One Stupid Mop

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Dropkick Murphys - Going Out In Style

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Dropkick Murphys typically sound like a punk rock pirate circus and their new album, Going Out In Style, is no different. I don't know how they do it, aside from having 40 people in the band, but it sounds like they're trying to play louder than the craziest party in history on every song. Suffice it to say, listening to this album at 7:00 am will get you out of bed - which is what I did this morning. Then I listened to it on the way to work, while working at my desk and on the way home. 

If you don't know who these Irish guys from Boston are, check out their bio, but there's no excuse. DM are punk mainstays who have earned their universal love by bringing the aforementioned circus on the road. They're happy (for the most part) and just want to kick the crowd's asses.

This new album has received a little extra press because Bruuuuuuuuce Springsteen shows up for a verse on "Peg 'O My Heart," and that's one of the best songs on an album that has no mediocre songs. That's right, forget bad, there's not even a mediocre one.

I've gone with the title track, "Going Out In Style," for a post the night before the album comes out because, firstly, it's a raging shit-kicker, and secondly because as random bad-asses are being namechecked, Fat Mike's name comes up, and then he squeaks out a line, and then he's gone. Really, the whole song is about a wake for a hard-living bad ass and throwing a party to celebrate him - even the part about Van Morrison.

Every week should start with an album, and a song, that is so clearly a middle finger to anybody who doesn't like you. 

Buy the new Dropkick Murphys album, Going Out In Style, on vinyl or CD from the band themselves. (You can also grab it on mp3 from Shockhound.)

TV On The Radio - Will Do

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Over the last month or so, I've found myself listening to Dave Sitek's debut album as Maximum Balloon because it's the closest to a new TV On The Radio album it seemed we'd have for a while. I've noticed a lot of things about the album in that time, aside from it being a very dance music kind of beast. Most of what I've noticed though leads me to think that he was just trying to fill time until his actual band got back together.

All of a sudden, here comes an announcement that a new TVOTR album, Nine Types of Light, will be upon us sometime this spring, and then yesterday, "Will Do" was posted by the band and released to radio. It's a pretty straightforward love song, but Kyp Malone's falsetto, as always, takes it to the next level. And Sitek's always overly deep production, which just reveals more and more the louder the track gets on headphones, is impeccable.

The thing that makes Sitek, and indeed TVOTR as a whole, stand at the front of the Brooklyn experimental pack is that they can bring together soulful vocals and all manner of sounds into a complete package. So where "Will Do" could conceivably be produced and sung by any number of duos, the layering and complication is what makes it special. Danger Mouse's specialty is that he strips things bare, and has a sound all his own. Sitek goes in the opposite direction, though with a sound that even more his own. Starting out with what could be a mid-90s Massive Attack-style beat, the song opens into the type of melodic groove fans have come to expect.

Here's the other thing: "Will Do" tells us exactly nothing about what this album is going to sound like. All we have is another slab of soulful music. Three days ago, I suggested that the new Radiohead album was made for alt-sex romance. Scratch that. TV On The Radio wants you to feel actual emotion. They want you to roll with it. My answer? Will do. 

Buy all of TV On The Radio's discography, or just the pieces you don't have, from Amazon.

Hit The Switch - The Everfading Afterglow

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Until I started reading some comments on stuff about these guys, I never drew the obvious line to The Offspring. Not just because their viciously speeding 2006 album Domestic Tranquility and Social Justice was on Nitro Records, which is owned by Dexter and Greg, but something about the band reminds me of the early Offspring stuff, you know, before they stopped giving a shit.

That said, you can hear some early NOFX and the faster Sum 41 stuff. Hell, bring up Strung Out, Diesel Boy, or whatever other mid-90s Fat Wreck stuff you want - this would fit in perfectly, but doesn't sound dated or ripped off.

Hit The Switch has all the ingredients to be a huge Warped Tour-pushed skate punk band. Yet even with my interest, and demos that I've had on my cell phone for two years from their second album, Observing Infinities snuck under my radar because the band basically self-released it. There is an explanation, but come on, I bet Fat Mike loves these guys. Sign to Fat Wreck - it's an album at a time and nobody ever gets fucked over. At least, if it happens, nobody talks about it.

Most of the first album was vague political messaging begging listeners to question, you know, everything, while pounding the shit out melodic-skate-punk-style. The second album is just as political, although I take this track as something personal, but that's me. There are solos on Observing Infinity, but the time shifts and stop-start on a dime skate-punk remains. 

These guys should be huge. Somebody send an mp3 to Kevin Lyman. Please.

Buy Domestic Tranquility and Social Justice from Shockhound or Observing Infinities from Interpunk.

The Ergs! - Hysterical Fiction

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I'll never understand why bands break up. If your band is getting huge like, say, The Ergs, why would you want to leave? Isn't that the idea - for lots of people to fucking worship your music?

The Ergs were a three-piece pop-punk band from New Jersey. I place their sound somewhere between Hagfish and Green Day but often faster, and the songs are almost always about girls and relationships. Is that an awful and boiled down description? You bet.

Drummer Mikey Erg's scraggly voice worked equally well on the fast punk tunes as it did on sad country songs like "Stinking of Whiskey Blues." That and the loud bass-playing of Joey Erg (which reminds me of Mike Dirnt every few songs), and well-written, melodic songs, are what made Dorkrockcorkrod and Upstairs/Downstairs thoroughly digestible over and over and over again.

"Hysterical Fiction," which thunders in halfway through the second half of Upstairs/Downstairs, brings in all these elements nicely. It wouldn't be out of place on the first Unwritten Law album either, but I like it better here because, strangely, it flows nicely into the aforementioned "country" song.

Apparently, Upstairs/Downstairs isn't available anywhere online (unless you want it on CD or vinyl), so just go grab Dorkrockcorkrod from Shockhound to start with.

Radiohead - Separator

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Radiohead has always clicked best for me on headphones, and usually not on the first listen. "Idioteque" blew me away, in the car, the first listen, on the way home from the record store. OK Computer and Hail To The Thief (let alone Pablo Honey and The Bends) never baffled me at any point. But overall, this is a band that demands repeated listens, through all manner of speaker: car, home stereo (and I mean stereo, not that tiny shelf crap from Wal-Mart) and headphones. The King of Limbs takes this requirement to new lengths.

The range of reactions to this surprise album, a surprise because before last Monday the only thing we knew was that Radiohead was working on something new, has run the gamut, though nobody has embraced it full on. After listening to it about a dozen times in the last three days, I think I know why: They're too busy trying to have the first review, and get page views while the hype is high, to really let this thing sink in.

The King of Limbs is an album of textures, many of them dark, and even more of them subtle. But by the third time I let the understated bottom end of the album, especially "Bloom," "Morning Mr. Magpie" and "Little By Little," because when you've got it on repeat, those tracks, which are the closest to bangers this effort comes to, the moody experimentation at work lays itself bare. These guys are pushing out, but not in the what-else-is-there-to-do that resulted in Kid A and Amnesiac. This time, it's different.

As the title implies, Radiohead is a band lost in the forest. There have to be more than eight tracks that came from the Limbs sessions. With In Rainbows, the band held back on the loud guitars. Where that album was about emotion, this is all about nuance, so there's not telling what else could come up. Thom and company want us to get lost with them - which is why I posted "Separator," the last track on the album.

Get yourself a drink and plug in some headphones. Even if The King of Limbs has already been taken off your respective music player and buried deep on your hard drive, put those cans on your ears and let "Separator" seep into your head. This is 3 a.m. come down music. It might be alt-romantic sex music. Whatever. By the fourth or fifth listen, you'll be revisiting the rest of the album to see what you've missed. "Separator" makes sense the same way as when you realize that "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" is the best track on The Bends. It's the revelation that makes every song before it that much better.

The King of Limbs is already the most underrated album of the year because in the fast, faster, fasterest times we live in, nobody is giving it a chance. Radiohead is begging you to slow down and lose yourself in an album like the Internet never happened and the long-playing album never approached its death throes. Forget the reviews and let yourself wander. It's worth it.

Buy The King of Limbs directly from Radiohead. (Worth every single penny. But you knew I'd say that.)

Marqui Adora - Everything That Makes No Sense

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So this will be a weird post...

I'm typically pretty gun-shy about posting about music I'm directly involved in, but I'm in a good mood so fuck it! ;)

I just finished my initial listen of Radiohead's "The King of Limbs" and it's lead me back to one of my bands songs from 2006. Well the song is a few years older than that actually, it started out with just John and I messing around with a Rhodes piano and playing a bunch of different live drum loops into Pro Tools some time in 2002 after the implosion of our Drum & Bass group, New Republic. Nonetheless, the song was finished with Marqui Adora and made the cut for our White Buildings EP in 2006 (and re-released in 2007).

ANYWAYS... It's my favorite song from Marqui Adora's catalog. We never played it live, we were too lazy for that, but it stands out, to me anyway, as one of the songs where we truly achieved something different. Yeah, John and I we're linstening to a lot of U.N.K.L.E.'s "Psyence Fiction" at the time but when it reached the finish line with Danny's wall of Vocals and John's swerving Bass lines and Anthemic Guitars it felt like the song reached a whole new place. No one else might see it that way, but to me "Everything That Makes No Sense" raised the bar a little higher for what we were capable of and how much harder we would have to work to top it (take note of the lack of our output over the past few years).

So now you're saying "That's nice Joe, but what's that got to do with Radiohead?" Yes exactly. The drums. Being a drummer it's what I pick up on first when listening to music. On "The King of Limbs" the drums for nearly every song are comprised of live loops of Phil Selway, and Thom Yorke I suppose, playing rhythms on top of them selves. I can relate because I've done it, although with far less reverb.
It's funny how new sounds can send you in all sorts of directions isn't it?

Get more Marqui Adore here for free and enjoy your International Radiohead Listening Weekend!

-Joe

Portishead - Machine Gun

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Between the strange repeated popping up of "Maggie's Farm" on my cell phone every time I shuffled the playlist - as in, it was among the first five songs every time I shuffled the 150-song list of music - and more than one realization that there was no way I could actually absorb the Radiohead album while driving with the windows open in my car. (I have no a/c and live in South Florida. You do the math.)

Each shuffle brings something half-unexpected, though not totally unexpected because, come on, it's only 150 songs. On the drive home, it was Portishead's "Machine Gun," one of the startlingly stand-out tracks on the 2008 album Third.

Rather than the slowed-down hip beats that main man Geoff Barrow usually brings to the table, "Machine Gun" is built on a rotating drill of drum sounds that just pounds it's way into your head for five minutes with little reprieve.

Aside from the track being another thing of dark beauty in what is a flawless career, why write about it now? As I pulled into my garage, the last minute and a half of the song, which I listened to three times to see if I was just delirious and crazy from a long week, spoke to me. Actually, it just made me wonder, why does Barrow make the beat sound like I've been breathing whippets for 20 minutes and then start playing the a soundtrack straight out of Terminator or some similar film? 

Suffice it to say, the rest of Third is now back in rotation. I think it's time to dedicate some real headphone time to this album the way I studied Dummy and Portishead - on repeat.

(Either that or I'll settle in with The King of Limbs, which is distracting me from just about everything right now.)

Buy Portishead's Third from Shockhound.

Moby - Sevastopol

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Pretty much everything Moby has done since the brilliant and perfect Play has been disappointing and forgettable. Maybe it's because of just how jaw-dropping that album could be, but it's not like the guy was worthless beforehand.

Let's skip the extended nostalgia about one of techno music's greatest producers and leave it at this: Moby has a long track record of great sampling and mind blowing tracks. Play, which was more hip-hop and rock than techno, clearly threw him off as far as quality is concerned.

Which leads us to yesterday, when the esteemed bald one posted a link to download three new tracks from his forthcoming album, Destroyed, which is due out in May. The three-track Be The One EP includes that song, as well as two purely beautiful techno tracks. Maybe I like "Sevastopol" and "Victoria Lucas" better because "Be The One" is a looped vocal sample over a rocking guitar-based loop. It's not bad, but it's not great either. I'm going with acceptable. Very acceptable.

"Sevastopol" and "Victoria Lucas," on the other hand, sound like the golden era of blissful techno by Moby. While "Victoria Lucas" is a nice headphone-style come-down track, "Sevastopol" starts off like Richie Hawtin and turns out to be a rave-face flashback.

Here's to Destroyed rebuilding Moby's reputation among the hipster elite. And anybody else too.

Download the Be The One EP for free at Moby's website.
Run through Moby's discography on Shockhound, especially Play and Everything Is Wrong.

Bright Eyes - Jejune Stars

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The start of every new Bright Eyes album, for me, is strongly marked with an expectation of probably boring, overly-emotional and possibly awful. That's not based on any history, because usually the albums turn out decent, but inexplicably, that's what I'm expecting.

The People's Key, though filled with self-doubt and too much examination, has kept my attention for a week now. It's grown on me with more listens. Since it keeps getting better, I thought about waiting another week to see what I think, but it came out today, so why wait?

What stuck out to me, aside from a mix of Spoon-like rock and modern-day Unkle-sounding trip hop tracks, was Bright Eyes get the closest to Desaparacidos since that band's only album, Read Music/Speak Spanish, on "Jejune Stars." I will endlessly defend my opinion that Oberst wrote the best songs of his career with Desaparacidos and the band could be not only huge, but hugely influential, if he hadn't turned back to Bright Eyes. Not that I don't also understand why he did it. (Steady money, and I get the feeling this comes pretty easily to him.)

"Jejune Stars" doesn't actually sound like Desaparacidos, but I still think it's a standout on the album. It's a shame Oberst doesn't write more songs for Bright Eyes that are like it. Like every one before it, I'm going to get bored of The People's Key. Probably sooner than later. And then I'll just go back to listening to Read Music/Speak Spanish. Right now, though, this album is really interesting. 

Buy the new Bright Eyes album, The People's Key at Shockhound.
Buy Desaparacidos only album, Read Music/Speak Spanish at Shockhound.

The Arcade Fire - Wake Up

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I spent all day listening to Radiohead, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, after finding out The King of Limbs will be out this Saturday and whipping out my credit card in the same skipping breath as I read the sentence. Radiohead loves us. They really love us. But we've got six days for that. First, the really big news that indie, it seems, has broken through. To the Grammys.

No, Grammy notice does not mean that The Arcade Fire has finally arrived. That happened in 2004 when Funeral, which "Wake Up" comes from, was pretty quickly embraced not just by the hipster elite, but by much of the music loving world from critics to musicians to fans beyond said elite music-obsessed few.

With The Suburbs, the band hit stride and, more importantly, hit Number One on the Billboard Top 200. That may not seem like a big deal when pop music has made the list look pretty saggy, but Number One is Number One. And The Suburbs is a seriously reflective, near-perfect effort that's been hated only by reflexive haters. Which is fine.

I wouldn't know, because big tours don't come to Florida, but Arcade Fire concerts look like a religious revival, or at least a religious experience, on television, and it would be hard to believe that many, many people didn't have their heads blown last night as the 7-member band blasted out "Month of May,"  and "Ready To Start."

This is the kind of band the music industry isn't willing to take a chance on any more. As we learn more and more every day, most of the music industry just doesn't matter any more. That's fine though, because The Arcade Fire is going to be the biggest band in the world. Just like the rest of indie rock. You'll see.

Buy The Suburbs, and the rest of Arcade Fire's discography, including Funeral and Neon Bible, at Amazon.