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Reviews
These are record reviews. Many of them are super old because we’re stupid slow, some were written by a member of a local high school track team, who may have graduated by now.
The Mae Shi
Heartbeeps
Kill Rock Stars
The Mae Shi's newest compact defibrillator is called “Heartbeeps”. It provides 16 minutes of oscillator-augmented electrocardio shock therapy for dancing, driving, and computer use. Previous clinical trials have indicated similarities in efficacy between the Mae Shi and Pavement or Sonic Youth. However, it is my medical duty to inform you such comparisons are blatantly false, because the Mae Shi is an awesome dance party where prog and dance and noise classic rock and post-Le Shok whatevercore are all getting down with their mutual friends the Bible, the USS Abraham Lincoln, Paleontology Today, and The New England Journal of Medicine. Based on my research, I can incontrovertibly recommend “Heartbeeps”. Because The Mae Shi is making a difference in the lives of leukemic youths and spastic teens. Because the Mae-Shi lets you play tambourine at their shows. Because they care.
Cut City
S/T EP
GSL
Somewhere between pep rallies and getting arrested on the scale of high school shittiness is putting up with ripoff bands. You know, the pricks who have exactly one influence, which happens to be whatever marginally independent and extremely popular band clutches the airwaves and cable television wires. Anyway, thanks to the miracle of Pitchfork and international shipping from Urban Outfitters' website, the newest generation has started spawning in Sweden and ripping off Interpol. According to GSL, they're making "danceable art-punk". The truth is that in 1991 they were making fun of the Op Ivy sticker on your binder while clad in Nirvana tees, and now they're making fun of your Pig Destroyer hoodie from the ironic sanctuary of their tight blazer. If Cut City had only stayed in Sweden, they might have turned their competent but incredibly boring Interpol-jocking into a comfortable year or three of girls, shows, and popular 7"s, but they've made the wise decision to migrate to LA and be killed by ambition, just like when those high school assholes tried to play a real punk show and the crusties scared them shitless. Summary: like Interpol but not their catchiness or substance? Hate bands that have any redeeming characteristics? Desire to further the decline of GSL? Dig this, man.
International Friends
S/T
Permanent Marks
Uh…I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. I guess it's like ambient electronic music, and I'm not really equipped to discuss the subtleties of the genre but basically this sounds like a budget score for a modern B-film. It could suit all sorts of wooden dialogue and clichéd scenes. No, wait actually it sounds like 80's yuppie shite my dad listens to. No, actually I'm still confused, so I'm on the International Friends website, where it's
still 1995 and posting "psychedelic" animated .gifs is crucial and you call yourself PrinceViper or Jon Dead or 835. If that appeals to you, check this out.
Federation X
Rally Day
Estrus
Instead of reviewing this (good) CD, I think I'll review what half a dozen music publications thought of it (thanks for the excerpts, Blue Ghost Publicity!) Mojo Magazine deftly combines alliteration and hyperbole to get "Brutal and utterly brilliant" whereas I'd have merely said "heavy and good." Punk Planet takes a break from the sensitive indie stuff to say "thinkin' man's stoner rock," and I can dig that. Reglar Wiglar talks
about feedback and slithering guitar lines and stuff, but that's just boring rock journalism, though it's true. Thumbs down, Reglar Wiglar. The Portland Mercury evidently listened to a different band than me, because the vocals never go insane, though they're plenty good. But Tone And Groove takes the cake for stupidity by referencing six bands in two lines, and the wrong bands at that. Oh yeah, Fed X's music – think Melvins, Big Black,
400 Blows, Lightning Bolt and similar high quality heaviness.
Denison Witmer
Are You A Dreamer?
The Militia Group
I remember one time early last summer when me and my best friend decided to create the Ultimate Sensitive Solo Folk/Indie Artist. We went down to the beach, and readied the ritual. In a fire pit, we placed a vial of teenage virginal tears, a bottle of Zoloft, some acoustic guitar strings, whiskey, and the test pressings of some Elliot Smith LP's. Then we waited for lightning to strike. But because this is SouCalif, there isn't much lightning in June. As we waited, some lifeguards showed up and started yelling at us. Then they noticed the whiskey bottle, and called the po's. Shit. Anyway, they weren't any more receptive to our artistic mission, and we ended up with two underage drinking citations and a fine but no uber-whiner. One year later, this disc came in the mail. Sadly, it's not the U.S.S.F.I.A and it's not particularly close, either. This really didn't impress me, and in twenty minutes I'll have quietly forgotten it.
Be Your Own Pet
Damn Damn Leash-EP
Infinity Cat Records
EP's only get 300 words; EP's only get 300 words: blaring over and over again in my head and through the off-white Bose stereo with inset CD player--a gift from you know who. Be Your Own Pet…tap…tap…tap; Be Your Own Pet. What does that mean? It could only mean that The Great Empire is set to implode on her flatulent self; a withering piece of fruit dissolving like in the stop motion photography of that man; that certain, you know… And as it swallows itself, its citizens are reduced to, to smut-faced Urchins; of the dead castle on the hill. A worried populace believing that all the glittering waste—that all this fresh rotten fruit—falls from the gently swaying branch of a benevolent tree; one that no doubt is as crisp as a freshly burned corpse—do *they* sway so munificent? Think of the yellowed smoke injecting itself into the atmosphere only to be ridiculed by the birds. Think of crapping yourself at the exact moment of your death—a death issued by the frolicking hands of combustion—do your blackened cheeks even respond? Is there a sound spare that drilling hiss? Are your turds nothing but expressways to an alternate reality? Doesn't decomposition say that much? Is digested waste just a portal to a future of the same stenching hole? Are those donuts for the taking? Don't mind if I do.
Meneguar
I Was Born at Night
Magic Bullet Records
If you’re a girl who went to college at some point in the mid- to late-90s, Meneguar will probably remind you of the CDs that certain boys played while you were sitting around their dorm rooms on school nights, drinking Natty Light and wondering whether or not you’re going to make out. This could be the record that Frozen Embryos/Between Names (Jordan Catalano’s band on My So-Called Life, duh) would’ve made if they turned smart and listened to a lot of Husker Du [I can’t figure out the umlauts]—it’s not very adventurous or exciting, but the songs are catchy and the nostalgia feels all soft and fuzzy and sweet. You can’t tell what the band looks like from the album art (they’ve got black-and-white roaring cat heads superimposed onto their faces), but on their MySpace page there’s a supercute picture of them holding warm little kitties in their laps, which increases their crushworthiness tenfold.
The Peppermints
Jesus Chryst
Paw Tracks
&
Crimson Sweet
Eat the Night
Shake It
There should be more gross girls in bands today—not cutesy-gross like Karen O drooling Corona onto her designer prom dresses, but grosser-than-gross like the guitar player from L7 pulling out her tampon in the middle of a show and chucking it at the boys in the pit. The girls in the Peppermints seem like they’re totally, genuinely, awesomely gross, which I guess you have to be if you classify your music as “experimental barfy trash-rock.” Sometimes they sing like Muppets (the scary monster kind like Sweetums, not the approachable ones like Scooter or Rowlf), sometimes they’re really sexy (especially on “Santorum,” the prettiest and creepiest anal sex song ever), and sometimes they do this nerdy sing-song stuff about getting molested and drinking Slurpees and hijacking buses (that’s on “Onion Salad,” which sounds like some weirdo kindergarten recorder recital). There’s a boy in the band too, and he’s maybe what Thurston Moore might have become if he didn’t have a wife and kid and just sat around watching scrambled porn and eating Pixy Stix all night every night. The whole record’s geniusly bad and everyone should love it to death, even for the song titles alone (“Sexy Total Fuck,” “Rabid Frogs,” and “Blududud” are my favorites).
The singer for Crimson Sweet is basically just sad-gross, like the way less charismatic sidekick to the psycho bully girl who might try to light your hair on fire at the back of the school bus. She screams her head off on every song, but it’s so boring because her band plays generic bar punk and the lyrics are mostly embarrassing (“Let’s get loaded and do it” is probably the best line on the record, especially since the first half of the couplet is “Born too late to quaalude it”). She makes Juliette Lewis’s humping-the-mic-stand-in-spandex-pants thing look subtle and classy, and after a few songs you want to grab her and give her a big squeezy hug and tell her to find some new, nicer friends.
Molecules
DNA Forever EP
Usually when anyone sings in French, it automatically sounds lusty and mysterious and maybe kinda dirty, but Guylaine Vivarat from Molecules makes you think of clean stuff like fancy perfumed soaps and pristine fields of lavender. There’s something overly brainy about this band that counteracts any potential horniness, and the parts when the guitarist (Nikolai Goodich) sings in English sort of kill the mood altogether—the title track has a line about being “cannibalized by the western mind” (ick), and “Born Today” is essentially a list of things you shouldn’t do (lie, kill, steal, etc.) followed by a list of things that it’s okay to do (escape, protect, confuse). But the music’s mostly pleasant, with lots of Krautrocky, Stereolabby melodies that you could probably describe as “soaring” or possibly even “majestic.” They should just have the French girl sing all the songs so you can try to pretend the lyrics are really pervy, like that Serge Gainsbourg concept album where he crashes his Rolls Royce into a teenage girl’s bicycle and then takes her back to the “special hotel” with the mirrors on the ceiling.
The Ex
Singles. Period.: the Vinyl Years 1980-1990
Touch and Go Records
These Dutch fucks. I’ve got no problem with free speech; hell I watch enough Fear Factor to know that the envelope is there to be stretched—eating bull testes, c’mon! That’s fucking awesome!
But I draw the line at unpatriotic jive like this music. I’ll go ahead and get this out of the way right now: titling a song “Stupid Americans” just isn’t cool. If we’re so stupid then why do you drive the cars that we invented? Huh? And if we’re so dumb, why do you take all of our Bruce Willis movies and dub them in whatever language it is that you speak?
Stupid Americans think they are so big/Stupid Americans think with their prick/Stupid Americans are walking in the way.
Whatever, bros. You know what I’d like to see? Sean Hannity feeding each of you his stumpy prick. How funny would that be? What’s that you say? Oh, I can’t hear you, I’m getting video of you being defiled by a great American; one who’s wearing a U.S. flag-print Kimono.
I’m going trade copies of it for OxyContin online.
The Detroit Cobras
Baby
Bloodshot Records
I went to see The Detroit Cobras over Thanksgiving weekend two years ago, expecting a rowdy, drunken performance led by a half-naked Dolly Parton ringer. Instead, Rachel Nagy took the stage and announced to the holiday crowd that tonight, she was sober. So instead, we got a sort of sterile prancing-in-place set. Nagy’s sobriety seemed to take hold of the crowd—who got lost weekend wasted to make up for her abstinenc—and her band—who looked sleepy; with the lone exception of guitar-player Mary Ramirez; that cyclone of hair and hot licks couldn’t be bothered. Alright, time to jump this sinking ship…
Baby, their latest album is—as are past efforts—a (rather) large collection (19 tracks) of R&B covers with one original tune thrown in to make it twenty. The album was co-produced by Greg Cartwright of the superb Memphis rock band, Reigning Sound. I guess it shows too. There are a lot of charming songs here. Plus, The Cobras choose a lot of lesser-heard songs to cover, which fosters a diminished mental snag.
Their own contribution, “Hot Dog (Watch Me Eat),” is nice and suggestive: You bring the drinks/and I got the buns … and that’s a hot dog/watch me eat a hot dog… I know, right?! Man, that’s naughty.
I’d say this a good record for a party with lots of hair jelly and Pabst. The kind where pit bulls comb the living room drinking warm, ashy mixed drinks out of forgotten red cups; the kind where dudes are arm wrestling in the kitchen and the object girls are wearing cheetah-print bobby socks; where there’s a framed picture of Mike Ness hanging in the bathroom; and where all of the kids are in their bedroom watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre…
Ooooor, if you are going to host a closing-night party for the understudies from the Palookavile Players’ midsummer presentation of Grease. They need a good record to lessen their load; all of their hopes and dreams were used to wipe tufts of sticky pubic hair off of the urinals in the bathrooms adjacent to the Palooka High School auditorium. When the cover of Lowman Pauling’s somber, “It’s Raining” comes on, second-tier Danny Zuko will give requisite Sandy Olsson one last pleading stare before dashing off into the forest to masturbate near a creek. Eeeeeew.
The Willowz
Talk in Circles
Sympathy for the Record Industry
While making Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, director, Michel "Michelle" Gondry, wanted some White Stripes songs for the soundtrack but—so the legend goes—the Stripes were too pricey. Dear old Meg Stripe told Gondry about The Willowz, however, and, soon enough, trivial history was made. Do you want to kick me in the nuts yet? No? Well, then how about this: the aged wunderkind later had a dream about The Willowz' song, "I Wonder," and directed them an arty little video—too cute, right? I don't know if you noticed, but I just put a possessive apostrophe on the letter Z. Is that how that works when the Z implies a plural? Fuck it, I'm a genre-buster. Anyway, in the video, singer/songwriter Richard James Eaton wears a fake beard the whole time and tries to build a car out of crap; mmmm, crap. BTW, fake beards are soo hot right now that you have to damp them with water before putting them on just so they don't burst into flames at the dance party. Are you ready to take a punt at the lil' danglers now? Still no?! Okay, fine. So now we've got Talk in Circles. It's a spunky effort. Lots of blues pillaging and garage fuckery (read that with a French accent if possible, so it sounds like: “gare-haje fuck-hairee”). Oddly enough, Eaton's nasally singing sounds a lot like Jack White's pinched delivery, with the added excitement of a rabid weasel lunging at his crotch; ie: "Who do you think you aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrree?" It's actually pretty good, but I'd never admit to actually liking it—I’ve got a harem of Gorilla Girls that I simply cannot disappoint—so don't even go there. At their best, The Willowz are reminiscent of Portland's now-defunct dark-horse, Hazel, who … oh, you've not heard of them? Never mind that I have, and furthermore that the quartet has been climbing my frontal lobe as if it were the blight-soaked face of Mt. Kilimanjaro for over a decade now! Ahem! But who really needs this shit when you've got Kiss' entire catalog cross-bred with Weezer's and implanted in your ass? Anyway dudes, the buzz on this band is soo hot right now that you could give yourself a crew-cut with the liner notes of Talk in Circles alone. But why would you want to do that? Shaggy locks are still the rage.
Right? Fellas?
Alright, please, kick me in the nuts. Wait, let me take off my glasses first.
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