In the winter of 2002 I was in the throes of my passion for Múm’s second LP, Finally We Are No One. Hearing it, by proxy, almost daily my roommate referred to the song “k/half noise” as “The carwash one.” “What?” The comparison was still dawning on me. “You know, the one where you feel like you’re going through a carwash.” It was a most apt physical description for a very abstract sound.
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The Patron begins with a sharp static blast and deep rumbles. Then, a violin (or cello?) that sounds like a long, sharp saw coming down from on high like God’s own blade. More often than not, To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie’s debut album elicits in me (if I let the imagination go) the ghostly paranoid mist of the bombed out streets of London circa Gravity’s Rainbow in ’44? ’45? In short, it’s all bombed to hell and no one’s there – at least no one who wants to be.
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My brother and I have a recurring joke about the countless hours spent in the bedroom of our childhood friend – Adam Pikarsky – playing Tecmo Bowl and Baseball Stars (the days of the original Nintendo) into the early morning hours, listening to 93Q, Syracuse’s “#1 Hit Music Station.” (We were cool enough at a young age to listen to U2, Nirvana and Simon & Garfunkel but, I for one, remember digging Color Me Badd and Hi-5.) MGMT’s debut LP, Oracular Spectacular, reminds me of those video game/pop music twilights in a most hat-doffing way, in particular “Of Moons, Birds & Monsters” ‘s Benny Mardonis chorus.
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There is a blatant, entitled attitude to Keeper of Youth, The Only Children’s second LP, that has prohibited me from recommending it, even casually in a music related conversation. “Have you heard this band The Only Children?” dies on my lips when I recall the LP’s “Dirty Magazines”, one of the best present but also the most potentially offensive (as in “What a bunch of jerks”), particularly for the impatient. The song, lonesome and empowering, relates, “Some shithead from L.A. / Writes for some shitty magazine / Telling everyone my music ain’t up to par / Some fuckhead from New York / Says his band’s the next big thing / Me, I’m counting sheep in the dark.” This stifles my enthusiasm for the band.
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How does one go about critiquing or thinking about the Greatest Hits release of any musician(s)? The first thing I usually wonder is, How many of these have I heard before? I don’t live under a rock, therefore if these “hits” are so “great” I will probably have heard them. “Greatest Hits” means, after all, the best of the most popular songs by the artist. This might be an interesting – however (un)useful – list to compile for Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder – artists who have had such a large output and so many hits that one release containing more than merely the “greatest” of them would be impossible. (Or outrageously expensive.) What Ed Harcourt’s Until Tomorrow Then: The Best Of… sidesteps is the need for anyone at all to have heard these songs, let alone consider them great. Best Of. Yes. That’s a collection I’m really interested in as it promises unnoticed or ignored gems from the recesses of LP’s.
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The Last Little Life, the Rentals four-song EP, begins at the beginning. “It’s a bright day / It’s the right view / Central Park right in front of you.” A gently distorted guitar, another one plucking out arpeggios, a xylophone chiming, mosquito keyboards all amount to a sweetly melancholic seventeen minutes of “The Rentals are still around? Oh good!”
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Their first song, “Vietnam”, was their best. “The finest army / I’m a
working man / Dropping bombs all over Northern Vietnam / And Cambodia / I got a back up plan / This is what I’ve learned from war in Vietnam.” The angry and somewhat – as a matter of course? – didactic lyrics, spit sung in singer Dylan Rau’s warble, elevated the intense transcendence Bear Hand’s visceral guitar rock wants to induce. Elsewhere during the set I was moved or rocked or wowed, but the booming violent glee of the opener was not to be paralleled. Not that the rest was yesterday’s leftovers, either.
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Karl was vacuuming the carpet like I had asked him to while I flummoxed and flumped the furniture all over the narrow living room, making way for the fake but, to our eyes, gorgeous and redemptive tree.
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