Rantings, reviews and lists from a person who structures half his life around obsessing over music.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Tom Waits "Big Time" Screening

In celebration of Tom Waits' 60th birthday, the continuing Magic Bus Movie Night series hosted his classic concert movie, Big Time, last night.

Sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Magic Bus screens music-related concerts, clips and documentaries on the first Thursday of every month at the 9'th St. Media Center.

David Smay, author of the Continuum Press 33 1/3 for Swordfishtrombones hosted the event, inserting little tidbits of Tom Waits knowledge into every other sentence he spoke, and opening the movie with trivia, and a bunch of infinitely entertaining, miscellaneous Tom Waits-related clips including his cover of Daniel Johnston's nararration of King Kong set to clips of the film, an animation for the track from Orphans of Waits reciting a chldren's story (note: don't let Tom Waits near your children) and a dog-food commercial Waits did in one of the more "down-and-out" moments of his career (Is there anything that wouldn't sound cooler with Waits narrating? He's like the Morgan Freeman of hipsters).

As for the movie itself, Big Time captures what was quite possibly the greatest touring band Waits has ever had, with the barbed and harsh guitar stylings of Marc Ribot, San Francisco wind-instrument guru Ralph Carney and Greg Cohen of John Zorn fame on bass. If those names aren't familiar, all you have to know is that the performances prominently feature the output of Waits at the peak of his career (the Swordfishtrombones/Rain Dogs/Frank's Wild Years trilogy of the 80's).

A carnivalized version of "Rain Dogs" finds the whole band slowly congregating into the center of the stage for a gypsy-groove celebration bridge while Waits shows off his dancing chops, "Down in The Hole" finds him eerily echoing Daniel Day Lewis from There Will Be Blood and classics like "Clap Hands" and "Time" are delivered with even more body, texture, lushness and flow than their studio counterparts.

Performances are intercut by Tom Waits' character-features, involving hilarious on-stage rants about used erotica featuring girls without skin, a woman getting pregnant through a bullet previously pierced through the testicle of a soldier and a dire need for wigs and novelties in Indiana (cigarette lighters the size of encyclopedias!), as well as surreal shorts with Waits' alter-ego, Frank, as the main character, no doubt a product of the fruitful collaboration at the time between Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan.

Big Time does the best job possible of summing up exactly what was so special about Waits in the 80's, from his dark humor and oddball-avant characterization to his incorporation of technical proficiency in the realms of completely American forms such as blues and folk. A Tom Waits performance is not only a musical event, but a sort of "fusion" art engagement between stage-acting, comedy, art and sounds. Concert movies don't always justify their existence, but for those who've never had a chance to see Waits live, this is well-documented argument for his nomination as the greatest performer alive.

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Thursday, December 10, 2009

Yeasayer - "Ambling Alp"


If music is any indication, Brooklyn has been in a state these past ten years that can only described as "everlasting-dance". This is a sociological community-state that the Brooklyn of the 00s has defined and is similar to how we would refer to Flint, Michigan as"impovershed", L.A. as "polluted" or anywhere in Florida as "really fucking weird". Brooklyn is "everlastingly-dancetastic". The streets are littered with easy-to-use wires, pedals, and electronics that, when touched, create randomized futuristic sounds and everyone wears face paint and is on acid all the time and speaks only in mystical pseudo-philosophical tongue. As Yakov Smirnoff would put it, In post-9/11 Brooklyn, drugs take you!

And where do they take you exactly? We gotta wait for Odd Blood, due February 9, 2010 on Secretly Canadian to find out, but the album's first single, the warm, inviting "Ambling Alp", suggests it's somewhere you'll want to go.

The track opens in an ambient Animal Collective influenced (let's get that obvious reference point out of the way and move on, shall we?) collage of tweets and atmosphere before rising and climaxing into the playful verses; an acutely structured sequence of percussional noises and sound effects leading the way for a whistling keyboard and bouyant bass to remind the listener that this bizarre combination of sounds is intended to be fun, not terrifying (and with a music video like this, I imagine most people will need that reminder). Cue Horns and falsettos in the chorus to do the same. On a certain level, Yeasayer aren't doing anything new, but the great thing about the Brooklyn futuro-tribal fusion movement is that it seems like it's going to take a long, long time before different combinations of the same thing stop being interesting.

Song after the jump:
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Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Vampire Weekend - "Cousins"


Vampire Weekend clearly don't care about the indie-community backlash that's been steadily growing against them because, if they did, they would've never chosen "Horchata" to open their new album. "Horchata" seems to streamline every single element of their sound that the typical anti-VW personality hates into one piece of music: cutesiness for the simple sake of being cute, a hook that could fit comfortably into Kids Bop, and an element of upper-class sterility that occasionally seems to be trying a tiny bit too hard to sound "worldly".

The true lead single from Vampire Weekend's upcoming Contra, however, is the complete opposite.

"Cousins" is "A-Punk" if the song had any replay value whatsoever. The overplayed single from 2 springs ago was frantic, but that's more or less all it was. The brilliant thing about "Cousins" though, is that it doesn't just settle for being excited; it aims for batshit insanity. No one would dare accuse "Cousins" of being shallow because it doesn't give you enough time to even think about the song in those terms. As if the simplistic, jagged guitar riff opening the song didn't sound spastic enough already, the constant rapid-fire drum fills, snake-like bass and Ezra Koenig frantically switching between monkey noises and quick-paced, clearly enunciated, yet completely meaningless rhymes ("Dad was a risk taker! his was a shoe maker! You! greatest hits! 2006! list maker!"), only heightens the frenzy. The unhinged snarl of the verses bring Vampire Weekend down to earth in a way that will make the most devoted Vampire Weekend doubters give a double-take.

What pulls "Cousins" together from a fun racket into a genuine song, however, is the glorious instrumental chorus where twin guitars break into a contest to see who can pick out descending notes the fastest. Surf music, post punk and indie rock attitude hasn't been combined this effectively since The Pixies, but even they never sounded like they were ever having this much fun.

Song after the jump:
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Monday, December 7, 2009

Smashing Pumpkins - "A Song For A Son"


There are two types of people in the world: the rationalist skeptics and the faithful believers. There are many tests to determine which one you are, but the one I like to use these days is the Teargarden by Kaleidyscope test. This test is simple. Just ask the subject how they reacted when they heard that The Smashing Pumpkins' (or more accurately at this point, The Billy Corgan Experience's) next studio album would be composed of 44 songs released one by one over the course of 3 years. Both types sighed, of course, but if you are a Rationalist it was probably a sigh of exasperation. The faithful on the other hand...

These are the same people who believe there was once a time when Billy Corgan's pretentiousness was a source of intrigue. Whereas the rationalist probably looks at most of Corgan's work as worthless teenage angst, the faithful know that there was something genuinely magical about the art in the liner notes of Mellon Collie. When spun, those smiling moon and sun illustrations covering both discs told dense, engaging fairy tales and painted pictures as fantastic and transportative as any myth Robert Plant was once able to spin.

These two camps are almost equally separated when it comes to the Machina albums. The rationalists will hate it on principle alone, and won't give either of them much of a bone. But the faithful, regardless of how much they liked or disliked them, will always at least commend Corgan's vision throughout it; a complicated conceptual story involving a rock star named Zero, the voice of God, and uncountable amounts of eye-liner.

With Zeitgeist, this distinction disappeared. Everyone hated it.

But what "A Song for A Son" represents is the moment from which the two camps have finally broken off again. The rationalists will undoubtedly write it off as more childish Corgan-penned melodrama. But the faithful will pick up on the prominent use of harpsichords, mellotrons and atmosphere, embrace the prog-rock structure, rave about the dramatic classic rock guitar solo midway throughout the song, and find themselves as excited by the prismatic art that comes with the download as they probably were when they first saw the video for "Tonight Tonight". Do you hear that? A sigh of relief.

So before listening to Corgan's first of many chapters in what will either become the best 90's Alternative (or 70's Classic Rock?) revival album ever or just an excruciatingly long descent into a your average Rock Star ego trip, ask yourself what kind of person you are. Because as much as "A Song For A Son" should be hailed as a refreshing, swoon-worthy, totally awesome return to form, the bottom line is that it's a song made for the faithful.

Song after the jump:
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"How many times must a man look up
before he can see the sky?"