i hate the sound of guitars

artist of the week: Stripmall Architecture

artist of the week: The Indelicates

artist of the week: Pest 5000

Stripmall Architecture and back

A friend on Twitter mentioned the new Stripmall Architecture single Radium Girls. I liked the title — reminded me of OMD’s “Tesla Girls” — so I listened. Liked what I heard, bought it, and more. Stripmall Architecture are one of those bands centered around a male multi-talented instrumentalist and a female singer, in this case Rebecca and Ryan Coseboom. I hate to quote a band’s own press, but the artists they liken themselves to, The Cocteau Twins and Sigur Ros, are unusually useful signposts. Stripmall Architecture balance atmosphere and urgency — it’s evident that a lot of care goes into the recording, arrangement, and production of their work; there’s ear-candy a-plenty — but it doesn’t feel too mannered or too polite. Some of the guitar work, in fact, is downright rude (and that’s praise).

I thought I’d encountered the Coseboom’s previous outfit, Halou, when I was exploring trip-hop artists, which seems plausible, except that if I did, I didn’t listen to it much, which seems unlikely. It’s more dance- and less rock-oriented than Stripmall Architecture, reminded me a bit of Splashdown (and that’s no condemnation).

The Indelicates and sideways

It’s been a while since I’ve listened to Luke Haines’ projects The Auteurs or Black Box Recorder, so probably The Indelicates would remind me less of either band than I think. The Indelicates have a fairly wide stylistic range, sometimes sedate, sometimes pretty rockin’, but they seem very British whether Simon Indelicate or Julia Indelicate (the latter formerly of The Pipettes) is singing. They also write a good bit about music itself, and they’re not afraid of the grandiose. “If Jeff Buckley Had Lived” is much better than any song with such an unwieldy title should be, like something The Waterboys’ Mike Scott might have penned on one of his very best days. I wanted to hate “The Last Significant Statement to Be Made in Rock’n'Roll” on the basis of its title, but it’s pretty catchy (and it doesn’t hurt that Simon Indelicate really makes the most of his vocal resemblance to Jon Langford on the track).

That title reminded me of My Favorite, another act I loved despite/maybe even because of their pomposity and tendency to write pop music about pop music. In fact, I could have sworn My Favorite once called a song “The Last Great New Wave Song.” I can’t substantiate this claim unless it was released on a 45 I’ve grievously misfiled, but they could have written a song with that title, even if they actually didn’t.

Turns out most of My Favorite has re-coalesced as a new outfit, The Secret History (danger:MySpace). Perhaps knowing that Mick Ronson’s daughter Lisa is one of the singers colors the way I hear the music, but I like to think that having Lisa in the band inspired guitarist Darren Amadio to play riffs that evoke her dad a bit more than he used to in My Favorite. In any case, sounding a bit more like Mott the Hoople* isn’t likely to lessen any act’s endearment to me. And one of The Secret History’s songs has the line “This! Is! The end of music” as a vocal hook, and you could slot it right next to “The Last Significant Statement to Be Made in Rock’n'Roll” on a mixtape with no problem.

Both The Indelicates and The Secret History have new albums due imminently, and I’m even now struggling to rein in my expectations.

Pest 5000 and forward

Listening to Interabang (or, if you prefer, (In-ter/a-bang/) (?!)) I was struck by two thoughts. First, it sounds like a record that could have been released last week as much as one from 1996. It’s co-ed vocalled music that that’s a little too harmonically unruly to be quintessential indie pop, but not texturally abrasive enough to be indie rock, and there’s a lot more of that around now than there was then; I think maybe the Internet/quasi-hobbyist model of releasing/distributing/finding music is kinder to quirky artists than the college radio model. Although Pest 5000 were heavily hyped by CMJ, so I’m probably full of it.

The second thought was surprise that I never put more effort into finding out what became of Pest 5000’s members. Then I played Palimpsests and remembered why: over-long, self-indulgent, deliberately listener unfriendly (like some of The Swirlies’ least-approachable and most baked-sounding releases) it is not an album that left me screaming for more. Still, it’s probably the easiest way to hear “Fault,” perhaps the best Ed’s Redeeming Qualities song that Ed’s Redeeming Qualities never wrote. And it’s much easier to trace band lineages with the modern Internet at one’s disposal.

Bassist/vocalist Patti Schmidt is now a Canadian radio personality; she was a co-founder of the Ta-Da record label which released an eponymous album by Nanobot Auxiliary Ballet, featuring Schmidt and Pest 5000’s Kevin Komoda. It’s blippy bloopy jittery stuff; much less pop than Interabang, but much more focused and coherent than Palimpsests.

Violinist/vocalist Geneviève Heistek played in Sackville, which explored territory somewhere between slowcore and alt-country, with a bit of outside seasoning. They seem like the sort of band I should have been listening to since their inception, but now I have to play catch-up. Heistek now plays in Hangedup, a violin and percussion centered duo with Sackville’s Eric Craven. I’m not sure if it’s best described as post-rock, jazz, or what. A mutant version of New Order’s “Blue Monday” is the most accessible introduction (on their self-titled release). Interesting stuff I need to spend more time with.

* Even if Ronson wasn’t technically in Mott the Hoople long enough to matter

artist of the week: Holden

artist of the week: These are Powers

artist of the week: Johnny Foreigner

artist of the week: Gay for Johnny Depp

Case in point why I don’t even try to come up with year’s best lists anymore — last week I discovered 4 artists with albums last year that could have been contenders.

Holden: A tiny bit of noise
I first heard Holden’s “Où sont vos bras, monsieur?” (from last year’s Fantomatisme) on shuffle, and at first I thought it was Julie Doiron: Armelle Pioline’s voice has a similar timbre and tentative delivery. After a minute or so, drums creep in, accompanied by hisses and hums building to a (gentle) crescendo. It’s a much milder version of the sort of tricks that Mogwai applied to such great effect on Young Team. Holden clearly knew they were on to something with this, because they built to the crescendo twice in the same song, which didn’t stop me from listening to it four times in a row before I took my iPod off shuffle to hear the whole album straight through. “Où sont vos bras, monsieur?” is probably still my favorite song, but the record is a strong, consistent listen — pretty, pleasant, but with little dollops of noise here and there to prevent it from being saccharine or snoozy.

…I heard Fantomatisme by illegal means and it doesn’t seem easy to purchase in the US, but I did buy previous releases Chevrotine and Pedrolira; they’re swell, too.

Link: Holden (MySpace).

These are Powers: More noise
These are Powers remind me a lot of Suicide. Dual vocalists Pat Noecker and
Anna Barie both have somewhat yelpy deliveries, and Bill Salas provides a bed of mostly electronic and chilly percussion. But These are Powers also offer lots of noisy guitar stabs (while still keeping things spacious, if not quite minimalist), and what I can decipher of the lyrics seems a little more Dada and a little less obvious than Suicide’s). Suicide is of course hugely influential in a way These are Powers are unlikely to ever be, but I find These are Powers more fun to listen to.

Link: These are Powers (MySpace) Several early recordings are available from Pukekos.org.

Johnny Foreigner: Even more noise
Johnny Foreigner’s songs often sound like two or three sparer songs played simultaneously. The coed vocals mix sweet harmonies, histronic oversinging, and unison screams, often with overlapping or interlocking parts. The tunes shift texture and mood abruptly — they may establish a hook, but it rarely, if ever, overstays its welcome. This also describes Los Campesinos! pretty well, and Johnny Foreigner sounds enough like Los Campesinos! that I hope it’s a result of being influenced by some of the same bands than a deliberate attempt to jump another band’s wagon. But songs like “Salt, Peppa and Spinderalla” (probably the one you should hear if you’re only going to hear one Johnny Foreigner song) and “Choose Yr Side and Shut Up” from last year’s Grace and the Bigger Picture are good enough that I really don’t care, if these are just rip-offs, they’re damned good ones. Also, Johnny Foreigner sounds like they loved Superchunk more than Los Campesinos did — more nasty guitar, less snyths, some faster tempos — which, unsurprisingly, I’m completely fine with.

If you’re willing trust Music Glue with an email address, you can get download a 3-song EP from the Johnny Foreigner Band website.

Gay for Johnny Depp: A fuckload of noise
I was going to lead with some hyperbole, like “Gay for Johnny Depp might be the most abrasive band I’ve ever heard that work in song form”* But I pulled out some Pg.99 and Drowningman for comparison, and they’re also both pretty fucking brutal. But often I’ll go see some extreme noise terror band and the members will all be soft-spoken vegetarians whose day jobs involve disadvantaged schoolkids or something like that. That could be true of Gay for Johnny Depp too, I dunno. But Gay for Johnny Depp strikes me as genuinely scary in a way many metal bands aspire to, but miss. Their lyrics play with uncomfortable places like the border between homoeroticism and homophobia, and the line between patriotism and sedition. There are a few gaps in the onslaught, a few lines sung rather than screamed, some moments approaching melodic hookiness (and that demonstrate significant chopsiness), and song titles at least, that suggest a sense of humor (e.g., “Godspeed You Black Mogwai”). Mostly this is a punishing exercise of remarkable consistency and density. If this sounds like the kind of thing you like, you’ll probably like it a lot.

You can download a few songs from Gay For Johnny Depp’s website.

* as opposed to Metal Machine Music or Aube or something like that.

artist of the week: The Organ

Quick-trip to self-referential land: My post on Sky Larkin convinces Terri to give them a listen; she responds that they remind her most of The Organ*, so I have to listen to them.

The Organ sound more self-consciously retro to me than Sky Larkin — I totally get why they draw comparisons to Joy Division and The Cure (although supposedly the (young) band members never heard those bands until reviewers started citing them as influences … Christ, I’m old.) But, y’know, I like The Cure and Joy Division. And “Don’t Be Angry,” from their final release Thieves is singularly lovely.

* For some reason, it’s almost impossible for me to keep this band’s name in my head. I keep wanting to call them The Orchard or The Orchid or almost anything else.

How I learned to stop worrying and love Auto-Tune

• Not to imply that Auto-Tune is “the bomb.” Overuse of Auto-Tune is a scourge we have to learn to live with somehow. Maybe if we all pretend we’re all Peter Sellers it will help.
• All of this music was new to me in 2009. Most, but not all, of it was also new to the world in 2009. Not claiming it’s the “best” of anything; more about representing what I actually listened to.*
• 2009 was the year of Hussalonia. On average, I listened to more than one Hussalonia song every day — and I didn’t even start until September
• Considering I’m on record as saying the perfect length for a pop song is 90 seconds, there’s a lot of long, slowly unfolding songs on here. Dunno what’s up with that. Dunno what’s up with all the smutty disco, either.
• In 2 songs the word “Away” on two high notes hangs and fades, kinda like in Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” Coincidence? Or a gimmick to which I’m unusually susceptible?
• At my dayjob we worry a lot about “single points of failure” — if one particular computer crashing will make really bad things happen, we work to fix it. 2009’s single point of failure award goes to Beat The Indie Drum. Without this website I might not have heard Hussalonia, The Invisible Cities, MC Lars, or The Broken Family Band. (Continued props to Bradley’s Almanac, WMBR, loud-fans, and many other sources for turning me on to lots of good music, too.)
• I know it’s too darn long. You should see the list of stuff I couldn’t find room for (Sian Alice Group, Venice is Sinking, Pony Up!, Chris Richards and the Subtractions… and so many more).
• This is a suggested listening sequence, not a ranking.
• There’s f-words and s-words and other content that may not be appropriate for young listeners.
• If you control the rights to anything here and want it removed, please ask.

the mix

Part 1

1. “Ready to Lose,” Husslonia, Matt Barber Hussalonia (2007)
2. “Energy Shortage,” New Grenada, Energy Shortage (2008)
3. “Freshman Thesis,” Thee More Shallows, More Deep Cuts (2005)
4. “Satellite Mind,” Metric, Fantasies
5. “This is Fullerton,” His Hideous Heart, Only the Earth Can Make a Tree (2008)
6. “This Isn’t It,” Giant Drag, Hearts and Unicorns (2005)
7. “Cities Need a Subway,” Hello Dragon, Cities Need a Subway
8. “D.I.A.L.O,” John Vanderslice, Romanian Names
9. “Corpus Callosum,” The Invisible Cities, Houses Shine Like Teeth
10. “Meet Me on the Tarmac,” Love is Chemicals, Song of the Summer Youth Brigade (2008)
11. “All the Things You’ve Been Missing,” The Beatings, Late Season Kids
12. “Blank Passports,” Hallelujah the Hills, Colonial Drones
13. “Youth Map,” Smokers Die Younger, Smokers Die Younger
14. “The Only Ones,” The Sounds, Crossing the Rubicon
15. “Mystery Train,” The Cinch, Shake It If You Got It (2005)
16. “Spontaneous Combustion,” Nanobots, Live In Stereo (2008)
17. “Comme Ci Comme Ca,” Terry Poison, Terry Poison
18. “Hear It in the Cans,” We Have Band, Hear It in the Cans
19. “No Logo,” MC Lars, This Gigantic Robot Kills
20. “Little Tigers,” Tune-Yards, Bird Brains
21. “Single Ladies,” Pomplamoose, Single Ladies

Part 2

1. “The End,” Liechtenstein, Survival Strategies in a Modern World
2. “We Know Martha Webber,” Now, Now Every Children, Cars
3. “St. Albans,” The Broken Family Band, Please and Thank You
4. “Evergreen,” I Was Totally Destroying It, Horror Vacui
5. “Collision Theory,” Eux Autres, Cold City (2007)
6. “5 Metres Apart,” Stricken City, Songs About People I Know
7. “Proof on Tape,” Apollo Ghosts, Hastings Sunrise
8. “Got to Stop,” Pants Yell!, Received Pronunciation
9. “Purity Test,” Franklin Bruno, Local Currency
10. “Sudden Oak Death,” The Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice, Moon Colony Bloodbath
11. “Witches Vs. Wolves,” S-S-S-Spectres, S-S-S-Spectres (2007)
12. “See the Enemy,” Andrew Bird, Fitz and the Dizzyspells
13. “Sick Couple,” My Toys Like Me, Where We Are
14. “Transparence,” Asobi Seksu, Simple Mental Math
15. “Forest,” Kit, Broken Voyage (2007)
16. “Void,” T.I.T.S., Second Base
17. “Coeur Synthetique,” Nancy Fortune, Crystallized
18. “Speed,” Quad Throw Salchow, Speed
19. “Jump,” The Cast of Glee, Glee: The Music, Volume 2
20. “For Those About to Rock I Ignore You,” Hussalonia, Emile Berliner Hussalonia (2007)
21. “Mom and Dad Play Rock’n'Roll,” Ben Krieger, Class Dismissed (2008)

*There’s a teeny tiny bit of weight against records you don’t need me to tell you about (Phoenix, Wilco, Neco Case, The XX, etc.) and towards records I heard late in the year but expect to listen to a lot in early 2010.

Artists of the week: Theoretical Girl, Veda Hille

Theoretical Girl did an avent calendar thing on the theoretical girl blog, offering up a mix of live tracks, alternate versions, and covers of folks from Joni Mitchell to Tokyo Police Club. Well worth the time it took to persuade the file hosting service to let me download the tracks.

…and Veda Hille also offered up a handful of songs at advent time. The teaser for an upcoming 2010 release is particularly fine.

Album of the week: Tokyo Police Club, Elephant Shell

Speaking of Tokyo Police Club, Theoretical Girl’s lovely version of “Nursery, Academy” inspired me to revisit Elephant Shell, the album where it originally appeared. When I first heard it I was really disappointed — but now I can’t imagine why I had that reaction.

Artist of the Week: Sky Larkin

Late with this week’s post in part because I find Sky Larkin tricky to describe. Singer Katie Harkin’s voice reminds me a lot of Land of Talk’s Lizzie Powell, which is the sort of comparison I hate. Perhaps more usefully, both bands are guitar/bass/drum indie rock trios. Beyond that, I get a little stuck. Sky Larkin is a little too spiky to be classified as power pop, but not as jittery as, say, Los Campesinos! or The Sugarcubes. It sounds a little bit like a lot of things, and not slavishly like any one thing in particular — which is pretty much how I like it.

For those keeping score, this is yet another find I owe to Bradley’s Almanac.

Artist of the Week: Radon

I never heard Radon in the twentieth century, but I fell in love with their 2006 reunion effort Metric Buttloads of Rock!, largely on the strength of “Minneapolis,” a rough-edged but tuneful ode to the likes of The Replacements (explicitly mentioned in the lyric) and Hüsker Dü (explicitly referenced by the guitar sound).

Not sure why I never followed Radon back to their prior releases 28 and the odds-and-ends/live compilation We Bare All. But I’ve rectified the problem now.

artists of the week: 13ghosts, masshysteri, the vicious, gorilla angreb

My friend Joe has been lately been mentioning some unjustly overlooked best-of-decade candidates. His first pick was 13ghost’s Cicada. After only a spin and a half, I’m not prepared to say “best of decade,” but it deserves more attention for sure, and I might eventually decide it is on the short list. Moody, somewhat rootsy, mostly slow, but still sometimes rockin’, calls to mind the likes of Sparklehorse and Centro-matic.

If Ted Leo told me to jump off a bridge, would I do it? That remains to be seen, but if he calls Masshysteri’s Vår Del Av Stan the best punk record of a recent year, I’ll go listen to it. If I agree with Mr. Leo that it’s pretty awesome, I’ll take steps to purchase it so the band and the label get some recompense, even if it’s not super-easy, and I’ll backtrack along Masshysteri’s family tree at least as far as The Vicious and Gorilla Angreb.

So as far as the bridge thing goes, let’s just hope Ted Leo doesn’t ask me to jump off one unless there’s a pretty good reason.

Artist of the Week: Arctic Monkeys

On my first trip through Humbug I had the impression that Arctic Monkeys had done an about-face: laddish, spastic bursts like “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor,” were traded for slower, moodier, much more subtle (and, to me, interesting) compositions that evoke Spoon and Sparklehorse (while somehow remaining distinctly British). Revisiting the catalogue reveals that this is a little unfair — Humbug isn’t a reversal as much as a continuation of explorations begun with the band’s sophomore release, Favourite Worst Nightmare, which deserves more spins than I gave it when it was new. And the debut release is probably a little brainier than I was crediting it with being.

But still: I like Humbug a lot. Probably somewhere in the top 50 of 2009, if not near the very top, and almost certainly my favorite Arctic Monkeys release to date.

Artist of the Week: Fugazi

I listened to Chunklet’s entire 45-minute assemblage of Fugazi stage patter. It seems to be drawn mostly from the Fugazi shows available to download from archive.org, but it has most of the classic bits, wrapping up, of course, with “ice cream-eating motherfucker.”

Things that it made me think:

• Fugazi has long been dogged by the notion that the band’s music is secondary to the band’s ethos and/or politics. The band is partly to blame for this, particularly thanks to MacKaye’s longstanding (and, I think, disingenuous) insistence that he’s a “communicator” not a “musician.” But I don’t think audiences would have put up with the most egregious Fugazi stage harangues if they hadn’t been one of the best touring bands on the planet. And although the intensity of their performances had something to do with that, ultimately I think the quality of the songwriting was much more important.
• In a perverse way, by singling out stage-divers and moshers, Fugazi rewarded the behavior they were trying to curtail. I bet there were a lot of people going around the day after a Fugazi show proud that MacKaye or Picciotto had called them an “asshole.”
• There’s very little music in the patter assemblage, but you do hear Fugazi tune up a lot, and they don’t stray much from standard tuning. And man, did listening to them talk ever make we want to hear them play.

For boring reasons, I spent most of the week isolated from my actual Fugazi compact discs, so I spent the most of the week listening to most of the aforesaid recordings available from archive.org. From which I learned the following:

• Fugazi wasn’t a perfect performance unit. If you listen to enough live takes, you eventually hear a few things that actually qualify as mistakes.
• Even early on, they didn’t make mistakes often.

I’ve been seeing a lot of best of decade lists flying around lately, but it’s a teeny bit hard for me to take one seriously if it doesn’t have The Argument on it.