wilco: wilco (the album)

a cheeky apt title for this bugger which is bit like a greatest hits composed entirely of new songs.  owes as much to the unfairly maligned sky blue sky as it does to the long-shadow-casting a ghost is born.  i love both those records.  i dig this also.

ducktails: landscapes

by rights i should hate mondanile’s summery jams.  the sun to me is like a forgotten third cousin at a wedding.  i know it’s there but don’t have fuck all to do with it.  it’s too warm, the sun.  that’s the problem i have with it.  anyway this is more pleasant july day twinklings from ducktails.  ‘cept this time there’s a bit more of a fuzzy am rock feel to the affair.  gorgeous stuff.

pissed jeans: king of jeans

and in stark contrast, the hateful throaterry and six string mangling of pissed jeans.  if somebody had taken all the amrep touch & go bands my fifteen year old self loved, melted and boiled and reduced them to a simmering ugly mess and strained the stinking soup through one of gregg ginn’s mouldy old black flag sweaty vests then it’d sound like this.

pontiak: maker

despite having bought a pile of their records and saw them live twice in the past four months this is the first time i’ve put fingers to keys to write of my man love for pontiak.  they look like three nordic clones of joe cocker.  they sound not unlike sabbath gangbanging the doors (again with that…).  you get huge doomy chords and blooze throb from these thoroughly decent chaps.  earth’s little brother.  or wooden shjips harder rocking older cousins.  hm’kay?

mouthus / cousins of reggae: split

the mouthus half is some uberdistorted racket that sounds a bit like a motorbike revving and the noise bill hicks makes when he’s doing satan.  if the melvins would stop arching their big bloody eyebrows they could be making musical filth this fucking nasty.  i could bash someones head in listening to this but then it goes all droney mumbling and i make m’self some tea and toast instead.

the cousins of reggae side may be some kind of tribute to the hudson bay.  perhaps by trying to musically emulate the tectonic violence and destruction of land masses and bodies of water forming over millions of years by knocking fuck out of some instruments, wire devices and old broken radios.  sounds a bit like if god (old testament yaweh if you please) locked wolf eyes and tetsuo the iron man in a tiny room and viciously shook them for half an hour.  i’ve put down my tea and toast in favour of scraping jagged rusty nails down my inner thigh.  anything to get through the day…