Journal sielwolf's Journal: All Out of Order 10
So I'm backlogged on albums as people keep dropping new music off on me asking for listens. Some of these albums I've had for over a month and what is a boy to do? Well for one I usually listen to music either A. in my car or B. at work. Well the first means I would need to burn it onto a data CD, which I'm not to hype on doing (because I'm anal and only want CDs by genre) and I'm not going to ride around with my iPod in there. In addition, the kid now has new company in his computer lab. So I'm not able to jam out on my music when even "louder" rock offends his sensibilities. So I'm left in endless loops of downtempo, electro, and IDM. Sometimes he asks me to maybe play something else (because it starts to lull him to sleep) and so I think "So what do you want Seasons in the Abyss or that new Clipse mixtape where they find about fifty million new ways to describe the drug trade?).
This happened when last I was rocking The Man Machine. Kraftwerk? How do you fall asleep to that? Especially when his solution is to listen to Dave Brubeck (zzzzz. Someone get me some Coltrane and Thelonius stat). Kraftwerk is the definition of Le Fwohnk and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise. Beyond Trans-Europe Express, the electro pioneering begins with TMM. Really, so fucking classic. "The Robots"? With that Czeck speak and spell and the synths going off like silent alarms? So completely worth it. And I like how the beat kicks in (with that laser high-hat) and the verse chord is- just- a- bit- slow. You want it to finish up on some eighth notes but it methodically goes on in quarters and maintains like a rubberband. And the album closes with the so completely sampled "Man Machine" which has the great honor of being Double Sampled: first by Fearless Four ("Rockin' It") which was then used by MC Lyte and others. It's such a glorious and exuberant break and you can see how it helped set off all the kids in Detroit. There's an ever so subtle reverb on it that wafts off of it like oil vapor. "The Model" (Rammstein has the honor of having, according to Florian, making the worst cover of this song. This boy likes it), "Neon Lights", "Metropolis". All so great.
But the track I really dig off of here is "Space Lab" which sounds like such an '88 club techno banger it isn't even funny. Someone throws down a toilet effect, peels off a few Kraftwerkisms. Then the track just shoots out of the gate with a somehow furious ambient rhythm. The long lines it draws over the beat is so fucking fantastic. And then in the bridge it has that little dark stab part. Heh. One thing I never got was how people always took Kraftwerk to be this ironic Luddite message where they were composing this contra-technological statement. "Radioactivity is about the dangers of radiation! Autobahn is about the dehumanizing sexualization of industry! Tour De France is about a Masturbatory Jerkoff KillBot Factory in Your Son's Room at Home Right NOW!!!!" To strap such simplistic polemics on Kraftwerk is to both complicate what they do and to reduce the music to idiot-space. Kraftwerk wrote probably the first music for the modern age: though tracing many features to concurrent scenes of rock and R&B, Kraftwerk wrote music both in the 20th century form of pop album signatures while replacing the ancient histrionics of guitar or orchestra with artifacts that could not have existed at any previous time. It was contemporary music, a microcosm of both the rewards and perils of technology. Kraftwerk couldn't just roll up their labs, car their 10 tons of materiel and set it up in a farm. It was wholly dependent. And yet it sounded unlike anything before. It blew doors, levelled cities, rocked a Starter jacket and a kufi before anyone else and still maneuvers through the streets on the clean whitewalls of yesterday's luxury automobiles. It's like that.
Now that sound has found its way back to the innovators. Madlib, as Yesterday's New Quintet, on a less jazz but more funk offshoot, Sound Directions, has this unbelievable song on the album The Funky Side of Life called "A Divine Image". It has this warning radar sort of high electronic point (sort of offputting, like AFX's "Ventolin" but not that bad) and it breaks into this sort of surreal James Brown break with scattering drums, and phantom horn section. The sound reels like a hallucination as yet unimagined. The sort of music that silences everything during a movie's montage and reeks of absolute hazard. Madlib always seems to find something outrageous to do. That he can just wind off these beats and compositions like there's no tomorrow (as a hip-hop producer/MC, as jazz, and here as funk). The album, after a disquieting intro, opens with "Dice Games" a projectile of a cut that leads with an interplay of bassline and horns following with a wonderful bit of a flute break down. That really kind of powdery kind that reads like a bit of conversation. The Funky Side of Life follows this as a sort of blueprint. Affected keyboards, and a bit of bubbling drums ("Wanda Vidal", "Play Car"), smooth cabaret ("Forty Days") or just straight up rollicking hymns (the eponymous cut, and the cover "The Horse"). The only thing about the album is maybe how too even it is. The breaks never really escape the 80-90 BPM range and the feel is a long set that plays after the partially acknowledge local group and before the lights drop and the headliner comes out to a few drum stabs. Once again the frustration of Madlib's artistic ADHD comes out: you get ten wonderful tracks that average about three and a half minutes and never show that last bit of polish or composition to really take the album to the front. Interesting to add to your collection and might spark some conversation but it'll never jump immediately into the front of your conscious.
*****
So what might possess me to buy an album that I already own, that I already have ripped and that would cost me another 14 bucks? Well the fact that the album, when pressed to disc was mixed so low that all of it kind of bled together and never sounded right when played in a list with the rest of the albums. That Martin decided to package the remastered Pigface debut, Gub, with the Welcome to Mexico... Asshole live disc, didn't have much to do with it. Goddamn I love this album. I remember the first time I heard it: getting driven to High School with Joe (who within a year would pussy out on acid, go to rehab and then milk that for the next two years and still be an absolute suck artist) and his mom and we rocked this in her tape deck. Man, we subjected adults to all sorts of shit: hours of night driving with Vulgar Display of Power looped endlessly, you name it. But hearing Gub (and then Fook a few weeks later) totally blew my mind. For one thing I hadn't heard many collaborative albums at the time, I had shit of an idea who Steve Albini was, I was only moderately familiar with the family of artists who made up the get, that it was based around two drummers... most important it fell into a really fascinating time in Industrial. Ahead lay the collision with speed metal and continental electro dance. For a moment everything was suspended at arms length so that the raucus magnetic thunder that eminated from Sheffield hung with manifold possibility. All the different personalities, all the different ways, and something solid created. Consider all the vocalists: the overprocessed howling of Ogre on "Tapeworm" where the tapeloops and effects just bellow out of the instrument of his voice while the the rhythm section has this wierd discintegration going on all about it. David Yow hyperventilating over like forty bass drums on "The Bushmaster". The Bowie-isms of Chris Connelly throughout, the sexual angst of a young Trent Reznor (who would then remix "Suck" put it as a hidden track on Broken and then earn the undying hatred and jealousy of the scene as he blew up), or the loose German ramblings of En Esch. "Tailor Made" has probably the most classic industrial rock vocals on it; Paul Barker sort of yowling angry inanities. But where the song if written three years later would be a wall of pedals and guitars and samples is just a big unbelievably funked-out bass line (Bill Rieflin pulling double duty. His basswork on "Point Blank" is also great). The song has those huge long intro and outro break parts where Albini extrudes the shit out of the drums and it gets that grimy distorted shit we all love. The idiotic "Whoop-whoop-whoop" sample at the end. It's strikingly avant garde and particularly fearless (making the shame of Easy Listening even more disappointing). So much of this album is just fucked up tape loops and drums. And it always seemed to bring the best out of the best of the artist. "War Ich Nicht...?" with the competing drums in each channel that sounds like some Berlitz speed reading of Bukowski. Or "Suck" with that thick acid sort drum effect that appears to slide up walls. Here, the original version has unbelievable restraint with the bassline waiting til the 1:20 mark and then the rewinding film samples. The effect is agonizing instead of short and simple ejaculatory release. Chris Connelly really captured me on this album. Maybe because he has four tracks here, all of them weaving across a spectrum of emotion (the agonizing noise of "Blood and Sand", the smooth cool of "Little Sisters") with the crown being "Weightless" which forms from the start of acquiescence to the state of affairs. He sings sort of sideways, that kind of "I'm not going to let this one get over". The guitar forms these sort of long punctuations. And then there's the indecipherable chorus and *bam* the second verse which is just so goddamn- transcient? He sees something and tries to capture the image with words that do it no justice save the confused overwhelming of senses. Sentiment, is weightless.
Damn. Listening to this and then going back to the poverty of what goes for the scene now just saddens me. Gub is the sort of album that was made with no notions, no ideas of what was to be. It was a gift without ideas of satisfying quota or expectation. No one cared, gave a shit. It was your favorite bands making some shit their label wouldn't let them get away with otherwise. Have one song? Fine. Got some fucked up reels you found at a yardsale? Shit, throw them on there! Oh man, that's twisted! They found this place because they weren't anywhere else. The provisions weren't there for an audience. No net and you let go of the trapeze. At a time I would prefer the wall of guitar, the satisfying progressions, the albums that were all a good standard deviation placed from the mean. But when that one sound would wear on me and I'd tire of it, Gub always reveals something new. Listening you can hear the dozen alternative futures of the early 90's where caution had not yet taken hold. Between the notes there lay worlds untapped.
[As for Welcome to Mexico..., well I listened to it once, thought "huh" and put it back in the sleeve. Really, as a memento it means much more to the participants than the audience. It can go there right next to my The Truth Will Out]
Kraftwerk The Man Machine *****
Sound Directions The Funky Side of Life ***1/2
Pigface Gub ****
speaking of the Quintet... (Score:2)
its funny how much Holly hates that version of Superstitious. She screams at the radio "MY GOD! YOU HAVE NO CONCEPT OF SWING! THIS IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A SEA SHANTY!"
That being said, I find it to be a pretty fat and round 'sea shanty'...
so Ha Ha sound got fired at you this morn (as MP3s!!!). I include it because I put the first 4 songs of it on my Tender Buttons cd ("how quaint!" you must think, "being limited to 24 tracks in the car!") and, well, they're good and ind
Re:speaking of the Quintet... (Score:2)
Ha Ha? This Ha Ha? [discogs.com] The guy at the lower right looks like the other guys' "uncle".
Oh yeah, so what about the other shiz on that MP3 disc that you couldn't remember? On the next I threw on Mu, Roisin[sp], Hecate, Remarc, and Venetian Snares. Anything else on there that caught you by the earlobe?
Re:speaking of the Quintet... (Score:1)
Whats worse, is that I get an image in my head from Sailor Song of an old sea dog with a giant pot-belly doing a shanty jig where the main focus of the dance is his belly; he sort of dances around it and with it. I'll let Kesey describe it for you in better detail but to think of a fat guy holding his belly like a bowl full of jelly and getting down to "Verrry Supa-sticious!" plagues my mind in the best sense of word "plague."
Unfortunately for you, HaHa Sound is the 2003 albl
Re:speaking of the Quintet... (Score:2)
Re:speaking of the Quintet... (Score:1)
Re:speaking of the Quintet... (Score:2)
Re:speaking of the Quintet... (Score:1)
Well, 'cept for Broadcast... but you know ALL about Broadcast now! (perhaps more than you ever intended)
Re:speaking of the Quintet... (Score:2)
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oh yeah, I crammed some brainiac on my mp3 disc for ya just incase there was some weird rip in the space-time continuum and you hadn't been introduced...
HAHA has some real shit to it, no doubt. I mean, I like some tracks of Tender (I hate buying a new album to gear up to seeing some band live, and then realizing that I don't wanna see them no more) but for me the tie is between "Pendulum" on haha and "I found the F" on Tender; those are the two that are sticking in my head. Bu
Re:speaking of the Quintet... (Score:2)
The dreaded new direction?! The coasting on accumulated cred? What happened?
[BTW I've just added more statistical views of my music purchases: by country and by elapsed time. I've got histograms, trends, the whole bag. I'm an Excel mastermind!]