Podcast Episodes 721 & 722 are live!
Mid-November midweek special
Two new episodes are now available.
Episode 721 features Throwing Muses, Eros, claire rousay, Moin, Zachary Paul, Voice Actor and Squu, Leya, Venediktos Tempelboom, Cybotron, Robin Rimbaud and Michael Wells, Man or Astro-Man?, and Aisha Vaughan.
Episode 722 has James Blackshaw, FACS, Laibach, La Securite, Good Sad Happy Bad, Eramus Hall, Nonconnah, The Rollies, Jabu, Freckle, Evan Chapman, diane barbe, Tuxedomoon, and Mark McGuire.
Wine in Paris photo by Mathieu.
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The hilarious packaging for this release would have us believe they're a clean-cut, fun-loving rock'n'roll band getting into scrapes and solving mysteries Scooby Doo-style. They're actually experimental improvisers who've made a successful crack at differentiating their record from the hundreds of others which opt for a dour, minimalist presentation.
Peaches has a little secret. She doesn't want you to know that deep, down inside, she's not a filthy slut, but a respectable Canadian-born music teacher living in Berlin. However, in the three years and three incarnations of this release, she has gone from what seemed, at first, to be a campy underground joke to an internationally-renowned dirty post-disco diva.
The Catheters craft hard, agressive, and at times completely merciless rock in the strongest traditions of the genre. Their sound is menacing and fast-paced, while vocalist, Brian Standeford sounds like he either wants his vocal cords to bleed, or your head to explode starting with your ears first.
I haven't listened to His Name Is Alive for about six or seven years, so I wasn't sure I had the right disc in my stereo when I pressed play and expected to hear the new album, 'Last Night.' The recent blitz of 4AD releases which all look thoroughly similar (computer-blurred images on a dark background digipak) didn't help my confusion, either. Instead of the dreamy His Name Is Alive indie pop I expected, what I got was a soulful, jazzy hybrid of funk and R&B with female vocals I did not recognize.
It's easy for pop musicians to get a complex about being taken seriously in the music world. We've been through the 80's fetishists attempt to reclaim pop music via forced kitsch, and we've seen would-be pop singers succumb to the trend du jour by lacing their otherwise straight-ahead songwriting with up-to-the-minute studio trickery that is bound to sound dated in a few years. Luckily, Sing-Sing are smarter than this. On "The Joy of Sing-Sing," they get down to the business of making pure, catchy pop music with a tried and tested set of sounds and production techniques that never get old if they are used in the right way. And they are here, as evidenced by the fact that I woke up this morning with their single "Feels Like Summer" repeating on infinite loop in my brain, and I didn't mind. While most of the press surrounding Sing-Sing seems intent on comparing this album to the two songwriters' previous body of work, and ultimately telling you what this album IS NOT (it is, after all the product of people who have been involved with other bands) I feel like it's more interesting to tell you what Sing-Sing IS! It's bitter-sweet lyrics about friends and lovers that falls nicely between the two unbearable extremes of chic lounge indifference and embarrassing heart-on-sleeve open-ness. You won't know what side of the bed singer Lisa O'Neil wakes up on, but she's also not so flippant towards her miniature tales of personal connections that you don't lose interest. And therein lies the allure of Sing-Sing. The looped beats and layered guitars are interesting enough to draw you in while delicate vocal harmonies allow you to take the songs with a grain of salt, or to pour your heart and soul into every crisply recorded breath. Sing-Sing is pop music for people who remember liking pop music at one point, and aren't afraid to like it again, but don't want to have to like it with their tongue always planted firmly in cheek. Sing-Sing write songs that take three minutes to move from point A to point C by way of B without drawing attention to the formula that makes them work, and are intelligent enough not to be seen as a guilty pleasure. This is the kind of album that will make you want to go to a show and (gasp) buy a t-shirt again. It can be easy to get stuck in a rut of listening to nothing but 'serious' music, and we all need a break now and then, and Sing-Sing has the perfect recipe. It's music you don't have to get involved in to enjoy, but it' that much richer if you do. Oh, and Emma from Lush is in it. 
Moonsanto's Fraud - Hell - Dope goes awry in the first minute and never gets back on track. It's a concept album, and right off the bat that means it has a lot more work to do to keep me from saying "oh, come on already." Don't get me wrong, there are some great concept albums where the result of a deeply rooted idea being fleshed out over the course of an album yields a result greater than the sum of the parts. This is not one of them. The story here is about "Professor Dr. Goodseed" and his ultimate pesticide, and well, I don't really have to finish that thought, because it all gets much more silly as it goes along. Is this supposed to be creepy or diabolical? If it is, it achieves that tone only in the way a Scooby-Doo villain does. The background noise is just that: relatively uninspiring electro-acoustic mishmash of instruments and digital blurbs. On its own, it wouldn't make an engaging record. What intensifies my frustration is the near constant voice-over that vaguely tells the story of Moonsanto, the Professor, and Mary Ann in a pitch-shifted and nearly cartoonish voice. It's like the Teletubbies trying to trip you out, and it's not working. There are a few worthwhile moments where the composition makes sense and is intriguing, but for the rest of the release Moonsanto is either assuming that being vague and faux-spooky will be enough for me to suspend my disbelief, or being ironic and tounge-in-cheek to cover up the utter lack of real content. Either way, Hushush is usually on point with odd music that a lot of other labels wouldn't touch, but with this one, they cast the net a little too far. Reel it in. samples:
Picture the scene: Three hundred wide-eyed and crazy club kids from the Ukraine, desperate for a place to hold the mother of all parties, hi-jack a dormant soviet submarine and load it up with a massive sound system, a bar, and several cases of glowsticks. They descend into the icy waters and let the rumble begin. Meanwhile, Andrew Duke, a Canadian Naval sonar operator picks up a faint throb from the distant party sub as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. The gurgling beats are mangled by the time he receives them several thousand nautical miles away, but as he listens for signs of hostile intent, he begins to tap his foot, and the impetus for "Sprung" is born. He leaves the Navy with deep-sea sonar recordings in tow and buys a laptop where he begins to splice the faint, distressed beats and pulses with more audible scratches and pops and the Bip-Hop label is more than happy to release the results. I'm not sure if that's exactly how the recording of "Sprung" went down, but if you sit back with a copy of "Sprung," and a pair of headphones and picture that wayward sub and its crew of tripped-out dancing kids slowly descending through the darkness until the pressure squeezes the infinite beat into submission, you'll have the perfect soundtrack. 
Let me just say this one thing to our entire British audience before I get started with this review: Just because you guys import our urban music by the barrel doesn't mean we Americans should have to put up with any quantity of yours. Sure, we'll take the occasional Craig David track and play the video on M2, but we have no interest in your "So Solid" UK Garage (save for the R&B-like MJ Cole and Artful Dodger). That being said, my heart is filled with nothing but the purest of pity for the poor A&R over at Vice Records who's going to lose his or her job in the crash and burn effort to attain some level of crossover success with The Streets. Sole member Mike Skinner may speak directly to the British youth in the same way that Eminem speaks to suburban white teenagers, but he's speaking an entirely different language than what this market speaks. The lyric sheet that came with this promo CD is essential for any attempt to understand the heavy slang here, although some translations would be even more useful (birds = bitches; geezers = UK garage wiggers). While I could waste far too much of my time slagging The Streets' total lack of lyrical flow, I'll just say that it really takes away from the mediocre tracks underneath. The peppy single "Has It Come To This?" sounds like a radio spot where the hyper-caffeinated disc jockey babbles on, unable to oblige the listeners by shutting the fuck up and go back to the music they actually tuned in for. Sadly, this song stands among the few-and-far-between decent moments of the album. Tracks like "Sharp Darts," "Don't Mug Yourself," and "Too Much Brandy" are so ridiculously bad that I am stunned that a reputable music magazine like NME praised 'Original Pirate Material' as a "landmark record." Still, a handful of the songs would have worked as instrumentals, namely the moody two-step lurch of "Geezers Need Excitement" and the string washes of "It's Too Late." Though I'll take another twelve Damon Albarn side-projects before I listen to anything like this again, 'Original Pirate Material' does manage to come out sounding better than that last Vincent Gallo compilation, destined to be the worst CD of the year no matter how many more British MCs release albums in 2002.
The peculiarity of Pavement's music to me has always been its indifference. A song like "Loretta's Scars" is at once dreary as well as rousing. Stephen Malkmus's slackeristic vocals contribute to the indifference, but I think it has more to do with the unconventional composition of Pavement's songs. On the one hand, at the time 'Slanted and Enchanted' was recorded, you had a bunch of fellows who, at best, had moderate skill with their instruments, yet a fairly intimate connection with them. On the other hand, part of the band was living outside NYC, while the other part was back in Stockton, California, and so the result is a sort of bicoastal composition which successfully hybridized a bunch of antagonistic pairs: Malkmus's melody craft with Kannberg's explosiveness; menacing snarls with mournful croons; an East Coast melancholy with a west coast optimism.
Terrastock 5 was an outrageous weekend-long nostalgia fest. By the evening of Sunday I'd really had enough of musty old psychedelic rock. The day had been disappointing. I was mostly hanging out at the bar, happy for any distraction from the music that came my way when suddenly, in the middle of it all, SubArachnoid Space made my day. They punched through all the dross, chatter, space and bodies and captivated my attention. At last, here was the prog rock aesthetic demonstrating its superior durability by sweeping away all the psych cobwebs of the weekend. Despite some technical issues, their sound was excellent—very loud but tight, punchy and clear. The first rate drumming, which reminded me of Police-era Stuart Copeland and of Trans Am's second album, combined with massive wedges of bass (sufficient to cause a perceptible draft) to lay down the groove while ingenious guitar figures and washes filled out the well delineated compositions. This was so good that, in a guilty, devil-may-care frame of mind, I broke the terms of my unemployment and bought a couple of their CDs. The first, "These Things Take Time" on Release was recorded live at KFJC in Silicon Valley in 1999 and the second "Play Nice" is a self-released 2002 tour CDR comprising bootleg-quality recordings from rehearsals and concerts. To be candid, if SubArachnoid had played like they did on these CDs in their T5 set, I wouldn't have bought any CDs. "Play Nice" holds some of live set's powers (check the samples) but overall the material is, unfortunately, much more psych than it is prog. While SubArachnoid's set at T5 was (blessedly) on the fringes, the music on these CDs would have been right in the middle of the T5 spectrum, almost definitive: lugubrious noodling jams with lashings of space echo on the guitar — pleasant enough in their own right, sometimes breaking the barrier into interesting, a long way from being enthralling and almost memorable. The good news is that SubArachnoid Space are working on a new album.
