Programm, Like the Sun EP. Dark and somber yet strangely upbeat in how the rhythms jump and the female vocals seduce. “We Barely Escape” opens with an unearthly sound that starts as an alarm but turns into a modulated Hugo Montenegro-esque melody. The six and a half minute opus “ZeroZeroZero” opens in a slow neo-classical vein that turns into a thoughtful indie-pop soliloquoy and then spirals upward into a vibrant guitar solo, anchored by arch piano chords. Lots of unexpected textures on these four mysterious songs.
Monthly Archives: February 2015
Tuesday the 17th of February
Magic number: 57955
Magic word: spleen
“Chiiiiiiin…” = “Join.” “…Ah” = “Up.”
Playing a New Wave comp on a family road trip. Realizing that for over 30 years, I’ve thought there was a song called “Join Up,” which I’d assumed was some sort of revolutionary rallying cry or maybe a recruitment song. Turns out the band is The Red Rockers and they’re singing “China.” So, not a call to arms. Apparently something about dishes.
Rock Gods #325: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene
What’s up with Mountain Horizon? They change their name, change their style, change into new stage outfits, even grow beards… then drop all the changes and fade back into Mountain Horizon again.
“We had a pal who fancied herself a style consultant, like a personal dresser or something,” chuckle Charles Rimboflé, the band’s heavy-handed organist. “We’re still friends and everything, but she lost interest, and so did we.”
The brief transformation was not without its benefits, however. The band was able to sneak into a club that had previously banned them, and were so popular they’ve been asked back. Also, the outfits and grooming convinced the aunt of rhythm guitarist Pat Hülli that this was a professional combo worth investing in. The generous relative is sponsoring the first Mountain Horizon recording session. “We did tell her we’re not dressing up anymore, and she’s still cool with us. She liked the clothes, she didn’t like the beards. Said we could wear T-shirts as long as we shaved more often.” Rock the dress code!
Tonight: Look! Park had to cancel at the Bullfinch. Last-minute substitute unknown… Wax Fun, What, Lee? and Feed & Seed at Hamilton’s, all doing pretty much the same covers… An Evening With Coolly Dickenson (The “Don’t Call Me a Scumbucket!” comeback tour) at D’ollaire’s…
Riverdale Book Review
Archie Andrews has been marketed as “America’s Typical Teen,” yet it was his quirks and individualized distinctions which allowed him to surpass Wilbur Wilkins, a similarly lovetorn teen who happened to precede Archie in the MLJ comics pantheon by three months, debuting in September 1941 in the 18th issue of Zip Comics. What’s typical about red hair, checkerboard sideburns
Wilbur—who’s blonde and crewcutted, as so many young men appeared to be in the 1940s—is so typical he’s downright dull. Even more annoyingly, there’s a moral quotient to a lot of Wilbur stories that Archie tends to sidestep. Wilbur learns from his mistakes. He regrets hurting the feelings of those he cares for. Archie, on the other hand, is comically oblivious, making the same blunders over and over and not noticing how he’s disappointing friends and family. It’s an extension of his natural clumsiness, making him a full-blown comic character. Wilbur? Wimpy, reliable, self-aware. Typical
For Tomorrow We Shall Die: Diary of a College Chum #295:
All work makes us dull.
Scribblers Music Review
Dolce Désir, Le Couleur. I like dance-pop, but I do not actually like to dance. So I need there to be some cleverness to the non-dance elements of the music in order to catch my ear. The Canadian trio Dolce Désir satisfies this requirement for me with a level of silliness and irony (on such peppy compositions as “Concerto Rock”), not to mention the flowing French lyrics. Another distinction is brevity: none of the five songs on this EP is over four and half minutes, and the percussively precocious “Autovariation #64” clocks in at 2:28.
Monday the 16th of February
Magic number: 73925
Magic word: grasping
Rock Gods #344: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene
Bit Lie wrote “consciousness” when she felt she’d lost hers.
“It was originially an instrumental about the depression I went through when my dad died and my relationship broke up. No boards, you know? Then they came to me, but not all of them were, like, words.”
She won’t write down or otherwise spell out the lyrics, describing some of them as “words destroyed by weeping” and “the sounds of the middle of the night. I kind of make a door slamming noise with my mouth.”
“consciousness” (lower-case “c”—she’ll give us that much) is a slow, slow ballad—drone and pitch plus those mournful sometimes-words.
“It’s a weird song to be known for. I feel better now; otherwise I don’t think I could do it. But there’s always someone at every show who’s living it, right then, and has to share. I’m up for that, but sometimes it’d be nice to be known for, you know, a funny sing-along thing or something.
Tonight: The Ballad of the White Horse at The Bullfinch. One set is “Queen of Seven Swords” in its synth-orch entirety. … A Miscellany of Men at Hamilton’s. Covers, but good ones like “Brave New Family.”… An Evening With Manalive at D’ollaire’s. No original members and they have the nerve to call themselves Manalive…
Riverdale Book Review
SIxty or so years ago, you could have heard the Archie radio series in Connecticut on WELI in New Haven, WNBC in Hartford and WNAB in Bridgeport.That was still the so-called Golden Age of Radio, before TV caught on. The Archie Andrews program debuted at the end of May, 1943 on the NBC Blue network, moved to the Mutual network in 1944 and then back to NBC for another nine seasons, 1945 to 1953. Considering that it ran for a decade, it’s appalling (but not that surprising, given the cavalier treatment of old tapes by their original owners/broadcasters) that only around three dozen episodes seem to still exist. You can find the shows at https://archive.org/details/ArchieAndrews.
Just as the comic book Archie was clearly derivative of literary bad boys such as Tom Sawyer and Penrod, the radio show leaned on existing film and radio awkward-teen archetypes such as Andy Hardy and Henry Aldrich. Unfortunately, the radio forebears didn’t line up clearly with the radio ones. Archie Andrews, too often, was a family sitcom about a family. On many of the extant episodes, there’s way too much of Archie’s father Fred. Fred Andrews tries to take a bath, and keeps getting interrupted by Archie and his friend. Fred Andrews tries to paint a room, and the kids interfere. Fred Andrews has a cold. Etc.
It should be said that the Archie comics had this same problem when they first started. Authority figures were all over the place, defining the teenagers’ place in the world rather than letting them set their own comic boundaries. But within a few years—well before the radio show came along and made the same mistakes—the teens were largely on their own.