Thursday, October 10, 2002
Primal Scream's "Evil Heat" is finally released in North America at the end of November (with a bonus DVD!). Hell yeah. It's about time. Why the hell are they waiting until the end of Nov? Did it take a while to get the distribution deal worked out, or are they trying to time it for release "just in time for Xmas"? If it's the latter (and it wouldn't surprise me in the least), then to hell with them. It's the new Primal Scream, not Elton John's Greatest Love Songs Vol XIV. Nobody buying Evil Heat cares when it's released. "OOOOH, 'Evil Heat', that's just what Mom wanted! We can get her that together with 'Celine Dion Unplugged in Las Vegas' and that dietary cookbook that we read about in Oprah's magazine!!"
Sunday, October 06, 2002
It is 3:30 AM. I'm feeling a bit tired, and I'm undoubtedly not at my sharpest. I've been managing to drag myself into bed past 3 AM for the past week or so, and although some people can keep up this semi-nocturnal lifestyle almost indefinitely, I am not such a person. Tonight, however, is different, and my frame of mind is perfect for it. I am about to hear the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor album. The new album that is released one month from now. G-d bless Kazaa and whoever got this stuff on it, whether it was leaked, stolen or previewed legitimately. I don't care. I'll buy the album anyway. Hearing it now -- this means something to me. This is exciting to me. It's 3:30 in the morning, why else would I be staying awake to do this if I wasn't such a passionate fool. I'm a peon for my music, for my trade, bless me, curse me, be jealous of me. Whatever. After two years of gigs previewing this material, after all the bootlegs and frustrating non-information "communicated" by the band, it's here, It's the FUCKING ALBUM OF THE YEAR and if "Motherfucker = Redeemer" takes the rest of the night to download then so be it, I'll sit here and wait.
This record begins with "09-15-00", which is the renamed "12-28-99". Sure, they renamed the band by changing the punctuation, might as well change the date on the song title too. I think this album contains deep rooted themes of Godspeed's dislike of American culture. Nevertheless, they enlisted an American, Steve Albini, to "record" this album, and it definitely shows. The guitars chime, attack, blare, and trumpet themselves far over everything else. This used to be a relatively quiet track but now the buildup within it is dauntingly massive. Even, the "outro", usually almost inaudible during live performance, is bathed in echoes and the lonely wailings of sweet electric guitar. I'm certainly not complaining. I love volume. Also, it was obvious from the gigs that the new material was meaner and angrier than their previous work. Tracks like "BBFIII" can be said to grow in volume to raise the drama. "Tazer Floyd" does not. It begins tense and barely restrained. It explodes and does not inch toward extinction, it just lays uneasily dormant. When you're writing these types of songs, you need the guitars. You need lots of them. When fifteen minutes isn't cutting it any longer and you feel the need to stretch "Motherfucker = Redeemer" to thirty-five, while also creating a need to drone and improvise your way through such an epic length, then you need a person in the studio who can capture this careening, spontaneous, live dynamic. Call the master. By the way, this is only the first track, although it's 22 minutes long which makes it seven minutes longer than your average boy bands' career. And it's going to get better.
The Song Formerly Known As "Tazer Floyd" is now called "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls". This is basically a good thing, since the former title is a cute pun, but altogether inappropriate considering Godspeed are a deadly serious symphonic rock outfit and therefore are not permitted to have a sense of humour. This is the price you pay for acting as the political watchdogs for the rest of us comedy-laced Canadians. The latter title sounds far more like it belongs to a Godspeed song. The content is far more accurate as well. "Tazer Floyd" sounds like some hippie commune bullshit featuring enlightened acid casualties going cross-eyed in a $50 million light show while a bunch of stegosaurus play a meandering song called "We Hate The World and Everything In It" containing synchronized video/sound montages right down to the sixteen separate guitar solos. On the other hand, "Rockets..." is a great title because this track is about as loud as a rocket taking and packs the punch of a rocket crash landing into the ground. Six minutes in, the fake ending begins and the track pounds onward for far longer than you'd think necessary (but in a good way). It fades away into little more than a slow insistent beating of the bass drum, gradually and inexorably building into the shuddering climax which makes my teeth chatter in fear and admiration. This building process persists for FAR longer than you'd think necessary (but in a VERY good way) and it's just beyond loud, beyond awesome and beyond emotional. I'm breathless.
I said I'd wait all night for "Motherfucker = Redeemer" to finish downloading ... but right now it isn't downloading and I'm having a near apoplexy with worry because I can't put a claim to reviewing an album without hearing the final half of it. It has to finish, and it will eventually, but (*loophole*) if it isn't downloading at all, then it's not exactly fair for me to wait for it. Particularly since it's almost 5 AM. So I'm heading to bed, my "exclusive" report shall be continued ...
... sooner than I thought. I could not go home. Not long after I finished typing the words above, the download restarted. Like the episode of ER from this past week, my download showed a pulse mere seconds after I had already declared it dead. So it is now 6 AM. I suffer for my art.
It starts small. No really, I'm a bit shocked. Two minutes of gentle chimes and xylophone drift by before the tick-tocking guitar and violin riffs click in. We trot along, the metronomic rhythms gelling the piece in contrast to the barely controlled chaos of the Live Versions I Have Known. And again, I speak too soon, as blazing ear bleeding hell breaks loose about seven minutes in. I brace myself for the middle, spacey droning portion and hope beyond hope that I won't fall too entranced and fade into unconsciousness.
But again it starts small. The guitars are shuddering away while background flutters gradually begin to force their way into the background. I'm thinking that the arrival of the bass signals a shift into complete stasis, but I'm wrong again and they recede. Only fifteen minutes in. Lots of time.
The next several minutes metronomically pace themselves along. Lost, lonely vocals weave their way underneath the click of the guitar. Twenty minutes in, it's another fake ending. One of the many beautiful things about this song is that a listener can barely recollect the fireworks at the beginning, because this song is so *damned* long. The beginning is another eon ago. Yet, through repeated listens one can appreciate how each movement flows into the next without a sudden stylistic change.
Twenty two minutes in and it's building again. I dare not write that the guitars aren't droning loud enough and the chaos is controlled or some other junk like that, because I'll just be proved wrong within seconds. See, there it is, the guitars are howling. Still, louder boys and girls!! Ah, ask, and I shall receive. It's running, speeding up, showing no signs of stopping. This is the big, and I mean BIG finish. The drums tap away in the background, they're barely audible above the racket. And finally, twenty nine minutes in, it's fake ending #3, and it's the best one yet. Swirling guitars make way for the march-like percussive effort that screams this track, and this album to a close with a fist-clenching, headbanging, and sinus clearing rock out. And in the end, the droning cuts off abruptly/
It's really not fair. I knew what I'd be hearing going into this. Godspeed have been sitting on most of these songs for months and it's been only a matter of time before they figured out a suitable method of translating the live fury and intensity these songs requite onto a disc. Then would come the easy part -- releasing the album to a rapturous audience. That said, I knew what I'd be hearing. And it shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that this album is insanely good. This is the record where Godspeed, musically at least, storm out of their snowed-in Montreal bunkers and strike out with anger. Anger at what? I don't know. I have things in my life to be angry about. Everyone does. Pick yours, put on "Yanqui U.X.O." and rage until your fingernails puncture your palms. It'll feel good. I promise.
6:52 AM.
This record begins with "09-15-00", which is the renamed "12-28-99". Sure, they renamed the band by changing the punctuation, might as well change the date on the song title too. I think this album contains deep rooted themes of Godspeed's dislike of American culture. Nevertheless, they enlisted an American, Steve Albini, to "record" this album, and it definitely shows. The guitars chime, attack, blare, and trumpet themselves far over everything else. This used to be a relatively quiet track but now the buildup within it is dauntingly massive. Even, the "outro", usually almost inaudible during live performance, is bathed in echoes and the lonely wailings of sweet electric guitar. I'm certainly not complaining. I love volume. Also, it was obvious from the gigs that the new material was meaner and angrier than their previous work. Tracks like "BBFIII" can be said to grow in volume to raise the drama. "Tazer Floyd" does not. It begins tense and barely restrained. It explodes and does not inch toward extinction, it just lays uneasily dormant. When you're writing these types of songs, you need the guitars. You need lots of them. When fifteen minutes isn't cutting it any longer and you feel the need to stretch "Motherfucker = Redeemer" to thirty-five, while also creating a need to drone and improvise your way through such an epic length, then you need a person in the studio who can capture this careening, spontaneous, live dynamic. Call the master. By the way, this is only the first track, although it's 22 minutes long which makes it seven minutes longer than your average boy bands' career. And it's going to get better.
The Song Formerly Known As "Tazer Floyd" is now called "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls". This is basically a good thing, since the former title is a cute pun, but altogether inappropriate considering Godspeed are a deadly serious symphonic rock outfit and therefore are not permitted to have a sense of humour. This is the price you pay for acting as the political watchdogs for the rest of us comedy-laced Canadians. The latter title sounds far more like it belongs to a Godspeed song. The content is far more accurate as well. "Tazer Floyd" sounds like some hippie commune bullshit featuring enlightened acid casualties going cross-eyed in a $50 million light show while a bunch of stegosaurus play a meandering song called "We Hate The World and Everything In It" containing synchronized video/sound montages right down to the sixteen separate guitar solos. On the other hand, "Rockets..." is a great title because this track is about as loud as a rocket taking and packs the punch of a rocket crash landing into the ground. Six minutes in, the fake ending begins and the track pounds onward for far longer than you'd think necessary (but in a good way). It fades away into little more than a slow insistent beating of the bass drum, gradually and inexorably building into the shuddering climax which makes my teeth chatter in fear and admiration. This building process persists for FAR longer than you'd think necessary (but in a VERY good way) and it's just beyond loud, beyond awesome and beyond emotional. I'm breathless.
I said I'd wait all night for "Motherfucker = Redeemer" to finish downloading ... but right now it isn't downloading and I'm having a near apoplexy with worry because I can't put a claim to reviewing an album without hearing the final half of it. It has to finish, and it will eventually, but (*loophole*) if it isn't downloading at all, then it's not exactly fair for me to wait for it. Particularly since it's almost 5 AM. So I'm heading to bed, my "exclusive" report shall be continued ...
... sooner than I thought. I could not go home. Not long after I finished typing the words above, the download restarted. Like the episode of ER from this past week, my download showed a pulse mere seconds after I had already declared it dead. So it is now 6 AM. I suffer for my art.
It starts small. No really, I'm a bit shocked. Two minutes of gentle chimes and xylophone drift by before the tick-tocking guitar and violin riffs click in. We trot along, the metronomic rhythms gelling the piece in contrast to the barely controlled chaos of the Live Versions I Have Known. And again, I speak too soon, as blazing ear bleeding hell breaks loose about seven minutes in. I brace myself for the middle, spacey droning portion and hope beyond hope that I won't fall too entranced and fade into unconsciousness.
But again it starts small. The guitars are shuddering away while background flutters gradually begin to force their way into the background. I'm thinking that the arrival of the bass signals a shift into complete stasis, but I'm wrong again and they recede. Only fifteen minutes in. Lots of time.
The next several minutes metronomically pace themselves along. Lost, lonely vocals weave their way underneath the click of the guitar. Twenty minutes in, it's another fake ending. One of the many beautiful things about this song is that a listener can barely recollect the fireworks at the beginning, because this song is so *damned* long. The beginning is another eon ago. Yet, through repeated listens one can appreciate how each movement flows into the next without a sudden stylistic change.
Twenty two minutes in and it's building again. I dare not write that the guitars aren't droning loud enough and the chaos is controlled or some other junk like that, because I'll just be proved wrong within seconds. See, there it is, the guitars are howling. Still, louder boys and girls!! Ah, ask, and I shall receive. It's running, speeding up, showing no signs of stopping. This is the big, and I mean BIG finish. The drums tap away in the background, they're barely audible above the racket. And finally, twenty nine minutes in, it's fake ending #3, and it's the best one yet. Swirling guitars make way for the march-like percussive effort that screams this track, and this album to a close with a fist-clenching, headbanging, and sinus clearing rock out. And in the end, the droning cuts off abruptly/
It's really not fair. I knew what I'd be hearing going into this. Godspeed have been sitting on most of these songs for months and it's been only a matter of time before they figured out a suitable method of translating the live fury and intensity these songs requite onto a disc. Then would come the easy part -- releasing the album to a rapturous audience. That said, I knew what I'd be hearing. And it shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that this album is insanely good. This is the record where Godspeed, musically at least, storm out of their snowed-in Montreal bunkers and strike out with anger. Anger at what? I don't know. I have things in my life to be angry about. Everyone does. Pick yours, put on "Yanqui U.X.O." and rage until your fingernails puncture your palms. It'll feel good. I promise.
6:52 AM.
Thursday, October 03, 2002
Vinyl is a lot like the Yiddish language. The Yiddish language is a lot like vinyl. Most people think that it isn't around anymore. They think it's faded away, it no longer has any contemporary value, and has been replaced by something better. True, it's popularity and usage has drastically receded since it's peak of a few decades ago. It reached a nadir in the early 1990's but has been making a comeback ever since. More and more people are discovering it for the first time, or rediscovering it for the first time since their youth. Mainstream tastes may have passed it by, but modern-day enthusiasts know that you just can't get the same stuff from anything else.
Tuesday, October 01, 2002
The Year in Review: Early Edition!
Normally, I'm maliciously against any kind of review until the last week of December, but I've written so little about current music lately that I felt the need for a bit of "State of the Union"-style sermonizing.
I severely curtailed my spending after buying 48 291 records and CD's while in California and Montreal. I returned home and realised that I was going broke, so I stopped and became yet another enemy of the music industry by downloading huge amounts of stuff from Kazaa. Most of it has been bootlegged live music (the same was true of my downloading habits from the Napster era) so before the president of the RIAA comes knocking on my door, you wouldn't have seen that money anyway, so leave me alone. Therefore, most of my summer was spent trying to catch up with my purchases and downloads, while shopping and gig-going came to a near standstill.
But there wasn't much happening anyway. Fall and spring are the best times for new releases and concerts, so I don't feel as though I missed much. Still, immersion breeds passion, so I do feel somewhat dirty for not being more excited about the release of the new Primal Scream album (in August). Instead, my thoughts were centred on when I'd find the time to spin records and not wake up everyone in my building, and why it was so damned difficult to find Mogwai live tracks from 2001 and 1990's wrestling matches from All-Japan.
I've been on a vinyl fix for about a year now, but vinyl junkies are just that -- junkies -- and extending your financial resources comes with the territory of being a junkie. So now, I can take a hard look at my recent albums without the distraction of wondering about the best way to get Kennziffer records. And my first reaction is that there have been very few excellent albums so far this year. Again, there's a few good releases still expected in the next three months. Also, I was singing the same lament at this time last year (and even later). The only things which have truly blown my mind have been Hollowphonic and Speedy J, and that should surprise nobody given my yen for guitar noise and aggressive minimal techno. Primal Scream's newest is no XTRMNTR, as the Kevin Shields/Scream bipolar monster of noisy dance fear-mongering has failed to spread it's pixie dust over the album as a whole. Scion released a simply astounding compilation of reconstructed Basic Channel material, but I'm hung up on whether to call it a "new" album. Where is their proper album?? With "My Love is Rotten to the Core", Tim Hecker proved himself as the first artist (that I've heard) to expand on the beauty/pop/noise hybrid crystallized on Fennesz's 2001 release "Endless Summer".
The new Godspeed album is out in a month. What will be on it is anyone's guess, I can't find a track listing anywhere. But they've featured three new songs prominently in their concerts: "12-28-99", "Tazer Floyd" and "Motherfucker=Redeemer". The latter is over thirty minutes long, and doesn't the title kick major ass? One of the finest song titles of all time. So, that's over an hour of material from those three tracks. I've been saying for months (and now I'm writing it -- I'm now accountable) if those three tracks alone make up the new album, and the recorded versions do a decent job of capturing the live versions, then it's the album of the year, hands down, lights out, everybody go home. I just recently learned that Albini worked on the recording, so that should answer the question of "capturing the live versions" with a resounding "hell yeah". Keep your fingers crossed.
Normally, I'm maliciously against any kind of review until the last week of December, but I've written so little about current music lately that I felt the need for a bit of "State of the Union"-style sermonizing.
I severely curtailed my spending after buying 48 291 records and CD's while in California and Montreal. I returned home and realised that I was going broke, so I stopped and became yet another enemy of the music industry by downloading huge amounts of stuff from Kazaa. Most of it has been bootlegged live music (the same was true of my downloading habits from the Napster era) so before the president of the RIAA comes knocking on my door, you wouldn't have seen that money anyway, so leave me alone. Therefore, most of my summer was spent trying to catch up with my purchases and downloads, while shopping and gig-going came to a near standstill.
But there wasn't much happening anyway. Fall and spring are the best times for new releases and concerts, so I don't feel as though I missed much. Still, immersion breeds passion, so I do feel somewhat dirty for not being more excited about the release of the new Primal Scream album (in August). Instead, my thoughts were centred on when I'd find the time to spin records and not wake up everyone in my building, and why it was so damned difficult to find Mogwai live tracks from 2001 and 1990's wrestling matches from All-Japan.
I've been on a vinyl fix for about a year now, but vinyl junkies are just that -- junkies -- and extending your financial resources comes with the territory of being a junkie. So now, I can take a hard look at my recent albums without the distraction of wondering about the best way to get Kennziffer records. And my first reaction is that there have been very few excellent albums so far this year. Again, there's a few good releases still expected in the next three months. Also, I was singing the same lament at this time last year (and even later). The only things which have truly blown my mind have been Hollowphonic and Speedy J, and that should surprise nobody given my yen for guitar noise and aggressive minimal techno. Primal Scream's newest is no XTRMNTR, as the Kevin Shields/Scream bipolar monster of noisy dance fear-mongering has failed to spread it's pixie dust over the album as a whole. Scion released a simply astounding compilation of reconstructed Basic Channel material, but I'm hung up on whether to call it a "new" album. Where is their proper album?? With "My Love is Rotten to the Core", Tim Hecker proved himself as the first artist (that I've heard) to expand on the beauty/pop/noise hybrid crystallized on Fennesz's 2001 release "Endless Summer".
The new Godspeed album is out in a month. What will be on it is anyone's guess, I can't find a track listing anywhere. But they've featured three new songs prominently in their concerts: "12-28-99", "Tazer Floyd" and "Motherfucker=Redeemer". The latter is over thirty minutes long, and doesn't the title kick major ass? One of the finest song titles of all time. So, that's over an hour of material from those three tracks. I've been saying for months (and now I'm writing it -- I'm now accountable) if those three tracks alone make up the new album, and the recorded versions do a decent job of capturing the live versions, then it's the album of the year, hands down, lights out, everybody go home. I just recently learned that Albini worked on the recording, so that should answer the question of "capturing the live versions" with a resounding "hell yeah". Keep your fingers crossed.
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