NEWSLETTER

SILK FLOWERS		KRAZY BALDHEAD
TIGHT CHOCOLATE
LA COKA NOSTRA/ GOATWHORE

V/A Wu-Tang Chamber Music E1/Universal I knew a kid in eighth grade who became a black belt because of the Wu-Tang Clan. I was still listening to Operation Ivy and I thought the kid was a dweeb. In retrospect, he was sort of incredible. I wonder what happened to him. I bet he’s really fat. Anyway, this is two albums in one. The first is a blazing-hot old-school jamfest that had me nodding my head. The other part is basically a speech-impediment-filled, seemingly improvised spoken-word record by the RZA with a minimal Bruce Lee movie soundtrack behind him and the occasional sounds of everybody kung fu fighting. That part, not too into it. But when people are rapping, smiley faces all around. CHRISTOPHE STORMINGTONINSKI EYEDEA AND ABILITIES By the Throat Rhymesayers		LA COKA NOSTRA A Brand You Can Trust Suburban Noize Uhh, so these guys really like selling coke. Or at least they like talking about it. While listening to this, I couldn’t help but constantly picture these guys as stereotypical Hispanic gangbangers from various movies, wearing collared shirts buttoned at the top and bandanas, saying things like “ese” and “vato” and telling me they’re “loco” while picking their teeth with a buck knife. It all comes off as pretty hokey, actually. To make matters worse, a guy who sounds like one of the people who almost kills Ethan Hawke in Training Day is dubbed over the music every 15 seconds shouting about the advance-copy status of my MP3s and ending his sound bite with a “what?!” What? Nothing, man, I didn’t say anything. I hope these guys don’t kill me. FAKE NAME MCGEE

By now, the word emo has been beaten into such a pulp and carries with it such baggage that even if I simply uttered it in front of my parents, my mom would think I was a total retard. Well, here goes any semblance of my journalistic legitimacy: This record is fuuuuuckin’ emo, dude. These guys are pissed and they want everyone to know about it. They’ve made some good stuff in the past and have pretty respectable cred, so when did they move back home and start writing in their composition notebooks with their bedroom doors locked? I’m sure they want to be real and truthful in a world full of bling and bitches and stuff, but I’ll take Cam’ron or Soulja Boy over this embarrassing drivel any day. My mom would agree, I’m sure (she loves Cam). CHRISTIAN STORM
HEALTH Get Color Lovepump United I’m sick of disaffected robot-style vocals but I still like this record. The first song sounds like angels flying around a subway train that is encircling Earth and blowing up car by car. Each track stimulates elaborate mental music videos. Track 7 makes me think about running from mutants in a hospital. They get some awesome Wolf Eyes-type sounds in there but it’s always energetic and danceable even when it’s scary or uncomfortable. PATTY O’FURNITURE THE GOSSIP Music for Men Columbia		KRAZY BALDHEAD The B-Suite Ed Banger This is an unfocused electro record dressed up as a highbrow cross-genre experiment just because it was farted out by a French guy with a jazz background. When I was seven, I pooped in my hand at a family reunion at Lake George and told everyone it was baby-dinosaur turd I found in the woods, but the only one who believed that was my cousin Lawrence, and that was only because he’s retarded. BILL WALKER

Maybe I’m just out of touch, but every Gossip song I’ve ever heard has always sounded the same. This one is a bit slicker due to major-label-ization. That’s unfortunate. Most of the music I get sent to review these days sounds like it was tailor-made for Burger King and car commercials. Vague, poppy, and danceable but ultimately shallow. I would have named this record Soul Music for the Soulless. PATTY O’FURNITURE

ASTRA The Weirding Rise Above Astra is really into self-identifying as a “Prog” band (capital P, for some reason). This is basically a scene of musicians who would fit right in at a Renaissance fair or LARP event except for the fact that electric guitars and drums did not exist during the Middle Ages… because they were stolen by SPACE DRAGONS! Zzzzzooooooorrrrooooooonnnnnnggg! But the mighty psychedelic arsenal of Astra will soon vanquish them! Vvvvvvvooorrrrppp-doodle-dee-dooo! Nah, only kidding. It’s just some tooled-up Sabbath/Floyd nonsense. Who cares. DIZZY CUPCAKES IRON AGE The Sleeping Eye Tee Pee Unlike the recently passed trend of metal/death-core bands with names that could be titles of battered-wife TV-movies, Iron Age is the GOOD result of metal and hardcore jumping in the sack, and they more or less remain a hardcore band at heart, such as other usually good-to-great road dogs like Midnight and Annihilation Time. And when I write “hardcore,” I mean 90s crust, not poseur “We’re on Epitaph/a major ’cause we’re gonna corrupt the machine from the inside out!” shit like Gallows or the Refused. Iron Age haven’t fixed the fucking economy or invented dog food that tastes like cat shit or anything, but they do something inspired with well-worn source material (His Hero Is Gone, COC, DRI, GISM, a little Ringworm), and that’s really hard to pull off. ANDREW EARLES ONEIDA Rated O Jagjaguar This is a first. I haven’t disliked one album I was assigned to review for this issue. This one’s a no-brainer. I like Oneida and I piss my pants for triple albums. What doesn’t make any sense is that Rated O is the first triple album by a band built for triple albums; it just seems like they’ve released four already, much in the same way that it seemed like Porter Wagoner had been dead for years when his passing was announced. And when an album packs more Oneida than on previous releases, it becomes their best release by default. It boggles the noggin that a band like Mars Volta can get huge with that shit-prog garbage and a band like Oneida still weather neglect in some circles. ANDREW EARLES DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR Better Ways to Die Bridge Nine I recently started running because I’m afraid I’m getting fat because all I do is drink because it’s the only thing that makes me feel OK. As a result, I’ve rediscovered a lot of shitty old hardcore because, for some reason, Blank Dogs just don’t quite cut it when you’re pushing your out-of-shape body to its limit. Anyway, I mention this only so you know I’m not coming from a jaded ex-hardcore-guy perspective—there’s a playlist on my iPod right now that starts off with Pitboss 2000, Madball, and E-Town—when I tell you this blows my dick. ANGEL SANCHEZ GOATWHORE Carving Out the Eyes of God Metal Blade Goatwhore promised this record was going to be heavier than previous albums and they weren’t foolin’! This shit makes the last album sound tinny and trebulous. Trebulous. Is that word? It should be. Whatever. This music is thick and dense like an evil forest where the trees are coming alive and they eat you. RICK AMAZIN’		THE INTELLIGENCE Fake Surfers In the Red Been digging this band since the Dirtnap compilation in 2003, and they have gotten progressively grimier. Half the tracks here sound like they fell apart in the middle and got hastily stapled back together. I don’t think this kind of mess can be planned; it just sort of happens and you’re lucky if you can frame a few parts of it for the purposes of calling it a song. If you can appreciate musical moments and brief aural happenings outside the standard two- or three-minute pop-rock anthem, this fits nicely in your brain alongside those early live Devo tracks and Fall B-sides you downloaded from reclusive-nerd.blogspot.fuckingcom. MINT FANTASY TIGHT CHOCOLATE Put It in Ya Self-released demo First song would be at home on almost any mid-90s Rip Off Records release. One fast, simple, and sharp stab to the face. The rest follow suit with a little more melody involved, and that’s OK, but I would prefer to be stabbed in the face a few more times. Catch this band around NYC before they break up so in 20 years you can brag to teenagers about how your life used to be interesting. STEVE BLUSH FONDLECORPSE Creaturegore Razorback Sonically, Creaturegore may be a reasonable facsimile of first-gen death metal circa 1990, but the big difference between Fondlecorpse and, say, Malevolent Creation is that Fondlecorpse illustrates how metal (and its millions of subgenres) is no longer choked with super-serious assholes. Any band that uses a bootleg Critter (yes, from the PG-13 horror franchise of the same name) as its mascot is OK by me. You may or may not know what you’re getting into here, but let’s just say that if my mom spent over five minutes with Creaturegore, it would be similar to when Bill Cosby heard NWA for the first time, so we mustn’t forget how insane this stuff is compared to MIA. We mustn’t! ANDREW EARLES BAD PARTY Coming Out Slowly Animal Disguise Here we have a reverse garden weasel of a guitar-and-drum-machine duo that shreds everything that might possibly have poetry or life or prettiness in it to tiny bits of shrill aggravation. I am tempted to say it makes me want to punch someone’s lights out, but beating up people because of music (or talking about it) is very lame. So instead I will say that this is a great record to aid you in very intensely ignoring someone who really deserves it. In fact, I’m going to do that right now. And… there. Fucking attention pig, go get ass-fucked by a turd. All your emails are now going unanswered straight to my FUCK YOU box. Woo! That felt empowering and therapeutic! Thanks, Bad Party. BETTE R. THANYÜ PISSED JEANS King of Jeans Sub Pop These guys are a blast live. I remember seeing them at Market Hotel and they punched out the only light source in the whole place. But it doesn’t feel as hardcore on record when there isn’t a writhing Muppet breaking the club in front of you. The fast songs are kind of OK, but the slow ones are torture. I would like the record if more of the tracks sounded like Human Upskirt. It just occurred to me that Pissed Jeans is a grunge band. PATTY O’FURNITURE

THE SLITS Trapped Animal Narnack		THE SPITS IV Thriftstore
These band names are only one letter apart, so to avoid confusion, I will explain how to tell them apart. The SLITS are from the UK. The SPITS are from Seattle. The SLITS fall into the “postpunk” genre, because they expanded on the punk approach to music and incorporated elements of dub. The SPITS are postdrunk, incorporating elements of Bud. The SLITS sing about rejecting the nine-to-five lifestyle and paying rent by making art. The SPITS have a song about living in a van. The SLITS are smart people making socially conscious dance music. The SPITS are drunken robots making semiconscious violence music. The SPITS are old enough to be my dad. The SLITS are old enough to be the Golden Girls. The SLITS are “artists.” The SPITS are “retarded.” This is the fourth studio album from the SLITS, but who gives a shit? It’s also the fourth SPITS album, and I think I just shit my pants. FUSSY CLAMBAKES
ROBERT POLLARD Elephant Jokes Guided by Voices, Inc.		BOSTON SPACESHIPS Zero to 99 Guided by Voices, Inc.
The man needs to be stopped. It’s not even one of those snotty critic things like, oh, he needs to “edit” himself better or whatever. As far as I can tell, these two CDs, along with the other 49 records he put out in the last ten minutes, are pretty consistent in terms of quality. I just flat-out don’t care. I don’t like anyone or anything enough to keep up with this kind of pacing, and I don’t like music enough to pretend to care. Sorry. JR GIDDENS

GANGLIANS Monster Head Room Woodsist Just imagine Syd Barrett writing songs for the Beach Boys. No, seriously—just go sit down somewhere and imagine that because it’s a way better idea than listening to this shitty band that sucks. HOLE HANDS DESOLATION WILDERNESS New Universe K		NUDGE As Good as Gone Kranky Nudge (basically one Brian Foote plus rotating cast) go the drone-pop/ambient route with enough melancholic feeling and almost-rock instrumentation that it gets over the hump that so many of these types of albums can’t traverse. Like some other well-known, long-running indie labels, Kranky lucked into a band (Deerhunter) that afforded the label a second act. But unlike those labels, Kranky release albums like this, sticking to what they’re known for rather than becoming a Shitgaze Brill Building overly concerned with the paper-thin “tastes” of a certain herdlike demographic. ANDREW EARLES

All these floaty-echoey songs belong in one of those movies where some blond misunderstood dude can’t connect with a girl, for whatever reason, and at several intervals he’s crying by himself on a rock somewhere, or crying underwater, or standing on a rooftop trying not to cry. Meanwhile you are watching and thinking, “OK, I’m lost, what the fuck is going on? No one does this shit!” So basically this is an album for guys who are histrionic and self-absorbed pussies, and for women in general. MAYOR MCJIZZ
ISLANDS Vapours Anti Now this is some party music! Only it turns out the party is stupid and tedious and generally terrible—like that time you decided you’d escort your little sister to her friend’s birthday party because you thought it’d be a good place to “scope chicks” that were the same age as her (12). Rather than unearthing a trove of wonderful and adorable miniskirted things to keep you entertained, all you found was an onslaught of grating squeals and chirps and yips. JULIO STONG BIRD NAMES Sings the Browns Upset! the Rhythm Almost exactly one year ago, I was in Los Angeles and a song by this band came on KXLU as my friend who dresses like Willy Wonka drove me to the beach in his old turquoise Mercedes that runs on vegetable oil and smells like french fries. I had just tried DMT for the first time and was feeling euphoric. Every song that came on the car radio that day sounded weird and magic. When I got home I actually looked up the playlist on the radio station’s website and downloaded everything I had heard. It was THAT good of a car ride. To me, this band sounds like DMT, the beach, french fries, top hats, freeways, old friends, and sunshine. I like them. KELLY AMNER		SWEET THUNDER OF NIAGARA FALLS “The Museum” 7-Inch Self-released/DFA In 1999, a bunch of weirdos from Chicago put on a variety show in the Starbucks on Astor Place that featured a young Andrew WK in his first New York performance and a fledgling Fischerspooner, when they were still called Sasquatch and Casey Spooner performed in a full-body hair suit. It was called the Sweet Thunder Variety Show and the headliner was a concept band called Sweet Thunder of Niagara Falls, who sang songs about, right, Niagara Falls. Suffice to say, everyone in that Starbucks got their minds blown that day. The whole shebang was the brainchild of one Miss Kelly Kuvo, formerly of the legendary no-wave band the Scissor Girls. Now, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of that day, she and her cohorts have dug up an old Sweet Thunder song called “The Museum” and restored it to its original insane, operatic glory. The B-side is a remix by our old pal Phiiliip that painstakingly assembles samples of every Sweet Thunder song they ever recorded. It’s all very mind-melting. You youngsters don’t even know. MEG SNEED SILK FLOWERS Self-titled PPM Records Full-length debut by these three synthy fellows from here in New York. If you need a “sounds like” thing, OK, it kind of sounds like a nondepressed Ian Curtis singing over a really good John Carpenter soundtrack, and the band is half Kraftwerk and half Goblin. Jesus, isn’t that enough? You should just be a puff of dust pointing toward the record store after hearing that. Bye-bye. JERRY McPHEERSON

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