forgotten radio stations play forgotten things - the guess who's first album after bachman left - share the land. can't say i enjoyed it that much although after my introduction into the world of the boogie rock via the James Gang last weekend I at least began to understand where they were coming from. Unrelated, I think that Music from Big Pink is a terribly overrated album and if I hadn't sent my bs into Chunklet on the matter, I would add that to my list. anyway, the first song is this totally bizarre dis on people who ride public transportation called 'bus rider' which had this crude visciousness to it that, 32-years later, seems hilarious in its childish attitude. c'mon man, what's wrong with the bus? especially in fucking manitoba or wherever they're from. anyway, one of my least favorite oys of the piano is in gratutious honky tonk chatter thrown down under bands like this to give texture - it works in great rolling stones songs, is fabulous in early spiritualized and all over where layered with care. but this shit was awful. not that anyone reading this doesn't know deep in their hearts that the guess who sort of suck.

conceptualist v. concept driven...annoying distinction, but needed. john cage, a man i wish i knew more about than the sort of exploded cliches i've adopted for party chatter about idea over action. of course, others did it at the time - stockhausen and his om - but cage really explored it with all types of compositions - from radios, speaking, silence (argh, i'd love to bring a boom box to 4' 33" and get kicked out...oh, another of my musical audience annoyance pranks has been hatched), and of course, tape loops. ahh, to live in california in the '40s. all that concrete, all those pinko minds.
nina nastastia - good stuff - sort of like a country rasputina sans annoying super-fake vibrato. always trust touch and go, even in the promo. very inoften do i approve of extended jams where the strings, usually cello, is allowed to come out from the mix and have melodic dominance, but the song 'ocean' really gets me. she's not even country, she's just cat power without the twirled-hair ignorance and coy downplay, tory without the stigma or harpsichord (or overuse of breathy delivery)...
also, the new pop writer for the new york times who covered nelly today is trying to do some sort of 'larger commentary' on society with his bs about mr. cornell (i love finding out the real names of monikered stars, guilty pleasure) being a posterchild for the mundane, army-brat midwest existence. st. louis is everywhere, and nelly the every man. let's take off all our clothes.

britney spears should be horsewhipped for her cover of 'rock n' roll.' i'm not a fan of the bust mentalitiy 'wwjjd' what would joan jett do pseudo rock girl thing but fo real, man, that just put the nail in the coffin. luckily we're all up in the alicia keys funny hats and acid wash mismashed denim era + native american accent so i don't have to think about it anymore.

got the neko case album today and listened to it excitedly. as indie rock sputtered and died, so many defected to alt.country. case is the real deal, if a canadian can be country, which thinking about marlboro ads of big mountains glistening, moose, etc makes total sense. the music, unfortunately, is saccrine, overprocessed and borderline cliched. her voice lacks the sincerity that makes smaltzy country music okay - maybe i'm the cliched one thinking that sound needs a little dusk or gravel, world wearyness. it's hard to have a good balance, it only happened once for edith frost and then she lost it, wilco has it by sheer overattention to the empathetic quality of each tune, and guys like jason molina or oldham only use it as a touchpoint. does music need to push always? no, but neko seems to settle in production, songwriting and even in her own inflections...i'll listen more and maybe understand differently.

listened to aspects of physics, one of those amorphous acoustic-electronic bedroom style projects that everyone who 'has a friend who's really great/creative/into his computer' will be forced to like at some point in their lives. it's like mice parade sans the late '90s chic or badly drawn boy merciless pop sentiments. these albums are always prompting the question ' why do we need so much music' and why isn't this person just taking the time to actually do something real with the project instead of sending the dat off to be mastered and never thinking of it again? wouldn't the indie world be much better if people consolidated their efforts, pulled their bedrooms together and put out only the best? or is this one of those mountain goats scenerios, where documentation is synonymous with creation. does he even remember all of the songs he's written?
i'm playing devil's advocate in a way because i am all about documentation and believe in the semi-inspired whirlwind of lo-fi or singular, uncritically or commerically motivated music making. but is it meant for a general, disinterested or uninitiated audience? isn't the beauty of proliferation that individual scenes can have actual, solidified objects associated with it, a sound coming from a group, a locale, a membership...or has computerland destroyed that physicality entirely, or does that even matter? viritual communities, labels as communities (warp, aethestics, young god, mego)...
can publications have communities? the wire may, internationally...there seem to be for things like mc sweeneys or basement life (he he), even sound collector even if its more social then philosophical. hmm. it's hard to imagine publications like tiger's eye, creem, early nme - things people HAD to read to stay in touch with their communities. then again, at the nation everyone EVERYONE read certain pubs and you could jump into the next level of any author's argument virtually w/o having to reference the pub (the new yorker, nytimes, the guardian, salon, slate, the post, in these times, etc).

love life. maybe i'm the only one in the whole world that likes them but i might want it that way. i want them to play for me, be masterful, bruding, crepe-covered spindly and smart just for me. the goth kids on the boardwalk like post-industrial nu-metal ambient techno. there is no place in this world for the languishing shadows and otherworldly creep of a sad violin, a widow with a mocking pierrot tear. strange, young fear lovecraft, who was what tolkien would have been if he stopped being epic and told a good story. crafted with the sense of the inevitable, and that sureness being absolutely sensical.

they are a band to get behind. to create fantasies around. sadly, to discover in many years and say 'why did this not change things' and to mix into tommorow-influence.

the new spin, which i read today and replaced in the general mail bin, is a travesty. tricia romano is ridiculous and wrote half of the magazine. it's bad enough she gets inches in the voice. the entire front half of the book is nu-metal girlie mag charticles, including an advice column with lil bow wow. wow, could it have gotten any worse? i had to ask. alan light, former editor and secret amerimojo wannabe, got to write a tearful tribute to left eye. it read like yesterday's hamster fodder only with the poo pre-soaked into the pages. yee haw glossies.

okay...now it's just ridiculous. it's june 7, over a month since last time i wrote. things have been crazy.

music. i'm now living in south jersey, listening to classic rock radio almost exclusively and being way too nice to press people because they hold the one key to my sanity. new music. it's incredibly hard to explain to friends in the real world how difficult it is to be back, after five years, in a world where being really 'into' music makes you an outsider, a child, a geek. That's not the only thing that classifies me as such but...

So I just spent the last fourty five minutes of my life being assaulted by Weasel Walter's Flying Luttenbackers - the production was so bad it sounded like cotton spun all around my stereo, my room and my head - the volume barely escaping. weird that this muddy haze is not really a sound so much as sensation. Three piece no-wave brutality ending just as begun and CD out. Like most stuff on Troubleman, no reason to listen to it when you might be able to see it. Documentary.

what I've really been getting into is Neil Young. Old Man - the kick-in when his voice goes from remorse to yearn, so definite with his band following like a tail on a kite. God. The banjos, the occasional J. Neitsche orchestra, the clouds of clay dust even as he berates the south for not coming clean. Some of his songs are just plain cheesy - Oh Lonesome Me, Lotta Love - but the sentimentality is blunt and almost like that of a Werner Herzog film. Maybe, embarrassing?

final comment for today...why the fuck would anyone waste their time listening to something as derivative and inane as Pedro the Lion? The singer's voice is unstyled and grating, the music even a reductionist death cab with little invention or even reason to be noticed. yet, the very mundane-ness of the band, their ability to fit wherever 'slo-core' is still being beaten to death on stage, assures their continue marginal realm of success. bah.