today was rainy, beautifully so, and i finally picked up the linda perhacs album from downtown music to celebrate. that store is so wonderful and cheery that i might become a regular - i always buy more than i mean to and never feel bad about it cause i know the album is going to be good. perhacs' voice is thin, reedy, over pure 70s smooth jazz bass and elegant fingerpicking - folk with a psych fringe and weirdo neo-country tendancies. i prepared the song 'who really cares' to play at a show once but backed out at the last minute cause the vocal part bouces over an octave as the bass line slips around. too hard for me at the time.

perhacs disappeared from the world after this one album. the reissue people can't even find her to give her the royalties.

also bought henry cow, intentional prog rock sounding more like pierre boulez and the worst free jazz mashed together with occasional guitar lines. scary that parts are actually acceptable - the album's called 'unrest' which makes me wonder. the downtown guy told me that cow was english and when they broke up in '77, members came to nyc to jump start american prog. thanks henry cow.

he also told me about this 20 band festival that happened at an art center in 1977 with bands featuring bill laswell and all the brewing nyc downtown underground artists - not no wave or punk or anything of the type - and it occurs to me that even subculture history has a hegemony. and sub-sub culture, etc.

lunch with a friend today, talking about the power of a real performer - 'focused energy' versus the unfocused nervousness of people like cat power. its completely random who has it and who doesn't - and i'm sure it switches depending on the music being played.

never want to think about siouxsie and the banshees again after this dive into the '77 world for q. having read england's dreaming, watched the filth and the fury and dumpster dived thru every '77 or siouxsie site on the web, i feel totally spent on the energy of that time and i still haven't heard a 1/10 of that music. mainly i feel like i never need to listen to the clash again. odd the presentation of class in england vs. the alignment with the avant garde in new york city. very much still the same way, even for pop bands in the UK. jarvis cocker as caste exploder.

am listening to the smashing pumpkins cover of 'never let me down again' and thinking how very much i love billy corgan's voice. kids i went to high school with complained that it was effete (though they would never use such a word) and emo (though the term wasn't invented then) - which it is. more than rites of spring, fugazi or any of those authentic punk guys, i imagine emo kids as closet sp fans, screaming sadness with their hush hush voice.

last night played with mates of state - an amazing, slightly voyeuristic experience to stand behind the drummer and have the keyboardist stare at him the whole time - like she is looking at you - so incredibly in love with each other, so locked into time - and her piano skills are fantastic - vocals yearning in unison - they shouldn't play so long though - the richness of her keys gets a little too much after 20 minutes, the rushing triplets exasperating. i'm sure it will come to me later but right now i can't think of any band doing music like there's.

we also played with this bad emo band 'circle and square' whom are destined to mediocre celebrity cause their lead singer is marginally attractive and is somehow friends with a vj from mtv. worse than being a bad band is being a band with no desire to be anything but famous. if it weren't for the cheesy guitar solos and inane lyrics (uninspired rythmns, blocky bass lines, boring drum patterns and lackluster vocals) i would have actually enjoyed them in a sunny day/slowdive kind of way. i was trying to at least bc, although they we 2nd out of 4 bands, they played the longest set. during the late bit of inter-song banter, the singer asked 'how many emo kids does it take to...' to which my very angry hardcore friend shouted 'at least four' and then called them 'james taylor-esque'. weird to be in a group that's heckling at your own show. poor form?

it's two am. i'm currently researching the creatures in attempt to know something for the five minutes of my siouxsie interview tomorrow -she's calling me! it seems so...normal. i wonder if someone dials the phone for her. in celebration, no, because i have to write about her three best albums, i bought three albums today - juju, kaledioscope, and hyaena - it will be a rare taste test this weekend.

am brainblind from the hood show. opener daniel someone or other, from the chix aesthetics label, sucked the grace of amplified sound from the very room with his neanderthal beats, uninspired melodies, dumb downtempo cliches. he introduced his set saying 'this is a conversation between word and sound.' sssschhuuuucccckkkkkk!

and he played for an hour. he read his lyrics off half-folded paper. he plugged his album at the front and end.

don't know why i thought seeing hood would be life-changing. chances are that when a band defines themselves by bedroom studio antics and lo-fi garish charm, they are going to pull off exactly that live. great. early mogwai washes with umm..phat beats jammed by the guy with cargos on, sideways facing drumkit played four-sticked with brushes and those fuzzy pom-pom sticks. the lead singer looks like my anal irish ex-room mate, i think it's the adam's apple. never trust people who bounce off their monitors. they took requests and mine was to leave before they could be swindled into an encore. haven't heard their new album, which is supposed to raise the cat's fur et al, but if that's the way it's going, i'll save my money for siouxsie.

also listened to st. thomas today - banjos are tricky, it's hard to not sound like the 'fields. lovely in parts.

watched two movies last night - the filth and the fury and nico icon - ahh, the music video nerd-out night. filth and the fury proved not as lousy as expected although splices of cheesy shakespeare films and embellished portraits of the late 70s england climate tainted the general truthfulness. enjoyed the bill grundy moments immensely - play by play with commentary after each uttered profanity. the whole thing seeks to paint malcolm mclaren as evil as possible, which he truly seems - like the runaways guy, only less perverse, more high-minded.

nico was strange - low budget post-fame gaze at a ruined starlet lost to her own self-inflated sense of mystery. damaging to think about that low, sultry voice meaning nothing to anyone in her whole, junked up and decidedly unglamourous life. ended with john cale at a grand piano in this warehouse playing the 'sail away' song from marble index, only his voice interpreting over living, strong as he ever is. that's my second fav. nico song, after one on chelsea girls unfortunately written and played by the young jackson browne, who was one of her lovers (lou reed, jackson browne, jim morrison, iggy).

plenty of people want to sing like nico, who wants to sing like bjork? who wants to be in a band that sounds like U2? is production more important than playing? reading this led zeppelin bio (hammer of the gods, recommended by one modest mouse), i am appalled by my own lack of ability to play - to really play, and think about the history even of rock music, and how punk changed it not so much because of sweet shortness, attitude or equipment, but rather in the idea that there had to be something behind, not ability but at least knowledge of the 'ol boys.

my band only knows eight songs and if you asked us to play a cover, we'd laugh you out of the crowd. that is of course, because my keyboardist can't hear a tune, let alone improvise over a chord structure. but ha! we have no chords, as we have only bass and keys, so....

am anxious to get home and spin 'gris gris' by dr. john, but have to see this band hurricane lamps first...

stole this book from work (actually, i'm going to pitch it to them so it's okay, right) about 'avant rock' with chapters dedicated to king crimson, jim o'rourke, sonic youth, glenn branca et al. strange sub-genre involved with the art/political reconfiguring of traditional idioms, cliches, for some hybrid expansive and meaningful but still gut wrenching experience. mostly decends into wankery, too many linear notes and fey attitudes towards volume (least abrasion be the point). interesting though the idea of transcending technique - thus defining it against 'art-damaged' punk like television. it's impossible to address this situation without looking into the psychology of the willfully outsider musician - namely, accuring enough cred to validate monsterous, dehumanizing pretension.

on that note, am listening to rye coalition and can't find one reason to hate the music - the dude's voice is awful - only the most superlative moments of steven tyler's screams. they have a song called 'stairway to the free bird on the way to the smokey water' which, though not clever, may be their perfect summary - nothing more than a conglomeration, again most outragous moments (ooh, the pickslide!) as common affair.

went to bed listening to 'the tired sounds of stars of the lid' which, after reading that toop book about ambient music, made a lot more sense to me. it finished only seconds after i closed my book and eyes for the night. love it when that happens.

tonight, tonight - saw panthers/the walkmen/the liars. panthers, hmm. whatever. the walkmen, as my dear blog reader(s) know, have been tickling my fancy for some time. they proved wholly mid-20s, not so witty onstage, frightfully self-assured from their BIG LONDON GIG only 30 hours earlier (it's amazing how that telegraph machine works, you can send messages anywhere! it only costs a buffalo nickel.) and generally didn't live up to their bonobravado (neologisms galore!) although at one point a heckler shouted "play Another strokes song" which really put them out. they'd been interviewed by fancy mtv mics in the dingy under room of merc. lounge before the show, 15 industry types were on the list for them. and the heckler called them on their shit. ta da! no dynamics, no passion, just dudes in button downs going through the motions. they covered a neil halstead song in poor taste.

then, there were the liars. recorded, i say they sound like p.i.l. which is no small thing. live, their wiry australian singer whose accent convientely gives them that british edge angled through the set with the lazy cockyness of a class clown. he's too tan, too blonde to be singing 'i'm soooo sick of fucking you...over' when all it looks like he does is the walkabout and the hula. did i just write that? anyway, their bass player, much like myself last weekend, has sat down with 'entertainment' a few times - only i learned it all on acoustic guitar (dude, check out my tattoo - the world's first flying acoustic guitar!) and was perhaps even more theft driven than, dare i say it, radio 4. aaron, the guitarist, he's great. but they are a cartoon, a void and worse than a void, a meaningless spectacle. yay de bord. triumph over content. and they're on mute, did a peel session, so on.

afterward, ran into a boy who's constantly trying to trick me into saying something condemning about the super cool things he likes. at halloween last year he told me low was the new joy division, now he's telling me the liars are the birthday party reincarnate. he's a beautiful looking boy, but he's quite stupid. so goes the other music fall out.

am interviewing siouxsie + the adverts in a few days. all nerves. punk rock, etc.

the new issue of spin is fucking hilarious. true to rumor - big, horrifically ugly photographs and two of my shinnier fingers high of text. about six record reviews. andy greenwald is the worst music journalist i've read in a long time, all his metaphors trip on each other's feet. you'd think only the strokes and dashboard confessional mattered in the world. which actually may be true, but pah!
richard hell - time - charming song called 'going going gone' which reminds me in title of that song on the reality bites soundtrack (discussion of 'so alternative' songs last night when 4 non-blondes came on the radio). in the midst of roir crappy tape hiss sounding live concerts, this song remarkably torch-like, simple and even a little countrified-Stones sounding. Hell has a great singing accent - part Dylan, part Jagger, with a sneer McLaren could never steal.
Guilty as charged - learned the Shin's "New Slang" on guitar (actually my room mate taught me). Rumors that the song sells fast food - that M2 has a video of it. Too sincere for success?
Magnetic Fields "69 Love Songs" this weekend at Lincoln Center - a glowing audience, very dinner theater. LD wore a smoking jacket, Stephin in his trademark mismatched stripes. He should never speak - only sing. His and Claudia's banter is like watching Harvard undergrads make eyes at one another in intro to philosophy - makes my stomach turn with its smug in-ness. Didn't know all the tracks - am warmed mostly when the strict 4/4 full-band is not in effect, when Claudia isn't singing (her voice is amateur at best, you'd think after 10 years of performing that she'd work on it). Actually, the most cloyingly fey, theatrical or crooning songs hit me most - even when the ever-debate over Merritt's ability to ever mean what he says reaches fever pitch. The near-betrayal is the most heart-breaking.
Has kicked me, unsurprisingly, into a wave of lyric writing. Probably enough material for half the record I've been writing since I got my acoustic back - with my jazzboy room mate showing me the ropes, i'm ruling all over the guitar these days. or not.
am bummed to hear that black cat music, a band i reviewed quite favorably, was terrible live this past friday. borderline couldn't even pull off their songs. who tours at that level of terrible?