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.

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....

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.