Warm Slime

It starts with a few bird chirps, in a serene, deserted haven of nature, no doubt. Within seconds, however, a massive onslaught of toxic sludge pours down from above and covers everything. You're carried away, with no way to swim to the surface, not a second to breathe.

No, I'm not talking about the Louisiana coastline after a BP fuck-up (those would've been turtles getting sludged, anyway). I'm talking Warm Slime, the 11th full-length from San Francisco garage lords Thee Oh Sees. And, to be even more precise, I'm talking about the album's eponymous opening track, a thirteen-minute freak-out in which guitars flare and burn like lobs of grease on a red-hot skillet, devilish yelps sizzle in their thick, reverbed juices, and the drums and bass keep their relentless pace while everything around them explodes and rekindles a hundred times over. A song like that, my friend, will leave you feeling like you've just been moshing in an overheated broom closet.

But then it just goes on. Because that's what Thee Oh Sees do: they release album after album, song after song, of filthy, toxic, insanely brilliant (or brilliantly insane) garage-rock; they never stop, and why should they? They have energy that's too twisted and raw to turn to formula, and they play music that sounds ageless anyway, as primitive as evil itself. Listen to "Everything Went Black," martial and demented. Hear the terrifying whoop that launches "Casuistic Tackle"'s implacable cavalcade. Do you really believe these people can be stopped? I didn't think so.

These people, or this man, since Thee Oh Sees, to this day, revolves around John Dwyer. John Dwyer, whose face looks kind of like a forlorn bull-dog's, and whose weird square-dancing kicks onstage tell you that this man will be doing what he's doing until the drugs leave his body cold. Few other garage bands today play their music with as much intensity, psychotic dedication, and steadfast madness as Thee Oh Sees. And for that, they're precious — much, much more precious than the thick, black slime that's been wreaking havoc on the Gulf of Mexico the past few weeks.

Thee Oh Sees, Warm Slime (In the Red, 2010) (Purchase - definitely worth it)

Thee Oh Sees Myspace

FC

Daydream - But Make Sure It's Good Stuff

Let's start with a guilty confession: I rarely take the time to check out opening bands that I don't know prior to a show. Worse, I often plan on getting there late so I don't have to sit through an overlong, boring act, buying three pints in the process. It's because of this kind of douchebag mentality that I barely caught the last song in Cale Parks' opening set for Passion Pit in Northampton, MA (way back when), which I regret to this day. Luckily, I wasn't THAT late gettng to Deerhunter's Parisian show last month. Thus I became acquainted with Bachelorette.

What a lame, lame name, I thought to myself as I bought my first pint of the evening, reading it off a piece of paper loosely taped to a dirty wall. Still, because the room was somewhat empty, I made my way towards the front of the stage. Two laptops, two mics, a guitar, a trumpet and keyboards, if I remember correctly, were already set up. Soon, Bachelorette took the stage. Fittingly (har har) she was alone up there.

And very quickly, tears came to my eyes. "I repent!" is what I wanted to yell. Thank you, Lord of Good Music, for having proved me wrong once again. Because yes, Bachelorette's show was fucking beautiful, for lack of a better word. Playing off clean, sampled guitar loops and drum patterns, patiently adding elements to her songs so that they bloomed into full, familiar-yet-intriguing universes, Bachelorette's main advantage was her voice: versatile, it alternated between soft and vibrant, and instantly evoked a long history of equally dazzling singer-songwriters, while still remaining pretty unique. When she sampled that voice of hers into soaring harmonies, as she did on several songs, I wished I had a big bouquet of roses to throw onstage.

On My Electric Family, her latest album, Bachelorette — who, by the way, is named Annabel Alpers, and comes from New-Zealand — builds a delicate psychedelic nest for her voice to populate with crystalline, instantly memorable melodies. Although Alpers works with machines a lot, she's closer to sixties folk legends like Vashti Bunyan or blissed-out la-la bands like The Mamas and the Papas than to eighties, Kate Bush-y divas. From gorgeous opening track "Instructions for Insomniacs" to the delightful closure of "Little Bird Tells Lies," each of Alpers' songs feels like a friend, a warm pillow, a hot cup of black tea on a freezing winter evening, a cool reflection in a raindrop… Seemingly mundane things that, when you stop to think about them, reveal themselves to be the backbone of your everyday happiness.

Bottom line is, My Electric Family doesn't invent or even reinvent anything. But as a humble pack of absolute gems, it's a record that could — and should — be loved by everyone. Especially YOU.

My Electric Family (Drag City, 2009)

Bachelorette Myspace

FC

Majorie? & t.E.S.S.I.M.: t.B.U.Ed.

Indie (often mentioned with its evil sidekick, Pop). Some people hate it, some love it, some just don't care ("if it sounds good, I'll get it"). Basically what pitchfork built its fame on, it seems to be an extremely vivid and rapidly evolving microcosm of the music industry, with its unknown heroes, pioneers, over-anticipated releases, add infinitum ...

If I were to attempt a semi-intelligent remark, I'd say that it also has a vast potential market, because one thing fans seem to have in common is the willingness to spend a ridiculous amount of money on it, even if they'll illegally download enough to fill their hard drive, their mother's hard drive, and their mother's uncle's college roomate's grandson's best friend's hard drive at the same time.

Notice also that indie doesn't mean anything: "indie" comes on major labels, and not all independent labels release "indie". That being said, I'll be the first to argue that most genre names (if not completely senseless) are, by the time they become accepted, somewhere between inappropriate and incorrect.

But to be honest, it's hard to escape whatever we ended up conveniently calling indie. And why would you? If you look hard enough anywhere, you're bound to find something good (at least in music, indie is no exception). If most thing labeled indie have in common, it's to have catchy melodies. And if you go with that criteria, you'll find some catchy shit indeed.
 
Moving on.

This mix was quickly thrown together in a time of packing and leaving beautiful places/people for this godforsaken overheated summer. It is a random combination of things I've mostly found in the past year. Probably haven't digested all of it, but you tell me what you think.

The Elephant Space Snowstorm Catchy Indie Pop Mix (The Barely Underground  Edition)

1. Wake Up - Arcade Fire
2. Psychic City - YACHT
3. Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa - Vampire Weekend 
4. Ring Ring - Sleigh Bells
5. For Reverend Green - Animal Collective
6. Red Sock Pugie - Foals
7. Postcards From Italy - Beirut
8. Lit Up - The National 
9. While We Go Dancing - White Rabbits
10. Jumping Jack - tUnE-yArDs
11. Jodi - The Dodos
12. Zebra - Beach House
13. Beach Comber - Real Estate
14. Borderline - The Flaming Lips With Stardeath & White Dwarfs
15. All My Friends - LCD Soundsystem

 "I'm outta here"

And I'll do another album review very soon. Not that I think any of our 3 readers (that's you! thanks for reading! please comment!) misses them, but probably because you're annoyed by Flavio and myself mostly using this blog as an opportunity to throw mixes at each other over the internets.

Hope the summer's going well for you all,

JNCT

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Surprise, it's an album review! not expecting that, were you? From the murks of the Bucolic Tundra...

Well, making compilations sure is fun. You do it for other people, you do it for yourself, it's all great.
And this stays true to the original goal of this website: make people who care maybe discover music that they'll like as much I did. 
However, thinking about this like I do about many other futile things (i.e. way to much) as I was writing this made me think of two inherent flaws to mixes: first of all, they take the song completely out of its context (an album), and second (possibly a consequence of the first), they induce a sort of musical A.D.D. that can be fun but maybe ends up being exhausting and not always very satisfying (I've always found it worth it to get an entire album rather than download "that one track you like on the radio" off the internet). 
Of course, my other option, album reviews, have their own flaws, but I do enjoy writing them as much as I appreciate reading other people's. Hence, after SEVEN mixes in almost 2 months, here is an album review. Hopefully, we'll be able to better balance the blog in the future. 

And remember to buy the music you like (but only that one).

Tobacco

Maniac Meat

Anticon, 25th May 2010

This stuff blew my mind. What I don't understand is how critics seem to appreciate this album and give it almost good reviews but never really find it that great. Well, whatever.

Lets start with a little story. Tom Fec , also known as (A.K.A A.K.A.) Tobacco, is Black Moth Super Rainbow's (apparently) main evil genius (also from BMSR, check out the Seven Fields Of Aphelion, a synth lady picking the bucolic almost soothing ambient road out of paranoid pop). If you listen to BMSR (and I recommend you do try), you'll recognize him as the  author of the  beautifully creepy trademark vocodized vocals you can hear on number of tracks. The Fec is thought to live somewhere in Pennsylvannia, where he roams the forest of Penn wearing nothing but underwear, pulling a chariot containing his recording studio and a generator, until he finds a suitable spot to enter a hiphop beat trance and compose his music (the last sentense is mildly offensive lie, apologies to the concerned).

Without any more confusing attempts at joking, this album has many particularities that give it personality. First of all, its cover. I'm still not sure if I think it's awesome or it's just ugly (both?), but it sure is strange borderline creepy: hair? chicken? muscles?

Second, titles: Maniac Meat? Constellation Dirtbike Head (track 1)? New Juices From the Hot Tub Freaks (track 10)? Nuclear Waste Aerobics (track 16)? I usually think great names are very good indicator of great music, and Maniac Meat sure does follow that rule.

Because behind all the crazy visuals, the inventive horror of the names and really just Tobacco's pure wackiness, there is an album of varied, percussive, original and more-than-well-thought sonic collages that form the third and most important aspect of Tobacco's work. I'll call Maniac Meat a collage because it builds its songs like... well... a collage.  As represented by the following poorly designed visual: 

The occasional vocodized vocal Tobacco came up with for BMSR's albums. Creepy, evocative, lovable

(in this album, Beck provides weird vocals for a couple of wonderful tracks)

 ---------

 one or more of the following: dreamy/harsh/chopped up synth melodies. Those will melt through your skull right into your brain

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Funky as hell, thick, heavy but sparse yet trance-inducing bass lines

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Gnarly, Fucked Up Awesome Harsh Hip Hop Beat, like if Run DMC's rhythm tracks were made by a zombie Galifianakis purposefully taking the blue acid to have bad trips and taking ecsatsy to fix the problem

detail: -------- means that the element over is added on top of the element under

A thought that came to my mind while listening to this record (over and over again) was that Tobacco might have followed the following method: take a bunch of beats from the 80's, complete with questionable amounts of reverb and an uncomfortable tendency to be used for disco tracks, and make something interesting out of them. I'm quite glad he's found enough to make 16 tracks.

One of the reviews for Tobacco's previous LP, Fucked Up Friends, said that it was the stoner album of the year, except traditional guitars had been replaced by drum machines, loops, synths and effects. This is even more so for Maniac Meat. Psychedelic is one of the first words to come to mind when listening to this album, which makes great use of harsh sounds, heavy driving rhythms, and spaced out vocals/synths. Here is another feat from Tobacco: being able to make a maniac psychedelic record, with an edge about as sharp as Hawkwind's Space Ritual, with which it shares a tendency for bliss through sonic agressivity and being, as uncle Barney says it so well, Awesome.

To me, it's one of the best electronica records in a very long time, up there with Boards of Canada's Campfire Headphase. In fact, one could almost argue that Maniac Meat is Headphase's evil nemesis. Both psychedelic in their own right, Board Of Canada's record is soothing, resting, with a weird sense of calm depth to it, and, as Bibio says, an underlying mystery - like a place in the country (...) with barely any humans but a breathtaking view. Maybe a glacier or two, and definitely no clouds. On the other side, Tobacco went all out with his appreciation of beats and harsh but melodic electronica, taking BMSR's unsettling/uncomfortable pop magic to a new extreme. Like being trapped in the darkest jungle, unable to stop running, barely able to disctinct shadows of creatures making the strangest sound you've heard yet. And I like that.


I hope you do to!

" hmmmm..."

http://www.myspace.com/tobacco

JNCT

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