What is spinning?

[Davey]

No idea what any of that means in the picture, but I still find it oddly intriguing ...

[Rae]

Lots of Cul de Sac too, those 90s records from Ecim through Crashes to Light all are great, both music and sound wise, though China Gate may be the real standout overall musically. Hard to say, the one with John Fahey is pretty cool too, not something you would necessarily expect to work so well.

iirc the story about the Cul de Sac guys finally getting to work with John Fahey was pretty heartbreaking. Maybe that's already been discussed here. I can't remember the details offhand but I guess he was not just an asshole but really managed to get inside their heads and totally dismantle them, just a crushing experience.

I'd kinda forgotten about them but I think I need to revisit their catalog. I got the chance to see them once with Damo Suzuki from Can in a real small room, that was a special experience. I wonder if they ever recorded any of the stuff that they were doing with him?

~Rae

[Davey]

iirc the story about the Cul de Sac guys finally getting to work with John Fahey was pretty heartbreaking. Maybe that's already been discussed here. I can't remember the details offhand but I guess he was not just an asshole but really managed to get inside their heads and totally dismantle them, just a crushing experience.

I'd kinda forgotten about them but I think I need to revisit their catalog. I got the chance to see them once with Damo Suzuki from Can in a real small room, that was a special experience. I wonder if they ever recorded any of the stuff that they were doing with him?

~Rae

They do have a live album with Damo, and I do actually have it on my computer (2 CD set from 2004) - think I have all their stuff now but haven't become familiar with some of the later ones yet. The liner notes has the tour schedule and lists the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis on 5/11/2002. Listening now for the first time and this is a pretty amazing... but kinda crazy recording. Must've been quite a night!

But if you want to sample some Cul de Sac, I'd probably recommend going all the way back to their debut, ECIM. It does have one reworking of a Fahey tune (which is linked on my SotD page), and has some occasional vocals, overall very nice record, and I think it was available on UK vinyl way back then in 1991. Just a little indie here in the US, and you know how quickly some of them came and went in the 90s, sometimes folded after one release, so it spent a long time oop until their current label reissued/remastered it a few years ago. Couple 3 extra songs, and a bit louder of course, but sounds pretty good. I only have a mp3 of the original, but am still looking for a good physical copy. Like I said above, just something more honest about those earlier masters, almost always are the ones to have.

The Epiphany of Glenn Jones has a lot of very cool music, really spacey, more electronics that I expected is what I was referring to in my other post (not the friction), almost like Kraftwerk at times. Glenn does go into all the details in the liner notes, and it did go really badly ... up to a point, but it turned out OK in the end. He just had to make some big adjustments, and the rest of the band as well, but mostly Glenn cause it was he who idolized Fahey, and it was his plan that Fahey refused to follow.

I remember reading some interview with Fahey, can't remember when or where now, but Jim O'Rourke and David Grubbs, aka Gastr del Sol, had covered Fahey's "Dry Bones in the Valley" on Upgrade & Afterlife, and very well too with some future nods to O'Rourke's later Bad Timing and Eureka records, and maybe they'd done some shows together, and O'Rourke might've been scheduled to work with him or produce him or something, and he'd probably done the Cul de Sac record then, but he was really candid in his feelings about Jim and David, and some of his newfound indie rock idolatry. I think he was a little confused about who was who, but said one of them was pretty lacking in talent. Funny guy. Not sure he was really as bad as you make him out, and that experience didn't kill Cul de Sac. But it was probably worse than what Glenn lets on in the notes, and he still makes it sound pretty bad. Edit: And if you click on the link at the bottom of the page below, there's some more nasty stuff that didn't make the liner notes

The Fahey Files - John Fahey - Liner Notes - The Epiphany of Glenn Jones

[jonnyhambone]

kinda proggy- metal lately...



Helms Alee - Night Terrors and Weatherhead : really great metal-leanings with male/female harmonies and art-punk atmospherics. One of my favorite new things I've heard lately. + the production/technical/SQ is all excellent! The guitarist builds these as his 'day job'...beautiful amps!



Grails - Deep Politics such a great album! has their trademark post-rock instrumental stuff going on but takes it a bit further and is more personal feeling - where some of their other earlier recordings were technically awesome yet generic - very cool and good - but a bit generic after a few spins. This one has some of the nuanced elements of Beck's Sea Change album but spun in a heavier, more lysergic-drenched world.

[Rae]

Ooh, I'ma check out that Deep Politics. Redlight got a lot of plays from me back in the day.


Wooden Shjips - s/t - Bought a ticket to see these guys in Chicago in November!


Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky - Saw Gira & co in concert in Minneapolis this past week. So so punishing.


Starfuckers - Brodo di Cagne EP - Italian abrasive psych


Birdmen of Alkatraz - Glidden' Off EP


Fabulous Diamonds - ii


Bill Orcutt - How the Thing Sings - Ex-Harry Pussy old man guitar acoustic freakout


Lungfish - The Unanimous Hour


Jens Lekman - An Argument With Myself EP - Just came out this week, I think. I need a few more listens to see if anything becomes as woven in the fabric of my sensibility as some of the stuff on his earlier records, but it doesn't sound disappointing. His creative trajectory is only further cementing him in my mind as Jonathan Richman's obvious spiritual heir.


Oaks - orange tape - Maybe I'll start a new thread about this one in the next couple of days


Cave - Neverendless

~Rae

[nobody]

New Order: Power, Corruption & Lies

My favorite New Order record by far. Great blend of pretty melodies, electronic dance beats and moody bass lines. I am still pretty much of the opinion that they did a lot of good stuff and the later albums are fine and all, but just get this and Substance and you've got all the New Order you need. Maybe toss in Technique. Always amazed how Joy Division could crash and burn and this rose from the grave.

[nobody]

Tom Waits: Swordfishtrombones

My favorite Tom Waits album. I'm not sure it is possible to make a better record.

[dakatabg]

[Stone]

I should have sent you my copy instead of giving it to Goodwill.

[dakatabg]

Well I already got one

[Rae]

Oh man, I love both those Springsteen and that Tom Waits record. Three popular records that I unabashedly adore.

~Rae

[Rae]

John Cage / Luciano Berio / İlhan Mimaroğlu - Electronic Music

Felt really overwhelmed with stress today and put this on the turntable. Helped to somehow externalize the chaos.

~Rae

[nobody]

Alton Ellis: Collectorama - The Story of Mister Soul

Like the title says, a great collection of soulful tracks by the rocksteady legend. I haven't really dug into enough different compilations to say if this particular French collection is much better or worse than other available, but it's got all his most famous songs and then some and is a great listen.

[noddin0ff]

This may be the longest this thread has gone with out a post. Certainly, the jazz has relocated to Rabbithole but still, this silence is kind a sad. Snif.

I wasn’t listening to much lately but started up again. Here’s what I’ve been spinning.


Howe Gelb & A Band of Gypsies: Alegrias
I’m finding this an oddly satisfying album. I’m just drawn to it for reasons I can’t put my finger on. I was about to type that Howe Gelb was new to me but then did my due diligence and see Slosh slipped in a Giant Sand track in a 2008 compilation. Anyway, consider and amalgam of Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, & Bill Callaghan with the tired giggles deciding to free associate some melodies over a Spanish gypsie band. It’s good, but not the obvious kind of good.



lamb : 5
“Folktronic?” I saw a comment on this album that said is was Portishead for people who were afraid of the dark. Not wrong, but not fair. I think there’s some simply beauty here to make it on its own merits. Been sampling this one. I see Amazon has it as a $30 import. That’s more than it’s worth to me. I’d bite for $9.99. Easy to digest, indie folktronic.



Feist: Metals
I like it. I apparently missed previous Feist altogether. A bit uneven but enjoyable. I think it does better in it’s spare and fragile moments.



Richmond Fontaine: The High Country
First spin in progress on this one. Alt-country. Really interesting. I think this one will grow well on my. Spare and honest. Has some ambient conversations throughout which probably suggests a concept album story going on. I tend to like that and it sounds like it’s pulled off decently here. Time will tell. Really good sounds.



Tom Waits: Glitter and Doom
Not from 2011. Actually I’m only listening to Disk 2, which is a 35 minute disk of the live banter, shaggy dog jokes and stories he tells between songs. Just strung together smoothly, one after the other. On first listen it can take a while before you think, “Hey, when’s he going to sing?”. It’s really therapeutic to listen to and probably better than disk 1, which is the music.

[nobody]

Saw that tour and it was fantastic. Amazing thing to me about that tour would be that if you asked me beforehand to name the ten songs I most would have wanted to hear him play, he probably didn't play any of them yet I still walked out more than satisfied.

And ss long as we're back to Tom Waits, I spent some time with this:


Tom Waits: Bad As Me

Maybe not a quintessential Waits album but a damn good one. I like this much better than Real Gone, his last album of new material. It starts out frantically with the opening track flying past your ears before you're ready for it but it settles in nicely in short order. He's left behind the clinging and clanging of some of his more recent albums for the most part (although is does crop up from time to time) but a lot of this terrain is familiar, hazy ...sad eyed ballads and caustic uptempo numbers that fuse everything from raucous blues to sultry jazz to carnival noise and everything in between. Not one of his reinvention albums, more of a honing the sounds he's been crafting over the years, maybe letting a bit more of his older styles blend in this time rather than leaving the old troubadour behind. I'll definitely need to keep listening to this for a while.

[noddin0ff]

I don't really get out to shows, which is a shame. Tom would be one that would be likely to drag me out to one though. I can only imagine its a fun experience

I'm really looking forward to getting this one. I see it on some of the sites but will be putting in my order for hard copy soon.

I see it streaming on NPR as of today.

[poppachubby]

[noddin0ff]

^^ That cover would've been great to frame and hang in the dorm room... or the man cave now if I was 'allowed' to have one. heh heh.

What with the turn to post-fall weather and threat of snow tonight, Halloween just around the bend and a great new Tom Waits album (as per above), I'm starting on a Waits bender today. I could write something about them, but whatever I could come up with wouldn't be as entertaining as what Pitchfork (2002) ran with. If you'll forgive the long copy/paste...


Tom Waits: Alice


Tom Waits: Blood Money



"The abundance of elder tunesmiths keeping it real is enough to make a youngster want to move to an assisted-living community in Florida, get his hobble on, and stand behind a screen door in a cardigan yelling, "It's my soccer ball now!" Let's check the oldometer's current readings:

Badass: Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Elvis Costello
Still Kind of Mildly Half-Cool, In a Way: David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Neil Young, Robert Pollard, Jagger/Richards
Why, Why Did You Duet with Rob Thomas and Kid Rock?: Willie Nelson
Hack/Dork: Paul McCartney
McCartney almost single-handedly stinks up the whole batch. If only Tom Waits had been given a seat and a microphone beside all those painkiller-and-vitamin-goofy ex-jock anchors at the Super Bowl halftime show, Waits could have responded to McCartney's "Wouldn't it be great if, in these patriotic times, the Patriots won?" blather by howling-- as he does on one of his two new albums-- "Who gives a good goddamn?!" In fact, Waits' new platters offer three rejoinders to "Freedom," McCartney's banal attempt at a post-millennial moment-defining anthem: "Misery Is the River of the World," "Everything Goes to Hell," and "We're All Mad Here."

Tom Waits has been milking the concept of the ramshackle apocalyptic carnival for twenty years now, flaunting a keen otherworldly nostalgia and a preoccupation with freaks that transcends the hell out of Harmony Korine's. In the 80s-- when everything was measured in 'oodles' and forecasts didn't include a 30% chance of terrorism-- Waits rescued himself from his role as a clever lounge slouch by going real weird right about the time he hitched himself to Kathleen Brennan, whose influence has grown with each release (she co-wrote and co-produced both new albums). Back then, fans of the old Waits cried "Yoko!" but let's face it: that barroom-sage thing was getting pretty half-hearted. It's difficult not to hear the new song "Coney Island Baby" as an ode to Brennan, the psycho-circus muse: "Every night she comes/ To take me out to Dreamland."

Both of Waits' new discs are their own concept albums, and both are collections of sick Germanic showtunes resulting from overseas theatrical collaborations with Robert Wilson (the man infamous for staging Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach, and with whom Waits made The Black Rider). Both albums' subjects are headline-fodder: Alice deals with (ahem) (cough) intergenerational desire (reportedly based on Lewis Carroll and the famous little girl whose hand he would squeeze during their walks), while Blood Money (written to accompany the play Woycek) hazards the realm of psychopharmacology via its tale of old-world medical mind-tampering. Waits makes his woebegone statements about the muck of modern life artfully and metaphorically, avoiding the overt outrage that leisure-class sophistos would label tedious.

These albums function in Waits' discography the way the film The Man Who Wasn't There fits into the Coen oeuvre: they are self-homages, full of superceding revisitations, that hone rather than advance. The exotica of Swordfishtrombones, the arch storytelling of Rain Dogs, and the better elements of the hit-and-miss Mule Variations are fully realized here, sustained for 91 cohesively transportative minutes of convoluted waltzes and marches. At one point, Waits even plinks the piano bit from "Innocent When You Dream" with a winking brio that whispers, "Ain't I fun?" Blood Money's clomp-and-stomp and Alice's musty ether represent the osteoporosis of Bone Machine and the senile dementia of The Black Rider, allowed to blossom into terminal malaise.

Both albums are further testament that Waits' inner cryptkeeper is getting sharper, combining disparate instruments with calamitous precision and conjuring worlds in which celebrities are born without bodies and razors 'find' throats. The music is so expressive and confident in its spook-ass vibe that it's flat-out cinematic. The instrumentals serve as aural Rorsharchs (the gorgeous violin of "Fawn" made me see bugs mating-- now you try!) and Waits' voice is warmly recorded on each of the pump-organ-and-stand-up-bass dirges, some of which seem to channel the balcony-leaping spirit of a heroin-shriveled Chet Baker.

The guitar of "Starving in the Belly of a Whale" sounds like an animatronic parasite prancing on your spine. "Lost in the Harbour" captures the creaky havoc of metal bending to the sea. "Lullaby" is a perfect nugget of twilight insecurity, and the nightmare cartoon of "Kommienezuspadt" begs for a club mix. Every syllable of "God's Away on Business" is a seizure, with the Ben-Hur slaveship-rowing coach pumping the tempo to ramming speed. Those of you who first heard Tom Waits, as I did-- that is, over lasagna at the house of a junior-high teacher with a skin disease who was trying to seduce you-- will relish the albums' creepy love songs. They shine a morbid light on how most love-pop reduces the world to a consuming need for one magical person, and how often it's a bum swap: the Alice of Alice brings its protagonist an ounce of redemption and a ton of ruin.

Okay, so you might find the voices silly (there's Ancient-Mariner-on-a-bender, post-pubescent Grover, Golem-in-a-tux, and Gungan Boss Hogg). Okay, so this is the first group of Waits songs where the ingredients seem so familiar that listeners feel empowered enough to try to guess the recipe and write their very own Tom Waits Song (I'm talking to you, Joe Henry). Okay, so a moratorium should be imposed on the kiss/bliss rhyme. Okay, so some of the recombinatory stunts of The Man Who Wasn't There felt autopiloted and didn't satisfy as much as the first time you encountered them. Okay, so Anti's copy editor should have to rescue rabbits from cosmetics testing labs to atone for how badly they transcribed and jumbled the lyrics in the booklet. (What gives? I bet Epitaph has a brigade of undergrad interns that sort out each apostrophe in Bad Religion liner notes.)

Still, you should be ashamed you bought that Cursive, or Pedro the Lion, or Ladytron CD, and get these. Synth-pooh and guitar-flarney doesn't have jack on calliopes, marimbas, chamberlains, cellos, and tubas, all of it in classily surreal packaging that screams "F_ck the Grammys." While the rest of pop culture infantilizes itself with cussing puppets and manufactured bands who willfully dangle like marionettes, Waits is serving up vintage brittle fusion and somehow breaking the law of diminishing returns. Something wicked this way hams, and it ain't afraid to be misanthropic and admit that humans are just monkeys trained to parallel park. Come on, you Disney puds, it's time to let Waits and David Lynch do Kafka's Metamorphosis as a musical."

[Stone]

I took some shots on another board for calling this a highly overrated steaming pile, so I won't do that here.

[Rae]

And yet you're still spinning it...?

Today, all I want to do is listen to this all day:



~Rae

[Stone]

And yet you're still spinning it...?

Today, all I want to do is listen to this all day:



~Rae

Nope. Spun it once all the way through. Never again (hopefully).

Is that the self-titled OMD? I think my copy is orange.

[Rae]

I'm totally dizzy for this album right now (not coincidentally because of some real-life giddiness that occurred while I heard it for the first time earlier this week). OMD was always a band that I never gave a chance to because I assumed I wouldn't like them but I was dead wrong. This album is stellar from start to finish.

[s]It actually surprises me quite a bit that this isn't yr thing, buddy. How long ago was that spin?[/s]

Oh, I misunderstood what you were referring to. You meant the Soft Machine and not the OMD, right? I just read too quickly.

Oh, and I think that's the German cover or something. Whatever, it's what was on the copy I was listening to.

~Rae

[nobody]

It's an all Raveonettes day for me today...







And as long as on the subject, I must once again pledge my undying love and devotion to Ms Foo. Still not sure why she's not returning my phone calls.

[Slosh]

Original CD release:

[Rae]

~Rae