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Beat Happening!

Jamboree is the first full length effort from Beat Happening. I picked it up years later, and didn’t really get into it. The title track itself is just plain horrible. Indie DIY is fine, but total loss of any semblance of tempo, tune, rhyme, or anything resembling a song just does nothing. Aside from the live a capella “Ask Me”, Heather’s tracks didn’t work for me. Now that I listen to it again, I could put the Calvin tracks like “Bewitched” side by side with any of the JSBX/Dub Narcotic stuff– amazing how little has changed in fifteen years.

“Indian Summer” on Jamboree filled in the gap of reference in Black Candy. The wistful nostalgia of “We’ll come back for Indian summer, and go our separate ways.” is a perfect conjuring of lost youth, the girlfriend you left behind, and useless longing.

Black Candy was my first out of sequence taste of Beat Happening, and by far the best. They nail the perfect combination of coy cuteness and reckless danger: The Velvets meet Gidget meet some heavy reverb laden musings about the big D. Acid seduction of the innocent ponytailed babysitter on the couch by the blue light of an unwatched television.

I love this album so much bought it three times. Left the first copy in a youth hostel, an ex got the second, and I’ll never lose the third.

an entry on a short-lived blog I had going using Blosxom on an old Mac at my house, which was in turn recycled from something I had originally posted on K5. Thus the back dating.

Beasts of Bourbon

I picked up the Beasts of Bourbon- Europe 1992 in a bargain bin a few years ago. It’s not bad, but not worth too much repeated listening for me. I got it because I liked the name of the band and because they had an incedibly great and creepy song called “Psycho” on a comp called the Bigtime Syndrome. They seemed to have lost the creepiness though. Maybe it’s just that it’s a live album and I’ve never seen them live, so I can’t really put myself there. The opening track is a rendition of “Driver Man” which is excellent. The disc quickly drops with a cover/re-working of the RHCP “Give It Away”. It’s very dated now, but maybe it was fun when it was new.

an entry on a short-lived blog I had going using Blosxom on an old Mac at my house, which was in turn recycled from something I had originally posted on K5. Thus the back dating.

The Beastie Boys

I once owned Licensed to Ill on vinyl. Then I had the CD. That disappeared into the void somewhere, probably at a party. The rest of my Beastie product follows. And, boring personal news of the “When it rains, it pours” variety.

Paul’s Boutique: Yes, I too hated it when it came out, only to realize later that it was actually pretty cool, only to then lose interest.

Alio E Olio: Trying to prove they can still rawk!

Check Your Head: Still gets heavy play.

The In Sound From Way Out: This gets the most play of all their discs. I actually use it at work sometimes. It’s not bad as background music in some classes. Just what the Beasties would want to hear, I’m sure, background music. It is enough to cover up the dead silence that nobody wishes to break, without overwhelming people. Plus, I enjoy it. Students tend to like it and often ask who it is.

Root Down: Cheap bootleg picked up in Hanoi.

Hello Nasty: Kinda all over the place, but what else is new.

As mentioned above, Licensed to Ill is conspicuously absent from this list. I had it. I don’t need to have it anymore. OK, that is a lie. I need to replace that disc, just for completion. I am a geek.

Even if I don’t have the disc anymore, I still remember the show. They played New Haven Coliseum on that tour, with Public Enemy and Murphy’s Law opening up. Who thought this was a good idea? This was way before Public Enemy had crossed over to the white suburban brat mainstream. The concert was not a showcase for peaceful coexistence and the power of music to break barriers.

I lived in New Haven for a couple years. It is a tough town, or at least it was. Frat boys out to see a giant inflatable penis and dancing girls in cages, sometimes racist skinhead hardcore fans of Murphy’s Law, and the at that time predominantly black Public Enemy fans made for a pretty screwed up mix. Everybody hated everybody else’s music, so why stop there? Things got pretty bruising at points. A hockey rink sized mosh pit free-for-all was not a brilliant idea. It was the last concert held at the Coliseum for many years. This narrowly beat a double bill of The Fleshtones and Black Uhuru as the most idiotic concert line up ever.

“When it rains, it pours.”

Hadn’t heard from my sister in a while, so when I got an e-mail I was less than overjoyed to hear that a close friend of the family had died suddenly in her sleep and one of my uncles tried to kill himself. Apparently he came pretty damn close, but a bad drug interaction kept him from kicking off. All this one week after my Mom lost her second brother to cancer. Cancer got the first one about six months ago. Oh, and the wife has finally admitted that she is ill. Guess what? That’s the good news. End of whining fit.

Off to work I go!

In which my continuing vainglorious quest to listen to all of my CDs is accelerating. Unfortunately the time available to write witty commentary on them all is decreasing. (more…)

In which I pontificate on the relative merits of the B-52’s, Baby Ray, Bach, and the Bad Brains. Alphabetizing your music makes for strange bedfellows.
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Or, relics of the past. In this much delayed installment, your humble cdiarist trudges through the rest of the first letter of the alphabet. Only B through Z and the compilations to get through. About 750 or 800 more discs.

The first installment was April 3, 2003. At this rate, I may qualify for retirement before I get through the inventory, but here are three more discs. They are the sad leftovers of a passing phase. The relationship is long over, but the marks of the other’s musical tastes are still there in the CD bin.

Asian Dub Foundation

Rafi’s Revenge and Black White are the two discs I have by these guys. Pretty good stuff, if it’s the kind of stuff you like. I don’t normally go in much for dance music

Two minute earthquake break. Tremors went over a minute. I actually got up and moved to a better part of the apartment. Stuff fell off the shelves. According to NHK it was in Tohoku- far north of here. Damn. If NHK says it was long lasting and strong, it was bad.

Back to our regularly scheduled diary… I like ADF better than most dance music. They have an actual guitar and excellent bass player. It’s not all programming. The similarity in sense, if not sound, to The Specials (”Free Nelson Mandela” vs “Free Satpal Ram”) makes them a bit more accessible to me. Plus, they put on a truly fun, humorous, excellent show at Fuji Rock a couple of years ago. It was nice to see a band I didn’t know well alrready at a festival and get into them a bit. I still throw these on the player once in a while and remember the afternoon sun and the dancing “ななななな” signs.

I think NHK is now giving tsunami warnings.

Atari Teenage Riot

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time… Actually, it think it was a good idea, just a bad implementation. why not make hardcore punk with machines? Big Black did very well with a cheesy drum machine? ATR just had more attitude than talent, as evidenced by their inane pseudo-political stage patter on the Destroy 2000 Years of Culture Australia Tour E.P.

I’m gonna leave the building after that last after shock. Time to go for a walk.

The quest to listen to all of my CDs in alphabetical order continues. From the forgettable to the archetypal. (more…)

Angry Samoans:: Part One

Back From Samoa is one of those albums that imprinted itself so deeply on my mind that I almost don’t have to listen to it. I don’t need to put it in the player and let sound waves enter my ears to change my consciousness: a part of my brain is this album.
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Agent Orange

Or should I say “Angsty Orange”? Long before Pulp Fiction reminded everyone of Dick Dale and his signature track, “Miserlou”, SoCal surf punks Agent Orange knew all about it. On Living in Darkness, tracks like “Too Young to Die”, “Everything Turns Grey”, and “Bloodstains” took the shiny happy-go-lucky surf thing, added bittter angry young man lyrics, speed, and distortion. It was good. The fact that it was recorded more than 20 years ago on a limited budget makes the CD sound a bit thin compared to your current crop of mega-budget pop punk favorites of today. It still kicks ass.

Akakuro

In 1990, I first went to Japan on the JET Program. Monbusho was kind enough to put us up in the Keio Plaza Hotel, Shinjuku. This was conveniently close to Shinjuku LOFT, a live house which featured lots of punk, metal, noise, whatever bands- No J-POP. It was a heady rush to be out of the USA on my own for the first time. I had no idea what was going on and Shinjuku was a total stimulation overload for a naive jet-lagged young man.

So, what did I do? Second or third night, I grabbed two of my college classmates who were on the same program and headed to the LOFT. We had no idea who was playing, but the scene looked cool. I think I’d heard abou it in MRR, or something. Why not?

Akakuro was a fairly poppy punk style outfit that was a lot of fun. They looked like Johnny Thunders clones but sounded different- not so sloppy. I picked up two of their indie CDs Crazy Party and Look Like A Fool. Basically these guys copped bits and pieces of The Stooges and later Iggy Pop tunes and changed the lyrics. You can hear “TV Eye” clearly on the first eponymous track of Look Like a Fool. “Lust for Life” gets a reasonably good workout as well with different words. The singer really could do a pretty good Pop Party era Iggy impersonation. Not exactly memorable discs, but the night out sure was. We got to know members of one other band who took us out for an all night session at a Chinese restaurant in Kabuki-cho. Good stuff.

The Amps

Pacer is a fun little album- The Breeders meets lo-fi. Who doesn’t love Kim Deal?

Editorial note: This entry was recycled from an entry on a short-lived blog I had going using Blosxom on an old Mac at my house, which was in turn recycled from something I had originally posted on K5. Thus the back dating.

From the Department of Odd Juxtapositions and Guilty Pleasures:

Had a day off today between jobs, so it was cleanup day. Laundry, dishes, sifted through old papers, backed up the HD, cleaned off the front balcony of the apartment, put away some sweaters and got out the shorts: spring cleaning, I guess. I also alphabetized my CDs. Yes, I alphabetized my CDs.
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