Shot through with starlight

Shot through with starlight is my visual homage to the musicians who really have mattered to me.  Drop by and dig the new breed!

hegemony

How I prefer The Clash:

1. Super Black Market Clash
2. The Clash (original U.K. version)
3. London Calling
4. Give 'em Enough Rope
5. Live at Shea Stadium
6. Combat Rock

I realize that Super Black Market Clash, an expansion of the earlier Black Market Clash EP, is a "compilation", but I consider it the Clash at their very best: a collision of sounds, styles, and influences that fully fleshes out the band as a living, breathing rockroll entity.  I listen to it more than the others (which really is the most important qualification when putting an artists work in orders of preference) and do not own, nor do I feel the need to own, any of their others.  My bottom two are only pulled out when I am feeling nostalgic but nostalgia really ain't my game so gather dust they do.

Super Black Market Clash simply holds up extraordinarily well over the years.

inspiration from a rock'n'roll badass

 

"I'm your worn in leather jacket / I'm the volume in your fucked up teenage band" - Social Distortion, "Don't Take Me for Granted", Sex, Love, and Rock'n'Roll

 Sunny, warm, the sun glistening off of a calm lake.  Not too far from the 101 today so Social D's finest it is.  While I love Social Distortion and think Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell is their most complete work, Sex, Love, and Rock'n'Roll is the most Californian album they put out.  And Social Distortion is California to me.  This is a road record if there ever were one, thus a Cali record.  Of course, the sun has to be shining or you'll just get depressed. But when it is shining nothing feels better than an open window, an open road, an open can of beer, and Social Distortion on the stereo.

Dream on motherfuckers...

legends

"The only band I wanted to be in was Mott the Hoople"  It's the only band that mattered.

reconsidering

The Rolling Stones - Undercover

On the heels of three records comprised of outtakes and tidbits from the cutting room floor (two exceptional, Some Girls and Tattoo You, the other, Emotional Rescue, entertaining ) and one uninspired and useless live record (1982's Still Life) it would have been easy to just call it a career for the Rolling Stones.  Clearly tiring of each other and sick of being "the Rolling Stones", the band was picking at pieces of the past just to put product out. That they were able to cull together a couple of very good rockroll records doing so speaks volumes to their productivity in their heyday, but hardly portended an exciting future.

The MTV era had begun and the Stones were, well, too old. I mean old old. Geezers (or so we thought at the time...twenty years later, go figure). Tired. Done.

Weren't they?

Well yeah, they were.  But it turned out that the band was not to old, too tired, or too done to go on one geezerly, mid-life crisis of a ramshackle, nihilistic, sex and violence drenched bender and produce a pretty damn good, no great, rock and roll record before irrelevance finally took hold.

Undercover is the Stones' grungiest and most weirdly, wildly diverse record sonically since, oh god, Exile on Main Street (I'm not comparing the two, so pipe down you Exile-ists, I'm just saying...).  It's an angry, bleak, dark record that is full of dissent and discontent. It's also a hodgepodge stew of the many, wildly varied musical styles and interests of the band - the hi-hat disco drive behind "Too Much Blood"and "Undercover of the Night"; the of-the-era dance funk of Ronnie Woods "Pretty Beat Up"; the vintage Jagger whine on "Tie You Up" and the reggae-fied "Feel on Baby";  to the Keith Richards as rock classicist "Wanna Hold You".

All that  messy diversity gives the record a feel of having been slapped together as an afterthought, and that's a good thing. It's loose, shoddy, and always on the verge of collapsing (something we all know Mick would never let happen, the CEO that he is, he'd have made it a shitty record if that meant holding it all together). The band sounds likes each  member is hell bent on pulling it all apart.  It's strain we hear.  Tension.

They still sort of cared. Cared not necessarily about the Rolling Stones, but rather about rockroll as art.

And it was the last time they did.  All too underrated and too often overlooked.

music

Wussy - Strawberry

"What's with all of this goddamn sunshine?" - my friend Lucas, while listening to Strawberry, Wussy's latest, for the first time

Yeah, what is with all of this "goddamn sunshine"?  Listening to "Asteroid", the opening track, Chuck Cleaver's bluegrass wheeze turns into a warm Santa Ana breeze.

What the fuck?

Is it California circa nineteen sixty nine again?

I mean this is damn near psychedelic stuff. Arthur Lee as a white, Midwestern, Nuggets bandleader sort of stuff.  Moby Grape if they'd actually listened to Lou Reeds' pop Velvet Underground stuff...and liked it.

Weirdness abounds.

And why not?  These are weird times.  Very weird times.  Cleaver and songmate Lisa Walker are certainly, as much as they'd love to be I am sure, not insulated from the prevailing weirdness of these times.

So a simple acoustic strum starts "Asteroid", walked along by a simple bass line, and ultimately propelled by a simple sturm and drang snare, the track is pierced ever so gently by the  quietly hovering flying saucer engines of a theramin.  Then, um, harpsichord?

Really?

Okay.  

It's an audacious opening that, while entirely unexpected from the post-post(post I said!) modern Richard and Linda Thomspon of previous Wussy efforts, is as exciting and as close to a perfect reinvention and self-reinterpertation I've ever heard from a band.

Maybe they got bored?

Whatever it was, Cleaver and Walker are wearing this Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks, John Doe/Exene Cervenka by way of Parsons/Harris (Gram and Emmylou) very well on Strawberry.

Old and odd sounds also abound.

"Pulverized" is pure ranting and raving Cleaver, as he's crushed between a couple of walls of guitar. "Magnolia" opens with a Dennis Wilson "River Song" piano and then floats across country to Lisa Walker's Ohio River home. "Grand Champion Steer" is pitch perfect Cleaver midwestern metaphor: our band as lovelife? Our band as life itself? A lament for love never had now lost?  An actual date at the state-fucking-fair? With Cleaver it's never a reach and the song becomes the ball that actually, finally, knocks those damn milk bottles - all three of them - off of the stool.  Pick the big stuff bear of your choice Chuck...she'll love you for it, if only for a summer's eve hour...

Yet none of this all sounds entirely like the Wussy of yore. "Pizza King", a parking lot hang out, bounces off of a rollicking rhythm awash in fuzzy buzzy guitars. Walker takes a summer road trip through sunny, um, Indiana? Not California after all.  North to south she spends time at KOA's, supermarket parking lots, and outside of a Pizza King - of course.  The track is awash in sunshine. Walker's vocals  are playful, whimsical, a daydream of a tune that belies its geography.

But don't worry folks, the sunshine merely causes sunburned skin and scorched earth.  As the pavement broils relationships decay all over this record.  None of it is all too nicey nice (or, to be punful, smilely smile - wiki "Beach Boys" young'ns).  Hearts are breaking; folks are cheating; some contemplate suicide while their partner seemingly mocks the idea ("Little Miami").  Strawberry is itself a contradictory album. The music lies to the senses, giving a false sense of security. The words sting; they're storm clouds not just gathering but rolling across the Midwest landscape.

Not since Fleetwood Mac's Rumours have dying relationships sounded so positively, well, exhilarating.  A weirdly wonderful feeling from a wonderfully weird record. Exceptional.

music

Considering T. Rex...

While establishing critical hegemony within a single artists' oeuvre isn't always an easy task  (especially in cases where the artists' output has been particularly robust)  it quite often isn't a very daunting one either. 

After spending two or so years initially as Tyrannosaurus Rex, a spacey, hippy, lame, nearly unlistenable, and quite misinformed folk rock group Marc Bolan mysteriously transitioned his group into something altogether different seemingly by simply dropping the "yrannosaurus" and adding a ".".  And although one album, 1970's T. Rex, introduced both the identity shift and the bands intention of a new musical tact, the end result of that "." replacing those twelve prehistoric letters was equal parts mystifying and magical.

That or Marc Bolan figured out what his cock was for.

Electric Warrior - Complete with iconic Hipgnosis album cover art and Tony Visconti 's empty warehouse echo chamber production, Electric Warrior comes across as so fresh and revelatory that it's hard not to discount Bolan and his band-mates having sold their souls to the ghost of Little Richard and  and Chuck Berry's love child.  As nonsensical in places as it is overtly a sexual cum-on, Bolan litters the catchy grooves the songs cut with trite lyricism, hot metaphors, sly seductions, bad teen-boy poetry, and an undeniable sense that the whole affair is one big disposable joke.  And Bolan knows this. It's what makes him go. It's what turns him on. And his turn on becomes his come on which in turn sets the mood that set Electric Warrior apart from its predecessors. Indispensable still.

The Slider is nearly as absurd inside as it is outside. Bolan in a Mad Hatter over-sized top hat graces the cover in a ghostly visage.  A stern seriousness floats around his face, yet it appears as though he might break out laughing. He's certainly not serious. Or is he? Inside is more of the same: sexy stop/start grooves, humming vocals, angelic choruses, lyrics confusing science fiction with sex, and a confident and swaggering Marc Bolan as Master of Ceremony. The sound is fuller than it was on Electric Warrior, the approach more assured, the songs themselves a touch stronger, and the band is absolutely at its peak. Bolan continues to treat his music as mere disposable pop commodity and that is his enduring strength - understanding that it's meant to entertain, that it's meant to make you smile for a couple of minutes, that it's meant to forget about the world around you and give you someplace to which you might escape for a little bit of time.  T. Rex at this peak merely wants to give you a good time; it asks for nothing in return. The Slider is their best.

music

Sinead O'Connor - I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got

More political than you might remember, she was young, a bit naive, and not fully bat-shit crazy yet (okay, political correctness intact - mentally ill), I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got has only the titular song as a miss (which is, thankfully, the closer) and has her finest moments - be they Prince penned ("Nothing Compares 2 U") or her own ("Black Boys on Mopeds" and "This is the Last Day of our Acquaintance").  The album not only survives the years that have passed it becomes more relevant. Who'd have figured?  A great listen...now as much as ever.

music

We’re New Here – Gil Scot-Heron and Jamie xx

Gil Scot-Heron is a ghost.

I don’t suppose Scot-Heron figured when he originally recorded the strained, struggling, and alternatingly sad and sobering Richard Russell produced I’m New Here in 2010 that his voice and words would ultimately and posthumously return as a mystical narration to a trip-hopping hyper-stylized dub-stepping soundtrack.  In fact I am pretty damn sure that Scot-Heron’s once gifted but, by 2010, severely drug-gutted mind (Gil, by all accounts, had an intense and sadistic drug appetite) thought that he was still delivering the revolutionary goods when he sang/spoke/muttered the deteriorated blues-of-his-life poetry on I’m New Here.  But that record fell flat and well short.

Resuscitated by Jamie XX (and brought back to virtual life by “Take Care”, Drake’s Rhianna-laden cover and hit version of XX’s reworking of Scot-Heron’s “I’ll Take Care of You”) Gil Scot-Heron’s ghost is hardly sober and at times barely there, but We’re New Here isn’t about the poetry and isn’t necessarily about the poet, but rather it’s about taking a voice that once mattered and giving it an appropriate graveyard.  And Scot-Heron's voice has not mattered in a long, long time. Yet, somehow, he will always matter.  If it takes a hipster using his beleaguered voice as a feather in his “cred” cap to remind, reintroduce, or revive Scot-Heron’s legacy then so be it; if it can be done as well as it is here, then we are all the better for it.   

One of 2011’s essentials.