9 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(06/02/16 5:22pm)
The American indie underground of the ’90 is a decade I’ve managed to completely co-opt through the magic of a Soulseek account, membership to several private torrent trackers, and a last.fm. Across these crawls I’ve discovered some righteous albums and some gnarly bands. Did you know the ’90s gave us at least three (3!) sad-bastard opuses that use overdriven guitars and extremely specific space travel metaphors to chronicle their frontman’s crushing tales of heartbreak and heroin abuse? Heavy stuff.
Heavier still is Shudder to Think, the glam-hardcore outfit responsible for Pony Express Record, an album that, even compared to the rest of the weird, loud, angry rock that was bubbling up from the underground into the mainstream that decade, proved the most head-fucking alt. rock album ever committed to tape.
First, some history. Punk broke through to the mainstream in 1991, and before I get any further with this thought: this is Thurston Moore’s brilliant assertion, not mine. But if you’re thirstin’ for more, here’s the rest: Playing the European festival circuit in 1991, Sonic Youth brought along a little band called Nirvana. Kim Gordon befriended a young Kurt Cobain and even though he was too high for the majority of those two weeks to do much other than shamble around, wide-eyed and completely discombobulated in a white smock, it was still pretty evident to the Youth that the Seattle three piece was going to be the band to finally break noisy underground rock music into the mainstream. Maybe they’d even deal the deathblow to Guns ’N Roses, though I’m gonna speculate here and say getting banned from St. Louis coupled with whatever the hell their Spaghetti Incident was probably did as much damage, if not more, to cock rock.
September of 1991 proved Thurston right; Nirvana’s Nevermind, released courtesy of mega label Geffen Records, began shifting 300,000 radio-friendly units a week. In today’s streaming-ravaged music biz, that would be enough, but back then, everyone wanted more. Daddy’s new Windows ’96-equipped PC wasn’t gonna buy itself, and so began The Great 90s Indie Rock Feeding Frenzy. Major labels, eager to find the next Nirvana, began snapping up weirdo underground acts and paying ungodly sums of cash to fund their studio time, but it wasn’t all screaming fields of sonic love. Sure, it gave a band named the Butthole Surfers the opportunity to score a minor radio hit in 1996, but it also ravaged a fragile ecosystem of cult acts, thrusting talented bands well-suited to their respective niches into a national spotlight they weren’t meant for. Cue the breakups. The sole legacies of these bands? Scathing indictments of “sell-out” in prickly indie ‘zine Maximumrocknrol land incredibly expensive-sounding records with zero appeal to suburban mall punks clamoring for the latest Candlebox LP.
In opposition to this crass commercialism stood Ian MacKaye and his Washington, D.C. label Dischord records. Across his work fronting Minor Threat, MacKaye had proven himself a serious mover and slam-dancer in hardcore while practically inventing emo and post-hardcore with Embrace and Fugazi in the late 80s. Also a vegan straight-edge punk, MacKaye never charged more than $5 for a show, and, in case you got kicked out of one of his shows, made sure a like-minded vegan skinhead was standing at the door to return your five bones. Such righteousness extended to Dischord’s business acumen, and to date, only two bands felt they could do better and left to take a swing at the majors. One was the post-hardcore four piece Jawbox who signed a deal with Atlantic and savored some minor college radio airplay. The other was the heroes of our story, Shudder to Think.
Shudder, by the time they quit Dischord, had recorded four LPs, beginning with the relatively straightforward glam punk of 1988’s Curses, Spells, Voodoo, Mooses (released on MacKaye’s sister’s label, Sammich Records) and culminating in the cryptic post-punk of 1992’s Get Your Goat. Somewhere in the midst of this initial run, the band played the birthday party of local 16 year old Nathan Larson who’d join the band five years later upon the departure of original guitarist Chris Matthews. Following the addition of Jawbox drummer Adam Wade a year after that, the new lineup recorded “Hit Liquor,” their final Dischord single and their first offering for Epic.
It’s not surprising “Hit Liquor” didn’t get a whole lot of MTV play. Try and nod your head along to that lead guitar. Look at the face Wade gives the camera after caressing the head of that dead guy around the 40 second mark. Notice how the body in that bed is gone by the middle of the video? Where’d that meat guitarist Nathan Larson’s hacking away at come from? Oh. And none of that takes into account frontman Craig Wedren’s histrionic, Freddie Mercury on bath salts vocals. Only in the ‘90s could someone coo the lines “The cage of her bones is softer than loose / meat” on a major label single, and Larson’s guitar here, in all its theatrical, horror-movie glory, adds a weird sense of camp to it all.
“Hit Liquor” wasn’t just a vestigial limb of Shudder’s indie days; it was an almighty opening salvo for Shudder 2.0. Larson’s slashes of angular, dissonant guitar chords and Wedren’s perverse ramblings didn’t really seem like a logical choice for a label presumably interested in making money, but Shudder were smart, self-aware dudes. They probably knew that. So instead of toning it down, they laughed and cranked it up. “Gang of $” features all the muscular rhythm and loud guitars expected of an alt-rock outfit, but the machismo’s drained out by Wedren’s flamboyant come-ons to the band’s non-existent groupies. “9 Fingers on You” teases a Stone Temple Pilots groove but consistently comes up a beat short in every measure. “Earthquakes Come Home” almost features a sing along chorus, but that’s sabotaged by a slinky verse that sounds like something Buffalo Bill would prance around to, and “Chakka” would probably have gotten the kids moshing if it didn’t sound like Larson’s guitar was in the wrong tuning. Only “X-French Tee Shirt” got any radio play.
Another David Lynch fever dream of a video, “X-French Tee-Shirt” should have dominated MTV; at it’s heart, this is a pop song, and the first half, built around a whopping two guitar chords, is alt-rock genius. But around the halfway point, the song destroys its own momentum, dissolving from a sensual strut to a single note drone over which Wedren coos a stream of consciousness mantra that seethes for the last three minutes.
Again, the video captures the weirdness of the music, featuring a goateed Wedren riding a service elevator up through a dilapidated hotel to peer in on the guests. All are consumed by tasks at once bizarre and entirely mundane. One’s just riding a bicycle in circles. Another’s wearing angel wings and bouncing a tennis ball. When Wedren arrives at the top, just as that mantra starts, he’s given the old bedroom eyes by a copy of himself. Like “Hit Liquor,” it’s confusing, sexy, spooky as hell, and begs for multiple listens. As does the entirety of Pony Express Record.
I don’t know the exact sales figures of Shudder’s Epic debut; the circumstances surrounding the recording and the immediate fallout of Pony Express Record are almost as cryptic as the album itself. I know “Hit Liquor” got the Beavis and Butthead treatment upon release and I know Wedren is bald in “X-French Tee Shirt” because he was battling Hodgkin’s Lymphoma at the time. There’s a few 120 Minutes performances that are absolutely astounding in their precision, and at one point the Almighty Pitchfork had this record listed as one their top 100 releases of the ’90s.
By the time Shudder resurfaced in 1997 with their second major release, 50,000 B.C. (I reckon this a reference to a wacky 1963 caveman nudie flick), they’d crammed their art-damaged weirdness into ostensibly straightforward pop rock tunes, and in touring with the Foo Fighters and re-recording an old masterpiece, there’s a sense that the band was finally trying to meet their label halfway. Despite this attempted courtship of the mainstream, the band again failed to sell a billion copies (I reckon this was a reasonable quota before Spotify) and quietly released two masterful film soundtracks in 1998 before calling it day.
“Major labels are everything everybody says they are, both good and bad, and so are indies,” says Wedren of his time on Dischord and Epic. Therein lies the brilliance of Shudder. They saw value in the weird, DIY artiness of the American indie underground, but they also knew how to crank the distortion and rock. They could bend the rules of the rigid and sexless Dischord sound and also twist pop into nearly unrecognizable shapes. It’s the same spirit that made Sonic Youth a minor cultural force. Shudder’s songs are rigid in all the wrong places and their melodies ramble and never quite resolve into anything resembling their disparate influences.
22 years later, Pony Express Record’s twisted majesty hasn’t at all diminished. Sure, it sounds completely of it’s time, thanks to it’s overdriven guitars and classically 90s alt-rock production, but in terms of songwriting and performance, it’s completely unique, something of a feat considering snippets of its DNA are everywhere. Fellow DC post-hardcore outfit Dismemberment Plan cribbed some of the knottier rhythms, Deftones bit some of the Pony’s more sensual vocals, and nu-metal pretty boys Incubus have been known to straight up cover “X-French Tee Shirt” when the mood strikes.
Shudder to Think took a genre like post-hardcore, built on loud guitars and mosh-pit ready rhythms, and made something completely alien out of it. It’s something you think we’d see more of today, what with the internet making it easier than ever to maintain schizophrenic music habits. Just today, this bored, jaded youth listened to the new Chance tape, the progged-out final Sunny Day Real Estate album, and the debut records from both the schizoid electronic LFO and LFO the Abercrombie shills. But punk’s taken a turn for the polite in recent years. Mysterious, disturbing, and completely rocking, Shudder to Think made the kind of music that sounded weird at the time and sounds even stranger today.
(05/17/16 2:52am)
6/7
Radiohead release albums whenever they want, but there was a time when they didn't, a time when we as music consumers naively believed that in order for a record to succeed, the humble 'Head needed PR, a slew of singles, a label, etc. That was proven wrong in 2007 when, after breaking from major label EMI, the lads from Oxford released In Rainbows online without any publicity or set price tag. The Internet lost its collective shit, not just because the business model cut out the middleman, but also because the record featured some of the most tuneful, concise and nakedly emotional songs the band had recorded in over a decade. In 2011, they released their eighth effort The King of Limbs in a similar fashion, although to considerably less fanfare. Maybe the web changed in those four years. Or maybe the album, clocking in at under 40 minutes and carrying only eight tracks, was just too slight to make a splash.
Here we sit in 2016, a week after the release of Radiohead’s third surprise outing, the restrained and pensive A Moon Shaped Pool. While I’ll let you come to your own conclusions about whether or not we’re living in the dystopian future that’s had Thom Yorke so wigged out ever since 1995’s The Bends, the band’s eased off on that angle with this latest effort, and it works for and against them. By backing away from their techno-dystopian soapbox, the band have crafted a record that, while subtle and probably their most nuanced to date, fails to add up to more than the sum of its thematically disparate parts.
But that’s not to say these songs aren’t outstanding or that they don't touch on the darker points of the modern world. This is Radiohead. Many of them respectively are and do. Case in point: lead single and opening track “Burn the Witch.” Featuring anxious strings arranged by guitarist Jonny Greenwood and performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra, the song simultaneously addresses the political and social climates of 2016, leveling subtle digs at the world’s reaction to the Syrian refugee crisis as well as the digital crucifixion anyone deemed #problematic on a certain social media potentially faces (it can’t be a coincidence that the music video opens with an image of a little blue bird).
Next comes “Daydreaming,” the second track and second single (I'm noticing a pattern here) that, between Thom Yorke’s wounded falsetto and yearning chords and Greenwood’s orchestral flourishes, is probably the most Radiohead thing Radiohead have ever done. But that’s not to say that the magic has run dry since Thom decided he wasn’t here and this wasn’t happening fifteen years ago, and nor is that considering the backmasked vocals which moan “half of my life” over ominous strings at the song’s fade. It’s here that I should probably mention that Yorke, 47, recently separated from his wife of 23 years, Rachel Owen. You do the math.
These two songs highlight the record's dichotomy, as well as it’s greatest fault. In swaying back and forth between their typical twenty first century meltdowns (the lovely strummer “The Numbers,” performed previously in various live settings as “Silent Spring," warns against climate change) and deeply personal tracks that often seem to deal with the crumbling of a relationship (the menacing kraut of “Ful Stop” and “Identikit,” the fragile and scared “Glass Eyes"), Radiohead have given us a record that doesn’t quite succeed as a call-to-arms to save the world nor features the singular introspection to completely work as a bloodletting break-up album.
And, looking at how most of these songs have been kicking around for some time, that makes sense. This isn’t a record born of a single session, but rather one assembled from a series of orphan tunes; “Burn the Witch” dates back at least to their 2002 Hail to the Thief sessions, and Yorke's performed album closer “True Love Waits” live as far back as 1995 before first canonizing the song on the band's 2001 live LP I Might Be Wrong as a surprisingly straightforward acoustic strummer. Here, it turns up as a stripped-back piano ballad that’s probably the prettiest song they’ve ever committed to 0s and 1s.
“Don’t leave” Thom whispers in the outro as layers of icy keyboards take the place of the triumphant acoustic chords that closed the live version. On I Might Be Wrong, “True Love Waits” stood as a reminder that, despite the fact that everyone had the fear and the ice age was most definitely coming, humanity's ability to connect with each another could be its saving grace. Here, in 2016 and among muted songs of personal heartbreak, political turmoil and environmental devastation, it's the sound of a man realizing that it might already be too late.
(09/28/15 7:32pm)
If you had a tough time in high school, you probably listened to at least one band composed of sad pallid bastards with loud guitars and dance-y bass. This wayward blogger spent an entire six months listening exclusively to the Joy Division discography before New Order pulled him out of his Dark Night of the Soul.
Thanks Downingtown.
Grim as my adolescence may have been, A Place to Bury Strangers probably had a worse time; through some unholy alchemy they formed a band melding post-punk, shoegaze and noise rock. If you haven’t heard those genres, back off: you might be too well adjusted for this scene, man. On the off chance you get down with The My Bloody Valentines or the Jessie and Marty Chain, APBS might be the look.
These are serious young men with seriously loud guitars and probably an undiagnosed case of Acute Doom (this is an actual prognosis, I swear). Scope ‘em at The Bishop this Wednesday. Tickets are just 14 bones at the door, but if you haven’t the bones to spare, you can pay $12 in advance. Get there at 9:30 p.m. to groove to Grooms’ jangly gloom. Wear black or at least a jean jacket with Morrissey on the back.
(08/30/15 4:03pm)
The 90s happened something like a ten years ago but there’s still kids who like to wear flannel, reference The Simpsons and pride themselves on their lack of ambition. You can thank those kids for giving Mac DeMarco his career and making Burger Records “a thing.” You can also thank them for Colleen Green, the SoCal punk who I’ve just learned isn’t the long lost sister of Stephen Malkmus (thanks TinyMixTapes).
https://youtu.be/O2VUAi-sIYM
She’s playing The Bishop this Sunday. Doors at 8 p.m., $8 for a ticket but expect the typical extra $1.50 charge for an X on your hand if you’re under 21. Remember kids, while it’s true that Fugazi never charged more than $5 a show, that was the 80s, and when you adjust for inflation and the cost of Hand Xs, $8-$10 is a totally fair price. Come early for Jaill (this is probably what the kids mean when they mention “indie”) and Punani Huntah (electro-dub of the haziest order).
Ed. note: The Bishop no longer charges a $1.50 surcharge for underage attendees.
(04/08/15 3:58pm)
Released 3/31/15
Grade: 5/7
Montreal post-rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor have returned with their sixth studio LP and their first album of new material since reuniting back in 2010. Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress doesn't mark a huge departure from the band’s acclaimed sound, but it doesn’t need to. A new Godspeed record is always an event, and this one stands as another consistently great album in what’s arguably the most impressive discography in post-rock.
If anything can be said for Asunder, it’s that it’s definitely Godspeed’s most concise full-length. Clocking in at a mere forty minutes and featuring what is essentially one song divided into four movements, Asunder doesn’t even run across two slabs of vinyl. This ends up working to the album’s favor. As much this reviewer loves his copy of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, he’s still never found the time to sit down and properly listen to the damn thing front-to-back. Asunder, with its four movements, two typical post-rock mini-symphonies separated by two drone pieces, proves a more digestible listen.
But what of these four songs, you might ask? The song titles, typical Godspeed word salad, won’t tell you much. Opener “Peasantry, or ‘Light! Inside of Light!’” kicks the record off with slow, Eastern-tinged strings that glide and swirl around a lumbering rhythm section. Eventually the song dissolves into the album’s two droners, “Lambs’ Breath” and “Asunder, Sweet” which when listened to while screwing around on the computer come off as slightly underwhelming, but, when listened to heroically stoned are probably labyrinthine and deep and speak to the collapse of Western society or something. Not that I would know.
Closer “Piss Crowns Are Trebled” rises out of the hum with a wash of major chords. Minutes later the string section kick back in, then so does that buzzsaw guitar that everyone loved on “She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer, She Dreamt She Was Alone in an Empty Field,” and before you know it Godspeed are serving up a classic slab of crescendocore. Everything gets really loud before collapsing in on itself and the record ends on a surprisingly hopeful note. This too is kind of surprising, considering the band began its mythical career by regaling us with stories of burning cities and wallets full of blood.
Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress doesn’t innovate. To be fair, though, post-rock hasn’t evolved a whole lot since the 90s, and Godspeed has already given us two or three absolute classics. Asking for another seems unreasonable. Instead, this record follows the trend that most of 2015’s blockbuster guitar albums have established. This is Godspeed, a master class indie rock band if there ever was one, slipping into a comfortable middle age. That it’s doing so with such a solid, Godspeed-to-its-core record is cause for celebration.
(04/01/15 4:39pm)
Released 3/31 via Harvest Records
Grade: 6/7
Last June, Sacramento noise-rap trio Death Grips released Niggas on the Moon, the first disc of their then-unreleased and presumably final double album, The Powers That B. They assured fans that disc 2, the cryptically titled Jenny Death, would follow shortly. Then they cancelled all tour dates, broke up, revealed that Robert Pattinson (yes, that Robert Pattinson) had played guitar on 2013’s Government Plates, released an instrumental soundtrack for last month’s fashion week, and re-united. For artists allegedly repulsed by fame and fortune – they refuse to give interviews and regularly release their records for free - it’s impressive how much attention their antics can gather.
Now finally released in its entirety, The Powers That B proves that Death Grips weren’t trolling their fans these past few months. Despite missed deadlines and cancelled tour dates, Death Grips have managed to craft an impressive pair of records that stand among the band’s most ambitious and diverse work.
Niggas on the Moon builds its eight songs around samples snatched from Icelandic Avant-pop icon Bjork. Her presence – in the form of finely chopped, heavily processed voice clips - gives the set a nimble versatility. On “Billy Not Really,” the band chips and tips her voice into eerie pan flutes. Instrumental “Have a Sad Cum,” feeds her and frontman Stefan Burnett’s voices through a meat grinder of Pro Tools effects, snipping them into unintelligible coos and snarls that weave in and out of a latticework of polyrhythms and warped synths courtesy of drummer Zach Hill (one half of ex math-rock/shred-meister duo Hella) and producer/synth-lord Andy Morin (colloquially known as Flatlander).
The disc also features some of the most aggressive songs Death Grips have recorded yet. Opener “Up My Sleeves” finds Burnett half mumbling, half chanting the titular phrase before launching headlong into the track with the declaration, “I’ll take my life like I kept it.” “Fuck Me Out” features one of the band’s densest rhythms, and though Burnett gives a remarkably restrained performance, his lyrics loses little of their sheer intimidation with the volume down; if anything, Burnett’s subdued cadence only underscores the desperation and suicidal intensity of his MC Ride character.
Jenny Death eschews the rhythmic complexity and electronic precision of Niggas on the Moon for brute force drums and guitar. The sound, at least in terms of sheer aggression and lyrical nihilism, hearkens back to the band’s molten 2011 mixtape Exmilitary. “I Break Mirrors with My Face in the United States” lives up to its name, riding a tidal wave of piercing synths and Nine Inch Nails drum machines that shatter the clinical calm (relatively speaking) of Niggas on the Moon’s final tracks. “Inanimate Sensation” builds a bona fide hook around revving electronics and tribal beats that have more in common with power electronics provocateurs Whitehouse than anything in the realm of hip-hop. “PSS PSS” masters the emerging art of the airhorn.
Starting with the titular cut, the final tracks of the record build in rap-rock intensity, climaxing with the previously released “On GP.” In the context of a single, the track proved instantly memorable, if a little confounding (the music video in particular, featuring a street magician vaping and subsequently goofing off for six minutes, is just plain stupid). Placed at the end of the album, however, it’s absolutely arresting. The four power-chords worth of guitar pummels with a primitive anger reminiscent of early West Coast hardcore and Hill’s drums pound like a classic rock drummer with sledgehammers for arms. It’s Burnett, though, that launches the track into the stratosphere.
Gone are the ridiculous one-liners and the “fuck, kill, steal shit” mentality of Burnett’s incendiary MC Ride character, and though Burnett still barks his lyrics like an apocalyptic drill sergeant, behind the vitriol is a profound weariness. Lines like “I’d be a liar if I sat here claiming I’d exit in a minute/But I can’t say I wouldn’t have my limits” place Burnett closer to post-punk martyr Ian Curtis than a thoroughly #noided Henry Rollins. “On GP” marks the point where, after raging against the violence, paranoia and oppression of the 21st century for four albums, Burnett realizes his anxiety comes as much from within as it does from without. Instrumental album closer “Death Grips 2.0” underscores the revelation, ending the record with a sense of loss and unease.
As is somewhat telling from the one-disc-at-a-time release strategy for The Powers That B, the album is not a cohesive collection of songs; Death Grips have instead structured its two discs as counterpoints rather than supplements. The effect mostly works and serves to underline Death Grips’ versatility, with Niggas on the Moon encapsulating the abstract and rhythmically dense style first heard on the messy but occasionally brilliant Government Plates, and Jenny Death perfecting the raw, abrasive, and scorched-earth stylings of Exmilitary. Arguably the only element underrepresented here is Death Grips pop side; listeners looking for a cyberpunk rave-up akin to 2012’s major label debut The Money Store ought to look elsewhere (a few bangers can be salvaged from 2014’s messy Fashion Week instrumental soundtrack).
Death Grips may make more records. Last week they announced a world tour, and a few days ago a cryptic Facebook update in response to a fan inquiry regarding future records hinted “we might make some more.” Even if Death Grips never makes good on that, The Powers That B, an album equal parts angry, confused, confusing, messy, and even touching, would make a fitting conclusion for a band that, in retrospect, is miraculous for simply lasting this long. Despite raging against the machine these last five years, Death Grips have enjoyed (and maybe even continue to enjoy) a remarkably successful and prolific anti-career. Maybe they’ve got the Powers That Be on their side.
(04/11/14 12:16am)
Drekka Interview with Bryan Brussee
If you like music and live in Bloomington, you’ve probably run into Michael Anderson– he frequents local shows and works as a clerk at TD’s CDs and LPs. He also makes ambient recordings under the name Drekka, and was recently kind enough to sit down with me and discuss his nearly 20-year career under the pseudonym. Want to know more? Read the interview. Want to hear more? Check out his Bandcamp page and see him live this Saturday at Culture Shock.
Let’s start at the beginning. When did Drekka start?
I started doing Drekka in ’96. I was 26. I started doing my first recordings probably around ’86 – like these silly little tapes.
Who were the influences?
When I first started doing stuff, me and my cousin would do these little radio plays. He was super into The Beatles, and I was into Devo, so we would do these silly little pop songs. But then by the time I was 20, I was just really into the industrial movement, Psychic TV and Neubauten – the British and German post new-wave industrial scene, post-punk and that kind of stuff.
So how did that inform the sound of the first couple Drekka releases?
The first couple Drekka records… by then, at that point I was super into this sort of Bristol scene, that was kind of space folk… post-My Bloody Valentine people that were also really into psychedelic folk music. So I was playing in a group that was sort of a bigger, ambient shoegaze band, and I was combining field recordings and the wall-of-sound shoegaze stuff with folk.
And this was all happening in Bloomington?
No, I was in Boston still and just mostly listening to bands like Flying Saucer Attack and Slowdive out of England and His Name Is Alive out of Detroit. And then I moved to Chicago in ’96, right around the same time that I started [Drekka].
Grieve was recorded at my old house. We lived in this huge red house, and everyone moved out and we just recorded it in the big empty rooms.
When did you come to Bloomington?
I moved here in May of 2000 to work with the then new Secretly Canadian label. We were just in a house right up by the Denny’s with everything shoved in the basement.
Jumping back to the name “Drekka” – what’s the story there?
Since the mid 80s, I was obsessed with The Sugarcubes and band they were in before The Sugarcubes, Kukl. I used to go see them all the time when I was a teenager, and they were really confused and excited that I new about a lot of the other Icelandic punk bands, so they sort of took me under their wing. The first time I went to Iceland was in ‘90 something, and they introduced me to all these other people that I’d worshipped. Drekka is Icelandic for ‘to drink’ because I was trying to think of an Icelandic name that would be very Icelandic, and they’re all total alcoholics, so I just chose it. And I was straightedge at the time so I thought it was really funny. It also turns out to mean “new-born infant diarrhea” in Slovenian.
You recorded your most recent album partially in Iceland.
Yeah, I’ve been going [to Iceland] once or twice a year for the last ten years. I’ve developed a close friendship with some people over there, mostly with my friend Thorir. He and I record every time I’m over there and play some shows. Half the record is a reissue of a 3-inch CD-R made for a tour we did over there. It’s called “Ekki gera fikniefnum,” which is the name of the album, too. And then the new record that’s coming out later this year is also from stuff I recorded in Iceland.
And the title of the latest record translates as “don’t do drugs” or “don’t make drugs.”
It’s a mistake. My friend who came with me on the trip, her mom wrote a note that said jokingly “don’t do drugs,” but she Google translated. What it actually means is, literally, “don’t make the drugs” as in “don’t make the drugs come over there and slap you.” It’s a really bad translation.
I was thinking it might be a reference to straightedge.
It’s a reference to that, yeah. I’m not straightedge anymore though.
What was so attractive about straightedge?
Just being a kid in the suburbs, it was mostly afraid of drinking or whatever. You see your friends acting stupid and you’re like “they’re being stupid, you shouldn’t do that, Minor Threat rules!” Straightedge was really big on the East Coast in the 80s, because we were so close to D.C. We had jackasses like Slapshot and stuff like that. The D.C. scene was much cooler than the Boston scene. The Boston straightedge scene, I quickly realized, was just a bunch of violent goofballs beating up kids for drinking, which was stupid. Back then, it meant not drinking Coke, you couldn’t drink caffeine, you had to be abstinent.
I can’t really think of two more opposed genres than hardcore punk and ambient folk.
Even before that, I was super obsessed with the Butthole Surfers, which are like the most psychedelic acid freaks on the planet. It was pretty funny. Not too many straightedge Goths, that’s for sure.
How has your sound changed over the almost 20 years you’ve been writing and performing as Drekka?
I’d say it’s almost regressed. When I started doing the shoegaze, space-folk, whatever you want to call it, I couldn’t play guitar or anything. I sort of tried to learn but didn’t really have the discipline to do it. And then I sort of got less interested in playing the songs [and more into] making the sounds. I think what I’m doing now is more influenced by what I was listening to when I first got into Psychic TV and all that stuff in ’88, ’89ish. It’s almost like doing what I’m most comfortable with. I don’t know. I’m mostly interested in just sounds, how different sounds work or don’t work together. Simple melodies. I’m really into implied melodies. You hear a sound, and for some reason think of a song. Simplicity.
What’s the process like for writing a Drekka song?
A lot of the times I won’t start working on a piece or a song unless I have some sort of melody in my head for weeks, and then I’ll go try it out on different instruments. A lot of the stuff I’ve been doing the last five or six years is actually collaging. The live shows are 70-80% improvised, and I record them all directly to my hard drive off my board.
And there’s some of that stuff on the new record.
And so a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing lately takes those recordings and uses them as the material for new stuff. A lot of the new record started off as live recordings. The first track that I did with Annelies Monseré is a collage of two different live recordings of the same piece, panned left and right. They sort of come and go because they don’t come out the same every night.
And that first track is based off an English folk song.
It’s a song that Shirley Collins used to do called “Go From My Window” that Annelies is really obsessed with.
I’ve noticed from a lot of your track titles that “windows” are a recurring theme.
The whole B-side of Windowframe, the album, is all different ideas of the same melody recorded on different sides of the glass, the inside stuff being “comfort zone” and the outside stuff being natural. So the tracks recorded on the outside are the melody literally being recorded during a windstorm with a contact mic on the window so you can’t really hear it because its being played inside.
The back of the latest record has a picture of the word “coward.” What’s the story there?
I played this show, and it like… it was weird. I had to keep moving room from room because so many people were smoking out I was paranoid that I would catch a contact buzz. These people were totally out. Totally fucked up. It was an awesome show, though. It was in a basement, and there were two different video artists working at the same time, projecting onto the wall behind me, and I just sat on the ground and had a ring of Christmas lights as a sort of barrier and people were sitting right up to [me]. And the next day I wake up and there’s people just asleep everywhere. It’s really weird. And I go into the kitchen and there’s this huge, awesome, weird ring of salami. Food everywhere. And then I went in the hallway and there’s really stark morning light, and there’s this mirror, and for some reason someone had written above it the word “coward.” It just looked perfect.
Have you ever played culture shock?
I did. I played Culture Shock when I was a member of Racebannon in 2001, I think, and it was great.
What kind of band was Racebannon?
They started out as kind of a hardcore screamo band, and evolved into this scream / post-rock / metal-tinged machine… sort of like Melvins or something like that. What I used to do was I would sit on stage while they were playing and record the volume coming off the stage and collage it. So when they were done with a song, I would immediately blast back sort of a cut-up of the song that you’d just heard.
What are your views on today’s independent music scene and independent music distribution over the Internet?
It’s so easy for anyone to put anything out now, so the listening public has gotten overloaded and desensitized to a lot of stuff. So, on the one hand its really amazing that anyone can do it, but now a hundred times more people are doing it. It’s much harder to stand out or to even get someone to bother listening. But there are still people out there listening.
What’s been your favorite place to perform?
I really love playing in Slovenia. I was super excited to go there, because I was really obsessed with Laibach, this Slovenian industrial band. And then I went there and nobody cares about Laibach. It’s kind of like here. I grew up in Boston and moved to Chicago, where everyone was obsessed with Magnetic Fields and Dinosaur Jr. I didn’t go see Dinosaur Jr. like a hundred times because I just didn’t care.
What makes a good audience for the kind of music that Drekka makes?
A relatively small audience. Situationally, it could be a place where people are predisposed to be quiet. People need to be quiet. The worst shows are when people aren’t paying attention, which is fine, I don’t care if people pay attention to me, but it makes it almost impossible for me to play a nuanced set. So if people are talking, I need to go into crybaby mode and get really obnoxious and loud, and those shows are kind of fun, they get really punk, sometimes you get some fights. And that’s fine, I used to sing in a death punk band called Turn Pale, and there was a lot of physical interaction with the crowd. Same thing with Racebannon. I have no problem kicking someone in the face, but with Drekka, I feel like when its done, I think “that was garbage, it was just a dancing monkey show.”
What’s the future of Drekka?
Well, it’s kind of weird, because Drekka’s become less a band name and more a name. People refer to me as Drekka, so if I play on someone else’s record, they’ll credit me as Drekka or Michael Drekka. It’s kind of become a life brand, probably. I think if I started something else, I’d probably credit myself as Drekka, just to be funny. At this point, I pretty much continue doing it because it’s a free ticket to travel the world. As long as that’s feasible, I’ll probably keep doing it.
Last question: What’s your favorite Drekka record?
I really love the 3-inch CD-Rs I’ve done, especially the original 3-inch version of “Ekki gera fikniefnum.” I had a tour planned to go all they way around Iceland’s one highway, Route 1, in 2010. The ring road, they call it. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull made travel to the south impossible, so with a couple days off, Thorir and I recorded, mixed, designed, and burned 20 copies of this little EP. It was a lot of fun, and we had a special new release to sell at the remaining shows!
(04/04/14 12:25am)
Released: 4/1/14
6/7 stars
Whether you call it “jizz jazz” or just good old-fashioned slacker-core indie rock, Mac DeMarco definitely has a distinctive sound, all lethargic vocal deliveries and greasy guitars. It’s the kind of music that’s made for hanging out in your hammock to while the sun beats down and the breeze blows, and ever since his debut EP, the glam-rock flavored Rock and Roll Nightclub, DeMarco’s sound has only gotten looser and more laid back.
Salad Days, DeMarco’s second LP, isn’t much of a change from its predecessor, the 2012 sleeper hit 2, but that’s okay; even though the sound is essentially the same (“Goodbye Weekend” might as well have been called “Ode to Viceroy pt. 2 this time with even more twinkly guitars!”), DeMarco has a long way to go before his languid songwriting starts to sounding derivative – It’s not like anyone else in the indie scene sounds like a redneck Stephen Malkmus.
The introduction of the odd synth flourish roughly halfway through the record goes a long way towards mitigating the “been there, done that” feel that haunts Salad Days’ opening cuts. Standout “Chamber of Reflection” puts the instrument to the best use, creating a seriously stoned 80s throwback whose electronic elements wouldn’t sound out of place aside vaporwave artists like Macintosh Plus or early Oneohtrix Point Never.
The standard DeMarco tunes also standout. First single “Passing Out Pieces” features a wobbly six-string drone that fits perfectly with DeMarco’s ambivalent lyrics, at once trying to express an existential crisis and deflect any resulting gravitas through his trademark ennui, and “Brother” is just catchy enough to warrant that Best New Track it earned over at the notoriously picky Pitchfork.
“Let Her Go” proves another excellent moment, and arguably the most straightforwardly melodic song of his career. Sure, it falls back on that old trope of “if you love her, let her go” that we’ve all heard before, but this time, delivered by a gap-toothed prankster, I can’t help but believe the sentiment.
Salad Days isn’t DeMarco’s Trans, but radical reinvention has never been synonymous with quality music anyway (just look at The National – they’ve made the same great album five times over). Instead, we have a fine-tuning of an already great formula. DeMarco’s even matured a little, replacing songs about meth cooking dads and wigged out neighbors with lyrics about life and love that hit more often than they miss.
Just a couple years ago, Mac DeMarco was known mostly for putting drumsticks where they don’t belong while giving drunken renditions of U2 songs. Salad Days puts some of that to rest and stands on its own as a remarkably mature record from a 23-year old artist.
(02/19/14 2:08am)
Released: 2/11/2013
7/7 stars
There’s a part in Sun Kil Moon’s Benji, the latest album to come from indie folk singer-songwriter and ex-Red House Painters frontman Mark Kozelek, that’ll make you laugh out loud. It happens between quiet saxophone and flamenco guitar and nestled inside Kozelek’s matter-of-fact recounting of seeing The Postal Service on the album closer “Ben’s My Friend.” As Kozelek grapples with accepting middle age in a restaurant, he finds solace in the “sports bar shit” that clutters the walls.
Okay, maybe the humor of the whole situation dies out when I try and type it up, but trust me. In the context of Benji, the moment is a sort of glorious, hilarious catharsis.
See, Benji is a sad album. It’s not a trendy or self-aware kind of sad, like The Smiths, nor is it a romantic kind of sad, like The Cure. Lyrics feel as though Kozelek tore them right out of his diary, and the results are devastating, such as on opener “Carissa,” in which Kozelek recounts how his second cousin died in a freak fire one night while taking out the trash.
Two songs later, we learn the same fate befell his uncle.
“Dogs” is another stand-out track, and arguably the most personal, with Kozelek rattling off every one of his ex-lovers by name before shrugging off his pain and sighing “It’s a complicated place, this planet we’re on.” The admirable thing is, Kozelek never points fingers, as is so often the case in songs focusing on relationships. Instead, he chooses to simply recount his experiences over steady, solemn guitar chords.
That’s the beauty of Benji. It’s quiet, stark, and never overwrought. A lesser album would drown its arrangements in horns and strings in an effort to affect a reaction from its listeners. Benji sounds too tired to care. Even the track “Prayer for Newtown,” which could have, and probably should have, sounded like a cheap attempt to cash in on a tragedy for some fleeting emotion bares a quiet dignity and grace befitting its subject matter.
My first interaction with Benji came from a stream of the second track, “I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love.” I smirked at the title, and listened to it right off the Pitchfork Review page, wanting to hate it, partly for that big red “9.2” stamped on the page like some sort of Seal of Approval from the Indie-Cred Bank, partly because of the dorky title. After fifteen seconds, I dropped everything, sat back, and listened.
I just can’t stress enough how exceptional an album Benji is. It’s gut-wrenching, honest, sometimes humorous, and always deeply humane. This isn’t the kind of wistful, vaguely melancholy indie pop music you’ll hear playing from a high-school kid’s iPod. Benji is a beautiful and emotionally exhausting account of a man’s search to find meaning in the death (and sports bar shit) that surrounds him.