One Stupid Mop

We like music. You should too.

Justice - Beginning of the end

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Well it's not much, but it's something new, New Justice that is, fresh from the Ed Banger outbox and to be taken from an album do out later this year also to be titled ✞ (at least according to the ID3 tag). It's a very simple track, perhaps something that will serve as an intro (Hopefully!) Just as it begins to get interesting it cuts short, probably intended. Fingers are "crossed" that our other favorite Parisian dance duo will pull out another winner and not a sophomore dud.

 

Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner

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Let me quickly sate the purists and say that I know this isn't the original version. It's the remix by DNA. I just like this one better, and that for good reason.

This is one of the simplest songs in the history of recorded music. Someone sits in a diner, reading a newspaper, and looks at some people on a rainy day in New York City. If anyone told you that this was the subject of the song before you ever listened to it, it would stink of the banal minutia that new parents force upon people who clearly don't give a shit about their baby.

Yet the reality is an elegant minimalism. Characters about whom you've heard less than two sentences take on breathing life. As personalized as the picture in your head can get, its known that almost all are about the same. Beyond the picture, there is only enough information given to move from one thing to another without being incomplete. The chorus is a reflective break, rather than a point of synergy - the song is left open-ended, giving any credit of profundity to the listener.

Most of the reason I prefer the remix is that it feels like the reality being described. A rainy day in the city is a steady pulse under a smooth sheen voiced with internal dialogue on the people passing by. North Bronx to the Village, it fits.

It's hard enough to put music to song such that it captures a particular time and place, but to capture a place that is an amalgamation of several thousand spread around an enormous area and a time that comes about 50-100 times every year borders on monumental. It's practically blind luck.

The only thing it's missing: a background track of someone yelling at guys with golf umbrellas walking two wide on a scaffold sidewalk. It happens every time.

The Hot Rats - (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)

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I'm not sure the world needs another covers band. But another superstar covers band? Now that's a different story. Especially when they've gone so far as to steal even their name from another band.

I may be going a bit far with using that "s" word up there, but there was a time that Supergrass was one of the best around. I guess it says something that two-thirds of the band makes up The Hot Rats, whose easy-to-listen-to debut, Turn Ons, comes out tomorrow.

Gaz Coombes and Danny Goffey have some pitched up takes on "Damaged Goods" by Gang of Four, "Pump It Up" by Elvis Costello and an absolutely incendiary cover of David Bowie's classic "Queen Bitch." If that didn't give away my taste, I don't know what would.

But with the Beastie Boys classic, the song that introduced them to the world - and for much of the world, unfortunately, completely represents them - the Hot Rats go for broke by turning it into a song from The Who. The excessive drum fills and soft harmony on the verses giving way to bashing out the name of the song at the chorus, that's what made The Who into The Who. This could be on any of their records released pre-Who's Next.

This is a solidly rollicking set though and shows off why Supergrass was/is such a great band. Hopefully, the full threesome will come back with the strength they once had. In the meantime, at least they're jamming on some good shit and doing it well.

Wild Beasts - The Fun Powder Plot

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Wild Beasts remind of the 80's in the best way possible.  Eccentric English guys who can play their instruments extremely well and clean. They use words not commonly found in modern pop music, such as "bereft", "bovver" and "donkey-jaw diction". Their songs are full of drama made of glassy guitars and syncopated rhythms and have a feel that is both "modern and of the renaissance" to quote their myspace page. Boasting Falsetto, Tenor and Baritone vocalists, I had to ask myself, "Is that Antony of Antony and the Johnsons sining with a more restrained Mew..." No it isn't but it sure sounds like it. 

From all of the songs on the 2nd record, Two Dancers, I choose "The Fun Powder Plot" simply because it's the 1st song on the album and it gently lulls you into their overall dramatic and dynamic sound. Plus it has may favorite lyric of the whole record "This is a booty call; my boot, my boot, my boot, my boot up your arse hole."

Love it.

Enjoy!

The Exploited - Beat the Bastards

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File under "Some People Are Awesome and Get Even Better With Time."

I'm not trying to get all whambulance with this miniseries, saying that everything sucks now and things were better back in my day. In fact, the sheer volume of crap music that came out 'in my day' makes modern Mtv look like a cosmopolitan showcase of time-tested talent.

What I'm saying, in general, is that almost every band you like or ever will like will eventually turn into a steaming pile of cow flop, so far removed from its origins that you will swear thrice before the cock crows that you never knew the pathetic little buggers. What is important is to do exactly that: forget it and keep listening to the good stuff - they can't screw it up retroactively.

Or maybe you'll get lucky; sour milk transmogrifies into fine wine every so often.

The Exploited were already pretty bad ass when they were 20-somethings in the 70s rocking the UK punk scene. But Wattie Buchan - the only one who's been in the band all the while - was 40 when the album containing this titular track came out. 40. And he's likely to have a new record this very year - at the ripe age of 53. Iggy Pop is a pansy by comparison if you're doing thrash at that age.

Metallica - Battery

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File under "Things That Were Once Awesome But Eventually Turned to Shit."

Really, do I have to make a comment on this one?

They're the circling-the-toilet standards.

And anyone who's still trying that "Well, James got voice lessons and sounds so much better now" line: Yes he did and yes he does. But unless he's using that voice on a song he wrote before taking those lessons, it still makes me want to use a blowtorch as a Q-tip.

White Zombie - Feed the Gods

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File under "Things That Were Once Awesome But Eventually Turned to Shit."

Rob Zombie fans are already getting in a huff. I can feel it. But there's no denying that, at one point, White Zombie helped influence a wide branching and experimental culture in metal that reverberates down through history to this day - nor is there any denying that "Sick Bubblegum" is crap.

One thing that always did it for me with this band were the lyrics. I don't care what insanely dangerous mix of hallucinogenic drugs that you're doing, they don't make a damn bit of sense. A good set of meaningful lyrics is all well and good, but it's really how you deliver them that counts (think of "Tears in Heaven" being done by Flava Flav). Their lyrics were a bunch of jibberish that sometimes rhymed, and it still sounded great and fit perfectly.

At some point, a couple extra wires got soldered into Rob's skull, and he lost track of his innovation. The rehashed electronica-metal hybrid animal lovechild that's become just doesn't measure up.

Rancid - Bloodclot

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File under "Things That Were Once Awesome But Eventually Turned to Shit."
 
Were I a far wealthier man, I'd pay every single person on the planet to stop talking about that show 24. The first few runs were engaging and entertaining, giving a realistic cliffhanger aspect even without tacking them on to each episode. Currently, they could save money and time showing people a 1-hour program that's nothing but a photoshopped still image of Jack Bauer standing on a hovercraft just above a family of sharks, perpetually in the course of going too far.
 
It was this that reminded me of the travesty that is the modern Rancid album. The last one (Let The Dominoes Fall) was so boringly unspectacular that I hardly remember that it exists. For a thousand other bands, that might have been a good debut. But not for a group that lived up to the "bad motherfucker" claim made in this song.
 
That "bad motherfucker" label just has a way of hunting people down and proving them wrong. A high bar is harder and harder to reach over time. Where one day you can get away with a chorus of nothing but Na's because you backed it up with some visceral palm-mutes and a killer bass line, a few days down the road you've got to convince people to even remember your albums - let alone listen to them.
 
Not everyone can be Lemmy or The Nuge.

...got a couple more of these coming your way today, so stay tuned.

Orbital - Halcyon (live)

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Life is about the build-up, right? Some cliched crap about slowly getting there I think. Which is fine and mostly true. When it comes to Orbital, a lot of the best stuff they did was build up.

For my money, the best 18-minute song in history - not 18-minute jam, or alternate take, but actual song - is The Decline, by NOFX. That thing is filled with peaks and valleys and all sorts ska and politics. When it comes to long form, in your headphones, just let it roll, though, there's nothing like a solid Orbital album.

I mention the NOFX track because the only song longer than that which I can listen to all the way through every single time I listen to it is the full 28-minute-long version of "The Box," Orbital's 1996 high water mark.

Cut into four parts, the track is really a lot more than build-up. There is melody, emotion, rhythm and, finally, vocals. In all truth, it's probably the pinnacle of electronic music. Orbital built their career on big, rolling beats and instrumentation about halfway between Victorian formality and clanging pots and pans. All of it, and I mean every single bit of it, lines up for the half-hour tantric orgasm that is "The Box."

Some versions of In Sides, which includes the first two sections of "The Box," included a bonus disc. That disc had two versions of the excellent guitar-driven track "Satan," two versions of their theme track to "The Saint," and a live version of "Halcyon."

"Halcyon" took on several forms over the course of Orbital's career: a rare original version; an album version on the self-titled "Brown" album; edited and remixed all over the place; and live.

The payoff to a haunting, beautiful, swirling thing like "Halcyon" comes on the live version. The whole thing is magic every time I listen to it.

Surfer Blood - Twin Peaks

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There's a chance that two of the top ten albums in 2010 will be released next Tuesday. One of them, the latest album from Spoon, is expected - nay, commanded - to make those year-end lists. The other is probably way off most people's radar.

I've neglected to get this posted for about 10 days since I wrote it, so "way off most people's radar" is now limited to those who don't read any music blogs, Pitchfork, Stereogum or the South Florida alterna-weekly paper City Link. Thankfully, I know that group includes most people.

Surfer Blood is to puke out their debut album Astrocoast on Tuesday. Recorded in their dorm room at the University of Florida, the 10 songs on the album are feedback-laden, melodic, classic feeling songs the bring to mind the all manner of indie sounds from the mid-90s til now.

There is a palpable cross-section of Weezer-Pavement-Sloan to just about every track while managing to sound like the boys are aping none of them. Yes, they sing about girls, but they also sing about television, as in "Twin Peaks," included here. 

The first words on the album's first track beg somebody to "forget the second coming/I need you here right now." This album sounds like the second coming of the alternative nation, partially because so many of those mid-90s buzz bands are touched, even momentarily, on Astrocoast. For me, that's a good thing, because Surfer Blood doesn't really sound like any of them. Even the bands I mention above are only echoed because nothing specific is lifted from any of them.

It's not the second coming, but hot damn what a debut album Surfer Blood has served up.

Here's another track to check out... (You'll have to find the album yourself before next week.)

</object><div style="font-size: 9px; margin-top: 2px;">Swim (Single) - Surfer Blood</div>

Fyi, the Spoon album is guaranteed to be on those lists. Listen to the stream for yourself.