broken, not fixed

 

i grew so tired of movement so one day i stopped.

how it happened;

picture me as occam’s razor. with tits.

picture me as emmeline pankhurst. with catheter.

how it happened;

the opposite of awakening.

the sun rises one morning and you don’t. there are no more choices only slogans. you lay comfortable with the realisation that there is no freedom only consumption. medicine is an illusion. love is panic. it all fades. clouds lift. doors forced open in the most obviously phallocentric way. when i get famous they’ll talk like this. they’ll dress it up, but what they’ll describe, reduced, is cock and cunt.

so here i am.

the comedian frozen on stage.

i gather moss.

lost in biology.

so here i am.

the opposite of shark.

what i am not is collectivism or compromise or default.

what i am is as certain as a plane hitting a building.

this is not an exit.

what happens is my eyes dry up quicker than you’d think. light hits like a rock to the head. each photon burst an apocalypse of self-abandonment.

i dream of refusing, not flinching, not struggling.

what i fear most is subconscious.

what i fear most is involuntary.

what i am is body politic.

the doctors dare me to move, wet for reaction. what they do is start hurting me for fun. i am bone scratched by hypodermic. i am vivisection for sniggering rationalists. i am marcel marceu offering my sincere apologies. i am a pinprick in the sky.

what i am is tabloid and broadsheet. one talks of foucault, the other expounds illness of the year scares. they all attach meaning to something as obvious, as ridiculous as me. there is no intellectualisation.

i am not new labour or neo-con.

i am the blue tinge on your lips.

i am a redefinition of myself.

i am a terrorist.

i see my cunt as a zipper.

i am so much wasting meat.

i am seven years old. i weigh fifty three pounds. i am four feet tall. i am explained in numerical terms. i am defined by the slit between my legs. what i am is the product of someone’s hunger.

sores spread like catholic guilt. the church sees me as a child of christ, as joan of arc, as original sin. i am a protest against war. or homosexuality. or celibacy. i see islam as the enemy. i am aryan. i am slave. i am apology.

i wallow in my filth.

my mother prays. my father struggles.

as my body breaks down, swelling changing and growing in so many new and interesting ways:

they gather outside, some with bombs strapped to their chests, moist brown thumbs itching for eternity or finality.

they gather outside, some with candles and poetry. they talk of gaia, of blood and sisterhood. i think of them in dog years.

they gather outside, some in ecstasy with the blood rush hard anxiety of the newly converted. i am a prophet and we are linked by lack thereof.

there is nothing outside. it all happens in here. genesis through revelation. armageddon and kingdom come.

my heart is a fist.

i am true. i am moral. i am happy.

i am here, in this moment, me.

i want to stop progress. cease going forward.

we should un-evolve, un-enlighten.

i want to be the first butterfly to emerge from the cocoon as a caterpillar.

samaritan

anonymous with creaks and fear spidery in her throat, a voice insinuates itself down wires too distant for comfort. i keep secrets, swollen and slug-like, echoing with other peoples panic, breathy and wet; sweat strangled confessions with masturbatory aloneness. the four a.m. fear a damp shower curtain of catholic guilt and self-help abandonment. no-one is in love. everyone has more tumours than fingers. clinging to kittens and bottles and god.

gowns: broken bones (latitudes / southern)

 

want to know what kinda place this freaky skeletal shit is coming from? read erika anderson’s liner notes:

listening to this recording evokes a time when we were barely holding on by our fingernails. ezra had broken bones in his foot, which the cold and rain didn’t help. there were points during that tour where i just kind of lost my mind, and during the recording of heaven there was a moment where i completely forgot where i was, who i was, and what i was doing. can you hear it?

by christ you can. bad drugs. bad vibes. bad things. a veritable swamp of dread. but a surprisingly beautiful one at times.

so gowns. one of them used to be in the mae shi. one of them is in amps for christ. they come together like spook-rock power rangers. churning out some majorly bummed disjointed jams, reworkings, composed of noise and pop and folk and electronics and whatever else you want to chuck avant- in front of. hey, at least it’s a change from post- somethingorother.

it’s like a forty minute fucked up charalambides album for want of a better comparator product. just replace the sweeping warm texan-psyche tones with some haunted mutterings and scratchy string abstractions. the fractured violin scrapes and barely controlled whispers of feedback actually put me in mind of those drawn-out velvet underground stumbling garage drones.

in amongst this folkish personal apocalypse are burbling electronics (yr man ezra was the mae shi’s synthy module music box fella) in the nervy horror movie soundscape mould, oddball deconstructed balladeering and cracked kindof spoken word soliloquies. it’s the spectral confessional on dog that sticks unsettlingly in my skull. disjointed murmurings of rednecks with dogs and child abuse, full of claustrophobic ambiguity and all delivered in this confessional narcotic drawl. an all too real haunted house tale.

incapacitants: lon guy (harbinger sound)

quelle surprise mouth breathers, yet more racket. and boy is this clever stupid. wonderfully so. like kevin drumm’s noise work there’s a sense of humour behind the squall (impotent hummer anyone…) which frankly in this ever so po-faced scene is a minor miracle. and this mad rubbery bugger is chock full of chuck jones style exclamation marks and tex avery aural ultraviolence. like a tramp waving his diseased cock in the street, it disturbs as much as amuses and no matter how hideous it gets you can’t quite not look at the grotesque swollen monstrosity and it’s filthy sour discharge.

it comes lunging at you like some engorged dayglo beast, track one urging us to take it! take it!  take it! exclamation mark. take it! and take it we do. say! oh oh oh we do.  over and over again. five times. in every orifice. all holes filled. punished. brutalized. double, triple, quadruple penetrated. leaving us depleted, spent, ragged, soiled, gasping for release, for let-up. ‘no more’ you beg, as the convulsions take hold, as the adrenaline wears off, ‘no more…’

the unreserved dastardly fuck of volume here is horrendous. if you’ve heard hijokaidan (you’d remember if you did) you know what to expect. excruciating pummels of corruscating machine noise, the hissing fizz and klang of exploding electricity pylons, the wrongbrained shrieks of middle-aged man-mentals. hysterical. in every sense of the word. it’s disorientating in the most excoriatingly psychedelic way. wave upon wave of amorphous evil energy, ultrarawk electroverload, all lovingly presented in the most hideous fidelity, unnecessary twisted crystal clarity, so you don’t miss one vicious heaving (un)note.

not something i’d choose to listen to regularly but when in the mood to be musically disembowled, aurally enucleated, acoustically asphyxiated this is the disc to spin.

my skull’s busted… should come with a goddam health warning…

kevin drumm: imperial horizon (hospital productions)

so as i lurch from one depressing personal tragedy to another i figured i need something ugly and harsh to soundtrack these rather grim days. and i figured what better fella to get involved in this than kevin drumm. the man who spawned, vomited, shat out, sheer hellish miasma. which at times provided the most gutjuddering ferocious noisemongerry (see the inferno for details) i’ve heard in long while. like burzum being fed legs first into an industrial shredder, recorded onto damaged tape and played down a long distance phone line on loudspeaker through amps the size of andre the giant.

but no. the fucker’s let me down. kindof. instead of an hour of self-flagellating aural brain scour i’m presented with an hour of thick-bliss melancholy, a slo-mo blizzard and the (un)welcoming sleep of a snow blanket.

y’see i haven’t heard anything of his since the miasma rerelease. haven’t heard imperial distortion, so i foolishly assumed he’d continued the loud sound (of a seven year old record, i realise…). not that miasma is entirely ugly, but it’s pretty far removed from this.

one track. just lay down and forget it. all the connotations that come with that title apply musically. how to describe something so inherently minimal, so utterly unwordy? why with my usual verbose prose, irritating hyperbole, iconoclastic phrasing and repugnant non-sequiturism of course.

be prepared to focus (on the hour of music, not this crumbling bilge), concentrate that mushy mulch of a brain of yours. there’s no point dipping in and out like some flitting, flittering, flighty a.d.d. haribo addict. you could play it in the background but frankly you’d zone out and think somebody next door’s hoovering. no i recommend a sit down, eyes closed, big headphones on. or go one better. on saturday i submerged myself in one of those isolation booths, you know where you float on salty water in a pitch black tank for an hour and feel yr consciousness bugger off to another place altogether. t’was an odd heaven. use this shit the same way.

it is quite frankly akin to substance abuse listening to just lay down…. it’ll alter yr mindwaves in a subtle hypno- way. reductionally it is nothing more than some ultra low frequency drone, a mildly fluctuating hum of submerged electrickerry, an all encompassing immersive wash of monotonic tone. but given time, zonked silence and a fortress of solitude, it offers a veritable pandoras box of minimalist delight.

drumm’s ouvre (man i dig that word…) inhabits some odd venn diagram overlap between merzbow (if his laptops voice broke) and popul vuh (at their most static). and like masami akita he’ll either test yr patience or deliciously warp yr fragile morrison-like wooly cotton infant brain.

it’s textured, smooth and cold and soft like someone playing wine glasses in a gentle snowstorm or delicate whiteout. notes, tones, sustained for seconds minutes hours, hang sometimes threateningly in the air. it undulates almost imperceptibly, unfurls indiscernibly, vacillates and mutates and fluctuates om-like. it gazes at you with the blank soothing terror of nietzsche’s void.

i dare you to stare back.

endless endless endless / e.p. hall / sentient machine (another rum bunch of random offerings)

endless endless endless: black talisman – this frankly is rather beautiful. in every way. handsomely packaged as some kind of laser etched shamanic artefact. and aurally the kindof shit that wouldn’t sound out of place on not not fun or next to james ferraro’s holy mountain output. self described as a post-noise duo that plays guitar and gameboys. i came expecting dj scotch egg instead i got a fountain of bliss. a balming wash of drawn out orgasmic whale noise, korgesque squelch and nes eight bit percussion.

they inhabit a soothing elseworld of guitar plink and fuzz and twinkling klang. it’s noise, but one enveloped in a snowy blanket of collaged and unwrapping, unfurling, evolving swoosh. oddly organic despite being made by machine, black talisman is a soothing, warm, pre-comedown elated treacle of melting harmony. it’s all blurred polaroids and repeated electrick agitation and loop upon loop of gentle tongue inside ye earholes. it’s occasionally unsettling, with a creepy boards of canada on downers feel, an almost psyched-out folk vibe. imagine the skaters brighter, murk-free sound filtered through the synthy japanesey machine clank and street chatter of blade runner’s ambience. a crude trope that in all likelihood makes little sense outside my head but fuck it, that’s where this music belongs.

if i had more time this would’ve been in a post of it’s own. but i don’t. so go to the bandsite. there’s a tonne of albums for free. and for the love of christ buy this.

e.p. hall: mommy crow - more beautifully packaged noise. noise as noun, not genre y’understand. this has proved a rather fitting introduction to morning-time following last nights jack rose fingerpicking slideguitar beer excesses.

remember regina spektor before major label antiseptic turned her into a saccharine produced sugary shadow of her former self? well this is what i’d rather she was doing. chucking out occasionally noisy rattling folk murmurings. all things bookish, creepy, and thinky. quoth the raven. in other words (and there are a lot of those) there’s something of the heart and brain and guts about this. something stripped and bloody and bare-boned about the whole affair. but one rich in emotion and language and imagery.

most of the time it’s just lady singing with guitar (a voice that reminds me of a less naif-ish joanna newsom (and i dig joanna newsom)) and then it branches out into xiu xiu style electronickery or cello drone or birdsong or burbling noise or avant percussion, as on churchyard. hell, the emperor’s note even chugs into fizzing arcade fire moves. it’s a decidedly robust, satisfying listen, and one that despite it’s apparent monochromatic minimalism rewards repeated listening.

anyway this is out on the twenty fourth november followed by a euro tour with drekka (whose bluesanct recently put out a fabulous screenprinted boduf songs vinyl). go get. go see.

sentient machine: sentient machine – fuck me this is slick and sexy. like an oil spill on a white alaskan shoreline. sounds like what trent reznor does now but with fire in their ample bellies. is it just me or has rez written some spreadsheet formula for composing nine inch nails songs over the past three records? anyway this has all the spit sheen and polish of million dollar studio album. how the hell they got this to sound so bloody expensive i dunno. maybe i’ve been lo-fi too long and gone all aural mr kurtz…

so hints of faith no more, in the quirky pop-metal of architecture man. hints of killing joke on she blew me away’s tribal stomp (which develops into pure bombastic synth pomp in a stupidly awesome seventies prog, power metal vein). it’s an unrelenting twenty odd minutes, unafraid to inject the punkfunk, toot some big-ass brassy brass, weedelyweedeley solo like zappa (i demand more schmears of zappa over more songs!), chomp down on some disco biscuits, angularly grind out those geetar chops and get all eighties l.a. sleazy on hard enough, a song which has a jazzy breakdown that smacked a big grin across my ugly mug. yr man adam insists there’s an albini influence in there. i don’t hear it. but then i didn’t write the goddam thing. decide for yrselves and get this sparkling pile of audio wonder free from the bandsite.

errata / i was totally destroying it / turzi (a rum bunch of random offerings)

errata: errata – i s’pose you’d have to class this as post-something if you were in the classification business. post-metal, post-hardcore, post-whatever. what they do is that kindof epic soundscape meets thundering uber-chordage and throaty roar-vox that envy (should that be inveja…) and cult of luna (if they were amphetamined out their swedish heads) and will haven (make up yr goddam mind grady…) do. they’re portugese (as if you could tell…) and really rather good. niftily keeping the right balance between deranged bellows, guitar battery and widescreen ambience. a bit like the brutal stick violence dance of jogo do pau. i like this.  a lot. 

i was totally destroying it: horror vacui - been hearing a lot of this kindof thing recently. feels like i’ve somehow regressed back to my teenage years. nirvana at reading on cd. yo la tengo live in glasgow last night. pavement, sebadoh, dinosaur jr. all playing again. this? this indulges some decidedly tuneful power pop. bit like superchunk or veruca salt. roughed up tunes aplenty. incredibly pleasant (not meant in the pejorative) powerchording and choruses. the radio friendly shit that for some reason never gets played on the fucking radio. makes me want to dig out those old cheap trick records. which is never a bad thing. and even if you don’t like their musical shenanigans there’s a fairly intellectual / amusing emo-boy rant by their lady singer:

male emo-pop bands are laughably effeminate at times in their mannerisms and personal hygiene, to the point where i, a lover of all things feminine, am almost offended by it. androgyny should be an exploration into the metaphysics of gender, but in this case, i feel that it’s just a thinly veiled mockery of women. all girls are to these boys are nameless entries in their lyrical diaries. we break their hearts, we cheat on them, we love them, we fuck them, and sometimes we even get back together with them. as jessica hopper puts it, “our existences, our actions are portrayed solely through the detailing of neurotic self-entanglements of the boy singer – our region of personal power, simply, is our breadth of impact on his romantic life.” our faces are their album art and tattoos. we have doe eyes, long flowing hair, we need validation through our relationships with these boys. they either have us, or they don’t. it makes me want to throw up.

oh and i rather like the band name too.

 

turzi – and a track i totally dig but know nothing about for some reason. it’s a bit of a curious hybrid, some utterly mental chimera that somehow reminds me simultaneously of goblin, iron maiden, harmonia, guapo and pounding fucking techno. it’s all very exciting and excitable and i suspect a rather sweaty danceable live show to boot. i need more. if you sent this, send more. moar! as the internet kids say.  it’s driving.  it’s pounding.  it’s relentless.  chuck any vaguely sexual metaphor at it you want.  oof.  and i love the fact the french still totally dig prog… 

califone: all my friends are funeral singers (dead oceans)

califone make so bloody little out of so bloody much. that’s not meant in the pejorative y’understand, just sometimes they’re so damnably subtle you’d hardly know anything was going on.

born of chicago’s red red meat (bunny gets paid being one of the last few finefinefine records released by sub pop) who (and which) paved the way for califone’s folksy murmurings and electronic burblings. and with each album they refine this formula to bare-boned perfection.

all my friends are funeral singers is part companion piece, part soundtrack to califone honcho tim rutili’s movie of the same name. it’s a film i know bugger all about beyond the psychic-living-with-ghosts-in-old-house premise, but this don’t impact on the absorption in / enjoyment of the album. i guess the themes and stories overlap and complement, but one isn’t required to understand the other. i hear the tour will incorporate both into the live show.  which should be pretty ace.

the music is the usual mix of brittle blues and electronic textures. it sounds simple, hushed even, but when you start unpeeling the oniony layers and collage overlaps, picking (hoho…) through the banjo, guitar, piano, fiddle, drum, horns and vintage organs, the complexity of their compositions dawns. reduced you could call it skewed folk but it’s so much more, like if william basinksi recorded dylan’s basement tapes.

it has strange contradictory qualities, whereby it’s junk-rough at times, while also softly tactile, organic yet industrial, tender but unsettling. whether it’s the bass squelch opaque electronics of giving away the bride, a song which radiohead would give up their wonky right eye for, or the more straightforward pop structure of polish girls, which has an understated melody of such weary beauty it brought a little warmth to even my black heart. it is within these disparities califone work so well.

all of this combined with the queered folk threads which run through the whole album, the string-picked stomp of ape-like, the psyche insinuations of buñuel and evidence result in a listening experience so rich, yet so light, you can gorge yourself like a vomit speckled roman emperor for hours. dig deep people, this album is incredibly detailed, a subtle agglomeration of sounds that have a delicious lush cinematic quality.

facetiously i could describe them as wilco’s little brother, or uncle tupelo’s weird nephew — the correlation being jeff tweedy’s willingness to grasp both the dissonant experimental, bucolic blood and dust sides of americana. but i won’t. i’ll leave you, dear readers (listeners), to decipher those mumbled symbols and splashed cymbals yourselves. enjoy!

mission of burma: the sound the speed the light (matador)

the only good thing the smiths ever did was not reform. when that day comes as far as i’m concerned my personal seventh seal is broken. not just because i have a pathological loathing for all things smithsian but also because i have a pathological distrust for band reformations. a peculiarly new phenomenon ( i think…) within the indie world. i’ll lazily lay the blame at all tomorrows parties circle-jerking feet. it continues apace with recent pavement and public image ltd reunion tours announced. all good bands split up. all bad bands eventually reform. that’s a ninety nine percent fact.

the one percent exception to this rule is mission of burma (and to a lesser extent dinosaur jr. coz the new stuff’s pretty ace and it does mean less time available for lou barlow to release dreary fucking indie pop solo albums). in essence what i expect, nay demand, is that you continue as you were, as a working band. write, release, tour etc. not to be some fucking nostalgia act, some slick karaoke kash kow, touring festivals, playing older fatter versions of your classics at gigs attended by thirty-something mid-mid-life-crisis twats trying to reclaim their youths from a mediocre stereophonicked adult life. paying yr forty quid gets you the pixies in some giant soulless corrugated warehouse playing a greatest hits set (ie doolittle and a handful of songs from other albums) and a desperate yawning void inside that says you’ve been so fucking had, here’s yr entirely unironic ‘ha ha we’ve reformed for the cash’ ironic t-shirt. is this different from bananarama or inxs without the dead guy? no. accept the fact your time has come and gone. yr just dying with a little less dignity, a little less of your scrawny black souls in tact, with yr trousers round your ankles like some fat balding indied version of the king…

anyway, bile spewed, rant over. back to the main event folks.

mission of burma’s third album proper since the regrouping. it’s slightly unsettling to think that signals calls and marches and vs. are twenty seven years old. but they are. and the sound the speed the light comes on like it’s nineteen eighty two all over again. with maybe even a nod to this on ssl83?

it’s the spikiest spunkiest record of the three newbies. fairly unrelenting in it’s boisterous pace and with that rather tasty mix of brains and brawn, noise and melody, that made me fall in love with the buggers’ music all those years ago. it is, reduced, a straight forward (punk?)rock record. relatively speaking. you can still see the minutemen-style we jam econo in them. not so much in the music but certainly in the attitude, the aural politics the sheer bloody belligerent verve and nerve of them.

opening with the wordily humorous – one, don’t look at anyone / two, drink only when drunken to – decidedly tuneful and frankly singalongable power pop of 1,2,3 partyy! is a bold move. kindof reminded of the newer buzzcocks albums on this one. the video’s below.

and from there on in it’s the usual mix of miller, conley and prescott’s differential aesthetic poise. and it’s this meshing of the divergent styles that makes mission of burma so fucking great. whether it’s peter prescott’s percussive intensity and more overtly confrontational writing as heard on good cheer with it’s occasional link wray distorto twang and shouty thumping rockerry. or clint conley’s brash melodic bombast (who oddly also provides the record only slowish moment with feed). or roger millers more intricate numbers, dense and tense and wiry textured, building like the feast of angled geetar scratch (plus a fuzzy delight of a solo) and ferocious drum rattle and thud that is possession.

everything on here stands up to the ballad of johnny burma or that’s how i escaped my certain fate. an indication, i think, of how good this shit is. so treasure them while they’re still at it because prescott stated last year that they only had a few more years left in them. as burma anyway.

robedoor: raiders (not not fun)

i went home last night, fell down on my bed, i got to dreaming so, i was talking all out of my head…

robedoor have only gone and bloody done it. fully embracing the lysergic blues hinted at on the transitionary exorcism blues joint. not that they’re playing some twelve-bar boogie, more an annexing of the existential howl and the eerie wail of blind lemon, that hissing otherworldliness of pre-war ghost recordings re-recaptured by alan lomax.

when you’ve made as definitive a statement as rancor keeper, the only aesthetic option is to keep moving, keep changing. you stop, you die. says the shark. and trying to follow that thuggish yowl of pure cthulhuan vinyl evil with more of the same would have been the most redundant move since lydon’s public image reformation (which i know is chronologically illogical but it sticks in my fucking craw…)

whereas old school robedoor was thick like tar and murky like crowley these new jams have a discernible stoned blooze throb, choking in a fug of hell-cellar trance moans. now they’re channeling the deranged almost-garage not-really-punk drone sprawl of suicide. i dig it. this is slightly less restrained than exorcism blues, less underdriven and semiblown amps-set-to-six. there’s an almost bardo pond third eye clarity to this collection. but more of a buggered bardo pond performing next door in a fog of hash plumes and miasmic bad vibes.

frankly it’s a kindof beautiful record, but an ugly beauty, a terrible beauty. like knowing the hot chick in ‘v’ has freaky lizard shit going on beneath the softsoft skin and totalitarian fetishistica. yup. from the first echoed morricone twang and splash incantation of countdown to depression, through the zonked vu / joy division shapes of indo shadow and people of the book to the monstrous chugging squall of the downcast eye, this is a swollen voodoo dream of a record.

mark mcguire: vdsq – solo acoustic volume two (vdsq)

by christ it’s been a noisy old month what with lightning bolt, entombed, little claw, shit and shine, factums, pelican, isis, gary war, billy bao, drunkdriver all cavorting around my damaged lugholes. therefore it’s time for a break from all this distortion, this ugly racket, this howling and hollering, this mad spastic din. it’s time for something clean, something linear, something harmonious. and that something is this rather soothing piece of acoustica from emeralds fella, mark mcguire.

echoplexed or multitracked or both i dunno, but it’s layered. not in the same huge orgasmic waves way emeralds build their kosmiche om’s. but it’s sparse and light and dare i say it earthly rather than heavenly. somewhere floaty between the takoma schtick and the string picking of popul vuh’s daniel fichelscher (who informs mcguire’s solo stuff as much as emeralds).

starts off basic with some brief bog-standard chord strummery, then builds all arpeggiating sinewave style through my brainspace with gorgeous warm intent. side a is the more settled beast, like some stripped down and restrained james blackshaw. second thoughts has a shimmering twang that reminds me of glass and japan and eno.  i’ll leave you to decide what that means.

side b takes this and runs with it. the introductory improv of front porch breeze (and i’d love to hear the full on version of this) and it’s krauty rhythmic string chops sets up the twelve minute psyche folk joy of burning leaves. which unfurls in loops and waves. which indulges in that unwinding emeralds-style electrickerry i dig so much. but it’s kindof deconstructed here. instead of one vibrating everbuilding climax this quietly loops and overlaps and scales and harmonises in a decidedly minty mind-tingling way. like a steel and wood tangerine dream.  like emeralds laid bare.

lightning bolt: earthly delights (load)

the story goes that hieronymus bosch was a member of the adamites sect, heretical, obsessed with the fleshier temptations, but one where cock and cunt were free from sin. they sought a world of guiltless sex, of euphoric screwing, of blissful fucking, of carefree boning. you get the slightly soiled picture, non? so his garden of earthly delights triptych (see where i’m going with this…) could be read not as a warning against the pursuit of sloppy pleasure but as a vision of earthly heaven. not so much a narrative of innocence, temptation and the hellbound fall due to those saucy bloody women and their lovely soft bits, but a celebration of the simple joy of amorous fondling and ejaculatory joy.

all of which quite accurately encompasses the eruptive glee of the new lightning bolt album. *

for all the talk of chaos that surrounds lightning bolt there’s an element of almost sensually tight control that runs through the core of their gay abandon.  as utterly gurning deranged as they are live (and slightly less so on record) it takes some degree of restraint to focus this level of intensity and yes dammit virtuosity and not have it sound a complete masturbatory mess.  as established previously lightning bolt are all about the coitus not the onanistic.  not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with this, but it’s for other buggers to (self)indulge in.

whilst not exactly a progression to verse chorus verse pop structure this is a kindof refined and polished gem compared to say wonderful rainbow’s lump of bonkers coal.  i’ll stress again this sure as heck ain’t pet shop boys territory we’re in.  just that they’ve added a touch more diversity, a touch of light and shade, some subtle changes to their face-fucking battery technique.

so the template’s still in place.  the bass.  the three drums.  the distorto-chatter.  the hypno-riffing.  nation of boar and s.o.s. hold no truck with progression.  this shit is primitive and regressive, the unrelenting noise of two guys called brian engaged in old school sweatsoaked instro-destruction.

but there’s wonky melody creeping around the proceedings like some schneaky seedy peeper opposite a girls school.  see rain on lake i’m swimming in with its monged nursery rhyme kids tv theme shenanigans.  or the middle east twang that molests yr ears suddenly unexpectedly on a few tracks, exemplified by the rolling stones paint it black / nirvana breed / omar souleyman dabke thrashmagoria of the sublime freak.  add to this heady brew some slidey blooze on the monstrous dayglo om-esque colossus (one of the best things they’ve recorded) or country boogie twang on funny farm and frankly you have nothing short of deconstructed musical mentalism.  but what wonderful deconstructed musical mentalism it is.  one that pounds on you remorselessly while gently tickling those bits you like tickled.

entombed, entombed and more entombed!

even as the original line-up is whittled away (they’ve never really been the same since cederlund jumped ship for disfear) and they record and tour less and less frequently and the rock and roll shit is sloughed off for a return to their harsher death roots, this swedish collective are still one of my allfuckingtime favourites. i can’t imagine my record collection without them. when wolverine blues came out i had all but walked away from this-kind-of-thing. think this and unsane’s total destruction kept my metal(ish) heart ticking round about my mid-teens. by this time i’d stumbled upon the gories, mazzy star and cordelia’s dad, the butthole surfers and minutemen, the sonics and fugazi and all that rough trade pop and american indie shite that forever warped me. which is the reason why there’s no fucking focus on here, careening around like a drunk on the sixty two bus at three in the morning between black metal, country, bedroom pop and everything betwixt and around the two.

anyway i paid far too much money on an amon amarth ticket (cheese, vikings and horn o’ plenty abound…) just so’s i could catch twenty minutes of entombed live in glasgow for i reckon about the twelveteenth time. t’was good. i’ve missed them over the last few years. but they miss uffe more i reckon. here’s some songs (with bob dylan and lee hazlewood covers) and some videos (one directed by troma’s lloyd kaufman no less)….

• the ballad of hollis brown
• to ride shoot straight and speak the truth
• come clean
• wolverine blues
• young man nihilist
• some velvet morning

last days of radio (laurie what’s the boogeyman?)

i met him fifteen years ago. i was told there was nothing left, no conscience, no reason, no understanding, in even the most rudimentary sense, of life or death or right or wrong. i met this six-year-old boy with a blank, cold emotionless face and the blackest of eyes, the devil’s eyes. i spent eight years trying to reach him and another seven trying to keep him locked away when i realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely, simply evil…

happy halloween fuckers.

• the mountain goats: michael myers resplendent
• the cramps: zombie dance
• john carpenter: halloween theme
• sonic youth: halloween
• the frantics: werewolf
• daniel johnston: casper
• the shaggs: it’s halloween 
• the misfits: ghouls night out
• scratch acid: monsters
• dead kennedys: halloween

little claw: human taste (ecstatic peace / not not fun)

earlier in the year i said this about the race to the bottom seven incher: with a sleeve that looks like it was designed by me drunk at four in the morning with a head full of medicine and my hands celltotaped to a broken felt tip pen. two tracks with the overdriven guitar sound of an nice old pink telecaster being gently forced into the guts and anus of a broken amp.  some folk holler pop nonsense over the top of this distorto din.  it’s frankly fucking ace.  and the best silt 7” i’ve heard, oooh since the last bugger.  more stuff soon on ecstatic peace.  exclamation mark.

so here’s the latest stuff on ecstatic peace (vinyl on not not fun).   exclamation mark (none required).

canadian folk singer dies after coyote attack said the newsbox this week.  would it be bad form to suggest that this is a decent approximation of how this record sounds (and it’s called human taste y’know…)? probably.  but i’ll blunder on regardless…

it has on occasion a weird leery folk scrawl mud-smudged across it’s chops in the same way magik markers sometimes do.  it also has more frequently the violent skree of music being gently disemboweled by furry buggers with razorteeth and mucky nails.  from the velvet underground rubbery chug on colors you drown which has all tomorrows parties’ thump and shake behind it to the spurting stooges spunk of modern vampire, it’s a confused cavorting beast of an album.

one that veers between dirge and drone, skewed skewered poppery, and flat out sloppy rock throb.  a double percussive stew of stumbling dead c monomania and monged crampsian boogie shuffle and portland refugee associates smegma’s artless/artful wonk to fill yr belly yr boots yr skull with for fifty five minutes over these cold winter nights.

shit and shine: 229-2299 girls against shit (wet dream #16)

lickitlickitlickitlicklicklick tongue like cat tongue like cow tongue jarring fuzzy needles on skin round lobes, dripping wet wet wet monstrous salival and groans of damp wood exposed to brutal sun. fingerfingerfingers trace of lucid gulfs moistened folds cartilage hinges bending this way and that way break opening up expectorating exposing fleshy flesh and bits of thisandthat to brutal neon buzz and teeth glints in moon dark.  ease  ease easing  in, till engulfed engorged following regurgitated splutter and sweatsoaked anxious gasps for air, spasms once nauseous twice debilitating thrice unsettling tranquility of post-vomit euphoria.  nervy unnerved continuing pushing harassment oh the wondrous holes brutal and alive, pink dilated sadism, casual vile red glistening with joyous escalation of of of punishment, a harrowing furred serenity and calmly mutilated contortion. clamping down finding limiting break point pounding needing kneeding beyondbeyondbeyond till oh heinous chaos, oh ejaculatory pandemonium but no, no, no, choked back white knuckled but no, sweet discomfort endurance, uncivilized humiliation of zips and lips, clits and tits, cunts and roses. the most sincere cold derangement flicking sharp knife satanically over life parts, shackles and tentacles and grunting overloading waveuponwave of blunt force and primal thump.    overload.   tireless consumed spent huffing.  skin gluey, glued to cotton leather dermis, velcro lipped mumbemouthed warnings and pleadings and threatenings and clasping gasps of no too much. bruises flower like fear passes like regret stings and stains.  forcing moremore moremore of disorientating wrist deep in stinking corporeal onslaught, lubed and foul relentless and oblivious and oblivion sweet deep swaggering oblivion swamped in sodding spatter of juice and glans and membranous fudge.  grinding remorseless, frenetic ganglions, surreal into excessive grooves.  gnomic assholes gaping.  the biggest cock in christendom billows flaccid broke and redredred raw sore.  sweet weeping eye hangs open like sodden mongmouth as you so casually drip free.  no-one here gets out alive…

factums: flowers (sacred bones)

all material has history.

so said painter, sculptor, photographer, performer, art prankster robert rauschenberg. fitting for this random word spew for two reasons.

one: his (re)construction of collage.  two: he painted simultaneously pieces titled factum i and ii.  factums.  see?  possibly.  anyway his use of collage, incorporating found things, trash, newspapers, glories in the disparity on canvas.  fuck unity.  appropriate, agglomerate and present.  draw yr own conclusions.  dada or pop art or proto-neo-whatever.  his work represents a capturing of whatever’s to hand.  the factum paintings incorporate oil and ink and pencil and fabric and newspapers, photos, pictures, calendars.  they were painted sided by side.  they appear the same but obviously they’re not.  they have in common the tools and methods but beyond that they’re neither alike nor unlike one another.

which of course brings me to factums.  who revel in this collage creativity, melding and melting and layering and chucking a bunch of shit at the wall to see what sticks.

there are obvious nods – throbbing gristle, the fall, cabaret voltaire, residents, chrome in particular (everybody’s digging chrome these days…).  but the pleasure lies in the theft, the recontextualising, the stitching together of noises found and made, using pieces of aural sketches, soundtrack textures and actual proper song structures, exploring all these things then churning them into a whole (of sorts).  like the factum paintings the composition seems as important as the completed article.

so what is the completed article?  reduced it’s a cacophonous clatter of mongular rock.  deranged jump cuts of post-post-something throb and stumbling gonzo punk and nouvelle vague futuro-moves.  all interspersed with fucked spook house ambience and auto-detuned radio noise.  part whirlwind heat bass spazzery, blank dogs sci-fi chug, pop :zoviet*france:)  and pocket rocket from the tombs sprawl.

none of these pseudo- mutterings should put you off what is probably factums most straightforwardly listenable record.  split screen is a kindof coachwhips at their distorto blooze best, all unintelligible vox and swoops of feral sax.  and there is a garage-y vibe to the whole affair, just one oxidizing under a deluge of wet fuzz and permeated by a funked nightmare of machine skronk.  just some kind of mutant retro-future vision caked in new zealand geetar apocalypse and kraut dystopia.  as much plastic as it is metal.  as much of the past as the present as the future.

pelican: what we all come to need (southern lord) vs. isis: wavering radiant (ipecac)

  

philosophically i hate the genre enthusiast. generally a bunchof taste nazis. see metal is what i grew up on, up with and (scene-wise) away from. reason being, as a pup, the willful cuntishness of yr reactionary fan on the street sometimes made me wish i’d never borrowed number of the beast or paranoid or master of puppets.  the ficklest of the fickle; any hint of progression from a band slapped down as a move away from their metal roots towards big gay pop.  exclamation mark.  course it’s all changed hasn’t it?  we’ve moved on from the days where covering nirvana meant death threats from the metal community?  mogwai in kerrang.  goatsnake in the wire.  gabba in terrorizer.  sunn o))) in the telegraph.  it’s all one big musical melting pot innit?

i bring this up for a reason.  pelican and isis released their last albums to a somewhat muted response.  and by muted response i of course mean pissing and moaning on the internets.  the plaintive cries from yr average cockbrained metal aficionado of ‘it’s gone all fucking quiet like pink fucking floyd…’ were heard, howling like maera over icarius’ corpse.  i’m not particularly in favour of change for the sake of it but what was the last ac/dc record you actually honest to god liked?

if i’m being honest city of echoes and in the absence of truth ain’t my favourite pelican / isis sides. both had their moments but generally the records seemed occasionally strained and unfocussed, just didn’t gently tongue my neurons the way i like. so i was interested to see/hear what these new(ish) buggers sounded like.

don’t misunderstand me, while both bands may be from the same stock they are more like third cousins.  but interesting parallels abound.  both incorporate the reflective, progressive qualities of the previous moderately maligned albums.  both hearken back to earlier material.  both put a bit of a pop (relatively speaking) sheen on things.  and aaron turner appears on both records.

gary war: horribles parade (sacred bones) vs. wet hair: glass fountain (not not fun)

 

is there a weirdo factory in the yoo ess somewhere churning out deranged, whacked out pop bands? if you play these records backwards will you hear the sonic shite of sgt peppers playing forwards? don’t do it kids. john is dead… john is dead… and thank funk for that.

and is not not fun actually a front for some hideous hypnagogic government brainmashers designed to subtly warp the minds of young men in funny clothes who buy limited vinyl releases and turn them to acts of political murder when the correct combination of notes from a red krayola song are played?

well?

probably not.  but here’s two records, flipsides of the same coin.

really dug gary war’s new raytheonport.  which musically was like a mouldy onion, full of occasionally oddly coloured and whiffy layers to unpeel.  kindof an ariel pink gone horribly horribly wrong.  this?  this is taking the miasmic murk another step beyond.

with vocals that sound like he’s gurgling tar, a clamorous mess(thetics) of euphoric keys and synths and vaguely punkish guitar that’s swaddled in so much flange and phaser effex they sound like jan hammer being gangraped by chrome (and that thought makes my knees tremble a little).  this is proper perverted great.  utterly modern (unpejoratively) fucked up psyche abstraction that’s not continually referencing some obscuro sixties private pressings that only three people now own, like the keys to some vinyl weapon of mass destruction.  it’s not an easy listen by any manner of means (unless yr brains already tuned to zelda from terrahawks fronting a mental-hospital bachs cover band) but get yr tiny spade looked out and start digging coz there’s a tonne of monged treasure buried in this melodic muck.

and a more restrained, minimalist approach to this helios creed abstracterry comes from the new wet hair record.  partly culled from the dream lp recordings (which i haven’t heard) this is probably just as divisive, vocally anyway, as gary war.  both seem to have taken the same notes in music class but this strays more into a suicide, a spacemen 3, vintage drone and electrickerry with some truly monochrome paroxysmal vocal exercises.  it’s kindof punk in that vega / rev mould.  has a slightly seedy creepy bent to it, with a recorded in perverts basement vibe.  plenty tasty organ fuzz and disembodied trance exorcisms.  whereas horribles parade has a teeny bit of ecstasy about it, glass fountain is a more beaten, weary beast.  the sound of a stumbling paint fume huffing elseworld doors.  only on stepping razor is the formula deviated from and snazzy drum fills are chucked in.

the bucky rage, the jackhammers, king khan, the almighty defenders, jack of heart and demon’s claws…

this week saw the newly redesigned bucky rage return to stage, lean and muscled like a young jean claude van damme.  back to being a quadruped.  but with keys and pedal noise in place of six strings. so you get the same old fashioned masked madness you know and love, just with extra 13th floor elevators swoosh and voom.  and a buncha new aural surf stompers.  in celebration of this and as a result of me unearthing a tonne of live stuff on an unmarked disc here are some bucky moments caught unguarded untreated unsober and unconcerned with yr nonsense mental ideas of fidelity, structure, style, talent.

also saw the jackhammers with their (un)unique brand of stupid punk bunk.  they’ve finally learned to play.  added a fourth chord to their bellowing nonsense.  chuck in a cover of one of the cows favourite numbers (lexicon devil by the germs) and you have something approaching enjoyment.  what the fuck fellas?

and finally there’s an interview with king khan of the spaceshits, bbq, shrines fame.  on subcity with rager handsome al.  click here to listen.  see below to read it, be ye deaf or too stupid to click or weird amish.

shakedown ben – hello, you’re listening to the saturday shakedown on subcity radio with me ben

shakedown matt – and me matt

sb – and we’re here with handsome al out of the bucky rage, say hello al

handsome al – hello guys

sb – and we’re very privileged today to be interviewing king khan, from king khan and the shrines who is in glasgow playing with his band tonight.  so we’ve got a little bit of time and al’s just bought you a local drink there.  a fancy whisky, what do you think about that?

king khan – there is hair growing on my chest as we speak!

sb – i think that is a jura, quite a smokey one.  anyhow, we’re delighted to see you here in glasgow tonight – you’ve been on tour.  is this the middle of the tour, the end of the tour?

kk – it is actually right in the middle of the tour right now

sb – so are you hitting your stride?

kk – we’re doing good, everyone is surviving, everyone is happy.  a lot of drinking going on.  it is our first time ever really touring the uk like this.

al – it has been a long time coming!  we have been waiting desperately for it to happen.

sb – we play you quite a lot on our radio show, ‘the saturday shakedown’. with king khan, bbq and on your own and with the shrines, and with the almighty defenders and all kinds of folks.

kk – you guys got the defenders record?

sb – yeah we played the track “bow down and die”. what was the story behind that lp?

kk – well it basically happened that the black lips got kicked out india and they called me, from india , on my birthday in january and then jared was distraught and was like, ‘we got to get out of here!’ and they felt they were in danger and stuff so they came to my house and me and mark sultan were recording our new record and we just put all our heads together and wrote a bunch of songs, and they kind of had this gospel theme going through it so, we kind of went with that and i am really happy with it.  i’m glad it happened.

sb – it sounds like it was a lot of fun to make, it is quite wild and you all obviously get a long…

kk – yeah, we’ve been touring together for the longest time and we’re pretty much like brothers and you know the black lips were covering some songs of ours and i recorded the ‘let it bloom’ record also in my living room, or half of it.  so it was kind of going to happen eventually.  it took them showing their balls in india for us to get religious.  (laughs)