Archive for the ‘Tunes’ Category

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Wishing cities would sleep

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The Fall – New Face In Hell

New Face In Hell does to my gut what the Velvet’s Gift never fails in doing – that is the spin back to life of a rottin’ stomach. If I were a guitarist I’d be a rhythm guitarist. I’d take the backseat, pass plaudits to the lead, and live a life of devotion to the pop of hips; the bringer of the rhyme of no reason to dancing tricks.

Title and knowledge of the fact aside, I still hear Smith scream, “And you face him… how?(!)” I somehow like it better that way. The judgement. And that kazoo, too, mocking the contagious nature of the lead guitar and its notions of musical notation. My eyes feel like irritated wounds. If I were sleeping now it would change everything. [Explanded & Deluxe.]

Posted on November 23, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

I’m not afraid of running away

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Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – Breakdown

I’m homeless.

Friday morning at 8 I shoved all my shit in the back of a Civic and drove away, pushing off from the curb and merging into the tide of traffic washing down Interstate 5.

After fourteen hours at the wheel I sailed into San Fran and coasted to a stop next to an apartment in the lower Haight with a window 10 feet above the sidewalk. Noah Davis poked his head out of the open window and said, “That you?”

Four inches of Johnny Walker, two beers, one cigarette, and a peaceful sleep on his surprisingly comfy red couch later, I was back in the Civic, aching from too much time hunched over in my car and not enough sleep over the past week.

The drive down to Monterey is a rough one. Sheets of rain raking across my windshield didn’t help matters, and midway through my 20 minute stint on the winding CA-17 I began to feel nauseous.

But eventually, 17 dumps into CA-1 at the coast, the sun glistens off the ocean, foamy waves caress the shore, and I slide my shades on. I may be homeless, but I’m still stylin’.

[Buy stuff.]

Posted on November 21, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

CATCHING UP

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Posted on November 20, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

“Bring your wiary sould to the alter”

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Sanders Bohlke – Bring Your Weary Soul To The Alter

Some nights she just wanted to sleep. She sat at her desk, slumped over the keyboard, feeling her eyes grow weary with bags drooping across her cheeks, her expression sinking with every minute. But there wasn’t enough in her bones to slide into bed and drown in the sheets. So her bones ached and stung with the pain of sleeplessness, like minuscule daggers pinpricking her pores right down to the marrow and the walls blurred into a drowsy swirl of pastel paints and moths led astray by the lone light shining in her moss-ridden apartment ceiling. [Buy.]

Posted on November 19, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Love is defying

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The Airborne Toxic Event – All I Ever Wanted

I’m in Los Angeles because of a failing relationship. The City of Angels lies an easy 350-mile flight from San Francisco, a city where I now live for reasons that have more to do with her than I’m willing to admit but less than my friends and family back east believe. I didn’t have to see about a girl. Well, at least not entirely.

We worked wonderfully in theory when she and I lived in Brooklyn and we were dating other people. In practice, we’re a fatally flawed couple. Neither of us says anything, but it’s over. She’s known for a while. I held on to the slowly yet inevitably unwinding thread for longer – which explains why I bought us tickets to The Airborne Toxic Event’s homecoming show at the resplendent The Walt Disney Concert Hall and flew south – but I’m now letting it slip from of my grasp, too. “We lie to each other like they do and say we’re so happy / It’s easy when you’re young and you still want it so badly.”

So here we are, starring down at the foursome, their assorted friends and lovers, and the rest of the audience from our seats 20 feet above stage left. It’s fine; the concert, a charming celebration of the band’s remarkable success, is the type of event that calls for a date, even one with no future.

Later that night, she falls asleep on my arm in her bed. “I stare out the window and I think that I might scream.” I don’t. Sometimes you smile, gaze into the sky, and let things wordlessly fall apart. [Buy.]

Posted on November 18, 2010 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

Just wishing that I had just something you wore

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Pixies – Cactus

Run outside,
In the desert heat
Make your dress all wet
– And send it to me.
Bloody your hands
On a cactus tree,
Wipe it on your dress,
– And send it to me.

This, for me, is rock music at its most concentrated, free from fears of restraint and sterile backlash, ready for consequence; the marriage of macabre and comely poetry. Lust of the obsessive compulsive (the starved), and the damning of separation. The trudge and delicacy of jangly guitar, ushering through support, exploding in rising chords that dangle on the precipice of climax. The space between the parted is where the perverse dream. Cactus is the pleasure of suffocation and the capture of heat. [Buy Digital.]

Posted on November 16, 2010 - Tunes - 2 Comments » Share

You only need songs when you’re young.

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Stars – The Last Song Ever Written

My vision of the far future is tainted by tacky television shows. So when I try to imagine the world in 100 years, pretending this actually was the last song humanity came up with, I see people in those silver jumpsuits. They’re in a museum, all sleek lines and dust-free.

One of them sporting a Win Butler haircut approaches a pair of Sennheisers hanging on a stand. A holographic message pops up explaining the background of the song and band. The kid apprehensively puts the headphones on and the song begins.

For a while the embarrassingly self-referential and meta lyrics distract him, but then syrup voices sing “la la la la la” and somewhere under that half-shaved haircut, pleasure censors in his brain flick on in places they’ve never lighted before.

[Buy The Five Ghosts.]

Posted on November 15, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

You need help!

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Queen – Don’t Try Suicide

How many ways are there to kill yourself?

I thought about a couple: belly-flop into the North Atlantic ocean from an airplane; slit your wrists with your father’s carving knife; sit idly in the garage with the doors and windows closed and the car running; pluck a plant from the garden, pretend it’s Gillyweed, dive headfirst into the swimming pool and breathe; play a round of Kings with petrol instead of alcohol; adopt a rabid pitbull… [The Game.]

Posted on November 13, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Bi-hearted

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TV Girl – If You Want It

“Hello, it’s me.”

It may be the early-bird present giving season saturating my already eager system, but If You Want It‘s pocket-change-jangling introduction sounds like supermarket shopping distraction; those seasonal tracks spinning in dance on open air over product shelving, spinning just a little too fast to hurry you out of there.

“We’ve done this before.”

The song’s storyteller, its one sided bias, tells of a drunken romp with the familiar, a certain masochistic guilt, the passing of lacking-time, and repeated consummation of bare skinned embrace. Somewhere between the narrator’s enunciated admission is the space to park our very own exaggerations of possible love or obsession or both, and the petty jealousies that birth thereafter.

“I can see you’ve learned some tricks from those boys over in Europe.”

“If You Want It” meanders with the vinyl static of an Old Dirty Bastard instrumental (I think it’s the tight lipped slam of anything rhythmic) and never lets up, with a fragranced air of rattled piano keys and squealing trumpet. “In the hallway your eyes stay on the ground. Doesn’t bother me, because when the weekend comes around you’ll want it [again] and you’ll get it.”

If you do want this and those pockets of yours (ours) are ever too tight, to the point of finger nibbling on inspection, then fear not, TV Girl has released a self-titled four-track extended play for free download – even in fantasy high formats for “audiophiles and nerds”. It’s a welcome feature and seasonal one. Go get it.

Posted on November 11, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Please be well

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happiness

Silver Mt. Zion, Tra-La-La Band – Horses In The Sky (Live)

I worked for eight and a quarter an hour, doing bullshit work, but I didn’t mind it much because for the first time in my life I didn’t have homework. Every afternoon I would come home to my subleased apartment and plop myself down on the vomit brown loveseat I’d inherited when the Burks’ grandmother had died, and I would put on a record.

I vacuumed, but the house was dirty. Particles of dust would swirl in the rays of sunlight splayed by the window slats.

I would push my shoes and socks off, rubbing my feet together and scratching between my toes.

“What are you doing?” my roommate would demand when he got back from law school. “You’re  just sitting there, existing!”

And it was glorious. The sunlight would fade against the far wall and my feet would chill in the open breeze. Eventually I would put on shoes again and leave my room to interact with humans. But for those moments alone in the swirls dust of my room and with the records idly spinning on the turntable, well, those are the moments I want back.

[Buy.]

Posted on November 10, 2010 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

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