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Awesome Love video
Love performing “Alone Again Or” and “A House Is Not A Motel,” the first two tracks from their classic 1967 album Forever Changes. The only original member in this clip is lead singer Arthur Lee, who succumbed to leukemia in 2006. He’s being backed by Baby Lemonade, a neo-psychedelic band from LA.
Filed under: psychedelic | Leave a Comment
Tags: arthur lee, love
Pyramids – Pyramids (2008)
This music sounds like it was made by ghosts.
I tagged it as “post-rock,” but honestly they don’t sound like anything I’ve heard before. Tracks 8 and 9, “Ghost” and “Monks,” sound like black metal made by My Bloody Valentine. You just have to hear this.
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Tags: ghosts, hydra head, post-rock, pyramids
Book recommendation
I just finished The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. It’s pretty much essential for anyone interested in avant-garde music. There’s a lot of musical analysis, but also a lot of awesome stories about the composers. Who knew that Philip Glass and Steve Reich used to run a moving company together? Or that Schoenberg used to have regular tennis matches with Charlie Chaplin?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
In The Book of Angels, composer/saxophonist John Zorn combines genres as diverse as klezmer, thrash metal, reggae and jazz without sounding forced or gimmicky. Performed by the multi-instrumentalist Koby Israelite and his ensemble.
Filed under: world | Leave a Comment
Tags: john zorn, klezmer, tzadik
The Thing – Action Jazz (2006)
A free jazz cover of a Lightning Bolt song!!??? No, you haven’t died and gone to hipster heaven. You’re just listening to Scandinavian jazz trio The Thing!
There’s honestly nothing I don’t like about this album.
Filed under: jazz | 3 Comments
Tags: free jazz, jazz
Infectious pop melodies + math-rock rhythms + psychedelic noize + shredding = endless rainbows of sound!
Features Zach Hill from Hella on drums.
Filed under: math rock | 7 Comments
Sometimes I try to picture the meeting that took place when the French black metal band Merrimack came up with their name.
“We must come up wiz ze most metal name in ze world!”
“Ah, zere is a beautiful river zat runs between Massachusetts and Nouvelle-Hampshire in Amerique! Eet iz called “le Merrimack.” Henry David Thoreau wrote about eet in his 1849 classic A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.”
“Zat… eez so… fucking… metal.”
So New Englanders like myself might be puzzled at their absurdly un-metal name, but this sure as hell ain’t the soundtrack for a leisurely walk along Crane’s Beach. Black metal, a genre that originated in Norway, isn’t pretty stuff. Guitarists hammer out atonal riffs using a rapid style called tremolo picking (think of Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” with all the joy sucked out of it), the drums are as fast and hard as they can be without ripping a hole in the space-time continuum and the singers sound like they gargle rat poison for breakfast. Oh, and the bands tend to look like this:
(That’s Darkthrone, one of the original Norwegian black metal bands. And I know what you’re thinking: yes, that picture is from ratemycorpsepaint.com!)
Well, I hope you enjoy Merrimack, or at least their gloriously pretentious song titles. “Descension From Life (Of Spiritual Discipline And Metaphysical Gravity)”, anyone?
Filed under: black metal | Leave a Comment
Tags: black metal, metal
The best song ever
I swear to Lou Reed, Ray Davies and Patti Smith, the song offered for download below is the pinnacle of all music. EVER!
It came on a compilation of ethnic choirs that I got from my town’s library. (You have to wade through a lot of Barbara Streisand and Kenny G, but you can occasionally find some real gems at the library.)
It’s from Azerbaijan, a country I’m not sure I’d even heard of before I heard the song, but now I totally want to go there (in the hopes that all their music sounds like this).
Holy shit, this song is so good!
Filed under: world | Leave a Comment
Did you ever wonder what Pavement would sound like if they were a Captain Beefheart tribute band fronted by a Fun House-era Iggy Pop?
Well this album is the answer.
(And Jim O’Rourke produced it!)
Filed under: math rock | Leave a Comment
Tags: captain beefheart, jim o'rourke
Entertainment! is definitely one of my all-time favorite albums. Its lyrics are cerebral and political, but the music is still funky and punky enough to get even the most hardcore Thatcherite shakin’ their booty on the dancefloor!
There isn’t a note here that seems misplaced or unnecessary. The music has such an incredible sense of space. It’s clearly well-thought out and organized, but Gang of Four don’t come off as sounding cold or clinical. They have as much passion as the punk scene which spawned them.
Filed under: post-punk | 1 Comment
Tags: post-punk
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