Chatting with a PR acquaintance of some renown yesterday, I'm asked, "hey, what's the name mean?"
In the spirit of full disclosure, what you got to your left is a total kickass Hogan-era tag team whose name I shamelessly--or whatever the word for 2/3 of shamelessly is--pinched back in the day.
But anyhow, that question got me to thinking on the ways in which a band's a germ, a project, a collective, a force writ large or small. Without naming names, I feel like a *lot* of the local and national bands I've seen and heard over the last couple of years suffer from a crippling, myopic sense of the outlying world as a captive audience at a third-grade arts and crafts festival. It's really rare I'm struck by a band with its pilot light set on purpose; songs feel offhanded, players are stuck in a costumerie, shows feel like toothless, dumb-pumpkin Halloweens. Everyone's shooting for honorable mention: trying and winning's too effortful; second place feels too much like losing, so you end up with a roomful of folks enjoying their own decision to be in a band--at the great, great length of leisure. This isn't what Brian Wilson had in mind when he wondered how nice things would be; it's everything that's wrong with how easy things are on easy street.
All that said, I'm not saying we win, maybe not very often at all in fact. But in conception, in perception, under the great room light of hope, our ideas are meant as fucking bombs, fiery things that couldn't possibly surface in any other form. Whether we work or not, whether *they* work or not, well, that's not for me to say. But thinking on things, I'm pretty frigging happy with how hard we've been working what we want to work.
And more than that, I'm curious what things you all are listening to these days, what things are jumping like hell through your speakers and headphones, what's feeling absolutely undeniable to you all. Lemme know, and thanks for the indulgence.
7 comments:
again and again the word you all used before "urge" is right on the money. urgency comes through like bombs.
over in this: Miles Bitches Brew and environs. about being alright with what you want/are.
i gotta listen to bitches brew once and for all.
this entry was also to remind the gallery i can write circles around a crey pas point at will...at will, people.
bravo.
funny, on the miles tip, i'm listening to the complete jack johnson sessions, which i got as a birthday gift.
can't say enough good about bitches brew.
also listening to 'no wow' by the kills, which was another b-day gift. wasn't sure i'd like them, but they've got a lot of nice hooks and some good stuff going on with the rumbling fuzz bass/guitar that crackles almost to the point of coming apart.
I've started digging into YouTube for live clips almost as much as I listen to the stuff in my iTunes library.
When it's iTunes, it's mostly been Massive Attack in the past few days.
On YouTube, there are some pretty intense Twilight Singers clips, especially them playing covers of the Gnarls Barkley "Crazy" and "Where did you Sleep Last Night," which reminded me of how good music can be.
Also a few good acoustic J. Mascis clips, and a tremendous amount of old GNR clips from the 80s.
funny, BR, i was thinking of an afghan whigs song on the busride this morning. i never much got into the twilight singers but i'll check those videos out for sure
you should checkout all the road running by mark knopfler and emmylou harris. as you know i'm a big fan of mk, but his last couple albums have been a lot of faffing about. this one, to use the word you very rightly suggest, feels real urgent. plus emmylou is pretty awesome.
Yeah, so I'm a bit late on this, but Astor Piazzolla has been kicking my ass for the last year and a half with his precise, burning, intense sense of purpose. Check out "Rough Dancer and the Cyclical night" or "Tango: Zero Hour." Every goddamn note is like a tracer bullet. These two join Pet Sounds for me on the urgent bombs list.
Also found some OOP disks by Air (the awesome Henry Threadgill trio from the seventies, not the crappy nineties bunch) and man...Again Threadgill's growly notes come off like a manifesto. He's cut out so much of the fat and still managed to say so much in an astonishing variety of contexts.
Roscoe Mitchell and Sahib Shihab also deserve to be here for different reasons. Hearing them play is like sharing a room with thunder.
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