Disambiguation: The White Rose

Endless Boogie - Long Island LP (No Quarter)

There is something very “it was written…” about this band. Maybe it’s that its members are the fingers to the hidden hand controlling all y’alls taste in music. Or maybe it’s the tenacity – fully exhibited no matter where you happen to check in: song, album, career. The gist of ‘em is in each of the parts, like a Homeric epic. Then again, how is Endless Boogie not like Ancient Greek song culture? They’re old, tough, epic, intimidating, hard to penetrate yet built so that misunderstanding them is impossible. They test endurance, and that is not to say only for the listener. Most of all, and fully realized in Long Island, Endless Boogie’s endowment makes itself manifest through sheer pronouncement, much like the hero Achilles, early in the Iliad, declared his own fate.

I hear ya…. “Hey there! Ho there! Whoa there! Some dude who calls himself ‘Top Dollar’ just casually recommended that I not trust William Tecumseh Sherman in the song after a song called ‘Taking Out the Trash’; itself explicitly stating (in an arbitrary rallying call), My intentions are unclear!” –

You take these things as alerts to not take this band too seriously. Your ready-whipped complacence is acquiesced in a Village Voice interview with the band. In turn, you pledge allegiance to a band like say, Purling Hiss – who take the piss as vaguely as possible, because an understanding of the benefit to maintaining creative plausible deniability is somehow built into the sociobiological make-up of an uncertain cross section of contemporary rock music, which also mismanages any real libidinous urgency. Naming a song, “Lolita” does not summon the desired effect; it draws attention to its inadequacies. Whereas the first song off Long Island, “The Savagist,” although not only refuses to recompense cultural signifiers, but also not a recognized word, does eventually make you feel like a naughty little girl around its 11th minute.

In spite of its flushing effect, I’d be willing to bet – in fact I am certain – that much of what is captured on Long Island cuts premature of spontaneous laughter from within the band. The music is impromptu, but much like Zappa Plays Zappa, it aims to simulate an onus of musicianship. When perfect recreation is met, it is recognized, and it’s hilarious. If you have held the records in your hands that these fellows have, nurturing them from patent obscurity to market absurdity, you’d find that the only honest end to making music is fraternity. The lack of tact here is mine, meant only to illustrate the impossibility of writing music, when you have inadvertently built the siphon for so much of it. (http://noquarter.net)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

from Dusted, STILL SINGLE

Shut Up I Am Here City's Full Strife Waiting For A Sign Dead Nature She Will No Face Hit Me Husbands Marshal Dear

True art always appears where we don't expect it, where nobody thinks of it or utters its name. Art detests being recognized and greeted by its own name. It immediately flees. Art is a character infatuated by the incognito. As soon as it is divulged and pointed out, it flees and leaves in its place a glorified bit-player carrying on its back a large poster marked ART; everyone immediately sprinkles it with champagne, and lectures lead it from town to town with a ring through its nose. 
Jean Debuffet, "Art Brut in Preference to the Cultural Arts", from the exhibition catalogue

I Missed Record Store Day

By missed, I mean did not participate in.

That's what I get for searching for "One Man Melodic Black Metal"

Always on the lookout for the serendipitous DJ: One that can provide a nexus of knowns and unknowns, unobtrusive enough to cater to productive spans of writing, with a welcome earworm-stimulant every hour on the hour. In the case of which, I can source the provenance without having to maneuver ulterior motive speculation. Last FM was on-bat for the job. Upon registration, my entire computer-listening history swept onto a profile page in a swift display of unsolicited analytics. Once I swallow the initial unease of seeing my own band in the number one spot  - most played, with various (hilarious) television programs rearing up into the top ten, I decide the service has a fighting chance: This was social media transparency I could get behind. It is not enough to merely claim you like listening to, say...Steel Pole Bathtub, or Whitehouse, or the Chicago Transit Authority, you have to clock in for it. And in case you're interested, I qualified the upper-rankings of my own band and the Sarah Silverman Show rather efficiently thankyouverymuch.

U2 Negativland

1991 Island Records v. SST
Negativland Response

Best of 2012 Vol. I - Head In A Box: The Musical

Screaming Females | Ugly

Final Club | Blank Entertainment

Northern Liberties | Glowing Brain Garden

Uranium Orchard | s/t

Family Band | Grace & Lies

Connections | Private Airplane

Christian Mistress | Possession

D’eon | LP

Cat Power | Sun

The Dream | Terius Nash: 1977                   

Death Grips | Ex-Military, Black Google, The Money Store, NO LOVE WEB DEEP

Botanist | I: The Suicide Tree & II: A Rose From The Dead, III: Doom in Bloom/Allies
Nervosas | Ardentes, Rev 45, Descension 

Sky Ferrierra – “Everything is Embarrassing”

Acid Pauli – Johnny Cash/Will Oldham “I See A Darkness”

Gut and theory; the most impressive musical documents from the past year (and change) bolster exceptional proportions of typically disparate hallmarks. Sometimes a person just has to clear their throat. No subtext. Still, it is with intent to speak.

A Note From...Downloading Beth

(Pitch: Apocalypse)
            
A few days ago, I found an errant note-to-self; long sheared from a sticky-pad given to me when I had an answer to, 'what are your favorite colors?', and that answer was green and pink. These colors shaded in the thoughtful details of small gifts throughout my childhood, printed here in the header (A Note From...) and footer (my name - Beth), making the personalized sticky-pad doubly so, yet ready-made. Kin to magnets, key chains, and shot glasses - only the goods that cast the widest net of usability are predisposed to personalization. Despite it being a rather generic gift, and of the literally ephemeral, this sticky-pad lived past its expectancy. This was in part due to a syntax snatch (you know the type, but in an effort to put the 'wow' factor back into all things meta, look up syntax in the OED). The 'scratch' part of the pad was betwixt A Note From... and Beth, so whatever I thought to jot down would read...trying to thing of a plausible example from my childhood.... like, A Note from... fix garbage disposal Beth or A Note from....Lemmy Killmeister was in Hawkwind! Beth. 

Kylesa - From the Vaults, Vol. 1 LP (Season of Mist)

If this had been released as a proper studio album, it is safe to say none of Kylesa’s exponentially budding fanbase would have been the wiser. A title like From the Vaults, Vol. 1 usually works as a disclaimer, in the sense of providing a framework as to who should be alerted to the release (hardcore fans) and what they should expect: an endearing historical document, contextualizing the band and uncovering prescient snapshots of their current, past or future glory. A patchwork quality in recording and unfinished zygotes of song are excusably revealed, while the inclusion of covers is standard issue. From the Vaults, Vol. 1 includes two such covers and features a song called “Drum Jam,” so while these assumptions are not completely irrelevant, Kylesa’s sixth full-length LP bears a thoughtfulness worthy of its place alongside 2010’s Spiral Shadow in the discography. The comprehensibility was intended. It is properly sequenced and uniformly booming in sound. Old songs, previously released or not, are never just upended from the floor.

Connections - Private Airplane LP (Anyway Records)

Connections Private Airplane is out now in Columbus, Ohio

I don't want to talk about the Ohio water, as in what's in it, as the raison d’être for another instant classic of underground pop to surface to vinyl with Connections’ Private Airplane. This allusion is justifiably thrown up in the hands of well-wishers at a loss for words, yet to say Ohioans are dosed from the tap with a certain knack is to slight what constitutes the substance. Other liquids are more conspicuously involved: blood, beer, whiskey and gasoline - although I wouldn't recommend that order. Songs like "Finally", "Casuals", "Cindy" and "Love St." don't just happen, albeit by the time we hear them it certainly seems like they do; spontaneously, with whatever working degree of immaculacy you uphold. The five members of Connections are not bystanders for a conduit; Kevin Elliott and Andy Hampel of 84 Nash, Adam Elliott of Times New Viking, Dave Capaldi of El Jesus de Magico and 'peach district laureate' Philip Kim have been clocking in for awhile now. Private Airplane is a result of their craft; fifteen paragons of song, each laden with hooks you can't pay for, never mind get, anywhere else.

Brian M. Clark - Songs From The Empty Places Where People Killed Themselves 12” EP (Discriminate Audio)

This is an exercise in program music – four instrumental songs crafted to impart thematic intent upon the listener. I don’t know how they did this back in the golden days of orchestra, in the pit/pre-pit, but the exposition found on this EP leaves little room for error. The track list on Songs contains even more explicit subtext. For example, “Suburban Bedroom (A Pretty Young Girl Swallows A Bottle Of Pills For Reasons That Would Have Seemed Stupid In Retrospect, Had She Lived)”. I want to frame the declamatory nature of this with “Death of the Author” and the assertive naiveté of abstract painting, but again, the margins here are narrow, even for my esoteric criticism (itty-bitty). Moreover, considering the source, this record is more genuine, more direct, than a didactic monolith for darkness’s sake. Suicide is a rote walk in contention park next to Brian M. Clark’s oeuvre of overtly deviant-themed artwork, anti-books, and nihilistic sucker punches.

Yek Koo - Love Song for the Dead C LP (Emerald Cocoon)

Burgeoning through a capricious gaze in the late ‘80s, the Dead C.’s tempered rise to legacy is currently testing the glass ceiling of the underground. If you, as I, were also born with the moon in post-punk, early Dead C. records were beyond the pale by the time you came of age. However, recent years have offered respite in reissue format, with the exception of Operation of the Sonne, a title which I happen to covet. In the spirit of the popular opinion garnering interest, whittled on down to cliche, if I had a penny for every time the Dead C. was referenced, the price of this original pressing would increase in tandem and still no transaction would transpire. Good thing I thought that one through first. Guess who didn’t?

How do I explain Yek Koo? You know how people like to say, “Blondie is a band”? Well, Yek Koo is a sucks.

FIRSTIES! BITCHES.

The New Times New viking EP 

Over & Over “Sleep-In”                 LISTEN

Robert Pollard - Jack Sells the Cow LP (GBV Inc.)

This is a Robert Pollard solo album—12 songs, 32 minutes—hovering around the 80th percentile on a sliding scale of his own design, methinks. With this number, I aim to fold the extent of my critique, as it is all I see fit to impart on a Robert Pollard solo album in 2012, the fourth record he has been a part of this year and the googleth of his career. His net has been cast, with a fanbase like a block of granite and a persistence equally resolute. If ceaselessness panders to futility, here it is the writer’s burden to bear. The same agent that puts a damper on criticism’s utility is an accelerant to the torch of a relic. 


BAUHAUS PARTY

                                                 
                                                                                                                           

The XX - Coexist LP (Young Turks)

The Antithesis of M. Night Shymalan-A-Ding-Dong 

I was really rooting for this, until I realized the album title alluded to, not post-disclosure human/alien love, but yucky, mopey, regular old hetero-loss of love. Ho Hum. 

The boy/girl vocals on Coexist take turns airing disengaged musings in real time. They never hear each other, which is a shame because they often say the same things. So much in fact, the occasional sentiment occurs in unison and we find their timbres match. This is by chance, an inadvertent by-product of having once been close, like ordering the same toppings on a pizza. Now besides the point, it becomes a futile agreement. Patterns of speech line up and everything is colloquial—from the language and brand of insight to their intonation, scantly more melodic than talking. This is all a modest allegory for the lyrical content: the mutual, yet distinct, grievance of the dissolution of a once sacred pact and the tragic irony in wanting and needing and saying something so parallel that acquiescence is impossible.

The New Times New Viking EP

The new EP, 

The New Times New Viking EP Over & Over, 

by my humble band Times New Viking, will be released on October 16^th November 28^th. 

The Purloined Postcard

Although not intended to be scanned and postmarked: Internet, unfulfilled; I am reminded that the best letter is one never received, never to be misinterpreted. I cannot imagine a better ocean for my corked missives than you, www.

Open Hand - Trench Warfare & d'Eon - Al-Qiyamah

New "Prayer to God"

-because the old one is C.O.B.A. 

(Co-Opted By Assholes)

YOU DO THE MASH

pop tropes: Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson and the Winged Victory of Samothrace

Feeling obliged to tap into the mainstream, I set aside the necessary block of time to watch the Democratic Convention the other night and quickly found another option to feed the remove - the MTV Awards. I toggled back and forth between the two and I gotta say, Taylor Swift wanted it more than anyone else. Granted, it was no "Since U Been Gone" circa 2005 a la Kelly Clarkson, but Swift's performance of the new-to-me "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" gave me more of that pop sentiment flutter than Obama's speech, which history is sure to find safe and stale. Swift's songwriting is consistently not bad, but the impression made all the more sense when I found out the song was co-written by the same Max Martin that co-wrote "Since U Been Gone", which I had mistakingly thought to be written by Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes. Although this insight sands down a mythology I once treasured, "Since U Been Gone" is still fantastic, and Linda Perry still is the bearer one of the most enviable career paths. The top 40 songwriting checks out, even if it is through the subpar Pink's Missundazstood (the crazy spelling is killing me here, at least there was already a song called "Since YOU been gone", reasons people, have 'em).

Some recent reviews I did for Still Single...

Is it still hatorade if the substance actually has a bitter taste to it? If not, what bev-y is that? Unequivocally-bad-artorade? Cause I be drinkin’ that.

Debatorade.

Dan Deacon - America LP (Domino)

At any point prior to America, mentioning Dan Deacon to this reviewer could evoke the following associations: 

1.) The guy that brought a loaf of homemade bread backstage for Bradford when my band played with Deerhunter in 2008.
2.) This:    

                                Q. "Can It Get Eddie Veddar?"         
                                A. "You bet your Dan Deacon it can!"

3.) That brassy ring-leader of the opposition in dogs vs. cats.
4.) "Who's chair is that? Not my chair. Not my chair, not my problem that's what I say..."

How is it that the public can be both paranoid and complacent about the apocalypse? Perhaps because, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek says, it is easier for people to imagine the world ending than what it would take to stop it. Although it is nothing if not narcissistic to suppose the rapture will happen in our lifetime, this possibility, with its various seductive entry points, flickers across the minds of the best of us. As a hypothetical, it is the great perspective-inducer, socioeconomic leveler and priority adjustment bureau, becoming ever more mercurial as it slouches toward reality. In such a case, sheer terror would eclipse any sense of beauty.

But the theoretical apocalypse?

"Seriousness is a form of infectious stupity."-Alec Waugh via Dave Hickey

Joe Sola, Studio Visit, 2005

It has been a while since I paid money for an art magazine. Heck, it has been awhile since the media loaf I test drive with coffee at Barnes & Noble has had but one. Immediately after art school I clocked out of the contemporary art world; institutional critique (funny-art-about-art) was my last stop. David Shrigley, Chris Burden, Maurizio Cattelan, and a more recent inductee thanks to A.S.E., Bill Drummond, all work with themes that, for better or worse, balance themselves on the tapered end of theory. In one Cattelan piece, the gallery owner himself was willing to be taped the wall of his own space – which he totally asked for by commissioning a Cattelan. Humorous and unfortunately relevant to the state of the arts establishment, yet this kind of work quickly wears on an individual who once felt art possessed some kind of spirit. They announce their own death, and if this is the only new art I take notice in, I thought back in 2004, it’s time to find a new medium. 

It was the December 2011 ARTnews cover feature, “What’s So Funny” that got me back in the fold. More specifically, the Joe Sola’s Studio Visit from 2005.

Over a period of two years, Joe Sola invited art critics to his house on the premise of a studio visit. Shortly after introductions, he would spontaneously leap out of the fucking window. He did this 20 odd times, and not with complete abandon; he had trained as a stuntman prior to the performances.

I laughed out loud as I read this; okay, I'll jump.  

Northern Liberties - Glowing Brain Garden

Bailterspace - Strobosphere LP (Fire)

Strobosphere, Bailterspace’s first studio album since 1999, wastes no time in assuring us of its formidability. Whipfast, the first breach from silence to song in “Things That We Found” is merciless in its arrest. It is primarily the guitar melody that baits, hooks, and demands a replay, a replay that is permitted by the song’s fadeout, and with which the vocals, low and along for the ride, aren’t at odds. All of this has been standard critical issue for Bailterspace in the past, but here it’s on its head, servicing the song impressively.

Marx and Coca-Cola / An American Video By Joshua Clover

Charlie Megira & The Modern Dance Club - Love Police

Confounding! Guitar virtuoso Charlie Megira’s identity is couched in ‘50s greaser/surf nostalgia, rounded out with an Elvis fixation. Half of the material on the double album Love Police is in debt to this, while the other half is a near-comprehensive skirting of the rock genres that have followed: ‘60s garage, ‘70s punk, tongue-in-cheek nods to No Wave, ‘60s heavy/hard rock, ‘80s and ‘90s re-interpretations of the same. It is all done with unnerving verisimilitude. Megira’s ability to deftly transition between styles, in form and historical scope, self-aggrandizes above all else. It creates a kiss-off element, and with “No Wave Exercise” and “Another No Wave Exercise,” he makes sure we know he knows (we know). They are what they claim, yet the album contains at least seven other tracks, without smart-aleck signifiers, that also tread my-kid-could-do-that waters via backwards tracking, radio roulette and some goddamn convincing hazardous Dead C.-esque guitar noise. Love Policebegs to be compartmentalized, and aims to be all inclusive with one-offs like “Existence” (hard rock), “Here Comes Your Mama” (country, swing), “Je Ne Parle Pas Francais” (new wave), and even “Dead Girl Blues” tacked onto the end, although the plug is pulled after 48 seconds (dude, we know you are not serious).

Liliane Lijn: Collected Film and Video Works 1970-2012

If you will be in New York this weekend, you would be wise to stop by Spectacle Theatre in Williamsburg, where for $5 you can see the films of Liliane Lijn - as curated by my girl Kellie Morgan at STRAIGHT TO VIDEO. She let me write the bio, below:

Liliane Lijn: Collected Film and Video Works 1970-2012

     Widely known for her Poem Machines (invented in 1962 alongside Burrough’s and Gysin’s Dreamachine,) in which Lijn stirred a conversation more relevant now than ever: The relationship between language and time, text and movement. Lijn’s application of text onto rotating cone-shaped “koans” stripped language of its meaning as it dematerialized the volume of the cone, inducing a hypnotic state – not unlike the nullifying effect that the increased rate of information has today. Lijn’s Poem Machines were featured recently in the MoMA’s Ecstatic Alphabet exhibition this past spring. What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping documents these sculptures in a montage that is perhaps the ideal way to experience the breadth of their impact. Always one to stay current, Lijn has used the evolutions of science, industry, and technology as fertile hunting grounds for unearthing the archetypal resonance within. This query begins with vignettes of industry in Factory Snaps, a series of production close-ups captured in Super 8 film using factories that aided Lijn in her work throughout the late ’60s in London. She trades the autobiographical jumping off point for one rooted in mythology in Fire Water and Caution Matter, initially a video installation, but shown in this program as vignettes. Fire Water further crops industry to specifics, while expanding its key to the logical mythographic end, which is to say the beginning, as Lijn documents two factories found along The Sacred Way – the connecting road from Athens to Eleusis. A “reconnection” of art and science is the central thread of Inner Space Outer Space, a series of interviews with scientists from when Lijn was a resident at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley interspersed with moving images of her life’s work. But it is the timeless absurdity of Power Game that has provided the most coherent touchstone in Lijn’s career. The stipulations for this send-up of power, which uses the ambiguity of language as currency in which complicit “players” hedge their bets, was first staged by Lijn in 1974. This video enfolds layers of the original game with its subsequent re-stagings up to 2010. These films, along with a batch of autobiographical works that enlighten Lijn’s familial ties and early awareness of the body as matter, will be shown August 5th and August 19th at Spectacle Theatre in Brooklyn. Films in which art critic Frank Popper has heralded as instrumental in “the passage from the mechanical to the electronic in art” are not to be missed as we find ourselves approaching even more guarded passageways in art, technology, science and industry.
–Elizabeth Murphy

Lorelei - Enterprising Sidewalks LP (Slumberland)

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since distortion, feedback and volume joined to form an unremitting flesh. It jostled the  pedantry of post-punk and offered a backbone to sentimental pop across the Atlantic. At once a warm blanket and fierce intimidator, shoegaze liberated the twee literati. At the helm was Washington DC’s Slumberland Records, an imprint that established lines for these transatlantic sentiments and then some. As important as it was to introduce Stereolab to America, it was the nurture and support to bands like The Lilys, The Swirlies and Lorelei that cultivated the American underground pop aesthetic as we know it. 

Jim Shepard - Most of the Time

Of course he did.
One of my favorite artistic entities of all time covering one (of two) of my favorite Dylan songs of all time. Now I just need to find a Dave Mason cover of "Mama You've Been on My Mind".

"Most of the Time"
Jim Shepard (V-3, Vertical Slit, Phantom Limb)
Folk City Aztec Drama, Volume 2 [Iron Press, 1991]