Album of the Day 9/3/11

This coming weekend is our last blowout of the year. We realize that all the time we’ve spent on the road this year, coupled with starting a brand-new blog to catch some of the spillover from this one, would take its toll on our daily coverage for awhile, and we apologize. More of the usual reviews and concerts coming next week. Til then, every day, pretty much that is, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Saturday’s album is #514:

Motorhead – No Sleep Til Hammersmith

How does Motorhead manage to sound so titanic with only one guitarist? Lemmy’s wall-of-sound bass chords. He plays bass like a guitarist, which enables whoever’s on guitar – in this case, Fast Eddie Clarke, in his last stint in the classic original lineup – to take off and go way, way out into the bluesmetal ionosphere as much as he wants. This raw, cheaply produced but intensely adrenalinized 1981 live set – which went to #1 on the British charts – includes the longer anthems like Capricorn and Bomber that the band was beginning to introduce alongside their more punk numbers like their signature song, Stay Clean (what a joke that title is), The Hammer, Overkill and of course Ace of Spades. The best track is actually a mammoth version of We Are the Road Crew, the irresistibly catchy tribute to the guys who lug all the gear and never get any credit; the band also tackle a cover of Born to Lose and actually avoid embarrassing themselves. Why’d we choose this one? Only because everybody else seems to choose Ace of Spades. Here’s a random torrent.

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Album of the Day 5/23/11

In recent weeks you may have noticed how sluggish this blog has been during the weekend. That will change – promise! But this past one was one of those completely lost ones. To give you something new, as we do every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Monday’s album is #617:

The New Race – The First to Pay

Think about this for a second: in 1988, the late great Ron Asheton was so broke that he had to sell the master tapes for this album to a French record label, since no American one would put it out. Another shocker is that it’s been out of print pretty much since then. The New Race were a Detroit rock supergroup with the MC5’s Dennis Thompson on drums, Asheton and Radio Birdman’s Deniz Tek on guitars, plus Warwick Gilbert on bass and Rob Younger from that band on vocals. They did a single Australian tour that resulted in three live albums of raw, searing, primevally intense garage punk metal. It’s a mix of Birdman and Stooges songs plus three tunes the group came up with together: the metalloid space shuttle tribute Columbia, the surprisingly poppy Living World and the maniacally scurrying Haunted Road. Gilbert’s menacing bass chords take the doomed intensity of Love Kills to another level; likewise, the chromatically-charged Smith & Wesson Blues and All Alone in the End Zone are completely unhinged. They also do a very satisfying, amped-up cover of Destroy All Monsters’ November 22, 1963 along with the Stooges’ Loose and TV Eye. The whole album is streaming at grooveshark; here’s a random torrent via rogkentroll.

The Soda Shop’s First Compilation Kicks Ass

If you’re wondering what the cool kids across the USA are listening to, chances are that some of it is right here. Last month our colleagues over at the Soda Shop put out a massive free compilation – the first in a series – that you should get your hands on if you like metal or the louder fringes of stoner music. The corporate media are trying as hard as they can to make you believe that anyone over age eight actually listens to Kesha, or that anyone actually enjoys Arcade Fire instead of merely pretending to because they don’t want to seem uncool in front of their trendoid friends. The reality is that metal is bigger than ever, and maybe better than ever, because the new wave of bands who play it have gone back to the source, the motherlode of it all, Black Sabbath. Tony Iommi should be proud of what he spawned here, yet while most of the bands here have the sludgy slow stoner groove, double and tripletracked solos and chromatic riffage, they aren’t ripoffs either. This is a LONG album, sixteen songs, most of them well over five minutes a clip and most of them various shades of excellent. A couple of them are spoofs, but most of them are straight up pure adrenaline.

Period-perfect early 70s style band Stone Axe open this up with riff-rock on the off beat. Is it a Sabbath homage? A parody? Maybe both. Meat Charger, by Boston’s Gozu, sets lazy drawling Skynyrd vocals over crunchy riffs, more artsy than their smoking Meth Cowboy/Mr. Riddle release from last year. Ohio band Lo-Pan’s Dragline works a long psychedelic 1-chord intro into brain-melting, galloping torrents of guitar triplets, while Brisbane band Shellfin get even more hypnotic, proving that you don’t even have to change chords at all, at least until the overtones are ringing so loud it sounds like a guitar orchestra. And when they do, it’s pretty macabre. Seattle power trio Mos Generator also keep it simple and smart, from the War Pigs echoes on the intro, a catchy bass solo and the ridiculously tuneful, too-brief guitar solo out.

Dayton, Ohio’s Blaxeed, “a heavy drinkin’ hard rockin’ no frills 4 man rock-n-roll band” are represented by the swaying, slightly funky Whiskey Warrior, and have the balls to quote the Beatles. Devil to Pay, from Indianapolis, offer the fuzztoned riffs and doomy lyrics of High Horse, with a juicy brief wah-wah solo to wind it up. The best of all of them may be Cleveland band Venomin James’ Cosmonaut, sounding like Pantera covering Sabbath, some cooly ominous backing vocals lurking toxically in the background and a ferociously charging, doublespeed bridge – if you like this, also check out the scorching live version of their song Abu Graib.

There are also some great songs here that don’t reference Sabbath at all. The funniest track here, Brooklyn band Strange Haze’s Straight Dope, is pure early 70s satire, complete with “soulful” blues harp. This band’s lyrics are off the hook – on this one, the singer wants to walk you “down to the marble garden with a buckskin bottle of wine – sometimes I get so drunk I can sing just like a child…” Luder (German for “little shit”) hail from Detroit, springing from the ashes of the band Slot, and add a dreampop/shoegaze vibe with bassist Sue Lott’s ethereal vocals over layers of crunch and echoey swirl. California trio Whores of Tijuana do a funny punk/metal-meets-ghoulabilly number. And another Detroit band, Chapstik, offers a punishing blast of mostly instrumental metal/hardcore a la the Bad Brains but more chromatic. The compilation starts to run low on gas toward the end, with some nu-metal and grungy stuff that stands out like a sore thumb. But the beauty of this compilation is that you can cherrypick the good stuff, and there’s plenty to choose from. Besides, it’s free. Spread the word and keep your eyes open for Volume 2.

Album of the Day 2/12/11

OK, time to push the drinking songs down the page and replace them with something far more serious. Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Saturday’s album is #717:

The Larval Organs – Posthumous

This careening, intense New York punk/metal band put out a couple of lo-fi limited-edition ep’s during their brief 2004-06 lifetime and this is the better of the two. The original, long out of print, had just four amazing songs. The grand guignol dysfunctional holiday scenario Ziploc Torso and the explosively manic-depressive Devil Come Madness capture the band at their loudest. City Parks is a characteristically vivid portrait of angst and alienation; maybe ironically, the classic here is the uncharacteristically upbeat janglerock anthem Mansion of Your Skull, a rare example of a love song that doesn’t suck. The narrator’s “death machine rusts in the yard” while he reveals that “my heaven is a hall in the mansion of your skull that I wander through.” A recent reissue comes with welcome bonus tracks: the inscrutably bizarre, catchy anthem Israel, the hauntingly funny Wizard Gardenia, Heaven Is a Drag, and Close to the Bone. Frontman Daniel Bernstein a.k.a. Cockroach, a brilliant and prolific songwriter, would go on to front the equally assaultive Whisper Doll and then chamber-pop band Hearth before going solo, frequently collaborating with another brilliant, brooding songwriter, Erin Regan.

Album of the Day 10/5/10

Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Tuesday’s album is #847:

The Electric Eels – The Eyeball of Hell

These guys invented no wave. In Cleveland. In 1972. Contemporaries of Rocket from the Tombs as well as the Raspberries (sounds absurd, but it’s true), in their brief three-year career they played three shows and released one album, reputedly because nobody in the band got along. Which makes sense once you hear it. This 1998 compilation contains pretty much everything from that along with almost another album’s worth of outtakes and rehearsal material. Frontman Dave E channels some seriously strung-out vibes over John Morton’s fingers-down-the-blackboard guitar, through a completely unhinged, screeching, feedback-enhanced, sometimes early 70s metal-flaked attack on songs with titles like Agitated, Cyclotron, You’re Full of Shit, Sewercide, and a hilarious spoof of free jazz, Jazz Is. They were also responsible for one of the alltime great punk covers (as a description, punk might be a little tame), a version of Dead Man’s Curve that beats Jan and Dean at the drag race of death. Not exactly easy listening, but as ugly, confrontational, uncompromising and in its own twisted way, disarmingly honest music, it has few equals. Here’s a random torrent.

Beefstock 2010 Day One

Beefstock is sort of Bonnaroo for great obscure New York bands, an annual two or three-day spring music festival in the Catskills. We’ve covered the previous two – the backstory is here. In the beginning, it was skewed more toward jam bands, but in recent years it’s become more and more diverse. As with all festivals, it’s impossible to take everything in, and the quality of the bands at this one – arguably the best Beefstock ever – was frustratingly good. Standing around watching music for seven or eight hours at a clip gets exhausting, so, apologies in advance to the acts who played who aren’t covered here. With breaks for food, wine, more wine (Beefstock requires a lot of refueling!), checking email (there’s no cell service at the festival site, the Full Moon Resort in Big Indian, NY) and general socializing, this is simply one perspective on this year’s festivities.

A later-than-expected departure from Manhattan meant missing the early Friday night performances. By eight in the evening, Fred Gillen Jr. was wrapping up a characteristically tuneful, invigorated set of socially aware acoustic rock with his new drummer. If memory serves right, this was their first show together, and they rocked, concluding with a spirited version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Liza Garelik Roure and her husband Ian Roure, who would play Saturday night in their band the Larch, followed with a duo set showcasing songs from the band she fronts, Liza and the WonderWheels, and these proved more richly tuneful and emotionally diverse than ever (their upcoming cd ought to be awfully good). “Trailer punk” band Mr. McGregor followed them, including in their set an inspired, rocking Joe Maynard cover and a resonant ode to grilled cheese.

Girl to Gorilla were good at last year’s Beefstock. This time around they absolutely and colossally kicked ass, with a clanging, careening set that was part southwestern gothic, part paisley underground psychedelia, all of it with a snotty punk sense of humor. The electric violin wailing over the din of the guitars is the icing on the cake with this band, the violinist contributing some intense harmony vocals on a couple of numbers as well. One song sounded like the Dream Syndicate. The catchy, minor-key Evil Man was like a cross between True West and Ninth House. The equally catchy Waste of My Time was followed by a new wave-flavored one, a ska-punk number, a Steve Wynn-style riff-rocker and more menacing, jangly stuff. They encored with an aptly wired cover of Koka Kola by the Clash.

The next band, Black Death also absolutely and colossally kicked ass. To say that they sounded like the UK Subs but with better lyrics doesn’t give them enough credit. They jokingly describe themselves as not stupid enough to be metal but not good enough to be punk while they combine the best elements of both styles, punk fearlessness and heavy metal fun. Their Les Paul player gave a free clinic in good bluesmetal solos while their frontguy roared his way through one ferocious, pounding number after another with both his voice and his guitar. Maybe appropriately, their biggest audience hit, I Like Pussy, had a death metal feel. They closed their set with a Balkan death metal waltz and encored with the blasting Live Free or Die (not the Bill Morrissey comedy-folk hit recently resurrected by Hayes Carll) with a deliciously long, bluesy guitar solo.

Following Black Death was a Plastic Beef spinoff, Live and Let Diane (an inside joke), with backbeat drum monster/Beefstock impresario Joe Filosa showing off the same kind of casual cool brilliance on the mic that characterizes his work behind the kit. By now, the wine had kicked in, the really nice guy behind the bar had given one of us a generous glass of Jameson’s on the house, and it was time to call it a night or miss out on a lot of the next day’s fun.

An account of Day Two continues here.

Song of the Day 7/16/09

Every day, our top 666 songs of alltime countdown gets one step closer to #1. Thursday’s song is #377:

The Larval Organs – Mansion of Your Skull

Let’s face it – most love songs suck. Here’s a rare one that doesn’t, with murderously good double entendres and a tiny bit more of a glimmer of hope than is usually the case from the band’s frontman Daniel Bernstein, backing away only slightly from his usual themes of death, anguish and revenge. “My heaven is a hall in the mansion of your skull that I wander through.” Nice snarling post-REM backbeat melody too. From the NYC punk/metal band’s classic Posthumous cd, 2004, now out of print; good luck finding it.

Concert Review: Daniel Bernstein at Sidewalk, NYC 7/9/09

Even by Daniel Bernstein’s standards, this show was particularly transcendent. Like Luminescent Orchestrii, just reviewed here, Bernstein gets raves from his fellow musicians. No matter how he ends up putting his songs out there – as punk/metal in the great early zeros band the Larval Organs, as austere chamber pop in Hearth, in the ferocious, coyly named Whisper Doll or simply solo acoustic as he delivered them last night, they always pack a wallop. Railing more than he was singing, alternating between unleashed rage and kvetchy discomfort and backed by soaring harmonies from Erin Regan – an equally good songwriter in her own right – he nonchalantly burned through a nine-song set of bleak, brilliantly lyrical and very catchy existentialist angsthems. This may have been an acoustic show, but the sound was loud, the sound guy very impressively pulling a good mix together, Regan’s pitch-perfect wail in stark contrast with Bernstein’s haphazard snarl.

Death pervades his lyrics. Decaying carcasses, dying light and dashed dreams are so abundant as to be inescapable. As is a sense of being completely and overwhelmingly alone. To say that Bernstein channels Beckett in places would not be an overstatement: his lyrics are plainspoken yet profound and symbolically loaded. And as with Beckett, there’s plenty of stream-of-consciousness gallows humor to make things a bit more tolerable, if only momentarily before the plunge back into the abyss. The best of this stuff ranks with Ian Curtis, Roger Waters, Leonard Cohen and any other legendary dark songwriter you can think of. Bernstein’s catalog of songs is considerably deep, this show mixing new material along with a couple of genuine classics from his Larval Organs days. He opened with a characteristically anthemic number chronicling miscommunication, burned bridges and “summers spent in ashy crash.” The dark, forsaken Wizard Gardenia, an upbeat Larval Organs song was inspired, he said, by a brand of aerosol disinfectant: “Her skin is young like a dead man’s tongue…if I never wake up for a thousand years would you still be blowing those Pyrex tears?”

The forsaken vibe continued with another more recent tune, skeletal fingerpicking on the verse giving way to an upbeat chorus: “God thinks it’s treason if you ask why…a quarter ounce of truth is the only truth we divine…ain’t no way out of here, look how far we’ve come.”

In these songs, love is always fleeting, a momentary yet irresistible distraction that becomes a destructive obsession, vividly illustrated in the Larval Organs song City Parks:

Grey skin like the hue of rotten meat

That is cooking itself in the heat of its desire…

I know that love is not some sort of prize

And I am all alone on this ride

Still I wish that you would hold me in

They saved the best for last, the Larval Organs classic Joyless Now:

There’s gold in the hills

There’s a thousand bottles of pills…

We go on to John Brown’s grave

I’ve got a heartache the size of a great lake

I’m so faraway

I’m on the outside either way

I want to bring myself into a room

Pretend the lighting fixture is the moon…

I’m on the outside and I’m going insane

Let’s speed and drive all night

Into the diffused grey light

With that, he sent everyone off into the as-yet-undiffused, unseasonably cool black comfort of a relatively tourist-free Thursday midnight in the East Village. Watch this space for upcoming shows: if lyrical rock is your thing, you need to get to know this guy’s songs.