Blackalicious: Mid 90’s underground storytelling hip-hop. One of the very best. They followed this with Blazing Arrow and finally got their recognition. They always had the respect.
“So as I think about tomorrow, I hesitate and say…”
Sometimes you form a vague image of someone while listening to their music on repeat, which may or may not resemble reality. When I first went looking for live Bonnie “Prince” Billy, I sat in shocked silence until the very end, when he looked up, bared his teeth, and hissed at the camera. Will Oldham is a prince of the night. He is also very sweet.
“Well you’re my friend…”
B-Side: Break of Day
Ah, Soul Coughing. Deliciously weird spoken word music. Dig the drums, they are musicians first. I played this in the car for my father and brother once, long ago. They… did not care for it as I did. In hindsight that was an obvious, if earnest, error. This, here, is where it belongs.
“And the radio man laughs, because the radio man fucks a model too.”
B-Side: True Dreams of Wichita
Before Bill Callahan was a solo artist, singing wise songs about birds, he was Smog. And Smog was something else. Something primal, and personal, and sad. This song gets me something fierce.
“I’ll never be a Bowie, I’ll never be an Eno…”
B-Side: Cold Blooded Old Times
They had everything you need to make it. In another time, another place, they would have been The Rolling Stones. Instead they got into heroin and went on tours of self-destruction, bad luck, and failed showcases. For whatever reason, it never happened. In the end they fell apart. There is something to be said for making a bonfire of your dreams and walking through the flame– Just don’t expect to come out whole.
“You should be picking me up…”
My theme song, my mode, my only poetry ritual. Before every reading I’ve ever given, I’ve found a quiet place to sit alone, put on headphones, and listen to this song. To get my head right. To remember. When it ends I exhale, walk back inside, climb up on stage and leap off a cliff– Hoping, praying I sprout wings before impact.
A-side: Tacobel Canon
It’s time for some Tallest Man. His writing isn’t perfect, sometimes he tries too hard and wanders into nonsense, but he’s earnest, and when it’s good it’s really good. His voice is what it is, and I enjoy it for that. First and foremost though, the man can flat out play. Tunes the strings all strange, claps a capo halfway down the neck, then just… damn. And when it all comes together? He is capable of something truly special.
“Why are you stabbing my illusion?
Just ’cause I stole some eagle’s wings,
because you named me as your lover–
Well, I thought I could be anything.”
The American Civil War was described by Shelby Foote as “reciprocal murder.” This was the first modern war, where the new weapons of precision and efficiency were used on a large scale against walled masses of men. It was the deadliest per capita conflict in recorded history. And one night during the 40 days, in the evening after a battle, in the lull before another battle, while the wounded in the thousands lay pleading between camps for water, wounded they weren’t allowed to help, the bands on both sides struck up songs.
First the Union, and I wish, oh how I wish I remembered what it was, and then the Confederates replied. This tattered band of old men and pubescent boys in grey rags who could play something, anything, and hadn’t yet been forced into service– They played this song, over the countless campfires, over the cries of the wounded, over the men on both sides who would walk into shrapnel and amputation and death with the dawn.
They played this fucking song. I can’t get the picture out of my head. This happened. Like a specter of all we could be, rising angelic and knowing, knowing, to rain down on the coming of blood and screams and bone saws and death. They were humans. This happened. It’s so beautiful I could cry.
MF Doom and MC Paul Barman kill it weird as fuck. Sampling Creedence and a funky little jangling guitar they lay it down playfully, lyrically, and intellectually. So, so, so many good lines.
“It ain’t all about the dollar bill, you can be dead broke and be a scholar still.”
“That’s true.”
“You’ve got bruises on your body”
As far as I’m concerned, The Darjeeling Limited exists as a feature-length film solely to give context to its companion short: The Hotel Chevalier. Instead of a prologue, or an epilogue, it’s the short story Jason Schwartzman’s character talks about writing in the movie, the story of the events that led him to India.
The genius of this conceit is that it’s not what actually happened (which was itself already fictional, and off-screen, and largely irrelevant). Instead it’s his story of it, the writing of a fictional character trying to survive by re-imagining a fictional heartbreak. The dialogue, the music, the lighting, the artificial ending — it’s all a blend of what actually happened with what he wished had happened. The result is art as a coping mechanism, one that’s beautiful, and dignified, and free from the sad embarrassments of reality. And it’s not even that,
it’s the film adaptation of that.
This… Woof. This is a level of meta-construction that makes me giggle and clap my hands excitedly. It’s also something I have done, god help me, and it just breaks my swollen little heart. Fair warning: this setup won’t work for everyone. Also fair warning: Natalie Portman gets naked, and is awesome. That girl can act in my shorts any day.
Oh yes, and the song. That song…
by Joshua Clark Orkin
Been listening to a ton of Lemon Jelly lately (lemonjelly.ky is a drug), and their funky simple sample grooves got me thinking back to the guy who got it all going in the first place: DJ Shadow. Arriving in ’96, well, well, well ahead of its time, Endtroducing….. was one of the first successful albums composed entirely of samples. No “new” music was involved in the making of this patchwork wonder-quilt. All the little snippets were wound down, sped up, spliced, chopped, re-worked, and re-assembled to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. In an F. Scott Fitzgerald type twist, it was basically his Gatsby– The beginning and end of him as an artist. He would never escape the shadow of his own accomplishment.
B-Side: Organ Donor
Alright, a real mystery. I found this guy posting on a music subreddit some five years ago. He said he’d made an album in the grips of alcoholic depression, then decided it was trash and tossed the whole project. Years later, in a fit of sobriety he pulled it out, listened again and decided it wasn’t bad. I downloaded Deep in the Valley Looking Down because I thought it was an interesting story. What I got for my trouble was magnificent.
It’s a chaotic, risky mess, equal parts misses and hits, and you sit right down in it with him. The recordings are disturbingly personal, low-fi and weird, with lots of looped guitars and feedback, the lyrics are simple and powerful when they exist at all, and the song titles are pure poetry. I’ve always had a fetish for good titles. My favorite of the bunch is, “for the fat girl in the bejeweled sweater, i told you i was genius.” That. That is a fucking title.
I honestly have no idea what happened to this guy. It’s been years now and I can’t find him anywhere on the internet, he never popped his head up again. Who knows if he’s still making music, or if he’s even alive. But I have here this album, and a handful of other tracks, and I treasure them. I would love to find Howlround, wherever he is now, if for no other reason than to tell him someone listened. Someone heard him, mumbling there in the dark. And it was good.
When House of Balloons first appeared it was an enigma. No interviews, no identities, just this music. Beach House samples, dangerous lyrics, a voice so smooth it sounded like auto-tune, a silky guitar hook and a drop to blow your hair back. It was this faceless voice from the basements of sex and degradation and darkness. It was creepy good.
“Girl put in work…”
Stirring, rolling, flowing, eerie. A theme for being scared. A theme for packing boxes.
“I’d make sure if I were you…”
The studio version is perfectly mastered waves of sound, and this rinky-dink recording is decidedly not. Definitely, definitely do seek out the studio recording. For now though, for this space, there’s something raw and flawed and dancing on the edge of destruction in this performance that makes me hold my breath. Get personal with your music, get up in its face, watch it miss notes– Touch the flesh inside the machine. I also really appreciate her spelling of grey.
“Great-grandmother lived on the prairie: nothing, and nothing, and nothing, and nothing…”
Here, I’ll save you the trouble:
Dan Boeckner, front-man of Wolf Parade (and, I just discovered, guest guitarist for Islands on “Swans”), performing with his then-wife as Handsome Furs. They’ve since divorced and disbanded, as one does, and yet here we have them preserved — in a time before time wore them down. The sound quality isn’t great, which is a shame because it deadens the drop, but the other qualities?
Oh, the other qualities.
“…Go.”
“If you knew the depths I’d wandered,
or measured that hole that I’m in,
If you knew just how far I traveled,
then, maybe then, only then…”
Kevin Morby, of Woods and The Babies fame. Watch him solo all casual.
The last track on the Unicorns only full album was “Ready to Die,” and it’s no coincidence Return To The Sea begins with “Swans.” It is both an homage to, and a maturation of, the Unicorns sound, including a number of songs they were performing before the breakup. Loosely a concept album, it’s the story of an apocalyptic future where volcanoes erupt, the oceans rise, and humans are driven underground to probe the edges of extinction. There are also excellent songs about anorexia and diamond mining. I said loosely, right? I’m gushing a bit here. Return To The Sea. Get it. They were never this good again.
B-Side: I Feel Evil (Creeping In)
a Mountain Goats song
Dueling singers, off-beat lyrics, unicorns, ghosts, and guitars. The Unicorns were a wonderfully odd band. In time they died their dysfunctional death, and from their ashes rose Islands on Return To The Sea. But that’s for later. For now let’s just linger with these two, at the height of their collective power, in the silly sunshine of youth.
You’d have thought choosing just one Radiohead joint would be difficult, but it was surprisingly easy. The perfect song for weird dancing. Get long-limbed, oddly jointed, slowly, unfoldingly wild. Get dark with it.
“You should turn the other cheek…”
I’ve got nothing right now.
Just listen.
The Stumblebum Brass Band playing a bar in Queens at 4AM. Another New York City subway graduate, he’s sort of a trash-bag Tom Waits with a trumpet. Raw, powerful, and an absolute mess.
The Morning Benders changed their name to POP etc, after discovering “bender” was a gay slur in Europe. They then made some terrible, terrible new music. Such are risks and changes. Such is life. Big Echo is still an awesome album, nothing they’ve done since changes that. There is metaphor in this.
Shaky Hands, for the morning, for lifting one up out of bed.
Help me up, fellas.
Once a Velvet Underground fan-boy, sleeping on their manager’s couch and failing to make a living, later the unlikely godfather of punk music, covered by David Bowie, The Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, The Violent Femmes, The Pixies, and appearing as the guitar-playing Greek chorus in There’s Something About Mary. Somehow Jonathan Richman remained forever the child on that couch– Playful, earnest, unaffected. Bless his heart.
I remember years ago stumbling on an old clip of this on YouTube, long before Ghostland Observatory got famous, when it only had a few hundred views. He was playing it live in someone’s shag-carpet basement, androgynously pudgy and gyrating weirdly in tight leather pants, with long black hair and dark sunglasses. The comments were mostly some kid calling him a faggot.
Ready?
Dance.
Bill Callahan, once of Smog, and a voice like no other. Not in range or scope, but in richness, like the timbre of a masterwork guitar.
Waking up to light with love beside you. Yawning, stretching, coffee, and sunshine. I know of nothing better.
handkerchief tied to stick 