What's the Point of Holding on to What Never Gets Used? (Or: Why Negative Reviewing Does Not Belong Here)

While I am unsurprised that my least acknowledged post continues to be my confused and rambling "mission statement" (I mean, it has no pictures or music!), there's something to the whole idea. If I had to stop the rambling and confusion and take it to a single sentence: I want to talk about the good, the peculiar and the interesting in music.

I thought of this as I was listening to limbo band (somewhere between independent and 'mainstream,' and with derision and praise arriving from either end) the Whigs. I was attempting to decipher a word here or there in the song "So Lonely,"¹ and I couldn't actually find the lyrics posted anywhere, which is relatively unusual for a band on ATO Records (a division of RCA) and all. They've released two albums, no less, both even distributed on vinyl (indeed, because it was a ridiculously good deal for including the actual CD, I have the vinyl of Mission Control), meaning there's some force behind them.

What I did find were a bunch of dismissive reviews, quoting the lyrics I was attempting to filter by as means to decry the band as "cliché-ridden" or derivative (though I did also find a brief entry on one blog from someone who stumbled into the song after liking their first album and losing track). The two foremost reviews--which quote the chorus of "So Lonely"--are from PopMatters and SputnikMusic, sites I've run across in the past, though I admit that I really don't read reviews too much, unless I'm feeling anxious about a new album from a band I already like.

Now, just to give us a frame of reference before I launch into the whole point of this entry, here's that song and its accompanying video:

That Make a Small Portion of the World Cry -- B-Sides

There are, I don't know four or five major types of bonus tracks included on reissues and special versions of albums: studio out-takes and "alternate" versions, live tracks, b-sides, BBC sessions (which are occasionally live), and non-album singles. Similarly, there are about four major types of compilation: the best of or greatest hits, which typically collects singles with an occasional popular deep cut;the live album, which may contain a concert or two, or tracks excised from a variety of performances, either on a single tour or throughout a band's career; rarities albums that contain a mix of the "bonus tracks" I've just listed, and occasionally focusing exclusively or almost exclusively on one of them like b-sides or BBC sessions; and "comprehensive" (sometimes!) anthologies of a band's entire career that typically contain all of the above, though they're sometimes just pretentiously named "best of" compilations.

Now, there's debate, concern, wariness, and about every negative (and probably every positive) attitude you can think of when it comes to these "extra" or "bonus" tracks. Some people are annoyed when they interrupt the repeat flow of an album, when playing it numerous times in succession on a CD player or the like. Others think it's a cheap gimmick to gouge people for money. Some people just find them extraneous junk and trim them away in digital form or just eject the CD when the album proper ends. Some artists or labels acknowledge this and program in an extra bit of silence to separate the album from its errata, often using the "negative space" that CD technology allows (I'll talk more about this some other time, as it's actually quite interesting), or doing like Rhino did with their 2008 Replacements reissues, and sticking in an audio cue, which, in that case, was the sound of someone walking to a door and locking up to leave (which I appreciated at the end of "Here Comes a Regular," but was disheartening to find on every other album, including the far more raucous Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash or Stink, where it was less appropriate to the song it followed). They're a mixed bag in "anthologies" and the like, too, being seen in the same light as "valueless filler" to some, and the entire point to others.

Me? I love them.

Indeed, for whatever it says about me, there's little I love more than dissecting these extra tracks--or, better yet, whole compilations of them!--and discovering where they came from, the context they originally appeared in, and how they were originally presented, if at all. My digital music database is filled to the brim with excessive information, like replacing an album title with the name and location of a studio for "unreleased" tracks, which I arrange by their recording dates. It's interesting to find a studio appear in common between seemingly disparate artists, or to find a studio that has seen a huge chunk of a genre come through it. Trident Studios in London, for instance, saw Harry Nilsson recording for Son of Schmilsson, David Bowie recording for many of his earlier albums--and the Buzzcocks, recording demos shortly after Howard DeVoto left to form Magazine.

But let's pare me down here, and for now, let's talk about my favourite of these options: The B-Side.

What Do You Call That Noise That You Put On? -- XTC and Obsession

This is pop?

Right now I'm listening to the Replacements and dipping into some early 90s hits for my own entertainment. I've been listening to Paul Westerberg's (of the Replacements) solo material for a lot of the day, spent last night listening to Ryan Adams and the rest of today listening to early Bee Gees, Dinosaur Jr, Meat Puppets, and Badfinger.

Despite all that, though, I went out to Charlotte's Manifest Discs and Tapes, which I last visited about eight years ago, yesterday, and though I walked out with some of the Ryan Adams and Meat Puppets I just mentioned (as well as some long-desired Thin Lizzy and Church reissues), the find of the night was an object that's been in my peripheral vision for a while, then suddenly went out of print. I'd seen a copy at my old friends CD Alley but it had even left there--and they often have box sets that just hang out until they go out of print and one of us stumbles in and goes, "Hey, waitasec..."

Somehow, this thing was sitting there with that TWEC-style sticker¹ denoting their online usage of TWEC's SecondSpin.com (not worth linking to, I'm afraid) and consigning many of their prices to absolute weirdness (see: unusually long footnote). Sometimes a great deal, sometimes a horrendous one not worth touching. Indeed, this particular item is out of print, as I noted, so that makes the price a huge gamble. The list price, when in print, was around $60, and that's become the starting used price for most of the year. This one, though, was marked $37.99. So, screw anything else I was going to find--this was coming home with me.

So, what was "this"? Well, here, of course, is a picture:

Now It's...Parking Lots. -- Pere Ubu in Their Pop Phase

I've let this blog sit for various reasons, partly as a result of moving and shaking back in the real world, partly to try and get myself situated for a few discussions that are more in line with the underlying motivation, which is to talk about current and recent musical explorations more than older ones I want to bring to the light, as I've been doing recently. There are some flaws with that plan, mostly stemming from the fact that I'm generally headed in one direction musically of late. I don't think even many people I know, let alone a ton of people in general, are looking to read about this or that post-punk band or strange, unique 80s alternative band of even other stripes. At the same time, I'm treading familiar ground for many people, which can be a nice confirmation boost for some (including myself when I read similar things), but isn't news and becomes disposable.

I don't know who you know, or who he knows, or she knows, or they know, and sometimes I don't even know who my best friends or family know. I've had nothing but bemused pleasure at sitting my father down for bands he'd discarded in the avalanche of music in the 70s in particular and was surprised to find himself appreciating more. But that's an unusual instance, and most people I know either don't pay attention to music or already know all the underground-popular bands I do.

Today I'm going to talk about one that I'm not sure of anyone's familiarity with, beyond one friend. Brian and I shift bands back and forth, and he will nudge me toward the odd one established in the last two decades, and I will nudge him usually with the force of more years of musical exposure from the father and friends I've had. Of late, there's been a willing trade of post punk and alternative bands, where I hit some first and he hits a lot of others first. His willingness to dive in to digital formats makes his access to them a lot more rapid, so he got through The Cure far faster than I did, for instance, but my bull-headed insistence on "getting" a band I cross my fingers and literally buy into, physically, and get chunks of side-story on via both text and "bonus" tracks gives me a different point of view on them.

Or, sometimes, we just attack a band from different periods in their career. To sort of amusingly illustrate the band I'm going to talk about, here is David Thomas, vocalist for Pere Ubu, answering the bizarre question, "Do you think you've improved with age?" by comparing his band to...a cup.
 

But I Don't Really Need It If I'm a Big Star

Most of the bands I write about, they have not only got followings, they have presence, be it hits or a reputation. Once in a great while, I stumble into an artist purely by chance, whether the name just sounds interesting, I like the cover art, or the extremely rare instances of compilation and split appearances. Most of the time, though, I hear the opinion of someone I find interesting, hear a band name over and over in awed tones, via label or artist association, or any number of entangled methods that are thoroughly indirect and require existing experience.

To be honest, most of the ones I find on my own, for all that I love them, are not bands I will zealously advocate to others. I had a subscription to eMusic once upon a time--back when they were a "fee per month, unlimited downloads" service, and I started going through their artists alphabetically as they seemed interesting. This is actually how I know the band !!!, and have done since their self-titled first album¹ but some of the others are a lot more obscure and remain as such, like Atomic Bitchwax, Aspera Ad Astra (who later changed their name to Aspera, and were obscure enough that I added their bassist to my AIM buddy list and spoke to him on there, and he was appreciative, not creeped out), and 2 Lone Swordsmen--though they have appeared in a few independent electronic discussions and such.

To find some great band, some secret, hidden one that people just don't talk about, at least around me, would be something of an achievement. It's not impossible, but having had my father's collection of 8,000 records growing up, as well as his love of music and tendency to pull a "Now, who's this?" on the whole family when a song came on the radio, I had a lot of things covered. Still do--he was just visiting for a Lyle Lovett/John Hiatt concert, and pointed me repeatedly toward mostly classic country artists, as well as attempting to expand my existing awareness of people like John Mayall (from whom I'd only heard the Bluesbreakers/With Eric Clapton album).

If that weren't enough, my best friend in high school and college was into punk when I met him, taught me a lot about it and grunge to an extent, plowed on into post punk later, and then got exposed to some classic stuff he'd never heard via being around me, but far more indirectly. And he tended to absorb and expand at a ridiculous rate. I still remember being around when he was first hearing early Kinks ("All Day and All of the Night" and "You Really Got Me" in particular), who I'd started to find boring and repetitive as compared to their later work.

Stumbling into my friend and ex-manager Gerald and various other people I've known has only made it that much more impossible to stumble on the truly hidden gems. Sometimes, too, I ignore a thrown off reference. Or the name sits and simmers, and then clicks much later.

So, it was pure chance that, one day, I was rooting through a box of newly-arrived CDs at my store--back when I worked for Borders--and saw this:

No Matter What People Say, I Never Loved Eva Braun -- The Boomtown Rats

While I was not old enough to be thoroughly aware for the entirety of the 80s (indeed, I wasn't even alive for about half of them), I have a pretty distinct affection for bands from the 80s, and a predilection for many of those scorned and discarded as one-hit wonders, known only for one hit (if that) or otherwise "lame" and catchy, thus becoming "pop" which is now often a bad word.¹ This isn't to say that it's a consistent opinion, nor that I do this with all bands thought of as such. I mean, it isn't as if I've got even Reach for the Beach, let alone the entire Fixx discography, for all that I indeed love "One Thing Leads to Another"--though I did recall the album, artist and song title without a pause, so there's still something there.

In any case, my love for INXS, Oingo Boingo, XTC and Robert Palmer are uncomfortably well-known amongst people who like me, though it often becomes known rapidly that these artists have a lot more to them--true of most bands or performers given a large enough oeuvre, though. Still, it gets more complicated with the band I want to talk about right now: The Boomtown Rats. That name isn't one people hear too terribly often, and if they do, it's likely in the context of "I Don't Like Mondays," and is immediately followed by a reference to loud-mouthed frontman Bob Geldof and, more specifically, his involvement in Band-Aid and Live-Aid.

Me? I had no idea there was a connection, except somewhere in the back of my mind. Like many artists I started listening to in high school and college, an interesting song or three led me to obsessively tracking down everything I could find. As it happens, "I Don't Like Mondays" is both indicative and not representative of the band, though it comes three albums in in 1979, on The Fine Art of Surfacing. But alongside it are similarly acerbic descriptions of morbid topics like "Diamond Smiles."

It's Thunder and It's Lightning, And Where Are Your Manners? -- The Sound of (Modern) Young(ish) Scotland

For some reason--likely boiled down to the single word "Mogwai"--Scotland has managed to become an important source of music for me. There was nothing calculated or deliberate about it, as Mogwai simply drew me in with the 4 Satin EP, of all things, and particularly "Superheroes of BMX." I had legal access to most of their catalogue and ate through it quickly, following it to either end--the oldest and the newest, until eventually they were one of my ridiculously, excessively, obsessively collected bands. No, I didn't start looking for an original copy of "Tuner"/"Lower," but I did (digitally) track down everything I could. I was most excited about getting a copy of the expanded version of the creatively titled EP, now titled EP+6, as it included all of the original EP and two of their other extended plays, though ones with more thought-out titles, being 4 Satin and No Education=No Future (Fuck the Curfew).¹ The latter contains what I feel was their personal apex: "Xmas Steps."

Mogwai are probably best known for their early approach to dynamics, known colloquially as "loud-quiet-loud." They come from a group of bands collectively termed "post-rock" for their tendency toward unusual usage of rock instrumentation, not necessarily avoiding pop-style song structures, but playing the characteristic rock trio of instruments--guitar, bass, drums--in unusual ways, generally with a greater wash or wave of sound than even the riffs of harder rock. Often in almost orchestral or mood-oriented or anthemic, soundtrack-style fashion.² It also has a tendency to avoid prominent vocals--often lacking them entirely, or working through vocoders and samples. A slew of bands arose in the late '90s and early '00s under the auspice of "post rock," from Godspeed You Black Emperor! (later Godspeed You! Black Emperor--no, I'm not kidding) to Cerberus Shoal to Sigur Rós to the thousand splinter GYBE groups in Montreal (A Silver Mt. Zion, Do Make Say Think, et al.) on to Explosions in the Sky and many, many others. Mogwai come more from the "Slint" school of "post-rock," which tends toward the louder elements, the noise, the, somewhat ironically, "rock" elements.

I've Got a Preacher's Mouth and Rock 'n' Roll Heart -- Okay, Mostly Rock and Roll, If We're Honest: The Murder City Devils

The principle purpose--so far as I can guess--of compilations and split releases is often lost on me. I avoid compilations as a general rule, as I find them difficult to follow, or so unrepresentative that they might lose me on an interesting artist by sampling too little and too wrong a part of their entire repertoire. Most splits, at least those I know of are singles with a song per band, one on each side of a 45 7" record. Sometimes, too, they are gimmicky ideas or peculiar thoughts, which are most interesting with bands already familiar to listeners. Mudhoney and Sonic Youth each played the other band's song on the "Touch Me, I'm Sick/Halloween" split. Braid covered the Naked Eyes' hit version of the Bacharach/David song "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me" and Burning Airlines backed it with Echo & the Bunnymen's "Back of Love," so there was even disparity in use of existing songs as hooks. At the Drive-In did one in-character track and one peculiar pseudo-dub track, which fits their experience and tastes but not the band in general, when they did a split with Sunshine--so on and so forth.

So, I often excise the side by the band I'm already interested and let the other pass, in the interest of not writing them off over a weird experimental track. It's not always the case, as I'll go with it given the entire split for some reason, via legitimate MP3 or CD release (as I did when acquiring the Burning Airlines/Braid split). Once upon a time, I ended up with the MP3s for the split that leads me to today's entry:

That is the ultra-limited blue issue, though the less limited gold pressing out there. Interestingly, it violates the same "rules" I approach most splits with: they are both remixes by The Latch Brothers. At the Drive-In I knew and loved, which was the reason for snagging the tracks in the first place. Each is represented on the clear sleeve packaging: At the Drive-In's Vaya EP had that angled boombox on an orange field for its cover, and the skull and crossbones image was the Murder City Devils' emblem for a time. The Latch Brothers remixed ATDI's "Rascuache" (from Vaya, the apex of the band, for me), and MCD's "Press Gang." That track comes from the Murder City Devils' third long-player, In Name and Blood, and it's a doozy, even when tweaked by outsiders.

[I'm Not Foolish Enough to Post My Amateurish Translations] -- Japanese Bands, Especially That Super Funky One: Bazra

DISCLAIMER: I apologize to anyone who does not have MS Mincho (or equivalent) installed or enabled for display in their browser or operating system. I dislike romanizing without giving the original, so, while I will quickly gravitate toward it, most names will be established in their original language first.

With a taste for music like mine, the title of this post is pretty well guaranteed to reflect one of the handful of Japanese bands I like. Dealing with エレファントカシマシ (The Elephant Kashimashi, sometimes "Elekashi") is still a bit too daunting for where I am, and a bit too important to me to reduce too far. I like other bands with non-English-speaking origins, but plenty are instrumental, and others are languages either Romantic or readily translated into English, even if with sparing accuracy.

Translated Asian languages seem to suffer some of the most problems, for various linguistic reasons that I have only the mildest of familiarity with. Obviously this means I don't share my family's relative necessity for linguistic touches in vocals, though I can appreciate them. But I don't understand the lyrics of 宮本 浩次 (Miyamoto Hiroji) at all. In my college days, I took a fair bit of Japanese, but my lackadaisical approach to all things in structured education hindered my understanding severely, and even translating one song ("Call and Response"¹) was an arduous effort, which involved listening, transcribing and then comparing and refining where the phonemes could not be properly separated into words or tweaked into the right words. Then, beyond that, actual translation was an enormous headache, as my brain cannot decide whether to go with poetic license or extreme faithfulness. The end result looks like someone attempting to write something pretentious, but failing because they are writing in English and it's their third or fourth language and they've yet to master it.

Bazra is no different, in terms of my lyrical understanding. Bazra as a band, however, is very different. It's going to be difficult to impress the divergence from a more "classic" sound like Elekashi, rather than just attempting to establish the sound in the first place. It would be great if I could begin at the point that explains both my awareness of and my affection for Bazra, that being "星の降るような夜に," ("Hoshi No Furu You Na Yoru Ni") an Elekashi song from their 1994 album 東京の空 (Tokyo No Sora, which I can comfortably explain is "The Skies of Tokyo," though still rough as a translation), their 1994 album that marked the end of an era. But we'll talk about that some other time. To give a rough estimate, here is Elekashi in 2008 performing "Hoshi No Furu You Na Yoru Ni":

And Now a Big Surprise: We Can Thrive and Stay Alive

About two years ago, I went out to see some friends that I only ever see once a year. Occasionally, we'd exchange gifts, partly because two of them had birthdays right around that time, partly because it was the only time we saw each other. That year, though, my friend Yannick handed me one and said he was looking through my ridiculously extensive Amazon Wishlist¹ and said he could not believe that I did not have the albums he was handing me.

Of course, one of them I did (kind of) already have, that being Death's Symbolic, which was the album recommended to me by the friend who was the most help in expanding my knowledge of metal (introducing me to At the Gates, Opeth, In Flames, Dark Tranquility, Emperor, Mayhem, Cancer, Cathedral, Cynic...that list would take a while to finish, so let's stop there) out of Death's entire catalogue. It's an excellent album, but, as I say, I did already kind of have it--I had the original CD issue, and this was the reissue that included 4-track and 8-track demos Chuck Schuldiner had recorded prior to the album's actual recording sessions.

So that was not any kind of revelation. What came alongside it, though, was Bad Brains' I Against I. My knowledge of Bad Brains came from my best friend in high school and college, Jogn, who knew or knew of a slew of punk bands, as far as I could tell as a relative--almost absolute, to be honest--neophyte. Now, as a result, I knew Bad Brains as a hardcore band. That strain of music that followed on the heels of punk and sped things up to a blur of sound and a wave of aggression in most cases. Some punk bands recorded limited hardcore releases, like the Dead Kennedys' In God We Trust, Inc. EP² or The Misfits' Earth AD, both of which are ridiculously short, as hardcore songs had (and have) a tendency to be very short.

Indeed, Bad Brains, the self-titled debut of the band of Rastafarian punks responsible for I Against I blasts through 15 songs in about 34 minutes, almost half of them clocking in at less than a minute and a half. I have that release on vinyl (though, originally, it only appeared on cassette), but, at the time I received I Against I, all I knew was The Omega Sessions, equivalent to a lot of the cheap-o artist compilations that can be found in bargain bins around the United States for relative chump change, though the prices for "real" (older) albums are rapidly approaching the same. Well, that's not exactly fair: the EP is titled this because it's a set of recordings made at Omega Recording Studios in Kensington, MD, rather than a bunch of random junk live tracks that the "Extended Versions" series throws out without telling people. But demos and live tracks in general are perceived very differently when we're talking about Bad Brains and not Kansas.

Interestingly, The Omega Sessions does include a very early version of the title track "I Against I," but, though it is structurally similar, it is a lot muddier, being a cheap demo recording, and it's played a bit more loose, lending itself more toward the songs on Bad Brains. Of course, these recordings also include the reggae leanings of Bad Brains, with songs like "Stay Close to Me" and the pseudo-dub of "I Luv I Jah."

To give you an idea, if you don't know, what both hardcore and early 'Brains sounds like, here's "Attitude" from their self-titled debut.