Jun

Christina Aguilera – Bionic
Amplive – Murder at the Discotech
Archipelago – Have Here
Melissa Auf der Maur – Out of Our Minds
Bomb the Music Industry! – Adults!!!…Smart!!! Shithammered!!! And Excited by Nothing!!!!!!!
The Challenged – Loaded Language
The Cute Lepers – Smart Accessories
The Depreciation Guild – Spirit Youth
Die So Fluid – Mercury
Elk City – House of Tongues
Foals – Total Life Forever
Hannah Georgas – This is Good
Glee Cast – The Journey to Regionals
God Help the Girl – Baby You’re Blind
Sarah Harmer – Oh Little Fire
Hey It’s Okay – This is an In-store not a Riot
Hussalonia – Hissalonia
Hussalonia – The Somewhat Surprising Return of Percy "Thrills" Hussalonia
Jeremy Jay – Splash
The Like – Release Me
Marina and the Diamonds – The Family Jewels
Mates of State – Crushes
Tift Merritt – See You on the Moon
Janelle Monáe – The ArchAndroid
Nada Surf – If I Had a Hi-Fi
Nina Nastasia – Outlaster
New Idea Society – Quiet Prism
Nü Sensae – TV, Death and the Devil
Operator Please – Gloves
The Paradise Motel – Australian Ghost Story
Pernice Brothers – Goodbye, Killer
Pillow Fights/Smokejumper – Uh Huh
Queen Adreena – Taxidermy
Ratatat – LP4
Gemma Ray – It’s a Shame About Gemma Ray
Sleigh Bells – Treats
Laura Stevenson and the Cans – A Record
Television Personalities – A Memory is Better than Nothing
Tender Forever – No Snare
Tokyo Police Club – Champ
The Tubers – Anachronous
Kurt Vile – Square Shells
Paul Weller – Wake Up the Nation
The Wild – Set Ourselves Free

May

65daysofstatic – We Were Exploding Anyway
The Alarm – Direct Action
The Alps – Le Voyage
Arctic Monkeys – My Propeller (single)
Avi Buffalo – Avi Buffalo
The Bats – How Pop Can You Get?
Bicycle Voice – Tis the Ghost of Martinellis
Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record
Calories/William – (split single)
Camera Obscura – The Nights Are Cold (single)
Chin Chin – Sound of the Westway
Effi Briest – Rhizomes
The Fall – Your Future, Our Clutter
Free Electric State – Caress
Frog Eyes – Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph
The Futureheads – The Chaos
The Garlands/The Sugarplums – (split single)
Girl in a Coma – Adventures in Coverland (3 eps)
Cast of Glee – Volume 3 – Showstoppers
The Hundred in the Hands – This Desert (ep)
Japandroids – No Singles
Knight School – Revenger
LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening
Male Bonding – Nothing Hurts
MGMT – Congratulations
The Method Actors – This Is Still It
Minus the Bear – Omni
Mystery Fix – Syllogismobile (single)
Naked on the Vague – Heaps of Nothing
The National – High Violet
The New Pornographers – Together
New Young Pony Club – The Optimist
Noumenon – Party Mathematics
Sam Phillips – Magic for Everybody
Phosphorescent – Here’s to Taking It Easy
The Sadies – Darker Circles
Slothbear – Qids
Small Black – Small Black
Snowglobe – Little More Lived In
Spouse – Confidence
Standard Fare – Fifteen (single)
Stereo Total – Baby Ouh!
Twin Sister – Color Your Life (ep)
Various Artists – Sing Me to Sleep
Watch out for Rockets – Shaman Shit
The Whitsundays – Saul
Wild Nothing – Gemini
Woods – At Echo Lake

In my metal days, I followed guitar players from band to band, not singers. It was a plus, for instance, that Graham Bonnet sang with Alcatrazz, coz I knew him from Rainbow and the Michael Schenker Group, but Graham Bonnet wasn’t the reason I bought Alcatrazz albums; the reason (as embarrassing as this is to admit) was guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen, who could, at the time, go wheedly-wheedly-wheedly-woo faster than anybody. (And Steve Vai was a reason to pay attention after Malmsteen left, but that’s another story.)

The exception to this rule was Ronnie James Dio.* I bought Holy Diver not because I thought Vivian Campbell was a hot guitar picker — he was okay, but not interesting enough for me to follow to other bands. I bought Holy Diver because of Dio’s work with Rainbow and Black Sabbath. And coz “Rainbow in the Dark” was the freakin’ bomb. And what made “Rainbow in the Dark” the bomb wasn’t Campbell’s de rigeur pinch harmonics and pro forma hammer-on/pull-offs, it was the cheap faux trumpet keyboard flourish, those almighty stomps on the one and three, and how Dio almost-but-not-quite rolls the “r” in rainbow and loses it in “dahk.” What strikes me most after a week reviewing Dio’s catalogue (with Black Sabbath. Rainbow, and his own band) contrasted with some of his contemporaries, is that Ronnie James Dio wrote honest-to-god songs, not just platforms for guitar licks and wheedly-wheedly-woo solos.

The next thing that hits me is the calibre of Dio’s performances. There’s his sheer conviction, which sells lines like “we’re the throw before the toss,” and makes them sound meaningful, if not actually profound. And there’s the tonal quality of his singing. Metal vocals fall on a continuum from castrati operatic wailing to the almost literally monotonous bark that characterizes a lot of extreme metal. Dio is right in the middle — harsh enough to convey aggression, but actually carrying a tune and hitting notes. It’s the quintessential metal voice — for my money, only Metallica’s Hetfield comes anywhere close.

Dio is still probably the most famous musician I ever spoke with in person, after a 1985 CMJ panel on “crossover,” the then-nascent music-marketing niche that, depending on who you asked, was either hardcore punk with prominent guitar solos or socially-conscious speed metal. Dio in no uncertain terms disapproved of the form. Metal, he said (and I’m pretty sure I have this quote exactly right, nearly a quarter-century later) “should be about magic, and gods, and demons,” not politics. At the time it struck me as kinda hidebound, even a little goofy,** when contrasted with content like “Reaganomics killing me, Reaganomics killing you.”

But here’s a thing about Dio’s lyrics: if they’re a little Dungeons & Dragonish, if he maybe sang the words “rainbow” and “dark” a bit too often, they’re also nearly free of metal’s least likable lyric tropes. There are handful of Lilith or Morgan Le Fey-type evil women in his oeuvre, but Dio hardly ever succumbs to metal’s reflexive misogyny or virigin/whore dichotomies. And sometimes he jumped farther out of the D&D manual than he got credit for; Holy Diver’s “Inviisble” has a sympathetic portrayal of an adolescent struggling with sexual identity issues. It wasn’t just an extraordinary thing for a mainstream metal artist to tackle in 1983***, it was positively brave.

R.I.P., R.J.D.

At least we still have your music.

*Technically I guess Ozzy should count, too, but I was first a fan of those two Randy Rhoads’-enhanced solo records, and only went back to Ozzy-era Sabbath later.

**I had a graveyard crossover radio show at the time, basically an excuse to play D.R.I., Hüsker Dü’s “59 times the Pain,” and Straw Dogs’ “Young Fast Iranians” over and over again, so I took it kinda personally, although not personally enough to stop me from seeking him out after the panel for some oldschool fanboy gush.

***Metal once had a leather-clad hold on the title “most homophobic music genre,” although gangsta rap probably loosened it.

album of the week: a reference of female-fronted punk rock 1977-89

Anybody who’s known me long enough is doubtless tired of my riff about how what jumpstarts the aging process is when you stop falling in love with new music. It’s a little worrisome that I followed up a spin through the new album from The Alarm (Direct Action; not bad — seemed stronger than Guerilla Tactics) by exhuming some of their ‘84 and ‘85 material (embarrassing as it is, although I know by some objective standards those are not good records — watered-down Clash or U2, depending on which album you pick — they still get my blood pumping).

But I think it’s reasonable to make some exception for older music that you never actually heard before, and that’s what the floating-around-the-internets 12(!)-volume Reference of Female-Fronted Punk 1977-89 is chock full of. I’ve made it through volume 5 so far, and along the way revisited plenty of familiar names (Poison Girls get a special shout-out as a “oh yeah, I need to listen to that album right now!” pick — “Other” still knocks me out.)

What’s primarily amazing about this compilation, though, isn’t the trip-down-memory-lane aspect, it’s the incredible breadth of artists I’d never heard of before. You know the saw about how 25 people bought the first Velvet Underground album and/or the first Big Star album, but they all formed bands? A Reference of Female-Fronted Punk 1977-89 suggests that if a few million people heard The Sex Pistols, a few thousand of them started bands that only 25 people heard. Or maybe heard only for Warhol’s fifteen minutes. There are plenty of underexposed English-singing artists from the US and the UK, but what knocks me out about the selection as a whole is its polylingual and global scope.

My absolute favorite find so far is Sweden’s Fega Påhopp (”Cowardly Attack,” if I can trust the Internets) who apparently only released this one stunning single. The B-side “Hålla masken” is swell enough stuff, but the A-side, “Pärlor åt svinen” (confusingly mislabeled as “Hålla masken” by A Reference of Female-Fronted Punk 1977-89) is the stunner. It starts out rather unassumingly (if I were splitting genre hairs I’d call Fega Påhopp “postpunk”; certainly not hardcore) but midway through the song takes a hard left turn and accelerates into deep uncharted waters. The vocal performance is flat-out amazing — I was reminded of the first time Kristin Hersh curdled my blood with “Hate My Way,” and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins demented utterances in “I Put A Spell on You.” And I played it again, and again, and again.

Just so you don’t think Ive become a helpless fuddy-duddy, I did listen to some new stuff this past week, with Male Bonding (cue the Pitchfork hype-cycle backlash in three … two … one … but I thought this was solid, if every safe) and, especially, Effi Briest at the top of the heap.

p.s. If I listen to a lotta Ronne James Dio this week, that ain’t about nostalgia, that’s about paying respect.

Apr

Animal Names – Let It Been
Apollo Ghosts – Mount Benson
Best Coast – Something in the Way (single)
Black Francis – Nonstoperotik
Black Tambourine – Black Tambourine
The Blanche Hudson Weekend – The Letters to Daddy (ep)
Brilliant Colors – Never Mine (single)
Roger Bryan & the Orphans – Wolves
Circus Devils – Mother Skinny
De Novo Dahl – Tigerlion
Dum Dum Girls – I Will Be
Eddy Current Suppression Ring – Rush to Relax
The Ergs – Thrash Compactor (ep)
Everyone Everywhere – Everyone Everywhere
Glass Candy – Feeling Without Touching (ep)
The Cast of “Glee” – The Power of Madonna
The Go Find – Everybody Knows It’s Gonna Happen Only Not Tonight
Good Luck – Demonstration 2010
Good Shoes – No Hope, No Future
Harlem – “Hippies”
Hole – Nobody’s Daughter
Hussalonia – Attention Deficit Recorder
The Indelicates – Songs for Swinging Lovers
I Need Sleep – Fun Tunnel
Insect Guide – Dark Days & Nights (single)
Kaki King – Junior
The Knife – Tomorrow, In a Year
Lali Puna – Our Inventions
Little Women – Throat
The Living Sisters – Love to Live
Lovesliescrushing – Crwth (Chorus redux)
Magic Man – Real Life Color
The Manhattan Love Suicides – Deluxe Edition, Louder and Longer
Masshysteri – Masshysteri
Matt Pond PA – The Dark Leaves
Medications – Completely Removed
The Menzigers – Chamberlain Waits
Kate Miller-Heidke – Curioser
The Mitchells – The Secret Sounds
Museum Mouth – Tears in my Beer, I am the Idiot of the Jungle (ep)
Modern Rivals – Modern Rivals
Joanna Newsom – Have One on Me
Palmdale – Get Wasted (ep)
Pill Wonder – Jungle/Surf
The Pipettes – Stop the Music (ep)
Portugal. The Man – American Ghetto
Quadron – Quadron
Red Sparowes – The Fear is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer
Rotting Christ – Aealo
Sambassadeur – European
Serena Maneesh – S-M 2: Abyss in B Minor
Standard Fare – The Noyelle Beat
Statuesque – Reader, I Curried Him
Stripmall Architecture – Feathersongs for Factory Girls, Studio Sessions
Swanton Bombs – Mumbo Jumbo and Murder
J.G. Thirlwell – Manorexia: The Mesopelagic Waters
Title Tracks – It Was Easy
The Unwinding Hours – The Unwinding Hours
Virgin of the Birds – Banquet Years
We Were Promised Jetpacks – The Last Place You’ll Look (ep)

song of the week: When You Were Mine

I recently stumbled across Sound as Language, a blog which has a whole lotta overlap with what I like, but writes about quite a few things that are new to me. I liked the way Will wrote about Good Luck like I should already know about them, and I liked the picture of the band, looking none too glammed out, apparently rocking some library stacks very hard. So I bought their new demo from bandcamp. Holy crap. I had to go buy their previous release Into Lake Griffy immediately afterwards, and it’s another case of if-I’d-heard-this-back-then-I-woulda-had-to-find-room-in-the-year’s-best-list. (In the mean time, the 2010 list is already looking like it’s gonna be awful crowded, but it’s pretty surely gonna have some Good Luck in it.)

Singers Matt Tobey and Ginger Alford are both blessed with the sort of rock’n'roll voices that sound really good when they’re straining for a note; they sound real fine harmonizing too. Listening to Tobey’s guitar work, e.g, the fluid hammer-on/pull-offs on “Decider,” he sounds like the sort of guitar player I should have been dutifully following from band to band for years — not because he can play some jaw-droppingly ornate parts, but because he’s got the restraint and taste to play simply when the song calls for it.

Good Luck self-identify as “Pop Pop Punk PUNK” which doesn’t sound wrong, exactly, but seems somehow inadequate. “Stars are Exploding” sounds enough like an excellent pop-leaning punk band plowing through a John Darnielle tune that I had to double-check that it wasn’t a cover of a Mountain Goats song I’d somehow forgotten. (Which was silly, because if it was a Mountain Goats song, I wouldn’t have forgotten it.)

Prince’s “When You Were Mine” was always one of my very favorite of The Purple One’s tunes. Good Luck play it straight and hard, with an outstanding, impassioned vocal performance from Alford. I can’t stop playing it, and it only makes me hungry for more.

Tears in My Beer sounds kinda like a country album title, and maybe not a good one either, but this North Carolina trio’s debut is rambunctious, noisy indie pop. It sounds like not a lot of microphones were involved, and they were all pretty much traumatized. Bassist Savannah Levin takes the lion’s share of the lead vocals (drummer Karl Kuehn delivers the rest). Levin could easily call to mind Be Your Own Pet’s Jemina Pearl, not just in her vocal timbre, but also in her exuberant delivery. Museum Mouth reminded me superficially of Times New Viking as well as BYOP — both comparisons they stand up to surprisingly well. They’re plenty rough around the edges, but the songwriting is solid, with some welcome mood and textural shifts — there’s even a slow (well, slower) pretty song, albeit with the same needle-in-the-red vocal treatment. I want to hear more from this band for sure — and I wouldn’t mind if they went just a little higher-fi next time. I feel like right now there’s a boatload of bands hiding behind sloppy fuzzed-out production because if you cleaned up the recordings you wouldn’t have anything very interesting left. That’s not a problem Museum Mouth needs to worry about.

No need to take my word for any of this: stream Tears in my Beer at punknews.org, hit up Sound as Language to snag the I am the Idiot of the Jungle EP, and vist Museum Mouth on MySpace for a link to free teaser single “Outside”.

(h/t to Deckfight for the heads-up!)

& now you’re up to date.

Friends pointed out that there are lots of current big-in-the-underground female-fronted acts that draw on the musical legacy of riotgrrl — Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, and many dozen more. Someone suggested that the likes of Cherie Curie and Joan Jett were “too old” to listen to these bands. In Joan Jett’s case, at least, I disagree — the label she co-founded, Blackheart Records has releases from bands like The Dollyrots, and Girl in a Coma. But I think the hipster darling bands are irrelevant — they lack any significant economic impact on the industry.

I think it’s about who (if anyone) gets to take the promise of riot grrl to the bank. I think the argument Jess Hopper is refuting is that artists like Pink and Avril Lavigne represent the failure of riot grrl — they adopt some of the musical and/or fashion signifiers of riot grrl, but divorce it from its content, and thereby rake in boatloads of cash. I think Hopper is asserting both that any female artist making music without some Svengali-string-puller in the background is fulfilling the promise of riot grrl, but also that music doesn’t have to have fast tempos and loud distorted guitars to challenge the status quo.

I’ve been sticking with the new weekly format so far, but I’m starting to feel overwhelmed by the stuff slipping through the cracks:

• I feel bad, for instance, for not devoting a week to Paula Carino and her excellent new Open on Sunday (at first I thought Ross Bonadonna’s guitar work was a little busy in places, but the songs won me over/I warmed to the arrangements anyway; I catch myself humming Ross’s licks as well as Paula’s vocals lines).
• Like probably a lot of folks, I learned about Honneycombs (yes, with 2 n’s) because their gorgeous cover of “Nightime” (on youtube) that made the linky rounds in the wake of Alex Chilton’s passing. Arson Garden fans will be delighted to know there’s new music from April and James Combs, but Ida fans should know that the Honneycombs release is distinguished by beautiful three-part harmonies and elegant, acoustic-rooted arrangements. (Don’t miss the fine cover of The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” available free from their website.)
• I’ve also been much enjoying the new releases from old fave Bettie Serveert (rockin’ again!), recent faves One for the Team, and Titus Andronicus (RIYL The Thermals, Hallelujah the Hills), and new (to me, anyway) faves Nana Grizol, The Happy Hollows, and The Light Footwork.
• Also still scratching my head over the dense, weird, but increasingly fascinating Hidden from These New Puritans
• I sort of expected that this week might be largely given over to hotly anticipated releases from Apollo Ghosts or Dum Dum Girls; both were initially a little disappointing but Apollo Ghosts, in particular, may just need some time to sink in.
• And then I learned the new Medications album was available early exclusively from the Dischord site, so I got to hear the ex-Faraquet folks’ latest post-punk/math-rock goodness sooner than I’d reckoned.
• And also, suddenly wondering whatever became of The Manhattan Love Suicides led me to learn they broke up, but just re-released/re-mastered the self-titled album with a passel of bonus tracks including the post Burnt Out Landscapes singles, and splintered into two new groups with new releases. The Blanche Hudson Weekend, with TMLS lead singer Caroline, sounds almost exactly like TMLS, i.e., awesome. The Medusa Snare, initially sounds more like Skywave to me than it does either (post-Skywave project) A Place to Bury Strangers or (Skywave influences) Jesus and Mary Chain, i.e, awesome.

However, for this week at least, all of these worthies were trumped by Standard Fare’s The Noyelle Beat. This is yet another indie pop band with co-ed vocals who doubtless would have loved the C86 scene if they were old enough to remember it. There’s a lot this around right now, and goodness knows I listen to my fair share of it and then some, but this band and this album really stand out. Hooks a-plenty, but what really sets it apart, I think, is more sophisticated songwriting than most of those working the general territory — lots of little bridgelets, breaks, overlapping parts & such —- and singer Emma Kupa. She can (and sometimes does) do the wispy pretty thing that is quintessential to the twee genre, but she can also belt with a lot more grit and verve than most.

Mar

AFCGT – AFCGT
Aloha – Home Acres
The Art Museums – Rough Frame
David Bazan – Live at Electrical Studio
Boston Spaceships – Camera Found the Ray Gun (ep)
Broken Bells – Broken Bells
Cast of Coraline – Original Off Broadway Cast Recording
Clogs – The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton
Cotton Candy – Top-Notch & First-Rate
Double Dagger – Masks (ep)
Drive-by Truckers – The Big To-do
Efterklang – Magic Chairs
Excepter – Presidence
Frightened Rabbit – The Winter of Mixed Drinks
Golden Triangle – Double Jointer
Gorillaz – Plastic Beach
Nana Grizol – “Ruth”
Emm Gryner – Stray Bullets (ep)
The Happy Hollows – Spells
Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 – Propellor Time
HollAnd – I Blow Up
Honneycombs – Honneycombs
Hussalonia – Alonia
Zola Jesus – Stridulum (ep)
JJ – jj no3
Kid 606 – Songs About ****ing Steve Albini
Miles Kurosky – The Desert of Shallow Effects
Lali Puna – “Remember” (single)
Cate Le Bon – Me Oh My
Ted Leo & the Pharmacists – The Brutalist Bricks
Let’s Wrestling – In the Court of the Wrestling Let’s
Liars – Sisterworld
The Light Footwork – National Historic Landmarks
Lonelady – Nerve Up
Love is All – Two Thousand and Ten Injuries
Holly Miranda – The Magician’s Private Library
One for the Team – Ghosts
Graham Parker – Imaginary Television
Emma Pollock – The Law of Large Numbers
The Radio Dept. – Clinging to a Scheme
Rogue Wave – Permalight
The Secret History – World that Never Was
So Cow – Meaningless Friendly
Static of the Gods – Knowledge Machine
Summer Cats – Your Timetable (single)
Surfer Blood – Astro Coast
These New Puritans – Hidden
Titus Andronicus – The Monitor
Vulgaires Machins – Requiem pour les Sourds
Wetdog – Frauhaus!
White Hinterland – Kairos