Mean Mary - Live at Montani Semper Liberi 2019

 Mean Mary - Live at Montani Semper Liberi 2019 - Part 1

 

 Mean Mary - Live at Montani Semper Liberi 2019 - Part 2

 

1. Who would you most like to cover one of your songs? Whose song would you like to cover?

To be honest, anyone. If they’re a big star, that’s even better for me. I think there’s nothing more honoring to an artist or songwriter than having someone else want to play your music. I’m always flattered when I receive emails from people asking permission to perform my songs or telling me they played one at a show, in front of friends, or at church.
I’ve performed a lot of cover songs over the years, and there are quite a few more I’d love to play. I’m sure I’ll cover them in the future. We’ll just have to wait and see which ones show up!

2. If you could collaborate with someone, any person, living or dead, who would it be, and why?

Ludwig van Beethoven. I’m a huge fan. He’d be brilliant to work with, but probably a bit of a jerk too. I’d love to see his process and see if I’m right about him. I’m hugely stubborn when it comes to creative work and prepared to die on the sword when I really think something should be a certain way, so I imagine it would be an interesting spar. He’d probably be right, but I’m pretty good at getting my way!

3. What was the last song you wrote, and how did it come about?

The last song I wrote is basically right now, and it still might not be finished. It’s called Ghosts and Fire. I started it while I was on the road, staying at an Airbnb that was basically just an old trailer. I had a day with no shows, took out my guitar, and the song just began. When I’m on the road and free from daily thoughts, songs tend to just happen. Like most songs I write, I saw the images in my head along with the lyrics.

4. Favourite gig played and watched?

When the audience shows up, and I have good sound — that’s my favorite gig. I think that’s every artist’s favorite. We’ve all played tough shows at some point. Maybe no one knew who you were in that town, and you ended up playing for a handful of people. Or you booked a bar where everyone just came to talk. Or you had a nice crowd, but the sound was terrible, and the monitors made everything feel like you were playing through a tin can. But when people show up to see you, it’s a full house, and the music sounds warm and full on stage — that’s always a great gig.
I didn’t grow up going to concerts, buying tickets, and attending shows. I saw other artists at festivals or events where I was performing, but that’s not quite the same thing. Years ago, though, I bought tickets to see Buddy Guy in Nashville. That was probably my first concert, just sitting and watching, so it felt pretty special.

5. Favourite winter activity?

Staying indoors with a blanket over me.

6. What advice didn’t you follow and sometimes wonder about?

I was often told, growing up in Nashville, that I didn’t fit into a category and that if I wanted a contract, I was going to have to make myself commercially viable. I needed certain songs and to do them in a certain way that was popular at the time. The idea was, once you’re successful, then you can do what you really want, but first you have to play the game. That was something I just couldn’t do.
I often wonder how things would be different. I wouldn’t change anything, but I’m curious whether I’d be able to do things the way I want now if I had started off doing what I was told. I know I do what I want now — just with a lot less money, I’m sure.

7. Top 3 most beloved albums?

When I was about nine, I had a bootleg cassette of Bonnie Tyler’s greatest hits. One of my brothers sent it from overseas when he was in the Navy. I loved it and played it a thousand times.
Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill came out when I was an impressionable teenager, and I played that album over and over. I loved how unique it felt and the way she sang.
I also loved movie soundtracks growing up, and one of my favorites was the Immortal Beloved soundtrack. The film is about Ludwig van Beethoven, portrayed by Gary Oldman, who has always been one of my favorite actors. When I listened to that album, I could see the movie in my mind, and I thought they did a marvelous job pairing scenes with his music.

8. Something funny from childhood?

When I was about four, I ran around with a toy gun tucked into my waistband like a tiny outlaw. The problem was, I didn’t have a belt, so my pants kept sliding down while I charged around. There are plenty of pictures of me mid-adventure, pants at my knees. (Editor’s note: sadly, we could not locate one of these pictures, and no, we are not pervs. Just thought it would be cute, funny, embarrassing.)

9. Most important thing to know about you right now?

I love what I do and put everything into my work, but I don’t take myself that seriously. I’ve never been a fan of artists who can’t laugh at themselves. Everyone has deep feelings and thoughts, just because you put yours into words or melodies doesn’t mean they’re more important than anyone else’s. I’m just grateful there are people who care about what I create, so I’m always going to give it everything I have.

10. How did Mary James become Mean Mary?

The name came from the first original song I wrote when I was about 4½ years old, called Mean Mary From Alabam. It was my first original song, and people started requesting it. I was touring at a very young age, so the local press picked up on it and started calling me “Mean Mary.” It stuck.

From: https://americana-uk.com/interview-mean-mary-answers-six-of-one-and-half-a-dozen-of-the-other 

 

Rockfour - Half & Half / Oranges

 Rockfour - Half & Half

 

 Rockfour - Oranges

 

There’s something about starting a review of a new Rockfour album by making a point of referencing their country of origin (Israel) that feels, well, a little too obvious. I mean, I’m doing it, anyway. But I do feel kind of guilty about it, if that’s any consolation.
And, besides, to my way of thinking, it’s an understandable reference to make. Personally, I find it legitimately fascinating that they’re an Israeli band with music tastes steeped in ’60s psychedelia from the US and UK. Maybe it’s just the naïve American in me, but it seems like an odd combination, which in turns piques my interest.
Just for the record, though, there have been other rock bands from Israel, though most of the others seem to have been progressive rock in nature, taking their cues from the likes of Gentle Giant, Van Der Graff Generator, King Crimson, and early Genesis. (Take a bow, Zingale, Lord Flimnap, and the Ashqelon Quilt.)
The thing is, though, if you didn’t know the Rockfour were from Israel, you couldn’t tell it from listening to the album; the group sings in English. Or, at least, they do now. (They recorded three albums in Hebrew during the ’90s.)
Rockfour are, to offer a comparison that readers who shop at Not Lame Records will undoubtedly appreciate, like the Posies driving into the Paisley Underground while grooving to the Byrds on the car radio. They’ve played at International Pop Overthrow (no surprise there), but also at South By Southwest and the CMJ conference — and, perhaps more importantly to their US career, they opened for the Dave Matthews Band. Surely that sold them a few copies of their records.
Nationwide, the band’s fourth English album (there’s also a collection called For Fans Only), finds the band continuing in strong form, with Rickenbacker guitar mixing it up alongside fuzz bass (it’s no coincidence that one song is called “Fuzzy White”) and harmonies verging on the immaculate (particularly on “I Can Read You Now”, where the band channels the Beatles’ “Because”). Producer Jim Diamond (the White Stripes, Electric Six) goes for a less crisp, more raw sound for the album, and the result works well, as one might expect it would for a band that adores its garage rock.
The songs, while still mostly decidedly pop, don’t necessarily hit you over the head with fun and sun; there’s an inherent darkness in “To the End”, for instance, that’s reminiscent of “Eight Miles High” without actually being derivative of it. The aforementioned similarity to the Posies can be heard particularly on “You Said”, which sounds like the missing link between Failure and Frosting on the Beater.
“Moving Fast” might be the album’s single best track, and, truth be told, would serve as a better closer than the delicately plucked “Much More to Offer,” which, despite its Brian Wilson-inspired harmonies, finds the proceedings ending with something closer to a whimper than a bang. It’s also a bit ironic, given that, indeed, Nationwide has so much more to offer.
Post-script: Regarding the popularity of prog rock in Israel, I recently traded e-mails with Issar Tennenbaum, drummer for Rockfour on the topic. “No,” he admitted, “I guess we too did not escape the ‘curse’ of progressive rock. It is still very popular here in Israel. As we’re all basically a ’70s generation, we could not help growing up on everything from heavy metal to prog rock to Beatles, even though most of these styles we discovered only in the ’80s as a result of the frustration we suffered as beginner musicians with all the synthesized music going on at the time. Actually, if you listen to our first 2 albums in English — Supermarket and One Fantastic Day — you will hear many more of the above influences and how Nationwide came to sound the way it did as a result (and a continuation) of those two albums.”  From: https://www.popmatters.com/rockfour-nationwide-2496048757.html 

 

An Eagle in your Mind - Desert Land

Like a horde breaking through in a deserted plain, An Eagle In Your Mind distills a new kind of folk. The French duet manages to blend the sound of a folk guitar and of an Indian harmonium together with analog percussions and vibrating drones; as well as a spectral voice singing about revolution and the possible.
The duet formed on the fringes, in an old Mercedes van turned into a wandering recording studio, which took them from the confines of Europe to the gates of the Orient, from great capital cities to underworld areas. Ambassadors of a folklore which is not yet born, An Eagle in your Mind precedes the dark and hypnotic history told under their lost rhapsodies. This is folk music for a people in the making, a people of migrants. The arrival at the crossroad of two worlds: this is what their new album ‘Intersection’ continues to invoke.
Since its formation in 2016, the duet has trod the stages of Europe and Africa. While this long-term journey allowed them to rub shoulders with various audiences, it was also an opportunity to develop a specific way of working together. As collectors of sounds, instruments and vintage gear, Raoul and Sophia record everything together. Bathed in this almost unreal traveling space-time, the recording phase has become a true lab for the duet. Sophia sings, does choirs and more choirs, inspired by Byzantine colours with psychedelic swirls, which she mixes with the sound of the harmonium and then superimposes indefinitely to create the ground layer for Raoul. He creates beats made of Berber percussion, shamanic drums, bells and charms. He is inspired by trance, he uses and abuses drones and analog delays. In short, this is craftsmanship, an endless back and forth between those two searching souls. On stage, thanks to programming and a substantial set of machines, everything is restored to exactness, with that extra soul that comes with the joy of sharing music and seeing your own horizons reflected in the eyes of the audience.  From: https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2023/03/intersection-by-an-eagle-in-your-mind-album-premiere.htm

Diane Coffee - All The Young Girls

Diane Coffee is the solo project of Shaun Fleming, a musician who has been a child voice actor for Disney and the drummer in Foxygen with his friends Jonathan Rado and Sam France. Under the name Diane Coffee, Shaun Fleming is also an outrageously dolled up performer. "All The Young Girls" is from the band's 2013 album My Friend Fish.
As for the video, which I love; the tale begins with a clay couple in love and literally goes up in flames. Danny Lacy, who directed the video along with Jacob Pfeiffer, shed some surprising light on how it was made:
"We completely destroyed my 1br apartment and turned it into a clay and glue-covered workshop in the couple months that it took to make the video and set. The set was shoved in the corner of my living room on top of my art desk. There were bags of flour, an insane amount of Accidentes Classificados magazines we got from Food 4 Less (for the papier-mache,) dry moss, and clay just everywhere. The floor was a beautiful mess. We just scrubbed everything down last week and my apartment is an apartment again! I kind of miss it, though.
The set skeleton is purely thick, back-breaking papier mache on a flat piece of shitty 60 x 60 inch wood that we cut into four quarters so we could shoot from various angles. We covered the papier-mache mountains and ground with a bunch of (real) dried moss from craft stores that we mixed with mod podge and glue and stuck everywhere. The sky is just a blue piece of fabric push-pinned into my wall behind the set. I ruined a pair of pants and maybe 3-4 socks. I still find tiny pieces of grass around my kitchen. It was worth it."  From: https://www.npr.org/2014/04/22/303351543/diane-coffee-all-the-young-girls

Carolina Chocolate Drops - Country Girl

You lost a founding member [Dom Flemons] this year to a solo career. But you’ve added two new talented members [Rowan Corbett and Malcolm Parson] and the group is starting to feel like an artists’ collective of sorts. Tell me about  how the group identity is morphing with these lineup changes.

Rhiannon Giddens: It’s really exciting. When we first started, it was a trio and the first original member to leave—Justin Robinson—when he left, I just couldn’t imagine the band as anything but the three of us. But Dom said, “I think we can do this; let’s just see what other amazing talent is out there and let’s keep it going.” It’s more than just a band, you know? When we brought in Hubby [Jenkins], that was a huge moment, because it was then  that I realized that he can learn some of the Joe Thompson tunes through us and that he knows all these other  things he can bring to us. We were able to do different songs that we couldn’t do before. Then we brought Leyla [McCalla] in on the cello and that opened us up even more. With the departure of Dom and Leyla—though  she was only with us for a while and we always knew she was focused on her solo career—everybody has brought some amazing songs and points of view which have expanded the band. I just feel like everybody is richer because of it. The people who traveled with us for a while had a great experience and we were enriched by it—I think everybody wins; that’s the way we look at it. Now we’ve got a fantastic cellist from New Orleans [Parson] and another North  Carolinian [Corbett], who plays [a] bodhran (which we’ve never had before, so that will be really cool), along with all the other stuff that they bring. It’s exciting. Musically, there will be changes just like there were the first time the band changed lineups, but the songs will retain the things about them that people really enjoy. We won’t suddenly be doing, oh I don’t know, R&B Irish music or something.

You brought a new little Chocolate Drop into the world just over a year ago. It’s been said over and over again that women can do anything, but how do you personally strike the balance between caring for your kids, touring, recording etc.? Your plate seems very full.

It is very full and I wouldn’t be able to do it without support. This was actually my second little Drop, as my daughter is four and a half years old, so we’ve been through it before, which makes it a little  bit easier—although now it’s a little  harder in a way because there are two of them! But my husband is amazing and everybody on the team has been very, very supportive and helpful. I’ve been out here in California recording and my tour manager was actually taking care of the baby.

Are you the only band member with  children?

I am. So they’re really kind of the band’s children. [laughs] Everybody’s been really great and they’ve learned a lot. Leyla has said that when she has a kid, she will have learned so much from being with us while I was pregnant and then the first year of his life, so I feel great that my family life has enriched my band life. Band life is really kind of an artificial, weird thing because you spend time with these people all the time—more than you do with your own family—and having kids along kind of humanizes it. Just to remind you that,  oh yeah, we’re human and there’s more to life than getting that note right.

Speaking of your husband — who is Irish — one of your many side projects is a duet with  him that  focuses on Irish  dance  music. That made me wonder what  came  first:  the relationship or the musical partnership?

Oh definitely the relationship. When we met, he was into prog rock and stuff like that. He actually wasn’t even into folk music. He started learning how to tune pianos and he just realized “Oh yeah, I love acoustic music; I had forgotten how good acoustic sound is.” So he started playing the guitar again and I was like “Hey, let’s play some tunes!” and the bug bit him. And that was it, you know? So it’s been really great to work on that with him. Also, he speaks Gaelic to our kids and he’s been really exploring the Gaelic music part of his heritage. So that’s been really cool to watch, too.

On your last record, Leaving Eden, you delved into a lot of areas of historically African-American music, including string-based folk, blues and gospel/spirituals. There  was even some beatboxing the last  time you played live here. What can we expect the live show to be like under this new lineup?

We’re still finding ourselves as a new quartet, so we’ve got some new things that we’ve been getting together and we’ve been doing our renditions of Chocolate Drop staples like “Cornbread & Butterbeans” and things like that. It will be a nice mixture. Each new member brings not only their instrumentation, but their own sort of take on this music and their own interests and influences. So we’ll be mining that, but it will obviously take time to find its way to the stage. I know that the show will be awesome and entertaining and I’m really proud of what we’ve put together so far, and we’ll also see what the audience is digging. It’s always kind of a never- ending process.

You guys are doing work to preserve a kind of music  that is largely  forgotten outside of the American South. Do you plan to continue mining that vast back catalog of field songs and spirituals and putting your own spin on them, or do you hope in the future to focus more on original compositions inspired by that sound?

You know, a little bit of both. Mostly mining and a little bit of original. There’s just so much amazing material out there—not just African-American music from North Carolina, but there’s the whole black diaspora to look at, all over this country, in the Caribbean, South America. There’s such a rich tradition that it’s kind of endless, so there’s plenty of material and I’m always inspired by finding new things. And all the guys are finding and bringing their own thoughts about that, too. But then I’ve really been reading a lot of history and really probing into the history of us as a people and I’ve been inspired to write new things and reimagine folk songs, so there’s going to be a little  bit of that too. We’ll always be more on the “cover” side, but just because there is so much great existing music that needs to be heard. But I think that it’s nice to get a new perspective on old themes, so you should be seeing a little bit of that coming out as well. I’ve been performing a few in the show and people seem to be really digging them, so we’ll just pepper that in. But we’re pretty firm on who we are. You know, every other band in the world does original material, but we’re just so happy to be serving these songs.

I’ve heard it said that you guys tackle “standard” folk tunes, but I don’t find anything “standard” about most of what you do, being that your versions are often the only exposure many people will have to these songs. In my mind, “standard” equates with “done to death,” but I don’t feel like the classification fits  here. What would you even call the types of songs you cover?

We just call them traditional songs. There are so many songs where you don’t even know who wrote them— they just kind of survived the human condition and obviously spoke to people, so we kept doing them. And they need to be heard. It’s important for people to continue to get them out there, because it’s amazing that when you realize how they speak to modern people, you see how much of history  just continues to repeat itself and how we can really sympathize with people from 200 years ago because, in a lot of ways, we’re dealing with the same stuff.

From: https://antigravitymagazine.com/feature/country-girl-an-interview-with-the-carolina-chocolate-drops-rhiannon-giddens/ 

 

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Ice Cream for Crow

It’s perhaps fitting that Captain Beefheart’s final album, Ice Cream For Crow, released in September 1982, was his first to make a dent on an album chart since 1974’s Unconditionally Guaranteed hit No.192 in the US. It had been even longer – a full 10 years – since Beefheart found favor on the UK charts, when The Spotlight Kid peaked at No. 44. In 1982, Beefheart’s UK fanbase rallied again, taking his final ever album to No. 90.
With the likes of Public Image Limited and other heroes of the late 70s/early 80s new wave citing him as an inspiration, perhaps the world was finally ready for Beefheart’s organized chaos. His label, Virgin, certainly thought so, not only releasing the title track as a single, but going so far as to film a promo video for it. Yet the clip was rejected by MTV, who found its fractured imagery – much like Beefheart’s lyrical excursions – too baffling to put on rotation. Yet, as David Fricke noted in his review for Musician, the album was “at once giant steps ahead of today’s plague of synthetic funk records” – the music that was getting traction on MTV, after Prince kicked the door down with “1999” – “yet still deeply rooted in its elemental John Lee Hooker rasp.”
Those au fait with Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica would find much to enjoy in Ice Cream For Crow’s rawest moments, such as “The Thousandth And Tenth Day Of The Human Totem Pole” (with fantastic soprano sax skronk from the Captain), a song re-recorded from the 1976 Bat Chain Puller sessions. Yet … Crow also found Beefheart in transition. His wild-man vocals are let loose on the likes of “The Past Sure Is Tense,” but, more often than not – as on “… Totem Pole” and “Hey Garland, I Dig Your Tweed Coat” – he speaks his lyrics with measured cadence.
Behind him, however, The Magic Band are reliably raucous. Future Lydia Lunch and Red Hot Chili Peppers sticksman Cliff Martinez provides solid, if reliably wayward drum patterns which Rolling Stone identified as sounding “as orderly as coconuts hitting the ground.” Having proven his worth on Doc At The Radar Station, Gary Lucas is once again on hand to unleash his wiry guitar lines, his solo showcase, “Evening Bell,” emerging as a career-high apparently transcribed (and played to perfection) from Beefheart’s own avant-garde piano template.
Beefheart had initially hoped to use original recordings from the shelved Bat Chain Puller tapes to make up much of Ice Cream For Crow, though Frank Zappa, who had recently finally settled with Herb Cohen after years of disputes over the ownership of the tapes, refused to grant his former charge the rights to use them. Forcing Beefheart to largely work up new material seems to have been a good thing, though. With fervent energy, “Skeleton Makes Good” was written in just one night, and Rolling Stone found that the album boasted some of Beefheart’s “most aggressive, angular music” since Trout Mask Replica.
The promo video for “Ice Cream For Crow” might have given MTV the horrors, but it was, perhaps more satisfyingly, accepted into New York’s Museum Of Modern Art. Beefheart’s best music had never been made for commercial consumption (notoriously, when he tried, he lost swathes of his fanbase); he was a bona fide artiste – a natural visionary who had no choice but to follow his muse. Which is why, after Ice Cream For Crow emerged, he suddenly disappeared, renouncing music-making for the rest of his life as he focused on his painting.
The signs had all been there – after all, Beefheart’s paintings had begun to grace his album covers with increasing regularity. It’s likely he always planned for Ice Cream For Crow to be the last word. For that album’s artwork, one of his paintings serves as the backdrop for a photo by Anton Corbijn, in which it’s not hard to see Beefheart’s pose being something of a final bow. Or, as Rolling Stone put it: he wears an expression that conveys “the wounded fright of a hunted animal” – an animal ready to take flight.  From: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/we-all-scream-for-ice-cream-for-crow/ 

 

Vocantus - Mirie it is While Sumer Ilast

I’d like to present the first video of my medieval music band "Vocantus". We play music from the XIII to XV century on historical instruments. In this recording one of us plays a medieval version of a nyckelharpa, called a” viola a chiavi" (inspired by iconography from Siena 1408) - this one was built by luthier and band member Tomasz Czypul, founder of brand "Medira instruments".
We are delighted to present to you our first studio recording—complete with visuals! We invite you to listen to our rendition of the 13th-century English traditional song, "Mirie it is While Sumer Ilast."  From: https://www.facebook.com/groups/NyckelharpasForum/posts/1627176124155077/ 

Coil - Circles of Mania / Ether

 Coil - Circles of Mania

 

 Coil - Ether

 

From the start, Coil were inspired by the thrill of rattling the establishment’s bars. Born to an academic family (his father, Sir Derman Christopherson, OBE, was a master at Magdalene College, Cambridge), Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson came to the United States in the early 1970s to study at SUNY Buffalo, an avant-garde haven. There, he became obsessed with Robert Mapplethorpe and produced a photographic portfolio of boys with ghastly injuries he fabricated himself. Legendary British design firm Hipgnosis hired him when he dropped out: The photos were well lit and, according to the firm’s co-founder Storm Thorgerson, he offered a “sexuality” and a “phallic,” “moody” quality that the company lacked. Sleazy was one of the first photographers to capture the Sex Pistols—Malcolm McLaren deemed his shoot, which took place in a public restroom, too disturbing and homoerotic.
As a designer of LP sleeves, Sleazy became a musical Zelig of the 20th century’s final quarter, sprinkling his poison fairy dust all over the business. He worked on some of the most striking album covers in rock history, such as Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and Led Zeppelin’s Presence, and simultaneously all but invented industrial music as a founding member of Throbbing Gristle, a group so iconoclastic that even the punks found them offensive. Sleazy was among the earliest musicians to work with a sampler, which he designed and built with band member Chris Carter. It was during this ascendant phase of his career that he met 17-year-old Geoffrey Rushton.
Rushton, who would change his name to John Balance (and sometimes spell it Jhonn), was the son of a farmer in Nottinghamshire. In his book of collected interviews, Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations with Coil, writer Nick Soulsby cautions against trusting all of Balance’s childhood tales, but his background was clearly miles away from Christopherson’s. Balance was a troubled dreamer who developed a precocious diet of psychedelic drugs at a young age, purportedly taking mushrooms constantly, at school, from 11 to 18. Doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia and he spent time in a mental hospital. Though Sleazy never responded to any of Balance’s bountiful fanmail, they became romantically involved when the younger man was 19. Soon after, both joined the cultish collective Psychic TV with former Throbbing Gristle frontperson Genesis P-Orridge.
The relationship between Balance and Sleazy was one of complementary opposites. Balance, Sleazy’s junior by seven years, was a poetic lyricist and an intuitive musician, wielding a Chapman Stick like a wizard’s staff. Sleazy was a kitchen-sink alchemist, rigging a rudimentary Fairlight digital synth into a sequencer on the groundbreaking Horse Rotorvator. Both experimented with psychedelics and amphetamines while composing, but Balance always ventured farther out, using liquor to reel himself back from desolate, spaced-out mornings. Sleazy crafted their music videos, including the heartbreaking clip for their 1984 cover of “Tainted Love,” set in a man’s hospital room, which ends with a title card informing viewers that the song’s proceeds all went to the Terrence Higgins AIDS Trust—a charity that still goes strong today. The film was one of the first times the music industry made significant mention of the virus. Balance and Sleazy signaled the future of HIV activist art by using their dais to impart an agitprop message, and with a public donation of their own money, they also lit a beacon for concerned peers.
Sleazy was Coil’s anchor, and eventually seemed to play the role of Balance’s caretaker. More even-keeled than his significant other, he funded both their lives and their outré collaborations with his day job directing TV advertisements for global clients like Nike and Pan Am and music videos for mainstream acts, among them kindred spirits Nine Inch Nails and polar opposites Hanson.
Coil offered the two men common ground: a moonlit lair of sex and gloom, papered by woozy tape experiments, ordered by the lockstep beats of emergent dance music and thrumming with a deep mutual desire to upend social mores. Horse Rotorvator’s pummeling opener and single “The Anal Staircase,” like the band’s debut LP, Scatology, was banned in major retailers across their native United Kingdom because it references butt sex. The song contrasts erotic joy with found recordings of a little boy giggling and a backwards, pitch-shifted loop of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. This fricative soundscape elicits uncomfortable jolts of static electricity from individually gleeful elements. Coil sought out juxtapositions so sharp they sliced away pop surfaces and revealed queasy cores, hand-carved for queer listeners—just like their contemporary, the novelist Dennis Cooper. The Christmas fanfare on “Herald,” the drag show-style intro of “Circles of Mania,” and guest Marc Almond’s operatic backing vocals on “Slur” and “Who By Fire” are high camp when considered in their own right. Yet Horse Rotorvator paints a defiantly post-camp tableau by setting these qualities against solemn melodies and Balance’s theatrical sprechgesang. It’s as though the costume ball just ended and the attendees were all found dead on the dancefloor.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coil-horse-rotorvator/

 

Birdeatsbaby - Muscle Museum

Birdeatsbaby was an English progressive rock band from Brighton, United Kingdom, formed in 2008. At their start, the band's music was considered to be within the dark cabaret genre, but later began to incorporate aspects of heavy metal, klezmer and other musical styles. Their music is noted for its orchestral elements, complex rhythms and exotic instrumentation, with lyrics referencing themes such as religion, alienation, sexual orientation, obsession and animal rights. According to group members, their influences include Chopin, Mozart, Debussy, Queen, Muse and Nick Cave. Since the release of their 2016 album Tanta Furia, their influences have also come from progressive metal artists such as Tool and Opeth.
Birdeatsbaby has toured throughout the UK, North America and Europe. As of 2020, they have released five studio albums and 20 EPs and singles. The band has previously released music through their own label, Dead Round Eyes Records, and since 2018 have been under the label Dr Music Records. In 2024, the members of Birdeatsbaby formed an alternative metal band called Crimson Veil, and stopped releasing music as Birdeatsbaby.
Mishkin Fitzgerald has said that the name “Birdeatsbaby” came from a "lucid nightmare" she had during a particularly long bout of insomnia in her teens. Fitzgerald, a classically trained pianist, met and became friends with Garry Mitchell while at University in Brighton. The two formed a creative partnership and would go on to form Birdeatsbaby, along with Keely McDonald, Ella Stirney and Philippa Bloomfield. Fitzgerald has stated that the band's first gig took place in 2006. Their first EP, China Doll, was released on January 1, 2008.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdeatsbaby

The Verve Pipe - Cup Of Tea

The Verve Pipe’s Villains originally came out March 26, 1996. In honor of the album turning 20 this year, and our new list of the Best Alternative Rock Songs of 1997 that includes The Verve Pipes’ “The Freshmen,” we’ve republished a piece on the band that ran in our August 1997 issue:
When Brian Vander Ark was a kid growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he and his brothers often played a perverse game of “church,” with Brian as Jesus and his brothers as the congregation. Once, his brothers crucified him mid-sermon by strapping him to the backyard deck with belts and rope. Alone to atone, Brian wept as his brothers partied on. “After hours of screaming, they finally took me down,” recalls the Verve Pipe singer. “My brothers were relentlessly sadistic Christians.”
Along with crucifixion anxiety, Vander Ark says his religious upbringing left him “ridden with guilt,” a subject that figures prominently on the Verve Pipe’s major-label debut album, Villains. Set to a hummable brand of workingman’s grunge, Vander Ark’s painfully earnest tales of regret have made the group this year’s dorm-room poster boys. Either their ascendancy is a sign that for every year there must be a grunge giant, or the scholastic set is more wary of irony than anyone could have imagined.
“We appreciate the dynamics of grunge,” says drummer Donny Brown, brushing off charges that the Verve Pipe’s music can sound plainly derivative. “If the song feels heavy and it sounds better driving it, then we drive it. Make it grunge. Who cares?”
Brown and Vander Ark met in the early ’90s when they were both painting a Lee’s Famous Chicken Shack restaurant in Kalamazoo. Along with Vander Ark’s younger brother Brad on bass, the trio enlisted guitarist A.J. Dunning and keyboard player Doug Corella from Michigan-area alternative bands. The band soon found a home on the fertile fraternity circuit, where, says Vander Ark, “they’d still pay us, even after the cops pulled the plug.” Now, six years later, they’re in New York on “the biggest day of our lives,” taping Letterman and VH1 appearances, with the proud Vander Ark parents in tow.
After a day of minimal hijinks—the Verve Pipe behave like scrupulous Midwesterners—Vander Ark kisses his parents goodbye and gets ready to head north for another gig. Still, he seems more like a frustrated choirboy than someone living out his rock’n’roll dreams. “I still believe in blasphemy,” Vander Ark admits. “Like that scene in The Exorcist where Linda Blair is masturbating with the cross. That absolutely bothers me. For the sake of the movie, it’s a fabulous scene. But it makes me squirm.”  From: https://www.spinmagazine.com/2017/04/the-verve-pipe-interview/

Cymbals - Rally

Cymbals was a Japanese pop rock band active from 1997–2004. The trio was composed of vocalist Asako Toki, bassist/guitarist Reiji Okii, and drummer Hiroyasu Yano. Like other Japanese bands which emerged in the late 1990s (including Clammbon and Hermann H. & the Pacemakers), Cymbals were strongly influenced by the British pop-rock sounds of the 1960s. Due to their eclectic blend of styles, the band is often linked to Shibuya-kei. Despite solid songwriting and album production, they never scored a true "hit", which eventually resulted in the band's breakup in September 2003. They played a final 90-minute farewell concert at Shibuya O-East on January 20, 2004. The group's members remain musically active – Toki as a solo artist, Okii as a producer (for Toki and others), and Yano as a session drummer and producer.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymbals_(Japanese_band)

Shibuya-kei ("Shibuya style") is a microgenre of pop music or a general aesthetic that flourished in Japan in the mid-to-late 1990s. The music genre is distinguished by a "cut-and-paste" approach that was inspired by the kitsch, fusion, and artifice from certain music styles of the past. The most common reference points were 1960s culture and Western pop music, especially the work of Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, and Serge Gainsbourg.
Shibuya-kei first emerged as retail music from the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Flipper's Guitar, a duo led by Kenji Ozawa and Keigo Oyamada (Cornelius), formed the bedrock of the genre and influenced all of its groups, but the most prominent Shibuya-kei band was Pizzicato Five, who fused mainstream J-pop with a mix of jazz, soul, and lounge influences. Shibuya-kei peaked in the late 1990s and declined after its principal players began moving into other music styles. 
The term "Shibuya-kei" comes from Shibuya, one of the 23 special wards of Tokyo, known for its concentration of stylish restaurants, bars, buildings, record shops, and bookshops. In the late 1980s, the term "J-pop" was formulated by FM radio station J-Wave as a way to distinguish Western-sounding Japanese music (a central characteristic of Shibuya-kei) from exclusively Euro-American music. In 1991, HMV Shibuya opened a J-pop corner which showcased displays and leaflets that highlighted indie records. It was one of those displays that coined the moniker "Shibuya-kei".
At the time, Shibuya was an epicenter for Tokyo fashion, nightlife, and youth culture with a cluster of record shops like Tower Records and HMV, which housed a selection of imports, as well as fashionable record boutiques. British independent record labels such as él Records and the Compact Organization had been influences on the various Japanese indie distributors, and thanks to the late 1980s economic boom in Japan, Shibuya music shops could afford to stock a wider selection of genres.
Musicologist Mori Yoshitaka writes that popular groups from the area responded with their "eclectically fashionable hybrid music influenced by different musical resources from around the world in a way that might be identified as postmodernist ... they were able to listen to, quote, sample, mix, and dub this music, and eventually create a new hybrid music. In other words, Shibuya-kei was a byproduct of consumerism". Journalist W. David Marx notes that the musicians were less interested in having an original sound than they were about having a sound that reflected their personal tastes, that the music "was literally built out of this collection process. The 'creative content' is almost all curation, since they basically reproduced their favourite songs, changing the melody a bit but keeping all parts of the production intact."
Specific touchstones include the French yé-yé music of Serge Gainsbourg, the orchestral pop of Van Dyke Parks and the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, the lounge pop of Burt Bacharach, and the sunshine pop of Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends. Wilson was romanticized as a mad genius experimenting in the recording studio, and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound was emulated not for its density, but for its elaborate quality.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibuya-kei 

Pink Floyd - Free Four

 Even though its June 1972 release falls between Meddle and The Dark Side of the Moon, two of my favorite Floyd records, Obscured by Clouds was, well, a little obscure to me. After having listened to it again, I agree with Ultimate Classic Rock, which called the album ‘underrated.’ They also said it was “one of rock’s most under-appreciated treasures — and perhaps the most underrated album in Pink Floyd’s impressive discography.” I’m less sure about that statement.
Obscured by Clouds was set in motion when film director Barbet Schroeder approached Pink Floyd to ask whether they could do another soundtrack for his upcoming film project La Vallée. Previously, the British group had written and performed the soundtrack for More, Schroeder’s 1969 theatrical feature film directorial debut. Obscured by Clouds was recorded at Strawberry Studios at Château d’Hérouville close to Paris, France over a span of just six weeks.
The two sessions took place between late February and early April 1972 during two breaks from Pink Floyd’s Japan tour. At the time, the band had already started early work on what would become the brilliant album The Dark Side of the Moon. Quoting from drummer Nick Mason’s autobiography Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, Ultimate Classic Rock noted Mason confirmed the group utilized the same methods employed on More, where Pink Floyd could be found “following a rough cut of the film, using stopwatches for specific cues and creating interlinking musical moods that would be cross-faded to suit the final version.”
French TV station ORTF captured a short segment during the first recording session, which featured interviews with Roger Waters (bass, vocals) and David Gilmour (guitar, vocals). After they had completed recording the album, Pink Floyd had a falling out with the film company and decided to release the record under the title Obscured by Clouds rather than La Vallée. As a result, the French film was retitled La Vallée (Obscured by Clouds) when it appeared in July 1972. Time for some music!
Side 1 kicks off with the title track, an instrumental co-written by Gilmour and Waters. The monotonous synthesizer line and drum part combined with Gilmour’s slide guitar give the tune a haunting sound. It has a largely improvisational feel to it.
Burning Bridges, another Waters-Gilmour co-write, is the only song off the album I had been able to name prior to this review and perhaps the most memorable tune. It also features Waters and Gilmour on vocals.
Wot’s… Uh the Deal? is a nice acoustic tune featuring multi-tracked vocals by Gilmour. The lyrics were written by Waters, though the song is credited to both him and Gilmour. According to Wikipedia, the words “Flash the readies, Wot’s…Uh the Deal” is a phrase Floyd roadie Chris Adamson apparently used.
Side 2 kicks off with Childhood’s End. Notably, this was the last Pink Floyd song entirely written by Gilmour until A Momentary Lapse of Reason, the band’s thirteenth studio album from September 1987, and the first without Waters. The tune was named after a 1953 science fiction novel by English sci-fi writer Sir Arthur Charles Clarke. I have to say I really like that track!
Free Four became the record’s only single released in July 1972. Solely written and sung by Waters, it did not chart. Songfacts notes, The lyrics are rather depressing, but the song is very upbeat (including Roger Waters gleefully uttering a line about the angel of death). It’s about how our lives pass by – most of the time with no real effect on the cycle by which we all live and pass. Wikipedia cites a review of the single by music industry trade magazine Cash Box, asking “Would you believe a happy song about death?”
The final track I’d like to call out is the closer Absolutely Curtains. Credited to all four members of the band – Gilmour, Waters, Mason and Richard Wright (keyboards, vocals) – Absolutely Curtains is a largely instrumental tune that ends with a chant of the New Guinea indigenous Mapuga tribe who is also seen in the film. The instrumental section has a cool spacey sound reminiscent of Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here albums.  From: https://christiansmusicmusings.wordpress.com/tag/free-four/

 

Michelle Shocked - Come A Long Way

Music can be escapism. It isn’t always, but I suspect that is why a 50+ professional who has lived his whole life in either New York or New Jersey and has a pretty quiet family life likes to listen to music about people living on the edge, drinking, carousing, ramblin’. I know that I never will ride a motorcycle, get into a bar fight, hitchhike across the desert, or be a rock star. And, honestly, I don’t really have any interest in doing so.
But it is fun to listen to music that is about things that are outside your experience. I remember once reading an article that said that people like roller coasters, or eating spicy food, because it gives the illusion of danger, without real risk. That your body reacts by producing adrenalin and endorphins that give you that edge and pleasure, without having to worry about actually getting beat up or killed.
Which is why, I guess, I have always liked this song, by Michelle Shocked. Her narrator rescues her motorcycle from the repo man and drives it around Los Angeles, referencing a number of local landmarks and noting that she has driven 500 miles, but never left the city.
Shocked is an interesting artist—uncompromising and demanding of creative freedom. Her first few albums were incredible, and the album that this song comes from, Arkansas Traveler, is both brilliant, and controversial. In great part, it is a reworking of traditional folk and country songs, with all-star guests including Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, Hothouse Flowers, Uncle Tupelo (which included her brother), Taj Mahal, Pops Staples, and others, and there are many, many good songs. But Shocked insisted on appearing in blackface on the cover, to highlight her interest in blackface minstrelsy, and her label refused. The album was barely promoted and failed to sell, leading to the end of Shocked’s major label career.  From: https://sixsongs.blogspot.com/2012/08/going-distance-come-long-way.html

Daughters - Live In The K! Pit 2019

We had noise rock lunatics Daughters take over the back room at The Gutter, our favorite Brooklyn dive bar. More like an old-world religious service than a rock concert, the Daughters K! Pit has to be seen to be believed. Between leaping into the crowd, breaking lights, riding the audience members like horses, and smashing the mic into his forehead until he drew blood, frontman Alexis S. F. Marshall spewed dissonant and eldritch lyrics about hope, death, madness, humanity, and what it means to be a creature made of meat in a world that hates you. The result will be beautiful to some and unsettling to others, but exciting and impossible to look away from for everyone.  From: https://delirivmcordia.wordpress.com/2020/09/18/daughters-live-in-the-kpit/

Daughters is an American rock band formed in 2002, in Providence, Rhode Island. The band's most recent lineup consisted of vocalist Alexis Marshall, guitarist Nick Sadler, drummer Jon Syverson, and bassist Samuel Walker.
The band started out as a mathgrind outfit, developing their sound with each album, with later albums often described as noise rock. Daughters disbanded in August 2009 after Marshall left the band, and their self-titled third album was released in 2010 while the band was broken up.
The band reunited in 2013. In 2018, the band signed to Ipecac Recordings and released the album You Won't Get What You Want, which released to universal critical acclaim, with many critics naming it one of the best albums of the year. It marks a significant departure from the band's earlier style, with relatively more conventional song structures and vocals. 
Daughters' early material was primarily described as grindcore and mathcore, while their later material has been described as noise rock. Daughters have also been described as industrial rock, no wave, math rock, post-punk, experimental rock, alternative metal, art-rock and art-metal. Sadler has said that he has always disagreed with Daughters being described as a math rock or mathcore band, stating "Daughters has always been a kind of calculated band, but not in a math rock way. None of us are classically trained at all and I don't think anyone in Daughters has taken a lesson in anything. The music just comes out that way and it's always been the nature of the band."
With the release of the band's second album, Hell Songs, Marshall's vocal style had noticeably changed from high-pitched screams to a singing style that over the years has been compared to David Yow, Nick Cave and Michael Gira and also has been described as "Elvis Presley being tortured" and "Jerry Lee Lewis on hallucinogenic drugs." Marshall explained the reason for the change in vocals saying "It's intimidating to be in this band. These guys can play. I don't want to be like, 'You guys be impressive and I'll just scream.' We're not a band like that. Our music is not like that, so why should the singing be like other bands?"  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_(band) 

 

The Youngbloods - Ride the Wind - Full album

01 - Ride The Wind
02 - Sugar Babe
03 - Sunlight
04 - The Dolphin
05 - Get Together
06 - Beautiful

Ride the Wind followed up Rock Festival (1970), another batch of live recordings. However, Ride the Wind (1971) is far from simply a stop-gap effort between studio discs. The trio of Jesse Colin Young (bass/kazoo/rhythm guitar), Banana (guitar/piano), and Joe Bauer (drums) are definitely in their element on these half-dozen sides. In much the same way as their Marin County contemporaries, the Grateful Dead, the Youngbloods' live experience allowed the band to stretch out and take their improvisational interplay to a level that is merely hinted at on their studio sides. The disc begins with a nearly ten-minute version of the title track, which was initially issued on Elephant Mountain (1970). Banana really shines, as his laid-back electric piano runs are ably complemented by some interesting contributions from both Young and Bauer. The centerpiece is the extended instrumental interplay that ebbs and flows as the groove builds incrementally. The happy-go-lucky "Sugar Babe" sticks closely to the up-tempo ragtime version featured on Earth Music (1967). The band returns to Elephant Mountain for an easygoing and pastoral rendering of "Sunlight" that again allows for some well-tempered improvisation. The cover of Fred Neil's "The Dolphin" is another not-to-be-missed epic, as the Youngbloods never issued a studio version and once again a strong jazz influence dictates the performance's overall vibe. "Get Together" was the band's best-known side and still holds up in what is a spirited reading with just enough alteration to make it a worthwhile inclusion. Ride the Wind concludes with a final track from Elephant Mountain, as the optimistic "Beautiful" is given a lengthy and funky workout. When paired with the harder-edged Rock Festival, this live volume gives listeners another aural vantage point from which to rediscover the Youngbloods' unique country-rock leanings.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/ride-the-wind-mw0000057260  

 

Smegma - Nattering Naybobs Of Negativity - Full album

01 pile
02 happy baby rhumba
03 spring flowers
04 freakish high
05 (...)
06 limp dynamics
07 thru the warty evening
08 innermost cravings
09 porky section
10 en vout
11 mouthful of rubber

Smegma’s roots lie in the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) scene of the mid-’70s, and yet this long-running avant-rock collective are one of the few groups from that era that are still active today. With the musicians hidden behind ridiculous pseudonyms, Smegma offered a strange psychedelic improvisational music, throwing in all sorts of odd instruments as well as tapes, and turntables. The group began in Pasadena, CA in 1973 as a reaction to the bloated fusion rock of the day. They were unaware that other nearby groups had also formed to perform similar free-form experimental music. They became part of a gang of similar noise artists who gathered almost nightly in the backroom of the Poo-Bah record store in Pasadena, which in 1975 merged with the LAFMS. Smegma have always been a loosely run collective, and early members included Amy Zonbambi, Chucko D.K. Fatts, Ju Suk Reet Meate, Dennis Duck, Cheez It-Ritz, Cheese-Bro, Dr. Id, Dr. Odd, and Reed Burn. Ace Ford Farren, who joined the group in early 1974, introduced Smegma to crazed street performer and Zappa protégé Wild Man Fisher, and in two sessions, one on New Years Day of 1975 and one a few months later, they recorded some tracks with Fisher on vocals. Smegma moved to Portland, OR by the end of 1975 but remained in touch with the rest of the LAFMS crowd. After appearing on various LAFMS compilations, their first LP, Glamour Girl 1941/Five Years Wasted was recorded and produced in their own studio in July 1978 and released by LAFMS the following year. They also released several 7″ singles that same year on their own Pigface label. The next year found them sharing a 7″ with industrial pioneer Non (Boyd Rice), released by Mute. Throughout the ’80s Smegma kept a low profile and continued to put out LPs, singles, and cassettes on their own label, and occasionally gigged live. With their worldwide reputation firmly cemented, their LP Nattering Naybobs of Negativity was released by the U.K. label Dead Mans Curve and the LP Smell the Remains by the German label Dom. More albums came out in the mid-’90s on the Portland label Tim/Kerr, including the LP Smegma Plays Merzbow/Merzbow Plays Smegma with Japanese noise artist Merzbow. In the late ’90s, rock & roll author Richard Meltzer became their vocalist, adding his verbal ramblings and sardonic wit to their improvised sound.  From: https://lafms.wordpress.com/smegma-from-their-website/