the gerogerigegege – tokyo anal dynamite

Fun fact: The true musical zenith was reached in 1990 by a cross-dressing homosexual Japanese man and a group of like-minded aural terrorists.

Gerogerigegege, roughly translated as the sound of someone throwing up and defecating at the same time, recorded this blistering live noise rock set in a little over half an hour, totaling over seventy tracks, the longest of which stands at a towering 57 seconds.

It’s hard to tell exactly when songs begin or end, but on occasion you can hear the sound of an angry frontman screaming “ONE TWO THREE FOUR,” doing his best demented Joey Ramone impression.

The sound on this album is hard to describe. There’s a drumset, there’s the aforementioned angry frontman, and what can only be described as an unknown number of guitars playing with insane levels of feedback behind them. The band turns into one overpowering wall of sheer guitar noise, accented with snare shots and cymbal crashes. It’s unclear if the guitarists are actually playing notes, or just hitting the strings to create noise. In any case, it’s brilliant stuff—just sheer chaos, broken up into roughly-thirty second intervals.

The songs come and go at an increasingly frenetic pace. The only indication that there are actual songs being played at all is the fact that the singer actually announces a good portion of the songs, with his incoherent vocals sounding vaguely similar to the track titles. (It might be easier to understand if I spoke Japanese.)

There’s little else to say about this album, other than LISTEN TO IT. LISTEN TO IT NOW. THIS IS THE SOUNDTRACK TO MY LIFE. I WANT TO EAT, SLEEP, BATHE, WORK, STUDY, DRIVE, AND FUCK TO THIS ALBUM. SIMULTANEOUSLY. THIS IS THE SOUND OF SANITY.

kanye west - college dropout

I wonder if my kids will know Kanye West even made music.

Even today, it's a commonly overlooked fact that he used to make brilliant rap albums. It's hard to feel bad for him, since it is his own fault he's a total jackass, but at the same, it's very easy to feel bad for the music.

There isn't a single bad track on College Dropout. Not even a mediocre one. Hell, even the skits fit into the overall theme remarkably well. At times it's stunningly personal, at others it's the same "Hey look at me I rap real good" MC nonsense, and at others it's a borderline gospel album. Singles like "Jesus Walks," "All Falls Down," and "The New Workout Plan" play beautifully against deeper cuts like "Spaceship" and "Two Words," flowing brilliantly from beginning to end. It's a hip-hop album that has a soul, one that manages to make even the most blatant singles undeniably original, a skill Kanye arguably brought back into the mainstream single-handedly.

This is a well rounded artistic statement from an artist now so deeply hated and ridiculed, South Park singled him out for an entire searing episode, christening him a "Gay Fish" in the eyes of a generation who, ironically, he proclaimed himself to be the voice of.

This is the same artist who can't lose a VMA without throwing a temper tantrum, the same artist who "wrote" an inspirational book made up mainly of clichéd sentiments and blank pages. If I played this album for my kids and told them it was by the same guy who interrupted Taylor Swift, they’d just laugh. And how could I blame them?

In this 2009 outlook, the album plays like a tragedy, almost completely opposite of Kanye's original vision.

The album at face value tells the story of a kid growing up in the ghetto, raised by his single mom, selling drugs to get along, fighting his way into college, only to be shunned by the people around him until he finally drops out, begins rapping, and is all of a sudden picked up by Jay-Z, who's now helping him record one of the greatest rap albums of the last decade.

In 2009, however, the album plays like an egotistical, immature rapper obsessed with fame revisiting his past, still making claims that he was shy, poor, and oppressed by the people around him, even though they're the farthest things from the truth. It's an album that simultaneously shows how far he's come, and how far he's fallen.

"A shorty [lookin'] up to the dopeman," rising from poverty to the point of superstardom, only to have it eat him alive, replacing it with a self-proclaimed "Voice of a Generation" who just can't get over how amazing he is.

College Dropout is a triumph and an embarrassment, a brilliant piece of hip-hop history that will follow Kanye to the grave, for better or worse, hopefully one day reminding future generations (and Kanye himself) that there was once a legitimate artist behind the ego.


Edited 6/7/2010

the pains of being pure at heart - the pains of being pure at heart

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's debut LP is perfect.

Too perfect.

The kind of perfect that does nothing original whatsoever, adds nothing to the state of music in general, and should result in the artists responsible having to pay substantial amounts of money to the numerous people they've blatantly plagiarized from.

Upon a second listen, it's simultaneously gorgeous and disgusting. Taken on face value, there's nothing wrong with it at all. In fact, it's pretty much brilliant—shoegazer pop riddled with perfect hooks, beautiful harmonies, all laid over an ever-present dense, ringing guitar feedback, creating a sound that's one part Beach Boys and another part Jesus & Mary Chain. What's not to like?

Everything.

Your average listener can pick every song on this album apart and point out exactly who and what they're ripping off at any given second.

It's borderline criminal.

Actually, scratch that. It is criminal. Somebody get me a lawyer.

The Raveonettes, the Jesus & Mary Chain, the Beach Boys, the Cure—hell, even the Beatles are getting a paycheck out of this. It is their music, after all, just crafted and molded into something semi-new sounding, just enough to fool the less musically educated among us.

Not that this kind of thing doesn't happen all the time, because it absolutely does. That is what rock and roll is made of, after all. The Raveonettes are a perfect example of this, and yet even they are getting robbed of their (un)musical merits.

Criminals robbing criminals robbing criminals, that's what this is. And even if I can't prosecute all the regular old criminals, since they pretty much make up music itself, the least I can do is prosecute these exponential offenders.

Justice must be served. This cannot and will not stand.

In the meantime, I'll be listening to this album. Again and again and again. Because damn it, it's still perfect.


Edited 6/7/2010

james brown - live at the apollo

I’m in the middle of writing last-minute papers on the Politics and Culture of Ireland that happen to be due in two days, but I still had to stop writing them to write down my thoughts on the album I’m currently listening to: James Brown – Live at the Apollo.

This has to be the greatest live album ever made. Maybe Live at Leeds, maybe some Velvets bootlegs, maybe a few Mountain Goats shows, maybe a lone few greats can stand up to this recording, but even that is doubtful. This is nothing short of a recording of a man in complete and total control of his audience, moving them to the point of hysterics with the sound of his voice, sending men, women, and children screaming at the top of their lungs with a single note or a single unseen movement. Even without visual aid, you cannot help find yourself mesmerized right along with them, focused intently on the insane energy rifling through every word, every cry, every sound coming out of his mouth.

It is nothing short of awe-inspiring. There are no modern comparisons to this kind of act. Kiddie groups like the Jonas Brothers have achieved similar levels of insanity with their music, but even that is more a result of corporate dynamics and TV ratings than anything else. This man used his actual ART to control the masses to this incredible degree, something unheard of in this day and time. No other artist could bring an audience deathly silent, only to cause spontaneous screams and cries of ecstasy with a single gasp. This is true magic on record, and absolutely must be heard by anybody with any interest in the unbelievable power of live music.

health - live at the village

I am what you could call a "fan" of concerts. And by "fan," I mean a concert is the one place where I can achieve some form of existential tranquility, the one place where I feel completely at home, the one place where I am perfectly content and want nothing more from my life or any of the other people sharing it with me. Let's just say I like them.

Being a "fan" of this whole writing thing as well, I find myself writing concert reviews in my head as I'm watching bands play, hopefully retaining some of those thoughts long enough to write them down when I get home.

This, however, was a different kind of concert.

I came home that night and didn't even attempt to write out one of my usual bombastic, ridiculous descriptions of how a band of angels had descended from heaven, plugged in their guitars, and blessed my ears with feedback and noise so holy it could only have come from the hands of God himself. Instead, I went to sleep, woke up the next day well past noon, and wrote this concert review on one of my frequented music sites:


"The musical equivalent of finding God. I can't hear anything out of my left ear and I hope I never do ever again."

Granted, that's pretty much the same thing I always say, minus the whole "describing the actual concert" thing, but still. This concert was different, and that little blurb proves it.

---

For those unlucky souls who've yet to experience this little band called Health, I'll attempt to sum up the general experience of seeing them play live.

Health is made up of four members.

Two generic American indie kids both sporting:
- Short, slick haircuts
- Horrifically tight jeans
- V-neck white t-shirts, one of which advertises their Colorado-based electro opening act, Paperplane

One six-foot tall Asian man with:
- Long, straight black hair reaching well past his neck
- Equally as frightening, how-did-he-put-those-on skinny jeans
- A blue t-shirt, reading "Glass Candy" in a hip style and font

One neanderthal-looking man sitting behind a drumset with:
- A ponytail
- ...
- That's all I've got on him

The reason I've gone into such oddly homoerotic detail with the band members is that a live Health performance is all about imagery, more so than any other band I've ever seen. Even the music itself becomes a visual force: as the audience is blasted with wall upon wall of screeching feedback and effects, you cannot help but be hypnotized by the dizzying array of instrumentation onstage, to the point that the music almost becomes an unnecessary distraction from the mesmerizing act that the process of "playing" the instruments quickly becomes.

And when I say "playing," I mean "playing" with every ounce of quotational hyperbole imaginable.

Defining the role each member plays within the band is basically useless. The drummer is the drummer, that much is set in stone, but that's about it. There's the vocalist/guitarist/percussionist/keyboardist, there's the bassist/vocalist/keyboardist, there's the guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist... You get the picture. The stage is littered with guitars and pedals and keyboards and drums and cymbals that anybody at anytime could get up and start playing.

To illustrate just how far this band takes those aspects, take this into consideration: This is a band that uses microphones as instruments. Not as a means of picking up sounds and sending them through speakers, mind you, but as actual vehicles of noise-making.

Seriously.

In what was possibly the most mind-blowing moment of the entire show, the two guitarists and the bassist all fall to their knees in front of their individual arrays of pedals and buttons and flashing lights and begin fervently turning knobs and adjusting effects, while the drummer is sitting in the background making seemingly random noise at will. With a couple quick glances across the stage, the three men all pick up microphones and quickly switch them on.

KRRRAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOAAAAAHHHHHHHH.

One flick of a tiny little plastic switch opens up a blistering death knell of sheer noise, feedback ringing and echoing and racing through a dozen pedals and switches, all putting their own unique spark of insanity into the mayhem that is washing over the audience at absolute full volume.

The noise sends the band into a frenzy. One of them is on his knees screaming into his manufactured chaos device, his own voice getting lost in the careening digital voices around him. Another has his microphone raised in the air, his head buried in the maze of cords in front of him. Another is dancing across the stage, throwing his body wildly into the air, head tilted back, eyes closed, immersed in the incomparable high of aural destruction.

And then it stops. The microphones are switched off with perfect timing, the feedback is silenced, leaving only the chaotic drumming which pales in comparison to the cacophony that has left the band visibly reeling, almost as if they themselves are in shock of what had just happened.

On some invisible cue, the three members drop to their knees and switch on their mics once again.

KOOOOOORRRRRRRAAAAAHHHHHHHEEEEEEYYYYYYOOOOOOOAAAAAAHHHHHHHH.

Another wave of noise hits the audience, this one somehow more punishing than the one before it. All three men have taken to screaming into their instruments, sounds you could just barely pick out among the impossibly dense feedback. The bassist's hair is completely covering his face and arms, and for a brief second it seems that his very soul is crying out through the speakers.

At this point the sound is truly overwhelming. The stage takes on a nightmarish atmosphere, the flashing lights clouded with smoke, the bodies responsible hurling themselves around the stage, completely immersed in the chaos of it all. Even the most confident and seasoned concert vets begin to back away from the stage, their ears overcome by the violent sounds coming not out of the speakers, but the band's monitors. A look backwards brings you face to face with trendy 18-year old girls in neon sunglasses and puffed up 80s hair wrapped in ridiculously flashy headbands, all nearly doubled over from the pain. And yet the band is unscathed.

The noise relents once more, and then continues yet again, louder than ever. My well-worn actually begin to hurt, a sensation I've never felt at a concert before in my life. I find myself leaning over the stage to escape the sounds of the speakers, my head positioned against the band's monitors, inches away from the tangled web of pedals and cords creating these beautiful, terrible sounds. For a brief second I consider reaching over and hitting the one magic button the bassist has been frequenting all night, the button to make this insanity come to a close.

Finally, the band ceases for the last time, moving onto their next sonic experiment, leaving an entire room of people in total awe, yelling in vain into their friends' ears, trying to communicate the level of pure ecstasy and pain they had just been exposed to.

Every man on that stage is completely and utterly lost in the music. From the energy and momentum pouring out of them, you would have never guessed that they had performed this act hundreds of times before, touring endlessly for years, recording two studio albums and a remix album in the process. Any band can push a few buttons and create feedback, but this band fades into the feedback themselves, becoming a part of the music, putting bodies and faces and movements onto what was once before nothing but sound.

This noise in motion, this living feedback, is what packs the Village and hundreds of venues just like it full of people ready and willing to lose a bit of hearing to experience one of the most exhilarating, unforgettable acts on the music scene today. It is a musical occasion that has to be experienced, not read about, not watched on Youtube, not retold by a friend, but felt.

I can truly say I will never be the same after that night. Only partially because my left ear still rings a little when I sleep.

my bloody valentine - loveless

Once upon a time (aka about a month and a half ago), in the middle of a Lester Bangs headrush of ironic bullshit rock writing (RIP you goddamn genius you), I decided to rant about how Isn't Anything was better than Loveless for some goddamn bullshit hipster reason like songwriting, I don't even remember. The point is it was total bullshit.

Loveless is the greatest album of all-time.

This leaves me in quite a predicament. What's more hipster, thinking Loveless is the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity, or thinking Isn't Anything is the better album just because everyone loves Loveless so fucking much? It's quite the hipster conundrum. All I know is, on about my dozenth listen to Loveless, it suddenly hit me what an unbelievably beautiful album it was, and how it was miles ahead any of the other bullshit I listened to, and how "Sometimes" was a more goddamn perfect song than I would ever find the words to describe in my entire life, and how the entire album is nothing but pedals and power chords but it's just so goddamn perfect regardless, there are just no words to describe it.

The first song to hit me was "When You Sleep." It was the "oh" part in the first verse, followed by the "once in a while," a sort of one-two punch that made me realize what a total jackass I had been for never actually listening to this album, even though I had heard it a million times.

Interesting sidenote--I'm willing to bet there are millions, MILLIONS of people just like me who have heard this song a million times and called it their hipster bible and all that bullshit but have never actually listened to the music, never actually listened beyond the initial wall of noise with the mumbled shitty mixed-down lyrics and improbable guitar effects and indifferent extra instruments. That makes me sad.

That song actually made me cry, when every other time I had heard it, it was just another sub-par filler track until "Come In Alone," which is still a fucking fantastic song but isn't even close to being the best song on Loveless, let alone one of my favorite songs of all-time.

What lead me to the whole "favorite album of all-time" business when it used to be my second favorite My Bloody Valentine album is the fact that this is the only album I can listen to all the way through and enjoy every fucking second of it. Other albums come close--OK Computer, Songs About Fucking, In an Aeroplane Over the Sea (yes I'm fucking serious), the Downward Spiral, 69 Love Songs, Bee Thousand, etc., etc.--for all of them, no matter how amazing they are, I reach a point where I have to force myself to finish the album. With Loveless, once I start it, I finish it every fucking time.

So I don't know where I'm going with this. I suppose I'm trying to say that I'm a fucktard for saying Isn't Anything is the better album, and anybody who makes a similar claim is just as stupid as me. (Incidentally, I don't support the use of the word fucktard at any time, in any situation.) Listening to "Sometimes," it makes me think that life is worth living after all, and that I should just open up to the fucking world, letting the dissonance between chords fuel my daily existence, stirring the pots that need to be stirred, saying the things that need to be said, reaching out and telling D E R L R and C all the things I want to tell them, all the things I can't tell them as much as I want to, all the things this song tells me I just need to fucking let out.

I know this is just a bunch of rambling bullshit. But compare this to the rambling bullshit I came up with listening to Isn't Anything, and YOU tell me which is the better album.

have a nice life - deathconsciousness

There are countless beautiful moments on this album. The one that brought me to tears was not one of them.

The song is called "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000." About three minutes in, my eyes welled up with tears, and my body took that terrific depressive downturn that reminds me so much of old times. And then just like that it was over. And once I came back to my senses, I realized the song I was listening to wasn't in the slightest bit emotional or powerful or beautiful or anything. Nice guitars layered over a basic synth beat. A fucking synth beat. And I almost cried to it.

I guess I should note now that I like this album, but I have no idea where to begin describing it. The last.fm page calls it "shoegaze/industrial/new wave," and that was probably written by someone who's listened to the entire album at least once--a feat I have yet to accomplish. I had heard good things and I wasn't disappointed. But I'm turning it off two tracks before the end, 'cause I've got bigger things on my mind tonight. Like whatever the fuck just happened with that stupid song.

I used to get like that all the time, way back yonder, ya know, all that crap I blathered on about end over end on this little pathetic document here, but now that's an extreme rarity. The last time I cried was the result of weeks of emotional turmoil all boiling over into one big drunken awful confrontation that most any person would have succumbed to. It was fucking awful. So why tonight?

Oh yeah, I'm 20. That's an easy answer/excuse, but it's a wrong one. I have been thinking it over somewhat tonight, so I might as well follow through with it, right? Sure. Why the fuck not.

It occurred to me that a 20 year-old can't get away with the kind of shit a 19 year-old can get away with. That big two up there means that you gotta grow the fuck up. To a point, of course. It made me think that all the little cutesy relationship shit I've pulled over the years is juvenile as fuck (Listen to me, what a prick) and at some point it's just old and you gotta just stop (Seriously are you reading this? I'm writing it and I can't believe it. Here's the real deal here. I shouldn't feel sorry for anything. None of it. I'm acting completely fucking rationally. It's the rest of you that need to get your heads out of your asses and grow the fuck up, because guess what--I'm fucking 20, and frankly I don't need any of your bullshit. None of it. Grow up and move on. Because it's killing me, and it shouldn't be, because we're all mature fucking people and this is something that we can handle as such mature people. So FUCKING STOP. It's not cute, it's sick, it's disturbing, and it's starting to scare me. Normal people do not act like this.) going over the same tired, time-tested-and-proven-false paths.

So here's to growing up. Or not. Depends on who you ask.

Edit from Sept. 3, 2010: Lol.

my bloody valentine - isn't anything

With the release of Loveless in 1991, the fate of Isn't Anything as the second-best MBV album was seemingly sealed. On the surface, Loveless is clearly the superior album--the lush drone effects and otherworldly guitar sounds that drench the album make it unlike any record before or after it, and combined with the myths of year-long studio sessions that bankrupted their record company to back it up, it has gone down in the indie history books as a masterpiece. As it should have. It's a brilliant album.

In recent years, as a result of the subcultural phenomenon known as hipster irony, it's become commonplace to rate Isn't Anything above Loveless, simply because it's the uncool thing to do, which makes it really cool. In reality, however, Isn't Anything really is the better album. (I am slowly coming around to the fact that I'm a massive hipster, so you can take that claim with an admittedly deserved massive grain of salt.)

Both albums are the crowning achievements of the shoegaze genre, which they all but created. Both albums took feedback and combined it with standard pop songwriting in a way it had never been done before. Both albums are absolutely required listening, regardless of the reigning opinions of either.

Isn't Anything simply has something Loveless lacks: SONGS. Somewhere along the tedious, chaotic production line of Loveless, the songs themselves became lost in tides of feedback and fuzz and the tangled webs of pedals and knobs that create the racket that engulfs the entire record. The songs became tracks, objects to be worked on and layered and fine-tuned to death. And it's pretty and it's impressive and frankly I love listening to it, but Isn't Anything achieves a similar effect which much, much much less effort.

Where Loveless is fuzz, Isn't Anything is noise, plain and simple. The ratcheted off-tune guitar playing and sweeping guitar textures compliment the songs, not bury them. The vocals aren't buried under mountains of ethereal fuzz, the structures aren't reduced mere vehicles for the sonic onslaught, and by god, there's NOISE. There's a girl singing and the guitar is creating a wonderful dissonant moan and it sounds like SHIT. Glorious, glorious, SHIT.

That's what feedback was meant to be, wasn't it? Just a means of pissing off the folks and filtering out the people who just didn't get it. Then Loveless came around, and suddenly that same deafening, soul-destroying, virginity-stealing squall became pretty. PRETTY. PLEASANT even. Well fuck that. Isn't Anything takes the same radical concept of Loveless, making pop songs based on feedback, and keeps true to its roots. "Lose My Breath" is a gorgeous song, absolutely breathtaking, but at it's core, it sounds like shit. That right there is Kevin Shields' vision, not that other shit.

I know what you're thinking: Loveless sounds like shit too, asshole, so shut your hipster mouth. Well you little prick, it's not the same and you know it. It's overblown, it's overdone, it's GOOD, and I can't fucking stand it. It's a betrayal of everything I know to be true in music. It can't hurt and feel good at the same time--it's supposed to feel good BECAUSE it hurts. The first ten seconds of "I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)" will empty a room full of normal people listening to normal music, because the guitars are out of whack and it just doesn't sound good, which is the POINT. The chorus kicks in and sounds phenomenal and almost ruins it for me, almost, but there's still that whiny feedback in the back shooting off sparks and burning anyone with normal ears who still dares to come close. IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE BAD, DAMN IT. STOP RUINING IT FOR THE REST OF US BY MAKING IT GOOD.

m ward - post-war

This is my first real encounter with M Ward, excepting a few stray shuffle encounters and his stint with the overhyped folk duo She & Him, who I had the pleasure of seeing live. (They immediately preceded Lil Wayne, and were practically booed offstage when they announced their last song.) This album is chock-full of proto-typical sunny California indie-pop, brought to life by M Ward's aching, bluesy voice eking out tales of longing that seem to float effortlessly out of him. The album flow just as easily, each song tied together by Ward's brilliantly layered acoustic workings as subtle percussion and vocal effects seep through the background. The result is music that is remarkably easy to listen to, yet never seems to sink into the banal regions of Jack Johnson-type bland beachy shit.

Ward's songwriting abilities cannot be understated. The album moves swiftly between styles, from the traditional folky lows of "Eyes on the Prize," to the instantly catchy pop tune "Magic Trick" (made famous by She & Him several years later), directly to the upbeat instrumental track "Neptune's Net," each song hitting it's intended emotional note and fading instantly to the next. Yet for all the variation he achieves on a track-to-track basis, Post-War as a whole is as fluid an album as you'll ever find, a well-rounded, well-crafted statement without a single wasted moment. It's a simple concept album: the War in question is a relationship, and this is his struggle at the end of it--as far as I can tell. In any case, it's a unified piece of indie deliciousness, music made for a lazy Summer afternoon, giving you just enough to make you think and feel but not enough to take you down off that cerebral 78-and-sunny high.

Or shit, you can strap this puppy in for a Summer thunderstorm at sundown, hang on to every tortured word that comes out of M Ward's mouth, think about lovers past and nonexistent, and cry your eyes out as the warm, indifferent rain falls around you. It'll work both ways.