In October, Young God Records was set to release We Rose from Your Bed with the Sun in Our Head—a live document of material from SWANS' promotional tour of its 2010 reunion album, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. It still isn't out, so while we're waiting for Godot, here's a recording from SWANS' appearance at last year's Portishead-curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival, I'll Be Your Mirror, at the Paramount Theatre in New Jersey on 1 October 2011.
The recording highlights the often inadequate distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian art. A studio recording is, generally, a wholly different affair to a live concert. A SWANS gig, for instance, is very much a bodily experience. What was touted as the band's final record (two double albums ago now) was somewhat misleadingly given the title Soundtracks for the Blind. «Misleadingly», because live, SWANS make music for the deaf. You don't need to bring your ears; the propulsion of sound reverberates throughout the entire body as the slow, repetitive waves of bass, drums and noise blow against it, giving the molecules that comprise you a healthy old rattle 'n' shake. Forget about discerning words, melody. We're talking primordial soup of vibrating static, everything a painful blur. SWANS live is pure masochistic joy! The spectacle of a possessed M. Gira riding both his band and audience members' demons like a fifth horseman of the apocalypse, astray and AWOL, to wrest any control you might think you had out of your weak, little hands only adds to the gluttonous punishment.
But as has always been the challenge for live albums, they can never convey the experience they attempt to record. Sometimes that's fine. More than a souvenir, the live album can give you an opportunity to hear details you missed the first time around, in all the eardrum shattering hiss. SWANS' last live album, 1997's Swans Are Dead, contained some of the most blissful, cathartically mournful, erotically frightening and finger snapping moments in the band's recorded history.
Toilet Guppies caught SWANS on their recent European tour in Berlin and in Oslo, and can say with some authority (I said «some») that what was a near-transcendental derangement of the senses in a live setting—the sheer volume obliterating the mind/body dualism—comes across as meandering and a little self-indulgent in mp3 format. Too bombastic to be used as background music, but not pummelling enough at 128 kbps through tiny, tinny iPod headphones or speakers to satisfy the average contemporary attention span, this is not a recording anybody is likely to listen to while taking the bus in the morning or doing the dishes in the evening. Nor while they're dancing, fucking or doing drugs, for that matter. Three of these tracks run for about 25 minutes, most of which is taken up by repeated Wagnerian percussive stomps, or cycles of slowly building marching drums. Live, these give rise to fear for your ears, before finally bringing your resistance to your knees. You surf numberless waves of hypnotic, all-enveloping sound until you wake up from a trance, once the music and the pain in your aural orifice has subsided. Sweat trickles out of waxen ears. Taken out of the concert venue and its formidable PA, however, the pieces drag on a bit. The songs are great—the surprisingly funky «Apostate», in particular, shines here—it's just that by the time they're wrapping up the intro, you've been waiting a quarter of an hour. It's like a particularly conscientious lover's never ending foreplay, always promising, but when will they deliver?
On Swans Are Dead, Jarboe's occasional lead vocal duties and funereal organ lent the proceedings much-needed variety, texture and, dare I say, femininity. There is no such respite on these recordings from the phallic three-guitar, one-bass, two-prong percussion attack. The pieces become much of a muchness, really, bleeding over into one another. Everything has that same structure, always cranked up to eleven, innit?
The above download, then, is mostly a souvenir for those who have witnessed the real thing, or else a curious document for those eager to eavesdrop on the process leading up to the already-recorded, but yet-to-be released follow-up to My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. This recording was originally uploaded by NPR as one long 128 kbps mp3 file some time ago. I've split the file into individual tracks. A no doubt far superior live document—mixed and mastered, without the glitches, culled from a multitude of concerts and in lossless quality—is set for release four months ago, and should be available in our lifetime. Sign up to Young God Records' mailing list for a notification upon its release.
For more of the same, but in far superior sound quality (at once far more compelling) and with admonitions to the Spanish people to overthrow their government, download a couple of songs performed by SWANS at Barcelona's Primavera Sound festival last May (care of WFMU and Free Music Archive):
Tonight, the War On Drugs are playing at the NBI here in Berlin. Their new album Slave Ambient (and its companion EP «Future Weather») contain some of the most uplifting sounds released this autumn. I don't know how, but somehow their brand of classic rock, veering as it does towards the middle of the road, is still never boring. Listening to their latest releases on a headset is a pure, hedonistic joy any bon vivant should experience at least once. As synthesizers prepare the ground, numberless guitars swirl back and forth and in and out, the wave upon which Adam Granduciel waxes lyrical:
I hear you dish it out, dish it out
well, you want to remain
my friend, no it's not
it's not quite the same
Remember me when you dissolve in the rain
when the rivers run dry through the cold mountain range
and you turn to the name you invented to keep
your identity safe from the smell of defeat
And there is no way
to carve your righteous paths of rage
by holding the candle to those half your age
Your jaw will be locked from hornets and bees
and you'll understand why I leave so suddenly
with the breeze
For a taste of what their new stuff sounds like, check out these free mp3s, courtesy of record label Secretly Canadian:
And if that's still not enough for you, go to the top of the page and download recordings of the War On Drugs playing live in the studio for KEXP, back in 2009 as a three piece, promoting liberating debut long player Wagonwheel Blues (albeit without Kurt Vile). There's a blissful rendition of «Show Me the Coast», and Wagonwheel's five-minute «A Needle in Your Eye #16» is transformed into the 12-minute workout «A Needle in Your Eye #24».
Monday 19 September 2011 at
Neue Berliner Initiative
Kulturbrauerei
Schönhauser Allee 36
Hate Rock's forthcoming album has a release date: 6 September. Pitchfork just debuted a song off it. Sonically the band has evolved. (Shame about the lyrics.) They're doing something right when in the current art/music climate, every new release of theirs comes as a relief.
But there's no point in reviewing or promoting the song with some blog marketing press release liner note spiel. Download and listen for yourselves. Highly recommended, as always.
Have you of late lost all your mirth, allowing yourself to sink into despondency and fantasies of suicide made all the more pathetic because you have absolutely no intention of going through with them? Not to worry! In such times of emotional paralysis—every thought in any which direction just another imagined road to futility and regret—there's only one thing for it:
… some tape hiss to dredge the shallows of your consciousness, plus a little guitar twang and '50s aw-shucks! trembling vox to sex up the muscle memory, make you come alive again, bucking and rearing to go! If all your desire has gone limp and withered up, dissolved into the nothingness you'd like to follow it into, these sounds should do the trick. Things are never so bad kicks can't be had. (Well, not always, anyway.)
Here, then, is Dirty Beaches. They—or he, young master Alex Zhang Hung-tai—started out making homespun, lo-fi instrumental noodlings that were a little unremarkable, but exploded in 2009 with worded songs springing forth from the point where the caveman stomp of rockabilly, the motorik of krautrock, the shit of shitgaze, the aesthetic of Suicide (the band) and the ethereal, yet twisted sensuality of early David Lynch films all converge in a sultry murk of rambling, suggestive sound. Eerie, creepy, sexy sounds—the mutterings (and occasional yelps) of a confused pervert driving his lonely lorry at night, kept awake by speed and reveries I think it best not to mention.
There are few cocktails as potent as lust, fear and confusion. Did I forget fun? Man, I did not forget fun. And if you ever wondered what a grown man crawling on his hands and knees towards the custodian of his pleasure sounds like, wonder no more.
Before releasing their latest album, the highly recommended Badlands, out now on Zoo Music, those Dirty Beetches had a penchant for releasing their music on magnetic tape, and in very limited editions. Here's a sampler of the finest songs and soundscapes from those discontinued releases, starting in 2009 until more or less the present (with the exception of readily available CDs/digital albums and singles, such as Badlands, a split EP with US Girls and the «No Fun» single).
For anyone in Oslo this weekend, Toilet Guppies has two spare tickets to the SWANS gig on Friday (6 May), to be given away for free to the first man, woman, beast or child to claim them.
If the transcendent din, so loud it might make you forget who and where you are, of Michael Gira's curious brand of oddly disciplined, yet excessive and decidedly perverse derangement isn't your cup of tea, note that James Blackshaw plays support. I'm loath to use adjectives such as «meditative» and most of all «magical», but Blackshaw's delicate, ever-ascending blend of instrumental bluegrass and classical guitar actually qualifies. You will be transfixed. For a little taste, download the above mp3s, recorded live in studio for NPR a couple of years ago. Just know that he exerts a far more mesmerising effect live.
And afterwards, SWANS will give you the greatest release this side of sex.
Send Toilet Guppies an email to claim one or both tickets.
[Upload deleted by MediaFire, for «copyright infringement». The track had originally been distributed for free on the Walkmen's MySpace, and has never been commercially available. But you can still get it over at Stereogum.]
Ah, Sunday in Spring! A day owned by a band like the Walkmen. And so here's a rarity—an mp3 you could download for free off their MySpace back in 2008. It's an instrumental jam that sounds like a song sketch (probably from the sessions that produced You & Me).
While we wait for the album currently most anticipated here at Toilet Guppies', HTRK's Work (Work, Work) (to be released in about five months' time), the band is currently offering a live album, recorded in 2008, over at their website.
Not very well known—nor will they ever be if they continue to explore, in such a stubborn manner, what most people would rather avoid, all the more so because it's always there, that hum underlying your very existence—HTRK is still the most interesting «art rock» outfit since Flux Information Sciences. But unlike Flux Info, HTRK doesn't dilly-dally with things like distracting or ameliorating humour. Their music is not the type to cowardly put on a brave face, forcing itself to qualify, always unconvincingly, «… but it's not that bad.» Or to find other ways of looking away.
You can be indifferent about many things. Most things. Sorrow and sex are not among them, which is what gives HTRK its emotional currency. While other indie bands tend their hairdos and seek out people with whom to schmooze like so many gold diggers at the yacht club, so that they may better peddle the ditties they've slapped together with a view to becoming rich and adored by the snivelling and the stupid, HTRK takes care of business. Music was made for dealing with these things—pain, boredom, desire—and not for certain people to have their narcissistic exhibitionism indulged, their desperate need for validation met or their pointlessly ambitious greed gratified. When you've lost all faith in music—when every recording artist comes across as either a scenester or just plain bland—a band like HTRK comes around, offering you hope with their brand of hopelessness.
I'm sure that wasn't their intention, but there you go. Take it as a gift. Then go buy their live album.
[The above mp3, by the way, has nothing to do with the live album. It was a free give-away, downloaded off their MySpace some months back. Although a demo, it's as good as the songs on their records (and certainly boasts higher production values than their debut). Fuck the hyperbole, it's really very, very good. One of their best. So far.]
That's a respectable 24 minutes and 20 seconds out of a total 45 minutes and 48 seconds of uncomplicated music for complicated emotions. Unpretentious down home classic rock feel, perfect for Sundays. Swirling acoustic melodies with odd drips of cocoon noise psychedelia to fully secure the introversion of compositions penned by a guy who does for serious heterosexual males with periodic bouts of social phobia and/or disabling misanthropy what Blondie or Joan Jett did for girls who just wanna have fun and who have to ask, «What does 'misanthropy' mean?»
So, if you're full of sadness and frustration as brought on by friends, lovers and other enemies, get Smoke Ring for My Halo now. As the man sings on the album opener, «I will never, ever, ever be alone / 'cuz it's all in my baby's hands… / I get sick of just about everyone / and I hide in my baby's arms / 'Cuz except for her, you know / as I've implied…»—be that «baby» drink, drugs, work, a hobby… or music, such as, say, the songs on Smoke Ring for My Halo. Hey, whatever gets you through the day.
If you're a cheap Charlie and need even more coaxing before parting with cash for Vile's new record, here's a little compilation of various more or less recent Internet radio & TV recordings of the troubadour plugging this and his previous album (the equally worthwhile Childish Prodigy)—though I'd go with the official studio releases, if I were you:
Sometimes, it's hard to tell whether the spiritual impulse of religion is really the lust to be one with the world beyond your lonely self—like those medieval nuns visited at night by ecstatic visions of the «light» of Jesus «penetrating» them—or whether you're just a single minded, one track degenerate for ever thinking so in the first place. Pervert.
Regardless, scripture is a great source for loophole pornography—suggestive literature heavy with similes and symbolism from a time when people were too bashful, prudish or classy to be outright and crass about it. Because, you know, like Sparks sing, «Chicks dig dig D-I-G dig dig metaphors / Use them wisely, use them well / and you'll never know the hell / of loneliness». I'm sure a lot of those guys who penned the Bible got laid. They would've been the rock stars of their day and age.
And why not? As any fan of gospel music can attest to, the raptures of religion and of rumpy-pumpy are closely related. The Bible's Song of Solomon, for instance, is one long, bawdy allegory for wanting to be one with God, trying to convince us faith can feel as good as fucking. Turning this onto its head are singer-songwriters who show us that fucking can feel as meaningful as faith. And what better metaphor than the Holy Ghost, with its tongue and tendency to fill people?
Let the Holy Spirit lick my fins I want to crawl back to the ocean For you Lose my limbs and my lungs My agility of tongue For you
This sultry little couplet is sung by Canadian cabaret mermaid Clara Engel. Imagine if burlesque was still innovative and alive and relevant as an edgy art form, sexual once again and not just kitsch, quaint and cute, this is the type of song you might hear at a show. Far more literate than the old Betty Boop-oop-ee-doo/«teach-me-tiger» schtick, it would actually stir something in you.
Other than the burlesque-esque jazz of the arrangement, the composition hints at Middle Eastern melody and so, by extension, the crazy Judeo-Christian religious frenzy that is, despite everything else about it, actually quite sensual… Hips swaying, bellies dancing, pelvises grinding, slow and determined… Thankfully, the backing band is more focused on sonic texture than on squeezing in as many notes and rhythm changes as possible. It's jazz as played by perverts, which is exactly what that particular genre needs more of, cerebral and stuck in a time warp as it is.
Women routinely go weak at the knees just at the thought of a man who can sing or play the guitar, but it's not often a man is given cause to go weak at the knees upon hearing a female performer. Sure, there are men drooling over hit list divas given music video make-overs, but that's not about the vivifying music, mesmerising charisma or shimmering eloquence as much as the lighting, clothing (or lack thereof) and Photoshop. So it feels good to hear the powerful, confident singing of a succubus challenging and perhaps even scaring you a little bit with the sheer force of her voice and convictions, sensual to the point of obliterating mysticism. Personally, I haven't felt a sensation quite like this since I heard PJ Harvey command me, through the speakers, in no uncertain terms to lick her legs.
And tell me true: Is there any sexier image than that of a woman crawling on her hands and knees through the hot sand towards the beckoning waves and slow ebb of the undulating sea? This woman wants to go back all the way to the birthplace of life for you… to seek out the original life force for you… go bathe in the primordial soup with you…
Don't you want to go with?
[«Lick My Fins» is from Engel's 2009 album, Secret Beasts.]
Toilet Guppies is loathe to be the scurrying, little errand boy of record companies and marketing hipsters, but here are some free, legal downloads dropped by some of our favourite artists' record companies to promote hotly anticipated albums:
Both from Smoke Ring for My Halo, out on 8 March. These little tastes, as well as last year's «Square Shells» EP and «In My Time» single, indicate Kurt Vile is going the way of inconsequential Sonic Youth family values indie listening; here's hoping there are moments scratching deeper than the surface (as on all his previous, truly terrific albums). At least these tracks are a little dreamy, reminding us that there is such a thing as summer and that this winter business won't last forever. (While you wait, I strongly suggest you download early radio session versions of two of the tracks slated for release on Smoke Ring for My Halo—«Ghost Town» and personal favourite «Runner ups».
Oh, and don't forget Vile's former band's new digital EP, which comes highly recommended, with the record label already magnanimously distributing two of its tracks, entirely for free:
From S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT, out on 8 February. Pretty song. Akron/Family are a bit hit-or-miss these days, but at least they're a bearable and not least intelligent voice of positivity and innocence, for those days when you need a break from the loathing. And where else are you going to get that?
Don't believe the hype, but enjoy the music. Sweet, free music…
Toilet Guppies isn't rap's biggest fan. But if you need a break from touchy-feely singer/songwriter fare, cathartic rock'n'roll, catatonic ambient, mindfucking electro or spine-warbling noise, here's one of the very few rap rarities in Toilet Guppies' collection—a yet to be released track from 2008 by Red Café. I have no clue who he is, but apparently Diddy a.k.a. P. Diddy a.k.a. Puff Daddy a.k.a. Puff a.k.a. Puffy a.k.a. Sean John a.k.a. Sean Combs makes an appearance (seen below, shocked at the appearance of a one dollar bill among his regular, heavyweight denominations).
I know, I know… but the track is actually good. It's easily the best song about money Toilet Guppies has ever heard, with eminently quotable lines such as «Blocka blocka blocka / Money money money / Any given day I'm pourin' honey on your money and I murder everybody»!
¡España! A land untouched by Toilet Guppies… Most of the people who check out this blog do so from IP-addresses in Indonesia (hello, Indonesia!), so in an attempt to break Spain and the 30 per cent of South America that isn't Brazil (no offense, Indonesia), I have put together a primer of Spanish-language rock'n'roll, as a tribute to all my Spanish friends (all three or four of 'em—and that's counting the Catalans), one Mexican acquaintance, some Peruvian regrets and three Norwegians I know who are trying to learn Spanish.
For a northern European infected with Protestantism, it's immensely beautiful to see how in Spain people know how to enjoy life and the moment they're in. Like when they're indulging in an absolutely delicious cuisine (one of the world's tastiest!) that, once you take a bite, sends a message throughout your entire body that this shit is unhealthy, the mortality it reminds you of making you feel more alive, not like you're merely preserving your body with all these nutritionally correct foodstuffs.
Spain! The land where they still indulge in bloody, brutal animal sacrifice in public. (Still in touch with what it is to be human, warts and all…) Where you can buy witchcraft paraphernalia in run-of-the-mill specialist shops that aren't even considered weird or unusual. (Keeping the mystery alive…) Where the brown eyed girls' voices are as sensually rough and gravelly as the coffee is smooth and rich… Where the sun actually warms!
Even in the bars, they give you napkins made out of paper that doesn't absorb, so that you have to use a ridiculously extravagant amount of them. And due to a complete and systematic lack of bins in these bars, like a naughty child you have to gleefully throw all those discarded tissues right onto the nasty floor, until at the end of the day you're sat in an oversized ashtray and they finally sweep up the rubbish and the ashes and cigarette butts (because no health freaks refuse you to smoke in public in Spain!). Only then will they put all of that trash in a bin liner that, in more practical cultures, it all went straight into in the first place… And let's not forget the siesta—two hours of sleep or fucking in the middle of the work day, which snowballs your schedule to the point where you don't eat dinner until ten at night—again, against the express advice of your physician.
These self-indulgent, non-functionalistic routines, rituals and ways to go about everyday life, some of them bordering on the idiotic, all amount to one defiant rebellion against the grinding boredom, grim inevitabilities and unhappy accidents of human existence. Rationality's got nuthin' on the complexity and immensity of life, to the point where living your life sensibly isn't sensible at all, so you may as well move to Spain and enjoy yerself!
Or, in lieu of that, listen to some great Spanish-language music, from Spain and equally groovy (if not more so) South America—where mothers pushing prams sexually harrass you in the street and little Lolitas on scooters wolf whistle like hardened construction workers as they drive past. Where the girls are fiery and prone to a violence that defies the dull demands and expectations heaped upon their gender.
Naturally, in the long run the Latin passion, heat, possessiveness, faked intimacy and lack of both punctuality and a neat social order will prove grating on a northern European, but let's pretend I'm not Norwegian for now and that the New World of South America is the Promised Land. In such a promised land, I would like the soundtrack to sound something like this:
These dilettante rockers didn't invent or even re-invent the wheel, but they made something that lasts to this day—a mix of fun, sex and anxiety that's unaffected by nostalgia, irony, pretentions of cool, etc. In addition to a couple of deranged Peruvian originals (check out the cojones on track 21! And 22 gives Norwegian black metal a run for its money any day), there's the unexpected rendition of Desmond Dekker's golden ska oldie «Israelites», as well as a whole host of Spanish language covers of British and US American garage rock staples like «Hey Joe», «Gloria», «Pushin' too Hard», «Little Girl», «Take a Heart», «19th Nervous Breakdown», «For Your Love»… There's the ultimate version of «Wild Thing», rather freely translated as «Loco te patina el coco», performed by some joker calling himself Juan El Matemático (who competes with Los Johnny Jets for best artist name on this comp). Bo Diddley's no-nonsense warning «Mama, Keep Your Big Mouth Shut» becomes even less of a compromise as «Hey, monstro».
Incidentally, there's only one group on here from Spain (I think—some of them I don't know where the hell they're from). Others are from Mexico, some Colombia, some Peru, one from Brazil. I suspect Argentina, Chile and/or Uruguay (or was it Paraguay?) may also be represented, but who knows and who cares, it's all in Spanish and it kicks culo. Some of these tracks are so obscure you wouldn't even be able to find them on secondhand vinyl—you're lucky to get them as low bitrate mp3s after thoroughly scouring the Internet for amateurish Third World music obsessives' dodgy uploads, so don't come pissing and moaning just because some of the tracks are as low as 160kbps and full of vinyl crackle and hiss. The wildest music most true to the spirit of rock'n'roll was never about high fidelity, anyway.
So, roqueros y roqueras, bring out the tapas, cocaine and sexism, and rock out to these scuzzy southern sounds of the '60s. ¡Viva España! and all of her former colonies and la revolución! Rock y roll!
A few days ago, Pitchfork reported that Nas is having a public dispute with his record label, after an email from him to Def Jam executives was leaked. Apparently, the rapper is outraged that his second volume of outtakes(!) is not being marketed aggressively enough by Def Jam.
Reading Nas' rant, it's interesting to note that a man who makes his living on words—streams and streams of rhythmically delivered swashbuckling and vaguely expressed hype about how Nas and his homies roll/do/wear/drink/smoke things and perform various activities (without really specifying anything, except perhaps where exaggerated and usually unprovoked threats are concerned)—a man ostensibly so gifted with the gab cannot spell. Yet let's not lower ourselves to petty pedantry. What's far funnier than ignorance of spelling, words and their meanings are the sky high pretensions of a wordsmith who uses so many words to say so little. Idiocy is only funny (rather than just depressing) when the fool thinks him- or herself profound, or otherwise blessed with superiority of historical importance. Thankfully, then, Nas' lack of logic (or just a set of relatively coherent values) gives us some of the most entertaining statements coming out of hip-hop in 2010:
From: Nas To: LA Reid, Steve Bartels, Steve Gawley, Michael Seltzer, Joseph Borrino, Chris Hicks Subject: PUT MY SHIT OUT!
Peace to all,
With all do [sic] respect to you all, Nas is NOBODY's slave. This is not the 1800's, respect me and I will respect you.
I won't even tap dance around in an email, I will get right into it. People connect to the Artist [sic] @ the end of the day, they don't connect with the executives. Honestly, nobody even cares what label puts out a great record, they care about who recorded it. Yet time and time again its [sic] the executives who always stand in the way of a creative artist's dream and aspirations. You don't help draw the truth from my deepest and most inner soul, you don’t even do a great job @ selling it. The #1 problem with DEF JAM is pretty simple and obvious, the executives think they are the stars. You aren't.... not even close. As a matter of fact, you wish you were, but it didn't work out so you took a desk job. To the consumer, I COME FIRST. Stop trying to deprive them! I have a fan base that dies for my music and a RAP label that doesn't understand RAP. Pretty fucked up situation [sic]
This isn’t the 90's though. Beefing with record labels is so 15 years ago. @ this point I just need you all to be very clear where I stand and how I feel about «my label.» I could go on twitter [sic] or hot 97 tomorrow [sic] and get 100,000 protesters @ your building but I choose to walk my own path my own way because since day one I have been my own man. I did business with Tommy Mottola and Donnie Einer, two of the most psycho dudes this business ever created. I worked well with them for one major reason……. [sic] they [sic] believed in me. The [sic] didn't give a fuck about what any radio station or magazine said….those [sic] dudes had me.
Lost Tapes is a movement and a very important set up piece for my career as it stands. I started this over 5 years ago @ Columbia and nobody knew what it was or what it did but the label put it out as an LP and the fans went crazy for it and I single handedly built a new brand of rap albums. It's smart and after 5 years it's still a head [sic] of the game. This feels great and you not feeling what I’m feeling is disturbing. Don't get in the way of my creativity. We are aligned with the stars here, this is a movement. There is a thing called KARMA that comes to haunt you when you tamper with the aligning stars. WE ARE GIVING THE PEOPLE EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT. Stop throwing dog shit on a MAGICAL moment.
You don't get another Nas recording that doesn't count against my deal….PERIOD! Keep your bullshit $200,000.00 fund. Open the REAL budget. This is a New York pioneers ALBUM, there ain't many of us. I am ready to drop in the 4th quarter. You don’t even have shit coming out! Stop being your own worst enemy. Let's get money!
-N.Jones [my italics]
Interesting that a guy whose creative endeavours mainly consist of self-centred bullshitting about bling and sexual and violent bravado, invokes the words «karma» and «soul» (and «truth», as coming from the «innermost» «depths» of this purported spiritual self). One minute he's the tortured artist castrated by the Man, the next he's giving a fat cat money maker's pep talk—as if he can't decide whether he wants to battle the unjust deprivation suffered by his multitudes of fans, all ready to fight for a much larger budget to promote a second volume of outtakes (unless they're already «dying», that is), or whether he simply wants more cash to buy gold chains and some nouveau riche decor worthy of an MTV reality show episode.
Be that as it may, when delusions of grandeur meet the limitations of reality, a Messiah complex is born. But if you want to be Christ, you need to be prepared for the crucifixion. Actually, Nas is loving it, which is why he's inventing this persecution in the first place.
It takes a certain something—or someone—to make you side with a big corporation for once. Unlike Saul Williams, rapper of substance who was given producer Salaam Remi's incredible backing track to Nas' «Made You Look» (and Amy Winehouse's «In My Bed») to say something actually relevant to someone beyond only Nas himself. Whether you agree with Williams' political sentiments or not, at least he's not just gazing into his own diamond encrusted navel.
We can't recall when and where we came across Williams' rare recording, but it was ages ago. «Made You Look (instrumental with guns)» was the B-side to Nas' by now out of print CD single «Made You Look», which, in all fairness, is a monster. Nas may not be the sharpest shiv on the cell block, but the man's got flow and a voice:
We here at Toilet Guppies don't much care for advertising, especially in cases where it pretends to be art, as with «music videos». Yet the new single by Deerhunter is so sublime you should hear it (without actually illegally downloading it), so here's the relatively inoffensive video, for your listening pleasure:
Diplo and Lunice's remix, however, is freely up for grabs. It's a good listen, too.
The song is based on a true story, as told by author Dennis Cooper:
Dima (real name Dimitry Marakov) was born in 1986 in the town of Nalchik, Russia. From a young age, he dreamed of working in the fashion industry as a designer. Lacking the moral or financial support of his parents, he actively sought out contacts within the industry through the internet. At the age of 14, he became acquainted with a successful fashion photographer in St. Petersburg who invited the boy to come live with him and work as his assistant. Dima accepted the offer and moved in with the photographer. According to friends of Dima, he became the older man's lover for approximately the next year. He eventually grew dissatisfied with the lack of benefits he had been promised would result from the arrangement. He left the photographer to become live-in lovers with a wealthy man who provided the financial backing for a conglomerate of pornographic gay websites. It was at this point that Dimitry adopted the stage name Dima and, with the help of false documents that corrected his age to the legal 18, began a successful career modeling naked and starring in hardcore sex videos on the gay websites financed by his lover.
Between the age of 15 and 18, Dima was a highly sought after pornographic model and performer. He saved the money he made from modeling to pay for the tuition at a leading college of fashion that he hoped to attend when he reached 18. At a certain point, Dima began supplementing his income by renting himself out as an escort within his lover's circle of associates and acquaintances. According to friends of Dima, they included several leading figures in the entertainment industry as well as one of the most powerful men in Russia's world of organized crime. Dima began to express concern to his friends that the organized crime figure had become obsessed with him, but he refused to accept their advice to stop seeing the man because of the large amount of money these dates were earning him. Sometime in 2005, Dima abruptly left his lover, gave up his modeling career, cut off all communication with his friends, and moved in with the organized crime figure. The last public Dima sighting was late that year when his friend Ignat Lebedev, who was also working as a male escort at the time, accompanied a client to a private sex club where he claims to have witnessed a very thin and confused looking Dima being forcibly sodomized by a group of perhaps ten to fifteen men. Lebedev claims his client identified one of the men as the organized crime figure and dissuaded him from speaking to Dima for his own protection.
Lebedev claims he described what he'd seen to Dima's former lover and was told Dima had been killed the previous week and that he shouldn't speak of this again. Lebedev reported both incidents to the police, but after interviewing the lover and being told Lebedev had made the story up, they declined to investigate the matter. In 2006, Lebedev persuaded a prominent Russian gay journalist to write an article on Dima's disappearance, but during the course of investigating the story, the writer was abducted by unknown assailants, beaten, and told he would be murdered if he wrote the story. Dima has not been seen or reliably heard from in three years, although in early 2007 another organized crime figure, Evgeny Ershova, who was awaiting trial on an unrelated murder charge, claimed that in late 2005 he witnessed a young male prostitute matching Dima's description be pushed out of a helicopter over a remote forest in the north of Russia. Before Dima's ex-lover died of lung cancer in late 2007, he reportedly confessed to friends that Dima was sold as a sex slave to a man in the Ukraine in late 2005 and had lived until late 2006 when he'd committed suicide.
This is two-year old news, so no news at all, but it's news to Toilet Guppies as we're a bit slow to catch on:
Chic and gorgeous trio of sumptuous, sad and sexy pop music for the baroque and slightly psychedelic adult, the magnificent Blonde Redhead, wrote and recorded the original score to a documentary about enthusiasts of the role-playing game of choice for sensual nerds of distinction, Dungeons & Dragons!
Thankfully, the combination of exquisite music, documentary film and geekshow is only almost too good to be true:
I know this place in Oslo where unashamedly morbid people go; a haven for folks pretentious enough to think—at length—about death. To wit, fucking and birth!
It's a mausoleum, by and for sculptor/painter Emanuel Vigeland, erected pre-emptively as a shrine to his own memory. (Athough it was originally intended as an exhibition space.) An egg-shaped urn containing the artist's ashes is strategically placed over a low door, so that visitors have to bow before the artist upon entering or leaving the always cool premises. The walls and ceiling are the canvas of a painting of countless people all in a heap, fucking, giving birth, being born, dying or already rotting in the middle of the frenzied orgy, beside, behind and on top of you.
The confronting adornments enveloping the visitor makes Vigeland's dark, womblike tomb bear little resemblance to a resting place. They depict neither the intimidating doomsday tableaux nor enticing salvation scenarios evoked by Christians, Vigeland's employers throughout most of his consequently limiting and unsatisfying artesan's career. Perhaps not surprising, then, that after a professional life of decorating churches and illustrating hymns, the artist let loose his almost blasphemously sensual, bohemian-cum-pagan brand of fatalistic mysticism inside his own private space, to which he finally would have to answer to no one. (Unless there is a Jehovah, in which case he might very well find himself fucked, still.) The paintings—or should I say, the one large painting, as all the motifs merge, much like its many pictured orgiasts—conjure hubris and inevitability rather than the Christian stick'n'carrot of hope and damnation: A woman holds her newborn triumphantly up at the sun, oblivious to the carcasses she's stood on to reach up to the sky.
One of the first things people notice upon entering the chamber are the unlikely acoustics, the tiniest, little sound ricocheting madly from wall to wall until the room is filled with a thick, reverberating echo that's almost tactile. In the mausoleum it's as if sound were something you breathe in as much as hear. This is why a strict code of silence, quite literally, is enforced inside, with no talking allowed. This hushed not-quite-silence of impending sound becomes symbolic of the inescapable nothing- or emptiness underlying this and everything; the cosmic static Christians and Muslims want to prolong forever while Hindus and Buddhists want to cut it short, once and for all.
These acoustics have attracted various artists and producers, and after several albums were recorded there the custodians of Vigeland's museum have welcomed and even arranged concerts inside, with an über-intimate capacity limited to about 30 people only. On 14 April, Australian composer Cam Butler and an improvised backing band of three local strangers dubbed «the Shadows Of Love» played the mausoleum (to a ridiculous crowd of nine). For the occasion, Butler (electric guitar, loops) was accompanied by cellist Kjersti Birketvedt, violinist Morten Eike and drummer Gunnar Motland. They had to play ever-so-delicately to avoid upsetting the acoustics and the very room itself, rousing old Vigeland from inside his little egg. Butler's elegant and unassuming compositions, springing from melancholy, but subdued enough to avoid pomposity or sentimentality, came over graceful because of the patience and careful interplay the surroundings demanded of them. The music on Butler's 2008 CD Dark Times (Symphony No. 2), which tends towards the epic, is quite different from what Mr. Butler, Ms. Birketvedt, Mr. Eike and Mr. Motland played in the dark and sexual womb-tomb. Because of the volatile fifth instrument the acoustics amounted to, the drummer only lightly tapped the skins and cymbals with his fingers, never resorting to sticks. (No bombastic battery in the live performance.) And instead of a grandiose chamber orchestra overstating the emotions, the one violin and one cello were enough to provide the melodies, while not being too loud to drown out the subtleties, aural, musical, emotional or otherwise. Vigeland's mausoleum proved the perfect vehicle for Butler's compositions.
All his miniature symphonies that evening hung in the balance between hope and hopelessness, avoiding the falsity of hope and the self-indulgence of despair, allowing you to come to terms with what is instead. A subtle form of transcendence, as if on your deathbed you release your fear and regrets, yet obviously do not harbour any hopes. It's not indifference, but the kind of peace that could be mistaken for it, if not for the calm at its core. It's this calm that Butler and his Shadows Of Love conjured in the centre of that mausoleum, as if juxtaposed with the strife depicted all over the walls by the person supposedly resting in it.
But then, what do I know about dying? Or peace? It's just wishful thinking, which is hope after all—which is bullshit. Still, Cam Butler's music allows you to dream, and that's something. A moment of inspiration and a little existential ambition in all this pointlessness!
If there's one thing worse than nostalgia, it's irony. Yet sometimes there are people—you might know some—who actually manage to combine these two forms of escapism into one exceptionally annoying way of running from reality. They play and listen to retro music that makes them feel warm and safe due to a (mistakenly) perceived innocence of the «good old days», while at the same time guffawing at the naffness of it, lest they be perceived as corny by their peers—the cardinal sin of uptight, hung-up, self-conscious hipster doofi everywhere. (If you're wondering, yes, «doofi» is hereby plural for «doofus».) It's like a bulimic's version of having your cake and eating it too. In this way, they distance themselves from the relentlessly confronting nature of reality, both through lulling themselves into believing in something nice that never was and by not taking anything seriously.
And it's hard to like vintage music (or vintage anything) without being accused of nostalgia—or of taking the piss. Yet all decades and centuries offer at least some music that is still valid. «Trendiness» is just another word for «dated», but sometimes—and despite itself—even something easily dated possesses some kind of timeless quality. Believe it or not, there are songs from past decades that aren't guilty pleasures, nor quaint and cosy mementos for people to run to when they're feeling vulnerable and they need the safe feeling of something familiar.
There are legions of people moaning about the nowadays. You know the ones, prone to «they-don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to» type arguments. With '60s garage rock music, for instance, the subculture is lousy with DJs and compilers who always focus on the most saccharine examples of the era—the bubbly harmonies, the anthemic melodies, the feelgood vibe, the puppet-like shaking of bobs—giving the entire decade a false and pathetically rosy hue, colouring its music output innocent and naïve. The nostalgic person is always a revisionist, and we don't approve of that stuff here on this blog.
No, sir. We like our '60s music alive and kicking, as sweaty and scruffy now as it was back then! We want rude 'tude and rawness with our garage rock! We prefer the stuff that doesn't merely sound cute, 50 years on. We want balls, wet with sweat, and possibly other fluids. We want mean drums, nasty guitars and snarling vocals. And if you love that too, you'll like today's Toilet Guppies comp:
Somewhere on the interweb, there's a mysterious man by the name of Dan who possesses in his garage a collection of old 45s that you simply have to take your hat off to. 1960s amateur rock from North America, Europe, Australia, &c. that probably only a handful of autistic record collectors who were punks in the '80s are already familiar with. Dan rips these neglected little vinyl babies and graciously shares them with '60s rock enthusiasts on his blog, detailing info on each forgotten (and in many cases never known) act.
Quite a few of the 45s have appeared—usually in more doctored, cleaned up form—on various garage compilations: the definitive Nuggets boxes, the overrated Pebbles series, the underrated Garage Beat '66 set, the no-nonsense Back from the Grave volumes, the mind blowingly comprehensive Mindrocker comps, the obscurity-truffling Teenage Shutdown collections… And these are just a few in a confusing and expensive array of multi-volumed series of various artists collections compiling ineptly recorded and incompetently performed inane compositions that, despite and because of it all, blow your mind and kick your arse! Dan also does us the favour of ripping B-sides that in many cases never made it onto the mess of garage compilations for sale out there.
So far, Dan has posted 29 volumes(!) in his ongoing series of rare vinyl rips, each volume containing 28 to 31 tracks. (You do the math.) I recommend you go check them out. By way of introduction, I've compiled some favourites—although I've avoided those songs that are already featured on commercially available digital downloads or CDs (that I know of, at least), such as artist retrospectives or compilations like the ones mentioned above. (The only exception is the inclusion of rip-roarin' «Rich with Nothin'» by the Split Ends, which as far as I know only exists on CD on Trash Box—Wild Psychotic Garage Punk!!!, but in an anti-social vinyl transfer that is so insanely tinny it'll give you instant tinnitus. Dan's rip sounds far punchier.)
Dan's transfers haven't been given the vinyl restoration treatment. These 45s are often scratched and worn, but this excessive surface noise somehow adds to the already poorly engineered, badly played music. This is rock'n'roll, with organic and imperfect textures that the record industry would have you believe is wrong, but which is symbolic of the artists' fun-loving enthusiasm for the energy of music, perfect or no, and which provides them and us with so much unbridled glee. Hi-fi perfectionism is the aural equivalent of anal retentive inhibition, and we can't have that. This scruffy stuff may be a sin against technology and Capitalism, but that only makes it better.
So Toilet Guppies hereby prescribes a submersion of your ears in a sea of warm and fuzzy static. Stomp along to the primitive rhythm, from your heart down to your good foot. Swirl to the distortion! Clap yer hands! Play that air tambourine! This stuff will make you feel alive. Sometimes nasty. In fact, it'll make you feel a little like when your eyes hone in on the holes at the centre of the 45s in the picture above. This is a collection of the best in ultra-rare garage rock—songs so obscure they shouldn't be good! Yet somehow they are… It's a bit of a conundrum how something so mediocre could actually be so great, but it's out of place to overthink these simple songs. Anyway, the tracklist is as follows: (For info on the acts, just follow the links in the artist name to Dan's relevant blog posts.)
1. The Judge 'N Jury: «Roaches» Dan calls this a novelty song, whereas I prefer to view the lyrics' omnipresent cockroaches as a misanthropic, if humorous, metaphor for people. The narrator ends up marrying one, then fathering several. Could it be a snide attack on the bourgeoisie? In any case, even a novelty song is better than the standard boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl, «I want to hold your hand» type lyrics as prevalent in the genre as cockroaches are in this song.
2. The Hysterical Society: «I Know» Move over, rap. A surprising barrage of verbiage in this soulful stomp rocker. I can't catch the words, but they sound cool… Then the drummer loses his cool towards the end and the track erupts!
3. The Pineapple Heard: «Valleri» Normally this would be a tad poppy for my liking. Still, you can't deny that the steady drums, the eminently hummable melody and the dreamy back-up harmonies make the song irrepressibly catchy. And the riff, so cheery and innocent, is delivered nastily enough that it works. If it sounds strangely familiar, the Fall quote/plagiarise this riff on «Barmy», a song off their 1985 masterpiece This Nation's Saving Grace.
4. The Shags: «It Hurts Me Bad» Again, a little soft for me normally, but the laid back cool, the soul syncopation and the hand claps put it over the edge. The Shags were from the US, but this sounds like a perfect slice of freakbeat, more restrained and stiff upper lip'ed than the garage-psych punk fuzz freak-outs of North America.
5. King Bees: «On Your Way Down the Drain» Cow bell and hand claps! Probably the most sensational find in Dan's garage is this song which, unaccountably, isn't one of those household hits everyone knows from the '60s. (But then I suppose it doesn't really fit in on the Forrest Gump soundtrack.) Everything comes together in this forgotten recording by a neglected act: the catchy melody, a driving rhythm, scathing lyrics, snarling attitude and biting delivery… It even sports high production values, with varied instrumentation (a harpsichord sweetening the bitterness in the chorus). It's perfect as is. And a remarkable love song: a vitriolic attack on a lover who hasn't even done anything! Never before has a love song been so hateful:
I don't know, and don't wanna find out 'Bout the money you had I don't know, and don't wanna find out Good friends that went bad But if you keep foolin' around Causin' ev'rybody pain Don't forget to wave to me, darlin' On your way down the drain
And I don't know, and don't care to find out 'Bout all the places you've been I don't know, and don't care to find out All the chances you've had to sin But if you keep foolin' around Talkin' about your losses and gain Don't forget to wave to me, darlin' On your way down the drain
I don't know, and don't wanna find out What a good person you are I don't know, and don't wanna find out How you coulda been a star But if you keep foolin' around Drivin' ev'rybody insane Don't forget to wave to me, darlin' On your way down the drain
I don't know, but if I were to find out That you cheated on me I don't know, but maybe I will find out Then you'll surely see I won't care to know what you feel inside Or what's goin' on in your brain I'll just sit here and wave to you, darlin' On your way down the drain
Wow. Check out the 'tude! What a hilariously unnecessary bitch slap, with a little paranoid flourish there at the end as well… Well, everyone gets on someone else's nerves sometimes, and a song for when that special someone gets on yer tits can be a good thing to have, I suppose…
6. 'Twas Brillig: «This Week's Children» A bona-fide floor stomper to have you dancing like it's 1966, complete with the singer's delicious freak-out towards the end…
7. The Mugwumps: «I Don't Wanna Know» Another mean love song. At least it's honest:
Cry your eyes out over me Don't you see, don't you see All the things they said are true I'll be mean to you
I don't want to know I don't want to know I don't want to know About you
You gave me all the love you had Made me glad, made me glad Go find yourself another boy I'll only make you cry
The singer doesn't say why he doesn't «want to know about» the girl, but the song combines an odd consideration for her future well-being with being brutally unapologetic. All set to a highly danceable tune. Few songwriters write catchy songs delivering unnecessarily cruel rejection anymore. Songwriters these days are too sophisticated (or too dishonest?), I suppose…
8. The Seeds: «Up in Her Room» (radio edit) A song to celebrate uncomplicated pleasure, as if Christianity never happened. Original flower punks the Seeds' until recently available 1966 album, Web of Sound, closes with an ode to a free love sister, a quarter of an hour-long, entitled «Up in Her Room». This is the short and sweet two-minute radio edit, from the flipside of single «Mr. Farmer». I still recommend the epic full length album version, though. Two minutes wouldn't satisfy a sexually generous original punk hippie chick up in her love nest—not by far.
9. 49th Parallel: «Laborer» If not one of those boringly polemic, Socialist punk songs, this is an amusingly caustic look at Capitalism. That you can dance to.
10. Sumpin' Else: «Baby You're Wrong» Another turning-against-one's-love-interest track. One can imagine the singer putting into this song all the things he never dares tell her:
Baby, you tell me that I can't dance (But you're wrong) You say that I move like there's sand in my pants (But you're wrong) 'Cause I can do the Duck and the Temptation walk In fact, I taught you how to do the Dog! (So you're wrong)
Also, note the gloriously fuzzy bass lining the song like a static-electric carpet underneath your feet. This was before the Rolling Stones ushered in the unfortunate rock'n'roll precedence of burying the bass way down in the mix. Bill Wyman's doormat ways and subservience to the Glimmer Twins is directly responsible for the tyranny of guitar wankery and cock rock!
11. The Split Ends: «Rich with Nothin'» Like Paul Revere & the Raiders, only nastier! No sweet harmonies here, the band just yelling in the background. Also, whatever happened to rock's signature scream introducing the guitar solos? I know, I know… Feminism and Grunge made the guitar solo politically incorrect. But the least you scuzzy indie rockers can do is wail and howl a little…
12. Terry Knight & the Pack: «Numbers» Another mean'n'nasty riff backed by stomping drums, with acerbic (if slightly nonsensical) lyrics that could've come out of Bob Dylan's mordant mouth in 1966, had he been slightly more coherent:
You've got 13 years of learnin' At the finest schools They gave you 26 teachers and you made them all Look like fools You told 11 good men that you loved them But you know you lied 'Cause all you ever do is Lay around your house and cry
13. The Todds: «I Want Her Back» The singer, drummer and guitarist—even the organ player—are all competing here. Even the lyricist and the guy who wrote the melody must have been competing with each other on this one! The result is rocking. (Creative tension, people!) And I suspect the pogo was invented whilst trying to dance in time to the drummer and organ player on this frantic number.
14. The Bougalieu: «Let's Do Wrong» «The way you look at me / A man can plainly see / Your eyes are full of lies»! There's that bitterness and disdain again—something civilised and healthy individuals aren't supposed to feel, but which they're allowed in songs such as this, so liberating. Also, the title alone is worth the price of admission. The guitar player sounds delightfully impatient, and the avant garde break sounds like US Maple, thirty years earlier. And surely this singer must be one of the coolest human beings to ever have walked this mucky space rock? He sounds like the kind of guy who could wear sunglasses after dark and get away with it.
15. Don & Jerry w/the Fugitives: «In the Cover of Night» «All the things I need / Are waiting, yes indeed / In the cover of night»!
17. Boo Boo & Bunky: «This Old Town» «Boo Boo & Bunky»?! Kudos for the name alone. But the song is actually good. Driving, pounding, stomping drums, simple and primal and made for the dance floor.
18. The Belfast Gipsies: «Gloria's Dream» Scruffy Murphy rock here, no doubt trying to cash in on Them's monster ode to teenage lust, «Gloria». The party the singer's on about is one party I'd love to attend…
19. The Teddy Boys: «Where Have All the Good Times Gone» An American cover of the Kinks' original, this performance is indicative of the difference between the more pastoral and restrained British mod/freakbeat scene and its sexier, more unhinged cousin across the pond. This rendition wins, hands down.
20. The Hardtimes: «Fortune Teller» The Rolling Stones did a decent version of this funny, little ditty, lyrics like a joke, complete with set-up and punchline. But this version is just as good, if not better. Uncomplicated rock'n'roll run-through.
21. Vinnie Basile: «Girl» Stupid lyrics, inept musicianship, just what the doctor ordered. Proof that obvious rhymes, out-of-tune strumming and hack drumming can create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
22. The Sting-Rays Of Newburgh: «Fool» Nasty riff, psychedelic organ, echoing harmonies… Can't you just hear the black/strobe lights and the swirling oil projections on the wall? Another party, part debauchery, part existentialism, that I'd love to attend, most psychedelically.
23. The Bluebeards: «Come on-a My House» The Bluebeards are pushing it, kitsch-wise, with the oriental flavourings in the melody and percussion, but the way they emphasise «candy» when they harmonise, «Come on-a my house, my house / I'm gonna give you caaandy» sounds gleefully wrong and creepy. Wonder if one of these guys is a Catholic priest now?
25. The Wolf Men: «Watusi Beat» Sounds like they stole the 13th Floor Elevators' «You're Gonna Miss Me», but with a scuzzy sounding guitar solo like that, who cares?
26. The Troyes: «Rainbow Chaser» «One day you'll wake and realize / That the love that's in her eyes / Was only a disguise…» Banal lyrics made to sound profound; hypnotic vocal melody, groovy rhythm, great garage-psych. Yeh!
27. The Evil: «Whatcha Gonna Do about It?» One of those staple garage covers. With the way they drawl, ever-so-suggestively, «whatcha gonna doooh about it?», my money's on the Evil's version…
28. The Myddle Class: «Don't Let Me Sleep too Long» Pure ecstasy and affirmation of life. We can all sleep when we're dead, so don't let me sleep too long. Dance, Daddy!
29. Corporate Image: «Not Fade Away» The Rolling Stones' rendition seems to be considered the definitive version of «Not Fade Away», but this relentlessly urgent, driving stomper by the Corporate Image (what a great moniker!) pisses all over it:
How could the Corporate Image's version have ended up such an obscure recording?! Another of Dan's remarkable finds.
For much more of the same, go check out Dan's curation of rock heritage and socio-cultural history over at his virtual garage. Also, Garage Dan has a band, Dan Frank & the True Believers. I don't know whether Dan is the Dan who's the eponymous man in the band, but there you go.
THIS BLOG IS DEFUNCT. Absolutely all uploads have been summarily deleted by MediaFire. Re-ups may be done on request, but no promises. For music of similar kinds as championed by Toilet Guppies, we endorse Bathwater Radiowaves.
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