we sing with our heroes 33 1/3 rounds per minute

Salad Fork: List Of Exclusives For Record Store Day [April 17th]

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:50:56 -0600

Salad Fork: List Of Exclusives For Record Store Day [April 17th]: I will take the Pavement, Sonic...

I endorse anything Mr. Sniper does, in particular Blank Dogs....

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:53:37 -0600

I endorse anything Mr. Sniper does, in particular Blank Dogs. New album this year. Sadly I have heard no more live shows.

saladfork:

Get it here

via

Frankie is a master of verse and his words can snap your heart...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:17:24 -0600

Frankie is a master of verse and his words can snap your heart like a twig. The new album is beautiful and so is his voice.

hardcorefornerds:

Leatherface - ‘I Want the Moon’ from Mush (1991)

“When I say I want the moon, I expect the moon”

- Conrad ‘Connie’ Hilton, Mad Men

“And I want the moon, I don’t expect too much from honeymoons”

- Frankie Stubbs, Leatherface

“What do you want… you want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down”

- Jimmy Stewart, It’s A Wonderful Life

I was reminded of the second quote by the first, and I’m guessing that one or other of them might have been inspired by the third. However, there’s a lot more to the Leatherface song than naked ambition. I’ve posted it before, saying “Reading George Orwell [specifically The Lion and the Unicorn] and listening to Leatherface. A perfect self-hating bourgeois Sunday afternoon in the British Isles [which I feel now I should change to the Celtic Archipelago, except nobody uses that and it’s offensive to both Angles and Saxons].”

I’ve always had a problem interpreting Leatherface lyrics. Not only are they inherently vague, but Stubbs’ delivery is characteristically hoarse and the lyrics are written in tiny handwriting. There is the staccatto rush of scattered phrases - “Mass chant vigilante bad taste rat race” - and the repeated anthemic phrases - “And I want the moon”. But at the end, “We don’t make bargains and don’t deal with markets” seems a pretty clear statement of leftist politics. It could be that “I want the moon” is Leatherface’s equivalent of Crass’s “Do they owe us a living? ‘Course they fucking do!” - defiance in the face of capitalism and its imposed morality. Elsewhere, on ‘Winning’, they say “Roundabouts and swings aren’t my favourite things”.

Coming from Sunderland in the industrial north of England, and writing their best songs at the start of the 1990s, I tend to view Leatherface as dealing with at least the legacies of Thatcherism in British society. Which was as much a focus for early 80s punk in the UK as Reaganism was for punk in the US, although for hardcore the latter probably had a greater specific influence. Before that, at the start of punk rock, Labour and Democratic governments were in control - something Nicholas Rombes highlights in A Cultural Dictionary of Punk in an entry on ‘Callaghan, James, Prime Minister of Great Britain’, beginning with a quote from a New York Times article and a subsequent correction pointing out that, contrary to the article’s description of ‘the social climate’ of Thatcher’s Britain and the Sex Pistols’ cry of “No Future”, Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979 and the Sex Pistols disbanded in 1978.

Rombes’ take on this is not just that the mistake perhaps reflects “the broader tendency of many (certainly not all) rock critics and historians to interpret, reflexively, punk’s nihilism as a street-level reaction against conservatism” - something which, in cruder terms, leads to an automatic and, to a degree, unthinking association of punk with the left - but also that the pessimism of the economic climate, eventually leading to the ‘79 Winter of Discontent, and of Callaghan himself informed the said nihilism of punk bands; and similarly in the US with the economic situation, particularly of New York, and the political messages of Carter. To an extent, this also leads to an apolitical punk rock - the Ramones’ ‘I’m Against It’ comes to mind - and to one that’s reactionary against traditional left politics and trade unionism.

In the last week, I watched a couple of interesting political BBC documentaries - one on the recently deceased former Labour leader Michael Foot, essentially an opposite number of Walter Mondale in that he ran against Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 general election on a relatively far-left platform and lost dismally, but who had also first became an MP in 1945 and consistently espoused democratic socialism, and another on the Grunwick dispute over trade union recognition in a London film processing laboratory between 1976 and 1978, which the documentary concluded, from at least one side, was instrumental in breaking the trade unions’ power pre-Thatcher (one of the contributors I recognised from the previous documentary as Michael Foot’s revolutionary socialist, and outside the Labour party nephew).

Now more than ever, it’s important to connect with punk’s real roots in economic and political disarray, and even in its ironic “we don’t make bargains and don’t deal with markets”, because humane, democratic socialism needs an intelligent response to capitalism and the pressure of defining ambitions in material terms, of asserting the primacy of the market and the economic individual over the right to social provision and the right to collective workers’ action. Watch this heart-warming live lyrics too.

I picked up this while in Chicago at the Dusty Groove. 60s soul...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:11:01 -0600

I picked up this while in Chicago at the Dusty Groove. 60s soul and 77 punk attitude. Go get it.

hypem:

daualset:

JC Brooks and The Uptown Sound - I Am Trying To Break Your Heart (Wilco cover)

Wilco goes Motown/Stax. Awesome.

(via you me them everybody)

One of my favorite albums. Chet is the the king of smooth...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:23:00 -0600

One of my favorite albums. Chet is the the king of smooth cool.

vinylsunday:

i-rocksteady:

Vinyl Sunday Chet Baker- Sings

sweet :)

The Mummys are going to tour this year I think. Please come to...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:15:19 -0600

The Mummys are going to tour this year I think. Please come to Tejas!

pas-d:

goo22:

tiredandsleepy:

The first Mummies release. Covers were hand folded and glued. 1990.

Butthole Surfers and Doug Sahm were the most famous bands to...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:11:00 -0600

Butthole Surfers and Doug Sahm were the most famous bands to come out of San Antonio Texas. Surfers met at Trinity University. Both groups put out classic classic stuff.

pas-d:

suicidewatch:

thesweetestpsychopath:

Butthole Surfers - “The Hurdy Gurdy Man” (3:52 ~ 1990)

Murray Street is my favorite Sonic Youth album punch for...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:47:52 -0600

Murray Street is my favorite Sonic Youth album punch for punch.

hypem:

talkingrecords:

‘Murray Street’ by Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth is a band that holds a very unique place in the history of rock’n’roll. With a career lasting almost 30 years, Sonic Youth has always been a leading influence in underground music. They are just one of those bands that has been around forever but has always found a way to doing something new and interesting. The way I see Sonic Youth is as a gateway to more experimental music. They are like the gateway drug of avante-garde music. You listen to Sonic Youth before you hit the heavy stuff.

That isn’t to say Sonic Youth doesn’t make some heavy, crazy music themselves. The SRY series is designated for their experimental compositions. Plus, when they started is 1981 they were a big part of the no-wave scene, helping bring noise rock to more people. As time wore on they became major players in the alternative scene and played with such acts as The Jesus Lizard, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, etc. Sonic Youth survived the 90’s and continued to make music into this millennium. For this album they added on long time collaborator Jim O’Rourke as a fifth member. For their 12th album they created a landscape of simple drumbeats and guitar noises.

This album is made up of my favorite type of Sonic Youth song, the noisy, lyrically thick, stream of consciousness jams that you have to listen to three or four times before you fully appreciate them. Compared to a lot of Sonic Youth records, ‘Murray Street’ is rather light. All the guitar noise you’d expect from Sonic Youth is there but it’s used in a different way. Instead of smack you in the face and throwing you around, it’s used for texture and mood. The most aggravated this album gets is on the track ‘Plastic Sun’ which features the classic angry vocals of bassist Kim Gordon, which is one of my favorite gritty vocals in history. This album is also another example of the rhythm section keeping it somewhat simple for the benefit of the song. I know it works for the song because I’m bobbing along to it.

My favorite part of this album and the the thing that separates it from other Sonic Youth albums for me is the lyrics. I’m heavily into beat poetry and the whole stream of consciousness type of poetry. While the lyrics of ‘Murray Street’ aren’t all like that, a good portion is. Every line is a poem in itself, wound together to create such a clear and thick image. The words on this record almost breathe with the music. It’s sometime hard to distinguish a separation. They are the kind of lyrics that it doesn’t matter what they say but instead how they make you feel.

All in all ‘Murray Street’ is a great album to start with if you want to get into Sonic Youth. It’s a point in their career that they were changing sounds so it has elements of all their work in it. It’s not too long or abrasive, which is likely to scare the uninitiated. It’s a beautiful noise punk record.

Song: ‘Radical Adults Like Godhead Style’

This is next.

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:28:05 -0600

This is next.

Yes the actor. Really.

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:04:35 -0600

Yes the actor. Really.

Did you know Dinosaur JR did a Gram Parsons cover W/Matt Dillon...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:02:37 -0600

Did you know Dinosaur JR did a Gram Parsons cover W/Matt Dillon on backup vocals

What kind of mood will these put me in?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:28:06 -0600

What kind of mood will these put me in?

But first some forgotten 70s glam

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:28:06 -0600

But first some forgotten 70s glam

Row B! THAT IS 2nd row! So excited about seeing ROKY.

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:49:03 -0600

Row B! THAT IS 2nd row! So excited about seeing ROKY.

yvynyl: Attic App - iPhone App For Forgotten Albums in Your...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:01:13 -0600

yvynyl:

Attic App - iPhone App For Forgotten Albums in Your Library

whatevernevermind:
Brilliant!

Totally.

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals: A View of Other Windows - photos...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:14:00 -0600

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals: A View of Other Windows - photos by Neal Casal. Go buy this book. Video montage of some pics and Ryan’s song Memory Lane. Preview and order book here.

I bought my first record when I was 10 years old just because of...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:19:11 -0600

I bought my first record when I was 10 years old just because of the cover, it was Kiss Alive II… and that was where it all began. I did it again with this one. Great double LP from Mexico.

I have 7 of 29 singles so far. 3 bands in the UK had a great...

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:19:00 -0600

I have 7 of 29 singles so far. 3 bands in the UK had a great great string of singles in the 1970s, Bowie, T. Rex, and The Sweet. My favorite thing about collecting these is not just the picture sleeves, it’s the b-side. Most often the band would use up all studio time making the a-side perfect and have just enough time for one take for the b-side. These b-sides on The Sweet’s singles are some of the best raw punk-glam songs ever.

Rocky Votolato - Red River - from his new album. My little girl...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:51:00 -0600

Rocky Votolato - Red River - from his new album. My little girl is napping in the other room and I am just now listening to this. Absolutely beautiful album. I have been reading that after a year of literal hibernation in his apartment because of depression and anxiety he has emerged. Some say Rocky has written the album of his career. They may just be right. But come on, this guy has never put out a bad record. Nancy, this is for you. Stream the whole album here.

T. REX - Life’s A Gas - from 1971’s Electric...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:07:22 -0600

T. REX - Life’s A Gas - from 1971’s Electric Warrior. The king of glam as far as I’m concerned.