7/30/2007
Monday Music Memorandom
Tiny Masters of Today: Radio Riot (Mute Irregulars)
1. They're from Brooklyn, New York.
2. Brother and sister duo: Ivan is 13, Ada is 11.
3. David Bowie says: "Used to be you had to be well into your teens to develop this kind of attitude. Genius."
4. Guests on album include Karen O (Yeahs Yeah Yeahs), Fred Schneider (B-52's), Gibby Haynes (Butthole Surfers), Kimya Dawson (Moldy Peaches).
Devendra Banhart: Tonada Yanomaminista (XL)
1. He was hatched on Planet Texas in 1981 and raised in Venezuela, but now calls LA home.
2. His band, currently known as Power Mineral, renames themselves wherever they feel like it, and has previously been known as Fried Hummingbird, Hairy Fairy Band, Hairy Fairy and First Woman Millionaire, Las Putas Locas, Stoner Boner, and Bathhouse Of The Winds, among other names.
3. The new album hits on September 25.
Against Me! - White People For Peace (Sire)
1. Founded in 1997 by singer/guitarist Tom Gabel at age 17 as an acoustic solo act.
2. Accused unfairly of "selling out" by voracious fans after signing to Sire Records, much to the indifference of the band, who say they just want to reach as many people as they can.
3. New album, their third full-length, is a classic political punk masterpiece and was produced by the legendary Butch Vig (Nirvana, Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth).
4. "Protest Songs in a response to Military Aggression. Protest songs to try and stop the soldier's gun."
Beep Kitty: According to Plan (unreleased)
1. Best synth pop act in Walla Walla, Washington!
2. Brother and sister duo: Jeff and Elizabeth Knight.
3. So far, they've only released music on cassette format.
4. http://www.myspace.com/beepkitty
Labels: David Bowie, Devendra Banhart, imeem, Music Reviews
7/13/2007
The David Bowie Aquarium
Things can sometimes get a little rough in my 55 gallon aquarium. Its occupants are mainly oscars, which are notoriously mean fish who enjoy a weekly feast of "feeder" goldfish. The bigger ones snap an entire goldfish in one bite, while the smaller ones prefer the more gruesome method of attacking and eating the goldfish's eyeballs, then gradually devouring the rest of the helpless creature community style. It took me awhile to get used to the raw carnage, but now it doesn't phase me at all.
I suppose it would be stretching reality a bit to say that each fish has their own personality, but since I decided to actually give them names, they've somehow become a little more dynamic to me. I decided to use a common theme for naming my fish. My favorite music artist ever is David Bowie, so that was the magic inspiration. Here's a little who's-who tour of the Making Flippy Floppy aquarium.
Lady Grinning Soul (Aladdin Sane LP, 1973) She's pre-historic, she's way into algae, and she's catty. Lady Grinning Soul is a giant plecostomus (Hypostomus punctatus) and at 15 inches long, she's the queen of the whole show. She isn't the most gorgeous gal on the block, but she makes up for her looks with ability to keep things clean, hoovering up bits of algae, fish poop, and half-eaten feeders. She's not one bit picky. She's a bit of a loner, most of the time she can be found enjoying the tickliness of the bubble area. She blends in well with her surroundings so well that sometimes when she moves suddenly, people are startled, thinking she was just a big rock. Her skin is like you'd imagine dinosaur skin, hard and thick and greyish brown, sorta spiky.
She's been known to have sudden, unexplainable fits where she suddenly bolts into action, flipping and flopping wildly, practically shooting herself out of the tank and causing all the muck settled at the bottom to stir all up. It sounds crazy when she does it, a giant loud splash and a thunk when she hits her head on the tank. I think this is somehow her form of entertainment. If I sit by the tank long enough, she'll eventually notice and swim over to get a look at me with her beady little eyeball.
Iman. (Mrs. Bowie) The latest addition to the tank and the biggest of all the cichlids at about five inches in length. She's a Jack Dempsey (Archocentrus octofasciatus), a type of fish which was named after the notorious boxer because of their pissy attitudes and habit of bullying the other fish. Actually, Iman has been quite mellow so far. I really haven't seen her get cross with another fish. Maybe it's the fact that she doesn't have much seniority in the tank makes her less bitchy. She's gorgeous, though, which is the reason I brought her home from Duncan's Pet Store awhile back. It's hard to find fish for my tank that won't get eaten - at pet stores I mostly find just the little bitty cichlids that would become a casual snack as soon as they hit the water.
So when I saw Iman, all big and sassy with her lavender-gray body and phosphorescent blue and silver spots, I knew I had to have her. Sadly, I was told she was "under surveillance" and not currently for sale. I wondered what she had done to warrant direct observation, the little troublemaker. They told me they'd call me when she was done being punished. She came to her new home about a week later in a big plastic mayonnaise bucket, sliding into the tank with an enthusiastic plop. She's been cool as a sea cucumber ever since.
Ziggy Stardust - (The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars LP, 1972)
This guy is so glam, no other name would have fit the description quite as well. Ziggy Stardust is appropriately, a Fire Mouth (
Blue Jean (Tonight LP, 1984) - This one is a Pearl of Tanzania (Labidochromis), and is electric blue under the special nature bulb half of the tank, with a glowing yellow fringe. Blue Jean isn't too big, but carries herself with a lot of poise. For some reason, her facial expression makes me think she's asking "Who?" all the time.
Silly Boy Blue (David Bowie LP, 1967) - This Pindani (Pseudotropheus socolofi) is a little duller blue color, with darker blue stripes that glow a bit when they feel like it. Silly Boy Blue has always been the shyest fish, choosing to hide mainly in the fake leaves of the plastic plant. This fish is also a survivor of a feline fishing endeavor last year. I walked in the room in the nick of time to see all three cats staring quizzically at Silly Boy Blue, who was laying helplessly on the on the living room carpet. At first, I thought one of them had dragged in a slug, because the poor thing had turned from brilliant blue to dull gray in the air. I realized it was a fish and immediately grabbed its tail fin and tossed it into the tank. It floated lifelessly for a minute, and just as I was assuming the worst, it started wriggling a bit, and eventually came back around to normal. I'm pretty sure the culprit was Kitty Face, the only one who's ever shown much interest in the tank. Fortunately for him, he hasn't tried fishing since.
Joe the Lion (Heroes LP, 1977) - A cute little Kalingo (Nimbochromis livingstonii), named because of his cool Leopard Spot coloration. Unfortch, David Bowie never wrote any songs about leopards, so I had to go with a different large, carnivorous feline.
The others are cool too, but they don't really have amusing stories so I'll just run down the names: New Killer Star, Low, Red Money, Abdulmajid and then there are the surviving feeder goldfish that have managed to not be devoured by the bigger, meaner fish, who I collectively call (what else?) the Spiders from Mars.Labels: David Bowie, Fish, Watery Death
6/29/2007
Audio Flashback: 1975
I got in trouble for posting my Get Out columns here on my blog on Fridays, a day before they hit the actual newspaper. Apparently they think if my articles leak early, nobody will buy the paper on Saturday, since that's all they really want a copy for anyway (AS IF). Fair enough, I can wait until Saturday mornings to post them here. Meanwhile, I had a new idea to fill the space on Fridays from now on. I'll pick a random year and highlight a couple of albums that came out that year that I love and discuss them a bit as well as post some songs using my totally neato imeem music player thingie. I'm pretty sure every year has had it's great moments in popular music. Let's go right for the meat of the matter and start with the wonderful, woozy mid-70's.
David Bowie: Young Americans
This is a bit of a transitional album for Mr. Jones, released after the glittery death of the Ziggy Stardust persona and before the art-cocaine madness of the Berlin era albums. Remarkably, it was the album that finally broke Bowie into the big BIG time in the US, with the title track and the John Lennon collaboration "Fame" becoming colossal hits. White boy soul was literally invented on this album and tracks like "Fascination" and "Right" predict the disco craze that would soon take over the world. David's voice is different here than on previous albums, deeper and careening melodramatically from high to low like an art-damaged lounge singer. He swoops and soars impressively on his heartbreaking cover of The Beatles' "Across the Universe", which I always thought was such an unusual choice for this album. Somehow, it fits. The presence of a very young Luther Vandross and a set of soul-sister backup singers injects some real fever into the recordings, making this one of Bowie's most "human" sounding records. The recent deluxe anniversary edition adds two brilliant studio outtakes to the original 8 tracks, as well as the disco-fried and very rare single "John I'm Only Dancing (Again)"
Kraftwerk: Radio-Activity
Their previous album Autobahn was the one that perked up ears around the world with it's exclusive use of primitive synthesizers and Teutonic Beach Boys schtick. However, Radioactivity is the record that would serve as the brittle blueprint for the rest of their groundbreaking catalog of electronic pop. This album has a spooky, otherworldly quality with it's beeping geiger counters, hissing radio signals, reverberating synth effects and tinny machine percussion. Like all Kraftwerk albums, it has a theme and here it's "the miracle of radio". 1975 seems a little late to be tripping out about such notions, which lends the album a weird retro-futuristic quality, like some fusty artifact discovered in your crazy great-uncle's workshop. Florian, Ralf, Karl, and Wolfgang lay down some darned chilly soundscapes here with electronic music machines that were barely just invented - I can only imagine how foreign and freaky this music must have sounded to people when it came out. Even all these years later, it has still been known to cause extreme reactions.
Abba: Abba
When this album came out, Abba were huge all over the globe, everywhere except the US, where this album reached a meager #174 on the Billboard charts. It saw the Swedish foursome making a blatant attempt to harden up their sound, and while Abba is not exactly known for it's hard rocking, tracks like "Hey, Hey Helen" and "Rock Me" are at least as hardcore as say, Elton John was at this point. "Mamma Mia" and "SOS" are now classics, although most people never make it beyond those songs' presence on Abba Gold. Out of all of the original albums, this has the most variety; they try out reggae on "Tropical Loveland" and torch polka on "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do". Bjorn and Benny had already perfected their full-to-the-brim, high-gloss production methods and Anni-Frid and Agnetha harmonize like only they can, creating that unmistakable, irreproducible Abba sound we love so much. The CD reissue includes THE most insane Abba recording ever, "Medley: Pick a Bale of Cotton/On Top of Old Smokey/Midnight Special". It's never been explained to me why Abba would stitch together a slavery-era relic, a children's standard, and a current pop hit, but if anybody ever accused Abba of being humorless, this proves them way wrong. Aw, Lawdy!
David Bowie: Young Americans
This is a bit of a transitional album for Mr. Jones, released after the glittery death of the Ziggy Stardust persona and before the art-cocaine madness of the Berlin era albums. Remarkably, it was the album that finally broke Bowie into the big BIG time in the US, with the title track and the John Lennon collaboration "Fame" becoming colossal hits. White boy soul was literally invented on this album and tracks like "Fascination" and "Right" predict the disco craze that would soon take over the world. David's voice is different here than on previous albums, deeper and careening melodramatically from high to low like an art-damaged lounge singer. He swoops and soars impressively on his heartbreaking cover of The Beatles' "Across the Universe", which I always thought was such an unusual choice for this album. Somehow, it fits. The presence of a very young Luther Vandross and a set of soul-sister backup singers injects some real fever into the recordings, making this one of Bowie's most "human" sounding records. The recent deluxe anniversary edition adds two brilliant studio outtakes to the original 8 tracks, as well as the disco-fried and very rare single "John I'm Only Dancing (Again)"
Kraftwerk: Radio-Activity
Their previous album Autobahn was the one that perked up ears around the world with it's exclusive use of primitive synthesizers and Teutonic Beach Boys schtick. However, Radioactivity is the record that would serve as the brittle blueprint for the rest of their groundbreaking catalog of electronic pop. This album has a spooky, otherworldly quality with it's beeping geiger counters, hissing radio signals, reverberating synth effects and tinny machine percussion. Like all Kraftwerk albums, it has a theme and here it's "the miracle of radio". 1975 seems a little late to be tripping out about such notions, which lends the album a weird retro-futuristic quality, like some fusty artifact discovered in your crazy great-uncle's workshop. Florian, Ralf, Karl, and Wolfgang lay down some darned chilly soundscapes here with electronic music machines that were barely just invented - I can only imagine how foreign and freaky this music must have sounded to people when it came out. Even all these years later, it has still been known to cause extreme reactions.
Abba: Abba
When this album came out, Abba were huge all over the globe, everywhere except the US, where this album reached a meager #174 on the Billboard charts. It saw the Swedish foursome making a blatant attempt to harden up their sound, and while Abba is not exactly known for it's hard rocking, tracks like "Hey, Hey Helen" and "Rock Me" are at least as hardcore as say, Elton John was at this point. "Mamma Mia" and "SOS" are now classics, although most people never make it beyond those songs' presence on Abba Gold. Out of all of the original albums, this has the most variety; they try out reggae on "Tropical Loveland" and torch polka on "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do". Bjorn and Benny had already perfected their full-to-the-brim, high-gloss production methods and Anni-Frid and Agnetha harmonize like only they can, creating that unmistakable, irreproducible Abba sound we love so much. The CD reissue includes THE most insane Abba recording ever, "Medley: Pick a Bale of Cotton/On Top of Old Smokey/Midnight Special". It's never been explained to me why Abba would stitch together a slavery-era relic, a children's standard, and a current pop hit, but if anybody ever accused Abba of being humorless, this proves them way wrong. Aw, Lawdy!
Labels: Abba, Audio Flashback, David Bowie, imeem, Kraftwerk, Music Reviews
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