Don't Waste My Time, This Is It: This Is Really Happening -- DRA, the "Abusive," "Petulant" Artist

There are artists with reptuations, and there are reputations that precede artists, and some who can be described as either--depending on who it is you happen to be speaking to. I mentioned when I spoke of Whiskeytown's Strangers Almanac that my first exposure to Ryan Adams (born David Ryan Adams, hence the common "DRA") was Elizabethtown, a movie that has been disappointing or despised in most circles for creating an alleged new stereotype or caricature of women, for being flaccid, self-important--anything to take down a director who has a following and a reputation. This isn't to say that I necessarily believe that jealousy inspired the responses, or passive-aggression, but that the nature of expectation and reputation can inflict grievous harm, as can the end results--the fact that many think that "Manic Pixie Dream Girls" originated in this movie and spread virally (in the disease sense from which "viral videos" get their name, rather than in the more cheerful sense of "viral video" itself) has not helped the movie in the times following.

I watched it at around 4am one morning, simply because it was there, I felt like watching it and it seemed possibly relevant to my lonely and melancholic mood at the time. I didn't know, when I heard "Come Pick Me Up," that it was a Ryan Adams song. I was familiar with him by name. I saw his name on Whiskeytown reissues. That was really about it. I didn't know anything else--I knew people liked him, but people like a lot of things, some things that I think are good, some I don't, some I just don't get. It was meaningless. But that song--that wasn't meaningless. I thought I ought to get the album it came from, support the artist, take a chance on the rest of it being that good. It was. "Call Me on Your Way Back Home" struck similar chords, while songs like "Amy" and "Damn, Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains)" were just...good songs. I mean, not "just good," so much as just plain good. Not especially relevant to me, but effective nonetheless.

Welcome to Hollywood, Hey Man, Can You Spare a Quarter?

Scattered in bits and pieces across the internet (including on this blog in a few places, like my purchases from Record Store Day this year, my discussion of unusual voices, and as performer of one of my favourite b-sides), my love for Leon Russell is not even close to a secret. Indeed, I've even a noticeable affection for the look he rocked throughout the 70s in particular: salt-and-pepper beard, top hat, and hair to his shoulders.

But I'm actually here to talk about something else in Leon's career, besides his "solo" work that began with 1970's Leon Russell. I do forget on occasion that Leon's come up a bit in the public conscious since Elton John began to emphatically display his love of Leon's work, enough that they released a joint album, The Union, in October, 2010. Still, the parts that jump out to me are often stranger bits, less known bits or more uncommon bits--simply because I was not given a purely singles-based method of hearing the man's work.

It all came from my father's encouragement to listen to Gimme Shelter: The Best of Leon Russell, a two-disc anthology of work only released with the man's work visibly attributed to him. In large part, this meant it covered his solo work. But that anthology is (was--it's out of print) chronologically arranged, by effective recording time, rather than release. That means the set opens with "Hello, Little Friend," from a 1971 album entitled Asylum Choir II, credited to "Leon Russell and Marc Benno." At first glance, it appears to be one of a number of duo albums Leon did (another big one would be One for the Road with Willie Nelson). However, this is actually the sequel to the comparatively obscure Look Inside the Asylum Choir, credited to, well, The Asylum Choir, released in 1968.

Keep on Hoping, Keep on Dreaming, Whilst in the Real World You... -- Carcass

CAVEAT: Metal, especially death metal, and even more especially sub-subgenres like grindcore (or, worse, goregrind) are not everyone's cup of tea. I ask that, dear reader, you willingly submit yourself to some of this and take it as a curiosity or an analysis: it's an emotional and personal writing style I have, it's true, but this is music, despite the claims of some, and there's something in it. I'm not asking you to like it, I'm asking you to listen to it with an open mind, to hear what there is to hear in it--after all, that's my own goal here, and my own approach to music, as best I can manage it. Good luck--this band hit a few different styles, and I urge you to sample each of them as I embed them for the sake of this.  Think of it as an academic exploration in curiosity, if you must.

 ----

 Recently, I was out at a local café and started a peculiar run of people across my path. I was served my slice of cake (I actually don't drink coffee, but cafés have the most interesting dessert foods) by a woman in a Satyricon shirt.

"Samael is an excellent album," I say, by way of hoping to skip ahead to actual discussion.
"What?" she says, as we all do when someone makes a non sequitur comment on our shirts. Well, I do it, as well, at least. "Oh!" she says as she realizes my seemingly random comment actually had a sensible origin. "I'm a little bigger on Dark Medieval Times."
"Oh, old school, then. You must be big on Darkthrone, too."
"Yeah."

And off it went. Later, I was at CD Alley (as usual) and a fellow shopper was searching for earlier Death albums--earlier, that is, than their very last one, Sound of Perseverance, the only one in stock at the time there--and had a brief conversation. Back again a few days later and I was recommending Kylesa too a woman shopping there at the same time I was.

I'm Good, Gone, Down on the Hip -- Jawbox

I've always had an affection for music videos, which has led to the purchase of numerous otherwise-ignored-by-the-public DVDs, and some other oddities. Before I'd really settled into the mode of pursuing b-sides, my purchase of Deftones' B-Sides and Rarities, which naturally compiled its titled objects, was driven by the unmentioned inclusion: all of their music videos on a DVD accompanying those songs. Because I like the band quite a lot (Deftones was one of my few major label modern releases on vinyl for a long time, and still has only a few relatives of that variety, and I was known for my endless listening to White Pony in high school), I did decide to go ahead and listen to the "accompanying" CD (as I saw it, at least).

In the process, I was faced with a good number of remixes, live and acoustic versions, but also a solid number of covers. Deftones were part of what was considered the "nu metal" wave of heavier popular music, but rapidly found the label inappropriate or uncomfortable--and their choices of covers only re-emphasized this. Their performance of the Cure's "If Only Tonight We Could Sleep" from the MTV Icon show for the Cure appears on the disc, surrounded by covers of The Smiths, Cocteau Twins, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Sade. However, the cover I'm bringing all of this up to mention is the one chosen to lead the disc: "Savory."

Of course, that cover is technically just Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno and the band Far, but that's not relevant for where I'm going, which is toward the band from which the song was sourced--Jawbox. When I picked this disc up (near its release seven years ago), even the Cure was only vaguely familiar, Skynyrd through the obvious singles (though not the one covered there--"Simple Man"), and the rest were alien to my ears, though the names rang bells in a way that suggested I ought to know them in the sense of knowing things about music, but I had no clue why, and would easily confuse them with other familiar band names that I had no music to associate with. Jawbox easily fit here, except that I didn't even associate the band's name with a reputation.

"Savory" was probably the standout cover on the album, even if it came from the earlier phase in the Deftones' career, which has remained my least favourite. The song itself, though, is so very unusual that it is at first jarring but rapidly becomes alluring and curious. It starts with a distorted, circling, ringing riff, with a more staccato, muted, and heavier one driving underneath it until an unusual drum beat comes in and the first riff turns to a higher note and circles closer. Chino and Jonah Matranga (I assume) then begin to sing and carry the melody, with harmonized emphases over the near-atonal, repetitive riffing until it spreads apart to single-picked notes that mimic the previous riffs like an echo, but carrying more melody by moving between strings.

Indeed, the instrumentation is all preserved from the original track:

Didn't Know What I Was Looking for, Maybe Just a Blanket or Artifacts -- Whiskeytown's Strangers Almanac

Its been a busy few weeks, so I've been a bit quiet. Tonight's not much of an exception: I'm going to see my favourite band tonight (Coheed and Cambria). I've been dancing around genres of late as always, from sampling Dead Boys and more Sparks to Luna and the solo albums of Fugazi's Joe Lally to my first round with Cocteau Twins. I've spent most of my time fiddling a bit with "alternative country" and "country rock" (the latter courtesy of Gram Parsons's Reprise albums with Emmylou Harris). The most consistent culprit for this is a band that was originally from and heavily recorded in this area: Whiskeytown. Ryan Adams has gone on to endless solo work (usually described with a pithy comment about the sheer volume of it), and I've found myself stuck on a normally maligned album of his (Rock and Roll), but Strangers Almanac has a veritable stranglehold on my listening, be it here at home, in the car, or wandering around playing with my Toshiba tablet.

This isn't the place to get too much into the causes of emotional resonance, but it's worth noting that that element is a strong part of what is pushing it up the listening list so readily and regularly of late, and it means something that it has the resonance, even if the "why" of it isn't immediately relevant here.

Guess Who Just Got Back Today? -- Thin Lizzy

Around high school and college, I had a habit of trying to avoid limiting myself to singles and familiar tracks from any given artist as a means of making sure I didn't unintentionally and unknowingly find myself without some lesser-known but glorious music. It also helped to know where to start with artists who never really had a "Greatest Hits" due to their relative new-ness or because it simply hadn't happened in any reasonably available fashion. Of course, the fact that albums are some of the more commonly discussed in circles surrounding music history encouraged this as well, nevermind the affinity shown by musicians toward making "albums" as a cohesive unit of music starting sometime in the late 1960's, which is the beginning of when I find most music interesting.¹

As a result, I spent a lot of time in those days with complete (though simple) discographies from artists who caught my ear, thinking it would be rather peculiar for anyone to write a number of songs that I liked and only that handful--or, really, even a single song. I suppose the logic ran that if the band or artist was still known and discussed ten, twenty, thirty years on, there must have been enough of value in all their work to maintain a fanbase after their initial charms might have worn off. I've mentioned that XTC pushed me to eventually pursue more complete (sometimes excessively so) discographies, but that came from pushing through album after album, getting scattered first by things like well-regarded EPs from modern artists.

Still, for quite some time, many artists from the 1970s and 1980s in particular were available primarily only via their album-styled works or greatest hits compilations, rarities being not-oft discussed, let alone easily found. Heck, I didn't realize how often bands would even bother with them in the major label, popular-mainstream of things until stumbling into things like The Cars' Just What I Needed anthology, or The Police's Message in a Box set (which actually isn't a box, for the record).

One of the bands I picked up in those days, alongside less traditional (though possibly more loved) artists like Tom Waits--leading, incidentally, to my fascination with his lesser-regarded earlier works--was Thin Lizzy. Of course, most people think of them from that 1976 smash hit (assuming they even know what band was behind it) "The Boys Are Back in Town," and I was not much of an exception. Now, to spare you just a bit, let's drop that song in, to give those unfamiliar a simple hook to start from, via that very song:

But I Don't Need to Argue Anymore -- Sound Team

I often attempt to wrangle others into the concerts I attend² but find myself rarely successful. It could easily be chalked up to the volume of my friends who identify themselves as flakes (who happen to comprise the most music-oriented and local of my friends, albeit only coincidentally), but it helps nothing--nor, I'm sure, does it help readership of a scattershot blog like this--that my tastes are unpredictable, and I look at a wide range of shows when I'm in the mood to attend them. Six years ago in October, though, I casually suggested it to a friend (one of the "flakes," oddly) that she attend a show with me, which she agreed to as it apparently was the thing for her to do that day. We were going to see Sparta (remnant of At the Drive-In, and the show where they did this) and they had a pair of opening acts with them: Lola Ray (touring on the heels of their second album, Liars) and Sound Team, a fellow (to Sparta) Texas band (Austin, not El Paso, though) who had just released their first officially recognizable and available full length, Movie Monster.

Lola Ray appealed to me via their vocals more than anything else, coming from John Balicanta. But Sound Team pulled out this furious, hypnotic drum-heavy song in the middle of their set that was instantly engaging, where the rest (like a lot of live shows where I don't know songs) sort of blurred a bit. That song was called "Shattered Glass":

No, no I don't know why it was coupled to an image of Steve Martin ironing a kitten.

Stand Up, Listen, I'll Show You Where We Went Wrong -- What's Wrong with Music Communities

I was going to write about what I personally think of as a 70's hard rock revival that has been happening off-and-on for the last fifteen years or so, and some bands from this area I love, but I'll have to save it. Halfway through my little bouts of research, background and source-gathering, I found something obnoxious while trying to consolidate opinions on what genre other people consider the aforementioned bands. One band in particular--The Parlor Mob--stood out when I saw the (only) genre listed, and I'm going to give you a sample of two of their songs from their first album which led to this ideology, and I want you to at least sample a bit of each before I get this thing rolling:

"Hard Times"

"Can't Keep No Good Boy Down"

 Wikipedia generally serves as a solid repository for collected multi-genre listings, and this time led me to the notion of "hipster metal" which was eye-rolling enough as an alleged genre (did you listen to those two songs?)--but then it just led to the page on "stoner metal," which was a wildly inappropriate label for the band in question (see above). Trying to find out just what the hell "hipster metal" was led me to a bunch of stupid crap back and forth about "hipster metal" and "real metal," which tended to emphasize my desire to stay away from the youthful elements of the metal scene, or whatever led to this. Apparently, this is to describe Mastodon, Boris, The Sword and various others (possibly Converge?).

I'm Trying to Free Up Them Wings, Trying to Bear Some Teeth -- Doomtree

In case you ignore the titles, I normally leave their origins something you have to look up. However, this time, the lyrics are from a set of those I'm often found quoting, even if just in silly places like Facebook statuses, and I'm going to repeat them:

I'm trying to free up them wings
Trying to bear some teeth
Insignificance ain't no signature I'm trying to leave

Part of the reason for emphasizing them is that they appealed to me on a visceral, happy level--they reference "wings and teeth," the logo seen above for this group of people from the Minneapolis, Minnesota. They're found in the collaborative work "Traveling Dunk Tank," from the False Hopes collected album released in 2007. It's the 12th False Hopes, actually, the name of a series of releases they began when they started, functioning as internal or demo releases, interspersed between "full" or "official" releases. That said, I listened to "Knives on Fire," the second track from False Hopes [XII] (as it's labeled in my digital collection) over and over and over and over and over before the album was released for those of us who ordered it.

Doomtree and I are oddly entwined, albeit from a distance in many senses.

I Ain't Tellin' You a Secret, I Ain't Tellin' You No Lie -- Dinosaur Jr

I often collect music in huge groupings, often managing to catch names and groups that I've seen, read, or had recommended all at once, then find myself having difficulty keeping enough track to explicitly explore any that do not immediately have some effect on me. This is the primary reason I set up a poll on the right side of the page to help me pare down my listening and focus it a bit. It was mostly successful, though the runaway nature of my post about The Church (after both the Church's official Facebook and Steve Kilbey himself--calling it "worth reading" [!]--shared it through Facebook, it has had nearly 500 views, which is about...33x the usual views I have) caught me in an interesting problem, as former leaders, 70's pop-glam-stomp-rockers Slade were suddenly over-taken by alternative guitar-driven power trio Dinosaur Jr. Of course, the Big Star official page had also given me another couple hits, so maybe it was them? I can't be sure, of course, though I only wonder out of curiosity. I'd believe either of them.

Anyway, I'd been learning what I knew of Slade's Slayed? and Nobody's Fools when all this happened and I had to shift gears. Luckily, the alternating leads--in the poll, not guitar leads--meant I'd already been dropping in little tastes of Dinosaur Jr the whole time, but it seemed Slade were in the lead for sure and now I was just all goofed up.

However, as agreed, I'm going to write about the final winner: Dinosaur Jr. The name, like many, passed my eyes many times over the years--mentions as opening act or headliner for whom another band opened, an influence, a love, an example, but never enough to give me even a hint of what they sounded like. When I saw the cover art for the last Dinosaur Jr album, Farm from 2009, as well as lead guitarist and overall lead vocalist J. Mascis, 2011's Several Shades of Why, I got the impression of laidback, pothead, jam band type stuff. Of course, this is likely hysterical to anyone who knows the band or Mascis--at least, parts of it--or may reflect elements of the band or his solo work (or side projects) I'm unfamiliar with and be amusingly accurate, but having heard Dinosaur Jr for myself, well, I was ridiculously incorrect. Mind you, as a young child I confused U2 and REM (for which I was thoroughly admonished and mocked--though I later discovered they were commonly grouped together in some ways, at least in the 80s, even if not commonly confused, and felt a bit vindicated) and have trouble with confusing various indie bands I only know by name, often via strange trains of thought such as: Silversun Pickups -> Silver Apples -> Apples in Stereo, meaning I could conflate all three and be utterly lost.