this is not pitchfork

Angry Samoans - Back From Samoa

Back From Samoa clocks in at just under 16 minutes. That’s the whole album. 16 minutes. This whole album takes up less time than an intro to a Dream Theater song.

What can you do in 16 minutes? Hell, I can’t even cook dinner to this album because it’s over before I’ve even burned the chicken. And really, “They Saved Hitler’s Cock” is not the most appetizing music anyhow. Hell, the whole album is a crash course in offensiveness. And everything is played at this blinding speed and sung like a cocktail of espresso and speed was handed out in the studio, and you find yourself laughing at the lyrics and bouncing off the walls and the whole thing is like, well, you ever read those Captain Underpants books? They are stories full of fart jokes and toilet humor for kids, but for some reason teachers and parents still think it’s good literature. Back From Samoa is like Captain Underpants for punk rockers. You listen to it with a Beavis and Butthead grin on your face, but you know that underneath the whole idea of poking your eyes out with a fork, there’s some god damn good music there. It’s killing time! Todd killings!

Guns N’ Roses - Use Your Illusion I and II

[Some people see these as separate albums, some as one double album. Call it what you’d like. I’d prefer to just get these reviews over with in one shot. Also, I understand that my negative opinion of these albums is a minority opinion. Last time I wrote about these albums - and Axl - on an old blog, I got death threats. They were amusing and frightening at the same time]

My history with Axl and company is a long and complicated one. I imagine that most metal fans who hooked on to the early GnR bandwagon followed the same path I did. Think of the seven stages of grief in reverse. From acceptance (Appetite for Destruction = welcome to my record collection) to denial (I swear to you I never owned The Spaghetti Incident), we watched - and in some ways participated in - the slow death of a once great band. But it wasn’t their years of putting out head banging, fist pumping music that was the greatest show. No, it was watching Axl Rose trying in vain to raise the phoenix from the ashes that offered the most jaw dropping, car-wreck kind of entertainment this side of the November Rain video. But that’s another story and another review called Chinese Democracy.

I was looking forward to these albums. It had been about three years since Lies (which did not float my boat the way Appetite did). I think of each new album we wait for from a band we love is like the promise of hot, dirty sex after your partner has been away for a while. Well, my lust for the band kind of faded upon the release of these discs. It was then I realized that GnR was the equivalent of the girl who teases you with her perky breasts for years and when you finally manage to get under the hood, you grab hold of three inches of padded bra. All that music before Use Your Illusion was just a ruse to get us to this point. They gave us the good stuff first so they could later on sit back and make this pretentious, melodramatic drivel that they called art. There was nothing left to them. Empty D cups.

From the Harlequin romance of November Rain to trying-too-hard Civil War, the Illusion albums left me feeling frustrated and unfulfilled, which is not an easy thing to do when there are 30 songs to choose from. Bottom line is, my relationship with GnR boils down to a fabulous one night stand with Appetite, and a lot of too-drunk-to-fuck booty calls after that.

Aztec Camera - High Land Hard Rain

It’s 1983. I’m sitting in the basement of my boyfriend’s house in the middle of winter. There’s a huge storm going on outside and we’ve got blankets and pillows and High Land, Hard Rain on the stereo as we watch the snow swirl around under the streetlights.

I wanted to memorize the moment because it was just so perfect. And, at the wise old age of 20, I thought the perfection would remain, that every night would be like that, that I’d found everlasting happiness. There was so much comfort and warmth in those blankets and Roddy Frame’s voice was the perfect backdrop to all of it.

It’s so easy to think things are wonderful when you have no idea what’s coming next. When there’s calming melodies and soothing rhythms enveloping you and the mood is set in a way that lets you forget how much angst and anxiety is buried in your soul, it’s so easy to call it perfection.

Listening to this album now, I think if i knew then what I know now, if I knew that so many years later This Boy Wonders would bring a rueful smile to my face - I’d still enjoy the heck out of the album, even the moment, however fleeting.

I love that I can still enjoy Walk Out to Winter without feeling any kind of remorse or regret over the memories it brings up. Unlike other albums that remind me of less stellar times in my life, there’s such a quaint sweetness to this that makes me remember the warmth and forgive the cold that came after.

High Land, Hard Rain is full of words that sound like movie dialogue spoken every so quietly by some wispy haired boy brandishing a broken heart, a thousand secrets and a gun. Yet those words somehow make you smile wistfully, as if we’re all privy to some intimate memory he’s about to shoot down.

Insane Clown Posse - The Amazing Jeckel Brothers

Another CD skeleton in my closet (see, Vanilla Ice). This happens to the best of us; music winds up in our collection and we have no recollection of ever purchasing it. I even checked the CD to see if it said “promo copy” on it, hoping that it was given to me for free and that would be my excuse. But no, I have no idea why I have this. I was an adult when this album came out, I can’t even blame it on the follies of youth. Maybe I can blame my ex. But I have promised to review every album I own, and here this is, staring me in the face like 70 minutes of pure guilt.

What I know about the Insane Clown Posse is their fans are called juggalos, which makes me think of, I don’t know, thugs dressed in clown outfits juggling cans of Faygo. I know (after extensive research) that they believe in MMFCL- Much motha fuckin clown love and, well, I’m not down with the clown love. I know they have conventions and they wear makeup that makes them look like a cross between some WWF wrestler and Tammy Faye Baker. And they bring their kids to these conventions - I know this because I once saw a clip of a two year old singing Fuck the World - and you may think that couples who name their babies Adolph and live in white supremacist enclaves are what’s wrong with the world, but after researching juggalos, I beg to differ.

But here it is. Here is this CD in my collection, shelved right between KISS Alive and Slipknot’s first album and I wonder if maybe I don’t have some deep seated fetish for rock bands dressed in makeup and masks, which has some underlying meaning in regards to my fear of clowns.

Oh, wait. See, there is a reason I have this. It’s the guest appearance by Ol Dirty Bastard on Bitches. Another mystery of my music collection solved. ODB makes everything ok.

The Von Bondies - Pawn Shoppe Heart

We picked up this CD at Amoeba Music in San Francisco on a whim when we needed something for the drive back to Sacramento. We ended up listening to nothing but Pawn Shoppe Heart for the rest of our time in the car on that trip, and it’s been in constant rotation ever since.

If I had to describe this album to someone who never heard it before, I would say - imagine if Danzig and Sleater Kinney morphed into one band. Well, that was my first reaction. It’s a bit garage punk, a bit punk, a lot of blues and pure rock and roll, in the vein of MC5. I love that they switch between male and female singing; it makes the album feel continuously fresh, no matter how many times you play it.

Pawn Shoppe Heart will forever remind me of driving around the streets of Sacramento, windows down, sun shining. It’s a good enough reason in and of itself to enjoy the album; that’s it’s filled with kick ass songs gives me reason to love it.

The Doors - S/T

I still own every Doors album in some form or other, so it’s best to just start at the beginning with them.

I was, at one point in my wayward youth, the Biggest Doors Fan Ever. I have since come to terms with the fact that Jim Morrison really didn’t speak to me from the poster on my wall. You can see how I was easily swayed into believing so, though. There he was, in glorious black and white, shirtless, arms outstretched like a scarecrow martyr. His eyes followed me around the room. He used to tell me things, whisper to me in the dead of night when the only light in the room was from the red-tinted bulb that pointed towards my Morrison shrine. When Jim whispered, he said things like You cannot petition the lord with prayer!

I was probably about 14 when my fascination with the Doors began, and it started with this album and one song in particular. Yes. The End.

Now, I’m not denying that the Doors put out some decent music and that Morrison wrote some interesting lyrics, but when you look at this stuff from the distance of 30 years or so, you wonder what life may have been like without the drugs. Well, I do.

The End is probably the most quoted Doors song of all time. It’s quoted by pretentious potheads who think they are being deep and meaningful; by retro beatnik poets who carry tattered paperback copies of On the Road in the back pocket of their faded jeans; by psuedo-intellectuals who claim that Adlous Huxley’s Doors of Perception is the single greatest thing ever written by man; and by despondent, razor-weilding, confused, emotional teenagers who think they have this connection with Morrison, a connection with the sixties, man and hey, the blue bus is calling us.

Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake…he’s old, and his skin is cold

Do you know that otherwise intelligent people have spent entire weekends drinking vodka and deciphering those very lyrics? Here’s a news flash: It’s nonsense. No matter what you want to believe, no matter how allegorical and deep you think those words are, no matter how much Freud you studied or Smirnoffs you drank, those words are the magnetic poetry of the Age of Aquarius.

I’m not saying the Doors sucked in general. I was a big fan and I still dust off the albums once in a while. But if you’re over 18 and not hindered by drug addiction or alcoholism that may cloud your thinking and you still believe these words are the most powerful thing you ever heard, you might want to rethink your life path.

On a side note, I spent about 200 hours of my life watching a Doors cover band play in shitty clubs. The very same cover band the Dead Milkmen mocked in the opening to Bitchin’ Camaro.

It sucks when the haze of youth clears away and you realize your idols were nothing more than phonies. You hear that, Jonas Brothers fan?

Pixies - Doolittle

I picked this album up because I was still in love with the previous year’s Surfer Rosa, specifically the song Cactus. Surfer Rosa was sparse and experimental in a Steve Albini kind of way. So Doolittle was like being fed a giant, seven layer cake when you were expecting a cookie. It was full and enormous and swallowed me up.

I had to listen to it a couple of times the first day I bought it. I had to let my expectations born of Surfer Rosa go and enjoy Doolittle for what it was. And I did. From that hooky little bass line that opens Debaser, that relentlessness of Wave of Mutilation, all the way through to the end, Doolittle felt like a 15 song long party, with Frank Black and Kim Deal serving mind altering drinks.

Even though a lot of the subject matter is dark, Doolittle still feels sort of light and airy. Definitely more accessible than Surfer, but that’s relatively speaking. While Doolittle is at times catchy and melodic (especially Here Comes Your Man), it’s not pop music. It’s not even rock and roll. I don’t know what it is. It’s like a sonic wall of sound that throws so much at you, so many different voices and meanings and emotions and sounds, but all combined it’s like an awesome blend of derangement and sensibility that stays in your head forever.

Nomeansno - Why Do They Call Me Mr. Happy?

There’s so much going on with this band. There’s heavy doses of funky jazz and funky doses of heavy metal. There’s weird timing changes, jagged rhythms and lyrics that seemed to have been penned by someone who has traveled through Dante’s circles of hell while on acid.

I’m not gonna lie; this is some weird shit. It’s an acquired taste. This is not an album to listen to casually in the car or while doing some other work. Maybe later on, after you’ve studied it and buried yourself in it and picked up every single nuance within. But your first couple of listens? Devote yourself to it. Just you and this album. In the dark. With headphones. Turn off the rest of your life and submerge yourself in the music and words. You need to become one with this. And here’s the thing about this album: you either get it or you don’t. There’s no in between. Either your mind completely rejects it or your soul clings to every note.

So, why do they call me Mr. Happy? Takes you the whole album to find out the answer to that. And it’s worth the trip to get to that point. It’s like you are on a boat, no, a ship, a huge ship that’s out in the middle of vast, churning, dark waters. Think Poseidon Adventure. Not Titanic. Leonardo DiCaprio has no place here. No, we’re talking Ernest Borgnine and Richard Dawson as your captains. And you’re Mr. Happy. The ship starts rocking. The ocean rises and falls, rises and falls, and one minute you’re partying, thinking you’re on top of the world and then it all crashes and you’re upside down and everything has gone to hell and you wonder if the devil has boarded this ship and is just having some fun with you. Your life flashes before your eyes and every dark secret spills forth, every ounce of bleak emotion you ever experienced - all the sadness, depression, despair, regret, hatred, fear - surrounds you like dark water but you push through all that, come up for air, fight off flying glass and fire and zombies eating human flesh and screaming people yelling at you to save them and you just kick all that out of the way, because you can. You can. You get to the end, you see the light and you’re standing on the deck and breathing in fresh air and that little kid is there and asks you : Why do they call me Mr. Happy?

Because. I’m. So. Fucking. Smart.

Pantera - Vulgar Display of Power

There are gonna be times in your life when you feel like kicking someone in the face with a steel toed boot. There are going to be days at work that could drive you to murder, road rage incidents that make you feel like you could overturn a Hummer with one flick of your wrist, arguments with a significant other that make you want to eat someone’s soul.

That’s what this album is for. Mouth For War, Walk, Fucking Hostile, This Love. Vulgar Display is about 50 minutes of pent up anger, frustration, hurt and rage ready to be unleashed by just pressing play. You put this on when no one is home, with the curtains closed and the door locked and the stereo cranked to 11. You play air guitar, you kick the couch, you scream til your throat is raw, you jump off the couch and use a broom as a mic stand and you purge yourself of every ounce of hatred that entered your soul in the past week. It’s an exorcism. It’s a cleansing.

Sure it was so much easier to jump around like that when you were younger. And maybe the hate came easier and the anger was closer to the surface. And maybe saying RE-SPECT. WALK. doesn’t carry the same authority it did when you were young and drunk and hanging your car window*. But it still feels damn good, doesn’t it?

*That was my sister, not me. I was 30 when this album came out. Already too old to hang out the car window. But I was driving.

The Kinks - Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)

Do you know how many great songs this band had? It’s really a shame that so few people mention them when making lists of the greatest rock bands of all time. Look over their catalog, they tried a little of everything; fast, hard, mellow, groovy, conceptual - and almost all of it worked. They were really a brilliant band whose work spanned almost 20 years before I started to wish that they would stop.

The most well known song on this album, Victoria, is everything that was great about 60′s music, with none of the bullshit. It’s groovy and funky and it’s got great harmonizing laid over some cool rock and roll.

I had this awesome babysitter back in the early 70’s. Linda let us watch horror movies and made us pancakes for dinner and she always brought her records over and made me listen to them. She talked about the songs as if she was teaching my the meaning of life, and maybe she was. One night she played this album for me and I was so completely taken with Mr. Churchill Says that I decided right then and there that when I was a little bit older I would form a band and I’d be the songwriter and I would write an awesome song like that and one day some girl would be babysitting and play my album for the kids and they’d hear my awesome Kinks-like song and they’d be inspired to……well, you know how that goes. I set my standards for myself way too high. Very few people write songs like Ray Davies.