It's the witching hour...

Happy Hallowe'en

Your hallowe'en dance party

 

Needs this, every dance party does...

A morbid dedication

Terrify guests tonight with your spooky eclecticism (you're welcome, again). This is as about as uncomfortable as odes to serial killers get, probably a little more so. If you don't already know Whitehouse they are a great primer in the early power-electronics. Put this one on loud with a speaker to your window to keep families away tonight.

Sadist

Disclaimer: I shouldn't need to state that the politics that could be associated with the artists I post are not my own, in this case the extreme opposite. In posting such artists I am only forwarding their audio-politics, which should not immediately be equated to the kind we normally refer to when talking about problematic subject matter. It should also be observed that subject matter itself should not be interpreted as indicative of a musical artist's personal political agenda, while wariness of such agendas is encouraged. However, with this blog the intention is to cultivate awareness of politics in sound, 'audio-politics' as I called them a moment ago. With that in mind, this album is a great example of an artist utilizing subject matter that reflects the oppressive sounds he puts forward. Don't enjoy.

Come an' get it

Be careful when bobbing for apples tonight kids.

get it?

My life in this bush of posts

If you don't know this by now consider this a generous looking the other way from me while you educate yourself with your ears. Also, today is a day for ghosts.

A Dead Post

A Dead Link

Smells like Foetus

Frenetic frenzies fraught with funky frustrated fury. Bastardized bebop barrages, bleep-blasts, barked bitch bouts, bent & busted bass bursts. Crazed, cramped, crooked & crowded car-crash collage cut-ups. Gagged guttural grunts growled & garbled to gaggles of gluttonous gunk. Nightmarishly narrated nervous nods to naked knuckle-knocking neurosis. Dated daring, dismissive destruction, daunting dark derision, derivative derogatory danced damnation. DEAF!!      

...AND SOMEONE SAID FAIR WARNING LORD WILL STRIKE THAT POOR BOY DOWN TURNED FROM HUNTED INTO HUNTER WENT TO HUNT SOMEBODY DOWN...

Consider yourself WARNED

Forgetting Something?

Sorry

Self-Destruct

Get Sad ...

... Dance

Rocktober: 1981 NWOBHM Trinity

No No No No NoNo Noooooooooooooo!

Purgatory

Hellbound

Heavy Metal rules

The Operators

There is so little point in talking about this because its influence is still speaking to us from basically every record released since it. Without this album the Black-Eyed Peas would have to learn how to program a drum machine and Coldplay would have to know how to write a hook. Wanna know the secret to radio-play-ability today? FOLLOW THE FLOCK, RIP THIS OFF. 30 years later, this record is our world. 

Compute

The album art is better than the music inside...

You may not think this is very good, and you would be very wrong. You may think this is very good, and you would be wrong. While we've all come around to the fact that the Sex Pistols were not the most important, original, authentic or even interesting punk band, their influence is undeniable and don't lie, you still like listening to No Feelings and dancing/singing along to it in your room in pajamas. However, PiL are an even harder band to make a case for. Were they influential? Yes. Ok, but why? Were they original, authentic, interesting and important? Yes to all but the last one. I wouldn't say they were in no way important but what I think makes PiL the more authentic John Lydon project is their excess. We really didn't need a bunch of white kids making what they thought was cultured, experimental music when it was really just them getting high and jamming and getting attention for their shelved punk-rockstar careers. But in a way you think Johnny knows this and likes to rub it in all the more because of this. How else can you rationalize dumping the rest of the band in the mid-80s only to rip-off a Flipper album title, make charts with a pop single and hire an all-star band including Tony Williams, Ginger Baker, Shankar and former P-Funk organist Bernie Worrell? Clearly our snot-nosed idol understood just how far he could to push his notorious celebrity, and continues to. All that being said, this album is great either for when that too-stoned, cabin fever paranoia sets in or you start believe you're the messiah come to tell about the end of days and other reasons for all the rest of mankind to become Rastafari.

Keep banging the door     

Your new favourite Cure album (you're welcome)

Why this remains the sole record people in their first big Cure phase seem to overlook or just find completely uninteresting is still beyond me. Sure, Primary is no A Forest or One Hundred Years but does anyone listen to a Cure album just for a single standout anthem? I hope not, because most their albums are an immersing series of anthems, each more compelling than the one that came before, until you see the larger whole. What makes Faith different is that it is a typical Cure album from this period in a much more subtle sense. While every song still contains that anthemic quality inherent to the band's writing at this time, the emphasis in the songs here is on mood and atmosphere and there is little else from this formative time for this kind of music that does this in a fashion so tastefully nuanced. Try and not fall into the gloomy existential depths of All Cats Are Grey, the distance and frigidity of The Funeral Party or the brooding reflection in Doubt, it's nearly impossible. The images contained here are some of Smith's most bleak, at times despairingly universal and at others desperately emotionally opaque. After 30 years this knows any depressed 20-yr-old's psyche better than they ever will. Not for the happy-go-lucky.

Doubt

Broken Record

This is the record that broke sound, first in CBGB's 30 years ago and later (2006) in a particularly mind-bending Dilla donut. Don't fuck with Frith.

Speechless

This might be the record that broke music, for good.

just killing time...

This record was made broken.

Down Below

Wounded By Bomb Splintaarss!



It's about as hard to picture the aftermath of nuclear fall-out and the subsequent rise of violent anarcho-punk packs to the primary form of human governance had Discharge not existed, as it is to picture the character of punk, hardcore, cross-over, grind, power-violence and crust today had Discharge not existed.

WHY?

FUCK WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM

Venom's debut shook the foundations of rock n roll so violently the musical idiom has never been then same since. All ascension to the realm of high art for this genre and culture was lost, at least for a time, when these swineherdly blokes rolled on the scene with blown amps, bad hair and reeking of Newcastle Brown Ale. What makes this record so compellingly influential is it's paradoxes: a band of untrained musicians trying to make rock n roll while satirizing occultism giving birth to a genre of intentionally untrained musicians trying to make occult-inspired walls of noise. This is indeed the truest of black metal albums because it can't possibly appeal to anyone who is looking to it for artistic merit. Or can it? Either way I recommend you put this on  tonight and crank it up when some friends come over and see how long it takes for conversation to turn to "what is this fucking shit we're listening to?" then drink 40s until no one wants to listen to anything else.

 Poisoned!

Rocktober: Upping the Ante

Apologies again for inconsistency but let's just say my weekend was hijacked by turkey...

Tempted?

You'll Never Be A Man

Go To Sleep

There, satisfied? I hope so, back in '81 this was the best London had to offer (ok except maybe that whole 'punk' fad but I'd have trouble stretching my definition of rock here enough to include that). You may look at this hefty trio and wonder how the last record fits in here and it is that very record I want most to talk about. Scenes and reputations and legacies aside there is no question in my mind that these are three revolutionary records, though for very different reasons.

If Squeeze's more well-known, schmaltzy bubblegum singles left a bad tang on your tongue then indulge in the alt-pop feast presented here. Underwhelming at first listen, it is a complex palette of ever-so-subtly twisted ditties with infectious hooks, rock solid arrangements and each with it's own weird edge to it. Mid-record you'll have your mind gradually blown by F-Hole at which point the truly original contour of this album is fully revealed. 

From 77-86 Elvis Costello had one of the most impressive runs in rock/pop history. Trust just happens to be sandwiched between Get Happy! and Imperial Bedroom and it is in this trilogy where I believe the scope of his genius is most effortlessly demonstrated. Maintaining the high-energy, to-the-point performance of pop anthems from the former while making a clear progression towards the programmatic moodiness of the latter, Trust is one of his most concisely engaging and rewarding listens and features some seriously underrated classics.

This Heat's Deceit stands out here both in aesthetic and influence but provides a contrast I believe necessary to getting a accurate image of the whole of London's music scene at the time. Recorded in a converted meat freezer (Cold Storage Studios) with the band's own D.I.Y. set-up, Deceit sounds like nothing before or after it. Nor will any album ever come close to capturing such an audible nuclear-arms-race-inspired paranoia as this does. This Heat were onto so many idiomatic innovations with this record it's sort of not surprising this completely fell under the radar; it's hard to know what to make of what's going on here now, let alone 30 years ago. Each song is a totally unsettling and morose atmosphere unto itself, making the whole as accurate a tableau of the proposed dystopia Thratcher's government represented to disillusioned British youth as we'll get.

While Squeeze and Elvis were wrapping their political commentary in love-story allegory and Discharge and Crass wore their anarchism on their armbands, This Heat crafted the most convicted and visionary depiction of an apocalypse that, instead of bringing about desolation, left us some of the most inspired original sounds, sowing seeds for numerous forms of post-punk musical expression to come. 30 years later it's still spine-tingling. 

Needs no introduction... except maybe to non-Canadians

One time a friend, and huge Rush fan, was working at a movie theater when Geddy Lee came in. She didn't notice him from the concession stand until she looked up from ringing in his popcorn and coke at which point she lost control, blurting out "HOLY CRAP YOU'RE GEDDY LEE!" Geddy appeared a little more than slightly put off and snarkily replied "Can I have my popcorn now!?!" Needless to say she was crushed to learn her Canadian idol was just a stuck-up jerk. But lo and behold a mere two weeks later Geddy Lee happened to visit the very same theater while my friend was again working concession, she was nervous from their last interaction as he directly approached her. Timidly he said "Hey, I remember you from last time and I wanted to say I'm sorry, I was having a really bad day" then posed for a photo and signed his receipt.

30 years later this album still sounds like a nice nerdy Canadian rock star on good day.

YYZ!

Rocktober: A half-assed in-depth retrospective

Alright so I'm showing up to this concept/theme a couple days late and a couple dollars short but give it a chance anyways. I think if I give monthly themes to my posts it will give me a need to post things, whether or not I have anything remotely interesting to say about them.
This month it's Rocktober: a retrospective of great rock albums that turned/are turning 30 this year. In middle-class north american culture we consider 30 some kind of trial, turning point or questioning of perserverance in the face of age; ridiculous right? For people yes, but perhaps for albums there is some truth to be told by their reaction to such an age. For example:

X's sophomore effort saw them elude the stigma of 'being a punk band' enough for pure pop/rock fans to appreciate them for the powerful songwriting force they were, without losing any of punk's edge. Whether this was thanks to improved production values on the part of Doors keybordist Ray Manzarek and a bigger budget or the band honing and owning their craft to a new level than on Los Angeles is hard to say. However, the presentation of these micro-anthemic homages to east coast punk lifestyle are flawless at  depicting the grunge inherent to them equally alongside the introspection, sarcasm and second-guessing that makes up Doe & Exene's narratives. The maturity and perspective these poets of punk bring to the table on this record are no less astounding today in their simultaneous accuracy, acutness and unflinching conviction.

I'm coming over