Album of the Day 7/25/11

Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Monday’s album is #554:

The Who – The Who Sings My Generation

OK, OK, this is “classic rock,” the one thing we’re trying to stay away from here. But what a rhythm section – and a tragedy that both John Entwistle and Keith Moon both left us so young. This album came out in 1965, when the band’s sound was new and fresh, before Pete Townshend turned into a Jimmy Page wannabe and Daltrey…well, the music here is good enough to make you forget he’s on it. With his completely unpredictable rumbling thunder attack, Moon absolutely owns La-La-La-Lies and Much Too Much. A Legal Matter mines the same amped-up R&B style as the Pretty Things and the early Kinks; the Good’s Gone foreshadows the Move. There’s also the country dancehall stomp of It’s Not True, the blue eyed soul ballad I Don’t Mind and Out in the Street, with its cool tremoloing intro. Oh yeah, there’s also an oldies radio standard, a future movie theme and a primitive, fuzztoned quasi-surf instrumental. The band only miss when they misguidedly try their hand at James Brown. Here’s a random torrent.

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Album of the Day 7/22/11

Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Friday’s album is #557:

The Jam – Setting Sons

Maybe someday in 2013 when this list is finally finished, we’ll move this 1979 punk rock classic a little higher…or maybe into the alltime top 10, where it probably deserves to be. This might be the best rock bass record ever made, Bruce Foxton growling and punching his way through one fiery, melodic riff after another. The best of all of them might be the one in Private Hell, frontman/guitarist Paul Weller’s searing, sarcastic account of a day in the life of a yuppie shopper. There’s also the ripping, mod-punk Girl on the Phone; the rueful, metaphorically-charged Thick As Thieves; the scorching, anti-imperialist Little Boy Soldiers and The Eton Rifles; the alienation anthems Burning Sky and Wasteland; the populist Saturday’s Kids; the best version of Smithers-Jones, done with a string quartet here; and a punked-out cover of the old Motown hit Heat Wave. Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler still tour, with a new guitarist; Weller sadly and unexpectedly lost his touch as a songwriter when the band broke up in 1984 and never got it back. Here’s a random torrent via Mod 64.

Album of the Day 3/29/11

Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Tuesday’s album is #672:

The Dog Show – “Hello, Yes”

Ferociously literate oldschool R&B flavored mod punk rock from this Lower East Side New York supergroup, 2004. Everything the Dog Show – who were sort of New York’s answer to the Jam – put out is worth hearing, if you can find it, including their debut, simply titled “demo,” along with several delicious limited edition ep’s. Frontman Jerome O’Brien and Keith Moon-influenced southpaw drummer Josh Belknap played important roles in legendary kitchen-sink rockers Douce Gimlet; Belknap and melodic bassist Andrew Plonsky were also LJ Murphy’s rhythm section around the time this came out. And explosive lead guitarist Dave Popeck fronted his own “heavy pop” trio, Twin Turbine. O’Brien’s songwriting here runs the gamut from the unrestrained rage of Hold Me Down, the sarcasm of Every Baby Boy, the gorgeous oldschool East Village memoir Halcyon Days – which just sounds better with every passing year – and the tongue-in-cheek, shuffling Everything That You Said. Diamonds and Broken Glass is a snarling, practically epic, bluesy kiss-off; White Continental offers a blistering, early 70s Stonesy let’s-get-out-of-here theme. Too obscure to make it to the sharelockers yet, the whole album is still streaming at myspace.

Song of the Day 6/1/10

Happy summer! Brand-new June live music calendar coming momentarily. In the meantime, our best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Tuesday’s song is #58:

The Jam – That’s Entertainment

Paul Weller famously said that he wrote this in twenty minutes after coming home from the pub, pissed and pissed off. Too bad he hasn’t done that in the last twenty-five years. The best version of this one is the one with the organ and the horns on the 1983 Dig the New Breed album (although the studio recording with the acoustic guitar and all the backward masking isn’t bad either). The link above is a live acoustic British tv appearance from that era.

Song of the Day 2/9/10

The best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Tuesday’s song is #170:

The Jam – Mr. Clean

“And if I get the chance I’ll fuck up your life, Mr. Clean,” Paul Weller snarls. One of the great anti-yuppie diatribes ever; sweet Bruce Foxton bass groove too. From All Mod Cons, 1978; Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler continue to play this one live in their From the Jam project.

Concert Review: The Dog Show at Sidewalk, NYC 6/8/07

You just had to laugh. A loud rock band onstage at this usually sedate folkie joint, just blazing, playing to pretty much an empty room. On a Friday night. And it was the Dog Show. Sound incongruous? Not when you consider that most New Yorkers don’t go out on the weekend anymore, not with Humvee limos full of Wall Street trash and their trust-funded spawn overflowing the bars, clogging the streets and screaming into their cellphones. Maybe the Dog Show expected this, considering that they didn’t rehearse for this gig. Not that it showed: this was one of the most rousing, passionate shows we’ve seen this year. It was especially notable for the fact that this was frontman Jerome O’Brien’s first-ever gig playing bass and singing lead (he usually plays rhythm guitar in this unit). It’s not easy singing and playing bass at the same time, and O’Brien is a real hard hitter on his four-string Fender. But he wailed, playing well up in the mix with a dirty, growly tone. Guitarist Dave Popeck seemed to be in a particularly mischievous mood tonight, playing licks from Stairway to Heaven and Beatles tunes in between songs. Lately he’s been playing lead in this project, but he handled the additional chordal work with aplomb, in fact using it as a springboard for some particularly pathological soloing. Tonight the Dog Show sounded like an unhinged version of the Jam, right down to drummer Phil McDonald’s spirited mod beats.

On the catchy, riff-driven I Do It for You, I Do It For Me from their album Hello, Yes, the band began the first couple of verses with just the rhythm section. By the third time around, Popeck was fleshing out the song using strategically placed sheets of feedback. He took a careening, bellicose solo on the next number, I Heard Everything That You Said. On the angry, sarcastic 6/8 blues Diamonds and Broken Glass, the band brought the song way down to just the drums after another Popeck solo, then took a long, rather puckish climb out. They wrapped up the set with Hold Me Down (another song from the Hello, Yes album), Popeck blasting out a wah-wah solo. It was as if Jimmy Page decided to swing Paul Weller around until his capillaries began to pop. The small crowd screamed for an encore and the band obliged with the gorgeously anthemic, politically charged, Who-inflected Masterplan, including an all-too-brief breakdown into total noise mid-song. Right before the final climactic hook, O’Brien took a percussive, crescendoing walk up the scale and when there was nowhere else to go, Popeck slammed into the gorgeous, haunting riff that opens the song. This is the kind of show where people who weren’t there will someday say they were in the house. Even the sound, usually dodgy at this venue, was exceptionally clear. Somebody give that sound guy a raise.