Sonic Youth Snark Snippets

I haven’t bothered to read many reviews of The Destroyed Room, the new Sonic Youth rarities collection, because, well, good or bad reviews are fairly irrelevant to my need to own anything Sonic Youth, but as it turns out I’m quite happy I wandered into this one at Stylus. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here are some especially funny snippets:

“In an effort, presumably, to stay lock-step with Ghostface in the holiday odds £ sods market, the Yoof have put together The Destroyed Room: B-Sides and Rarities or More Fish for Balding White Music Critics.”

“The Diamond Sea, which originally clocked in at 19 minutes, wasn’t exactly yearning for an extended mix.”

“If you own all this material, congratulations: you are probably David Fricke or Lee Ranaldo’s mother.”

Here I Go, Here I Go, Here I Go Again

Long-suffering is the man who queues up at the long-queue Punggol nasi lemak place on Tanjong Katong Road to ta pao for the sore-footed fiance lazing on the couch in his flat, watches 3 episodes of the X-Files with her while she squeals “AWWWW POOR SCULLLEEEEE…DEAD??! HE CAN’T BE DEAD!…HE’S ALIVE YAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY!” (studying in England screwed up my X-Files viewing, so I haven’t seen any episodes from the middle of season 8 onwards) intermittently throughout the evening and finally, sits calmly while said fiance gleefully searches out old Salt’N’Pepa videos on Youtube and raps to them because she fucking feels like it.

I bet you’re thinking this is a poor excuse for a post, and so far, you would be right. But you see, although all of the above did happen, I wouldn’t normally bother blogging about it. But then I found this:

Jens Lekman (Bar Baa Black Chic, 24 Jan 07)

I have to give it to Jens Lekman, it takes a certain je ne sais quois to start your gig in a packed club of indiepop kids by playing a yodelly folk track, segueing into dancehall, and then playing about 3 or 4 more tracks on the console without singing a single note into the microphone while intermittently tossing glowsticks into the crowd. I can’t say I thought it was the best way to start off (dude, I didn’t stand in this sardine can for the past two hours in my pointy work heels just to hear you DJ) but hey, maybe that’s just the way he rolls.

I quickly forgave him when he finally started off his set with Black Cab, my favourite song on Oh You’re So Silent Jens, though it’s a pity the backing track was a little too loud and drowned out his singing. The next highlight of the gig for me was how enthusiastic the crowd was in singing along, most audibly to the chorus of I Saw Her In The Anti-War Demonstration, the “ba-ba-ba-ba” bits of A Sweet Summer Night On Hammer Hill, You Are The Light and the “I’ll come running with my heart on fire” bits of Pocketful Of Money, where he basically let the crowd take over and only needed to sing the backing vocals.

The last two highlights of the night for me were completely unexpected. A Postcard To Nina, which I wasn’t familiar with, is a hilarious account of a visit to Berlin to see his penpal Nina, before she moves to San Francisco with her girlfriend. She invites him to dinner (“great vegetarian German food”) at her parents’ house, only to inform him on the doorstep that she’s told them he’s her boyfriend. He delivers the next line to us with deadpan understatement: “And then it gets really awkward.” I can’t really do the rest of the song justice by describing it here, but a quick Google search suggests it’s a crowd favourite at lots of his gigs so perhaps a copy will surface online.

After finishing Pocketful Of Money, he wondered aloud what song he should sing next and someone shouted A Man Walks Into A Bar. Deliberately mishearing (I assume), he said “A man walks down the street?” and promptly launched into You Can Call Me Al! To the American-accented guys next to me who had the following conversation – “I’ve actually not heard this one before. Is it a cover?” “No, I don’t think so.” – I can only say I envy you for having escaped one of the most annoying songs of the 80s. But in that funny way that things go, I loved his cover, so here I am today digging out Graceland and listening to it again for the first time in a while.

By the end of the gig, Jens had a glowstick-waving, flower-strewn (during the gig he’d been throwing orange gerberas into the crowd) audience in the palm of his hand. He ended things off much like they began – a little strangely – by playing Scala’s cover of Heartbeats on the console, then leaving the stage to come meet the crowd. My track record of debilitating mortification from meeting people I admire suggested I shouldn’t attempt any communication with him, so I waited outside while Atarashi got his autograph, after which the least I could do to thank her for rocking so hard was to buy her prata.

Setlist:

  1. Black Cab
  2. I’m Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You
  3. The Opposite Of Hallelujah
  4. I Saw Her In The Anti-War Demonstration
  5. A Sweet Summer Night On Hammer Hill
  6. You Are The Light
  7. Maple Leaves
  8. A Postcard To Nina
  9. Pocketful Of Money
  10. You Can Call Me Al
  11. Julie

Jens Lekman Plea

Because I suck, I left it till too late to buy Jens Lekman tickets, and now they’re sold out. If anyone knows of any extra tickets that become available, or existing tickets that aren’t being used for whatever reason, PLEASE hook me up (email syntaxfree at gmail) and I’ll display my gratitude by buying you beer and singing your praises. Alternatively, if you hate my guts and are willing to give up your ticket to see me humiliated, I’ll stand in the road outside Bar Baa Black Chic proclaiming my undying love for Coldplay and singing a Coldplay song of your choice.

Addendum:
Q: HOW MUCH DOES ATARASHI ROCK??!
A: PRETTY FUCKEN HARD.

Thanks ever so much, I owe you one. :) :) :)

Mo’ Money Mo’ Mosaic

Lord have mercy, the Esplanade has more than compensated for the borefest that was last year’s Mosaic festival (Jason Mrazzzzz and Kingzzzzz of Convenienzzzzz) with this year’s lineup. My bank account’s going all “Bitch, please,” but I’m justifying it as a week of birthday celebrations.

So far, this is what I intend to attend:

12 March: Yo La Tengo (third time!)
13 March: Jaga Jazzist
14 March: DJ Vadim
15 March: Chick Corea and Gary Burton
18 March: Femi Kuti

This is just the trimmed-down list I arrived at after a painful priority-setting exercise resulted in the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Terry Callier, Jose Gonzalez, Rickie Lee Jones, Nerina Pallot and Ursula Rucker being relegated to my second “if I can spare the cash” tier. I’m still a little wracked with guilt over the choices given that I’ve seen 2 of the first-tier acts before already (YLT and DJ Vadim), so if you think it’s a travesty that I’m passing up the chance for one of the bands in my second tier (or any others in the lineup) please let me know and I might waver.

Popcorn

You know how when half-asleep and half-awake you can get lost in thoughts that are almost like Dadaist films? And if someone happens to come wake you up in the middle of this you start babbling incoherently, like “No, I’m not going to work today because I need to stay and wait for the clothespeg inspector,” and it’s really embarrassing while you sleepily try to explain why the clothespegs need to be inspected (so that your kindergarten teacher can use them in her home renovations, naturellement) and somewhere along the way it slowly begins to dawn on you that no clothespeg inspections will be necessary, you haven’t seen your kindergarten teacher in twenty years, and the other person is laughing their ass off?

(Please God, don’t let this just be me.)

So anyway, this has happened to me a fair number of times while sleeping normally in my bed, but Friday was the first time it was prompted by the particular music I was listening to. Deep in my usual commuting drowse on the bus to work with Hood’s Cold House on the iPod, somewhere around the last 50 seconds of I Can’t Find My Brittle Youth I became convinced that the popcorn machine on the bus was overheated and about to explode. Why was everyone so calm? Maybe I needed to raise the alarm and alert everyone to the danger so we could escape from the bus! Maybe it was too late and we should just all hit the floor to avoid being skewered by flying shards of hot buttered metal!

I jerked awake in shock and stared bug-eyed around the bus for a good five to ten seconds before I realized that springing into either course of action would be a very very bad idea.

Matthew Herbert: Plat Du Jour

I haven’t been enjoying Matthew Herbert’s Scale anywhere as much as I liked Plat Du Jour, which was one of my top albums of 2005. Scale’s nice and catchy for when you’re riding in a convertible and drinking cocktails with paper umbrellas in them but I don’t find it as musically interesting as Plat Du Jour, and after a while all the breezy flirtiness of the music feels a bit vapid to me.

Since it appears (from the Metacritic stats, anyway) that the bulk of music writers don’t agree with me, I thought I’d dig up my old unpublished, unpolished review of Plat Du Jour and give it the props I should have last year:

Plat Du Jour took 2 years to research and 6 months to record. It was born out of Matthew Herbert’s growing distaste for the workings of the international food chain and the songs themselves are crafted using, amongst other sounds, eggs as percussion, melodies made from blowing over the top of a Pepsi Max bottle, and field recordings of slimfast breakfast drinks tied to a bike and ridden round the yard.

So there’s a fair amount of gimmickry on Plat Du Jour and a couple of ways to react to it. One, you can explore the site as you listen to the album, marvel at the lengths he went to in making this, and actually learn something about what we should all perhaps think harder about before ingesting. Two, you can dismiss it as wank and simply see if the album holds up on its own musical merits first without having to bother about The Message.

I chose option two, plus a large order of fries to go. But thankfully, the music impressed me enough to make me want to find out more about The Message, which I think is quite possibly the best outcome a musician could hope for.

Plat Du Jour makes you bop ya head considerably more often than you would expect from an album which bases one of its songs (The Final Meal Of Stacey Lawton) on the jar of pickles a condemned man ate for his last meal. The song featuring various field recordings of chickens (The Truncated Life Of A Modern Industrialised Chicken) is, well, quite funky. These Branded Waters gets great wind instrument tones from the mouths of San Pellegrino bottles and segues halfway into a jazzy bit where I somehow keep feeling they’re going to break into the Super Mario theme. I can’t exactly pinpoint the amazing bass on An Empire Of Coffee from the recording details on the site but I think it’s probably 2 Sara Lee instant croissant tins tied together with a piece of garden string and plucked. Celebrity has Dani Siciliano on vocals, is made entirely from food endorsed by celebrities and features a chorus of “Go Gordon! Go Ramsay! Go Beyonce! Go Beyonce!” Hidden Sugars backfires a bit insofar as it gives me yet another reason to love cans of Coke – which all its melodies, chords and basslines are made from.

Making a concept album is often a sure-fire way to garner criticism from people who just don’t buy into it, but I do think you can enjoy this album purely for its music regardless of whether you buy its message. My only criticism, and it’s tongue-in-cheek at that, is that the great music Matthew Herbert’s made from junk food only validates my abiding love of it. I bet this album wouldn’t be half as fun if it were only made from organic produce.

Clan Of The Nick Cave Barenaked Ladies

This Coudal Partners contest on book/band mashups (via Daryl) is fun! Here are just a few of the entries that took my fancy:

  • Charlie and the C&C Music Factory
  • Chromeo and Juliet
  • Qur’an Duran
  • Courtney Love in the Time of Cholera
  • Bridge over the River Jamiroquai
  • The Odyssey and Cake
  • Pop Will Eat Shoots And Leaves
  • The Sun Also RZA (probably my favourite)

The contest’s over already, but as usual with these sort of things I couldn’t resist coming up with some of my own anyway.

Children’s books:

  • The BFG-Unit
  • Harriet the Spinal Tap
  • The Little Bonnie Prince Billy
  • The Curious Incident of the Snoop Dogg in the Three Dog Night

    • (double mashup!)

  • Smokey Robinson Crusoe
  • Alec Empire Of The Sun (okay objectively this one isn’t great but I’m sure you understand why it amuses me)

Penguin Classics:

  • Of Mice Parade And Men
  • East 17 Of Eden
  • Northanger ABBA
  • To The Lighthouse Family
  • The Autumn Of the Patrick Wolf
  • Mason And Dixie Chicks
  • Pnine Inch Nails
  • The Chemical Brothers Karamazov
  • Donna Summer Quixote
  • Tess of the D’urbervillage People

Others:

  • The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay Aiken
  • Kafka On The Beach Boys
  • We Need To Talk Talk About Kevin
  • If On A Winter’s Night A Blues Traveller
  • Anil’s Ghostface Killah
  • New Thom Yorke Trilogy
  • True History of the Kelly Gang Starr
  • Last Exit To Crooklyn Dodgers
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Ketchup

So awful that I just couldn’t leave them out:

  • W-iliad Grant Conspiracy
  • The Anticon-Tiki Expedition (yes, I know, record label)
  • The Bonjovifire of the Vanities
  • The Alcutchemist

Let’s hear yours!

Sonic Nurse, Two Years Late

I was just about to SQUEEEEEEEEEE all over this blog about Sonic Youth’s new album, which I got my hands on yesterday, but suddenly remembered that my reaction to the previous album was still languishing in my as yet unpublished top 10 list of 2004. Yes, I know.

So, since it’s not like this blog is overloading you with entries to read these days, I thought I’d just dig that up and post it as a prelude.

Sonic Nurse (Sonic Youth):

I should begin by admitting that I am incapable of being objective about this album. I’ve tried and failed to figure out how I would react to it if it were the first Sonic Youth album I’d ever heard, perhaps listening to it only because I’d read a good Pitchfork review, rather than in the context of what feels like the culmination of my decade of fanhood.

This album is vintage Sonic Youth firing on all songwriter and instrumentalist cylinders, and they know it. Pattern Recognition starts things off with what feels like unassailable confidence; you realize that this band which has collaborated with artists running the gamut from free jazz to glitchy ambient electronica and released entire albums of pure feedback is finally doing a tribute to themselves, and it’s going to be stunning. There are no dud tracks here – every song could have been the highlight of some lesser band’s career-peak album. New Hampshire, probably my favourite, is as broody and propulsive as anything on Daydream Nation, and although they keep this album version pretty tight at just a little over 5 minutes, it’s the sort of track that’s just begging for a protracted screaming-guitar-noise-freakout jam when done live. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to describe Kim Gordon’s singing as “heartfelt” before, but in I Love You Golden Blue she breathes her lines with a vulnerability I find surprisingly affecting.

In Paper Cup Exit, the line “I don’t mind if you sing a different song, sing a different song, just as long as you sing, as you sing, sing along” may seem incoherent or contradictory, but if you’re a Sonic Youth fan it makes total sense. As this excellent review at Stylus observed, “despite the consistently fine song-writing the band has to offer, it isn’t the songs themselves that keep their fans coming back. Rather, Sonic Youth is a band at perfect synergy with itself. Every tangential instrumental passage seems not premeditated, but psychically transposed.”

I heard Daydream Nation when I was 14; it changed the way I listened to music. Ten years on, as much as my musical horizons have expanded, Sonic Youth’s sprawling dissonance still explodes more stars in my head and quickens my heartbeat with more pure aural joy than anything else does. Sonic Nurse is my number one album of the year for more reasons than musical brilliance alone – it is beautiful unmistakable proof to me that my favourite band, 24 years, 19 albums, countless experimental tangents, and immeasurable critical acclaim after its formation, has not ceased to listen, create, and rock.