Sunburnt and lazy

Too lazy to write about anything, too lazy to even pick an album to put on. Here's a slice of shuffle, Scraps style.

On the sunburn tip: I went to the beach today and apparently didn't use enough sunscreen by far, because my entire body is bright red and in pain. The best part is that pretty much the only part of me that didn't burn is my crow's feet, which I didn't even know I had until today but which are now extremely accentuated. I look fifteen years older!

1. Boards of Canada - Bocuma
2. Spacemen 3 - Come Down Softly to My Soul
3. The Supremes - It's Too Late*
4. Mazzy Star - Still Cold
5. The Microphones - Between Your Ear and the Other Ear
6. Fairport Convention - I'll Keep It With Mine
7. Junior Murvin - Police and Thieves
8. David Bowie - White Light/White Heat
9. Belly - It's Not Unusual**
10. Sonic Youth - Freezer Burn/I Wanna Be Your Dog***
11. Erase Errata - Marathon
12. Captain Beefheart - Moonlight on Vermont
13. Bobbie Gentry - Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head
14. Porter Wagoner - How Close They Must Be
15. Jim O'Rourke - Ghost Ship in a Storm
16. The Crystals - All Grown Up
17. Culture - Black Starliner Must Come
18. Kraftwerk - Europa Endlos
19. Chumbawamba - On eBay
20. Gene Pitney - 24, Sycamore

*Yes, that "It's Too Late". No, it's not very good.
**Yes, that "It's Not Unusual". Yes, it's very good. Yes, my iTunes randomizer seems to be into versions of famous songs that are not the best-known versions today. It gets in moods like that sometimes.
***See?

Cluster, Zuckerzeit (1974)

This seems to be Cluster's catchy album. Actually, it's about halfway between Cluster 71 and Sowiesoso, with the driving rhythms of the former and the lovely electronic sounds of the latter; the abrasiveness of the earlier album is gone entirely, and the abstract ambient formlessness of the later one hasn't yet arrived. As a result, I could almost see dancing to this album, and, if it had words, singing along.

Cluster - Rotor

Free Kitten, Inherit (2008)

Around the internet and in the music press, I've only really seen two comments about Inherit: first, that like previous Free Kitten albums it's incredibly inconsistent from track to track, and second, that it's really not as interesting as a collaboration between Kim Gordon, Julie Cafritz, and Yoshimi P-Wen should be. I haven't heard the other Free Kitten albums, so I can't speak for them, but I don't hear the inconsistency here. Most of the tracks feel equally strong to me.

As for the second complaint, well, I kind of get it. All three women in the band have done more interesting things on their own and in their respective bands (though I can't say I'm the world's biggest Pussy Galore fan), but when I listen to a supergroup like this--particularly a supergroup of people as well-established as these--I'm not really looking for anything groundbreaking. I'm more just looking for a sense that they had fun playing together, and for that fun to translate to the listening experience. And that is definitely the case here. Honestly, I don't get the "not interesting" complaint particularly where Kim Gordon is concerned, because this album to me sounds exactly like what Sonic Youth has been trying to do on their last bunch of albums--fall into a relaxed role of slightly avant rock elder statesmen--but which has come out instead as a sense of blandness. Here the elder statesmanship comes across as entertaining--David Bowie's Heathen rather than Reality, say.

Free Kitten - Surf's Up

Justice, Cross (2007)

Justice's schtick seems to be mixing sampled classical instruments (harpsichord, violins), synth noises that remind me of a late-70's early-80's BBC conception of medieval times (or maybe early RPG video games), and utterly nasty dance beats and basslines. It's a good schtick. "D.A.N.C.E." was a good single, but the album as a whole is surprisingly solid and great. It's primarily instrumental, and the vocal tracks are actually the weakest moments. When they go away, Justice is free to get as completely gross as they want.

Justice Valentine

Yellow Swans, Psychic Secession (2006)

Oh my goodness.

The story I've heard is that the Yellow Swans played in Providence a few years back and received such a negative reception that they swore never to play the city again. It's a bit moot now, since they've broken up, but I find that incomprehensible. I mean, unless the show was advertised only to the rockabilly contingent in the city, they seem like they'd be right up the noise people's alleys here. Hell, they're on frickin' Load Records, for fuck's sake.

Anyway, this is pretty mind-blowing stuff, as far as I'm concerned. The sound isn't particularly similar to Einstürzende Neubauten, but the silly different-planes analogy I used when I wrote about Kollaps comes to mind here. The opening song is twenty minutes of near-formless noise that, towards the end, begins to feel like it's coalescing into something recognizable as music, but never does. The title track starts out with clear vocals and a melody, but that soon gives way to metronomic clicks that eventually descend into chaotic static and never really recover. And so forth. I haven't yet worked out why this is fun to listen to, but it is.

Yellow Swans - I Woke Up

The Fifth Dimension, The Age of Aquarius (1969)

I recently took part in a Fifth Dimension appreciation-fest over at Scraps's place. I don't have much to add to it now, so all I'll say is that I never noticed until just now that the saxophones in their cover of "Those Were The Days"* (starting around 1:10) sound like they've just popped in from the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks.

The Fifth Dimension - Those Were the Days (sorry for the skip at the beginning, it's from a record)

*Which, incidentally, to me equals Mary Hopkin's** original. I was tempted to say that it bettered it, but it doesn't; it's very, very different, and just as good. God, I love that song.
**Incidentally, did you know that the deliberately cheesy backup vocals on David Bowie's "Sound and Vision"--the "doo doo doo" vocals--were sung by Brian Eno and Mary Hopkin, and that she was married to Tony Visconti at the time? Apparently, they told her that they weren't going to keep the vocals in the final version, and when she heard the record she was terribly embarrassed, because she thought she'd done such a cheesy job on them. That story makes her sound adorable.

Peggy Lee, Black Coffee (12" version, 1956)

I love Peggy Lee to itty bitty little pieces, but even with that love I tend to think of her as kind of a campy curiosity--the Peggy Lee of "Is That All There Is?" and the Spanish novelty version of "You Gotta Have Heart". This is, of course, stupid; she was an immense talent (her version of "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay", which I posted a few weeks ago, is twenty times funkier than Otis Redding's), as one can tell on this album. The most exciting track is the first one, the title track, which until now I had known in theory as a standard but only as performed (excellently) by kd lang on her Shadowland. I'm aware that I sound very cheesy saying this, but I can't imagine this performance being played on anything but a crackly record. Listen to the muted trumpet bracketing her lines, particularly her breathtaking reading of "I'm hanging out on Monday/My Sunday dreams to dry" from 1:15 to 1:35.

Peggy Lee - Black Coffee

various, Welcome to Dreamland: Another Japan (1986)

Wow, I didn't realize my posts had slowed to such a dribble over the long weekend. Well, I was away from my house the whole time, so I didn't actually listen to much music* to actually write about.

Anyway, now I'm listening to this compilation, created by Fred Frith in an effort to introduce Americans and Europeans to the Japanese avant-garde, which they had largely been unaware of until then. Unfortunately, it's kind of a letdown. Aside from a few good tracks like those by Keiji Haino and Akira/Seiji, it's mostly silly semi-jazzy cartoonishness, like a halfway point between Soft Machine and Boredoms, only not nearly as good as either of them. I don't think I need this.

Keiji Haino - As It Is

*Except the goddamn fucking Girl Talk album at a party, which sucked all the life out of everything like it's fucking designed to do**, and some mixtapes in my car
**When it's on, all I can think about is how much I hate it, and everyone around me gets really really boring and I don't think they even notice it.

via Lost in Tyme

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Organisation (1980)

Ahh, that's better.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Enola Gay

Mazzy Star, Among My Swan (1996)

I can only imagine that, in 1996, this must have sounded very out of date. This is exactly the same shoegazy dream-pop that Mazzy Star made all along (though with somewhat simpler production, which is actually surprisingly nice for the style). Listening to it now, twelve years later, the timing doesn't matter so much, so I'm free to think that this is as good or maybe better than So Tonight That I Might See, especially because it's free of the WB baggage that that album has.

Mazzy Star - Disappear

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Naturally (2005)

I've said before that nostalgia is well and good but that I tend to be ambivalent about it. Not so with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. In a way, this isn't really nostalgia--if there's a type of music that is genuinely timeless, it is soul/funk. And despite all the efforts taken to sound authentically early-70's, right down to the immaculate analog production, this record really couldn't have happened any time other than when it did, nor could it have been sung by anyone other than Sharon Jones at this point in her life (after having taken part in the fringes of funk the first time around, always working with successful acts but never successful herself, and spending a few decades working as a warden at Rikers, of all places). It incorporates all the lessons of four decades of soul and funk, as well as other kinds of hard*, progressive music, producing an album that, while it may** never be as iconic as some of the classic albums of the late 60s and early 70s, is in some ways...actually better.

The most mind-blowing track here is "Your Thing Is a Drag", with its brilliant put-down lyrics ("I know you think you got your own thang/I know you think you got your own bag/But believe me baby when I tell you/Your thing is a drag") and its bassline written and played by God, but the song I'm posting is the most important, a reinvention of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land", which more than fully reclaims the song as the protest song it always was rather than the jingoistic nursery rhyme it's been turned into. Jones and the Dap-Kings have given it a new melody (cribbing slightly, brilliantly, from "It's a Man's Man's Man's World"), which improves on Guthrie's, either by being better or by being easy for me to separate from the co-opted version of the song I'm more familiar with, or both. It includes all the verses, including the one about the welfare office, and my favorite, the one about the "private property" sign ("On the other side/It didn't say nothing/So it must be that side/Was made for you and me"). And best of all, it ends, ingeniously and unavoidably, with a "Dancing in the Street"-style "don't forget about the Motor City" list of places that were made for you and me.

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings have recorded three unbelievable albums, and this is the best.

*Not in the sense of difficult
**And I do mean may

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - This Land Is Your Land

Plastic People of the Universe, Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned (1974)

Proggy, lefty anti-Communist revolution. What's not to love?

Plastic People of the Universe - The Wondrous Mandarin

Orange Juice, The Orange Juice (The Third Album) (1984)

Edwyn Collins and the other members of Orange Juice should sue Belle & Sebastian, partly for ripping off their sound on The Last Pursuit, but more importantly for doing such a poor job of it. Belle & Sebastian were hardly the first to do it (just as a f'rinstance, Space's "Neighbourhood" is to Orange Juice's "The Artisan" as Gus Van Sant's Psycho is to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho), and I'd be the last to complain about being heavily indebted to influences*, but if you're a great band impersonating a great band, there's no reason for it to be boring.

I say all this in lieu of the usual praise for Orange Juice. Go, Orange Juice!

*It's not like Orange Juice's sound was totally original, of course

Orange Juice - What Presence?!

Spacemen 3, Playing With Fire (1989)

Spacemen 3 are one of those bands that surprise me every time I listen to them. When they're not on, I pretty much only think of the 60's-soul-tinged shoegaze they do on tracks like "Come Down Softly to My Soul" and "Lord Can You Hear Me" (excellent songs both). But then I listen to the album again and pieces like the minimalist-ambient experiment "How Does It Feel" and "Revolution", the tribute to both The Stooges and the latter days of Joy Division/early days of New Order, and I remember with a little shock how varied they really were. They were obsessed with the recent past--not just parts of it, but all of it--and used as many elements of it as they could twist to their vision, combining them into a construction of what they probably saw as the future.

Spacemen 3 - Suicide

various, International Hip Swing (1993)

This K Records compilation (made up of songs from 7 inches in their "International Pop Underground" series from the late 80s and early 90s) is actually a really good companion to the Songs for the Jet Set comp I wrote about the other day. Where that album faithfully recreates the sound of the swinging 60s, this one unfaithfully updates it, in the process (seemingly) apolitically bringing it into the working class. Considering the later...um...excesses of the twee scene, it's easy to forget how brilliant a lot of these early K releases were. Sometimes you have to be in the right mood to appreciate it, and some moments (in particular, Jesus Christ, the spoken bit in the middle of "Man Thinks 'Woman'" by Mecca Normal) are pretty embarrassing, but by and large this is a fantastic compilation.

Of course, after I describe all that, I'm posting a song that doesn't really fit into that, and which is not at all representative of the album as a whole. Whatever. I really like it.

Duck Hunt - Vacation

Oval, 94 Diskont (1995)

The thing that strikes me immediately as amazing about this album, and particularly the twenty-four minute opening track, "Do While", is the way that Oval is able to take a whole bunch of elements that individually would be grating--skittering CD malfunctions, a bulging high-pitched tone that you can actually feel pressing on your ears--and combine them in a way that makes them sound utterly serene and beautiful. The whole album is like that. The sound fills up a room, and beautifully fulfills the promise of ambient music. If you listen closely, you will be rewarded for your effort, but, even better, if you let it the music will recede into the background, ceasing to be anything you're consciously aware of, but remaining a powerful subliminal influence; you might not realize why your mood changes two and a half minutes into "Cross Selling" (and you certainly won't realize that it is two and a half minutes into "Cross Selling"), but it will change.

Oval - Cross Selling

Lake of Dracula, Lake of Dracula (1997)

A Scissor Girls and U.S. Maple spinoff. And pretty fun. Nothing spectacularly novel here--basically what you'd expect from a band made up of people from avant-garde No Wavey bands having fun in the 90s. Primitive, short songs, with lots of guitar squeals and melodyless, near-incomprehensible, catchy vocals. It's got a nice beat. I can dance to it. I like it!

Lake of Dracula - Blues Fantastique

The Dead C, Future Artists (2007)

I bought this CD the same day I bought The Fifth Dimension's Stoned Soul Picnic on record, and it was fun carrying them together because their covers go really well together.

Anyway, I think I'm really quite fond of this album, although it does suffer a bit in comparison with 1992's Harsh 70s Reality, which is their album I know the best (and I think their most famous?). The music on both albums is very similar, although the production here is much cleaner, which the band uses in interesting ways, just as they once used lo-fi production in interesting ways. Otherwise, though, they sound basically the same as they did fifteen years ago, which kind of automatically makes this album less exciting. One song*, "The Magicians", is radically different (under four minutes, poppy, super loud, fast, with vocals) while still using the Dead C sound, and I wish that they would move more in that direction--not to say that I wish they would stop making sprawling slow epic abstract pieces, because they're still good at that**, but more variety would be nice.

*And, OK, a few moments, like the electronic noodling at the beginning of "Garage", which is really quite lovely.
**As I said, despite my complaining, I am quite fond of this album.

The Dead C - The Magicians

Leonard Cohen, New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974)

If I had to pick, I think this would be my favorite Cohen album. The production is a perfect halfway point between the hushed folk of his first couple albums* and the epic hugeness of his later ones**. The songs are some of his most devastating. Chilling, funny, heartbreaking, all the things he's great at, and at his best. Oh, and hi, Cohen lady backing vocalists, you're everywhere. Leonard Cohen, you make me swoon.

*Of course, this claim about the first few albums is kind of a lie, but I think you know what I mean, right?
**Same goes.

Leonard Cohen - Is This What You Wanted?

The Monks, Black Monk Time (1966)

My fucking god.

I went a long, long time not being familiar with The Monks, and that is just plain stupid. If you're not familiar with them, goddamn well get this album. It's...I mean, holy fucking shit.

This came out before The Velvet Underground and Nico. Jesus.

I've now listened to it now five or six times in the short time I've had it and I'm still reduced to gibbering every time. Christ.

The tone of the album is summed up by the way the first two songs interact. "Monk Time" starts the album off with its strangled, shouted, incoherent lyrics: "Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?/Mad Viet Cong!/My brother died in Vietnam/James Bond, who was he?/Stop it, stop it, I don't like it!", and then "Shut Up" responds dispassionately with "Got a reason to laugh/Got a reason to cry".

The Monks - Shut Up