I recently got to hang out with someone who was a dear friend of mine during high school. She lived in New York then, and I didn’t, so this was the first we’d ever met in person. Even though we hadn’t kept in close touch over the past 10-or-so years, it was still fantastic.
She (and, to a degree, her brother who was working for a record label) got me into so much music I wouldn’t have really experienced otherwise. We started from a common interest in They Might Be Giants (who had just put out their fourth album - sheesh), but she insisted I hear the stuff they’d done with Frank Black. They brought Brian Dewan on tour, so she sent me a mixtape including that stuff. I wasn’t familiar with Pixies? She rectified that. This wasn’t particularly obscure underground stuff, or closely guarded rarities, but to me, only just starting to get into what we called “Alternative”, it was mind-expanding.
I made a muxtape of the stuff I still really like from those tapes. Obviously, everything is 15 years old. If it’s the kind of thing you might want to spend 45 minutes with, I invite you to fromscarsdale.muxtape.com.
She told me she doesn’t really keep up with what’s going in music now (unthinkable to me, but she has her reasons), so I started sorting out what I’d really loved from the past 14 years - how I’d explain what I’d gotten into since high school with only 12 songs. That muxtape is up at superlady.muxtape.com. It seems a little arbitrary, even silly, but I think it’s an okay snapshot. I am sure there’s stuff you’ve heard there (particularly if you’ve been following the albums of the week here), but maybe some stuff you haven’t, and you absolutely haven’t heard all 12 songs in this particular order.
Rocket From the Crypt - Hot Charity/Cut Carefully and Play Loud
Well, this makes two in a row that are maybe sort of hard to find. Hot Charity was released on vinyl alone in 1993. It fits between Circa:Now! and Scream, Dracula, Scream! in chronology and stylistically. The thing that I hear now (15 years later - yikes) is the intensity - these are close to live performances. All the lyrics are about you or the writer being in danger. Cut Carefully… was another hard-to-find vinyl-only release, but… you know those record sleeves with the hole in the middle, so you can read the sticker through the sleeve? Cut Carefully has the record in the sleeve, with a larger-than-the-hole sticker placed over the hole, so that the vinyl is actually attached to the sleeve until you cut it out. Carefully. This was 1999, so I got the files from Napster and never cut mine. And in 2002, both were remastered and re-released on this one CD, so you don’t have to go through that.
They constitute a best-of, really, because the tracks here are as good as any of their other output. I think it’s probably a decent place to start if you’re not a fan already, but you would know that better than I would.
Well, this is awkward. One of my favorite records of the past six months isn’t available in America yet. You can import it on Amazon, where users have given it tags like “fake punk” and “no talent”. So! They’re a slick electro-pop band with a girl singer. Lyrics deal with being a slut and partying your face off, but Wikipedia calls the lyrics “smart and sardonic” so perhaps they’re criticizing actual party-loving sluts. Either way, you should understand that there are better choices for your preschooler’s playdate.
You know what? I’m sorry. I am a bad power-pop fan. I know almost nothing about XTC. I was a big “modern rock” guy from 1991 on, maybe a bit past their prime. We even started a little joke last year, when I added an Artist Alert on my XM radio to tell me when XTC came on, whether it would be “Peter Pumpkinhead” or “The Mayor of Simpleton”, because, ha ha, those are the only two XTC songs, right? But They Might Be Giants have been trying to turn you on to XTC for 20 years - they wrote a song about musical taste, “XTC vs. Adam Ant”, appeared on an XTC tribute, and invited Andy Partridge to do one of the first Hello Recording Club EPs. This is considered their best album - I don’t know. It’s my first XTC record. It’s super-Beatley, I’ll tell you that. If you can only scrounge together 89 cents, I’m totally infatuated with “That’s Really Super, Supergirl”. It won’t let you down.
I confess that it has been a while since a Frank Black - wait, Black Francis - release has been “satisfying”, but this comes close. The songs don’t meander quite as much as they did on “Bluefinger”, which is welcome. They flirt with a kind of maturity, almost, which generally means “inessential” and “forgettable”, but the melodies keep coming back to me at unexpected times. In particular, “Tale of the Lonesome Fetter”, which is almost meditatively slow, can’t be described as catchy at all, but for some reason I really want to put it on mix-tapes and play it on the guitar.
I don’t know how it happened, but I suppose a lot of people reading this blog aren’t huge Rocket From the Crypt fans. It’s possible you never got into the phenomenally talented side-project of John Reis, Hot Snakes, or the really fun pure punk off-shoot, The Sultans. Here’s what I’m going to guarantee with the Night Marchers record: it will have RFTC front-man John Reis on vocals, it will have a Hot Snakes-like sound, you will find it about twice as accessible and mature as the other bands I’m writing about here, and it will make your summer about four times as fun as it would have otherwise been.
Honestly, the Onion AV Club just reviewed “Pretty. Odd.” last week, and I picked it up out of curiosity. I had a ton of admiration for their first record (two years ago?) and their surprise win for Best Video (18 months ago?), but never really thought of them as a favorite band of mine. I have to go back to their first record and make sure I didn’t miss something - this new one is amazing. They’ve pitched some electro-diddling to pick up a hearty chunk of 60’s psychedelic rock and 70’s AM jams, but it’s the Sgt. Pepper’s tribute done exactly right. I’m sorry if you’ve been inundated with “Nine in the Afternoon” lately, but it’s one of maybe five insanely catchy songs on the record.
Another album I don’t want to go on and on about. I tried to get a friend excited about this once, and as I explained that all of the topics were brought back to food metaphors, he was like “oh, I get it.” But you don’t get it. I can tell you that MF DOOM jumps from topic to topic, using food jokes and metaphors as a central theme in his writing, and you can’t possibly think it’s as well done as it is. It’s not what it’s about, but how it’s about it. This is phenomenally smart, wickedly funny, and fairly adventurous. Even if you need to be sold a little bit on rap, this is exactly how people go from being innocent bystanders of hip-hop to full-blown fans.
I didn’t really “get” Talking Heads until I was probably 14. Some of their earlier, artier stuff was in the record collection at home, but I never sought it out. That seems odd, now, because they’re super-consistent and their old stuff is brilliant, but it might be a little adult.
We wore this tape out in my mom’s car over a few summers. I’ve probably got an emotional attachment to it for that reason, but if I’m wrong and you don’t like this, you’re saying no to nine really top-notch, tight pop songs. I could go on and on, but that’s not what we’re here for.
September 5th, 1993 marked a sleepover for my brother’s 16th birthday. A Sunday night that went into Monday morning (Labor Day), I actually had the chance to watch They Might Be Giants–my favorite band–host 120 Minutes, a show that I usually taped and watched the next day.
Halfway through the show, they introduced a video that started with a wall-of-guitars one-note riff. Shown on screen was a mariachi band, completely incapable of this garage-metal crunch, but eventually the real band was revealed. In matching plain white greaser t-shirts (and also matching Hawaiian shirts), they played in a tiny room illuminated by a disco ball. Images of the band goofing off (all repeating the lyrics), some house party, that mariachi band again, snapshots of southern California’s hispanic culture… it was a blur. At the end, I didn’t have any idea what I’d seen, but I loved it. It was Rocket From the Crypt’s first MTV exposure: the video for Sturdy Wrists.
I have no clue what the song means. It’s got something to do with wrists, elevators, and being in tune. I haven’t even looked up what the words of the chorus are, because as it is in my head, it’s perfect. After the verse riff has punished you enough, this horn kicks in - a gorgeous saxophone, in a punk song. It’s a total left turn, progression-wise, from what’s come before. But again, it’s so simple: only the wall of guitars is playing more than one note. They’re not trying to impress you with diversity or overwhelming cleverness: this is about boiling something down to essence, and hitting you over the head with it. God, that riff! The second verse is the first verse again, but now stated in past tense, and now nothing’s in tune.
The riff is the intro is the bridge, and once the second chorus is over, the same crushing riff is the closing statement. It’s perfectly symmetrical. The whole thing might be over in two minutes. It’s as punk as power-pop ever got, as far as I know. There’s no quiet/loud, no irony, no jokes… it was as if Helmet formed in the 60’s, or Black Sabbath played their funkiest stuff in double time at a beach party.
Which is not to say that RFTC never got better. Their follow-up, Scream Dracula Scream!, is a perfect introduction to their wise-ass punk-plus-horns-plus-keys philosophy, certainly more friendly, and at times, more intense. Hot Charity might be the best thing they ever did, but it was only available on vinyl for about five years, which made it an even more intimate, special and secret experience. RFTC off-shoots (Hot Snakes, Drive Like Jehu, the Sultans) are in no way inferior to their more popular sibling: all excellent variations (more or less serious) on the same themes.
They played their final show on Halloween 2005, and the DVD of that experience comes out next month.
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