Song of the Day 5/6/10
Working feverishly on getting the May-June concert calendar here up to snuff – have you noticed what a kick-ass summer we New Yorkers have to look forward to? Other stuff coming soon, in the meantime, the best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Thursday’s song is #84:
The Church – The Disillusionist
Centerpiece of the iconic 1992 Priest = Aura album, it’s a macabrely metaphorical examination of the charismatic appeal of fascism, surreal Kinks-style vaudeville rock through the misty, reverb-spotted prism of dreampop. “They say that he’s famous from the waist down, but the top half of his body is a corpse.”
Song of the Day 4/25/10
The best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Sunday’s song is #95:
The Church – Kings
Grimly hypnotic, apocalyptic anthem from the legendary psychedelic janglerockers’ visionary Priest=Aura album, 1992.
Software hums and hardware hears
We’re destined, babe, to live these years
The link above is a torrent of the whole album.
Song of the Day 2/19/10
The best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Friday’s song is #160:
The Church – Mistress
“All my songs are coming true,” Steve Kilbey laments on this death-obsessed, apocalyptic, surreal art-rock number from the iconic Aussie rockers’ classic Priest = Aura album, 1992.
CD Review: The Oxygen Ponies – Harmony Handgrenade
Call the Oxygen Ponies’ second album Love in a Time of Choler. Recorded during the last months of the Bush regime, it’s an attempt to reconcile the search for some sort of transcendence with the need to overthrow an enemy occupation. It’s also a strong contender for best album of 2009 (stay tuned!). Savagely lyrical, swirling and psychedelic, the obvious comparison is to the great Australian rockers the Church, although sonically and texturally a lot of it is gentler and sometimes more overtly 60s-influenced. Lots of dynamics here, organ and piano floating in and out, backing vocals sometimes adding a gospel choir flavor: it’s a triumph for producer Don Piper. Many of the tracks feature indie rock siren Randi Russo’s velvet vocals adding subtlety and menace. Frontman Paul Megna has always been a formidable lyricist, but here he vaults into the uppermost echelon. The cd’s opening track Love Yr Way begins skeletal, almost Leonard Cohen-esque, before leaping to an ecstatic crescendo at the end:
They broke my itchy trigger finger
Scratched an X upon my door
When they hang this message bringer
Blood will rain down through the floor
The insistent, midtempo Fevered Cyclones pans to a less-than-idyllic outer-borough hell:
We live like clones in our suburban homes
Substituting plastic to get by
You got the best, you want the rest
And you don’t think you’re living a lie
The War Is Over, a percussive garage rock stomp, throws another elbow at someone a little too perfect to believe:
The war is over, the bastards won
Don’t leave home without your lungs
They’ll shoot your mouth off without a pause
Every body has its flaws
But not you…
The war is over
The heroes lost
Cauterize the permafrost
The title track somewhat woozily chronicles two curiously named, possibly fictional, possibly pseudonymous women, Harmony Handgrenade and Melody Marzipan and the nasty repercussions their nonconformity brings them. Yet, it ends on a hopeful note. Grab Yr Gun begins slow and pensive, building to a catchy garage-pop chorus and then goes gospel, and satirically so: “Let your gun be your guide.” A big, scorching rocker, Finger Trigger evokes the loudest stuff on the Church’s Priest = Aura album, desperately flailing for some kind of hope, “Anything to dissipate the grey skies falling.” But it’s too late:
You and I and everyone waiting for a brighter sun to shine
We’re wasting time…
I can feel the terrorist inside of me
Choking on the apple of your eye
Hurry up, don’t be late, they’re gonna kill you where you sleep
Shut your mouth, shut your eyes and count the bombs in your heartbeat
The most indelibly Bush-era cut is the pensive, hypnotic, yet absolutely defiant, Steve Kilbey-esque Villains:
All you mystic gurus
Liars thieves and whores
A plague upon your houses
And all your holy wars
All you self defeatists
I call you all to arms
If we stop medicating
Then who will buy the farm
The fuckers in the White House
Hate your family…
We’ve got a long drive home
Defiance reaches a peak on the swinging, macabre ragtime tune Smile, shades of the late, great Douce Gimlet. The cd winds up on a somewhat subdued, sardonic note with A Bottle Marked the Enemy: “They’re gonna come for you, when they comfort you.” Like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins or the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist, this album perfectly captures a time and place, if one that 5.9 billion people would rather forget. There’s undoubtedly a post-Bush era indie film out there that could match up with this much like Garden State did with the Shins. Maybe more than anything else, this is a cautionary tale, a vivid reminder of where complacency got us the last time around.
Lucid Culture 