Pop Music

The last time I wrote something about pop music, it was to say how unsatisfying "pure pop" is in an album context. For instance, compare the Buzzcocks singles to their albums. The albums have stretched out songs, instrumentals, different styles--while their singles show only one side of the band (albeit to great success). The same could be said of a lot of great artists: anyone who buys Bob Dylan's "Greatest Hits" is in for some good tunes, but you miss the inspired album tracks like "It's Alright, Ma" and "It Takes a Lot To Laugh..."

This almost could lead to a discussion of "two types of artists": one type capable of writing songs in a variety of formats, and another type that is oriented towards only one thing. So, the Velvet Underground, Wire, Joy Division, The Cure, Fucked Up on one hand, and Black Sabbath, Gang of Four, Motorhead, Pink Floyd, CCR, The Ramones, The Kinks on the other hand.

But that is not an argument I'm really interested in making--since the dichotomy really proves itself: in the division between "variety" and "unity," everything is varied if you look close enough at one level, and everything blends together if you zoom back far enough.

Rather, I would like to point out that everything needn't come down to pop music in the end. This seems to be the logic of the day, when Justin Timberlake is the most universally-beloved artist.

Take the Ramones, for instance. The general take on the Ramones is that they were influenced by Phil Spector pop, the trashy glam-pop of the NY Dolls, and pre-Beatles American pop-rock like the songs they covered ("California Sun," "Do You Wanna Dance?"). And sure, these are their influences. But, to make this point for the millionth time, the most important influence on punk is The Stooges. The Stooges, who are a "pop band" in no one's conception. And I think it is through this lens that the Ramones need to be seen, to debunk the idea that they are merely latter-day, fucked-up versions of Jan and Dean (why this is an appealing vision I don't know, because it takes all the fun out of the Ramones). And in this conception, "Beat on the Brat" looks a bit different. Isn't this the worst pop song ever?

Ok, so let's define pop music. My definition is that pop music is self-interpreting. On another day, I might say, "pre-digested." I don't mean this negatively, nor do I mean to say that it can't be internally interesting, but if you look at the Beatles' hit songs in their later period, it is still apparent that these songs are, for all their interest, not difficult to hum. "Lady Madonna," "Ballad of John and Yoko," "Obla-di-Obla-da," "Hey Jude." (Here I should say that the all-time worst Beatles hit is the earlier "Paperback Writer.")

The correct point to make, in defending pop music, is all the complexity and variety that can go within a pop song and have it still be self-interpreting. The classic example of this is "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys, or, in a later moment, "Love Will Tear Us Apart," by Joy Division. The appeal is, "look how much went into this, and you can still dance to it"--a perfect union of artistry and accessibility.

I don't want to walk all over that, but I think that it has warped everyone's conception of music. For one, I would say that the other essential tenet of pop music is that you throw everything at the wall and see what sticks---this being incompatible with the refinement and genius bands expect from themselves. This, I think, is the motive behind the Buzzcocks' longer album tracks--they are working out one impulse, which will then be "channeled" in a more concise form, into endlessly rewarding pop songs--the same way that Gerhard Richter's split artistic personality was mutually reinforcing to its separate tendencies.

Let's say, then, that we need to get over our fascination with Justin Timberlake and "the perfect pop song" and return to an album context (exactly what has been destroyed by 70-minute rap albums and the prominence of mp3s)--which will have the added benefit of moving away from pure style into a revaluation of form. For instance, instead of trying to graft your Beach Boys harmonies onto your neo-folk ramblings, why not try writing a riff or melody someone might actually want to listen to?

*****
Ok, so after I wrote the first part, I saw this review of an 80s indie-pop retrospective:
"A lot of these bands went in for jingle-jangle 60s-styled pop songs, recorded roughly and sung in starry-eyed schoolkid voices. At times it was defiantly unsexy, and defiantly unambitious-- the sound of idealistic student slackers shambling their way through deliberately simple pop." And this reminds me of when I met kids a few years ago who, when asked what music they listened to, simply said "pop," meaning of course, NOT top 40 stuff. What is hip NOW, I think, is to blur the line (as Pitchfork repeatedly attempts) and say that Toby Keith, The Byrds, and whatever band from Brooklyn are all working in the same idiom, *really*. I find this disingenuous and pretentious, but also wrong-headed. I really stick by my example of "Beat on the Brat," and the Ramones' insistence that they ALL loved the Stooges. As if to prove my point, Pitchfork gives a mediocre review to this collection of the music they are always championing, as if even they can see, when you pile a lot of these singles together, it kind of falls apart on the level of interest.

To forget that the reason the Jesus and Mary Chain are so great is for the same reasons that they AREN'T the Byrds is to fuck everything up.

Well, to conclude very haphazardly, here is a wonderful song which would make a terrible pop song: the opening credits of "The Big Gundown," scored by Ennio Morricone and sung by Audrey Nohra.

What are your eleven favorite metal albums, Ben?

Good question.

Sacramentary Abolishment- The Distracting Stone
Darkthrone- Panzerfaust
Mercyful Fate- Don't Break the Oath
Judas Priest- Painkiller
Slayer- Show No Mercy
Celtic Frost- Morbid Tales
Repulsion- Horrified
Graveland- Following the Voice of Blood
Morbid Angel- Altars of Madness
Immortal- Pure Holocaust
Napalm Death- From Enslavement to Obliteration

MRR "Public Safety" compilation LP

I have been excited about this record since long before it came out, since I was visiting my friends at Maximum during some of the early planning stages. Of course, a number of my fantasies about the lineup did not come to pass–unsurprisingly, no Gauze, no Fucked Up, no Tragedy, no Lebenden Toten. On the other hand, the absence of such bands was exactly what made Welcome to 1984 (to which this is a kind of sequel) such a success: no Dead Kennedys, no Anti Cimex, no Poison Idea, no MDC, etc. On yet another hand, however, I must admit: this is no Welcome to 1984. I can’t even imagine punk without songs like “No SS” or “Fuck Authority,” and plainly nothing on Public Safety will make that kind of impression. And what amazes about Welcome to 1984 is that each time you listen to it, you can almost discover a new favorite band: sure, we all know the Stalin and BGK, but the Skjit-Lars and Depression songs are just as good, and of course we all remember the UBR Mania of the early 2000s. Also available for comparison are recent compilations like Lengua Armada’s Histeria series, Iron Columns, and the Crust War Konton Damaging Ear Massacre album.

So, here’s my review: as an album, this doesn’t work. I am glad to have a lot of these songs, and some I can deal with, and some I could do without, but I see no reason why they were all thrown together, and I am thankful to my itunes for letting me reconfigure these tracks as I please and leave out what I will. Unlike Welcome to 1984, which is so nearly perfect that there isn’t even the less memorable tracks at the end are totally worthwhile, or the Crust War comp, which is less essential but extremely consistent, Public Safety has about seven songs that I would have cut, eleven songs I really like, and eight that are just ok. Clearly the logic in ordering the songs was to intersperse the winners with the duds, so that we will listen to the whole thing. This strikes me as weirdly puritanical–why shouldn’t I be able to eat dessert and skip my vegetables? Or, to reverse this analogy, why should I have to wade through insubstantial fluff to get to the delicious nutrient-filled vegetables?

The album begins promisingly, with a Formaldehyde Junkies track which sounds like it could have been on Welcome to 1984–or more precisely, Flex Your Head, since the vocalist sounds just like John Stabb from Government Issue. It’s quirky and catchy, and you have to love any song that only waits eight seconds before going into a guitar solo. This is followed by the long-awaited new Framtid song, which is a monster, although I have no idea what the uninitiated will think of it–write it off as standard Scandi-crust, or abusive noise, or maybe see it as the devastating behemoth it is? I have to say, in isolation, Framtid sound very strange, since their greatness in part comes from their refinement of a specific set of influences, and in part from genius songwriting partially obscured by their devastating sound.

Then, the album comes to a virtual standstill during the Strung Up song, which is like a bad clone (pun intended) of Caustic Christ, with vocals that are unfortunately intelligible (rhyming “bitch” with “rich”), obnoxiously dumb riffs, mandatory you’ve-heard-it-all-before intro and bridge, and no attempt at a hook. I can just see these guys at practice blowing themselves away at the idea of singing along with the guitar and having multiple parts to a song. Ugh. Next is the weirdest song, “Cotton Fields” by Spanish band Disease–whom I know as a Poison Idea-ish band, but I can’t shake the idea that this is supposed to be a Leadbelly cover, since the chorus is “In those cotton fields back home.” I checked the lyric sheet, which only confused me more, since it has about three verses which do not appear in the song. Anyways, this doesn’t at all sound like Poison Idea OR Leadbelly, and is exactly the out-of-left-field-mix-tape-hit that makes a good comp. After this is No Hope for the Kids, who I think are overrated, an opinion confirmed by this serviceable but muddy and low-energy track, which seems to be in search of a hook.

The Regulations are a band I still haven’t made up my mind about–it seems like I like about half of their records (their second EP and the self-titled 12"), and even though this song is only 1:30 long, the word “Stop” is uttered twenty-seven times. I suppose there are worse words, and I’m glad to see this band has moved on from the word “problems” on which they were previously fixated, but this song doesn’t do much for me. However, I like the style it’s in, and an album of similar songs (if less repetitive) would conceivably be quite good. The same can also be said of the Limp Wrist song. Surely this will not be the first or last punk song about something fucking with your head, and the song doesn’t make much of an impression, but my criticism would be more that this was not a suitable choice for a comp, where a band really ought to stand out. Next is the Direct Control song, after which the entire comp is titled, and this really lives up to the bar set by NOTA on Welcome to 1984's “Propaganda Control”–I would make a snarky comment like, “Strung Up should take notes,” but these two bands have toured together and even put out a split record, so obviously Strung Up have already declined to take notes. Anyways, although stylistically similar, Direct Control hand Strung Up their asses on this comp.
Persevere are an example of that strange (but not uncommon) phenomenon of an excellent Japanese band that, for some reason, no one else cares about. While perhaps not as great as Laukaus or the Addiction, Persevere have the same squirmy catchiness–once people move on from “Myspace Crust,” hopefully these bands will be their next stop. Anyways, their song is predictably great. Signal Lost are another band overlooked by tastemakers, although part of that must be that their records pale next to their live set. This recording doesn’t do them any favors in that area, because this has to be the worst-produced track on the album. It’s just hard to hear! Which is a shame, because (as always) the song-writing is top notch, and this is one of their best recent songs. Had this been recorded HUGE the way it deserves, it would have been one of the best songs on here; as it is, I can only look forward to hearing it live. Also, who in this band is reading Heidegger?

The Pedestrians song is better than I remember them being, with some neat parts, while I kind of can’t believe that the chorus to Sleeper Cell’s song is “Blind from the fear.” What a fucking tired cliché. Then, I had to laugh at Deadfall’s lyrics, which rhyme “into the fray” with “protegé.” That’s funny! Bravo, guys. Oh, but your song sucks.

The Nightmare song starts off side B, and it is wild! What is weird about this band is that they ditched the much-derided saxophone player, but their newer records all have this crazy, squealing guitar noise laid on top of everything, as if they still want a bunch of wild squeaks everywhere in the mix. I think that’s cool, because everyone is like, “Oh, I’m so glad there is no saxophone anymore,” but then there might as well be. This song also wins “best guitar solo” award for the comp. Look Back and Laugh have one of the best drummers in hardcore, and their song vies with Framtid in terms of sheer leveling-power, but unlike Framtid, LBAL haven’t really mastered hooks yet, and I can’t tell this song apart from any number of their other songs. This band’s best material remains their most recent 7", but sometimes I wonder if they will ever get beyond turning their amps to 11 and bulldozing the audience. The Ääratila song is over before it starts, but (along with Nightmare) is a perfect example of hardcore veterans schooling younger bands–in barely over a minute, they do everything they need, it’s catchy, it sounds cool, there’s a guitar solo, blah blah–they are geniuses.

The Observers song is ok, I have always thought the vocalist for this band, by trying to sing everything, just sounds like Christina Aguilera, and all their songs sound the same. Honestly, I am not entirely convinced that this song isn’t on one of their other records, but I checked and at least the title is new. The Sunday Morning Einsteins turn out a good song, which makes me think I should go back and listen to their new album. According to the liner notes, it has a “7 Seconds-style chrous” to offset the negative lyrics, but now I wonder if they have ever heard 7 Seconds. Holy Shit’s song is awesome, although this band creeps me the fuck out, and I hated them live. It’s called, “We’re Going Out and It Sucks,” and it sounds like they improvised the whole thing. I can’t really review the Gorilla Angreb song, because it seems like a joke at my expense, down to the dude on the right channel singing (what sounds like) “duh duh duh duh” in a ridiculous low-voice during the chorus. They do have the coolest band photo, though.
In theory, I like the Regress song, but since it is about drafting Ivy League kids to fight wars, maybe I shouldn’t. But for real, their guitar tone is just amazing, although if you listen very close, it’s uncertain whether the drummer can even play! What is he doing?! The First Step are a boring straight-edge band, but actually their song grows on me with every listen. They obviously have done their homework, and thankfully it is not that new-fangled faux-hipster straight-edge style like Righteous Jams–just a bunch of uglies wearing khakis and living in Connecticut (probably–if not, they should get working on that).

Career Suicide put out too many records and sort of lost my interest, but I still count them as one of my favorite current bands, and having just one song to go through here, instead of a whole slew, reminds me why they are so great. This song is maybe a bit busy, but it’s great, and it’s hardcore, instead of (what would have been the easy way out) a slower KBD “rager” with angsty lyrics–I guess Regulations have cornered that market.

The Smalltown song is easily the best song on here, and anyone who knows me knows that I’m not just saying that because it is the most poppy and most legible song. In fact, I really don’t even like this band, but this reminds me of the Replacements “Bastards of Young,” and the vocalist really sells lyrics like, “I don’t know any reason for me to go on; tell me, who can I count on?”--which, as poetry, suck, but here it works. There’s no point reviewing this song, because all I can say is it is catchy, catchy, catchy, and you won’t believe me until you hear it, or care what I think once you have.

Smartut Kahol Lavan’s 7" didn’t impress me, and neither does this track, really, but I have to give the vocalist credit for sounding *exactly* like Steve from 9 Shocks Terror. Sin Dios don’t really close the album on an interesting note: their song is overlong, weak, and kind of jammy. Further, I’m not sure I even agree with their politics–the song is called “Iraq,” and it celebrates “Armed uprisings against the English, / How they threw out the puppet king, / of how Iraq was forged from these battles.” I find that to be weirdly nationalistic, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the song has no idea what to do with the 24 years of Hussein’s secular, nationalist rule. “Onward, people of Iraq” seems to me an unhelpful and even misguided propaganda, to the degree that the “Iraq forged from these battles” was by no means universal and inclusive. Whatever, it’s a punk song, and the sentiment is in the right place, but the political situation is so much more complex than, “Steadfast, until we throw them into the sea,” because–what then?

So, both sides separately run out of steam, the B-side is overall weaker, and most of the American bands are disappointing. The five best songs are by Smalltown, Direct Control, Framtid, Nightmare, and the Pedestrians, followed by a pack of less distinct but still strong hardcore songs. The worst songs are by Strung Up, Deadfall, Sleeper Cell, and the Observers. I would add to that, Gorilla Angreb, but it would ruin my claim that all the worst songs are by American bands, and also I plainly made no effort to get into the Gorilla Angreb song, so it isn’t “bad” in the same way. There’s no point speculating on why bands like Criminal Damage or Human Bastard aren’t on here–but my overall complaint is, there are so many great bands out there, that even allowing for differences in taste, the difficulty of getting all the tracks on time, the requirement that all songs be new and unreleased, and the peculiar vortices of taste operating on the MRR staff, there is simply no excuse for filler. For instance, there was no need for there to be FOUR bands from the Bay Area on here, especially when none of those of those songs are great, and Welcome to 1984 had zero. I had high hopes for this, and it has its moments, but I don’t think it lives up to its potential. To end this review on a high note, though, I love the essay on the back cover, which is perfectly constructed and unembarrassedly enthusiastic.

Fucked Up "Hidden World" Review

Do you remember (hüsker dü?) the first time you heard Motorhead’s 1916 album, or Hüsker Dü’s “Books About UFOs,” or The Ramones’ “Locket Love”–and realized that this garbage noise we listen to could maybe be real music, if you squinted hard enough? I hope so. You probably also know that hundreds of bands have tried to recapture the surprising pop genius of early punk, as if, as on the cover of The Minutemen’s Project: Mersh, a band could just will themselves to write pop gems. This is why the premise of DIY pop-punk and indie-pop has always struck me as ill-conceived: “We’ll just write great songs!” Not only that, but even when done well, I find an album-length barrage of “perfect three-minute pop songs” to be an exhausting chore. To me, a great album looks more like Abbey Road, Fun House, My War or Closer than just a slew of would-be singles. Call me pretentious, but keep in mind that Vibrators-Pure Mania and Misfits-Walk Among Us are among my favorite albums. I just think that bands would be better off trying out the album format than having delusions of grandeur about being the next Ray Davies. Blessedly, I have never delved into the indie-pop/pop-punk scene, but from living in New York I have a fair impression of it, and for the most part it is like reading a bad imitation of Hemingway or Chekhov–the format (the lo-fi pop song, like the short story) really demands perfection, and anything less is all the more glaring in its insufficiency.

Hidden World is simultaneously less “pop” and more “musical” than any of Fucked Up’s prior output. Their hardcore singles were catchy as shit, every one of them a potential mix tape entry, but that is not to imply that Hidden World is some tripped-out, inaccessible post-rock mess, devoid of catchiness. But it is that rare beast, the high-concept punk record, and I’m not sure I get the concept. Seven minute long Oi songs? Lengthy odes to outsider artist Henry Darger? Elaborate fantasy album art? Well, it’s all here, and all definitely floating signifiers–which is probably exactly the concept, as “cognitive dissonance” is a major theme of lyrics and interviews. Which is to say, they’re fucking with you.

The music is fucking with you, too. How many times can you hear a riff played before it isn’t cool anymore? I have to say, this is a single album’s worth of ideas crammed into a double album. Everything.....is..... really....spaced.....out. But, like the name of the B-side of the advance single, the record is full of “Neat Parts.” I would rather have these neat parts sequenced immediately following each other, as in The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away,” instead of spread out over 70 minutes, but for the most part, it works. And it works precisely because Fucked Up didn’t wake up one day and say, “Let’s just take the easy way out! Fuck hardcore!” Like The Ramones’ later work, is an established band-sensibility turned inside out to do things it wasn’t meant to do (compare “Beat on the Brat” to “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg”)–this still sounds like Fucked Up...I guess. While it could no longer reasonably be called hardcore, Hidden World has all the overflowing creativity of great early punk: The Ramones, The Misfits, The Germs, Stiff Little Fingers–bands that couldn’t always pinpoint the best outlet for their musical ideas, with strange but beautiful results.

Not everything works. Nearly every song loses momentum at some point, as the churning riffs tend not to go anywhere after a while. The songs “Manqueller Man” and “Fate of Fates” didn’t quite receive the same endowment in hooks as other songs. What also has to be remembered is the extremely limited format of the group–they aren’t Metallica, after all, and their idea of a long song tends to be to meanderingly jam out on minimal difference, instead of constructing a suite of riffs.

Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade remains, after untold listens, a record I remain ambivalent about–too much filler, pretentious, seemingly disjunct from their previous or subsequent records while obviously some kind of transition–and Hidden World suffers from all of these problems as well, although there is no knowing where Fucked Up will go next or if it will have much to do with this album. Nonetheless, a mixed-review of this album is not to be taken as equivalent to a review of a uniformly mediocre album. Since I have no clue what the band was going for, I can’t judge it to be a success or failure on its own terms, but any record with this many “neat parts” is so far ahead of the rest of the scene–reminiscent of Poison Idea’s Feel the Darkness, or Septic Death, or Nailbiter in that regard–that it will undoubtedly be some years before it really hits us that we all own an album with this cover art:

new Deicide album

So, I just bought this album and it is instantly the stupidest record I've ever heard.

First of all, this is the cover art:


YEAH.

So, with a title like "Stench of Redemption" and songs like "Death to Jesus," you know you are in for an IQ-raising experience. Actually, ok, typing this in my room, and having listened to death metal for the last five years, I started laughing out loud at "Death to Jesus." It's maybe the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

On the other hand, I do not have an ironic relationship to this album.

Although Deicide have been a running joke for the past ten years, since every album they put out seemed to be worse than the next (although mercifully, their previous records are ALL under 35 minutes long). Not to mention, that Glenn Benton publicly announced that he was going to kill himself and then DIDN'T (wuss). But after hearing the last Vital Remains record ("Dechristianize"), with Glenn Benton (from Deicide) on vocals, everyone in the "metal community" suddenly had to wonder, could the new Deicide album be good?!

Well...I mean...it's a Deicide album, so when you say it's "good," you have to take into account what that means. The guitarists in the band quit (they were brothers), and so Benton has drafted INCREDIBLE talent in the form of a dude from Cannibal Corpse and a dude from Iced Earth (yes, the band which wrote a concept "suite" about the battle of Gettysburg and features former Judas Priest vocalist "Ripper" Owens, the person portrayed by Marky Mark in the film "Rock Star"). So, while the music is still mostly the same weirdly slow and redundant Deicide riffs, on *top of* the normal material is extremely fluid and beautiful guitar melodies and leads. It doesn't exactly "fit" because the duhn-duhn-duhn-duh-duh-duh double-bass plod is so very unmelodic, that every time these sweeping solos come on, you have to switch into a totally different mode of listening.

In conclusion, the new Deicide album:
-is retarded.
-has the coolest guitar playing on a death metal record maybe EVER. (obvious exceptions for Death and Morbid Angel)
-has a bonus Deep Purple cover if you buy the vinyl.
-makes me want to buy a pair of white hi-tops.
-is not parent-friendly.
-is still not as good as the Vital Remains 2xLP...

recent jamz

Deadstop- "Done With You" LP
doesn't sound as much like Negative Approach (or...uh...AC/DC) as you might like... kind of has a Youth of Today meets Cro Mags (YEAH) vibe that is not as blatantly dumb as that implies. It's totally hard-as-shit, but never panders.

Dodsdomd- "Seven Deadly Sins" EP
This record came out in English and Swedish versions, I actually got the Swedish version, but I put up the English title, because I don't feel like walking four feet to read the title in whatever goofy "spooky" font they have on the cover. This is a big improvement from their LP: more memorable, no longer sounds like Sweden via USA.

Katatonia- "Dance of December Days" CD
For some reason, they changed the art on this album to look like some horrible I-don't-even-know, but suffice it to say there is a baby looking sadly at a grim reaper, and they changed the band logo. It was so much better when it was just these dudes with moustaches hanging out really close to each other, wrapped in purple smoke. Anyways, this is really over-emphatic "doom metal" before that whole style got co-opted by the Southern Lord crowd and some drone/ambient idea.

Mountain "Nantucket Sleighride" LP
Sounds like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Songs about Moby Dick.

Stan Getz "Sweet Rain" LP
This is one of those examples of someone who is REALLY GOOD at doing a popular version of something showing that their genius in the popular format (bossa nova) is actually based on a real understanding of forms, that can be demonstrated at will. Of course, I also appreciate the converse of this, the abstract understanding being masterfully put to use in a popular form.
examples of the former (rarer): The Beatles "Abbey Road", Beckett "Waiting for Godot"
examples of the latter: Judas Priest "Point of Entry", The Cure "Head on the Door", Velvet Underground "Loaded" (albeit less successfully).

Normally, the Stan Getz move-- "look, I'm sophisticated"--- backfires, and is just pretension. "Sweet Rain" is incredible, but one need only look at the career of Metallica and see their disastrous relation to their avant-garde roots in NWOBHM, a relation they seem incapable of drawing on for inspiration, thus blacking out their entire 80s career from proper context. So when Metallica try to write "sophisticated" music now, it sounds like it comes from Mars (in a bad way).

ipods

So. I don't have an iPod. I want one. But I would use my ipod as an arena in which mp3s I download would battle for my attention, for the honor of being purchased on vinyl as part of complete albums/singles. I buy music. For me, owning music is important, and not because of copyright issues. This is an increasingly outdated viewpoint, it seems, but I hope to show why I think it is the only way for someone who really enjoys music beyond background-noise.

This will seem condescending, I think. No one wants to hear that they do not "truly appreciate" music. So I hope to show the advantages TO listening of NOT downloading, which might seem counterintuitive.

1) It is easy to have "good taste" when you can download anything in the world for free.
...and yet! How rarely is this the case! Normally when I scroll through someone's ipod, it is a collection of inoffensive, friendly, unremarkable music that could be gotten with no research and less than an expansive taste. I remain unconvinced that downloading music broadens one's tastes, although it certainly has that possibility. I would say that it is because there is no risk to downloading something. Because you have not spent any money on it, you can simply send an album to the recycle bin after listening to one song. This makes for a conservative taste.

2) There is no reason to put in any time with an album/artist in mp3 format.
Separated from album art, lyrics, band photos, any sense of a discrete form, the mp3 really makes no demands on the listener to be absorbed, reckoned with, debated, "acquired" (as a taste), etc. So you end up with this completely ephemeral aesthetic, which demands instant attention and instant approval, and I would say that most tastes are acquired tastes-- songs, albums, artists, and styles which require some effort to "get into". I guess that is up for debate.

3) In an infinite space, there is no way to hierarchize one's preferences.
That sounds more boring than I really mean it to. What I mean to say is that our attachments to music are normally located around a "favorite song," or a memory, or something having to do with an experience/emotion we want to play over again and again. No one's *original* favorite song would be an abstract Eno noise-scape. It is probably a Temptations song, or something we can really latch onto-- catchy, good lyrics, easy to relate to.

So, if in point #1, I argue that downloading music makes for conservative tastes, here I am arguing that downloading music onto an infinitely capacious hard drive makes it impossible to ever have again the experience of listening to "Ain't To Proud to Beg" a million times in a row just because you just got the Big Chill soundtrack and are compelled to listen to it over and over. It is not just one spot on an infinite playlist.

4) But, Ben, don't you buy more records than you can possibly listen to very closely?
Fair enough. And I'm sure that some people listen to mp3s in ways that I would completely approve of, too. But there is something about the RECORD that is so much more endearing. It has an identity of its own, you physically interact with it, you have to take care of it, you can show it to other people, you can skip songs but you can't just get rid of them, you can play the same side over and over again, read the lyrics along with it, but mostly: you are responsible to a record. It is not abstract. If you treat it badly, it will sound bad. If you don't listen to it, you will have wasted your money. If you lose the art, it becomes contextless. And I think this is what taking music seriously is about: having some relationship *back* to the music. Knowing that "if I don't preserve this (melody, context, aesthetic), maybe no one else will."

I don't like "hard" music

On the radio show which Talya and I did this past summer, I made the mistake of playing the Jesus and Mary Chain single "Sidewalking". Don't try to remember how that song goes, because the important thing is (if I recall) the unnecessary "hard" and "edgy" bass-line, the drum machine, and abrasive (in a bad way) production. Maybe if I listened to it today, it wouldn't strike me at all, but in my expectations of the Jesus and Mary Chain, I was totally unprepared for such an unpleasant and digital experience.

So, over the air, I went on a rant about how I don't like "hard" music, eliciting a giggling response from my mother that "that's what we thought you DID like." But I think having said this, it does require some explanation.

How is "hard" different (and worse) than concepts like "heavy", "aggressive", "brutal", etc., all things that I think can be used postitively?

I think that each of these terms also has a shadow-life, normally in popular music, where its virtues are appropriated, and its identity (negatively) demonstrated. So, real heavy music would be the palm-muted bridge to Judas Priest "beyond the realms of death", and faux heavy music would be the nonsense gurgling riffs of a band like Korn.

Real aggressive music would be the insanely dangerous early Poison Idea, who sound like, if they weren't holding their instruments, would probably leap off the stage and beat you down. Faux aggressive music is the recycled gangster aesthetic of latter-day rap, where there is nothing convincing about the soap opera-esque aggression of the lyrics.

"Brutal" music would be like Fear of God, Think I Care, No Comment, absolutely feral. Faux brutal music is best heard in the senseless high-pitched clicking of the double-bass-drum in modern metal, meant to approximate some unrelenting attack but just sounding detached and having no effect but to clutter the mix.

There is however, no positive side to "hard" music. Hard is inherently a pose, inherently faux. Hard is a production trick, a lyrical pretension, a sleight of hand. Techno's insistence at adding pronounced beats to all music is "hard". Ditto, rap. Metal-core's stance is "hard". It is simply an image, or a knob being turned, or an after-thought. "Hard" is everything that is added between the practice space and the album.

"Hard" is World Burns to Death and post-1988 Metallica. "Hard" is Justin Timberlake and Madball.

suggestions for further listening:
heavy: Candlemass, Celtic Frost, Judas Priest, Joy Division, Assuck, Bastard, Cro Mags, Neil Young
aggressive: Koro, Antidote, Morbid Angel, Sacramentary Abolishment, Earth AD
brutal: Suffocation, Neanderthal, Dark Angel, Das Oath, Blitz "Razors in the Night"
* * * * *
I should also say that while writing this, I was distracted for about 10 minutes by the strangely compelling allmusic.com Recap of the "Rock Star" tv series

the history of punk

While knowing the history of punk is vital, knowing how history works on punk is equally important. It is not the same as for other types of music.

metal develops:
heavy psychedelic rock-->1st wave BHM--> NWOBHM-->thrash metal-->death/black/doom metal
Reggae develops:
ska-->reggae-->dancehall/ragga
Jazz:
dixieland-->big bands/swing-->bebop-->free jazz and/or fusion
Rock:
rhythm and blue-->rockabilly-->Elvis-->The Beatles (early)-->The Beatles (late)

Now, please not the admittedly retarded nature of these statements. For one, dialectically speaking, things don't move in straight lines like this, but require digressions, crises, etc. So, to move from one point to another, there is an infinitely complex, ramifying set of influences and more or less successful alternatives-- paths taken for a while, and abandoned, or continued upon until perhaps separating completely.

Caveats aside, though, I think these are both useful and true. Jazz to this day is STILL very much "post-Davis/Coltrane" to the extent that anyone even cares about nowadays jazz-- Wynton Marsalis being proof that people only care about nowadays jazz to the extent that it is concerned with the canon. Rock has barely moved beyond the Beatles, with the exceptions of punk, no wave, kraut rock, etc. As far as I know, Reggae in its most well-known (1970s) form is no longer popularly produced, and is given over to electronics and ragga. But mostly, the point is not to worry about whether any of this is technically the case, but that very generally, these musics have either left their development behind and moved into new phases, or gotten stuck.

The enduring popularity of the Beatles/Rolling Stones/ Bob Dylan/ Woodstock can surely be traced to it being one of the last moments that rock really was concerned with innovation within a pop context. If the Beatles were innovators, it was as the most popular band in the world. Psychedelia and funk are important developments, and also extremely popular. Sure, there are cult bands from this era, and dialectical divergences, but please keep in mind I am trying to make a point, and not writing a history of the 1960s here.

So, after the Beatles, so the story goes, rock music addresses itself less to a unified audience, and in the terms of its greatest success, has not moved on. See here for a retarded but self-consistent view of the history of rock music from the viewpoint of the 1960s.

Please notice that the above reviewer is INCAPABLE of making sense of Pink Floyd. Arguably the definitive group of the 1970s, from the viewpoint of a Beatles Fan, they potentially make no sense over their career. Moreover, here the Velvet Underground become an interesting sidenote and Black Sabbath are a kind of Led Zeppelin, Jr. Point being, the history of Rock music at this moment is kind of like Thucidydes' History of the Peloponnesian War: since we don't know how it ends, our judgments rarely make sense and usually establish a teleogy that slights some true complexity.

Which brings me to my point: punk doesn't work like this. (And, to create some discussion, I don't think, in 2006, in NYC or among heads in the know, much does--- everything is "back" and everything is new, all at once: girl group revival, early 80s rap, neo-no-wave, etc. But these things are hardly as important as punk, which is going on 30 years. ) There have been attempts, certainly, to make punk work like jazz, and just be a concept or epistemology, instead of a defined style/genre, which have led to many rewarding developments, (most of which I am a late-comer to), but I think the innate charm of punk *as* a style have persisted in keeping punk from going the way of jazz samba or some of the short-lived off-shoots of rock. Perhaps because punk is already post-modern and non-teleological, its importance far outweighing the stature of all but a few of its artists (this being the opposite of hard rock, for instance, where the stature of the most well-known artists accounts for 99% of the genre's presence). Punk is paradoxically a "reaction" (against double-live glam "excess") and a wild new paradigm, definitively "excessive".

Anyways, punk is incredible in that Disclose and His Hero is Gone could share a stage-- one band definitively exploring already-trod territory, and the other being relatively on their own. And this happens *without* feeling that one band is further along in a movement than the other, as would happen if you put a New Wave of British Heavy Metal band alongside a death metal band. Well, now I'm going to go listen to Black Oak Arkansas and think about whether any of this is remotely true.

why i will no longer read Pitchfork

Is there really anything more satisfying than watching someone who has clearly put a lot of time into something, who has situated their opinion in an historical discourse, who rolls it out on a red carpet, only to be see that they have merely dressed up a piece of shit and tried to present it as Something Important?

This happens fairly often, of course. I feel like aged professors sometimes get so wrapped up in thinking about something like ethics and a democratic society (for example), they inevitably produce this kind of boring platitude, already drenched in its self-important redundance.

This is also how I feel about any new Bruce Springsteen album. Unlike the Rolling Stones, who (at least I hope) know they are turning out garbage, or Neil Young, who is actually crazy, or Paul McCartney, from whom no one expects anything, Bruce Springsteen genuinely thinks he still has it in him. And because his music engages a broader cultural range than most pop music, and does so with a painful earnestness, he certainly can appear to be saying Something Important to a great many people. This is where Rolling Stone magazine comes in. As the completely sold-out bastion of the 1960s completely sold-out legacy (and legacy of selling out), Rolling Stone EXISTS in order to see Bruce Springsteen as a relevant figure. Their relevancy is tied together. There is a whole circuit of bogus cultural affirmation that serves as a mass circle jerk to this mainstream BoBo cultural that (I predict) will completely baffle everyone in thirty years, when the idea of Bruce Springsteen in 2006 will seem as ridiculous as it actually is. That is to say, as the importance of the moment Rolling Stone represents becomes settled into a timeline of our understanding, the unnaturally-prolonged life of post-sell-out masturbation will firstly lose all of the lustre it has assigned itself, and secondly, be forgotten about altoghether.

Today, I announce that Pitchfork has BECOME Rolling Stone, is no longer distinguishable from it, and therefore has obliterated itself. From falling over itself to praise the new Bob Dylan album (long a Rolling Stone trademark), the "greatest songs of the 1960s" list, which I won't even go into here, Pitchfork has issued enough definitive proofs that it IS what it has always wanted to be: Important. In the same way that Rolling Stone is Important. And in fact, by becoming hardly distinguishable.

Now, when I was a sophomore in college, I declared War on indie rock. I stopped listening to Fugazi, Sleater-Kinney, whatever, because I do not feel that punk exists on some kind of spectrum with those artists, with the same fans, etc. In this, I think Pitchfork and I are in agreement. Punk has nothing to do with it. Ditto, DIY. If ex-hardcore kids want to sound like the Human League, so be it. But it has nothing to do with me.
(By the way, this spectrum which I refute has earned the MOST EMBARRASSING name in Texas, and perhaps elsewhere: "scene." People actually refer to themselves or their scene AS "scene." Like "all those scene kids with white belts." !!!!! Mortifying!)

Now, I feel bad for people who thought that indie rock "meant" Something, and who have had to see it dragged through the mud and finally abolished in a quagmire of shame. You can't win 'em all. But I imagine these people feel massive resentment towards Pitchfork in its Time Magazine-like dedication to Sleater-Kinney, its obliviousness to hardcore, its embrace of Techno, its willful irrelevance, its reviews which completely ignore the music in favor of a Statement, its celebration of "Hey Ya", and therefore (here's the point of all this) ceasing to be the infuriating, clueless, pretentious, musings of indie-rockers too boring to "get" hipsterism right, and becoming like the Kennedys, like Wynton Marsalis, like Ken Burns: spokespersons for an Americanism so bland and so outside of my universe, it isn't even fun to deride anymore.

social circkle

OK, today I saw Social Circkle at ABC No Rio and I was really into it. Here's why:

-- 10 minute set
-- obviously playing below their collective talent level
-- no "fashion" (you could almost remove the quotes)
-- no mosh parts (and this coming from Boston!)
-- no premature crappy 7"s (I'm looking at you, Splitting Headache)
-- their fans were friendly and cute
-- totally DIY
-- playing a timeless style, which at the same time is totally unexplored by US bands since the 80s
-- obviously care about what they were doing, but were not "professional" or fake-careless

So, I'm into their songs, and their style, etc. But what I'm REALLY INTO is how they are running the band. No bullshit, no cellos, no Jade Tree, no splits with Agathocles, nothing to remind you it's 2006, no "unique" vocals, no myspace, no "rock" guitar parts, no substituting band shirts for real influences; their whole deal seems thoughtful, if not explicitly a manifesto, and I wish more bands would be as right-on as Social Circkle.

Part II:
See below post, see above (about Social Circkle)-- your life is a manifesto of how you think life should be lived. There are people with more talent, more creativity, etc., than I-- and there are people less privileged than I-- but all things being equal, without (always or necessarily) a value judgment, the way I live my life is not some accidental series of whatever-strikes-my-fancy, but is pretty much a principled existence. Of course, what life ends up being is a combination of principles, circumstances, abilities, "choices," etc., but I would like to make clear that for the most part, my behavior is not some random series of actions that could have gone the other way.

Easy example: I don't do drugs. I think drugs are bad.

Intermediate example: I don't go to Misshapes parties, I prefer movies. While I would like to meet cute girls as much as the next person, and, having long ago made a conscious decision that I am not "above" fun (a character trait I despise as woefully Brontëan), I certainly find hipsterism and vapid socializing ultimately unfulfilling. And I would prefer to share a cultural interest with someone, instead of a mutual love of dance kitsch. If someone went to such things, and even had a good time, I wouldn't judge them. But if someone partied nonstop and didn't have time for seeing classic or interesting movies, I would probably think that person was a bore.

Other examples: I don't vote for Democrats, I don't eat meat, I am DIY, I am not a Christian, I write lengthy reviews of punk records, etc. I think Democrats are bad news, meat is murder, DIY or die, Christians are self-delusional, I think punk is worth thinking about at length. This doesn't carry over into all aspects of life, but in all of the above examples, I do not feel like I could meet someone half-way. The way I act is how I feel about it-- if I thought eating meat was sort of OK, I would do it sometimes. If I thought Democrats were sort of OK, I'd vote for them sometimes. I don't. These are maybe too-political examples, but I dunno-- It's hard to give examples of daily life without getting into tedious minutiae, and moreover, I think I've made my point. Anyways, I don't want to seem like the most dogmatic person in the world, but I would like to set this in stone: wherever possible, when not trying to get ahead, or get laid, (and even then), I would like to say of my actions, that is how I think things should be done.

The joke is on me, of course, because no one takes my example seriously. But then, the joke is not on me, because (allowing for self-rationalization and excuses), I run my life in a way I respect, and not as some random free-for-all. So, believe it or not, however fucked up you think I am, for the most part, that is how I want to be and have gone to a lot of trouble to be.

(two emendations: 1) this ought to include the obvious necessity of personal growth, dialectical maturation, etc, and therefore *must* include a good number of mistakes, errors. 2) this comes across as weirdly "moralistic" when basically I just think a lot of stuff is "lame" and not "wrong" per se.)

-- People who "don't care about music" listen to shitty music. I guess that seems like an obvious point, but since the inverse could just as easily be true, it actually doesn't make sense. Have you ever met someone who "doesn't care about finding out about music," who is not a record-collector, who doesn't seek out new artists, who listens to "just whatever it is I enjoy," who listens to like, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix-- that is, completely well-known and accessible artists? --or, you know, just listen to classic music? Instead, the opposite is nearly always true, that people who "just listen to whatever" listen to music I've never heard of, which is terrible, disposable, and constantly changing.

My point is not (only) to insult people who listen to mp3 blogs, movie soundtrack albums, re-mixes, covers, or the radio, or buy CDs at Starbucks--- although as I have said, these people's "whatever" attitude actually seems to involve MORE effort at listening to WORSE music than if you just bought the top 20 albums on that Rolling Stone list--- it is that there is no such thing as a "neutral" or "whatever" attitude, really. Someone who "doesn't read" is 10x more likely to pick up a not-acclaimed, anonymous mass-market mystery, than to read a famous novel like The Grapes of Wrath. Someone who claims to hold some position outside of taste is actually an enemy of taste, and not just an innocent bystander.

Two things: how does someone arrive at a "whatever" attitude, in a culture which is inundated with reviews, lists, music videos, Barnes and Noble Classics, the Criterion Collection, employee picks, and THE INTERNET?, and secondly, what is the "message" of this position? My contention would be that it is a secondary position-- that of being defeated by or of rejecting this culture of taste/the canon/the new. This is why no one who supposedly "doesn't care" about music doesn't simply stumble upon having really good taste, by accident and by the massive availability of good music. You've got to really want it, to be into total crap. And someone who has this neutral attitude is not AS likely to stumble onto something great as to something banal and mainstream. The mainstream AT LEAST serves a regulatory function-- it is still where some aspects of culture occur. But the mainstream is actually fairly risqué, and stumbles forward unwittingly. I have no *real* beef with mainstream culture, which has given us The Simpsons, among other things. What I would like to see destroyed is the attitude that masquerades as indifference to culture (even mainstream culture), while at the same time despising culture, erecting of taste an Idol that will condescend to them, that they may hate it and plan its destruction.

"no direction home"

Just finished watching the Bob Dylan documentary that was on PBS ; what a fucking weird person. You can almost feel the wrench being thrown in the film's otherwise user-friendly texture by the MASSIVE WEIRDNESS that is Bob Dylan. By turns mercurial and taciturn, always refusing to give a simply-true answer (which is not charming or deep, but extremely frustrating), Dylan confronts the movie with the unfortunate paradox that this artist whose heart we think we have deduced from his hundreds of his songs is a complete enigma, almost a non-entity. He is so completely detached from his own life, from commenting on his work, from trying to place/label himself, you wonder how the man ever wrote a song in his life! Not to mention his completely dessicated, almost tacky appearance. And yet it is undeniably the same person.

By the way, undoubtedly Scorcese's best film since Goodfellas...

-- Musical development seems more and more like Seinfeld's routine about women's fashion: each season, they hide a different body part, until when the next season, they cover up some other part and reveal the long-awaited (say, calves), men go crazy. A rock act that turns acoustic. A rapper who puts out a pop song. An acoustic act that turns rock. A psych-noise-folk group who turn pop. A tough, forbidding artist putting out a sensitive ballad. Unbelievably, this is continually shocking to music critics and audiences everywhere. The fiction that people "grow" as artists is more laughable every year, when inevitably they are just shuffling the cards.
-- You can't get rid of your friends or quit a job very easily, or move, or get a new wardrobe, or anything very easily. So, on one hand, you see it taking an awful long time for people to drop out of things and become their parents already, just because they are still going through the motions. And on the other hand, it is a pretty arduous, tortuous grind to try and do anything interesting with your life.
-- This Side of Paradise is pretty crappy, but I am reminded of something wise a drunk told me at a party my parents had when I was in high school. I was reading The Great Gatsby, or about to start, and he said: Oh, Great Gatsby, that's one of my favorite books. There's a lot of truth in that book. They probably won't teach you this in school, but the rich characters in that book, they are a lot like crabs. In New England, when you go crab-fishing, the first crab that you catch, you have to put a lid on your bucket, or else it will crawl out and try to escape. But once you have a couple in there, they pull each other back in, if one tries to leave. Now, surely he heard this from somewhere else but damn if that doesn't sum the Great Gatsby up perfectly. Also this reminds me of reading "The Killers" by Hemingway the other day and crying at the part when the Swede says, “There ain’t anything to do now.” And Nick: “Couldn’t you fix it up some way?” “No. I got in wrong.”
-- The more Lacan you read, the more you cut people slack for being in some fucked-up intersubjective position vis-a-vis you, or for acting out on behalf of some field of the Other, or for erratic contradictions and most of all, instead of "taking the magic" out of things like love, what is more remarkable (like the movies, like Nabokov, etc), what is even more incredible about love (or other neurotic processes) is how perfectly they function even when we know how they work. Any "common-sense" criticism of this aspect of theory misses the point that there is no *undoing* the logic of these systems; they don't dispel once they are named.

a few comments regarding taste in music

Part I:
Walter Pater says, "all art aspires to the condition of music": in our modern world, this means to be constantly sampled in car commercials, rap songs, summarized in cursory greatest hits collections, butchered in covers, and turned off at parties in favor of reggaeton.

Yet music does hold an unique position. Music, after TV, is the most quickly consumed form of art. It takes thirty minutes to watch a TV show, and thirty minutes to listen to an album, but you don't really take it all in on the first listen, whereas you are supposed to have taken in an entire episode of, say, Drew Carey, in order to follow his zany adventures next week.

However, there is so little TV (would that this were true!) that it would be hard to really define oneself by the TV one watches. The most die-hard fan of Lost probably has not seen any more episodes than someone with nothing better to do most nights and catches the missed episodes in reruns. Moreover, the mass audience and mass appeal of popular TV prevent differentiation (from others) and intimate relation (to the show), respectively. Even being a huge fan of The Simpsons and Law and Order, I find not only little in common with most other fans, but I'm not even sure what it would mean to identify with these shows.

In literature, the moral conceptions, plots, and style of a given author are so unique (the opposite of TV's condition) that there can be no identical relation to an ouevre.
Films simply take too long to watch to meet our criteria here. Even among my favorite movies, there are few that I have seen even a dozen times. In a sense, one *moves on* from a movie after far less contact than with a record. (This could also be said of books, although it is not the main objection).
Art is too expensive. I would possibly allow that an art "movement" could work here, though, were one involved.
Poetry almost succeeds, but how many times can one read a poem?

Exceptions:
1) Trekkies
2) Tolkien fans
3) anyone leading some sort of expatriate, drunk "poetic" lifestyle (warning: you are a cliche!)

Which leaves music as the easiest art form with which to form a social bond-- and therefore a defining one.

Part II:
Walter Pater says, "all art aspires to the condition of music": in our modern world, this means to be constantly sampled in car commercials, rap songs, summarized in cursory greatest hits collections, butchered in covers, and turned off at parties in favor of reggaeton.

However, what interests me is the dialectic of taste. The other day, I was (half) joking when I said that I wanted to get into jazz because I wanted my music to be more dialectical. However, one's taste is already dialectical. What is taste, but a winding, mistake-filled dialectic which finds itself in the end through tribulation and identification?

In this sense, it is hard to argue with *and* hard to credit someone with really shitty taste in music. No one is born liking shitty music. This is something that must be arrived at. In the same way, however, liking shitty music is inherently valid. [Although, I should say that I once heard someone say, "I don't like the music that I like," and I suppose their earlier taste had not been constructed on firm ground.]

However, this process is essentially a reductive one. To wit, what people LIKE about the music they like is not a good guarantor of what they will like about the music they don't already like. We imagine that we have "cornered" our tastes from a really wide field, but the ordering of the points where one approaches each genre is colored by the previous instance. I know a lot of people approach black metal from the noise or hardcore scenes (for instance), and want to hear in that music what they already like, but this normally ends up with the WORST taste in black metal. What happens is that people decide "i don't like that kind of vocals" or "i don't like the production on this", but at the same time they listen to Modernlifeiswar is something, which is hardly the music an infant would choose at the outset, from the entire field of creative endeavor.

I do think that someone can simply "suck at listening to music." Old people, for instance, who insist that a distorted guitar is "angry" while the exact same notes, played acoustically, are "happy". Or people who insist that a particular form of pop-rock, with different inflections of instrumentation, somehow constitutes a new genre.

In short, (and to be honest I have to go eat some potato chips right now and can't continue this until later) musical taste should reproduce the wise words of Mr. Eliot: We shall not cease from exploration: And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.
Which is just to say, not that one should "taste every flavor" or "understand the history of a music before he forms his opinion"--nothing so trite--but that with each new song we hear, we simultaneously have to bring every song we've ever heard into the headphones with us, and to forget them at the same time. I do not believe there is such a thing as "being open-minded," nor that all music is equally valid, etc., but I would like to start thinking about (good) taste not as something one "has" or arrives at, but as maybe this other thing outlined above.

---i am staying up all night in order to touch my mousepad every hour so that my computer does not shut down, so that my download of the new Fucked Up album will continue without incident
---today I wore blue suede shoes; there were no remarks.
---if you convince me to buy an expensive reissue and i don't like it, we have beef [b33f]
---the construction "which" as a relative possessive pronoun is so egregious that it does not even occur as an "erroneous" usage in the OED--- and yet I snuck it by in my senior thesis. oops!
---no one likes being told they should go listen to "the teddy bears' picnic"
--- generate your own (meaningless) graduate paper
---text message distro updates=the future is here
---"veering towards solipsism"= the definition of my life/method
---all complaints about the content of this blog should be directed to the fact that I spend all day in the library

Vicious 12" review

Now that this band has a newer record out, I probably won't publish this in any zine, so I thought it could see the light of day here.

Vicious 12" (Wasted Sounds)
Not to pull a Jerry Maguire, but this EP “had me” at the Static Age album art, and even the cheesy band photos on the back cover (arms crossed, in coffins) was excusable because the guitarist is the cutest girl in punk. Actually, the vocalist is probably the most striking babe on the circuit, too; when I saw the Regulations (in which he plays bass), his ultra-tight jeans made *me* feel fat. With all these good-looking kids in the band, it is perhaps appropriate that their music is sexy as hell, but the lyrics are completely vapid: “I need somebody to destroy this generations, let’s invent our own” sounds so 2001.
Oh shit, did I forget to introduce this band? This is members of DS 13, Tristess, Regulations, and the International Noise Conspiracy playing basic punk rock in the vein of current Swedish bands, but more punk and less pop than, say, Knugen Faller. Their debut EP was widely praised for its authentic Bloodstains Across Wherever sound, and this record has elsewhere garnered comparisons to The Adverts. I’m really into this stuff, which probably means I shouldn’t have sold my Adverts CD the week after I first heard Skitsystem, but whatever.

The first thing you notice about this record (after their pants) is how *good* they are at doing this thing we think we are all tired of already. These six songs are all really memorable, the vocals (and lyrical tropes) threaten to get old immediately but never do, and the whole affair is punk as fuck. The singer should copyright his awesome way of saying the same thing once, and then saying “the SAME thing” “the same THING” “THE same THING” and making it really catchy. So, while this music could never be accused of complexity or depth, I listen to it all the time and it never gets old. They never deliver on the Misfits-promise of the album art, but I get the feeling this band is getting laid nonstop, so maybe they meant to and just forgot.