vacation...all I ever wanted

I am officially on vacation starting one shaky night's sleep from now, and since I will not be glued to a computer over the next ten days, the daily soundtrack reportage will be considerably thinner. Brace yourselves for pictures of majestic California beaches, giant burritos and sappy xmas fare.

More Felt

Poem by the River (lala) - their groggy paisley mini-masterpiece produced by OG psychedelic Maya Thompson
The Pictorial Jackson Review (lala) - Lawrence's moody Dylan-y defining statement against the rest of the band as they recorded Train Above the City without him.
The Splendour of Fear (lala) - Hypnotic and brooding, like somewhere between John Fahey and Joy Division at points, cough-syrup pastoral as Galaxie 500 in others. Plus the English spelling splendour somehow projects the concept more fulfillingly than splendor does. "The Stagnant Pool" clocking in at 8+ minutes is practically a thesis on 80's alt-rock moodiness. Maybe only Durutti Column does it better.
Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty (lala) - Few songs are as lovely to me as "Evergreen Dazed"

Some where on the old livejournal I wrote a really long thing about Felt, but thanks to LJ's unsearchability, I will encapsulated my thoughts thus: Felt is the perfect cult band. Enigmatic singer-songwriter with a flat but engaging voice who goes by his single name Lawrence (or did for some of the time), classically trained guitarist Maurice Deebank who turned Lawrence's little hovels into cathedrals, lots of infighting - one album Train Above the City did not include the singer/founder, presence of heavyweights like Martin Duffy and Liz Frasier and so on. Lawrence sang like Lou Reed but proclaimed a Morrissey-esque "New Puritanism" that mirrored the no drink/drugs/sex policies of straight-edge but with a more flowery air about it. The first single "Index" was recorded on a jambox on then sixteen-year-old Lawrence's bedroom and became an Sounds Magazine Single of the Week. They lived on critical praise alone, and faded into almost complete obscurity, their output sporadically reissued in a number of clumsy collections that miss the point of their divinely crafted little records.

Lee McFadden offers a history of the group at Perfect Sound Forever.

[The Record Crate] Another great year for music in Baton Rouge

The Record Crate will be taking a well-needed vacation until the new year, when we will return with our picks for the top 10 albums of 2008 -- you never know when one might sneak in at the last second. 2008 was a fabulous year for music, but then I am in agreement with the late BBC announcer John Peel, who when asked the best year of music would always respond with a resounding “This one!” It is great that we have the whole history of music available to us at the click of a mouse, but to really feel it, you have to see it live, to hear it as its being made. Thanks for another great year, Baton Rouge. I’ll expect an even better one next year.

In the final run down, here are some shows to catch:

With two accordions, seven languages and every possible kind of drunken revelry in their repertoire, The Zydepunks are proving to be the most potent sonic cocktail this part of the country has to offer. They will be backed up by the one-man blues dynamo Scott H. Biram at the Spanish Moon on Friday, Dec. 19.

Garage a Trois, the mind altering quartet of percussionist Mike Dillon, drummer Stanton Moore, saxophonist Skerik and master of the keyboards Marco Benevento will bring their downtown-NYC-meets-Frenchman-Street jazz funk rock supernova to the Chelsea’s stage on Saturday, Dec. 20. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after witnessing Garage a Trois.

Reception Is Suspected return from whatever backchannel wavelength they have been hiding on, promising a whole new set-up. I am picturing Tesla coils and possibly a Van der Graaf generator added into their assortment of electronics, but one will have to trot out to the Red Star on Christmas night to find out for sure.

Wednesday, Dec. 17

Mike Foster Project at Chelsea’s

A Band Named Sue at Boudreaux & Thibodeaux’s

Thursday, Dec. 18

Kristin Diable at Chelsea’s

An Empire at Sea and Panthalassa at North Gate Tavern

Sweet Root at Boudreaux & Thibodeaux’s

Friday, Dec. 19

Scott H. Biram & The Zydepunks at Spanish Moon

The Myrtles at Chelsea’s

Long Neck Society at The Varsity

Starscream’s Revenge, No Fuego, and justinbailey at North Gate Tavern

The Instagators at Boudreaux & Thibodeaux’s

Saturday, Dec. 20

Fleur de Tease Holiday Show and Hollywood Blues at Spanish Moon

Garage a Trois at Chelsea’s

Supervillain at North Gate Tavern

Bryan Lee at Teddy’s Juke Joint

Sunday, Dec. 21

Big Al & The Heavyweights at Teddy’s Juke Joint

Wednesday, Dec. 24

Mike Foster Project at Chelsea’s

Thursday, Dec. 25

Reception Is Suspected at Red Star

Friday, Dec. 26

Rebirth Brass Band at Chelsea’s

Meriwether at The Varsity

Saturday, Dec. 27

Eddie Bo at Chelsea’s

Tuesday, Dec. 30

BeauSoleil avec Micheal Doucet at the Manship Theatre

Wednesday, Dec. 31

Colour Revolt at Spanish Moon

Eric Lindell at Chelsea’s

Friday, Jan. 2

Ashes of Babylon at Chelsea’s

Mike Foster Project at The Varsity

Saturday, Jan. 3

A Band Named Sue at Chelsea’s

quitting hating places

I was about to pointlessly throw the Pitchfork top 50 list under the bus, but then I hadn't heard Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson's arch lonely-dude rock, and wouldn't have were it not on one of sublists, so there. And Robinson's multi-tracked hoarse holler reminded me of Richard Buckner's Since (lala), which I haven't listened to in ages.

Richard Buckner, and this record in particular, helped me process the Seattle I experienced surrounded by yahoos with no home training, whose unfunny take on irony spilled out into their corporatized lives and resulted in cheap shots like this editoral about Aretha Franklin being too fat to sing at Obama's inauguration. Buckner is of this imposing place and he flew the flag of emotional resiliency and fragility that I wish I had experienced more often directly from its people. I have had "Six Years" from his debut Bloomed in my head for a week now, and cannot find it, but "Ocean Cliff Clearing" from Since will do. Here he is performing it in Asheville, NC, a city declared by many to be the best place to live in the country



In Seattle and Kansas City, I learned to quit hating the South and realized it is a bigger part of my makeup than I had thought, and in the five years after moving back, I've learned to quit hating those places I hated so much when I was there. To quote the undersung, Buckner-esque Chris Mills in "All You Ever Do" - Why you gotta hate your hometown, honey? Them folks brought you up, but all you ever do is put 'em down.

And home is where you are, and if home doesn't feel right then find one that does and leave the other hometowns be. Annnnnnnnyway.... Buckner namechecks Felt (lala), the finest among flawed cult favorite bands, on "Ocean Cliff Clearing" and it is in their Spanish houses and crystal spires that I will place myself today.

here's your pony, now beat it, kid

Little Charlie & The Nightcats (lala) are a great loungey blues act with a heavy swing, but are linked here primarily for the hilarious more-Tom-Waits-than-Tom-Waits bummer "Circling the Drain"

Circling The Drain - Little Ch...

Golden Animals is here primarily for the genius album title Free Your Mind and Win a Pony. (ongakubaka)

[outsideleft] Black is the Darkest Shade of Pink: Nachtmystium and Psychic TV

Everyone should probably go through a Pink Floyd phase at some point, emphasis on the through. One of this esteemed websites founders is likely to disagree, but there is rich territory in Pink Floyd that can prove useful to the inquisitive young mind later in life on trails of their own carving. It can be argued that Pink Floyd made the psychedelic grand, and in doing that ruined it; akin to removing the drugs from little baggies and setting them out in silver platters – it’s just not right. I will leave the Floyd’s verdict in your hands, and offer in their tangential defense these two inflated pigs hanging on my wings.

Nachtmystium
Assassins: Black Meddle Pt. 1
(Century Media)

Chicago’s Nachtmytium was the very model of modern minor metal, growling and howling with basement din over that of the lesser US Black metal bands, but somewhere, flinty demon squelches and dual kick drums were not enough for this band, and they took some lessons from the Floyd. The most obvious allusion is “Meddle” in the name, but it is in “Assassins” that they real tribute lies. The track hums out in thick phaser tones as a pulse resembling the phone off the hook from The Wall beeps, pleads for connection. The album has not forgotten the corpse-painted zombies that brought them to the dance – you still get trashed around by scraped vocals and rage in “Ghosts of Grace” and “Your True Enemy” but even these storms are tempered with a daring addition to the underground metal script – scruatbility. Unlike every other metal album in recent memory, I can actually make out some of the words and discern the melodies, and those, particularly the repeated I never sleep and the guitar solo in “Your True Enemy” are the stuff of giant rock classics.

The heaviest moments on Assassins are not the brutal workouts but the smoldering ones, like the air-guitar ready riff of “Code Negative” and the three-part “Seasick.” These songs are melodramatic and moody like the great brood music of the late Eighties, and while no one would confuse these with tracks off, say First, last and Always or Pornography, or with Dark Side of the Moon for that matter, it would not be out of the question to put Nachtmystium in the same playlist on your iPod. And that is about as genre-expanding as it gets nowadays.

Psychic TV/PTV3
Mr. Alien Brain Vs. the Skinwalkers
(Sweet Nothing)

Psychic TV were always at their musical best not while tearing at their flesh with sheets of noise or titrating their consciousness through the faux-Leary drug evangelism of acid house(even if the band coined the term) but when they do quiet, simple, sinister things. And that is what comprises most of this album. The Pink Floyd connection here is blatant with the spectacular cover of “No Good Trying” off Syd Barrett’s solo masterpiece The Madcap Laughs. They cheekily play on the studio gaff that opens the original, playfully repeating it a couple times at the beginning before kicking into the jam, howling like Jim Morrison and riding the poisoned wave of the song as it crashes to the shore.

The real endgame is played out in “Trussed” with Genesis playing on words do you trust me over a dirge that has as much to do with a Geiger counter or submarine radar beep as it does a rock song. It sounds impossibly alive and dead at the same time. Psychic TV can plod with the best of them. VU’s “Foggy Notion” is garage-tastic in its reverent joy while “I am Making a Mirror”, penned by the late Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge is a devastating. Lady Jaye and Genesis were undergoing project of pandrogeny, slowly becoming each other through plastic surgeries and mutating of gender identities (pointed at the ragged rocker “Boys are Girls and Girls are Boys”) when Jaye passed away from heart failure last October, leaving Genesis in a singular state of mourning, half-himself, half-her with the other halves of halves in the hereafter. “I am Making a Mirror” (no pun intended) reflects that loss with chilling efficacy. Not every song is a winner here, but overall it is one of the more enjoyable and open Psychic TV efforts in years, and like the cracked Pink Floyd genius aped and lauded with “No Good Trying” it maps out a way to reach to the outer limits and drag something back worth looking at.

Link to original

desert blues and the river of lamentations

Touareg now: Tinariwen (lala), Toumast (lala), Terakaft (lala)

Thanks to this post by John Schaefer on the WYNC Soundcheck blog. In partial answer to his discussion therein "when we were asking whether critics were irrelevant or irreplaceable" adding another bucket to the River of Lamentations lazily running through The State of Music Criticism in the Age of Blog Critics, I would offer I am really enjoying the three Touareg albums he recommended in his commentary on NY Times critic Jon Pareles' world music list 2008.

The artists above, the sub-genre of Touareg, and, if I'm honest about it, most things under the the loose grouping of "world music" would go largely unnoticed by me were it not for people paid and unpaid on the Internet talking about such things . And now you have maybe read about them, and maybe listened to them, and maybe liked them, and maybe even bought them. And in that lies the value of music blogs and people talking about music not because it is their job to do so, but because they like to talk about music.

I am tangentially familiar with both Pareles and Schaefer (largely because they work for respected media outlets) but I would cite neither as my personal go-to guys for solid music opinion (not that they aren't qualified to be them, they just aren't the ones I read regularly), and yet here I am with Touareg's dizzying desert blues making my day thanks to them. So thanks, even if that is not payment enough.