think lizzy

Elvis Costello - Secret, Profane & Sugarcane (listen) I don't think I've listened to any of the Elvis Costello albums released in the last ten years in full, largely because I listened to all the preceding Elvis Costello albums in the preceding decade endlessly, with a spelunker's hope of finding a new antechamber in well-traversed caves. None, as far I remember, were discovered and somewhere ten years ago I gained a searing loathing of EC; he was suddenly a cameo king on every TV show with his goofy hat and glasses. When I heard him sing, I felt he was making that singer face at me, crooning the same song right in my ear while I was trying to pay attention to something else. I wanted him to just go away for a while. The problem clearly laid with me and not Elvis, and I'm starting to come back around to him. This is an example of a lovely record by a non-Southerner that loves Southern music more than Southerners do: thudding upright bass and a tangle of pedal steel and fiddle and mandolins and probably a damn singing saw in there too, so much texture that I can't really hear the songs all the time, but when I can, I hear the Elvis I loved back then.

My All Time Doll - Elvis Coste...

The Stranglers - No More Heroes (listen) Elvis' mandolin daydream dredging up glories past is all right and all, but this is more the rolling keyboard menace I seek. How a band could sound this goofy and menacing at the same time speaks to the malleable properties of new wave.

Bring On The Nubiles (1996 Dig...

I forgot all about this great forgotten classic...

Dagenham Dave - The Stranglers

which makes me want to listen to...

Thin Lizzy - Johnny the Fox (listen) It doesn't take much, I kinda always want to listen to Thin Lizzy, or at least the little bit of Thin Lizzy in every artist. in searching for the image and and then typing this, I accidentally typed "think lizzy" each time, so that will be my motto for the day. At any crisis, I will "think Lizzy" and let that notion be my compass. Maybe once Elvis Costello is awarded his Americana Grammy already and gets it out of his system, he can recruit the keyboardist from the Stranglers and "think Lizzy" about making a quivering, sneering great rock album again.

Borderline - Thin Lizzy

a jack stitched into the fabric

Mos Def - The Ecstatic (listen) Two summers ago, Aceyalone's Lightning Strikes (listen) was my default hip-hop ambient summer jam. Last summer, Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III (listen). This summer it is looking like it is this record. I just got word that the album is being released in t-shirt format as well by LnA, though I'm not exactly sure what that means. Will you be able to plug headphones into a jack stitched into the fabric? If so, that would be cool. Can I get an XL one with Pink Moon embedded on it for Sunday mornings? The Shaft soundtrack for when I need to get my stroll on? Is the XL and actual XL, or will the design wrap around me like those all over bus-ad decals? All I know is, I got the kitchen cleaned while listening to it, so please let me know if the Mos Def variety is waterproof.

Cluster - Qua (listen) This bit of throbbing Krautrock nostalgia segued in perfect with Mos Def's ripple, and allowed me to get some damn work done.

Kwesachu Mixtape Vol. 1 (via Micachu & the Shapes) No details, all alien pop awesome. I like mixtape culture very much. I copied the player code through advanced computer super-skillz, so you should be able to just up and click on the above image and make the wheels roll on the tape and roller skate on up to the parking lot where we will meet up later with the Mothership.

Boo Fries at Acme Oyster House, Baton Rouge

We gave the Baton Rouge branch of New Orleans' Acme Oyster House a shot last night. I was hoping to sample the new Abita Satsuma Harvest Wit before committing to a six-pack, but to no avail. They did, however have one of the first local sightings of boo fries - cheese fries slathered in brown gravy, better known in the regular parts of the world as poutine. I have been starving for this seemingly easy but elusive appetizer since February 6, 2007 when my friend Lori took me and the world on a poutine tour of Los Angeles. That is a long wait for an appetizer.

I suppose one could make this relatively simple dish at home, but it seems more the kind of thing you would eat out, idiomatically speaking. It's like making a shrimp po-boy at home; I'm sure it would be good and fresh and tailored to your specific needs, but it would be just a little wrong. Acme's boo-tine was salt-licious and bar-magic but truthfully, given the Southern acuity toward fried delights, they could have kicked out the jams a little. Mix in some of John Folse's goat cheese of which he is so proud. Make a roux gravy and brag about it. Work some chaurice or andouille up in there. Jalapenos. Toss in some fried crawfish tails to drive the only-here point home. In short, rock that shit. There is no valor in holding back when you are talking cheese fries with gravy. Push this greasy envelope and I will sing your praises and direct hungry, drunken people to your door.

I don't want to be too harsh on Acme. A testament to the quality of its version of the dish will be that we ate all of it before I could think to snap a picture. The above snapshot was ganked from Tripadvisor.com.

secret messages from everywhere

Ha Ha Tonka - Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South (MySpace) - I am wary of conspicuously Americana acts with funny names, it's like if a BBQ restaurant looks a little too consciously like it's trying to look like a BBQ restaurant rather than just being one, and this new record justifies some of that skepticism, but it makes up for it with understatement and raggedness.

Soul Asylum - Clam Dip and Other Delights - Back from when the indie bands all secretly wanted to be Guns 'N Roses. A woman on a message board to which my wife subscribes frequently posts about the secret messages Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner sends her, not just through their songs, but from everywhere. I mean... they could be coming from Ryan Adams and you would then be stuck deciding who is the crazier one.

Ryan Adams - 29 (listen) I keed, I keed. I wish more people were as "crazy" as Ryan Adams, doing what they want and being all damn the torpedoes about it.

29 - Ryan Adams

canon fodder

Castanets - Dub Refuge - All this talk about cannons/canons and I get a PR email regaling the forthcoming Castanets album (TEXAS ROSE, THE THAW, AND THE BEASTS, OUT 9/22 ON ASTHMATIC KITTY) that opened with

Castanets' contribution to the American music canon has always been a strange, experimental, defiant one.

No dis toward Castanets (they seem like a nice enough band) and not to heavily parse some PR copy (it's what they are hired to do) , but is Castanets contributing to the American music canon? Are all bands doing that by default? Is a canon a bracket of what is there and rises to the top, or is it a groomed thing?

I like this dub version of their 2008 album City of Refuge. I think dub is defintiely part of the canon, and not enough people are playing around with the idea anymore without just adding a dull reggae sheen to the work. Castanets are taking dub at definition and stripping out and skeletonizing previously recorded tracks into something that emphasizes the continuum that lies at the soul of source material, usually with a lot of echo. We tend to only really hear something once it has bounced off something else anyway.

Mark Kozelek - What's Next to the Moon (listen) The kernel magic of AC/DC songs persist whatever recontextualizing has been done to them. If I had a copy of For Those About to Rock sitting around, I'd play that just to answer the canon/cannon question with an actual cannon.

"chicken-fried Stooges"

The Icarus Line - Black Live at the Golden Coast (listen) I had about a 2-hour drive before me on Saturday and started a new Pandora station on my phone with Pulp's "Common People," thinking I was going to use a line from it in the article that was to result from this trip. Thankfully, Pandora could detect by just the shake of my hand as I pecked it in that I didn't really want to listen to Pulp. iPhones have gyroscopes so maybe they can actually do this. Instead it knew I wanted the dispatch from teenage wasteland that is The Icarus Line. They sounds like the Jesus and Mary Chain (if they were an actual chain) being used to stop the rented party barge from drifting too far into the reservoir.

Gets Paid - The Icarus Line

Verbena - La Musica Negra - (listen on MySpace) About 13 years ago my roommates and I went to see Verbena (incubation band for the quite popular AA Bondy) and dubbed them "chicken-fried Stooges" and while I think I would substitute Cheap Trick or even Foo Fighters now, neither description has the ring of "chicken-fried Stooges."



Big Star - In Space - (listen at the Rykodisc Big Star site) Verbena has a song called "Me and Yr Sister" which made me think of Chris Bell which in turn led to the fact that I've never listened to that "new" Big Star record from 2005. From what I gather, it is Alex Chilton backed by the Posies, which may not be the Big Star of legend, but is not a bad trade-off. This is a great little record. It has comfort-with-tension hidden under a blanket of harmonies and perfect chord progressions that I always want out of Alex Chilton solo records but can't quite find. I even like the much derided pastoral disco diversion "Love Revolution"; Alex Chilton might have some jam band aspirations that should be explored.

I frankly hope he continues to make Big Star records even if dismantling a beloved rock 'n' roll mythological canon is what it takes; it's his to tear apart and, if I may, the beauty of a cannon is best exhibited by firing it, not by polishing it.

warped sunset

iphone pictures 642, originally uploaded by real_voodooboy.

The sunset was unreal over the pastel blankness of Lake Ponchatrain from the Causeway, but not quite as unreal as this jiggled photo suggests.