i hate the sound of guitars » h

quick take : horrid red : pink flowers (ep)

guitarlover — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:56:53 +0000

Sounds like Joy Division for once not because of a gloomy baritone voice, but because bass and guitar parts recall Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner. Also sounds a bit like the instruments were at one of a tunnel, and the recording equipment was at the other. Some of this is hooky and/or pretty enough to compensate, notably the title track (more New Order than Joy Division, with the bass popping forward to carry the melody over big pillows of fake strings), and the graceful instrumental, “Vanished Along the Canal.”

quick take : holden : l’essentiel

guitarlover — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:13:56 +0000

The confusingly named L’essentiel is split into two halves: “Champ” (field) is 14 tracks culled (and remastered) from Holden’s previous releases; “Hors-Champ” (off-screen) is another 14 previously unreleased tracks. I suspect some, like a cover of The Smiths’ “The Boy With the Thorn In His Side,” were left off earlier albums because they simply didn’t fit; some missed the original cut because they were weaker; and a few sound like early demos before Holden found their voice — most of “Hors-Champ” hardly qualifies “representative,” let alone “essential.”

But L’essentiel finally provides US listeners with a (legitimate) way to hear 2 songs — “Dans la glace” and “Un toit étranger” — from Holden’s brilliant Fantomatisme, perhaps my favorite 2009 release. Fantomatisme walks a crazy tightrope between the fragility of largely acoustic arrangements and Armelle Pioline’s voice, and Uwe Schmidt (aka Señor Coconut)’s otherworldly electronics. It’s simultaneously hushed and noisy, arresting and compelling, and not quite like anything else I’ve ever heard. It’s also virtually impossible to (legally) hear it in the United States; Amazon says We don’t know when or if [the CD] will be back in stock; no digital service I could find is licensed to sell Fantomatisme in the US.

I think record companies that want to survive need to remove all barriers between music and the people actually willing to pay for it. Nationalistic protectionism isn’t doing anything but depriving Holden and their (former, I hope) label of resources to help create Holden’s next release (which I really want to hear). Anywhere in the world, you ought to be able to type “holden fantomatisme” into Google and get a link to buy it. You can’t. But you can get a link to hear it. (Although you may need to dip your web browser in lye afterwards.)

In the meantime, at least L’essential is readily available from Amazon’s MP3 store or iTunes.

quick take : Tim Hecker : Ravedeath, 1972

guitarlover — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:25:07 +0000

Much of the foundation material for this experimental instrumental recording was a real pipe organ in a real church. Since I’ve been been listening a lot lately to Julianna Barwick’s almost-a-cappella recording The Magic Place and the new Mogwai album, there’s a temptation for me to think of this as a third point defining a triangle connecting these works. Hecker is farther from conventional melodies than either of the other two, but superficially, the long sustained, overlapping tones of his organ are not entirely dissimilar to how Barwick sings, and, as with Mogwai, there’s some really noisy guitar. (I think Hecker also processes the organ to sound like guitar, and vice versa; there’s some peek-a-boo going on with the clarity/obscurity of the source sounds). More substantively, all three of these records really play with incorporating calm, restful, or “pretty” tones and textures, while achieving a cumulative effect that makes for decidedly uneasy listening. I like

quick take : Hussalonia : Deep in a Donut Dream

guitarlover — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:18:45 +0000

The Hussalonia Founder generally puts a strange spin on each of his many recordings. The main gimmick here is that the original guitar and vocal guide tracks were erased after the overdubs were done, with a new vocal recorded responding to the overdubs. As the founder describes it, the process leaves “a void at the center of the song” — sometimes you can almost intuit what the original guitar part was like. This album also uses particularly dense percussion overdubs. “I Now Doth Crazy Go” is one of the voidiest tracks, with a generous quantity of cymbal hits responding to rhythmic cues from the vanished guitar part over the pleasantly Paul Simon-ish bop of Jonathan Hughes’ bass. Hussalonia released music in each of the first ten months of 2010, a trend which ended with “Through with Music,” a title I found worrisome in context. Hussalonia founder, it’s good to have you back.

quick take : PJ Harvey : Let England Shake

guitarlover — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:46:07 +0000

A fascinating album that evokes the breadth of Harvey’s catalogue — she makes some use of the fragile, high register she first explored on 2007’s White Chalk and there are vestiges of the percussive guitar attack that drove her earliest albums — but ultimately sounds like nothing else in it. In “On Battleship Hill” her voice almost like Kate Bush; the melody and guitar line of “In the Dark Places” could almost be from a John Vanderslice song.

quick take : Darren Hayman : January Songs

guitarlover — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:35:53 +0000

I’m breaking a cardinal rule to write about Darren Hayman (ex-Hefner)’s January Songs project before it’s actually finished, so you have a chance to snag a handful of the tunes in their brief free download window, coz, frankly, owning this album could be a bit expensive for yanks at the Bandcamp going rate. But if you’re like me, you’ll want to.

There’ve been a lot of release-a-new-song-every-day/week/month/whatever projects on the internets in the past few years; this one is a new song written and recorded by Hayman every day in January. This sounds like a schedule that might encourage the artist to be slapdash about both the song-making and the recording part, but Hayman is really smart about he approaches it. He’s booked a lot of friends to help with the songs, including a co-write or two, and some lead vocals not delivered by his own distinctive-but-not-to-everyone’s-taste-and-admittedly-rather-nasal voice. Most importantly, he’s aware that it would be easy to let the writing quality slip, and he’s consequently conscious about avoiding his comfort zones, using tactics like recording in a park he avoids because his dog was hit by a car there* to jolt himself out of routine. Although he warns upfront that the songs “won’t all be good,” I’d say that remains to be seen.

I even watched a handful of the video diary entries, something I almost never do.

If you need more persuading, here’s a bloke who seems to have committed himself to review each individual track with a much less brief take.

* Beaulah was badly hurt, but happily recovered, and appears in the video diary.

Song of the Month: Hussalonia, “For Those About to Rock, I Ignore You”

guitarlover — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:00:02 +0000

It was just about a month ago that I became aware of the self-described “pop music cult” Hussalonia, and since then I’ve listened to Hussalonia songs about 350 times. Even more surprising, I’m showing no signs of getting sick of them.

Partly this is because Hussalonia is really good*, partly it’s because they (mostly just he — Jesse Mank basically is Hussalonia, although he has some collaborators on some tracks) is strikingly diverse, encompassing minimalist folk, musique concrète, power pop, heavy metal — too many genres to list. Like the work of many of my favorite songwriters, Mank’s songs are frequently funny and serious simultaneously; they’re seldom straightforwardly jokey. (His track-by-track re-invention of Billy Joel’s 1980 new-wave cash-in album Glass Houses is no joke; it’s a revelation.**)

“For Those About to Rock, We Ignore You,” is one of those tunes that makes me smile and wince at the same time and it melds a couple of Mank’s aesthetic directions. It’s about how unpleasant it can sometimes be to make it through a local band’s set to hear the band you came to see (or are in). This is certainly familiar territory for me.*** Mank approaches it with delicate picked acoustic guitar and a hushed, appropriately world-weary vocal. But what lifts it into the realm of the extraordinary are the underlying layers of guitar feedback — noisy, but melodically smart, and at least partly belying the sentiment of the lyric. (Another of Mank’s projects, Satan Among the Sofa Cushions, is a heavy metal EP that is too successful as metal to be dismissed as parody, even if Mank’s tongue is clearly in his cheek.)

Jesse Mank is manifestly uninterested in participating in the industry part of the music industry; his recent catalogue is only distributed digitally, and he gives the vast bulk of it away free on the entertaining and informative Hussalonia website.

*Triple-threat good: he’s an outstanding songwriter, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, and displays much more solid recording chops than I expect from indie home-recordists.

**Glass Houses was one of the first three LPs I ever bought, but while I still like Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 74-78 and even some of Foreigner’s self-titled album, Glass Houses was the first record I disowned. I used an exacto to cut up the cover so it said “Mr. Shit” instead of “Billy Joel.” I hadn’t thought of that in years, and certainly never regretted it until Mank’s amazing renditions made me want to A-B against the original.

***For a couple years I’ve been trying to finish writing a song that starts “There’s not enough booze in this bar/To get me through another set by your band/And there’s not enough beer in my glass/To get me through one more song/But I’m too cheap to waste half a drink/So I guess I’ll buy another round.” Mank’s lyric is much better than mine; also, he finished his.

Robyn Hitchcock, 21 November 2008

guitarlover — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:19:30 +0000

Friday’s performance was just the tonic for folks who’ve seen Robyn Hitchcock numerous times in the past. The setlist was primarily drawn from his magnificent first (mostly) acoustic album, 1984’s I Often Dream of Trains. He was accompanied by recent frequent accomplice Tim Keegan on guitar and vocals, and (former member of The Higsons) Terry Edwards on soprano sax, piano, and percussion. In addition to most of I Often Dream of Trains, the set included seldom-performed tunes like “The Ghost Ship” (the only other time I heard him perform this lugubrious epic, he apparently got bored after the first chorus, and instructed the audience to buy the “Balloon Man” single if they really wanted to hear the rest of it), “Goodnight I Say,” and “America” (the last from Hitchcock’s nearly-disowned second solo release, Groovey Decay, but also from Jonathan Demme’s new film Rachel Getting Married). According to fan database The Asking Tree, these songs have all been played far less often than one of the newer songs that Hitchcock played, “Olé Tarantula,” which was first performed in 2004.

Hitchcock’s voice is holding up quite well. You can hear a bit more strain at the top of his register, but not much. Rock-solid timing has never been his strong suit, and the one-two punch of “no drummer” and “lots of frantic strumming” led to several noticable gaffes. Hitchcock, who seemed relaxed and in good humor throughout, joked that we were getting the “organic” version of the show, from which the mistakes would subsequently be excised by the professional film crew.

Since there was a professional film crew (one could imagine that there might be some sort of 25th-anniversary hoopla for I Often Dream of Trains in the works for next year…) quite a lot of attention was paid to visual presentation, with Robyn taking the stage as a backlit, top-hatted silhouette, and wearing a black-and-white polka-dotted shirt against which his black-and-white polka-dotted electric guitar almost disappeared.

Highlights for me included the haunting, weird, and beautiful “Flavour of Night,” and “I Used to Say I Love You,” one of Hitchcock’s most straightforward, sad, and incisive songs (I think its lines “But you were reluctant/Although I was so hot/Now I understand it/But back then I did not” is genius). The barbershop trio arrangement of “Uncorrected Personality Traits” was outstanding, as were the three-part harmonies on faux-country “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus” (with lyrics updated from Cold War anxieties to Global Warmng anxieites). (Hitchcock also revised “This Could Be the Day” to make it slightly less un-PC, or perhaps he just mumbled. Either way, I can’t say I blame him.)

My favorite of Hitchcock’s trademark loopy anecdotes involved the recent colonization of Boston, and the construction of Logan airport after several hundred planes had landed there. The introduction to “This Could Be the Day,” was also memorable, casting the song’s narrator as one of the “Mojave Shrimp,” waking to fornicate (with a passel of synonyms) after the arrival of the once-in-several-decades deluge.

Kay Hanley – Weaponize

guitarlover — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:53:13 +0000

I had just enough leftover affection for Kay Hanley’s 90’s act Letters to Cleo to check out the previews for her new record, even though the only thing I remember about her solo debut Cherry Marmalade is that I felt like I didn’t need to hear anything on it twice. I’m really glad I gave Weaponize a shot; it’s perhaps her career highlight.

Hanley’s voice sounds better than ever, by turns both tougher and sweeter than in her Letters to Cleo days. Guitarist/former-LTC-member (and husband) Michael Eisenstein fills Weaponize with the kind of fat, crunchy, tone that used to be the hallmark of Eric “Roscoe” Amble’s production jobs. Weaponized is also packed with catchy tunes, with the “The Wrong Year” probably my initial favorite. Also worth a mention is the expansive “I Guess I Get It,” a slow-burning ballad/rocker that could pass for the best Aimee Mann song since Bachelor No. 2. Even the closing jokey grunge-rap number “Drop a Bomb” is kinda growing on me.

I liked Weaponize so much, I’ve since got a copy of Hanley’s 2005 ep babydoll, and it’s really good, too. I’m left to wonder if I was just in a cruddy mood when I heard Cherry Marmalade.

new england digital music bonanza

guitarlover — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:16:04 +0000

I’m going to link MySpace pages in this post. I feel like it’s a little irresponsible to do that without mentioning a more-or-less safe way to follow the links. Here’s what I recommend for visiting MySpace:

Set up a browser (or browser profile) to delete all cookies on exit
I like to configure Opera up for visiting unsafe sites, that way I can leave Firefox open with all the tabs I need for work.
Make sure it has all the latest security updates to prevent drive-by downloads
Close and relaunch the browser
Turn the speakers down!
Visit MySpace
Close the browser

I’ve been impatiently wondering when the first releases of 2008 from The Capstan Shafts would arrive, and just learned of all the goodies at http://www.myspace.com/capstanshafts. There are previews from both the new self-released EP Miles Per Famine and the upcoming Rainbow Quartz release Fixation Protocol. Also, there’s ordering info on getting gobs of the earlier and out-of-print Capstan Shafts releases directly from Dean. Big ups to Dan for giving me the heads-up.

You can also preview tracks from Ho-Ag’s imminent Doctor Cowboy at http://www.myspace.com/hoagsobject. I’m so pysched for this album. I’ve been wishing for a while that Ho-Ag would work with recording professionals who could capture the band better, and it sounds like I’ve gotten my wish. The samples from Doctor Cowboy are more vibrant than anything Ho-Ag has yet committed to plastic.

Slightly old news at this point, but Hallelujah the Hills have also raised their recording-quality bar with the Prepare to Qualify EP. It compiles the songs that have been trickling out from Stereogum and the like with some additional goodies; they’ve been re-mastered and sound super-fab.

And finally, I just stumbled on the Dirt Merchants site, from which you can download everything the band ever did, including the never-released The Speed At Which You Speak and several live sets. The only thing missing is a tip jar.