Since it’s Halloween week, and I always associate Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds broadcast with the holiday, it seemed like a decent time for posting proper on some Simply Saucer. Though their name sounds like an item you might pick up at your nearby intergalactic grocery stop, their astral psychedelic garage transmissions more than make up for poor title decisions (I mean, their quintessential album is titled Cyborgs Revisited… Ridley Scott, you own them some royalties, dudebro).

The influences are obvious – early Floyd, 13th Floor Elevators, the Velvets’ “Sister Ray,” Delay 68 Can, Electric Prunes, et al., but whereas those groups fine-tuned their sound and still maintained a compositionally tight feel despite their freewheeling image, Simply Saucer had no interest in aesthetic. Every song sounds as if it was recorded live with cheap tape recorders.  Its gorgeously raw sound and low-end clipping mix gives Simply Saucer extra (possibly unintended) atmosphere. It’s too bad that Simply Saucer was never known too far outside their native Ontario, as they really captured, at least in my mind’s eye, the archetypal ’60s/early ’70s psych movement from a candid, outsider perspective. Being removed from what was happening in England and the West Coast is totally an asset to Cyborgs Revisited. 

They were also to an extent, as a sign o’ the times, totally insane. “Illegal Bodies” was recorded live and begins with some poignant stage banter about the next song: “Here’s some heavy metaloid music. It’s called ‘Illegal Bodies.’ It’s a song in the future. It’s when, uh, unless you have a metal body, they’re not gonna allow you to walk the streets. No kiddin’.” Right on, man. I’ll post this song at a later point.

But first, I wanna discuss two of the strongest jams on Cyborgs Revisited. Both “Here Come the Cyborgs, Part 2″ and “Dance the Mutation” dabble heavy in United States of America-style noise, including theremin sounds and other flourishes. Rather than rip into solos and what-not, Simply Saucer resorted to their acumen for cultivating a disorienting mood, adding effects and textures that resembled some cross between a first respondent siren and sound effects from The Day the Earth Stood Still. Around 3:05 and after on “Dance the Mutation,” you’ll probably notice early rumblings of what will later become shoegazing. You need Simply Saucer if you’re a Spacemen 3 fiend.

Also, there’s a pretty sweet review of Cyborgs Revisited on Amazon.com from a dude who calls himself “Farmer Ted”:

“Yo. This album is hot.
They drop bombs and don’t mess around.
I can’t believe more popel have not heard of this.
When you want a band that just rips it up nice…
Simply Saucer.
It’s the mad sweet old just ripping and going for it.
No one wants to do that anymore…
Well…Simply Saucer did.
Buy it. “

MP3 :::
Simply Saucer – Here Come the Cyborgs (Part 2)
Simply Saucer – Dance the Mutation

Our favorite round, beachball-sized, constantly beeping friend turns 51 today. Or would’ve turned 51 today had he not burned up a bit in the Earth’s atmosphere. I like to spend my Tuesday evenings with PBS’ science program Nova, and this week’s installment covered all that you probably didn’t know about the Sputnik program and the advent of the Space Race…

“Listen now,” said the NBC radio network announcer on the night of October 4, 1957, “for the sound that forevermore separates the old from the new.” Next came the chirping in the key of A-flat from outer space that the Associated Press called the “deep beep-beep.” Emanating from a simple transmitter aboard the Soviet Sputnik satellite, the chirp lasted three-tenths of a second, followed by a three-tenths-of-a-second pause. This was repeated over and over again until it passed out of hearing range of the United States.

The satellite was silver in color, about the size of a beach ball, and weighed a mere 184 pounds. Yet for all its simplicity, small size, and inability to do more than orbit the Earth and transmit meaningless radio blips, the impact of Sputnik on the United States and the world was enormous and unprecedented. The vast majority of people living today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, were born after Sputnik was launched and may be unaware of the degree to which it helped shape life as we know it. Now is an especially good time to take a fresh and focused look at the event whose impact looms even larger with the passing of time. In the last decade an incredible amount of once-secret material has been declassified and made public. Scholars and writers both inside and outside government have coaxed key Cold War documents out of hiding. Collectively, this material has given new dimensions and twists to almost every aspect of the events leading up to and following the launch of Sputnik.

For example, one recently released document reveals evidence of a long-forgotten pre-Sputnik “olive branch” extended by Russian scientists, who asked their American counterparts to supply a piece of scientific equipment for a planned launch. By most indications, this piece of equipment was meant for the third Sputnik.

It is not widely known even now that one of the reasons President Dwight D. Eisenhower and those around him did not react with alarm over Sputnik going into space ahead of an American satellite was that Eisenhower welcomed the launch to help establish the principle of “freedom of space” [the idea that outer space belonged to everyone, thereby allowing satellite flights over foreign countries]. At the time of the Sputnik “crisis,” the White House, Central Intelligence Agency, Air Force, and a few highly select and trustworthy defense contractors were creating a spy satellite that was so secret that only a few dozen people knew of it. Even its name, CORONA, was deemed secret for many years. Instead of being concerned with winning the first round of the space race, Eisenhower and his National Security Council were much more interested in launching surveillance satellites that could tell American intelligence where every Soviet missile was located.”
- Continue reading at Sputnik Declassified

To celebrate the beep that bummed the Western World out, here’s a space related Super Swingin’ Mix. Can YOU guess how each song relates to Sputnik? I’ll get you started – Laika was the name of the dog who accompanied Sputnik II a month after the first launch and the name of the British space pop group whose song “Almost Sleeping,” off their album Sounds of the Satellites, is found below.

MP3 :::
Laika – Almost Sleeping
Spacemen 3 – Hypnotized
Boards of Canada – Over the Horizon Radar
Raymond Scott – Twilight in Turkey
Raymond Scott – Ripples (Excerpt)
Belbury Poly – The Moonlawn
Stereolab – Golden Ball
Astral – Blinder
Space Needle – Scientific Mapp

Once again, “woj” emerges victorious with another quality recording of WFMU’s broadcast of last weekend’s All Tomorrow’s Parties. This time, he comes bearing gifts of the Brain Jonestown Massacre and Spectrum (a.k.a. Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom).

The Brian Jonestown Massacre says “no” to hippies and ravages through a cross-catalog of jams in a 45-minute span. Though the volume is low, the quality is good, with no discernible rip hiccups or encoding snags. The highlight for me includes, what I believe to be, an impromptu cover of The Smith’s “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” right in the middle of “Hide and Seek” (from Spacegirl and Other Favorites). And of course, there’s always the strange and entertaining BJM stage banter.

Your Anton Newcombe Quote for October 1st:

Interviewer: What keeps you buzzing as a band?
Anton: Amphetamines

A quick programming note – the Decibel Tolls is ALL NEW this Friday with Kenny Bloggins v. Anton Newcombe. Comedy ensues when Kenny accidentally gets into an online nerd fight with the BJM front man, but they make up and touch weiners afterwards.

Spectrum… just plain sounds amazing. Spectrum dusted off and reworked some old gems, such as their own version of Spacemen 3’s version of Mudhoney’s “When Tomorrow Hits.” I’m also including a celebratory Silver Apples MP3 below since Simeon used to jam with Sonic Boom, often uncredited, under the Spectrum name. What, you don’t have the SA/Contact joint? Take care of that! Oh, and hey, anyone got that Spectrum/Silver Apples split Lake of Teardrops? That shit’s hard to find.

The new Spectrum album is tentatively titled On the Wings of Mercury (though I’m sure someone will correct me if this is wrong) and is supposed to be released before 2008 on Space Age Recordings, but no official date has been announced.

MP3 :::
The Brian Jonestown Massacre at ATP – 9.21.08
The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Here It Comes
Spectrum at ATP – 9.21.08
Silver Apples – Misty Mountain

Let’s talk for a bit…

Considering the date today, the clear blue sky outside, and the fact that I’m writing this at my desk in a building in downtown Chicago that’s considered a terrorist target, it’s hard not to wax a bit historical, even on a psychedelic-music-specific blog. I mean… I need a security card to do anything within this building, which is hilarious to me when noting that if, ya know, someone wanted to 86 this building, they could probably accomplish this goal without ever showing up on the premises. This is not a threat or anything, witch hunters, I’m simply speaking academically.

I very lucidly remember when it happened. I was a senior in high school and watching the morning unfurl in my AP Government class. My well-meaning but somewhat kooky teacher took a sort of anthropologically-removed delight in what was going on with respect to the subject she taught. “I can’t wait to talk about the political and social implications of today,” she smirked. I also remember when the North Tower collapsed – among the confusion and gasps, the dude who sat behind me mused “oh shit… this means war.” In my wisdom, I turned around and retorted “no it doesn’t… no sovereign nation did this. This was a group of bummed-out cohorts, probably of multiple nationalities, who planned and executed this. You can’t wage a, what, a ‘war on terror.’ That’s like waging a war on ghosts, or bad vibes, or, like, an ideal. You can’t just march into Terroriststan and seek your retribution.” So, I ate some twice-baked crow about a month afterwards.

Something that’s always bothered me, though, is how this, a tragic event, became a political issue this decade, and became the springboard for a dire national paradigm, ultimately brought upon by all of us. This is a moral and humanist issue, not political. And thanks to the politicization, and ultimately trivialization, of 9/11 – spewing forth constant rhetoric, punditspeak, and instruction on what to do/not to do “or else the terrorists win” – we have essentially done what we said we were never going to do: we “forgot” it. We let this become political – by the way we responded to it, how we’ve voted, by the way we spoke and continue to speak about it, etc. It’s deplorable.

The first time I noticed this phenomenon was when our principal, every day for weeks on end after the attacks, would pontificate how important safety is to the school and what we would do in the event of an Anthrax attack. I found this strange. Was anyone, really, going to put forth the effort to fuck with a public high school in central Kentucky just for the lulz? It was a waste of five minutes, every day, that I could not get back, not to mention a waste of school resources. Throughout high school, I was on our newspaper staff, The Masthead. When a new issue was coming out, we would promote it by placing handmade banners in the hallways throughout the school. In response to our principal’s unfounded (and ultimately irresponsible and panic-inciting) fears, I made a banner that read something to the effect of “New Masthead on Thursday – 99.9% Anthrax Free.” Kenny Bloggins got to go see the newspaper teacher shortly afterward. This was the first instance that our response to 9/11 semmed rather asinine. It wouldn’t be the last.

On our senior trip to New York, while there was still rubble on Vesey Street, souvenir shops were selling fuckin’ World Trade Center snowglobes. It was vile. Over the next couple of years, the event evolved into a neologistic issue in elections, and the panic it produced became the final arbiter in the 2004 election – a watershed in national stupidity. Shit, this event was the pillar on which a certain mayor’s presidential bid stood on. The attack became the origin point for a flubbed war, massive administrative corruption, xenophobia, really bad Photoshops of crying eagles, and, eventually, a joke. Instead of respecting 9/11 for what it was, a national tragedy and a opportunity to praise those who exemplified good in the face of and in direct contrast to evil (both first respondents and citizens), it has since become a sound bite, a visceral talking point, a justification for prejudice, and a political move to initiative massive, gnarly reforms. So ironically, the constant repetition of “never forget” played a part in the public psyche forgetting what we were supposed to take away from 9/11. Coining catchphrases and optioning several major motion pictures ain’t it. Something like this is a prime example of what we could’ve done, taking an opportunity to extract a lesson from what happened and better our great country, instead of letting our leaders spy on us, reelect them thereafter, and allow them and the media to re-trivialize the lives of 3,000 people. How did we let this happen? Why are we Fed-Exing our selves to hell with cute stamps?

Somewhere along the line, admist the panic, Kuber-Ross stages of grief, and the media’s (and, well, our) cheapening of this pivotal day in American history, we got confused, and never really learned a thing. The confusion is, now, more deafening than it was then. And that is odious.

MP3 :::
Spacemen 3 – The Sound of Confusion

The King of Amazing Drug and God Songs (and also the King of Pitchfork Music Festival, as you may have read earlier) has some serious Nina Totenberg hang time scheduled. In what I thought at first was spam was actually a rather exciting alert notifying me that Spiritualized’s performance this Friday at DC’s 930 Club will be broadcast live online, courtesy of NPR. When I think of NPR, I certainly don’t think of J Spaceman’s Martian redemption grooves, but I definitely applaud NPR trying to broaden their pallets, givin’ a nod to what us weird kids like.

I don’t think you can hear it on your local soft-spoken news affiliate, but it will be webcast in its entirety at 10 p.m. Eastern / 9 p.m. Central at NPR.org. Go forth!

After two months of flawless weather in Chicago, the climate waited until the most excellent of weekends to unleash her fury, with downpours on Saturday and oppressive, Biblical heat on Sunday. Despite that, Pitchfork Music Festival, by and large, ruled. Though we were all very privileged to see some excellent performances (sans Vampire Weekend… the Decibel Tolls is the only blog with an official “VW sucks it” philosophy), this whole festival belongs to one man, in my opinion.

And that’s Mr. Jason Spaceman…

Remember when I said Boris would be the loudest band at PMF? Wrong! Spiritualized was loud enough to decimate the festival’s PA system in the middle of “Take Me to the Other Side.” Mr. Pierce was so distraught over the whole predicament that, well, he took it upon himself to knock over their mic stands with his guitar and send his vintage (I think it was a) Telecaster through his amp head. It’s good to see psych dudes go delightfully apeshit every now and again. He wasn’t too upset about the whole thing, as he came back on stage to wave bye to the crowd and take a humble bow.

I was hoping that Spiritualized would roll through with an extra ensemble or two, and they delivered. The crowd roared when the Spritiualized gospel singers took the stage for some very intense, wall of sound plus gospel renditions of “Come Together,” “Soul on Fire,” and more. Pierce even brought out the big guns and dusted off “Shine a Light” from 1991’s Laser Guided Melodies (my favorite Spiritualized album)! This is the closest I’ll ever get to taking drugs inside a church.

Animal Collective brought a whole slew of new material during Saturday night’s performance. Actually, they premiered one song in the middle of a 20-minute rendition of “Fireworks” come to think of it. AC also brought out one of their newest fan favorites, known as “House” and “Simple Things,” depending on what you read. Avey Tare sported an awesome bucket hat. Unfortunately, none of my photos turned out that well, so I won’t post them. I had amazing photos of their performance last May at The Dame in Lexington, but unfortunately, my camera went AWOL shortly after. Moral of the story, unload your shit early and often.

Caribou was the other sick performance that stood out from the weekend. The rain hit right when Caribou started at 2:15, but the music was too sunshine-saturated to make you take notice. As I discussed in the Pitchfork preview, Caribou is an exercise in percussive fortitude. Dan Snaith performs with a full band, and bangs the shit out of the drums for each song’s climax.

The highlight for me was hearing an old favorite, “Skunks” off of 2003’s Up in Flames. Just like the recorded version, Snaith and Company laid the booty bass on thick. Though the Left Banke never received their due credit in the ’60s, their body of work is alive and well in Caribou. One interesting side note – Caribou seems to get 86 love in Chicago. At their Metro show back in November, they were opening for Battles (though they were great, Caribou was better). Otherwise, for their headlining shows, they’re generally plunged back into smaller clubs like the Empty Bottle. Their Saturday afternoon super-stoked psych-pop explosion blew the crowd away. You heard it from everyone in attendance, so methinks their Pitchfork appearance will reverse that current, and Snaith will receive his due props in the Windy City (though I do enjoy seeing Caribou in smaller rooms, he deserves a wide audience). Though the music was still sweeping and gorgeous as well, it’s the two drummer assault that takes emphasis live.

Also during Caribou’s set, hometown drank heroes 312 Ale / Goose Island flung about a bazillion beach balls into the crowd.

Though not related to the focus of this blog, my girlfriend (much to her delight) and I got to see our lil’ friend Jarvis, too.