Amir's TGIM Playlist: Acoustic sounds, and more

ACOUSTIC, SORTA. AWESOME, YES.(~33 MIN)
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What’s He Building in There?

Tom Waits - Mule Variations

Break out your brandy and your tobacco, and get ready to grow some hair on those nudie little nuts of yours. Tom Waits emits vitality. He builds a spectacular, surreal world where shit is just plain backwards, but Jesus, isn’t that reality?

Levity is something I’ve seen so many times when I throw this album on for a virgin ear. Initially, everything about his music is absurd and, well, slightly dirty, unsettling. A stiff laugh isn’t an uncommon occurrence, nor is it unwarranted. Mule Variations opens with “Big in Japan,” which is a perfect way to meet Mr. Waits. BOOM BA BA BA!!! It's in your face and it’s silly and it’s fucking ingenious.

“I got the bread, but not the butter,
I got the window, but not the shutter.”

This album is streaked greasy, battered, and fried. Waits’ haggard voice is soaked in a wry, twisted, harrowing vintage of grit. His voice is complemented and often contrasted by bluesy guitars, haunted pianos, wailing horns, screeching violins, clomping percussion, sexy saxes, a goddamn rooster crow. Fuck, you name it; it’s in there. He has a veritable orchestra behind him, and a distinguished one, at that. Each musician guzzles the blues, hiccups from it, which intensifies the old-timey feel of the album.

Nineteen ninety-nine, dammit! is when this album was released. It’s timeless. Let me hand you a little perspective: the day Mule Variations came out, you had probably just finished snorting bubblegum pop off of your Powerpuff Girls matching pillow set. Afterwards, you probably proceeded to diddle your pubescent self whilst pondering the validity of Britney’s boobies, and all the while, the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium album gently sobbed to itself in the background.

But seriously, I love this album because, under all the stench and all the grit, something complex and really rather raw bubbles its way to the surface. When the pace slows, I feel like I can breathe. Waits can capture a feeling, or moment in time, and convey it through any vessel he desires. He has in him the ability to use his words, his piano, his guitar, HIS VERY WILL to manipulate the chords of the heart, a most favorite marionette. Mule Variations is simultaneously real and ebbing on insanity. There is an unusual dark quality to his music; he won’t waste your time dressing his words with unwanted sunshine and sparkle bullshit. “Like a moth mistakes a light bulb/For the moon and goes to hell.” My God, that’s fucking beautiful, riddled with tragedy. I could go on all day about each of the feelings he radiates, but I couldn’t possibly do them justice.

So, whenever your testes feel that chilly draft a bit too easily, put this album on and man up, ya big pussy.

-Megan Smith (Guest)

Too Rare to Die: French Puppets and Nightmare Figures

Guignol - S/T

Recall that dream you had—you know the one:

It’s the one that looks an awful lot like a pastel painting. It’s dripping, dark, frantic. You make your way through a harsh maze or set of mazes in a some kind of circusy mess, dilapidated with cluster-fucks of brilliant and soft color, like an eight-year-old just got a new art set. Tents grow tall and shrink down around you, breathing almost more heavily than you do. It’s dusk, or seems to be. The sky is orange and black of an uncertain ash (colors rip right through it), and you start running—without an inclination as to why or from whom. The colors spin together in a dizzy terror, while you trip by rusted metals and broken mirrors.

Making your way through the endlessness of the odd objects surrounding you, you begin to hear the pulsating wail of an accordion, and lone drum beats. It starts getting louder, faster. It joins wind instruments and percussions ever picking up louder, faster. It’s the melody found in a lack of melody. The time is strange—but then again, everything is strange. It’s slick, what you’re hearing. You’d like it if it didn’t frighten you to the bone, but you still don’t really know what to make of it. Regardless of which direction you move, it just gets louder.

There’s a man in a hat, but you don’t know which man. He’s holding something (or maybe nothing). You move on, but he doesn’t leave you, not really. You’d swear he’s staring at you, but you can’t see his eyes. The sounds you hear swell and shrink like the objects in your periphery, like one long breath from a very large lung. He’s making you aware of the sad looking hand-puppets at your feet. They’re broken and like everything else in this place, a macabre impression of a sad operatic clown.

You move on, for lack of any more comforting action. Things pick up: it gets more dizzy, they start melting together. You can feel it, the crescendo of the piece—if this is art you swear you’ll never lay eyes on another piece again. The things spin you into the distinct feeling that you can’t see or that you can see too much and it gets harder to move. The man is gone now and you realize too late that he may have been a good thing. Something strikes you still, silent, and you have the distinct feeling of falling but it’s hard to say in which direction you fall. The music picks up and becomes disjointed and now seems to control your destiny. You plead to it, as if to make your case, but nothing gives. The images and sounds blend together in a very colorful strait-jacket as you finally give in to the gravity of whatever this is. The hyperventilating couldn’t possibly get worse, or at least that’s what you thought. You’re choked and scared until tears blur what little and bizarre sight you had. You make one last grandiose grab at something before realizing it’s really too late, and you’re played off by one accordion set to one marching beat. You savor it, because for lack of anything else it’s contact by collision, and you’ll take it.

Waking up, you can’t really shake the feeling of terror. Even if it wasn’t real, it’s hard to say what is. You still have the dizziness, which frightens you, but the world is no longer moving with you, and the colors and surfaces and faces and floors don’t bleed together anymore. You wonder why and how that was manufactured by your rather healthy imagination, but it’s not something you want to think about. You have no choice but to move past it and keep moving, and you find it hard to elude the feeling of being watched, at least for now.

Come to think of it, I guess you could call it a nightmare.

-Drew

Too Rare to Die: Charles Manson

Charles Manson - LIE: The Love and Terror Cult

Yeah, Charles Manson... sorry, blog's credibility. The thing is, it's a kind of cool freak folk album. Although back when Charlie recorded these songs freak folk wasn't a thing, so it's basically folk music filtered through the mind of a maniac. That's got to be worth something.

Before Manson was a wiry spectre haunting the Hollywood Hills, before he was one of the most notorious cult leaders of all time, he was a struggling musician trying to make it big. There was one problem: everyone thought his music was terrible. I don't see why, either - I mean, this was the late 60s, where tons of terrible music thrived in the acid-fueled music scene of the time, and Manson's stuff was good, if not a little dark and vague. Those bands got record deals, they got to play Woodstock, Charlie didn't. I'm guessing that didn't sit well with Charlie.

Am I saying that his music getting cold-shouldered is what led to Sharon Tate and others getting brutally slain years later? No, his crippling paranoia and psychosis are to blame for that.

These songs only saw the light of day once Manson was accused of planning multiple murders. Friends of his pressed 2000 copies of the album, of which only 300 sold, to help fund his defense. Charles Manson may be a horrific human being, but once upon a time, he wrote some pretty good songs. The sound may be familiar to some, since the 'new weird america' folk scene is catching up to the insanity Manson recorded decades ago - basically, Charles Manson was Devendra Banhart before Devendra Banhart was Devendra Banhart.

-Thom

Too Rare to Die: The Falling Idols

The Falling Idols- s/t EP


Sunny Southern California. We've been itemized by the likes of Best Coast and Wavves, as weed smoking, shorts wearing, taco eating, beach bumming peoples. On one hand, these generalizations are often true, but to make it a stylistic trend that even landlocked people and east coasters start sporting, well there's something utterly strange and lame about it. The point I'm trying to make is what SoCal is now being sold as has been around forever, just not so superficially accessorized. I'm going to use this totally radical Long Beach punk band from 1982 to drive the point home.

The Falling Idols are pretty much a no name outside of very small punk circles in Socal. I only know about them because Sublime popularized their very awesome surferelic instrumental titled "Falling Idols":



In 1982, they recorded a 5 song 12'', hand painted the covers, made 500 copies, and got it out as far as they could (which probably didn't extend far past LA and SD). This is their only real release, although there is a compilation later put together after the band's breakup. These songs find you in a dingy garage in Long Beach, beer cans lying around, garage door open halfway letting the sun peer in to keep reminding you you've been day drinking again...

These are just kids, probably towards the end of their teens, absorbing all the punk rock that's been going on in the world, riding out the wave of the local hardcore scenes, and sticking to their roots of the sand and sea. Guitar, bass, drums, and all the lazy suburban angst your little bored heart can handle.
love, Amir

Maybe We're Not Strangers After All

The Dutchess and the Duke - She's the Dutchess, He's the Duke

There’s something warm about sitting in a room full of friends drunk from solidarity, singing along to simple songs played on an acoustic guitar and set to the kind of grab-bag percussion a room full of drunks might produce. It’s that sort of intimate and free-flowing moment when guards are down just enough to enjoy yourself, just for this one small chuck of time.

This album is in many ways an extension of that moment. It’s the moment you can’t seem to catch but by memory. It’s a cancerous feather from a neighborhood pigeon, stopping for just an instant mid-air, but ultimately just delaying its trip to the sidewalk. You sit in that room, present for the moment, gripping for dear life at something real before it floats away.

It’s a short LP of gritty, pained songs, largely acoustic and bisexually duetted by two very tired people. The songwriting conjures dark images of notable alarm and the guitar lines mirror that slight gypsy-psych picking I wish I heard more often (a la “Paint it Black”, or something). In fact, the very first thing that comes to mind with this album is that it sounds like Mic Jagger started making good music again.

Anyway, the album serves as a respite for both musician and audience from the true nature of the problem. We’re huddled together to escape the rain, “but the clouds keep moving on in”. It’s an honest look at things that aren’t touched upon enough—the second track, “Out of Time”, is specifically about people having the gall to tell you everything’s going to be alright. It feels good to recognize a sentiment like that, for once, but it is like all of these things fleeting. They recently stopped making music, and it only seems fitting. This was never something to fix the problem, just a way of telling it to fuck off for a little while.

Think of it as a mobile version of our drunken sing-alongs. Put it through headphones and see if your foot doesn’t start tapping. Take it with you on a long, sunny drive. It’s comfort by way of words that people don’t write on greeting cards—anything but cold.

-Drew

Let's talk about chicks, man

Sure, not many chicks play black metal or thrash (although if they do, I wanna hear it, ladies) but girls can shred with the best of 'em, especially when they all band together.

Girl groups used to be something manufactured in the 50s and 60s to sell melancholy pop songs to high school girls, and some fantastic songs came out of that. The Supremes told you stop in the name of love, The Shangri-Las pined for the leader of the pack, and the Ronettes took you walkin' in the rain (while holding hands with Phil Spector.)

The came the Runaways, who showed that girls can do more than harmonize or just front a rock band, they can form a rock band all by themselves. And for a time, it was good. Then, Bikini Kill and the other Riot Grrl acts happened, which was all pretty boring, but expected, considering it was the 90s. The Donnas were pretty cool though.

Now though, in this golden age of independence and experimentation, these all-girl
outfits are dipping their pretty little feet in every puddle of rock n' roll.


Download the Mix
This sampler mix has 14 songs by 7 lady bands (6 modern, 1 classic) that I feel are doing their gender proud. The Splinters will start us off with some nuggets-era jangle, The Flips and The Like will woo us with some modern girl-group cooing, Those Darlins show how girls do country, and the Shangri-Las take us back in time before Pearl Harbor (aka Puro Instinct) will chillwave us right into some Vivian Girls.

Enjoy,
Thom

From a far away land called Vermont...

Happy Birthday - s/t

Vermont is a strange place for a great indie rock album to be created, sure, but I have a theory: the combination of small-town boredom, neglected state anonymity, and most importantly, three talented musicians who love playing together. It also doesn't hurt that the band is fronted by Kyle Thomas, aka King Tuff, who's first record "Was Dead" has had steady play from me since I caught wind of it last year. (download that album here)

This effort on the other hand, is a bit different. Whereas King Tuff was a tough little rock roundup owing a lot of debt to the 70s, this is much more poppy - at first glance, that is. There's a lot of pop to be had, but it's not exclusively catchy and cutesy, as some completely odd will whip at your ears when you least expect it. This is far from a perfect album though, some songs are major letdowns (Eyes Music) or just seem completely out of place (Cracked,) but mostly it's full of great, multiple-repeat-worthy tunes like Girls FM, 2 Shy and Subliminal Message.

This is an album to bring some fun to your turntable; it's everything you've heard before, but it's got something ever slightly so warped about it that keeps it from being boring. It's not different in the same vein as Nobunny or Smith Westerns, taking pop music and plastering it in grime and glam until it's something their own, I think I can put it best this way:

You see a pretty girl walking towards you down the sidewalk, she's blonde, floral summer dress, a cool breeze blowing her hair ever so slightly - but she's got a black eye, a real shiner. And all it does it just add to her charm.

-Thom

The Times That You Cried In The Movies

Girls- Broken Dreams Club EP (2010)


Good music has a certain emotion behind it. We take these different artists and sounds and use them to comfort ourselves with our own. Why do you listen to upbeat adrenaline rushed music when you're going out at night? Why do you listen to sad music when you're sad? The artist's sounds serve as a mirror of our own self.

With "Broken Dreams Club" you know what you're going to get. Bitter sweet sadness that we're all familiar with. That side of you that feels tragic flaws, restless unsatisfiable desires, guilt, regret. I'm not going to get into Girls' frontman Christopher Owens backstory, as it's already been beaten to a bloody pulp by the likes of pitchfork. All I'm going to say is this man has that genuine sadness so many artists fail to mimic. You can't just buy your way through these things, it needs to be an organically and spontaneously occurring thing in your life; real life, not your musical persona.

Owens takes familiar melodies from 2009's "Album", and creates more moodscapes with them. You'll notice beautiful horn arrangements from the get go on "Thee Oh So Protective One" (totally think this is a Thee Oh Sees reference btw). "Oh little girl they just don't know about the weight you carry in your soul". "Heartbreaker", released a couple of weeks ago is the second track, and finds Owens contemplating his own downfall in finding love in places he knows will hurt him in the end. "Broken Dreams Club" introduces the lonely sound of the slide guitar for this lonely music. A perfect match. 7 minute closer "Carolina" seems like a part 2 to "Hellhole Rat Race", a modern ballad.

This is urban country, with a pop twist.

"Broken Dreams Club" is set for release Nov 22nd on True Panther.
You can preorder the 12'' or CD here

Remember, this isn't Radiohead or Kanye. Please support the music by buying the vinyl or attending a live show. For fuck's sake, I was reading an article on Elvis Costello and even he still has to work to get the bills done.

Are you a part of the Broken Dreams Club?

love, Amir

Elec^&*(*^ccctri:::&*(ccccii%^&#(iiitttttyy*()*^$yyyyyyy

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band- Safe As Milk (1967)



When I used to hear about Captain Beefheart, I'd think about 2 things: the album cover for "Trout Mask Replica", and Frank Zappa. Some freak doing his best Howlin' Wolf impression and running with it. "Safe As Milk" is Beefheart's first album.

From Blues, to Soul, to Rock & Roll, this album covers it all, injects a half gram of pure grade A lysergic acid right into it's own femoral artery, and somehow turns it into one of the weirdest yet completely accessible albums ever made. I'll be frank, "Trout Mask Replica" can be hard to take in for virgin ears. I think most people that find that album enjoyable had first heard it in some fucked up state, be it drugs, stress, adrenaline; whenever it was, it hit them a certain way and tweaked their ears for it. "Safe As Milk" is no less weird, but its weirdness lies more in the consciousness of the Blues than absolute schizophrenia.

This is HEADPHONE music, TRUST ME. From the first notes of the album... delta blues guitar in the far right, and Beefheart's growly voice in your left, everything has its perfect place in the mix. Shits gonna get panned back and forth, you're gonna get dizzy n' foam at the mouth but dig every moment. It hard to decide which instrument takes the cake. The bass punches you, so groovily. The guitars are bluesy, and the percussion has to be the most psychedelic of them all.

This is Howlin' Wolf on a drug cocktail as the Beatles produce the album (whom also happen to have eaten one too many caps)

One of the most interesting things in this album has to be all the riffs and melodies you recognize. So many musicians have used this album as a toolbox to grab things from to make their own craft all the more interesting. I've heard The Birthday Party, The Black Lips, The Mummies, Thee Oh Sees, and more that's not coming to me.

How did the 50's turn into this...





And there's a song titled "Abba Zabba"... how can you not be curious?

10V3, Amir

Judas, 1966, England

Bob Dylan- The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert



Everyone's seen some sort of Dylan biograph, be it "No Direction Home", "Don't Look Back", or "I'm Not There". And everyone remembers that show, mid 60's, Dylan in full suit all knocked up on drugs. Everyone remembers that guy yelling "Judas! I'm never listening to you again!" to which Dylan replied, "I don't believe you... you're a liar".

Well this is where it happened. Recorded on May 17, 1966 at Manchester's "Free Trade Hall", and released as the Bootleg Series:4.

This is one of those live recordings that puts you right in the audience. The mix is spot on, the audience, ambiance, banter, and Dylan being Dylan. The set starts acoustically, with Dylan going through songs like Visions of Johanna, Mr. Tambourine Man, Baby Blue, and the lengthy Desolation Row, which he nails. This is intimate. You can hear his faintest breaths before exploding into orchestral harmonica solos and winding back down to talking his poetry.

This is a man trying to make peace with his audience. As soon as he picked up the electric guitar, his world became a whirlwind of heckling, chaos, and pointed fingers. He picks up the acoustic guitar because as much as he likes to present himself as the indifferent rockstar, he does care for his fans. Fans fight for his affection, and he fights for theirs. Its a strange relationship not really existing anywhere else in the musical world. And honestly, it hasn't changed much even in his live shows today.

The second set revs up with his backup band The Hawks (later renamed as The Band, you might have heard of them). Applause and boos all combine into this strange noise, happy but angry, approving but discontent. After each perfectly executed song, you can hear people get whatever it is off their chests. You can't make out most of what their yelling at him, but the tone is not friendly. But it doesn't sound like he minds, as he mentions them only in reply to the Judas comment.

But hell does the man play a rock and roll set. Sometimes I think I like this live version of "Tom Thumb's Blues" more than the studio. He howls! When he sings "I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough", he means it, seriously, and you can hear that he means it. His voice pierces through the organ, guitar, bass. I have this image of him just looking up at the ceiling as he sings and makes the whole theater shake. He sounds drunk, he sounds excited, he sounds confused... he sounds like the man we love. He fucking sounds great.

If you're a Dylan fan this is a must. This is Dylan's last tour before his hiatus, where he only began touring again in '74, and in a lot of ways, he became a different man. This show is the end of what Dylan created, before moving on to his other curiosities.

Reminisce my friends, reminisce..

love, Amir

Celtic Soul

Van Morrison - Astral Weeks

The History:
Van Morrison's sophmore album, and generally considered his magnus opum. It's a sweeping, soulful album that, I hate to say this, takes you on a journey. It's orchestral, it's folky, clearly heartfelt, and from what I can tell, was (and is) something truly one-of-a-kind. This isn't Brown Eyed Girl at all, it's something so different that I can't even place it in a genre or mood. I could try pick it apart and talk about it's ups and downs, but like a middle school kid who loves frogs, I can't dissect something so beautiful.



Basically, listening to the album, I was like



-Thom