Recently in Music Category

When I'm not setting overstuffed boats of prose adrift on these pages, I am occasionally reminded that this thing is actually meant to be a blog. As such, it is honour-bound to pay tribute to a few of the ancient traditions of the medium, established by our once and future kings in a neolithic age of model railway clubs tinkering with supercomputers. I refer of course to the year-end "best of" post. So, I'll bite. I'll give you some lists. My weekly distraction of presenting a radio show devoted to the musical arts has already produced a not-stressed-about-enough plain-old top ten albums of the year list, so I won't retread that here. Let's try a few other things out.

The James McNulty Awards for Excellence in Television

1. The Wire drawing to a close. Say what you will about the relative strength of the newspaper arc relative to previous seasons, but for a show that promised to be the greatest television show ever made, we were not let down -- it finished as so much more than that. It wasn't about cops. It wasn't in the end even about The City, which I'd thought it was for the first few years. It was about hope, about systems, about order, dignity, dreams and change; it was about humanity, about the sheer brutal fucking hopelessness and futility that comes with trying to live and be part of this world. It was pretty funny too. I shan't spoil for those unfinished, but the final scene between Michael and Dookie may just be the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen. For those entirely Wire virginal, perhaps because too many people have told you how excellent it is and that means you'll never watch it, don't be stupid. Get thee to a downloadery now.
2. The part in the first episode of the new Knight Rider series where the hot young leads strip to their underwear inside KITT, even before the opening credits. After KITT has changed both into and back from a GM pick-up truck. And just after they've been hit by a missile, after escaping from a tuxedo party in "Foreign Consulate, USA". To quote sassy nerd chick back at sassy control bunker full of sassy blinking lights: "Things just got interesting!"
3. David Simon and Ed Burns get a second nod for what was, in the end, an underappreciated series, Generation Kill. This mini-series managed a tough balancing act, presenting a scathing assessment of the early stages of the Iraq war and its planning, while being fair and loving and fiercely proud of the troops on the ground, be they racist fuckup redneck shits or genuinely good sensitive guys lost in a desert far from moral ground. They are the people that were sent there to die. For long-stretches of episodes, nothing happens except the talking of crap. And then things go crazy. And then more crap is talked. We stay frosty, we wait. I'm naive in the art of warfare, I'll admit, but this felt so much more real, immediate and important than any of the hundreds of preachy message films released on same topic by Hollywood this year.
4. Lost not just jumping the Dharma-branded shark but sucking it into a space-time vortex and moving it somewhere where we'll never find it. Season four was glorious and silly and not at all concerned any more for the impatient, or those who don't feel like googling theoretical physicists. As it should never have been.
5. 24: "Redemption", in which JACK BAUER saves Africa in two hours with no help from those pesky UN-ocrats who just won't think of the CHILDREN. See particularly JACK BAUER using Crocodile Dundee-style animal-taming hypnosis against a wild-eyed child soldier.
6. Jimmy Smits on Dexter. The third season of everybody's favourite good-guy serial killer show got mixed reviews -- I loved it, but mostly because I spent the entire season trying to figure out just what the hell was going on with Smits' completely nutso performance. It can be tough to play against everything Michael C. Hall has brought to the title role, but Smits went punch for punch and scalpel blade for scalpel blade.

TV On The Radio
Hi-Fi Bar, Melbourne
Sunday July 23, 2006

I was asked a few days ago if there was any band I could see in the world right now, who it would be. Not who is the best band in the world right now, but who you would want to see right now, at their time. I couldn't think of a better answer than the band we were about to see. I'd die if I saw the Arcade Fire, but Funeral came out two years ago. The Decemberists, well, there'd be sparks but really wouldn't you have wanted to catch them sometime around Her Majesty?

TV On The Radio, though, are at the peak of their powers. Past the undeniable perfection of "Staring at the Sun", I didn't care much for Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, but the ridiculously titled Return to Cookie Mountain is something else entirely. Hyperbolic reviews in street press compared it to Loveless and Blue Lines. It's neither of those, but you can see where they're coming from. It's something we've not heard before, dense, sprawling, ambitious excursions in sound proving there is still life to squeeze from rock and roll. In the past, people (including me) have tended to be impressed by TV On The Radio more than they've loved them, but in a sweaty basement somewhere beneath Swanston Street, caught in the hurricane that is "Dirty Whirl", I think I finally got it. Resistance is futile when you meet the three-pronged front attack of Tunde Adebimpe, the most imposing and commanding rock front man I've seen in years, Kyp Malone shredding his guitar beneath his most awesome of afros, and uber-nerd Dave Sitek, the band's production mastermind (behind the desk for the best work of Liars and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), roaming and stomping the stage, marshalling his men with immense enthusiasm and, for some reason, chimes strung from the end of his guitar.

Sometimes, their songs weren't so hard to swallow. "Wolf Like Me" is easy -- it simply rocks. It might not rock on planes you're familiar with, but as Tunde and Kyp back-and-forth, every bone inside of you knows you're being rocked. And that's comforting. But then the dark, inverted doo-wop of "A Method", which sits at the core of the new album, takes you somewhere your body doesn't quite know. And then, as the twin guitars and shaking percussion whip you up, "Dirty Whirl" spins you off your axis, hurtling towards the end of the world. Or maybe it's just the end of a girl. It's hard to say. Perhaps they're the same. Return to Cookie Mountain is something of a miniature apocalypse, an album of post 9/11 dread and the beautiful noise of destruction and war. It's a place to spend time in with headphones. Live, however, freed from the shackles of their studio genius (who supposedly smokes something like a pound of weed in a month), the songs seem more urgent, more compelling, and a little bit more dangerous.

"I Was A Lover", Cookie Mountain's opening track, finds the band at its most difficult and ambitious. It is a dark, brooding excursion into isolation, war, destruction and lost love, with hints of hip hop, drunkenly bashed pianos, monstrous riffs and the dual voices of Tunde and Kyp, jumping from shouts to falsetto, trading and duelling while the song slides away underneath them. On album, with headphones, you'll find about 50 different things going on in the song at any one time. It's brain music of the most spectacular kind. On stage, for the most part, this comes across, the monstrous presence of the guitars and voices still making you believe that somehow, somewhere in the room, the rotors of black helicopters are thwump-thwump-thwumping towards the frontlines of a battle we can't yet imagine.

On record, Sitek's brilliant twiddling tends to obscure the fact that Tunde Adebimpe has the finest lungs in rock and roll, but here, his voice soars far above his producer's will to multitrack him amidst the murky hip hop beats and skittering loops. Adebimpe is a spectacularly new kind of front man, allowing the music to rage while he brings the crowd along, frantically handclapping, pushing through the noise. And then he opens his mouth, and everything begins to whirl around him rather than through. The power is hard to miss. He's a little bit Redding, a little bit Jagger, a little bit Prince and a little bit Bowie. And he is, always, always cool in ways I could never find the words to explain.

Cookie Mountain is such a monumental step forward for the band that the encore of "Staring at the Sun" was something of an anti-climax, a return to something earlier and lower than the plateau they're on now. In twelve months in which I've been lucky enough to see some enormous gigs from some of the greatest bands on the planet, I've not seen anything like this. In the Melbourne inkies, I read a vague attempt by Kyp to explain the new album's title. If you found a mountain of cookies, he said, more than likely you were going to come back to it. As little sense as that makes, it's also kind of perfect. On a rainy Sunday night in the midst of a Melbourne winter, I couldn't rouse the interest of many friends to spend fifty dollars to see what might be the most exciting band in the world right now, but ah well, the memory of this mountain of cookies I can keep to myself. When they return to these shores next year, I'll be first in line to go back.

You know that possessive feeling you get over those things that are closest to your heart?

If you're a Sad Indie Kid like me, you've been through the cycle with countless artists. You discover a half mention in some crinkly zine or equally virtually rough around the edges website, perhaps a track spun on radio with the most brief of back-announces, and you're gone. You're downloading then mail ordering everything that they've ever recorded. You've met your songs, and it's time for friendship. They are yours. The b-sides. The tapes. The fan sites that obsess over lyrical nuance.

And then you walk past a radio playing a station you'd never listen to, corporate rock whores, all of that, (so says the back of your t-shirt), and you hear a chorus. And something inside of you breaks. They've. Oh god. They've crossed over.

They're not mine any more. They've met somebody new.

The Mountain Goats are the epitome of that special kind of band, once the most obscure of home tapers, releasing cassettes on a label called Shrimper, sparsely acoustic songs known as much for their tape hiss as their striking poetics. And then years on, a major(ish) label in 4AD, and lush John Vanderslice production, and full bands, and big singalong hits, and I'm reading about them in the New York Times. Here in Australia, suddenly there's Triple J high rotation, and singles, and digital downloads. They've crossed over.

Okay, so when I say epitome, it's not like John Darnielle is this decade's Michael Stipe, but I'm talking relative. Say, a scale of Okkervil River to Death Cab or something. Wait, let's obscure that up a bit better on the left side. Jandek? Nah, he's got a documentary and everything, and plays gigs these days. Neutral Milk Hotel? Pffft, I've heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea in the cafe next to my office. In these networked times, obscure becomes so much more tricky -- as soon as it hits Pitchfork, the OC set are never far behind. It's tough, being an elitist obscurist. The band I want on the left hand side are so obscure that you don't yet get to know about them. In fact, they've never even released a record.

(Ahem) To rerail the train...

When The Mountain Goats visited Perth two years ago, they (he) played to a respectfully sized crowd of the usual folks you'd expect to show up at any touring indie gig in Perth, which really meant about 10 people might have owned an album and everybody else was just along for the ride. Darnielle, bizarrely playing support at a bad (defunct) Perth band's album launch, sold CDs at the edge of the stage at the end, and thanked me profusely for giving him the right change. It was one of my favourite gigs ever. I hear the Bunbury gig had about 6 people present, all of whom were my friends that drove down there.

And then last Friday night, in a packed Rosemount, at the end of an entirely sold out Australian tour, a musician closer to my soul than most any other was playing to a crowd of singalong chart followers, talking over the old stuff and going crazy over the big singles.

And you know what? I didn't mind a bit.

If anybody deserves mainstream success, however unlikely, it's John Darnielle. His lyrics may have gotten me through breakups and bouts of depression, may still now get me through the harder days (the ones that haven't gotten quite desperate enough to break out the Neutral Milk or Molina), and may have given me more moments of lyrical appreciation than even Morrissey (who he, of course, does not like one bit!), but god damn it it was just fucking great to hear hundreds of people shouting along to the chronicle of self-destruction in the face of the horrors of family that is "This Year".

In Sasha Frere Jones' excellent recent article in the New Yorker, he draws threads between The Mountain Goats and another band I'm currently going crazy over for different reasons, The Hold Steady. Jones argues that the important thing both Darnielle and The Hold Steady's Craig Gill bring to music is something sadly missing from the last decade or so in the alterna-mainstream. Something simple: clarity --

Both are rock musicians who behave like hip-hop m.c.s, writing lyrics in complete sentences and delivering their songs emphatically, as though the point of making music is to communicate.

In Perth, JD seemed genuinely thrilled to be playing to such a ridiculously appreciative audience, and I'm happy. He's not crossed over -- he's been heard. The obscurist in me honestly does not mind. It would have had I neglected to buy a ticket before the night, but thankfully I had forewarnings of sellouts from the East. The show was every bit as brilliant as that last gig, even if there were few songs from the older albums. He seemed at times as though he felt some kind of need to satisfy the new audience and was almost apologetic for playing some older, quieter numbers (this crowd didn't even do the singalongs to songs from Tallahassee, and that was just two albums ago). But he ended, thankfully and brilliantly, with "The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton", and all was perfect. Hail Satan.

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As icky and sticky as the TomKat saga seems to be getting (Katie Holmes' interview in W magazine being something of a low in our celeb-fascination stakes), and despite the scariness of the Cruiser's increasing powers within the church, it's still got nothing on the actual story of the shady history of the church's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, as outlined rather well in this article from Slate. I can't decide whether the best bit is the consorting with minions of Aleister Crowley and attempted birthings of antichrists, or the years on the high seas with the fetching regalia of the Sea Org (pictured left). I can only stomach celeb-gossip once it lurches into my favoured territories of cult madness, so this recent bout of attention on Scientology has got me rummaging through dark and paranoid corners of the net I haven't visited in quite a while.

At any rate, all this cultishness has inspired me to finish a transcript of an interview I did with Johnny Lee Clary a few months back. So I'll go do that now.

Speaking of cults, the fans of John Darnielle tend to qualify these days. And as a card-carrying member of the compound (somewhere in West Texas, lots of booze on tap, windows always smashing somewhere in the background as couples hold each other in blissful hate), I'm just hopping about--the Mountain Goats are coming back to Perth! The last gig at Amplifier was wonderful, but a little odd in that it was a support for a not-so-great local band. This time, Darnielle brings backing and (hopefully) a headline. And we far-away acolytes can do more than just annoy their listening public by playing him on the radio every week.

Technorati Tags: cult, music

Ah, little lad, you're starin' at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right hand, left hand? The story of good and evil? H-A-T-E. It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E. You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man - the right hand, friends, the hand of love. Now watch and I'll show you the story of life. These fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warrin' and a-tuggin', one agin the other. Now, watch 'em. Ol' brother left hand. Left hand, HATE's, a-fightin'. And it looks like LOVE's a goner. But wait a minute, wait a minute! Hot dog! LOVE's a winnin'. Yes, sirree. It's LOVE that won and ol' left hand HATE is down for the count.

Pitching is the one part of this whole freelance writing gig that I've never been comfortable with. I guess it's the same in any profession, but while hunting for ideas I'm able to bring to an editor with at least as much pride and hope as my cat brings me the dish sponge, procrastination has brought some nice discoveries.

I've somehow managed to miss Night of the Hunter in all of my life until now, but it made its way onto the television last night while I was struggling for inspiration and the ability to stay awake. It's great when you have that feeling of discovering a real cinema masterpiece that's eluded you until now--I remember the same thing with Sunrise earlier this year. I've never truly got Robert Mitchum before, even with Cape Fear, but his borderline paedophile psychopathic murderous screaming ex-con preacher turn in this film is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen. Hate on one hand, love on the other. Just let him tell you the story...

It is a strange film about faith and how the righteous shall shine beyond the false words of the evil. Amidst its eerie psycodrama and its murky southern gothica, this strange expressionist work (the only film ever to be directed by the great Charles Laughton) is as striking to look at as any of the great films of Welles or Griffiths, and has lodged at least a few scenes into my more highbrow nightmares for good. Particularly that strange trip down the river with all the animals. Apocalypse Now, only with bunnies.

Likewise, I'd never heard of Santiago Alvarez until the weekend, when I caught Now!, one of the most extraordinarily powerful pieces of agit-prop cinema I have ever seen. And it's only five minutes long. I plan to find out much more about this angry Cuban and report back.

JG Ballard has pulled off several cold and clinical postmodern tricks in his career, but this one takes the cake. My most favourite writer of contemporary nihilism and industrial grump manages to argue critical worth to the various branches of C.S.I.. Really.

The real crime the C.S.I. team is investigating, weighing every tear, every drop of blood, every smear of semen, is the crime of being alive. I fear that we watch, entranced, because we feel an almost holy pity for ourselves and the oblivion patiently waiting for us.

Yesterday, I made a great discovery in the radio station CD racks while trying to seem knowledgeable: Malcolm Middleton, the less boozy half of Arab Strap, as bleak and irredeemably scottish as his mother band, only with a little more friendliness to our friend Guitar, and even that guy we met one time called Beautiful Pop Hook. I'm not feeling particularly rock-writerly tonight, so Drowned In Sound can do the legwork and describe for you just how Into the Woods hides the soul of a brutally tortured soul behind its melodies. One of the great things about having access to a CD library stacked with new releases - you can get suckered in by the artwork and find some real gems. Of course, every time you think you've found something, you know there are thousands of cooler than you obscurists out there listening and muttering about how they've had it on import for months, and they got it on Soulseek before it was even recorded.

And. Oh. My. God. Twentysomethings, we all must rejoice. And crack out the Subbuteo sets.

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