Quote of the Decade:
“I see someone like Devendra Banhart, and to me it’s fascinating that he’s able to create a context in which the scene in Animal House where the folk singer’s bashed over the head with a guitar never happened. In his context, not all of America saw that movie, laughed, and agreed that folk music was annoying. And I never thought that I’d live inside a context like that.” –David Berman, Silver Jews
Sittin’ around waitin’ on a client of mine. I’m in a chill ass little soup house twiddlin’ away at a new little contraption that is makin my life more technocratic by the nanosecond, and this old bird starts chirpin’ at me. ”Whatcha got thats under ten bucks?” ”If you’re a gamblin’ women, which by the looks of that white terricloth jumpsuit, you gots to be, I got a few junx that will make you haulicinate for under ten SEVEN CLAMS.” Aparently it was non-sequitor conversation, cause she flipped things towards my whereabouts of growin’ up. I hint towards Tidewater, and her snappy response was “Ain’t that were the 700 club resides?” ”Unfortunately so ma’am. Unfortunately so.” ”Why is that little man?” “Cause if i was claimin’ I have a yearly meetin’ with our Lord n’ Savour, I’d commit myself to the closest pajama BIN ASAP.” She crowed back, “I shouldn’t be gettin’ muddy in these waters” and clammered off. Pissed me right the fuck off! I have my meetin’ with my client, and start hoverin’ round town, and low and behold, two hours later she’s trottin’ hot shit in that same suit at a modest 15 MPH. Flipppered her the bird and cawed “ALL THAT BASTARD SAID WAS THAT OIL WAS GONNA BE 150 A BARRELL. JEBUS H CHRIST DON’T GIVE TWO SHITS!@!” I was a little forward I know, but don’t corner up and punk out please. ”Ever hear of the ‘Case for Christ?’ It’s on VIDEO NOW.”
NP:
Dry Rot - Submission 7″ (painkiller records)
Times New Viking - Rip It Off LP (matador records)
A-Frames - 2 LP (s-s records)
Quicky but alrighty roll call. The rock has been quite nice to me lately. The payola has been stickin’ to my sides, so I called the Mail Order nurse to scrape the scrape of the sides.
Catholic Boys - ”Fixed” 7″ (sweet rot)
Hue Blanc’s Joyless Ones ”Arriere Garde” LP (s-s records)
Electric Eels - “Eyeball of Hell” DBL LP (scat records)
Holy Shit! - s/t LP (Criminal IQ) totally got the cover of maximum rock n’ roll a month back i think. great humourous hardcore.
tv ghost - “Atomic Rain” 7″ (die statsi)
Coaxed by a brotha to skip town down into the recesses of this lovely Commonwealth. He’d never really gotten down with Hanoi Rocks, cause he’s one of them musician types that gripes about the 80s production values of a snare! Paf! The only time i wrap my rat brain around that kinda shit is when i’m tryin to figure out of the mic was submerged in fical matter or tapioca. Anyhow, the virtues of Hanoi Rocks need to be extoled upon here. But Battleship probably deserves a few words.
From Oakland, home of new/old cage rattlers Sixteen Bitch Pile-Up/Inca Ore/Demhuza Yellow Swans/various JRK bands/etc etc comes yee ol’ damn Battleship! I know it’s not really worth anyones salt to dig through the electronic firin’ in one’s
noggin’ to check off where this beautiful fucking racket is coming from, but it blurts itself out wonderfuly. Fractured Flaginess
/Chicago mid 90s horn skronk (at times)/San Fran vocal skreech. Stuff that Touch and Go was belchin’ out during the entirety of it’s 90s
existance. Growin’ up in the Beach, VA got my ears atuned to this kinda grime early on. Smackin’ of early Rye Coalition with a severe case
of terrettes, Battleship shakes the livin’ shit out of their songs. Tweeked with a little bit of that Weasel Walters production, the album has a nice
veneer of sonic grud plattered all throughout. Worth the price of admission.
http://www.ononswitch.com/catalog/011.html
http://www.terminal-boredom.com/battleship.html
BUT ROANOKE I LOVE YOU. Bill, the weed smoker in Spikes Pool Hall, I salute you ten times over. Your ”Afgini” really hit home with a mildly
drunk brother with nothin’ to do but get bothered. I enjoyed your banter about your three child tier of VT students, your hatred for your ex-wife, and for your love of pool. When your cup did spilleth, I done laugheth. You sir, are the spice of life.
it’s bound to happen with the weather comin’ down in yee ol’ fist city. dudes quit ridin’ and start clammerin’ up in the house. instead of embellishing my roommates by watchin’ gossip girl, i’ve done holed myself up in my hovel of a room and strapped on some heaviness. this time around, we’ve got cadaver in drag. they’ve been knocking around tuneage/noise for the past couple years out of Kentucky. mr. cope just threw this up on his album of the month club, so the vinyl is probably way gone. previous releases from these guys have been borederline knobs and berries. BUT JESUS DID THEY COME OUT OF THAT SLUMBER. whats we have here is some seriously heavy pysch. can’t really get too far deep into hyberbole about it cause this is just the type of downer album that needs to coat the bones personally. i’ll tip my cap and say that they’ve freaked me out with some amazing blend of extraneous noise/thuddin/ drummin/great riffage. praise be to allah and various milquetoasts!
it was a pretty typical saturday. mez and i were considering the possiblities of gettin a righteous load of boo from our boy pete. about seven heads roll over to my place and the deal goes down. we light, exhale, and throw on some neil young. next thing i know i find josh face down in the tub with about two inches of water surrounding him. it took the breath out of me. i could barely muster the strength to grab his hair and pull him out of the drain. his face was stuck. jim came in and helped me pry him out of the drain. his face had become elongated and comepletely fucked. he was a bloody mess. all i could bring myself to do was kiss his bloody snout.
next thing i know im at a zoo in kuwait. don’t know how i got there and i really didn’t care.
it was kind of smack dab in the middle of some war zone.
i get this odd feeling in the right side of my inner cheek. it was either fluid or another type of mass building up at a rapid pace.
what the shit is it? I start to dig at it with my fingers. i am able to pry out a good hung of inner cheek.
i keep pulling and i start to dislodge part of my gum. i run to the bathroom to see what it looks like.
my TEETH are coming out of the jaw line that apparently was being held together by those ”T” pins you stick into maps.
i finally yank out the whole piece. it looks like a piece of chicken that’s been cooked for thirty seconds.
i bite down to push my teeth back into my jaw.
i ate nothing the night before i swear.
but jesus, i’m gonna eat pho tonight and all i can think about is you!
Scott Soriano has been crankin out some of the best writing efforts in the blogosphere to date. His z-gun/crud crud/static party/terminalboredom contributions have been nothin short of solid gold for a wonderin’ eye such as mine. The first print edition of Z-gun came out a few months ago. Its 100 percent recommended. It contains so many rad reviews that it would be hard to mention them all. Here is the preface to the zine. Seek it out. Seriously.
“This zine’s purpose? Well, it all goes back to science fiction. Ya see, some of the very first zines to come out back in the 1960s were dedicated to leding some ”amatuer legitamacy” to that rather critically battered gener of fiction which seemed to appeal in the main to the spottier and prottier segments of the populace.These early sci-or zines simply took it for granted that a lot of what was held in contempt or simply ignored by the discriminating editorial forces o’ the day was in their humble opine some of the most compelling, original and enjoyable stuff that could be stuck between printed covers and consumed with the brain. This basic amateur zine concept was picked up by a lot of primordial rocker-types too infamous to name drop now (thanks in large part to their own efforts) and run with into with the hills or the swamps, depending on how quickly their tastes degenerated. For decades after that the zine remained as a basement level reality-check on both the mainstream and the underground music scene; No need to run that history down here, but there was always a passel of great reads you could expect to come out every so often that carried a certain gravitas lent by the cranky hyper-opinionated enthusiasm that’s part-n-parcel with that type of gulcher. They also functioned as a sort of short-term nausea-inducing time capsule, for both writers (what was I thinking on that one?) and readers (shit, why did I dump that record?). Well, then the Internet came around and kind of blew that whole dynamic out of the water didn’t it, which for some of us was counted a damn sham. I can’t tell you how much great writing I’ve glanced through online that disappears forever when the site/blog/comments box/whateverhaveyou gets deleted or doesn’t pay the damn monthly bill. Gone. Nutso. This zine desires to come back full circle to that early sci-fi/music nexus, kindled by that sincere desire to expose music that’s got more than a little gristle on the bone. It makes total sense to this reporter that if people are gonna be damn fool enough to insist on putting records out there in the permanent physical world that there should be other idiots willing to complement them with the requisite nagging paper-based rag.”
I’m not tryin’ to be some meta-critic here, but when a publication time in and time out craps out hyperbole that makes a bro cringe, I gots to speak! Sightings was one of the first noisy groups I got turned onto in college. Three piece rock band that dismantled rock with a no wave postulate. They just put out a new album called “Through the Panama.” Gave it it’s first spin yesterday, and it sounds pretty damn tight! Like structured rock song tight! Cover of Walker Brothers “The Electrician?” GOTS IT. But this asshat starts out a review with “In the dictionary of noise music, accessibility means betrayal.” Pull back the veil sir! Buying into the mystic is dead dude! Have fun with this music. Quit bein’ a fuckin’ academic! That is all.
