Music Geekery – Page 5

Is A Pity

Aw, hell naw. If I’d only known about Lambchop’s wonderful cover of Sisters Of Mercy’s This Corrosion before our wedding, it would totally have gone on the playlist. Don’t get me wrong, I loved ending the night dancing to Nina Simone with Alec, but words like “Gimme the ring, kissed and toll’d” would’ve been a fun counterpoint to soppy stuff like “I bless the day I found you”, even as wonderfully true as the latter may be. Future brides-to-be, don’t pass up the opportunity I missed!

(Based on what I wrote a while back about what I like and don’t like in cover versions, this song goes straight into the Complete Re-Imagining, OMG Awesome! category. Another direct entry is Grizzly Bear’s cover of He Hit Me It Felt Like A Kiss.)

(Endearing extra: The This Corrosion cover can be found on the bonus disc for Lambchop’s album Is A Woman. The bonus disc is called Is A Bonus.)

Whatever Colours You Have In Your Mind

Via J-Walk, I enjoyed this summary of what goes on during Bob Dylan’s radio show.

Here are all the topics on which he’s given out Useful Tips:

How to Hang Dry Wall
What to Pack When You’re Traveling
How to Walk Like A Runway Model
How to Give Yourself Dreadlocks

Here are some quotes. Almost all are very endearing, it was tough to pick just a few:

“The distinctive voice of Aaron Neville. A lot of people think we sing the same.”
Re: Tex William’s Brother Drop Dead – “Some people die too soon. Others, you’re kind of hoping. Tex Williams has a song for such a situation.”
Re: Howlin’ Wolf – “This next song is entirely without flaw and meets all the supreme standards of excellence.”
“The harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.” (I’ve never met anyone else who agrees with me on this, but I’m not ashamed to say it – I love the sound of the harmonica! And it’s pretty much because of Bob Dylan.)
“A giraffe can go a long time without water. But he wants to see a menu right away.”

After reading all this I instantly wanted to listen to him, but unfortunately all my Dylan albums are still back in my old room at my family’s place. I haven’t moved my CD collection over yet because, well, there’s no shelf over here capable of accommodating it. Perhaps a trip to IKEA this weekend…

I Put My Thing Down Flip It And Reverse It

Apart from the awesome Velbon travel tripod, Alec also gave me private DJ lessons with DJ Koflow for Christmas. (We aren’t normally this lavish, but for our first Christmas as husband and wife we decided to spoil each other a bit. Also we hadn’t given each other any birthday presents that year.)

It’s taken me a while to find time for the lessons but they’re finally set up, and I meet Koflow for my first private lesson this Saturday afternoon. Am a bit nervous, and acutely aware that my inability to keep up with new music over the last few years has hit my hip-hop listening especially hard.

Still, I’m very excited – despite years of enjoying and clubbing to great dance music, I’ve remained largely ignorant about the mechanics of DJing and now I finally get the chance to learn me some skillz! You know, like when Ice says “Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it”? Soon that could be me, baby.

Kode9 & Spaceape (Esplanade, Singapore, 9 March 2008)

I had left London by the time dubstep nights started taking off, and since dubstep seemed one of the least suitable subgenres of dnb ever for the bedroom speaker experience, I never bothered seeking out much of it apart from the occasional podcast. (One of the differences between 2004 me and 2008 me. I don’t like this difference, but it’s also true that remaining so ignorant means I no longer chafe about Singapore’s lousy club scene.)

So I attended the Kode9 and Spaceape club night in almost total ignorance, which may be why I spent the first 20 minutes channelling Marvin the Martian and whining to Alec “Where’s the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!” Instead of the ribcage-vibrating, internal-organ-displacing bass beats I was expecting, they were just doing the sort of expansive soundscapes that tend to start and end dnb tracks, with little or no beats. I was dismayed. I had come to get my mellow totally harshed, and it wasn’t happening.

Actually, they had just taken the long view and I was being an impatient child. The music built, gradually but perceptibly, to the point where Spaceape announced “That was all just to warm you up. Now it’s time to dance!” As it turns out, I got my earth-shattering kaboom for the next two sweaty, breathless, epileptic hours. And, as always seems to happen with any club event that actually interests me in Singapore, attendance was low enough that there was plenty of space for completely uninhibited dancing.

I’m too ignorant to name any tracks, but I thought they did a great job of playing tracks that were consistently danceable but with differing intensities – we’d get sections where everyone was dancing with total gorilla abandon, and then a section of slightly less frenetic music as a respite. It is admittedly possible that I entered some zone of transcendental bliss that meant they could fart rhythmically and I’d just happily twitch and jerk along, but I do think they did a masterful job of creating and maintaining a great atmosphere for dancing. I left with ringing ears and the “exercise high” I don’t actually get from normal exercising, only from dancing. Thank you Kode9 & Spaceape, first for exorcising us of the BSS disaster demons, and second for reminding me why I love clubbing. It’s been difficult to hold on to that memory, living here.

Broken Social Scene (Esplanade, Singapore, 9 March 2008)

I’m sure I must have been to duller gigs in my life than Broken Social Scene, but perhaps unsurprisingly, I can’t remember any of them now. In hindsight, it’s ridiculous that I’d been hoping the Esplanade sound system or a large live ensemble would help me appreciate the band’s songs better – at least on my iPod I could always just concentrate on my book and relegate them to aural wallpaper but now, here I was, trapped in an expensive concert seat with no other alternative for entertainment or distinctive musical ideas except Alec’s gentle snores beside me. I later found out Jacob and Pearlyn had walked out halfway, and realized for the second time that sometimes I really have to stop being so damn Singaporean about Getting My Money’s Worth, and just cut my losses and leave.

Perhaps some BSS fan might read this and my previous post on the topic and conclude that there was never any possibility I would enjoy the gig, because I was prejudiced against it from the outset. In fact, I was hoping against hope that like for Tortoise and Jaga Jazzist, I would go in actively disliking their music and emerge wild-eyed, reeling and evangelical. It’s possible my error of judgement here was equating BSS with the other two bands, because I find BSS’s music so pedestrian that I can’t even summon up active dislike for it, just complete indifference.

I don’t mean to enlist other people’s opinions in support of my own, but I enjoyed emptysignifier’s text-messages of outrage too much not to share them. (Again, emptysignifier attended the gig with an open mind, as a self-proclaimed “gigslut” just checking the band out. Although he has been on the receiving end of my music snobbery many times, he pays me no mind whatsoever, which is great.) I’ve received 4 instalments so far, starting immediately after the gig and even extending until yesterday! (Just provide RSS feed already lah!) Some excerpts:

“…for a band with a name like Broken Social Scene, they played more like a United National Front!…Why play a 2-chord rock song on FOUR guitars?!?!”
“While u rubbished them from the outset, I thought they were at least an erudite, intellectual band making introspective, eclectic, atmospheric music. But they’re really a rent-a-rock-band!”
“I mean, what’s with the woman and the trumpet? She had it hooked up to an uber cool utility belt of FX pedals, which was totally set up for consciousness-expanding sounds, but no matter what she did it still sounded like a goddamn trumpet!”
“…the ending was a fucking NDP warm-up cheering session!”
“Kevin Drew is the poor man’s Wayne Coyne!”

Even on a personal level and totally disregarding music, this gig = FAIL for me. I actually started the gig in a positive frame of mind about the band, because I thought their introductory joke about the members who weren’t present – including “Mas Selamat Kastari, who didn’t turn up for rehearsal” – was quite funny. Unfortunately, they then frittered away my goodwill over the course of the evening with a number of patronising comments (Matt, who attended the gig with an open mind since he’d never heard of them, and whose said mind I am incapable of poisoning with my music snobbery anyway, dealt with these pretty well in his account) and too many self-led cheerleading “OK EVERYONE CHEER FOR 60 SECONDS!!” sessions. For what blessedly turned out to be the very last one, after sitting in pained silence for the entire gig I finally reached the end of my tether and participated enthusiastically in the noisemaking by bawling “YOU SUCK! SHUT UP! FUCK OFF!”

King Rat: Needs A Remix

Oh dear, my naffness premonition about King Rat turned out to be right. Check out these lines:

“Saul’s heart was beating like a Jungle bassline.” [This is after Saul had been running for ages. Fuck saving the metropolis, dude has some serious irregular heartbeat issues to worry about! You want to exaggerate like this, say his heart was beating like Moby’s Thousand, but a jungle bassline is just…medically wrong.]
“The rats and Saul left the relative safety of London’s nightlands and entered the warehouse, the frenzied jaws of Drum and Bass, the domain of smoke and strobe lights and Hardcore, the Piper’s lair, the heart of Darkness, deep in the Jungle.” [Again with the unnecessary capitalisations. Are we in Brixton or the Hundred Acre Wood?]
“The Drum and Bass felt as if it would lift the hatch out of the floor, off into the sky. It was unforgiving, a punishing assault of original Hardcore beats.” [It feels a bit off to use that usual MC patois of “original hardcore” in a description like this. Is it just me?]
“She pulled the record back, let it forward again a little, pulled it back, scratching playfully like an old school rapper, finally releasing her hand and switching off the first tune in a smooth movement, unleashing the new bassline.” [Scratching like a rapper? Also, reading about how someone DJs is like watching paint dry.]

Apart from the drum’n’bass cringeworthiness, some other things about the book’s plot seem a bit misconceived, sort of like what you might come up with if you went out to a massive jungle night with your mates back in the day, took a lot of E, brought everyone back to yours to come down on some spliffs, and while lounging wrecked on your plonk-stained student flat carpet, started brainstorming ideas for a book. For example (some spoilers to follow, but I think they’re so damn obvious long before they happen that there’s no harm giving them away now):
Read More “King Rat: Needs A Remix”

King Rat (China Mieville)

I decided it was about time I read some China Mieville (although he’s a notable writer in his own right, I must admit the main draw for me was that he’s said the Borribles trilogy is one of his biggest influences) so I went looking in the library shelves. I know Perdido Street Station is his most celebrated work, but when I read the blurb on the back of King Rat it was clear I had to start with that instead:

Something is stirring in London’s dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul’s father, and left Saul to pay for the crime.

But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into his prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat.

In the night-land behind London’s facade, in sewers and slums and rotting dead spaces, Saul must learn his true nature.

Grotesque murders rock the city like a curse. Mysterious forces prepare for a showdown. With Drum and Bass pounding the backstreets, Saul confronts his bizarre inheritance – in the badlands of South London, in the heart of darkness, at the gathering of the Junglist Massive.

Like the DJ says: ‘Time for the Badman.‘

Potentially a bit naff, I know (who capitalizes dance music genre names like that? It’s like a Winnie the Pooh book), but how can I resist? I’m hoping it’ll be like Neverwhere…with riddim.

Words Of Mutilation

I’ve always pipe-dreamed about making some foray into freelance music writing, but I usually bring myself quickly back to reality by reminding myself that good music writing is damn difficult. I’m rarely satisfied with any of the writing I do here to begin with, and that’s already about music that stands out to me. So I worry that if I had to churn out something about music I was indifferent to, simply because I was getting paid to do it, the end product would be dismal.

I really hope the same reasons were at play for some of the bad writing I’m about to “showcase” – a rather bitchy thing to do, I know, but what are blogs for if not for occasionally venting the impotent fury that would bemuse and bore everyone else around you?

From Juice magazine, I’m not sure which edition (I photographed the offending text and threw away the rest), Pavan Shamdasani reviews a Pixies tribute album. Here’s the full text of the review:

“This is odd. There’s a considerable chance that you’ve never heard of The Pixies. They were never a mainstream band, and most of their popularity appeared years after their break-up, when Kurt Cobain admitted to ripping off their stop/start dynamics. So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. And even stranger are the cover choices – a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on “Gigantic”? A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad “Hey”? A Mogwai noisefest on “Gouge Away”? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in “Where Is My Mind?” OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special.”

There’s a considerable chance that you’ve never heard of The Pixies. Way to start off a review, dude – with a big dose of condescension for your readers!
…most of their popularity appeared… Popularity does not “appear” fully formed from Zeus’s head, it is “gained” or “garnered”.
So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. Where do I even begin? 1) Ferry disasters have casualties. Bands do not. 2) A huge number of tribute albums are made for people who are live and kicking. Google this if you need proof. 3) It is either misleading or ignorant to describe a band who broke up acrimoniously in 1993 and didn’t reform until 2004 as “still touring up till last year”. 4) The act of putting out an album cannot be described as a strange “occurrence”. It may be a strange “move” or an odd “decision”, but it is not an “occurrence”.
And even stranger are the cover choices – a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on “Gigantic”? Because male emo singers aren’t allowed to enjoy big black cocks, clearly.
A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad “Hey”? A Mogwai noisefest on “Gouge Away”? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in “Where Is My Mind?” OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special. What’s so self-evidently wrong with any of the cover choices described? Why do they pay little tribute to what made The Pixies so special? And given that the writer starts off the review by assuming most of his readers don’t even know the band, how on earth are they now supposed to understand this conclusion if he doesn’t throw them any frickin’ bone machines?

Mosaic Festival Vs Grey’s Anatomy Soundtrack…FIGHT!

I guess it was too much to hope that 2008’s Mosaic festival would be as unbelievably awesome for me as 2007’s. The indie acts coming mostly make pretty indie music for pretty indie kids, which is not a bad thing in itself, but everything I’ve heard by them is also pretty uninspired. I loved and still like MÃºm’s Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK but the tweeness of Finally We Are No One and Summer Make Good means that those albums really haven’t stood the test of time for me. I also found them quite dull live, and in hindsight it’s quite amazing that when I saw them in 2004, Animal Collective (who far outshone them, and I wish it was them coming here instead) was merely their opening band.

I’ll probably end up going to a bunch of gigs anyway since I’m always so desperate for them here, but much will depend on ticket prices, which are usually quite high. At times like this I’m especially thankful for The Necessary Stage’s Singapore Fringe Festival, which has offered adventurous and unpatronising music events for the past few years at great prices. We just got our $15 tickets for the Colleen / Sylvain Chauveau / Hauschka triplebill at the Esplanade Recital Studio – I mean, seriously. Seriously!