02/09/2010 • 1:42 am 0
LA Record recently published my review of Kyle Mabson’s Birthday Party at Pehrspace. Click here to read it. It features my perspective on Signals, Breezee One, XboxRox, and Abe Vigoda. I think that it came out really well, although there are two typos that I made and didn’t catch before I sent it to the editor. I won’t tell you where they are.
Filed under: Reviews , abe vigoda, breezee one, kyle mabson, la record, pehrspace, sean carnage, signals, xboxrox
01/21/2010 • 6:14 pm 1
Teddy Roosevelt lost vision in one of his eyes due to a boxing injury sustained while in the White House. But just because Roosevelt boxed in the White House, you shouldn’t think that he recklessly endangered himself in the pursuit of a strange fixation on machismo. No no no: Teddy fought for America, and every one of his boxing matches had a purpose.
The fight that led to his blindness, for example, was actually a contest between Roosevelt and Sugar Ray Leonard, then-president of Colombia. While Roosevelt lost his eye, Leonard lost the fight and was forced to surrender the northern part of Colombia to Roosevelt, who re-christened it “Panama” and built a canal there with his own two hands.
Later, Roosevelt became the first American to earn a green belt in jujitsu.
Filed under: Esoteria , teddy roosevelt, jujitsu, boxing, martial arts, colombia, sugar ray leonard, blindness
01/20/2010 • 7:02 pm 0
Pizza! just added a very special show to our schedule for this Friday. Presented by Manimal Records, it is a fundraiser to provide relief to victims of the Haitian earthquake. It takes place at the Echoplex, and it features a very impressive lineup of musicians including Nico Vega, Adanowsky, Jenny O., Soko, Corridor, and the LA Ladies’ Choir. Pizza!’s performance will also feature guest appearances by Uli and Morgan Gee of Big Whup . Cost of admission is $10.
We are scheduled to appear at 7:15. Doors at 7:00.
Help us spread the word – RSVP on Facebook and invite your friends.
We’re still playing the Smell on Sunday, and it’s still going to be awesome!
Filed under: Events , adanowsky, big whup, corridor, earthquake, echoplex, haiti, jenny o., la ladies choir, manimal, nico vega, pizza!, soko
• 1:50 pm 2
This is the best pop record that I’ve heard in a long time. Their self-titled album was delightful, but side A of that record far overshadows side B – which is understandable, because it’s pretty obvious that it got slapped together as a result of a giant wave of momentum (the story goes that they sent a CD-R to Stereogum and it just launched them into the stratosphere – my mp3s of that record still say “Blue CD-R” in the “album” field on iTunes).
Anyway, it’s nice to hear what this band can do with the opportunity to be deliberate in a studio. They had a lot of big expectations placed upon them, and they rose to the challenge. To be frank, I’m jealous of this record. Many of the records that I like don’t make me jealous, because even though they’re great they aren’t things that I could imagine myself making (Animal Collective, Hecuba, etc). But this record is soooooo on my wavelength: it’s music that I would have liked to have made myself… and it’s better than anything that I’ve ever done.
A lot of people have reviewed Contra and said a lot of very intelligent things about it, so I don’t really feel the need to get too in-depth about why I like it so much. That said, I’d like to rebut something that I read from Bret McCabe, this dude who writes for the Baltimore City Paper. McCabe’s big critique isn’t the boring one that I’ve heard from at least 10,000 people already (“Ezra K. wears boat shoes!”). Rather, he slags on VW because their lyrics are “inoffensive” and “don’t ruffle any feathers.”
Anyway, I bet that Mr. McCabe still wears Minor Threat shirts. He probably thinks that Rage Against the Machine is totally rad, and I bet that he picks John Lennon over Paul McCartney when he’s listing his favorite Beatles. That’s fine. I’d just hate to go on a long car ride with him – it would probably be pretty boring to me. Yes, intelligently confrontational music can be quite good. It can shake people up, make them think, give them the sense that their frustrations are shared, and in some cases give people reasons to rally and even create change (you know, like that Will.i.am song about Obama, haha) – but must music be confrontational in order to be good? Aren’t there other reasons to make and listen to music? Catharsis, for example, is very compelling. And so is entertainment!
Life itself is confrontational and feather-ruffling, at least where I live. Let me take a second to explain how bad things should have been for me today as I walked back to work from my lunch break. The weather in Los Angeles right now is absolutely horrible – it is raining harder than I can remember it ever raining here, and I work right in the middle of the city (dirt, traffic, hugely flooded intersections). My job right now is absolutely horrible – due to construction, my office is temporarily in a fluorescent-lit basement, and my current workload consists of writing comprehension questions for an English-language textbook. Oh, and my lunch today was also absolutely horrible – as a vegetarian, I have very few viable options for food in Koreatown, and in the nasty rain I couldn’t walk very far anyway… so I went to Taco Bell and got a Cheesy Gordita Crunch with beans instead of beef. It was not particularly good.
But things were not horrible as I walked back to work!!!! Last week, Vampire Weekend gave me a bright and sunny record to make me happy. I was listening to it on my Ipod as I walked, and it was enough to overwhelm any negative feelings that I might have had. The skipping calypso beats and trickling synthesizers put a spring in my step, even as I stepped in an unavoidably large puddle and soaked my feet completely to the bone.
So thank you, Vampire Weekend, for making the deplorable bearable – enjoyable, even! And thank you also for debuting at number one on the Billboard Charts this week. Certainly, there are other “indie” acts that have done well on the charts recently. There are others who have done incredibly well for themselves whilst showing that the charts are irrelevant to them. But have a look at all of the insipid shit that is filling the Hot 200 these days – seriously, Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 – the Soundtrack? It really seems, sometimes, that the mainstream pop world has absolutely no relationship to the world of sane music consumers. As someone who once, as a teenager, dreamed of finding himself in the same position in which Vampire Weekend now finds themselves (that dream has since been mitigated by reality – I doubt that it’s a dream that the VW boys had, either, but they got pretty lucky), this news is heartening. Sane people with taste do apparently still buy records. Hooray.
Filed under: Human Interest , alvin and the chipmunks, billboard charts, bret mccabe, cheesy gordita crunch, contra, koreatown, minor threat, rage against the machine, sinead o'conner, vampire weekend
01/18/2010 • 3:14 pm 0
Today I will play my first show of the new year, a solo joint at Tribal Cafe in Echo Park. It’s free, so long as you buy something from the cafe. Here is the flier:
This show marks the beginning of a new string of shows, one that will probably be pretty consistent until Christmas. That’s how I like it (I suppose). Here are the upcoming shows for Pizza! and Big Whup. There will certainly be more shows added to these lists (there are a couple of pending dates for Big Whup already):
Filed under: Events , big whup, geoff geis, l'keg, pizza!, the echo, the echoplex, the smell
01/15/2010 • 10:00 am 0
Teddy Roosevelt was a grubby youngster.
When he was a kid, Teddy’s family took him on several wild adventure trips to foreign lands. In his teenage years, he went to Africa with his family. He used that trip as an opportunity to learn about taxidermy.
On these journeys, Teddy and his brother shared hotel rooms. On his side of the rooms, the young Roosevelt would keep tiny little kitten mummies – discovered in the cursed tomb of a pharaoh in the Egyptian desert – in jars of formaldehyde by the window. After the kittens had become soft enough, the future president would sew their wrinkled corpses to live rats. He would then giggle mockingly as the strange hybrid creatures ran around in circles, confused and pleading for death.
Eventually Teddy’s brother got upset with the room-sharing arrangement and asked that they be separated.
Filed under: Esoteria , africa, hotel rooms, mummies, rats, taxidermy, teddy roosevelt
01/14/2010 • 2:25 pm 1
A certain sector of my internet was abuzz yesterday over the death of Jay Reatard, the twenty-nine year old punker from Memphis who made his name as a staple of Goner Records and was beginning to move on to bigger things as a recent enlistee to Matador. It is a tragedy, to be sure, and I have no intention of being light-hearted about it. While I personally wasn’t that familiar with his music (I’m not that into punk, and he didn’t loom as large within my circle of friends in Los Angeles as he appears to have in the Southeast and East Coast – looking at my iPod, I only have one of his tracks and I can’t recall ever listening to it), I certainly have nothing but admiration for his work ethic and dedication to music. Sadly, many of his followers seem to think that he had his best years ahead of him.
Beyond all of that, he was simply too young to die randomly in his sleep (Perhaps of flu? Damn!). That one’s a no-brainer.
Still, the biggest thing that I take from Reatard’s death is a lesson about living in the social networking age. The web 2.0 era makes it all-too easy for us to say juvenile or mean-spirited things and have them published immediately. It frees us to curse and to spew nastiness, and neither of those really seems to have much consequence because our facebook feeds (or Twitter, or whatever) cycle ever-so-quickly and our moments of crappiness scroll down the page. But we can’t take that for granted. What if the scrolling stops?
I’m sure that Reatard was, as Bradford Cox said, “a person with feelings and a good heart.” I’m also sure that a lot of his well-publicized bravado was based not on genuine meanness but on a desire to fit within the snotty and punky archetype of which he seemed enamored. That said, I can’t help but guess that he wouldn’t have wanted his crabby Twitter feed, complete with a final message asking fans to vandalize another band’s car, to have been his legacy. Yet that Twitter feed was where I, as someone only peripherally aware of Reatard, went when I first heard the news yesterday.
Thus, I resolve to be a lot nicer on the internet… just in case I die. I’ve been guilty of saying horrible things and not thinking twice about them. I’m going to do my best not to do that anymore.
Anyway, condolences to the dude’s many friends and fans.
Filed under: Esoteria , facebook, goner records, jay reatard, twitter, web 2.0
01/01/2010 • 11:28 am 0
Normally I don’t like secular Christmas songs. “Jingle Bell Rock” sucks. Songs like that just don’t take the holiday seriously, and are lame because they’re just dumb rock songs and don’t particularly have anything to do with Christmas. Real Christmas carols have a unique feeling to them.
There are exceptions, of course, to this rule. Generally, the exceptions go like this: if you’re an artist I like, then it’s okay if you have a stupid secular Christmas song! I’ve already mentioned that I love Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Another song I really like comes from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: “Christmas All Over Again.” It’s such a fun song, and I realize that my love of it contradicts my earlier statement because it’s totally just a dumb rock song with Christmas lyrics and some sleighbells. But the sleighbells really compliment Tom’s style, which has always been influenced by the Byrds and gets even janglier with the ruckus coming out of the bells. The grandiosity of Jeff Lynne’s production is also 
appropriate – this song has the “bigness” that a Christmas song ought to have. There are some very fancy Traveling Wilburys-style vocal harmonies that sound much more thought out than the stuff that some bands crap out in a couple of hours and call “Christmas songs.”
The lyrics are funny. He talks about not wanting to kiss relatives, but he does it in that same rebellious Florida redneck tone that snarled like this back in the 1970s. Well, maybe it’s a little toned down, but it’s still cool. At the end of the song, he asks Santa for some cool instruments.
Filed under: Wonderful Christmas Music , christmas, jeff lynne, mariah carey, tom petty and the heartbreakers, traveling wilburys
12/31/2009 • 10:39 am 4
So I’ve been on the fence about whether or not to do something like this. Pop music is one of the biggest constants in my life – and the only element of pop culture that consistently holds my attention. I’m also a critical type of dude, so I catalog stuff like this as it happens. That said, classifying music (or anything else) by dividing it into decades is kind of stupid and completely arbitrary – why, exactly, would something made in 2000 have more in common with something made in 2009 than something made in 1999? Moreover, the concept of “best” seems totally meaningless with a period of time so large and a pool of music so diverse – could Animal Collective, for example, truly be either better OR worse than Britney Spears? Aren’t they kind of on different pages?
Oh but what the hell? This is fun. I’m drawn to stuff like this. I’m sure that in five years I’ll have a far better perspective, but it’s better to get into the fray while the getting is good. I’ll say, though, that this list is intentionally not comprehensive. No sense in overdoing.
I tried to not write too much about anything.
Bands:
Liars. Beginning as the most punishing and fierce of the initial wave of “dance punkers” at the beginning of the decade, Liars has made a habit of taking dramatic stylistic turns with each subsequent record. They’re always weird – particularly on their middle two albums, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and Drum’s Not Dead.
Spoon. Spoon is a band that had a distinct forward trajectory throughout the decade. Kill the Moonlight might be the most enjoyable record they’ve made from start to finish, but as the years progressed their sound deepened and became more defined, culminating with the mature Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.
the Strokes. I like Room on Fire more than I like Is This It? But I like all their records.
—
Solo Performers
Justin Timberlake. At the beginning of the decade, he was kind of famous as the most visible member of *N SYNC and as Britney Spears’ boyfriend. Most guys would be fat and drunk on a reality TV show right now, but Timberlake parlayed those opportunities into a full-fledged respectable career. Pre-dating “Hey ya!” by several months, “Rock Your Body” was the track that softened me up for the eventual takeover of pop music in my brainspace during the mid-2000s.
David Byrne. What a great man! People want Talking Heads to reunite, but that’s in the past. Not to slag on the others, but why would Byrne want to reunite when he’s so vital on his own (or with Brian Eno, as on Everything That Happens)?
Lil’ Wayne. I’m seldom into rappers – the last last guy I really got behind was Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and he’s been dead for a while. But Wayne’s got me. He can sing. He’s musical. Now that he’s got the autotune, he uses it as an instrument unto itself. He doesn’t sound like anyone else.
—
Albums
Belle & Sebastian: The Life Pursuit. Oh my god, this one is so good. This is a runaway winner for my favorite album of the decade. I had forgotten about this band for maybe five full years before it started getting blasted at my house back at Alvarado Street and I was in love immediately. The band, always personal and charming, has blossomed into a full-on confident pop group that somehow holds on to its initial appeal. The songs are simple, but repeated listens are continually rewarding.
Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion. Despite having a million opportunities, I never listened to Animal Collective aside from one or two occasions until I got Merriweather Post Pavilion. Having not closely monitored their development, I was pretty shocked at the fully-formed and completely unique world that exists here. This is a beautiful record.
Sally Shapiro: Disco Romance. Annie seduced me in 2005, and Anniemal definitely paved the way in my palette for this album. I can relate better to Sally, though, and when I listen to this album I feel like it’s just walking with me, in a way. Does that make any sense?
Godspeed You Black Emperor: Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. An early favorite, and one to which I can’t help but return pretty regularly. Back in the day people called stuff like this “post-rock” and that title seems really silly right now. It’s just extended apocalyptic instrumental jammy time with rock instruments.
the Shins: Oh, Inverted World. Speaking of early favorites that I can’t seem to shake…
—
Songs
Outkast: “Hey ya!” Oh man, remember when this jam was current and you could hear it everywhere you went and people from all walks of life would dance like crazy as soon as they heard Andre go “1, 2, 3, 4!”? It didn’t matter if that shit came on in a Kmart or a funeral, people would be writhing in the aisles. At least that’s how I remember it…
Destiny’s Child: “Soldier (featuring TI and Lil’ Wayne).”
Hot Chip: “Ready for the Floor.”
Björk: “Cvalda.”
Hecuba: “Extra Connection.”
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: “Young Adult Friction.”
Radiohead: “There There.”
Feist: “1,2,3,4.”
Vampire Weekend: “M79.”
Smashing Pumpkins: “Tarantula.”
Kylie Minogue: “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.”
Arcade Fire: “Keep the Car Running.”
The Very Best: “Tengazako.”
Filed under: Features, Reviews , animal collective, arcade fire, belle and sebastian, björk, david byrne, destiny's child, feist, godspeed you black emperor, hecuba, hot chip, justin timberlake, kylie minogue, liars, lil' wayne, outkast, radiohead, sally shapiro, smashing pumpkins, spoon, the pains of being pure at heart, the shins, the strokes, the very best, TI, vampire weekend
12/30/2009 • 8:16 pm 1
Like Andrew Jackson before him and George W. Bush after him, Theodore Roosevelt was a wealthy and well-educated man who had delusions of “ruggedness” and eventually portrayed himself as a Rugged Man in order to appeal to the nation’s famously and intrinsically American sense of individualism and boldness. Early in his political career, he bought a couple of cattle ranches in North Dakota, near the town of Medora. Teddy was very much into the iconography of cowboys, and when he returned to New York for the cold winters (like any real cowboy) he would get Glamour Shots® made of himself in frontiersman gear.
Henry F. Pringle tells this story:
“The first time he took part in a roundup, some time during the summer of 1884, one or two hardened cowboys nearly fell from their saddles as he called in his high voice to one of the men: ‘Hasten forward quickly there!’ The phrase became a classic in the Bad Lands. Riders passing distant ranches relayed it with profane guffaws. Strangers in Medora and Little Missouri were puzzled as some thirsty customer ordered the bartender to ‘hasten quickly’ with his drink.”
Filed under: Esoteria , cowboys, medora, north dakota, teddy roosevelt
