Shakin – Eddie Money

for more shitty comix like this see http://jepcomix.wordpress.com/

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,800 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Their record, Pizza Face, is available on bandcamp (also on vinyl from Cheeky Monkey).  Both videos have a brilliant, contagious sense of celebration – I rarely watch a whole video, and these kept me in. I really dig this. Right on to the Chocolate Robots.

Just wanted to mention it. Big news.

Here’s something that would not exist without the CD (for better or worse):

The Jello Fund – Lemonheads (from Come on Feel the Lemonheads)

I saw Prince in 88 on the Lovesexy tour, and it was wunderbar. I haven’t really listened to any new Prince material in 20 years, but I doubt it’ll matter. I’m pretty stoked.

Just wanted to tell you. (Let’s see if I can post a Prince song and not get in shit..!)

Strange Relationship

Last night she took me to see Buke and Gass who were NPR phenoms last year, getting promo’d on Radiolab and their own Tiny Desk Concert. They make their own instruments, amps and pedals, and make a massive amount of sound for a duo.

They were the third of three acts following a free-music sax player named Lori Freedman and a percussion sextet named Mantra, who played 6 2-by-4s with contact mics on them for an hour. Both of these acts were interesting, sometimes fascinating, generally challenging. As often happens, myself and the lovely Pusher had radically different reactions at times – she was astonished when, halfway through the Mantra piece*, I mimed blowing my head off. Apparently she was riveted and in heaven. Trying to figure out those reactions afterwards is half the fun.

Buke and Gass played really rocking, heavy music with intricate, precise structures that reminded me of the Rheostatics jamming with PJ Harvey. I loved it. The IP preferred the concept to the realization. You make up your own mind: go.

Here’s another track called Revel in Contempt.

… And here’s the Mantra Piece (Timber) in excerpt:

“My first ‘real’  job was teaching English as a Second Language in Ontario. I  kept in correspondence with many of my students, and was pleasantly surprised to find one of  them, Sohee Jeon, had become an established animator in South Korea. She expressed how much she had been enjoying my music, and while I was working on my newest record The Secret Languages she generously offered up her services to make an animated video for my newest single “Love Teeth”.”

So I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised. The song rolls gently, somewhere between melancholy and not. The video is interesting and sad. Today is rainy as hell and winter is coming, and this song fits nicely. I’ll be curious to check out the album when it’s released.

Thought of this:

Me and All the Other Mothers – Loudon Wainwright III, from Therapy (1989) – a great record.

The first edition of our Musique Fragile series presents three self-produced records by three local/regional artists we’ve been following for a while. Taken together, to our ears (and hearts) these albums trace overlapping circles of Hermetic music – in the literal definition of the term: works that were conceived/executed in different forms of isolation (physical, artistic) and also each in its own way invoking a sense of esoteric mysticism (Hermeticism in its more ‘spiritual’ connotation) .

from the Constellation website

The set is beautiful: the box and each of the record sleeves are screen-printed, and each record sleeve is stuffed with postcards, posters, and the record on CD. The vinyl is heavy and pristine. Very fetishy.

I just got it, and am currently stuck on the Nick Kueper album (Avestruz). It’s an avant garde field-recordings thing, dissected and multitracked into short beats and sound-collages, totally fascinating and full of aural depth. It was apparently recorded over half a year in Argentina and mixed on a laptop. While the field-recording aspect is clear and present, it is not the main point, I think: the recordings seem to have been sampled in wee little bits of atmosphere and the music is thoughtfully arranged, so that this record seems a composed work, just made of real sounds.

Here’s a track to entice you. It’ll take me a while to digest this thing, and more posts could follow. For now, dig this and think of me, happy in the basement listening to records with an art boner.

Or think of something else.

Tail Still Moves – Nick Kueper

Who Cares What the Vultures Want? is true to the band’s nature/vow – unrehearsed, written and recorded in one day. Mistakes are everywhere, and the time is nuts. In-tune singing is rare. But it is wunderbar. The songs are crazily good, and this collection is full of the rock-out loud songs (which is when this band are their best).

Check out the nicely-titled opener Rug Burn Party (which sounds like it’s sung by Dick the Bruiser) or the heavy King Crimson-sans-all-the-precision Boy in a Balloon (which sacrifices everything for its off-key joke ending.)

Chiasmus is awesome, a clever addition to the very few songs daring to discuss grammar since Alanis’ unintentional destruction of the definition of irony in the 90s. Bravo, MPT … I hope you got Chiasmus right.

Don’t Excarnate Your Kids is fully rollicking and the source of the album title – the shouted chorus of “Who! Cares! What the vultures want!” tops off an already happening song.  And I Love Bread is a mid-80s white rap about how saliva helps digest food. You can’t lose, with this record. Get yourself a copy today at their site. Nice job, MPT.

Oh yeah – Vultures is on camouflage-coloured vinyl – a nice touch that only makes up for the terrible cover. Sorry guys, but I really miss the Chasing Monsters and Tentacles of Despair style covers. Two monkey-doodle covers in a row is too much.