What I’m Listening To (and other stuff)

There are a few reference points for the 1990s debut album that you need to forget right away. It doesn’t matter that Bernard Butler produced, or that two of the band’s members were in a band with the drummer from Franz Ferdinand. It does matter that the band in question was Yummy Fur because if you were a fan of their off-kilter and jagged brand of post-punky pop, you’ll like Cookies. Of course that covers a couple hundred people at best, so let’s say if you’re a fan of off-kilter, spunky and often laugh-out-loud hilarious post-punk influenced pop that ropes in the best elements of Art Brut, the Libertines, Comet Gain and the B-52’s, then there’s a good chance you’ll fall for the 1990s in a big way. Indeed, there is much to like about Cookies: Jackie McKeown has a perfect yelping voice to pull off the sarcastic, knowing and sassy lyrical pose, the band is tight and raw but able to rein things in on funky tunes like “Arcade Precinct,” and Butler keeps things quite simple and gets a remarkably punchy sound out of the trio. The only possible downfall to the album’s success is the mood of the listener — if you aren’t in the mood for goofy, silly rock & roll with no depth or greater meaning, you might want to hurl the record through the nearest window right around the mid-point of “Enjoying Myself” when the lyrics “I would not like to play chess with a man in a vest/unless he was wearing a Stetson” come fluttering through the speakers. If reading that couplet made you think of Dr. Seuss on cough syrup and made you chuckle, then Cookies might be for you. It’s a rollicking good time, rollicking.

http://sharebee.com/1b7aa204

Sorry for the recent lack of updates. I’ve had company visiting and I haven’t had time to post.  I also couldn’t decide what to post, so I decided to post some originals of mine. I made them in Ableton Live 6, and entirely out of loops. So here’s four (one is messed up at the beginning because I didn’t mean to repeat it that much).

http://www.mediafire.com/?8d9oewnyj10

Note: These songs aren’t licensed in any way, so feel free to use them wherever you please, just give credit where it’s due.

Disregarding all the wordiness and adjectives that can be heaped like a pile of horse dung at Disneyland upon great, timeless albums, the importance of this record can perhaps be more suitably measured by the number of people who remember the first time they heard it. 13 Songs (a combination of the Fugazi and Margin Walker EPs) is usually among the first records that spring to mind when defining alternative rock. Furious, intelligent, artful, and entirely musical, it’s a baker’s dozen of cannon shots to the gut — not just a batch of emotionally visceral and defiant songs recorded by angry young men, but something greater. Nearly every song here reaches an anthemic level without falling prey to pomposity. Most of these songs are anthems of the self rather than a rallying cry of accusation or unification, with “Waiting Room” and “Suggestion” serving as two examples. The attention-getting drop into silence that occurs at the 22-second mark of the former is instantly memorable. The relentless ska/reggae-inflected drive of the song is equally effective, as Ian MacKaye tells everyone listening to get off their behinds and do what they want. During the Meters-meets-Ruts thrust of “Suggestion,” MacKaye switches genders for an entirely convincing rant on the objectification of women. Guy Picciotto takes on the persona of an addict on “Glue Man,” whose blurred sense of reality is also conveyed in the warped, psychedelic guitars. Picciotto threatens to set himself on fire during “Margin Walker”; given the spirited play of the remaining members, it sounds like the same could be said for the rest of them. Foreshadowing the band’s knack for introspective and mid-tempo concluding tracks, the disc ends with MacKaye’s “Promises,” examining the pitfalls of trust in relationships of any nature. A landmark record.

http://www.gigasize.com/get.php/77336/F13S.rar

allmusic:

It’s unfortunate that the hype machine behind Sage Francis’ second effort for the Epitaph label totally missed the breakthrough factor and decided to sell it as “his most personal record to date.” Pound for pound, Human the Death Dance may be his most personal effort, but it’s also an incredibly well-built full-length — even when it borrows from a handful of genres — and it’s arguably his best lyrical effort, undoubtedly his best production-wise. While it’s good news that the Sage Francis faithful are getting to peer into the man’s head with this “personal” effort, Death Dance begins with a helpful crib sheet (“Underground for Dummies”) that suggests newcomers are welcome here, too, and maybe even desired. When he delivers “You wanna promo copy buddy/You can download the tracks,” it’s not entirely clear whether he would have designed the world this way. He’s cool with it, though, and declares “This is hip-hop for the people/Stop calling it emo,” as if he’s done with being pigeonholed, sick of being sold only to those “in the know.” And really, why shouldn’t he be? Any audience can appreciate the greatness of the organic blues beat producer Buck 65 lays on “Got Up This Morning.” Sage’s lyrics on the cut are equally smart and creative, with literary references thrown about in a flirty conversation between the protagonist and a sultry siren who just might be the Devil (“She asked ‘What would Bukowski do?’/Don’t go there!/He would make you his Mom”). Brilliant underground hip-hop producers Odd Nosdam (“Underground for Dummies”) and Alias (“Keep Moving”) both turn in great constructions, and composer/trumpeter/odd choice Mark Isham offers two elegant and sinister tracks (“Good Fashion” and “Waterline”) that prove why he’s the one who the film industry calls when they want slick 21st century noir. The truly personal numbers that close the album come after earning the listener’s trust and patience, and the Isham/Francis connection comes from work for Hollywood, more signs that the man is ready to connect. In the end, the claim “his most personal record to date” becomes as important as “the one with the most black on the cover” or “the one with the most producers.” What matters is that Death Dance works hard to immerse any listener in another world where angst, darkness, dark humor, ambition, the itch to create, and the hunger for all things creative demand attention. That this is the world in Sage’s head is secondary.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=M69RDBEE

allmusic:

Although seemingly impossible to comprehend, this landmark jazz recording was made in less than three days. All the more remarkable is that the same sessions which yielded My Favorite Things would also inform a majority of the albums Coltrane Plays the Blues, Coltrane’s Sound, and Coltrane Legacy. It is easy to understand the appeal that these sides continue to hold. The unforced, practically casual soloing styles of the assembled quartet — which includes Coltrane (soprano/tenor sax), McCoy Tyner (piano), Steve Davis (bass), and Elvin Jones (drums) — allow for tastefully executed passages à la the Miles Davis Quintet, a trait Coltrane no doubt honed during his tenure in that band. Each track of this album is a joy to revisit. The ultimate listenability may reside in this quartet’s capacity to not be overwhelmed by the soloist. Likewise, they are able to push the grooves along surreptitiously and unfettered. For instance, the support that the trio — most notably Tyner — gives to Coltrane on the title track winds the melody in and around itself. However, instead of becoming entangled and directionless, these musical sidebars simultaneously define the direction the song is taking. As a soloist, the definitive soprano sax runs during the Cole Porter standard “Everytime We Say Goodbye” and tenor solos on “But Not for Me” easily establish Coltrane as a pioneer of both instruments.

http://rapidshare.com/files/35153313/JCMFT-BYPAGE.rar

(allmusic): Thought by many to be the most revolutionary album in jazz history, having virtually created the genre known as jazz-rock fusion (for better or worse) and being the jazz album to most influence rock and funk musicians, Bitches Brew is, by its very nature, mercurial. The original double LP included only six cuts and featured up to 12 musicians at any given time, most of whom would go on to be high-level players in their own right: Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Airto, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Don Alias, Benny Maupin, Larry Young, Lenny White, and others. Originally thought to be a series of long jams locked into grooves around one or two keyboard, bass, or guitar figures, Bitches Brew is anything but. Producer Teo Macero had as much to do with the end product on Bitches Brew as Davis. Macero and Davis assembled, from splice to splice, section to section, much of the music recorded over three days in August 1969. First, there’s the slow, modal, opening grooves of “Pharaoh’s Dance,” with its slippery trumpet lines to McLaughlin’s snaky guitar figures skirting the edge of the rhythm section and Don Alias‘ conga slipping through the middle. The keyboards of Corea and Zawinul create a haunting, riffing groove echoed and accented by the two basses of Harvey Brooks and Dave Holland. The title cut was originally composed as a five-part suite, though only three were used. Here the keyboards punch through the mix, big chords and distorted harmonics ring up a racket for Davis to solo over rhythmically outside the mode. McLaughlin is comping on fat chords, creating the groove, and the bass and drums carry the rest for a small taste of deep-voodoo funk. Side three opens with McLaughlin and Davis trading funky fours and eights over the lock-step groove of hypnotic proportion that is “Spanish Key.” Zawinul’s trademark melodic sensibility provides a kind of chorus for Corea to flat around, and the congas and drummers working in complement against the basslines. This nearly segues into the four-and-a-half minute “John McLaughlin,” with its signature organ mode and arpeggiated blues guitar runs. The end of Bitches Brew, signified by the stellar “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” echoes the influence of Jimi Hendrix; with its chuck-and-slip chords and lead figures and Davis playing a ghostly melody through the shimmering funkiness of the rhythm section, it literally dances and becomes increasingly more chaotic until about nine minutes in, where it falls apart. Yet one doesn’t know it until near the end, when it simmers down into smoke-and-ice fog once more. The disc closes with “Sanctuary,” a previously recorded Davis tune that is completely redone here as an electric moody ballad reworked for this band, but keeping enough of its modal integrity to be outside the rest of Bitches Brew’s retinue. The CD reissue adds “Feio,” a track recorded early in 1970 with the same band. Unreleased — except on the box set of the complete sessions — “Feio” has more in common with the exploratory music of the previous August than with later, more structured Davis music in the jazz-rock vein. A three-note bass vamp centers the entire thing as three different modes entwine one another, seeking a groove to bolt onto. It never finds it, but becomes its own nocturnal beast, offering ethereal dark tones and textures to slide the album out the door on. Thus Bitches Brew retains its freshness and mystery long after its original issue.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CP4HJY5Q

OK, I finally changed the theme and the header, I like the feel of this theme more than the original one, because one column just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I changed the header too, its “ALovelyTree” from exhibition 1 of Desktopography. I hope you like the changes, and I think I’m going to go back to embedding videos from youtube for each post. Let me know what you think of the changes.

EDIT: I went back and added youtube links to the posts on the front page.

Josh Homme is a man of many talents, but he’s not quite a man of his time. He floats outside of it, sniping and sneering at it, but he’s not part of it — he’s too in love with rock & roll to belong to a decade that’s seeing the music’s slow decline. You could say that Queens of the Stone Age keep rock’s flame burning, but unlike other new-millennium true believers — like Jack White, for instance — Homme lacks pop skills or even the interest in crossing over (which isn’t the same thing as lacking hooks, mind you), and unlike the stoner metal underground that provided his training ground, he’s not insular; he thrives on grand visions and grander sound. He’s an anomaly, a keeper of the flame that will never be played on Little Steven’s Rock & Roll Underground because Queens of the Stone Age are too heavy, too muso, too tasteless in all the wrong ways to be commonly accepted or embraced as among the next generation of rock heroes — which only makes them more rock & roll, of course. And if rock & roll is indeed in decline in the 2000s, Homme and his Queens of the Stone Age prove that rock & roll can nevertheless be just as potent as it ever was with each of their remarkable albums. All are instantly identifiable as QOTSA but all are quite different from each other, from the sleazoid freak-out of R to the dark, gothic undertow of Lullabies to Paralyze, a record so willfully murky that it alienated a good portion of an audience ready to bolt in the wake of the departure of Homme’s longtime partner, Nick Oliveri. Its 2007 successor, Era Vulgaris, is as different from Lullabies as that was to their dramatic widescreen breakthrough, Songs for the Deaf: it’s mercilessly tight and precise, relentless in its momentum and cheerful in its maliciousness. Like other QOTSA albums, guest musicians are paraded in and out, but here it’s impossible to tell if Mark Lanegan contributed anything or if that indeed is the Strokes‘ Julian Casablancas singing lead on the lethal “Sick, Sick, Sick,” because Homme has honed Era Vulgaris so scrupulously that it’s impossible to hear anybody else’s imprint on the overall sound. QOTSA retain some of the spookiness of Lullabies — there’s a ghostly hue on “Into the Hollow” — but this is as balls-out rock as Songs for the Deaf, only minus the mythic momentum Dave Grohl lent that record. But Era Vulgaris isn’t designed as a monolith like Songs; its appeal is in its lean precision, how the riffs grind as if they were stripping screws of their threads, how the rhythms relentlessly pulse, and, of course, how it’s all dressed up in all kinds of scalding guitars, all different sounds and tones, giving this menace and muscle. If the songs aren’t pop crossovers — not even the soulful seductive groove of “Make It Wit Chu” (revived from one of Homme’s Desert Sessions) qualifies it as a potential pop hit — they still have hard hooks that make these manifestos even if they aren’t anthems: “Misfit Love” digs in like a nasty Urge Overkill, “Battery Acid” is metallic and mean, blind-sided only by the gargantuan, gnarly “3’s & 7’s.” It’s hard to call Era Vulgaris stripped-down — there’s too much color in the guitar, too much willful weirdness to be that — but this is Queens of the Stone Age at their most elemental and efficient, never spending longer than necessary at each song, yet managing to make each of these three-minute blasts of fury sound like epics. It’s exhilarating, the best rock & roll record yet released in 2007 — and the year sure needed the dose of thunder that this album provides.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BAD81UGJ

For the true follow-up to 2002’s Every Day — since 2003’s Man with a Movie Camera soundtrack had actually been recorded four years earlier — J. Swinscoe & co.’s Cinematic Orchestra produced another soundtrack, this one virtually invisible. Not long after Every Day’s release, Swinscoe began writing music for another Cinematic LP, but in another direction from where he’d gone previously. This was a series of quiet, contemplative instrumentals, with Rhodes keyboards and reedy clarinets, simply begging for a narrative (call them orchestrations for cinema). With scripts for each supplied by a friend — each track got its own story, together comprising different scenes from a single life — and a series of unpeopled photographs supplied by Maya Hayuk, Cinematic Orchestra had the narrative they needed for their invisible soundtrack. (Added vocals from Fontella Bass, Lou Rhodes, and Patrick Watson represent the same person at different ages.) The results form an intensely affecting record, but one whose monochromatic format unfortunately serves no large purpose; when every song attempts to become a mini-masterpiece of melodrama, patience grows thin. Swinscoe tells us that he wanted to record an album where “leaving the spaces as empty as possible was paramount,” but he can hardly complain if we choose to leave him the space to himself. [A U.K. version of the album was also released.]

http://www.mediafire.com/?7zmmjznmu4h

Hardcore Punk was the most rigid and extreme variation of punk rock. Emerging in the early ’80s, hardcore took the ideals of punk as far as it could go. The music was impossibly fast, the vocals were shouted, the riffs were simple, and the records looked (and sounded) like they were made in someone’s basement. Most of the bands sounded incredibly similar to each other, but there was a handful of distinctive bands; they usually developed musically quite quickly, leaving the sound of hardcore behind, but not its ideals. Hardcore punk was primarily an American sensation and was concentrated in Los Angeles and New York, but there were small, individual scenes scattered across the country. Hardcore kept going into the ’90s without breaking into the mainstream, though bands influenced by the hardcore aesthetic — including Nirvana and Green Day — became major rock stars, and former hardcore punkers like Bob Mould, Henry Rollins, Mike Watt, Ian McKaye, and Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis became alternative icons.

Suicidal Tendencies – s/t

http://www.mediafire.com/?1yoozyt2yjo

Black Flag – Damaged

http://rapidshare.com/files/2015718/Black_Flag-Damaged.rar.html

Dead Kennedys – Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0X4OFF9V

Minor Threat – Complete Discography

http://www.gigasize.com/get.php/83318/MT_CD.rar

Circle Jerks – Group Sex

http://s2.quicksharing.com/v/6212804/Group_Sex.rar.html

X – Los Angeles

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TG844S92

Misfits – 12 Hits From Hell

http://rapidshare.com/files/1759472/Fits12Hits.rar.html

Descendents – Milo Goes to College

http://www.mediafire.com/?5ta1rzdmyiu