October 28, 2020

Beauty Pill Release Election Day video "Instant Night"

Chad Clark and Erin Nelson of Beauty Pill. Photo by Morgan Klein.


The Washington, D.C. group Beauty Pill has surprised-released a new single and video titled, "Instant Night."

The song arrives for the lead up to Election Day with a clip featuring D.C. punk illustrator, Ryan Nelson as he sketches three harrowing political figures.

 

In offbeat timelaspe we watch Nelson as he creates ink blot portraits of the necrophiliactic three-headed power lords of D.C.: Trump, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham. The sloppy boar and his two whining wolves.

 

While the caricatures come to life the song swims downstream.

It's built off a rising and falling tonal scale that is quickly layered with multiple instruments. Then we hear Erin Nelson's voice as it swims through. She sings about, "GPS, doing the Macarena," and how, "Nature got the left swipe." Finding comfort in fear as the song slips off into lush swirls of slithering strings and calming notes from a woodwind quartet. Nelson assures us that, "Scared is all right."

 

Beauty Pill are Basla Andolsun, Chad Clark, Drew Doucette, Erin Nelson and Devin Ocampo. "Instant Night" follows their 5-track album, Please Advise, released this year in May, and Sorry You're Here, a score for a "dance play," released in February.

 

October 18, 2020

The Last Great Festival (Before COVID): Desert Daze 2019

Photography By Erika Reinsel >


Let's trip back one year ago this weekend.

To a time when musicians held outdoor concerts for massive groups of comingling, dirty, despondent, drugged out groups of people camping in close proximity with little running water. It was the tail-end of festival season--October 10-13, 2019.

 

The last great event before COVID-19 would put down the entire concert industry for 2020--the 8th annual Desert Daze music festival held at Lake Perris, California. After eight years it has found a unique slice of musical representation on the spectrum of stoner metal---free jazz. This is the festival's second time being held at the scenic campgrounds just west of Palm Springs.

 

 Midday lake gazing early Friday at Lake Perris. Photos by N. Leon. Composite by Eli Jace.

 

DAY 1: OCTOBER 11, 2019, FRIDAY


Music on the brain. Anticipation high.

Feet antsy waiting in line. First thing to alarm the senses after mucking through security is Lake Perris, set back above the tent-tops and stage speakers. Art installations scattered, awash in color. Giant white sheets flapping in the breeze. Everyone in a state of confused ecstacy.

 

From a distance I see Jessica Pratt, sun bearing down. Her voice feathers above the churning crowd. For a moment I'm in it. Over at the Theater stage comedian Fred Armisen is minutes into his "Comedy For Musicians But Everyone Is Welcome." He assuages everyone's dumbstruck mind. Some corny bits, and now he's going through a relay of regional accents, state by state. His Arizona is a muttered drawl. It feels like a live Portlandia sketch and is an icebreaker for such an overwhelming scene.

 

The lake is stunning, glittering in the distance, pulling in colors off the lights as they signify the start of night.

Opening Ceremonies have officially begun with Ian Svenonius and Alexandra Cabral. In slick black leather, they're ginning everyone up. Svenonius slides across the stage with warped scuzz guitar and Cabral pounds on her keyboard. Waiting for the legendary Stereolab out of London. After a decade-long hiatus, they returned to the road in 2019, touring with Wand who plays later tonight.

 

 Stereolab's Lætitia Sadier performing Friday night.

 

Singer Lætitia Sadier steps out with co-founder and guitarist Tim Gane; the band follows. They play songs from almost every one of their 13 albums in a seamless thrust of deep-space disco. Cooler than cool. Stereolab is a neon orange popsicle, a yellow bike ride in summer. Fried blue and purple electrolytes on the fade-out. Quick dip back to camp and Witch is mucking up the soundwaves at dark. The Vermont stoner metal group with Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis on drums is not to be confused with W.I.T.C.H., the Zamrock group, whose name stands for We Intend To Cause Havoc, playing later tonight.

 

The campsite still an unknown plane of dried out shrubs and unmarked walkways.

Vodka surge not helping. Stumbling back towards the fairgrounds and "Banshee Beat" by Animal Collective fades in. I can hear it. It's pulsing unevenly over the parking lot. The purple furry suit I'm wearing gets caught, or my legs get tangled, I don't know, but I'm the dirt, pathway disappearing. Shrubs are boobytraps and I hear Avey Tare singing, "There'll be time to just cry and wonder why it didn't work out."

 

I've arrived in time to blurt out the chorus and the song cracks with a single note change. "I duck out and go down to find the swimming pooOOool!" Too dizzy to surge through the packed crowd. Sitting against the outer rightward wall I lapse into a half-dream world. A voice enters and I return to the field. Some figure of security stands above me and asks if I'm okay. I nod thankful and pick up in time for "No More Runnin'" and the hysterically jubilant "For Reverend Green," played for the first time since 2006.

 

Animal Collective's Avey Tare on the main stage Friday night.

 

My drunk subsides and I'm in the pocket for The Flaming Lips' performance of The Soft Bulletin.

I'm in a gaggle of superfans from Michigan all geeked out in big sunglasses and droopy clothing. The Lips enter the stage. Wayne Coyne is sharply dressed, all-white head to toe, and most of his hair now. Fastened across his breastplate like a bra is a black leather holster complete with lock and unidentifiable gadgets. He's brought out one of his more recently used prop concepts for us. Extended above his body, out like wings he's holding silver lettered balloons that read FUCK YEAH DESERT DAZE.

 

"Race For the Prize" clicks off and they break the egg of The Soft Bulletin and let its yolk spill all over. Soon as the song starts Coyne throws the balloon into the crowd. It slackens inward and is pulled apart by every freak with an outstretched hand. I grab a fistful (and will use it to wrap holiday gifts.) The gush and ooze of pure love. An institution of psychedelic sunshine. The Lips turned their classic 1999 album into an endorphin-throttling live-action cartoon extravaganza. The gong was banged. A medley from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was played. An encore milked for all eternity. Back at campgrounds I am collapsible.

 

The Flaming Lips leader, Wayne Coyne, performing Friday night.

 

DAY 2: OCTOBER 12, 2019, SATURDAY


First band up is Big Business, from Seattle.

It's two guys up there, Jared Warren screaming and playing bass; Coady Willis on drums. It's a midday pummel of some thick beat-down metal. Peek-a-boo, I see Devo. Fell into a crowd pepped up with anticipation. Pogo punk with biodegradable luminescence. On the screens flash a mishmash of early-MTV graphics--did a wafer just sweetfuck a donut? Uh-oh, the band is making a dress change. The red energy dome hats are out for "Girl U Want." Lord, this unsuspecting psyche trance is rising. Their cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" has the groove tightened, pitched and diluted with hairbrained precision.

 

Mark Mothersbaugh, mid-song, has asked how it feels to be living under a tyrannical minority with all his carnival barker gusto. An unspoken dirge has settled among the crowd. A weird pall of quiet anxiety. I don't know where the fuck I am. I've been sucker-punched. Standing here slackjawed. It's not just "Whip It" and phone commercials. This band's main implementation is to be heard live--electrifying, engaging, inspiring, radical, goofy and flooded with energy.

 

Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh performing on Day 2.

 

A period of wandering.

Gleaming structures speckle the darkened landscape. Colored lights float along the sand. I'm drawn into some cactus cut-outs near the shore ("Space Mushroom Cacti Garden" and " Wood Wizard Wall" by Brad Rhadwood). I see faces melting, winking, morphing animalistically and can't tell if it's the lights, indigestion, or the art itself. I must look like a true maniac staring at this right now.

 

A nearby presence breaks my spell and a conversation starts with a man who in the dark looks like guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez but is really a French drummer. Lights reflect off his glasses and we discuss our common musical identity. A dark-eyed girl with a luring face shrouded in black hair enters the circle. She looks back and fourth at two drummers and smokes her cigarette. She asks each our Zodiac sign. I can't hear his answer. We're both Cancers.

 

I wander towards the Sanctuary tent where a hum is shaking the ground.

DNTEL is playing whooshing drones to a group sitting cramped from tentpole to pole, dazed by the deep electronic gurgle moving like ocean sludge. There's a group literally asleep in a big dogpile. I fit myself into a corner and feel the buzz.

 

Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova on the edge Saturday night.

 

Skronking mic feedback at the Theater stage waiting for Pussy Riot. Frontwoman Nadya Tolokonnikova and the group are plugging in wires frantically. No warning--lights out. A shaky video collage splashes across the members, standing poised. First tone strikes and the crowd grounds. Deep house bleeding the speakers. I'm packed in at the front of the stage. At my back a woman taller than me in a thick fur coat keeps whiplashing up and down, trying to break through the human blockade. Her bones are in my back. She leans in close, whispers in my ear, "This is our time," and presses into me the full energy of the moshpit.

 

On stage each member wears a neon balaclava pulled down.

Two dancers gyrate with precise electric energy on either side. They stare from eyeholes without emotion. The music is live drums and an electrical onslaught of hyperdigitized beat content. Scorching and confrontational. Tolokonnikova is the engine, soaking the whole crowd in their own sweat. On "Hangerz" she screams the refrain, "My body does not need advice from a priest!" Fur coat woman is mixing it up in the moshpit, pushing and pulling limbs, shouting, "If you're a white male, this isn't for you!" My breath barely makes it out of my lungs as the final note rings out.

 

The ringing, the ringing. I've stumbled now into a polar opposite scene. Temples are playing their Wal-Mart psychedelia. Every rail thin white male dances like seaweed in an underwater current. Rainbow lights. I turn my head and the girl of my zodiac sign from earlier is there. She offers me the very last half-filter drag of her cigarette and disappears in the shadow crowd when I decline. I look behind, turning all the way around, then walk through the limpid bodies. The trail of cigarette smoke scent dies and the wandering continues.

 

Flying Lotus in 2-D.

 

A three-dimensional dog with the face of Flying Lotus sits on a couch.

The video features director David Lynch and is our outré intro to Flying Lotus 3D. Throughout the day boxes filled of 3-D glasses were placed about. I had pocketed one. As the clip finishes, FlyLo walks out. His DJ setup looks like a giant melting boombox. Behind him is a huge fucking screen that pulls everyone in and out.

 

The visuals splash on the screen--too difficult to describe. Beyond the crystalline 3-D, there is such rapid movement to the visuals. Zoom pan-directionally through this Weird Cosmos. This spot of earth we stand on feels like a spaceship hurling forward on the whims of every beat drop from the turntables. When I can focus on FlyLo he looks like a 20-foot tall pirate slinging bags of coins. His dreads spin out sunbursting. This is future 3-D. Acid with a clear tongue. Walking outward from the throng I have to double-check the veracity of these glasses. When my feet hit the beach sand, I focus on making it to the front of the Theater stage for The Locust.

 

Goddamn sound issues again. Waiting with wrists bent against the rail.

Waiting as Justin Pearson figures out the mechanical failures. The band is dressed in tight buglike bodysuits outlined in caution yellow. All four members wear helmets with face shields covering their eyes. Ant-Man on the set of Blade Runner 2089. Another return act of the weekend--The Locust haven't played for us heathens since 2013. It's begun. My back is a bolt upright in a metal grinding machine. The band plays their instruments like jackhammers. The music is grating, toneless--a gnawing irritant like its namesake. A large man dressed in a pinstripe clown suit and an old punk mohawk just lumbered out sidestage, lingered for a moment, then dove drunkenly headfirst into the throng. Take a breath when you can.

 

Justin Pearson for The Locust early Sunday morning.

 

It's over. The dust creates a milky haze that only the colored lights can break. In the sand scattered among ripped cups, broken eyeglasses and trash is a 6-inch dagger. No blood, but still menacing. There are two surfaces of which I walk. At the Mystic Bazaar I follow a strangely familiar sonic glow. Radiojed is playing decontextualized Radiohead songs for a slow-ending twitching night.

 

DAY 3: OCTOBER 13, 2019, SUNDAY


Alvvays in the distance.

Wavering on strip of grass, walked on by legs and feet--beer counter to my left. Fatigue causing a fade... Sun is lower in the sky. Up ahead the screens are black and red. The Black Angels are starting. Alex Maas is out with the maracas, hat pulled down low. The band is already in flux. It's dark by the end of B-side "Molly Moves My Generation" and the hallucinations are beginning. The band is in total control. Each note hits the back of the neck. The Black Angels arguably are the band to fully encapsulate the core sound Desert Daze is known for.

 

The Black Angels' Alex Maas at sundown on Sunday.

 

Night has fallen for the final time. Ride was a last-minute addition, taking the place of Japanese psych hero Shintaro Sakamoto. Sakamoto was to be making his U.S. performance debut, but got held up because of a typhoon in Japan. After seeing Ride perform a few songs, I'm stopped by two guys my age. One asks what I thought of some band. I humor the question, but he keeps digging. His friend, standing to the side, is smirking and I realize this guy thinks I'm someone else.

 

My feet lead me into George Clanton's tent.

I dance to a few songs. In the distance from the Moon stage are deep blue hues emanating. They're calling me. Pushing through I come across the French drummer from Day 2 and we watch the first-half of Khruangbin's set. The trio from Houston are owning the positive vibes put forth tonight. Pure musicianship that brings one close to tears. By the time I get in closer the group has its audience melting with a sleek hip-hop medley and cover of Pink Floyd's "Have A Cigar."

 

Khruangbin performing Sunday night.

 

Burned out but persistent I make it to The Claypool Lennon Delirium and am pretty close right before the lights go on. Les Claypool, from Primus, and Sean Lennon, from the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, Cibo Matto and John, enter through the fog. Lennon wears a captain's hat that spills hair down his back. Claypool is suited up with a crisp felt bowler hat. They begin the night's second Pink Floyd cover, "Astronomy Domine." Half their set comes from South Of Reality released earlier this year. They finish with The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows."

 

Speed-walking to catch a glimpse of the Wu-Tang Clan

The 9-man rap crew out of Staten Island, New York are scheduled to play their 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). The full rapt audience is before me. The screen turns on and plays a trailer for the show Wu-Tang Clan: An American Saga on Hulu. Finally every rapper is on stage. All fanfair. The classic album I guess has started. Can't quite recognize the songs--beats are different. Growing antsy and heading back over the lumpy sandgulf to the Theater for Lightning Bolt.

 

Les Claypool performing with The Claypool Lennon Delirium on Sunday.

 

Crushed against the fence. Drummer Brian Chippendale is positioned with his left side to the crowd. It's everyone's last chance to splash in the pit and you can hear the anticipation in the anxious yelling. Chippendale slips on his mask with the microphone human-centipeded to his mouth and gives it a test. Sound issues again. A scrambling of frustrated barks. The crowd responds to each scream. Bassist Brian Gibson stands patiently. Sound issues solved, or at least sidelined, and it starts. High-contrasted rainbow lightshow for the jolt. Lightning Bolt is pure noise of wood steel skin cymbal and amplification colliding with a rhythm of happenstance.

 

Out of breath, distant bruises not yet revealed--the grass is squishy. 

I linger outward, lay down and get up. Pockets of flashing colors spread out. Here and there are unaccounted for bodies, passed out, in a sleepstate. Dead Meadow rings out over everything.

 

The moon is well hung in the sky. Every drug is pumping its last molecular transfer. Many have already left the campgrounds leaving strange vacant lots in the tent neighborhood. Most are asleep too exhausted to move. At the Mystic Bazaar there are a few groups milling about and a trail leading into a tent. It's Jjuujjuu & Friends set up for the Closing Ceremonies.

 

Sean Lennon performing Sunday night with The Claypool Lennon Delirium.

 

I peak over shoulders and see that Claypool and Lennon are here for the final jam. 

The one for those who've misplaced time. I see Phil Pirrone of Jjuujjuu, and king godmother of Desert Daze, and others at a small stage. Since the Mystic Bazaar is part of the campground, we bring our open containers, smokeables, edibles and settle in for what happens once and only once.

 

As the final beats accumulate and hit their peak, Claypool slips out a slit in the tent. Lennon soon follows. When the music finally does stop Pirrone sticks around to meet everyone left, and outside the sky has turned its first post-twilight shade.

 

 

Photos used with permission from photographer.

September 09, 2020

Hear a Haunted Nashville on Anne Malin's Waiting Song

 

 

For musicians, this pandemic shit has been especially disruptive to the album cycle.

Recording, touring and marketing have all been affected across the board. At the start of the year Anne Malin had planned to build upon their discography of southern ghost-folk and record a follow-up to their 2018 album, Fog Area. [READ: Review of Fog Area by Anne Malin.]

 

But that year was not to be.

Anne Malin is the work of two musicians, Anne Malin Ringwalt and her long-time partner, guitarist William Johnson. Ringwalt's vocal hypnosis is the electrical pulse of the project. Johnson aides her every note. The two had musicians recently moved to Nashville after living in South Bend, Indiana.

 

As COVID-19 spread throughout the country and most districts were forced to shut down, so too did recording studios. Nashville's The Bomb Shelter, where Ringwalt and Johnson had sessions booked, canceled all engagements as the pandemic took hold. The studio is an analog dreamhouse affixed with vintage instruments and beautiful rooms. Instead of taking up space in the comfort of a studio, the duo elected to keep writing and work from home.

 

Anne Malin Ringwalt. Photo by Rachel Winslow, courtesy of Clandestine Label Services.

 

On October 2 the world will hear Waiting Song, the result of those work-at-home sessions.

Anne Malin's third album continues on their sound, but finds more groove in the dusty ambiance. "Sleep" is like dream powder. It moves on a slow swinging rhythm with strings stretched and a country twang.

 

Ringwalt's voice is operatic and full-throated. There's drama in each note. "I don't wear ghosts like jewelry," Ringwalt sings on "Pearly Sleigh" against a simple piano composition. Johnson's guitar levels everything out with controlled force. It nails down in the album's theme: reaching for the light from the darkness at ground zero.

 

Johnson uses a pedal steel guitar often.

It brings out the Nashville, even if it's not coming from by-the-hour studio prestige. Where Fog Area was like dark charcoal smeared on the canvass, Waiting Song has some burnt umber and yellow ochre smeared on top of that.

 

On "Mountain Song" Ringwalt wanders through a deflating forest of guitarnoise like Jim Morrison looking for desert visions. Her poetry tracks across a mountain of innerthoughts. Ringwalt also publishes poetry under the name AM Ringwalt. [See: AM Ringwalt]

 

August 15, 2020

Godcaster Bring Combustible Joy on Debut


Some new music from a new band that casts light into this batshit quarantine anxiety rippling through the land.

Fuzzed out, erratic and sloppily sweet, Godcaster are a wily collective out of Philadelphia/NYC. They've released their first video for the song "All The Feral Girls In The Universe" off their upcoming debut LP.

 

Long Haired Locusts is all combustible joy.

The sextet sound like the Polyphonic Spree trying to casually blend into the background of a Deerhoof set. Singer and guitarist Judson Kolk brings to the set hyperanguished vocals that whip and whirl around the frenzied instrumentation.

Godcaster have massive frolicking sound. Behind Kolk are David McFaul on the keys, Von Lee on flute, Lindsay Dobbs on trombone, Bruce Ebersole on bass and Sam Pickard on drums. While the drums, bass and guitar clash wildly, the flute and trombone peer in to add a naturalistic euphoria. They'd fit right in on a bill with other big-band indie groups like Dirty Projectors, Wand, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Elf Power, etc.

 

 

Godcaster's main lyricist, Kolk, also drew the album's illustrations.

The alien cover art for Long Haired Locusts depicts the group in as insects similar to the creatures from the unsettling 1970s animated film Fantastic Planet. It's all a wonderful world of his creation.

The video for "All The Feral Girls In Universe," edited by McFaul, shows band members lollygagging in some off-ramp woods, wrestling plantlife, chasing each other and playing guitar. A shirtless Kolk leads the way for the jaunty summertime track with the anticipation of an unplanned afternoon adventure.

 

The songs are on Long Haired Locusts are thrown-together and loose with uplifted energy.

The album was recorded in a Philadelphia basement, live-to-tape by Ryan Power. Songs like "The Skull!!!," "Christ In Capsule Form," and "Serpentine Carcass Crux Bitch," are hot blasting shots of cartoon punk. "Bingo Bodies / Long Haired Locusts" is the album's greatest accumulation of their sound, crashing from note to note until its conclusion. "Don't Make Stevie Wonder" is an instant earworm, a funky proclamation with shifty making sure the legend gets his due.

Their debut will be released September 4th by Philadelphia-based label, Ramp Local.

July 23, 2020

numün Release First Video for Spatial Debut Album

Cover art for voyage au soleil.


numün, a new group out of New York City, have released the first video for their debut album, voyage au soleil.

The clip for the title track taps into the VHS membrane lifting the listener through a lost timeline. The album itself is a trip out past the pollution haze into the spatial luminescence and right into the superexploding sun.

 

numün is the sum of three musicians who work for the ambient side of sound.

Bob Holmes' recent group SUSS put out the ambient-country masterpiece, Ghost Box, and  Joel Mellin and Chris Romero both perform with Gamelan Dharma Swara, the Balinese dance group based out of New York City. Each member are also visual artists whose work has been shown in various museums around New York--the MOMA, the Met--and have been featured on NPR and other publications.

 


Holmes, Mellin and Romero began voyage au soleil with a single track, "Tranquility Base." It was featured on the compilation album, The Moon and Back -- One Small Step for Global Pop, released in 2019 by WIAIWYA in celebration of the 50th anniversary of man's debut landing on the Moon. The group remained in 1969 and began exploring the entire mission through electronic and analog soundscapes.

 

In addition to the ethereal synthlike waves, numün utilizes a great number of instruments.

Heard at the beginning of "Voyage Au Soleil" is the cümbüş, a fretless Turkish banjo. Throughout these six expansive songs you'll hear a mellotron, a 1952 Gibson hollowbody guitar, a violin, Balinese gongs, harpsichord and theremin. The album voyage au soliel will be released digitally and on compact disc by Musique Impossible on September 4.

 

July 14, 2020

Stones Dig Goat's Head Soup from Their Vault

Goat's Head Soup deluxe reissue cover art. 

The Rolling Stones are taking the Clorox wipes to Goat's Head Soup.


Last week The Estate announced the upcoming deluxe reissue of the Stones' underrated 70s album, with a new look and new tunes. The deluxe version, available September 4, includes an extra disc with 3 unheard outtake tracks, instrumental versions, and 3 Glyn Johns original mixes.

 

"Criss Cross," the defacto single, is grimy, street-walking rock and roll.


It would fit right between "Can You Hear The Music?" and "Star Star" to finish the album on a high groove. "Scarlet" and "All The Rage" are the other titles.

Goat's Head Soup is one of -- only one of in a long edifying list -- their loosest, druggiest, but also, most heartbreaker of an album. It's equal adrenaline and inner ache.

Goat's Head Soup assembled in the ether during their second major output of productivity--


--the tailend of the 60s into the early 70s. It was their third of 3 consecutive yearly releases: the incredible excess of Sticky Fingers in 1971 and the infamous double-LP Exile on Main Street in 1972.

The Stones started recording the album at the end of 1972 in Kingston, Jamaica. The fresh locale seeped into the sessions with various percussion, trumpet, saxophone, piano and a range of instruments that skitter along with the band. "Dancing With Mr. D," "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)," and "Can You Hear The Music?" are the some of the Stones' sexiest, excessively 70s songs. Jagger screams raw exacerbated flesh. Richards cuts jags of aural delusion.


 

To counter the craze are other more melancholic songs from the group's catalogue.


"100 Years Ago," "Coming Down Again," "Winter," and of course, "Angie," find the group in contemplative remorse, nearly ballad, soul-bearing territory. Together it's a great set of songs, an emotional pinwheel.

Another surprise hides in the unreleased tracks. "Scarlet" features another legendary guitarist, Jimmy Page, from Led Zeppelin. Page has had a few run-ins over the decades with the Stones. That tends to happen with megastars hitting fame at the same rate. He laid down some guitar for the song "One Hit (To The Body)" that would end up on the Stones' 1986 album Dirty Work. As is usual with the Stones, there are numerous variations of the album and its iconography for sale. Browse here.

Original album cover art.

July 02, 2020

ENTER THE WHITE PONY

White Pony alternate cover, image by author.

June 2000, daytime -- driving somewhere in America:


*click* --CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES-- *click* --ALL THE OTHER SLIM SHADYS ARE JUST-- *click* --IT'S GONNA BE MAY-- *click*

These are the sounds of driving with an indecisive finger on the radio dial in the first summer of the new century.

Twenty years isn't that long, but looking back, it's a gorge. Still pre-9/11, -MySpace, -Facebook, -streaming anything, -iPhone, etc. Cracked jewel cases were everywhere. Napster was one year in and MTV still had significant cultural and financial pull. This was the summer of sophomore releases from Britney Spears and Eminem--Oops!... I Did It Again and The Marshall Mathers LP respectively. Everything was pop.

The music of the mainstream was as bad as it had ever been (but not as bad as it would become.)


There's only a tiny chunk of music from this mini-era that holds up today. Then, American audiences were largely only offered two opposite ends of a colorless spectrum. There was Papa Roach, Creed, Kid Rock, and Korn over here. Spears, *NSYNC, Christina Aguilera and Sisqo over there.

Rock music at that point had since slithered from the entrails of grunge into this shitty beer metal pumped up with generic aggression and ripped off Nirvana riffs. Those cretins from Puddle of Mudd and Nickleback made a fortune. (dirty money) Forming its own branch off that was rap metal, an unfortunate experiment for all involved. At the same time it was also the apex of white girl pop. The legends of Spears, Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and Backstreet Boys were barely dug in. Suddenly every music video had a choreographed dance routine for every verse and chorus. It was all a lot of flash and bang to cover up the low grade of songwriting being done. 

Deftones, from Sacramento, California, brought a new mood to the charts.


The five-piece band released, White Pony, their third album, that summer. It would end up an important milestone, bringing them to their highest peak to date professionally. The first single, “Change (In the House of Flies),” was released May 20, 2000, on time for summer heartbreak. Opening with a single, distracted guitar strum, the song entered the radio with new emotion, a full deep breath. Starting the week, the top 5 songs, according to the Billboard Hot 100, were: 1. "Maria Maria" by Santana; 2. "Breathe" by Faith Hill; 3. "Thong Song" by Sisqo; 4. "He Wasn't Man Enough" by Toni Braxton; 5. "I Try" by Macy Gray. They snuck in when no one was watching.

“Change” begins slowly with singer Chino Moreno in whispers and builds into a big aching chorus. The lyrics are delicately haunted, daring and sexual.  “I look at the cross / and I look away / give you the gun / blow me away,” Moreno breathes out before guitarist Stephen Carpenter scratches out the silence with metallic shriek. 


White Pony album art, with Cheng & Carpenter, by Frank Maddocks.

At this period in music marketing, the music video was still the most impactful way to reach the biggest audience.


The song was one thing, but the video could breathe new perspective and insight to create a single piece of work (if done right). Total Request Live, then, was a game changer. The popular afternoon top-10 music video countdown show was just another spotlight for the major popstars, but every now and then, lesser-known artists would creep in the list and gain some traction.

The clip for “Change,” directed by Liz Friedlander, was the perfect visual match to the song’s disenchanted feeling. The band performs the song in the corners of a party house, long past the first shots were poured and lines were drawn. Beautiful models curl along the furniture, passed out. Everything is lit by lamplight and some of the revelers hide behind masks of jungle animals. The macabre scene was just as enticing as the song’s slow ragged hooks.

I was instantly obsessed.


My friend Josh R. knew this and for my birthday got me a copy of White Pony on compact disc a week or so after its release. The silver square with the white cutout pony in the corner was like a missing piece in the tableau of my music history.

“Change” definitely made it to TRL a few times and, though I can’t outrightly prove it, I’m pretty certain it grabbed the #1 video for a day. TRL’s top 10 videos for June 2000, according to user “adoug15” on rateyourmusic.com, were: 10. "Thong Song" by Sisqo; 9. "I Think I'm In Love With You" by Jessica Simpson; 8. "Somebody Someone" by Korn; 7. "Last Resort" by Papa Roach; 6. "American Bad Ass" by Kid Rock; 5. "Oops!...I Did It Again" by Britney Spears; 4. "If Only" by Hanson; 3. "The Real Slim Shady" by Eminem; 2. "The One" by Backstreet Boys; 1. "It's Gonna Be Me" by *NSYNC. Wow, what an era, honk honk.



This was the group's third time working with metal producer Terry Date. After Deftones' previous two albums, Adrenaline (1996) and Around the Fur (1997), White Pony would set them apart from other metal acts. Unlike some of their peers, they would not be pigeonholed into some formative pattern of aggression. They could expand.

Chino’s heart had always been open on songs like “Mascara,” “One Weak,” “MX” and “Fireal.”


But on White Pony he lets that thing bleed out from the carseat to the living room to the bathroom and back. On “Digital Bath,” Feiticiera,” “Passenger,” Moreno paints vivid violent imagery of drunk lust and conniving romance.

Stephen Carpenter, the group’s purveyor of grind, often namechecks the Swedish metal band Meshuggah and LA's Fear Factory as major influences. On White Pony he would find equal footing with his Cure-loving singer enough to wax heavy in all the right spots. Carpenter detunes and plays chugging riffs like Picasso's Cubist period, thick, slathered with sudden turns. He plays a 7-string and gets this thrashing higher-pitched alarm call on “Korea” and “Feiticeira.” And of course there’s “Elite,” the three-minute stabbing, which would win the Grammy for Best Metal Performance in 2001. [Nominees were: Iron Maiden ("The Wicker Man"), Marilyn Manson ("Astonishing Panorama of the Endtimes"), Pantera ("Revolution Is My Name"), Slipknot ("Wait and Bleed")].

All of drummer Abe Cunningham’s punk energy on the first two albums, finds restraint.


His quick offbeat bursts ricochet directly off Carpenter’s riffs. His snare hits like a taser, and when a song falls into cooler atmosphere, he adds that extra fill, playing unpredictably and to the mood. The three-song suite of “RX Queen” / “Street Carp” / “Teenager” is where the sonic experimentation really sets in. Bassist Chi Cheng lays down a stealthy bassline on “RX Queen.” DJ Frank Delgado fills in the empty spaces with textured atmospherics. “Teenager” is pushed by a dusty drum beat you might hear from Pete Rock, and Moreno’s full falsetto. It’s definitely the emotional center of the album, and a place metal doesn't often venture.

The beauty of White Pony is every element of the Deftones sound speaks without talking too much or over. The wide range of influences from each member creates a glowing mix of punk, thrash and doom metal, shoegaze, trip-hop and new wave.


 

As the nu-metal era died off those bands would have to evolve their sound or risk entrapment in a niche music category.


White Pony would kick into gear the cult following Deftones have enjoyed since, and help influence a number of bands, if not full genres. Taproot, Relative Ash, Trapt and Thirty Seconds to Mars all did their best Deftones tribute act. Emo, and then screamo, would owe a debt to Deftones. My Chemical Romance, Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, Muse and others would bite off their style. With White Pony the band proved they could break the metal label and all of its usual trappings to create their own offshoot.

Deftones' most recent album, Gore, was their eighth. It was released in 2016. Deftones have been mixing their ninth, again, with Terry Date. It's his return working with the band since their self-titled follow-up to White Pony in 2004. Originally set for a summertime release to coincide with a headlining tour with Gojira and Poppy, the new album has been put on hold because of the coronavirus outbreak. The tour is being rescheduled for 2021 and there have been vague rumors of a new post-summer release date. 

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of White Pony, the band will be broadcasting live from their YouTube channel Saturday, June 20, 8PM Pacific Standard Time.

April 16, 2020

Phoebe Bridgers Has A Great Week



Last week was a huge week for songwriter Phoeobe Bridgers & the girl never even changed out of her PJs.


Bridgers went on a make believe global virtual journey to promote her upcoming second album. The markets have been abuzz for a follow-up to Bridgers' debut Stranger in the Alps, released in 2017. It's a perfectly crafted album, with the lyrical acuity of these sadly strange times. And now, we need a second dose.

Phoebe's very good week started on Friday, April 3rd.


Bridgers showed up on a new song by The 1975, "Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America," off their upcoming full-length, Notes On A Conditional Form.

The following Thursday, April 9th Bridgers took to Instagram to announce her second album, Punisher, would arrive June 19th. In total, there are 11 new songs with titles like "DVD Menu," "Chinese Satellite," "ICU," and "Graceland Too."  Then she posted the video for second single "Kyoto," where she surfs a bullet train track in a skeleton suit in the city of Japan. (The video for "Garden Song" came out in February.) That night Bridgers performed the new song on Jimmy Kimmel Live! streaming live from her bathtub (in PJs). She sang into a toy Magic Mic echo-phone and played a small beat synthesizer in her lap.



The next day, April 10th Phoebe performed a quickie 5-song livestream through Instagram and Pitchfork from her home in Los Angeles.


This time, out of the tub, and into a straight-backed chair, she played three new songs: "Garden Song," "Kyoto," and "I Know The End," along with "Summer's End," a John Prine cover (WE LOVE YOU), and "Motion Sickness," her now classic song. Even against the fiber-optic buzz, Bridgers' voice soared, her face scrunching up to the right.




The new songs are a small slice of the full offering that seems so far away. Punisher will be released by Dead Oceans on June 19th.

REVIEW: "Miss Anthropocene" by GRIMES


Grimes shoots for high concept but never gets past the D n B.


Miss Anthropocene is the wily-eyed singer’s fifth album and finds her kicking her sound further out. It’s a party album for the fall of man, something to dance on the ashes of yesteryear to while Gaia chokes on plastic wrap.

Grimes is the sonic pet name for Claire Elise Boucher who started her music career in 2010, but really blew the fuck up with her third album, Visions. Miss Anthropocene is the final Grimes album for the label 4AD, following Art Angels and Visions.

The album charges up with "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth - Art Mix."


Boucher’s voice sails through a dark soundscape against a slow-dubby beat that twitches the limbs. Grimes raps like a sped-up pixie on “Darkseid.” "We don't love our bodies anymore," she sings over a heavy drum 'n’ bass beat with a devastating down-groove. By the end she sounds like an Egyptian goddess arising from the sand. 

Her voice is the main trigger throughout Miss Anthropocene. It's breathy, ecstatic, alarm-calling and always dying for comfort. She’s a banshee in distress stepping around the palpitating beats and melting electronic detours.

The third track, "Delete Forever," is the one that does not belong.


It’s an acoustic lite-rock song that hits like early-2000s Avril Lavigne. In an alternate world I could see this spending a few weeks at, maybe, #5 on Total Request Live. But it’s 2020 and this song is just not great. “Violence” returns to the pulsating heart beat rhythm with Grimes going sex siren singing, “And I like it like that / Said I like it like that.” Alright.

“4ÆM” captures the album’s peak uniqueness in sound. Grimes sings in fading halos to a rhythm that pulled from a lost ancient world. It’s a blasting grind like an old house mix of Nine Inch Nails or Prodigy from the 90s. A single piano plays in a dark room for "New Gods.” Grimes’ vocals pull the guts from every word.

The concluding "IDORU" gets stuck on a blasting beat, two notes plunging back and forth on the keyboard.


Grimes sings out of her depth, like an anime character riding a tornado. The rhythm is coke-snorted up and feels like a ride until about three minutes in and then you just want off.

Miss Anthropocene was an attempt of a concept album wherein an “anthropomorphic goddess of climate change” does something. That may have been the aim, but what we have here is really just a pretty cool dance album. Nothing in the lyrics immediately provides an avenue for discussion of an issue like climate change. But it does make me wish I were in a blacked out fuzzy state when it hurls through the speakers.

March 28, 2020

Bob Dylan Sings About a Past American Era



Bob Dylan, the man myth legend and hopefully healthy & safely quarantined songwriter has released another epic storysong.


"Murder Most Foul" is Dylan's first release in eight years and appears to be another offering of good tidings from a musician in this strange moment in history. The timing is perfect, because this song is nearly 17 minutes and hardly a second passes without a lyric. This will be one to unravel.


 

"Murder Most Foul" comes together with some cautious piano playing.


Dylan utilizes a small elemental band to swirl around him, each member in differing modes of winding up or down, on a slow jazz rush. The drummer comes in splashing the cymbals with brushes, a violin bow slices up and down, piano keys bristle.

Seconds in Dylan breaks through with that old gremlin growl of his. "It was a dark day in Dallas, November '63," he sings, "A day that will live on in infamy." In the song, Dylan plays out the gruesome assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States--the most heinous and still unsolved event in the country's history.

"They blew out the brains of the king / Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing."


He forcefully describes the scene, offering possible motive. "You got unpaid debts, we've come to collect." Dylan sometimes plays loose with the facts in his songs, so I wouldn't allude to him having any Secret Service knowledge, but you can't say there's no wisdom in that grumble. The scene continues, through the limousine ride, arriving at Parkland hospital to Vice President Lyndon Johnson's swearing in to office on the tarmac in Air Force One.

Dylan drafts a direct line between the country's need to heal in the aftermath and the eruption of the counterculture. "The Beatles are comin', they're gonna hold your hand," he tells us before examining the remaining years of the 60s and 70s: Woodstock in the Aquarian Age, Altamont, Tommy can you hear me? I'm the Acid Queen. It's all "a party beyond the Grassy Knoll," Dylan sings. Colorful references of the time are dropped throughout, but Dylan brings each verse back to that fateful day in Dallas when the country broke.




Most listening to the entirety of "Murder Most Foul" will be encyclopedic Dylanologists and will love it.


It's just always a blessing to hear the master's voice and know he's breathing somewhere in a recording booth. But this is special because he sings about his contemporaries during another American era.

Everyone else might find it hard to keep their interest apace. There is no shift in tempo, no change in instrumentation, no real chorus aside from the lyrical sequence ending with the song's title, and Dylan shuffles lines over every measure. But, what else is there to do? Play it and listen. Dylan's last album was Tempest in 2012.

Bright Eyes Return to Our Sad World



As we step carefully six feet apart to avoid total societal collapse, Bright Eyes have returned to share in our collective moan.


"Persona Non Grata" is the group's first chunk of new music in 9 long years.

Musically the song is very simple, providing a walking rhythm for singer Conor Oberst to set the words down. The drums waltz exchanging hands with piano and guitar. For the first time the band uses bagpipes adding a haunting surge. The group is still a threepeice with Oberst up front and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott filling out the rest.

Oberst's voice is the same shaky lilt it's always been. 


No audible aging heard, and his strangled cry still comes out a desperate blurt here and there. Just like old times. The lyrics are a detailed list of places gone and things done in characteristic Oberstian fashion. "There's a line out the church / Where your homelessness works / Where the stain glass of crimson / Meets Ezekiel's Visions," he sings in the first verse. It's a tempered message of bedroom crystal-ball examinations.

"Persona Non Grata" was thrown out ahead of schedule to tide over everyone at home on quarantine, a move Run the Jewels and other artists have also done. It's painful to think how many musicians might be sitting on new music. With this song there aren't any grand emotional swells, so it may have been the easier song to pick from the upcoming album without dimming the full listen.




Bright Eyes crested in the early-2000s with critical applause and a lovelorn following.


After hitting career peaks rare for overly emotive songwriting, the unit released 8 albums then went dormant after their last full-length, The People's Key, in 2011. In the years since Conor Oberst has been no slouch. He revived his previous side project, the Guthrie-punk band Desparecidos after more than a decade, releasing Payola, their second, in 2015. He formed the Mystic Valley Band and toured the world behind 3 solo albums, Upside Down Mountain, Ruminations and Salutations, some of his best work. On one of 2017's best albums, Strangers in the Alps by Phoebe Bridgers, Oberst can be heard, and after the two acts toured together they slipped us another new project last year called Better Oblivion Community Center. Now he's back where it all started to deliver on his end-times pronouncements.

New Video from House Lords

House Lords, out of Baltimore, have dropped the first single and video for their forthcoming album The Common Task. "People's Park" is a loosely-moving song that pops with angular rhythm like math rock with incorrect equations. The song's title comes from a neighborhood park established in Chicago's Lincoln Park by the Young Lords, a Latinx liberation organization.



In the video director Corey Hughes captures teenagers skating in semi-unison curlicues in the ice rink. Dressed in all-black they glide across the surface before a backdrop of foggy winter woods. The scene is somber, but there is freedom found in body's motion. Their movements fall in and out of sync with the rickety jam. "People's Park," like most of House Lords' work, is minimalist, capturing the house instruments propelled by a rascally rhythm. Their aim is to shake the listener's head around a little.

The Common Task will be released on March 13 by Northern Spy. Their east coast tour will begin the day before in Baltimore, Maryland. Learn more about the band here.

February 17, 2020

REVIEW: "Window In" by Michael Vallera

Michael Vallera creates dark room drone.


Window In is the new album from Chicago-based musician and photographer Michael Vallera. The entire album acts as a piece of scrambled drone surging through your speakers. It moves like space debris, hanging and sustaining. The field is wide.

Vallera has spent a career lurking in experimental music scenes of Chicago. He's released music as COIN, Cleared (with Steven Hess), and Marr (with Joseph Clayton Mills). Window In is the third album released under his birth name and third for Denovali Records, out of Germany.

The tunneling "Blue Mind" inaugurates the album.


It comes through like the halo-ridden soundwaves flaunting in the aftermath of a rocket launch. Vallera crafted Window In like a sonic blacksmith. The album's four tracks are disassembled and stripped back pieces of live recorded electric guitar, mished and mashed into a soup that never dissolves.


Outside of music, Vallera is also a contemplative photographer. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in 2018 his first photography monograph, "Wet Earth," was released by fine arts publisher Harmonipan Editions. The cover for Window In is a shivering shot of the Chicago skyline from a far-off shore with the day's light in submission. Cold waves below smack against the rocks in an uneven, but rhythmic pattern.

The album's title track is a meditation on twilight, breathing with the vibration.


The sound heard on Window In plays like film-developingchemicals as they clash and bubble making a toxic dispersal into the room. If it had a smell it might be that of rusted shipping container or a train track submerged in mildew. This is drone with a palpitating ghost pulse.

Window In is available March 27 on vinyl, digital and CD.

Photo by Michael Vallera. Courtesy of Clandenstine.

Photo by Michael Vallera. Courtesy of Clandenstine.

January 16, 2020

Hell is for Children -- The 2020 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, that beacon of overindulgence, has struck out once again.


This year’s inductees, with all due respect to Nine Inch Nails, are the wonkiest group ever selected by the increasingly out of touch voting board. Along with NIN, the Hall will induct singer Whitney Houston, rapper Notorious B.I.G, Depeche Mode, the Doobie Brothers and T. Rex.

One of the most important aspects that should be considered by voters is range of influence. Any band that heralds in a new branch of genre should instantly get in. Nine Inch Nails took the destructive power of metal and added to it gothic overtones and self-loathing to solidify industrial rock into the mainstream. He mixed in dub beats and soundscapes to heavy riffs and his aching scream.

Nails’ head, Trent Reznor, has quietly become this generation’s most influential artist, second only to maybe Thom Yorke of Radiohead.


Trent Reznor. Photo courtesy Spin.com.

While Nine Inch Nails has become a touring institution, Reznor has expanded the group’s sound with releases like Ghosts I-IV, Hesitation Marks and Bad Witch and won an Oscar and Grammy for one of his many Hollywood soundtracks. He’s even responsible for the two wimpy guitar strums on the intro for that goddamn song “Old Time Road” by Lil Nas X. (Banging my head on the desk trying to wipe away the image of Reznor inducting little Nas X into the Rock Hall in 2025.)

T-Rex is an obvious lock, conceiving glam rock. Depeche Mode carved their spot at the top of moody synth-based rock in the 80s and are one of those groups with intense fandom.

 

Then we turn to Whitney Houston and the Notorious B.I.G., the acts furthest from the ethos of rock.


Can't help but think they were largely included for their sensational untimely deaths. But I also wonder if they were picked simply to appease the growing calls of "more diversity" that rages from all quarters of Twitter when awards season rolls around. Not against all-inclusion in any sense, but what about these two artists have anything to do with rock and roll? 

The Notorious B.I.G. Photo courtesy of AnswersAfrica.


Houston’s big hit song was for a soundtrack. Her career went cold for a decade before overdosing on cocaine at a pre-Grammys party. Cocaine overdose is pretty rock and roll, but surely not the reason she’s in. B.I.G. was one of the great lyricists of rap’s heyday, an unmistakable delivery, but other than his murder being a Dateline episode I don’t see the rock and roll connection. But, hey, he’d be a first-ballot entry in the Hip-Hop Hall of Fame, which should expand beyond a museum.


Rappers in the Rock Hall was always a big question leading up to the late-70s eligibility period.


Should they or shouldn’t they? The first hip-hop entry was Afrika Bambaataa--the innovator DJ spinning records in the Bronx in the late-70s when NYC was engulfed in punk, disco and new wave. The Beastie Boys started out as a punk band and used rock, metal and punk samples in a way that had never been done before. Their first album is basically rock with some drunk shouting over it. Run DMC deserves the honor for sampling “Walk this Way” by Aerosmith and collaborating with the band. These early acts all have some significant tie to rock music’s history. It pretty much stops there, but every year there’s representation of the genre.

And if this induction garners more significance posthumously, like it seems with Houston and Biggie, then where is the love for Motörhead, MC5 and Thin Lizzy? Motörhead started out in England mid-70s and took what Black Sabbath was doing and sped it up. “Lemmy” Kilmister was the grisliest frontman and clenched the title until his death in 2015.

MC5 live. Photo courtesy of Riot Fest.

MC5 was part of the Detroit-area proto-punk scene of the late-60s, early-70s.


Like Hendrix or the Stooges, they were only around for a blip, but their influence has wide reach. Lead singer Rob Tyner and guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, who married Patti Smith, both passed in the early-90s; bassist Michael Davis, in 2012. From Dublin, Ireland, Thin Lizzy wrote some of the best drinking-on-a-Saturday-with-friends music in the 70s and were productive with 12 albums before bassist and lead vocalist Phil Lyncott passed in 1986.

The other nominees this year were Kraftwerk, Rufus featuring Chaka Khan, Soundgarden, Judas Priest, Dave Matthews Band, Pat Benatar and Todd Rundgren, who was nominated for the second consecutive time. What’s the hesitation? Rundgren didn’t only have some of the strongest hits of the 70s, he formed the prog-rock group Utopia, produced classic albums, wrote “Bang the Drum All Day,” and has experimented with his sound ever since.

Todd Rundgren live. Photo courtesy of Guitar Tricks.

The Doobie Brothers are a total throw-in, but in this group appear to be the only current live band, along with Depeche Mode.


So it’s 2020 and we’re celebrating rock and roll with the Doobies as the main act? Hopefully their cruise ship will dock in time for the show. Nothing against the group, they’ve kept at it over 40 years, but maybe the Hall should have a second annual show that is just every great forgotten act of the 60s and 70s.

Each year becomes more of a hodgepodge of acts that have little to do with each other. Eligibility for the nomination is 25 years from an act’s first official release. That currently puts us in the year 1995. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Radiohead, Metallica, Nirvana and Pearl Jam have been inducted, but were sort of the resident 90s act each time.

How cool would it be to have a year with Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Beck, Kate Bush and Rage Against the Machine all enshrined?


It’d be such an iconic representation of a slice of music history instead of this fucking amalgam of artists from all over the decades. This would bring back the spectacle of collaboration that used to be the Final Megajam. Maybe this year we’ll get the Doobies doing a yacht rock take on “Head Like A Hole,” with Reznor shouting, “I’d rather die than give you control.”

Oh well, it’s all bullshit anyways. Hope the winners have a ball on Jann Wenner's last dime.