Anton Checkov said of Leo Tolstoy: ““When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify […]
ON NO NAME, JACK WHITE STRIP(E)S DOWN As a songwriter, Jack White has two modes: cock-strutting rock where he says badass things that nonetheless don’t feel like they’ll lead to actual violence, and soft spoken romantic declarations that nonetheless don’t feel like they’ll lead to actual fucking. White’s retro fascination extends not only to […]
SONG BANDS VS. VIBE BANDS There are two types of bands: bands that fuck and bands that suck. No, I’m kidding. Besides that, it’s Song bands and Vibe bands. Even without listening you can usually distinguish Song and Vibe bands. Look at a track listing. If you’ve 12 songs averaging three minutes each, […]
Chat Pile’s logo is a bunch of indecipherable scribbles like a death metal band, but their music actually has musical DNA from a different genre that began at around the same time in the later 1980s: pigfuck. Robert Christgau dubbed the term “pigfuck” to describe the aural violence enacted by early Sonic Youth albums.* […]
I’m wondering if the purview of these Metal Mondays blurbs have changed. Initially, I think I wanted to share beloved classic albums and make the argument for new classics, but considering how much we’ve focussed on grindcore and metalcore and Nespite (?!), I’m wondering if maybe it isn’t more of a survey of the wonderfully […]
Ron Asheton, The Stooges, “TV Eye” (1970): It can be easy to forget that simple is often best. Ron Asheton has one good idea in “TV Eye,” a pentatonic riff in Am. He plays like 40 times in a row, as Iggy Pop hoots, wails, and tries to eat the microphone. When the song needs […]
“How the fuck do you learn this shit?” That’s me, trying to wrap my head around John Zorn’s 1990 masterpiece of jazz, no wave, film soundtrack, and grindcore, Naked City. One moment the six-piece is ripping through the “Batman Theme”, the next they’re bebopping through the French Quarter, the next they’re screeching through a blast […]
How much does production matter? Before Martin Hannett recorded their debut Unknown Pleasure, Joy Division sounded like every other band that formed because they saw a Sex Pistols’ concert: yelled vocals, barre chord guitars, sloppy musicianship, you know, punk rock. You can hear this embryonic band on the first two tracks of the compilation Substance, […]
Demilich’s guitarist/vocalist Antti Boman has a bizarre throat. I don’t mean that he makes weird sounds with it (which he does), I mean that it is physically different than your throat or mine. His singing sounds like a close-mic’d gastrointestinal tract trying to digest an entire Meat Lovers pizza. Boman gurgles, groans, and bellows in […]
You did it. You wrote the songs. You went to open mics. You harvested band members. You finally found a bassist. You got the band together. You KEPT the band together. You sent out emails with cell phone recordings of practice to book gigs. You played to people’s backs in a bar, to ten people […]