Tuesday, February 24, 2009

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN : AUTOMATIC (Blanco y Negro, 1989)


SUCK MY DICK

Early fall 2005 and I'm driving down 6th street during the day. This song comes on FNX's Leftover Lunch and I've heard it before. I almost sing along as it's all on the tip of my tongue but not close enough. It bothers me, and it stays with me.

"Can't stand up! I can't cool down! I can't get my head off this ground!"

A few weeks later I'm at work at Brew'd and I'm looking through Andy's CDs; there's "Automatic" and I know somehow that it's the one. Of course I'm correct; I listen to it all day.

Later at night, I pick you up from Ill Salt and I'm jonesing. As you connect your iPod I ask, "You got any Jesus And Mary Chain?"

"No," you say. And laugh.

some things are so hard to say even though you'd say them everyday

Friday, February 20, 2009

THE GUN CLUB: FIRE OF LOVE (RUBY, 1981)




I was going to make a post about some shoegaze bands I've been listening to lately, but I decided to go more along the lines of Dan's last post.

I attribute my entire musical development to two people: my aunt Susan and my cousin Chris (Susan is Chris' aunt as well, not his mother). Susan tells a lot of stories about me dancing around her kitchen as a baby to David Bowie and Depeche Mode records, and whenever we have family get-togethers at her house we force everyone to listen to shit like the Smiths.

I didn't have tons of contact with my cousin Chris when I was a lot younger, as he is almost 20 years older than me, but for some reason we started hanging out a lot right before I entered high school. In seventh and eighth grade I started listening to stuff like the Sex Pistols, sort of groping around in the dark, trying to learn about music. When this became clear to Chris, who has a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of music, he burned me a big stack of CDs. This specific stack of CDs has greatly informed what I've listened to in the past 7 years and what I continue to listen to. Included were Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' Kicking Against The Pricks, New York Dolls' New York Dolls, Alice Cooper's Love It To Death, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, Kraftwerk's The Man Machine, and The Gun Club's Fire Of Love. Now, I could talk ad nauseam about any of those records but it has come to my attention recently that a number of people I know have never heard Fire Of Love.

When I first heard this record, I thought, "What the fuck is this?" Frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce speaks, sings, and wails with questionable skill but it doesn't matter; when he says things like, "Gonna buy me a gun just as long as my arm and kill everyone who ever done me harm," over messy blues-punk guitar, I totally believe it. Every raw, aggressive moment seems to suggest something dark, something evil.

I can see where this album fits within the 1980's LA punk scene, and many bands (eg, the White Stripes) have since cited it as a serious influence, but I don't necessarily associate it with any of that in my head; there is definitely something singular about this record that makes it special. To me, there isn't really anything else like it.

To download (via MediaFire):

The Gun Club: Fire Of Love (1981) (Link Fixed: 5 March 2009)

Monday, February 9, 2009

BLANK DOGS: ON TWO SIDES (TROUBLEMAN UNLIMITED/FUCK IT TAPES, 2008), THE FIELDS (WOODSIST, 2008)

On Saturday night, I threw a couple of cans of Sparks in my purse, made sure I looked adequately homeless, and headed downtown to go to the WAVVES/WOODS/BLANK DOGS/NODZZZ show, organized by the infamous Todd P and taking place at the LESS ARTISTS MORE CONDOS loft space. My companion and I had a false start, what with the long-suffering doorman telling us, "It's sold out," but after we stood around on the sidewalk for about ten minutes, moodily smoking cigarettes, Todd P himself came out and asked us if we had been waiting to get in to the show upstairs. Our answer was "Yes," and his reply was, "Come up, come up!" I guess we looked cool enough.

The New York Times (!!!) has already written a lame/hilarious review of the show focusing on Wavves, and FADER has already written a brutal/sarcastic review of the NYT review here, so I'm going to skip Wavves and instead focus on the important thing, and that important thing is BLANK DOGS.

I was standing in the back behind some extraordinarily tall guys, which I usually do not mind at all, but I craned my neck a bit to get a few glimpses of the band, and I'm glad I did: the air in the space was sticky-hot and close, but the frontman was almost completely covered. He had a black hoodie on, and you better believe the hood was up over his head. My companion filled me in: Blank Dogs is actually just frontman Mike Sniper making music in his bedroom and employing a band in order to recreate this music live. He is apparently terrified of letting people see him: one of the covers of his releases features him completely swathed in bandages, another under a sheet. Okay, Mike Sniper, I'm intrigued.

My personal predilection for cripplingly shy, (probable) never-nudes aside, Blank Dogs sounded great. The negative things people seem to be saying about them/him around the internet are pluses for me: melodies are buried under tons of distortion, lyrics are nonsensical, it's pretty serious, it sounds like the Cure sometimes, Mike Sniper is scary, etc. Sometimes it is abrasive, sometimes it is catchy as hell, sometimes it is really fucking weird, more often than not, it is all of the above. I cannot stop listening to it. "Maybe (it's because) we are pussies?" FADER said, in response to not "getting" Blank Dogs. Sorry FADER, but I think you might be right.

To download (via MediaFire):

On Two Sides (2008)
The Fields (2008)