help Me--the prime-time Sesame Street special Elmopalooza, where they danced with the Count.

Yes.  I watched a Sesame Street television special.  Deal with it.

This comes from the excellent album Live From The Middle East, a recording of their annual year-end Boston concert-cum-holiday party.  The album as a whole gives you a great sense of the energy and enthusiasm that the Bosstones brought to their performances, and it’s a great little artifact of how the band was at the height of its power.  It’s also a snapshot of the classic line-up before the group fractured, as slowly over the next three years members left to form other bands or, in one case, to obtain their degree from Brown University.

Apparently, the song is about James Michael Curley, a notoriously corrupt but notoriously popular Boston politician who served as mayor four times (he was once re-elected mayor while serving a prison term!) and ultimately became Governor of Massachusetts.  The song is peppered with oblique and direct references to Curley’s life; Hell, the chorus begins by citing both the title of his autobiography and the Edwin O’Conner novel that was inspired by his colorful career.  Curley’s impact on Boston life is still clear to this day, and the Bosstones manage to address how ambivalent his former constituents are about him.  The song, after all, never comes out on one side or another about whether Curley was a crook or a hero...as Barrett puts it, ‘in the end they knew his name,’ and that might be all that matters.  I wonder if a parallel could be made between Curley’s tightrope walking between rogue and saint, and the way the Bosstones briefly did the same thing, striving towards popularity while trying to stay faithful to their ska-core roots.

After a break in the mid Oughts, the Bosstones are back on tour--and you can see Dickey Barrett every night on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where he plays Ed MacMahon to Jimmy’s Johnny Carson.

Here’s the video, which features footage from the film based on that Edwin O'Conner novel, The Last Hurrah.

And because I feel like it, here's Dickey dancing with the Count...

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

This Is Your Song For....April 3rd, 2013: Summer In A Small Town by Cleaners From Venus

If there ever was a Doctor Who of pop...this is him.
Most of you have never heard of The Cleaners From Venus (well, most of you who aren’t hardcore power pop fans, or deep devotees of 80‘s British pop in general).

There’s a reason for that.  Cleaners was primarily the brainchild of former Plod frontman Martin Newell.  Newell was so traumatized by the way Plod has been mistreated by its label that he retreated into Britain’s music underground.  Thus, The Cleaners self-distributed their albums in an age when self-distribution was difficult to make work, sending out cassette tapes that could be bought through ads in music magazines.  Newell, mostly with drummer Lol Elliot, managed to produce nine albums between 1981 and 1990, and each one is a weird microcosm of popular music styles--a typical Cleaners From Venus track, even with all the tape hiss, can sound like something out of the Britpop invasion, or the Mod movement, or classic middle-period New Wave.  It’s bizarrely timeless in its OCD-like tendency to jump the tracks, and any of these albums are recommended.

Which brings us to today’s song, which was taken by a retrospective collection called Golden Cleaners, and shows that Newell was an excellent storyteller as well.  Starting with Martin’s chant of ‘not go mad, not go mad, not go mad’ it tells the story of a traveling salesman spending a day in the titular small town and sitting in a cafe reflecting on how the music he loved as a child has mutated into something that terrifies him.  He keeps telling himself he can leave any time he wants, but seems horribly fascinated with how punk rock, psychobilly and other forms that make up the new soundtrack of this season indicates that ‘the Golden Age is not the present one.’  We get the impression that this man wants to escape from this world, but is resigned to continuing to move through it.  

What continues to floor me is how this feels so much like something out of the 90‘s years before the pioneers of the Britpop movement picked up their instruments.  Newell’s vocals are, in their phrasing, so reminiscent of such bands as Carter USM that it’s uncanny that they were recorded ten years prior.  The shimmery guitar work seems to evoke the cleaned-up sound of the Jesus and Mary Chain--except that I’m pretty sure that the J&M Chain wouldn’t popify itself for another couple of years from when the original source of this song, Under Wartime Conditions, was released.  There are half a dozen other bands I can cite--but almost all of them are bands that didn’t reach prominence until years later.  This song, and other Cleaners songs, seem to have tapped into something universal that we all find in pop music.  Newell, in his desire to pursue his own muses, may have hit upon this weird Cradle of British Pop Civilization, and we’re all the better for it.

Martin Newell, God Bless Him, is still alive and out there.  While his last musical contribution of note is a jazz album from 2004, The Light Programme, he continues to write (both musically and literary) and provides inspiration for all the wonderful artists who decide to travel down more unconventional paths when getting their music to the public.

Obviously, there are no official videos extant--but here’s the song anyway. 

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

This Is Your Song For....March 27th, 2013: Full Moon Rising by Neil Halstead

If you're going to go roots....you might as well go all the way.

Today’s song brings up something that intrigues me.  Neil Halstead, who wrote and played this very moody and atmospheric little piece of rootsy, folky tuneage, was one of the founding members of Slowdive.  Slowdive was one of the leading purveyors of showgaze, a musical genre that I talked about somewhat recently.  But once Slowdive broke up as bands that aren't interested in sucking the nostalgic dry of their money inevitably do, Halstead went off to form Mojave 3.  Mojave 3 is a country folk outfit, and Halstead’s solo work has continued on this path.

What is it about alternative rockers that they want to return to roots music once they strike off on their own?  There are far too many who have done this--John Doe did this after he left X, Bob Mould did this after Husker Du crumbled, Kristen Hersh did this when Throwing Muses was in flux...the list goes on and on.  I’m sure you can come up with four or five examples yourself.  Is it because there is this perception of folk, bluegrass, country and other ‘roots’ genres as being ‘purer’ forms?  Is it because writing music in a less tortured form acts as a palette cleanser, preparing these people for whatever their muse has in store for them next?  Is it a desire to cut through the red tape and make it just the singer and the song, stripped of layers of noise and production, so he or she can better communicate with the listener?

Granted, some of this impetuous to go down these country roads may just be a need to liberate oneself.  I talked recently on an episode of Maurice Bursztynski’s excellent Love That Album about how going solo liberated Stan Ridgway to follow his true passion for telling stories with his song, and I suspect something similar motivated Halstead.  There’s no denying that Halstead’s voice is suited to the stripped down arrangements of folk--this song features only him and his guitar, allowing us to soak in this evocative tale of a man and a woman at the exact moment where their relationship disintegrates.  The way Halstead switches from being accusatory to resigned to warning his now former paramour that she might find out what she wants isn't for the best is seamless, all bolstered by the wonderful guitar work.  It’s at turns beautiful and dreadful, as I imagine such a moment would feel to a lover giving up the fight.

There are times I wonder if these sudden changes in direction work (the decision of alt-pop darlings The Popinjays to become roots folkers with their third album confounds me to this very day, but that’s a story for another time)...but when they work, like with Neil Halstead, it’s magic.

Here’s a video.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

This Is Your Song For....March 14th, 2013: Welcome To England by Tori Amos

Somehow I don't think she's going to let you in on
the joke....

Ahhh, yes...it’s time to finally address an artist I’ve referenced many times in the course of this blog (like here and here), an artist I’ve had a rather odd relationship with.

There was a time--namely, in the early years of her solo career--where I had an intense crush on Ms. Amos.  In a way, I guess it’s understandable, as Amos was something of a stand-in for every alterna-geek chick of that period.  And those early albums--Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink, Songs From The Choirgirl Hotel, etc--were very nuanced and had a lot of that sweet-melody-with-dark-center stuff that I loved, plus many of the songs had a storytelling element that appealed to me.

(Okay, it also didn’t hurt that she was a redhead with off-kilter looks who played a piano like she was fucking it, either.  Or that she had this kinda purry/growly thing she liked to do with her voice.  Or...

Okay, maybe there’s still a lil’ bit of that crush still left alive in me.)

As we moved into a later period of her career where her whimsy seemed to overtake her darkness, I stopped following her career as closely--after all, as I’ve stated elsewhere, if I want my artists to evolve I have to accept that they might evolve into something I won’t like.

Which brings us to Abnormally Attracted To Sin and this, the lead single off of that album.  Supposedly, this was going to be the first single Amos was going to release on her own before backing off and signing with Universal Republic, and it seems to mark a return to that period of hers I enjoyed so much.  Hell, it sounds sonically very, very much like an outtake from the albums cited above.  An ode to her adopted country--she moved to England with her then-boyfriend, now husband to gain a little privacy, believe it or not--it doesn’t quite reach the storytelling heights of the best songs off, let’s say, Choirgirl, but it has its moments.  I particularly like the way there seems to be some ambivalence in Amos’ lyrics about the city, admitting on some level that she still feels an outsider, that she’s stuck dancing a different dance from everyone around her, that she’s still stuck ‘bringing her own sun.’  This sense of otherness is emphasized by the way Amos frequently lapses into a broad version of her own southernness during the song.  And I admit that, after a couple of years of stuff about bees and cars and hardcore whimsy, it’s great to hear her wonder about how cold it’ll be when her heart bursts in the middle of the song.

It’s weird--for someone who was with Amos at the very start of her solo career, this song comes off as comfort food.  It’s a favorite artist doing the sort of music she did when I initially became enamored of her.  I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing--while her recent releases included Night of The Hunters, an album of fairy tale songs written in collaboration with her daughter that seems to be a return to her storytelling roots, it also included Gold Dust, her attempt to get in on that ‘artists re-record their greatest hits’ trend I find so loathsome (which I need to get a ‘Cover-versies’ out about soon)--but for what it is, I’m okay with it.  I just wonder if she’s decided to regress rather than continue with the evolution she seemed to be going through in the ‘00s...and I also don’t know which direction I’m rooting for.

Here's the video.  It's got lots of nice places in London in it...

Thursday, March 7, 2013

This Is Your Song For....March 7th, 2013: New Deal by Martini Ranch

Yep...the guy from NEAR DARK, the chick from the B-52s...
and that other guy.

Did you know Bill Paxton was in a band?  It’s true...

Of course, I didn’t know that Martini Ranch was a collaboration between everybody’s favorite cowardly Colonial Marine and Andrew Todd Rosenthal--although given how her backing vocals appeared everywhere on their one and only album, Holy Cow!, I think it’s safe to give the B-52's Cindy Wilson a seat at their table as an official member as well--for some time.  At first, I just knew they were responsible for this cool new wave-y song with Devo-ish pretensions called 'How Can The Laboring Man Find Time For Self Culture?’ that was play a lot on U-68, the Jersey-based local music video station that challenged MTV for a brief time.  Their video captivated me, which made their album a must pick-up for me....and then when I learned Paxton was one of the vocalist, I was sold.

‘New Deal’ is the first cut off the album, and it does what a first cut should do--propulse the listener into the band’s style, hook him and get him ready for what he’s about to listen to.  ‘New Deal’ is very much dance pop in a new wave style with serious overtones of the Church of the Sub-Genius philosophy that infused Devo’s canon.  And that Devo sort of double-speak isn’t here just because Bob Casale produced this album and played on it along with Mark Mothersbaugh and Alan Meyers; this is something that infused all of Martini Ranch’s songs, and helps set them apart from similar sounding acts that sprung up in the mid-to-late 80‘s.

There is a very brief spoken word segment that starts the song (unlike, let’s say, the one that precedes the album version of ‘Laboring Man...’, it’s far too brief to call it a skit), and I wonder if that’s the influence of hip-hop.  Many of the other songs on the albums contain what could pretty much be called ‘skits’ at the front of them.  The song itself could be construed as Martini Ranch’s mission statement, exhorting the listener to prepare for change, to save his soul by buying into the band’s ‘new deal,’ where everyone gets to judge themselves by what they feel.  The transformational aspect of this song is a particular obsession of the band--other songs on the album include a paean to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, a novelty number about a fat-burning formula, and, of all things, a cover of ‘Richard Corey.’

(And this isn’t counting the, to the best of my knowledge,the never-released song ‘Brain Dead’ that the band recorded for the end credits of Bill Paxton’s low-budget film of the same name, a film all about mental transformation.)

To the best of my knowledge, Martini Ranch just...stopped existing in 1991.  Robinson formed a new, jazz-influenced band called Swifty’s Bazaar and is recording a second album.  As for Mr. Paxton, he continues to be a great lil’ actor, expanding into directing with Frailty.

Here is the song....

...and because I like you, and them, so much, here's the video for 'Reach,' which features the hottest director eeeeevah, Kathryn Bigelow getting her Clint Eastwood on....


Sunday, February 24, 2013

This Is Your Song For...February 24th, 2013: Olivia by The Mainliners

They're looking Mick Jagger, but feeling Ray Davies...

This week...Swedish Garage Pop!

Yes, there is Garage Pop, and it is in Stockholm, Sweden.  The Mainliners wear their influences on their sleeves--there's some MC5 in here, some Kinks, some Rolling Stones--and it's not hard to envision them side by side with fellow countrymen The Hives as a double bill.  Of course, The Hives, as fun as they are, never had amazingly sweet piano breaks in their songs like this one had, nor did they layer in what seems to be a radio call in their song like they did with this one.

But here's the thing about this song, from their 2007 self-titled album...even though the garage rock sensibilities are very evident, they can't help but be popsters.  Even with the Mick Jaggerism that lead singer Robert Billing forces onto this song about love-through-hardship, even with the hardcore guitar riffs and the martial drum beat, The Mainliners can't help but generate a decidedly melodic piece of rock that, quite frankly, would not seem out of place in an arena rock band's set--and that's not meant as a slam in any way.  And they do it without losing the energy that makes The Hives so much fun; it's just that the energy becomes transformed, being just as propulsive but more nuanced.  The Mainliners' music is just as fun, but more contemplative and majestic.

I have to assume that The Mainliners have broken up, as their last album was in 2009.  If that's not the case, I hope someone corrects me, because I want to hear more.

Here's the song....

Saturday, February 9, 2013

This Is Your Song For...February 9th, 2013: Tomorrow On The Runway by Trespassers William

Look at her...no, don't look at her...

For today's song...shoegaze is alive and well, at least until recently.

And I'm glad for it.  I was one of those people who bought into the whole shoegaze/dream pop thing during that weird period in the 90's where anything and everything could claw its way onto the Billboard Top 100.  I came through my admiration of the form legitimately, after renting out a VHS (Remember VHS?  Big, boxy thing with a black tape in it that showed you pretty pictures on your television?) showcasing three bands from Creation Records.  Since Ride and My Bloody Valentine were two of those bands, I was willing to look into this further.  That led to a brief and intense music crush on Miki Berenyi of Lush (culminating in a rather strange interview I conducted that seemed more about how much Miki loved horror movies and wanted me to recommend some she might not have seen in the attic/dressing room of the old Continental night club here in New York, but that's another story for another time...I seem to have this propensity for getting into these situations with my musical crushes), which of course morphed into a love of Britpop when that band decided to follow that path....but I don't think I ever lost my love of this sort of stuff.  This is the music of whimsey and woolgathering, a music that allows you to drift without losing you; it's always holding your hand, keeping you safe while maintaining your general sense of sleepy well-being.  This is the music for the misunderstood artistic type in all of us.

I first came across Trespassers William when I heard a cover they did of the Suzanne Vega/Joe Jackson collaboration 'Left of Center'--although, truth be told, I probably heard them once or twice before, as they were a darling of the WB for a while.  And I can see why shows such as Buffy and One Tree Hill loved them.  Like previously discussed WB soundtrack princess Rachel Yamagata, Matt Brown and Anna-Lynne Williams have that certain ethereal quality, coupled with Williams' breathy vocals, that are perfect for scenes of this season's Pretty White Girl to angst on in her Pretty White Girl Bedroom.

This is actually pretty straightforward.  It's a song about our P.O.V. character missing her loved one, and regretting not saying things to him when they were face to face (her not wanting her voice 'to go out over the air').  I get the impression that the separation is both rather vast, and rather recent...that maybe he 'left the darkness' just the night before to leave her alone.   There's the implication that there's something holding her back from joining him wherever he's gone--the lyrics seem to indicate a fear of flying, but it can also be interpreted given some of the references elsewhere that it's a more personal fear--a fear of intimacy, of getting close to her object of desire.  What does make the song different is, of course, the melody, which is waltz-like, languid, sensual without being sexual (you know, like a WB soap opera), dancing around the listener without touching him, preferring instead to just smile wanly at him in chilly enticement.

Trespassers William disbanded last year, leaving us a two-disc B-Sides-and-Rarities collection called Cast as their parting gift for us.  You can find both this song and that cover of 'Left Of Center' there.  Both Williams and Brown continue to pursue music, Williams as part of the duo Ormonde and Brown as a performer and producer for several groups.

There's no video for either of the songs I cited above--but here's one for another cover from the band...a cover of everyone's favorite Movie Executive from my podcast Better In The Dark....


Friday, January 11, 2013

This Is Your Song For...January 11th, 2013: Swimming by Mystery of Two



Welcome back!  Today we've got another indie guy--or in this case, a group of guys from Cleveland.  And unlike Meredith Bragg, we can learn stuff about them.  We know they're a three piece outfit, that they record on Exit Stencil Records, and that they fancy themselves an 'experimental rock' outfit.

In the very brief bio that the Exit Stencil site has, the writer cites fellow Cleveland experimental rock outfit Pere Ubu--and Lord I can see why.  Lead vocalist Ryan Weitzel is really trying to channel Dave Thomas at times, and it's that coupled with the melodies that at times sound like the old 'po' rock' bands like Drunken Boat that managed to get signed in the weird Post Nirvana Signing Frenzy of the 90's, other times like the highly underrated Texas band Emmet Swimming and other times like the Boston-area indie supergroup Big Dipper.  It's not an unpleasant sound, to be sure--kinda meandering, but with a definite upswing to it when the band isn't more obsessed with getting all sludge-jangle on us.  My only real problem I have with the outfit as it stands so far is that this song sounds a little too similar to the other songs of theirs I've heard.  I'm almost intrigued to hear what Weitzel's rubbed-raw vocals would sound like on a number with a different texture and tempo.  Hell, I'd love to see what a Mystery of Two slow-jam would be like; it may be a disaster, but it'd be a gloriously interesting one.

Mystery of Two have already racked up a pretty impressive back catalogue at Exit Stencil Records, so you might want to sample some of their wares.

For the second week in a row, I can't find a video for the song discussed, so here's another song that'll give you an idea of whether you'll like them or not.




Sunday, January 6, 2013

This Is Your Song For....January 6th, 2013: Second Golden Age by Meredith Bragg

Contrary to what this picture implies, he seems to like birds.


Hello and welcome to the New Look Segment of Singalong Scriptures for 2013!

And today we have an indie fella out of Washington, D.C.  This is another one of these people I have tried very, very hard to find out stuff about only to be met with a number of broken link, out-of-date tumblrs and the likesuch.  I can tell that this was from an album called Nest, which also features songs about architecture* and birds, and that Mr. Bragg is frequently backed-up by a band called The Terminals.

As for the song itself?  It's got some echoes of dreampop, especially in the echoey vocals Mr. Bragg affects.  It also seems like Mr. Bragg liked Elliot Smith a lot, judging from his vocal phrasing.  The song seems to be one of a number his record label, Kora, claims were inspired by the birth of his daughter.  After all, the 'second golden age' Mr. Bragg is referring to is the trannsformation birth has.  He makes an argument for bringing a new life into the world renewing a sense of wonder in adults who lost said sense in childhood.  He speaks of how we live in 'shadows' as adults, and that new life brings them back to life.

It's good for what it is.  I'll be honest when I say it might not necessarily be for me, but it is well put together and does what it claims to do clearly and freely.

I have to assume Mr. Bragg and his band continues to play, and that he's working on a new record.

Here is a video.  I couldn't find one for this song, so here's the one about birds.



*-and when I read that statement about architecture, I kept thinking how I almost called this blog Dancing About Architecture.