Written by Allen Leopard

In complete anticipation for Washed Out’s Amour Fati happening July 12th in the States, I listened to San Franciscan, Blackbird Blackbird’s,  self-released Summer Heart that he digitally let loose back in December.  It’s that slow burn thing that he does so well not unlike other digital/analog peers that have also been laying it down.  In heat, Summer Heart is fitting for when that hot weather has got your clothes damp and taking a cool, midday shower is a really good idea.  I don’t know better, so I am calling BB BB (Blackbird Blackbird), just for genre’s sake, Picnic Softshoe although from here on out for the rest of this I will just lump him in there with that Chillwave thing.

Mikey S is an electronic bedroom artist which means that if you’re seeing BB BB live then forget the beer or wadded up pieces of tissue for earplugs.  He’s going to be gentle and essentially surf the net in front of you while you gradually smoke cigarettes and look like you could be thinking about something really important.  Maybe contemplating if you have to go to the bathroom or if you’re just imagining that tiny pebble sized urge to use the toilet.  BB BB is great and I’d suggest if you’re going to listen to Summer Heart that you should have something related to giving fellatio, receiving fellatio, thinking about how to get fellatio, talking about fellatio, or dropping a tab or two of acid (you drop acid right?).  It’s sexy-time music designed to enhance your life for increments of three to four minutes.  Perfect!

Like most Chillwave stuff will last as long as a pair of jeans from Banana Republic from the waist of history.  You’ll get a few good wears until you put a knee down to tie your shoe and rrrrrrrriiiiiippppppp! there goes the neighborhood.  Should have just bought a two dollar boot cut from Goodwill or something.  Well now instead of wearing the jeans for a special occasion you can wash a car in them.  Maybe mow a lawn.  You can even just cut both legs off in line with the rip and you’ve got a cool new pair of shitty Banana Republic brand shorts.  Make sure you take’em up beyond Bermuda length though.  Only dweebs and posers cover their knees up.

Before I start to get real crazy on you I’ll say that if I were an actual mole man, never, not once been to the surface, and not just a human who acts like a mole man by staying indoors all day writing trash like this for the Internet then I’d assume from listening to BB BB that people aren’t dancing in clubs anymore, at least not a way in which I remember them dancing.  It’s been a minute since I’ve been to a proper club.  I told you I am a mole man wannabe. Leave me the fuck alone.

The last club I went to that wasn’t some Rock venue with a Dj was called Juicy.  It was in Detroit and the doormen in Detroit are big.  Like comic book bank robber big.  I walked up to this guy with a bluetooth headset and said hello.  ”You have your ID?”  I handed him my ID.  Something I like to do when showing people identification is to make the same face I am making in the picture.  Not so much to make it easy on them as much as it becomes a calling card face for future encounters with people that big.  I don’t really ever cause trouble so in the event that something happened, a case of mistaken identity, I could prevent a broken tooth or a stinted nose by making said face.  He looked at it and gave me my bracelet and an even bigger guy behind him says, “Ten bucks.”  YO!  Ten bucks I am thinking.  That’s how much it costs to digitally download Summer Heart from BB BB’s bandcamp page.

“Let me take a look inside to see if the parties jumping,” I say.  Before he can respond the person behind a friend of mine says, “Ten bucks!” he’s looking at his girlfriend I assume, “is there at least a drink ticket with that?”  The less gigantic bouncer shakes his head asking for his girlfriends ID.  At least I’m not the only cheap jerk.  I never dance and only ever go to these things to appease a girl who at the time I was thinking of rendezvousing with.  That was before she threw up on me.

The girl ends up yelling at her cheapskate boyfriend and bigger guy leaves the door resting on my foot.  I take my friends hand and run inside.

What a meat grinder this place was.  I went to Juicy because of expectations leading up to things like this.  Strobes are bouncing off the walls, the bar is a castle wall of people and all I could think about the music was “Three Six Mafia is still doing it, huh?”  BB BB would never stand a chance her.  he be getting DJ’s shot, in the dark.

The song “Hawaii” though seems like a song that DJs could play in a club, but it would have to be a club that was open in the daytime.  At Juicy it’s amazing and fists are always pumping.  Blackbird Blackbird would be able to nestle in between DJ sets no problem, but beyond that it could only work, live, in a beer garden or a boathouse.  Summer Heart is not enough “fuck me” but just enough “wanna come upstairs and hear me play guitar.”  It won’t have you snapping brastraps or biting nipples but it’ll have you thinking about it.  That’s the charm of stuff like this because sex sells, but making someone think about sex gets them to stream it on YouTube or your bandcamp site.

In Juicy I keep moving forward and away from the door hoping that Tiny and Thunder’ll chalk it up to bad luck.  I did have a bracelet.  The girl did not.

In an interview with the blog Night Drive Blackbird Blackbird said something.  It’s the kind of something that makes my jerky skin crawl, but I like BB BB so what he said about his future as an artists is duplicate to what a lof of music persons do these past ten years.

“BB: Musically things started picking up the moment I released my first EP “Happy High” for free on bandcamp. It was a great way to get the music spread to bloggers. When Don’t Die Wondering posted me, soon-after Transparent and Pitchfork got the word about my music. The blogs who supported me constantly are No Modest Bear, The Road Goes Ever On, and Smoke Don’t Smoke. Without these bloggers consistently posting new material, I would have much more trouble reaching larger audiences. “

This is interesting in the way that it perpetuates the idea that music has been completely split from either being art, progressive and academic into it being marketable and just ephemeral where never the twain shall meet.  It’s true, it has.

Apparently BB has said he’s looking to develop a full band, which always ends up being as big a letdown as a band breaking up into solo projects before a reformation i.e. Peaches going from solo to band and Iggy-screen duet, all the way to Radio Head drummer, Phil Selway, from the band to his solo release.  People need to start table-ing these aspirations for acrobatic themed change.  You take someone like Blackbird Blackbird who is looking to make the jump from bedroom recorder to real studio stud, and they want to do exactly the opposite of what their fan base has come to expect.  I can’t tell if there’s a good reason is the important thing.  It’s like some blue suited idiot walked into the middle of a BB BB bedroom session or what they would call in the big time – a ‘sesh’ – he looks directly at our hero and says, “baby, if you ain’t expanding, you’re sunk.”  With all these solo artists it’s like they have something in them that makes them want to branch out and dilute their ideas with equally ephemeral hook makers.  And it never amounts to a hill of beans.  Right now, he’s able to sell his record, of which he has total artistic control, has written all the material, gotten the rights to his remixes and digitally released it himself, and is selling all 18 tracks for ten dollars.  As far as I can tell, if he gets 100 digital downloads, he’s paid for half of his equipment.  Since production costs are nil with the help of a firewire, pre-production is the only chance a guy like BB BB is taking.  If he gets 500 digital downloads you’ve just bought yourself a minivan to haul your guts around town.  So, why expand so soon?  Don’t give me that ‘I’m an artist’ line,  I know I am not making a case for the longevity of musical careers here, but the part of the musical schism that I am talking about with Blackbird Blackbird is the ephemeral one.  It is in Summer Heart‘s very nature to be flavor of the month.  This is not a bad thing.  This type of music just seems to move at the speed of the endless future.

In the middle of of it all, where can we, the audience, expect to know that BB BB isn’t just some knob tweaker getting lucky.  I got into the last club I have been to in a few years.  Why can’t a few well placed blurbs give this guy the push to start a small career.  There aren’t many clues to help me or anyone decide if BB BB is something other than personal nostalgia that tells me that I may just my need to go back to a Digital Underground record.  My generation, the current twenty somethings, has been fooled into thinking that just because you “remember when” that that means music whose mechanism operates on that nostalgia is somehow worth your time.  It’s not.  Quit being the cobra in the basket and bite that flute playing motherfucker in the face!

The business dood in the studio would never say that the kids, they like change, but then again BB BB isn’t burning up whatever is left of the American Music charts.  The best part about the 21st century is that you don’t have to sell platinum anymore.  God, that’s probably great though.  You can be a DIY artist and make a living.  Peaking Lights is a couple that does a similar mixed media digi-music.  The story goes like this — they were somewhere on the West coast, got married and in the midst of showing up on gorillaVSbear and Pitchfork et al, they up’n moved to a place like Wisconsin or Minnesota.  Locations consisting of either cold that freezes the nose off a donkey, where the only way to survive winter is to get pregnant in December, give birth the following September and then eat your baby through till next spring, or Wisconsin, the home of cheese.  Not obvious choices necessarily for technologically inclined musicians.

You know why they moved?  In an interview from 2008 when asked why they moved to this particular house, in this particularly barren – some would say cultureless – location, the guy, the husband goes “…rents real cheap.”  He goes back to tinkering with some broken transistor radio.  You can make money in this day and age by being a blog-popular music duo.  If people aren’t buying the records than they’re at least going to see the show live.  Solo artists can afford big warehouse rooms in the Mission in San Francisco just by touring and doing photo-shoots for page turning DJ zines.

The question you should probably have right now is, what, if anything, does this have to do with Blackbird Blackbird?  Music that can be made in the middle of Wisconsin using some chicken wire and a stylish laptop may not be worth your time.  Blackbird Blackbird only requires a little effort to listen to and because of it you don’t have a reason not to listen to it during sex.

BB BB doesn’t live in Wisconsin.  He doesn’t live in Minnesota either.  I can’t talk bad about Minnesota for it’s home to Anthony Carter and Prince Rogers’ “Minnesota Sound”.  What I do think deserves a broken pool cue in the kiester are people who still want us to wallow in these shallow self deprecating gulags of “lyrics” and “image” and verbalizing about genre rescustating.  Blackbird Blackbird bust right through all that crap despite potentially committing the sin of moving in a direction that I don’t think a lot of these shoegaze guys are ready to: real music.

There are no valuable lyrics on Summer Heart and I love that.  Lyrics are stupid.  Lyrics are ten dollar cover charges into the world of whatever it is you want to think about an artists.  All the points go to Chillwave for things concerning lyrics.  BB B does it best though.  through all the filters and compression lyrics are inaudible and become *GASP* more melody.  If you’re going to layer digital synths and vintage electronic drum sounds like veins in cherry ice cream than the more melody the better.  The Devil with all that lyric mumbo jumbo!

I’ll be honest right now:  I  hain’t got a clue nor do I care who in the green hell is on the American music Charts.  We’re never going to talk about Animal Collective the way we talk about David Bowie or Elton John or Led Zepplin with all their monumentous sales numbers and, you know, their time at the top.  I know you know that those days are over.  I know that those days are over.  no amount of Lollapalooza, Bonaroo, Psych Fest, Coachella, or U2 are bringing those days back.  That’s why there’s VH1 and YouTube.  These days the only thing you can talk about at cons like SXSW is who grabbed the top spot on iTunes singles list, away from Kanye or GaGa.  The spot that that big mug from Juicy’s hand landed on my throat is all that music can do these days to be impressive.

So BB BB, why the urge to reshape?  Why the band?  Just push this one guy pony in a certain commercial direction.  Make your money and threaten Washed Out’s market market share.  Up the tempo, ice out the lulls and make horribly complicated hooks that peak interest immediately but return to form.  Push those slick mellow bastards.  They’ll either give up or make some unforgettable music.  In the event that they give up they’ll be leaving you to deal with…NO ONE (other than Toro Y Moi or Small Black (pushovers)).  Tobacco don’t want the spotlight.  Plus, and I mean this with the absolute respect, Tobacco are making real music.  The music they’re creating is something akin to metalworking.  The bad news is is that literally everyone can be Girl Talk – the ephemeral stuff.  No doubt He’ll probably start a band at some point too because playing with other people who aren’t macbook pros is cool, but you know and I both know that any monkey can do that kind of thing, for a buck.

Where are the David Yows of chillwave?  I’ve talked about Neon Indian and I think that when it comes to the Washed Out, Small Black, Toro Y Moi trope of gettin’ bizzy music, Neon Indian and  Com Truise are on the other side of that music schism.  They feels genuine.  It’s building up from somewhere else.  It’s not just a lucky break.  Ghost Hustler made me sweat electronic music again.  By that time in 2007 I was just listening to YMO’s After Sevice, calling it a day.  Com Truise is so confident that he just gives his music away (Thumbs WAY UP).  The husband in Tobacco is a part of so many other bands and slightly fractal groups that it’s obvious he wants the Phil Specter chair.  They’re still aren’t any David Yows but I’ll use him to illustrate the point that there is nothing on any side of Chillwave that brings it like a man shoving a microphone down his throat, shirtless and gyrating against the ghost of a prostitute, whose the mistress of a man who’s cray-cray too, and there should be.  We need more things like that!

For now I will keep waiting.  I need mystery.  Even something as positively utilitarian as live performance David Yow, there is mystery.  What could possess someone to yell and spit and act lobotomized like that?  Same with Iggy.  Same with Bowie.  Same with Jimi.

What the lug said when he got me I am too much a of a gentlemen to repeat.  he basically said time to go and I’ll be damned if he didn’t really know me by referencing a mole like rodent.  I hid my ID for as long as I could while I claimed I didn’t know what he was on about.  It was late anyway and I didn’t really care to stay there.  I waited for my friend to come out.  She: wasted.  I: drove.  She threw up in the car and on me.  I don’t like clubs.

I just hate answers is all.  They’re cheap.  They’re easy if your smart enough.  I mostly don’t like them because they end things.  Maybe the reason I keep going back to artists like Son House or Harry Hosono or The Whacks instead of spending more than 30 minutes on Blackbird Blackbird is because I don’t know a thing about what the world was like for those older guys or what their aspirations simply could have been.  The biographies and stories are all there like some accountants ledger, but deciding between what is fact or what is fiction is the exciting part though.  In my head the tradition leading up to Hip Hop through Rock and Roll via Jazz, inspired from having the Blues which was stolen out from the cotton fields were these simple Gods manipulating history around themselves.  They filled it all out.  They were building something apriori  and I don’t want ephemeral music’s seagull droppings all over my sacred temple of rock and roll.  People have worked too hard for everyone, artist included, to become indifferent.

Blackbird Blackbird is not easy music.  It’s not cheap, but it’s not risking anything so it’ll always win.  It’s the high school Jock of the dance.  In modern terms it’s the unique metrosexual philosophy student in college.

I can guess about  the mysteries of old music’s aspirations though.  Especially in The Whacks case.  First and foremost it was the aspiration to get young, nubile females all over you and eventually having your pick of which one to inseminate i.e. the real rock ethos, but what about other keyboardists like Gould, Ashkenazy, Mozart – Bach for crying out loud?  These were men with 19th century machines, true analog, programing music in the cpu of their minds and making magic, commercially successful and pushing the boundaries of musical form and theory.  At least they were also doing something before they got laid.  That wasn’t so much the reason they started playing music as it was just a byproduct of it.

So no.  Getting laid isn’t the only reason.  At least not all the time.  I have a hard time listening to Blackbird Blackbird’s hollow yet gorgeously lazy music and think that this guy isn’t doing anything but trying to get laid.  Can’t blame him.  Just listen.

RATING: 3

Written by Hope Dourich

Geneva Jacuzzi has released an album thing called Kooze Control and unless you’re up on your British English you may be confused.  You may be thinking that that is an uninteresting and strange way to talk about adeptly handling those foam beer gloves a can or bottle can slide into.  Those are “cozies” or beer “koozie”, not be mistaken as a kooze.  A “kooze” is similar in nature but unless you’re one to troll the Internet for disgusting videos of ladies stuffing beer cans, doughnut holes or bowling pins up into themselves, a Kooze is a derogatory term for a “loose, provocative woman”.  Prince wrote a song about this concept with nearly the same title called “Pussy Control” and let me tell you, that is a helluva song.  And that lend itself to being understood easier a little effortlessly.  Ok, we can’t all be Prince and literally no one else can make music like him so, let’s move on.

It would be no stretch of the imagination that when it comes down to waking up in the morning and finding that you want to listen to Appolonia VI, “Like a Virgin” Madonna, Kraftwerk and maybe even that one song by Glass Candy all at once, that it would be an interesting rest of the day.  Probably not even confusing either.  But if you weren’t some semi popular DJ, being able to mix five different electronic dance artists simultaneously – John Cage style – is a hard thing to do.  Really, after writing that sentence I rummaged through a pile of dirty clothes on my floor and found that breakfast plate I had scrawled in mascara the words “IDEAS” at the top and then “LISTEN TO APPOLONIA VI, KRAFTWERK, MADONNA, AND “ROLLING DOWN THE HILLS” ALL TOGETHER AT ONCE” underneath, right where I left it.  It was just what I had been looking for.

The idea to write something as ridiculous as that came to me after being asked to see Geneva Jacuzzi last weekend at the Brick and Mortar in San Francisco.  If you don’t know, Geneva Jacuzzi is that dame of Echo Park fame, Bubonic Plague, and has released Kooze Control sans Plague.  There’s a baby Casio that follows her around on a leash and when she’s not striking a pose or smoking cigarettes she’ll make something kool with it and then immediately go back to puckering up.  She’s on tour in the States  now and about to head out into Europe bringing with her her Peaches type presence and Vaseline on the lens sexuality.  If you’re looking for a good time, go see Prince when he swings back around.  if you’re looking for another type of cool time listen to half of Kooze Control or until that wine cooler goes warm.

At most Geneva Jacuzzi has a fantastic name, excellent hair, good taste in baggy Jane Fonda workout styled t-shirts and is doing something similar to every one’s favorite glo-fi genius, Ariel Pink.  It’s minimal post-disco music that they just don’t make anymore.  It’s the desperate and twitchy only those unrehearsed live television performances of Blondie or Linda Ronstadt can give you.  Hell, I am not even old enough to remember anything like that concerning music.  Mostly because I wasn’t even alive.  Thank God there’s Youtube!  Now you don’t have to sit in your room, sweating the hours away in front of that screen, reading about how to become a freelance graphic designer.  Jaccuzi makes it to where I can actually go to a room in a building that no one lives in and see it live in all it’s gold dusted, cellophane, Cleopatric glory.

Most of the tracks on Kooze Control really start to bunch all up into each other by the time you get mid record with the po-go-ing synth bullet “Leave Us Alone” and don’t stop becoming less bunched up.  It veers into near Soft Machine, jazzlike electro interludes space and that do not stop-a-coming.  From a lady so dedicated to the party or the performance it seems, it’s a bummer that you wouldn’t be able to play the album from front to back at your friends’ warehouse party.  Which leads me to the question, if you can’t listen to the whole thing at a party, then where can you?  The answer is! the afterparty.  Well, maybe.  By that time you’re either heavy petting someone in a booth at some dive or looking for a cab to drag your loser ass back home to jerk off and fall asleep, so that’s not a bad place to start.

Kid, I wish I could tell you flat out that this was a record you could really enjoy over and over again, but like the latter part of the record says “I Don’t Care”.  You can really tell she doesn’t too.  In a beginning where all of your favorite bygone synthmasters of late 70’s early 80’s pop groups are present and humping, in the end Mrs Jacuzzi just loses all control.  The sassy attitude and snappy non sequiturs like “..mouth erection, it was a mouth erection…” turn into handicapped wails and yawnings as if you’ve been listening to a homeless cat the whole time.

I get the feeling that there are certain people out there who consider themselves women who only really enjoy listening to other women when it comes to music.  Maybe it has something to do with that music being immediately, personally identifiable, albeit lazy.  Some things a woman can talk about and talk about in such a way that only another women could understand.  It’s a girl thing.  Same goes for people who like Motorhead who own a penis.  You want penetrating metal that deals with booze, women and gambling.  I am not saying that women can’t like Motorhead.  I have a few friends that do, but it’s music for guys by guys about the problems of guys.  So is this particular corpse of your favorite VHS film to Internet of analog drudgery aimed at being a ladies only thing?  If it is, than I haven’t been listening to enough Chicks On Speed  or refraining from shaving my legs.  Or, it’s just another way to spend a few minutes in some unnamed hour while I do my laundry.  Either way, Geneva Jacuzzi is out there, in those places, making YouTube music videos and doing it just as well as she intends to.

Rating: 2

In a sentence:  If you didn’t know better you’d swear someone had been stacking your Kraftwerk records on top of each other, in the sun.

Watch Geneva really do her stuff here and pick a date to head out and see her if you’re in the area here

I really wished I had scanned that picture of me when I turned two and got a My Pet Monster as a present.  That was a huge day for delicious here.  If you’re not familiar with the beast then let me tell you it’s a giant U-G-L-A-Y, plush troll creature with orange manacles.  The manacles come on his wrists not because he is so hideous that for the sake of society to move on, wherever it is that he is from, but because he needs to be locked up for he was a menace.  A menace to what and to who is a mystery, but the manacles come chained and bound on him from the get go.  The story about My Pet Monster is that he has been down in the refuse of a cartoon dungeon for so long that his normal, human-like features have been invaded by evil.  The ceturies of living in the shadows has made his nose grow long while the damp of his living crypt has caused warts to grow and his skin to sprout blue fur.  From eating all the bones and viscera of unfortunate Canines his teeth have gone all pointy.  Time has made his blood hatred.  He is too be feared and must never be let out again.  At two years old I became the proud owner of his destiny.  What a young warden!

Before he could be untied from the plastic twist ties of the cardboard paddy wagon that brought him to me I reached out to his gorilla hands and broke the chain of those orange binds in twain – he was free and he was my slave.

getdelicious is nearly one year old soon.  And for this occasion, something great is going to be happening here.  The site’s not a person and I can’t give it a birthday present but I can hope that it’ll maybe do for me what I done did for My Pet Monster.

getdeliciousDOTnet has a problem with Death Grips and we cannot imagine that we are the only people who have it.  The problem does not involve the inability to have the windows completely rolled down while listening to Exmilitary nor is it in line with something that makes someone feel the need to go out immediately and buy a pair of new shoes.  The problem is not solely being able to communicate something about Deathgrips either, but it’s definitely part of the problem.  When, exactly, it is the dilemma starts to unfold itself comes seconds after having been asked to explain who, what, why, or how Deathgrips is.  Describing to other people the particularly destructive combination between Hella-fied drummer, Zach Hill and top-of-the-lungs, MC Ride who make up Hip Hop Van Guard group, Death Grips, you begin to understand something about the nature and failure of using the “right” words.  No matter what you start to say or begin to write about Exmilitary you become oppressively and inadvertently mentally assailed with reining it all in by using the most caveman of phrases, of which end up being to the tune of, “THIS DEATHGRIPS SHIT IS REAL, DUDE!”  What we try to do at getdeliciousDOTnet is we try to actually let you in on something interesting about the music and refrain from using phrases like that, or other sentences that are variations of “this shit is raw, jack!”, or “this shit will fuck you up!”, or “there’s a new sheriff in Tent City!”  It’s not that those things aren’t true.  May a lightning bolt hit us where the good Lord split us be those proclamations not inalienable truths.  It’s not that other descriptions don’t work either – they do.   You’re using the right words about Exmilitary as long as the way you talk about it involves a sentence beginning with “Death Grips” and is followed by variations of “makes you step the fuck back and recognize, G,” then it works.  We want something more.  People deserve it too we think.  That’s the type of thing we like reading on the Internet at least!  So, this problem seems to be involved with not being able to hear and see Death Grips first hand.   In turn there is also a problem when hearing or seeing Death Grips firsthand that warps your agape jaw into utterances feebly clawing at the things in this world that are as rigidly explosive as Exmilitary and that do it proper justice in order to communicate.  The nature and ferocity of this brand spanking new group is one that let’s you know what a David Yow inspired hand axe of a Hip Hop group would have been like.  It creates some sort of idea in the library of your mind that files Deathgrips as some kind of gutsy, austere The Roots doppelgänger entity – and in every sense of the word doppelgänger.

Essentially The Roots are a many membered back-up group for Jimmy Fallon’s late night television broadcast, comes from the city of brotherly love, and have constructed some sort of politically active reputation alongside other NY/East Coast figureheads for Black empowerment and social awareness like John Legend, Alicia Keys, Jill Scott, Common and Talib Kweli.  In relation to Death Grips they are maybe in complete epistemic opposition.  Put simpler, The Roots are the Jesse Jackson to the Huey P. Newton ideas of progression — Deathgrips is the ruthless, representational West Coast gangster, Float Dog to 21st Century’s “Freeganism”.

So far the only members taking responsibility for Death Grips are Zach Hill and MC Ride. This makes them a duo.  We’ll find out in LA on the 11th of June, at a house party, but this also makes it sound like Death Grips is some sort of terrorist act that has been committed on the unsuspecting public of the world.  Man, so cool!!!!  Anyway, this bi-racial duo about addiction, spiritual empowerment, confidence divined from physical action, and territory disputes would not be caught dead giving a good goddamn about the dog and pony show of live performance if it didn’t involve instilling the fear into all members of the audience that after seeing Death Grips either on YouTube or off, that one becomes totally powerless in being able to shut this thing off like they would some sort of channel, or backing out of it like an Internet browser window.  Exmilitary is the music you can’t unhear.  It’s the video you have a hard time forgetting.  It crushes whatever things about Hip Hop you thought could only have come out of the meat grinder of Shoalin, Long Island, NY – Music’s gizzard stones!

This past March Japan’s Boris released their first record in 2011 as a part of a series of three forthcoming releases: New Album, Attention Please, and (a hopeful return to something) Heavy Rocks. The new Heavy Rocks is purple, as opposed to the original which is orange in color! However, that album isn’t going to be released until May 24th, and unlike New Album, it is going to be an international release. New Album’s not purple in color, but that is OK. It still has a nice looking anime mouth having, humanoid lady on the cover. It was a Japan only release and was let loose back in March. New Album’s sound is about as muddy, destructive and all over full of the guts – the guts from Boris that we’re all used to – as it would be if you cleaned your bathroom using a garden hose. We’re just confused that New Album is not like washing a dog using a boat sander or much in the way that we’ve really, spiritually come to expect. New Album is shiny.

Given Boris’ new-er releases like the Heavy Rock Hits volumes or the split with 9dw, it is not in a totally unanticipated move that New Album comes off leaving older fans with misgivings about them, their new musical direction, and the legitimacy concerning things as important as the lunar space landing. More importantly New Album may soon supply a new audience with the same feelings about them but in an opposite, historical order. For example, if you have been listening to Boris since the years they initially yanked the pull string of their deep seated gain adulation to the point now – where the dance floor goes air force – then we suppose that if you started now, listening to New Album – the point of hearing afterburners inside a club – upon climbing your way down into their discography, and uncovering the dino bones of an excellent psychedelic nature, then you’re left like the rest of us: you have a real pickle on your hands when it comes to understanding any aspect of Boris in combination with New Album and not feeling like an idiot for it.

That’s not to say there aren’t other really interesting aspects of the record. There are. Like the ridiculous amount of attention given to (cheap) imminent jabs of soulless music-boxing that reek of Visual Kei the likes of Hideto “hide (ヒデ “hee-dey”)” Matsumoto. It even has euro-dance modulation over top most of its riffs which really bring to mind opening themes of the anime, Death Note or literally any other “edgy” anime you could see on Cartoon Network. Edgy in this case means an anime not about a group or girls in highschool and instead means that at least three of the characters – if not male – are witches or alter-dimensional beings. All that trash aside, Hide was pretty great, as was X Japan, but in the States one may find similarity between those artists and Skid Row or Iron Maiden when encountering the Motely Crue inspired glam riffs of 90’s J-metal. You would not be the first jerk to think that but if you go along with a that brand of cynicism you may want to stop reading now. What is mind numbing and finger blistering about most J-music is its ability to be stimulated by international influences, let’s say glam rock, internalize it’s major traits and then reinterpret those things back out through what, if pressed hard enough, someone Japanese would say was “the Japanese way”. More simply through a Japanese lens. Do not ask us what that is. We are not Japanese. This sort of thing becomes very apparent when listening to J-pop or any Japanese music really. Please do not be confused in thinking that what we are talking about is related solely to musical scales or the blazing truth that the music will be sung in Japanese. That’s a part of it all, however the other decisions you’ll be presented with – beyond the physicality of the music – might just help you triangulate the position of your own cultural identity in the Milky Way and do it with the precision of an archaeologists.

Where the the less edgy, and less Heavy Metal sounding groups of old millennium Japan were Blanky Jet City and Mr. Children, Boris has tossed its glittery scarf into the ring somewhere in between them all. Why? We haven’t a clue. This leaves us with a lot of questions. One of them being if non-japanese or non-anime minded people, or Boris fans in general are even capable of liking something this steeped in J-rock tradition?

We’ll just see, but in the meantime getdelicious is still amusing ourselves with the idea that New Album is either some sort of hatred inspired Rock and Roll billboard addressing the rampant accessibility of music via the internet, or maybe it’s just some sort of hoax. All of that though is superfluous in a way. It’s more probable that this new Boris is just a step in a weird, popular music direction. One that requires some formal definition of what “Otaku” is. Most people are talking about it like that anyway. But for now let’s take the hoax idea away and it needs to be said that when reaching for a chapter in the good book of Boris we’ll be reaching for one without the title New Album, always. At a final look, what we’ve ended up with is a big hole where our large intestines used to be – out of sadness as well as by g-forces.

**

When we remind ourselves of why we like either boris, BORIS, or Boris and when we remind ourselves of liking all of them as much as we do, something always sticks with us. It is something gong basher Astuo of Boris said in describing what happens when the group approaches music… it even sort of sounds like maybe it was also the reason why they approached music in the first place.

First, what’s all kinds of interesting about it is the thought that before anyone had ever wondered what the hell a Boris was, all three members; Wata, Atsuo and Takeshi, lived as human beings. They rode trains while having to stand up. They bought their own instant ramen. I bet they even had to call their phone company if they had a a problem with their Keitai (cell phone) bill. Weird.   Standing in a crowd of apathetic music people and watching those same people, over the cours of sixty minutes, become happily stupefied upon seeing a Boris live show, the thought that these “hikikomori” rock scientists have done anything else outside of music never crosses your mind. Beyond that realizing that you are one of these people that have been rocketed out into “innerspace”, that is also a real precious feeling.  Quickly, “hikikomori” is a phenomenon in Japan that happens when, given the fear or anxiety a J-person feels while living as a Japanese person in a Japanese society, they begin to remain indoors and isolate themselves, interminably.   But Boris — human beings? Big deal!  “They hain’t so tough!” or something. “I can handle that,” is how you may feel. The thought will hit you one day, eventually, that writing out the tomes of How Rock and Roll Loved Me and Left Me was not always the way Takeshi got laid, or how Atsuo stays so thin, nor has every man with a pair of eyes and a penis immediatley been attracted to Wata. Before the cover of Takeshi’s Heavy Rock Hits Vol. I, which is a picture of him in all black, open collared shirt and surrounded by some purplish background, you’d never have known the guy owned a pair of eyeballs as Boris is so mired in guitar-mythos. But these days they look more than human so nothing’s totally surprising anymore. Before the completion of the the last millennium, what is interesting is that all the members of Boris were previously human beings who not only were human but people that had childhoods, worked at jobs and maybe, probably, even went to school. We are sitting here telling you that the three daemons that compose one of the world’s most explosive rock bands who may or may not be responsible for why most things Kraut are really en vogue these days, a band whose fan base is willing to drop around two hundred American dollars on a double vinyl-dvd-artbook release, and who are card carrying psychedelic priests of the highest order, that not at all the points of their existence were they smashing cosmic boulders with Rock and Roll magic. We suppose though that when it comes to most artists as penetrating as Boris that people can grow to feel that way – they’ve only ever been doing music it would seem.  That is not the confounding part of what Atsuo’s statement can be inferred as.  The real question is “What in the green hell were they thinking of approaching before the music?”

What. The. Fuck.

Of all the possible things that could have been buried, aged, and then brought back from the grave the way in which Boris does, why couldn’t they have made a hybrid automobile technology that runs on genetically re-birthed and then immediately incinerated dinosaur — or maybe anti-volcano technology that really just ended up being a way to perforate the earth’s crust with a series of “less serious volcanoes” to be detonated as a means to relieve geological stress.  Who knows?  It’s a fair trade though because now the world has Rainbow and things like the original Heavy Rocks amongst other records of theirs.

Second, what was actually said in regards to Boris’ approach to music is that they start from mistakes – their mistakes.  This is done in order to get an a-musical quality.  A “non-professional quality” or the what we like to call the “mis-set bone of Rock and Roll” approach.   In classical music tradition embracing something like this is humiliating.  Glenn Gould stopped performing live altogether citing the “blood-sport” involved with live performance.   Indulging in something like this is really the Rock and Roll legacy, but for the classically minded it is as embarrassing as walking into a bathroom where upon walking out someone notices that the top three button of your shirt have come undone for “some reason”.   It’s also as simple as despising a mis-struck chord on a piano or audibly passing wind during a performance.   The question is what happens to 1. the player when this happens, 2. the music in which they were playing and 3. how all of that is tied into what the audience is hearing – not hearing, but more importantly if both the audience and performer should A. panic!, B. feel it! or C. project thoughts about it’s implications in terms of it being i. an accident, ii. intentional, or iii. an act of divinity/fate/destiny/human creation/what the fuck ever!.

These Boris dudes are pretty far out (smart) you say?  Yes.   It may be true that maybe they are not just tone-jockies out to blow the ears off your head, albeit that happens too.

The approach to music as heard on New Album is most probably a new approach all together, but maybe not. From the mis-set bone of Rock and Roll perspective maybe Boris views J-rock, Visual Kei, or the like as nostalgic lethargy and more specifically one gigantic mistake. It has taken them nearly two decades to get to this point it seems, but let’s say that New Album becomes a little more tasteful by this analysis. We’ve established some sort of accessibility to it that goes beyond liking how easy it is to listen to (and forget). Now, Boris, if they still treat their approach as they’ve claimed, and given that that approach can never really totally encapsulate all possible Boris methodologies, the latest release would imply that during demo sessions perhaps all of their gut-punching riffs began to progress towards having a real “musical quality”. By the way if you are looking for riffs that could bite through the fabric of time and space, we’d recommend looking for them somewhere else in the 15+ years Boris has been cranking it out.   The licks and riffs on New Album are not lacking anything really, they just get to an uptempo cruising altitude and then stay there, waiting for something else to pique your interest.   While sweating this album out perhaps their “mistakes” molted. Dinosaurs are hypothesized to have grown feathers and taken to flight so stranger things like a philosophy turning in on itself have happened.   The idea is that the focus towards the a-musical quality gravitated back towards something else.   Previous to this Boris would blow said correct lines off and stick with other parts for that “non-professional quality” they seemed to go for.  The urge to slap Rock around is great and Boris kept grinding on the bastard, remained faithful to the Boris philosophy and then it happened.  The implosion.  The big bust.  The shirt button of their own musical lineage shot off and opened itself up like the rotting carcass of an animal, dead in the woods.   But, they fixed the shirt buttons back up upon stepping out of the bathroom this time.  Bluntly, they deconstruct their own deconstruction and without even intending to.   How fucking chic!   They celebrate despite that old “mistake” that they were starting from being the best decision, musically, that they had ever stumbled upon.   Though things like Heavy Rocks or Akuma No Uta always sounded like the “right thing” to do despite them sounding like a typewriter in a garbage disposal or of the same quality that a cake would be if made by a beaver.  Yet another example of what we’re trying to say is similar to what happened when people were researching a experimental blood pressure medicine to help the human heart.  Instead discovering a medicine with the intended effects of controlling blood pressure, instead it gave patients a raging, possessed boner.  A boner that could help you “dig out”, for lack of a better term, any lady of your having.  Not only did the medicine not do what it was intended but it currently helps people in some sort of cosmetic way by helping them to simply penetrate.   Up until this point Boris was sitting there with a boner that could not fail!

Having an erection this powerful would get tedious after a while.

Over time the Endearing Misery of musical quality emerged to this point as the Splendid Problem.   If you put something off for long enough it tends to leak back into whatever it is that you were trying to keep it from in the first place.  In the film Jurassic Park they simply chalk up our general misunderstanding of genetic, evolutionary holes in the phrase “Life finds a way.”   You could think of this type of thing as something extra. Having a server bring an accidentally free bloomin’onion to your table or like getting a discount at the register where you were willing to pay full price for that pair of pants in the clearance section.  In this case, proper musicality found a way.  What do we mean by “proper musicality”?   Without going into obtuse and idiotic detail “proper musicality” is most definitely not concept albums with tracks lasting 18 minutes where really only a handful of notes are played.   Its a good idea, but music theory it’s not.  Theory stuff tends to really get revved up when you cause horrible problems for the human ear in the form of 12 independent things happening at once, in different scale, and those things being counterpuntal.   Boris has never done that.   They have always been part of music’s “undoing” and the sledgehammer for that kind of intricacy.  Its minimalism in a way and finds itself antithetically inspired to speedy intricacy.  In fact, the whole drone and sludge movement has really taken to task all that musical theory rot and has made the both of them better for it, giving stiff opposition to all the general principles of classical ideas.

This is just a possibility in dissecting what it is New Album is of course.   If this were an action suspense drama it would be the part when the hero goes silent, looks around at the church he is standing in and whispers, “…the accident was never really an accident at all.”   The Boris Philosophy is now to the point where the only way to get that “accident” would be to make the “right” musical choice.   In the realm BORIS, it’s all gone topsy-turvy.  The musical quality has become what Boris is aiming for.

New Album, when placed in a private music collection or the genre section of someones iTunes written in, it will say Visual Kei or Kaiju or Heavy Metal and most definitely not Rock and Roll; that is unless the person is some sort of slob.  But realistically, can an entire genre be considered a “mistake”?  We’re jerks but we’re not assholes.  It’s different strokes for different folks and although New Album is part of a totally un-Boris sounding genre, it certainly doesn’t feel like some sort of mistake.  The only problem: that BORIS sound gets buried underneath all the glamorous thrust of doing something new like J-rock.  Making the mistake of thinking New Album was actually a ナイトメア (Nightmare) or ヂイルーアンーグレイ(Dir En Grey) release isn’t totally accurate.  However immediately hearing Boris! when “Party Boy” comes on isn’t accurate neither.

From an austere production and composition angle New Album is clean, painless, defined, loud, fast and devoid of any real discernible emotions beyond “yeah motherfucker, let’s go!!!”  The album plays out like a cautionary tale saying that if you have this much fun, by track five the E is going to wear off – you’ll get an introspective comedown, but there is good news – you can do something when the E wears off!   “What is it,” you can do when the E wears off, you ask?  Find the dude that has E and take more E.  The rest of New Album is that dude and it’s going to get you flying high again.   Maybe a format like this is some commentary akin to a concept of a monastic platitude. Without giving away any spoilers about which religion or philosophy this appeals to, we think it has to do with desire and what the implications are when you submit to it.   Again for old fans, the pain is immediate and it is confusing.  Instead of staving off these musically correct compositions, it’s time to indulge’in’em.  Have fun or something — (UGH!) life’s too short (PUKE!).

Man, if you have ever really loved anything in your life and it hasn’t loved you back life is mostly too fucking long!  It’s better to have loved than to never have loved at all is what they say.   Let us report now that pain does pass.

All of this is speculation.  It could be junk.  Well, all of this is junk.   No matter how clever all of it is or how fucking idiotic, it is really just one possibility.  A plain indulgent one too.   We’d have to be dangled, naked, from a sewage pipe, surrounded by military guards, in bright light to believe someone would spend this much of their time and money making something like this.  “Telling” us that, “The great Rock and Roll enlightenment is over! We have peace! The soul exists, so your suffering is for good cause!   Now…let’s realize our feelings together…in the club!” seems as cheese filled as pizza roll.  In this case we are siding with reason and the fact that maybe we’re reading into this way too much.

Three Albums in One Year and The Hoax Master General

If you have more than a decade of work under your belt where you steadily make one proper, full length release a year and leave room for touring and intermittent collaborations with other artists, then after two years of making no full length recordings at all is answered by releasing three full length releases the following year, it’s obvious that no one has actually had two years off.  They may have been planning.   They were touring amongst other things.  “They” is Boris and they have been busy, maybe.   Not to scourge this steed any more, but when you have to look for mistakes you must be doing a whole helluva lot correctly – at least most of the time.  Ok, you’d have to at least have very concrete ideas about what is and what isn’t correct.   Without going into the idea of “correct” for whom and why, it entails that Boris consider themselves real artists.  Spending time, spending money, making plans, executing them and finalizing records with more than just a general idea at the ship’s helm.   Kurt Cobain would have you know that a sloppy self image, an “I don’t give a shit, mate” attitude and being generally reclusive will convince most people otherwise.   But in the past two years we’ve seen not only a different looking Boris but a better dressed one too.   The Boris Image has been changing right along with our supposed deconstruction of which was inspired from their original approach, and because of the nature of being on the receiving end of Boris’ music, no matter what the transitions are, as consumer, they become both immediately apparent and not entirely accessible.

The question is, Is New Album real?  Is it sincerely a popcorn tub of music worth eating?  Are these guys seriously expecting anyone to be able to bend their minds around Boris going from ground zero tumble weeds of tone into the diamond hard obfuscation of one encompassing J-rock genre?  Probably not.  But for arguments sake what the hell is going on?  The anticipation for Heavy Rocks and Attention Please is killing us!  Will they be Americanized versions of New Album by exploring Nu-Metal bands via Korn or Limp Bizkit???  God, we hope not.  For now we are very glad for the confusion, however painful it is because let’s face it – there isn’t much in the way of anything else to go head over balls for the like Boris.

We cannot explain the paradoxical nature of both the confusion over this image change and the sincerity of this sound canyon of difference other than with this forthcoming example: the 1969 moon landing.  If you are unaware that there are any questions concerning the validity of the event then the question some people have about the lunar landing is if it was a real or if it had be forged?  Was it on a lunar surface or was it a sound stage in Burbank, CA. that humans were stepping on in ‘69?

The “truth” scenario:
Two men, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, went into space, propelled by a rocket with the intention of landing on the moon where they would then step out onto the surface of the moon. They were to swing golf clubs to demonstrate the properties of gravity when on the moon. They were to ride around in a scientific go-karts because that’s one helluva thing to do while in space – to cruise, dude!   And they were to complete radio and video correspondence with NASA .   Once they finished all of that it was get back in the ship and head home.

The “staged” scenario:
Two astronauts were hired by the US government, or some such faction, to play act a radio transmission between them and Houston that they had landed on the moon while (maybe) two homeless men from the San Fernando Valley were hired to show up to a sound stage, act out the already prepared audio correspondence and film it in order to convince the World that America had been the first country to set foot on the moon. All corresponding experiments and demonstrations dealing with gravity, as well as the materials brought back were just movie magic.

Whoa.

Believers of the staged scenario contend that the shadows between the lunar surface and the astronauts in relation to the sun(?) are all wrong.  The flag appears to be “blowing”.  There isn’t wind in space!   Also, if you take a picture of yourself with the help of a tripod the camera and the tripod should be reflected in the face mask of the astronaut whose picture it is of – which it is not apparently.

The only debate that you could ever have about something like this is between the evidence for the landing being real or that the evidence for the landing is manufactured.  Can’t really talk about anything else, like there being no evidence at all for being on the moon without someone dressed in white handing you a paper cup with pills in it.   When debating about something like the validity of the lunar landing you may feel your hair growing or your forehead getting elongated so be careful.  Don’t think about this too much.

One really important thing though that is related to asking if New Album is real and if the lunar landing actually happened is the questions themselves share a commonality.  What people don’t usually dispute about is the scope the supposed hoax.  Understanding that if America can get to the moon then it’s safe to imply that they could probably lay any country to waste is something similar to what people said about President, Barack Obama’s declaration that Osama Bin Laden had been murdered. He was just doing it to get re-elected. Does Boris want to be perceived as some indestructible mountain of Rock and Roll?  When in God’s name are politicians not trying to get re-elected?  When are musicians not trying to destroy, impress, entice and imperialize your brains.  Boris isn’t a group that “sees what happens” like most art-bands do seem to imply these days.  It’s a mega bogus to think maybe the impetus for forging a moon landing was to impress humans to the point that if America can get to the moon before the rest of the world, that means everyone will believe them to be simply smarter or something.  If there is proof in any of this pudding than this pudding not only looks of shit, but tastes of shit too.

The possibility that the moon landing was a hoax would mean that the fifty year old perception of US held dominance, of which has helped usher us into the world-state we inhabit now means that there is a terrifyingly gigantic number of things riding on, essentially, a joke!   How you manipulate people in the perception of world dominance by going where no man has gone before is understandable to a point, kind of. The scope of it, not so much.   For the sake of this Boris Crisis we are faced with this, we have to eventually make a decision: are Boris just having fun or do the intentions of New Album really lie somewhere between the needs for Boris to imperialize more genres of music and to simply test the boundaries of their own rock-mythos?  If it did turn out that what we thought about New Album is actually true, nothing happens other than us being able to save a few pennies in the future.  If it turns out that the moon is still as clean of footprints as a nun’s sheets than…(shivers)

In the truth scenario, if we are being as objective as possible, what we have is thousands upon thousands of man hours in calculation, preparation, training, manufacturing and contingency forecasting – all paid in full – led up to the implementation of the scientifically goaded exploration of new space.  It ended with the completion of a launch, a lunar contact, a recording, reconnaissance and the return of two men inside a space module.

Both of these stories are completely and literally fantastic!

The length to which this moon-hoax would have to go to cover its ass up has got to almost outdo the very cost of the hush money required where in comparison, to do all the work entailed in pretending to be preparing to land on the moon, you’d be some sort of unfathomable, idiotic psychopath to spend all that money and time on researching, training, planning, wasting peoples fucking time and not do it.  If you’re going to go to those lengths ou may as well land on the Goddamned moon!

The musical supremacy of Boris is imperialistic.   The first spin of New Album makes that imperialism seem like a weak ejaculation with X-ray specs on.  ”That can’t be,” we thought.  Boris though has always been aiming for something terribly interesting with their music. They’ve reinterpreted Rock music forever it seems. Whenever you think of Japan it goes without saying that you’d picture a samurai, or someone in a kimono. Maybe it’s just Mt. Fuji.   It could be a sumo wrestler thousand hand slapping Godzilla.   Whatever it is that you do think of when you eat sushi or meet a friend’s Japanese foreign exchange student, Boris should be the first words off your tongue if the conversation turns to music.  They’re Japanese and they are not.  The imperialism may be simply inspired less by our cockamamy theory and more by just the need to feel like they belong somewhere. Boris are hideously confusing and with New Album have asked you to go buy groceries with monopoly money where you become a legend for succeeding.  The problem is you cannot buy groceries with Monopoly money, not to mention that Boris has never needed to eat in their entire lives so get ready to change your mind and get ready to believe the unbelievable.  New Album has landed.

Man The Hunter “Take My Train”

Sounding like prom music that has been resuscitated up off a gym floor at first crack is probably a real fantastic idea. If this were prom night and we were Man the Hunter’s prom date, then later on that evening, when he tries to slide his hand up our dress, we’d have to take this novel approach (to his music) into consideration when the decision needs to be made whether or not we let him get to third base. In this case third base is if the song “Take My Train” gets listened to this summer or not. A home run is someone actually paying for it after visiting his bandcamp when it’s all over.

The precise gym floor where Man the Hunter put his moves on us is somewhere in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has been doing something officially since 2009 and upon seeing it live last week, maybe the “cool idea” can only really happen in his bedroom. In our heads the tuxedo of what Man The Hunter’s sound fills out is the stuff of hard chin lines, quaffed hair and really really cowboy sized hands, but with smooth, delicate knuckles that’ll feel so good later on – that is if he plays his cards right and makes with Amaretto. Oh God, we thought, please let it be more than just one night only.

So exactly what is “the big idea”? Well, if it was a big idea it’d be the fact that the stuff really does sound like it should be ushering out over a crate paper covered hardwood floor full of post-teens in ‘83 and oozing out through a set of the best JBL speakers school money could rent. The thing is that ‘83 hain’t really the right year for the analogue of it all, and the melodies aren’t exactly older than ‘78. Now what makes this just nifty is that this year sure as hell ain’t 1983 nor is it 1978. It’s 2011 and maybe the question should be, What does prom-genre music really sound like? What does it sound like in 2011? Have there really been that many definitive proms that all it’s music can be threaded out into it’s own genre – and we’re not talking about what movies and TV have given us despite that being the best place to start. What came first, the prom or the David Cassidy? It’s weird. It’s bizarre. It’s attractive. It’s naive. In all honesty though who cares about that. Maybe you got swirlied a lot when you were in high school. Most people who end up “cool” or “successful” from an era like this were busy being mute and deciding whether the dungeon should be dark on level 4b and full of orcs in dungeon 1a. Thinking about prom can be painful, you know. What is really nice about debuting something like prom-genre is that nothing about Man The Hunter evokes pain. A song like “Take MyTrain” uncovers the potential of this “cool” idea. It is an idea that has toned up in the gym over the years, and comes back to the ten-year reunion in a tight black dress like a clarinetist with braces – what a delightful surprise.

At this point before you’re ready to drop your knickers in the backseat it behooves us to remind you that we never said that the idea behind “Take My Train” was big. We said it was cool. We technically said it seemed cool. Having a reason to enjoy something though is worth it’s weight in gold, despite it’s subjectivity.

There could have been Vaseline all over the lens at first blush, but we said ‘yes’ and we were really happy to be going to the dance. In person when Man The Hunter showed up at the door of reality and stepped into The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor what really happened was we got slapped with a $12 dollar door charge, $1 PBR and a pizza faced geek wearing black rimmed glasses with a really great personality. He managed to sneak two of his other friends into the dance too. He just fiddled around with his guitar while he maimed the song we had dreamed about. The toes of why he could have been “on to something” the whole evening were just stepped on, each time a familiar tune was jammed into a fake leather jacket sounding trio. Ah, the pain in our hearts was unbearable and the punch bowl looked like our only friend. Plus, the jerk’s Casio or toy piano or whatever synth it is that he uses to get us all hot with, the guy left it at home. Seemed to never occur to him that those bedroom groans and those quiet, introspective sense of humor having key strokes were capable of making people love him. It’s not his ability to write a song, it’s his lemon squeezing the juice of romance into a familiar motif! His jokes weren’t as funny as we hoped and instead of him forgetting us or him trying to make out under the stage with whatever girl’ll give it up, we totally forgot him and instead left The Blind Pig with a pipebomb shaped drama student from a high school in Brighton, MI.

*You can download a few of his tracks, for free!, at http://manthehunter.bandcamp.com*

M.I.A’s myspace here

You Should Spend: $66.75

*breakdown*-

Cool Death of the Island Raiders LP

Help LP+CD (you’re going to want to listen to it in your car)

The Master Bedroom is Worth Staying a Night In LP

Hounds of Foggy Notion LP/dvd combo

Sucks Blood

*add 13.25 for Coachwhips Hands on Controls*

**prices based on midheaven.com.  Other sources may vary**

one line: “…the band explicitly decides to sound haunted and on the edge of something hundreds of feet deep right behind you.”

To Sound Like Sound Should

Thee Ohsees are a band from San Francisco playing a mix of what has been called Psychedelic Garage Rock and something like acid trip punished neo-folk music.  Neo is a pretty pathetic word here for what it implies but Thee Ohsees sounds like seminal rock and roll found a hyperbolic time chamber to keep the dream alive. They’re pretty damn good at it too.  I am not a doctor and am neither a pharmacist (legally) but I wager that when it comes to the misnomer of Psychedelic Garage Rock, that is an apt description.  However I don’t know what the hell it means.  A friend asked me once what that genre is supposed to sound like and I just so happened to have two perfect answers.  First, I showed them a picture.  In this picture was a box of antiques piled on top of each other in a beaten up, old wooden box.  My friend was further confused when I added that this box of antiques was lying in the middle of the floor of another friend’s barn in Chatanooga, Tennessee.  I probably should have just spun them a few tracks from Help or The Master Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In, just to not leave them in the dark totally about what the hell a psychedelic garage rock band would sound like.  That would have been a little less psychedelic and bit more surgical though.  I have had five major surgeries involving broken bones and hernias.  All of them were hair-whitening. And that’s no fun.  Period.  We likes to have our fun when talking about music. The second answer was- this one stayed inside of my mouth for fear that it was really something to be thought and not just written down to be spoken later- that Thee Ohsees were like a body shop Salvador Dali would conceive of to sell antiques.  Antiques of which he would age with his mind, only.  How in the hell he would do that I don’t know.  How in the hell did he shape is wacky ass mustache like that I have an idea but I’ll never be sure.  Something like that would have to be accomplished by fingertips full of ear wax and a whole lot of insanity.  Anything out of proportion for something like that would throw the whole guy into chaos and abstract trash.  The same goes for Thee Ohsees overall sound-thing-aesthetic they have ripping their music up.

So lo-fi music has been around literally since, I’d have to say 1887 or so.  I mean mechanically reproduced music had been around for some 1000 years by that point but it was all live and technically not recorded in a low fidelity.  I gather even without listening to the first phonograph that it was as lo-fi as things could get save you listened to someone talk to you through a tin can.  So what I am saying is the quality was always on-the-basement-steps level until the 20’s by comparison.  However for the time it would have been cutting edge.  Before that it was the basement floor of lo-fi.  In fact I charge a band to record an album through a tin can just for credits sake.  With all these hippies and audiophiles I am surprised the spirit of competition isn’t more readily available.  If it is then I am out of the loop.  Who cares though.  Music through a tin can would sound something horrendous.  Well given the right circumstance it may not sound that bad.  Ok, that was joke but in all seriousness you have got this lo-fi aesthetic sewn throughout contemporary music these days.  It sounds fucking fantastic too.  It’s also the main medium through which Thee Ohsees stand way the hell out in.  Most recordings with some sonic fuzz, blurring the tones or having clipping volume peaks to it sound great.  It feels like a girl you had a crush on in high school, where she gained fourteen pounds rounding out her figure and you lost weight, tells you at some point during the reunion dinner a secret about her marriage.  Recordings like that give you something precious that you want to hold onto.  You want to hold onto it for the fact that no one you could tell the secret to would care as much as it meant to your ego, and your ego is a precious thing.  Don’t get me wrong, digital music has it’s own qualities I suppose. I am all for digital music.  It sounds alright.  However it’s much more difficult to trust on the merits of a musicians talent with the amount of possible (simple/easily quantifiable)manipulation involved.  Besides it’s obviously also a chance for bums my age to do something innovative and as evocative as recording in analog.  Regardless, digital is missing something but not of it’s own fault.  I am not going to go and try to compare the two types of recordings.  Analog and mono and stereo are old.  Digital, high def resolution and other “superior” technology is new and different.  Plus people have had plenty of time to experiment with tape recordings for a much longer time than digital recording has been with us which makes for gigantic gaps between the technique catalogues of the two (is there even something like a technique catalogue?  If there isn’t physically one, there should be!)  The issue of digital’s infancy worthwhile-ness isn’t really important.  Hell the kid of it is even less important- especially if that kid grows up to become a bona fide asshole- but the point is that people like Steve Albini or Chris Woodhouse, TOS’s main producer guy, use tape and use it with skills the likes of how Orson Wells or David Mamet use cinema.  It’s a sculpture of rusted out persona and a busted through series of timeless ideas and decades of sweat.  It’s an art form almost to the point of it being science.  Maybe.  Well, when an art form becomes dogmatic or atypically mathematic this means we may have reached the point of theory born of hypothesis.  The hypothesis is what the hell sounds the best?  But before we suppose any answers, hold your damn horse because frankly we don’t know how it all ends.  When I mean ‘it’ I mean the universe/us.  We know it will end but how and when is a different story.  I am only in my twenties so for God’s sake, let the end be later than sooner.  I have got a ton of stuff to do.

This is where I am going to give a micro explanation of analogue and the properties of it inside of the creation of music.

If you play guitar and add an analogue filter for the signal to go through from the guitar to the amp, what you will be left hearing is a soft laundry wire sound.  You’ll hear the pitch bend and flutter like a white shirt hung out to dry on a breezy day.  The air of the tone will howl in your ears and breathe like ten wolves crying for help inside a gigantic Tupperware container with the lid shut tight.  It’s designed to add a bit of flex and some bend.  It sounds like adding hot white chocolate to a whirlpool of hot dark chocolate.  It sounds all kinds of delicious and creamy.  Is it superior?  In it’s day it was definitely considered downright an abomination by most and rightly so.  It was a mistake.  Led Zeppelin had recorded Led Zeppelin IV out in East Hampshire with the Rolling Stones mobile studio.  After overdubbing the record they went to get it mastered in LA and low and behold the tape had caused this warble and delay effect that was “unsatisfactory”.  Despite this the album has sold a record 37 million copies.  That’s one hell of a satisfactory amount of records to be sold on an “unsatisfactory” final product.  That said I definitely don’t think that Led Zeppelin were artists in the thinking sense of the word.  They’re a bit as the British might say “in a state” when it came to concept, but hey, I have never sold 37 million copies of one album.  Regardless, if you don’t want it to sound like a pack of wolves is trapped behind blast walls of plastic than yeah, it sounds the pits.  But, in art people do a lot of crzy beautiful crap.  If you want to capture a recording like you’re holding a mic up to the Ghostbuster’s Containment Unit than analogue and lo-fi are things of necessity.

(To beat this dead dog some more, Roger Ebert has been caught up in debate about if videogames can be art and I think it bears association to this idea.  Music is art, thankfully.  There is no debate there.  An art form is some kind of refined idea that should point an appreciator in a certain direction and hold them in a moment amongst other things or something.  What’s important is the part with Ebert and Clive Barker talking about a thing (it’s in the 14th and 15th or so paragraphs) but if you want more background on the issue go here and here.)

Lo-fi and tape do a lot of things for music.  It puts the ghost and scratch into TOS but not much more than it is already there.  That may sound confusing.  If you decide to keep reading I promise it won’t be by the next three paragraphs.  They record this way because project-freak-beast of a frontman, John Dwyer (Hospitals, Pink and Brown, Coachwhips, YIKES!, Zeigenbok Kopf) , says that he feels that TheeOhsees sound more like what recording in tape picks up.  In response to being asked, ‘Why change back from 2-inch tape to smaller tape,’ he responded, ‘live we’re a lot more static-y,’.  Apparently quarter inch tape gives a recording with an edge that sounds like balling up an entire automobile or shredding tin foil using your own teeth.  They record live as well.  If you’re wondering why something like tape, which is inferior for it’s obvious “give”, could attach itself more to the medium of recoding TOS it’s because they usually play through their own mics and in particular their own monitors.  Again if you are confused suck it up.  They have their levels set just right.  What in the hell is just right?  Like mom has tucked you into bed on Christmas just right, or the first time you have intercourse with a female and the whole time your thinking that this strangulated sensation down “there” can’t be right!?  You look down at the other ten year old and tell them that this doesn’t feel like you thought it ought feel and you leave.  The idea is this: imagine a band in a basement with all players there sweating it out and destroying Rock and Roll.  This means that the drums, guitar, bass, keyboards are all what they call “Stage Volume”.  The vocals punching through there own PA into some monitors so they’re at stage volume as well.  It’s live and the levels of each individual are not mixed through one source.  It’s raw and it’s alive and it’s coming to kill you.  Again Thee Ohsees record live.  They record mixed at stage volume.  No time tracks.  No overdubs to strengthen the sound.  It’s a band entirely EQ-ed against itself to be recorded as that.  Whoa.  Before we take a bite of that delicious cake slice of an idea, all this work to record something in what most of the professional music world thinks is inferior, the band explicitly decides to sound haunted and on the edge of something hundreds of feet deep right behind you.  It’s almost paranormal in sound quality if you go ahead and believe in ghosts.  Tape is catching something that the human ear shouldn’t pick up or isn’t able to scientifically comprehend, which is to say it does something maybe digital can’t.

Throughout the history of recording a lot producers and studios started to capture and minimize certain ranges of amplitudes and wavelengths in studio recordings to get a more “appropriate” sound for frequencies the human ear was “capable” of absorbing.  So instead of a boom you get an “articulate real sounding” capture of the thud of a kick drum.  I can understand that to a very sharp and complete point.  If you’re not recording the real articulation of the sound in the human ear it’s of no consequence, forthwith the range to be optimized and made more available to the human ear.  I don’t need to explain that when people use the words warmth or room sound or how the empty or flat something is, people may be directly referencing the idea that in a vacuum certain frequencies are inaudible but not expendable.  Rather it’s a case for certain frequencies to be essential.  In context all those discardable nuances of an analogue recording may be able to take on something tangible and actually audible in a weird sense of the word.  Like something wobbling or slightly breathing.  Feeling that this corner of the room is colder than the rest.  A better example of this is like someone telling you to stand in front of a whole in the center of a six foot thick cement wall.  The hole is the size of a quarter and it is explained to you that there is raging fire on the other side.  If you stand there you will feel the warmth at the “real” and acceptable/capable level because you do realize, of course, that only a set number nerves synapses can fire at a given moment to give you the sensation of being warmed.  This way the warmth that you feel is actually what you know can “truly” be felt.  That is fucking kool-aid man!

I am not bashing science here but the kinds of it found inside of aesthetics is, most of the times, at odds.  The people that say, “Man, digital music is the future,” should probably just eat rat poison.  That’s an analogue way to hurt yourself right there.  They probably wouldn’t do it.

If you have ever watched Ghost Hunters or something of the like only babies and Polaroid film is said to reliably detect apparitions.  You can’t just take your HD handy-cam and film Slimer pop all the caps off your detergent bottles and break your eggs on the kitchen counter.  You need something extrasensory.  You need a medium (literally) to detect eerie energy or see orbs etc.  If you don’t think the ability of other analog capture to an example of the secret lo-fi and other recording methods hold then I cannot help you.  You might not like listening to TOS.  If you’re like me, let’s roll up into this spaced out, time rip music that is Thee Ohsees.

Not all Thee Ohsees’ albums are recorded in the same place or by the same people or in the same medium.  Tape sizes and machines vary.  Isn’t that great?  The possible combinations for what potentially TOS could sound like in a given place is comforting.  It’s seemingly endless in the scope of human experience.  If I weren’t afraid of being poor or looking like a complete psychopath I’d suggest following Thee Ohsees on tour or something. Wait.  Don’t do that.  I am pretty sure if you were to see TOS live for nights in a row your family could sue me for your heart exploding in your chest.  All that variation is really very hopeful for people like myself who want every record a band puts out to be fresh.  It’s created a weird dualism here as well.  Each place that TOS record in or play is somewhat personified more so than with most other bands because Thee Ohsees have distilled what they do in terms of the overall sonicism (really don’t want to type sound again).  Think about it.  If bands were to set everything they did to one mixed level based on the performance, that means the only thing that really happens is volume increase, you’d always be getting the band’s sound, just louder or softer.  What would change from performance to recording to performance?  The sound of the room would then become something which could attach itself to the band.  Whether they intended to extrapolate on the idea of using different spaces and tape mediums as a part of Thee Ohsees we’ll never know.  It’s happened though and I think that’s what’s really important.  Ok, so before anyone yells “What the hell is this!” there are two ways in which you can discuss music.  Performance outside of recording and the assembly of performances inside of recording.  Thee Ohsees supersede the majority of recorded music because they’ve distilled their sound and record performances collectively.  The recording variables can be played with in a very creative way as a result.  Imagine if let’s say Picasso or Monet painted everything just once.  No sketches.  No paintings.  No notes.  No concurrent themes.  Now imagine they used different brushes and different consistencies of paints to capture their ideas on canvas.  It would be a mess and the idea of style for either of these two would be non existent.  Despite this, most music is recorded this way.  Music in most cases conforms to the spaces it is played in.  That isn’t a bad idea, but it’s hardly helpful to define what it is we like about bands that we like.

An experiment you can do at home, given you have some of The Ohsees material, listen to “it’s Nearly Over” from Dog Poison and immediately after that listen to “Maria Stacks” from The Master Bedroom… and the space and medium personification I was talking about will be extremely apparent.  I am going to ruin the experiment.  Now, before “Maria Stacks” finishes how long will it take for you to say to yourself that those two songs are different?  Maybe forever.  Hopefully two seconds.  The best part is that you’ll never even think to ask if it’s the same band or not.  Quite frankly, if you were to line up all 21 of TOS’s albums, eps and lps, you’d get a Baskin Robins 31 flavors of rock music- all of which are set in the key of, “I am going to place something onto my tongue that isn’t exactly legal and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it, Dad!”.  I am going to go ahead, do the same thing and write the rest of this article celebrating! if you know what I mean.

Putting music out with the ferocity that Thee Ohsees have has been looked upon as at least questionable.  If your producing so much, how much of the music is sincere is a question people could find themselves asking.  I mean Mike Tyson fought and KO’d 28 fighters before he turned 20 years old.  If you didn’t know his professional career started at the age of 18 I am going to crunch these numbers real quick.  Numbers crunched! That’s 1.167 repeating people fought and knocked the fuck out every month for two years.  That’s damn impressive for two reasons: 1. I have only knocked out two people in my entire life (one of them was a mistake) and 2. That has to have been exhausting.  The Ohsees have 21 legitimate releases and they have been around for a decade or so.  Point being that that is a lot of releases.  Another thing is that all of the releases are vastly different sounding but still coalesce to a certain identifiably unique sound as in, if you hear an Ohsees song you can know when you’re hearing another Ohsees song within the first minute.  Really, this doesn’t matter because a boxer and a rock band are not the same thing essentially.  What Mike Tyson and TOS share though is simple.  You learn when you practice.  Your punches get faster.  The ability to evade punches ultimately speeds up. You’re constantly working.  Then, after all the work is said an done you try and kill the guy across from you.  The cycle continues and progress will continue to the point of drug abuse or old age.  Now what happens when you fight legitimately, and in TOS’s case, release material legitmately, is you define yourself.  You become more than the collection of your successes.  Mike has defined himself as a tireless madman cast in iron.   Thee Ohsees are the Mike Tyson of psychedelic lo-fi pedantry.  The amount of material is a feet but the quality of their sound is goddamn spooky.  They impress with each offering.  And each release is something different but tangentially similar, getting stronger and meaner and faster.  Eventually Thee Ohsees will rape your free time and the bad news is you will lose when you try and take them to court.

Thee Ohsees are really enjoyable.  They are creative.  You may be able to expect something from them after listening for a while but inevitably what they do will be different.  Lo-fi music is anything but scarce these days.  The sad part is that really a lot of mega fun music to listen to is scarce.  There’s a whole hell of a lot of decent music that will fill an evening or make you ask your friend ‘who is this?’ but really not a lot of memorable and definitive groups in the past decade.  I am only talking about the lo-fi genre and it’s pretty broad so cut a brother some slack.  You’ve got derivative genres and groups.  They’re decent as well.  Everyone is doing something nifty or “earthy” or deceptively non-complex but not any of it has made me stop listening to The Jesus Lizard.  Animal Collective hasn’t forced my hand to click them instead of Yura Yura Teikoku (ゆらゆら　帝国) on my itunes.  My dollar actually paid for Coachwhips and concert tickets instead of a Diplo or High Places CD.  This is all subjective of course but really, given all of the differences of all of our preferences you may be hard pressed to pick ten groups from the past eight years that were more preferable than like Tom Waits or Wu-Tang Clan or even David freakin’ Bowie.  I mean a group with many albums.  Not just one.  OK, also when I say preferable I mean that if you were pitted with a choice between two things like Beach House or Rage Against the Machine (Evil Empire) your choice would be easy.  Then you say, “Well it depends on the situation!  I may want to really hear Beach House or The Knife.”  And you’re right, it does depend on the situation sometimes.  But where in the fuck is the Rage Against the Machine of the last three years?  The last five years?  Who in the hell is going to give me a Thriller album plus a damn fine few years of amazing music? before you cut your nose off?  I am telling you Thee Ohsees are it.  It’s sick how good the band makes music sound.  The way they record is one thing.  The variation from album to album while maintaining this drugged up gauze headed mood throughout is kind of unbelievable.  The amount of bizarrely familiar melody or tripped out early Rock and Roll or even Scottish folk you’ll hear while listening to them is like cutting your hair and doing a really god job at it.  It’ll also give you your nuts or pussy back and make rock and roll fun again without making it a complete fucking joke.  It’s  vulnerable in the early recordings and with the latest Warm Slime it’s criminal with the amount of groovy tunage that’ll make you shake your ass and toss an empty beer bottle at a stop sign.  Man, Thee Ohsees just forced me to write tunage.  What the hell?!?!  That may not be the last time that happens but I am going to keep a leash on it.  I promise.

Before I Go, It’s Cake Time!

Without trying sound like a complete jerkoff, the guitarist for one of the bands I am in has about twenty or so pedals of which he uses to accrue his tone.  Only around two of those pedals are used for manipulation to grab a hold of an alternative texture inside of a particular song.  All the rest are used in attaining the sound he has in his head.  If I had to go through and add up all the minutes spent during one practice with him saying ‘ the tone sounds like cheese’ or ‘what the heck happened man, this amp is just completely blown’ or (my favorite) ‘I need to have just good tone…in order to just, care.’, I would need to say the amount of time out loud and then simultaneously snap a Polaroid of me saying them into a mirror in order for it to seem real.  What the sound is that he is going for I don’t know.  I’ll never know and I don’t have to.  Sometimes the tone is great.  Other times it’s different.  Inside of one practice session he may change amps looking for this sacred and private tone so me coming closer to knowing what kind of sound it is exactly that he is thinking of just gets further and further away.  Plus we don’t always practice in the same studios in Tokyo.  Despite this you’d think that having these mechanical things to increase the regularity of the sound would help with just that- regularity.  Most of the devices are analog.  If you were paying attention to the wobble of lo-fi I was talking about earlier this is your cue to go, “ok”.  Analog makes things a bit irregular.  These pedals- however frustrating- become a band member or an instrument.  They are not mere additives.  It’s not something to be lost to the idea pf peripherals.  They are intricate.  Much in the same is the idea of using tape to record Thee Ohsees.  John Dwyer has extrapolated the idea of effects pedals into two other mediums: amplification/monitor levels and recording.  That’s friggin’ psychedelic right there.  TOS alone have three other magnificent attributes in the shape of Mike Shoun’s drumming, Petey Dammit’s ryhthm, and Brigit Dawsons hydroponic vocal harmonies beside the ingenious way TOS are exhibited.  But what makes them the most important garage band out there as well as a genuine standout is due to their presentation.  No other groups beat it up and roar like Thee Ohsees, be it Ty Segall or The Clap or Sic Alps.  Before you “see the rules of getdeliciousDOTnet” I am not comparing here.  It deceptively seems like I am but rest assured I am not. I am not comparing because all the bands I just mentioned are not a RIYLs but instead they are all of them other important groups inside of this particular genre, as of right now.

One More Thing On Album Art

Who gives a good goddamn about album art!  If you want to really hate on something, the next time your friend asks you what you think about this band being good or how that record sounds just reply with, “Man, the album art for that is sooooooo hott!”  Say that first.  If you say it last I guess that’s ok.  I am done being facetious.  TOS’s album art is some of the most fun out there.  Plus it’s all designed by John Dwyer apparently.

See the video here: Meat Step Lively

Zak McCune currently lives in Tokyo but may move at any given time.  While in Tokyo he plays in Large Prime Numbers.  Friend his band on myspace and watch him play drums on Youtube.