One Stupid Mop

We like music. You should too.

Saul Williams - Act III, Scene 2 (Shakespeare)

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Like Why?, Saul Williams isn't coming to South Florida either. He's coming to Orlando on a Thursday. Goddamn I say goddamn.

On a side note, this song introduced me to Thavius Beck. He's the badass who laid down this sick beat. Check him out if you get a chance. He throws up new shit on his MySpace page all the time and his records are pretty swell too. Oh yeah, and that guy doing the backup vocals used to be in a well-known band. I think they called themselves Audioslave.

Themselves and WHY? - Canada

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I’m really pissed off that Why? isn’t trekking down to South Florida during its current tour. Gainesville, Orlando and Tallahassee get love, but Fort Laudy Daudy gets bumfucked by a broomstick. You’d think the band would at least do us South Floridians a favor and schedule one of those shows on the weekend so our poor souls would have the option of attending after a hefty drive. Whatev, I’ll get over it. Shit, I download all their albums for free anyway, so I can deal.

Needless to say, Why?’s latest album was a satisfying departure, as was its recent collaboration with Themselves entitled “Canada,” which has been heavily rotated through my eardrums over the last few weeks. However, I will admit for some odd reason I feel kinda like a little bitch for enjoying this song so much. I really don’t know why it is I feel that way, but I do. The production value is precise and mesmerizing, possessing a dreamy energy that is floaty and pulsating. At the same time it’s wussy and whiny. I don’t care, I dig it. I hope you do as well all you pansy asses.

Kid Koala - Scratch Happy Land (Side A)

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Tuesday night marked the annual airing of "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown." While it may not have been the first time it was used, I am confident that Kid Koala's sampling of the holiday special on his world-shaking debut Scratchcratchratchatch is the best.

Released in 1996 as a very limited edition "promo" tape because of the impossibility of clearing any of the samples, Scratchcratchratchatch established Kid Koala as at the forefront of the turntablism movement in the mid-90s. The idea was to use the turntable as a musical instrument, scratching just about sound to create a beat, bassline or melody. 

Koala's Scratchcratchratchatch was mixed down to a shorter 10" release, Scratch Happy Land, side A of which you find here. Basically, it's the first four tracks of the album as one seven-minute mix. 

About four and a half minutes in, we get to the the last track of Side A of Scratchcratchratchatch, "Tricks 'n' Treats." The Peanuts kids are reviewing their Halloween hauls, and we all know what Charlie Brown gets. Kid Koala takes his misery to brilliantly new levels in the midst of blowing our vinyl-loving minds.

"I-I-I-I ga-got ta Ra-ra-rock." I piss my pants all over just thinking about it.

Alice Cooper - Frankenstein

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It dawned on me last night that I haven't done a single Halloween-related post anywhere. I woke up this morning with this song running through my head. 

"Frankenstein," from the first "Wayne's World" movie, is probably long forgotten. Really, it's significance in the film is just so that Wayne and Garth can a - worship a rock star; and more importantly, b - get information about how to fix Cassandra's career. Point being, it's a good song that plays a minor role in the story line.

Cooper gets all sorts of Halloween credit. This song, "Frankenstein," as performed in "Wayne's World," is perfect. Everybody knows "School's Out" and "Eighteen," but those have nothing to do with death, horror or creep. Cheeky necrophelia, though? Now we're talking.

So, in the movie, Cooper busts out of a skeleton in a concert scene and sings alternately about eating your flesh and molesting your bones. Sure, it sounds like the 80s and Alice Cooper has never denied that his career is all shock schtick. (Which is cool with me, by the way.) But Halloween is half cheese anyway, so enjoy it.

Them Crooked Vultures - New Fang

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What a way to open the week - and I'd like to thank Europe for being literally hours ahead of us. Them Crooked Vultures, the most super of supergroups to emerge since, what, The Traveling Wilbury's (Monsters of Folk may share a sound, but TCV share star power), let out their first single today, "New Fang."

Josh Homme, John Paul Jones and Dave Grohl have been slaying audiences around the world since late summer, raising expectations for their self-titled debut album with each passing second. Last week brought two announcements: the single is out today and the album is out in early November.

The actual sound of the band should not be all that foreign what with the live clips and teasers that have trickled out since the Vultures acknowledged their own existence in the first place. Homme brings the regular vocal- and solo-shredding swagger that fans of Queens of the Stone Age have come to expect. And it's no shock that JPJ plays his bass like a guitar and Grohl is, well, an animal.

Three quotes from the October 29 issue of Rolling Stone:


"It's cool to see people's reactions, because their expectations are so high, but they don't know what the fuck to expect," says Grohl. "I've never been in a band like that."

"I've never even heard of a band like that," says Homme."

"We're beginning to phrase alike now," Jones says. "We're doing fills and stuff in the same places. That's what it was like with Bonzo [yes, he referred to John Bonham when talking about Grohl]. We're coming up with the same chemistry within a rhythm section that makes a band great."

Those quotes are from Austin City Limits a few weeks ago, just before the band hit the stage. All three quotes are true. JPJ knows what he's got. And now those of us who haven't seen the band live know too.

The barreling, aggressive, bad ass "New Fang" lives up to a massive expectation built up over months of secrecy. This song now raises the stakes even higher for the rest of the album. 

Tom Waits - Step Right Up

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There really are few musicians that capture sentiments on track that translate across time. Whenever they do, we music fans immediately recognize the beauty of such a moment. To truly capture a concept of humanity that doesn't exist only in the time and space in which it was coined is one of those things that music is all about.

This being a recession - no, I'm not going to fuck around: it's a depression now - the shills are coming out of the woodwork like rats in a fire."Step Right Up" is the reaction of these times.

Besides the poignancy, there is a simple beauty in all Tom Waits songs that can't be denied. Few artists have ever been, let alone presented themselves as so honest as he always has.Whoever you might be, you can name at least a dozen people in politics and news and commentary and your personal life and your job and even the asshole at the car shop that you know goddamn well are lying straight to your face.

Tom Waits won't do that to you. He's too steeped in reality that he never needs winding.

Atari Teenage Riot - Paranoid (7" Remix)

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This week RCRD LBL posted a new track from Alec Empire called "1000 Eyes," and compared it to Lou Reed, among other things. I can sort of see it, what with the pseudo-poetic delivery. I'm a lot more afraid of Empire than Reed - for different reasons than I used to be though.

This, remember, is the guy sliced his arms open on stage and left a trail of blood as he walked passed roadies and other people offstage who claimed they could hear the meat of his arm sloshing. Left a trail of blood, as his arm meat sloshed loud enough for people to hear. That, friends, is hardcore.

While I don't think he's softened, the abrasive noise that so marked most of Empire's career from his own solo work, to Atari Teenage Riot, to just about everything he signed to Digital Hardcore Recordings left far deeper cleat holes in your face.

Not that he can't still get his noise on, but the new stuff is a little more nuanced. He's more menacing this way. I remember when he got together with friends and tried to make us go deaf though. Yeah, those were the days. 

(More on Alec Empire)

Towers Of Hanoi - I Just Ate My Only Friend

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It's not that women are underrepresented in the area of music. All I have to say is "Ella" or "Aretha," and people dwelling below Sisyphusian boulders can quote their favorite tune.

But for those of us with a leaning towards the more visceral form of the art, there is a serious lacking. Rachel Whitton is one of the saviors. A sprinkling of soul in a bowl full of shit-kicking cream.

That's without even mentioning everything going on behind her. The man parts make a meal out of a crumb of simple riffs and drum lines. I've heard this kind of line a thousand times before, but the percentage of bands that put it together into something that doesn't make me want to beat them to death on general principle is scant.

I only wish I could catch them at The Fest 8 at the end of the month. Anyone near Gainesville, Florida is hereby required to attend.

Mojo Nixon - Pirate Radio

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I'm coming in fashionably late to the party here, so let's just pretend this one is back on the first page.

I take this little diddy as a mission statement for our work here - it's really a radio station for those who think about listening to an actual radio and are met with an immediate puke-burp. Maybe that's just me, but I'm the designated asshole here.

Mojo Nixon has always been a favorite, and it's not because of any penchant for comical music. He's the non-invasive Dead Kennedys, the hillbilly Bad Religion, the unadorable TMBG. Musical commentary that is equal parts entertainment and critical thought.

"Pirate Radio" isn't just a condemnation of the FCC and an indictment of barriers to freedom as a whole - it's a song perfectly crafted for the message it conveys. Nothing is more politically functional than a singalong, and Mojo makes one that is both catchy and based in a sound that gets your blood moving. If you can't imagine yourself standing arm-over-shoulder with a bar gang in the local watering hole, giving the middle finger to the powers that be, then you're simply not listening.

Purpose, method, function.

And, if you haven't heard, you can download Mojo's entire catalog for free for a limited time, right here: http://bit.ly/2dLyNA

Julian Casablancas - River of Brakelights

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There are those who thought the Strokes first album was a fluke, second album was an attempt at repeating it and third album was an abortion nailed to the wall as art. I disagree on all three. 

Is This It was the sound of a band using everything they loved about music to make it their own. Maybe it's because I so fully fell in love with it, but that album is still great in every way. Prior to September 11, there was a detachment that those of us who came of age in the late 90s had used as a way of life. Cynicism, boredom and waiting. Example: the ridiculously unexplained chaos of Woodstock '99, which fittingly closed a decade that, while great for America in charging forward, went quickly from sincere-in-everything to rape-everything-for-cash somewhere around, oh, I don't know, 1997. Or maybe it's just always been that way and I was just too young to notice until now.

Room On Fire took a few steps forward, but pretty clearly existed in a similar space because while we said that everything changed after September 11, we all kept doing the same bull shit once the shock faded. "The room is on fire, and she's fixing her hair," Casablancas sang on "Reptilia." Everybody hated the album because it was a reflection of themselves, and nobody really cared or did anything about it. 

By the time First Impressions of Earth hit, most were over The Strokes because critics, many of whom nailed the band for not remaking themselves the way The White Stripes did with every album (ahem, they didn't, and stayed brilliant for it), ignored the record. That third album was the sound of a band stretching a bit, and sounding ready for a break, because despite the howls for them to do something new, nobody really wanted them to. First Impressions of Earth was also criminally underrated - again, mostly because nobody cared by the time it was released.

The rest of the band has been releasing efforts vaguely similar to the Strokes and Casablancas has pretty much faded from sight. Though he has occasionally teased about a new Strokes album (supposedly in early progress with recording due to begin early in 2010), he's also said there was a solo effort on the way. I didn't believe him until about an hour ago.

At this point, I can't remember the first single from Casablancas' forthcoming solo album. I know I downloaded it. I know I listened to it several times and probably enjoyed it. But it is no longer in my iTunes and I'm not even in the mood to look for it online. I just stumbled upon the glitchy, soaring, loud-guitars-and-drum-n-bass leak of the second single "River of Brakelights." The familiar drawl is there, but he is "getting the hang of it." There is an urgency here. One that can be found buried in each of the Strokes first three albums but which plays front and center here and works really, really well.

Julian Julian Julian. I don't know if anybody will get it this time man, but I'm right there with you. You're pushing forward while many others stay glued to the ground. "Timing is everything," indeed.