Trouble Down South is at Trophy's tonight with The Soft Set and Summer Wardrobe. Although it's a late show, it should be mucho fun. Come on out, even if it means blowing off work tomorrow! Isn't it about time that you destroyed your safe and happy life before it is too late?
Air We Breathe - 2003 year-end mix
1. Alone Again Or - Calexico
2. The Fitted Shirt - Spoon
3. Blanket and Crib - Okkervil River
4. Why Not Your Baby - Gene Clark
5. I Sent You Up - Knife in the Water
6. Los Angeles, I'm Yours - Decemberists
7. You Look Like a Lady - Lee Hazlewood
8. Man With a Harmonica - Ennio Morricone
9. Fuga No. II - Os Mutantes
10. Kotton Krown - Elf Power
11. Naomi - Neutral Milk Hotel
12. Leave My Kitten Alone - Little Willie John
13. I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms - Feelies
14. Already in Black - Moles
15. From Genesis to Judgment Day - Secret Intentions
16. Tell Balgeary, Balgury Is Dead - Ted Leo & the Pharmacists
17. One Foot In the Grave - Pernice Brothers
18. Pete Rose Affinity - Summer Hymns
19. Rhymes of Goodbye - Scott Walker
20. Red Dust - Iron & Wine
21. Air We Breathe - Dexateens
22. All of Your Tomorrows Were Decided Today - Che Arthur
23. Today Is The Day - Yo La Tengo
24. Apology Accepted - Go-Betweens
My preliminary Best of 2003 list:
* The Decemberists - Her Majesty the Decemberists
Fun, funny, and literate. It's like listening to Stephin Merritt and James Thurber share a joint and finish each other's sentences.
* Go-Betweens - Bright Yellow Bright Orange
Boasting their legendary ability to turn phrases and a more focused and folky feel, Robert Forster and Grant McLennon cast the mold for aging gracefully in rock music.
* Knife in the Water - Cut the Cord
Atmospheric as the previous KITW albums, but actually reaching a sense of RAWK at times. Although some of the lyrics wouldn't be out of place on a Yes album, the male/female harmonies and spacey redneck pop bring them home.
* Pernice Brothers - Yours, Mine, or Ours
Like Big Star, Joe Pernice is obsessed with building a better pop song. He reaches perfection on several of these, and the relaxed-but-rockin' feel of the overall album sits together very well.
* Calexico - Feast of Wire
It's like a mix tape of all the best Calexico on the previous albums, but it's all new, too.
* Ted Leo & the Pharmacists - Hearts of Oak
Someone has to pick up the mantle of pub rock. Smart lyrics and booty-shaking indie-rock.
* Summer Hymns - Clemency
Gorgeous chamber-pop/alt-country that calls to mind the guaziest, cliched summer memories and makes them live.
* Okkervil River - Down the River of Golden Dreams
Brimming with Fender Rhodes and bucolic instrumentation, this album sounds like Will Oldham built a time machine to recruit the top session players from 1972 and 1927.
* The American Song-Poem Anthology
Rock's bizarre coupling of inept folk art and slick studio hackdom. Incredibly fun to listen to the session guys decide that these lyrics -- unlike the hundreds of dry tunes they'd been churning out -- these lyrics really had that special something. They were worth pulling out all the stops and going for it.
* New Pornographers - Electric Version
Insanely infectious Nuggety postpunk-pop. And the bells go, "No no no No no no No no no No no no No no no no no."
Honorable mentions:
* Yo La Tengo - Today Is the Day EP
All is ephemeral. Quiet songs become explosive. What was a blow to the head shall be as gentle as butterfly kisses. The journey is short, but the terrain covers the map.
* Consonant - Love and Affliction
Moody rockers straight from the heart of the 80s underground scene.
* Iron & Wine - The Sea & the Rhythm EP
Bitterness can be murmured, too.
* Elf Power - Nothing�s Going To Happen
Goofy lo-fi covers album with impeccable taste and inspired wit.
Rocket from the Tombs, Emo's, December 13, 2003
This'll be obnoxious, but I have to start this review by pointing out what a shithole Emo's is. Every self-obsessed fashion-plate junkie-wannabe "I'm-punk-because-I'm-wearing-a-leather-jacket" pseudo-nihilistic prick in town packs that place to play out their own violent version of high school hierarchies with themselves recast as jocks and Heathers. To start with, as soon as I arrived, the bartender ignored me for ten minutes despite no one else being at the bar (to be fair, the guy was probably wrestling the fashion implications of whether he should pierce his dick or his tongue next), then plopped my change down in the only puddle on the bar, mere inches from my outstretched hand (no tip for you, smart guy). Then, when RFTT started, this tall guy physically pushed me back from my sweet spot mere inches from Richard Lloyd and tried to form his very own mosh pit right there. More on mosh pits in a second. I need to point out, though, that this guy, along with a few other people who also used their size to push people at the front around, were employees of the club. Yes, that's right, the people who work at Emo's pushed the people who paid to be there around and helped to set off some of the violence that they then had to control. Again: real smart, guys. Then people kept throwing beer at the band, spraying most of the audience while they were at it. More on this coming up, too. Then the club waited far too long to start the asshole removal process. Some of the assholes who had to be removed were buddy-buddy with the bouncers, by the way. The girl who broke a bottle at my feet and kicked my legs with her steel-toed Doc Martins ("Daddy, I'm a punk now, can I buy some $150 boots?") had been hugging and hugged by almost all of the bouncers and club employees thoughout the evening. Most of all, those fashion-obsessed fuckheads couldn't tell that the punkest guy in the club - the punkest guy who'd ever been in that club - was the 400+ lb guy onstage wearing a belt & suspenders under a pink sport coat, looking to all the world like a retired Polish steelworker.
OK, music instead of ranting. I missed the first band. Second band was the strangely popular Riverboat Gamblers, who have an excellent stageshow but unfortunately can't quite hide that while they look like the New York Dolls, they sound like a third-rate hardcore band from 1985 who haven't changed the 9 volts in their Boss distortion pedals for the last year. Seriously, I thought at first that my earplugs were the problem - surely the two guitars on stage were doing something other than making a hissy sound - but removing the earplugs confirmed that the hissy sound was the point. No hook, no choruses, and the catchiest part of any song was a shouted "Hey Hey Hey Hey!" The front guy was incredibly energetic, though, leaping into poles, hanging upside-down from the ceiling, throwing himself into the audience. If these guys locked themselves in a room with the Dolls' first two albums for two weeks, they might learn how to structure a song, which would make them formidable.
After they quit, my friends and I moved up to the front for RFTT with the rest of the old people and record collectors. We positioned ourselves one person back from the Vox AC-30 amp, which was obviously the Richard Lloyd side of the stage. Uh, for anyone NOT in the know, Richard Lloyd is one of the two brilliant guitarists from the seminal punk/guitar-god band Television. Lloyd's role in the reformed Rocket From the Tombs is to fill in for the deceased Peter Laughner, which is somewhat appropriate, given that Laughner briefly filled in for Lloyd in the mid 70s when Lloyd quit Television for a month or two. The rest of the reformed Rocket from the Tombs consists of David Thomas (the aforementioned steelworker-looking weirdo who formed the world-shattering Pere Ubu with Laughner upon RFTT�s split), Cheetah Chrome (who formed the Dead Boys with drummer Johnny Blitz after RFTT), Craig Bell (who also played Mirrors, another Cleveland protopunk band), and Steve Mehlman (currently of Pere Ubu) filling in for RFTT�s original drummer Johnny Blitz (whereabouts unknown).
RFTT opened with "Frustration," which is now mostly an instrumental (Thomas occasionally shouts "frustration," but all the lyrics of the 70s version are gone). Thomas was in heavy glaring mode, to say the least. I've never seen someone electrify an audience and demand attention with only a baleful glare before, but goddamn was it intense. The band then launched in "So Cold," but was interrupted by some asshole throwing a glassful of beer onto David Thomas. The band stopped, and Thomas, obviously pissed, left the stage. Richard Lloyd stepped up to the mike and threatened to quit playing if it happened again. Thomas came back out, and the band started "What Love Is," only to be interrupted by another glassful of beer thrown at Cheetah. This time, security waded in and pulled a leather-jacketed, moussed-hair "punk" out. Lloyd said something along the lines of "OK, we got the asshole, so let's keep playing." Cheetah Chrome started singing "Ain't It Fun." Then some guy back in the middle of the crowd threw several cupfuls of beer at the band, soaking Thomas, Lloyd, and everyone in the front, including me and my wife. Lloyd shouted, "Fuck you! We're gone!" and the band left the stage completely. Several guys around the beer-throwing dickhead ("Hey! He has a Mohawk! How transgressive!") apparently beat the shit out of the guy before security moved in and removed him.
We stood there, wet and cold (Did I mention that this was outside? Yeah, it was about 40 degrees), chanting for the band for about ten minutes. Finally, they came back on, and David Thomas said, "We're turning back the clocks fifteen minutes on the count of five." The man counted down, and the band launched into "Frustration" again, faster and with the intensity of a band with a fixed setlist and only an hour before the sound ordinance would close the club down.
They played their whole set, start to finish, exactly the same as it appears on the Rocket Redux tour-only CD. The set:
* Frustration
* So Cold
* What Love Is
* Ain't It Fun (Cheetah on vocals)
* Muckraker (Craig Bell on vocals)
* 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (good lord was this amazing)
* Sonic Reducer (Cheetah on vocals, Lloyd broke a string and finished the song on Cheetah's backup Gibson SG)
* I Wanna Be Your Dog (while Lloyd changed his string - David, Cheetah, and Craig each taking a verse, and David grabbing Cheetah's guitar for a verseful of skronk)
* Never Gonna Kill Myself Again
* Amphetamine (Cheetah on vocals, Lloyd on solo guitar through much of it)
* Down In Flames
* Final Solution (holy shit! I mean HOLY SHIT!)
Encore:
* A Richard Lloyd song, I don't know what it's called
* Life Stinks
Lloyd was on fire all night. He's the careful guitarist in Television, playing very precise, technically-accomplished leads, orderly yin to Tom Verlaine's anything-goes yang style. In RFTT, he's a goddamn chaos generator, channeling Laughner's H-bomb free-jazz noise style. Wow. Double wow. Mehlman, too, was absolutely amazing, playing lightning-fast busy drums all night. I've never seen a drummer come close to keeping up that level of concentration and speed over the course of an hour, and I saw Metallica on the ...And Justice For All tour.
My wife was elbowed by an older guy who pushed in front and started pogoing during "Life Stinks." After the show, she called him on pushing women around, and he apologized. I was buying a CD and shaking David Thomas's hand when he wandered up to Thomas and told him that he'd sent Thomas a letter in 1976 and that he now plays in Brave Combo, have you heard of them, David?
A quick note on mosh pits: fuck you, you selfish dumbasses. It's all well and good until some ex-Marine prick starts punching longhaired guys and groping girls (as happened that night - it took five guys to carry him out of the crowd) or until you start pushing aging fans over (there was a 50ish woman behind my wife who was being pushed around the entire show - I finally moved over to prevent the mosh pit from knocking her down (which is what I think lead to Doc Martin girl kicking me)). Ian MacKaye ain't right about much, but he's absolutely right about mosh pits being nothing but inconsiderate jerks expressing themselves through violence.
So, I did get to shake David Thomas's hand and bought the tour-only CD, which features classic songs by the current lineup and was produced by Richard Lloyd. The best parts of the show were watching these punk icons express their pleasure at being onstage together. Thomas hugged Cheetah about fifteen times and shared lots of whispered comment and laughs with Lloyd. Bell didn't know the turnaround in "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and made jokes at his own expense while fumbling around for the notes of the best-known punk anthem ever.
Anyway, the verdict is RFTT: stunningly good show and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these guys onstage together. Emo's: punk-wannabe suckfest.
New music for today:
* The Go-Betweens, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express
* The Decemberists, Her Majesty
The G-Bs album is smart and rather taut, stretched between the relative austerity of the previous album, Spring Hill Fair, and the lushness of the next two, the disappointing Tallulah and the brilliant 16 Lovers Lane. Lyrically, it's as sharp as ever. I'm going to have to let it sink in before going further in this analysis, though.
I picked up the Decemberists album because of the incessant comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel. The comparison is somewhat accurate, but the Decemberists are more oriented to pop songs (and have a Kinks influence) than NMH. The lyrics, although quite literate, can't manage the giddy freeform pleasures of NMH, and the music is almost painfully formal at times. NMH cast a long shadow, though. If my major influence were an artist as iconoclast as Jeff Mangum, I'd probably hide under the bed instead of releasing music, so the Decemberists deserve credit for courage. It will take a while to hear them for their own merits, though.
There will be a repeat of the Trouble Down South/Phenomenal Cats gig at the Carousel on Friday, Dec. 5. This time, TDS will play first.
Flyer
Music at the office today:
* The Fall comp by Bill Ham
* The Fall, This Nation's Saving Grace
* The Who Sell Out
* The Stooges, Funhouse
* The Meat Puppets, Up on the Sun
* The Bottle Rockets, s/t
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