Roll Out

Today my wife and I leave for our Honeymoon to the fabulous Northwest! We're going to Portland and Seattle to (hopefully) enjoy a relaxing week and a half vacation amongst trees and normal weather conditions. Phoenix has been in the triple digits for much of the last two weeks, so this break couldn't have come at a better time. We've got some things planned, but for the most part we'll be winging it and playing things by ear. If you know me, you of course know that part of these plans is to hit up as many good record stores as I can find, and thanks to the wonder that is AquariusRecords.org, I'll be going into those record stores with a shopping list.

So updates from this point will be sporadic. I'll see what I can post from the road in our downtime. Otherwise, entries will resume at the end of May. Peace out.

Digital Good Time: "Baby Baby Baby"

Digital Good Time: "Baby Baby Baby"

Damn. People sure are making creative use of nudity and censor bars in music videos lately. Last year there was Keith Schofield's video for the Brighton Port Authority, then there was Brooklyn duo Matt and Kim's "Lesson Learned" video, and now comes French electropop duo Make The Girl Dance with "Baby Baby Baby". Does the amount of female nudity in this video have anything to do with why I'm writing about it in a feature where I typically only write about videos with some artistic brilliance? Heeeeeeeeellllll yeah Maybe, but you do have to appreciate the direction in this video. I mean, France may be a much less sexually conservative country than the states, but I'm pretty sure orchestrating three naked chicks walking down the street in one take without interruption is no small feat.

The main thing I wonder about this video, from a purely technical standpoint of course, is if they put trackers on the nipples. If you've ever tried to track movement in post-production to add a graphic element (in this case the censor bars), you'll know that tracking markers makes the job a cinch compared to the time-consuming duty of doing it all manually in post. The movement on those censor bars seems way too accurate to have been done manually if you ask me. Plus, having tracking censors would definitely have skirted (juuuust barely) any public indecency laws that may have hindered production. Hmm...anyway, just watch it; and if it wasn't obvious: NSFW!!!

Links:
Make The Girl Dance

Revisited: Sub.bionic - You I Lov/// (2002)

Revisited: Sub.bionic - You I Lov/// (2002)
(I mentioned this band in Friday's feature and decided I'd share this old story of how I discovered this album)

Growing up in Cincinnati, I would often listen to WOXY on 97.9 FM before it went off the air and became a popular internet radio station (which sadly folded for good in the fall of 2006). Seeing as I had only just discovered the radio station in the year 2001 when I got my first car, I didn't realize how lucky I was to have such a resource for independent music right in my own town. It was a nice escape from the horrors of Clear Channel radio stations, where Nickelback and P.O.D. dominated the airwaves that year. I was able to listen to bands I had never heard of, none of which ever got overplayed.

WOXY got me into more bands than I feel like listing here, but one of them, as you may have guessed, was Sub.Bionic. I heard the song "Reply (Without Recourse)" one day while driving home from work and knew immediately that I had to have the album. The only problem was that it was impossible to find. I was just getting into independent music at the time, so I wasn't quite sure how to go about finding CD's that Best Buy didn't carry. No one on WinMX (one of the post-Napster clones) had their songs available to download. Even the internet provided very little information on the band. And I never heard the song played on WOXY again. To this day, I've yet to come across a website or even a MySpace page that documents the band in detail.

I finally did find an independent record store that was able to order the album for me, several months later. Thankfully, after all that time searching, the album didn't disappoint. It was mostly typical of the indie rock sound of the day, which I enjoyed back then but have since grown tired of. But even listening to it these days, be it because of nostalgia or whatever, there's a lot to like. The album starts nicely with "The Last Song on Earth", which totally wasn't the last song on earth, but shows the bands knack for embellished, over-produced soft rock. The band obviously knows a lot of studio tricks and/or plays a lot of instruments. Though there are only five musicians, you'd swear there were at least double that amount on each song, with the exception of the excellent, acoustic marvel "God In Neutral". The simple guitar riff is repeated throughout and backed occasionally, and effectively, by piano keys and keyboard effects. The singer desperately delivers powerful lines ("...for you don't know shit like you're daddy does!") before launching into the cryptic, nerd-tastic chorus ("You're just two bytes of RAM size numb on a hard drive"). The song is probably some statement on society or something, but hell if I know. I never studied the lyrics sheet and tried to get to the bottom of the meaning. Tough. Good song though.

"Reply (Without Recourse)" was as good as I remembered, with it's lazy yet memorable, effects-laden riff carrying the chorus as the singer croons something about multiplying and amplifying his love, his voice maintaining a delicate balance between Matthew Belamy (Muse) and Matt Berninger (The National) in it's own way. The song trickles on quietly before reaching this emotional chorus with a subtle, almost glacial feel, and trickles out the same way, acting as sort of the calm before and after the storm. "Phonophobic" is the only outright indie pop song on the album, and as far as my research went, the only proper single that spawned a video. The song ditches most of the extra instruments and tricks in favor of the traditional guitars, bass, and drums. It's catchy for sure, but almost too easy and dumbed down for their talent. The only real sour point on the album comes, conveniently, on the last track, "Nuclear Bomb Parade". I say "conveniently" because it's easy to just turn the CD off before the song comes on. The song attempts to be heavy with fuzzed guitar, distorted drums and vocals, and a faster pace. While not a totally terrible song, it sticks out like a sore thumb on this album much in the same way "Dog Door" did on Sparklehorse's It's A Wonderful Life album. Putting this song on an album where there's nothing but soft, orchestrated rock makes it seem out of place and tacked on.

Overall it's a nice listen. I'd like to hear more from this band, but it seems that they will continue to exist in relative obscurity and have probably disbanded. Which would be a shame, since this album showed some real potential.



"Reply (Without Recourse)"

8 Good Songs From Albums I Once Loved

In preparation for my upcoming move, I've spent the past couple of weeks going through my CD collection one-by-one and ripping them to my hard drive. With over 400 CD's to my name, this experience has been...how do you say....a time-consuming pain in my ass. I'm almost done, though. As I write this I've made it through S, and am hard at work on T (which reminds me: why the hell did Tool split Undertow into 69 separate tracks? I mean, yeah, I know, 69 ha ha ha...whatever, it's effing annoying).

Overall, it's been a fun experience. I'm being reminded of albums that I'd forgotten all about (some of which I'm getting rid of), realizing how many crappy indie and hardcore bands I'd got into during my late teens and early twenties and wondering how the hell I even found out about some of them in the first place. There have been many pleasant rediscoveries, though. I keep coming across songs I haven't listened to in ages and falling in love with them all over again. So, in true music nerd fashion, I decided to make a list of some of them here. Many of them are really somber and depressing, but I was a pretty emo kid back in the day:


"Lies, and Release From Silence" by envy
(from All The Footprints...)
Before they went the post-rock route, Japan's envy (lowercase preferred, I guess) were a hardcore screamo band. Surprisingly, I like their screamo stuff better. If I heard this for the first time today, I'd be turned off by the vocalist's lack of vocal variety (he's all "I'M GOING TO SCREAM FOR THE ENTIRE FUCKING ALBUM", except in Japanese). But back in the early-aughts, I was really addicted to this song. Even after all these years this still might be the most mind-blowingly relentless song I've ever heard.



"Six Days At the Bottom of the Ocean" by Explosions In The Sky
(from The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place)
Pure post-rock perfection from a band at its peak [note: I didn't put the P's in there purposely [note regarding note: I did that time, though]]. This album has stood the test of time very well. On this song, from the 4:49 mark until the end just may be the band's best moment ever.



"Is This Desire?" by PJ Harvey
(from Is This Desire?)
PJ Harvey's music never really gets old. This is quite possibly the finest song she's ever recorded and one of the few songs I've ever heard that gives me goosebumps each time I listen to it. It's so simple and minimal but so haunting and powerful at the same time.


"Blatchford" by Ilya
(from Poise Is the Greater Architect)
Ilya are one of those run-of-the-mill indie rock bands (well, they're more trip-hop actually) that I found out about randomly and got really into for a short time. Listening to it now I realize just how average they were, but admittedly I still enjoy this song a lot.
(P.S. - I saw them live once, and the Brazilian-born lead singer, Blanca Rojas, was stunningly freaking sexy. Like ridiculously sexy. Like you see her and the word "Gawddaaaayum" escapes from your lips before you even realize that you just said it out loud. Not that that's why I liked them or anything, since I got the album before knowing what she looked like, but when I talked to her at the merch counter after the show to thank them for the performance (and for that dress she was wearing - ooohhhhhh!), I totally signed up for their newsletter when she asked me to and I received their emails loooooong after I stopped caring about them because I didn't have the heart to block them.)



"With You" by Linkin Park
(from Hybrid Theory)
Shut up. Don't act like you haven't heard ONE Linkin Park song that stuck in your head and you thought was kinda catchy and that maybe you would've admitted to liking had it been recorded by another more hip, more obscure band. So yeah, I was really into Hybrid Theory in my teen years; what of it? I harbor no shame about this (I'm trying not to, at least). They had about ten billion hit singles from this album, but this album track was actually my favorite one.



"No Closure" by Piano Magic
(from Artist Rifles)
I never knew much about Piano Magic. I still don't. Artist Rifles was the only album of theirs I ever bought and this was the song that made me buy it. Another song that I can only describe as haunting; driven by that thundering kick drum and topped with spoken-word lyrics. Ultimate sweetness.



"Hurricane or Sunshine? by Signer
(from The New Face of Smiling)
I have no idea how I ended up there, but I vividly remember somehow finding Signer's label's website (Carpark) and hearing this song, then listening to this song on repeat for the next few days in a row (still from their website) before I finally found it in stores. Pretty good lo-fi shoegaze/glitch pop here, but the rest of the album isn't as good for the most part.



"God In Neutral" by Sub.bionic
(from You I Lov///)
Any band that spells their name with a period and their album title with three forward slashes probably deserves to wallow in obscurity and fade away without ever registering even a blip on the popularity radar, but Sub.bionic actually weren't that bad of an indie rock band even if they were pretentious as fuck. I got into them after hearing the song "Reply (Without Recourse)", but it was this acoustic track that I was addicted to as a youngster.

K-The-I??? - Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow (2008)

K-The-I???
Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow (2008)
I'm typically not one to dump on anyone who tries to experiment with music. I fully support it, actually. This is how genre's expand and how new sounds are brought to us: by artists who aren't afraid to push envelopes and turn off some listeners in favor of attracting those few who really want to hear something new. But as with any experiment, some ideas work and some just don't. Rules are made to be broken, yeah, but some rules are there because they're a really good idea. Take rapping on beat, for instance. Good idea! I mean, if you have a beat, why not follow it, right? Otherwise the beat is wasted. It's there but it's serving no purpose. It's wondering why its creator didn't just use white noise and abstract sounds or something that fits the rapper's freeform style. It dreams of a relationship with a rapper who will respect it and treat it right; take care of it when it's sick and never dare raise their voice at it unless the crescendo obliges. And when it starts to have doubts about the relationship like that, the song will invariably fall flat. That is pretty much my experience with most of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.

To state it clearly: this album just didn't do it for me. The idea of it sounds really appealing on paper. On one side, you have an innovative producer in Thavius Beck, who has found success making great experimental beats for great experimental rappers like Busdriver and Saul Williams. On the other side you have K-the-I???: perhaps the most experimental rapper Beck has ever been paired with. K's stream-of-consciousness style of rapping probably can't claim to make any sense to anyone but himself. The only way he could make his lyrics more abstract at this point would be to invent his own language and words (which I wouldn't put past him, actually).

Sadly, the pairing of these two talents never really meshes well. Beck provides a lot of nice beats and soundscapes, but they seldom seem to have been made with an intent for vocal contribution. It's as if he were working on an instrumental solo album, K-The-I??? approached him about some beats, and Beck simply allowed him to pick through what he had and rap over it. The fact that it was actually the other way around (Beck approached K-the-I???) is a little perplexing. They make a pretty convincing case on songs like "Lead The Floor", but otherwise Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow strikes me as a nice experimental turntablism album that happens to have some vocals on it.

Plus, the rapping slightly offbeat thing really does bother me. But I've already spent an entire sarcastic paragraph addressing that.


Score: 5/10


"Decisions"


"Lead The Floor"

Digital Good Time: "Warrior's Dance"

Digital Good Time: "Warrior's Dance"

Remember The Prodigy? Yeah, that techno-ish band that got really big in the late-1990's with songs like "Firestarter" and "Smack My Bitch Up"? They're still around, you know. Don't worry, I didn't know either until this new video, "Warrior's Dance", popped up about a month ago; and it's actually a pretty badass video. It was directed by the morbidly brilliant Corin Hardy, who's obsession with children's stories and old horror movies has blossomed into an impressive body of work thus far. He does a lot of stop-motion animation in the style of old special effects wizards like Ray Harryhausen, and his admiration for that era of movie-making really shows through in video's like "Warrior's Dance". Here, he brings to life a discarded pack of cigarettes who personify and commence wreaking havoc inside a bar with their recently freed cigarette box buddies. That is, before they burn themselves to death while dancing like there's no tomorrow. It helps to actually watch it for that description to make sense.





Links:
Corin Hardy

The Prodigy

Good Songs: April 2009 Edition

Good Songs: April 2009 Edition
(A quick recap of some of the best songs from albums I reviewed in the month of April)

There weren't many good songs in the month of April, mainly because I didn't write a lot of reviews, so I'll fatten this feature up a bit by taking an opportunity to post some video of the from the 1-on-1's & Heartbreaks breakdancing competition I posted aboutearlier this week. Here's the final battle. The guy in the yellow hat (whose name I can't remember) would emerge victorious.



This is the kind of video I'll be working with in After Effects. I still need to edit what clips I want to use and then decide on what kind of look I want to give it. There will probably be some storyboarding and art tests involved, so I'll update my progress as I....make...progress. Anyway, GOOD SONGS!



"Drunken Leaves" by Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound
Assemble Head are at their best when they do these types of songs, and this one is well-placed on the album as it really picks things up. It's just a really classic-sounding, surf-rock tune. I could listen to this on repeat a lot.


"Down Foe My Thang" by Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony
Yeah, I didn't actually review Bone's Creepin' On Ah Come Up EP, but since I picked it up a few days ago it has not left my stereo, bringing back good memories of my childhood just like their full-length E. 1999 Eternal did (as I wrote about here). This song is so fucking haaaaaard. The epitome of gangsta rap.


"Absolutely" by Doom
I love this beat. Just a really chill, laid-back sound with a smooth flow. I wish this album had more songs like it.


"Oblivion" by Mastodon
A rather subtle start to an album by Mastodon's standards, but the Mastodon on Crack The Skye isn't quite the same Mastodon. They're much more focused this time around. I love Brent Hinds' soulful vocals on this song. It really sets it apart from the IN-YOUR-FUCKING-FACE disposition of some of their other material.


"Crack The Skye" by Mastodon
"Okay, xoxobra. You love Mastodon's new album. We get it. *rolls eyes* Holy shit."