Sideasideb-Old Adventures in Lo-Fi EP

Any of you kiddies like doing downers? Lemme tell ya, there's nuthin' like it this side of a major depressive episode. Things just sorta slow down and then (if you're lucky) stop moving altogether. Kinda like a normal day except with all the bad shit (read: most of it) carefully edited out so that it becomes a choose-your-own-adventure.

Of course, if you're operating on a head fulla Xanax, there ain't many adventures happening, but I digress. Sideasideb's second EP is sorta like that: things are indeed moving, out there, somewhere, but it all sort of mushes together in a blur of glacial synthesizer and mumble-whispered vocals in the distance. "Ten Speed" is probably the best track here: cutesy artsyfartsiness gradually gets serious by imploding into drum-guitar spazzfukery worthy of Hella. In fact, the mix of beats and spazziness sort of makes the comparison more apt now that those Hella guys are doing DeathGrips. I think they sped up the drum track at one point but who cares, right? Just let the Xanies guide you through this bit of rambling rattlenhum.

You can demo this bit of downed out weirdness here; hang out with the band here.

Anadelta-Vita Brevis LP (2013)

Anadelta is an example of a weird offshoot of the  '90s fixation sweeping the nation(s). Instead of simply ripping off MBV or Godspeed You! Black Emperor wholesale, the group explores the connections (yeah, there are some) between ambient electronica, shoegaze, and the spacier end of post-rock. Yeah, I know, you're probably saying to yourself "geez, how many discordant genres can one person throw together? And why the fuck would I want to listen to a mixture of those three? Fuck you."

Well I sorta had the same impression when the album crossed my desk, but after a month of listening, this LP has grown on me considerable. This is not music you can dance to, nor does it strike a visceral emotion such as anger, excitement, or passion. It's not hippy-dippy jamband dogshit, either. Rather, the LP moves between aggression, brooding, and exuberant bursts of catharsis.

Having alienated almost all of you with those first two paragraphs, I can now exhort those of you still reading to buy this thing. "Where are you/Where am I," begins very, very slowly with sedate synthesizers and minor notes washing in and around themselves. Things get a bit heavier on "Oceans:" the flighty guitar line is mixed with clang-bang electronic beats that finally plateau in a squall before fading out. Anadelta's debt to electronica is more evident on side two: "A Garden with No Colors" sounds like Russian Circles being lulled into submission by Boards of Canada.

If you can put your inner savage in check long enough, this is a great soundtrack to a stoned Sunday at the beach. Hell, I'm amazed something this chilled out came from Greece, the cockpit of the current capitalist crisis. Throw it on, pop a Mythos, and watch Syntagma Square burn.

You can preview the album, then BUY IT, here. The first 200 copies come in a fancy-schmancy photobooklet thing. Lowtronik mixed and mastered it. Dig it. 

The Janitors-Drone Head 2X LP (2013)

Swagger is acrucial element in all blues-based rock 'n' roll. Simply put: Can you do justice to the Son House and Blind Willie McTell riffs at the base of your sound, no matter how many effects pedals you got? Or are you hiding behind these effect pedals 'cause there's nothing worthwhile behind the distortion? Nick Cave brought this sort of bravismo to new heights with his pre-Boatman's Call work. Unfortunately, swagger and unabashedly macho posturing has gone the way of the dodo of late. Of course, nine times out of ten, macho posturing is boring at best, repulsive at worst: think of hair metal. But when done right, as an organic component of the music instead of as idiotic chest-thumping, it's a good thing.

The Janitors and San Francisco's The Chaw are two of the only contemporary bands that can pull it off. Along with Annesley's much-missed Meat Thump, these bands' heavy, sleazy vibe is perfect for sordid living of all sorts. The Janitors and The Chaw are similar in another sense: both have a heavily cinematic quality that fills out their rock 'n' roll core, and makes it more compelling after repeated listening.

Listening to the Janitors' debut LP, this cinematic feeling runs straight through the two EPs and several new tracks found therein. Heavy guitars and a prominent rhythym section are key components to their sound, but the organ and killer production create an entire world you can lose yourself in. It's a ballsy move for your vinyl debut to consist in large part of previously-released material, but the Janitors' debut EPs fit together into a whole, much like the individual bricks make up the bar you like to pass out behind, after a long bender.

"Strap Me Down" sticks in my head after repeated listening. Agonizingly, mesmerizingly slow guitar stomp; menacing organs that swirl in and out of focus; and muttered, then howled vocals that are an indecipherable but essential part of the vicious grey stew the Janitors specialize in. "A-Bow," however, is the LP's cornerstone. Clocking in at 12:29, it sums up everything fun in the Janitors' sound. The first five minutes sound like a Morricone out-take, straddling the line between spaced out rock and spaghetti western majesty. The tension finally explodes around 5:30 into heavy, drawn out classic rock riffing with enough organs to keep monotony at bay. "A-Bow" is
a glorious, and gloriously ambitious, piece of blues stomp with more depth and space than most music in this tradition.

Basically, the Janitors are what would happen if the White Stripes were as good as you always wanted them to be: innovative instead of simply adept; lewd instead of gentlemanly; and, ultimately, more interested in worming their way into your brain than in temporary aural fireworks. This is slow-burn scuzz rock with a vengeance.

Check it out here. The vinyl drops July 15th, complete with a gatefold sleeve perfect for staring at when blasted on speed and acid. You can pre-order your copy from Cardinal Fuzz Records.

Dirty Beaches-Seaside EP (2007)

 "I knew my youth couldn't last forever/so I got the band together...."-T.V. Smith of The Adverts, 1977
"This person's had enough of useless memories..."-John Lydon for PiL, 1980

Dirty Beaches is one of maybe five current bands worth caring about. In an era where creating music consists of little other than selecting a previous era's art and ruthlessly (mindlessly) cannibalizing it, Alex Zhang Hungtai and his collaborators manage to be quintessentially nostalgic, without any of the necrophilia that adjective usually, implicitly, entails it in the early 21st century. At the risk of alienating those of you who hate reading, it's worth unpacking what I mean by that.

Before the advent of mass consumption and above all of the internet, nostalgia meant something quite different from our current understanding of it. To label something "nostalgic" today is to dismiss it: sentimental, perhaps, intensely emotional, hopefully, but fundamentally retrograde and derivative because of said qualities. It constitutes an objective, damning judgment that somehow grants the judge a certain gravitas.This was not always the case. Before the adjective and its attendant emotional state became pejorative, "nostalgic" was an intensely subjective, personal affliction: that of a person wrenched away from his/her homeland or natural setting, and deeply, desperately yearning to return to it. Melancholy, that strange, liminal state between depression and futile action, was its typical accompaniment. In the 19th century, American doctors treated nostalgia as a disease and a threat to masculinity, curable by warfare and the near experience of death it grants.*

My point is that Dirty Beaches' work, whatever form it takes, is fundamentally concerned with capturing a particular place, and all its attendant feelings and sensations, at the exact moment it slips away from you forever. Hungtai's records sound quite different from each other superficially, but this moment of transient attachment is what sticks them together like the glue holding faded photographs to a scrapbook nobody's read in decades. Dirty Beaches creates scenes of bittersweet beauty, only to shatter them. If only because all songs have to end, just like all relationships, and all lives, ultimately.

What better name for his best pre-LP work, then, than Seaside? For me, in any case, large bodies of water have always had a fiercely magnetic appeal. Oceans, rivers, and lakes are comforting, somehow, yet menacing. Especially the ocean: the noises of the sea are calming, but one is immediately overwhelmed by the relentless, inexorable continuity of the sea. Whatever subjective memories you have of la mer, it doesn't give a damn about you in the end.

Just like most lovers, in fact. Another reason Dirty Beaches' work is so good is that Hungtai manages to meld ambient landscapes and subjective feelings together much like particular places become indissociably tied to former lovers once they're gone. This is why Seaside is the best of the pre-Badland EPs: each song is a carefully crafted reconstruction of a particular place or relationship, that manages to gel with the other tracks.

I read a story, once, about a Greek leaving the Pelopponese for the U.S.A. around 1900. She had carried a stone from her village on board the steamer with her; her mother had told her that once the ship was out to sea, she should throw the stone into the Mediterranean. It was a ritualized, symbolic divorce from the Motherland: Americans would think of this as a brave severance from tradition, but for me, it sounds like a drastic attempt to cut short nostalgia before it starts. This is also the scene I think of when I play this EP: a definite departure that isn't anywhere near joyful.

"On the Streets of Shibuya" is a beautiful sonic landscape. It's simply begging for orientalist reconstructions of "The East," so I won't go into detail on it. "Sud Dud Bud Mud" hints at the more propulsive, destructively energetic tracks from Badlands: the chugging, retrograde synth beat in the background, the impossibly archaic, fleeting vocals, twinkling chimes in the distance. "A Hundred Languages" is the core of the EP: nothing but acoustic guitar and Hungtai's vocals, it's heartbreaking. At times Hungtai doesn't bother with real words, but simply hums. There are certain pieces of music that summarize in a single, savage, transitory moment all the misery we experience in any relationship worth starting, and for me, "A Hundred Languages" is one of them. "Blue Birds" is even better: again, nothing but vocals and guitar. These simple instruments say more in three minimal minutes than most bands manage to say in several albums' worth of overproduced garbage. "La Barca" manages to hover somewhere between obscenely obvious nautical sounds and another successful take on marine-based yearning.

Reading this review, you've probably come away thinking that Dirty Beaches and its music is nothing but depressoid, schizoid garbage made by and for depressoids (such as this author). Not true! And in any case, the whole point is that nostalgia, as an emotion, hovers somewhere between depression and exultation: Depression, because of our severance from the object of our love; exultation, because we anticipate returning to it. That's a clumsy reconstruction of an inexpressible feeling, so I'll shut up and tell you, once again, that Dirty Beaches deserves your fervent support and/or money.

....When I cross the border....   In large part, I'm posting this EP because DB just dropped a double LP that is well worth buying-get it HERE. DB is also on tour, so catch them if you're in Europe! Hungtai runs a blog that's well worth following, as well.

*Most of this spiel on the genealogy of nostalgia is heavily indebted to my reading of Svetlana Boym's "The Future of Nostalgia". It's a good book and one well worth reading. I first heard about it through reading interviews with Hungtai.

Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing-Eeling LP (2013)

This band has the worst name I've heard yet, in going on two years' worth of music blogging. It just sounds awkward: two gerunds in one band name? That's a little much. I'm not a nominalist, though, so heroic music critic (ha!) that I am, I'm willing to give everyone a fair spin before I change the soundtrack to Nino Rota.

Girls Pissing on Girls builds up impressionistic portraits of decrepit living, occasional outbursts of nightmarish action, and a barely-perceptible but pulsing rage beneath the static gloom. There's no forward momentum to these songs. They lumber along in an autistic sleep-walking nullnode procession, like someone who took too much Ambien and is stumbling around the hallways of their apartment at 5 am with the lights off.

The band is adept at sucking the listener into these freakish soundscapes, forcing one to keep listening even though the lumbering tension and lack of cathartic release winds you up something terrible. At the center of GPOGP (see? The name doesn't even make for a good acronym!)'s sound is the undynamic tension between the synthesizer and drumming: the synth is the canvas for the noisescapes sketched out by the rhythm(less) section and the harsh, flat intonations of the dual female-male vocalists. Best tune: "The Dance of Salome," which manages to maintain the eerie ambience of the previous few songs while making it almost warm. Fans of Swans will dig this; the LP also reminds me of Broken Water's majestically flawed Seaside and Semikrasky ropera.

Check out Eeling over at Tenzenmen Records. Then pick up a copy of it from the same peeps.

Batu Kan Pesti Rokona-Mezofoldi Kosmosz EP (2012)

Being that this is a solo project of the guitarist for Hungarian noise boys Opus Null , I was expecting raucous cacophony from "Mezofoldi Kosmosz." There's a bit of that, especially on the first track, but mostly the album features daring, varied improvised guitar that mostly succeeds.

"Az Apeh Gyermeke" is the closest song, musically, to Opus Null's work, although a bit less raucous than most of their stuff. Trashy guitar fuzz, rambam Ramones-style drumming, and heavy bass; along with "Araben," it marks a transition from the contorted thrash of Bencze's band. "Panelhazi Ugros," however, marks the real departure point: song structure is replaced by meditative, brooding guitar sketches that sound like distant thunder peaking over a mountainous landscape.
   The main strike against the album is the track arrangement: it jerks back and forth between the ambient stuff and more traditional psych rock. Whatever, "Felrehangolt Letelem" is truly idiosyncratic: as far as I can tell, it's just an extended bass solo with interspersed guitar: sort of like listening to a song on the radio, then changing the station and getting a completely different song.

"Zenit" and "Mezofoldi Kosmosz" are the heart of the album, and the most interesting songs. These are searing, minimalist pieces of guitar improvisation. It's only the guitar, scratching out patterns against an utterly empty, expansive mix. The closest parallel I can think of is Neil Young's majestic score to "Dead Man": raw, haunting noise that meanders in and out of focus. Whereas most rock music tells a story, music like this sets a scene, or paints a landscape. This is lonely, barren music that reminds me of driving through Wyoming: nothing but open country, malevolent skies, and yourself.

"Mezofoldi Kosmosz" surprised me, and all to the good. It's not as good as the "Dead Man" soundtrack, of course, but given that this is a first solo effort, I can't wait to hear what this guy does next.
Check it out HERE.

Walrus-Odobenus Rosmarus EP (2012)

Halifax's fraternal duo Walrus, unlike most bands featured on Drug Punk, doesn't sound like a drug-induced car crash. Instead, Walrus is the appropriate soundtrack to wandering down the deserted back alleys and empty boulevards of your hometown in the misty rain, searching for that pretty girl (guy?) seen from a distance just the other day.

This two-song EP has a lot more texture than anything I've heard recently. "Van Dyke Brown" opens with rain patter and feels murky, in a tranquil way. The singer's voice is distant and melancholic, but not despondent. The song floats along on gentle currents of electronic percussion and effects, and fades out slowly. "Weekdays" sounds like it was recorded on a blustery day, with more hazy electro-ambience.
The EP sort of reminds me of a more concentrated, compressed version of Herzog's first EP. It's an excellent accompaniment to the merry month of May, and I recommend it.

Check it out here.

Oldwyoming.-When Debord met Salinger[...] EP (2011)

Last November, I drove from Chicago to Portland, via Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho. It was fucking terrifying. Proud Chicago native and city boy that I am, I had no clue how vast Amurikuh is. Wyoming by itself is so fucking big and empty that I developed a weird sense of reverse claustrophobia after the first day. The middle of the USA was not meant for human habitation, and Wyoming frowns on intruders.

It makes sense this project features that state prominently. It's perfect music for a long road trip: the kind where you're driving for so long, you don't notice how much the landscape's changed 'til you get out to take a piss. The three soundscapes drift in and out of focus, sort of like Eno's ambient work, but this is as American as illiteracy: I can only see this kind of drone coming from the desolation and isolation of the U.S. heartland.

..I do get bored. Contact oldwyoming via Last.Fm for more info. He takes some good pictures, peeps his tumblr page, too.