Mry. XMas, Y'all

Not Santa Claus by a long shot

Okay, so first off, I owe you all (All? Who reads this anyway?) an apology for my lengthy absence. I moved apartments in mid-November and was immediately beset upon by the dual-headed beast of Bureaucracy and Language Barrier. Thus, I haven't actually had regular internet access for the past six weeks. How did I survive, you ask? Just barely, I'm sure.

At any rate, 'Tis the Season, and so as I regain my sea legs surfing the web, may I offer you this little ditty, a cautionary tale wrapped up in holiday cheer, from my (and others') perennial favourites, The Fall.

No XMas For John Quays - The Fall (Peel Session, broadcast June 12, 1978)

I'll be back later this week with a few selections from my favourite releases of the past year - which, not coincidentally, the Fall's Complete Peel Sessions boxset topped. Granted, such an incredible document of a band's incessant evolution would have been my pick o' the litter any year, but this year it was barely a contest. I'll wait until my End Of Year post before I leap on my soapbox about everything that went wrong this year in music, but for a snapshot of how far from Hip I am these days, compare my personal picks for the year with the Tiny Mix Tapes collective list of Top 25 Albums.

Notice that the two lists share ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in common.

But as I reel from reverse culture shock at my in-laws' in Baltimore this holiday season, let's not forget that it takes different strokes and in the end, it's all just music. I raise a glass of eggnog to ye where ever ye be. Happy Holidays.

(By the way, though my taste is, uh, underrepresented on the TMT collective list, I managed to rant my way thrice onto the Eureka List for underappreciated underground albums that were released this year. Take a gander. Enjoy.)

I Can't Believe This Is How I Spend My Time

College Radio DJ You scored a 133 Music IQ

You know your shit. You could easily have that widweek, 2am college radio timeslot. I would still sucker-punch you if you caved-in and took any Rilo Kiley requests, though.

How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 84%

Losing My Edge, Pt. 2: Microcosm

Tabuchi Hisako (R): "Oh, stop whining and grow some balls, Mukai."

As disillusioning as a larger cultural disconnect may be, nothing hurts like a favourite artist falling off. This has happened to anyone who has ever loved music: that rueful day when repeated spins of So-And-So's new album failed to reveal the genius behind past achievements.

So it is with Shutoku Mukai. The indie-rock experimentalist first rose to notoriety with the late, great Number Girl. I've raved about Fukuoka's finest at length, and with good reason: they packed the hardest punch this side of Drive Like Jehu while boasting smarter songwriting than any of their post-hardcore peers. Allow me to present Exhibit A, from their stunning major-label debut School Girl Distortional Addict:

Pixie Du - Number Girl

The title says it all: quirkily catchy college rock delivered with meteoric force. But all relationships end one of two ways - death or bust. After four albums and seven years, Number Girl splintered in several directions. Bassist Kentaro Nakao pursued a quixotic solo career, guitarist Tabuchi Hisako joined punk powerhouse bloodthirsty butchers, and drummer Ahito Inazawa (briefly) enlisted in Mukai's new endeavor, Zazen Boys. While Number Girl had cracked the confines of rote indie-rock, Zazen Boys offered Mukai a chance to indulge all of his musical whimsy. "In Number Girl, we always had certain boundaries as a rock band," he explained to the Japan Times. "There was just no way that we could mess with something like Prince. With Zazen Boys, I feel that I can experiment."

Quiet Sleep Stick - Zazen Boys

And experiment he does. "Quiet Sleep Stick" gives a glimpse of Zazen Boys' grab-bag eclecticism: stutter-start rhythms, caffeinated wannabe-Beat vocals, and expanded instrumentation push the band towards the proggy realm of rock intellectuals like King Crimson. Note that I said "push towards," not "push into." Mukai & Co. can capture neither the narrative melodrama and behemoth majesty of In the Wake of Poseidon, nor the dark dizziness of Crimson's technical pinnacle, Discipline. Instead, it sounds like Steely Dan mastered in "Volcanic" mode minus the AM Gold melodies. Mukai dresses the music to impress, but emasculates it in the process.

You Make Me Feel So Bad - Zazen Boys

Solitary songwriter though he may be, "You Make Me Feel So Bad" demonstrates how Number Girl's strength lay as much in performance as composition. The song opens on a serrated riff that recalls the punk noir of Public Image Ltd. or Number Girl's own Sappukei... and proceeds to go nowhere for three minutes. Had this been a real Number Girl track, Hisako's fiery fretwork and Ahito's machinegun drumming would have blown the song stratospheric about thirty seconds in. Instead, we're treated to a faux-soul falsetto that even Beck abandoned and one of the most pusillanimous guitar solos since your high school band. As predictable as the soft/LOUD dynamic may be, it's preferable to a song as flatlined as this. So much for the man who once ruled via volume alone.

Wanderlust - Toddle

So now we turn to Toddle, Tabuchi Hisako's post-Number Girl project. After three years of taking a backseat to bloodthirsty butchers, the quartet dropped their debut, I Dedicate D Chord, a couple of months ago. That it bests the whole bloodthirsty butchers catalogue is no suprise; Hisako has always been a more imaginative player than Yoshimura Hideki. But Toddle makes me think Number Girl was more matriarchal than only in name: Mukai may be male, but it sounds like Hisako's the one with the balls. There's more insouciant energy and slash-and-burn intensity packed into I Dedicate D Chord's thirty-nine minutes than in both Zazen Boys albums. Granted, Toddle's songs are several shades sunnier than her old bandmate's, but it's hard for Hisako to hide how much fun she's having. Toddle are superbly prepared to play the Breeders to Number Girl's (very self conscious) Pixies.

Hey, maybe with a little luck, in ten years, Mukai will pull his head out of his ass and we'll get a reunion, too.

Mending the Breach

Blame - Soul Coughing

I owe this to Courtney. Over four months ago, she tagged me for a meme, entitled "5 Things". In my state of eternal awareness, I completely missed the memo and never fulfilled my duty. Today, I make reparations.

Ten Years Ago: I was in eighth grade. Nine Inch Nails were my favourite band and I had hair halfway down my back. I was, by all accounts, happy.

Five Years Ago: I was back in Baltimore after a summer spent helping my family move to Halifax. Mr. Bungle was my favourite band, my roommate was brilliant and funny, and I was working as a tour manager. I was, by most accounts, happy.

One Year Ago: Still in Baltimore, turnover had made me the senior staff member at a record store after only nine months. My Bloody Valentine were my obsession du jour, I hadn't had a haircut in six months, and my wife was looking for a job in Japan. I was, in the most illusory of senses, happy.

Five Yummy Things:
Dark chocolate
Spicy tuna maki
Sponge cake
Shabu shabu
My homemade chili

Five Songs I Know By Heart:
"Cigarette Girl From the Future" by Beauty Pill
"The Passenger" by Iggy Pop
"Cut Your Hair" by Pavement
"Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond
"St. Louise Is Listening" by Soul Coughing

Five Things I Would Do With a Lot of Money:
Donate a huge wack of it to the Red Cross
Buy a house just so I could have a soundproof room for my work
Buy this guitar
Spend a year girdling the globe with Th' Wife
Stop worrying

Five Places I Would Love to Escape To:
Canada (cross-country road trip... again)
Hokkaido
Northern France
Somewhere in England
Cold Lake, Alberta, circa 1988

Five Things I Would Never Wear:
A hemp necklace
A white belt
Custom-made hipster gear
Angular glasses frames
Anything that cost me more than a CD

Five Favourite TV Shows:
24
The Simpsons
Matthew's Best Hit TV
Whatever Japanese game show is on
...uh, that's it. I don't watch a lot of TV.

Five Things I Enjoy Doing:
Finishing writing a song
Finding a band that genuinely qualifies as different
Reading social & political commentary
Resigning myself to panic as a means of motivation
Having breakfast on weekends with my wife

Five Favourite Toys:
My computer
My guitar
My little orange monster
My obstinately obsolete portable CD player
My larynx

Et ca suffcit pour maintenant. Since I try my best to steer clear of the self-indulgence inherent in this format, I will refrain from tagging anyone else. But this is the least I can do for Courtney.

Also, check out the collective forum of musical ponderance known as Musical Chairs. They've always got something fun on the table.

Postscript:: I'd also like to dedicate the song posted above ("Blame" by Soul Coughing) to the Bush Administration and their Neocon kindred. You reap what you sow, you degenerates.

Happy Hallowe'en

13 scary songs to score your night...


Release the Bats (Live) - The Birthday Party

TV Set - The Cramps

Beetlejuice - Danny Elfman

Mansion - The Fall

Spectra Sonic Sound - The Nation of Ulysses

Cypress Ghost - The Giraffes

Little Demon - Screamin' Jay Hawkins

Nosferatu Man - Slint

Night Goat - The Melvins

I'm Deranged (Reprise) - David Bowie

Dracula's Wedding - Andre "Ice Cold" 3000 feat. Kelis

Monsters In the Parasol - Queens Of the Stone Age

The Living End - The Jesus and Mary Chain


Toilet paper a tree for me!

Respect Is Due

Everyone I Went To High School With Is Dead - Mr. Bungle

An Open Letter to Status Ain't Hood:

This kind of conversation always starts with a confession of sin. First, please excuse my tardy reply to the post in question; I was caught in traffic in Hanoi at the time. Second, I'll admit to having taken a cheap shot or two at you in the past, and yes, your blog does not so much inform as remind me of all the bullshit in the American underground that I'm glad to have escaped. I do not mean to reduce your writing to aversion therapy. That's just how it serves me.

And I'll confess that I think southern hip-hop is some of the dumbest, irredeemably retarded music on the planet. (Don't think it's a genre thing, it's a Lowest Common Denominator thing: I think hardcore punk is analogously atavistic.) I also will say that, in late August, a friend and I guessed that you would be the Pitchfork writer who would review Cage's Hell's Winter, and that you would give it exactly an 8.3 out of a confused combination of indie-hop snobbery, collegiate overanalysis, and half-hearted wagon-hitching.

But I give credit when it`s due, my friend, and you will forever hold a place in my heart as Really Tall Guy who used to frequent the record store where I worked in Charles Village. And so, given that you seem to be the ONLY other music geek on the planet who openly criticizes Animal Collective, I salute you!

My heart swelled with joy as I read your dissection of their amoebic mass of echoing, mealy-mouthed, flaccid folk-rock. Finally, a kindred spirit unbowed by an excessive amount of reverb and delay! Someone else who says, "So what?", to facile chord changes and druggy Mother Goose imagery! Right on, fuck that! I understand that the hippie-cum-hipster schtick is a pastoral take on K Records' reactionary anti-machismo. But honestly, escapism has never sat well with me because it's willfully ignorant and solipsistic. I've always preferred bands who wanted to be my life than my fantasy.

At one point, you note that the Animal Collective guys didn't participate in Baltimore's ever-churning underground. "It was more about the back porch," claims Dave Portner. Okay, full disclosure: I went to high school with three of these four guys. It was a wealthy private school in a white suburb, hermetically protected from the more muddled culture of Baltimore City by a hundred acre wood. I was one of the school's charity cases and graduated with an unrepentent loathing for the rich. If Misters Portner, Weitz, Dibb, and Lennox relish the rural life, it's because they want to return to the womb of student life in a tree-sheltered prep school; it's because they can't confront the incoming crowds and chaos of daily life among other people. (They admit as much in their recent City Paper interview.) In high school, time spent away from the city was not out of preference for something as quaint and quietly reflective as "the back porch". It was because most of these spoiled brats were honestly afraid to enter a city inhabited by blacks and the working class.

Lest I be slapped with a libel suit, I am not asserting that the men of Le Collective Animale are scared of black people. But they did grow up in an environment that was stiflingly insular and naval-gazing. (One of "progressive" education's worse points is that it fosters the false notion that We Are All Special.) And so, dear Tom, there is a damn good reason you feel estranged from this music: it was born estranged from you and everyone else.

Gambate,
Seb

Losing My Edge, Pt. 1: Macrocosm

Top: Old Hotness the Fall; Above: New & Busted Art Brut


Tuning out is a side effect of living in a country whose language you don't speak. Since moving to Tokyo, I've become estranged from pop culture. The last movie I saw in theatres was The Life Aquatic; the last CD I purchased was Fantomas' Suspended Animation, an album well-known only to readers of the obtuse monthly tome The Wire. I now engage the entertainment industry the way parents do via their teenage children: from a distance, with a mix of bemusement and slight disgust at the parade of misguided attention-seekers. It's mildly entertaining but hardly worth investing much time or energy in.

And I'm not even out of my early twenties. Why bitch and moan as though I'm already old and grey? Why come down on what the kids are doing? Why regard the slang-slathered blatherings of musical otaku with the same mix of pity and piss-take that Triumph regards Star Wars fans?

Because it's bullshit, man. Let's not kid ourselves into thinking that the music industry/indie-stry is enjoying some new synergystic convergence of creative capacities when in fact it's mediocre pablum that offers nothing but a Pro Tooled repackaging of older (and better) ideas. Entrance is minstrelsy in Syd Barrett's chiffon scarf, Charles Manson beat Devendra Banhart to the punch by almost forty years, why listen to Louis XIV if you already own Electric Warrior, every band that's awarded above an 8.5 by Pitchfork qualifies as a Talking Heads tribute act, and don't even get me started on the ersatz twee escapism of fucking Animal Collective.

Now, I'm not didactic or conservative enough to believe there is no worthwhile music being made these days. Nonsense! But more often than not, the modern music that I get genuinely excited about is not what is being ushered into the cannon by the rest of society, mainstream or otherwise.

So I'm left railing against pretenders to the throne who steal the sounds of superior bands who I was too young to enjoy the first time around. Let us examine, for example, Art Brut:

18,000 Lira - Art Brut

Here's a band that has garnered the attention of the Underground Party organs with their recent debut, Bang Bang Rock 'N' Roll. The London band specializes in the spartan, snotty rock birthed by 1970s proto-punk bands like the Modern Lovers. Come to think of it, this sounds identical to the Modern Lovers. But then, that'd be asking too much that a band who gallingly call themselves "Outsider Art" to be, uh, not derivative, eh?

But it's not bad music. Bang Bang Rock 'N' Roll lives up to its name as a solid, unadorned, wham-bam-thank-you-Ma'am album; the proof is in songs like the minute-long romp of "18,000 Lira". A panicked narrative about a botched bank job, it's clever without being smart, but I can't help but notice the guitar riff's resemblence to a much older song:

Mere Pseud. Mag Ed. - The Fall

Backed by a dual-drummer batterie and Beefheart-class guitar butchery, Mark E. Smith unleashes one of his most scathing social critiques, perfectly skewering the press poseurs who cast themselves as prophets of the music world. A classic track from a classic album, the song kicks and flails so fiercely that it threatens to unravel at any moment, and yet the band never loses its locked step. This is true Raw Art, all the more impressive when considering the cultural climate at the time.

Lest this plummet into too much pining for post-punk, let's check back in with the Fall a full twenty-one years later when they excavated the song during a Peel Session:

Mere Pseud. Mag Ed. (Peel Session, March 13 2003) - The Fall

And the prosecution rests. To this day, Smith & Co. play with a rancor and conviction that makes other bands twenty years younger than Smith sound like self-indulgent exercises in irony and nostalgia. It's not a new offense for a band to build a career by aping the Greats of Days Gone By, but that's just a bad idea when said Greats are alive and kicking, showing these weak little whippersnappers how it's done. I doubt anyone ever suspected that the Fall would one day have members younger than the group itself, but why stop when all the young dudes have failed to render Old Man Smith obsolete?

Hatin'

Haters - Mu

Perhaps I'm being too harsh. Or perhaps I'm just sick of white twentysomethings co-opting a craze that sprang from a source they wouldn't be caught dead in. I'm taking bets right now on how high the medical bill would be for any white-belted W.A.S.P. who actually tried getting down in a REAL Baltimore Club joint.

But regardless, a quick note to all the bloggers who are currently grinding on Baltimore Club's jock: name-dropping Rod Lee like you know something about B-More Club is equivalent to name-dropping Fugazi like you know something about harDCore. Give it a rest.

Oh! The places I go!

"Roam the World" - The Billy Nayer Show

So th' Wife and I are off to the sporadically sunny climes and French Colonial-styled chaos of Hanoi for the next while, not that the two of you who actually read this claptrap will notice a lack of new posts. I promise to be better about regular updates in the future. In the meantime, please enjoy the Official Theme Song of me 'n' my better half, a raucous and reckless little ditty by the most appallingly underappreciated band from NYC, the Billy Nayer Show (of The American Astronaut fame). I've posted on them before, but a mention on a music blog does not stem the seemingly endless stream of evocative, smirkingly emotional, instrumentally inventive, topically scattershot and surreal songs from this band of renaissance men. This tune is from their 2004 ode to bonin', Rabbit.

Et maintenant, je m'en vais. Peace out.

Who are the Brain Police?

If you don't recognize this picture, go Google "HUAC"

Submitted for your approval and to stoke your paranoia...

"A Kid Who Tells On Another Kid's A Dead Kid"
By the Nation of Ulysses

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but Aaron Swartz did the research on some deja vu he experienced while watching Bill O'Reilly and produced this: a side-by-side comparison of chillingly similar quotes from Sen. Joe McCarthy and O'Reilly. It's a simple subsitution cipher - swap the word "communist" with "terrorist" and voila! Double-digit IQs are quaking in their boots across the country, dreading the treasonous dogs gnawing at their nation's soul.

Which raises the question of who is more morally despicable: the fearmonger who engaged in a witchhunt out of political ambition, or the disseminator of disinformation who does so becomes it earns him big bucks in the ratings game?

R.I.D.N.O.U.