What MUSIC are you listening to? ARCHIVE

Listening to Fela Kuti's greatest hits makes me feel like I am on the most awesome 747 with hot stewardesses in 1974.

Einsturzende Neubauten concert last night. Just WOW! With a band as experimental as them you know some music is going to be awesome, some is going to be dull, some weird, some painful, etc. Luckily they had about a 2/3 strike rate last night. If I could ignore the third of the concert that didn't work, I would put it up there in the top 3 concerts I have ever been to in my life. When they are on fire there are few bands live that can match them, but boy there were quite a few points when many people had fingers in their ears to block out the horrendous noise coming from the stage. The minute or so of high pitched whine in 'Head Cleaner' was amped up to 11 giving me a nasty headache for the rest of the night (luckily it was the last song before the encore).

I was apprehensive going in, as I was concerned I was going because I was infatuated with them as a 17 year old, and even then I liked them more because I loved the theory of what they do a lot more than the music itself. But they were just amazing for so much of the concert, much better live than recorded, and definitely worth seeing if you are prepared to take the bad with the good.

Having spent many happy hours skipping past rubbish tracks on last.fm radio, it hit paydirt the other day with this extraordinary piece of music:



Loved it, went in search of more material and uncovered a treasure trove of oddness, ranging from ecstatic folk lullabies (Free Grace, Because You're Young) to aggressively bizarre whimsy (Island, Ballad of the Talking Dog). Most of that isn't on YouTube, but it is on Spotify. Check it out.

Modern psychedelic rock, I guess. I like it.

I've been on a (formerly)-local-punk-with-discernible-lyrics kick.



See also: Fuck You Aurora.

And more just because I remembered it, totally forgot about these guys until a week ago:

How could anyone forget the Smoking Popes? Easily one of the better US bands to come out of the 90s. They got together a few years back and released 'Stay Down' which was a great album. I think they've done a concept album since then, and shamefully, I'm not familiar with it.

Also, isn't there some overlap between these two bands? I think the Popes drummer did some time with Alkaline Trio or something like that.

Anyway, with reading the recent news on the Shadowrun gaming blitz this year, I've been listening to a lot of Daft Punk, Kavinsky, etc at work. Kavinsky's album, Outrun, came out recently and it's pretty good.





Totally unrelated, but I was feeling a bit under the weather this weekend and for some reason was digging around old 80's music videos. I think I've narrowed the best down to two. I just love the playfulness, energy, and joy in these videos. I wish there was more this these days.

#2


That video was barely edged out by

#1


These guys are just having a good time and don't give an F. Fantastic! The tongue work at 2:16 put it over the top. No way a band does a move like that today.

I hadn't totally forgotten the Smoking Popes... just buried somewhere.

I heard those energetic chords in the intro, and then 20 seconds later, I crooned , "I need you around..."

Okay. Who the hell are The Lumineers 'cause they are putting out some damn fine music.

If you like The Lumineers, try out these other modern folk artists:

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes -- Home
Fleet Foxes -- White Winter Hymnal
Iron & Wine -- Naked As We Came
Swell Season -- Falling Slowly, also When Your Mind's Made Up


More plugged in, but still folky and fun:
Grouplove -- Tongue Tied
The Temper Trap -- Sweet Disposition

Get these and more at my Spotify channel . not exactly worksafe, as Macklemore and Die Antwoord also appear.

Can't stop listening to Iceage. Thanks, Michael!

Ironically, although I'm rabidly anti-Nazi, the thing that made me dig into their music was Michael's mentioning the so-called controversy around them in his second article. The first time he wrote about them I gave a quick listening to one of their songs (I don't even remember which one, it was probably the Extasy video that comes up first on YouTube if you search for "iceage"), and while I found it good, it didn't immediately blow me away, so I just left it at that. But after reading about all the silly accusations thrown at them, I became more intrigued and listened to everything I could find from them, multiple times, until finally I "got it". This is precisely the kind of music that doesn't work until you get used to it, and that takes more than a couple of times. So, I guess, controversy sells and their detractors did them a huge favor.

I wonder what will become of them. They have two full-length albums now (well, if less than 30 minutes can be called "full-length", but it's punk, so why not?), and so far they don't show the signs of "selling out", which is more than I can say about Foals and The Horrors, two bands I immediately fell in love with in the last couple of years after their absolutely awesome debut albums, only to see them "find their true voice" on their follow-up albums, meaning that they started to play insufferably mellow and polite post-rock and lose everything that made them unique.

Currently Iceage's awesomeness is due to the wide variety of their influences and the completely unplanned, nonchalant, "I have no idea what I'm doing" manner in which they build these influences into their music. They also have great songwriting skills (there are plenty of unexpected hooks in their songs), we'll see if that proves to be enough after the novelty factor and their charming cluelessness wears out.

Wice,

I guess I must have missed Iceage being brought up before. Thanks for doing it here.

I'm digging their sound, and in this picture they look like they'd fit in perfectly in the punk scene circa '82:

Harrington - check
Flight jacket - check
Denim jacket - check

Guess they're also dressing up like klansmen or something in some video? Several of the early punks flirted with nazi imagery for shock value. Maybe that's what's going on here?

I think the so-called "klansmen" outfit was a typical US-centric misunderstanding. It was simply red, pointed-top hoods, which, for an American may be reminiscent of the KKK, but for me, as a Europian, it's more like an executioner's hood, something like this:

Wow, iceage is really fun.

I love how, at least in those first two linked tracks, they kinda change it up around the 1:40 mark. For a blistering little 2-3 minute song, that's a good time.

Stompin' Tom died the other day. He was a Canadian icon, here's a memorial for those of you who don't know him:

www.spinner.com/2013/03/07/stompin-tom-connors-dies-punk/

He first made it big in the town where I grew up and there was a piece of an old stage hanging on the wall there with a hole in the middle of it... due to his stomping on it all the damn time. Hence the name. Above it said: "Stompin Tom's stomping ground" and I loved that place. It was the Maple Leaf Hotel and I played my first ever gig there.. that gig sucked but at the time I thought it awesome, I just didn't know any better. Here's a clip for those of you who don't know him:

der tpk (teenage panzer korps) is way more interesting than iceage for me



this band can totally soundtrack your barbarossa '41 game when it gets to the winter turns.

or in their new guise as horrid red



or if you want a uk take on the post punk revival thing, then hygiene have a pretty good aesthetic.