As the founders of Fuck It Tapes, the psychedelic/freak-folk outfit Woods have seen seen much of their roster move on to bigger press (Wavves, MV&EE, Vivian Girls, much more) but it doesn’t seemed to have phased them much. These guys are hype darlings with some backbone, content to quietly perfect their craft and let the rest work itself out.
Their upcoming Songs of Shame is more extroverted and less antiquated than 08’s At Rear House, and is pushed out of the womb with such fervor that I can finally get behind the strained falsetto, Elliott Smith experiencing zipper-trouble vocals. My favorite track from them so far, “Gypsy Hand,” is heavy on the Sweet’N Low and cuts through familiar territory of demented sing-alongs and jangly pop hooks until exploding into a manic dialogue of phased guitars and barrel-chested drum kicks. “Echo Lake,” is a brief warm-up for some ritual sacrifice complete with war-toms and diving licks of squelched distortion not unlike label mates Magic Lantern. I bet they blast these jams during parties on Endor.
I wasn’t a believer before, but this is shaping up to be one of my most anticipated releases of the season. Whatever shameful deeds you’re doing in those Woods, keep it up. The vinyl will be available April 14th here.
Last week, I had part one of the 26-song, seasonally-inspired, massive clusterfuck mix. Guess fucking what! This is part dos, just in time to send March off like a lion (or a lamb, depending on where you are I suppose). Spring rules, and I want you to have the jams I’m cranking in my car with the windows down and rims still spinnin’. Below are 15 more songs that are one million times better than the new Phoenix or St. Vincent or Lykke Li albums (or whatever the other blogs are poppin’ boners for). Fuck that shit. String Band, Meadow, Growing, Yoko, the Banke, Lilys, some Ghost Box, some insane old and obscure psych… I even put ol’ Ginger and Eric on here. I mean, Jesus, I wish someone had made me a mix like this.
No annotations just time. Just enjoy the jams. As always, if you think these shits is tight, support the artist and grip their album(s).
As a visual aside, I took some photos yesterday evening of the beautiful seasonal unfurling in the Old Louisville neighborhood. For our readers in the area, you should grab this mix (as well as the samples from the new Akron/Family and Lotus Plaza albums), load the tracks onto your iPod, iPhone, iCranial RFID chip, pipe ‘em through some big headphones (not shitty earbuds), and take a stroll down South 2nd Street between Magnolia and Lee Streets for a most transcendental time. Nature owns.
Some critics tend to take issue with an artist who lacks continuity on record. They may attack the artist for having some shade of a messy identity crisis. They might feel that a body of recorded work should be a cohesive submersion into an aurally cultivated landscape. I am not that sort of critic.
Sure, there’s a lot to say about continuity. An album such as, say, Lotus Plaza’s The Floodlight Collective is a great example of a cohesive record that sticks to a particular song structure and sonic timbre, and does it in a well-crafted fashion. However, there’s a fine line between cohesion and repetition or lack of inspiration. There’s also a fine line between ecclecticity and clusterfuck. Akron/Family, with the forthcoming Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free, very intelligently carves an eclectic, surprising record that is not afraid to experiment with disparate genres – almost to an alarming level. It’s a textbook example of experimental music for people who might not like experimental music.
Akron/Family have dropped the freak from their freak folk flag, and in its place, introduced 11 remarkable tracks that explore every corner of cosmic American music – torch ballads to bucolic dirges, country rock to atmospheric anthems, sunshine pop and grating noise, Television and the Byrds, Sun City Girls and Sun Ra. Does this sound interesting to you? It should, Set Em Wild, Set Em Free is utterly imaginative.
“Everyone is Guilty,” the album’s opener, masterfully combines funk and post-punk. For a psych folk group, that’s pretty insane. From there, next track “River” provokes a sunshine-drenched subdued pop song with a twang. Eno-informed electronic flourishes swell and subside, as well as steel guitar and horn arrangements. It’s obvious that the Akron/Family loves music with no restrictions, plain and simple. What’s most surprising, aside from the genre jumping, is that fact that the group’s downsizing from a revolving roster to a trio yielded their most expansive album to date.
Now jump to “MBF” in the second half of the record. What begins as Steve Albini rock turns into a self-destructive porous membrane of sonic intensity that could fit very nicely on a Wolf Eyes or Prurient record. The structurally loose “Sun Will Shine (Warmth of the Sunship Version” is another highlight. This track is the closest resemblance to the group’s last effort Love is All, yet maintains the consistency of maturation and playfulness that makes Set Em Wild, Set Em Free so remarkable. The almost eight-minute “Gravelly Mountains of the Moon” is the real gem, though – a bombastic technicolor psychedelic anthem stocked with vast instrumentation and a pulsating over-the-horizon melodic quality. I like Akron/Family, but I didn’t see that one coming.
I can see the pure ambition of Set Em Wild, Set Em Free to possibly be a point of contention among critics and fans. I hope not. Set Em Wild, Set Em Free is smart and psychotic, almost refreshing to a fault, and showcases a band who has absolutely no comfort zone. Akron/Family have proven themselves to be pretty much fearless, and as a consequence, are propelled to a level much higher than simply another good offering from New Weird America. While some might find the record unlistenable at times, anyone with a relative appreciation of music and how it evolved should be compelled to give Set Em Wild, Set Em Free a fair shot, at least to hear an example of a truly brave and crafty collective.
Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free hits the streets on May 5 and is available for pre-order on Dead Oceans.
Beakman, Mr. Wizard, and Bill Nye are all rad bros. But no one touches Carl Sagan. In my 9th grade Physics class, a substitute teacher day equated to a Cosmos day, and thus, equated to a pretty awesome day. I found the companion book at a garage sale not too long after my first introduction to the show, and it still holds a prominent, direct line-of-sight place on my bookshelf.
I was fascinated at the gingerly, father-like nature of Sagan – someone who explains mysteries in a logical, easy-to-follow manner, a very heady theoretical scientist who seemed approachable – friendly even – and spoke with a literary prose peppered with a few sardonic, excellent jokes. All the aforementioned aspects are rather unusual for brilliant scientist type, right?
The show’s imagery and music combined a rather trippy mix of 8mm film, computer graphics, and a Ghost Box-style soundtrack, all of which provided a rather forward thinking project for 1980. Certainly the Pixar guys have spent some time with the visual elements of Cosmos. Sagan was cool.
The whole series is available to watch here! Love you, Hulu! Miss you, Carl!
[Editor's Note: This is Norwood's first article for the Decibel Tolls. Welcome him, and let's avoid the normal flaming we have here on this fine music blog, nerds. Don't scare him off too soon, now.]
Last week, I was editing a chapter on garage rock for Piero Scaruffi’s revised rock catalog when I stumbled upon a band that begged me for my curiosity. One of the few reviews about this outhouse-rock group was written by Julian Cope (for one of his album of the month pieces). I skimmed through his review, finding the nihilistic mumbo-jumbo of rock gold more and more appetizing. The more I researched, the quicker I found out that my dear uncle Scott Derr was one of the contributing madmen. It’s a small world after all! Cope surely did a good job selling the band on paper, and now I had a blood connection. I thoroughly scanned the world wide web before finally unveiling the 24-karat cacophony that is Monoshock’s first, last and only LP, “Walk to the Fire.”
“Walk to the Fire” shows off the raw power of the Stooges, the improvisational debauchery of the Velvet Underground, and the schizophrenic swagger of Pere Ubu; all finely minced, thrown into a blender, and garnished with a bit of apocalyptic satisfaction. There’s just something about the amateurish indecency of “Walk to the Fire” that sounds strikingly original. This feeling of sordid wonder juxtaposed with frontman Grady Runyan’s aesthetic framework makes “Walk to the Fire” one of rock music’s most fascinating “Jekyll and Hyde” records. You could enjoy it because of its “no-fi” garage-punk sound, or because of its potent expeditions into the psychedelic avant-garde.
The record as a whole will blow your sails due south; whether your heading there or not. Made up of college buddies Grady Runyan (vocals, guitar, e-bow, violin), Scott Derr (vocals, bass, guitar, brass, blender), Rubin Fiberglass (drums, percussion, vocals) and Aluminum Queen (saxophone), Monoshock mixes sloppy proto-punk with sophisticated free-form experimentation. “Walk to the Fire” is simply another example of punk rock’s “Fuck it, I’m a teenager” ethos gone horribly right. Everything seems to go wrong on this record, and that’s the provocative beauty of Monoshock’s design. The chaotic mess of guitars, drums and orchestral instruments proves to be much more prophetic than ignorant. More singular than homogenous. And more honest than fraudulent. When listening, I often forget that running saxophones through oscillators, and aimlessly howlin’ away on brass isn’t the norm in rock music, but Monoshock does it with an unwavering conviction.
The opening track “Crypto-Zoological Disaster,” begins with a head bobbin’ Pere Ubu riff that steadily marches until it abruptly decomposes into a degenerative, DNA-like, orgy of half-conscious noise. After getting lost in the masochistic crescendo, Runyan and company come full-circle, bringing back the riff in a final tour de force.
“I Took You to it Baby,” Monoshock’s destructive ballad, features the group’s most conventionally catchy instrumentation. Fortunately for us, Runyan’s apathetic wailing combined with a belligerent, yet hummable, guitar melody makes you want to turn up the volume, pound the gas with your lead foot and flip the bird to the next copper you see on the open highway.
The almost primitivist “Astral Plane” sways back and forth like a drunk seaman, soon to be hanging over the ship’s railing in a sickening stupor. This uncanny, vaguely psychedelic sound appears all over “Walk to the Fire,” contributing to the record’s subtle hallucinogenic mystique. The track’s climax is marked by Derr’s disastrously fulfilling brass solo.
Monoshock’s “Walk to the Fire” will likely grab you by the neck, and wring you for every last penny. Sometimes being wrong feels oh so right.
As the resident Poet Laureate of Drag City, Bill Callahan only has two albums between his former moniker as Smog, but in this small gap of time we’ve seen a drastic evolution of style that would take most artists a lifetime to flesh out. On his newest effort Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, Callahan’s protagonist, whether autobiographical or a fictional character, has finally abandoned his teenage spaceship.
Those familiar with 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart will have noticed the increasing absence of tension in Callahan’s songwriting, which by contrast can make his newfound spaciousness seem almost intimidating, or possibly threatening to his artistic process. But can we really ask to him remain in the same winter-rate motels full of malignant claustrophobia that gave us a jarring shot of voyeurism and schadenfreude on albums like Julius Caesar? His final offering as Smog, 2005’s A River Ain’t too Much to Love, proved that he could burst through his type-cast as a gloomy lo-fi artisan, holding some of his best songs to date, and this new record provides further reassurance with it’s refined gospel splendor.
The opener “Jim Cain” allows the languid baritone to breathe deep. Even when delivered with the deadpan enthusiasm of a Walmart greeter, his voice attains a staggering presence against the gentle picking and sweeping violins. Sometimes I Wish is full of lush arraignments by Brian Beattie, but the vocals are the still the album’s focal point. The Instrumentation is there to aid narration more than create an atmosphere, and this can leave them standing fairly naked on their own, not as developed as some of the more accomplished orchestrations like Whaleheart’s “Sycamore”. Nevertheless, it works beautifully to compliment Callahan’s honed vocal nuances, relishing in his bright colloquialisms á la Breece D’J Pancake or a confederate Lou Reed.
“The Wind and the Dove” begins with a sliding Arabic cello that has a slight air of foreboding menace to it, almost touching base with fellow folk misanthropes Angels of Light or Current 93. “Rococo Zephyr” has a delicate harp-like guitar dancing up and down a simple scale with a minimal drum trotting along. As the base smooths out the lower register and a distant piano washes over us, we find Callahan at his most accessible and serene, even drawing some comparisons to Leonard Cohen.
Callahan has stated that this album was largely composed during a fit of sleeplessness, and themes of exhaustion permeate throughout. “Too Many Birds” is a tender musing on futility and wandering restlessness, “You fly all night to sleep on stone,” he sings describing the toll it takes when you don’t have somewhere to settle down. “Invocation of Ratiocination,” is a tongue-twister and a puzzling interlude of water-logged ghost wails and nervous piano. Maybe if nothing else, it’s a nod to his dormant need for subversion, or an innate human need to undermine harmony. The album proceeds to close with “Faith/Void” which, at almost ten minutes, I would assume is the longest song he’s ever written. A true polaroid of spiritual reevaluation that comes with approaching your mid-life that all those Broken Social Scene side-projects try so hard to capture. “It’s time to put God away,” he repeats over and over as the epic closer builds upwards.
When Callahan sings, “I started telling the story/Without knowing the end/I used to be darker/Then I got lighter/Then it got dark again,” it comes off as good summary of his career so far. Sometimes I Wish is an honest reflection on a lifetime of musical impulsiveness and risk-taking. Occasionally, with such a strong emphasis on lyrics (he claims to write them before any of the instrumentation) it almost seems like nowadays he’d be better suited as a novelist, but when they’re pronged with such confidence, no eggshells to tip-toe around, we can’t help but be won over, and those who listen will be rewarded with one of his most cohesive albums ever. Vulnerable, unapologetic, and full of soul, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle is a warm gesture in a music scene steeped in irony.
I was raised on Warp. During my very first job at a hole in the wall lawn & garden shop my boss used to put on the Richard D James Album whenever it was a slow day (i.e. every day except Arbor Day). But all my nostalgia aside, there is no other label that has promoted more discussion, mystique, or innovation to the world of electronic music than these guys right here, and after going 20 years strong, it’s time to fucking celebrate.
Here’s how they’re rolling it out. Right now, instead of reading this, you could be helping to decide the track listing for the Best of Warp compilation! This 20-song cd will have 10 tracks chosen by co-founder Steve Beckett, and the rest are up to us. Each person can vote up to 50 times (but only once for each track) from now until May 8th. My first vote just went to Squarepusher’s “Iambic 9 Poetry”.
What would a birthday bash be without some crazy guest appearances? Kicking off in Paris on May 8th will be a limited tour with a drool-worthy lineup featuring: Aphex Twin, arriving either by tank or submarine depending on location, and sharing the stage with him is wonderkid Tim Hecker, also !!!(chk chk chk), Pivot, Flying Lotus, Hudson Mohawke, and that’s only who they’ve revealed so far (I’m lookin’ at you, Boards of Canada). Most of the dates are in the UK, but the crew will make one stop state-side in New York on July 20th.
[Editor's Note: You too can see the spectrograph demon Richard James hidden in Windowlicker. What a creep! Read more here.]
Now, that’s already enough excitement for us faint of heart, but it doesn’t stop there. This autumn, Warp will also be releasing a collection of “new and unreleased tracks from the majority of the current Warp roster, as well as some of the finest artists from our history.” Quantities are said to be “extremely limited” so stay tuned in for details if you wanna beat me to it. Viva la Warp!
[Editor's Note: Fuckin' love Warp, dude. I just voted for Broadcast "America's Boy", Seefeel "Spangle," Aphex Twin "To Cure a Weakling Child" and Two Lone Swordsmen "Punches and Knives," four incredibly sick songs that I've included below for your consideration. Vote for 'em! If it ain't Warp, it ain't worth a shit!]
Too broke to booze tonight (except for some Heaven Hill, which I won’t go into) so I might as well blog like the winner I am. It should be apparent that I have the taste for the strange, and I often try to find gems of inexplicable oddity on YouTube. The third Adventures in YouTubin’ comes, this time around, with a theme and a new graphic (that, come to think of it, looks like I’m promoting a rave or some shit) – strange moments on the tele, subsequently uploaded to YouTube.
Enter fake Max Headroom:
I can only imagine that this was rather horrifying and surreal to randomly see on PBS. One autumn November evening in 1987, Chicago’s WTTW was airing a fun and fancy-free episode of Dr. Who, when the signal was intercepted and overtaken by pirates.
In order to hijack a television feed, you would need very sophisticated, expensive microwave equipment capable of overtaking a television station’s signal (not to mention extremely specialized technical knowledge). You would also need to know the exact location of the uplink antenna and be within line-of-sight. However, WTTW’s was on top of the Sears Tower, a very visible landmark, making it a bit easier to find, and certainly impossible to locate where the pirate signal came from. Investigators concluded that the “signal pirate” smothered WTTW’s broadcast with a large and uncommon rig of sufficient microwave power, the type of equipment that could be purchased for about $25,000 (in ‘87 no less), or rented for a few thousand dollars. If one wanted to cover their tracks well, the microwave rig could be disassembled and transported using a few large suitcases. It’s also possible that the pirate could’ve gained access to a powerful ground-based transmitter. He was never caught.
The mask, if you’re wondering, is the protagonist from the mid-’80s post apocalyptic program Max Headroom, a type of Orwellian show wherein tyrannical corporations control the media (sounds familiar) and subversives would disseminate their message of freedom by hijacking live TV signals. The social commentary was not lost on investigators.
The stunt required a lot of work, know-how, and money to pull off, all at significant personal and legal risk… for this:
“He’s a freaky nerd!””This guy’s better than Chuck Swirsky.” (a WGN sportscaster at the time)
“Oh Jesus!”
“Catch the wave.” (a reference to the New Coke marketing slogan)
“Your love is fading.”
[hums the theme song to the 1959 TV series “Clutch Cargo”]
“I stole CBS.”
“Oh, I just made a giant masterpiece printed all over the greatest world newspaper nerds.”
“My brother is wearing the other one.”
“It’s dirty.”
“They’re coming to get me!” [then cue mock S&M scene]
Moral of the story – be thankful. Do you see the lengths people had to go to publicize their pointless bullshit prior to the Internet?
It’s great when you can present a video so strange that John Cage’s “Water Walk” seems rather tame:
Not much to add here. This is an excerpt from a game show called I’ve Got a Secret. I have a feeling that some TV exec or talent buyer lost their job after this one, especially since this was three years prior to Steve Allen getting away with letting Frank Zappa play a bike on live television.
Finally, this could be classified as a horrifying moment in television like the first video, I suppose, though I don’t know if this is actually airing anywhere else besides public access. For those unfamiliar, the TARC is the Transit Authority of River City, our public transit system here in Louisville. The city’s initiating a fairly big push to go green, so more people are riding their bikes. Unfortunately, a lot of the busier streets don’t have bike lanes at the moment, so people switch to the bus. Evidently, there were enough people who couldn’t figure out how to bring their bike on the bus to convince TARC they needed to spend money producing… this…
Sweet sassy molassey. I would be totally bummed if I was a bus driver and had to participate in this. Kinda reminds me of D’Mite’s “Read a Book,” though, what do you think? Also, “concept and lyrics by Mamma Jamma.” I love this city.
If you find something insane on YouTube that should be featured here, send me an email: kb [at] thedecibeltolls (dot) com, and you’ll get some sort of prize if we feature it. Can’t guarantee it’s a good prize, but something free nonetheless.
I’m not sure if Edward Murrow was a household name for this generation before 2005’s Good Night and Good Luck came out. I hope so, as Edward Murrow was the greatest American broadcast journalist of all time, and arguably the greatest journalist of any medium anywhere. His elegant, almost poetic prose and his bravery – from reporting on rooftops in London during the Blitzkrieg (“this… is London”) to telling Joe McCarthy he’s a moron on live television – is unmatched, especially in our current 24-hour news paradigm.
With our current economic (and sometimes social) turmoil, it’s certainly as relevant now as ever before to listen to the sound of history as told by one of its best orators, in a time Murrow called the most exciting and dramatic thirteen years in American history. This record, I Can Hear It Now, Vol. 1, does just that – documents a sort of “greatest hits” between 1933 and 1945, what Murrow calls “a scrapbook of sound” (which is a bite I think DJ Shadow uses as a sample, but I forget the song).
Rather than simply a recount of the most famous speeches and recordings any student of U.S. history will be familiar with, I Can Hear It Now gathers every major milestone that was important at that time, without an outsider or historical perspective (it was released shortly after the war in 1948). Pearl Harbor and the 1940 Republican nomination of Wendell Willkie, the prayer of a pilot before commandeering the Enola Gay, Roosevelt and Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain and Joe Louis are all given a respectable chunk of time on this record. Of course, some of the more famous quotations make the cut, such as the Hindenburg “oh the humanity,” but also rare speeches by Stalin.
I found this at a garage sale a couple of years ago – why would someone sell this? The record is both uplifting and spooky – the sound of immeasurable fear during wartime juxtaposed against how all of us can make some lemonade of the situation(s). Pretty powerful.
I’ve transcribed the back of the record, which describes what you’re hearing in each broadcast collage, or “band,” exactly as it appears (save for the unnecessary capitalization that I assume was AP style in the ’40s). The end of band five reveals where Murrow got his trademark phrase “good night and good luck” (which is where Keith Olbermann got his phrase, if ya’lls were unaware).
Band One
Will Rogers talks about America and the Depression, 1932
Franklin D Roosevelt assumes the Presidency on March 4, 1933 “Nothing to Fear but Fear.”
Senator Huey Long, the Louisiana King-Fish and his “Share the Wealth” program, just prior to his assassination on September 8, 1935
The Duke of Windsor Abdicates for “the woman I love,” December 11, 1936
Band Two
Fiorello H LaGuardia wages war against the “Ward Heelers”
Alfred Landon campaigns for the Presidency, 1936
“Rendezvous with Destiny” speech; Franklin D Roosevelt at Franklin Field, Philadelphia, June 27, 1936
John L. Lewis castigates those who have deserted Labor (Labor Day, 1937)
the Hindenburg Air Disaster, Lakehurst, NK, May 6, 1937; Herbert Morrison of WLS, Chicago, at the scene
Band Three
September 30, 1938 at Munich
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returns from Munich and tells of his meeting with Hitler, September 27, 1938
Adolf Hitler lashes out against Eduard Benes and the Sudetenland, September 26, 1938
Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, Yankee Stadium, June 22, 1938 (Clem McCarthy of NBC describes the Knockout)
Iron-Man Lou Gehrig steps down after twenty-one hundred and thirty games of baseball, July 4, 1939
Band Four
Elmer Davis announces the Invasion of Poland by Germany, September 3, 1939
Three Views of US Neutrality: Charles A Lindbergh, Alfred E Smith, Hugh Johnson
Nazi Blitzkrieg on the Continent; actual march of Storm Troopers, “Seig Heils,” etc., Spring 1940
Franklin D Roosevelt at Charlottesville, Virginia, “The Hand that Held the Dagger,” June 10, 1940
Benito Mussolini’s Declaration of War, June 10, 1940
Band Five
Premier Paul Reynaud pleads for US Aid as Nazis overrun France, June 10, 1940
French surrender at Compiegne (via German Shortwave Radio) June 22, 1940
Neville Chamberlain resigns as Prime Minister, May 10, 1940
Winston Churchill forms a Coalition Government; Excerpts from several of his early speeches, May and June 1940
Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose speak to evacuated British children
Band Six
Joseph W Martin, Willkie Notification Ceremony, Elwood, Indiana, August 17, 1940
Wendell Willkie accepts Republican Nomination, Elwood, August 17, 1940
Franklin D Roosevelt campaigns for third term: “Martin, Baron and Fish” speech, October 30, 1940
Winston Churchill reads “Ship of State” message delivered to him from President Roosevelt by Wendell Willkie
“Arsenal of Democracy,” Franklin D Roosevelt, March 15, 1941
New York Philharmonic broadcast interrupted for Pearl Harbor announcement, December 7, 1941
Band Seven
US Declaration of War; Speaker Sam Rayburn introduces President, who asks Congress to declare a State of War, December 8, 1941
D-Day, June 6, 1944′ Messages on the Invasion by General Dwight D Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle, King Haakon of Norway, and others
Band Eight
Broadcast from Invasion Flagship Ancon on D-Day by George Hicks of the American Broadcasting Company, June 6, 1944
Marshall Joseph Stalin on the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution, November 7, 1941
Franklin D Roosevelt makes his fourth race for the Presidency (“Fala Speech”), September 7, 1944
Franklin D Roosevelt addresses Joint Session of Congress after his return from Yalta, March 1, 1945
Band Nine
Announcement of President Roosevelt’s death, April 12, 1945
Description Roosevelt Funeral Procession, Washington, April 14, 1945 (Arthur Godrey)
Harry S Truman makes his first appearance as president before a Joint Session of Congress, introduced by Speaker Sam Rayburn, April 16, 1945
President Truman announces German surrender, May 8, 1945
Secretary of State Edward Stettinius opens San Francisco Conference of the United Nations, April 25, 1945
Band Ten
Chaplain William Downey, US Army Air Forces, says a prayer at Tinian, before take-off of the Enola Gay, which carried first atomic bomb used in warfare, August 6, 1945
President Truman tells of our race for atomic energy and our plans for it, August 9, 1945
First bulletin of Japanese surrender (Robert Trout), August 14, 1945
General Douglas McArthur accepts Japanese surrender aboard Battleship Missouri, September 2, 1945
Epilogue: The thirteen years
In the note included on the back, Murrow and Friendly describe, indirectly, why they released this record: “It has been said that Colonial troops one hundred feet away from Washington at Yorktown missed Cornwallis’ surrender because the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. Yet GIs on KP at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts, heard MacArthur accept the Japanese surrender faster and clearer than sailors on the superstructure of the battleship Missouri.” His program on CBS was called “Hear It Now” after the title of this record. However, the name of the record, I believe, is the acknowledgment on Murrow and Friendly’s behalf of the power they wield, and the responsibility they carry during strange and transitional times.
This jam rules, and I sincerely hope you enjoy it. I Can Hear It Now is a gem in my record collection.
Big day at the blog office. We’ve heard two amazing records just today, which is amazing considering that all three of us are total haters – the new Lotus Plaza, and this mysterious offering from a massive cluster of trans-Atlantic musicians called Flowers of Hell.
I don’t care if no one told these guys that it’s not the late ’90s anymore and post rock is no longer en vogue and/or what the kids are listening to these days. Fuck the kids. The Flowers of Hell’s Come Hell or High Water is one of the sickest, most moving collection of songs I’ve heard in some time, and is unequivocally the first great album of 2009.
Actually, that’s not fair. Flowers of Hell are not exactly post rock in the strictest sense. Sure, the music is instrumental and tends to gravitate toward tension-and-release compositions. Make no mistake, though, there’s a fresh, revelatory element in their sound. I saw someone describe the record as “classical music for shoegazers,” and I have to agree.
“Opus 66″ opens the record right, taking a few pages out of the Do Make Say Think book, cultivating a crescendo that you could only measure in axehandles. All the ingredients for chamber rock is here – strings, piano, lots of reverb, tremolo-saturated guitar, et al. Where Flowers of Hell carve their niche, though, is the incorporation of electronic flourishes and psychedelic boogie reminiscent of Spiritualized’s mid-career work. This makes sense, as good ol’ Sonic Boom performs on the album – not to mention members of British Sea Power, Bat For Lashes, Broken Social Scene, John Cale’s touring band, The Earlies, Guided By Voices, The Clientele, Do Make Say Think, The Hidden Cameras, The Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa, Tindersticks, The Early Years, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. To add to the general radar blip this group exudes, band member and producer Greg Jarvis is a synaesthetic. Something to the effect of 3% of the world’s population has this gift: “The composing, recording, arranging, and mixing of Come Hell Or High Water was done largely by following timbre-to-shape synaesthetic visions. Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon where two senses are intermingled… With timbre-to-shape synaesthesia, sounds involuntarily trigger a translucent visual layer of moving shapes which follow a consistent audio-visual language. ‘I see sounds,’ explains Jarvis, ‘When I hear sounds, I see each timbre in front of me as shapes that follow patterns, often gliding, pulsing, and swirling with the rhythm and timing interlocking them all. Each timbre behaves differently, and that’s the main reason we’ve got such a variety of instruments on this album.’”
“The Inovcation” adopts a tribal rhythm with vintage electronic pings and pulses in the vein of the BBC Radiophone Workshop. “The Strength of String” is pure cinematic score – the foreboding mood of Morricone, but with a lot more melodic quality. “Bleumschen” ropes in a Faust/Neu motorik meets Loop-style fuzz sludge climax that totally slays me. Well-placed moments of dissonance (i.e. “Forest of Noise”) are peppered throughout the record as well, helping to establishing an overall experience as jarring as it is pleasant. The minimal beauty of Mogwai’s EP+2 is stretched across a full band canvas on album closer “Occasional Tears.” Considering the amount of musicians involved – 16 total – expect to hear a little bit of everything, including but not limited to: chamber pop, post rock, space, ambient, drone, and heavy fuckin’ metal. Basically, you’re an asshole if you don’t like Come Hell or High Water.
And zounds! Czech this video. The 8mm projections in this live performance really add the visual ambience that I wish more artists offer. I think this was recorded from their opening set for My Bloody Valentine. I might be wrong. Either way, my evening would’ve been a lot of better if the Flowers opened for MBV’s Chicago show instead of that shitty-ass Hopewell band.
Not to sound lame, but The Flowers of Hell offer everything I, personally, enjoy in my music. Fuck guitar solos, fuck wankery – make your music sound awesome. Sure, it’s nothing that you haven’t heard before, but Flowers of Hell offer the lush soundscapes, thick melodies, panned psychedelia known in the state of California to cause brain melting, and movements that, I would say, are rather triumphant.
Come Hell or High Water is out April 6 in Canada/The UK. Can’t tell if it will be available in the states or not, but you can grip it here.
