Happy 40 Baywatch

For you my friend...

Kiss - S/T

When you got nothing you got nothing to lose. Another bitchin' release from 1974 and still one of the most lasting and complete debut records in the last 35 years.

Bring it naysayers!

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Allmusic.com: Kiss' 1974 self-titled debut is one of hard rock's all-time classic studio recordings. Kiss is chock full of their best and most renowned compositions, containing elements of Rolling Stones/New York Dolls party-hearty rock & roll, Beatles tunefulness, and Sabbath/Zep heavy metal, and wisely recorded primal and raw by producers Richie Wise and Kenny Kerner (of Gladys Knight fame). Main songwriters Stanley and Simmons each had a knack for coming up with killer melodies and riffs, as evidenced by "Nothin' to Lose" and "Deuce" (by Simmons), "Firehouse" and "Black Diamond" (by Stanley), as well as "Strutter" and "100,000 Years" (collaborations by the two). Also included is the Ace Frehley alcohol anthem "Cold Gin," "Let Me Know" (a song that Stanley played for Simmons upon their very first meeting, then titled "Sunday Driver"), and one of Kiss' few instrumentals: the groovy "Love Theme from Kiss" (penned by the entire band). The only weak track is a tacky cover of the 1959 Bobby Rydell hit "Kissin' Time," which was added to subsequent pressings of the album to tie in with a "Kissing Contest" promotion the band was involved in at the time. Along with 1976's Destroyer, Kiss' self-titled debut is their finest studio album, and has only improved over the years.

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Rachel's - Music For Egon Schiele

Anymore it's hard to get through this entire record. Very significant/riveting/massive/moving.

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Allmusic.com: Composed for a live theater/dance production about the tragic life of Austrian artist Egon Schiele, the gentle majesty of Music for Egon Schiele is a welcome change of pace for anyone bored with popular music forms, transporting the listener's mood entirely. Rachel's weaves a delicate but highly moving musical fabric that wraps itself around you tightly and pulls you in, simultaneously cradling you lovingly while haunting you with its melancholy ambiance. At times, the emotionally rich compositions work as effectively as any ballet score to tell the artist's tragic story. It is to pianist Rachel Grimes' credit that her pieces convey a stirring sense of drama and vivid imagery that perfectly match her subject. Highly recommended.


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Etta James | Rocks the House [1963]

Here's a lady that delivers a quick belt to your belly and doesn't care if it hurts. Cue this up and get ready to go a few rounds with this lovely lady, but do watch out for that right hook, and she CAN wield a 3" heel con mucho gusto. Easily one of my favorite live releases ever, this 1963 recording at The New Ear Club in Nashville is a real bar burner. I've always been fondly drawn to the photos on the cover—talk about all business.


You don't know what Etta's got strapped in that ace bandage.


Better believe it, motherfucker.


Strap on some gloves if you can take a shot.

Urge Overkill - Strange, I...

Ah THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU Chunklet for digitizing what I've always felt was one of the best representation of that caustic, twisted late80s/early90s "Chicago Sound" (See Big Black, Naked Raygun).

Oh shut up, me. Just go to HERE and read the Chunklet bit. And you should be reading Chunklet all the time anyway, spazz.

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DJ/Rupture & Andy Moor - Patches

Atmospheres and essences.

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Pitchforkmedia says: Upon hearing that DJ/rupture is following his stellar 2008 mix, Uproot, with an Andy Moor collaboration, for a second there we worried the dude in question was the trance producer. After all, in 2009 all bets are off, and logic can basically go fuck itself: Hot Chip recently recorded with Robert Wyatt; Chris Cornell with Timbaland (although this makes a weird kind of sense for Cornell-- too pretty for Grungetown, too grungy for Prettytown, he's always been stuck between worlds). And now, this.

In fact, the Andy Moor in question is the Netherlands-based guitarist from such revered anarcho-punk bands as Dog Faced Hermans and the Ex. Patches consists of live, improvised tracks the duo recorded while touring together-- Moor on guitar, Rupture on turntables. In some ways, it's the opposite of Uproot: guitar-centric, spontaneous, and brittle. It sounds like an odd match, but if any punk guitarist is equipped for this sort of thing, it's Moor. Like Rupture, the Ex is known for incorporating a broad variety of non-Western styles into its music. Moor also has improv chops, as evidenced by the Ex's extemporaneous double-LP Instant and In the Fishtank collaborations with Sonic Youth and ICP. Rupture and Moor use different media, but their curatorial interests are alike.

Together, they've forged an often-delirious concoction of post-punk serration, dubstep duskiness, hip-hop swagger, and free-jazz texture. As a general tendency, Moor vamps on arid, precise riffs, around which Rupture weaves loose nets of manhandled breaks. Then he tightens the net as the riffs become more assertive, as if to keep them from galloping away. Some of Rupture's samples are glaringly obvious-- another shift from the arcane selections of Uproot. On the dubby "Ella Speed", Moor plays spidery figures as Rupture flips the wolf whistle from Juelz Santana's "There It Go (The Whistle Song)"; on "One Hundred Month Bloom" toneless guitar meets a tweaky version of the famous overture from Smashing Pumpkins' "Today". On "Jimmy Rogers", Diana Ross sings "My World Is Empty Without You" over disembodied vocals, shrieking pitches, and subliminal chords. Tracy Chapman shows up on "Tracy", its time-bomb riff ticking down to an echoing excerpt from "Behind the Wall". These moments feel like an unusually arty Girl Talk set, and are balanced by a ton of stealthy samples I'm helpless to identify.

The vibe is persistently chilly, the terrain merciless-- even when Moor sets controls for the heart of the sun, as on the riff-heavy "The Sheep Look Up", he can't thaw Rupture's unforgiving tundra. Some tracks are spectral and nebulous, like the watery, de-tuned "Tidal". The riddim-oriented ones are better-- on "Chisanga", Moor's string-bent squiggles gradually flatten out into a hitching riff, which Rupture surrounds with a phalanx of strafing drums. But the ones where they truly mind-meld, rather than Rupture chasing after Moor's riffs with periphery-bound FX, are best. On "Hot Pink Orleans", mercury-slick sonar blips, pinging whammy-barred guitars, and scudding bass amass into a well-balanced dubstep apparatus. On "Sometimes It Can Be Difficult To", nervous guitar skitters, nervous scratches, and reverbed snares build into something resembling a terrible car crash. "Our Enemies Have Watches But We Have Time" astonishes with its violent drum breaks, which make Moor's snarling riff sound meek by comparison.

True to its circumscribed nature, Patches lacks the awesome diversity of Uproot. But it's impressive that this improvised work packs a clandestine socio-political payload, which usually resolves in some latent irony between samples and song titles (although Tracy Chapman's lament of police uselessness is politically loaded from the start). If you know that "Ella Speed" is the title of a blues song about a man who becomes obsessed with a prostitute and shoots her to death, those Juelz whistles become less of a "hey I recognize that" gimmick, and more of an astringent comment on predatory male lust. The machine-gun drums and land-mine chords of "Our Enemies Have Watches But We Have Time" are a bit chilling if you know the title is a Taliban slogan. "The Sheep Look Up" takes its title from a dystopian sci-fi novel by John Brunner, which deals with environmental degradation in the U.S., making its party vibe rather sardonic. Careful listeners will discover other secret polemics, buried so deeply as not to disturb those who simply want to marvel at the killer instincts and catlike reflexes of Moor and Rupture live.

— Brian Howe, February 9, 2009

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MIA - Arular

Brothers & Sisters,

I slap in your lap what has got to be one of this blogger's favorite records of the past few years. I'm not a freak for grime, finding it a little provincial and limited, but this just unsnaps your jeans and give you a loving and right proper rump slap... and, hell yeah, it's got a message.

So, set aside your preconceived notion regarding the state of European dance music. Abandon your prejudice toward Sri Lankan disco auteurs and go strictly objective.

You too will be a fan... or you money back!

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Pitchforkmedia says: Arular was first expected to be released in late 2004, but instead M.I.A. gave half of its vocals away to Diplo's Piracy Funds Backlash mixtape, which married her London Sri Lankan patois to music from New York, Rio, and Kingston. The mix highlighted her big-tent approach to global rhythms and Now Sounds, an M.O. that was cemented when she professed her love for hip-hop crew the Diplomats and rap's spiritual cousins, grime, baile funk, dancehall, and reggaeton in The New York Times. Faster than you can say "galang-alang-alang," M.I.A. became the one-woman embodiment of what to some is great about the contemporary pop music landscape. All that's left is for M.I.A. to draft Seba as producer and that voice that name-stamps dancehall tracks like a heavily drugged, vocoded Just Blaze as MC: "M.I.A. on... Bionic Ras... Baile Funk... Forward Riddim..."

This transglobal express isn't new, of course: Young Jamaicans have been combining the best of U.S. hip-hop and UK dance culture for years, American rap producers seem addicted to the sub-continent, grime is actually lobbing singles into the UK top 40, and Nigeria is threatening to become the new hip-hop hot spot. "From ghetto to ghetto, backyard to yard, taking it transglobal on the aboveground, because that's where the people are," Hyperdub's Sterling Clover said of this trend a few years ago. At the time he was talking about bhangra and the Indian influences on hip-hop, but he could just as easily have been talking about dancehall or grime or baile funk. And when it comes to M.I.A., you can practically talk about all of them at once.

Unlike most musical tailors, neither she nor her mixtape partner Diplo is afraid to let the seams show. Rather than hiding up the ass of cratedigging culture, they relish sharing the spotlight with and revealing their sources, with M.I.A. dropping names in NYC broadsheets and Diplo opening two-way routes between Philly and the favelas rather than stashing all the best dubplates for himself. Northern Soul is probably turning over in its grave.

If the two are interested in creating a dialogue between different artists and sounds, they're also more than happy to allow listeners to eavesdrop, whether they're improvising (Piracy) or well-rehearsed (Arular, Favela on Blast). M.I.A.'s freedom-through-homelessness is shared by other artists (most notably dj/Rupture) but not by many of the source sounds found on her records, most of which are fiercely regional. Where Rupture's name suggests a destruction of the borders between scenes, cultures, and nations, his methods-- which include healthy doses of splatter beats and breakcore-- can also seem violently deconstructionist. M.I.A's moniker, on the other hand, appropriately suggests rootlessness. She's not exploring subcultures so much as visiting them, grabbing souvenirs and laying them out on acetate: The favela trumpet on "Bucky Done Gone", the London slang of "Galang", the disco sample on "Sunshowers", the steel drums of "Bingo", the electro-fueled vocal edits of "Hombre".

M.I.A.'s detractors claim her flirtations with terrorism and revolutionary politics reveal the biggest case of sufferer's envy since Joe Strummer but little depth of thought. But if the latter is true, so what? An in-depth examination of demonizing The Other, the relationship between the West and developing nations, or the need to empathize with one's enemies would likely make for a pretty crappy pop song. An argument can and has been made that her political lip service is unique enough to get those topics onto your tongue or into your brain, prodding listeners to at least examine them. Some might find that off-putting, but pop music that reflects uncomfortable realities and is packaged in this sonic collage beats the hell out of 1980s left-wing hand wringing from Bragg or Bono or Biafra.

And when it comes down to it, that "sonic collage" is still what's important here. With all the column inches and message board posts arguing about whether M.I.A. is an opportunist or a clever contextualist, genuine or a fraud, full of good intentions or no specific intentions at all, the closest thing to a truism about Arular is that it's a taut, invigorating distillation of the world's most thrilling music; a celebration of contradictions and aural globalization that recasts the tag "world music" as the ultimate in communicative pop rather than a symbol of condescending piety.

— Scott Plagenhoef, March 22, 2005

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