Dead Trend drumkit

I haven’t been playing drums for very long, and am way less of a gearhead than most (read: all) of my musician friends. But, regardless, here’s my kit.

Monday record review 5/7/2012: "Paul's Boutique," by Beastie Boys

Is there a name for that phenomenon when a celebrity dies, and repeated instances of tribute oversaturate and threaten to desensitize? If so, there needs to be a term for more tribute in spite of the glut—by the time you read this, Monday (or after), I’m sure you will have read as many MCA tributes as you’d like. I know this. But regardless:

There’s this parlor game that my friends and I have played for years: which celebrity, when s/he dies, would cause people to spill out onto the street, weeping? It’s harder than you think. Like we didn’t get Michael Jackson.
MCA—and the Beastie Boys—are so engrained in the psyches of everyone of a certain wide-sweeping age that his contributions are barely even noticed, so fundamental are they. The Beastie Boys were always impressive to me because not only did they have depth of reference—the Bad Brains AND the Ramones were sampled into their music with a winking cool, like “if you get the joke you’re okay with us”—but breadth, too. They paid attention to pop culture so widely that their references transcended genre and social groups equally. Go out, be curious, and dig what you dig, they seemed to be saying. It’s cool. It’s all cool.

With that said, I didn’t get Paul’s Boutique at all when it was released. It didn’t sound anything like Licensed to Ill. It was in 1993, after Check Your Head came out, that I got into it. My buddy John played the record every day of our summer camp employ at Wah-Tut-Ca, it seemed, so I learned the album through his gesticulations and pantomimes of the songs.

Paul’s Boutique (Full Album)

Of course, I didn’t get the record fully then. I probably still don’t now, to be honest. Almost twenty years ago, when I first dove in, I was too punk to acknowledge that there had been a band called the Beatles, much less that they were, and are, the best band of all time. So “The Sounds of Science” went right over my head. It was only years later that I caught the references. Public Enemy? Got it. But Trouble Funk? Curtis Mayfield? Funkadelic? I found all of ‘em years apart. They recontextualized the album, again and again. I’m sure that there’s still tons that I’m missing, that scholars haven’t been able to find or decipher yet. Like the Beastie Boys themselves, Paul’s Boutique was, and is, the Rosetta Stone of effortless cool.

The thought of the Beastie Boys not happening any more is unfathomable to me. I went out onto the street myself Friday in tribute. That was part of the magic: their music, with its references, is deeply personal, yet uniting. It’s this duality which makes Paul’s Boutique so rewarding: it’s a party record with depth, always rewarding because of its sonic and referential density. I can’t imagine that there will ever be a band able to simultaneously connect and transcend ever again.

Read more: http://365aay.com/y3d202/#ixzz1uQaOmWZR

Dead Trend roundup 5/3/2012

Thanks to all who came to the Three Rooms Press blowout last night at Le Poisson Rouge.

Brooklyn Vegan has these shots, including this one:

The Vinyl District reviews the show here.

Another quick review/roundup here. 

Monday record review 4/30/2012: "New England," by the Stoves.

You gotta be really smart to be this dumb. The Stoves have it in spades, this dumb, even before you hear a note of their album New England: titles like “Let’s Do It,” “(I’m) Violent,” and “Only Hard” greet you from the album cover. You know what you’re getting.

And damn, it’s refreshing. Seriously: the basest elements are what drives rock music. The urge to just thud along to a four / four beat and yell along with everyone else is what keeps music going, the communal experience of it. All these bedroom recording projects are well and good, but the live setting remains the most important aspect of delivering music. The immediacy is amplified by catchiness: the function of a pop song, after all, is to get stuck in one’s head so said one needs to buy the record and play the damn song to purge the pop. Then, since the record has been purchased, you have to listen to it again. And in that live setting, the first time around, if you know how the chorus goes by the end of the song then something is being done right, right?

I’m Sick

Like I said, the Stoves are really dumb: by the end of “(I’m) Sick,” a first-time listener knows how the entire song goes, and is laughing along the entire time. Is there a tacit agreement between the band and the audience that the whole thing’s tongue-in-cheek? Why, no. Not at all. They are sick of your shit. They do have a pen pal. Farm donkeys do look like horses. These are guys who grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons and lamenting Canadian hockey’s move to the South. Their songs return them (and, by proxy, their listeners) to a simpler time, before jobs and mortgages and kids, when the roll of a twenty-sided die or a game going to double overtime (pre-shootout rules, dawg) were the most important events of the day. And the agreement between the band and the audience to forget about politics, interest rates and all the rest in favor of returning to that simple time is what allows their transcendence: hey, let’s all just be in the same place in the same time for a while. Their enthusiasm and energy are immediate and infectious. The songs make you forget everything in your world but for butterfly knives and well-aimed pees.

Farm Donkey

Smart.

Read more: http://365aay.com/y3d195/#ixzz1tZrF5GyY

Dead Trend in the Boston Globe

Just in time for our show Saturday at O'Brien’s. Thanks to Luke O'Neill.

Monday record review 4/23/2012: Jawbox, s/t (1996)

Until recently, the idea of the second act was inconceivable—artists and bands got one shot, did what they had to do, and that was it. That’s in the eyes of the big time, though. Fans of “indie”—whatever that means these days—know that bands can make a viable go of it without becoming blinded by limelight. But during the feeding frenzy that followed Nirvana, the idea of viability became skewed. Let’s face it: most artists, no matter their discipline, don’t make a living from their art. Doing so is a tremendous accomplishment. Yet the popular notion of success calls making a living into question, to the point where eking it out but not working a day job on the regular isn’t enough to qualify. There’s gotta be opulence, names in lights, articles, exposure—bullshit, basically.

The narrative surrounding Jawbox involves Making the Leap: they and DC brethren Shudder to Think both made the leap from Dischord to the majors at about the same time. I remember being really worried about these signings (and later, Jawbreaker’s) when I was twenty. Like really worried, to an extent that cracks me up, now that I’ve, you know, had a job and paid rent. I was worried because the party line told me I had to be. It was all part of the mythical land of Selling Out, which, honestly, is nobody’s business but the artist in question.

I’m sure we can all agree that the whole “sellout” discussion becomes less and less relevant as artists now have to acclimatize to a marketplace which is shifting its values— it’s now about the live show, and about selling songs where and when you can to make some dough. Commercials? No problem now—in fact, a target now, whereas in the past such behavior would cause frothing dissent from the crusties and the trusties alike. (We had scene unity the whole time and we just never knew it! X up, y’all!)

Absenter

What I’m getting at here, of course, is that in Jawbox’s case, the jump forced a shift in narrative. Such fuss was made over their leap that their music was lost in the shuffle. For Your Own Special Sweetheart, their 1994 Atlantic debut, got some press, and rightly so—with an increased budget, the band was able to overcome the muddy production which marred the great songwriting on 1992’s Novelty and put out a record which remains one of the best records of the nineties, a perfect combination of melody, dissonance, and unexpected songwriting twists.

But the second act—or at least the perception of such an act—kept the band’s eponymous swansong from getting the recognition it deserved. Because Sweetheart did so well–because the band, the narrative went, Beat the Odds and Maintained Their Integrity in the Face of the Corporate Ogre—following up their major label debut wasn’t part of the story.

The fact of the matter is that nothing changed. Sure, the band got a budget, and yeah, Zach Barocas replaced Adam Wade before Sweetheart came out. That’s not what I’m talking about. Despite the deal and the weird-but-cool window dressings that came with it—remember that photoshoot in Details? Or when they played on Conan O’Brien?—all the band did, throughout their career, was progress. That’s the real narrative, despite the way that the deal is often framed as being End of Act One.

Chinese Fork Tie

Like I said, Sweetheart is a complete stunner, and how do you follow up a complete stunner? In Jawbox’s case, you keep doing what you did before: relying on expected shifts, jagged edges, and the mast of tunefulness that unites the disparate elements together. In most cases, this mast comes vocally in the form of J. Robbins, whose lyrics and vocal lines propel the band through the rough seas they joyfully inflicted on listeners. Nowhere is this more evident than on “Chinese Fork Tie,” a smorgasboard of riffs and textures bound up by Robbins’ off-time tirade. The dual guitars and backing vocals of J. Robbins and Bill Barbot interlock throughout, as on “Spoiler,” presenting a whole greater than the sum of already substantial parts.

Progression also comes in the band’s full integration of Zach Barocas’s beats. He’s one of the most consistently inventive ‘90s punk drummers I can think of (along with Amy Farina of the Evens / Warmers and Sara Lund of Unwound), and on Jawbox he puts on a clinic: the aforementioned “Chinese Fork Tie” boasts an amazingly odd and insistent backbeat which largely manages to avoid emphasizing the “rock” hits. “Desert Sea” is another such number, a prototypically explosive exercise in difficult dynamism made easy. Bassist Kim Coletta not only manages throughout to make sense of Barocas’s neo-jazz thwack, but acts, as all good bass players to, as the translator, teaching the listener how to hear the rhythm.

Spoiler

Jawbox is an album which gets nowhere near as much attention as it deserves, partially because its precedent was heaped with so many accolades. But part of it’s the false narrative, the idea that following up an amazing record with another strong effort isn’t important because of the slaying of the corporate dragon or whatever lame story idea the glossies foisted on the public. It’s more the arc than the story around the arc.

Read more: http://365aay.com/y3d188/#ixzz1suOhnP50

Rant in Philebrity about Kickstarter

gordonwithers:

Click through the link to read a rant about music-related Kickstarter projects from April 6. Someone posted this on Twitter today, and reading it left me with mixed feelings (full disclosure: I’ve run two successful vinyl Kickstarters and at least two KS employees follow this Tumblr).

The author brings up some points worthy of discussion. It is absolutely true (and tragic) that community-based “high” art funding is in crisis right now. As a society we should be ashamed for not valuing the arts more. Secondly, there are indeed many differences in the way people consume, interact with, and perceive art produced by bands, and that produced by those doing installations, one-off dance performances, etc. This can create a problematic juxtaposition when these two somewhat-similar worlds are lumped together in a context such as Kickstarter. Thirdly, while I tentatively agree with the author’s “pay your dues” argument to bands, I think it’s a separate issue that he/she incorrectly conflates with the community-art crisis.

A rising tide should lift all boats. Herein is my main problem with the author’s rant - he/she assumes a zero-sum game. I believe that excitement about the arts is infectious, with the ability to cross-pollinate and expand across artistic scenes. Last year, Kickstarter raised as much money as the NEA gave out in grants. Was this extra $150M diverted directly from peoples’ pre-existing arts budgets? Of course not. I believe the typical Kickstarter arts pledger probably spent more on arts-related items in 2011 than they would have anticipated. In the same vein, I highly doubt the author’s assertion that Philly band Kickstarters are cannibalizing community-arts funding. Certainly, not every band should launch a Kickstarter, and many who do so have poorly-conceived projects (Again, Kickstarter’s quality control is a subject for another time), and the same could be said about community-arts Kickstarters. But looking at this in a more positive way, there is an opportunity here. Excitement about the arts is infectious. If a community has a vibrant scene in one area, be it music or visual arts or dance or sculpture or anything, that excitement can spill over and fuel growth in any other artistic area. And it should! Some folks will have to pick and choose which projects and events to support, to be sure. But excitement and cross-pollination will bring more people into the arts and grow a city’s scene, benefiting everyone. There are a number of easy ways to start doing this - bands could message to their fans about worthy local community arts projects, and vice versa, for starters.

Art funding is not a zero-sum game. But perhaps more importantly, negativity and division within a region’s artistic community is insidious and destructive. Maybe not every band should be on Kickstarter. But the way to improve a local scene is to highlight the best projects that are being produced at that moment - not to nitpick the bad ones. Focus on the exciting, new things happening, and break down barriers between different artistic scenes! This will further the quality and vibrancy of your local arts scene. Harping on the “unworthy” will only set you back.

Thoughts welcome.

nervousacid:

Now that I’m forced to consider Levon Helm’s life and legacy — in the wake of the tragic news that he is currently in the final stages of cancer — it feels important to assert the fact that we really don’t need to go as far back as Music From Big Pink or The Last Waltz to be inspired by the man. In my mind, 1968 and 1976 may have been creative highs for Helm, but they weren’t exactly peaks. To use that word is to say that, since then, there has been a dip in either the quantitative activity or qualitative value of Helm’s work, and that simply isn’t the case. Artists who peaked in the 1970s don’t generally win Grammy Awards in 2008 and 2010 and then again this year; artists without creative fires don’t transform their homes into public venues every week for an opportunity to collaborate with peers and descendants alike. Levon Helm is nothing if not contemporary, and the only thing that might hurt my feelings more than his eventual departure is the idea that many of his eulogists will have already buried him with The Band.

I quit playing music for a living several years ago, but it was never my intention to quit playing music. To see Helm still playing the way he does at 71 years old is to see that it can be done. To see Helm building new musical communities in 2012 is to see a commitment to the kind of transformative social network that will never be realized by Facebook or Twitter. To see Helm collaborating with younger generations — as he does on this 2008 track by my favorite band Ida — is to see a man who recognizes the kinetic nature of music, and shuns the static bliss of nostalgia. He’s a flashlight-wielding shepherd in that regard, and I’d be blessed to follow him.

Monday record review 4/16/2012: "...For The Whole World To See," by Death

It’s easy, before the needle even hits the record, to not take Death seriously. That’s part of it nowadays, isn’t it? There’s such a barrage of band names—not even bands, but their names—competing for attention that a bum note nullifies any chance of drawing a listen. If you’re like me, you thought that an old Florida metal band had reunited or raided the vaults. If not, well: Death, you know? Nothing subtle about it, to the point of heavy-handedness. (Come to find out the band would’ve had a major deal if they’d changed their name when this stuff was recorded in 1973. Pretty punk.)

If you can get past the name, there’s the story, which works as a deterrent as well as an attraction: old band is “discovered” and moves forward to assume their rightful place in the __________ canon. In this case, the Detroit band is hyped as the missing like between the MC5 and the Bad Brains. I like both of those bands, don’t get me wrong, but it all seemed very calculated, you know? So much so, in fact, that I questioned the validity of the story. I’ve known bands who have come up with fake backstories—and have come up with a few myself, to be honest—so I couldn’t help but be wary.

Freaking Out

So, the confluence of seeing the name and the story all over the place made me react negatively. I feel like rather than finding or stumbling upon music I am now forcefed it more than I would like. Of course, back in the fanzine heydays ads and record reviews served the same purposes, but felt much more honest, somehow—perhaps in their passivity. Goddamn flash popups.

As is almost always the case, I listened to my friends rave about the record, then gave it a shot. And it’s great.

Where Do We Go From Here

So, pre-Florida metal, pre-naming your band with search engines in mind, Death got together and, as the headlines trumpeted, took the hard rock of their city—Stooges, MC5—and infused it with accomplished musicianship and more breakneck tempos. The stop / starts in “Freaking Out,” for example, are tight and timely, and “Where Do We Go From Here” will get stuck in your head for days. This is music that needs to be heard on its own terms, not in spite of their clunky name, and not because of any shoehorning of a band into a historical context.

Read more: http://365aay.com/y3d181/#ixzz1sFPH3TxG

Monday record review 4/9/2012: "Rio," by Duran Duran

That Duran Duran was my first favorite band makes sense: their emergence coincided with MTV’s. But it wasn’t just that channel: there was a local station which played nothing but music videos, and another local station which had a video show for an hour a day. Music video, for a time, was unescapable. It’s been well-documented and well-argued elsewhere that no band benefited so thoroughly from music’s shift to a visual medium as immediately as Duran Duran did (just as it’s been argued—though I can’t remember by whom, specifically— that the same shift was responsible for Christopher Cross’s untimely musical demise: he made more sense, unfortunately, as the faceless mastermind behind a flamingoed album cover than he did on television playing his music). MTV was The New Thing when I was eight and nine, and Duran Duran’s sensibilities were perfect for that age: quasi-plotless Indiana Jones-tinged adventures in exotic locales. I was a bit too young for the exotic women in the videos, but I understood that they held an appeal I wasn’t yet privy to.

Of course, I got a bunch of shit for loudly proclaiming them my favorite band to anyone who’d listen. Their ubiquity in girly pop mags like Tiger Beat didn’t help things any. Nor did their New Romantic style: ruffles will never be in, no matter what anyone says. But I soldiered gamely on, through lineup changes and side projects, until I declared Van Halen my favorite band in the eighties in an attempt to ward off predatory bullies in a new school (and this was Van Hagar—I was better off, in retrospect, with ol’ DD). Then punk found me, and it was the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys and all the rest.

Hold Back the Rain

I think, now, that Duran Duran are unfairly pinned to their singles. The videos remind people of a certain age of a certain time—that era of video ubiquity—and people of other ages of what they think the era was like. I have no idea what 1982 was like in the clubs so maybe things were all New Romantic. I bet, though, that New Romanticism is kinda like Electroclash: a genre that reflexively generated more buzz than substance, with caches of pre-Facebook photographs stuffed neatly under rugs, never to be seen again except ironically. What I’m saying here is that there’s a case to be made that “Rio” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” are pure kitsch. Which is a shame, because the album which spawned those tracks remains one of my favorites.

Listening to so many records causes callouses to grow, though sometimes not on the sentimental center of the brain. It’s always a drag when revisiting old stuff that meant a lot and finding it doesn’t hold up. One of the first records I ever owned, the J. Geils Band’s Freeze-Frame, is a perfect example, and one that works well in the context of this specific argument: like Duran Duran, their videos fueled their ubiquity, and point to a very specific mini-epoch for both people who were there and weren’t. Unfortunately, Freeze-Frame doesn’t hold up as an album. It sucks to realize that the only reason I was so smitten with the band was because I had listened to maybe five records to that point, but that’s the brutal reality of time passing.

Beyond Duran Duran being heartthrobs and having amazing videos, their early music manages to effectively meld synth, rock, and disco. Roger Taylor’s drum throne is planted squarely in hi-hat city throughout Rio, sizzling beats as John Taylor flexes his bass throughout. Nowhere on the album is this demonstrated as amazingly as in My Own Way, where his bass runs astound. They’re maybe a bit show-offy, but what makes them work is the fact that everyone is trying to be heard on the record (except maybe for Roger, who, hi-hat aside, always struck me as the most workmanlike member of the band—he was foundational, not flashy). Nick Rhodes harnessed the potential of his synth and keyboards in such a way as to circumvent the inherent tackiness of their potential: his parts, to this day, don’t sound as dated as other bands reliant on the instrument (Depeche Mode, I’m looking at you). Andy Taylor, on guitar, always had a knack for big, glam / arena riffage, opening up the undercarriage for nuance and subtlety, hollering without bogarting. And singer Simon LeBon, of course, always sounded good, the cocksure safari captain, somehow simultaneously macho and sensitive.

My Own Way

It’s not all just about pulsing disco beats and danceable bombast, as it is in “My Own Way” and “Hold Back the Rain.” Singles aside, there’s the slow-dance element of Rio, which manifests in synth balladry like “Lonely In Your Nightmare,” “Save a Prayer” (the one song on the record I think is heavy-handed and clunky, requisite shimmering video aside) and especially “The Chauffeur,” a song as impenetrable now as it was thirty (jeez—thirty!) years ago, with its vague lyrics and anthemically melancholy keys line (to say nothing of the odd background “found” studio noises, later prominently reprised by, among others, Talk Talk and Rodan).

Because of all the associations—the radio / video hits, the reprehensible fashion choices, the eighties in general—I understand that listening to “Rio” objectively can be very difficult. It’s the album, aside from the aforementioned J. Geils slab, that I’ve owned the longest. It’s the one I’ve kept returning to. Recent remasterings have brought John’s lines to the fore—the man rivals only Mike Watt on my list of preferred bassists—and have added a depth grounded in hindsight to Nick’s keys. Seriously, get over the associations—most of ‘em are probably bogus anyway. The album stands as a monument to an era: one not of pirate shirts and blow, but of the level playing field of punk / post=punk allowing bands to take—and, in this case, succeed in—chances.

Read more: http://365aay.com/y3d174/#ixzz1raXCEiyZ

Monday record review 4/2/2012: "Inflammable Material" by Stiff Little Fingers

Here’s the thing: I kinda like Hot Topic. In theory, anyway: jeez, if that place had been around when I was in high school, setting myself apart from the real and imagined aggressors in the hallways would have been so much easier. I would have had more time to go out and smash the state or whatever, though at that tender age “smashing the state” probably meant reading a book in a coffeehouse or hoping cops would notice my attempts to ollie curbs so I could proclaim, loudly, that I had been a victim of skate harassment.

But the cops didn’t care was the thing: I’m sure I was so bumbling in my attempts to grind they assumed—correctly—that I was harmless, if they noticed me at all. But the noticing is a key component of the formative days, whether we’re talking pre- or post-Hot Topic. No matter the era, the initial self-awareness yields some sort of reaction, an anti-matter which pushes away from what’s established and into the unknown. More than becoming a part of something, it’s a separation from the established order of things, definition by negation.

The ‘Topic is an early stage of that nowadays. So is nu-metal, so is hip hop, so is Skrillex, etc. It’s easy to get a reaction if that’s all that you’re looking for. But after a point, there’s taking things to the next step, using the initial shock as a springboard.

Alternative Ulster

The whole “punk is dead” argument comes into play more regarding the genre’s origins than the fashion and subculture it spawned. There’s a legitimate case to be made in saying that punk died around 1979, once the first wave started to dry up, break up, or move away from the initial narrow limitations. Not to say I believe any of this stuff, but I get it, and understand when first-wavers try to drive nails into that particular coffin. It happens all over music—there’s the school that says hardcore died in 1984/85, for example. Again, I get it, even if I’m not buying it.

What I am buying is the Stiff Little Fingers. They’re a recent discovery, spawned by pre-internet memories of skate magazines merging with a series of videos by ‘80s pro Jeff Grosso. Back then (and now) Thrasher was the edgy one, what with its great punk and hip-hop coverage. The skaters themselves, though, seemed like they’d make fun of me for not being _________ enough.Transworld was slicker, and accordingly the skaters therein seemed more approachable. After a time, Grosso was featured in both—he had something going on, in other words. I recently stumbled across a series of videos he’s doing, which made me think back to the interviews he did. I remember him talking about Stiff Little Fingers—after all these years!—and tracked ‘em down.

Grosso was right.

Certainly the punk “era” was rife with reasons for railing against the establishment—the socioeconomics on both sides of the pond, certainly, yielded plenty of strife—but a lot of said railing reverted to nothing but pose and aping by within a few years, part and parcel of something small becoming a movement (seriously, teenagers complaining about Reagan’s bad policies? C’mon, dudes!).

Suspect Device

Here in 2012, it’s easy to hear a barely restrained fury in Inflammable Material—the incendiary goings-on in and around Belfast drive the album, still bleeding urgency after all this time. The band’s politics are in no way kneejerk or aware of the “punk” genre—they’re responding to a time and a place in the most honest way possible in songs like “Suspect Device” and “Alternative Ulster.” This is protest music, plain and simple, speaking to the disaffected in a snarl that sounds like common parlance. But there’s joy in there, too—the sudden and unexpected means, perhaps, of self-expression coming together. The raw anger is certainly identifiable in terms of genre, as are some of the tropes—there’s reggae in here à la the Clash, for example, the influence of rockabilly, in-your-face song titles like “I Don’t Like You.”

What’s surprising is how fresh and influential much of this sounds, despite the band’s relative under-the-radar status. It’s easy to hear echoes of Crass in singer Jake Burns’ raspy croak—as well as the hoarse delivery of Frankie Stubbs of Leatherface, commonly thought of as the vocal ground zero for the seemingly endless stable of gruff melodic bands in and around Gainesville, FL. There’s Proletariat in their drums, and more syncopated stop-starts in “Suspect Device” than in any of the other early bands’ stuff. The initial wave becomes the foundation on which the band built their particular take on the time and place, using their unique vision to craft a document that acknowledges the recent past but builds on it, as well.

It’s a neat trick, sounding both familiar and fresh in the context of the day’s heavy hitters, but the Stiff Little Fingers pull it off admirably (both here and in their follow-up “Nobody’s Heroes,” the song Grosso, in his ages-old interview, used to reflect on his skating fame). Despite punk’s protestations, there’s a canon, and these cats deserve to be in it.

—Mike F.

Read more: http://365aay.com/y3d167/#ixzz1qwAkpt5R

Dead Trend: "Bad Policy" EP

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In preparation for our April and May shows. Out on vinyl soon on Save vs. Poison Productions

Monday record review 3/26/2012: Sun Kil Moon, "Ghosts of the Great Highway."

Mark Kozelek can be maddening. In his various iterations—acoustic, electric, Red House Painters, solo—there are degrees of transcendence which clash and intersect at odd angles with his whims. There’s humor and whimsy and virtuosic playing, but getting there often involves getting through. Many songs in the man’s oeuvre could stand an editor: as good as the riffs are, the sentiments, the last three minutes don’t always add to the conversation. Usually, anyway. When the listener’s mood syncs up with the music’s tone, the mopery can be glorious, the indulgence shifting in self from songwriter to fan. Other times, you might want to be able to listen to one of the recs with another human being in the room. Seemingly ironic covers are delivered deadpan; whole albums of same (like the Modest Mouse cover record) make you wonder if the joke is on you for buying.

After “disbanding” Red House Painters following Old Ramon, Kozelek started Sun Kil Moon. Their debut, Ghosts of the Great Highway is a focused display of musicianship and songwriting which ranks with the man’s best.

Glenn Tipton

The album starts with “Glenn Tipton,” which showcases both Kozelek’s pop chops and his quirky sense of humor (“some like Jim Nabors / some like Bobby Vinton / I like ‘em both”). As is often the case, though, there’s more than what lies on the surface: after ruminating, charmingly, on family and neighborhood, the narrative—which, as listeners, we’re predisposed to think is Kozelek—shifts tone, even as his voice remains steady, revealing the exploits of a serial killer (“I buried my first victim when I was nineteen / went through her bedroom and the pockets of her jeans / and found her letters that said so many things / that really hurt me bad”). It’s a neat trick, gaining our sympathy as listeners before upending our expectations, forcing us to deal with a humanized narrator who turns out to be unworthy of any sympathy.

“Salvador Sanchez,” a song about a Mexican boxer, treads on guitar territory familiar to Red House Painters enthusiasts, reprising some of the sloppy neo-Ginn skronk so prominent in Made Like Paper, RHP’s 1996 album. The guitar solo on that song, five minutes long, apocryphally got RHP kicked off of 4AD. But here, single sloppy notes are stretched to maximum clanging and squalling effect, simulating the haze of combat.

Salvador Sanchez

So yeah. It’s tough to be a fan, but when albums like this come along, the odd notes of the overlong / overthought records are forgotten–the tough albums, in other words, become a nifty analogue for Kozelek’s career. Calculated or not, the meanderings and missteps often prove interesting, especially within the context of the man’s career. But with that said, Ghosts should appeal to all, whether vinyl-hoarding fans or occasional spectators.

—Mike F.

Read more: http://365aay.com/y3d160/#ixzz1qG5UlblE

Vol. 1 Brooklyn "Hidden Wheel" review

All right!

Lowell

My true story of almost being beat up by skate thugs in Lowell, Massachusetts. Thanks to Wes and everyone at Jumping Blue Gods.