The Ackleys (2005); Forget Forget, Derive Derive (EP, 2006)
Indie-power-pop. Splashy drums, some keyboards give it a slightly new-wave sheen.

as King Everything:

The Drought (2008)
Mostly acoustic guitar/vocal

with P.S. Eliot:

The Bike Wreck Demo (2008, read about Bike Wreck demo here), Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds (2009), Living in Squalor (EP, 2010, pay-what-you-want download), Sadie (2011)

Except for the demo, which is crazy blissed out fuzzerific, this is straight up pop-punk. If you have to play the sounds-like game, maybe try Sarge, but since you can at least sample some guilt-free, don’t bother playing sounds-like; just listen & decide for yerself.

with Bad Banana:

Crushfield (2010; artist-approved download (mediafire))

Treble and sugar overdose low-fi buzz saw pop-punk. Yum.

as Waxahatchee:

Split release with Operation Cliff Clavin (2010)

Severely-traumatized-microphone-style acoustic guitar/vocal record. If not for the Internets, I’d still be wondering if “Clumsy” was a tune on one of the KRS Elliott Smith albums that I’d somehow overlooked due to its proximity to all the other awesome songs on those records. A thing about Crutchfield’s singing and production: it hasn’t, ’specially lately, fetishized clarity or anything, so a thing that happens a lot is I’ll be digging a tune basically just because it’s catchy and a really good lyric line will just jump out and floor me. So it’s helpful that the lyrics for the Waxahatchee split are available.

(Also on the read-the-words tip: Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds)

Except for Sadie, which is not out yet and now near the top of my “most anticipated releases” list, I think I listened to everything on this list as least twice this week. So, yeah, I endorse this.

h/t I Could Die Tomorrow, without whom my week woulda been a little duller

It’s not as much about the error Bill Buckner made in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, as it is about the long sequence of events that set that error up to lose the game. It quietly makes the point that every out recorded, every run across the plate, every play, even every pitch is something that goes well for someone on one team, and badly for for someone on the other. The line that almost makes me tear up a little is “Bob Stanley picked a pretty bad time to uncork a wild pitch,” which is almost the whole thing in a microcosm: if Stanley’d really picked a time, he would’ve picked some other time.

McCaughey’s lyric doesn’t read particularly well — it’s a bit like an an essay with rather mangled grammar — and it’s frankly kind of amazing that it works as well sung as it does. I credit that partly to McCaughey’s sensitive, restrained delivery, which makes his meaning plain when his words don’t quite, and partly to some very canny arranging. “Buckner’s Bolero” is the longest track on the record and one of the most expansively rendered. The timing of the backing vocals is notably sloppy, which makes the song seem a bit more loose than it really is, in a not-at-all bad way. Paul Brainerd’s pedal steel lends an appropriately melancholy country tinge to the track, but what really pushes this into the realm of transcendence is how Ira Kaplan’s guitar looms over it, simultaneously screeching and shimmering, both a curse and a benediction.

“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.

But if they pull a “Mission of Burma”-style return to active duty (and I hope they do), I would love to see/hear them again when they have another few shows under their belt, hopefully in a better-sounding room, and when I’ve had a chance to rein in my own unrealistic expectations a bit.

Damn, I’m prescient. Original bassist Steve Michener was missed, especially on “Ron Klaus Wrecked His House,” “Hey! Mr. Liconoln,” and “Faith Healer,” tunes to which generally capable fill-in man Tommie could not quite bring the required subtlety. But on the whole September 2008 Dipper seemed more sure-footed than April 2008 Dipper. Bill Goffrier had a little trouble pacing his voice through the set, but saved plenty of vim and vigor for the encore (”You’re Not Patsy”). And, most promisingly, there was a new tune (”Joke,” according to Bill’s shirt) with the typical Dipper earmark: just when you think you’ve got it pinned down, it takes a sharp left turn without becoming an iota less catchy. As an added bonus, after all these years, I’m finally clear on who is Bill and who is Gary Waliek. Bill is on the left:

Big Dipper seemed to feel constrained by their set time, so we didn’t get to hear two of the songs on Bill’s shirt, “Meet the Witch” and “Guitar Named Desire.”

We did, however, get to hear: Mr. Woods, She’s Fetching, Loch Ness Monster, Wake Up the King, Lunar Module, “Joke,” Edith, Bony Knees of Nothing [Gary: Here's one from our bad album. Bill: He's cute, he's real cute], Hey! Mr. Lincoln, Ron Klaus Wrecked His House, All Going Out Together, Younger Bums, and a rousing earned-encore rendition of You’re Not Patsy:

Bill says “Oh, yeah!!”

I do, too.

Also, Bill said a word to me! It was “Hi.” I was struck dumb.

*

Boston Spaceships were really friggin’ good. It’s a little scary sometimes to watch Pollard: at times, he seemed like the incoherent rambling man you’d want not to sit next to on the bus. But he can still sing. And the band, critically, stayed a little less soused. There was a hellalotta beer on stage, but there was also some vitamin water.

Tommy Keene brought much rock and gave great guitar cord:

Jason Narducy brought much rock. But do not throw a beer at this man! He does not like it when you do that.

Chris Slusarenko and John Moen brought much rock too, but I didn’t manage to photograph them doing it very well. This is maybe a good time to mention that “Rat Trap” rocked so hard and so well I didn’t even recognize it.

Selected bits of Bob Pollard’s wisdom:

“I remember playing the ‘rat back in 1978″ (much laughter).

Much love was expressed for Dipper and Bill Goffrier’s moves, in particular “the circle,” but I didn’t capture it verbatim.

“That was fucking prog rock [mumble] Peter Gabriel. It moved me. I don’t give a shit what it did to you, but it moved me.”

“Drunk and tight — if you can do that, you’ve got it made.” Which is a good point to get heretical: I saw Guided by Voices only twice, and neither was a typical GbV experience; one was an outdoor festival with the classic lineup, and one was the co-headlining tour with Cheap Trick. But Boston Spaceships might be a better band than GbV. Moen’s an awesome drummer, Narducy kept up with him, and the guitar onslaught of Slusarenko and Keene was nigh onstoppable. So I felt a bit bad about this:

People were pretty much going apeshit all night, but the end of the first encore was “Game of Pricks” and everybody went really apeshit. (Incidentally, I do believe the club did not want the band to play a second encore — one of the few times I’ve seen the house lights go back down after coming all the way up.*) From there on out it was all GbV: A Salty Salute, Motor Away, [I think I forgot something here], Cut-Out Witch, and Tractor Rape Chain. And this band and this band’s material deserved better than to get the biggest response of the night for the other band’s songs. But here’s why I was going apeshit, in especial particular: because I could feel just how much Chris Slusarenko had dreamed of playing these very songs and how much he love playing them, and because I know how very much fun most of those songs are to play myself. So there’s that.

* It’s gotta be a bit of a double-edged sword to book Pollard into your club. You know your drink sales are gonna be a New Year’s Eve levels, but so are your cleanup requirements.

You like everything that comes out on SST
You like everything that comes out on 4AD
You like almost everything that comes out on Homestead
I LIKE EVERYTHING THAT I GET IN THE MAIL FOR FREE!
(How ’bout that)

That stanza inspired me to become a reviewer so I could get music in the mail for free. What I didn’t know is that Sturgeon’s Law most definitely applies to what you get in the mail for free; even it’s own mother couldn’t possibly like all of it.

Anyway, I really enjoyed Great Plains’ set. They were a touch sloppy in that kinda good bar band-y way, or maybe that was just the muddiness of the mix. (Whiny aside: I really wish I liked The Middle East better, but all but a handful of shows I’ve seen there have sounded like crap, and downstairs is often uncomfortably like a sweatlodge.) Front man Ron House was in fine voice, and everyone on stage looked like they were having a good time.

It’s been bugging me that I can’t remember if I saw Big Dipper twice or just once back in the day. I know I saw them in Baltimore touring Slam (with a seismograph on stage, and Young’s “Rocking in the Free World” in the set), but I kinda think I also saw them in DC between Craps and Slam. At at least one Dipper show I know I was completely transported into the magical state of pure enjoyment. Maybe it happens to you and maybe it doesn’t, but when a band really connects with me, I stop being aware of things like what’s in (or out) of tune with what, whether the tempos are steady, how good or bad the mix is, and anything else from the analytical side of my brain. My consciousness shuts down and I just love what’s happening.

That’s a very high bar to reach, so it shouldn’t surprise me that the 2008 Dipper failed to reach it. It was great just to see Steve Michener, Jeff Oliphant, Gary Waleik, and Bill Goffrier on stage together again. They looked like they were having a blast revisiting the wondeful songs they crafted, and that’s important. Waleik seemed to be struggling a bit to hit some of the notes, but maybe he just couldn’t hear himself. I was certainly frustrated with the mix, my wonderful girlfriend and I weren’t feeling well, and we didn’t stay through the end of the night.

But if they pull a “Mission of Burma”-style return to active duty (and I hope they do), I would love to see/hear them again when they have another few shows under their belt, hopefully in a better-sounding room, and when I’ve had a chance to rein in my own unrealistic expectations a bit.

“Black Blade” is to my mind the least successful of the band’s three collaborations with author Michael Moorcock. I like the tongue-in-cheek presentation of Moorcock’s infamously melancholy protagonist, Elric (”I just wanna be a lover/not a red-eyed screaming ghoul”), but I can’t overlook the song’s lack of a chorus (”black” in one speaker and “blade, blade, blade” echoing away in the other does not a proper chorus make), or its lapses into the ridiculous (the “grow, grow, groooowww!” break; the song’s concluding section, with the vocoder voice of Elric’s evil sword boasting over a “Baba O’Riley”-ish keyboard bed).

“Monsters” is the track most emblematic of Cultösaurus Erectus’s identity crisis. With a lounge-jazz sax solo, a near-rip of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” and a section that sounds, well, kinda like Blue Öyster Cult, it’s got a few too many ideas for one song.

Most of the other tracks don’t gel for me in one way or another — “Divine Wind” is too straight a blues number; the instrument tones don’t blend pleasingly in “Deadline”; and “Hungry Boys” is tinny just where I think it needs to crunch. The nadir is “The Marshall Plan,” about which the less said the better.

Happily, the album improves dramatically at the end. Thanks in part to a rare, not-unDaltrey-esque lead vocal turn from one of the Bouchard brothers (I’m guessing), “Fallen Angel” sounds more than a bit like a late ’70s tune from The Who. “Lips in the Hills” has an almost punky energy level. As an adult, “Unknown Tongue”’s soft-core account of adolescent S&M-tinged sexual self-exploration/demonic ritual seems distinctly creepy, but I still remember the potent kick it gave me in my own adolescence, and the chorus harmonies are still sublime.

Star rating: 1.78

But the 7 songs in between are mostly pretty good, and a few are better. “The Great Sun Jester” is the median of sci-fi author Michael Moorcock’s collaborations with the band; not as good as “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” but better than “Black Blade.” Allen Lanier’s “In Thee” and Albert Bouchard’s “You’re Not the One (I Was Looking For)” are two of BÖC’s most straightforward love songs — no one in either tune seems to be any kind of supernatural entity — but they’re also both melodically sturdy and surprisingly unclichéd. Werman’s bag of production doodads does less damage to the title track and “Moon Crazy,” than to “Dr. Music,” maybe in part because their lyrics are better. “I Am The Storm” has some very silly lines (and weird scansion in the chorus) but it’s catchy and I like it. The pièce de résistance for me is “The Vigil.” It’s a lengthy epic about (I think) extraterrestial visitors that even Tom Werman can’t sabotage; if I assembled my own BÖC best-of, it’d be a shoe-in.

Star rating: 2.56

If you can get past its flaws, however, Imaginos represents a substantial recovery from the disastrous Club Ninja, and it’s arguably the strongest BÖC outing after the ouster of the original rhythm section. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Imaginos sessions allegedly began as a solo album for ex-drummer Albert Bouchard, and the song cycle (of which the released album is supposedly only a fraction) was cooked up with BÖC’s pleasantly-demented Svangali figure, Sandy Pearlman, starting in the early 70’s. (The wikipedia article on Imaginos has the bare bones of the album’s convoluted history, but currently omits to mention any of the epic mudslinging I’ve heard described.)

You can’t really follow the story by listening to the album, which is probably for the best. You can read a plot summary at the wikipedia entry referenced above, but I recommend against it. It’s all about secret mysterious forces, after all, and I think it benefits from being as murky and ill-defined as possible. Vaguely spooky mumbo-jumbo like, “seven years of labor for the instruments of time” is more evocative if you know less about what it specifically refers to.

Despite the strikes against it, Imaginos offers at least two bonafide classics of the BÖC canon, “In the Presence of Another World” and “Del Rio’s Song.” The former is almost reminiscent of occult goths Fields of the Nephilim, with its darkly swirling arpeggios and concluding, heavily-processed, horror movie vocals. The latter, by contrast, sounds of a piece with the band’s masterful first three records; the verse and chorus hooks are easily strong enough to stop the plot-advancing midsection from dragging it down. And if Imaginos offers only two real peaks, the lows aren’t so bad. Only the closing title track makes my skip finger itchy, partly because of the dumb chorus (”Ooh Imaginos, ooh Imaginos”) but mostly because of Jon Roger’s grating lead vocal. (It’s perhaps worth noting that neither Joey Cerisano’s stereotypical metal screech*, the overlong outro, nor the unwieldy title quite ruin “The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein’s Castle at Weisseria” for me.)

Star rating: 2.11

*Cerisano’s vocal credits include BÖC, Korn, and Michael Bolton. Ye gods preserve us.

Novelist John Shirley titled his first book, Transmaniacon, after a BÖC tune; presumably working with the band as a guest lyricist must have been a dream come true for him. Unfortunately, it didn’t make for a good record. Heaven Forbid starts promisingly with “See You In Black,” which is creepy and vicious, yet simultaneously, oddly heartwarming — it’s basically an anti-domestic violence number, but sung from the decidedly un-PC perspective of wishing ill upon the abuser. “Harvest Moon” is primo Buck Dharma — sweetly melancholic and effortlessly melodic. I love the line “young people feeling restless, old people feeling old.”

But after that, the album sinks into a morass of plodding, sadly unimaginative rockers that are both stagy and stodgy. “Hammer Back” and “Power Underneath Despair” feel much more forced than, say, “Career of Evil” or “Cagey Cretins,” partly because their lyrics traverse well-traveled country, but also because they’re not very hooky. Buck Dharma’s sparkling, fluid solos almost redeem a few of these songs, but not quite. A spare live version of “In Thee” (originally from 1979’s Mirrors) closes the record; it’s no insult to the original version, but it’s no essential reinterpretation, either.

Star rating: 1.36