I wrote a review for psych-ambient group Woodsman’s new self-titled, released day before yesterday.
“. . . I had the impression of beginning in the woods and ending up elsewhere, a good sign for a psychedelic recording. It reminds me of a fantasy series, Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber, in which the main character arrives on other planes by walking and simultaneously imagining the destination piece by piece, subtracting elements that don’t fit, thus shifting the landscape around him until he has arrived at the place he’d envisioned. It’s a good model for how each track tends to progress – movement in pieces, like clay being shaped.”
My favorite track off Crystal Shipsss’s Dirty Dancer, for the false Guided By Voices start, right into a surprise darkwave haymaker. The album has so much weirdness, and so many disparate parts that should completely flop, but wind up constituting a fascinating listen. The album somehow holds together within the thematic context of ‘suspicions of insanity’, but really, it’s just his fantastic ear for unnatural arrangements. A review is definitely forthcoming.
Seeing BLACK PUS with FOOT VILLAGE tonight at THE SMELL in LA! That sentence was disgusting!
Black Pus, the one-man piranha-percussor that is Brian Chippendale, of Lightning Bolt and Mindflayer. The first time I saw Chippendale was chilling in its intensity; I can still feel the tremors in my fillings.
Never heard any contemporary Thurston Moore or Sonic Youth stuff, so this is my first exposure. And it’s fantastic. Starts with simple ambiguous riff before dropping heavily into distuned muck. Brings serious thrash-metal moments but with restraint; not to overdo the distortion nor the pace. The more noisejoyish moments feel like a warm thundercloud, or bees running over the skin, partly because of the beautiful low register. And Moore’s voice is pitch-perfect grunge, but not in a corny throwback way.
Also his incredibly craggy face, and the fact that he looks like he’s a third his age, completely creeps the shit out of my girlfriend, which is fair since he looks like he hasn’t changed his haircut or wardrobe ever. Says his straining neck reminds her of a snake unhinging its jaw. Okay I think I’ll go to that CLM show.
Mindflayer – “Everyone Dies Pt. 2,” Take Off Your Skin
virtuoso relentless drum mayhem set to a constant glitch-siren
Mindflayer is another band of Brian Chippendale’s, the yarnmask-wearing drum half of the drum’n’bass experimental noise-rock duo Lightning Bolt, whom I love dearly after seeing them at FYF ‘12. Mindflayer is in the same vein but with more of an abstract-ambient feel (though not really, the drum fills and solos are melodic enough to seize center-stage) thanks to Matt Brinkman’s noise contributions. This track has Chippendale in especially good form.
“Scarecrows On a Killer Slant” – Liars, Sisterworld
Good for people who:
need convincing that punk is a valid aesthetic sometimes
need to dance, and like to fight, and don’t think the two are inseparable
need to celebrate some deep-seated xenophobia before something bad happens
Not for people who:
tend to speed when a fast song comes on in the car
Best lyric:
“We should take the cretins out at night Drag ‘em incomplete by their ears We should nail their thoughts to the wall Stand them in the street with a gun And then kill them all”
Parts of note:
happy dances at 2:52
smooth burn-off at the very end
Some songs work because they give a strange instance of a single mood or emotion, others explore the contours of the mood or emotion itself. Here, that word is Mania. Mania is paranoia, mania is fear, and mania is pure ecstasy.
This is the first Velvet Underground song I ever liked; everything else on that album just sounded too alienating and horrifying, like I was being mummified in all the pale and drug-sick bits of the late 60s (especially when you’re still at that tender age when Led Zeppelin is the Alpha and the Omega). Nico sounded like some Frankenstein amalgamation of my mother and father, lurching forward to do me strange sexual harm.
But “Heroin” was absolutely beautiful to me from the get-go. The violin-drone sounds like morning, like how I imagine how Fantasia does Morning (I’ve never seen Fantasia) it sounds like Sandlot movies where the kid is running in slow motion. And then his voice wanders in, floating on the aftercurrent of some titanic flood, feeling confidently undecided, and that’s where it began to scare me, because here he is, singing about how fantastic he feels in plain language, about sailing the world, about ‘making it,’ and the drum gets adrenaline-quick, but it’s just a drug, just an escape from the “big city,” and you can feel how shallow this sensation is nothing more than a small child running very fast to feel how good it is
It’s like watching a man in freefall, smiling and more alive than he’s ever been with velocity, too much to see that there’s a planet underneath, ready to splatter him and all good feeling into a big puddle of nothing, but he’s too in love with the present to care, who could stop him? Especially when he sings like there is nothing for him but to sail around the world in his heroin-galleon.
It’s a perfect portrait of everything I imagine drug-addiction to be; to be in love with a sensation that makes you feel adequate, in a world that doesn’t want you, knowing that this love will end you but what else is there to do? I don’t blame them; people are built to retreat from pain and gravitate towards pleasure, we’ve got billions of years of evolutionarily-wired instinct engraved into our circuitry, don’t act so surprised when you get one or two or ten people who want to hug that bright fire-light despite the heat.
I saw Lightning Bolt at Fuck Yeah Festival in LA this year. They were a smaller name, and their amps were painted in bright pink and orange, and with monster-muppet faces, kind of like if Yo Gabba Gabba was a band. They took forever to sound-test, set up effects and stuff, all for a drummer and a bassist (what’s up with that I wondered …) but the drummer had some of the finest, most amiable banter I’ve ever heard, so it didn’t even matter. And then he donned the chicken-mask and took us to ExperimentalRockHeck.
He was THE FASTEST, MOST PRECISE drummer, I’ve ever seen in my life. He has a telephone receiver for a mic built into his chicken mask (he has a different felt mask for every tour I think), that he screams into while flailing away, and I think the effects for the vocals are hooked up to his bass-drum. I later learned the bassist has a banjo-string for the fifth string, which explains that siren-like psychedelic shrieking I heard above the drumfrenzy. It was probably one of the greatest live experiences I’ve ever seen.
And I think this 12 minute epic sums up why I now man-crush on Lightning Bolt. Check out the top comment: “drummer brian chippendale stated on the official lightning bolt message board that this track was actually completely improvised in the studio while recording. ‘a lot of luck and little bit of psychic timing that comes out of 16 years of jamming together.’”
leather green gargoyle 