Video: Can- Bring Me Coffee Or Tea

Can are one of those bands you're extremely unlikely to have heard of until you REALLY get into music. If they're mentioned at all, it's in being namechecked by bands you like or listed as influences on Wikipedia entries. Nevertheless, they're one of the most forward thinking and revered bands in music history, and their story and background are just as fascinating as their indescribable music.

This video apparently comes from the Can DVD which I've always been tempted to buy but never have. Interestingly enough, this is a different version of the song than the one featured on the Tago Mago album. Here, it's more dreamlike and ambient, with footage mostly of Damo Suzuki cooing the song and slinking along to it.

I highly recommend picking up Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi, and Future Days if you're intrigued. They are very different and nearly flawless slabs of kraut-rock goodness.

Lil' Indie Round-Up 2

Album: Twilight by the Baskervilles
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: I don't get why it says 'apartment' and 'mcues' (??) on the cover. Otherwise, I expect either a psych/folk sound ala Love or Devendra Banhart or something more sinister and misleading, like a Velvet Underground throwback.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: I was just thinking to myself the other day about how there haven't been many good indie pop bands lately. There's Belle and Sebastian and The Shins, sure, but...well, anyway, the Baskervilles craft expert-level indie pop that recalls those two bands while putting their own little spin on it. The hooks stick in you on first bite while the melodies and surprisingly sophisticated arrangements reward repeat listening. This is the kind of album my friend Pat might like, and he's usually very discerning and contradictory with his taste.
Album: Premonitions by Bella Noir
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: This reminds me vaguely of the cover to Wire's 154, all impressionistic 80s lines. Except this cover is black and white, and that album wasn't released in the 80s. Err anyway, I expect something gothic and/or 80s synthpop.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: It's only an EP, but this band's sound is remarkably well formed. Sounding like Radiohead as fronted by PJ Harvey--or maybe Interpol as fronted by Chrissie Hynde--the songs have a deliciously deep atmosphere, dark, enticing feminine moans echoing out of alleyways while a taut rhythm section pounds the pavement in search of the guy making with the ghostly electronic flourishes and stinging guitar howls. Here's hoping they find a sympathetic label and producer for their album.
Album: Take The Whole Midrange And Boost It by Oppenheimer
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: If you went to the woefully understocked 'Dance' section of your local Best Buy and pulled out a compilation at random, it would look like this. A meaningless swirl of neon that is distinctly European and something our kids will probably make fun of someday.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Honestly, I was surprised by this one. Imagine that the New Pornographers were a synthpop band from Ireland instead of a power-pop band from Canada. I actually can't stand synthpop but it's impossible to resist the spoonful of sugar sans medicine that is Take The Whole Midrange And Boost It. I still wish they'd get a better album cover, but whatever.
Album: 1985 by Riddle of Steel
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: Frankly, a terrible hair metal tribute album.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Riddle of Steel are like a ultra-slick, ultra-boring combination of Weezer (that is to say, modern day god awful Weezer), Wolfmother's 70s festishism/plagiarism, and Van Halen-by-way-of-wanna-be-prog-rock guitar riffs. So, you know, bad.
Album: The Grand Hooded Phantom by Your Highness Electric
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: This looks like one of those flavor-of-the-moment screamo/post-hardcore/metalcore bands that I ended my subscription to Alternative Press 7 years ago over. I can only listen to so many bands who want to be, I don't know, Killswitch Engage or Atreyu with god awful names like 'Fear Before the March of Flames' and 'Creation Is Crucifixion' (I kid you not, those are real) before I want to scream(o).
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: I've given this a lot of thought, and I think I have the recipe for you. Take Rage Against The Machine minus rapping; add Red Hot Chili Pepper basslines (on some songs); add the chunky guitar riffs and funk-less drum groove of ZZ Top worshipping Queens of the Stone Age; finally, stir with a mixture of some of the worst lyrics I've ever heard, and some of the lamest "awesome" song titles ever ('Le Titout', seriously??). Once solution has settled, serve directly in toilet bowl.

Album of the Week: Pixies- Surfer Rosa

One of my fondest memories is a road trip some friends and I took years ago. Being the music nerd that I am, I had a huge leather wallet of CDs in the car with us and after much discussion we put Surfer Rosa on. Grinning in the ecstasy of youth and freedom that is a male road trip, we were singing along and joking around throughout the entire thing, every song met with "god, I love this album" comments and fist pumping. Air guitars may have been employed. I relate this story to you because, when you get beyond all talk of Surfer Rosa being influential and "important", you are left with a damn fine album that is a blast to listen to.

The Pixies were and remain a band for music nerds and critics. Though the grunge/alt rock groups that they inspired would go on to become massive stars and millionaires in the 90s, the Pixies have never been a band like that. Successful, yes. Beloved, yes. But--and this may be presumptuous to say--they belong to music nerds and critics. The subject matter of their songs is simply too odd and creepy, the music too noisy and unhinged to ever appeal to a mass market audience. If you went to high school anytime from the late 80s onward and you were the weird kid in class who wasn't satisfied with the music that was popular amongst your peers, chances are good you found the Pixies. Dropping the needle on (or pressing play) your first Pixies album is a revelation the likes of which you usually only hear about in religious circumstances. Oh, to be able to hear 'Debaser' for the first time again...

But that song comes from Doolittle, and I'm trying to discuss Surfer Rosa. The genius of what the Pixies did, first with Come On Pilgrim and fully realized here, was to play with the dynamics that had always been in place in rock music. What I mean is, loud/soft and noisy/clean. It's a very basic formula--one which Kurt Cobain famously admitted to ripping off wholesale from the Pixies--but one that pays incredible dividends: witness the rush of opener 'Bone Machine', which builds to a peak before the "your bone's got a little machine" lyric kills the sound and then the guitars come slashing back in. Witness 'Something Against You', which opens with a clean rhythm guitar before the distorted lead guitar blasts the door down and Black Francis howls in anger through what sounds like a bullhorn. Witness 'Gigantic', which opens so delicately and showcases the power of loud/quiet and clean/noisy dynamics.

At just a touch over a half hour in length, Surfer Rosa's every moment is excellent and worthwhile. Nothing is carelessly put on the album just to pad out the runtime--even the studio banter is classic amongst a certain friend and I. Hell, even the silly 'Tony's Theme' is great though it is my least favorite song on the album. And that's the crux of the album to me: it's just so enjoyable and so much fun to listen to. I frequently cite Surfer Rosa in reviews as an example of something that I find addictive and compulsively listenable. Due to its brevity and consistency, it's hard not to put it on when I can't decide what I want to listen to or, say, when I'm scrolling through iTunes and trying to come up with a review to write. I'm just sayin'.

I could talk about all those ancillary things about the album--Steve Albini's production, the perverse but catchy lyrics, the way it influenced indie rock bands to have a token girl often as a bassist--but like I said at the beginning, if you push all that aside you'll be left with not just one of the best indie rock albums or one of the best rock albums, but one of the best albums of all time, period. Yes, Surfer Rosa is that good. Go listen to it again; your awkward, strange younger self will thank you.

Islands- Arm's Way

It's tough to grow up. But it's even tougher to grow up when all you're known for is being a kid. Just ask any of the many child stars over the years who have tried to parlay their pre-teen successes into adulthood. What, then, to expect from a band like Islands, and leader Nicholas Thorburn, who has made a living out of crafting childish and catchy indie pop?? What to make of Arm's Way, an album that seems to perversely force itself into maturity and forget the band's appeal in the first place??

Well, that's not entirely fair. Thorburn's aesthetic, going back to the Unicorns album from half a decade ago, was to combine a whimsical, childish indie pop aesthetic with dark subject matter (many of his songs deal with death) and an experimental, genre bending playfulness that touches on prog rock, hip hop, and tropical flavors. And it's also true that the Unicorns album and the Islands' first album, Return To The Sea, had long songs. But, this album isn't as good as either of those, and gives one the impression that Thorburn took the worst tendencies of those albums to hear this time out, while simultaneously trying to forcefully mature the band's sound. Which is to say, he made the arrangements more complicated and focused more on nuance and overall sound than crafting 'hooks.' The result is an interesting, frustrating, and ultimately unfulfilling album that gives you just enough succor to want to come back but never enough to fill you up.

"Fill you up" is a bad way of putting it, because the one thing you're going to hear from most people about this album is how bloated it is. At 68 minutes it is inexcusably long, and for a band that formerly seemed to have no shortage of ideas (Return To The Sea is incredibly varied and consistently good at the same time), it's kind of sad that the album only has enough good material to support half that runtime. 'In The Rushes' is, frankly, a mess, a song that plods along for five minutes in search of a direction before suddenly quoting The Who's 'A Quick One While He's Away.' Unfortunately, this kind of "too clever for its own good" thing might have worked on a shorter, more quixotic Unicorns track, where you expect that kind of self conscious "oh, we're so quirky!!" vibe and can forgive it, but here it just seems like the band reaching to mirror their own attempts at length and bombast to that masterpiece and coming up very short. I will admit that I love the out-of-nowhere samba/Latin ending to 'J'aime Vous Voir Quitter', but this song is only three minutes long. Moreover, album closer 'Vertigo (If It's A Crime)' is 11 minutes long and mostly instrumental, and it's probably the most successful new idea on the album--it goes through many phases and ideas, but none of them are arbitrary or worthless fluff. So, my point is this: either give us these sharp changes in shorter songs, or go the Fiery Furnaces route and make the longer songs winding funhouses of sound, texture, and feel.

I've been listening to the new Wolf Parade album, At Mount Zoomer, at the same time I've been digesting Arm's Way and my overwhelming impression is that Thorburn desperately needs a creative foil. While the main Wolf Parade guys (Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug) can function very well outside of the band, they often have collaborators in those projects, too. Unfortunately, Thorburn seems adrift on his own course after the Unicorns broke up and Jamie Thompson left Islands. While he's capable of producing some brilliant and beautiful moments--of which 'To a Bond', 'The Arm', and most-likely-choice-for-single 'Creeper' are a testament--those moments are surrounded by lots of extraneous music that should have been left on the cutting room floor. This may sound hypocritical after I praised Sunset Rubdown's Random Spirit Lover for doing a similar thing, but the music between those brilliant, memorable moments on that album is very enjoyable if you listen to the album as a whole. With Arm's Way I just want to skip to the good parts and scrap the rest.

My hope is that Arm's Way is a difficult, growing pains album, not unlike the second Liars release. Now that Thorburn has moved his aesthetic past the quirky, quixotic, and compact indie pop/prog rock/cute-songs-with-dark-content phase of his career, let's assume he can either learn a new way of bringing his epic ideas to a more successful fruition, or perhaps re-learn some of what made his previous releases so great in the first place while better expanding their palette and delivery.

Video: Deerhoof- The Perfect Me

Assuming you didn't like their music, it would be really easy to hate Deerhoof. Especially based on playful videos like this, in which the band actually play over a pre-recorded version of the song 'The Perfect Me.' And Satomi messes with a silly light toy, a stuffed animal, and a Bob Dylan-esque "hold up the lyrics to the song" move. And they begin the video by talking over each other.

Thankfully, then, I love Deerhoof and I think this video is cute. I've never gotten the feeling that Satomi's "kawaiiii I'm a cute little Japanese woman who does funny poses and dances crazy!!" shtick is actually a shtick. Rather, I think it's just how she is, in the same way that Thom Yorke's seizure dancing isn't an act.

Resident Evil 4

I think this goes for most 'older' gamers, who have things like jobs and friends to take up their time, but I never replay games. Half the time I don't even finish games because I lose interest, or it's been so long since I played whatever that I can't remember what I was doing in the game. So I think it says a lot for the quality and replayability of Resident Evil 4 that I break it out every few months and have another helping.

The old cliché goes that nothing is perfect, but I think we all would call certain games "perfect." There are quibbles you can quibble over when pressed to, but your overwhelming desire is to praise the game and play it again every time someone brings it up. For me, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Fallout 1, and Super Metroid are perfect games, ones that I can replay on a whim and actually finish again because: 1) they're fantastic games 2) they're just the right length 3) they're pretty easy, and I'm a wimp.
Though I will fully admit to liking the Resident Evil games I had played, I always kind of knew they were awkward, clunky, and full of Japanese videogame bullshit that I can't put up with anymore. From the irritating save system to the poisonously bad controls (well, except for RE3, I guess) to the dumb inventory system (a shotgun takes up as much room as an herb??) to the shallow, shallow combat, it's incredible that I liked them at all. Resident Evil 4 does away with all of this, and is all the better for it. Instead of the usual "if you die, you go back to wherever you saved last" the game has various, unofficial 'checkpoints' you'll return to if you die. Sure, it's not quite the fast--and some would argue, cheap--"save anywhere you want as often as you want" system seen on PCs, but it's still better than 90% of Japanese games.

Also better than 90% of any games, Japanese or otherwise: the gameplay. There is something indescribably satisfying about RE4, all the way from the feel of the guns to the little hidden treasures you can find. Not only did they finally get the controls right (I still would like the ability to strafe, but I guess that would make it even easier than it already is), but they made it simply fun to move through the world and fight things. Before Resident Evils were slow and clunky, and now they were quick and smooth. One might even draw a parallel to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead zombies and those fast moving ones from 28 Days Later, but--let me put on my geek hat here--the enemies in RE4 aren't zombies. Not technically. But I digress.
The first word that comes to mind when I think of RE4's combat is "setpiece." But that doesn't mean much without context, so let me explain. When I think of great action movies--say, Raiders of the Lost Ark--I think of the great moments from them, not necessarily in a linear, plot focused way. The truck chase scene from Raiders is awesome. The Velociraptor/kitchen scene from Jurassic Park still makes me nervous when I watch it. And so on. RE4 is the same way. The boss fights are very creative, but they also have appropriate 'epic'-ness about them. Moreover, the various 'battles' you go through still ring true on my 10th playthrough, from the first villager wave you must withstand to the Last Standish fight in the cabin with Luis helping out to fighting through the defenses of the Los Illuminados while some dude in a helicopter is strafing and blowing things up. RE4 is a hell of a ride, as a movie critic would say, and it has setpieces from breakfast to dinnertime.

RE4 may not be a survival horror game, but I would still argue for it as an action horror game. A lot of the "survival" aspects of the previous Resident Evil games were artificial elements put in the game to make it difficult for the wrong reasons. The inventory system was terrible, and having to backtrack to the item boxes to juggle equipment, puzzle solving do-dads, and health items/ammo was just plain irritating and didn't add the "management of scarce resources" element that I think the developers were going for. RE4's solution is to give you an inventory system based on grid pieces--so an herb takes up two grid slots, while a rocket launcher takes up, say, 20. Then there's the absurd-but-clever addition of money and the various shopkeeper dudes you can visit during the course of the game, selling off worthless items, buying/upgrading weapons and equipment, etc. Of course this also gives the game further replayability, because you can't reasonably use every weapon in the game during each playthrough, so it's fun to try out a different shotgun or try out the TMP on this run.
Resident Evil 4 is also scary, at least it can be. Mention the Regenerators around me and my immediate impulse is to run like hell or scream. Oddly, I never found the Resident Evil games that scary. What fright they did provide was always "dog jumps at you out of nowhere!!" crap, which is cheap and easy. What RE4 did, other than adding some of the surreal/creepy-ness of Silent Hill, is to take the relentless Nemesis enemy from RE3 and give most of the enemies in the game his same ability to follow you through doors and keep coming at you. There still are doors that serve as loading screen transitions between areas which they won't go through, but for the most part the enemies will be hot on your heels all the time until you kill them or get far enough away.

I've made a pretty strong case for RE4's great gameplay, I hope, but there are some things that I'll still quibble over. (I think this is the most times I've used the word quibble in one update). Mainly, I guess, it's that the timed event/button press stuff is fun for awhile but quickly gets old. If you're playing the Wii version--and again, you really should be--then you get to do the kind of flopping and waggling that everyone personifies Wii players as looking like idiots for. It does add some interactivity to the cutscenes, but nowadays it frustrates me. I'm thinking of the knife fight/cutscene with Krauser, where you really have to be on time with your button presses or Wiimote shaking lest you die and then have to sit through all the talking over and over again.
There are some other small things I could quibble over (I promise that's the last time I use 'quibble' in this update) but they're mostly nitpicky stuff, like how some weapons are definitely better than others, and how the Mercenaries and other 'extra' modes are really cool but you won't play them much. Rather, the last thing I want to bring up is the cheap, cheap insta-deaths the game throws at you. I think I said this somewhere above: RE4 is a relatively easy game. I've never tried it on Professional difficulty, and I do die a lot even on the regular difficulty, but the kind of deaths I suffer are due to crap like failing the button pressing/timed events or the instant kill moves that some enemies--like the chainsaw dude pictured above--have. Because of the way enemies will drop health items/ammo depending on how badly the player needs them, you're very, very unlikely to run out of ammo or herbs, so practically every death you suffer is because you didn't hit A in time or those big blind guys with the giant Wolverine claws swung around in a fury and decapitated you. On the bright side, these losses of life and limb lead to awesomely gruesome and gruesomely awesome death sequences. I said this about Smash Brothers Brawl, and it applies to RE4, too: any game that can make losing just as fun as winning is pretty damn good in my book.

I've run out of things to say, and I can't think of a clever way to end this review. Basically, you need to play Resident Evil 4 if you haven't already. It's my favorite game of the decade so far, and I'm more than willing to call it A Modern Classic and have this sentence put on the gamebox with my name attributed. I'm waiting, Capcom.

Super Lame Monday Update...From The Past!!

I really did mean to do an update today, but I had an eye doctor appointment in the afternoon and my eyes are still messed up. My pupils are so dilated I could birth some sort of eye baby through them with no fuss and even less muss.

In lieu of anything new, here's a really old review I wrote of Rolling Stone magazine that is rife with spelling errors, punctuation problems, and other foul grammar. I think I wrote it when I was 16, and that helps explain why my opinions are idiotic and the points I try to make are ham fisted and even more idiotic. Idioticer. Uh huh.


"You know, I find it oh so ironic how trendy and pathetic Rolling Stone. I remember when I respected the magazine because they were just so popular that there had to be something good about it.

Well, there was 30 years ago. Flip to any random page and you are guaranteed to see an advertisement of some kind. Sure, the magazine looks huge when you see it on the shelf, but really 1/2 or less of the pages are actual content and not ultra trendy Gap or Tommy Hilfiger ads for the hipster 14 and under set. Isn't it ironic that a magazine that was created during the time of non-conformity and a hatred of all sponsors and big companies is now full of ads depicting these same things?

Perhaps the biggest problem I have with Rolling Stone is that they employ the worst possible people for jobs and let their amateurish opinions be known. I read an article on Rolling Stone online today, which was contributed by someone off of AOL. Being a former user of that service, I know how pathetic and xenophobic such people can be. But the aforementioned article, an attack of juvenile quality on Radiohead and their new album Kid A, was just too much. It was like CNN hired some random 14 year old to talk about how lame and stupid presidential candidate George Bush is. I do realize the article was mainly for comedy purposes, and most of Rolling Stone is a farce of one thing or another; but don't you think they could have got somebody more professional to do the jokes? Then it wouldn't seem like the personal attack that it was.

Any magazine that tries to cover all forms on entertainment will ultimately fail; because no one person or magazine can satisfy every group unless it is around 300 pages long....oh, and with half the pages *not* filled with advertisements. As it is, you have no excuse to but this magazine at all, because all news that is even worth hearing or reading about is found for free online; from unbiased sources. Any magazine run by entertainment 'critics' that features groups like Limp Bizkit or Britney Spears on it's cover and other such groups should not be taken seriously. If you can find me a credible music critic that actually thinks Limp Bizkit or Britney Spears are important enough or have great music to be on a cover, then I'll smash my copy of Kid A and declare my love for a magazine full of ads that smells funny."