Apparently Foghat had a resurgence in popularity when one of their songs appeared on the video game Guitar Hero. Suddenly a whole new generation was being introduced to their crap boogie-blues-70s rock. It was my first introduction to Foghat as they are not at all well known in the UK, even though its where the band are from.
I played that edition of Guitar Hero and sure it was fun playing along to Foghat, but it was also fun to play along to the Scorpions. Neither bands I intend to listen to outside the realms of Guitar Hero.
After spending some time with the game Story of My Life by the Californian band Social Distortion is a song that I did want to investigate more. It sounds like a punk band covering Creedence Clearwater Revial and is much easier to play on an actual guitar than on the medium level on Guitar Hero. The album by the same name is worth getting too.
Download an mp3 of Social Distortion - Story of My Life from here.
I’ve been playing a lot of music from Athens Georgia’s down tuned noise-rockers Harvey Milk lately. And one song that I’ve paid special attention to is the opener from the 2008 album Life…The Best Game in Town called Death Goes To The Winter.
It’s a pretty weird song. The opening verse doesn’t sound like Harvey Milk at all with its clean guitar and quire boy vocals, it takes just over a minute and a half before it kicks into the usual thumping riff and growled vocals of Harvey Milk.
And what a great outro, with a tight one note riff and a guitar solo where the strings are being loosened until they are completely slack so the guitar solo turns into a low pitched rumble. Oh and after all that it ends with a single big piano chord that replicates that end of song chord on The Beatles A Day In The Life.
Download Harvey Milk - Death Goes To The Winter mp3 from here.
Laughing Stock is considered to be of the first post-rock albums. I see it more as a sparse post-rock outline, albeit a very good one. Either way, it’s a massive departure from the synth pop of their early albums. Laughing Stock should be played from start to finish, preferably late at night. The exception is the song After The Flood which I can play anytime of the day. It glides along with a hypnotic laid back organ riff and then sores up in the chorus with Mark Hollis’ restraint but still intense vocal delivery.
Halfway through the nine minutes of the song there’s a one note solo that I believe is played on a wind instrument synthesizer called a Variophone. It sounds like nothing else that I’ve heard before as the note grows a life of its own and is trying desperately to stay in tune. Or desperately trying to wriggle out of tune.
Like in Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl sometimes a one note solo is all the notes you need.
Download an mp3 of Talk Talk - After The Flood from here.
For years I only ever though of Bruce Springsteen as some old overblown stadium rocker. As a kid growing up in the 80s I always used to hear him on the radio, mainly the big singles from Born In The U.S.A. That album was made for the radio, its so compressed and everything is up loud in the mix with no subtlety. Plus its got them massive shouty choruses.
Then about three or four years ago I picked up a copy of The River in the sales. I liked it but like almost all double albums it would be better if it was trimmed down to one really decent albums with no fillers. I soon picked up the stripped down acoustic Nebraska and the breakthrough album Born To Run, both good but it wasn’t until I heard Darkness on the Edge of Town that I really appreciated Springsteen. Then I got Born In The U.S.A which I liked more than I thought I would.
Although I now have and like a fair amount of his work I wouldn’t call myself a Bruce Springsteen fan as such. I will listen to him every so often but I’ve no intention of ever seeing him live as a three hour set in an arena would just be too much to bare.
Everything you need to know about the Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band live show is in the 2009 Super Bowl half time show. It had all the theatrics of a three hour set condensed into twelve minutes.
In the first minute he’s already thrown his guitar in the air, made a preaching speech to the camera telling the people at home to ‘step away from the guacamole, put the chicken fingers down and turn the volume up,' jumped onto a piano, jumped down again and is lying back while down on his knees.
In the four songs that follow all the boxes are ticket.
High fiving the front row. Holding the microphone to the crowd so they can sing. Sliding on knees. Air Punching. Members of the band all singing the chorus into one microphone. Fireworks. Playing back to back with the lead guitarist. Big rock and roll ending.
You feel knackered just watching it.
Great for stadium rock and the half time show but I would prefer to watch the basics of a Neil Young & Crazy Horse show.
So I guess I do still think of Springsteen as an old overblown stadium rocker, but with good songs.
The Hombres were a short lived psychedelic garage rock band from Memphis. I only have one song of theirs called Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out). Its their most well know and the only one you need.
Its got a simple three chord riff and a laid back swinging groove over rambling vocals that don’t make too much sense. ‘Hanging from a pine tree by my knees, sun is shining through the shade. Nobody knows what it's all about, it's too much man let it all hang out.’
The best place to get it is from the brilliant compilation album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 were you will also find many other short lived psychedelic garage rock bands who recorded one two great songs.
Download The Hombres Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out) mp3 from here.
While most of rock music’s elder statesmen lost their way during the 80s, Lou Reed ignored all the glossy production values of the time and found his way again. There’s no synth stabs or linen snare drums on the guitar driven The Blue Mask from 1982. Then at the end of the decade he released his finest solo album. New York was my first introduction to Lou Reed. Sometime in the mid 90s when I was about seventeen or eighteen my dad suggested that I listen to it, saying “If you like Bob Dylan then you might like this album.”
My dad was right. Lyrically I would put New York on par with any Dylan record. Set mainly to a late period Velvet Underground sounding backdrop (though there is a lounge jazz sort of song that somehow doesn’t feel too out of place) its full with stories set in New York City and takes swipes at many public figures and highlights many political issues. “Americans don't care too much for beauty, they'll shit in a river, dump battery acid in a stream. They'll watch dead rats wash up on the beach and complain if they can't swim.”
From New York I went on to Velvet Underground albums then back to the solo records. Some of his solo stuff I wish I hadn’t bought like Sally Can’t Dance and Berlin (I know Berlin is supposed to be one of Reed’s finest albums but I find it extremely dull), and some I still regularly listen too like Street Hassle and Transformer.
But in my opinion New York is Lou Reed’s finest Moment.
Around this time last year I got a self titled album by a band called Moonhearts. I played it once and then forgot about it. Until last week that is, and now its on heavy rotation. I know little about the Moonhearts. All I know is that they’re a three piece band that used to be called Charlie & the Moonhearts who play stripped down garage punk rock and are on Tic Tac Totally Records.
When I first gave them a listen it was just after I'd recently purchased the Gangliens album Monster Head Room. I think that took up my drenched in reverb rock quota for a while. Maybe I just needed to give Moonhearts one more listen.
Whatever, its doesn’t matter, it has my attention now. It’s a short energetic album, where the guitar is loud and the vocals are buried. There’s a few goofy titles (like Eat My Shorts) and a couple of mid tempo songs with strong melody’s. All which sound as if they have been recorded in a large bathroom.
I’m now going to see if I can get my hands on the album they did when they were called Charlie & the Moonhearts.
If you’re an instrumental band then its much harder to name a song. You can’t just take the first or last line in the chorus when there is no chorus. Even more thought might go into naming the album. Or maybe you can just open a book and put your finger on a random word and stick with that. That’s what the Washington DC progressive/math rock three piece Caverns seemed to have done by naming there 2008 album Kittens!
Today I heard Kittens! for the first time in a while and its just as fucked up as I remembered it. Over the shredding riffs and crashing drums there's a piano that's sometimes playing in a grand orchestral way and sometimes just plink plonking along.
If I listened to this sort of music for too long I would soon tire of it, but Kittens! doesn’t tire as its a short album of twenty four minutes.
Download an mp3 from Kittens! called Dance You Son Of A Bitch from here.
I’ve downloaded many music podcasts, tried them out and then deleted them. There are so many out there but most of them are ill informed rubbish or slow and boring. Podcasting is like radio. It can’t meander about. It needs a flow and that’s where the students who think they can record a podcast on their laptop after a joint or two go wrong.
Here are some music podcasts that are well worth a listen:
Sound Opinions
A Chicago public radio show that also comes out as a podcast. Its hosted by well informed music critics Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot. The show includes music news, record reviews, sometimes has live in the studio performances, sometimes has a feature on a theme or classic album.
NPR: All Songs Considered
Another Public Radio podcast this time from Washington D.C. It’s a varied one that could be a discussion about the best new music discovered at a recent festival. Could be an episode devoted to a certain genre. Could be a well known musician that comes in to have a chat and play some songs.
Word Podcast
No music is played in this podcast. It’s a few people from the Word Magazine - sometimes with a guest- who sit around talking. Music is discussed but it moves onto other stuff. The way that conversation does.
Musicheads
This is from the Minnesota Public Radio station The Current. Each week host Bill DeVille and two other dj's from the station give their opinions on three recently released albums. It’s a standard format that’s done well.
In a previous post about rock without guitars I didn’t mention Holy Fuck who are an electronic band that rocks a whole lot more than most skinny white boy bands like say, Razerlight. One of their hardest rocking songs is the last track on their second album Latin called P.I.G.S. It has the most overdriven pounding bass, industrial Nine Inch Nail type drums and a keyboard riff that sounds like Thin Lizzy’s twin guitar attack.
Why a band would have the word fuck in their name I don’t know. Its hard enough to get on in the music world without giving yourself such a handicap. Its supposed to be edgy I guess, like saying ‘yeah we don’t want to be in your corporate machine anyway man, fuck you’. Yawn. If you type Holy Fuck into Google their website is at the top of the list, but when they first started out it must have been well difficult. Especially if you then clicked on images.
For every reasonably successful band like Holy Fuck, Fucked Up or Fuck Buttons there’s hundreds of bands who fought that putting fuck in their name would be a good idea but got nowhere. Fuck People, Fuck The Facts, Fuck The World, I Just Wanna Fuck, Fuck Your Shadow From Behind, Fuck You And Die, Fuck On The Beach are some of the band names with fuck that I found on Myspace. Most of them Metal bands or Hip Hop because of cause its fuck you and the horse you rode in on music.
I don’t own a lot of music that comes from the Merseyside area. I had an Echo &The Bunnymen album on cassette but that’s long gone. There was a whole sleuth of Brit-Pop bands in the nineties such as The Boo Radleys, Cast, The Lighting Seeds and Space. Cast had a few good singles but I didn’t care for the others at all.
Half Man Half Biscuit, The Coral and Clinic are alright but I’ve never really got too deep into their music.
The Zutons and The Wombats don’t interest me. As for A Flock of Seagulls and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, no thanks.
There’s some other band that I’ve forgot to mention. Some band from the sixties… Gerry & the Pacemakers, no. Oh yes of course, The Beatles. Yeah sure I can appreciate that they made some great music but the only songs that I have are a few that I ripped from an old flatmates CD.
My favourite band from around the Liverpool area are unlike all of the above. They’re a psych-space-kraut rock band called Mugstar. If you’re into that sort of thing then you won’t be disappointed my Mugstar. Their latest album Lime is very good, but I would start with Technical Knowledge As A Weapon. Its full of big riffs and freakouts, and ends with a thirteen minute mammoth of a song called Faurklausundbo.
I’ve yet to see them live but will make sure that I do the next time they play in London.
Download an mp3 of the song Ouroboror from Technical Knowledge As A Weaponhere.
