Bonnie 'Prince Billy' - A Whorehouse is Any House

A Whorehouse is Any House

I've maintained for years and will continue to maintain until evidence to the contrary arises that Will Oldham is the best there is at the songwriting style of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, et al. The phrase singer-songwriter irks not just because it reminds one of so much garbage music but also because it doesn't seem to really describe anything musical. Terminology aside, this is a recognizable categorization of musicians, if not necessarily a genre -- right?

Anyway, I call Oldham the best at this. His great songs are at least as sublime as those of the more famous aforementioned, his body of work more varied with more success (not counting his lame album of Nashville-style self-covers), his voice richer and more interesting, his collaborators superior. Oh, and he writes good words. That's not my main interest with most music, but dude has made me love the poetry of song more regularly than anyone else.

And so I'm going to share this one Oldham gem, which shines all the brighter for me as I only managed to hear it on a CD-R a friend copied me years ago of Palace / Bonnie Prince Billy ephemera. A quick search turns up that it was the b-side on a Sub Pop 7" from '99. Apparently it bears the provocative title "A Whorehouse is Any House." News to me.

In a perfect gentle harmony with a woman named Glynnis McDaris (according to Discogs), accompanied by first-take casual/lazy guitar, bass, and percussion (is that someone patting on a table?), the narrator of the song describes following a woman home from a bar, both of them drunk. A classic singalong-friendly chorus -- with all the beauty of a pre-pop folk tune and none of the hokiness of almost all imitators of pre-pop folk tunes -- affirms his love of the pursuit of the woman over the actual attainment: "And I needed so much to have nothing to touch / and I wanted so dear to have nothing so near." Or maybe it's not even that straightforward. Does he lust after having nothing? (Recalling the epic line from Days in the Wake "When you have no one, no one can hurt you" -- that might not seem so epic being quoted, but listen to it sung and be convinced).

Apparently that's not it either, as right after the chorus he's in her room (though "her room is my world"?) and he slips in to her bed, still apparently unacknowledged, and "she doesn't stir, so I saddle up warmer and warmer to her." There follows a transcendent musical goof: four bars of synth sexy time.

And then one more time with that chorus that I can hear a thousand times and keep wanting to hear again.

Jimmy Cousins & the Crime Spree - "Coo Coo Brain"

Coo Coo Brain

Jimmy Cousins writes southern rock songs that you swear you heard before, and has the voice to justify such an act.  The last time he lived in Philly I had the good fortune to play bass in his band, along with Jake Anodide on drums and Eliot Klein on keys.  This track is from a CD-R that Colin Langenus from USA is a Monster put together, and which I'm happy to share since I haven't the slightest idea how you'd get a copy if you wanted it.  The disc is half Colin's Brooklyn funk band (with members of Talibam and Gwar!) backing Jimmy, half us (credited as "The Crime Spree"), and a few other tracks to boot.  Several tunes are recorded with both bands.  Whatever.  You'll never hear it unless you really like this song and you come over to my house and ask me to put it on.

The song is a winner from start to finish.  A pleasure of finally getting the CD-R (thanks Eliot and Richie for heading south on tour!) was hearing Jimmy's psyched out vocal doubling, but the song stands even without the manipulation.

I believe Jimmy's in Shreveport now.  Maybe he'll be back at some point.  In the meantime, come over and I'll play you the rest of the songs. 

p.s. This doesn't count as "self-promotion" (see other page of this site) because this was me being subservient to the song.  Jen Rice also played in Jimmy's Philly band, and it could just as well have been her on this track as me.

A Minor Forest - So Jesus Was at the Last Supper. . .

So Jesus Was at the Last Supper. . .

This song is from a true forgotten masterpiece, A Minor Forest's Flemish Altruism. Sometimes I let myself fantasize that the world of independent rock bands will rediscover and want to imitate this band and its brilliant balance of visceral punk energy stripped of adolescent rage crossed with sly composition stripped of chamber/prog pretense. And that I'll still be going to shows when that happens.

As much as anything, I love that A Minor Forest rocks lean. Their songs aren't simple and they certainly aren't concise, but every element steps in and makes its statement without flailing sonic excess or unnecessary instrumental duplication. I picked this track less because it's one of my favorites on the album -- I love it, but there are ones I love more -- than because it's such a nice illustration of this leanness, despite running for an almost totally linear fourteen minutes.

It opens with a syncopated 4/4 drum beat soon joined by a dead-simple 3/4 guitar arpeggio and then eventually a teutonic slow bass line. None of the parts would be particularly exciting in isolation, but together they make a lattice* as tight as the math rock analog to the parts of a James Brown tune -- that's a pretty loose comparison, but feel me on the syncopated simple-part combo, if you would.

Another great AMF feature is the drummer (I'm pretty sure it's the drummer) screaming starting at 2:38 while the guitar remains undistorted. Hello? How come no one else ever does that move? Why does it have to be that if one dude is rocking out at 11, all distortion pedals must be on?

Other great features are all the other parts and how much they rock. So about that '90s indie post-punk math-metal revival. . .


*It is hearby acknowledged that I used the metaphor of a lattice earlier in this blog. I think it works well for music I like, so whatever. I'm surely the only person who noticed of the four people who actually read these posts.

Circles - "Away With the Tide"

Away With the Tide

My friend Nick Millevoi plays guitar in a lot of different contexts.  Most of it falls in the umbrella of free jazz, or at least of free-thinking jazz moves applied to music in other genres.  He used to be the leader of a band called Cirles, though, which at its most exciting moments played what I like of think of as free rock.*  Free rock, in my lose conception, isn't rock dudes totally shredding with lots of dissonance and improvisation (as in Nick's excellent current band, Many Arms) -- that's more like rock fusion.  Free rock has songs, and songs that would make sense as rock songs of one subgenre of rock or another, but that are being muddied, confused, and ripped apart by the musicians' rendering.

On "Away With the Tide," the plaintive melody and it's slight variation with double-Nick harmony repeat with only a quick break for the duration of the song, ceding the foreground to the two drummers, rumbling faster and slower, like Sunny Murray more than any other classic free jazz drummer (maybe. . . someone correct me if there's a closer comparison).  Despite his formidable ax abilities, Nick approaches his instrument only for accompanying arpeggiation, speeding and slowing, but never varying from his chord progression.   The entrance halfway through of Dan Blacksberg on trombone brings only brilliant coloration of the harmonies, but no wailing.  We're left humming along with the vocals -- and four years after I first heard it I'm still happy every time this song gets stuck in my head -- and marveling at how much better a piece of music this is for lacking the bland drumming of the radio country rock that could accompany that melody.

Alas, after many line-up changes since this recording, Circles has been inactive for a while now. Perhaps we'll find out in the comments section below whether they're "broken up." 

*Yeah, I know, Nick.  Many Arms has songs.  And Storm & Stress, who I think of as the height of free rock, just barely did. Maybe I still need to work on this theory.

Tiala - コトバのナカ

Tiala

This raw burst of energy is the first track of two on a CD-R that I got when I lived in Japan in 2004. The band is called Tiala, and I saw them at one of a string of shows that I went to with an Australian guy named Jordan who somehow knew and loved the band Neil Perry, which band I hadn't imagined anyone knew outside of New Jersey. Judging from the shows that Jordan took me to, '90s American screamo was blowing up in Japan in the mid-aughts, but I remember thinking Tiala was the best of what I heard. In fact I remember thinking they were better live than most of the equivalent stuff I heard in New Brunswick basements during my time there ('98-'03). Maybe it was just hearing it in such a different context.

Either way, I remember this band destroying a packed room of well-mannered Japanese. This track suggests why. Also I'm pretty sure the freak out part in the last few seconds of the song was the sort of thing they did a lot more of live. This isn't a particularly groundbreaking piece of work, but I'm psyched every time I re-find this disc in a pile and put it on again. Since there's approximately zero chance that anyone in the United States of America would ever hear it, I figure it's worth sharing.

Harmonia - "Dino"

Dino

This collection of music appreciations would be incomplete without something on the German bands from the '70s loosely grouped together under the label "krautrock." Rather than highlighting an obvious masterpiece, I feel like picking out a perfectly generic track to draw out a few things about why this retroactively reified genre rules so hard.

This is from the debut of Harmonia, which was two the dudes from Cluster and Michael Rother from Neu! (who was also an original member of Kraftwerk) cloistered in a studio making side project recordings that often exceed the considerable excellence of their primary bands. The track fades in and and out, and in fact these recording sessions sound like an extended summoning of a mood, rather than a conscious laying down of a "piece," much less of a song -- I suspect that each track on the album is culled from a much longer jam. The mood summoned captures, as well as anything in the krautrock corpus, a perfect balance of mechanical propulsion and pastoral beauty. The three musicians (jamming live and overdubbing, I imagine) tightly weave together simple synth and guitar parts so that none is ever quite in the lead -- the entire lattice of sound is at the forefront in way that I don't think is too farfetched to call baroque. Every phrase marches along, or enters and exits, cleanly and clinically, as though assembled on a cost-efficient music assembly line. The miracle of the thing, though, is that it does this without sacrificing warmth. Maybe that's not much more complicated than the musicians having a bunch of really sweet analog synths. The only thing that doesn't sound pre-programmed is Rother throwing in some short subtle guitar phrases that color in the spaces but pass up the chance to take the stage and solo.

At the root of the thing is the interlocking of drum machine in dead-simple 4/4 and bass in lightly syncopated 7/4. This groove make the track downright danceable if you're the sort of person who likes to dance to rock music. I'm not one of those people, but I'm in luck because this track -- along with the rest of the album -- can be heard as pure ambient music as easily as it can be heard as music to move to.

Busta Rhymes & Ol' Dirty Bastard - Woo Haa!! Remix

I don't have to tell anyone who was alive in the '90s about the original version of this song, but it's my experience that most people don't know this remix. It's also my experience that this might be the weirdest act of rapping committed to tape. If that's not true, I'd love to hear what's weirder.

The track starts almost identical to the original, just a notch slower, but wait. . . what's going on in the background? Yes, buried in the mix, hollering and howling like a drunk singing in the subway, it's the Ol' Dirty Bastard. This anti-intro hardly prepares the listener for the insanity that follows once we can mostly make out what ODB is saying, and once we can clearly hear his positively Beefheartian vocal melodies. He turns Busta Rhymes's song -- which, with its tritone bassline and eerie "yaa yaa yaa" chorus, was already pretty cartoonish and irreverant -- into something that can hardly be heard as pop music.

Busta opens telling us how dominant his squad is, to which ODB responds that "we on some outerspace shit like you watch Star Trek." It's pretty clear from what follows that "we" might just be ODB and his various personalities (Big Baby Jesus, Dirt McGirt). Each free associatively nasty ("I had a wet dream that I was boning Jody Watley") or crazed line is half-rapped/half-sung/half-shouted in a different psychotic voice, and many are elongated long in to the next line as though the rapper is too drunk and high to realize that something else is going on. One could in fact speculate on the state of the Wu Tang maestro's consciousness, but whatever was going on the recording studio that day, it must be acknowledged the advanced musicality involved in taking rapping to this level of experimentation.

If you don't buy that, take a listen again to the third minute of the song. After a trippy bridge where several of the sounds play backward and both men rap simultaneously kind of like they don't want you to hear what they're saying, Busta seems to try to bring the song back to earth with a verse of fairly conventional content and meter. ODB will have none of it, though, as he comes in at 2:59 with a half unintelligible verse (what does he say about a "fungus bowl"?) that's based around a short melodic phrase that has nothing to do with the rest of the song, and is laid down with a rhythmic sensibility as free any free jazzman's. The verse ends with two seconds (3:18-3:20) during which he sounds like he's choking on his tongue. . . then spits out that phrase one more time.

Oh, and the video's pretty weird too.