The Ganlgians Monster Head Room
As another band from sunny California, Ganglians are a “Wish You Were Here” picture postcard of secret Rock and Roll whereupon flipping the postcard over you find “right behind you” written on the back. It’s easily identifiable as some sort of garage psychedelia. But Secret Rock and Roll is a much cooler genre misnomer.
You have three types of Rock and Roll (adjusted for inflation and embellishment) and they are these: Rock and Roll that is meant to pick you up; Rock and Roll that pounds you into the earth like a coffin nail; and then the secret kind of Rock and Roll. The first two R&R’s can throw you through a plate glass window or maybe slingshot your brains into the sun, but Ganglians’, Monster Head Room, as was said before is the Secret Rock and Roll. It’s so quiet about it’s thunder. It’s the Rock and Roll that just leaves you the fuck alone and rages at the table across from you. It’s the type of rage though that isn’t the viscous punk throwing over the table. It’s the type of rage a computer feels while reading seventeen Victorian novels at once. While a lot of records do the garage thing with – We are sorry to type this next part – punk adolescence with a virulent urge for the things “really noisy”, our boys Ganglian seem busy taking things easy and hard chilling with it. You have to be careful listening to Monster Head Room while you are lifting things, or not lying down, or if you were required to drive the speed limit. It’s also important to add that it is really something when you can tell a band isn’t trying their damnedest to let you know “WE ARE ROCKING HERE!!!!” Of course We like rocking of that kind too but We also like to be stress free. We recommend listening to Monster Head Room for your relax time in this case.
Monster Head Room is a mark-ed swerve from the Ganglians’ self titled release from simply a lower volume standpoint. This record is quieter, totally contemplative and even manages to take all the heroine passages of the beginnings and turn them into weeded out come-downs. *personal note: We’d refrain from referring to musical phenomenon with drugged out similes and other such nonsense but seriously, how many times can you have lyrics about smoking weed and not just carry that idea in the burlap sack of your mind, so at any time ready to whip out the goods about what these guys really care about* Who says that you can’t rock’n’roll soft but carry a big God damned stick? Why does switched-on have to mean deafening lights and rolling in broken glass? The answer is it doesn’t. Oh how is doesn’t too!? That is exactly what Ganglians have punched into the face of Rock and Roll here.
Talk about a mind bender – when you go from the flippantly, nearly hobo-austere openers of “Something Should Be Said” and “Voodoo” and into the absolutely groovin’ internet praised hit ”Valiant Brave”, it’s less than accurate to say two things; “whoa” and “that’s cool”. At record’s high water mark, “The Void” can start to give you the picture of how badly these hippy pimps have been holding back and why the impressions of Monster Head Room start to muddy even further. The rest of the record plays out as smoothly and surprisingly as the first half without almost any idea that it had happened. When you first started listening to Ganglians you had no idea you’d be stranded here on this desert island they’d created, but by the end of it you decide to stay. The thought then strikes you that maybe you had always been on that musical desert island. How else would explain feeling so comfortable listening to it and with almost no prompting?
From another weird standpoint Monster Head Room is still a bit non-poignant about there being one discernible way to listen to it. Not surprisingly though, it is this that may be the point. This point can be taken as a suggestion really. That’s the excellent news. You are not being fed something solid. You’re being bottled with a perspective, a perspective that you are free to subscribe to or not.
Before we go on any further about what Monster Head Room does and how you could handle its general aesthetic, it is important to note that you, the reader, should be reading this with a healthy, gigantic realization that getdeliciousDOTnet is taking creative/poetic license. As of right now Ganglians are keeping mum about the real intentions of their music. This is also excellent news.
Furthermore, the perpsective is like this:
Instead of touting what you know is the absolute truth – in this case the truth about things cold and chiseled and rock and roll – is that that “fact”, that “truth” it is just ignant! That’s ignant (ignorant and impossible to be sure about)! Being non-poignant can be advantageous if it’s laid out in the approach. We happen to believe that Monster Head Room is tied up with this approach, so instead of sitting down to some roundtable in order to have it out with Rock and Roll they are able to become a really surprisingly secret, Rock and Roll band.
So what is the secret though? Kenny Roger’s talked about knowing when to hold them and also about when to fold them. Maybe having a general idea and “come what may attitude” is really what is important and you’re not really going to know it until that final atom-bomb moment when you totally “get” that you are really never going to know. Before that you can have a good idea. You can have calculated, called, bet on and dealt with all the variables, you can have put most of your “known” ducks in a row, but not until you read “look behind you” on that “Wish you were here!” postcard do you finally get the joke. In the meantime, enjoy it. Feel confident too. There is monster head room for it.
Posted: March 24th, 2011
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Acid Folk Rock,
easy listening garage,
Ganglians,
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zak mccune
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M.I.A. Makes An Album That Has YouTube Video Progress Bars As The Main Theme
/\/\ /\ Y /\’s worth: Pick It Up and Look At It.
Maya (M.I.A.) was very successful at a very successful rate only a few years ago when she came to the mainstream with the hit “Paper Planes”. Before that she was only a sleeper for little bit really while having released a record by the same name as her father, Arular, before releasing the record with the song on it, Kala, rocket-shipping her into everything not the ghettos of Africa or the slums of Sri Lanka. She fit herself into all the cracks in all of our music collections solidifying a place, for the most part, at least in the honorable mention category as some lazy – I am being a tad glib here – positively, unimaginatively charismatic person who makes music. I happened to like it too. In fact I wished more music personalities had this “thing” about them. The unimaginatively charismatic – thing. As someone who has never been able to hear the blown out subwoofer of some red, dilapidated, possibly stolen African brand hatchback rolling down a street Johannesburg doing its damnedest to let everyone else walking down the street “in” on the latest kwaito jams, I think M.I.A. is totally worthwhile. So, years later she has become a mother, actually political in as much as most political polls could ever be, toured with everyone, made offensive Youtube videos as well as inexpensive ones all the while the internet has been beating everyone to the punch – we’re all struggling to hold on. At the same time, swimming through all what the internet is leaving in it’s wake we remain confused but only as much as we let ourselves become too engrossed in what we are doing. It sure ain’t hard to find any and all information you could want to on what kinds of things there are in the world to terrify, enthrall, inspire, shake down, educate, waste or paranoi you. It grows and topples onto you. The information on any given subject starts to form a mountainside with a cannon embedded in it’s slope. It’s a tidal wave rushing at you until it just collapses on you and itself. It spits you out of the other side and whats behind is just the horizon of the rest a calm ocean. There will be another wave but you don’t know when or how big it is going to be or if you’re ready to ride that one any better.
The empty future was able to really ignite punk rock in the seventies. It made the whole world buy houses in the eighties, lied to us when it didn’t end in the nineties and has led us back to just pick up the pieces in the new millennium. I’d say the prospect of the empty future now is what we all needed, something to not give a shit about and to start enjoying ourselves.
Maya has essentially delivered us music that she seems to be partial to and has packaged it in a way that is less about where it is from and more about why American hip-hop was one of the last great things to happen to folk music in the traditional sense of the word while maintaining that it was much less culturally homogeneous to The States and rather culturally significant to the rest of the world.#1 So we all won for a while. Now with /\/\ /\ Y /\ it may be proving to be harder than she thought to push things forward in a discernible, exegetic direction. It’s even more difficult to do it naturally. What’s more is it’s near impossible to make it seem to everyone else that the change is natural. This is where /\/\ /\ Y /\ has corked the ability to allow us to inject enough of our own preferences into her music. It’s the soundtrack to an uninteresting YouTube video about a night in a nightclub. The camera of the album’s composition makes you a little seasick and when the narrator of the events gets on the mic you start watching the video more than listening to the voice. When the internet lays a precious egg on you of a Corgi belly flopping into a lake in slow motion you want to tell your friends. When you are curious while watching “RE: Man Says To Exterminate White People” it stays in the vault of your short term memory awaiting the next dump cycle. /\/\ /\ Y /\ punches but never kicks. It’s also hard to even hum along to. Its odd when people build stories around a certain Beatles song when they drove by themselves for the first time. Or how people think a song is great for purely nostalgic or personal reasons. However people do dance to “their” songs at weddings. That’s not strange. It’s only strange when you don’t like the particular song that is theirs and don’t know why it’s theirs. That sure doesn’t make a song less credible. Or the artist for that matter. In fact a case could be made that that makes for it being more significant, kind of.
One of MIA’s most endearing traits (for people who care about that kind of thing) are all of the bits of old folk/religious melodies (Mary Had a Little Lamb, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, This Land Is Your Land, Row-Row-Row Your Boat, The Saints Go Marching In for peat’s sake!!) and chops them together with amateur glue as some sort of hope and a promise. It sounds like her music is second nature to anyone really. Making music like M.I.A is not easy or all that natural in the digital sense of things. Some people could misconstrue those types of melodies or structured childhood things as a crutch and they’d be happy to say it. It don’t change that fact that most ethnic/folk/kwaito music has been made in a way where the only word I can think to describe it as is Oral Tradition. The cheap Casio keyboard sounding hi-hats or the bizarre undercutting of that plonk! wave file that would usually be accompanied by a “UGH!” or “YEAH!” is something really special with music like M.I.A.’s. You can love something like that for all of its imperfections.
/\/\ /\ Y /\ has none of those things I just mentioned on it. Instead it seems to have all of these song like ideas on it. Some songs talk about, “I just give a damn. I just give a damn, damn, damn,” while others call into question the whole damn anatomy racket or just the “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” song. It is postulated that Google may be involved and accordingly the Government. M.I.A.’s lyrics never were really worthwhile and I am one for the idea that most lyrics are not worthwhile for things other than just letting you know when and where to stop listening to a song. Iggy Pop being the king of lyrical kingshit would not have much to say about the lyrics on /\/\ /\ Y /\. Nothing suffers from it really. However I don’t know when to start listening to the record and when to stop. Things like this are important only if you do music that is not club music so in the case of /\/\ /\ Y /\ nothing is lost. But what is unclear is that maybe it’s not club music, entirely. It sure sounds like the carrying-ons of trance or house which inherently drone on and just grind into the next song but /\/\ /\ Y /\ has like a chorus here and refrains – those are some of the times though. When a track ends you’re surprised because you didn’t know it really hit the jump. Most of the time M.I.A. seems like she has been taking advice from an advisory board that consists of cast members of Jersey Shore and Donald Trump’s unsuccessful YouTube series “Are You Drunk Enough Yet?”. I haven’t perceived this much demographic pressure since watching a YouTube video of a sit-in Montgomery. Pressure is not a bad thing. Sometimes those people who do the pressuring know exactly what they want. When people pressure other people to do something or when someone doing something perceives that someone could potentially be pressuring them, the compulsion to become confused just starts to compound like someone trying to guess their way through the serving size for a stack of pancakes to be eaten by hippopotamus needing to gain weight. A lot of what is on /\/\ /\ Y /\ does not seem confused for someone who realizes that the demographic for their music are club going indie people, with the propensity to be listened to also by the frat, sorority, college group (i.e. other club goers). What is confusing is how trite it all is in the scope of things that M.I.A. has done in the past. It’s not cool to compare records but the real problem is that if this album were a human being it would find itself being listened to only because of the comparison of it with its past incarnation of the same creator.
( I just had to take a break after writing that last sentence because of the velocitude of it’s implications on how I am so depressed with no apparent reason right now.)
It’s all a little too confused but a case where not much emerges from it that you can take home and tell your enemies about. Maybe in the past when listening to Kala or Arular you could never really explain as to why you liked those records so much. It is apparent that in the case of /\/\ /\ Y /\ that M.I.A. may not know either.
1. In the past two decades we’ve seen hip-hop reach it’s gold watch wristed hand across the world blending into any cultural background and becoming something entirely unique at any point. If the changing of the seasons and the pain of love caused people to wrap catgut over fret boards and tell the story of their their lives then these days poverty is a far sweeping enough concept that the whole world could understand at least one aspect of Hip Hop and want to tell their stories in a new, genre specific and stylized way.
M.I.A’s myspace here
You Should Spend: $59.22
*breakdown*
- Settle Down City Special Edition LP
- Old Wounds CD
- Split Series – 4 splits that make a cool skull when put together on a hardwood floor
- White Large Print T-shirt from Shirtkiller.com $10 on sale
- Ticket to a show near you (at least $15)
- Charmer - Breather Resist CD
one line: dying in the middle of a gang bang and you’re not the center of attention
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Young Widows
The band Young Widows are a group of three dudes from Louisville, Kentucky that play minimalist Rock and Roll music emptied out of a burlap sack. They formed as a way to deal with the singer/yeller/screamer of their previous group, Breather Resist, leaving. If you think that judging by the name alone this band is music you wouldn’t show to your mom, you’re already headed in the right direction…unless, that is, your mom is a fan of Gang of Four or Stiff Little Fingers. If your mom is an actual young widow I bet that would be weird too.
I want to first really gigantically clear the air here. It’s quite clouded and smells like a tour van. Anything you will google about Young Widows may inevitably lead you to read one sentence or sentence like thing. If you have read most any interview with or about Young Widows, the beginning of it will probably sound like someone using something older to describe something newer and how “neat” they think that is. If you dogpile search Evan Patterson you will also get some results about his brother. In case you were to find some obscure blog from South America getting at what Young Widows are, it’d share something in common with almost anything else you could read about Young Widows. That is kind of weird if you ask me. The common thread is this: The Young Widows sound like and openly “wear their influences on their sleeve” – The Jesus Lizard. The thing that really sucks about that is now that I have typed that and now that you have read it you will be just encased in this veil of DUH MAN! once you make a real good decision and cop some Young Widows stuff. Please for the sake of your own souI try to not think that this band sounds like something else. Ok, going to put it on the line for the last time here: they do. And alright, everyone sounds similar to something else if you really get bored. Also you won’t be the first one to say that. By default what’s the friggin’ point of saying it then? Just please don’t rub your dick back and forth to that particular RIYL. You’ll go paralyzed. Plus you may just realize that if this happens a lot when you talk about other bands, it “may” turn out that you “may” not like music as much as you “think” you do. So let’s have a bit of fun here and see why Young Widows are deliciously different from most other groups these days.
Heavy music has never been easy to understand. It’s always been disorienting, gutsy, terrifying, edge crushing or soul kidnapping stuff. If it hasn’t felt that way to you than it’s probably not that worthwhile in the first place. However one thing remains true, it’s not easy to understand what the hell is actually going on without seeing it live and hearing if it really is the “if I met God himself, even He would be cut” caliber thing that matters. Tread lightly. There are a ton of red flags out there about heavy music and all of them are pretty deceptive to a point (i.e. the right clothes or big facial hair or by something that could be deemed “tough”). The key thing to remember here is that if you are defining music by the fashion you are definitely not defining it by the music. Simply put real deadly music can deceptively only consist of- on the surface- 1. shoulder displacing volume 2. canyon huge sounding riffs and 3. break your head wide open speed/ murder contemplating emptiness one minute and cannonball exploded beef the next. Believe it or not I have heard and seen mimicry of one or two of those things in some really awful music. Those bands fool a lot of people too. So, they’re doing something right. Most of the time though a band like that (one using trickery, gimmicks – gimmickery) is only capable of one of those things at a time. That’s the great news. I will say it’s incredibly easier to be fooled live than to be fooled on a recording. There are always exceptions to the rule though. Recently I was tipped off by Animal about a new phenomenon called crab-core that is happening in the States. As I don’t live there I had no way of seeing it firsthand. Tokyo tolerates many a heinous trend but thankfully not the likes of what has happened in the States. In crab-core the guitarist sits super low while playing some staccato sacramental hardcore riff. While they do that the rest of the band has choreographed Motown-like moves. We are all supposed to be impressed and think what a great innovative throwback that is. With out going into what a bizarre idea “innovative throwback” is, an example of this kind of thing is a shuffle foot step, a collective hand wash gesture to remind you that this is a show. Instead of the softer movements of Motown a collective head bang or guitar flip are are incorporated to make it dood-edified (dude edified). In the throws of crab-core one might think ‘Oh! I totally get what they’re doing there.’ But no, it’s impossible. You cannot “get” this thing. There’s nothing to get. It’s the curtain over the Chinese Water Torture that conceals the trick slots next to the lock. It’s the one card trick your Dad knows of music. There’s nothing to get because the secret is there is no secret: the perpetrators of this kind of thing rightly deserve to watch concert after concert of it and then just fade away into a job at the Warped Tour or something. So, with nut-blasting music like YWs it is also never easy to know what the hell is going on or how to really get at the guts of it. Things like crab-core just muss it all up anyway and just make music a linear joke told by Santa Claus. This is also the great news.
The proclivity for many people to say the same thing about YWs taps me on the shoulder that the band is great and that no one really knows what to say about them. They’re too involved with knocking the brains out of your head and making you feel like you’re getting sick than busy answering why it is that everyone thinks they sound like someone else. That is to say I do understand that using a description of sounding like The Jesus Lizard makes whatever music being talked about easy to manage. Like, if you only had 12 seconds before the go-cart you were duct taped to was to be rocket propelled off a 400 meter ramp and if you couldn’t definitively encapsulate why the person with their finger on the button should listen to YWs you’d become a grease stain in the sky then of course I get why people say stuff like that. I have a question though. What the hell happened to enjoying yourself? Why would you want an easy description of any music? Again I understand time constraints or immediate demands. But singles are still at least three minutes (or should be around that) in length. That is a short investment. Blurbs are cool. They save time. But singles decidedly do not even give you an accurate portrait of any group or any album either. So, it’s not a waste of time per se it’s just, you know, not conducive to something a little more worthwhile maybe. God, Sasha Frere Jones does not read my stuff, but if he read this he might hate me. Oh well.
It takes the GZA a few days to record a album. It takes YWs longer than that to record an album. Thee Ohsees can record a record in the time it takes to play a full set it seems. Let’s have some respect for the music y’all. It can only take three minutes to enjoy the music and if it’s it’s good enough, can hold years worth of admiration and healthy exposition. It may help you get laid for God’s sake. So this is call to slow down and sit with it. Smoke a cigarette and drink some coffee. Eat soup with it. You may want to stick around and eat the rest of the meal with the music. Ok, I regret to inform you that the girl of your dreams will not want to have sex with you while YWs are playing on the stereo. It’s not YWs fault. It’s your fault for dreaming out of your league.
Seeing canyon sized riffs- Hearing cannonball exploded beef (my capatain beefheart exposition section)
I don’t like it when people say that all food tastes the same. That may bother me more than noticing someone breathing through their nose in church. I haven’t been to church in about ten years but I have never ceased to be reminded of hideous breathing since my last church-going experience. Just go anywhere people have to stand, sit, or mosey around some place, usually against their will, and you’ll have a wretched methodical breather near you. I had gone to catholic school and no matter how bad I hated going to that dead ritual called mass every week it never failed that some person somewhere around me was really feelin’ the spirit so hard that they could not find it in themselves to just alternate between nose and mouth respiration. Respiration of that caliber is catatonic enjoyment like watching a video of someone masturbating while that person is stroking off to a destruction derby- only their head being shown. That person was usually my grandfather; not the person masturbating but the one breathing mono-nasalistically (made that word up, yes) and he was a firefighter when he was my age. He did that job for a long time. I say that because of that job he gets five years worth of a get-out-of-jail-free card for exhaling inconsiderately in his old age. It’s okay now because he is dead. He died holding that card. I miss him. I tell ya, if I were a firefighter in this day and age I would definitely be listening to Young Widows when fighting a fire.
When I was a kid and still impressed considerably easier than now. I had always been morbidly curious about what music they played at the firehouse when the fighters weren’t accruing 50 lbs. of gear and trying to save a life from man’s true enemy and savior: fire. That curiosity was quenched when I got the opportunity to hang out at firehouse #115 in West Toledo. A guy my dad played softball with was a firefighter. I had said to my dad I wanted to go to the firehouse and probably pet a Dalmatian or something. Funny thing is that they did have a Dalmatian. It was called Spark. Most of the guys called it Flinty though. The coolest part is that they pumped James Brown the entire time through these ridiculous, humongous speakers in the game room all day. At least while I was there. It seemed like there was a barbecue happening most of the time I was there too. At some fire houses they might play Jerry Lee Lewis and at others, who knows, they might bust Pavorotti the whole time. Everyone of the firehouses(? homes) is different. They couldn’t all of them be the same. Buildings are different heights. More or less rooms than others. The climate is different which would demand slightly different building materials. The neighborhood and constituency would shift at a pretty regular rate. You’d also have to assume that every time you get ready to leap into a fire there are many seen and unforeseen problems that could arise. The ceiling could have already collapsed. A stairway might be melting. A family could have ran into a basement. The dog might bite you. Hell, the owner could have a collection of agressive alligators in the guest bedroom. There are all these problems within certain houses, built at certain times, built by certain building companies which then would have used different building materials. Different materials burn differently. Standards for construction, no matter how perfect you think certain things in society are, do change over time. They also change quite frequently. If you don’t think of all of these things, as a firefighter, you might unfortunately already be dead. I mean running into burning buildings is a box I guess you have to check on the fireman application before you become a firefighter. Metaphysically or otherwise.
Now if I were someone who ate McDonalds at least six times in one week, I would no doubt be capable of saying things like “I’m lovin’ it” or “it tastes like chicken”. People that don’t eat at McDonalds less than that have probably said when eating shark or whale or alligator or some creature that yes, it tastes like chicken. My little sisters said turkey tasted like chicken during their second Thanksgiving. They were two. This may be a bad example but if you think anything that is not chicken tastes like chicken and really believe it, congratulations! You probably are one of the billions and billions to be sold to. For those that understand (and I believe there are many) that saying something tastes, sounds or looks like something else this is a nice “small talk” device to get people to like you. People may even be inclined to agree with you about how similar one thing is to some other thing. It’s like saying it’s hot outside. It’s something people do. Most of the time it’s harmless. Prince looks like Jimi Hendrix, I said it! Prince has a sexual style on his guitar that sounds like Jimi (amongst other things!!!!). Fact of the matter is is that chicken may not taste the same as anything else. Hell, I am going to say that I have never had chicken taste repeatedly the same except for a few rare occasions (I don’t eat fast food). The complexities to get this particular chicken to taste like that particular chicken are obvious as well as mind boggling. In my experience it rarely happens. At this moment please excuse me. I have been standing on my head writing this for the past hour. Wait. I am lying. I was not typing this at that point. I was watching The Matrix. I was trying to induce psychosis via gravity. It kind of worked. Standing on my head feeling gravity is like standing on my feet feeling it. It’s amazing.
Hit Me As Hard As You Can. I’m Dying.
Let’s discuss for a moment doing anything that could be considered disrespectful while fighting a fire and how I think it is automatically not disrespectful. Doing something to music has always made that particular activity more enjoyable, to me at least.
#1, You didn’t start the fire. In fact the person who could have fallen asleep smoking in their easy chair or a kid twirling around with a box a matches trying to light as many blue-tips as he could started it. Or it was faulty craftsmanship. Or, you did start the fire because it was your property or a close friends property and you are obviously doing it for insurance purposes. We all have got to do what we all have got to do. And fires like these have always been burning. Anyway, modus operandi for fighting the fire is so it doesn’t get to other parts of the neighborhood and kill a ton of other people. That would make people homeless. Homeless people are a hassle from a complete city government point of view. In the process of fighting a fire the authorities might save a life or two. That is a seen as a plus. Some call it a good deed. A fireman calls it his job. So, listening to music while doing your job could involve blasting the firetrucks stereo while trying to snuff a fire. Yeah! This is an automatic O.K. I think. It goes without saying that I will never be a firefighter. Maybe for this reason? Like, if you were to go to a funeral it would be the perfect opportunity to listen to Young Widows- just as the coffin was being lowered. Whoa. But you’d be the most gigantic jackoff in at least 8 counties. Or if you gathered up the nuts to go into the woods of Alaska at night intending on hunting down and killing The King of the Wolves, having Young Widows in your noise canceling earbuds, you’d both be shitting on the prowess of the Wolf King and you’d be all sorts of dead in no time. Some things just can’t be done. A lot of the times some things like only breathing through your nose -consciously or unconsciously- shouldn’t be done. In a fireman’s case, it is both recommended to listen to something like the music of Young Widows while strangling a fire. **SUGGESTION** Remember the movie Backdraft starring Kurt Russel? Go dig out that VHS or rent or steal that movie, put it on mute, and just listen to Young Widows’ Old Wounds and Settle Down City in that order on repeat while you set your zine collection on fire. If the fireman who rescues you doesn’t ask you who that was playing on the stereo as he drug you out of the burning wreckage I will be aghast with surprise.
#2, Have you ever been around a real roaring fire? Like a bonfire in Michigan that’s as tall as a farmhouse? It is one of the loudest natural phenomenons this world has to offer that isn’t involved with the weather. If you were listening to anything while punching a fire to death be it The Jesus Lizard or Friction you’d have a hard time hearing anything other than fire unless you were bumping it in the best system tax money could buy. Now that I am writing this I am getting more and more curious about the possibility of music being pumped into the ear pieces in fire-helmets? If anyone who reads this knows anything about making soundtracks for firefighting let a brother know at bigdelicious@getdeliciousDOTnet. Also, being inside of a burning building would be terrifying for a pinata full of reasons. One, as with anything, is the fear of death. The others are just variations including the end result of the initial fear. You have to give firemen a break here. They should be able to drink from a golden boot for a press conference after each successful extinguishing of a fire in any neighborhood the world over.
#3 I don’t think Young Widows have intentionally created 26 plus songs to put a fire out to. This is what I call a synchronized congruence. Although fires have been around for a real long time I think making music that compliments the task of fighting fires has just naturally occurred here. A tip on how to extinguish a flame to death involves a person having to beat at the thing on fire with a hatchet. In other cases you have to smother the thing do death with a wool blanket or something. This does not mean that all music simile-ed together between The Jesus Lizard and Young Widows ( or between anyone for that matter) can be put on playlist for firefighting. It appears I am trying to snuff the idea of simile here. Maybe I am. Anyway, I have come to describe this linear styled, hefty music in verse. Now, if you please…
I think I have found it
some event that all of us
anywhere can share
agreeing about anything
in public aural endeavors.
That ‘thing’
that ‘anything’
it’s a bang
a bang smash
a crash bash
slash or
THUMP!
How great does it sound when a piece of junk is dropped off the top of a pick up truck parked on the edge of a cliff, free falls and then just crushes into another pile of junk at the bottom. I’ve seen it in movies. I’ve done it in gorge-like places in Tennessee. Bjork wrote a song about it. So I really don’t have to write about this any more. That don’t mean I am going to. On occasion I have called music like the Young Widows “sports” music. What crunchy hard rock music couldn’t be considered sports like. Well it’s not sports like. It’s sports affiliated. Maybe it’s just how music and sports share something intangible with each other. They share a common bond through entertainment as most anything does however some sports definitely conjure up something that could also be considered art. The same goes into the performance of most any music. It’s funny in music’s case that the opponent is the audience. Perhaps the thing truly shared is just how intense music and sports can get inside of their respective mediums.
If YWs were a sport they’d be snowboarding. It’s something that to the listener it instills a feeling however gigantically crushing it remains fluid. Notes and vocals and bass and drums are dwarfed by the surrounding empty spaces of the music as it slips down Rock and Roll’s mountainside. You get to settle into the grooves. It’s fun but nothing to make you really smile about because the threat of death or being destroyed by Rock and Roll mountain is ever present with this band. Ultra simplistic vocal yellings come out of whispers like a man slow to anger but when angered is Montezuma. The quiet loud dynamic has one direction before you have three dudes thrashing fists at their instruments and punching at their stuff like some bar room brawl. In the case of snowboarding when you are tilted toward the mountain the mountain is trying to eat you. Mother nature wants you to fall, spilling blood down her majestic breast. It’s a fight against the mountain and it’s a fight against yourself. YWs ebb and flex right on down. Hypnotic is their pace and pendulous are the thrills of it. The rider cuts between two rows of trees and the helicopter of our own hearing starts to pull back. The behemoth that YWs slide down is growing. The mountain becomes much bigger than we thought and the one thing holding it all together, swooping down it is becoming smaller and smaller while it slices grooves into Rock music’s face. Then you see it. From far away now, one gorge hidden behind a row of trees. It’s the size of Satan’s bowling alley. The rider couldn’t possibly see it. They’re going to fast and the trees are becoming to dense for them to notice they’re getting closer to it. Strings are popping and ripping out of control against a black background. The guy won’t survive. If they knew what they were up against they’d surely waver. You bite your bottom lip and slowly curl your fist. This is it - The couloir. Suddenly the fury just drops out. Someone, somewhere inside of a sinking submarine knows exactly how you feel. It’s all in free fall. You’re thinking there is no way in hell this band going to survive. They are going to die when they hit the bottom. You’re feeling a strangers meaty hands around your throat until BASH! you’re back in it and you have got to check to see if you”re still able to hang on while the music is tearing it’s way down this mother fucking mountain.
The Board Game
I liked board games a lot when I was kid. I had a closet full of them. Everyone did. I would keep my heavy rotation outside of the closet on top of a huge oak bookshelf in my room. Kept’em high. That was at my house and everyone had games. You’d go to your friends house. You’d hang out for three days in a row and in that time if you played another round of Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter II Tom Cruise was liable to break into the basement window and arrest you for future crimes you had not committed yet. One thing that would inevitably happen- I know this hard to believe seeing as how it was the 90’s- is the closet would be consulted like a pile of bones, hoping for some kind of enjoyable future amidst a foreseeable one of terror and loneliness. You crack the door, look at the top shelf and just start working your way down to see what the hell you guys felt like playing. You’ve got the standards: your Monopoly, your Connect Four, your Life, and if you were a fucking nerd, Risk. In the end, all of these games would force you to go home if you were at your friends house or they would force your friend to go home if they were over yours. That’s not really important when you think about games other than the concept that games helped both of you realize how mutually, utterly sick you were of each other after a few days together. The game doesn’t cause it. The game uncovers it.
Board games are a pretty sick waste of time if you want to get down to it. Generally they involve collecting the most of something, gimping your opponent so you can make it to the finish line before them, persuading them to give up something “important” or backing the opponent into the corner to force them to make a choice about how they are going to be beaten. If you win, you become the center of your own attention spinning alone in the universe. For a moment you become surrounded by it instead of you being one of the things that surrounds it. I happen to think that two board games in particular were the best and not as sadistic as say something like Mouse Trap or Guess Who? (aside: why in the hell did the game have a “?” in the title. Was this some kind of challenge to have spontaneous games burst out on the street if the title was spoken?). Monopoly and Fireball Island were two of the most impressive and isometrically opposed games and really the only games worth playing. Everything else is too much like watching 2001: a space odyssey without eating candy or smoking large amounts of drugs.
Monopoly games usually never ended because someone would just give up, flip the board, tell someone to fuck off, not negotiate (leading to a stalemate), or the ice cream man is coming!!! If you run out of money you lose. That is unless your Dad is the banker and gives you a loan to keep the game interesting. If you win it’s because you have the most net-worth but only in comparison to three other people, who probably still have some (real) money in their back pockets. Monopoly was as frustrating as things could get sometimes. I have been audience to games that would end “just because” as well.
Fireball Island is a board game that has smooth mountains and candy looking grooves with rivers in them. It has reddish marbles, a giant head shaped like a nightmare and rickety bridges across the gorges of the same black plastic. Next to the head is one red polygonal ruby that everyone has got to get to. The game has a beginning and an end. There is no middle, really. It has cards to make you think there is a middle but you roll dice, racing to the ruby, and then once you have possession of it, bust ass back to your boat (of which is in a different place for every player) by rolling dice. Those are kind of the same principles so, whatever. It’s like intermission giving the illusion that something different is going to happen after you have the ruby. Games of Fireball Island on the other hand can be played in quick ten minute blocks (that is if you don’t have an implied understanding of the card rules) whereas Monopoly, if played like a human being (whatever that means), does not really end…definitively.
Monopoly is never about speed and all about the ground you cover and how much attention you keep. It’s also impossible to know what the other players are thinking so you really should be constructing some strategy revolving around the idea of growth. Fireball island is only about greed and your will to manipulate other people who have a similar ambition. You know what the other players are thinking because you can either pray for a fireball to kill your enemy or hope that you can get close enough to use your ruby-stealin’ card.
What does this have to do with YWs? Well it is only marginally related to YWs but it is a better example of how music is made and why. What’s more is that it is directly related with how people perceive music. We all have closets full of games as most of us have boxes or shelves full of our music collection. Music is usually something to be consulted as how to spend our time thinking. Or it’s used to patronize our physical predilection to operate (if we aren’t sleeping, but even then…). We gobble music up. We can pay attention to it or put it on in the background like some neural security blanket. We can use it for inspiration or bridge the silence between two people that don’t have much to say to each other. It builds and it frenzies. If it frenzies enough we need it to wain or drop out which only leaves us wanting more. When you are crushed under the chassis of a black pick-up truck you only want the thing to get off of you. If you love a girl that’s across an ocean you only want to be closer to her. Once you get the truck off of your chest the way you’ll feel may be complicated- if you can still feel. When you hold the hand of that girl and she says lets get in the back of her pick-up truck and do something about the last 26 lonely years of your life, if you’re thinking that in this situation you will always say ‘yes’, that’s complicated too.
In Louisville, KY there are a group of artists that define a solitary paradigm of music that is generally destructive and amazing. YWs are a part of that thing there. I will say they have distilled the paradigm down into something really unique. Some time around four years ago -but at all different times- upon hearing the bands Coliseum, Lords, Young Widows, and only slightly before, Breather Resist did I conjure up an idea for “the next” board game. For this board game you had to build a radiator that fit into a Ford Truck. In this game you could choose from five different sweaty mechanics that all look like members from The Jesus Lizard. This was going to be the first board game to come in a red toolbox with real wrenches and schematics for the whole truck. There was to be a note attached. It would have read as such:
DIRECTIONS
Why don’t you go to hell
…scrawled in real motor oil.
The Young Widows are Evan Patterson, Nick Thieneman, Jeremy McMonigle.
Myspace- here
Releases- there
SHIRTKILLER- SHIRTKILLER
Posted: August 15th, 2010
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Evan Patterson,
Fireball Island,
Jeremy McGonigle,
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MInimalist Sports Grind,
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Young Widows,
zak mccune
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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.
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