yet more music involving saint james toth, surely-by-god the definitive polyphiloprogenitive of 2011. and for what it’s worth, briarwood, probably my favourite record this year. some bold, straight-faced / straight-laced kristofferson moves going on here. despite what pitchfork’d have you believe it’s been a pretty good year for fellas with guitars singing songs.
damaged electronics, seasick tones, corroded tape bastardisations and mutant vox. yup, dilloway’s back. new record – modern jester – next month on hanson.
m’kay maybe this is a bit too fancy to be dismissed with a wave of fuzzbox, three chords and 4/4 beat, as mere garage. but the core is thatkindofthing. s’pose it’s coming from the same place as the amen dunes record sacred bones put out this year: spacemen 3, phil spector, 13th floor elevators, etpetercetera. but there’s more oomph, more spunk, less paisley. lashings of fractured psych and muzzy blooms of tunes. hollered swoons of words and melody, smothered, covered, inward looking, buried, hidden/hiding. everything shrouded, dense, gauzey. then they lock into some bastard noisegroove, pirouetting between the ramones and v.u. sister ray jam extremes, and you want to dance with the fuckers before you lose them in the fog again.
i like e.p. hall’s music, made with voice and guitar. i like even more that the songs end up kinda damaged when she’s done with them. i like how it’s prettiness is skewed. i like that it’s off-centeredness unbalances. i like it sometimes when wheels aren’t reinvented just spun a slightly different way. i like this.
what the fuck is this? they shriek, lunging for the (virtual) volume knob. slapping hands back with fiendish precision, i counter, glossolalia. their confusion gains me valuable seconds. i’m quickly armed and brandishing. by way of explanation i sink into religious trance and start babbling in aroused, slurred cut-up: of lord rod i fear, his oil forever runneth over me, before the staff i shall lie down, my comfort preparest thy goodness, he annointest me in shepherd water, a soul green and evil…
etpetercetera.
soon it’s all liquid syllable. i find a rhythm. a sharp descent into unsense, a wondrous singsong, a pitching mellifluous flow of language goo.
they back off.
i’m left alone, engorged, onanistically inclined; delirious, wallowing in nonsense, a pig in musical shit.
the lord? this lord is not my shepherd. not my father. not in heaven. dehallowed. unforgiving.
but.
oh my, the temptation, the evil, the power, the glory.
for ever. for ever. for ever.
amen!
i am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. i am recording the sound of my speaking voice.
i am clockwork orange alex, eyes and ears stapled obscenely open, glued to that bit in scorsese’s cape fear: bobby de niro (as played by bobby mcferrin) handcuffed to sinking boat, gibbering in tongues.
that’s a bit like what this is (having trepanned it’s way into yr skull with a tiny toffee hammer). a crack in the kishkas real horrorshow hot. vocally, a foul flatulent fuck. kindof a cappella gabba. lazy, moist, stabs at comparison: a forty minute venetian snares guffaw composed of cartoon body noise. matmos with a sense of humour (and i’ve met matmos, they’re a pair of right funny fucks). dylan nyoukis gone happy hardcore.
ach, bugger all that. distil all this. extract any pretence of musicality. leave behind nothing but butthole surfing bad drugs, mad hair, brutalist boing and klank; a warm, dribbled, semi-verbal diuretic; a mulch of dr evil duckha-duckha blethering, elastic bands, pingpongballs and kissy noises; a mid-album guitar breakdown that’s so nonsensical it makes perfect bloody sense.
noise honed; beatboxed consonants, scat vowels, bastard tics of techno, gabbled r’n’b kazoo beats, frotting, sputtering, gurgling against around over one another with pornographic glee. leaving you sticky with ectoplasm, gurning away as mutant ardour subsides.
epic drone (like there’s any other kind). all trembles, sighs and ellipses… less facetiously, this is pretty textured. the kinda thing i used to dig about labradford. guitar strings to the fore, often gently damaged beyond recognition but oh when it drifts into great yawned notes and breezeblock reverb, well my heart get’s all a-fluttered.
i already got trouble with my kids my wife my business my secretary the bums the runaways the roaches and a homo dog… exploitation of the highest order. poetry as desperation. booze, homelessness, apocalypse. a world of liquor stores, ruined tenements and junkyard rot. vietnam war veterans, dirty fucking freaks. immigration, consumerism, mental illness, dreamstates, community. the forgotten, the detritus, tramps, cab drivers, bellboys, junk yard dogs, waiters, security guards, mafiosa, street thugs, rapists. new york baby! the ugly rotten conclusion of 80′s freemarket policy and a product of its societal cheapening. class politics, gender politics, race politics. a prophecy that’s so fucking obvious. ugly truth. political in a way that movies just aren’t anymore. cruel. relevant. look do what you want to burt he’s black no ones gonna give a shit. gerra fucken job the dude shouts. no enter vor pu the broke window states. no kissing says the homeless fella who looks like gram fucking parsons. you can’t deal with reality kevin! i read like old people fuck! dead maggot shit! i’m sick, i’m shitting in my pants whizzy! everything ends in exclamation. a venereal world. everything’s fucked, everyone’s sick. the jake’s melt, burst, explode. a cop pukes on a hitman. the rich get pissed on shat on. the rich get drunk and raped. fat fucks go off like meat balloons. the last post whistled. beautifully wrought violence. a pov shot from behind a dudes glasses fore he gets fucked up on windshield. a necro cock-ripping boogie woogie laurel ‘n’ hardy scene ending on the side of a school bus. it’s art. stylised as west side story or the warriors or marvel comics or a godzilla flick. primo satire. larry cohen’s the stuff. the gonzo violence of mad max. the harsh ectoplasmic dreams of wes craven fore the system squeezed him. soundtrack that’s as good as a ferraro / clark joint. goddam this is art!
crikey. it’s been a relatively restrained acid mothers year so far. just the cracking pikacyu*makoto combo (i think…). and kinda fitting that this is the most reserved record they’ve put out; titles, tracks, length, music all exhibiting a relative stately grace.
ripper as the basis for lcd soundsystem’s losing my edge: but have you seen my records? flower! travellin’! band! led zeppelin, pink floyd, hawkwind, grateful dead, the doors the doors the doors the doors!
aye. it’s got ‘67-’71 schmeared all over it. and impishly plays up to it. the brazen buggers. there’s a lotta freaking hammond. a pile-up of sitar. atsushi indulges his mr mojo risin croon. it’s decades old classic rock and roll taken to its (il)logical modern conclusion.
chinese flying saucer opens the record, literally and metaphorically riffing on hard rock riffing, by cribbing from whole lotta love, before getting all hawkwind (as they’re want to do). taking the blooze chord and stretching it out like a giant om across the horizon till it flatlines and floats off into outerfuckingspace.
the doors (or the cult depending on yr charitability (or inclinations)) loom large and hairy on back door man of ghost rails inn. it’s in the title fer chrissakes. fifteen minutes of the end / when the music’s over melting gibberously together like those shunting motherfuckers at the end of society.
pink floyd (or marillion depending on yr charitability (or inclinations)) loom cosmic and amorphous on shine on you crazy dynamite. it’s in the title for chrissakes. the sixteen minutes of interstellar overdrive drawn out languorously for another six. undulating like jelly spooned from a psychic brain.
you dig?
psychedelic’s a term that gets bandied about too often, describing anything from a lady gaga video to a fucking warpaint album. nothing more than an accoutrement. but goddam this ain’t no metaphor. goddam this is real. virtually… it is the kinda shit for defettering, getting all languid and unurgent. just don’t expect an blown-out psych-scourer this time round.
yes! long time no hear. i’d assumed the buggers were in semi-retirement. but! new material from my favourite concrètists / typeset fetishists. this is kinda playful, kinda pretty. just a shame there’s nothing to untangle, unwrap, uncork with aac’s…
in terms of song as summation, of man / myth, lucinda williams’ drunken angel nails it. buncha verses that get to the core of blaze foley and his fucked cosmology (but hell could have been written about van zandt or hank williams, steve earle or johnny cash in the depths of their respective artistic highs/personal voids). some kind of saviour singing the blues / a derelict in your duct tape shoes / your orphan clothes and long dark hair / looking like you didn’t care / drunken angel
it’s too easy to get bogged down in the quicksand of legend. too easy to get lazy with the whisky-sodden troubadour clichés. when you talk of the clown or the drinker or the fighter or the fucker, you ignore a) the man (it is a particularly masculine affect) and b) the music.
the psychic connections linking iconoclast and audience: how much of the image/person is created for them? how much is encouraged? that romantic / destructive lifestyle williams sings of: some threw roses at your feet / and watch you pass out on the street.
there’s complicity there.
it’s something america excels at, that no other western music / art form does quite as well. a particularly texas / tennessee praxis. the outlaw songwriter: part jesse james, part brendan behan, part salvador dali. draw the line from waylon jennings to kris kristofferson to gram parsons to james jackson toth.
van zandt describes him: one of the most spiritual cats i’ve ever met; an ace finger picker; a writer who never shirks the truth; never fails to rhyme; and one of the flashiest wits i’ve ever had to put up with.
he says: he’s only gone crazy once. decided to stay.
in a way blaze is like one of these 20’s blues singers. a fella that exists in a single washed-out photograph, in rumour and memory. through chance and misfortune only a fistful of songs recorded survive. someone who’s now, and seemingly always was, more story than flesh. someone who lived in a treehouse, counted newt gingrich among his fans, had master tapes confiscated by the fbi, died in a bar fight, whose grave was dug up by townes to retrieve a pawn shop ticket.
all of it’s true. none of it’s true.
the duct tape he was so obsessed by, a symbol, not just of clothes falling apart / held together but the man himself. an existence of bits, glued together.
he lived his life as a performance. no day job. no compromise. just music. and what music it was. clay pigeons collects a lifespans worth of studio, home and live cuts. stripped down. stripped bare. a voice that’s warm with age and ache. life, love, death, heartbreak, politics – lyrically the usual nashville affairs. listening to this record, there’s a cruelty, not in the songs themselves but in the fact they’re unheard, unloved, unwritten. when you hear the bar-room chatter, the barely listening conversation over his strum and words, it fucking kills me. alone. ignored. that moment on stage reflecting his life at large. more famous dead than he ever was alive. yeah, the story, the song, the singer, the writer, the life, the dude himself, inseparable.
