We're what's happening

Labor Day approacheth. And I'm ready to drag my weary self into a much-needed weekend of battery recharging. Speaking of weary, here's a nice song to stumble around town to with your gang of wasted clowns, seeking deeper degrees of numbness in the druggy night.

I suppose that's a good enough note to mention a little break from the 'blague. How does a week sound? Pretty good to me. See you back around 9/10.

Iggy Pop - Nightclubbing

Number one in hell

Cheers to Ariel Pink for creeping everyone out again. For those who thought he'd gone hi-fi and cashed in on the perverse interest he'd accumulated, his new one reminds that he remains a truly demented guy. Also, a first-rate con-man. This tune feels like it belongs at a demonic beach party, pre-empting the sinister moonlight with some queasy afternoon sunshine.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Live It Up

Move on up

Good to know that '60s could've-been-rock-heroes The Move have been posthumously elevated from Nuggets love to full-on reissue fever. The one "Best-of" in my possession is a proverbial treasure trove of psych garage pop that makes me legitimately wish I'd been around to see them in action. Here are but 2 such gems. I challenge any band functioning today to use the word "terminus" in a more rockin' way.

The Move - Blackberry Way

The Move - Omnibus

After all the day's away

Here's a palette cleanser. As in, forget everything you want/expect/deserve from music. Just because your band sounds like they don't know how to play their instruments, it doesn't mean they don't have a deeply clear sense of what they want to sound like. Early Red Krayola is one of those bands that I don't put on often, but when I do, it's completely necessary.

The Red Krayola - Night Song

Underwater affirmation

God bless the boys of Animal Collective for reminding us that psychedelic sound mining can easily intersect with pop bliss. Panda Bear's Tomboy effort continued the gang's winning streak, with some excellent tunes that belong more to a hidden underwater world than a starry-night campfire. This one makes me a bit misty in that anthemic way. On the other hand, tears under the sea? That doesn't really seem possible.

Panda Bear - You Can Count On Me

Traveling inward

Sorry to bail on a Thursday tune. Life's distractions sometimes overwhelm. But here we are away from all that noise and back into the world of searching sound, courtesy of one of Australia's finest avant-post-whatever bands. I really want them to play at my next birthday.

The Makers Of The Dead Travel Fast - Untitled

The Makers Of The Dead Travel Fast - Three Heads

Vanish in a tragical way

From hypersexual glam to pretty nonsexual and definitively non-glam. Mike Oldfield may occupy one of the dweebier regions of the musical starry night, but I'm drawn to him the way you might be drawn to the brainy, gawky cousin you see hanging out alone at the family reunion. This song is his attempt at pop, and I'm trying to visualize the faces of the British kids bopping around to it in their early '80s bedrooms.

Mike Oldfield - Mistake

Stroke me like the rain

Reading the big new Bowie biography has me going back to the catalog for re-evaluation. We'll see what ch-ch-changes emerge as I get out of "salute the classics" mode and into some renewed critical engagement, but I've already re-fallen in love with one tune. And what's not to love about this slice of omni-sexual rock n' raunch.

David Bowie - Velvet Goldmine

Out on a limb

It seems the most important aspect of experimentation is the risk involved. Musicians are generally applauded for going out on a limb, but I can say from experience that it can be damn scary when you're actually out there. But anyone who tries new things balances the threat of artistic free fall with the prospect of magical breakthough. Which allows me to be very forgiving of experimental sounds that try and maybe don't succeed as well as they might. At least they're stretching people's ears.

Zs are a new music outfit that works its way through a Bang On A Can-inspired world, but are legitimately trying to carve out a landscape of their own. Every time I hear this tune, I revise my opinion of it, which I take to be a good thing. The pounding regularity of its eight-notes would be too much if they drums didn't keep upending the flow and flipping the usual expectations of melody and rhythm duties. It's a kind of mischief I can't help but smile at right about now. Tomorrow, who knows?

Zs - B Is For Burning

No glasses for classes

Funny how certain old impressions never change or even die. They just sit suspended, as though carved in rocks that never come into contact with weather. I put on the Swirlies every now and again and the recollections (mostly borrowed) are always the same. This song came out a little before my college days, but every note (and fairly ludicrous "noise" coating) smacks of the hermetic indie rock landscape that I was enamored of, and yet never fully connected with, at the time. Genuine pleasure, but it still feels like I'm looking into someone's bedroom window.

Swirlies - Pancake

One foot in the door, the other in the gutter

 

The thinking person finds ambivalence everywhere. But where it could paralyze, the truly wise make it something to rock out to. And there are few wiser than the Replacements. Here, it's ambivalence about taking their punkness uptown or wrapping it in a suit or some other metaphor for making the primal rock instinct palatable to the mass market, such as it existed in the mid-'80s. I'm not sure if the horns are meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but for me, they make for an irresistible, snarling groove.

The Replacements - I Don't Know

Shafted

It is a shame that so much pop consciousness of Isaac Hayes's work centers on Shaft, which reveals itself as a pretty crappy movie once you get over the initial Blaxploitation yucks. Like many of Hayes's albums, the soundtrack frustratingly mingles brilliance with filler. But, oh the brilliance! Maybe none more awesome than this slinky jam that spools out to a luxurious 20 minutes like the loverman himself stretched out in wait on the bearskin rug.

Isaac Hayes - Do Your Thing

Burn the feel

There's a part of my head where it's always 1982 and electrofunk soundtracks moments both great and small. This tune represents a few characteristic minutes in that world. Sure it's a party jam, but I can't help but find the music moving. Which is weird, I admit. As for the upper case "k"s in the middle of her name...you got me.

JaKKi - Got Me Burnin' Up

Visions

Ah, sweet unheralded psych pop magic. Bless the people at Rhino for their continued curatorial prowess. Pulled out this adjunct to the Nuggets series and was charmed anew by nearly every track. I couldn't share just one. 

I don't know what I like more about this first song — the easy grooviness or the fact that it came from a has-been rockabilly guy reconstructed for the psychedelic era. At this distance, quality wins over authenticity, and who really cares if this Baker Knight was cynically cashing in or having his mind blown? As for Kim Fowley's mini space adventure, I cannot bring myself to believe he wasn't laughing all through the session. In both tracks, I sense a wide-eyed wonder that may take several generations to recapture.

Baker Knight and The Knightmares - Hallucinations
Kim Fowley - Strangers From The Sky

Woozy walking

Feeling the walking wooziness after a hectic week on this Friday. One of these days, I'll figure out a way to get summer vacations back into my life. Here's a tune for my state of mind, courtesy of a some light sidework from krautrock luminary Dieter Moebius. This tune brings to mind all my childhood dreams involving clowns, and magically makes them a lot less scary.

Liliental - Wattwurm

Swing from a good good rope

These days, I'm wouldn't even pretend to boast about being the first kid on the block to get to know about this or that band. I wasn't a super early adopter 10 or so years ago, but I do remember catching an early wind of TV On The Radio's Young Liars EP and knowing there was something special about them, even if in retrospect they were just beginning to crawl out the Williamsburg murk and into the sunshine of global acclaim.

That debut work continues to sounds great. In some ways, even better than the big brilliance of what they've evolved into. This song remains my favorite — a bold cover that absolutely re-imagines (and arguably overtakes) an indie rock semi-classic. People talk about the voices that haunt. This has about 15 of them.

TV On The Radio - Mr. Grieves

You'll lose your mind and play

It's a rare song that hits on most of the hallmarks of psychedelic music without coming off like a parody. Pre-arena Pink Floyd were aces at that. And not just in long form. Syd Barrett could conjure musical visions from the outer (inner?) regions in the space of a tight pop song. Case in point...

Pink Floyd - See Emily Play

Everywhere I go the sky is falling

Interesting how I had a sudden desire to listen to M. Ward, and then I go check my calendar, and see that I've got plans to watch him play tonight! A nice synchronicity. I don't usually think to listen to him, which is probably due to my being far less intrigued by his music learning some actual information about the man. Which is to say, when it became clear that he wasn't a phantom of some real or invented part of American lore. Maybe the biggest pitfall of fame is becoming a known quantity and losing the possibility of shrouding yourself in mystery. I guess I'll find out soon enough whether I dig his current material. Hopefully, it's as sad and soulful as this tune.

M. Ward - Paul's Song

Disappearing

Deerhoof is so damn charming, it hurts. Experimental and bubblygummy and always effervescent. Album after album, the more they expand their sound, the more I'm pleased by how well they do it. And I love how well their fractured, lanky virtuosity translates to the stage. Here's a tune that gets into some droning Can territory with drummer Greg Saunier pushing relentlessly ahead, equal parts Tony Allen and Jaki Liebezeit, which is fine company to sit beside.

Deerhoof - Desapareceré

May I sing with me

The Sparks obsession has segued to a tender look-back thru my Yo La Tengo collection. I maintain my collegiate perspective that they were one of those rare bands that could try anything without looking stupid. (Something about humility and not worrying too much about your career, I guess.) And yet, every song of theirs I put on the 'blague is a rocker. Hmmm.

Yo La Tengo - Upside-Down

Boys of summer

OK, I think I've had my Sparks fill for now. Just in time to celebrate the new album by perennial 'blague fave Windsurf, whose retro-futurist cosmic beach jams never fail to take me to a place of sonic bliss. This is the title track of their latest, and though the video has been around a while, I can't help but not share it, so deftly does it capture that jumbled, subjective '80s mutation that is at the heart of their aesthetic. I really can't get enough of this stuff.

A wallet from a careless man

 

Can't resist one more from the Mael Bros. Here's a tune from their classic Kimono My House, which is maybe the best place to start in their daunting and varied discog. The usual lyrical saltiness aside, this is one with universal appeal — that feeling when you find a wallet on the street and decide that the poor sap is actually better off bankrolling your subsequent spending spree. If fist-pumping Glam is about anything, triumphant liberation from guilt may just be it.

Sparks - Lost And Found