Savor These Firework Shards While They Fly

Mischief Brew - Bak'en'al

I’m not quite sure what possessed me to write-up this short EP (other than that it’s pretty fuckin’ good, that is), but I’d at this point consider it some sort of nap-hangover strangeness that seems to fuel a lot of my nightlife doings nowadays. This is all to say there’s something about these five songs that I’ve never been able to put my finger on. It’s something that I can’t call “off” and wouldn’t stretch to label “uncomfortable”, but it’s got a tone and a feeling that reeks of oddball nights and carnivalesque drunks.

It’s a decent cross-section of the Mischief Brew catalogue—that balance of rustic folk rebellion and gypsy vertigo jams that elevate Erik Peterson from the scores of punks that got old and started getting folky to a punk that is way too talented to be labeled solely as such.

The first song, “Devil of a Time” starts with a sample (one that’s arguably responsible for the name of this blog) and the line “Didn’t we have a devil of a time?” set to strange chords and strange rhythm. It’s a question that seems to still remain a question, despite the fact it’s probably meant to be a leading one. What I’m getting at is that the ambiguousness of the song here and its slightly unsettling backdrops are a microcosm of the whole Mischief Brew kick. It’s about the fever dreams of a world in which the pieces aren’t quite fitting together.

The rest follows with excellent guitar licks (and impressive ones at that, if you’re one of the few that only know Peterson from his punk outfit The Orphans). It’s a mixture of acoustic and electric with everything from mandolins to children spliced in for added effect.

Track 3, “The Drunk of Three Nights” is a favorite, and perhaps a song to match tone and content so fittingly as to make it seem like some sort of cinematic narrative—some gritty noir flick flush with hazy drunks and a femme fatale. It’s a romance that builds tension and releases it with a heavy drop of distortion and reassures us that moments like these are only fleeting.

The final two tracks cover Mischief Brew’s more acousti-folk, “I’m a grown up anarchist, just fucking leave me alone” aesthetic. It’s the cheeky bits about planning silent rebellions and passive retaliations that characterize this other half of the catalogue. It’s no longer about firebombing post offices, it’s about living outside the lines and finding a peace in the rustic and the philosophical.

So here I am, barricaded in my den and moist of nap-sweat in a sway and gaze that led me through this EP about four times. I’m realizing now how befitting of my mood this one really is. I think that strangeness is lurking somewhere and it lives in more forms than one. This is all a bit dramatic, sure, but I think these moments in between the waking life and whatever happens when we lose consciousness are sort of telling in a weird way. They beg the question of whether or not we’ve got the whole thing right. Maybe we did have a devil of a time.

-Drew

Crushed Little Kids Adorn the Boardwalk

Dead Kennedys - Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

I was riding in a car with Douglas “DJ Teach Me How 2 Dougie” Sweeney the other day, and my 6-disc (yes, I still use compact discs in the car) popped on this little gem of an album. The Dead Kennedys aren’t exactly en vogue lately, and I still haven’t gotten over Jello Biafra’s support of Jerry Brown in the recent California gubernatorial election (not that I cared for the alternative, mind you, I just don’t appreciate the irony), but I’ll be goddamned if this isn’t a near perfect album.

From start to finish, it’s everything we love about the DK’s: it’s a catchy, clever, and biting sound that added a whole new dimension to the punk scene during its time, especially in California. Jello’s not afraid to say whatever it is he feels like saying. It pushed boundaries with crass satire and “I don’t need this fucking world” sentiments that eventually created a voice for the countless.

With these punk-standard albums I’ve been beating into you lately, I feel like it’s pointless to really harp on them. You’re either into it, or you’re not. If you aren’t, I should say, just listen to the fuckin’ thing.

-Drew

Look Out Below

Death From Above 1979 - You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

Death From Above 1979 (hereafter referred to as DFA) will probably always be one of my favorite bands.

Back when I heard them for the first time at the tender age of 14, punk to me was music that either a.) I wasn't cool enough for, or b.) was the terrible music in the background of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. DFA, who I heard about on one of those MTV Underground 3-minute spotlights oddly enough, made me look at heavier music in a new way. Blood On Your Hands was the song that drew me in and held onto me like desperate cement. It was fast, it wasn't perfectly tuned, it had some anger (or angry noises) in it. Liking this band felt pretty cool, especially at a time when I was certainly not. This band is in a way is the driving force which pushed me off the path to Pussyville, and i'm not talking about a town where you get your dick wet a lot.

DFA is punky, yes, that much is clear, but it's also completely dancey if you pay close attention. Every song is as appropriate for moshing as it is for some grinding and groping that'd cause a friction burn. Not bad considering it's just a drum kit and one hell of bass setup. Sebastian Grainger makes his bass sing like 3 guitars at once, and Jesse Keeler's drumming is so precise at sometimes he sounds like, well, a machine. The songs are invariably about girls or sex, like your friend's daughter (and fucking her?) on Little Girl or your temptress of a boss in Sexy Results. It's not the angsty/political/serious punk that's ubiquitous now as it ever was, it's completely itself, and if wants to be dancy-sex punk, it sure as hell will be.

These crazy Canadians are reuinting for the first time in 5 years for Coachella this year, so I want you, the readers, to get a liking for them, because Coachella may be your last chance to see them. Ever. Maybe. Hopefully not.

-Thom

Chill the fuck out (((seriously)))

After a lot of sniffling, cold mornings, and rhinovirus infections, we're finally getting some beautiful warm weather. Coincidentally, two albums have been playing nonstop on my iPod. When I'm at school I catch myself briskly walking under the sun. Sweat starts to form under my armpits, so I stop to take off my hoodie (why the fuck am I wearing it?) and either wrap it around my waist or around the strap of my book bag. I take the opportunity to swap my eyeglasses with sunglasses and put the perfect tune on my iPod. When I begin walking again, my speed and demeanor have changed.

I'm no longer just pacing towards destination X anymore. Destination X is now just a general goal, and every slow step under the sun warms me up more and more, but I don't go in the shade. I strut by, bobbing my head like an egyptian dancer, ironically to artists who are currently some feet under the snow.

Ducktails- Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics


Ducktails is cool. Ducktails is sunny. Ducktails is pop. Ducktails is awesome.

Ducktails is Matthew Mondanile.

Matt is also a guitarist in Real Estate. Awesome.

This is so New Jersey. You'll hear similar guitar vibes here as you do in a Real Estate album, but the songs seem more distant, more abstract. Instead of a drum kit, there might be a strange repetitive electronic noise keeping the rhythm, or some simple tambourine, sometimes two tambourines. There may be bass, there may not. But there will be guitars, many of them.

Highlights include Hamilton Road, The Razor's Edge, Killin' The Vibe, and Don't Make Plans. There's also a song called Art Vandalay, what's there not to love?

There's also a version of Killin' The Vibe featuring the aid of Panda Bear, and Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, and Dent May. (The album version doesn't have Panda Bear on it, but you can listen to it here on pitchfork).

Kurt Vile- Constant Hitmaker


(Best album cover in a long time)

Kurt Vile is based in Philly, and often plays with his band The Violators. This album is all him though. Kurt is one of the most interesting song writers in the Indie rock circles. He was one of the pioneers of the re-emergence of bedroom pop, drowned in reverb, fuzz, and everything fun, mellow, and light hearted. He gives off the impression of someone who can write as many songs as he wants, whenever he wants. He knows how to fit words into any little corner of a chord, and has intelligible lyrics to go along with it. He's that genius high school dropout, or something.

These songs are often simply fingerpicked guitar and vocals. Sometimes they are not. He makes perfect use of the space he has in your headphones, putting the right sounds in the right places. His goal is the shroud himself in a cloak of mysteriousness... or maybe the dude just loves ambiance. Freeway kicks off with the most accessible and "full" songs in the album. The album kicks into a lower gear and you get an intimate couple of songs with Kurt. Slowly more synths and drumkits are introduced, and towards the last half of the album you are buried.

But have no worries, Kurts got your back.

Classic Rock in Spring/Freeway in Mind will dig you out and leave you feeling as light as a feather. Its really an amazing feeling going through this album.



Hey, how are ya?
You sure got a way of greeting a man.
But I had the perfect sun tan.
Your riding on your yellow Schwann.
Blasting classic rock in spring.
A couple of summer demons.
With battery recharging.
When you hear the Bob Seger song, you know I'll be long gone.
Cutting all my classes, like a hit of acid.
Hey, how are ya?


PS-I made this last night:



Some exciting news: We've purchased a domain name (lyhd.us), and recorded our first podcast. These things are in the future, or the semi-near future. Hopefully soon.
love, amir

Word Attack, Word Attack

Adolescents - Adolescents

I hate feeding into bad stereotypes of myself, but on off days I stop giving a shit. Today is one of those days. I couldn’t imagine boring you with the details—suffice it to say, I feel rather meh. Anyway, in utter typicality, I’m cooking vegan food, drinking juice from a large jug, and listening to the Adolescents at a piss-off-the-neighbors volume.

This S/T album is one of my favorite albums ever, and it reminds me of my more angry youth. In a weird way, this makes me less angry. It’s an album that is as standard to the general punk collection as “Birth of the Cool” is to the guys-who-own-turtlenecks collection. Most of you’ve either had this album since middle school or wouldn’t like it to begin with, so I won’t harp on it. It’s quick, it’s angsty, it’s catchy as fuck, and above all else it’s solid all the way through. If you’re in the minority that reads this write-up and starts diggin’ on this album: shame and double shame on you, but I guess that means I’ve done my job.

I’ll leave this short, because I feel like a big bummer. I guess the only thing left to say is that today sucks, but fuckall, I’m gonna cook some potatoes.

Have a nice day.

-Drew

Daisies by Your Stone

William Elliott Whitmore - Hymns For The Hopeless

In Southern Texas a few weeks ago, my road-companion and I stopped for a while to watch a freight roll by. As we played with the hypothetical of us chasing it down and then being beaten unconscious with a Maglite, my thoughts slipped into this rustic aesthetic of heavy machinery chugging through American wasteland beside the setting sun. It’s hard to explain the feeling that a scene like this conjures, except to say that it’s a little too real for comfort. Through dead ground and dry brush this vestige of man pushes ceaselessly onward—it’s striking.

In the days since, I’ve found myself listening to this album a lot. It’s slow-moving, it’s rough, and it’s pained. Whitmore has the voice of a ghost. He sings in a sort of bristly amalgamation of the voices of old bluesmen and railroad workers and fill-in-the-blank hand-calloused souls that gives the impression he looks a lot different than he actually does. The music, as my friend Doug would say, is real shit-kickin’ music—it’s the type of blues you get when you need the help of your guitar or banjo to tell the whole story, to make the whole apology.

Where Whitmore really shines is in the honesty of his writing. He’s not padding the blow, because it doesn’t seem like he can. The songs are about death and regret. They’re about the things you couldn’t bring yourself to tell someone and the things you never got a chance to. “It does me no good to say I’m sorry, although I am, for what it’s worth”, he confesses. But from apologies for unmentioned trespasses to the unmentioned deceased, he moves on to hopeful metaphors and he chugs through a certain darkness with enough light and levity to keep from being kitschy—it’s just sort of real.

The album is about the often unbearable pains of life. It speaks to the things we’ve done wrong and the people we’ve lost, one way or another, but it never indulges the idea of giving up. It has a tenacity about it that keeps us as listeners certain of the fact that life keeps moving. It inches along, slowly sifting through the defeats of a truly tough existence. Dusk is turning darkness and the wasteland is all around us, but there’s still a necessary belief that the sun will make its way back up again, and this train doesn’t stop, not even for a beat.

“May the light shine down upon your head.”

-Drew

Fuckwave (consider the term coined)

Keep Shelly In Athens - In Love With Dusk

If Barry White did chillwave, it would sound like this. A mellow, sexy groovesperience. Not my usual cup of tea, but it's doing something that stands out in a very ubiquitous, monotonous genre.

Short post, I know, but I'll be back with my usual lack of brevity soon.
-Thom

Things I Learned in NYC // Jay Reatard

Words of Wisdom:
1) Last call at 4am is both good and bad.
2) Don't let cheap beer/shot combos become your go to drink the whole night.
3) The view from the top of the Empire State Building (at night) is well worth the insane waiting time.
4) Every homeless guy has an elaborate made up story.
5) Its never as cold as it seems like it should be.
6) There's way too many "Ray's" Pizzas (there's apparently an original one somewhere).
7) People in Manhattan > Williamsburgers
8) Everything cool in LA is just trying to mimic something cooler in NYC.
9) The Giants are the Manhattan team while the Jets are the surrounding burroughs (and Bud-Light knows what subways to put the appropriate ads to exploit this)
10) Artichoke pizza from "Artichoke" is the greatest thing you can put in your mouth.
11) Jay Z's "Empire State of Mind" is 100% true.
12) I want to live in NY.

MUSIC
Jay Reatard's got a morbid mind. Although he doesn't have many cheery things to sing about, he packages his gloominess in quick, aggressive, hook-covered songs. The word "epic" is often thrown around with this music... not epic in a Pink Floyd in Dark Side of the Moon sort of way. Epic in the way these songs gear up, and finish; often starting with a simple riff, and ending in a multi-instrument whirlwind building upon one repeated phrase.

"Blood Visions" is one of the most raunchy albums, ever.

Jay Reatard- Blood Visions (2006)


Amir

An Endtroduction to Endgineering...

DJ Shadow - Endtroducing... (the up of this was taken down, so you'll have to hunt it down yourself)

Sampling is not difficult to do. In fact, it’s so easy that many people discredit it as an artistically fulfilling form of music. The pros will tell you that sampling is only meant to be used as a base to leap off of, a foundation for a great piece of music. Sampling is crisp and precise, but it’s not organic, it’s not natural, and it’s not a form of music that most people would describe as being “alive”.

It’s strange then that Endtroducing…, an album composed of nothing but samples is one of the most deeply ethereal albums ever made. It’s so special to so many people that nearly every song used in it was backtracked, and you can find almost every piece of music that was used to create this marvelous collection. Finding negative criticism for this album is like finding a needle in the Amazon Rain Forest.

It holds a record in the Guinness book for being the first album ever made using only samples, and it started a wave in the world of hip hop that is difficult to qualify (it all seemed to come at once in the mid-to-late 90s). DJ Shadow didn’t really stand out then to most people, but today his first album is regarded as one of the most important ever made. It’s still difficult, though, to grasp the idea that an album made entirely of samples could be moving.

But then you pick up the album and your mind shifts. You start to hear a sound that seems entirely transcendent of efficient beats and perfectly timed drum sets. Shadow doesn’t just sample, and he doesn’t just lay out beats to bob your head to. He finds the passion in records and whirls it into a veritable eddy of harmony. Sure it sounds corny, but that’s what you get with this album. It’s absolute, and it puts you at ease with the idea of being more passionate about hip hop than you might normally be. Lord knows I’m not a connoisseur of the genre, but I definitely took it less seriously before listening to this album. Maybe it takes a couple listens to fully grasp, but I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t level with me after hearing it. When you can go on for 20 minutes about how special this album really is—and refer someone to the ridiculous amount of praise and recognition that it has received just for being primordial in the world of hip hop—the feeling is pretty undeniable.

There are certain songs that epitomize this feeling more than others, the feeling of the music being slowly dripped into your eardrums. Songs like “Changeling/Transmission 1” or “What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1): Blue Sky Revisit / Transmission 3” come to mind immediately. The latter deserves a review all of its own. Blue Sky Revisit is just magical, there's no other way I can describe it. Those legendary saxophone notes, the mashed up drum beat from David Young's “Joe Splivingates”, Shawn Phillip’s intro, and the elegant, soothing vocals used throughout. This song is, for me, the most entrancing. It starts and ends so perfectly, so beautifully, it’s honestly difficult for me to keep coming back to the fact that I’m essentially listening to a compilation of beats. But that’s the great thing about Endtroducing…, it doesn’t fool you. You're aware of the process the entire time, you're aware of the fact that this music wasn't recorded live, but it just makes it that much better. The tracks are so goddamn perfect, they're so beautifully crafted that you can’t help but listen in awe.

“Changeling” invokes a similar feeling but on a different level, it's another perfect ensemble of songs, but it doesn’t dip into your psyche like Blue Sky does. It’s just a complete embodiment of the word “cool”. From the very beginning you feel like everything is moving in slow motion, and like you’re wearing sunglasses. Then that succession of notes kicks in at 1:38, and you’re now smoking a cigarette and leaning back in your chair with that “I don’t need anything or anyone because I’m just that fucking content” look on your face. Then the guitar riff comes in at the end and you walk away from the cool and into the epic. Clearly these analogies have a silly undercurrent, but trust me, listen to the song and you’ll understand one way or another.

I’ve used the word “special” a number of times in this review, and in the end I feel it’s the best way to sum this album up in one word. The people who have grown to love this album have a relationship with every single song, a memory that is more permeated than most because it is accompanied by “Midnight in a Perfect World” or that immortal drum session on “Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain”. There are stories to go along with every song, and always something new to listen for every time you play it back again. The specialty of the album may seem obvious at first, but the genius is impossible to miss if you know what you’re looking for. The perfection, the craftsmanship, that’s really what makes this album great. The meticulousness and efficiency translate into spirituality and essence in ways that I honestly still don’t understand.

I don’t know if I would feel more comfortable calling Shadow an artist or an engineer. Either way, though, he is truly a master craftsman. Sometimes it’s difficult to truly immerse yourself in any kind of electronic music, people are often attached to the idea that music needs to be living and breathing in order to be artistically valuable. But that attachment can be severed, and I can promise you that if you listen to this album all the way through, your musical perspective will change.

-Sean Canzone (Guest)

I Get Up In The Morning to the Beat of the Drum

Dead Man's Bones - s/t
It is the new year, finally. A time for change and moving on with these lives we lead. The sky is still white and grey and brown in trees and grass - winter is in full effect, cold and dead, it's swan song at least two months away.

Consisting of the ever-adorable and infinitely talented Ryan Gosling, his friend Zack Shields, and a children's choir, Dead Man's Bones recorded this eponymous debut back in 2009, but I never gave it a real chance until now. It's the perfect album for these death throes before the rebirth of spring.

Doo-wop and ghost stories mesh surprisingly well, turns out. This album is like a valium-fueled romance that takes place on the Haunted Mansion ride. The fact that I'm a sucker for choir vocals doesn't hurt either.

It's a quirky album; slow, haunting, catchy. You may feel like the world dissolves into black and white while you're listening to it. It's, without getting too pitchforky about this, an experience. It's a hazy adventure through a foggy voodoo swamp, with Gosling as your dark priest, and the Silverlake Children's Choir as the angels chanting in the distance.

It's not without it's faults of course, the first 3 (sometimes 4) tracks are painfully boring and repetitive, but once "My Body's a Zombie for You" starts up, it's smooth sailing from there. And please, don't be turned off to this just because the guy from The Notebook is it's mastermind - this isn't some Bruce Willis and the Accelerators, i'm-famous-so-here's-my-shitty-band deal, it's solid music from a truly creative person who just so happens to be gracing the cover of GQ this month.

-Thom