55 posts tagged “rock”
I'm a Nine Inch Nails fan from way back. I was hanging out with my pal $ean at the original Kemp Mill Records where he was assistant manager the day Pretty Hate Machine came out; I bought one right out of the shipping box. I listened to it and knew immediately that "Head Like a Hole" was a future classic. It wasn't as hard as the stuff on Wax Trax! or KK, so there were plenty of haters who derided it as watered-down industrial; too bad for them. I saw NIN on the Pretty Hate Machine tour, at the Grog and Tankard in Baltimore, with Meat Beat Manifesto opening. I still have the t-shirt from the show. Come to think of it, I still have the SPK t-shirt I wore to the show; talk about threadbare! But since then I haven't really connected with NIN; Trent took a long hiatus, I started listening to different music, and I just skipped over everything else he put out. I really dug "The Perfect Drug," but not enough to buy it. So now he's free of record label ties and is giving away his new music; I downloaded Ghosts I-IV, but it didn't hook me. Yesterday I downloaded The Slip, and it did hook me! I've listened to "1,000,000" three times so far today! My initial reaction is that this is Trent's best album since Pretty Hate Machine. This is the new music buzz I remember from my youth!
The Slip has the feel of Trent's live-on-the-radio performances with Peter Murphy: no more futzing around in the studio with umpteen overdubs trying to get everything just perfect, he's just laying down a few tracks and rocking out! And it works beautifully!
Ghostland Observatory seem poised to be this year's Big Thing, leading to overexposure and backlash, but a month after listening to their new album, Robotique Majestique, I still have several of the melodies and choruses running through my head. Ghostland Observatory are a synth/vocal duo in the classic mold of Soft Cell, but where Soft Cell looked to 60s female soul hits for influence, G.O. starts with Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Case in point: the insanely catchy "Heavy Heart"--
Singer Aaron Behrens even brings rock histrionics to the stage show; can he compensate for the lack of any actual instrument-playing onstage through a whole concert? That will be insteresting to see, if I ever get a chance.
Of course I remembered even more Moldy 70s songs immediately after I posted my Moldy 70s video collection, but one of them led to an unanticipated discovery. Looking for Starbuck's "Moonlight Feels Right" on YouTube, I found instead a live performance from 1986 of the same song by Yukihiro Takahashi, the former drummer of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose members (Takahashi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Haruomi Hosono) have a hand in just about every piece of music from Japan that I hear. It's an impressive arrangement with the synth riffs played by a horn section, and the keyboardist even replicates the what is undoubtedly the best marimba solo ever in a pop song:
And for comparison purposes, here's the original:
Just days after discovering the recent resurfacing of a member of long-lost Way of the West, I've found another blast from the past: Slab! Slab's few records, released in the second half of the 80s, are an exhilarating mix of pounding, near-industrial rhythms, fuzzed-out-bass funk, scraping guitars, tape loops, weird lyrics, and, on the early records, a horn section. I have never met another Slab fan that I didn't introduce to Slab, and in fourteen years of web-surfing I still had never found one. Until a couple days ago, when I found this post on the Unfit for Print blog. At last, here was another human enlightened to the cacophonous joys of Slab! Not only that, the post engendered a long comment thread that was joined by actual Slab members! After so many years of silence, I've finally learned "whatever happened to Slab." Of course that means more records added to my wantlist, but isn't that what life is all about, seeking what you want, then when you find it, seeking something else? In celebration of this discovery, here's a Slab! track, selected by being the first one I could find the cover art for:
Hear more Slab! on Muxtape!
I've been saving up my Way of the West singles for eventual ripping; they were another English band who were a minor staple on the WHFS of the original new wave era, usually represented by their song "Don't Say That's Just For White Boys." I always thought of them as like the Police, but better: Pete Carney's vocal melodies were similar to Sting's, and the guitarist (don't know which one is on which records) plays lots of weird unresolved chords like Andy Summers, but Way of the West got a better groove going. They put out a total of five singles, but never released an album; I thought to put together a makeshift album from the records I accumulated (and mp3's of the one I never got, "See You Shake"). Once again someone has saved me the trouble, only this time it's from the artists themselves, or one of them at least. Pete Carney, now Pete Kearney, has put together a Way of the West website which includes streams of all the songs, plus unreleased tracks! He's preparing them for digital release on iTunes, which will fill in a big hole in the classic 80s reissue universe. Here's a leech of "Don't Say That's Just For White Boys"; I hope it stirs up long-forgotten memories.
As an addendum to my previous post, I've found a usable (i.e. under 20 minutes) edit of "Prelude" from Agharta, the electric-era Miles Davis tune that opened up a whole new area of music to me in 1991.
I've liked Medeski Martin and Wood ever since I first heard them on the Get Shorty soundtrack (one of the grooviest soundtracks to a mainstream movie since the 70s), but I only ever got a couple of their albums. One that I bought was their first album with guitarist John Scofield, issued under Scofield's name alone as A Go Go. That came out in 1998, and MMW dropped off my radar after that. Last week I decided to do some catching up, and got their second collaboration with Scofield, Out Louder from 2006, credited to all four of them this time. I skipped forward to "Miles Behind," which I gathered was a play on Miles Davis's Miles Ahead and may be a tribute of sorts. And it is a tribute: not to the late-50s-era Miles of Miles Ahead, but to my absolute favorite stretch of his career, the wildly creative funk-rock-jazz fusion of the early 70s, Bitches Brew through Get Up With It, so despised by jazz purists but beloved by many who, like me, approach music with rock as their baseline. I first heard Miles's 1975 live album, Agharta, at the Tower Records (remember those?) in Rockville in 1991, and I bought it even though I was broke, because it was exactly the music I needed at the time. "Miles Behind" nails the Electric Miles sound (albeit without a trumpet); it distills that entire oeuvre into less than three minutes, and reliving the rush of my initial Agharta revelation actually gave me goosebumps.
A couple more new-wave-leaning songs that got regular airplay on staunch AOR station WAVA were Bram Tchaikovsky's "Girl of My Dreams" (1979) and the Motors' "Love and Loneliness" (1980). I always think of those two songs together because Tchaikovsky (actually Peter Bramall) was a member of the Motors before going "solo" (in quotes because Bram Tchaikovsky was one of those "yes it's the lead singer's name but it's also the name of the band" deals), and also before the Motors recorded "Love and Loneliness". So the only link is a shared history, but that's enough for me. One of Tchaikovsky's early bands, Heroes, recorded a version of Springsteen's "Growing Up," so it's not surprising to hear Bruce's "Born To Run" motif in "Girl of My Dreams"--
Sure enough; there are plenty of worse songs to copy. But there's a double-time beat in the bass and keys (though not in the leaden drumming) that would come to define a large chunk of the New Wave sound:The chorus of the best-known track, "Love and Loneliness," sounds exactly like Steve Stills' "Love the One You're With" — and that's as good as the record gets.
I have previously written about my dear friend, the late Mark Harp. Mark's band Null Set brought postpunk to Baltimore; when another band called Null Set, from another city, put out a record, Mark's Null Set changed their name to Cabal. The singer for Null Set and Cabal was Bill Dawson; after Cabal broke up, he teamed up with George Hagegeorge to form Black Pete and play guitar-charged industrial music in the vein of Ministry and Skinny Puppy. They put out one twelve-inch in 1989, recruited an apparently substance-addled young glam-metal dude as their "bassist" (though it was speculated that his real role was to get into fights and thereby gain "cred" for the band), and folded shortly thereafter. I missed my window for getting a copy of the record back then, but thanks to the Internet and GEMM, the window is open again. I found a copy and ordered it (from a dealer with multiple copies), and it arrived yesterday. The A-side is a cover of Mountain's "Mississippi Queen"--
Coincidentally, on the same day, Ministry released their supposedly final album, Cover Up, a collection of covers of classic rock tunes, one of which is... can you guess? That's right, "Mississippi Queen"--
That last part of this version (one of eight they recorded) has the best bass-drum workout since Steam's 1969 hit and perennial stadium favorite "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye"--
I would have loved Cover Up in 1990, perhaps as late as 1995. Maybe if I pretend it's a reissue, or long-suppressed recordings just released from the vault!!!, I'll like it better.
Finally, wouldn't it be funny to refer to Laibach as Audioslav?
After hearing about it for close to twenty years, I finally saw Heavy Metal Parking Lot over the weekend. It's a low-budget documentary of the parking-lot party activities before a 1986 Judas Priest concert at the Capital Centre in Largo, Maryland. What a scene. The Cap Centre was my local arena, and I went to a whole bunch of rock'n'roll shows there when I was in ninth and tenth grade (1979-81). While I never took part in any parking-lot debauchery (I was either too young, too scared, or too sensible), I sure did rock out. Seeing the now-demolished* Cap Centre made me try to remember all the shows I saw there, and for posterity I've put together a Seeqpod playlist that contains most of the bands I saw there. I've tried to select songs that represent the albums they were promoting at the time, but it wasn't always possible: there just aren't any tracks from Foghat's Tight Shoes, Blackfoot's Tomcattin', or Yes's Drama on seeqable sites. Some of the opening bands I couldn't find at all (Marseilles, FM) and some I've forgotten altogether. If I could find again my wooden box with all my ticket stubs in it that would help a lot, but I'm afraid it's lost forever. But now I will always have this playlist to remind me, because the Internet is forever, right?
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