pain jerk - recycled music

I may be the most immature person I know.

I graduated from college in May, degree in-hand, wandered out into the real world, and it's really a wonder that I'm still alive.

I had to write a couple checks today to pay for a doctor's visit, and I had to Google "how to write a check," because I had been using a debit card since I was fifteen. I honestly had no fucking idea how to do it. And even with the Googled instructions in front of me, I still fucked up one of the checks and had to redo it.

The whole college education thing I paid thousands of dollars for (or eventually will, I guess) doesn't seem to have done a goddamn thing for me. I can write, I can hold a logical conversation, I can rattle off stupid meaningless facts that I picked up somewhere along the way, but I'm completely incapable of existing in society as I am today.

All of my college friends are living at home. All of them. We're all too broke to even begin thinking about moving out. Most of us have jobs. Some of us are going to grad school.

The difference between me and them, though, is that if push-came-to-shove and they had to move out and make a quick living and survive, they could do it. But I really don't think I could.

Sometimes I think I have agoraphobia. It'd be nice, really--having an excuse not to leave the house, ever. But really I just think I'm a fucking moron, and having to be around people day-in and day-out reminds of that, constantly. So really I'm not scared of people, I'm just scared of having my own insecurities and weaknesses reflected back on me by everyone I come into contact with.

My days now are just a series of fuck-ups, hesitant conversations, and awkward eye contact. I feel stupid every day of my life. I feel completely incapable of normal human communication, yet that's what I'm paid to do, eight hours a day, five days a week. At a college, no less.

I'm twenty-two, not that much older than the students I interact with--hell, some of them are my age, if not older--but I still feel that same incredible, numbing disconnect with everyone I talk to. As a result, I feel way fucking older than twenty-two. It feels like life is passing me by double-time. I'm wasting away in my khakis and dress shirt and completely phony attitude and appearance, because...well, I don't know.

I need money, I guess. To pay off my loans, which I used to get this college degree I clearly utilize so well. And to pay off my credit card, which I used in the precious few months of freedom after college that would've been totally awesome and amazing if I hadn't been hilariously depressed the entire time. And to pay for music, which is really the only thing keeping me going at this point. (Also beer.)

My dad says I'm buying music now because I'm growing up. Which is clearly bullshit. I'm buying music because I have money.

As much as I never would've admitted it, I've always felt guilty downloading music. Especially when it came to the lesser-known, independent label, dudes recording in their basements kind of music. Which I love. You can spin it anyway you wanted to (and god knows I did), but I was enjoying their art without giving anything back to the artist. And there's just no way to sit right with that.

I've probably bought more music in the last few weeks than I have in my entire life. I got a nice package from Parasol in the mail today (The Extra Lens, Black Dice, The Hentchmen, Brick Layer Cake), and it was such an incredibly satisfying feeling unwrapping that needlessly taped up box of music. Not just the feeling of getting something in the mail (admittedly an excellent feeling), but the fact that I was enjoying music as something other than a Mediafire download or a soulless Mp3. My asshole music friends here on the Internet will tell me that you can't even hold music, but goddammit, I held five different CDs today, and I was holding music. (I also got a Lake of Dracula compilation.)

I hate to be that cliché twenty-something rambling on about the glory of vinyl, but standing in a record store in a basement in Frederick, flipping through racks upon racks of albums, stumbling upon gems like Two Nuns and a Pack Mule, Freedom of Choice, or a copy of Sticky Fingers with the zipper still intact... I honestly can't remember the last time I was that happy. And there's not way to explain it or justify it, because it's fucking stupid, and I know it. It's a dead medium. It sounds like shit. It degrades over time. It's a pointless fetish item coinciding with a larger, mindless societal grasp toward a nostalgia I never even owned to begin with, and it's insane. But I don't really give a fuck.

People ask me that whole "what would you do if you had a million dollars" question, and my honest answer (after sleeping for like a week straight undisturbed) is that I would get a van, drive around the country looking for record stores, and build a record collection. Then I would get a room with a swanky stereo setup (not too swanky--my ears are too dead to really appreciate the good stuff), and just listen to music, all the time. Again, it's stupid, but it's real, it's my own, and it's fucking something, which is more than I have right now.

And right now... Right now all I want is to have my ears smashed in by two walls of flowing static. Just to cleanse and burn it all away for a few minutes, numbing me down and closing everything else out, giving myself a break from feeling like such a waste. Which, consequently, is all happening through a pair of brand new cans (HD-558's) that I bought with the pay from my soul-crushing job. So I guess I'm getting something out of all this bullshit after all.

dog leather - greezy man and stinky man meets smutty ranks on tarantula hill

Out of the multitude of new artists I saw at Whartscape in 2010, DJ Dog Dick was certainly one of the more interesting. His music was an unholy hybrid of noise and hip-hop, and his sanity was questionable. It was loud and borderline painful, but it was fascinating to watch, and enjoyable on a level I couldn't quite explain. It was simply music unlike anything I had ever heard before.

Dog Leather, a collaboration between DJ Dog Dick and like-minded artist/DJ/maniac Sewn Leather, follows along the same warped patterns set out by Dog Dick, and the result is an album every bit as defiant as his solo work.

The sound is almost impossible to describe. Abrasive dub, littered with fractured samples and sparse percussion, with frat-boy stoner rap scattered over top of it all. You can throw out any number of buzzwords and try to tie it to any number of artists--I've seen writers compare this to witch house, which is an absolute joke--but none of it comes close to the reality. (If I was trying to spawn the next bullshit NME cover story, I'd go with "post-crunk" or "psychedelic glitch" or "PCP-core.") Just when you find yourself adjusting to the spaced-out dub flow, bam--flute solo. Once they have you relaxed and situated, watch out--walls of shrieking feedback over a jackhammer synth beat. For good measure, random interludes of cell phone recordings are thrown in between tracks. It's all over the place.

The only element really tying the album together is the manic, druggy energy that flows freely throughout. (Not only are there allusions to smoking PCP, but the CD case includes a few blatant drug images--just in case you had any doubt as to their muses.) It doesn't sound like anything, even track to track, which is a unifying factor in itself. But once it's over, once the blur of sounds fades out, you're left undeniably wanting more.

The madness of it all, the dizzying amount of influences that come together to create such an oddly satisfying product, just leaves you feeling empty afterwards. It feels like just that--a product, an end result, a cold, hollow piece of music lacking any real depth or passion. It feels like a tossed-off side-project, which it may very well be.

That's not to say there isn't anything to like on Greezy Man and Stinky Man. Surprisingly, the tracks with the most half-assed rapping turn out to be the most memorable. (Definitely did NOT see that coming.) "Do Gleat Her," "Gunky Monks," and "Goblin Massacre" are undoubtedly party anthems at the innermost depths of the Baltimore underground that I can only hope to glimpse on occasion. The dub styling on "Troll Spray" even makes for downright pleasant music. I'll be giving this plenty of listens in the future, and I certainly don't regret coughing up some money to support a product as unique as this. It just doesn't quite live up to its potential. Here's hoping Dog Leather gives it another try in the future though.

the vinyl stitches - all strapped up

(I missed Friday's post due to personal conflicts and alcohol. Mainly the alcohol, stoked by the conflicts. Which is odd, since normally it works the other way around. But that's okay.)

There came a point in my life, about six months ago, where I realized that I was forcing myself to listen to music I didn't really enjoy. I had turned my iPod into a rock critic's wet dream, at the expense of my own pleasure, to fulfill some dated, convoluted standard that was irrelevant to begin with. Which is pretty fucked up.

I wish I could remember the specifics of this epiphany. All I know is I slowly began admitting to myself that I really don't like Captain Beefheart, Faust, or Andrew Bird, but I love shitty noise rock, every Mountain Goats live show ever recorded (pre-2004), and most especially, garage rock. So I deleted all the shitty prog and experimental arty nonsense that was simply exhausting to sit through, and began delving deeper into the mindless caveman garage bands that truly got my dick hard.

I've become quite the pompous ass when it comes to garage, if I do say so myself. I've run through every volume of Nuggets, Pebbles, and Back From the Grave many times over, trying to pick out the few bands in those collections that actually released more than one 7", and in the process developed a love for that raw, noisy, awful racket that accompanies good, true garage rock. It's just attitude and naïvety, kids who just wanted to be rock stars so they bought guitars and figured out a few chords and ripped off the Stones and the Who as close as they possibly could without straight-up copying the riffs note for note. It's primal and pure and it's more exciting than any other music I've encountered in my relatively-short life.

The early-2000s brought on a wave of "garage-revival" bands, most of which were absolute shit. The good ones were "garage" in the vaguest sense possible--somehow the Strokes, the Hives, and the Vines fall into this category, when they were really just playing poppy rock 'n' roll with a healthy dose of punk posturing. The bands that actually tried to sound like their Nuggets idols are the ones that suck the hardest. The Flaming Sideburns, the the Mooney Suzuki, the Datsuns, and an endless stream of other bands that played pristine bullshit rock songs and completely missed the point. Where was the edge? Where was the grime? Where was the fucking soul?

The list of modern revival bands that I actually enjoy is short and sweet: the White Stripes, the Greenhornes, Black Lips, the Hentchmen, and maybe the Kills, if we're pushing the boundaries far enough. But none of them quite have that garage sound down like of one of my favorite new bands, the Vinyl Stitches.

These guys got it right. Which is apparently really fucking hard to do these days. They have more in common with the 80s-90s revival groups that predated the whole movement, and did it better than anyone else--the Gories, Oblivians, the Chesterfield Kings, etc. The Vinyl Stitches probably fall somewhere between those three groups. Take the Nuggets songwriting of the Kings, mix in the Oblivians punk attitude, and filter it through the delicious cacophonous fuzz of the Gories, and you get something close to their new album.

The thing that makes this band stand out among the army of look-a-likes is the energy. They sound just as excited and restless as the original wave of garage rockers. Whether they're plagiarizing that energy wholesale is beside the point, because they're plagiarizing it really, really well. I believe it. They're not celebrating rock 'n' roll in the third-person, in that obnoxious Hellacopters style that permeates everything "revival"--they're just living it. Which is cliché as hell but it's true, so who gives a shit. The Vinyl Stitches set out with "a vision of creating a band that would reproduce the live spirit of rock 'n' roll!" (Emphasis there's, not mine.) The scary part is that they somehow succeeded.

All Strapped Up is simply one of the most enjoyable rock albums I've heard in years. Which fits them perfectly into my new-found approach to honestly enjoying music. Not that I'm dropping the noisy, rough shit altogether--I'm listening to 2 by Hanatarash as I type--but it's nice to be able to fit one or two of these nice, wholesome albums in the rotation to lighten the mood on occasion.