MC Krakow / James Iha / YLT’s Tom Courtenay

More Onion genius:
Polish Rapper Under Fire For Use Of The Word ‘Polack’
DETROIT — MC Krakow, a popular Detroit-based rapper of Polish descent, came under fire Tuesday for his use of the word ‘Polack’ on his new album “World Warsaw III…In an official statement, MC Krakow defended his use of the word: “When I say, ‘Y’all be my Polacks,’ or ‘Yo, what up, Polack?,’ it’s my way of taking the word back. Our people need to re-claim and embrace ‘Polack’ with pride, just like Eminem did with the word ‘faggot.'”

Given that I think Ryan Schreiber’s description of James Iha’s solo album (borrowed off Yoichi on Tuesday along with some Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, the Rent soundtrack and the new Pulp) as sounding “like the Gin Blossoms and Matthew Sweet soundtracking an early ’70s film about young hippies in love, minus the drugs” is incredibly spot-on, and given that I find the album as a whole remarkably uninspiring, Sound Of Love really shouldn’t have been in my head all of last night and this morning, but it is.

While we’re on the subject of happy happy jangly layered harmony poppy sounds, you might as well also read about Yo La Tengo’s gem Tom Courtenay at Rebellious Jukebox, which is a recent addition to my list of dailyish reads.

Earlier I described the riffing in Sonic Youth’s Drunken Butterfly as “seductive”, which I meant in the predatory, skulking sort of way rather than the “let me slip into something more comfortable” way. Just to clarify.

Sonic Youth: Documentary and Dirty notes

Crept downstairs last night during an extended break from jurisprudence to watch 4Music’s Pioneers feature on Sonic Youth, which reassured me that my marked inability to evoke the sheer joy this band’s music gives me in any sort of articulate way is shared by lots of other people, including the band themselves (although we didn’t even hear from Kim and Steve at all, boo, C4). There was Butch Vig using the tired old (but still frustratingly spot-on IMO) “glorious noise”, Brian Molko talking about getting chucked into volcanos and swimming around in magma (also quite apt, really), and Sonic Youth themselves (grovel, worship) sounding very art-rock and cliched and saying how everything is about the music, blah blah blah.

But be not deceived by this flippance. Truth be told, I sat in front of the TV for those precious 20 minutes like a 14 year old girl watching a Westlife porn video.

I was then, unfortunately, forced to stay downstairs trying to wolf the rest of my supper down while David Gray sang what felt like the same song for half an hour, after which I staggered back up to my room and put Dirty on very loud, because I was in the mood for it (yes, I know it’s supposed to be the sell-out album and lots of people hate it but I like it anyway), and here are random notes:

Does anyone else find the riffing in Drunken Butterfly incredibly seductive?

I think the best part of this album for me is the three song sequence in the middle. Sugar Kane initially sounds like another one of those exceptionally accessible Thurston-vocal SY songs like Teenage Riot and Sunday , but the minute you hear that intro you just know this song isn’t just going to be about catchiness, and that they’re not going to be able to resist some sort of descent into chaos later in the song. You can’t wait, but you also sense some return to order will follow, this is a song they’ll taper to a close. They do…and then they launch into the rollicking riot of dissonance and attitudinal Kim that is Orange Rolls, Angel’s Spit. And after this you get Youth Against Fascism, which is one of those songs which SY detractors probably jeer at as aging rockers’ attempting to keep in touch with the Ghostworld crowd, but which to me feels exuberant and brash and something I could mosh to without getting killed, and hey, sometimes that’s all I’m asking for. No one ever said they were political philosophers, after all, and yeah the president sucks/he’s a war pig fuck is fun to yell.

Beta Saxophone

It probably says something about the Beta Band when you’ve been listening to The Three E.P.’s, which you’ve owned for a while but somehow never listened to very much, and vaguely wonder why they’ve chosen to end the album with several renditions of the Ave Maria on unaccompanied saxophone, but you shrug your shoulders figuring hey, it’s the Beta Band, this is the sort of thing they’d do, and then you realize the album ended long ago, and it’s been your neighbour practising all along.

April March / Sue Garner + Rick Brown

Recent arrivals from Django:

April March: Chrominance Decoder

Right now I find myself incapable of saying more about this album other than that it is incredibly boring. Nothing of the rambunctious tweeness that made Chick Habit such a romp. The liner notes are amusingly pretentious and say things like “So April is a child. But nothing is quite what it seems. Could it be that she really loved you, Mr Clever? And what, or who, does she think of when the end-credits dissolve from the TV screen and the murmur of radio parasites wraps her in electrical snow?”, but I can write nothing about the music, because each of the four times I have tried playing it, it fades into the background within minutes, and believe me, when you have a very bored Michelle ploughing through the Brussels Convention on Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters 1968 and longing for distraction, something has to be very boring indeed if it doesn’t distract. And this album is very boring. Please talk to me if you have heard this album and like it. I would like to stop being bored.

Sue Garner & Rick Brown: Still

Earlier this year I described them (inadequately) as “Sarah McLachlan’s voice singing with Ani DiFranco’s attitude accompanied by Sonic Youth remixed by Tortoise”, and I am unfortunately unable to come up with a better description, but they really do deserve better than my fumbling reductive comparisons. Different feels to the songs depending on who’s singing: her tones are as dulcet as anything the Lilith Fairies can warble, and his are as nondescript as most of indie-rock’s finest, but in every song you feel this is a band that likes the subtleties of sound – in a lot of the second track (I Like The Name Alice) the sound we hear with the most clarity and detail are the steely plucks of the guitar, with her voice farther away, and each note’s got a twang, a twist, an emphasis of its own that the other notes don’t have. A note of its own in the wider scheme of notes. This appeals to me. I’m a believer in the individuality of notes.

(Still eagerly awaiting Leaves Turn Inside You, which has yet to arrive.)

(Elsewhere in the convenient world of online music reviews, Pitchfork likes the new Silver Jews, Flak reviews the Piano Magic compilation, and I really wish I could rave about MJ’s latest as much as PopMatters does.)

(Did I mention Chrominance Decoder is boring?)

Climbing Up The Walls

Currently playing, probably too loudly, on my speakers:

  • Our Lady Peace and Headswim albums (loans from Tay)
  • Hopelessly Devoted To You, a punk sampler (loan from Yoichi)
  • Who’s In The House? (answer: Jesus), by Father Brian featuring the Fun Loving Cardinals (loan from Alec, who swears almost convincingly that he “borrowed it from a friend”)

My neighbours are possibly feeling less than Christian love for me right now.

Happy Snippets

Snippets from the weekend (no more than snippets, though. Tufts in the fur of the woolly mammoth of my current happiness. Some of the reasons I’m happy make me go a bit shy and fluttery, and I don’t feel like writing about them here):

After an extraordinarily taxing day, Thai food, Mercury Rev and charming company made for an extraordinarily pleasant Friday night. Even though I somehow managed to buy a Rev T-shirt that was shocking in its random ugliness (I blame the wine, and Alec for not stopping me), and even though I was the lucky one who got to sit next to Stupor Guy, whose travails on the astral plane manifested themselves in the inexorable downward drift of his upper body towards an increasingly cringing me, the gig still had its moments – nice renditions of The Dark Is Rising, Spiders and Flies, Hercules, Tonight It Shows and Goddess On A Hiway’s always fun. I do wish they’d played Endlessly and A Drop In Time though, and I don’t think they played anything from Boces or Yerself Is Steam, which was a little disappointing.

Their live sound is rougher round the edges than the pristine sound on the last two albums. Their album sound feels as if each component of a song (think Endlessly, for example) occupies a distinct musical space with clearly delineated boundaries, and exists quite happily there without really interacting with other elements of the song, even though they all complement each other very prettily when taken as a whole. Like a consomme. Live, it’s more of a stew, or perhaps a chunky soup, and I’m not sure how much I actually liked hearing the songs that way. For me, Deserter’s Songs and All Is Dream are the sound of late nights studying or reading in bed, just right for the spaces between the sounds of night drizzle and Gower Street white noise. Having said that, I do think gigs are meant to sound different from albums, so all this is more commentary than complaint.

Saturday was the President’s Cup, the only intervarsity tournament for novice debaters in the UK, and something Mark and I had been slaving over (well, kind of) for the past couple of weeks. Relentless perfectionist that I am, I’m still half convinced that every person who kept coming up to me and raving about how fantastic the tournament was, was either piss drunk or just being polite, but there does seem to be considerable consensus that it was a resounding success. Which makes me happy, although it could all have been so much better if not for a plethora of organizational failures that I know I made, and which I feel lucky for getting away with.

Special mention must be made of:

  • Mark, tournament convenor AKA My Bitch, who ran himself ragged during the day, supplied alcohol at night, and has generally been absolutely lovely to work with because of his ability to find hilarity in drudgery and give wonderful hugs when I’m not in the mood for hilarity.
  • Russ, who sacrified his Saturday to perform the extremely boring functions of a tournament drudge, because I really needed the help, and because he’s sweet like that. (Oops, he hates being called sweet. Oh well.)

After Saturday, Sunday was a day for nothingness. Woke up at noon. Practised the organ for evening mass. Spent the rest of the afternoon in bed with Seamus Heaney and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, falling in love all over again with the Olivia Tremor Control’s Dusk At Cubist Castle, munching Kettle Chips, breathing in chrysanthemum tea. Had fun at evening mass playing my calypso version of How Great Thou Art. Chocolate pancakes a la Mark for dinner. Subjected Alec to The Lost Children (stomach-turning song on the new Michael Jackson album, to be excoriated here in the very near future). Camp dancing extravaganza with Mark to New York City Boy (Pet Shop Boys), which might possibly have been quite inconsiderate to Stefan downstairs due to my very creaky floorboards. In retrospect, I suppose you could say it wasn’t actually a day of nothingness, except in the sense that it involved nothing that detracted from happy, happy, happy me.

(Are you tired of this yet?)

Was Down. Am Back Up.

I was sitting in my hall’s reception area yesterday feeling unusually low (tough day in school, hacking cough, debating/organ-playing stress) and slightly resentful at the person who hadn’t turned up for reception duty, even A.H.W.O.S.G (which I’m loving, and will probably rave about in the near future) failing to rouse me out of listlessness, when Virgin Radio (not my channel, but the office radio can’t seem to receive Xfm) started Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of.

(I think I’ve written about it before. The pop song you sneer at when you are at your most cynical becomes your Dawson’s Creek pensive moment soundtrack when you’re at your most vulnerable, and suddenly the lyrics seem to speak to you when before they were nothing more than pleasant but gooey sounds to move your mouth to and hopelessly garble from time to time, and before you know it you’re writing blog posts quoting song lyrics that aren’t hiply oblique (e.g. Can’t catch me, I’m syntax free – “The Ineffable Me”, Sonic Youth) like they’re supposed to be in order to meet the indie coolness criteria, but they really are speaking to you, they really are…)

And you are such a fool
To worry like you do
I know it’s tough
And you can never get enough
Of what you don’t really need now

During Benediction I was more distracted than I should have been, mulling over various mull-issues, thinking maybe what I needed was to get out of the house, maybe go to a movie by myself, maybe Amelie for feelgoodness. Found out after Benediction (the organ playing was relatively hitch-free, hooray) that Alec was thinking of seeing it too, tagged along with him. Liked it a lot but didn’t absolutely love it – a little too many shots of Audrey Tautou being gamine, which got mildly tiresome after the initial charm wore off, but I did enjoy many of its other little touches: the jet-setting garden gnome, the bullied artichoke-caressing veggie stall helper, the girl at the centre of Renoir’s painting but not really there at all, the jealous ex-boyfriend cataloguing perceived flirtations (time-stamped) into his tape recorder.

Talking outside the pub after the movie, I realized with relief that I hadn’t actually become recently socially dysfunctional (which I’d been wondering about), I’d just gotten rather tired of group conversations with people I’d just met and needed one-on-one conversations that went beyond the polite, chirpy “How are YOU” barrier to recharge.

There was also the matter of the pig keychain which ballooned shit out of its arse, but you really just had to be there.

It’s just a moment
This time will pass

It did. I’m glad.

If Headmusic Was A Sweet Mine Would Be An Everlasting Gobstopper

A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.

The last line of the article finally got a non-torturous song in my head again. Last week Mark got Tom’s Diner on repetitive loop. Then Mark’s friend replaced that with the intro to Bootylicious. Then Enter Sandman somehow found its way in, and stayed there all of last night despite efforts to get rid of it with Boards Of Canada (Music Has The Right To Children, gleefully scrounged from my neighbour’s CD collection and very much enjoyed). But I can live with Simon & Garfunkel in my head quite happily, for at least the next few days.

“Fleeing Nuclear Holocaust” List

Apart from the fact that the writing at dooce.com is hilarious, other kicks I got from reading her site include the fact that at one point directly under her link to me she linked to “Sexual Healing” and “Pay-per-view consumption of porn in Provo”.

I’m too late to take part formally in her cruel exercise (If you were fleeing nuclear holocaust/a second term with G.W. Bush and could only take one mix tape with 12 songs on it and one book, which 12 songs and which book would they be?), but couldn’t resist giving it a try, belatedly.

But before I do: the problem I have with lists of this sort is never deciding how seriously I should take the criteria – if I were truly fleeing nuclear holocaust, I might just balk at taking Soundgarden’s Blow Up The Outside World along even if I absolutely loved it. This is a subset of a more general species of consideration – should the music reflect my probable need for spirit-boosting and optimism when in the process of fleeing nuclear holocaust or more George? Because a great deal of the music I love isn’t particularly happy-clappy, and who knows what effects it could have on my fragile sanity in such circumstances. Also, assuming these 12 songs are all I’m going to have to listen to, surely I’ll need variety rather than just my 12 favourite songs, so even though it sorely pains me to have only one Sonic Youth song in there, it’ll have to be that way for balance.

And after that long preliminary ramble, my 12 songs, list prone to frequent and irrational change, are:

‘Cross The Breeze (Sonic Youth)
AT&T (Pavement)
Manta Ray (Pixies)
Marine Machines (Amon Tobin)
Black Steel (Tricky)
Get Ur Freak On (Missy Elliot)
A Question Of Lust (Depeche Mode)
Sometimes When We Touch (Dan Hill)
Wednesday Morning 3 AM (Simon and Garfunkel)
They Can’t Take That Away From Me (sung by Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong)
Brahms’ 2nd symphony (just the 1st movement if I’m not allowed the whole thing)
One Day More (Les Miserables)

And my one book probably has to be Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, although I choose this sulkily because of all the others I have to leave behind.

The Mercy Seat (Nick Cave)

The Mercy Seat is dizzyingly claustrophobic; no matter where you run, you keep running up against “And the mercy seat is waiting”, and a menacing wall of sound closes in, frenetic psycho strings, crashing piano, approaching terror in the drums, close your eyes and you see flashes of cold steel, the jagged violence of electricity, shadowed corridors that eventually close in and engulf you.