LC/50, I Don’t Like Me Either— The band kicks out the old school hardcore jams, and vocalist Teresa Ortega elevates the whole affair with her absolutely amazing rock and roll voice. Bonus (from my perspective): recorded live. I think rock and roll should be recorded live, either in the studio or in front of an audience, to capture the energy of a performance. Bands in studios often seem to get obsessive about making sure everyone puts in a perfectly clean performance and so release these perfectly performed but kind of inert studio recordings. Not the case here! Not that this is sloppy in any way—but it just feels energetic in a way a lot of recordings don’t.

Upchuck, Bite The Hand That Feeds— I’ve been following this punk band from Atlanta for a while, and this record finds them branching out a little bit musically and sounding better than ever, and absolutely kicking ass. Absolutely no shortage of energy here, and there’s also melody, some kickass guitar licks, and one inexplicable but irresistable Pixies pastiche. Vocalist KT rocks incredibly hard, as does the entire band.

The Chelsea Curve, All The Things— Folks who went to shows in Boston in the 90’s may recall Miles Dethmuffin, whose bassist Linda Pardee fronts this power pop trio providing hummable melodies, irresistible hooks, and witty lyrics. What the hell else do you want from power pop?

Coco & The Hitmen, Coco & The Hitmen— Bought this on impulse—no recommendation or anything. I just came across their page last Bandcamp Friday and saw the band photo with the guys in horizontal striped shirts looking like the Rentacrowd-Era Len Price 3, saw it described as “garage pop,” and hit the buy button. Coco’s got a great alto voice, the backing vocals are great, and, best of all from my perspective, the recording sounds kind of terrible. I mean this as a compliment—it sounds much closer to something my friends used to record on their crappy little 4-track recorders than to a slick studio production. The spare, no-frills sound fits the music perfectly.(Bonus: great cover of Frida’s classic “Something Going On”.)

Couch Slut, You Could Do it Tonight. All art forms offer different pleasures, so let me just say first of all that these songs are not particularly melodic, and though it’s usually classed as metal because the songs have bass-heavy doom metal-esque grooves, there are no deedly-deedly guitar solos. And most tracks feature vocalist Megan Osztrosits screaming. And I love this album. People who make heavy extreme music tend to be unhappy about the world and possibly their lives, but metal usually approaches this stuff through metaphor—hence all the Satan stuff (and occasional Lovecraft and/or folk horror stuff.). No metaphor here. The songs are about being in dangerous, drug and booze fueled situations with the threat or reality of rape ever present, and Megan Osztrosits is pissed. Actually that doesn’t do it justice: she’s enraged. And women are usually socialized not to express rage, even in their art, so this, sixty years into rock and roll, feels transgressive in a way hardly any other rock-based music does these days. It’s not an easy listen, by any means—it’s not gonna be background music, and it’s not something (like a lot of metal) where you can enjoy the grooves and riffs and disregard the vocals. This album both demands and rewards your attention. I hesitate to say any work of art is important because a lot of different works of art can be important to an individual, but not that many are important to a culture. I think this is one of those. Uncompromising and powerful, and if you’re comfortable with the extreme metal idiom (which, again, this doesn’t quite fit into but is definitely adjacent to), you should pick it up.

#music #review

I grew up listening to punk, which is sort of metal-adjacent, but the mainstream conquered punk in 1991, whereas the more extreme versions of metal remain pretty stubbornly un-commercial. I mean, I assume some of these bands make a living making their art, but nobody’s getting rich making black metal.

I’m drawn to art that gathers in misfits, as punk did when I was a kid, and so I have been slowly working my way into metal. I like the theatricality and the musicianship, but I’d still consider myself an outsider to the scene. (I mean, also I’m old as fuck, so). So this is pretty much going to be an outsider’s view of a metal show. Which means I don’t know all the proper names of the sub-sub-sub genres, for one thing, so don’t yell at me about that. Okay, off we go!

Necrofier opened the show. They kind of embodied the contradictions in extreme metal—it’s both rebellious and extremely conventional. (This happened in hardcore punk too). If you look at a lot of metal band photos, they’re all pretty much the same—guys with long hair and/or beards and big arms wearing black with their arms folded looking slightly menacingly at the camera. And so Necrofier was definitely cut from that cloth. The vibe was extremely macho. I know nothing about the band’s politics, but the aesthetic and vibes were giving fascism. That is to say, it was a performance that felt like it was about masculinity, power and domination. The guitarist yelled at the crowd to form a pit, and there was some halfhearted moshing going on, but overall they didn’t seem to be a big crowd favorite. And it was just all so SERIOUS. I had the thought while watching them that metal is just punk with its sense of humor removed. And then I remembered that’s actually Fugazi.

Next came Worm. Or possibly WORM. In any case, this band was cool. I think the subgenre is doom, or, as I think of it “sounds like Sabbath.” The aesthetics were VERY different here. The singer, who goes by the name of Phantom Slaughter, was a skinny guy in dark glasses with white corpsepaint and frowny lipstick. It was giving metal Joey Ramone. Or possibly Stiv Bator. The guitarist was wearing a vest, puffy shirt, and a cape. He may have had vampire fangs in—I was too far back to see. But, in any case, Slaughter is a mesmerizing performer, the grooves were slow and sludgy, and the aesthetic hit what is the sweet spot of metal for me, which is to say, both a joke and not a joke. Like, there’s a guy in a vampire cape—it’s ridiculous. And yet it’s played totally straight. Anyway, I dug this band, and while I was checking the time 15 minutes into Necrofier’s set, I wished Worm had gone on longer. I also wished I’d been able to hear the guitars, but the sound guy was apparently so dedicated to turning the bass up to “bowel shaking” levels that the guitars were lost in the mix. It’s a testament to the quality of the performance that I wanted more anyway.

And then—Devil Master. Now, this may be in part because they are sort of a punk/metal band, and so I’m just more comfortable in this idiom, but this was the highlight of the night for me. One guy in corpsepaint and a cape (again, it’s a joke, and also not), and the other guys looking pretty normal (well, the singer/bassist had improbably long hair that obscured his face for most of the performance, but still.). They rocked the fuck out, and nobody had to yell at the kids (it was an all-ages show) to form a mosh pit. It broke out spontaneously. There was a big run to their merch table at the end, which I think shows that people were impressed with the performance. They played their album front to back and left. I recommend the album, Ecstasies of Neverending Night, and the songs are even better live.

Finally Hulder took to the stage. Hulder is a one-woman band in the studio, but here she was backed by a bunch of guys as she delivered traditional black metal, complete with those gutteral, growling vocals. I dug this, because by using this traditionally ultra-masculine style, she’s undermining the misogyny and machismo that taints a lot of metal. One of the guys in her band was even bald, which I believe is black metal heresy. But I guess the sound guy really hated her because, once again, the guitars were inaudible as the bass and kickdrums dominated the mix. Now look. I liked being able to feel the music, but one of the things that’s interesting to me about metal is the interplay between the heavy drums and bass and the extremely treble-y lead guitar lines. So we lost basically half the music in this mix. And also Hulder didn’t bring much to the table, stage-presence wise. I like that she was dressed and corpse-painted in a way that was very un-sexualized—it was giving angry witch, or possibly kid from The Ring all grown up—but she didn’t give us much in the way of performance apart from a few headbanging, hair-flying moments. (Her bassist did the same and got his hair momentarily caught in the sprinkler, which was amusing). Her new album is good, and I think I would have enjoyed the performance much more if the sound had been competently mixed.

Some general observations: the crowd was, as you might expect, VERY white. What you might not expect was that there were a lot of women in the audience. Maybe this is due to Hulder, but either way, apart from Necrofier, there just wasn’t a lot of metal-bro energy in the audience, which I liked. It was a relaxed, friendly, and welcoming crowd. A couple of times I bumped into people, or they bumped into me, and it was always, “whoa, sorry!” I have certainly been at concerts where an accidental bump would get you a glare at best and a threat at worst, and you might think a metal show would be like that, but it totally wasn’t.

Here’s something weird, which I guess is a convention of this kind of music? No stage banter. Well, one sentence was spoken to the audience the entire night: “We’re Necrofier from Texas.” (The guy who tried to order the kids to mosh was doing it off-mic.) No intros, nothing between songs, no “okay, we got one more for you, you’ve been a great audience, good night.” This was especially weird at the end of a set. The song would end, and the band would walk off stage, and we’d all kind of look at each other and go “Hmm. I guess the set’s over, then.”

Also, no smiles allowed, apparently. There were plenty of smiles among the crowd—in fact, there was a pretty stark contrast between the gleeful smiles of the kids in the pit and the humorless miens of the performers. Now, as I mentioned, there was humor, certainly—you just can’t wear a cape in total seriousness—but nobody on stage gave any indication that they were having fun. I guess this is part of the culture, but since I’m not used to this culture, it felt a little odd to me. I’m used to feeling like live music is a communal experience including musicians and fans, but here it felt more like the fans were having a communal experience that the bands were providing the soundtrack for.

So, in the end, for 25 bucks I got to see two bands I really enjoyed and two bands I enjoyed somewhat less. Definitely a bargain! This tour has upcoming stops in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, Lawrence KS, and Denver. Definitely worth the price of admission!

#review #music #metal #concert

First up is a book I think I got on the street when someone was moving or just cleaning out their bookshelves. It’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector by Mick Brown.

Really enjoying the book so far. I’m just at the embarrassing flop of “River Deep, Mountain High.” Here’s something that jumped out at me: at one point in the book, Jerry Wexler is quoted thusly on Phil’s famed “Wall of Sound”: “That gargantuan leakage, everything leaking out of everyone else’s mike, was something we guarded against fanatically at Atlantic. To me it was like a muted roar. I didn’t like it, and I still don’t like it.”

I was taken aback, because while I’ve always heard that Phil Spector was mentally ill and thought that he fucked up both Let it Be and End of the Century, and of course, he’s a murderer, the genius of the Wall of Sound is just something that’s always been a given in any discussion of 20th century pop music.

I wanted to listen to the songs I was reading about and I have always liked those songs, so I queued up a bunch and found…Jerry Wexler was right. They sound shitty. Now don’t get me wrong, they’re still genius pop songs (though, lyrically, it’s a lot of moon/june dance/romance bullshit), but the sound is very dated. You can listen to Motown songs from the same era, and they don’t sound like they were recorded inside a garbage can. More like Wall of Mud, amirite?

It’s fun to read about how the recording sessions were fun chaos because they’d have like 5 guitar players and 3 piano players and two drummers and a crowd of randos shaking tambourines and stuff, but, like, why? Why do you have five guitarists playing a guitar line you can’t even really distinguish in the final mix?

The history of the first two decades of rock and roll was written by boomer critics who were teenagers in the late fifties and early sixties. And so here, at last, we arrive at my point: absolutely nobody is to be trusted about the quality of music that came out when they were teenagers.

The music is just too deeply entwined with the operatic rollercoaster of adolescence, when your feelings are so big you feel like they might break out of you at any minute, and hearing a song that taps into that is a tremendous relief. Everybody wants to feel seen.

But, ultimately, this doesn’t mean that the work of art that affects you so profoundly in those years is going to have the same effect on someone else years later. Tastes change, the culture changes, and what seems like a timeless work of genius might just be the thing that made you feel less alone when you were fifteen.

I certainly include myself in the “absolutely nobody” above. I will happily tell you that Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” is a timeless pop masterpiece, and maybe it is. Or maybe it’s just that it was playing on the car radio when I was in the back seat and my friend and his girlfriend were in the front and I was luxuriating in the delicious melancholy of my latest unrequited crush and the harmony on the chorus seemed to capture my feeling perfectly.

But you’re not me, and you didn’t have this experience with this song. It’s tempting, when you feel like everyone else likes something, to go along. I pretended to like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for a long time until I realized that whatever people liked about that record wasn’t speaking to me. (also it’s an artistic dead end that leads to the self-indulgence of prog rock, whereas the albums that preceded it set the stage for decades of delicious power pop.)

But you’re allowed your own taste, and you can and should be very skeptical of praise that anyone lavishes on a song that came out when they were teenagers.

(I cut a few paragraphs from this, but I just need to say Pet Sounds also sucks a lot, Rod Stewart’s voice is annoying, and that scene in Almost Famous where they sing “Tiny Dancer” was so mawkish and embarrassing it made me want to crawl under my seat.)

#books #music