The Waves (2016)

And Also The Trees do landscape music through songs (rather than strictly abstract evocations), so sonically it's all damp English countyside and lyrically it's characters trying to find meaning in said landscape. It's prose then. Born Into the Waves moves beyond this physical locale and its instrumentation constantly travels, but the landscape is psychological, and this revelation doesn't so much return us to England or even suggest that it's framing these journeys, but sits cold at the heart of everything instead

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Silkworm - In The West (1993)

I care less about Slint (beyond Good Morning, Captain) than the next guy, and maybe Pavement too (beyond Silence Kit)* and oh my hear that part in Raised By Tigers that's like straight lifting the noise guitar from In the Mouth of a Desert (!!!) but you should just HEAR IT come together out of that chaos, THAT'S why Silkworm exists, not because, as I said earlier, or intimated, they're a sad+alcoholic Pave-lint (or Slavement (!)), rather Silkworm is a mess that just can't keep itself together, a constantly moving shambles that's always falling apart and picking itself up again, forever damaged by the fall, but endlessly rebuilding itself. It creates its own chaos, because of its brain, and always wants to transcend itself, through using itself, in spite of itself (it being a collapsing, self-sabotaging mess). When Silkworm fall short of these ambitions, it's impossibly hard to look away. When they succeed it's like an against-all-odds situation that hardly makes any sense at all, a noise rock peoples' champion that hits as hard as Fugazi or even Shellac despite its messy origins, awkward gait, and disturbingly lean physical appearance.

*I decided to ask the guy next to me and it turns out I actually care more about Pavement than he does, and probably Slint too

A-

hey

You're Nothing (2013)

Sneaks in like it doesn't know any better. Like it's not from 2013 but 1979, 1987, or 1999. Like it's raw and artless. Like if Brainbombs awoke from their nihilistic fatigue and got in touch with their shitty feelings. Like if emo kept to power chords as an appropriate way to express these feelings. Like its garage-ness isn't planned but spontaneous. But it does! Know better, I mean. Know what it's doing, that is. More feely than raw and transgressive, its decided simplicity works because of its rugged physicality. Its familiarity works because of its influences. Its timelessness works because of its access to retrospection. Its intelligence is its arty awareness of the fact that heart should emerge from passionate ugliness, and You're Nothing works because it always makes sure to let that happen.

B

buy / try

Matt Johnson - Burning Blue Soul (1981)

Johnson's gift was making art and torment and inaccessibility accessible with The The. Before that gift was properly realized, however, he produced Burning Blue Soul in which nervous self-awareness, disorienting loops, and arty percussion were met with a punkish disregard for pop structures, and a half-assed psychedelic haze tied together disparate ideas and genres. It's a paranoid mess which for all its eccentricities manages to feel monochromatic, it's expressionistic but too planned and analytic to convey anything other than said self-awareness and paranoia, and it somehow manages to turn experimentation into tedium. Maybe if I hadn't started my day with twee pop I'd be more appreciative of his gloomy post-punk defiance, but I think it all just works better restricted to a pop framework- he writes a killer song when he wants to, and his pains and frustrations are more potent when they border on catchy

C-

stream / -

Dolly Mixture - Demonstration Tapes (1983)

Twee pop is either the greatest or the worst depending on what twee pop you're hearing. Dolly Mixture make me wonder why I don't listen to twee pop every day

A



v0

Band of Susans - The Word and the Flesh (1991)

The kind of shoegaze which retains a punk rock-ish level of angularity in spite of the haze, and, interestingly, Shields' groundbreaking movement into complete abstraction the same year and within the same vague field (shoegazing?), what to do but make a superficial link to Rhys Chatham, they cover him on the last track, and to New York City rather than Dublin, noise rockers rather than feely abstractioners, Sonic Youth rather than Slowdive, thought rather than pure feeling, and so on, or whatever, a rare case of that trite yet inevitable comparison actually bringing out the record's best features

A-

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Silkworm - Firewater (1996)

Deconstructed indie rock, punk rock, slacker rock, sure, pieced together but still unhinged, invariably- drier, more angular, their secret lies in their ability to convince you it's all sloppy when really it's direction, even purpose.  Maybe it's because their drug of choice isn't weed (Pavement, Dino jr) but beer (...), dudes sound like they've got some real low-life topics and issues going down- desperation rather than apathy, hangovers rather than wordplay. At its worst it's Pavement without the fun (weed), and at its best it's a down-to-earth Slint meets guitar heroics (beer). Fuckin rocks m8

A-

v0 (fixd)

The Durutti Column - The Return of the Durutti Column (1980)

Along with Dylan Carlson, Vini Reilly does the best kind of instrumental rock music. The appeal's right there in the sound! Stripped down & fragmentary but evocative and essential, no thinking required, just listening. Sketch for Summer is just that, Sketch for Winter is too, fleeting impressionistic soundscapes neither wholly punk nor folk nor rock nor ambient

A

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Singles (1986)

Killing an Arab's hipster indifference followed by ~16 tracks about how much he feels. Yeah, it's silly, Smith's a cool guy less Meursault than sentimental new wave half-handsome ladies man and if he's a stranger he thinks you're an outsider too and he'll sing about yours and his feelings with some of the best hooks and deepest moods of the 80s and for all they stand for (Faith and Pornography) it's where they just aren't like that that a compilation such as this works. I wouldn't even call it a document like people seem to do because a) that's bullshit and b) it takes away from how well Staring at the Sea flows through 7 years of the band's material

A+

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B-Sides & Rarities (2005)

• The acoustic Deanna gets to the No carpet on the floor/and the winding cloth holds many moths/around your ku klux furniture/I cum a deaths-head in your frock part before going into the gospel Oh Happy Day showing where he got the idea for the song and while not exactly ending on a positive note unless ejaculating ominous moths is a good thing, at least there's no murderous rampage! Oh happy day!
• Roy Orbison's Running Scared is one of the best songs ever. Nick Cave's version is SO b-side/rare.
• I always like Cave doing Black Betty
• I like when Mick Harvey gets credited with guitars and Blixa with feedback guitars
• Another x song?! Weeping songs, ship songs, now TRAIN songs. Straightforwardly sentimental, train as a metaphor for escape or missed opportunities universalizes his narrative
• Someone bought me The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young for my birthday a few years ago and I still think it's a special record and Cave's Helpless and Pixies' Winterlong are pretty heartbreaking as is. Helpless is on here, not Winterlong 'cause that'd be weird
• (I'll Love You) Till the End of the World from Wim Wenders' 'ultimate' road movie Until The End Of The World sounds like Tom Waits set to ridic Nature&Organisation cornballishness
• Leonard Cohen done noise-Elvis is always fun compared to 80s Cohen groan-core originals
• The What A Wonderful World duet with Shane MacGowan is the sole justification for this b-sides & rarities collection. Fuck your dorky collector impulses!
• Straight after that is a cover of Rainy Night in Soho from The Pogues' Poguetry in Motion. I prefer MacGowan's haggard original. Weird 'cause I usually dig MacGowan more as a poet and Cave more as a singer!
• 3 O'Malley's Bars
• Where the Wild Roses Grow with Blixa instead of Kylie!
• 3 Discs!
• I was lying about collector impulses and What A Wonderful World being the only reason to get this. The video is much more fun
• 
  
• Hmmmmm
• How to assess something like this
• Are the versions on here better or worse than the ones we already have?
• What are we meant to do with three discs worth of b-sides and rarities?
• Collect them, I guess
• Dork
• B-
• try 1 / 2 / 3
• buy

Half Japanese - Loud (1981)

On Charmed Life Half Japanese went half-retarded without knowing any chords or theory, just plucking/hitting their instruments in a way they thought sounded alright to cutesy songs inspired by the wise simplicity of Jonathan Richman. I figured they thought they sounded like The Modern Lovers in the same sorta way that Daniel Johnston thought he sounded like The Beatles... I thought the Captain Beefheart-ish moments were entirely coincidental! But the earlier release, Loud, changes all that. They didn't end up cutting-edge through sheer naive passion and endearing amateurism! This shit has DNA, James Chance, Captain Beefheart, and Pere Ubu all over it! These guys know their punk rock! They know their no wave! They know their noise! What the fuck! I'll never hear Charmed Life the same way again!

But man, their dumbass no wave inspired noise rock is pretty awesome

B+

sample

Killing Joke - Duende: The Spanish Sessions (2008)

I met Jaz Coleman when I was 13 and he signed my CD Jaz and then my t-shirt be a man not a hairy arsed boy and then gave me life advice and he was the coolest dude. Hope they find him soon :(

Duende- Spanish Sessions is a reformed Killing Joke performing some of their best songs. I'd give at an A 'cause Jaz's voice is haggard and the band are incredible and raw on it. I'll copy+paste some Prindle tho:

Paul Raven passed away in 2007. He asked not for it, lest none of us betwixt thither and thou. But lo, with tragedy comes retribution, and thus the original Killing Joke line-up reunited for the first time since Revelations to tour the world in a gigantic space van with "The Who" written on the side. The result was this album: the reunited band's practice session! Kicking bleeding bloody arse on 6 Killing Joke (Original), 3 Pandemonium, 2 Night Time, 1 what's THIS for...! and 2 non-LP tracks, Killing Joke prove that they remain the greatest band of mentally ill paranoiacs in the worldiverse!
Geordie plays his distorted high-pitched guitar, Jaz sings through his scraggly hoarse throat, Paul hits the drums hard and on time, and Youth plays the bass like he never recorded two horrible techno albums with Paul McCartney. The mix is terrific, the set list is mostly on-the-knob (except maybe the overlong "Tomorrow's World" and dull-versed "Millennium") and the performances are completely top-of-house (except "Pandemonium," which finds a clearly bored-as-shit Geordie playing dick-around metal licks instead of the jubilant original riff).

The thing is: the performances are so strong and faultless (complete with the appropriate synth tones for each track -- including latter-day House Rave Dance Spectacular "White Out"!) that there's really no reason for anybody but Killing Joke completists to hear them! Unless you're just blown to bits by the thought of Paul Ferguson drumming on some Pandemonium songs for the first time ever, this is just another great recording of this great band performing great songs that they've played many, many times before. And yes, what's here is great, but it's also awfully disappointing that they chose to touch on a mere FOUR of KJ's twelve studio albums. For example, what in Hell happened to Revelations? It's one of only THREE studio albums to feature this line-up, and they pretend it doesn't exist!? Well it DOES! I've been there, on that album.

Of particular note are these points I am about to make:

- With Youth back in the bass fold, "Pssyche" finally gets its disco bass line back!
- Whoever sings "Pssyche" is unable to sing it with anything near the vitriol of the original. Thankfully, the band kicks the absolute fucking energetic holy hell awesomeness out of it.
- You can hear the three descending keyboard chords in the chorus of "Are You Receiving?"! It's amazing how many renditions of that song completely bury what is easily the most melodic part of the song.
- Geordie uses a cleaner guitar tone in "$036," somehow rendering the song even creepier!
- Jaz is incapable of shutting his lousy pie hole (or "Mouth") during the supposed instrumental "Bloodsport," instead taking the opportunity to share such critical insights as "I defend the right of every citizen to bear arms. Not to protect yourself, but just for pleasure!"
- Near the end of "Pandemonium," silly ol' Geordie sneaks in a couple bars of the "Democracy" riff! Oh you Geordie! You're always Geordiein' us around like that!
- There's some creepy descending noise going on in "Eighties"! What is it? A second guitar? A synth? Jaz shaking a fly swatter at the government-controlled mosquitos that are implanting violent thoughts in his mind?
- How in Dicksville USR is Jaz able to hit the high notes in final track "Love Like Blood" after he's just spent the previous hour raspily shouting through the shredded skin-flaps of a mutilated throat?

Actually, okay -- if you're as big a Killing Joke fan as I am, you NEED THIS. I've given you all the reasons. GO BUY IT! And let's pray that this line-up manages to put together a new studio album before Jaz runs off to Iberia to avoid The Big Conspiracy. 9/10

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Thin White Rope - Moonhead (1987)

1. Not Your Fault 3:49

2. Wire Animals 2:57

3. Take It Home 3:58

4. Thing 4:37

5. Moonhead 2:22

6. Wet Heart 2:47

7. Mother 2:57

8. Come Around 2:44

9. If Those Tears 3:22

10. Crawl Piss Freeze 5:37

This record is so fucking cool. I can't even tell if I like it or not, it's just awesome

Taking Smiths-y jangle stuff and Americana-izing it when the idea is trip through the desert at night would seem suitable- the Americana to the road and the adventure and whatnot, but Moonhead is uniquely nightmarish and surreal in its vibe, like there's ghosts and they're watching you and that's actually pretty creepy and Moonhead is a pretty creepy and unique album despite somehow fitting into and making a lot of sense in the alt/indie canon

B+

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Killing Joke - Brighter Than A Thousand Suns (1986)

Last one for the day: one that I was scared of and then heard and then thought needed defending. The infamous (but not infamous-est one, that'd be Outside the Gate) synthpop/new-wave record from the band who famously i) took synthpop/new-wave and then ii) metal-ified/punk-ified/noise-ified it, but for a few releases (like this one) stopped after the first step (i), leaving Duran Duran pop gone to hell or waiting for the apocalypse. Sound good? It is!

Geordie's guitars buzz and cut and weave like they should, and Jaz appears like a prophetic maniac: "Insane crusades, destructive gesture of the freedom bringers and all the bells shall toll, as holy banners fly and all will talk of freedom. Revolution – points of no return. Evolution – we cross the Rubicon"

Brighter Than A Thousand Suns is obsessed with mortality- like Tibet (I read), Coleman's convinced that the world we belong to is an empire that'll fall in due time. Like Vonnegut (I think), he often points out why he thinks everything's going to hell- Darwinism, war, and so on- but here he can't seem to see any sign of hope. People who've heard Killing Joke are probably used to his rants- humanistic or nihilistic- but here they're made unsettling by his lovely singing voice and catchy synth-heavy arrangements. For once it's all mood, no aggression.

If you haven't heard them before, don't start here. Get onto that shit quick though, they're the best post-punk band there ever was! If you have, take a listen! They make a pretty good pop-band-on-the-verge-of-a-mental-breakdown

B+

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Crime & the City Solution - Room of Lights (1986)

Everything we want from a record with Rowland S. Howard involved: that disorienting mix of slow, wailing, meandering, yet chaotic, urgent, pining.

A-

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Sonic Youth - Evol (1986)

Sonic Youth's best: Bad Moon Rising with songs. Previously their skeletal avant-tardisms couldn't really convey what they wanted to conceptually, whereas here their one-note Cure (doom-laden) instrumentation ends up saying all that (the apocalypse) while their mouths spout avant-hipster cliches. 5 stars in spite of said avant-hipster cliches and pointless no-wave leftovers

A+

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The Birthday Party - Live 1981-82 (1999)

Whoever recorded these Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari weirdos forgot the general rule that in rock the voice is central, accidentally allowing for the guitars to share prominence with the shrieks. All the better for it, a band like this benefitting from the emphasized duality of Cave’s pretentious primitivism (Freudian, Nietzschean...) and Howard’s pretentious Romanticism (Poe?). That is, beside (rather than behind) the shock and aggression there’s a direct, defeated, desperation and vulnerability. 16 songs is too long, but it has Junkyard live 1981 on it, so A

A

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Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible (1994)

Sometimes known as the heaviest album of all time or the darkest album of all time or the scariest album of all time- lyrically focussing on suffering of all kinds (spiritual, mental, physical), with the Guns N Roses obsessed Welsh britpoppers focussing more on the machine-like atmospherics of a band like Joy Division or PiL, than trying to go filter yelpy pop choruses through glam metal. The non-personal sources for these exercises in suffering are often history (concentration camps in Dachau and Belsen), politics, and literature. For all that it's easy to snigger and recall one's own teenage angst (I remember thinking this really spoke to me when I picked it up in a bargain bin 8 years ago), or the ironic right-wing perspective of that girl you knew that read Sylvia Plath, Nietzsche, and Camus in high school, the fact remains that Edwards was assured enough in his beliefs to not only write this shit, but (SURELY) kill himself in 1995. As a stand-alone work in the same mysterious vacuum that Bryan Loren found himself in, the lyrics don't fit most of the songs and vocalist Bradfield sounds like he's having a real shitty time squeezing all those syllables into every line, no matter how quickly he yelps. It's also really long. Like, play the record, think this goes on a while!, walk to the dairy, come back and it's still playing long. But that mysterious vacuum isn't real! Acknowledging Edwards' beliefs and persona, The Holy Bible is a sick, dark, nasty album, self-obsessed and completely misanthropic. But it's gripping because it's so sincere. And I like it! Maybe it's 'cause I first heard it when that kind of shit meant a lot to me, but that's probably not the case 'cause a lot of people much older and wiser than me circle-jerk over it all the time

My favourite's Yes 'cause I dig the riff and Die in the Summertime 'cause it's the best example of HOLY SHIT DEPRESSING lyrics over Wire-esque poppy punk rock yelp choruses

A

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The Smiths - The Smiths (1984)

The thought of The Smiths in their early days jamming then Morrissey coming along and doing his tone-deaf moan over the top and the whole band stopping and going yo that sounds real good, keep singing like that! makes me so happy whenever I listen to them

Flowery creep shit with sweet jangliness, weird moans when there's nothing to sing, overlong falsetto outros, and varying quality from track to track. But man it's charming (ha)

I consider Reel Around the Fountain The Smiths' best song after This Night Has Opened My Eyes, but I get the same vibe from both of them. This Charming Man is delightful. Hand In Glove is surprisingly driving and good. Suffer Little Children I mentioned in a Chills post which got taken down (ò_ó) 'cause it's designed to chill the listener and is in my opinion one of the greatest pop songs ever written. Calling the victims of the moors murders out by name is fairly eerie, but the inclusion of the victims' families' reactions (I know my son is dead, I'll never rest my hands on his sacred head) is tragic, and giving Hindley a voice with her infamous psychotic insistence that whatever he has done, I have done is bold, AND Morrissey has the good sense not to turn everything into a trite amoral goth/post-punk song as the notion of the Romanticism of death fades in the second half- But fresh lilaced moorland fields cannot hide the stolid stench of death- and he gives the children a voice to condemn their murderers- But we will be right by your side until the day you die... You might sleep, but you will never dream

Not their best album, BUT IT'S THEIR BEST ALBUM. Their better albums sometimes bore me. The chaotic amateurism here keeps me excited. What do I know though? I still think the best thing to get by them is a damn compilation! Note to self- also post Hatful of Hollow, the damn compilation

A

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Rowland S. Howard - Pop Crimes (2009)

I contracted liver disease a while back and I've basically got liver cancer, I'm waiting for a transfer, if I don't get it things might not go so well...so..
-Rowland S. Howard, 2009 

And so we have Pop Crimes. In my baseless view of the story of rock n roll he's the guy who made The Birthday Party the sick surf punk weirdos they were, rather than the tedious elitist post-punkers they might've been (although I couldn't imagine any of the members producing anything too hip, jerky, or intellectually arty). Pop Crimes would be his last album and it's a good one full of "surf guitars gone to Hell" (Henry Rollins) and monotone low-pitch singing. It's a really sad listen given the tragedy of Howard's death and when reading Cave's statement that he was "Australia's most unique, gifted and uncompromising guitarist," it leaves a kind of hole in the listener's stomach, like, man the guy really was a legend in the underground. But then Harvey's "Sometimes people are ready to go because they have been sick for a long time, but Rowland really wanted to live. Things were going well for him outside his health and he wanted to take advantage of that, and he was very disappointed that he wasn't well enough to do so," elevates Pop Crimes as a statement, not just a reason for music magazine obituaries. It becomes sadder- dude really wanted to live- but also better- Howard's own statement on the album becomes life-affirming rather than defeated, and that permeates the album. Shut Me Down might shove its hands down the listener's throat, pull his/her stomach out and stomp on it with the simple chorus I miss you so much- it's not just lovelorn but a real tear-jerker, particularly given the circumstances, but Howard's cover of Talk Talk's Life's What You Make It is so ballsy and optimistic that the previous tragic narrative becomes just that, a narrative. Pop Crimes is Howard's final statement and he's not gonna have you crying after crediting too much of his craft to existential introspection. A bold defiance of the Romantic image of the songwriter. So bold in fact that here I'm gonna quote Life's What You Make It and it can't be cheesy because it's one of Hollis', not Howard's: Beauty is naked. Life’s what you make it, celebrate it, anticipate it. The spirit of that is all over Pop Crimes. If it's gonna make you cry, cry tears of happiness a la Donuts


You fucking crybaby


;_______;


A

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