i hate the sound of guitars

The lead single from Please and Thank You manges to be simultaneously sweet, creepy, and poignant in a character portrait of uncommon economy. The song’s narrator is moving in with his sweetie. If we take him at his word, he’s literally drooling at the thought of a live-in friend-with-privileges, which is at least a little icky. But the enthusiasm he’s mustering for the new arrangement is touching. I don’t give the couple good odds, though: it’s not a great sign that he needs to “get [his] shit together” in order to “head out for some breakfast,” and it’s even more worrisome that he only really commits to the move in the shower, pondering his finances. I foresee him spending a lot of days on the couch too hungover to be employable, while his breadwinning partner’s resentment gradually simmers. But I hope I’m wrong.

“Salivating” was the first thing I heard from The Broken Family Band, but they’ve been around for a handful of years/albums, and I’m gradually exploring their back catalogue. They apparently started out as a sort of British take on Americana, with some identifiably country-ish traits, but now they’re producing straightforward rock with no particular genre signifiers. “Salivating,” with its bouncy bassline, simple-but-hooky verse riff, and energetically strummed chorus, sounds a little like a distant cousin of The Godfathers circa Birth, School, Work, Death.

Please and Thank You has several more strong songs, and a quarter of the way through 2009, it’s my current candidate for year’s best album.

At the moment you can listen to Salivating at The Broken Family Band’s official website.

Glasgow’s Nanobots sound pretty much like they could have fallen through a time warp from the very early 80’s — before New Wave got slick and commercial (or even sharply differentiated from punk). It makes perfect sense that they’ve been opening lately for the current edition of the Rezillos, and I didn’t need to hear the cover of “Uncontrollable Urge” that’s currently on the Nanobots MySpace page to discern their love for Devo.

The trick an unabashedly retro act needs to pull off is to craft songs worthy of the obvious influences. Nanobots deliver the goods with “Spontaneous Combustion.” It features an arresting, octave-hopping, staccato, guitar-masquerades-as-keyboard riff and outstandingly geeky (and hooky) co-ed call-and-response chorus (”No chemical/Spontaneous!/Accelerant/Spontaneous!”).

Nanobots have been active almost four years, but so far have left little recorded evidence — I’ve only tracked down a pair of (digital) singles. “Spontaneous Combustion” is only available in a live version on the one from Simbiotic Recordings that hints at, but doesn’t fully realize the song’s potential — the sound is a little murky and the performance is not quite as tight as you might expect from a studio recording. But Nanobots’ energy and enthusiasm carry the day, as far as I’m concerned, and if they can put together an album with a few more songs this good it will be a year’s best shortlist shoe-in.

If they make it to Boston (and I hope they do), they’d fit perfectly sandwiched on a bill between two Beantown acts: the similarly retro Miskatonic, and the similarly twitchy Ho-Ag.

I show no signs of getting tired of bands that worship at the temple of The Fall’s early days: ungainly lurch, quirky lyrics, atonal-but-strangely-catchy — I can’t get enough. S-S-S-Spectres’ “Witches vs. Wolves” might sound like a runner-up in a fake Fall album/song-title contest, but it made me say “what the heck?” in the its first few seconds, a lugubrious chant of “None will survive” punctuated by a solitary snare. From there it’s on to an unruly bassline and scritchy-scratchy guitar that eventually settles into a propulsive buzzsaw riff. The overlapping male/female vocals describe a witch/wolf conflict that’s perhaps both memetic (”engaged in a secret war/to become to the dominant metaphor,” which manages to sound kinda sexy) and literal (”we will win the day/we’re claiming victory/none will survive”). With its intro, a noisy bridge, and a coda section in addition to verses and choruses, it’s got almost enough textural shifts to fuel a prog epic, but it does all its damage in just a shade over 2 minutes. I can play it 3 or 4 times in a row before I want to move on.

You can check out “Witches vs. Wolves” at New York Night Train Recordings, and there are more links from there. S-S-S-Spectres EP Sea Potentia Divina is also available from eMusic and iTunes.

I’m way late to the party with this one. All the hip Brooklyn music blogs cooed over this back in 2007, and the band has already broken up. Sigh.

I have gone all completist about S-S-S-Spectres, and there’s evidence on the Internets that people have listened to tracks — notably “Magic Mountain Reference” and “Your Hands Are Missing Mine” — that I haven’t yet been able to track down. If you can help me listen to those, please get in touch.

1. Parts & Labor
2. The Airfields
   This indie-pop outfit came to my attention via the Take the Pills years-best list, in which I thought their track was a stand-out. Their last.fm bio starts, “We’d like to tell you that we write our songs in an abandoned airplane hangar, just to account for all the echoing, but that would be very untrue and a little fanciful,” which was basicallly enough for me to order their disc on the spot. It turns out I like their 2007 EP Laneways a smidge more than the 2008 full-length Up All Night, because the former features a little more unruly guitar. Spiffy stuff all around, though. I’m working on my own year’s best mix, and “Never See You Smile” is a definite contender. The graphic design is really nice, too.
3. Deerhunter
   Finally got to spinning Weird Era Cont the bonus disc that accompanies Microcastle. I love the story behind this recording — the album was leaked online early, the band was frustrated, and retaliated by doubling the volume of the release.; many critics proclaimed the thrown-together second disc the stronger of the two. Me, I liked ‘em both okay, and will give both more attention, but at first blush, nothing on either disc grabs me like “Flourescent Grey” did.
4. Wire
5. Los Campesinos!
   I was just thinking, all the new bands I love are either from Scotland or Canada. Woops, forgot Wales! This Welsh outfit released two full-length albums in 2008, posing another minor year’s-best dilemma. I think the debut Hold on, Youngster is a tiny bit stronger than follow-up We are Beautiful, We are Doomed, but my actual favorite song is on the second release. A good problem to have.
6. Joel Plaskett Emergency
   I’m having fun digging into the catalog from the former frontman of Thrush Hermit. Still looking for a song that hits me like “True Patriot Love,” but I will buy records as good as Ashtray Rock as long as he keeps putting them out. I would especially commend this one to all my friends who love Tommy Womack. (Ashtray Rock is kind of a concept album, but not in a get-in-your-face-about-it way. Also the second disc of the week with packaging/art that deserves special mention.)
7. Times New Viking
8. Deerhoof
   I wish I liked Offend Maggie a little better, but, so far, I don’t. Not that it’s bad, it’s just not amazing. Needs more time to sink in, maybe. It will get it.
8. Fifty Foot Spiders
   This Copenhagen-based act mixes familiar elements — mostly post-punk and shoegaze — but the result is surprisingly cohesive and fresh.
10. Cloud Cult
    Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) is the album this year that I love despite it being pretentious. What I’m saying is, if you’re going to write songs with titles like “Story of the Grandson of Jesus” you better put ‘em on an record with a whole lot of good hooks.
10. Hello Saferide
    It’s like a wrote out a set of instructions for making an indie pop record I’d find utterly irresistable for Hello Saferide leader Annika Norlin, and she followed them to the letter. More Modern Short Stories from Hello Saferide is a very late (to my ears) but strong contender for a slot on the 2008 year’s best list.
10. Love is All
    On one hand Love is All seem like one of the most slavish and narrowly-focused imitators of early post-punk — their evocation of X-Ray Specs is specific enough to feature demented saxophone bleats. Josephine Olausson’s twitchy delivery is also reminiscent of Sue Tompkins’s singing in the more recent Life Without Buildings. Several of Love is All’s members were in indie-pop/twee Girlfrendo, a very color-within-the-lines sort of outfit. The radical shift in sound provides circumstantial evidence for cynical band-wagon jumping. But on the other hand, they’re doing it so well. And many of the lyrics on A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night are pretty great.
10. P.K. 14
    Here’s a thing I’m a sucker for: a previously noisy punk band suddenly expands its range of textures, tempos, and/or dynamics. This describes several of my very favorite records of the last decade or so, like Fugazi’s The Argument, Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You and Blonde Redhead’s Melody of Certain Damged Lemons. P.K. 14’s City Weather Sailing doesn’t exactly fit the pattern — for one thing, they weren’t all that noisy to start with. But I still like it a lot. (I originally learned about P.K.14 from the very fine Look Directly into the Sun: China Pop 2007 compilation, which inspired me to check out full albums from several of other the featured artists, notably China Dub Soundsystem, Queen Sea Big Shark, and Hang on the Box.)
10. These New Puritans
    What if The Fall had formed in 2006 instead of 1976? Instead of emerging in the context of punk’s first wave, they would arise in the thick of post-punk/new wave revivalism. They’d still be cantankerous and spiky, the lyrics would be still weird with some chant-like repetition and sung in not overly pretty fashion. Maybe they’d be a tiny bit funkier. In other words, they might sound a hell of a lot like These New Puritans.

64 artists, 432 tracks.

1. The Capstan Shafts
2. Jilted John
3. Transistor Transistor
4. Theoretical Girl
4. Ult Cult

5 artists, 27 tracks — holiday week = not so much playing music.

1. The Wedding Present
2. Momus
   Over at his (warning: nsfw images) Click Opera site, Momus has been posting high-quality MP3 of all the songs from the albums he recorded for the Creation label, with interesting notes on each track. In general he thinks his 80’s work holds up a little better than I do, which doesn’t mean I’m not happy to hear the records I never heard before.
3. The Deathray Davies
3. The Hummingbirds
5. The Cat’s Miaow
7. Seely
7. Sleepyhead
9. 18th Dye
9. The Capstan Shafts
9. The Ebb and Flow
9. The Manhattan Love Suicides
9. Mark Templeton

164 artists, 327 tracks.

1. The Capstan Shafts
   I was just thinking, “Dang, there’ve only been two releases from Dean Edward Wells (a.k.a. The Capstan Shafts) so far this year,” so I went to see if anything was in the works. Sure enough, the short version of Cretin Flowers is available at archive.org, which provides something to listen to while I wait for the long playing version to arrive. Nice.
2. Hello Saferide
   More sweet melodies and barbed lyrics, just the way I like ‘em. I gather Hello Saferide started as a one-woman project, and perhaps it still is, but the delish electric guitar work on the new More Modern Stories from… sounds much more like a rock band than the more acoustic, but still spiffy Introducing…, both of which are new to me, and which I fear presage an effort to track down obscure singles and EPs.
3. Made Out of Babies
   Thorny, posture-free metal-core with sometimes shrieked, sometimes sung, generally terrific vocals from Julie Christmas. The Ruiner is their best yet.
4. Julie Ocean
   Yummy indie power-pop from veteran DC sceneters. Of the many bands these guys used to be in (Severin, Velocity Girl, Swiz, Glo Worms…) guitarist/vocalist Jim Spellman’s time in The High Back Chairs is the most relevant.
5. Frankie Goes to Hollywood
   No doubt about it, I like the idea of Welcome to the Pleasuredome better than the reality. The faithful but unsuccesful cover of “Born to Run” seems especially odd, but Trevor Horn’s production has not aged well in general.
5. Talking Heads
   I listened to the reissue of the terrific Fear of Music. This is one of the most drastic remastering jobs I’ve heard — although it’s been years since I heard this album, there’s far more clarity and separation between the instruments than I remember; it sounds almost as if the album were remixed rather than remastered. On the one hand, it sounds awesome — vibrant, and surprisingly fresh. On the other hand, I slightly miss the murky way I remember it sounding. The alternate versions of “Cities” and “Life During Wartime,” in particular, are striking. In many ways, they’re close to the familiar arrangements, but they’re augmented by additional, much noisier tracks. Leaving them out was almost certainly a sound commercial decision, maybe the right artistic one as well, but they’re interesting to hear now.
7. Grouper
8. Maps of Norway
8. Suicide
10. The Ebb and Flow
    These folks cram so many ideas into a song that a) if you like a quarter of it, you won’t necessarily like the rest and b) it’s hard to evaluate whether it’s good songwriting or just gimmicky. I think it’s a bit of a mix.

246 artists (a lot of compilations), 463 tracks.

1. Vulgaires Machins
   Upon discovering just how much I loved Compter les Corps I immediately ordered everything (in print) of the band’s back catalogue, and the brand new live CD/DVD Presque Sold Out. This week my order arrived.
2. The Damned
3. We Versus the Shark
   Murmurmur is complete! I was expecting the final entry (in We Versus the Shark’s year-long cover-tune project, in case you didn’t follow the link or notice me ranting about how good this is earlier) to be a song from Murmur, so it was just a tiny bit disappointing to find they’d opted for Tears for Fears. But only until I listened to the track.
4. Cindytalk
5. Zsammy
   …speaking of in-progress albums released on the Internet, Zsammy had added a couple of songs to Be Here Now since the last time I checked. Some savvy music producer should license this guy’s work for a hip soundtrack. I emphatically do not mean that as a slight.
6. Ho-Ag
   I’m trying to figure out which song from Doctor Cowboy goes on the year’s best mix. The slowly unfolding “Drawing Back the Boundaries of Night” is scarcely typical of Ho-Ag’s spastic math punk, and it’s long. But it’s also so good.
6. Marty Jones
   Among other things, this has been a big year for long-lost friends reconnecting via the Internet. One of the folks I re-found was “Crazy” “DJ” Jeff, who has probably had as much influence on my musical taste as one person ever. He reminded me how I’d given him my copy of Jones’ Unsophisticated Time after it had gotten warped in a tragic take-the-records-to-the-radio-station incident, so of course I had to play it, and then a bunch more Marti Jones besides.
8. UK Subs
9. 18th Dye
   They’re back! And sound pretty much like they never went away, thank God, although one song is marred by grievous use of Autotune.
9. The Bicycles
   Come to think of it, maybe my newfound affection for The Bicycles helped inspire the recent C-86 binge.
9. Cranes
   Spun the new (self-titled) one again to see if anything stood out this time. Still finding it pleasant, but unmemorable.
9. Suicide

43 artists, 347 tracks.

1. Colleen
   Les Ondes Silencieuses isn’t tecnhically eligible for the best-of 2008 mix … but I may bend the rules.
2. The Damned
   I’ve been on a bit of a first-wave punk kick lately.
   I spent some time wtih the deluxe reissue of Damned Damned Damned. The bonus material is probably aimed at people who are bigger fans of The Damned than me. The real news, though, is how much I like Strawberries, which somehow I’d never heard.
3. Crash My Model Car
4. The Capstan Shafts
4. Ellen Allien
   I’ve been on a bit of a bleepy bloopy kick lately.
   Somehow I missed it when SooL was added to the “eMusic catalogue. Not only did I like it about as much as I expected to, it inspired me to listen to a more from Allien’s label BPitch and other like-minded glitch/electronica types.
6. Friction
   There have been a surprising number of artists named Friction. This week I was listening to the one which featured Bob Nanna, who went on to indie fame with bands like Braid and Hey Mercedes. This was one of those listen-closely-all-the-way-through-to-make-sure-I-wont-regret-selling-it experiences. It’s not terrible, and you can hear nods both backward toward birth-of-emo bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace (or maybe more relevantly, Kingface) and forward toward the next generation. But I like my emo to be either more tuneful or more abrasive.
7. Apparat
   Apparat records more for Shitkatapult than for Allien’s label, but did collaborate with her on Orchestra of Bubbles (2006). His 2007 release Walls finds him productively and prettily working the territory between electronica and indie pop.
8. 14 Iced Bears
   I’ve been on a bit of a C86 kick lately.
8. The Baseball Project
   Somehow this collaboration of Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn (with some guy named Peter Buck playing bass, and Linda Pitmon of Zuzus’s Petals/The Steve Wynn 3 on drums) hasn’t cracked the top-10 list before this. Odd. Anyway, it’s all songs about baseball, and I’m not sure which one goes on the 2008 best-of mix. Maybe Wynn’s “Harvey Haddix,” maybe not. But this is one “volume 1″ from a supergroup that has me scarily eager for more.
8. The Cat’s Miaow
   There were always enough Australian bands that I liked and knew about that I assumed I was hearing about all the ones I really wanted to hear about. By rights, some of the money and effort that I channeled into finding obscure releases from, say, Heavenly, should have gone to The Cat’s Miaow. But I’d never even heard of them until this week.
8. caUSE co-MOTION!
8. Cindytalk
   I’ve also been on a bit of post-punk kick lately (even if I hate that term).
   It’s kind of striking how dated this band doesn’t sound (and how well their angry ambient soundscapes mesh with some of the current glitch and experimental electronica I’ve been listening to). I love that the kind soul who digitized “Transgender Warrior” and “Guts of London” to share with people couldn’t decide whether the single was meant to play at 33 or 45RPM, and provided both versions.
8. The Crowd Scene
8. Crystal Stilts
8. DA (Daniel Amos)
   Darn Floor, Big Bite, strangely enough, mostly fits into this week’s post-punk theme. It reminds me in roughly equal proportion of Shriekback and The Talking Heads, with a dash of Peter Gabriel, and gobs of notably Belewish heavily processed and delightfully salty guitar leads. The amazing thing is that this is the product of a hugely successful Christian rock act that committed near career-suicide by moving away from the styles (and lyrics) its audience expected, to become a treasured niche act instead of megachurch-fillers. J. Edward Keyes convinced me to download it with his eloquent notes on the reissue at eMusic, and I’m sure not sorry.
8. The Foals
8. Killing Joke
8. Magazine
8. Matmos
8. Public Image Ltd.
8. Shop Assistants
8. September Collective
   A glitch supergroup of sorts, September Collective started as a evening-ending improvisations among tour-mates Paul Wirkus, Stefan Schneider, and Barbara Morganstern. The group’s name suggests a perhaps pastoral sound, the album title All the Birds Were Anarchists suggests a harsher one; the former is mostly correct.
8. Andy Stedman
   Stedman’s got a vulnerable, slightly reedy tenor, and writes mostly mid-tempo indie pop that’s a little hard to pigeonhole — rootsy, pubrocky, and britpoppy by turns. “The Middle of the Sea” has a great chorus it overuses just a tad … you know, like “Hey Jealously” overused its chorus (for example). And it sounds to me like a tune that could make Stedman a similar quantity of dough.
8. The Stranglers
8. Suicide
   For the most part I’ve found Suicide’s early work (more entries in the long list of albums I felt I should have listened to but hadn’t) interesting more than enjoyable. No denying how influential their sound was, though.
8. Mark Templeton
   In some ways, Templeton’s Standing on a Hummingbird sounds like the inverse of Colleen’s debut album — where Colleen took splinters of old recordings and used them as the building blocks of new compositions, Templeton starts with what sound like they were once minimalist acoustic/post-rock compositions and deconstructs them into shards of sound and disjointed loops. (Maybe a bit like applying the principles of cubism to a pop song? Okay, that’s probably reaching.) Templeton seems closer in spirit to music concrète than most of the other artists I’ve spent the week with, but the neat trick is that this is still fairly accessible stuff — especially the brilliant “Difficult to Light.”
8. Ultravox
8. The Zombies

77 artists, 561 tracks.

Unbalanced listening week; Thanksgiving.

1. Boyracer
   Why has Boyracer not been one of my favorite bands until now, when they’ve just broken up (dammit)? Apparently because the first thing I bought was the 1996 In Full Colour, which doesn’t seem to be the best place to start.
2. Robyn Hitchcock
   Trying to give some of the newer records (Spooked, Luxor) a fair shake, but mostly still not feeling them.
3. Blind Idiot God
   Andy Hawkins’ band’s catalogue splits into two very distinct groups: there are spacious experiments that use some of the production and arrangement techniques of dub, and there’s abrasive jazz-metal (or is that metal-jazz?). The least interesting of these tracks (”Alice in My Fantasies,” say) sound more or less like instrumental heavy metal; many of them start with riffs you can’t imagine Ozzy singing over but veer into harmonic territory I can’t imagine Iommi exploring; and the best are like nothing else I’ve ever heard — sheets of distorted guitars, and a striking approach to tempo (perhaps best exemplified by the cyclic accelerandos and ritards of the aptly named “Rollercoaster.” One of the many bands I was introduced to by the ear-opening instrumental SST comp No Age.
4. Crash My Model Car
   The samples sounded pretty interesting so I downloaded a bunch, but in bulk the over-histrionic singing grates on me.
5. Rabbit in Red
   My “wow-now-I-love-Boyracer” sent me climbing the band’s family tree…
5. Arrows
5. Baak Gwai
8. Vulgaires Machins
8. Joel Plaskett Emergency
   “True Patriot Heart” is a really good song.
10. Joel Plaskett

12 artists, 253 tracks.