One Stupid Mop

We like music. You should too.

Almost A Memory - Not The Same Old Summer

(download)

I don't know what it is but for much of the last decade Long Island has pumped out a stream of great punk bands from Brand New to Latterman to Bayside. Really, there's a killer scene out on the island, even if it gets slagged off by those hardcore kids who don't dig on melodies. I say those kids can suck it.

That said, I can't resist posting a track from my brother-in-law's band, Almost A Memory. When I was up there for a visit last month, I got to watch them practice in a cramped basement bedroom, which makes the china in my in-law's living room rattle. Let me get this important point out of the way: If they weren't actually good, I wouldn't be posting them. Ain't no nepotistic bull shit going on here.

My first thought, because of lead singer Vicki, is the Paramore factor. AAM have it, cause the songs are good, and the band is better. Joe and Chris on guitar, John holding it down on bass and Daniel all over the drums, this is a solid band, and much more so than Hailey and the bitter boys she made stars. It's the voice that sells AAM for me, and I don't think she's come close to her potential yet. Somewhere in there, this chick has the kind of voice that reminds me a little of bands like Tilt, that can knock people off their feet. Hailey has that voice, but - not that they sound alike - Tilt lead singer Cinder is a better example of someone who isn't holding back. Sometimes I think Vicki is. She's got more. But I didn't get to catch a show, so maybe it's just that she doesn't let it rage in the basement. 

Of the handful of songs I saw in practice, "Not The Same Old Summer" stuck with me, just as it had the first time I heard it playing off a small boombox hours earlier. First, because unlike everything else at the PA-less practice, I could hear Vicki singing over the band, and, mostly, because I think people who don't listen to all sorts of punk-influenced pop bands would dig this song a lot. I've said before though that I'm a sucker for this kind of female-fronted band, and the acoustic to pounding look-back-on-summer-love, well, I'm a sucker for that too.

The 15-year-old me identifies with lyrics of frustration like "Fate Knows Your Name" and especially "Lessons Learned." That middle-finger-in-the-air has endeared a lot of bands to me that I probably should have forgotten, Green Day included. (Not that Green Day should be forgotten, but see most of Dookie for what I'm talking about.) Joe and Chris are banging out the power chords that have driven this stuff for two decades - it took a good 10 seconds for me to realize that "Lessons Learned" wasn't "Welcome to Paradise," which happens once a year anyway - and that works well too.

What AAM needs is time. If they get some time, and keep doing what they're doing, there's a good chance somebody who isn't spending the weekend sleeping in their practice space is going to listen to them at least half as much as everybody in my house has over the last six weeks. That, obviously, is a good thing.

Buy the debut Almost A Memory EP Lessons Learned from iTunes.

Squarepusher - Come On My Selector

(download)

Yesterday, I heard CJ Bolland's classic-to-me "Sugar Is Sweeter" on the Joe Shockley Podcast after, as Joe put it, it regifted itself to him on one of those wonderful shuffled playlists. I don't know how many years it's been since I heard the track, but it's definitely more than one, and probably closer to two or three or four. So as I piled mp3 backups to rip and load onto my Amazon Cloud, the site of Squarepusher on a playlist caught my eye.

Like "Sugar Is Sweeter," "Come On My Selector" is one of those tracks that was first seen by my eyes on an overpriced import CD and later on a psychotic video on AMP on MTV. It's not just the freaky Japanese girl in the video killing people that does it for me, though that helps, it's the fastest beats I'm pretty sure I'd heard to that point, the squelching bass lines, the actual bass lines, and the way it just twists and gets crazier. From "let the bass kick" to the climax after "come to fucking daddy" and gradual drop off end of the track, with a steadily tranquil bassline as it's guide, it's a mind fuck.

Every track on Big Loada, the stateside full length this comes on, is like this and crazy. What's really amazing is that Squarepusher, or Tom Jenkinson as his mother calls him, is a hugely talented bassist who, when he got several albums of what came to be called drill 'n' bass (sometimes the beats sound like drills, let's be honest here), turned to revolutionary jazz. Eventually, he combined the two and started triggering all his d'n'b samples through a bass. Yeah, revolutionary. I know.

While Aphex Twin wants you to actually go insane, and Luke Vibert wants you to get stoned and follow a groove, I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that Squarepusher was just looking for listeners to dance as though they're having a seizure. Frankly, it's the best seizure EVER.

(If you're not convinced, here's "Problem Child" from the same album.)

Buy Big Loada from Shockhound.
Or, just check out the entire Squarepusher discography. They're all good.

Times New Viking - Don't Go To Liverpool

(download)

I've been crowing about how Times New Viking was writing great, hooky pop songs and then playing them sloppy and distorted, with an extra layer of distortion put on to make sure you really wanted to hear what they were doing and were willing to put the work out. With Dancer Equired, I got my wish that they'd clear some of that slush out, but now I don't know what to think of it.

After a few days of listening to Dancer Equired I couldn't remember what TNV had sounded like on their first four albums. When I went back, what I found sounded like a bad recording of a live show, which I know is what they had been going for the whole time, and now that I could hear their songs, suddenly this is an indie rock band, in the tradition of Guided By Voices or, what I really can't stop thinking, The Moldy Peaches.

I don't know how you go from Pussy Galore to The Moldy Peaches in one album. From straining to hear shit hot rock songs buried in noise and poor recording quality to just somewhat lo-fi recording and clear, endearing melodies (though none of the Peaches sometimes overplayed clever sarcasm). Tracks like "Don't Go To Liverpool," and there are several like this, remind me a bit of pop punkers Mixtapes, if the left out the skate punk parts. On a previous TNV album, there's be a huge, static-y riff on there, and part of me hopes they have one in concert.

If anything kills the momentum Times New Viking has gathered in the last two years, though, I don't think it'll be the shift in recording quality. Much as I've enjoyed the album, it sounds like a different band. Not bad, just different. For a lot of people other than myself, however, different equals bad. Give Dancer Equired a chance to warm up to you. The knowledge that there was a soul beneath all that feedback and static is reason enough.

Buy Dancer Equired from Amazon.

Sleepy Vikings - Calm

(download)

I could have waited for the PR company to send me Sleepy Vikings debut album, They Will Find You Here, but after it got me to stop streaming the new Beastie Boys album (which is fucking stellar) for half an hour cause I just let "Calm" repeat over and over, I decided not to even bother emailing first and just this post tonight.

My initial reaction to "Calm" was that the fast parts have a "Paint It Black" kind of feel and the melodies and chorus have a great easy indie feel like the best of stuff from Polyvinyl Records. The more I listened to it, thought, the more the track lines up with the Pavement and (latter-day) Sonic Youth comparisons that came on the emailed press release introducing me to the band. All the references to jangly guitars and southern shoegaze, a genre which may or may not actually exist, they match up too. 

While I may sit on my tired-parent ass at the end of the day, swallowing beer and staring at the Internet, I bet Sleepy Vikings rip through songs like "Calm" in concert. Though they'll have to hit Fort Lauderdale for me to ever find out, and that's not on the itinerary, I plan to force a lot of people to listen to They Will Find You Here. If the awesome cover drawing of a barn on a fire is any indication, this is a another great album for 2011. 

Keep an eye on the Sleepy Vikings website and Facebook page for where to pick up or download They Will Find You Here on May 10.

Mastodon - Just Got Paid

(download)

It's been a whole week and absolutely nothing, not even one of those bonus tracks from Radiohead, has been posted here from Record Store Day. Not that I've got nothing sitting on the hard drive, but between the holidays and distractions, well... Let's rectify that right now.
 
Mastodon is one of the hardest, heaviest bands around. I've heard the quip that they're "metal for hipsters," but they're sick, so suck it. In addition to shredding, they use classic literature such as Moby Dick for inspiration. Look it up - it's worth the effort.

"Just Got Paid" is obviously somewhat lighter in subject matter, and is a pretty straightforward cover of a pretty straightforward track by ZZ Top. The track comes from the bearded boogie boys second album, Rio Grande Mud. The cover by Mastodon was the a-side of a limited edition 7-inch put together for this year's RSD international event. The b-side, by the way, is the original. And yes, both of them kick ass.
 
So, with all the off the wall stuff that came out on RSD, why this track? Well, why blow the whole RSD load so early, you know? Plus, this is a great track and it works for the best kind of Good Friday there is: PAYDAY!
 
(Super cheesy, that is, but I'm just happy to go swimming through the room full of money once again! Feel free to rock and/or roll, people.)
 
Buy music by Mastodon from Shockhound.
Buy Rio Grande Mud from Shockhound.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Shadow's Keeper

(download)

Why aren't BRMC huge? Maybe their lack of a massive audience is just further proof that people don't want fuzzed out led-heavy rock and roll every day. Which is loss for them, cause this trio has spent the last decade alternating heavy and fuzzy with country-tinged and introspective, sounding like Jesus and Mary Chain had been ripped right out of the late 60s instead of the 90s, and melded with The Brian Jonestown Massacre and the occasional Stones reference (just like every other good band). Oh, maybe that's the explanation. It's a limited audience.

For every track about a woman problem, there's one about the government or not being a doormat or just being a bad-ass. Last year's Beat The Devil's Tattoo was another solid album from BRMC, who have done a little label hopping but managed to retain the low-key focus they debuted to the world way back in 2001, when I'm sure Virgin Records figured this would be an easy garage sounding sale for the times.

Not long after their somewhat self-titled debut, BRMC, was released, I managed to get 20 minutes on the phone with main man Peter Hayes. Though I was half-drunk from a lunch that included multiple shots of Jagermeister, I managed to dial and speak. This wasn't the first inebriated interview I'd done by this point, and thankfully was prepared with the knowledge that both Hayes and fellow main man Robert Levon Been were a tough interview, so wasn't discouraged or worried he knew about my lunch coming from shot glasses. I just kept talking until he finally started. Which was good, cause that first album (and the second one) consumed a lot of my listening time and would have been seriously disappointing.

Beat The Devil's Tattoo doesn't find the band pushing much beyond their boundaries, but rather continuing to find new ways to twist and layer grooving feedback-heavy chords on each of the 13 tracks found here. It's like a baptism by refreshing, that the masses thankfully could still care less about.

Buy Beat The Devil's Tattoo from Shockhound. 

TV On The Radio - Dirty Whirl

(download)

TV On The Radio announced that bassist Gerard Smith lost his battle with lung cancer today. Before the release of the album, the band said that Smith would sit out at least part of their current tour in support of the band's just released fifth full length album, Nine Types of Light, while undergoing treatment for the disease.

Though it was tempting to find a track from the band that somehow relates to death, that's too cliche and unlike this blog. More appropriately, "Dirty Whirl," the eighth track on Return To Cookie Mountain, the 2006 album that blew the doors open for the band from indie freak-outs (really, those of us in the know were having aural orgasms on a daily basis for two years) to pretty universally acclaimed awesome, is a swirling, beautiful song. 

Like every TVOTR track, Tunde and Kyp's vocals are front and center, but it is Smith's guitar and bass work that turn it into a mesmerizing and hypnotic ode to somewhat willful destruction at the hands of a girl.

There is no doubt, based especially on the post at the band's website, that Smith went willfully. This is one of the best songs on an album full of best songs. The band loses a friend, and the world loses a great musician, as evidenced by "Dirty Whirl," and his work on tracks on each of the last three TV On The Radio albums. The reasons should be pretty obvious for why this loss is so great.

RIP Gerard Smith.

Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan's 115th Dream

(download)

After an inadvertent break for Passover - I'll blame the wine and leave it at that - my first thought on starting the week was to roll with a song that just keeps popping up on my shuffles. Actually, a bunch of Dylan stuff has been bubbling to the top of shuffles, but this song has played more than once and it got me thinking. 

It's pretty likely the former Bob Zimmerman did not have a seder, considering he gave up on Judaism years ago, but this tale of Captain Kid checking out the New World just before Columbus rolled up made me think of the Exodus despite its complete lack of a real link. The search, for salvation in both cases, comes through for me though, even with the lack of biblical references in the lyrics. Really, "Highway 61" would have been a better pick. Forget that, though, here's a slightly less obvious track that I've grown to like a lot more most of the time. 

The other thing I really dig about "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" is the way it starts - a studio misstep, and everybody sounds too stoned to really care. I'm only mentioning that part because it's April 20, and some will wonder why I didn't post "Rainy Day Woman #12 and 35." The simple answer, for anybody who listens to the words, is that it's not about drugs. At all. 
 
If the 60s had really been successful, you'd have smiling, large-bearded Ginsbergian religious-looking figures davening to "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." Instead, everybody cashed in and only a phrase or two has continued in the popular lexicon, and that phrase is used about as much as the word lexicon. No shame, considering money is what makes things happen, but the words of that track are at least as useful as anything in a Passover Haggadah, if not the entire Bible itself.

Alas, here we are, a better nation and world, despite a lot of the American Enlightenment's failure, and I'm willing to bet that most people 29 years and younger currently alive haven't even heard these songs, or the albums they come from. You don't have to love it, but you should at least know it. Then again, that bit of bitterness comes from a guy who loves everything about Passover from the story to the wine to the screaming about who does and does not find gafilte fish jelly completely disgusting, so do whatever you want.
 
Buy Bringing It All Back Home from Shockhound.

(For the record, those versions of "Rainy Day Woman" and "It's Alright Ma" are not the album versions, and totally worth checking out if you didn't do so already.)

Handsome Boy Modeling School - The Truth feat. Roisin of Moloko and J-Live

(download)

This song made it onto more than half the mix CDs I burned from the first CD burner I got in 1999 up through at least 2005, if not later. At this point, it's one of several hundred random songs that I just leave on iTunes and migrate from iPod to iPod and now from cloud service to cloud service. 

The Handsome Boy Modeling School album, So... How's Your Girl, took forever to come out. Magazines and whatever venues provided music news at that point - either I'm getting old and can't remember or we were just making shit up and saying it to each other - talked about the collaboration between Dan "The Automator" Nakamura and Prince Paul for at least a year before it finally hit stores.

So... How's Your Girl is a long album, but with appearances from the Beastie Boys' Mike D, El-P, DJ Shadow, Alec Empire and Father Guido Sarducci, among many, many others, that long time flies by. 

Roisin Murphy's voice purring over that bass heavy, plodding beat never, ever runs out of steam. J-Live has a great verse on there too, but that's a bonus to what makes this song great - and that, obviously, is Murphy singing. 

I haven't tracked anything Murphy, the former vocalist for Moloko, has done, other than knowing that she's put out a couple of solo records in the last several years. Not that I'm not interested. I'm just pretty satisfied with this track. 12 years on, I guess I ought to look her up. Oh, and despite the fact that nobody talks about it, the Handsome Boy Modeling School efforts remain worthy listening.

Buy So... How's Your Girl from Shockhound.

Prefuse 73 - The Only Lillies and Lilacs Pt 2

(download)

It would have been easy to dismiss the new Prefuse 73 album during the first listen as ambient noise, almost the way Radiohead's The King of Limbs can easily be dismissed for not being loud at any point. Like the Radiohead album, I think that would be stupid. The Only She Chapters is a whole new plane of existence for Scott Herren and his main alter ego, however, to dismiss as minimalist what really is a complete redefinition and exploration of a new area actually feels like I'd be cheating myself.

Though he first started releasing music as Delarosa and Asora in the late 90s, the first Prefuse albums established Herren's reputation for glitch-hop - chopped up MC's over static-y, stuttering beats - and turned heads immediately. In the decade that followed, however, the abstract producer has gone all instrumental in some parts, brought in vocalists and experimented with all manner of instruments beyond his sampler, and been all over the place while creating some ear-bending tracks, which makes the drawn out illbient-style productions of The Only She Chapters even more fascinating.

That i-word, illbient, was one of the first that came to mind as this album, from top to bottom, reminds of DJ Spooky's full length debut, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, some of the way out Future Sound of London records in the ISDN-era, and even the 16-minute bliss-outs on early Orb albums. On the Warp Records page for The Only She Chapters, Herren refers to the album as a different way to get at his music. Far from a different way, I'd say it's a whole different mindset, despite some of the sampling sounding distinctly Prefuse.

There are only two ways to listen to this album: turned up really loud on a large stereo system, or turned up really loud on headphones. I've got the headphones route and been seriously rewarded because slapping cans on your ears blocks out any other noise, a good thing considering the voices, tones, and sounds Herren has woven into these intricate recordings.

Some people like to use drugs when they listen to music like The Only She Chapters. If that's your bag, go for it, but realize that this album, itself, at high volumes, is its own drug.

Pre-order The Only She Chapters (and check out a sampler of the album), or buy other Prefuse 73 albums on MP3, CD or vinyl, directly from Warp Records.