Peel Sessions II - Dinosaur Jr., Timber

I

Some of you will have already heard this, since I mixed up the two Peel sessions I was planning on posting. Anyway, Leatherface is back in its rightful place and for those of you who weren't able to take advantage of that happy accident, here's Dinosaur Jr. in a proper post...

I never really knew this band until I heard their latest single, 'Crumble', on heavy rotation on my local radio. Soon I went out and bought the album, Beyond, and boy, is it good. So good that it's still on heavy rotation on my stereo; so good that the first 3 seconds of 'Almost Ready' contains the sum of all human emotion ever expressed through the electric guitar. Yes, it's that good.

These recordings are about two decades previous, but despite differing production values and a somewhat rawer sound, they're recognisably by the same band. In any case, J. Mascis's voice is pretty distinctive; it's charm for me now rivals that of the almighty Stubbs of Leatherface. Dinosaur Jr. straddle the sounds of punk and grunge, hence their anaemic categorization as 'alternative rock': someone commented on my Husker Du post that they were the band "Nirvana stole from"; perhaps, but Dinosaur Jr. did the same and with more authentic flair. Dinosaur Jr. embody the anarchy and the emotion of that notorious strand of post-punk, emo; they are subversive of grunge in their tender gruffness, and defiantly SST-style hardcore in their gritty sonic assault.

These four songs, again like the Leatherface session, are split over two studio albums. A pretty good snapshot of the band in earlier days, and one which more than reflects their current sound:

Dinosaur Jr. - 11/88

II

Now, I'm no John Peel, but this nice guy from the States did e-mail me his band's demo tape. Already in Mediafire format, nonetheless - cassette tapes are so old-fashioned. He also sent to me a while ago, and for that I apologise.

Timber are a three-piece from Gaithersburg, MD, with a wide range of influences (Neu!, Drive Like Jehu, Wire, Brian Eno, amongst others), a good hardcore sound and the possibility of a 7" due out in the spring. Check out their demo here or stream their songs on this site. Enjoy!

Blog Action Day 2007

'Jet Set Ready'

"So I ask myself, are we too far gone?

Because ever since we put our hands on the mill, we’ve been cutting strong.

Blind to life and the consequences of taking life.

We’re not jet set ready. We’re sinking with the ship we built too quickly.

But we’ll shift and reshift the blame to keep it off our conscience that we helped to build it.

So long to the simple song, the balanced one that’s long gone forgotten by more than some.

Minds burned while young by pioneers gone wrong.

Who won’t cease to live without oppressing life…

And so long to the ways that we knew fit with the world that we lived in.

They didn’t generate enough wealth or power when we can take and take until we have it all.

We live in a gracious world, a forgiving world, and show our thanks with industry.

Open eyes can see while open mouths could speak to change or rearrange what should not be taken."

(Hot Water Music - No Division)

‘Kyoto Now’

"it’s a matter of prescience but not the science fiction kind it’s all about ignorance, and greed, and miracles for the blind the media parading, disjointed politics founded on petro-chemical plunder and we’re its hostages

if you stand to reason you’re in the game the rules may be elusive but our pieces are the same and you know if one goes down we all go down as well the balance is precarious as anyone can tell this world’s going to hell

Don’t allow this mythologic hopeful monster to exact it’s price Kyoto now! We can’t do nothing and think someone else will make it right

You might not think it matters now but what if you are wrong you might not think there’s any wisdom in a fucked up punk rock song but the way it is cannot persist for long, a brutal sun is rising on our sick horizon it’s in the way we live our lives exactly like the double edge of a cold familiar knife and supremacy weighs heavy on the day it’s never really what you own but what you threw away and how much did you pay? in your dreams you saw a steady state a bounty for eternity

- silent screams –

but now the wisdom that sustains us is in full retreat

Don’t allow this mythologic hopeful monster isn’t worth the risk Kyoto now! We can’t have vision for the future if it can’t be fixed

Alien

We need a fresh and new religion to run our lives

Hand in hand

The arid torpor of our lives will be our demise"

(Bad Religion - The Process of Belief)

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Download the Hardcore for Nerds special Blog Action Day 2007 release: Jet Set Ready b/w Kyoto Now

Peel Sessions - Leatherface

It seems today is John Peel Day, it being the anniversary of his last live broadcast on October 11, 2004. RIP John Peel.

I've had this post in the works for a while, chiefly as an another alternative to posting another full album. Something short and sweet being required, these 10-20 minute sessions fit the bill nicely. I never really listened to John Peel on the radio (although I could always get the BBC stations on cable) but we are all, I reckon, familiar with the concept of radio sessions. If one were to be grandiose, they could be classed as a pre-Internet equivalent of the music blog. Highlighting a particular band, usually at a particular defined point in their career, in a short and accessible format.

So without any further ado, here is one excellent example of British broadcasting at its finest...

Leatherface - 12/93 [It's actually Leatherface; I accidentally posted the Dinosaur Jr. session, but that's fixed now]

Leatherface shouldn't need much of an introduction - abysmally gruff, tenderly fragile post-punk/hardcore from Sunderland. Contemporary UK punk at its best, and with a slight reggae inflection. Come to think of it, that makes them sound like a British Fugazi... suffice to say, I think they could probably hold their own.

This session features four songs, 'Heaven Sent', 'In My Life', 'Do the Right Thing' and 'Little White God'. The first and the third are from the album Minx, the other two from their (at the time) final album, The Last. The latter was released, effectively posthumously, after this session - although the group subsequently reformed (more of which later... see 'Coming Soon'). These songs are perhaps Leatherface at their pinnacle, challenged only by either (in my opinion) the B.Y.O. split, or their classic Mush album. Words fail me in describing the heartache, emotion, viscera and soul of these songs. They are simply liquid gold in aural form, electric tears vibrating in the carotid pulse of drumbeats...

These songs are all, as I say, album tracks, but here the radio-quality sound, all shifting volumes and muddied frequencies, adds an extra layer of mystery to their sound. Their real quality doesn't suffer from it, but rather makes it feel distinctly immediate. You can imagine that you are actually listening to them play on the radio, hearing the angular chimes of Dickie Hammond's guitar and the gravelly lyricisms of the wonderful Frankie Norman Warsaw Stubbs. (Yep. That's British names for you).

Finally, as an added bonus, this recording (which I think I got from the Leatherface fansite, www.x1984x.com/shipyards, although I'm not exactly sure where) contains snippets of John Peel talking between songs. On this day, I think it is particularly poignant that he announces Leatherface's "final session for us, or indeed for anybody else... they broke up the day after apparently"

And on that note, I'd just like to say, "don't worry... we got more coming". I just had to get the start of this post up on the 11th...

Envy - 'Scene' (video)

I particularly wanted to post this video, not because it’s all that good in quality, but because of what it signified when I saw it first: the arrival of a new Envy album. Insomniac Doze, as indeed this song shows, proved to be quite a different beast from A Dead Sinking Story. Which album, in turn, was significantly different from the preceding one – a fact that allows some people to portray Envy as a ‘maturing’ screamo band, abandoning the chaos and brutality of their earlier work for a calmer, more reflective post-rock sound. They’ve quietened down, into the epic, cinematic musicians they always wanted to be, into the next stage of artistic achievement. While, equally, for some people the idea of a ‘maturing’ screamo band is by definition a sad decline – a crying shame, one might say, rather than a screaming pride…

What I’ve just sketched is I think a pretty straightforward account of Envy’s current musical evolution; however, it’s too pat, too mean and too dull. Because, above all, it makes it too easy to write off Insomniac Doze as Envy’s boring, late album.

And that’s a shame, because Insomniac Doze could quite possibly be Envy’s most beautiful, authentic record yet.

What I want to talk about today is shoegaze. Why? Because in the overwhelming beauty of, say, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless (one of the best albums ever made) is the key to understanding Insomniac Doze. Or at least, since ‘key’ sounds a bit too dogmatic, another approach to the appreciation of Envy’s music.

Genres are always ambiguous, and I don’t wish to confuse post-rock with shoegaze. If you’ve watched the video above, no, ‘Scene’ isn’t a shoegaze song. (But the following song on the album, ‘Crystallize’, takes the same melody, adds in a few dance-y steps, drapes itself in shimmering guitar distortion… and you’re halfway to MBV’s ‘Soon’. In my opinion). A liking for shoegaze is not a direct correlation with enjoying Insomniac Doze, but it helps to get the feel of the album - its slowness of sound and its sheer density.

Further on this point, there is already a band which has been combining the elements of post-rock and shoegaze – Justin Broadrick’s Jesu. I was very interested in hearing Conqueror or Sun Down/Sun Rise, just on the basis of their apparent synthesis of styles. And don't get me wrong - they are all pretty good records. However, in my opinion they don’t quite live up to their potential – or rather, I should say I find them frankly a little bit dull. Which is why, by contrast, Insomniac Doze proves to be such an enjoyable album. Envy are still, when it comes down to it, a great screamo band.

Insomniac Doze takes the poise of post-rock, the tenderness of shoegaze, and combines it all with the power and dynamics of screamo. Japanese screamo, nonetheless, which might also be considered innately epic.

Insomniac Doze is a great album – beautiful, deep, moving and viscerally dynamic. So sit back and enjoy the blue clouds, rain and post-industrial trucks. Not quite Envy at their best, perhaps, but close enough.

Links:

- A bunch of lesser-known, but rather good, shoegaze albums posted on someone's livejournal. I recommend Bleach - s/t and Air Formation - Feel Everything.

- A bunch of Jesu on ROAWR!. It may be everything, actually. ROAWR! tends to be that way...

- A bunch/everything of Envy on ROAWR!. There's also a similar mega-post in the archives on (where else?) Zen and the Art of Face Punching...

...which, incidentally, is a year old this month (October). Happy birthday, blend!

Dan Deacon - 'Crystal Cat' (video) - New & Improved Post

Gabbagabbahey likes the Ramones. So does this guy.

In fact, if you go by Pitchfork (which isn't always such a great idea), Dan Deacon connects "at various points with... happy hardcore and gabba techno... the Ramones, Koji Kondo (composer-in-residence for the Nintendo Entertainment System)," amongst others. Really, the Ramones and Nintendo comparison are the only ones which stick in my head, and mainly because they describe this particular song so well. The rest of the album, Spiderman of the Rings, is more than very good, if somewhat of an acquired taste at times (Wooody Wooodpecker, anyone?). But this song is fantastic.

'Crystal Cat' is my new favourite song. It's so good that it could be a 21st century B-side to 'Blitzkrieg Bop'. It should be a hit pop song, like many other songs before it (see the post below). Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works.

You can get the album here on Arpeggi, a Music Blog; but I for one (still) intend buying it.

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And if you want to hear more 'music' from crazy individuals, here's some stuff I came across recently:

Italian Horn

Courtesy of the amazingly named Jeff Chord over at Zen and the Art of Face Punching. It's just this one guy from Brooklyn, NY, making a lot of classy, classy noise... it's hard to describe - "somewhere between post-rock melodic repetition and Today is the Day's dark ambience" is one attempt, which is somewhat lost on me! Seriously though, it's really good music. Check it out - you can download the 6-track EP from Jeff's post, and although 'Aspirin Headband' from the Myspace is pretty good, 'Skinhead With a Bluetooth Earpiece' from the EP is really the standout track.

gtuk

I recently discovered a lot of exciting music on this site, Believes in Patterns, which fits very well into a bit of an offbeat look at the already strange world of hardcore and noise. This writer, Walt, did a previous post about 'alternative screamo' and then goes on to describe gtuk as one of those bands but "on Speed or Crack or both with a healthy dose of crystal meth to make things work out". So, yeah, it's pretty wild.

Anyway, gtuk is a German one-man screamo band, heavily influenced by electronic sounds. Check it out - Wir Sind Glucklich? is probably the better of the two albums, but they're both pretty good.