Savages - Silence Yourself

One thing I respond very positively towards in music is fury. It's an emotion I invariably find thrilling and intoxicating; the energy expressed, whether it's a fury born of rage and anger or of exultation and delight, rushes straight through my entire body akin to a full-on adrenaline rush that makes me want to leap out of my chair and dance until I collapse from exhaustion. It's the thing that initially attracted me to dance music and tends to inform the rock music I listen to.

Another component I really dig is craftmanship. A band that works together like a well-oiled machine will almost always score bonus points with me, partially because of the respect I have for the time and effort required to create that type of seamless-seeming performance synergy.

When I first encountered Savages, it was via an appearance on "Later with Jools Holland" where they performed the song "Husbands". I won't lie; the band had about a 70% chance of winning me over before they ever played a note. Four women, mostly in black, standing on stage as feedback came up around them... this wasn't going to be a snuggly, comforting performance. Then, the drums started up, followed by that rolling bass, and I was completely, totally entranced. I felt like I had been transported back to 1980 and was watching a band that one day would be mentioned alongside The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees as a mainstream-yet-subculture juggernaut that would rip your face off in the most professional way possible. This was exactly my type of fury; harsh, discordant, yelpy, elegant, musical, precise, wonderful. The album expands upon all of those, ranging from all-out squall ("Hit Me", "No Face") to gentler, more reflective songs that still contain steel ("Waiting For A Sign", "Marshal Dear"). I've read a lot of people poo-poohing the album as Yet Another Post-Punk retread with lots of comparisons to Joy Division and Interpol, which frankly is bananas; there's more punk in here than that, and more precision as well (and, quite frankly, if an Interpol album exists that has even half the energy of this one, someone point me towards it immediately because everything I've heard by them has been soooooooooo enervating and boring). If I was going to point to a forebear, it would be Bauhaus. However, I'd much rather press play and pogo to the break at the beginning of the chorus to "She Will".

Savages - Silence Yourself on Spotify.

FAVORITES OF 2013

Let's try this whole blogging thing again.

I want to talk a little bit about some of my favorite albums from 2013. The ordering and number will be arbitrary and I'll post Spotify links where available. I highlight these albums because I really, really enjoyed them; I wouldn't call any of them "obscure" but some have definitely received more mainstream attention and achieved more mainstream success than others. The only thing I think they have in common is that I find them all massively entertaining and I hope someone out there happens across this blog and enjoys them.

30DSC DAY 1: YOUR FAVORITE SONG

This entry was completely up in the air right up until I picked "All Cats Are Gray". I love so many song so deeply that marking out one as my favorite bordered on painful. It may sound melodramatic and nonsensical, but music makes me feel alive; listening to it, performing it, in all of its guises, makes me who I am, and narrowing down that portion of myself to one song seems worse than limiting. It's almost like lying, really; I feel like I'm trying to boil my personality down to one specific thing that only represents a small facet of who I am.

I picked a Cure song because I knew one would be easy to find online. I picked this particular Cure song because it is one of the few that it always on my shortlist of favorite pieces of music; the simple percussion line mixed in with those haunting synths and the plaintive vocal line, followed by that aching coda... not only is it well-constructed and performed, but it's also an emotional sledgehammer rife with imagery. The album it comes from, Faith, is 30 years old this year, but in many ways it still feels like it was just released yesterday.

There are many other songs I could have posted here; take, for example, this:



I first performed "Take him, Earth, for cherishing" as a college sophomore with the Harvard University Choir. This was my second year singing in a church choir and it really formed the backbone of my college experience, especially as a musician. In fact, the main reason I am a church musician now is tied into the fantastic experiences I had with that group at Memorial Church. The song itself is one of many outstanding pieces of choral literature that we did during my college career; the shifts in tempo and how it hops through different tonalities make it a living beast, even setting aside the occasion for which it was written, as a memorial to the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy. Adding that layer into an already heady mixture makes it one of the most personally meaningful pieces I've ever performed. I'll never tire of it, and I am always thankful I was introduced to it during my college experience.

Conversely, I could have gone this route:



I've cycled through several favorite electronic acts, ranging from synth pop through industrial acts and lots of styles in between, but the album that has stuck with me the most is Orbital's In-Sides, largely because of this song, "Adnan's". Most of the album looks to meld the dancefloor with the epic but this is the track where all of the pieces really fall into line. The synth melody that appears around 4:05 encapsulates much of what I look for in music; simplicity augmented by repetition into something much more majestic than the sum of its parts. In fact, I stopped writing and just basked in the music coming from my headphones once the track hit that midpoint.

Finally, there is Prince:


Housequake Live 1987 by samsarax

I can't find a link to the Sign 'O' The Times version of "Housequake", which literally is one of the greatest things ever recorded. It's pure, visceral, booty-shaking funk as only Prince can do it; this kitchen-sink live recording is also amazing but you really need to hear the stripped-down album version to really get the genius melding of iciness and heat that elevates this song into genius. So basically, go get a copy of Sign 'O' The Times. Almost every song on it is as amazing as this one and this one melts your face.

So, there you have it; several different perspectives on "what is my favorite song?" Even now, I want to keep going and list even more songs, but I really need to save at least a few for later entries.

30 DAYS, 30 SONGS

Welcome back from a 6 month hiatus! Lots has happened in the interim; my co-blogger got hitched and I sang on a Mountain Goats album. Oh, also Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden (perhaps one day we will know what was on their iPods).

I've been doing the Facebook 30 Day Song Challenge for a couple of weeks now. I figured I could use this space to expand on some of the choices I made since:

a) Facebook has limited space in status updates to really get down and navel-gaze.
b) The whole purpose of this blog is to write about music. Both John and I have fallen down on that and this is a good excuse to get back in the habit.
c) No one is actually reading this anyway so I curse with impunity; also snatch, tits, fucksticks and shitty twatburgers.

Coming up: my favorite song. (As if there's only one.)

GOODBYE 2010

I plan to talk about these albums in more detail later; for now, enjoy this list of my favorite albums of 2010:

Massive Attack - Heliogoland
Owen Pallett - Heartland
Janae Monae - The Archandroid
Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
Underworld - Barking
Abe Vigoda - Crush
Sleigh Bells - Treats
We Love - We Love
These New Puritans - Hidden
Vampire Weekend - Contra

honorable mentions:

M.I.A. - MAYA
Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)
LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening
Kokayi - Robots and Monsters
The Knife/Mt. Sims/Planningtorock - Tomorrow, in a year
Notic Nastic - It's Dark But It's Okay
Bloody Mary - Black Pearl
Third Eye Foundation - The Dark
Glasser - Ring

wow we are terrible at this

I thought that growing older made you grow wiser, more mature and more focused. If anything, I find myself even more afflicted by "ooh, something shiny!" syndrome, particularly when it comes to writing; I've never had the discipline to just sit down and crank out WORDS about something, even when I've been passionate about it, so on a certain fundamental level the very idea of me attempting to maintain a blog presence is laughable. Still, this is something I want to do; at one period in my life I got a lot of praise for how I put words together, so I tend to think I'm pretty good at it even if I hate doing it for extended periods of time.

I don't know what John's excuse is. Possibly the lack of sudden international superstardom based on discussing Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Gay Witch Abortion has left him jaded.

That's probably more navel-gazing than the three people who ever stumble across this thing want to read, so instead let me talk for a second about We Love:



Their debut album just came out on BPitch Control, the same label responsible for Ellen Allien, Apparat and Modeselektor. This duo is from southern Italy, yet manages to ape the cool Scandanavian vibe of The Knife well enough to make me assume on first listen that they are cut wholesale from the same Scando-Germanic cloth. This entire album panders directly to me; it starts out controlled and warm and blossoms across 11 songs into a ever-growing slab of controlled dance floor awesome. Tracks like "No Train, No Plane" (linked above) and "Hide Me" aren't what I would typically consider to the type of banging choon that would make me lose my mind, but the entire package works. Where The Knife would take a harsher edged, less subtle turn in incorporating quirkiness into their music, We Love opts for smooth cool, perhaps betraying their romantic Italian roots in the process.



The entire album may be too monochromatic for some but I defy anyone to listen to all eleven songs in isolation and not find at least one really great track.

#40 Krallice - Krallice

Well for one thing, I appreciate it when a band decides to do the whole s/t thing because that is one less thing I need to remember when talking about them, and I have a lot on my mind between eating and what's on TV and if I left the windows in the bedroom open because there is a storm brewing. This is complicated work on display here, and the members of the band have significant avant-crazo pedigrees from their previous/other bands, but what I think people tend to kind of gloss over is that there's some interesting melodic work going on under the screams and madness. Yes, the techie side is well represented, and there is much flailing of pick-hands and gnashing of teeth, but the bones lie mostly in composition, not look at me attention whoring. Much has been made of the question of whether this is really uppercase serious face Black Metal, but I think the answer is two-fold, only one half of which is "Shut the fuck up." The really great old school Black Metal out there lives and dies on composition and structure, albeit sometimes structure that is hard to glean on the first shot. SO the people that decry this band because they are too technical are like the jerks that get mad when East Bay Ray plays a non power chord and makes the Dead Kennedys all arty and not punk. Or from the school that feels like any Black Metal recording needs to be made by one lonely dude in a closet with a Fisher Price "My First 4-Track" that offs himself right after pressing the pause button and then his buddy makes 3 copies, buries two, and sends the third one to Terrorizer with dead dudes pinky toe in a baggie.

Where was I again? Oh yeah, Krallice. It's good despite the use of a saxophone in the rock idiom (ok Ihsahn gets a pass on this one too). Warning for the short attention span types bouncing up and down in their desk chairs: it's long! There is repetition! Too bad for you!

Krallice - Energy Chasms