Wednesday, September 30

Revolver

The Beatles - Revolver

I will not make pronouncements or judgements because I am not worthy. I am less than the dust on the soles of his sandals, I am not fit even to listen and I am only allowed because of his magnanimous grace. In times to come they will say he was only human but in the glory of the spectacle I can only see majesty, purity and perfection.

adam

ONCE AND FOR ALL: THE SECRET TO WRITING

Distance, indifference, dispassion. Writing and music may portray emotions but may not contain: emotions in the writing process should only be accessible as a product not as an ingredient because they shut down the multi level process that art requires. To give way to emotions is to lose coherence, structure, and above all true appreciation - it is the mind that stores the details, not the heart, and the mind must recreate the details to recreate the response in the heart.

adam

Horehound

The Dead Weather - Horehound

Yes, I did actually go out and buy it and I don't regret it at all. The first thing I thought was 'I've never heard anything like this before' and the second thing I thought was 'I've heard this all before, somewhere'. I think the truth probably lies somewhere in between - Horehound is a kind of recombinant album, country/western meets blues meets hard rock meets rap metal. Individually the parts don't sound particularly new - blues licks, banjo sounds, feedback noise, Led Zep, reggae-style delay. But we've never really heard them put together like this, with such facility and with such attitude.

'Treat me like your mother' is probably the best (and cleverest) song on the album, and sounds a bit like Rage Against the Machine grown a sense of humour. 'I Cut Like a Buffalo' has Jack White singing some of the evilest reggae ever made by human beings. 'So far from your weapon' - a sort of far out blues written by Alison Mosshart, but it hits home, which is more than can be said for Frank Black and his parade of weirdness. So Jack White and co have a bit more of a handle on weirdness than perhaps any band that capitalises on the aesthetic have had. And it's good. The rest of the album is just gravy - Bob Dylan cover, instrumental which wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack to starcraft 2 (which is a compliment), 12 bar blues, the works.

The truth is the re-tread nature of this album may cause non-discerning individuals to dismiss it as 'jock-rock', or a bunch of over the hill rockers trying to be Limp Bizkit (which it certainly -may- sound like). But give them credit for a sense of irony, which is draped over the album like a good sauce. Jack White never falls victim to his macho constructions - although he never distances himself to the point of outright tongue-in-cheek. There is a sense of revelry in the over-the-top riffs and aggression and macho posture (especially on Mosshart's part) - and this ironic distance gives the album the depth it needs, proving once again that white is a genius and that it is possible to make some headbangin' hard rock without being stupid. Applause.

adam

Tuesday, September 29

Wednesday, September 23

I am in love with Alison Mossheart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Goi2YcW2To

Not many vocalists can actually send chills down my spine.

adam

Dear Friend

I've seen the way she looks at you
very ugly - that comingling of familiarity
and expectation
very unbecoming (like something out of a movie scene)

as if her eyes could wrench
your sordid emotions from your chest
still throbbing; bleeding.

I've seen your smile (ecstatic/bovine)
your little jokes (asinine)
and a thousand little sins against Man
Please.

I know they are masks for happiness.
I know you are only hateful because
you hate how joyful
how unnecessary
how sublime your happiness is
You can't take it
but if you give it away it'll break my heart fuck you


Friday, September 18

Premature

I will not fall into the trap of making Pronouncements this time. As far as I'm concerned, the greatness or lack thereof, and the success or lack thereof, of this new band called the Dead Weather can be bloody well left to fate, or market forces, or Jeebus or whoever's miserable job it is to decide these things. But for now, I kind of like them. Normally I'd be a bit suspicious of the new, almost painfully hip indie posturing of which Jack White is almost certainly guilty of. But the music is redeeming - loud, difficult but firmy attached to the ground via the blues, which is one of Jack's few redeeming qualities. Alison Mossheart is charming, the other two kind of blend in but the organ is wicked, all in all it's a good time and I sincerely hope they go somewhere rather than become another White Stripes side project.

adam

I believe in the market

I consider it a (partial) vindication of the modern audience's taste that a band as abrasive, avant-garde, noisy and melody-less as the White Stripes can make it big. Of course after shout-fests like 'seven nation army' they shored up the leaky bits with plenty of melodies on 'Get Behind me Satan' but the fact is that they are in no way a feel good pop band, and Jack White as a frontman is antiquely unhip, what with his strange tricolor fixation, blues playing and fascination with electronic noise and Bob Dylan (who's to say which is less marketable?). Still, they sell. There is hope for humanity after all.

adam

Thursday, September 17

Albums pt 2

With less hype this time -
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Chronicle
Sonny Rollins - A Night at the Village Vanguard

I did go to the shop one of my main purposes being leaving with some country rock (because I've been into this country phase) - probably the Allman Brothers, but instead my mum wanted CCR and I figured it was worth a try. It's not totally off the wall Redneck Rock 'n Roll like the Allman Brothers, complete with hat and moustache, but it's pretty Southern, and John Fogerty ain't half bad.

adam

Albums!

Cream - Disraeli Gears
The Beatles - Revolver

The Classic Albums, Best of '67, whatever. I wanted to see what the hype was. So far I've only put Disraeli Gears on - it's as psychedelic as the cover suggests, plenty of high falsetto shrieking and reverb guitars riffing on middle eastern modes - the works. Also, fairly playfully put together (see mother's lament O.o what? psychedelic rock album plus cockney filler music?), fairly well written, Eric Clapton's guitar like a liquid orgasm laid on top of the rest of the music. Graphic.

adam

Wednesday, September 16

Waterloo Sunset - the Kinks

Robert Christgau: 'The most beautiful song in the english language'

Personally I wanted to give that to 'Sunday Girl' by blondie but to each his own I guess - and Christgau deserves props for being the Critic With a Brain, and stunningly astute on many things unrelated to music, which informs and credibilises his criticism. I do actually read his reviews for sheer entertainment value and informativeness.

Also, I love this tune.

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling
Flowing into the night
People so busy, makes me feel dizzy
Taxi light shines so bright
But I dont need no friends
As long as I gaze on waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunsets fine

Terry meets julie, waterloo station
Every friday night
But I am so lazy, dont want to wander
I stay at home at night
But I dont feel afraid
As long as I gaze on waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunsets fine

Millions of people swarming like flies round waterloo underground
But terry and julie cross over the river
Where they feel safe and sound
And the dont need no friends
As long as they gaze on waterloo sunset
They are in paradise

Waterloo sunsets fine

Saturday, September 5

Kim

At the suggestion of my dear friend, I have christened my new guitar Kimberley, after my heroes Kim Deal, Kim Gordon, and the Pink Ranger.

adam

Friday, September 4

Kudos

go out to Lady Gaga, whose aesthetic coherence is nothing short of stunning. I can't say I'm a huge fan of electro-pop et cetera, but this woman will be something big, just you wait and see.

adam
Robert Christgau:

"...it ought to demonstrate once and for all that the function of avant-garde art is to inspire other artists, not the public."


adam

Thursday, September 3

Led Zeppelin - the stupidest band ever to make Great Music.

Let's face it - Plant was no Lennon, Page was no Hendrix and JPJ sure as hell wasn't McCartney. Hendrix's medievalism was at least more colourful. McCartney's love songs were playful, not creepy. Simon and Garfunkel managed real folk by leaving out the machismo, something which Plant shamefully neglected to do on tracks like 'Going to California' which really reads like a mid life crisis for guys who like both Bob Dylan and shooting things.

No, Led was not a lyrics band at all. They failed in the lyrics department - and the closest they got to greatness in that department was a sophomoric dance track 'Rock and Roll' which unfortunately predates our modern club music in its subject matter. 'Stairway to Heaven' is another great failure of lyrics - it's pseudo medievalistic pagan claptrap that doesn't have the sense to be clever. In many ways they predated the regrettable trends in what was later called 'prog' and then 'neo-classical whatever' - medievalism, paganism, classism (all the isms, they're causing schisms).

And despite all the bashing I've been doing, I truly feel that they were one of the seminal acts in rock and roll after the 60s. No band today is without a deeply fundamental debt to everything they did - and though they didn't do many things well, what they did they did bloody well. And what they did well was this: a ham-fisted talent for making noise in the lower frequencies, and an clumsy (but entirely accurate) understanding of the blues. In fact, 'clumsy' is probably the best word to describe their style of ponderously repeating riffs and thundering drum beats. It was clumsy, but shockingly effective, and for this I credit that second thing, the blues, which gave Jimmy Page all the songwriting chops he needed. The blues gave them the simplicity needed to deliver the heaviness, and the result is satisfying in the gut the way the blues should be.

As the case study I pick 'When the Levee Breaks', a track in which Plant abandons his medievalism, Page abandons his progressive tendencies, and John Bonham abandons any remaining vestiges of subtlety. He opens the track here with what would become (I think) an iconic beat with the anticipated first beat of the second bar on the bass drum. As with all Led Zeppelin music, the key to heaviness (which I define as the 'insistence' that we so prize in rock music) is repetition. He does not vary the hi hat pattern, and plays sparsely so the reverb is audible. He sets a slow moving but unshakeable tempo for the song to begin, and it begins on a note of steadiness, steadiness that soon develops into inevitability. Inevitability is the real theme here - 'If it keeps on raining, the levee's gonna break/ If it keeps on raining, the levee's gonna break/ If the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay'. Notice how even after the the first line is repeated a la traditional blues, the words 'levee breaks' happen one more time in the third line, as if the first two times didn't make it clear enough. This slow build of paranoia is one of the rare successes of their songwriting. The guitar intro is played with a slide, like the real bluesmen did - only he plays the same thing over and again, only three notes - the root (and harmonised fifth, making it the 'heaviest' chord playable on a guitar at any pitch), the flattened major third or 'blue note', again harmonised, and the fifth. Aside from the blue note, these notes are colourless, being the fundamentals of the harmony. The nature of the notes is not lost on the listener - he only hears the blue note, the 'colour', the root which is the resolution, and the fifth which is tension. The slow ululation of tension-resolution over the steady drum beat, always with exactly the same notes, is another element that adds to the growing paranoia prevalent in the intro.

The next part of interest is the sudden instrumental refrain, which modulates to the major key. The tone here is almost triumphant - I say almost because the blues is never triumphant, and Page proves his facility with the idiom here - but the resolution from the 7th chord makes it uneasy, almost terrifying in a Gothic sort of way rather than satisfying. The chorus of multi-tracked guitar parts adds to this cathedral-like atmosphere, hinting infinitesimally at the sound of a wind orchestra, and the associated grandeur. It is a terrifying grandeur.
The second half of the refrain is a motif played distorted with slide guitar. Again, the three phrases are variations of the same melodic motif, and the repetition serves to create a feeling of insistence and intensity. It should be noted that this part of the refrain is not played in the intro, only after the first verse. Again, Page plays only simple chords. The accompaniment plays a root and a fifth, which reminds us of the band's perennial medieval obsession - certainly, it sounds like a drone note music, tonally resembling bagpipes or violin, both of which are often used to play drone notes in traditional scottish, irish, and indian musics. The medievalism here is subtle at least, and they get away with it - it only adds a not unwelcome colour to their straight-ahead blues.

TBC soon!

adam

wb :

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