The Best Show on WFMU and the Tuareg Guitar Revolution!!!!

I have too many mp3s. I'm not doing anything drastic like deleting anything. But I have TOO many mp3s. Yes, many are torrented and many are downloaded from sites like these. I have a subscription with emusic--50 mp3 downloads a month. Bands that I obsess over I try to support that still have available product, such as The Sound, For Against, The Chameleons. (I promise to go more into my post-punk obsession in the future.) I also buy bands that are associated with the Best Show on WFMU. I'm not totally into all the stuff he (Tom Scharpling) plays. But he plays a pretty diverse array of stuff that rocks. I found the Bingo Trappers, Reigning Sound, Black Lips and some other garage-punk that I hadn't really been into before. He also has a profound knowledge of classic rock, and is a convincing advocate of Paul McCartney's solo work, and always throws in some killer psych-rock. (It is really quite amazing how much amazing psych-rock there is.) I also have been buying Ted Leo and Pharmacist albums--and I like them, even though I hated them at first. But he is a friend of Tom Scharpling, and all around cool dude who works his ass off to make incredible dense, hook-heavy punkitude rock.

Scharpling directed Ted Leo's latest video. It's a funny send-up of the Green Day musical:

Ted Leo And The Pharmacists - "Bottled In Cork" (Official Video) from Ted Leo and the Pharmacists

And I recently actually ordered some actually physical product, both from Merge Records: The new Superchunk record, and the three CD retrospective of Big Dipper. Both are Best Show related. Tom Scharpling set the wheels in motion to get the Big Dipper set out, and his comedic cohort Jon Wurster is the drummer for Superchunk (as well as for The Mountain Goats.) I haven't even listened to them yet. I don't even know if I like Superchunk. But I've developed a personal relationship with some of these guys. {Sort of, I mean, they don't know who I am really, but I post on the forums and they are my facebook "friends." [Facebook is really great for stalking minor celebrities. (hint-hint, K)]}

Which of course has nothing to do with my inspiration for today's post. I may have tens of thousands of mp3s, but I really haven't been excited enough to listen to an album over and over again since my encounter with Group Inerane.

I found the album on the excellent blog exp etc, via a google buzz alert from Gary.

The description of the band makes it sound too good to be true:

Group Inerane is the now sound of the Tuareg Guitar Revolution sweeping across the Sahara Desert and inspired by the rebel musicians that started this music as a political weapon used to communicate from the Libyan Refugee camps in the 1980s and 1990s. Spearheaded by the enigmatic guitar hero Bibi Ahmed, Group Inerane has been together for several years and carries the rich tradition of Tamachek guitar songs for another generation. These ten tracks are a combination of amplified roots rock, blues, and folk in the local Tuareg styles at times entering into full-on electric guitar psychedelia.

It's an electric African psychedelic drone-rock blues. My God, man. My God.

You Are The New Leaves, You Are The Open Buds

A particularly lovely moody/grimy album from this band, which has some ties to Movietone and Flying Saucer Attack, and in earlier releases (only a couple, of the EP variety) tended towards blurty blurry experimental spaz-rock. The stuff presented here is much softer and more melancholy: it sounds like people you know, in a living room, quiet and intense, after a long-expected but heartbreaking breakup, and right before a long dusty afternoon nap. I've never heard an album quite like it.

One thing's for sure: the recording style is unusual. It's home-recorded, and they supposedly collect antique reel-to-reel recorders. There's a fuzzy shimmer to everything here that makes that seem like an excellent idea, even though nothing is even remotely hi-fi: drums whump and tap, guitars plink and buzz, vocals mumble and murmur. Yet it's not lo-fi, nor does anything sound retro or antiqueified. It's just covered in a glossy coat of autumnal haze.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/h4mkjrzjw3n/Crescent- By The Roads and The Fields.zip

What is the Heart of Everything?

You know how sometimes you hear an album, and think, this is the music I've wanted to hear all my life?

Overview: Dutch anarcho-punks team up with Ethiopian soul-jazz magician. Abrasive, soulful, intense, occasionally awkward or even corny, and overall fucking brilliant results.

For more info, try the Youtube video below:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zfyizm1332m/Getatchew Mekuria, The Ex & Guests- Moa Anbessa.zip

Sweet Waste From Hell

Early-80s new-wave horror-hard-rock splatter. It took me years of loving this record and wishing it were different, before I realized how great it is, just as it was made.

The basic story can be found online-- Roky (pronounced Rocky apparently, though my whole life I always said "Roke-ey" and no one ever knew who the hell I was talking about so no one ever corrected me-- that's the pre-internet era in a nutshell) was a gleaming star of the bright new psych era in mid-1960s Texas.

He founded the hugely influential Thirteenth Floor Elevators, whose lyrics named this blog and have been an inestimable influence on me (and, more importantly, bazillions of others). He was apparently a self-aware, spiritual dude who liked to push some boundaries with his drug use.

Over the years this has become an "acid made him crazy" story. This may be at least partially true. These things happen. Lots of psychedelics and an unquiet mind can lead bad places.

It appears though that what really pushed things in the wrong direction was that, as a figurehead of a dangerous youth scene, Texas authorities hounded the hell out of him. Eventually he was caught with a single joint. His lawyer arranged for him to go to a mental hospital for the criminally insane, instead of long years in prison. Presumably this sounded like a good idea at the time, but they experimented with him there, using pretty abrasive techniques (electroconvulsive therapy among others) to banish his troublesome personality. He was never quite right afterwards: it seems like all the light turned to pain and negativity. Well, on the cusp of the 1980s that probably made a lot of sense too. I think of demons too, when I think of Ronald Reagan.

By the mid-70s he'd started making music again, and abandoned the relatively gentle trajectory of the Elevators, whose folky music was mostly about mind expansion, for abrasive hard rock based on horror movie themes. This album was one of the products of that time, though it wasn't released until 1980 or so.

Apparently he wasn't in very good shape through most of the intervening years. In 2007 however he started touring again, apparently having gotten enough help from family members to stay focused well enough to rock out. Since these songs are pretty uniformly dark-side, it may be hard to imagine them seeming like a beacon of love and hope. But, hearing him rock the hell out of them at that show was one of the most joyous concert experiences I've ever had.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zzm5xingojm/Roky Erickson & The Aliens- The Evil One.zip

One last thing: Merry Christmas.

Liver Damage

This sounds like possibly the creme de la creme of bootlegs. Thank you, internet.

http://stadiumstudios.blogspot.com/2009/08/rolling-stones-liver-than-youll-ever-be.html

Watch Us Fall

Great gloomy 80s psych. Definitely a glam crash, not the pop Bunnymen of the mid-to-late 80s, nor the crisp post-punk Bunnymen of Crocodiles, this is a twitchier, sobbier, drunker and stoneder collection of dour imagery, full of late-night collapses and horror flashes, a world in which all that was ever good in the world is lost forever and nothing that remains is worth saving. (Which is more or less how I remember most of the 1980s, actually). The band sounds driven, though, and the songs are beautiful.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/2oygjjujywn/Echo & The Bunnymen- Heaven Up Here.zip

Cuddly Toys, formerly "Raped."

The story of (Irish!) Cuddly Toys just seems to get stranger and stranger the more you look into it. They formed originally as the punk band, "Raped," in 1977. (Although some would argue that since they didn't form in 1976 or before, they weren't a real punk band.) They changed the name to "Cuddly Toys" shortly thereafter, for obvious reasons (presaging Steve Albini's similarly ill-fated band "Rapeman" by several years.) Their first EP was "Pretty Paedophiles." Ahem. It seems like just another band crassly, cynically, reprehensibly seeking publicity. Which would make sense, given the climate of those early punk years. But nevermind: somehow their first hit, "Madmen," was penned by none other than both David Bowie and Marc Bolan. I don't know the story behind this collab, but it's pretty remarkable. (The poster of the youtube video apocryphally states that the band found old bootlegs of unfinished T. Rex and Bowie songs.) Marc Bolan died shortly thereafter. The band friendly-ed up its image with glam gloss and a stellar groove with the release of this album "Guillotine Theatre." (Honesly, I don't know if "Pretty Paedophiles" by "Raped" is available--I'm afraid to look for it.)

Anyhow, the musical result is pretty interesting; they represent a nexus of some past and present major preoccupations of mine in guitar/rock built music: Punk Rock, Glam Rock, and the post-punk thereafter. They sound like a punk rock band with a serious glam influence. Not surprising. Glam had a huge influence on early punk--see New York Dolls--(which was mostly stripped, to its detriment, IMO, in hardcore.) The influences don't quite gel, and the move past punk isn't as paradigm-shifting as it is in Devoto's Magazine. But Cuddly Toys deserve a place in the post-punk pantheon, and also will provide a good springboard for future post-punk posts on punk on this blog.

There's more Diamond Dog Bowie in this than anything else. The Marc Bolan influence is there too...I have to say I can't really listen to whole albums of Marc Bolan. I certainly love a T. Rex song sprinkled in a mix here and there. And there's probably lots of bands that are much better than Cuddly Toys. I'll have to post the ones I know in the future, such as Virgin Prunes, The Sound, Sad Lovers and Giants, UK Decay, Danse Society, Wolfgang Press, Teardrop, not to mention some Brazilian and Svensk shit I got. (And Ero hinted at some Bunny-action.) But this is a good place to start. I feel good about it.

http://www.mediafire.com/?hnmmn5fkefj

RAPED? It's a raped-based economy.


Who are YOUR favorite post-punk bands? Marilyn Roxie has a kick-ass list here.

She Slowly Furnishes My Continuous Ride

Near the end of my freshman year of college, goth, newly broken-up from my lesbian girlfriend, wearing black trenchcoats and smoking clove cigarettes, depressed and trying to impress a girl I barely knew, i did a hit of acid. (The other acid voyagers were the lady and her ex, and our minders were his pals. I had no idea how vulnerable acidheads are, or how messed up this dynamic is. In retrospect I'm lucky they were nice guys, or they could've really destroyed me.) The results were bad.

I felt my flesh become clay; I saw the thin air become frozen crystal; I ground my teeth heroically as the cold steel bones of the universe revealed themselves through geometric and unexpected apertures in solid reality. I was convinced that I could see past and future, and into the minds of my companions. Ordinary humans became bizarrely proportioned sideshow freaks, and I myself an ancient and decaying corpse. There were unexpected moments of reward and beauty: shimmering dragons emerged in institutional bathroom tile, and forlorn trees amidst the halogen-lit parking lot deserts suddenly bloomed into complex mathematical spirals filled with sublime divinity. But coming down the next day, I listened to Echo & The Bunnymen (another post, perhaps) and watched mutilation and torture movies projected from my eyeballs to the dorm ceiling. Several months passed while I slowly put reality back together, unhappy and in existential shock. I believed then (and believe now, somewhat) that what I experienced on the drug was just as real as what I experience off it. This raises some difficulties, to put it mildly.

Later I tried acid again, and low doses of mushrooms. In better mind-states I found a higher ratio of beauty to horror, though always there was some terror, whether of the lurking divinity's brilliance (a sunset on ocean endlessly fractaled into unbearable delight) or of the cruelty and emptiness of the surrounding world (helicopters in the city night, hunting shrieking human prey). But for many years these experiences defined much of who I was. To this day a great many of my personal spiritual beliefs have to do with the sacred geometry of nature and the omnipresence of divinity, which tenets I first glimpsed on that one banal night of risk-taking and fear.

Anyway, during this initial refractory period I picked up a Spacemen 3 album on cassette. It stayed on heavy rotation through many years afterward.

Now, a decade and a half later, this album sounds like a pastiche of influences: Stooges, MC5, Stones, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, etc. But what the hell. The band members were working what then (in the bleak end of the 80s) was an untapped vein, and they worked it hard. Some of this still is startlingly great. Later they made Spectrum, and Spiritualized, and E.A.R., all of it worth hearing, and all of it devoted, at least in some degree or fashion, to the inital promise of the motto: "Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to". (I'm keenly aware that much of the album is more heroin-chic than acid-head, at least in intention. But my experience was all about bong hits and trips, so that's what it means to me).

Post is in two parts due to filesize restrictions. Unzip to one folder and put it on your tongue.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zdymznizjjy/Spacemen 3- The Perfect Prescription 1 of 2.zip

http://www.mediafire.com/file/ylmymdnj1mg/Spacemen 3- The Perfect Prescription 2 of 2.zip

Pushing the Extreme

Deeply satisfying over-the-top guitar punk. A secret classic of American rock and roll.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/2lk13yyylzz/Wipers- Youth of America.zip

Mixtapes For Mason: Crack! Whoosh!- Misc Rock

Dylan, Eno, Galaxie 500... sort of a mishmash of great rock music on this last mixtape post.

Enjoy.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/fntmynjj1md/VA- Crack! Whoosh! Rock 4 for Mason.zip

Mixtapes For Mason: Whiz! Bang!- Rock- 80s & 90s

This mix is mostly 'alternative' rock; it starts with R.E.M. and ends with Yo La Tengo, and what's in between gives a fairly good guide to my youth.

I'm old enough and jaded enough to find alternative rock, and most other rock, pretty uninteresting. But this is a pretty starry-eyed parade of sumptuousness all the same.

These mixtapes, for those who didn't read earlier posts, were intended for cassette, and for a teenager, as a musical education-in-a-box, but without undue academicism. I flatter my mixtape-making abilities overmuch, perhaps, but I think this set of music will rock the teenager's college-roomates' world.

This particular side may not be up to the same standard, since it's a bit more personal/subjective. Aw, hell, no it's not... they're all personal/subjective, and they're all solid. This isn't, though, a guaranteed bell-ringer like the first rock side posted. But, you'll enjoy it. If not, let me know (if so, let me know too).

One more rock mixtape post coming up, then no more mixtapes from me for a while.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/tgfnyn2owh3/VA- Whiz! Bang! Rock 3 for Mason.zip

Mixtapes For Mason: Is In Our Ears- Rock- 60s

More rock goodness. This starts with the Bobby Fuller 4 (doing the song Clash fans know so well), but otherwise is pretty crunchy granola hippie. Byrds, Neil Young, Kinks. You know you love it. (If not, what's wrong with you?)

Older posts explain. Enjoy.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/odyhmktzy2k/VA- Is In Our Ears- Rock 2 for Mason.zip

Mixtapes For Mason: Our Sense Of Hearing- Hard Rock

Closing in on the end of this massive mixtape series. Rockers will enjoy this one: it opens with the Stooges, and stays heavy and vital all 40 minutes. Nonstop headbanging. Roll a joint, do a shot of Jack Daniels, turn it up. Most rockers will know most the songs. You'll still enjoy it. I'm not bragging but it's hard to imagine a more consistently tuff cassette side than this. (Unless it be side A of the punk mix). Clearly this is where my roots are; I may not listen to much rock these days, but I've got a good grounding in it.

Read older posts for explanations of the mixtape context; upcoming ones (three more) will all be rock rock rock. Rock rock rock rock rock rock.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/y0mh5uqmz13/VA- Our Sense Of Hearing- Rock 1 for Mason.zip

Song #30,084 that has been stuck in my head

Here is a great reason why nobody hates the Pretenders: Glam, Post-punk, Classic, New Wave...It's all there:



And in case you don't already have a huge crush on Chrissie Hynde:

Mixtapes for Mason- Satan- 80s Metal!

The second 'side' of the mixtape series. This one's 80s metal oriented. The metal I grew up on. None of this silly 'growl vs. screech' stuff with the quadruple kick drum. We're talking dudes with bleached moussed bouffant hair and a bondage-dude's leather vest with studs, ripped jeans with a codpiece and knee-high high-heel boots. We're talking dueling FLYING V GUITAR SOLOS in which the two guitarists stand back to back and lean their sweaty shoulders against each other as they shred, two-hand-tapping toward the sky.

As I put this together I realized just how awesome these bands actually were.

I'd intended a mix that was a little silly, but most of these songs kick total ass regardless of context or irony or the hypothetical and probably mythical greater sophistication of today's music listeners. Fuck the haters. This music was powerful and fun enough to have earned its own self-aggrandizement. After all, it is indeed a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll. (and how did I make this mix without AC-DC? What was I thinking?)

That doesn't mean I can ever entirely forgive & forget. There was a time when the obligatory guitar solo ruled rock. And rock suffered as a result, in ways that are easy to forget nowadays, when rock's biggest threat is total airwave irrelevance... and the previous Worst Thing was fake-sensitive manly men with bad goatees and tanning salon tans, making gruff moany sounds on shitty power ballads.

Wait a minute, you're telling me the Post-Grunge Fake-Sincerity Die-Off of the 90s was directly descended from the worst elements of hair metal?

That, in fact, wimpy fakeness is the same in all genres?

My head just imploded. Better make the devil-horn gesture and go back to headbanging.

OK, that's better.

Obligatory Note (in case you can't be bothered to read the previous post):

These mixes were originally put together for a teenager, so the content is designed to do a little educatin' and a little mind-blowin'.

They were formatted to fit on cassette, so each 'side' will be around 42 minutes.

Most of them are genre-specific, and sort of strike a balance between trying to cover the bases in that genre (i.e. reflecting the 'great artists' in the canon), and reflecting my taste (which is erratic, mystically-oriented, and limited by ignorance), and fitting well together. Occasionally this leads to odd results. But I think they're good listening.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/jyzkjzcizrm/VA- Satan- 80s Metal for Mason.zip

Up next: blues.

Underneath the Sticks and Stones are Lots of Little Demons

The Kinks were always contrary-- when everybody else was playing psychedelic rebel, they made a record celebrating 'donald duck, vaudeville, and variety'. Richly painted portrait-and-landscape songs, nostalgic and adventurous and worth coming back to again and again. There's a recent remastered extended edition release which is probably worth buying (I once heard a vocal-less version of 'Phenomenal Cat' on the radio and nearly cried with joy)-- but this is the normal version, for your delectation.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/itymdmcogcy/Kinks- The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society.zip

Quit Mumbling... And Talk Like A Man

The precise spot where blues and proto-R&B meet punk rock. Also hints of acid rock and rap. In other words, this album contains a lot of the half-century of music that followed it's release.

More importantly, it's a lot of fun.

Home-digitized from scratchy vinyl; apologies for fuzziness.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/njyyqwrggzm/Bo Diddley- Have Guitar Will Travel.zip

Beware The Need For Help

Drastically different from #1 Record or Big Star, though those are also excellent. This is a moody, intermittently suicidal record filled with lovely angst.

The CD version of this comes with several bonus tracks; I removed them because they wreck the mood. I have mixed feelings about bonus tracks in general, for this reason. Why add random miscellany to the end of a cohesive album?

I originally heard this as an album I borrowed from a friend-of-my-girlfriend back in 1995 or so, along with Dylan's John Wesley Harding. In exchange I loaned out my Syd Barrett albums and a Nick Drake CD. Eventually I returned the items I borrowed, but I never got mine back. Oh well.

I once had a dream about 'Big Black Car', in which I was floating silently through a night city in a black limo, on my way towards Death. I was very worried for several days afterward, but at least I would have died with a good song stuck in my head.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zemrngxztkr/Big Star- Third-Sister Lovers.zip

People Always Kill The Most Beautiful Things

The only East River Pipe album I've spent any time with. I suspect others are great too, but I've always been afraid to destroy the magic of this one, by comparison.

Nearly every song is a small soaring-melody-and-wry-lyrics masterpiece of low-budget high-fidelity home recording. Some may not like the canned beats or synth sounds, but the songs they wrap around could carry much heavier weight as far as I'm concerned. If I could write songs this good, I'd die a happy man.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/yfnoxazmcmt/East River Pipe- Mel.zip

I Can Hear Someone Crying... I Know That Sound

I first went to see Dead Moon at the Casbah in San Diego, because a guy who shared our practice space in a warehouse downtown told me, "they're the best rock and roll band that's ever existed." After seeing them, I agreed.

Now, rock and roll. Whatever. Labels. Hierarchies. Best. Whatever. The thing is, Dead Moon really are Rock & Roll. They've got to be nearly 60, and Fred & Toody are still bringing the rock action from Clackamas, OR, as they have since the 80s. (Though now with a new drummer, in a band called Pierced Arrows).

But Dead Moon is all about the rock mythos-- stoned and drunk on whiskey in a van in the New Mexico night, with broken guitar strings and a broken heart. If you love that shit, then this is for you.

They record themselves in mono, to a vinyl cutting machine. So don't let the fidelity get you down. Just feel it.

This may or may not be their best album (how would I be able to decide such a thing anyhow?), but most days it's my personal favorite.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/njz2mimozd2/Dead Moon- Crack In The System.zip

Side note: Mississippi Records apparently just released an album by the prequel to Dead Moon, Fred & Toody's band The Rats. It's online at the excellent Big States blog:

http://bigstates.blogspot.com/2009/05/rats-intermittent-signals.html

Side note two: as a runner, I really really enjoy the idea of Fred & Toody running a marathon:

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/reverb/2008/10/fred_and_toody_cole_finish_the.php