Scraps– 7″

Brisbane is producing sum gr8 stff at the moment (Kitchen’s Floor, Blank Realm, so on), and Scraps is no exception. The first Scraps 7″ exhibits the upbeat side of Laura Hill And Her Keyboards, squeezing in three pop tunes that ditch the whole lo-fi thing (to some extent) for cleaner environs (to some extent). “Simple Minds” contains some of the best seconds I’ve had this year, when Hill harmonises atonally with herself after the chorus; oh man! The song itself is neat-o, crediting Simple Minds with making empires dance and perhaps (perhaps) lashing out at their lack of critical acceptance in the last two decades. But probably not. Also great is the lovely “1982”, wherein she serenades a computer (“touch your buttons/print out your name) over an enchanting an’ angular casio waltz. My only regret is that this 7″ is forcing me to reconsider whether I should be forgetting that Neil Hamburger ticket and acquiring her !great! Bedroom Suck LP Classic Shits toot sweet.

Diplo– “Express Yourself” b/w “Bird is the Word”

Major Lazer and M.I.A. connexions aside, Diplo has always struck me as the Graham Nash of electro-produxxion; coasting from association to association without ever doing something important off his own steam. “Express Yourself” is changing my mind, though, as it is some nasty-ass, bitch-slap firecracker stuff that refuses to congeal at any point, raping your furniture etc. I’m still reeling. Whether this is plain shock and awe or substance, I can’t tell , but he’s split my head open enough to not care for the time being. Ignore the flipside; it fucks with “Surfin’ Bird”, scanning like a youtube amateur makin’ a dubstep rmx of Peter Griffin being a jackass. Got to keep busy somehow.

SEAMS– “Magic Circle” b/w “Boomer“

With “Magic Circle”, clean-cut weirdos SEAMS have taken a step away from the ebullient dreamin’ of their first single (2011’s “Early” b/w “Cabinsong”) towards more ambitious and occult terrain. The band makes a strong bow on their first vinyl and label release, as the A-side is an impressive hybrid of laser gunplay and wide-smiled gamboling which shifts gears seamlessly (heh) between disparate feels. Imagine Mr. Bungle playing themselves some Syd Barrett (I can’t, but you might be able to) and you’re in the ballpark. It’s chopsy stuff, and one of their best songs to date (as well as in its own right); heck, I’ll even forgive them for rhyming ‘fire’ with ‘desire’. B-side “Boomer” is all suggestion and lean, moving between 6/4 and 7/4 with the phasers set to ‘jitter’. It doesn’t quite make good on its promise the way the a-side does, wearing a moribund feel in spite of all the rhythmic frenzy, and condescending to get loud instead of developing further. So it goes. Also that the group-singing at the close of the track comes off more like a bunch of third graders auditioning to sing the theme to a children’s TV show called “Boomer” (n.b. this series does not yet exist), which sorta guts the menace out. Still, the ambition and execution is good, if the ideas aren’t perfect. The Ourobonic Plague remix of the A-side which rounds out the single is sort of like putting your hand in a blender and pushing it deeper once the pain starts, but in a really benign way. (That’s not a criticism, exactly.)

Jack White– “Love Interruption” b/w “Machine Gun Silhouette”

You irk me, shaman! Jack White hasn’t been a guy whose mistakes have stuck to him too much. Who holds that godawful James Bond theme against him? Who didn’t chuckle about the Insane Clown Posse collab and let it go? Over the last six or seven years, he’s gotten away with making mediocre and “good… I guess” records because they’ve been Jack White + 3; his collaborators can’t be blamed for them being so-so because they aren’t Jack White, and Jack White gets a free pass because he has more cred than he can run through all at once.

“Love Interruption” might be the point where things get sticky for him though, since White has finally given us absolutely nothing to work with. Nothing happens. The most notable thing about the song is that he’s playing with a blue colour scheme in the video. Even the guest vocals aren’t worth a damn; just file ‘em under ‘sultry’ or ‘smoky’ or ‘pregnant undercurrent of sexual tension’, because they convey nothing in terms of meaning or feel beyond what they’re there to signify. His formula is starting to show itself, it feels. The song hinges on the phrase “I want”, yet for the first time, it’s kind of difficult to figure out what White actually wants, since it just seems like he’s settled on ‘placeholder’. I mean, if you like Jack White, you’ve already heard this song; and if you love Jack White, you bought it and didn’t care too much. Problem is, his peculiar brand of  invincibility (born of reheating and reinventing the blues canon in a way triple j and NPR listeners can both agree on– a feat in itself) requires a constant stoking of the coals; if he keeps writing songs like these, he’ll soon become irrelevant.

Beach Fossils– “Shallow” b/w “Lessons”

Why are songs that are ostensibly about summer/the beach/feelings more sweatless than The Man Machine? Maybe this isn’t a quibble I should have, since Beach Fossils seem to have their eyes and ears set on making music that reflects the dazed, glossy reverie that can come from being depressed and Brooklynite in the sun. Yet, when the songs are this flavorless and reductive (do you like clean guitar lines? DO YOU?), trying to defend Beach Fossils on any other level than their (fleeting) surface pleasures feels futile. If Washed Out have provided us with a soundtrack for taking Ambien and watching porn instead of making lurv, Beach Fossils are for looking up the CliffNotes page for The Waves in lieu of being alive.

Curren$y– Here [EP]

He made this in three hours and put it out on Superbowl Sunday, so I really should have known what I was in for. Pilot Talk I & II were great, but (dangit) if Curren$y isn’t going to put it out in a store on a label and stand behind the thing properly, I don’t know if I can be bothered, because you can really tell when he isn’t going for it properly. If I wanted to hear a pot-smoking dude talk lazy about shit to no real end or purpose for about fifteen minutes over some okay beats I’d buy one of my friends a bag and put some Ta-ku b-sides on shuffle. (The spirit hasn’t moved me to do that yet.) There’s nothing wrong or offensive with Here, but it’s overwhelmingly half-assed and unnecessary. He gets some good lines in, but they are easy to miss considering how disinterested his delivery is. When Curren$y is ready to make something full (and he will), take notice, but this EP basically boils down to #curren$yisstillhere.

Every now and then I seem to get lost in an endless link-clicking cycle. You know, you see or hear something you like and you click on a link that looks like it will take you somewhere with something equally as good. Sometimes it’s something funny on YouTube and you have to click on the ‘remixes’. Other times it’s some cool new music that grabs your attention. Well… one of my random clickathons led me to stumble across this tune from a couple of Mexican producers I’d never heard before.

Bufi & Juan Soto’s ‘Monrovia’ is a 7 min slice of beautiful slow-mo disco. It’s just one of those tracks that instantly hooks you in. A ridiculously catchy melody that’s so simple, but gets your skin feeling tingly. Stabby synth bass and staccato ‘80s chords round out this deep building number.

Boy am I glad I had a spare 30 minutes to kill….

If you like what you hear, be sure to tune in to RTRFM’s Full Frequency between 3pm and 5pm, as Sardi and Dart explore the world of Drum and Bass and beyond.

As soon as you hit play on Puta Madre Brothers’ It’s A Long Long Way To Meximotown you feel as if you have entered some bizarre party situated in an alternate universe or, at the very least, another country. Three one-man-bands from Melbourne join together to develop a faux Mexican trio, complete with bad Spanish and almost believable personas.

The lo-fi production adds to the authenticity of this facade with quick tracks creating the feeling of short attention spans and fast body movements. Slowing down halfway like a huge exhalation and producing an almost soulful track, this album has crazy fast momentum but manages to give us a break, if only very briefly. The few songs that include vocals have lyrics that translate to complete nonsense with lines like “One more day and I will kiss you on the ass, speak my bad language and buy you ice cream, every night I will scream, I want your meatballs everyday”. CW Stoneking’s “Dodo Blues” features as “Blues Dodo”, a cover the band performed live to provoke a reaction from him. A strange little fable told by three very weird guys, It’s A Long Long Way To Meximotowm skips halfway between a complete parody and dances around very serious fun, a carefully articulated brain mush.

Admittedly I don’t quite get the whole idea here, but I think that’s the point. It’s one of those moments where you find yourself asking – is this a joke? Well yeah, it kind of is. Shenanigans on stage imaginably being the real catch here, Puta Madre Brothers are a band you probably need to witness firsthand to really get the concept. Even so, after the first listen I found I was tempted to play it again. Ever more surprisingly the idea of inviting my friends over, providing sombreros and tequila with the only intention to recreate our New Year’s Eve Mexicana party and act like complete drunken buffoons was actually, really, really appealing.

Asked about how long they can keep up this Mexican spook for? — They have no idea. The crowd’s reaction at their crazy gigs warrants that although we may not “get it”, there really isn’t anything to get and that works for them for reasons quite unknown.

As Deadelus explains, “each night they’d play the original song [“Don Juan”] and I was quite impressed with its composition and crowd reaction, and even in this slowing and scraping mix I think the charms of their song are apparent.”

The good news, however, is that you can help. The band are sending the drive off to “super pro-Hazmat-suit wearing CIA motherfuckers” to try to recover the data. It’s not cheap though, with the bill running to $2400. Grails have set up a page where you can donate to the drive-saving operation, with the reward being free downloads of live material or an LP from their back catalogue. Check out the page here.

The real reason for giving, of course, should be so you can hear more stuff like this.

I LED THREE LIVES! — Grails from The Fact Facer on Vimeo.

The record has an incredibly communal feel to it, it always seems like there’s a dozen people playing at once, which gives Big Sky a very energetic vibe.

You can stream it below, or download it on a name-your-price basis from the Cow Parade Cow Bandcamp.

The record feels incredibly busy, in the best possible way, with field recordings, loops and fractured rhythms punctuating a dream-sequence-in-a-film style ambiance that definitely falls on the haunting and unsettling side of the spectrum.

Stream it below, or download it for free from the ever-awesome Bandcamp.

“Mary Lou” is an almost eight minute long voyage that is everything we love about the Vancouver band. Check it out over at Stereogum. We can only hope the rest of the record is as good.

In the meantime, you can check out Pink Mountaintops at The Bakery on April 7 with Dead Meadow (tickets here).

Tracklist
1. Phosphorescent Waves
2. Bright Lights
3. Mary Lou
4. Embrace Euphoria
5. Tyrants
6. Modern Music
7. In Sequence
8. Wilderness Heart
9. Breathe

The record marks a change in recording methodology for the band, with Ataraxia/Taraxis being Pelican’s “first release built by making recordings in multiple studios (often not with one another) and compiling the results.”

While you wait for the full record to be released, you can download the second track from the release, “Lathe Biosas”, from the Pelican Bandcamp, or stream it below.

This is a recount of a scene from John Cassavetes’ film Faces. The film is renowned for its stark, bare portrayal of American life and love in that most turbulent of times, using minimal photography, grainy unfocused images, muffled sound, but amazingly naked and emotionally tormented performances from its lead players. There is a misconception too, with his work, that it was improvised, which couldn’t be further from the truth: his work was tightly scripted, with the actors rehearsing for weeks, sometimes months, before a scene was shot, and then, they were given the freedom to explore their characters and react to events according. No acting exercises, no marks to meet, no grand speeches to intone: it was real people, acting as real people.

So why does this guy matter? Think back to that scene I described a paragraph above: why is that scene important? The younger man dances with the older woman, who asks him sweetly to kiss him. The woman has seen better days, she is older, she has seen more, experienced more, lived more than anybody else in the room. But she’s still human, she stills wants the most basic of human tenements: love. She thrusts herself at this man, who we see in previous scenes seems like a fun, larger-than-life kind of guy, played by Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel, who, as it turns out, seems like a fun, larger-than-life kind of guy beyond film. So yes, she doesn’t catch the guy, she doesn’t get laid, the older generation missed out I suppose on that sexual revolution, what the hell that means. She tried though, didn’t she? She wanted to love, to feel, to connect.

Faces, and other films by Cassavetes, are full of scenes like this, where people lay their emotions bare. They have a certain rhythm, where there are force fields, misconceptions, misunderstandings, which crumble and disintegrate and leave people there, for who they really are. A Woman Under the Influence is full of scenes like this. It’s a film about two people who are deeply, madly in love with each other: so much so that they fail to understand that they fail to understand each other. Peter Falk, that most lovable of mumbling fumbling guys, plays Nick, a man so oblivious to his wife’s kooky nature; somebody who wants a perfect family life, a perfect wife, a perfect life. Life isn’t perfect, and nobody is perfect. So they fight over insignificant things, she gets chucked into the nuthouse, and in one heartbreaking scene, when she is about to return, Nick invites well over a hundred people to his house, to welcome her home. From the nuthouse, no less! It’s a film that is an emotional battering, leaving you stunned and bewildered, and its one film that I will cherish forever watching.

So what then of Cassavetes, the man, the filmmaker? Well, for me, he is an enigmatic, interesting figure. Here’s a guy who worked in the Hollywood system, putting in great supporting turns in classics like The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby, just to pay the bills accrued from his own films. He wasn’t perfect, being an alcoholic, difficult to deal with in business matters, and constantly arguing with his better half, actress Gena Rowlands, the lead actress in many of his films. But he was also driven, he worked hard, and his work is so personal yet so universal it’s kind of scary. Here’s a man who laid it all out, who he was, what he felt, what he thought, in his work. It’s sort of like he pulled his heart out of his chest and said ‘here, it’s yours if you want it.’ That’s why people found his films so challenging and weird and strange when they were first released: nobody made films that dealt with the truth about life, about love. Films hide behind clichés, stock characters, big emotional arcs, big speeches, dramatic gestures, to get their point across, which is, entertainment. Cassavetes did not make entertainment, in the strictest sense of the word, that where you can mindlessly munch on some popcorn and have two hours of fun: he wanted you to feel, wanted you to think.

And it did make me think. It make me think about why I connect to different artists, musicians, filmmakers, people; what makes them interesting to me, why I find myself wanting to know them. As an example, the other day I listened to The Birthday Party’s Live 1981–82 record, which I have always considered one of my all-time favourite records. Why was this? When I first heard it, it was a huge mess of sound, cacophony, just majestic in its bombast, five or sometimes four men, beating the shit out of their instruments. Furthermore, I considered the dearly departed Rowland S. Howard one of the great guitarists, sculpting these figures of noise so deftly. I would listen to it on my MP3, going to and from university, catching public transport, being blown away by this primal noise, Nick Cave trying to ‘SAY SOMETHING’, express himself. When Rowland died, I did not listen to it, for a long time, and I mean really listen to it, not have it on as background padding, saying ‘I love this record, listen to that noise’, I mean the kind of listening where you’re analyzing, you’re absorbing. The other day I listened to it and I was confused: why did I like it so much, why did I like Rowland’s playing so much?

It comes back to that ‘here’s my heart’ kind of thing. I had failed to realize that Rowland S. Howard was one of the few modern romantics we had. I don’t mean in the sense that he was always fawning over a lady, writing meandering poetry or symphonies for people he would never love (unlike Berlioz, which, as exciting and nervy the Symphonie Fantastique is, it’s kind of like, well, get over yourself pal) or anything like that, it’s more that whenever he played a note, sung a phrase or spoke a word, you had a sense of who he was, and you could take it or leave it; which of course, most people left, in his lifetime, for nobody likes dealing with the truth. When you consider the career paths of the two warring figureheads of the Birthday Party, Rowland and Nick Cave, while one developed prestige and fame, the other languished until they ultimately died a senseless death. Is that right, when one of them traded only in caricatures, clichés, dallying with Southern Gothic, greasy haired bleedin’ heart and mindless sex fiend whenever he saw fit? That’s not to discount the man, he’s made some great records, not to mention that Mick Harvey travelled between the two camps seamlessly, because he is, in fact, a nice man who works well with people. I don’t know him personally, obviously, but there’s another man who is what he is, he doesn’t hide or try and trade in something that’s fake or obscure. But back to Rowland: nobody likes dealing with somebody who wears their heart on their sleeve, do they?

It’s sort of like in polite company, if somebody asks you the question, ‘how are you?’ you have to invariably answer ‘fine’. ‘Great’. Are things ever really ‘fine’? Why can’t you answer ‘well actually, I feel alienated, I’ve thought about dying five times today, I worry that I’m a bad lover, my diet is horrible, my students don’t listen to me because I cannot communicate properly what I expect of them, I’m reading this really interesting book about a man who finds their exact double and it’s sort of like how we deal with identity and’ – that just doesn’t happen. People are afraid of showing others who they really are, warts and all. But isn’t that what makes people interesting? How their strengths and weaknesses work together, or against each other, to create that person?

A friend of mine recently told me that they see life in moments, catches in time, where they go from event to event, different people sort of floating together in the breeze, chaotic, ready to experience something and then move on to the next thing. This strikes me as overwhelming selfish, because you’re always putting yourself in the centre of these moments, meeting people but not actually knowing them, for there’s different sets every time. It’s selfish because life isn’t all grand gestures, shattering speeches and majestic moments; these things can happen, but it’s the minute of life, the drudgery that makes it interesting, that makes people interesting. It’s sort of like passing your hearts to one another, again that ‘here’s my heart’ thing, you know their faults and they know yours, and that is far more engaging and beautiful.

And that brings me back to why I love and admire the work of Cassavetes, Howard, Fahey, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, Prince, Francis Bacon etc., because they create their work with such personal verve that you either accept who they are or were and go with them, or you reject them. That’s fine, if you choose to do that, art is subjective and we all want different things from music, film, painting, literature, anything. It’s sort of like that though because we’ve been trained to ignore these matters of the heart and that people produce work which I can admire, I can enjoy, but I can never love. I can never love it because I don’t really know the person. You could say, quite rightly, that I don’t know any of the artists I’ve mentioned in this article: but through their work, I feel that because they lay themselves bare, I do. I can hear parts of the personality of Rowland S. Howard in every note he plucked. I can see the force of Cassavetes’ nature in every frame of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a film so derided when it was first released because although the main character was a gangster, it wasn’t a gangster film: it was about how they destroy the dreams and loves of other people.

And on a personal level, that’s what I try to do in these columns. It’s tiring, it’s hard, sometimes I get way in over my head and reading back the previous ones over the past year, you get the sense where I really am letting you in, and when I choose to close you off. They’re messes, but then again, I’m a mess of a man. Does that make it more or less interesting to read? I might just be not that interesting a person. But for me, it’s far more rewarding to let people know yourself, all the bad bits included, because then they might let you in; which makes life all the more interesting. They can also shut you out, and reject you, and that’s ok too. I firmly believe though that you should always strive, in your art, your work, your personal life, to have love in the foremost of your conscious, not in some hippy-drippy way, but just in the way it’s taken me 2000 words to try and describe. That’s why I love to ramble: I love to love. And I hope you love to read it.

THINGS TO CHECK OUT:

Faces (film by Cassavetes, 1968)
A Woman Under the Influence (film by Cassavetes, 1974)
Live 1981–82 (record by The Birthday Party, 1999)

And:

Any local musicians/artists/filmmakers/people that really try and connect with their audience on a personal level; one heck of a big instruction, but you’ll find that when you really try and look, you’ll find them.

Next time: Dave hits me over the head with a copy of The Mollusk, saying ‘why don’t you have some fun ya big ol’ jerkwad?’, while Alex hands me a cider and says ‘did I ever tell you the story about Steinbeck riding a pig?’