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

Thee Oh Sees Warm Slime

Conceptually, The Oh Sees are more than the most deserving band to be played while you get ready for a date at a bowling alley.

God, that’s an awful first line. You should be ashamed for reading it. You should whip yourself with a wet noodle more than eighty thousand times if you thought about it in a “positive” way. In fact, we’ll go as far to say that we are so sick of writing about Thee Oh Sees that we’re tired. Not to eager to tell friends and “those inclined” about them much either. They Got Us! They Win! Warm Slime is another hot stinky chapter in the book of “How To Kill Rock and Roll”.

At a glance, Thee Oh Sees have way better album art than most. So good that if you saw any of the artwork out in public you’d look for the nearest garbage can a Muppet could be hiding in. If you accidentally eavesdropped on what someone had playing from inside their house, and what you heard was Thee Oh Sees then you probably wouldn’t be capable to explain to someone, at a later date, why it was, precisely, that you really liked what you heard. If you had heard it and then did try to explain to someone why it was great, you’d be overcome with genuine fear that the person whose time you had wasted would, then, be in their legal rights to knock-your-block-off! What you just read was nonsense. We’re sorry but we sad we were tired. Okay, all of that was just some weird way of saying that in an instant Thee Oh Sees can seem samey, similar and, without a doubt, a band you could hear at any spot in San Francisco. The reality is that you can’t judge a book by how it smells. You can’t buy it because of the sleeve. You’d be shot if you lingered on the first sentence and told your friends you’d read it.

In this case I m recalling a part of The Social Network, where the actor playing Mark Zuckerberg tries with all his feeble skills to look perplexed and happy about saying to another character, “We don’t know what it (the Facebook) is yet.” Warm Slime is NOT facebook. Warm Slime is NOT the Internet. Rest assured though that Warm Slime is still music, but maybe it’s a little more. We don’t really know. The sound of Warm Slime is kind of like the world’s newest way to make a sandwich. All the gristle and electricity it contains is all but mellowed out, or shellacked over with a groovy Rock and Roll mayonnaise. Its sound seems even more balanced even for Thee Oh Sees. Usually when you get a garage band breathing heavily it all becomes either one of three things: muddled; hair raisingly psychotic sounding; or just not enough of something. Warm Slime has found a way to do all of those three things in a such an enjoyable tone that you may be inclined to try a puff of a marijuana cigarette in front of a congressman immediately after finishing “Meat Step Lively”. Whence you take the fatal puff in front of the good congressman, you’ll have done it with the hopes he’ll join the fight to repeal Prop 8.

I apologize for this nonsense. We’ll be back at some point with something intelligent to say. We’ll also make it coherent. Anyhow, we’ll keep on trucking on this decaying tooth of trash.

Warm Slime’s an extraordinarily short album. It’s a one inch punch of psychedelic garage music in a beautiful container. Why make something that short and call it an album? Why are people still making albums at all? We have the iTunes store. You can get on mailing lists that, for a low rate, will get you a whole travelers dictionary of 7-inches bi monthly. Amazon.com has next day shipping, but also it’s own digital library and by the way, digital music files are getting more and more fidelitous by the year (that may not be true). But, the Internet allows people to supply the fans of their art with such immediacy that potentially there could some sort of new artistic dialogue that could emerge, we thinks. Is Warm Slime a step in that direction – who knows? Albums still have there place make no bones about it, but Warm Slime is, instead, maybe the mark of a real, legitimate, artistic band. The album is a lovenly exact piece of candy, it never gives you enough time to get bored, has a very groovy and warm opening track that gets you red hot with “man, bring it!”, and does what Thee Oh Sees do best – never gives you what you had expected, at least not exactly. It’s 2010’s I Just Had A Real Good Conversation album of the year!

The Fresh and Onlys Play It Strange

If being selected as one of the albums to listen to of 2010 were really a contest (which it kind of is) then 1st prize for most uninteresting and God-blowing album art goes to Kanye West (lol). Second prize goes to The Fresh and Onlys Play It Strange. There plain hain’t nothing that is as fun as basketball is about it. Period. Luckily album art having to do with how good something is is not the case. The look of an album has little to do with the merits of how it sounds or what exactly might be going on. Now, this may sound really weird because “of course the album art has to do with it!!!” Most of the time you’d be right. Most anything of consequence should at least be making a joke about the art or about the album, or, for pete’s sake, at least have it relate in some way. *NOTE to bands: if you only think your album art looks cool, maybe you should worry more about the entertainment aspect of your group like the Gorillaz or Wavves or something. (I don’t know, it’s your band)*

Play It Strange is another really nice record for 2010. It’s all about remembering that America is still America and that means America is BIG. It so big it hurt, big. I hear it so big that big wants it’s big back. A lot of music busting the American blogs up with slung shot pebbles instead of bullets are these pastoral groups like The Smoke Fairies or Iron and Wine or some other bearded jerk-off – if a male – or fringe haircutted cunt -obvioulsy female- wearing a pair of cowboy boots talking about what it’s like to love a person while standing on a street corner. My mother has told me that if you don’t have something nice to say then don’t say nothing at all. Well, then, I guess I will just say that there are a lot of people from big cities writing songs about falling in love and pretending to be from a farm. The idea of it is actually a cool one , but apparently no one has gotten the memo that both literal interpretation of either actual country records or literal interpretations of the “mood” of your favorite country places are not 1. exciting 2. sounding pretty cool or 3. the owner of any testicles whatsoever.

Introducing The Fresh and Onlys. The guys that kind of get “it” and get “it” right. What is the “it” am I talking about? Well, “it’s” the not making really boring soundtrack music for an equally bad, yet to be imagined independent film that would end up wasting your time, or not tell you any jokes. The Fresh and Onlys’ Play It Strange is that movie about a surfer kid from Cali who moves to Ohio only to bring his savvy surfer know how to aggressive inline skating. This gets him the girl and pwns the preps. Not to leave Play It Strange at that but this is about it. What it’s really kind of like as well is a show, of which we cannot totally remember, about a kid from Ohio in the 60’s who is forced to move to Califonia, learns how to surf and starts to exhibit super powers – like predicting the weather, and calling upon elements and such. We may be hallucinating here but this surfer-goes-country trope found in The Fresh and Onlys’ Play It Strange is pretty cool. It’s a nice sensibility and much more American Rock than most other bands that try.