Top Ten Songs of the Week 5/25/09

We do this every week. You’ll see this week’s #1 song on our Best 100 songs of 2009 list at the end of December, along with maybe some of the rest of these too. This is strictly for fun – it’s Lucid Culture’s tribute to Kasey Kasem and a way to spread the word about some of the great music out there that’s too edgy for the corporate media and their imitators in the blogosphere. Every link here will take you to each individual song.

 

1. The New Collisions – Beautiful and Numb

80s new wave updated with a savagely smart edge for the end of the zeros, a slap at GenY complacency. From their excellent new ep. Boston fans can see their cd release show on at TT Bear’s on 5/29.

 

2. Matthew Grimm & the Red Smear – Ayn Rand Sucks

Did you know the dead right-wing fag hag has her own facebook page? LOL taken to a new level.  “She’s just another Nazi skank.”

 

3. Barbez – Strange

Sounds just like Bee & Flower – slow dirge, quiet then loud again, with a big organ crescendo. They’re at le Poisson Rouge in August.

 

4. Laura MacLean – Prescription for Pain

Blue eyed soul siren leading a janglerock band – a particularly relevant update on Mother’s Little Helper for the zeros. She’s at Banjo Jim’s on 6/14 at 8.

 

5. Freylekh Jamboree – Kojak Cecek

Balkan brass from Japan – as ghetto as you could possibly be! As good as another excellent rousing version by the Stagger Back Brass Band.

 

6. The A Team – Girlfriend Like Big Papi

Funny funk song. Does this mean she’s suddenly lost her stroke…or that her wrist is still bothering her?  

 

7. School of Seven Bells – Cabal

Like the first Lush album – female-fronted dreampop with a hypnotic Indian edge. They’re at Bowery Ballroom on 6/12.  

 

8. Satoko Kajita – Summertime

Sanshin (3-stringed Okinawan lute) player. Lyrics in Japanese and English. Who says minimalists can’t swing!

 

9. Extra Golden – Thank You Very Quickly

Brisk guitar-driven Kenyan-American psychedelic dance-pop

 

10. Cady Wire – Crown Vic

Gothic Americana nocturne – slow, atmospheric, genuinely haunting.

CD Review: Satoko Fujii-Myra Melford – Under the Water

One of the most exciting piano albums of recent years, this Myra Melford/Satoko Fujii collaboration is an intense, often ferociously haunting yet sometimes extremely funny album. Fujii’s Libra Records released a limited-edition run of 500 copies, each with a one-of-a-kind hand-printed sleeve by klezmer accordionist Sachie Fujisawa. Of these, somebody saw fit to send one to l’il ole Lucid Culture [aside: (slap) Get your fingers off that thing! It’s a collector’s item! No, you’re not taking it home, you can listen to it right here]. A series of duo piano improvisations plus one solo piece by each performer, it’s a clinic in good listening (for anyone who plays improvised music, this is a must-own – memo to Libra: PRINT MORE!) and interplay, worth checking to see if it’s sold out yet or if there are (hopefully) more on the way. Each performer’s individual voice asserts itself here, Melford the slightly more traditionalist, Fujii (a Paul Bley acolyte) somewhat further outside. Both pianists use the entirety of the piano, rapping out percussion on the case and manipulating the inside strings for effects ranging from something approximating an autoharp, to a singing saw.

The first improvisation builds with sparse, staccato phrases from inside the piano, like a muted acoustic guitar. The second, The Migration of Fish is a high-energy, conversational feast of echo, permutation and call-and-response. Of the two solo pieces, Fujii’s Trace a River vividly evokes swirling currents, schools of fish and a bracingly cool fluidity. Melford’s Be Melting Snow, by contrast, is a murky, modal tar-pit boogie of sorts, practically gleeful in its unrelenting darkness. Utsubo (Japanese for moray eel) closes the cd on an exhilarating note. Fujii just wants to lurk in her lair and wait for prey, but Melford wants to play! And finally she cajoles Fujii out of her fugue (literally), and then they play tag, and YOU’RE IT! But Fujii isn’t done with lurking. She goes back between the rocks, way down with a pitch-black blast of sound, working both the keys and the inside of the piano and at the bottom of the abyss Melford adds the most perfect little handful of upper-register single-key accents, only accentuating the savagery of the ending. Wow!