Prunella Vulgaris's compendium, or: A companion for the ingenious of either sex. The newest experiments in japanning, to imitate the Indian way, plain and in speckles, rockwork, figures, &c. The art of persuming and beautifying. Divers receipts in physick and surgery, with many other useful things. To make enamel of divers colours for gold, silver, or other metals. To which are added, many curiosities, and rare secrets, known to few, but very profitable and pleasant.
Sometimes I wish I could tell other people they're being myopic when they harp on their pet issue and don't see the larger picture of ye olde shite being messed up muchly. But that's a fool's errand, and therefore I get the catharsis out in big riffs and taut punk rage.
echobelly - scream
REM - crush with eyeliner
the verve - so it goes
radiohead - lucky ride - howard hughes
lush - superblast
wire - mannequin
mission of burma- progress stiff little fingers - suspect device the pagans - street where nobody lives
the wipers - D-7
the gits - beauty of the rose the clash - I'm so bored with the USA X- the phone's off the hook (but you're not) soft boys - I wanna destroy you
the ruts - dope for guns the undertones set - you've got my number (why don't you use it), teenage kicks, family entertainment, hypnotised
billy bragg - to have and to have not / help save the youth of america the adverts - no time to be 21
sleater kinney - turn it on discount - sleeping motor boy tomahawk - waratorium torche - in pieces
50 foot wave - long painting nirvana - lounge act fugazi - burning/give me the cure jawbox - lil shaver
god machine - tremolo song
quicksand - how soon is now? screaming trees - witness
I broke my no-shows-before-my-show rule last night, having hooked up a friend and her friend with tickets to see ...And You Will Know Us By The Length of Our Name Trail of the Dead last night. They were one of those bands I dug in college and forgot about with the exception of a few notable songs, and they tend to have pretty swank artwork along with the tunes, and it's one of her favorite bands so it was nice to see her enjoy rocking out muchly. We're Team Early 90's, she jokes, as we meet up and I'm wearing a Soundgarden t-shirt with the Badmotorfinger artwork on it and she's got an old Nine Inch Nails shirt from way back when. Judging from the band t-shirts around us, the smaller crowd seemed to be about our age or so as well. Ume, the opener we did catch, was enjoyable to watch, with a girl guitarist who could have been the kid of Kim Gordon with her stage presence, and Thurston Moore's squalling guitars.
The last time I saw them, they were following up their major-label debut with a record that people didn't buy, and I remember the slamdancing at that show being incredibly fun, though my indie rock compadre at the time hated it and stood in the back with his arms folded as I let myself go in the waves of bodies in front of the stage. The pit was full of other amiable kids straddling the lines between punk and pre-Garden-State alt-rock, and I left feeling awesome and he left being cranky that night, complaining that it was "too heavy" and "too punk." We ended up leaving early because he drove, so I got to hear "How Near How Far" for the first time live this time. I forgot how much noisier and energetic this songs were live, stripped of the production, calling to mind the more incendiary early shows that got them signed.
Sources, Tags, and Codes was the album we were all most familiar with, and the choice cuts from that one that came out, damn, ten years ago, got the greatest response.
By the last song, we'd discovered how to recalibrate our bodies to move like they once did, as the band came out onto the floor with us and we left sweaty and satisfied by a band that almost tasted the bigtime and now is touring and thirsty again.
In the slow boil of dystopian creep, there are no secrets, there have been none for most of my adult life, everything is out there, or easy to find, especially when one has all the power and the analytics at one's disposal. It's creepy and disconcerting and my heart breaks for the wrongfully ensnared and my mind rages against the willful obliviousness because as long as we have the right bones thrown to us, it doesn't matter that we're being robbed as long as someone else we don't like is getting hurt more than we are. I could write so much more, but I've said it so often already, and others say it better, and willful ignorance or justification of the unjustifiable will never be palatable to me. .
And as I continue to say, that is our fundamental problem, our universal common denominator of suck, a lack of compassion, a lack of love for God and fellow human and created beings and the ground we walk on and the air we breathe.
Yet I distract myself, because I can't believe in survivalism either, because I want to love my neighbors and because every era of life has had its dehumanizing factors that need to be overcome, and there is so much beauty here still even in the midst of so much wrong and the best thing to do is not live in fear but continue to live.
I'm having friends over for dinner tonight, I'm figuring out how to fix my side-view mirror and realize I'm bereft of useful tools. While I was taking apart the contraption, I saw there was a goldfinch trapped in the netting of the cherry tree who seemed to have given up on life so I got a pair of scissors and cut him free and felt so uplifted watching it fly away.
A homie from the station gave me some super amazing hot pepper plants and I provided him with cabbage and kale in return. There are flowers on my front porch now and vegetables on the back and I'm trying to figure out how to make my landlady's yard look less ugly in the front without really spending too much money.
I end up at a show last night, because this is my escapism, and there's not too many people there, a couple radio people that I don't know as well, so I get lost in the big riffs alone, amazed that I used to do these kinds of things without earplugs, or maybe it's just gotten louder. Like Randal, I dig the big riffs and the stoner rockery of Columbus dudes Lo-Pan. For those of us who grew up on classic rock and grunge in inner ring suburbs, it's satisfying and solid riffage with big excellent vocals that'd probably be on some modern rock rotation if the band was more photogenic and The Kids weren't all listening to dubstep. That being said, I'm glad they're getting love in the underground, and I enjoyed it enough to pick up a CD with a t-shirt thrown in.
Hipsters might disapprove of the accessibility but I'd go see these guys again and I infinitely preferred them to the next band that reminded me of the hardcore shows I used to go to as a teenager where it was trying to be intense and just ended up being uninteresting. The guys were young, so I guess I could cut them some slack, since it's not my thing at all. If it wasn't so cold and I had some homies with me, I would have loitered outside for most of their set because despite their technical abilities, it didn't do much for me.
Torche on the other hand, loud and sludgy and strangely poppy and exuberant, was a different story, as they were the last time I saw them, unpretentious and unrelenting and constantly having to retune, but damn there's something so satisfying about loud crunchy guitars and dudes who can sing in this world of twee milquetoast indie and metallers trying to out-brootal each other. One dude who decided this would be a great time to start a moshpit, shoved me out of the way and proceeded to pummel everyone within five feet of him before realizing that no one else wanted to mosh at all and just wants to watch the band rock out and I didn't see him for the rest of the night and was backed up by a pair of heshers who stood behind me to get a better view of the band and insulate me from any hooliganery. Thanks guys for being chivalrous, I guess.
They started off with the first four songs off the last full length and a smattering of cuts from the previous records and ended with 'Harmonslaught' which might be one of my favorites.
Drove home listening to a fellow DJ play Black Flag bootlegs, it rained this morning and watered my plants, I need more coffee, and life continues in its strange way.
I had a depressive week, and promptly forgot about homework until right now, and I'm still procrastinating. Me and College Radio Homie went out to the east side to see Floor and Thrones, and while he dug all four bands, I only liked the last two, but I've realized I'm just getting set in my ways and dramatic no-waveness just isn't my thing. Still, the low sludgy end of things was fabulous, the crowd was refreshingly clown-free, and there were others of us up there to hang out with. I still like Torche better but it was a great show.
I realized how out of shape and profoundly unathletic I am at the softball field, having a profound inability to calculate where popups will drop, feeling my bones ache every time my bat made contact with a ball. Is it supposed to hurt like that? I say and our captain just looks at me. But it feels so good to be outside in just a hoodie and comfortable and I take a walk afterwards on the beach, which would have been perfect if there weren't hundreds of dead fish washed up in various stages of decomposition and from there I head to the radio station to provide the masses of Clevelandia with the evening's riffs of stoner/doom/grungy swankness
tom waits - 16 shells from a thirty ought six gutter twins - bete noire heatmiser - disappearing ink
fugazi - nightshop
my bloody valentine - several girls galore
husker du - the girl who lives on heaven hill
buzzcocks - harmony in my head
gray matter - oscar's eye
the police - next to you
echo & the bunnymen - crocodiles
the ruts - something that I said
X - los angeles
bad brains - big takeover
the gits - guilt within your head
mudhoney - I don't remember you
monster magnet - twin earth
queens of the stone age - how to handle a rope
rival schools - holding sand worm ouroboros - failing moon throwing muses - speed and sleep royal thunder - black water vision
cave in - brain candle starflyer 59 - le vainqueur
subrosa - the inheritance dead meadow - green sky green lake'
jawbox - savory dream syndicate - forest for the trees the posies - grant hart
the breeders - flipside/I just wanna get along
the pixies - monkey gone to heaven ride- leave them all behind.
things played last week: swervedriver- a change is gonna come
mudhoney - slipping away/I like it small
sebadoh - can't give up
the melvins - the stupid creep
sonic youth - swimsuit issue/theresa's sound world
starflyer 59 - second space song seaweed - red tape parade 50 foot wave - pneuma jucifer - backslider subrosa - borrowed time borrowed eyes jawbox - ff=66 faith no more - caffeine corrosion of conformity - seven days brmc - red eyes and tears nirvana - blew screaming trees - all I know meat puppets - we don't exist monster magnet - all friends and kingdom come smashing pumpkins - geek usa jane's addiction - oceansize bad brains - I against I torche - harmonslaught kyuss - 50 million year trip REM - crush with eyeliner elder - dead roots stirring doc watson - steel guitar rag (request) throwing muses - surf cowboy
College Radio Homie tells me he doesn't think much of cover songs, and there have been some bad ones, but there's something that I really like about when a band covers something and does it well, or turns it into something that you didn't expect that still works.
I was thinking about this because I was listening to a bunch of Screaming Trees b-sides last night while doing some reading for class. Evidently grunge bands and tales of nuns getting demonically possessed go together in my brain, but anyway, there's certain folks who can take a song and totally make it work, and other times it just feels utterly unnecessary or just plain wrong.
There are those covers where the original is rendered irrelevant or at least not as pleasing to my ears.
The ones that do a complete deconstruction.
Greg Dulli's remarkably good at this kind of thing. Thanks to Prince being a copyright goon, I can't find the stellar rendition the Twilight Singers did of "When Doves Cry," which is totally a first world problem. Still there's some other great ones here.
Longtime readers know I dig pretty much anything Mark Lanegan's ever done except those records with Isobel Campbell. The Christmas EP might be essential holiday listening now. That voice pretty much makes most songs awesome. That being said, I hoped that him and Martina Topley-Bird doing my favorite XX song would have been more awesome than it actually turned out to be. Still, the covers below are pretty swank.
The air of menace in this Leadbelly cover gives it a sense of doom that's not necessarily apparent in the original. I know Cobain gets a lot of props for his version of this on MTV Unplugged, but this 1989 one where he's playing guitar is still my favorite.
Kristin Hersh always gets props:
I'm also partial to the Ramones' version of 'Somebody to Love'
Jawbox was also extremely awesome in the cover song department.
Other Joy Division covers that do it for me:
And the Mighty Melvins
One of my fellow DJs starts his show off with a Sabbath cover or two every week. Sometimes they're awesome, sometimes not so much. I want to track down a physical copy of this one since it's not even on itunes if I wanted it and this copyright chilling effect business makes other routes unconducive.
My sister's having me over for dinner tonight, so I'll get the love of my nephews and hang with the folks and maybe decamp to Algebra or a greasy spoon for some homework time and tea, we'll see. Life is pretty damn good, no need for single awareness days or gross candy or self-indulgent pity. Just big riffs and little babies. I see way too much drama around me to desire anything more than what I've got.
Though I love my misanthropic yearningish tunes. I don't think my inner teenage goth kid will ever grow out of it.
