Black Moth Super Rainbow - Dandelion Gum

Hailing from rural Pennsylvania and sporting one of the weirdest band names since The Flaming Lips (a band they’re opening for this fall), Black Moth Super Rainbow have quietly made a few retro-minded instrumental albums over the past five years. Dandelion Gun, their latest offering, continues with their psychedelic soundscapes while managing to make a more lasting impression than the last few Air albums combined.
Their secret is two-fold: memorable melodies created on instruments (and recording studios, for that matter) that are no less than a quarter-century old. The instrument of choice ends up being a variety of pawn-shop synthesizers underneath a dated vocoder. This strategy makes deciphering the vocals (when they’re present) nearly impossible and, because it’s used so frequently, there’s a chance that a listener can grow fatigued of the gimmick while sober and/or long periods of listening.
But when Dandelion Gum is taken in small sittings, and one of the best methods is to throw in an individual track on a mix-tape, the results are enormously rewarding. For the past month, I’ve been enamored with the opening track “Forever Heavy,” going as far as to include it on my own commute mix and add it as a song profile to my own MySpace page (they’ve since deleted the track).
That song, as you’ll discover throughout most of the album, eloquently balances a low-fi economics (here’s hoping B.M.S.R. never get a proper recording budget) with lysergic-fueled visions (apparently, Dandelion Gum is “Hansel & Gretel” themed concept album that probably makes sense after a few tabs of acid) to create a spacious, and sometimes creepy, album.
As hokey as their stage names are (the band members are referred to as Tobacco, Iffernaut, Father Hummingbird, Power Pill Fist, and The Seven Fields of Aphelion) and as limiting as their antiquated equipment may be, Black Moth Super Rainbow are deserving of a wider audience, which is hopefully what will happen after a high-profile tour with their fellow Oklahoma zanies. At the same time, with Dandelion Gum being just a few tracks short of long lasting flavor (get it?), they’re well on their way to getting that wider audience completely on their own.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Bob Dylan - Together Through Life

It’s quite possible that the worst Bob Dylan album of all time is the one in which he joined up with the Grateful Dead for the Dylan & the Dead release. Twenty years after that disastrous merging, Dylan again looks to the Dead camp and calls up lyricist Robert Hunter to help out with album 33, and not just on a few cuts, but nearly every single one on Together Through Life. It’s an album that may not challenge Dylan & the Dead in terms of sheer blandness, but it comes close and it certainly knocks the wind out of Dylan’s late career winning streak.
Aside from a few unique forays into “Tex-Mex,” there’s little intrigue to be had at all, with everything sounding very much the age of Dylan himself and with none of the lyrics providing any insight to Zimmy’s mindset as he approaches 70. Instead, everything sounds like it was put together in haste with Dylan’s words taking shape as an afterthought.
I get the idea that Dylan makes the records that he wants to and that there’s no reason why he needs to consider what any of us should think the next step should be. But this seems like a patchwork, cobbled together from mundane musing on love and half-baked songs born out of movie soundtrack compositions instead of real inspiration. It is the sound of Dylan going though the motions with a very competent band who make each song sound like a dust-worn border town.
And then there’s the matter of Dylan’s voice, so wrecked at this point that you’ll cringe at the sight of Bob lighting up on the inside sleeve photograph. As wasted as it sounds, his voice may be the only truly intriguing thing that Bob contributes in Together. Everything else-either by pen or by phrasing-is just too cozy for its own good.
Even the arrangements sound congenial, like their true inspiration came from a couple of podcasts of his radio show instead of Dylan or Hunter’s prose. There’s no complaint about the performances mind you-they’re all nicely executed, well suited and completely forgettable-but when you’ve got Bobby phoning it in under the pretense of laid-back spontaneity, for fucks sake have someone spike the punch a get shit going. As talented as the musicians might actually be, they all sound like they’re sitting on their ass, working out after-hours Tex-Mex run-throughs and a few nods to the Chicago blues. It sounds like everyone had a swell time playing-hell, even Dylan busts out with a laugh on “My Wife’s Hometown,” but the thing about “after-hours” is that not all of us are invited to the show. The bar is closed, the doors locked, and we’re left outside, pining for a glimpse of greatness from a man with a well-documented past. You listen for those hints of greatness before realizing that the man is not the slightest bit concerned with it.
Because-and this is key-we understand that time is a precious commodity here. There’s a disservice to both himself and to those of us who love him when we see him spinning his wheels like with Together Through Life. We’re wanting every moment and every album to count from here on out, and we remember those years when Bobby’s releases were disappointing affairs. The slightest hint of a slowdown, particularly after coming off a few very good efforts, only gets me even more worried about album 34.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Dethklok - Dethalbum II

Shredding?
Check.
Kick Triplets?
Check.
Murmaider sequel?
Check.
Yes, Dethalbum II is similar in many ways to its predecessor and it packs a mean metallic punch. But one of the things that it loses over the debut is a sense of humor. I hope that Brendon Small isn’t thinking of taking Dethklok into legitimate territories, because the animated series brilliance is how laugh-at-loud funny it is.
That must be a little tough for Small, a talented musician himself who has surrounded his surprise hit series with equally talented musicians.
It’s not surprising that half of them have histories with members of the Zappa family-another artist that struggled with finding a balance between absurdity and legitimacy-because Dethalbum II is chock full of nearly too perfect performances that is obviously way smarter than the fictional characters could possibly come up with.
Don’t get me wrong: there are funny moments throughout the sophomore effort, but it isn’t as obvious as the debut and much of it is darker.
Take the song “Dethsupport,” which is a timely commentary on our health care system. Dethklok solution to even the most mundane and treatable of ailments (nearsightedness, epilepsy, cataracts, etc.) is to simply “pull the plug…kill me now!” because the treatment is too expensive. The humor is in how close the lyrics resemble the Republican rhetoric how overhauling the health care system would create “death panels” and result in Grandma and Grandpa dying from bureaucracy.
Other tracks, like “The Cyborg Slayers” aren’t even funny at all or are only funny in title alone (“I Tamper With The Evidence At The Murder Site Of Odin”). But the musicianship is so impressively brutal that you can’t help but play this at such ear-damaging volume and enjoy it.
All joking aside: Dethklok’s Dethalbum II continues to affirm that the band continues to stand head and shoulders above any other cartoon band. It certainly is a bit harder than the debut, but then again, the jokes are harder to come by too.

A review of the Dethklok show in Des Moines can be found here.

Right Turns On Left Of The Dial

Do you want to know why people don’t listen to the radio anymore? Because there’s no personalities, there’s no distinction between one station and another, they play the same songs that they’ve always played for the past quarter century, and there’s no localism being broadcasted.
One would think that the stations left of the dial-those that take up the non-commercial bandwidth-are staying true to their roots and broadcasting the things that other radio stations are too afraid to play.
What we have here is an actual playlist from KRUI 89.7 FM, a student run radio station at the University of Iowa that used to be a Mecca for subversive and challenging music. Sure, the quality of the airshifts varied from dj to dj, but I don’t ever remember it looking this bad:

You Don't Need to Be A Prostitute - Flight of the Conchords
Magnolia Mountain - Ryan Adams & The Cardinals
Percussion Gun - White Rabbits
Walking the Dog - fun.
Charmer - Kings of Leon
Kids - MGMT
An Eluardian Instance - Of Montreal
Have You Ever Loved a Woman - Eric Clapton
Non Dairy Creamer - Third Eye Blind
Doris Day (Don't Go) - Jack's Mannequin

Again, this may be just a show that’s playing by their own rules and totally dismissing the intent of the station. Maybe the thinking is that by including such mainstream acts like Third Eye Blind, Eric Clapton, and Kings of Leon that they’re actually being rebellious or an alternative to the alternative.
My thinking is that they’re not thinking. That they’re using the public spectrum like an Ipod shuffle while encouraging us to, ironically, reach for their own Ipods.
And yeah, in case you’re wondering: Flight of the Conchords have a new disc out and, like their first one, the best FotC you can get is the one available on dvd.

No Soup For You!

True story: I was messing around online at work and I noticed that the number one search item for a few hours today was Soupy Sales.
What on Earth, in this day and age, are people searching for Soupy Sales on the internet?
And then I noticed that Soupy passed away today.
The dude rubbed shoulders with the Rat Pack, knew a bunch of hip jazz musicians, and sired on-time Iggy Pop and David Bowie rhythm section members Tony and Hunt Sales.
I never really paid much attention to Soupy; he was after my childhood and I really only remember him from those game shows in the 70's. I do remember my father speaking poorly of him as an unfunny hack. Balance that with Iggy Pop's claim (on the Dinah Shore show) that Soupy sales was an influence on The Stooges.
When in doubt, trust in Iggy.
Here's Soupy with a surprise visit from Alice Cooper.

You Can Never Go Home

I wish I could adequately tell you how awesome my hometown was growing up. It had its share of typical small town bullshit, but there was moments of joy. In fact, there was a point in the mid-90's when I thought the town may be on a the brink of a turnaround.
As we entered into a new century, I understood that it wasn't to be.
It's been a year since I've been to my hometown-ironically to help my parents move, thereby ensuring that any real return home would come to an end. It's just as well as those who remain there seem content on watching the town deteriorate. Each time I did manage to go back it became frustrating watching neighborhoods crumble and the exodus of families leave for better opportunities.
It was like seeing an old girlfriend, one who developed a nice meth addiction since you saw her last.
But I remember when she was cute, just like her funny name.

Juicy Fruit

Check out this late night finds. A pair of hit singles from the 1910 Fruitgum Co. Who are these guys? One of the originators of bubblegum music, a genre from the late 60’s that focused on non-threatening pop music. It was a genre that was met with such disdain from my father that I never actually had any singles by these guys, the Ohio Express (“Yummy Yummy Yummy”), The Archies, or any other “group” that had a hit or two on the radio.
The 1910 Fruitgum Co had 3 top five hits and one top 40 hit that The Ramones covered (“Indian Giver”) before imploding thanks to label chokeholds. You see, Buddha Records-the band’s label-didn’t really want creativity. They wanted hits. And if you didn’t conform to their demands, then you were quickly replaced. See the awesome movie That Thing You Do! for more details.
Take a look at the first video for the band. This is the original line-up, a group of guys from Jersey who happened on to a record contract. The lead singer and keyboard player-Mark-was the last piece of the line-up and the youngest member of the band. More on that later. Notice how goofy the bass player is in the video. He’d become the first member to go. Now check out the dude playing the Fender Jaguar. He’s either really high, or he just doesn’t give a shit.

As you can see, 1910 Fruitgum Co. shows were only attended by two people at a time. Now here’s hit single number 3. The Talking Heads covered this one when they were first starting out.

Did you notice how every member of the band-aside from the lead singer, Mark-are no longer in the band? Keep in mind, this was merely a year after their first hit. The band was on the road performing when they went to do a radio interview. The DJ began asking about the new single, a song that the members had never even heard before. Except Mark. He followed Buddah record’s suggestion that he cut the vocals on a new track without the rest of the fellows. Then, as the band was touring, the label released the song to radio without telling the rest of the guys about what had happened! That’s what you call a “dick move” in the business. Naturally, the rest of the guys got pissed, split with the idea that they could do it on their own, leaving Mark to continue on with the 1910 Fruitgum Co. name and to work with a bunch of session players. Except the tambourine guy, he might have been Mark’s secret lover.
The best moment is when Mark says the secret of their success is because of the label promoters. When the host politely suggests that “talent” has something to do with it to-an obvious attempt at stroking the young musician-Mark stands his ground and firmly reiterates that the promoters at the record company are more important to a band than talent. You can see-in one short year-how the guy has turned from a scared young pop hopeful into a cynical and defeated old man. Before too long, Mark would also leave the band and enjoy a life of a piano salesman in New Jersey.

Preparing To Be Face Fisted

The waiver has been signed, so this may be my last post ever.
With any luck, I will die from scalding hit Duncan Hills coffee being poured over my body at tonight's Converge/High On Fire/Mastodon/Dethklok show in Des Moines.

Is it just me, or does the middle age dude playing guitar with Brendon Small serve as an image killer? I mean, I understand that I won't actually be seeing Murderface, Pickles, and the rest of the cast, but I didn't know that they would reanimate the corpse of Jerry Garcia for rhythm guitar duties either.
But seriously, a quick search of the net finds the old fart to be Mike Keneally, a Zappa protege who has traded licks with the best of them while still managing to look strangely out of place while shredding with a fake melodic death metal band.
I have high hopes that this will be as brutal as the line-up suggests it will be, regardless of how anyone looks.
It better be: I'm using one of my floating holidays to recuperate.

Kylesa - Static Tensions

I’m going to confess that, while I was waiting for the release of Mastodon’s Crack The Skye, I totally immersed myself in Kylesa’s Static Tensions and the experience was very gratifying. While the Savannah, GA’s quintet delivers a different kind of metal than their Atlanta brethren, it is an equally challenging offering.
It would be easy for a band with drop tuning foundations to get lost in the landscape. After all, there is a ton of bands out there wallowing in the sludge and most are interchangeable. What Kylesa have going for them is lean set of tracks for their fourth effort, all logging in at an efficient 40 minutes and nicely decorated with aggressive riffs and plenty of trippy sidesteps.
While none of the tracks reach the six-minute mark, there are enough psychedelic meanderings within the guitar parts to make everything sound concisely epic.
Then there’s the bands ace card-a dual drummer attack-which is immediately noticeable but curiously underutilized. Drummers Carl McGinley and Eric Hernandez frequently drum in tandem with each other instead of against each other’s patterns. There are plenty of moments of polyrhythmic workouts but surprisingly little in terms of bashing every bit of white space into a whimpering pulp. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, mind you, but I expected a band with this type of arsenal to use it to the fullest.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of Kylesa’s approach is with guitarist/vocalist Laura Pleasants’ contributions. Thanks to a strategy that splits vocal shifts between her and other vocalist Philip Cope, Static Tensions doesn’t wear thin and the result is a metal album with brains, heart, and hints at the possibility of greater things.
Kylesa is band with a revolving door of members, which has been their Achilles Heel for past efforts; there’s been little opportunity to grow as the band focused on getting the right members on board.
Thankfully, they have a fine line-up in place for their upcoming tour as Mastodon’s opener. Here’s hoping the journey will solidify this line-up’s camaraderie and spark them to look at further forays into the more aggressive corners of stoner metal. Because Static Tensions demonstrates, it’s a journey that Kylesa is well equipped to undertake and that they might be miles ahead of their closet competitor already.
Awesome cover, too.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

The Get Up Kids - Something To Write Home About

It’s a shame that the Get Up Kids are-at this moment-pegged with an image problem. And how ironic is it that while this image problem is in full bloom, they are now hitting the road for a series of reunion shows. Will the fanatical and those that admit the band had some pretty formidable records show up, or only the faithful? Have the faithful diminished to the point where the band is full circle, touring the same venues like they did when they first started?
The band is guilty of more than a few crimes, the first is that they helped accelerate a genre known as “emo,” which in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, when you get around to considering who the true originators of the genre are: Rites Of Spring.
The Get Up Kids tidied up the genre that Rites created (and ultimately destroyed by calling it a day after one landmark album) but they also managed to sound like a bunch of whiners, which is crime number two.
According to those aforementioned fanatics, the album to get the GUK’s second full-length platter, Something To Write Home About. On its release, it was met with such praise that I picked it up. I remember liking “Company Dime” and “Holiday” seemed kind of catchy, but I’ll be goddamned if I’ve heard it since then and a recent spin (resulting from the news that they’re playing close to home) had me scratching my head “Why do I even have this?”
I had money to burn back then, and there must have been some review that caught my eye. Which is why now I must implore you to save your money or your internet connection and avoid this album. Don’t make the same mistakes that I did.
Something To Write Home About is a collection of twelve songs that seem to dwell on missing a girl. The irony is how connected out society was becoming at that time (1999) which only points to the possibility that nearly every one of those twelve songs is rooted in bullshit. The idea that life on the road promoted such sorrow and loneliness by only the SECOND ALBUM seriously points the need for every one of the Get Up Kids to contemplate another career choice.
Crime number three is creating tepid arrangements around such pansy-ass themes that you can actually feel a vagina beginning to grow where your balls should be immediately after listening to this. The album is littered with keyboards and acoustic guitars during those moments when someone must have mentioned “Hey, let’s throw in an acoustic guitar right here and sound like bigger pussies!”
Something To Write Home About is an album of tempered performances and of tempered creativity. It tries so hard to be important that it overlooks the fact that its themes translate into such unintentional pathos. It renders all of its emotional content useless which makes it hard to understand how anyone would even be able to connect with it.
Ten years later, The Get Up Kids will see first hand if anyone still relates to Something To Write Home About during their reunion tour.

Mastodon - Crack The Skye

On the band’s fourth full-length (fifth if you count Call Of The Mastodon) Atlanta’s Mastodon make an album that will finally test the patience of the alternative elite that have traditionally supported them. I tend to view these music-types with more of a suspicious eye then an indie rocker who will verbally announce disdain for anything metal because at least the metal hater is being honest about it.
Yes, I’m one of those who believe there’s a large contingency of hipsters that have stood by Mastodon on the sole reason that they needed to find a relatively underground metal band to align with just to prove that they’re open to all kinds of music.
Their affection towards Mastodon should end with Crack The Skye, an album that puts the notion of “concept album” to a point of ridiculousness while utilizing a famous producer (Brendan O’Brien) to help capture the mayhem and, quite possibly, tidy up the results to get it ready for mass consumption.
While Crack The Skye isn’t quite The Black Album, it does share that album’s spirit and intention: to make the most technically precise album of their career and to make it the most accessible too.
Here’s where the bands took different roads: Metallica started to compose songs that were completely different from their catalog arsenal. Mastodon is taking songs that are in their catalog titles into entirely new dimensions. They’re now toying with progressive elements. They’re singing. They’re creating songs that you may actually hear on the radio, not just the stations on the non-commercial bandwidth.
It is these elements that will most certainly take a negative view to anyone that isn’t a real metalhead underneath all that pretention.
While Bob Rock taught Metallica that recording is the process of capturing the perfect take of each song, Brendan O’Brien is teaching Mastodon that recording is the process of capturing the perfect sounds of each song. He’s introduced the band to an impossible amount of vintage gear-amplifiers and guitars-and these brushes are used extensively. In every song. In every manner.
The amount of soloing will make your head spin, but it’s the tone and texture of these sounds that will make you understand what a great producer O’Brien is. There’s a great risk that any band would faced when dealing with this amount of interplay. O’Brien’s gig was to introduce new tones for these indulgences, but it fell upon the band themselves to make sure the execution worked.
They do, particularly Brent Hinds who treats every solo like it’s his last. Perhaps it’s the result of one scary and stupid altercation with the bassist of System of a Down that left Hinds with a brain injury, severe enough to the point where he was at risk of losing his craft. His soloing gets more intense as the album progresses, until it gets to the last song on the album, A thirteen-minute-long epic called “The Last Baron.” Halfway through it, Hinds unleashes a solo is so sick that you have no idea how they’ll come out of it let alone how they got there. The answer is clear: the band has decimated nearly every aspect of metal in the course of the album that by the time they reach the final track, they have no choice but to start lifting techniques from the Zappa camp.
Crack The Skye clocks in at a wonderful fifty-minutes in length. As a result, it doesn’t wear thin while it gives you plenty of extra sonic gravy to savor with repeated listens. It’s the kind of album that your older brother, if he really loved you, would bequeath to you when he left the house for good.
The only downfall of the album is the concept-something about a kid hiding Rasputin’s spirit and using it to travel through the astral plane in order to get back to Earth-is impossible to take seriously.
Not only does the concept itself take on too much and serve as a point of contention among non-metal critics, it’s a distraction from what the real concept of Crack The Skye is. The album’s namesake is drummer Brann Dailor’s sister, Skye, who passed at the age of 14. Dailor, one of the album’s chief composers, has spent a long time dealing with that pain, and this album seems like one of the first attempts at coming to terms with the tragedy. The fact that he’s hidden the album’s true meaning in a mess of Muscovite Tsardom indicates to me that Dailor’s still not ready to let go of some of his emotional baggage just yet and having to explain such a wordy concept theme is more tolerable then having to recount the details of his own personal tragedy.
What he leaves off the paper, Mastodon executes through sheer musicianship and that is what makes Crack The Skye special. The moment you forget about the “concept” or worry about what it was supposed to be, you can do nothing but admire the performances it contains. There’s no band today that can match what Mastodon is able to do with their instruments.
Is it better than Leviathan or Blood Mountain? It’s probably in the middle. While those aforementioned albums have a bit more muscle to them, Crack The Skye has a bit more passion behind it. Not only with the “real” concept it avoids through ridiculous diversions, but in the manner how the band talks through their shit by playing together. There’s a scene in the deluxe edition DVD where the band discusses the making of the album. Brann begins talking about the inspiration his sister provided them, while a later interview with Brent Hinds shows his not entirely certain about the details of Dailor’s sister. As the album shows, Crack The Skye is the band’s sonic therapy session and it is even complex and layered than the real world baggage that helped forge it.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Mastodon will be appearing with Dethklok and High on Fire October 14 at the Val Air Ballroom. Cook venue. Awesome line up. Don't be stupid. Show up and get floored.

Celluloid Heroes

Cedar Rapids has been in the news from the flood of ’08 and the presidential elections from last year, our town has been quietly absent from any national recognition. It now appears that we will be featured in a major motion picture and our fair city will also serve as the film’s name.
The film features Ed Helms as “a wholesome and naive small-town Wisconsin man (Helms) who, when his role model dies, must represent his company at a regional insurance conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where his mind is blown by the big-town experience.” The Hollywood Reporter also reports that John C. Reilly has also signed on to the film, which is scheduled for release next year.
The reality of Cedar Rapids is much different, of course, directly resulting from the aforementioned flood and the slow process of recovery. If you were to visit our town right now, you’d probably be surprised at how little it has to offer right now, aside from the occasional minor league sports, an art museum that prominently features native Grant Wood, and a wide array of chain eating establishments. Most of the town’s character was knocked back a few steps with the influx of water, and hopefully some of the charm will return when things have rebuilt.
Our neighbor, Mount Vernon, is just down the road a spot, and it hides one of the state’s best restaurants (it’s up there with some of the best eats in larger cities and over half the price) and a cool vibe that’s really prevalent during the fall and winter months. Apparently, it’s on the hipster’s radar too.
Aside from that, we’re kind of in transition. The preverbal “pardon our progress” sign is on which means that we’re in need of a nice Hollywood makeover.
We’re content to recommend that you visit Des Moines which has a burgeoning night life (2 hours away) or Iowa City for drunken tomfoolery and related assaults from drunken youth (about a half-hour away, so technically in the neighborhood). We also have Dubuque, which is your atypical river town (an hour away) albeit with more Catholics per-capita than most Iowa cities, or Davenport, another river town that is part of the Quad Cities (an hour away). I really have no idea what made that area a destination point, but all four points (Davenport, Rock Island, Moline, and Bettendorf) all make up a reasonable amount of Midwestern population and pointless commuting. Then there’s Waterloo/Cedar Falls, which is like North/South, black/white, rich/poor, all rolled into one. It’s about an hour away. I like it. Lots of cool nature shit (Backbone State park, about an hour to the east is pretty awesome and will change the opinion of anyone who thinks Iowa is all cornfields and farms.
I failed to mention Council Bluffs, which is essentially a suburb of Omaha with a few casinos, and Sioux City that is in the northwest part of the state. It’s close to South Dakota and is strangely Republican. They keep voting this moron Steve King into the U.S. House, so we don’t visit there.
Hopefully, by the time Cedar Rapids the movie is in theatres, we’ll be dressed up enough to have you stop buy and say hello. I hope the director will treat us with a modicum of respect and not point too much fun at our version of a “city.” We actually think the model that most of you are familiar with is kind of silly-what with your hour-long commutes, toll roads, and endless entertainment. “You can’t always get what you want.” Is our model, and the stuff that passes as sushi at Target is almost as good as the real thing.
But seriously, you can find the good sushi here.

Totale Finally Figures Out That 3 Doors Down Are Corporate Sellouts

I don’t know if this is confession or an incredible source of pride for me, but until right now, I had no idea that the song on one of those Caveman Geico commercials was, in fact, a song. I use the word “song” lightly of course, but what I mean is that I had no idea that it was created for something other than a Geico commercial. I’m sure that 3 Doors Down made a ton of money with this pairing, but it’s saying something when you agree to have a moment of creativity that will forever be associated with cavemen bowling.

OCD Chronicles: Kim Mitchell-"Go For Soda"

One of the coolest things that my father ever did for me was to hook up and FM antenna that I got for free, on the ceiling of our attic and run the cable all the way down to my bedroom. He tucked the cable into the trim on the wall and snaked it to my Technics receiver, transforming it from a static inducing nightmare into an awesome FM signal-capturing giant. I was able to pick up rock stations like 97X in the Quad Cities with no trouble and, on occasion, I could even pick up the legendary KSHE-95 in Saint Louis when the leaves fell off the trees.
For those of you not familiar with KSHE, it was the premier AOR station in the Midwest. They played your typical AOR hits, but they also developed their own-regardless if it was a hit elsewhere in the country. Back in the early 80’s they spun some pretty new wave sounding songs that most AOR stations wouldn’t touch. I’m not saying the songs were good, I’m just saying it made the station sound a tad more eclectic than other stations with similar formats.
It was from these memories that recently I began creating an IPod playlist with somewhat of a nod to the old KSHE 95. I began adding minor hits to the mix, carefully avoiding the trappings of worn out rock tracks like “When The Levee Breaks” or “Crazy Train.” Instead, I began filling those spaces with things like April Wine’s “Say Hello,” Honeymoon Suite’s “New Girl Now,” and Saga’s “On The Loose.”
Notice a pattern?
What the fuck is with Canadian rock bands from the 80’s with their occasionally catchy songs, only to disappear into obscurity? I suddenly remembered one such Canadian rocker with his only claim to American fame that was woefully missing from my AOR playlist.
Kim Mitchell’s “Go For Soda.”

If you’ve never heard the song before, you’re not missing much, really. Musically, it’s forged from anonymity, a relic from the 80’s that you’d easily overlook in between songs of similar structure. But if you spend a few moments paying attention to it, “Go For Soda” may harness you in. Mitchell comes up with a pretty good guitar hook and a chorus that seems to celebrate sobriety, without an indefinite article. I mean, why not go for a soda. For Mitchell, he just goes for it.
I quickly download the song and chucked in a few bucks for a track from the obscure Kansas City group Missouri a track from another Kansas City alumnus called Shooting Star and the long version of Manfred Mann’s “Blinded By The Light.”
Real AOR stations don’t play single cuts.
All together, I have a pretty nice playlist of AOR cuts with just the right amount of familiarity and surprise closet classics.
And Kim Mitchell? From what I hear he still goes out every once in a while to play “Go For Soda” for the millionth time when he’s not working his day job as a DJ for an AOR station.

Brian Johnson Gets His Nodes Scraped-AC/DC Tour Postponed

Who the fuck schedules a medical procedure when the band is on a world tour?
Brian Fucking Johnson, that’s who!
Yeah, I’m a little ticked that six dates of AC/DC’s Black Ice tour have been postponed while Johnson recuperates under doctor’s orders from some unnamed ailment. I’d wish him well if one of those six dates didn’t happen to be a date that I planned on attending.
Sure, the tickets will be honored when they get around to announcing a new date, but I chose the Des Moines date because it was a weekend and it worked out better economically. We sold our tickets to the Chicago show for this date and, wouldn’t you know it, the Chicago show went off without a hitch.
The band is also supporting what looks like a fairly worthless box set called Backtracks. Not only is the name of this compilation pretty weak, but so are the tracks. Evidently, only one disc is devoted to rarities, and some of them have already been featured on Bonfire. Then there’s two other discs of live performances-neither one a complete show-so if you’ve got a hankerin’ to hear “Hail Caesar” from the Stiff Upper Lip tour, well now’s your chance!
It also includes a 180-gram vinyl version of the aforementioned rarities disc and it comes housed in box that’s shaped like an amplifier.

You may be thinking, “Wasn’t there a box set that was shaped like an amplifier not too long ago?” and the answer is “Yes.” The Heavy Metal box set came shaped like a Marshall head with knobs you can turn. I’ve got the set and it’s pretty clever.
AC/DC decided to go a step further and make their box set that’s shaped like an amplifier actually work. That’s right, you can plug in an electric guitar directly into the packaging and a tone that vaguely resembles an electric guitar comes out. Angus Young demonstrated this in a promotional video for the box set and, in the process, managed to show us how awful he can sound when playing through a fucking toy.
The price, you ask? $200.
And not one note from the fabled Back In Black sessions with Bon Scott on vocals.

You Wanted The Best And You Got The Best.

Mohair Pear may be the last remanent of old-school awesomeness on The Hill in Cedar Falls. It's been a while, but whenever I'm in the area I'll stop in and gawk like a creepy old dude. Then I'll march up to Hill Street News and Tobacco and fumble through the titty mags just like the old days. I try not to bug Dave and Barb too much, but occassionally I'll corner them to remind them of how cool they are.
Want proof?
Dig the picture of their latest ad.

Yazoo - In Your Room

I’ve written at length at how completely influential this band was to my own creative development, so why not shell out a few extra clams that housed this electronic duo’s only two albums and a few extra oddities.
Allow me to justify.
My cd of Upstairs At Eric’s recently bit the dust and I used an old strategy of trying to gently rub out the scratches with toothpaste. It didn’t work. In fact, it made it worse. I swear, I’ve gotten it to work wonders in the past but for whatever reason…
I don’t have You & Me Both on cd; only on vinyl. It’s the original copy that I got in ’83 from Disc Jockey in Keokuk. A girl we nicknamed Denda was eyeballing a copy of it at the same time I was at the end cap of “New Releases” towards the entrance. We both picked up a copy and marched straight to the checkout. Shortly after, the store began carrying 12” singles of Yazoo stuff. I still have those too. Thankfully, those are all included in In Your Room.
I got into Yazoo before I got into Depeche Mode. And even then, I only liked Speak & Spell because it was the only album with Vince Clarke in it before he quit and formed Yazoo with Alison Moyet. After Yazoo broke up, about 18 months after they first began, we began scouring the record stores for their last single “The Other Side Of Love,” available only as an import. A friend of mine found it, along with Clarke’s post-Yazoo side project called The Assembly.
Then he formed Erasure and I hated them. The dude sounded just like Alison, but he didn’t write as good as her. I couldn’t understand why he would break up Yazoo for something with less substance.
Then came the reunion shows of last year, a quick outing to bring attention to the In Your Room box and to travel to a few places that never even got a chance to see them during the first round. Actually, that’s just about everyone since Yazoo only played two dozen gigs during their entire existence and only two of those were on American soil.
When I read about the shows, I nearly wept.
When I saw that they were playing Chicago, I nabbed the first pair of tickets that I could find.
Good thing too, the band promptly ended the reunion and any hopes of new material after two more shows were played.
So what is it about this band that conjures up so much emotion and blind allegiance with me? First off, Upstairs At Eric’s is a masterpiece. It’s an exercise of cold electronic minimalism against the warm, soulful voice of Alison Moyet. It’s two things that shouldn’t be together at all, but the way these two put it together, it’s eye-opening.
It also contains one of the best songs in the past 50 years with “Only You,” a timeless love song that should have been a massive hit in the States. I’ve heard dozens of versions of it since then, but none can match Moyet’s original take.
Eric’s also has one of the best dance songs ever put to wax, “Situation,” an ass-shaking bit tune that has been remixed countless times because the original is still so recognizable that it needs new window dressings every five years or so. There are five versions of it on In Your Room and there’s probably another dozen or so floating around.
You & Me Both is the break-up album. Literally. Most of the songs are related to breaking up and the album itself was recorded in the midst of Vince and Alf’s separation. Vince recording his part in the afternoon, Alison came in to do her vocals in the evening.
It’s not as weird as Eric’s and, admittedly, not as good. But there are enough good moments to make it a worthy purchase and it’s home to another fantastic single, “Nobody’s Diary.”
The American version had “State Farm.” The UK version had “Happy People.” I remember hearing “State Farm” on a small college station out of Quincy, Illinois once and immediately calling directory assistance just to find the station’s phone number so that I could thank him. He was playing the extended version (also on In Your Room) and I thought we might make a music connection; a mutual love of Yazoo. Imagine my disappointment when he had no idea what I was talking about. He was merely “following the playlist” that was provided to him by the music director.
So virtually everything is on In My Room. I had to get it. It also contains a short documentary, video clips, songs the two lip-synched on Top Of The Pops (many of them repeated) and 5.1 versions of the two proper albums. It’s perfect for the uber-fan and completists. It’s not the place that a newcomer should start.
I finally found a copy-suspiciously cheap from a dude in Hong Kong-and rolled the dice to see if it was legit. It was. Everything’s cool. It doesn’t appear to be a bootleg of the proper release. I’m stoked. Essentially, I got the thing for under $10 a disc and if you can manage to find a similar deal, then by all means nab it.
If not, or if the idea of jumping head first into a band you’re not familiar with ain’t your thing, then fork over the $10 for Upstairs At Eric’s. Fuck those single-disc compilations; that first album is awesome, like a science project that manages to split atoms or something. From there, I’m sure you’ll be searching for the follow-up in no time, or kicking yourself for not just getting the box set to begin with.
As the documentary title says: “2 albums, 4 singles, and that was it…”
And what it was, was gone way too soon.

Fever Ray - Fever Ray

It wasn’t that long ago when Karin Dreijer Andersson, one-half of the duo The Knife, was blessed with the kind of praise that most independent artists would kill for. Pitchfork named their album Silent Shout as one of the best records of 2006 and the Swedish recording industry agreed by providing the Dreijer siblings with a total of six awards for the Swedish equivalent of the Grammys.
At that moment, the idea of playing ball should have been the first priority of the band. Instead, the two sent friends dressed up in gorilla costumes to collect their prize (an protest of Sweden’s Caucasian-heavy music scene) and then promptly went on hiatus.
During this time, Karin gave birth to her second child and while most parents of newborns become mentally numb during the months of ensuing sleep deprivation, Andersson used her somnambulist hours to program beats and put the beginning touches of a solo project on to her hard drive.
The project is entitled Fever Ray, a ten-song collection of post-natal electronica that effectively captures the dark corners of when restlessness sheepishly tangles with unchecked creativity. The circumstances here have helped to create an album that is both somber and cold while being strangely endearing.
Don’t expect much coherence in terms of Fever Ray’s lyrical content. It comes from an alternate universe and seldom makes sense on this planet. When it does, there are hints of a woman in need of a good nap. There are numerous references to time, the passing cycles, and of general exhaustion.
Karin attaches a variety of vocal sounds to match these moments; “Dry And Dusty” utilizes a pair of pitch shift vocals that drag her voice down to an eerie masculine persona. On others, she mirrors Kate Bush-minus the expansive range-an influence that Fever Ray is more than obviously indebted to.
Musically, Fever Ray wonderfully captures the cold chill of electronic minimalism with a lush palate of early 80’s synth-sounds. It’s a weird algorhythm of familiar nostalgia and modern hard-drive production and is the first album that I’ve heard in quite some time that sounds as isolated as it must have been during the creative process.
As a result, Fever Ray is unnerving as much as it’s intriguing. You can practically recreate the lethargy of the original recording just by listening to it and appreciate the dreams that its slow and methodic beats long to attain.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

John Paul George and Ringo

My cousin and I were also talking about the individual Beatles, specifically how annoying the Ringo songs were. I mean, God love him, he’s a Beatle and he’s an awesome drummer who’s just perfect for the band. He is one of the reasons why they are so legendary regardless of how technically good he was and regardless of how shitty he was as a singer.
There becomes a point in everyone’s life where various members of the Beatles are your favorite, and unfortunately, when Ringo is your favorite it’s because your mind hasn’t fully developed and logic skills aren’t completely in place.
Here's a timeline of the members of the Beatles and the age in which the average music lover begins taking notice of them


RINGO
Date Range: 4 – 12 years
Selected Discography: “Yellow Submarine,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “A Little Help From My Friends”
Comments: His limited range is perfect for kids. It’s cute, easy to follow along to, and just annoying enough to become the first piece of the Beatles’ catalog that you grow tired of around the same time you grow pubes, or around the time you figure out when he says “getting high with a little help from my friends” that he’s not talking about your buddy giving you a boost onto a tree branch.

PAUL
Date Range: 12 – 19 years
Selected Discography: “Michelle,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Birthday,” “Hey Jude”
Comments: Let’s get one thing clear: Paul is a genius. His genius is how he was able to incorporate so many different styles into the pop arena while speaking to so many different people. You begin to realize just how catchy and clever his songs are around this time and they never really leave you, they just begin to annoy you about the time you’re packing for college.

GEORGE
Date Range: 19 – 21 years
Selected Discography: “Within You Without You,” “Taxman” “Love You To” “Something”
Comments: George’s songs sound weird and boring…until you hit college. Then you start smoking pot and then they sound brilliant. If you move on to LSD, even “The Inner Light” sounds genius! Revolver is where George really shines as John and Paul gave the green light for a whopping three of his songs. They’re what make that album such a masterpiece.

JOHN
Date Range: 1 – 100 years
Selected Discography: “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Revolution,” “Come Together” “I Am The Walrus.”
Comments: Everybody loves John, and that bugs the hell out of Paul. To be fair, Paul probably had an equal or even a few more flat-out brilliant songs than Lennon, but John always seemed to take the band’s success with a huge chunk of reality. Fiercely independent, incredibly witty, and endlessly creative, John is the safe Beatle to like at any age and the only one where you will never be second guess. When you’re a kid, he’s the one that made funny faces. When you’re a teen, he’s the one that seemed to write the heavy songs. And when you’re in college, he’s the dude that buried Paul and married Yoko.

But seriously, the above list ain’t the rule and it isn’t the Bible. It’s just a fun way to put together the individual Beatles at the points in your life when you began to warm to certain members. It’s part of what makes this band such a lifetime companion, and what’s really weird to you youngsters is how you begin to repeat the list as you get older: you go through phases where you begin to re-appreciate McCartney. Then Harrison. Then Lennon again.
One thing is for sure though, once you leave the Ringo era, you never go back.

Meet The Beatles (Again)

Aside from some Queen and a brief period of IPod shuffling, the weekend has been all about the Beatles. At nearly every big box retail outlet, I was met with various Beatles promotion and on nearly every music website, there is something about the Beatles re-issues.
I could be very cynical about such things-this idea that we need to purchase shit that we already have-but there are a few things about the Beatle reissues that have brought about a bit of a hypocritical aura.
First of all, the do sound awesome. I went the cheap route, purchasing the albums post-Rubber Soul using a strategy devised by my cousin: the individual cds are on sale at the place with the red bulls eye and when you buy two you get a $5 gift card. So buy a pair and repeat. You’ll save a bit of scratch.
It was just the hype talkin’ a few weeks ago when I had an itchy finger for that mono set.
Second of all, I just realized that all of my Beatles shit that I have currently on cd I never paid for. It’s all promo stuff that I got while in radio, except The White Album, which is a first edition serial number that my dad got me for Christmas one year.
So technically, this is the first time that I actually bought any Beatles material on cd.
I devised a strategy when my wife and I were running errands over the weekend, explaining that we needed to stop buy said big box to get some laundry detergent, dishwashing detergent, pull-up diapers, Magical Mystery Tour and Revolver.
I also tried to explain to her how I was saving her money, but she didn’t seem to connect with that.
Over the weekend though, I figure out the real significance of this Beatles reissue. It isn’t really about the cds themselves. I’ve heard a lot of younger listeners state how they were going to pick up the music on ITunes, incorrectly thinking that the material would now be available there.
And really, cd sales are down so much now that not even the Beatles can turn around the sinking ship.
The real impact is with The Beatles Rock Band, the video game released on the same day. I saw a pair of brothers-probably aged 9 and 12-fiercly concentrating on “Yellow Submarine” at the Best Buy store. It was adorable, but it was also brilliant. In the process of following Ringo and George and watching animated (and historically incorrect-at one point, the band appeared to be playing the song in Shea Stadium) images of Beatlemania, they were becoming familiarized with the band’s material. Those 9 and 12 year olds may not have a copy from the big brother or parents to be passed down to them. Instead, they have a video game to learn the songs, and they’ll remember them too, long after their Xbox or PS3 or Wii has become obsolete.
Those songs will stay with them.