I
saw The Waterboys touring their most recent album An Appointment with Mr. Yeats. The show was just as amazing as
everyone is saying it was [here][here][here].
Truth
be told, I always thought Mike Scott, the band’s lead man, was a little silly -
he whispers, he rolls his r’s, he plays his Irish accent more than his guitar.
It’s easy to call it overkill.
But
this show brought me around. Scott has world class control over his voice - in
a Shakespearean actor sort of way, not an Adele sort of way. Making music to
the poetry of Yeats is the perfect outlet for Scott’s talent. His passion, even
nerdiness for the poetry is too sincere to be appreciated today – I think we’re
all a little afraid to step outside our own irony. Scott forced me out. I knew it was gone for sure when he stepped onto the stage in his three-faced mask (a
reference to Yeats’ theory of the mask).
I’m
hoping that the horrendous mask will become some sort of icon in musical
history. It deserves it. See it below.
The
equally literate warm-up act was amazing too. Freddie Stevenson is a Scottish
cross between Mike Scott and Bob Dylan. Here he is singing about J.K. Rowling.
The
first time I heard tUnE-yArDs (that’s a pain in the ass to type) was in a
Blackberry commercial. In the commercial the song is cut up and people are
talking over it. It didn’t matter – what
is that song? I wasn’t the only one with the question. People were asking
all over the internet.
The
album W H O K I L L is one of my favorite ever. My friends used to make fun of
me for finding songs through ads, but the fact that I found tUnE-yArDs via
Blackberry has always made her angy anti-“buziness” songs sound even sweeter to
me.
Lately
though, the trend with music in commercials is just gross.
Is
there some advertising firm out there with indie robots programmed to write hip
songs? I’m afraid.
Divine Blessing! A free
1970’s Fender Rhodes. I’m so giddy.
My
girlfriend just found found me a
legendary Fender Rhodes keyboard. For free. She’s the best one ever. (The
girlfriend, I mean… not the keyboard.)
The
Rhodes is an electro-mechanical keyboard. It gets its sound from vibrating
metal tines, and it was the bee’s knees back in the day.
Since
then its sound has been the target of plenty of digital emulators. But my
Rhodes has personality. Some of the keys buzz, and one of them doesn’t even
work. Emulate that!
I love bandcamp.com. It’s filled with
eccentric, (usually horrible) music – experimental BS, high-school garage bands,
and lots of banjo-toting women, all working so hard for their quirk. Intermixed
are some great musical treasures. Every once and a while I spend the day dredging
the site for treasure-albums.
Canadian actor, producer,
guitarist for Tropics. A Hound at the Hem takes place in some wonderous
lost dimension.
Slim Twig is working with
lots of amazing Canadian bands, featured below. Come to think it, they might
all hang out together in that same lost dimension.
Stumbling through this
instrumental album, don’t be surprised when you come across the decaying bodies
of jazz, funk, pop, circus music, and rock ‘n’ roll.
Here’s a great oddity from the
golden days just before the advent of electrical amplification. In 1900, John
Matthias Augustus Stroh was granted a patent on his “Strohviol,” a violin that
used a horn to mechanically amplify its sound.
Since then the instrument has
died…except for a few strange, lovely applications of the technology. The
instrument’s biggest proponents today are those weird steam punk people.
The Min-ETune system, new this year
from the Gibson Guitar Corporation, is a sexy little robot attached to the back
of a guitar’s headstock. With the push of a button, the thing will tune a
guitar perfectly. At first I was as angry as my purist friends on the internet.
But anger is almost as silly as this invention isn’t it? This thing will
probably flop even harder than Gibson’s “robot guitars.” And we can’t expect
much from a company that’s dealing in endangered and illegal tonewoods, can we?
I’m coming around on sound art installations. They’re
easy to dismiss – strange men with too much grant money. But lately I can’t
stop reading about them and listening to them.
What’s bringing me around? Robert Frobisher, mostly. Frobisher
is the visionary (fictional) composer from David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (if you haven’t read it, stop
screwing around here and go get it). Frobisher thinks in music.
In the smoky firelight the
two old men nodded off like a pair of ancient kings passing the eons in their
tumuli. Made a musical notation of their snores. Elgar is to be played by a
bass tuba, Ayrs a bassoon.
Another thing bringing me
around: Charles Spearin’s album The Happiness
Project. Spearin interviewed his apartment complex neighbors on what happiness
means to them, and composed music to their recorded answers. This is an album to
make you cry from joy. Spearin shows us beauty in the most mundane speech
patterns – a beauty that we ignore all the time.
What a way to experience
the world! We swim through a sea of sounds every day. But I won’t stop to
appreciate them unless I am informed that
they are worth listening to. Seems like I missing out on half of my own
existence.
I am no musical genius. But
I’m going to try to start appreciating good sounds like a good sunset. And
these sound installations – what a great way to explore the world of those
sounds around us.
He’s
been a musical favorite of mine for a long time. The late Kevin Coyne wasn’t
afraid to yell, scream, or howl. He also made frequent use of grunts, groans,
squeaks, squelches, and that mean, mean blues guitar.
Here he is doing it all at Hyde Park in 1974.
Guess what. Kevin Coyne was also a painter, poet, and film
maker.
The more I read about this guy and the more I listen, the
more I fall in love. Kevin Coyne could feel.
He worked as a psychiatric nurse and a drug counselor from 1965 to 1968. In
1969 He got his record deal. But you can hear the hospital in that first album,
Marjory Razorblade.
Coyne simmers with righteous anger for the treatment of
the mentally ill. He’s always on the verge of crying, and screaming, and
laughing.
Here are some of my favorites from Coyne’s less
appreciated mediums.
Robert Pollard was bumbling on about how his band
releases so many records, how they weren’t like some of the reunion bands at Riot Fest - obviously making a jab at The
Replacements, playing their first shows in 23 years.
Well, I saw The Replacements later that night, and
there’s something to be said for scarcity. They were magnificent. Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson came running onto
the stage in orange cowboy hats and pink skirts. Punk awesomeness and skirted hijinks
ensued. All the dads in the audience had flashbacks and cried (half of them had
road tripped from Minnesota, The Replacements’ home state).
And at the end of the show, Westerberg did a spot-on
impersonation of Pollard’s mic-spinning gimmicks, then unplugged the mic and
threw it to the audience.
We laughed. GbV 0, Replacements 1. That’s what I say.
As expected, Robert
Pollard stumbled onto the stage at “Riot Fest.” It was 5:00 on a summer
afternoon, in the middle of a field somewhere near Byers, Colorado. Pollard chugged
some tequila straight from the bottle and began his routine – alternately dropkicking the air, swinging his microphone dangerously by the
cord, and… more drinking. His lead guitarist Mitch Mitchell was the perfect
complement to Pollard’s cartoonish debauchery. At the beginning of the one-hour
show, he put two packs of Marlboro reds on top of his Marshall amp. At the end
of the show, both packs were empty and lying on the stage floor. This wasn’t a
Guided by Voices concert. It was a play.
I came away
disenchanted with the band. It’s common for musicians to put on a
don’t-give-a-shit air. But these people seem completely sincere - they actually don’t give a shit.
Not even about
their own music. Maybe that’s why the band releases three or four albums in a
slow year. Pollard seems to slap the first thing that comes across his
intoxicated mind on a tape recorder. Once he has a large enough collection he
gives it some marvelously meaningless title (The Bears for Lunch, Let’s Go Eat The Factory) and calls it an album.
My first GbV
album was Bee Thousand. It’s amazing,
and everyone knows it. It’s on just about everyone’s “top indie albums” list.
But are we getting played? I think we
might be. Pollard and his cohorts have mastered the sexy appeal of angry,
affected lo-fi music and accrued a cult following among fans and critics alike.
Just look at
this from Eric Carr’s Pitchfork review of Relaxation
of the Asshole.
“If more drunks
would learn from Robert Pollard, simply accept his teachings, alcoholism
wouldn't be treated-- it would be celebrated. An alcoholic risks losing his
family and his job, systematically alienating all who would ever respect or care
for him; Robert Pollard is loved, adored, and urine-free. Surely this career
arc is the very embodiment boozing success, a seminal text on how to drink
professionally for more than a decade.
The secret
directions to the Bizarro dimension Pollard inhabits, however, have until now
been well-concealed, only unearthed from the occasional between-song words of
wisdom doled out at GBV gigs, and impossible to accurately assemble into a true
life-plan. With the tearful passing of GBV's live act, it seemed as though the
teachings would be lost forever, but listen up, drunky, because there's hope:
Relaxation of the Asshole, like the Rosetta Stone of Inebriation, is the first
step towards making sense of the the Man, the Wisdom, and the ins and outs of a
healthy career in alcoholism.”
A drunken pig with a microphone is still a drunken pig,
people. I’m all for the tortured artist. But isn’t
Robert Pollard just a tortured douchebag? and I’m all for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’
roll. But drunken rock is an art. And I’ve seen it done much better than GbV.
Take The Replacements.
I’m sure Guided
by Voices was cool at some point. “I Am a Scientist” was written on a guitar missing a string - classic
cool. But whatever cool the band once had has been replaced by silly. And these
men aren’t the rebels their followers want them to be. They are walking,
dropkicking, mic-swinging advertisements for Marlboro, Patrón, and human
sickness.
Am I missing something here? Tell me I’m wrong. I would love to love GbV
again.
