Postmodern Accident

The Legendary Pink Blog: Chemical Playschool Volumes 3 & 4

2010-11-13T11:36:00.009-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, and welcome to the ongoing Legendary Pink Blog.

Pardon me as I've been taking a short break from this evolving documentary; I've got a long way to go and need to make sure not to burn out.

This next entry is an absolute beast to conquer... maybe even a basilisk! This is because my ongoing examination of the music of the Legendary Pink Dots has led us to one of the cornerstones of the band's earliest years; it is essentially the end-all, be-all of their cassette efforts and one of the band's most treasured accomplishments. I can't describe it any better than Edward Ka-Spel does here, from the liner notes of the 1998 CD edition:

"Unlike Chemical Playschool 1+2 which was a simple 'best of' the first year of The Legendary Pink Dots, Volumes 3 and 4 was a special, utterly private project. It first saw the light of day as a double C90 cassette project on The Dots' own Mirrordot label. Released in 1983, the idea was to make just 83 copies available through the mail each with hand-made covers. The demand surprised the band, some people ordered 5 or 10 copies at once, and in typical Dots' fashion they simply lost count of how many were made at one point. It is estimated that around 110 were created from this initial edition. Since then the double cassette has been re-issued 4 times, always on cassette-only and licensed to both Staalplaat and Germany's Jarmusic. However, it's a few years since this work was generally available and The Dots' felt it was high time to reissue it on CD. Both volumes have been abridged a little to fit the music into the digital format and some work went in to making the sound clearer. Perhaps it's lo-fi, but it was recorded with loving care on very primitive equipment. In fact The Pink Dots themselves considered CP3/4 to be the pinnacle of their creations for around 5 years. We still feel very close to it now... light a candle when you listen to it."

Chemical Playschool Volumes 3 & 4

The Light (In My Little Girl's Eyes)

The Top

Neon Gladiators (Version One)

Obsession

Hideous Strength

The Waiting Game

Curse (The Sequel)

She Said

BLUEPRINT FOR THE TOWER

Film of the Book

Tower 1 (Version One)

Lullaby for Charles' Brother

Collapse

Tower 2

Glad He Ate Her

Barbed Obituary

Tower 3

Expresso Curfew

Surprise Surprise

The Bride Wore Green

When the Clock Strikes 13

Just Passing Over, Lovey...

Premonition 10 (Stages I/II/III)

THE APOCALYPSE DISCO

Grind

Choke

The Plasma Twins

Apocalypse Soon

Apocalypse Gone

Cherry Lipstick

It's Raining... Again

The Glory, The Glory

For me, this release represents a landmark transition in the band's development and it crosses that threshold between (a) the somewhat amateurish band that produced an overwhelming amount of varied material, not all of it good, just to see what would stick, and (b) a fully formed band that knew what they wanted to do, with a challenging edge and a gift for nuance and restraint. Beginning in 1984, the Dots would grow up. The progressive and avant-garde elements of their music would take a major step forward. The albums would become of greater interest to an international audience and fans of dark, experimental music. The
"industrial" aspect to their sound would come to the fore. After all, by 1984 the band was only about four years away from having their LPs available in suburban American malls, and that momentum was about to begin. But first, there is Chemical Playschool Volumes 3 & 4, the Dots' own love letter to their newly honed sound and a brilliant representation of how refined and sophisticated they had become in just a few short years.

Reviewing the artistic achievement of this release in chronology before the next two official Dots LPs is going to prove difficult, as much of what makes those releases work is first assembled here, but for the sake of this blog I will just have to treat each of these releases with a fresh ear as if I haven't come to them with a greater knowledge already. My goal is to put each release in the context of what came immediately before, not what immediately follows, and I apologize for occasionally neglecting this approach.

A LOT MORE TO COME...

Chemical Playschool Volumes 3 & 4 CD tray card (above) and discs (below)

GO FORWARD to Faces in the Fire ----->
<----- GO BACKWARD to Basilisk

The Legendary Pink Blog: Basilisk

2010-11-10T20:41:00.019-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, and welcome to the ongoing Legendary Pink Blog.

"SING WHILE YOU MAY!" Are you having fun? I'm having a blast. Reevaluating the catalog of the Legendary Pink Dots after so many years is allowing me to discover parts of songs, complete tracks, or even entire albums to which I never paid enough attention. Not least of these releases is Basilisk, a 1983 cassette that was remastered and reissued by Beta-lactam Ring Records on CD in 2002, one of the last of its kind—six full years after Prayer for Aradia appeared on CD and opened up another whole world for Dots fans. As with Prayer for Aradia and Traumstadt 1, this has the individual sides still programmed together on one track position each (except for "Clean Up," which is oddly on a track of its own), while three bonus tracks have been added, none of which entirely fit the sound or even the proper vintage of the Basilisk material. For all of these reasons and more, I underestimated this release for most of the past decade, which is an absolute shame... because in listening to it, I have come to realize that Basilisk is an intriguing self-contained opus and a unique snapshot of a very specific time and place for the Legendary Pink Dots. Consider me enlightened. (There's a joke in there somewhere about enlightenment coming with a blast.)

By the way, if you don't know what a "basilisk" is, scroll to the very bottom of the page.

Basilisk

Stigmata Part One (Freiheit) *

Klazh *

Love Is..... *

No Reason *

834 *

Wall Purges Night (Version) *

Basilisk 1 *

Methods *

Clean Up *

Basilisk 2 *

The Ocean Cried 'Blue Murder' on a Ferry in a Storm on a Walkman

Ideal Home

The Glory, The Glory

* These tracks appear on the original 1983 cassette Basilisk

Basilisk 2002 CD tray card (above) and disc (below)

Basilisk is easily the band's most coherent and self-contained cassette release. While other tapes would quietly nudge in other recent tracks that were seemingly unrelated to the artistic project at hand, all of the tracks here feel like they belong where they do, and more importantly, they all share a sound and approach that unites the tracks as one, as all good records should. This particular sound is subdued and pretty; Edward Ka-Spel conveys no mania here, and actually so many of the tracks sound like they were recorded with just his voice and an accompanying keyboard that it almost feels like the entire project is a practice run for his solo career (which was about to launch). The keyboards conjure up images of weddings and funerals, ballroom waltzes, and old time ice skating routines—not exactly the realm of edgy audio experimentalists. Yet this release is highly experimental, founded on a 26-minute ambient soundscape ("Basilisk 2") with threads of this material woven throughout the other tracks to tie them all together.

At the end of the last entry, I indicated that this release was more or less a sister release for Curse, as a couple of the tracks here sound like demos or incomplete versions of songs that already appear there. But in addition to that, the two releases are utterly complementary because they are nothing alike. Curse is rather energetic, with a handful of upbeat songs and a colorful array of sound and style varieties. Basilisk, on the other hand, kicks off with a ballad, and only raises the tempo when one song—the opener, "Stigmata Part One (Freiheit)"—literally speeds up in playback toward the end. In fact, about half of the original tape's runtime slows to arrhythmic ambience. And because the songs have an overall lethargic feeling and mood sustained throughout, this release is monochromatic, especially when compared to Curse's multifaceted prog pop.

"SING WHILE YOU MAY!" This phrase cryptically began appearing on the back of LPD records as early as Brighter Now, and the tradition continues to this day. Basilisk begins with this motto, as a woman who may or may not be April Iliffe intones these words in a chanted loop for 30 seconds before the program begins. Then "Stigmata Part One (Freiheit)" fades in on the familiar sound of arpeggios, accompanied by the metronomic beep of what sounds like a heart rate monitor. Ka-Spel's vocals are low in the mix and he's not enunciating as clearly as usual while he describes a sculptor who hears the needs of existing statues ("Venus wanted hands, and Bonaparte a brand new hat, 'cause the old one looked so silly") but ignores them in order to focus on his current work. "Freiheit" is the German word for freedom, and it seems to apply here to the feeling the sculptor gets while he's "working fingers till the bones are working through his skin." It's an obvious metaphor for God and His creations (the statues end up mocking their creator), and although it's a near-perfect opener for the mood of this set, the song is a little too obtuse to be a classic. As if to demonstrate that Basilisk is going to continue in obtuse, unpredictable directions, "Klazh" immediately and surprisingly detours into dark ambience; there's rhythm to it, but it sounds like a drum track that has devolved into nothingness. The end result approximates the echoey sound of the air vents in an abandoned old industrial complex. It is the first hint of where the record will end up.

"Love Is....." is an early version of "Love Puppets" (from Curse); the song has been stripped of vocals and guitar but has gained several effects, including chirping birds and chirpy synths. The familiar portion ends in a bit of cacophony followed by a low-key synth waltz in which Ka-Spel expresses his typically downbeat views on love ("If I was the only boy in the world and you were the only girl, we'd fight like hell") in the midst of describing the haunting of a man by the lover he strangled and buried in the park. So that's what love is, eh, Edward? Thanks! The anti-love theme continues into the next song with cold aloofness. "No Reason" appears to be the motivation behind a breakup, and the song is an emotional antithesis to the self-pitying sadness of "Legacy" from Brighter Now. The drum on this track strikes solely on the third count of each measure, giving the track a plodding rhythm, while the keyboards take time out from their "organ" presets to whistle and quiver liquidly in the background. The organ sounds return for the brief interlude of "834," a vocoded spoken track with a funeral backdrop. Although the vocals are unintelligible, the concept of "834" will pop up again and again in the Dots' work and will be further explored later.

"Wall Purges Night" is a fairly straightforward live/demo run-through of the Curse track, complete with duet vocals between Ka-Spel and drummer Keith Thompson. The beat is nowhere near as prominent here and the production touches are much less polished; especially distracting is the lo-fi megaphone aspect occasionally applied to Ka-Spel's vocal, such as with the refrain, "Enlightenment comes with a blast!" The inclusion of this track amongst the others clearly shows at what point in the Curse LP's recording the Basilisk cassette may have started to come together, and perhaps the band wanted to capture a certain energy in this performance—otherwise it serves as filler.

"Basilisk 1" begins with a short sample of Winston Churchill but soon becomes an instrumental version of "Flesh Parade," the awesomely pretty song that anchors the first half of Prayer for Aradia. It's a little bit more devolved than that, with all sorts of cosmic and dubby effects flying out of it in various directions, while the chords are sustained just long enough to give the piece a slightly slow-motion bent. The effects get kind of annoying, actually, as they detract from that lovely chord progression, one of the Dots' finest. As I said before, it is no wonder the band and Ka-Spel himself both return to this song in various forms several times over the next few years. "Methods" originally closed the first side of the cassette and ends suddenly enough that it most certainly had to be a longer song edited down to fit into the two minutes of remaining space on the tape. Ka-Spel is frantically listing a number of suicide options, occasionally interrupted by an Atari-like synth while he maniacally laments, "Methods! There are methods!" The song is grim, but in typically Ka-Spelian fashion, ends up strangely amusing. Why would anybody sing about this so excitedly?!?

"Clean Up" develops out of a kaleidoscopic collage of backward effects and vocal snippets, officially announcing side two. This is reminiscent of the "Sing While You May!" intro at the beginning of side one, and the old-timey ice skating organ sound that identifies the overall feel of Basilisk rears its ugly head again here. And similar to side one, "Clean Up" is a strong opening song, lethargically declaring, "The world would be so nice without people!" It seems we caught Edward in a celebratory mood, yet again. He sounds suspiciously drunk, and by the time he mentions his adenoids, the song has already earned a very unique place in the Dots canon.

This is a basilisk, by the way. Apparently a mythological lizard king so horrible that its looks can kill, I think it's usually more dragon and less chicken than this representation would have you believe. No—a friend has just corrected me—a basilisk is usually quite cocky. (See what I did there?)

GO FORWARD to Chemical Playschool Volumes 3 & 4 ----->
<----- GO BACKWARD to Curse

The Legendary Pink Blog: Curse

2010-11-07T15:50:00.018-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, and welcome to the ongoing Legendary Pink Blog.

Throughout the '90s, the Legendary Pink Dots had a phenomenal dub-influenced bassist and drummer named Ryan Moore, whose massive input on the band's live tour had turned their appearances into must-see events. By the end of the decade, however, Moore's own reggae dub side-project, Twilight Circus, was gaining traction as a full-time vehicle, and Moore was getting his own interview coverage in magazines and on websites. The only reason why I bring him up now is because, when asked about whether or not he ever listened to the Dots' earlier material, the only album he admitted to liking was 1983's Curse.

Curse

Love Puppets

Wall Purges Night

Lisa's Party

Arzhklahh Olgevezh!

Prüümptje Kurss

Waving at the Aeroplanes

Hiding

Dolls' House

The Palace of Love

Stoned Obituary

The band's relationship with Pat Bermingham's In Phaze label, which had begun with the debut LP Brighter Now, continued with its proper follow-up Curse, an altogether bigger and badder record. And perhaps due to the reception of the debut amongst certain post-punk subcultures, it is certainly much more goth, even featuring one of the most capital-G GOTH! album covers produced in the '80s. Creatively, this one is all over the place with a mix of old and new material, but it avoids the instantly-dated sound of its gentle predecessor by playing up the full-band arrangements on more than half the tracks while cutting back the overt electronic experimentation. Themes include many of the usual concerns, such as therapy and introverted insecurity, violent social outbreaks, two songs performed entirely in a made-up language, sexual obsession, and of course death death death: a soiree wherein the hostess kills all of her guests, an antagonist attempting to make planes crash with simple gestures, and a little girl gleefully setting fire to her toys—or is it a woman burning her family alive? At times grim, often funny, and always a little bit strange, Curse matches a cynical worldview with a wide range of sonic textures to produce the band's first quintessential release.

First CD edition of Curse tray card (above) and disc (below)

The album effectively buries Brighter Now in the dirt. Which is a difficult thing for me to say, actually, since that record has its own charms. But where the debut was instantly dated, this one has a greater variety of sounds and production gimmicks and, as I mentioned before, better use of full-band arrangements. The first record also felt as if it were showcasing a very particular version of the Dots, as it leaves behind a bit of a fantasy aftertaste. While this one is dressed up in goth clothes, the actual contents of the record demonstrate so many wonderful and crazy aspects of this band that it paints an overall clearer portrait of what the Dots do—a greater palette of colors, perhaps. And last but not least, song for song Curse is simply better. Brighter Now contains one inescapably massive song in their developing oeuvre ("Hanging Gardens") with a number of respectable but limited contenders. Curse contains two similarly massive tracks, while most of the others at least attempt to expand the listener's expectations.

The twin pillars upon which Curse is built are the opening and closing tracks. "Love Puppets" is such a huge milestone for the band that it's hard to describe without hyperbole. Effectively, it is the first tripped-out mindwarp in the Dots' canon. They had certainly tried before, but had never quite achieved the right balance of sound that would allow a song's production to enhance its psychoactive effects rather than constrain them. Nearly 30 years later, however, this one still takes your brain on a journey. The missing ingredient? SPACE. From one listen, it is obvious that the Dots have adjusted their approach by slowing things down and stripping away some of the layers. Edward Ka-Spel already sounds deeper and more mature here, and there's an allure to his voice that isn't evident on the earliest tapes. Guitar and synth no longer fight for the top of the mix; the instruments take their turns waiting for one another, and each is used in such a way to maximize impact. Sure, the track begins in familiar territory: after a couple of disembodied breaths, we're assaulted by Ka-Spel's backwards ranting while a squelchy synth spins in place. But the noise cuts out after a mere 40 seconds, allowing the spotlight to focus on the deliberate lyrics. Ka-Spel poetically relays his frustration with endless therapy sessions ("What gives you the right to analyze? You paralyze me with your probing. In the end I just agree... Maybe we're just puppets after all") and rhetorically asks the therapist to marry him in order to hurry things along. It's a sad but beautiful song that underscores not just the desperation in loneliness but also the frustrated state of mind that can cause it. Meanwhile, the synths continue to minimally plink along a four-note pattern occasionally interspersed by shards of guitar or even accompanied by whispers of backward guitar lines. The best bit is the interlude that begins about four and a half minutes in, wherein the synth tones gradually widen and evolve over numerous echo-laden (and creepy) effects; just when everything falls to silence, a sequenced drum pattern grows out of the quiet and threatens to overtake the song in a way that it never does. This is a typical example of the restraint the band has finally learned, and this passage, which might have been a song all by itself on an earlier release, marks the band's most sophisticated moment to this point.

The closing song, "Stoned Obituary," is ironically not a similar head trip, despite its title and thoroughly psychedelic lyrics. Though the double entendre might be intentional, the song is literally about a man who has been crucified and stoned... Whether or not this Man is supposed to be Jesus is still somewhat enshrouded (sorry) in mystery, as the song is told from the perspective of an onlooker who may have known Him, and there are numerous references to modern society that didn't exist in Biblical times (cameras, ice creams, the French national anthem, etc.) Anyhow, we've seen this song in its earliest, most straightforward form on Prayer for Aradia, and we watched it evolve into a multi-part suite on Kleine Krieg. Now the song gets significantly beefed up by its production values, gaining a much more solid vocal performance, a variety of underlying textures that differ distinctly from one another, and an incising guitar-based midsection that elevates the dramatic impact of the song right before the Man dies and all hell (heaven?) breaks loose. In fact, the song is so progressive in its ever-changing structure that all twelve minutes of it have never been properly tracked together on CD; it has always (mistakenly) been split into two parts.

Curse original vinyl cover (above) and labels (below)

"Love Puppets" and "Stoned Obituary" make such significant bookends because the former really does appear to be opening the door to the future while the latter closes a chapter of the past. The other songs between these two monuments cover a range of styles while remaining considerably closer to the pop end of the spectrum. "Wall Purges Night" glides along on a simple rhythm that occasionally breaks for spoken choruses, but its most surprising aspect is that it is a duet between Ka-Spel and drummer Keith Thompson. Hearing another male sing lead on a Dots record is oddly shocking. The song title is a play on Walpurgis Night, the pagan party day related to May Day on which many European countries celebrate with drinks and bonfires. Instead, the song plays up the "purge" concept, recounting three or four atrocities in which people in power made "cannon fodder" of those beneath them. The recurring motif ("Enlightenment comes with a blast!") is both catchy and thought-provoking, but the song itself is a pretty simple attempt at new wave. "Lisa's Party" is the first appearance of Lisa on a Dots record. She will reappear frequently over the next few years. Somewhere along the line, Ka-Spel has admitted in at least one interview that Lisa acts as a sort of alter ego for him, which really raises the question of whether or not she's supposed to be a heroic figure. The song is charming synthpop with a bouncing bassline, which masks the grim punchline: an extravagant party of poetry and circus arts turns deadly when the guests are all poisoned. What is unclear about the song is whether or not the guests deserve what they get. This is followed by another song that maintains the upbeat tempo (driven by a sort of slap bass!), yet is almost willfully weird and meaningless. Ka-Spel speaks in tongues throughout the verses of "Arzhklahh Olgevezh!" At first he's kind of jolly, then he growls, then he shrieks. Amongst all of this is the equally humorous and heartbreaking chorus, sung by April Iliffe (aka Aradia): "No one understood him, no one understood him at all!" In fact, Ka-Spel's language—mostly an odd blend of English and Dutch that looks Slavic and sounds Russian—would subsequently appear on every LPD release after this one, usually as a comment in the liner notes meant to sum up the album or as an unidentifiable credit role. The language also dominates the two-minute "Prüümptje Kurss," an epilogue of sorts to the last song and the only thoroughly experimental song on the record. Ka-Spel's atonal foreign lament is backed by a variety of spacy effects; my best memory of this one is that it used to scare the hell out of my roommate's cat.

The second half of the record opens with the album's slightest song, "Waving at the Aeroplanes." It's another grim pop song, but it superficially betrays this fact with the same sort of hippie instrumentation that dominates Brighter Now, complete with bongos. For the most part the song would be the last of its sort on a Dots album. It ends with a crash, followed by "Hiding," another hideous poem by Sally Graves, who also appeared on Traumstadt 1. She says, "Look at me, touch me; I'm human and awkward, longing to be found, incapable of exposing myself." I certainly don't mean to downplay this bit's importance in the overall theme of the record, but I'm fairly certain we all feel like this until we lose our virginity. Thankfully, Sally only wastes a minute of our time before we move into a remarkably improved version of "Dolls' House." For those keeping score, this song is on Ancient Daze, Chemical Playschool 1+2, and Kleine Krieg in an earlier form that is nearly ruined by an overzealous performance on primitive keyboards. The maddening chords that drive the song are newly buried in the mix, bringing out the rhythm (especially the bass) and adding a lot of space. The song now feels sculpted and dramatic; as with "Stoned Obituary," Ka-Spel's performance is infinitely more nuanced. "Dolls' House" warrants an award for the most improved reworking of an earlier track, but it is still cloying and therefore overshadowed by the better songs on the album, including the next one. A weird edit occurs between the two songs, in which we hear a few seconds of an instrumental synth track which then cuts into a slurred loop of children laughing and playing. Then another arpeggiated synth track fades in called "The Palace of Love." This pretty little song houses one of Ka-Spel's all-time best vocal performances, as his intensifying enthusiasm as the song progresses ends up conveying so much more than the actual words.

The high points that Curse reaches are an early benchmark for the Dots, and in the long run, it's not hard to see why Ryan Moore may have singled it out amongst the early crop of releases. In the mid/late '80s after the band's international fame started to boom, the album was reissued on vinyl and for the first time on CD by the band in conjunction with their label at the time, Belgium's Play It Again Sam. Curse finally received an official U.S. release in 1996, when it was reissued by Soleilmoon Recordings and given terrible new (more gothy but less Dotsy) cover art, as seen below.

Next up, the Legendary Pink Dots released two more cassette releases in 1983. The first, Basilisk, plays like the flipside to Curse's creation, and includes a couple of outtakes from the album.

GO FORWARD to Basilisk ----->
<----- GO BACKWARD to Prayer for Aradia

The Legendary Pink Blog: Prayer for Aradia

2010-11-05T21:27:00.014-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, and welcome to the ongoing Legendary Pink Blog.

Before I continue analyzing and discussing the full discography of the Legendary Pink Dots, I'd like to quickly recap where we're at. A few entries back, when first crossing into 1982 on the LPD timeline, I suggested that the band would release four cassettes in a year's time and since then I have written about four cassettes: Brighter Now, which evolved into the Dots' debut LP; Premonition, a collection of low-key pop songs kept intact on the 1997 archive CD, Under Triple Moons; and the electronic/experimental sister releases Atomic Roses and Apparition, which appear together on a CD called Traumstadt 1. So, theoretically, I should now be moving on to 1983, and discussing the Dots' pivotal second LP. Why, then, am I about to write about yet another cassette via the CD release that contains it?

Prayer for Aradia

Premonition 8 *

Flesh Parade *

Purity *

Purified *

Forgotten *

Davritt *

Outsider (aka The Heretic) *

Invocation *

Love in a Plain Brown Envelope No. 1 *

Love on a Stained Glass Window *

Space Captain No. 1 (aka Close Your Eyes, You Can Be a Space Captain) *

Premonition 9 *

Premonition 5

A Spanish Bridge

Stoned Obit 1980

Peace Krime 2 **

Professional **

Brill **

Sensory Deprivation **

Temper Temper **

Amphitheatre Shuffle **

Before the End **

Fin **

* These tracks appear on the 1985 cassette Prayer for Aradia
** These tracks appear on Chemical Playschool 1+2

First of all, Prayer for Aradia is an extremely unique item in the Dots' catalog and I am thrilled to be able to revisit it, as well as describe it, in some way that fits into the overall narrative of the band's work. The most unusual thing about it is its original release date. Even though the tracks themselves were recorded in 1982, supposedly the tape itself did not actually see the light of day (on the French label Bain Total) until 1985. Three years at this point in their career inevitably meant a lot of forward progression, so instead of releasing just another compilation of outtakes and tracks that for whatever reason weren't considered for proper LP release, the Dots decide to heavily mix and crossfade the tracks together into side-long sequences. While this isn't a new concept for them, it is exercised somewhat more extremely here. (I tried to digitally separate the individual songs using a sound editor, and it absolutely does not work.) Something about the song selection also seems more sophisticated than the band's 1982 work would reflect; perhaps by the time of the tape's release, the play order had been tailored to compliment what the band were doing on their LPs at that time, rather than three years before. But all of this is assumption on my part, as I try to make sense of this singular oddity in the catalog and why, if you played it for me blind, I might think it originated from 1983/84.

When Prayer for Aradia was released on CD in 1996, each side-long sequence was indexed to a single track position, so that the entire contents of the original cassette make up tracks 1 & 2. The rest of the CD was padded out with 8 tracks salvaged from Chemical Playschool 1+2 and a track ("Premonition 5") that had been licensed out to a various artists compilation, plus a couple of otherwise unreleased pieces from the same early era. While this may sound like a haphazard collection, especially after the logical sense behind an archival release like Traumstadt 1, at the time of its release in 1996 there simply had been nothing like this in the Dots' oeuvre. The fact that the band were willing to start digging into their deep past and putting some of those legendary cassette tracks out on disc for greater market consumption was a shocking, welcome development, and it wiped the slate clean for endless future possibilities. Now that they had begun to re-release these tracks, how much further could they go? Would everything eventually see an official release? My friend and I began to pore over the text discography documents that were available online, reading track titles, laughing about them, wondering about them, and having no idea what to expect. We were kind of obsessed with the details, but I absolutely miss those days.

[Discography note: Yes, I am aware that other cassette tracks had seen LP and CD release on The Legendary Pink Box in 1989, but that particular release was designed and intended to be a retrospective. Its architecture feels like an attempt to reiterate the past while also closing the door on it. Its message says that old songs could at any time get reabsorbed into the Dots' ongoing development, which has always proven to be true, but it does not signal any kind of opening of the past for further evaluation. Work presented as "the best of the early cassettes" unfortunately has the unintended side effect of quietly discrediting the work that was not selected. Prayer for Aradia does not feel like this at all. It represents one piece of artwork in the gallery, not the entire exhibition.]

Prayer for Aradia tray card (above) and disc (below)

So despite its haphazard selection, the Prayer for Aradia CD at the time represented an endless number of potential future collections and it was unclear whether or not the backlog of cassette tracks would be divided up on these thematically, chronologically, or according to some Dotsian logic than we are never meant to understand. In this case, the appearance of a handful of tracks from Chemical Playschool 1+2 allows us to put that earliest era behind us, which I know I keep promising. But the complete tracklisting also plays in such a way that one can almost catch a glimpse of that untouchable Dotsian logic. Let me see how well I can explain it...

The compilation immediately launches with the cassette portion of the program, which despite the presence of twelve track names is really only six substantial songs—some of which now rank as early Dots classics—plus the interstitial bits that link them all together. The sequence begins with "Premonition 8," about 90 seconds of cosmic synth sounds, starting with an imperial death march of sorts, some Poltergeist samples, and a hyper blast of white noise that could represent something taking off, in this case the Prayer for Aradia cassette. This really is not a song, but it doesn't have much to do with the moodier "Premonition" pieces that have been littered throughout the last three releases. The blast sounds die out as the bouncing staccato rhythms of "Flesh Parade" fade in. In a lot of ways, this song represents the erotic awakening of the Legendary Pink Dots, as it seems to consider the daily grind (ahem) of the sex trade but does so in a typical detached manner that never seems lewd despite some explicit references ("The longing thighs say come in for a night...", "She likes a man, but a hand's just as effective," etc). All in all, "Flesh Parade" boasts one of the Dots' fullest and most memorable melodies and would continue to be rearranged and re-recorded for several more years. In fact, this song is one example of how the recording of this material would almost fit into the LPD timeline better in 1985 than 1982. On the other hand, "Purity" has the amateurish sound of earlier Dots. It gallops into the mix rather quickly just as the arty outro of "Flesh Parade" finally starts to fade. "Purity" is much rockier than other tracks from this era, dependent on guitar and drums, and progressive in its arrangement; imagine Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" with very little machismo and more of a hippie feel. The song drops off suddenly in a burst of disorienting keyboard noise and muted human howls that approximate the sound of someone in freefall. This lasts about ten seconds and is called "Purified." "Forgotten" is built upon arpeggiating synth chords that create a loopy kind of beauty; this is the beginning of a formula that the Dots (and especially Edward Ka-Spel) would employ for many years to come. The song personifies the forgotten mythological hero in the form of a weary King Arthur, mourning in a crypt for his glory days, and it introduces a motif of "tired eyes" that would follow Ka-Spel's career as well. The first half of the Prayer for Aradia sequence ends when "Forgotten" is juxtaposed with 30 seconds of dissonant piano tones, oddly entitled "Davritt."

Side two of the original cassette begins with pounding drums and funky shards of post-punk guitar. Could this be a Gang of Four track? No, the undeniable declaration that follows makes it rather clear that this is the Legendary Pink Dots, playing with brute force: "Excommunicate the heretic! Chain up, crucify the lunatic, the fanatic!" Though labeled "Outsider" here, the song would soon become immortalized under a different name as one of the Dots' best early live tracks. About a minute of multiple layers of manic backward vocals ("Invocation") acts as a transition into "Love in a Plain Brown Envelope." If "Flesh Parade" was the sexual awakening of the band, this song is the loss of its virginity. The song is built upon low electronic pulses and orgasmic chants, almost certainly influenced by the retrofuturism of Barbarella and similar sci-fi themed sexcapades. "Heaven is a hole, there's a whole lot of heaven in your cavern," indeed. It's a massive track and a milestone in the band's ability to make complex creations out of sounds where there may not be much of a song. "Love on a Stained Glass Window" is a brief tape loop experiment that electronically approximates the sound of a thunderstorm, but it serves more to drown out the previous song than it does to make a satisfying transition. Instead of fading in gradually, "Space Captain" starts rather cold, immediately pulling the mood down considerably. It takes the shuffling, exotic backing track from Brighter Now's "City Ghosts" and slowwwws it dowwwwwn. It also features all-new lyrics, about suicide as self-medication for despair. Ka-Spel reaches an all-time sinister low here, as he takes the role of the devil urging on the dose: "Take them now! Take them now! You can be anything you want to be!" The psychology behind the song fits beautifully with its psychedelic overtones, offering the sort of anthem that someone like Syd Barrett would have been too afraid to do. The sequence comes to an end with "Premonition 9," which offers the brief after-hours ambience of a jazzy sax solo coming from down the hall.

At this point, any good discography geek should be asking about those "Premonition" tracks. After all, "Premonition 1" and "Premonition 2" are on Under Triple Moons, "Premonition 3" is on Traumstadt 1 and "Premonition 4" is on Brighter Now. But suddenly this release skips up to "Premonition 8". Where are the others? Of course the Dots are never predictably straightforward, but they might have considered this rhetorical question as this CD was being compiled, because "Premonition 5" features as its first bonus track, and it makes an excellent, logical transition. (Its only previous appearance was on a various artists compilation that was released sometime in 1983.) This installment in the series is much more in line with the premise of the first four tracks, a moody sort of thing that is built around an established sample or altered form of a pre-existing recording. In this case, the track has been developed into a lovely 11-minute tour de force of quiet beauty and new ideas, as it presents both an instrumental version of a romantic, medieval string piece called "Time Dance" and a backwards version of the early LPD classic "Voices." New lyrics have been written and recorded over the "Voices" part, demonstrating how "Premonition" tracks don't have to stop at simply creating moods and can instead evolve into something else entirely.

Two previously unreleased tracks complete the transition into the Chemical Playschool 1+2 material. The first is an instrumental electronic piece built upon short breaths of synth noise and a Spanish-style guitar lick. It is suitably called "A Spanish Bridge," for that's exactly what it is. This leads directly into "Stoned Obit 1980," i.e. a version of "Stoned Obituary" earlier than the one found on Kleine Krieg. It opens with arrhythmic cut-up electronic horns that could easily be mistaken for a tornado warning or an air raid siren, but quickly becomes the sort of manic keyboard number that often overwhelmed the band's earliest tapes. It's difficult to imagine why this hadn't seen any kind of release prior to this, as it's clearly a finished recording with the vocal narrative firmly in place. The melody here has not yet developed the aspects the song shares with "City Ghosts," but that's not necessarily a detriment. This version also doesn't have the ever-changing backdrop that is present in later versions.

The rest of the bonus material on this CD was covered in previous blog entries. Meanwhile the song "Stoned Obituary" was soon to become one of the monumental bookends on the Dots' second LP, Curse.

GO FORWARD to Curse ----->
<----- GO BACKWARD to Traumstadt 1

The Legendary Pink Blog: Traumstadt 1

2010-11-02T22:54:00.019-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, and welcome to the ongoing Legendary Pink Blog.

It's almost embarrassing how much material the Legendary Pink Dots recorded in their early years. They released two more cassettes, back to back, in 1982. Both cassettes were relatively short showcases of songs that were not necessarily new—the quality of the recordings and the general sound on both tapes is about the same as that of Premonition or at times even Chemical Playschool 1+2—but none of the tracks had appeared on previous cassettes except for one, so the end result is over an hour of all-new material. Both tapes also demonstrated a bit of evolution in the way the tracks flowed together, and in fact when the contents of these tapes were inevitably (but belatedly!) transferred to CD in 2003, no effort was made to index the individual songs; the entire duration of each side of each tape was assigned to one track position on the CD. [Naturally, the first thing I did upon acquiring the disc is load the tracks into a sound editor and split them up into separate, individually digestible files, which was not particularly difficult in this case since the crossfades simply aren't very substantial.] Obviously the Dots were proud of the flow in the way these tracks were mixed for cassette, and thus this aspect is preserved for the digital format as well.

Anyhow, the individual tapes were Atomic Roses and Apparition; the CD, which compiles these together, is called Traumstadt 1.

[Discography note: This title was first used by the Dots in 1988/89. Approaching their tenth anniversary and enjoying newfound popularity, the band released a retrospective series of five cassettes, each with the name Traumstadt (which translates to "City of Dreams"). The first, as explored here, contained the full contents of the two earlier cassettes, Atomic Roses and Apparition, one on each side. The artwork for the Traumstadt 1 cassette was essentially the same artwork that appears on the CD, reworked to fit the new medium. None of the other four haphazardly compiled Traumstadt releases have been issued on CD, but much of their content has seen the light of day in various bits and pieces over the course of a decade. Please see the bottom of this page for more discussion of Traumstadt 2 through Traumstadt 5.]

Traumstadt 1

Of All the Girls... *

What's Next? *

Playschool *

Sex *

Closet Kings *

Spiritus *

Hauptbahnhof *

The Wrong Impedence *

Passing Thought *

Atomic Roses #1 *

Ideal Home *

Atomic Roses #2 *

God Speed **

Pay to Be Alone **

Spontaneous Human Combustion **

The Blessing **

I'm in the Drill **

Powder Crowd **

Strychnene Chaser **

Alive! **

Believe! **

The Plague **

Premonition 3 **

No Bell No Prize (Version Ridiculous)

* These tracks appear on the 1982 cassette Atomic Roses
** These tracks appear on the 1982 cassette Apparition

Despite some minor annoyances, Traumstadt 1 is a fantastic release and well worth having. While other early Dots cassettes feel stuffed with rehearsals for tracks that would eventually find better homes in more developed versions, this one plays like an alternate history of the band, presenting many obscure-but-classic songs and experiments in a palatable format with other material of the exact same ilk, most of which would start and stop with these exact recordings. Nothing feels particularly out of place nor do any pieces detract from the overall sound or mood, which is livelier and slightly edgier than that of Under Triple Moons.

That being said, the mastering does leave a lot to be desired. "Sound enhancement" is credited to a Bernard, who did not do the overall excellent job that primary Dots engineer and technician Raymond Steeg did so successfully for Ancient Daze. The sound here is super clean and listenable but the spectrum is limited, demonstrating treble and midrange with almost no bottom end whatsoever. In fact, this is almost the exact opposite from Under Triple Moons, where some fidelity was deliberately traded for fuller bass and an attempt at a more organic sound. The end result is that these recordings sound harsher and more electronic than they probably were meant to be.

Traumstadt 1 back cover (above) and disc (below)

The Atomic Roses program comes first, and despite a weak beginning it's probably the stronger part of the collection. "Of All the Girls..." is strictly introductory material, a bunch of dissonant Casio chords played on top of one another under samples of classic Hollywood movie dialogue. Nothing to see here. "What's Next?" is a slight and simple song with a little bit of melody in the music but none in the vocals. "Playschool," despite the title's use on earlier tapes, is a spoken vocoded piece that appears in longer form as "Trance" on Chemical Playschool Edition 2. It also lacks melody, which is excusable for tracks that are interesting in other ways; thus far none of these have managed such a balance. "Sex" raises the bar several notches, however. The song is built upon a faster arrangement of "Violence," the plodding opener to Ancient Daze (get the connection?), but features a more electro sound and a slightly more neurotic performance from Edward Ka-Spel. And at a mere three minutes, it still manages to sport an industrial midsection that gives it surprising musical heft. "Closet Kings" follows immediately, and it's easily one of the best tracks here. A brilliantly performed lyric about possibly gay men finding better satisfaction in the safety of their homes rather than cruising the anonymity of the nightclubs is propped up by a staccato piece with an exotic tone and a strange undercurrent of "hare krishna" vocoders. It's no "Hanging Gardens," but it solidly entertains. Continuing the winning streak, "Spiritus" opens with parts of "Apocalypse Then" (from Brighter Now) played backwards but eventually gives way to whooshing wind effects underneath a lively and lengthy demonstration of synthesized piccolo. The end result is slightly medieval, thoroughly New Age, and unlike all the band's other efforts.

The mighty, memorable "Hauptbahnhof" leads into the second quarter and reads like a journal entry, logging a series of observances upon the crazy life at a train station. Meanwhile, a naïve synth line climbs up and down the scale on top of washes of keyboard. The best Dots tracks either juxtapose great lyrics with surprising musical choices or perfectly match the vocals with the other instrumental happenings to bring about something that transcends its sonic limitations; this is an example of the latter. Following this track with a thoughtful instrumental piece would have been a nice way to boost its power. Instead, the next track revives the horrid chirping mania of the first version of "Louder After 6," from Ancient Daze, with new lyrics. "The Wrong Impedence," indeed! At least here the chirping dies out occasionally to focus on the scraping rhythm underneath, which almost has a cool ambience to it, and the deeper sections of the track again manage industrial undertones. "Passing Thought" is just that, a snatch of angsty poetry reading by one Sally Graves. I've now almost said more about the track than her poem does. "Atomic Roses" was the title track of the original cassette for a reason: ambition. It's a six-minute exercise of slow-burning electronic psychedelia split into two parts and is nearly impressionist in its approach but not entirely successful. The song it cradles in its center, "Ideal Home," is a warm and charming guitar-based pop song that recalls the late '60s hippie songwriting of David Bowie. It immediately qualifies itself to be of the utmost early Dots caliber, akin to tracks like "Voices" and "Defeated," and strangely it anticipates the sound of the Dots' upcoming second LP more than the others featured here.

Moving on to the Apparition portion of the program, the good stuff just keeps on coming! "God Speed" kicks off with the sounds of someone plunking quarters into an arcade game and a starting-gate fanfare that should sound familiar to 8-bit gamers. This erupts into a drum machine rhythm that recalls the new wave pop scene that was actually happening at this time, proving that the Dots weren't entirely oblivious to it. The melody is anemic but its close proximity to actual dance music and the collage of white noise into which it eventually breaks down adequately make up for its weaknesses. "Pay to Be Alone" is kind of weird and doomy, but its uncanny and inadvertent representation of what both the Dots' and Ka-Spel's solo material would sound like in ten years makes it ahead of its time and absolutely worth hearing. "Spontaneous Human Combustion" is nowhere near as explosive as it sounds; simple crowd sounds give way to bubbly electronics in an interstitial snippet that contains no percussive elements whatsoever. Much scarier is "The Blessing," an extended analogy between an unwanted sexual experience and, well, a blessing. ("Don't worry, dear, he likes you, it's the way he shows affection, don't you think those rolling eyes are cute?") This is mostly vocals with some minimal synth backing until the narrative of the song is overcome by a sort of incoherent ambience that could easily represent the sound of someone mentally checking out. It's chilling. "I'm in the Drill" thankfully doesn't raise the energy level too much; it melds a stoned '70s rock feel with elements of Russian dance, including what might be the first true appearance of violin on a Dots record, and ties it all up with a jazzy outro. The schizophrenic aspects of the song are a testament to the band's disparate influences.

"Powder Crowd" launches the final stretch with a blast of energy, including a great live drum track that is too low in the mix and an ascending hook that brings the drama. "Strychnene Chaser" offers creepy gray fields of garbled vocals and calls to mind the early gothic soundscrapes of Current 93. A more typically Dotsian string snippet finishes it off. "Alive!" and "Believe!" may be the same song: the former is radically pitch-shifted into chipmunk levels so that the high notes of the chorus reach comically manic levels, while the latter is an unspectacular band track that simply sounds undeveloped and doesn't work. The novelty carries on... "The Plague" begins with a self-described "funky" bassline and could be somewhat danceable in another form but here the performance is so loose and unkempt that it barely masks the insanity around the edges. Ka-Spel's voice at times recalls Genesis P-Orridge's great unbridled passion in Throbbing Gristle's "Subhuman." Finally, the program concludes with "Premonition 3," a shorter installment in the series of numbered mood pieces. This one shares a similarly dubby and percussive track as its starting point, possibly played back at an altered speed, but it's too short to actually go anywhere.

The last track on the CD is a bonus track rescued from a various artists compilation and doesn't belong here. The standard version of "No Bell No Prize" can be found on the 1997 double-CD archive release Stained Glass Soma Fountains, which contains several songs from the other Traumstadt releases as well.

Traumstadt 2

The second cassette in the Traumstadt series, from 1988, was primarily a selection of tracks that had been previously licensed to various artists compilation albums as well as unreleased versions and outtakes. 13 of its 18 tracks were officially released on CD in 1996 and 1997, primarily on Under Triple Moons and Stained Glass Soma Fountains.

Traumstadt 3

The third cassette in the series, also from 1988, was a selection of live tracks recorded between 1985 and 1988 in various European cities. These have not been released on CD.

Traumstadt 4

Unlike other cassettes in the series, the fourth entry contained two side-long tracks, both of which were unreleased elsewhere. They have since been released on separate CD compilations, namely Stained Glass Soma Fountains and Crushed Mementos.

Traumstadt 5

The last cassette in the series was released in 1989. LIke Traumstadt 2, it contained tracks primarily salvaged from various artist comps and other outtakes. 8 of its 13 tracks were officially released on CD in 1996 and 1997, primarily on Stained Glass Soma Fountains and Prayer for Aradia.

GO FORWARD to Prayer for Aradia ----->
<----- GO BACKWARD to Under Triple Moons

The Legendary Pink Blog: Under Triple Moons

2010-11-01T22:21:00.010-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, and welcome to the ongoing Legendary Pink Blog.

I have to admit it's a bit of a bummer to return to the Legendary Pink Dots' self-released cassettes after writing about their very first album Brighter Now, which of course was a much more important release from the band as they had finally put themselves out into the industry with an LP. (Not to mention the fact that it is much easier to write about a nine-track album than it is another compilation of 16-20 songs.) But this shouldn't necessarily reflect on the quality of the material, as the band was obviously very creatively fertile in 1982. In fact, their next cassette release, Premonition may have even been released before the Brighter Now LP, as there is certain evidence on the recording to support this.

Premonition was originally released in a couple of different track variations but it appears that the latter one is the one that stuck. This release, as with Only Dreaming's presence on Ancient Daze, was kept more or less intact on a compilation CD released by ROIR in 1997, marking the beginning of a fruitful relationship with ROIR that continues to this day. The funny thing about this is that the CD was released at a new height in popularity for the band in the '90s, when their legendary tours were drawing large crowds and the albums they were releasing at the time greatly supported this live experience. So the fact that one of the most common CDs to show up in the bins at this time, due to ROIR's presence on American soil and excellent distribution, was billed as "their earliest cassette-only private edition tapes" threw many new fans for a loop.

Under Triple Moons

As If *

Splash *

Submerged *

Amphitheatre *

Digital *

Dying for the Emperor *

Oceans of Emotion *

Small Anthem *

Intruder *

Premonition 2 *

Frosty **

One for the Pearl Moon ***

The Whore of Babylon

The War of Silence

Garlands

A Lust for Powder (Version Apocalypse)

Punishment

Down from the Country ***

Premonition 1 *

* These tracks appear on the 1982 cassette Premonition
** This track appears on both Only Dreaming and Chemical Playschool 1+2
*** These tracks appear on Kleine Krieg
The five remaining tracks are culled from a 1988 compilation cassette called Traumstadt 2

Under Triple Moons back cover (above) and disc (below)

I'll be honest: I don't like this release very much. Premonition is missing a lot of the cohesiveness that made their last few releases so enjoyable, and the additional tracks added to round out Under Triple Moons seem equally haphazard in their placement. After all, the recording of the tracks range from 1980 to 1984. But the original 1982 cassette remains an important release for a number of reasons, not least of which is the introduction of the "Premonition" concept.

As seen here, numbered tracks called "Premonition" would become something of a thing in the Dots' discography, and even though they may not have known so at the time, this series of tracks would eventually become something of a staple for the band. In fact, we've already discussed "Premonition 4," which appears on Brighter Now. This mood piece was one of the bonus songs added to the LP version of that release, indicating that the Premonition cassette, with its tracks "Premonition 1" and "Premonition 2" may have come out (or at least been conceived) before the LP did.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The compilation begins with the meat of the Premonition cassette on a crescendoing collage piece called "As If...", in which you can hear drones, bleeps, backwards masking, bits of the bridge of "Amphitheatre," and other "Did you hear that?" moments that will recall bits and pieces of other Dots songs. This segues, or rather crossfades, directly into "Splash," a low-key ode to alcoholism that features a softly-sung vocal by Edward Ka-Spel and adequately sets the tone of the rest of the program. In fact, the defining quality of this sequence beyond the low fidelity is the softness of the songs, as if the band wanted to consolidate its strengths writing three-minute pop songs akin to Brighter Now's rendition of "Louder After 6." The other defining feature, as I mentioned above, is the tendency to crossfade rather than use new interstitial bits to connect the songs together as the band was doing before. "Splash" rolls directly into a cool little sequenced bit called "Submerged," which—minus the vocoded speaking—anticipates certain strains of techno years before its popularity took foothold. Next up is a much improved "Amphitheatre," which qualifies as one of the best tracks here. The melody is simple but catchier, and more audible, than the song demonstrated just a year before, and though it is repetitive, it also boasts notable choruses and an infectious midsection with naïve charm. The end of this track cuts off suddenly, because the original Premonition cassette finished off its first side with a couple of other tracks that don't appear here, including a reprise of "Voices" and a track called "Odd," which is possibly the same unpolished track that finally reared its ugly head on the most recent incarnation of Ancient Daze.

Next up is another new track, "Digital," which is notable for its cut-up sounds and a somewhat monotone vocal performance. It's a puzzling track with vague lyrics: "I test myself, I test my friends, it never ends. I bend their minds, I mind the bends. They take it all, don't mind at all. They're digital." But the track is not as digital sounding as one would hope, and almost to draw attention to this, it fades haphazardly into a repeat performance of "Dying for the Emperor," the video game ode lifted directly from Chemical Playschool 1+2. The song's Asian motif is cloying but it's not terrible; it just sounds like a big step backwards from the point of development that the band had reached and is probably the major faux pas of the Premonition cassette. The subdued second half of the song is more in line with the sound of this collection. "Oceans of Emotion" is another poppy song but it offers very little that we haven't heard before in a better form. This is squarely a song reminiscing about past love but without the poignancy of something like "Legacy." A sloppy fadeout takes us to "Small Anthem," a 30-second guitar snippet that was unlisted on the cassette editions and doesn't really register. "Intruder," on the other hand is upbeat and likable, with the same kind of restrained arrangement that served the band so well on the prior LP.

Finally, we come to "Premonition 2." In typical Dotsian perversity, this is sequenced before "Premonition 1" on the CD. It's a languid seven-minute track featuring a spoken sample from a political newscast about men standing together and pledged to each other, but it is not clear what cause they are supporting. Otherwise, the musical backing has the same sort of spacious mood as "Premonition 4" from Brighter Now, which raises the issue of whether this is the track that laid the foundation for that one, but played at normal speed. It's actually a meditative piece unlike anything the Dots have done before, which raises the question of what the "Premonition" tracks mean. Personally, I have always felt that these tracks are any experimental works that build dreamlike states from samples and pieces of other songs. I could swear that in its final seconds, there are bits of "Hauptbahnhof," a song not yet released.

Moving away from the Premonition cassette, the second half of the CD kicks off with "Frosty." I can't say much more about "Frosty" than was already described here, but effectively the song is one of the Dots' earliest tracks and it sounds like it. Despite its full arrangement and upbeat sound, the song appears to be about a man so afraid of the world that he is kept preserved in a freezer where no harm will come to him. I'm afraid I'm misrepresenting Under Triple Moons by featuring this song below, but it really holds a unique position in the Dots' back catalog or they wouldn't have included it here.

"One for the Pearl Moon" is next, and it is slightly abridged from its Kleine Krieg form. The next five tracks were recorded 2-3 years later and sound like it. The prominence of strings (!!) which we have yet to hear on any Dots tracks thus far are quite the telltale distinction, and though maestro Patrick Wright (aka Patrick Q. Paganini) would become a major player in the band's sound for the next decade, now is not the time to introduce him. [Perhaps I will discuss these tracks later if I try to piece together the Traumstadt 2 retrospective from 1988, from whence these came.] After that detour, we get "Down from the Country," again edited down from its longer form on Kleine Krieg.

The CD closes with the last Premonition track, the ever-important "Premonition 1." Another seven-minute mood track, this one is essentially "City Ghosts" from Brighter Now, dressed up in white noise and keyboard squeals with some pitch-shifting thrown in for good measure. The track does indeed conjure up an abstract vision of something concrete, but the question remains: Is it a vision of the past, or of the future? I like to think this is the way that the collection identifies itself as the dream state, as compared to the waking life that the Dots were creating with their actual LP. Dream states officially became an important part of the Dots mythos with these recordings, and they would only prove to grow more important as the band's career progressed.

One version of the original Premonition cassette:

GO FORWARD to Traumstadt 1 ----->
<----- GO BACKWARD to Brighter Now

The Legendary Pink Blog: Brighter Now

2010-10-31T11:19:00.011-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, and welcome to the ongoing Legendary Pink Blog.

The Legendary Pink Dots released four more cassettes in 1982. 1982! Thank god I'm done with 1981, because sorting out all those random tracks on random releases in 1981 was thoroughly exhausting. Unfortunately we've got one more year before the Dots truly shifted their focus to LPs, but 1982 would at least see the official release of their first one...

...but it didn't happen right away. The Dots did hook up with Pat Bermingham's In Phaze Records to release a six-track cassette named after one of their more recent songs, the melodic but unsuccessful ballad "Brighter Now." The cassette did not include the title track but instead featured six tracks that had developed since their appearance on Chemical Playschool 1+2, including a reprise of the excellent "Legacy" that had been given prime placement on Kleine Kreig. Later in the year In Phaze would partner with New European Recordings to bring this material in slightly remixed form to LP, and in order to pad out the length, the Dots added three tracks.

[Discography note: Presumably by the time of the LP release, at least two of the other 1982 cassettes had been assembled if not released. Based on the appearance of particular songs, the Brighter Now cassette seems to clear the deck of some of the holdovers from earlier tapes whereas the other 1982 releases feature all-new material. Therefore it makes sense for the narrative of this blog to cover this release first.]

Brighter Now

Front cover of vinyl reissue and first CD edition on Terminal Kaleidoscope

Back cover of vinyl reissue (above) and CD edition (below)

Red Castles *

Louder After 6 *

The Wedding

Apocalypse Then *

Legacy *

City Ghosts *

Hanging Gardens *

Soma Bath

Premonition 4

*These 6 tracks were on the original cassette edition of Brighter Now.

On their debut album, the Dots come across as song-oriented and gentle. Much of the experimentation littered throughout their early cassettes has been excised here, leaving at least half of the material to focus strictly on Edward Ka-Spel's voice with musical backing that applied an unexpected amount of restraint to a baroque variety of sounds and instruments. There is absolutely no doubt that the Dots are attempting to be commercial here, though the recordings are still painfully lo-fi and in some cases badly produced, meaning that a band that worked with synthesizers and electronics would already sound dated by the time of the record's release. In other words, this was not going to be able to compete with the likes of Depeche Mode or the Human League, and the band certainly must have known this. Of course, this is a major part of the record's charm.

Along with the shift in sound, the band started to develop a mythology of its own. The cover image of the winged man descending from the heavens, which is more distinctly illustrated on the cassette, is no accident, as it immediately calls to mind everything from Icarus to Flash Gordon to the Bible. Brighter Now is the album that accentuates the band's roots in hippie folk rock, '70s prog, science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales. Characters who were once bored office workers or bohemian artists were now drawn as knights, maidens, princesses, and magicians. But instead of living happily ever after, these folks were hung for crimes they didn't do, mourned for the loss of their loved ones, and revolted in dystopian societies that tapped their phones. Underneath these gentle pop songs, with their choral backdrops, acoustic guitars, and Casio keyboard presets, an apocalyptic vision was beginning to evolve.

In Phaze cassette exterior (above) and interior (below)

"Red Castles" is an odd way to start the album, as it's one of the dinkiest sounding songs on the record. But I suppose in an alternate universe where the Legendary Pink Dots were eligible for chart success, if a song were to have been designated as a single, this might have been it. The song is especially catchy and it does a great job of establishing what the band is about thematically, as it immediately draws a parallel between the Dots' fantasy world and real life scenarios such as bar fighting and seeing a therapist. The central message seems to take on the self-help movement, where visualization exercises can help a person overcome obstacles: "You are king of the castle. Your glory excels in here." The chorus includes transcendent background vocals, but otherwise the song is brittle sounding, especially the drums. "Louder After 6" follows, and it wins the award for most improved, as it was the song on Ancient Daze that was so overheated with chirpy synth sounds that it was rendered unlistenable. Here, it is a much smoother affair, with a swinging rhythm and soft, outdated keyboards that make it sound like something you'd hear at an organ demonstration in a mall music shop circa 1979. In fact, the song is now such a harmless pop song that it is somewhat unremarkable, though the numerous phone effects at the end act as a true reminder which band this is. "The Wedding" reappears next, and it is still a heartfelt ballad, somewhat polished up and played on a real piano this time. It is a nice song with a typical Ka-Spel twist; the protagonist is marrying but feels insincere about it, and this is his inner monologue throughout the ceremony. "Maybe someday the rewards wil be there in Heaven just for us." Amen, indeed.

"Apocalypse Then" is much more interesting than I have ever given it credit for. It describes a wartime panic scenario where everyone thinks the world is ending, but it is presented in a four-part structure that feels unified and never loses focus over seven and a half minutes. In fact, it continues to build dramatically. After a narrated intro, the song features an extremely lovely middle passage with harmony vocals (courtesy Ka-Spel and guitarist Mick Marshall) and fingered guitar, then builds to an intense climax where, "You cannot keep this country down for long because we win so many fucking (wars)." It ends with a rallying crowd and the sound of a far-off belltower, achieving something cinematic that the band hasn't really tried before. The general sound of the track is a denser sound, almost rock, that doesn't rely as much on production gimmicks and therefore anticipates the direction the band would follow for the next four years.

"Legacy" (from Kleine Krieg) appears in a lush version next, kicking off the second half of the album, and it remains a standout of the oeuvre. This is followed by an update of "City Ghosts," again a trippy folk rock track with a memorably exotic sound courtesy of Keith Thompson's percussion, Roland Callaway's snake-charming bass, and Mick Marshall's Spanish-tinged guitar. Actually hearing audible contributions from all members of the band is a welcome change of pace after so many lo-fi cassettes, and at this point, the song is certainly an album centerpiece. Though its innocent pagan/hippie sound really dates it, "City Ghosts" ends up as one of the more adventurous pieces on the album, featuring a bridge underscored by percolating synths and moments of true progressive beauty. Better yet it segues directly into "Hanging Gardens," an absolutely stunning monster of a track and the sound of a band finally reaching artistic triumph. Again, the song is gentle, but its combination of ethereal synth washes, light acoustic guitar, and ever-so-slightly vocoded singing makes for irresistible atmosphere. The prettiness of the song obscures the ugliness of the lyrics, which could be about a woman with royal power who is either unable or unwilling to save her lover from a death sentence. But what knocks this track out of the ballpark is the fact that, led by a hypnotically dubby bassline, it suddenly reverses direction two-thirds of the way through.

Listen to "Hanging Gardens" here:

The album ends with an encore of "Soma Bath," apparently unchanged from its form on Kleine Krieg, which neither detracts or adds to the overall feel of the album, and finally a moody experimental track called "Premonition 4." This is the only instrumental track on the album, and after a brief moment where a girl sings "Ring Around the Rosie," it basically sounds like a 45 RPM record being played at 16 RPM so that the slow rhythm of the drum and bass fills the sound spectrum with darkness. It's a nice finishing touch to the record, if not overwhelmingly memorable. Other artists would stretch this out over 20 minutes, but the Dots know how to be economical when they have to be.

Brighter Now gained wider distribution in the late '80s when it was reissued on the band's own label and distributed by Play It Again Sam, a Belgian company that would play a major part in breaking the band internationally. However, it did not receive an official U.S. release until 1996, when it was reissued by Soleilmoon Recordings and given terrible new (goth) cover art, as seen below.

GO FORWARD to Under Triple Moons ----->
<----- GO BACKWARD to Kleine Krieg

The Legendary Pink Blog: Kleine Krieg

2010-10-30T19:30:00.020-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, and welcome to the ongoing Legendary Pink Blog.

By the end of 1981, the Legendary Pink Dots were starting to learn that they could pick and choose certain tracks from their oeuvre and present them in a way that served them better, rather than just dumping everything into one big pot the way they did with Chemical Playschool 1+2. By ordering the tracks a certain way and using their experimental instrumental tracks as interstitial segues between various pieces, they could take their listeners on a head trip with much greater narrative, the kind of experience a seasoned drug user might expect rather than the newbie who is confused and bewildered by the sensory chaos. They did not pioneer this approach; early experimental rock act The Red Crayola did this as early as 1967 on their amazing LP The Parable of Arable Land, on which psychedelic pop gems like "Hurricane Fighter Plane" were connected to others via much less successful passages called "free form freakouts." But the whole can often end up much greater than the sum of its parts, and the Dots were finally starting to think about the whole.

Perhaps they were pruning their material in preparation for an actual LP, or perhaps they wanted to see what would happen with longer forms, but their next major release strives for epic in a way that nothing they had done previously was able to achieve.

Kleine Krieg

Defeated [aka (Still) Defeated] *

Deflated

Black Highway *

Soma Bath *

Peace Krime #2 *

Break Day *

(The Palace of Love)

Stoned Obituary

Stars on Sunday *

Vigil (aka Vigie)

Legacy *

One for the Pearl Moon *

Dolls' House *

Brill *

Down from the Country

Thursday Night Fever

Die With Your Eyes On

Opus Dei

* These tracks appear on Chemical Playschool 1+2.

Kleine Krieg was a single 90-minute cassette release. It was released three times over a four year period, including once as part of a package with a model airplane (as pictured above!), but there are really only a couple hundred copies in existence. It was never reissued in the late '80s as the prior cassettes had been by the Dots themselves or any of their usual mail order accomplices, such as Jarmusic or Staalplaat, and despite its scarcity—and arguably its importance—it also hasn't seen an official CD release. Three or four of its tracks have appeared on various archive CD compilations (e.g. The Legendary Pink Box, Stained Glass Soma Fountains, and Under Triple Moons) but it really deserves a better fate, and was finally remastered in 2007 when Vinyl-on-Demand included it on double-vinyl as part of the 5-LP box set The Legendary Pink Dots, the same box which housed Chemical Playschool Edition 2.

Kleine Krieg double vinyl release

Kleine Krieg includes a number of tracks already featured on Chemical Playschool 1+2 but it recontextualizes them, in some cases combining them with leading or trailing tracks as described above and also sometimes editing them; the versions are the same, but they may end sooner or last even longer. The cassette editions reportedly boasted clearer, fuller sound than other tapes of the time and only a couple of its tracks fail to reach the five-minute mark, a notable distinction from the fast rush of Only Dreaming.

The vinyl release once again makes a fantastic addition to a burgeoning LPD vinyl collection because, except for one track, it does not overlap with Ancient Daze or Chemical Playschool Edition 2 on vinyl, assuring that you get the widest variety of tracks at the best possible sound quality. Of course, the fact that it is packaged with the latter means that someone obviously thought it through lovingly and carefully.

Case in point: the leading track, "Defeated." The early version of this was included on Only Dreaming but not on Ancient Daze; the second version of it opened the program on Chemical Playschool 1+2 but did not appear on Chemical Playschool Edition 2. It finally appears here, and as a song it's very much in line with other early LPD rock songs, like "Voices" and "Black Highway," though to call it "rock" would be exaggerating its impact. Like "Voices," it's a fully realized song that makes the most of its arrangement but is simple enough (despite its complex lyrical structure) that it has likely come as far as it can. In fact, it would not evolve beyond this form. The song immediately segues into "Deflated," a spacy track that hints at how accomplished the Dots were becoming with their signature bleepy tracks. "Black Highway" reappears next in its best form, including a brief guitar intro that would grow out of the sounds of the song before. The song really pulses in a Krautrock way, betraying the obvious debt that the Dots admit to having for Neu! Unusually, the cribbing of "Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Fire!" for the chorus never comes off as cloying, guaranteeing the song a position in the Dots' hall of fame. Edward Ka-Spel's vocal gets progressively more manic, climaxing at the end of the song in a reckless shriek.

"Soma Bath" is an ace synth track with a standout bassline courtesy Rolls Anotherone (aka Roland Callaway), whose time in the band would be short but memorable over the next couple releases. This track is another that appeared in some form on all previous releases and would make an encore performance in this exact format on the band's upcoming debut LP. It mutates into "Peace Krime #2," abandoning the song format for a piece that marries church organ with the same sample of Margaret Thatcher that appeared in the track's earlier namesake. Sounds of a rallying crowd and a peaceful keyboard melody interrupt the sample for a bit before the church organ returns. Squelchy wobbling synth tones carry over into the next track, "Break Day." One of the standout tracks from Ancient Daze due to its intriguing structure, it has been slowed down and rearranged to make the most of its tension. The music is oddly disconnected and electronic sounding, while Ka-Spel sings with wider range and more subtlety. In this instance, the Dots are ahead of their time, but the melding of avant garde techniques with a broken pop song is still impressive. The sinister lyric ends with, "Linking arms, drinking orders, urinating on the floor. Spilt the milk, split a hymen, took her wicked, made her sore... Let her know it was Break Day." It conjures images of a military rape-and-pillage scenario, a hint at the dark themes that would soon encompass the band. The song devolves into fussy atmospheric murmurs and backwards masking that may or may not be called "The Palace of Love," as it is credited on some cassette versions of Kleine Krieg.

Earlier when I described this release as "epic," I was partly thinking of "Stoned Obituary," a song that had been kicking around since the band's earliest days in 1980. Here, it is an 11-minute monster that shares melodic elements with the hippie anthem "City Ghosts" that appeared on Chemical Playschool Edition 2. One of the defining characteristics of "Stoned Obituary" is that it never stays in one place for long, changing the sonic backdrops while never breaking pace or narrative. It's not exactly a good song, but it shows that the Dots' songwriting goals were getting much more ambitious. A nice drum machine pattern kicks in about a third of the way through, increasing the song's urgency. The song concludes with Ka-Spel intoning religious funeral rites in Latin amongst a repeated mantra of "Die with your eyes on!", whatever that means. Ominous abrasive synth tones kick off "Stars on Sunday," the band's lone devolution into incoherence on this release. The track appears to be a medley of various bits and pieces of other tracks, connected together by surgical electronic sounds; perhaps it was influenced by the legendary disco medley pop of Dutch group Stars on 45 that was popular at this time. As the track progresses, Ka-Spel howls along with droning keyboards, we briefly revisit the pitch-shifted chanting of "MPNMEP CTPAHA," somebody (or more probably, something) beatboxes for a couple of minutes (!!), and "Phallus Dei" plays saturated in reverb for a short time. The track is several minutes longer in its Chemical Playschool 1+2 appearance, but here it is cut short as it steers into an all-new lyric and melody called "Vigil," itself a shapeless track that gives way to overpowering helicopter-like drones and small melodies that fade in and out underneath the din. All in all this sequence of three tracks comes the closest to approximating the ambitious, side-long programming that I discussed above, and even though all three tracks don't really stand on their own, the sequence is extremely interesting and listenable.

The second half of Kleine Krieg begins with a great song, a ballad akin to Chemical Playschool Edition 2's "The Wedding," only much more heartfelt. Apparently Ka-Spel has experienced heartbreak as he sings about becoming accustomed to life without his live-in lover. The musical backdrop shows the full band in magnificent form, especially the drum machine/bass combination and sparkling synths that don't overplay their hand. This is the song that the Dots would re-record 25 years later on a limited 45 to celebrate their silver anniversary. It fades into a recording of an inaudible dialogue between a man and a woman underneath heartbeat pulses. Out of that particular ambience comes "One for the Pearl Moon," an odd song boosted by a jazz boogie bassline played slightly out of step. The lyrics here are apocalyptic and impenetrable, but they show how the romanticism of "Legacy" was much more of an exception to the rule than a norm. The lowest bass drones on a Dots recording thus far carry the song into dark ambience for a moment before the sprightly, overzealous keyboards of "Dolls' House" kick in. The song uses the image of a dollhouse as an analogy for familial drama, as the matriarch of the family eventually sets the house on fire and Ka-Spel ends the song whispering, "Crackle crackle!" in a way that is both sinister and campy. This is the one track that appears in the same version more than once on the vinyl releases discussed so far, as it is also on Ancient Daze; however here it sounds a bit slower and lower with a more apparent melody, so it is hard to tell if it is exactly the same take.

"Brill" is a chaotic collage piece carried over from Chemical Playschool 1+2 that sounds out of place here because the Dots had already surpassed it technically. While it is definitely memorable, it uses bits of other LPD recordings, such as "Phallus Dei" and the otherwise unavailable "Boule (Viens Ici!)" to make its noisy point. It is sufficiently disorienting but never really goes anywhere. A clean break separates it from "Down from the Country," a likable melodic song with dubby bass and rhythmic guitar strums that appropriates Neu!'s motorik beat into something much more palatable and grooving. The song is overtaken by extremely high-pitched ascending tones that lead into a new version of "Thursday Night Fever," the song about obsessive jealousy that first appeared on Only Dreaming. The new arrangement is extremely welcome, as it is slower and more deliberate, playing up the song's sinister edge. This advancement is reminiscent of the similar success of "Break Day" and bodes well for the band's future. In the early version, Ka-Spel sings, "You're my girl, I own you!" with unbridled mania; here, he intones it with barbiturated intention, which gives way to more backwards masking. Based on the title "Die With Your Eyes On," which is printed backwards on the record sleeve, this is the coda from "Stoned Obituary" reversed. Kleine Krieg closes with the otherworldly flangey trance of "Opus Dei," a gentle collage of monks chanting over ringing synths.

In 90 minutes, the Dots have graduated from their early haphazardness and have proven themselves ready to put out a genuine album.

GO FORWARD to Brighter Now ----->
<----- GO BACKWARD to Chemical Playschool

The Legendary Pink Blog: Chemical Playschool

2010-10-29T21:08:00.041-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, and welcome to the ongoing Legendary Pink Blog.

As I continue with my reinvestigation of the catalog of the Legendary Pink Dots, I'd like to now discuss the Chemical Playschool series. From as early as 1981, the Dots had an extreme wealth of material, and rumor has it that they made an early vow to release everything they ever recorded. Thus, over their entire 30 year career, they have edited outtakes and alternate versions of recordings together into new packages, and have labeled these releases Chemical Playschool, named after a bleepy track from their first cassette release, Only Dreaming (that is now found on Ancient Daze). These compilation releases ultimately—and perhaps ironically—have become absolutely essential entries in the Dots' canon and the mere invocation of the two words together will now fill your average Dots fan with excitement and enthusiasm over what the band has uncovered and/or resurrected.

There are now 13 volumes in the series, counting 1989's triple-LP retrospective The Legendary Pink Box (which had a working title of Chemical Playschool: The Box) as volumes 5 through 7.

Chemical Playschool 1+2

As with Only Dreaming, 1981's first entry in this series was only available on cassette directly from the band and severely limited, with a wider release finally occurring in the late '80s. The Dots themselves have always belittled this release somewhat, with Edward Ka-Spel describing it as "a simple best-of the first year of the Legendary Pink Dots." In fact, this is true, duplicating most of the material from Only Dreaming and adding numerous tracks that would appear on other releases of the time. Therefore, it's no real surprise that Chemical Playschool 1+2 has been relegated to its past incarnation as a set of two 90-minute cassettes and no subsequent CD release.

Examples of early Chemical Playschool cassettes (above) and insert (below)

Defeated ***

Voices *

Ideal Home

Black Highway ***

Soma Bath ***

Dolls' House **

Louder After Six **

Phallus Dei **

Stand Firm, Damien (aka Playschool)

Dying for the Emperor *

Peace Krime #1 *

Brighter Now *

Peace Krime #2 ***

MPNMEP CTPAHA *

Apocalypse Then

Professional *

Donna's Blitzed Again *

Brill ***

Witch Hunt (aka War Krime) *

Break Day ***

Break Down (aka Shit, It's Raining; aka Fin)

City Ghosts *

Onward

Legacy ***

One for the Pearl Moon ***

Sensory Deprivation *

Temper Temper *

Amphitheatre Shuffle (aka Amphitheatre Stomp) *

Misfortunes *

Red Castles

Hanging Gardens

detaefeD

Before the End *

Waiting for the Call - You 'n' Me

Amphitheatre 1 (aka Amphitheatre) **

Frosty *

Another Kind of Violence (aka Violence) **

The Wedding *

Stars on Sunday ***

Caligula

Fin (aka Moaners/Passover)

* These 16 tracks appear on Chemical Playschool Edition 2 (below).
** These 5 tracks appear on Ancient Daze.
*** These 9 tracks appear on Kleine Krieg.

Some of these tracks have seen the light of day on other archive releases the band has put out, such as the eight that appear on 1996's Prayer for Aradia. The variations in track names noted above are due to the original names often being forgotten or confused between the time of the initial release in 1981 and the later releases that came out in 1988/89.

The one thing I can say about the original cassettes is that they are rather top heavy. The Dots at this point must have noticed that songs like "Defeated," "Voices," and "Black Highway" would go down in history as their earliest classics and thus they proudly sit at the top of the play order. In fact, it's not until the instrumental "Stand Firm, Damien" or the experimental "Peace Krime" tracks that any of this feels like filler; there are seven or eight solid songs in a row. The release as a whole contains early versions of eight of the nine tracks that would eventually appear on the band's debut LP.

[Discography footnote: Dots on the Eyes was another 1981 cassette release by the Dots that I have chosen not to discuss here because it was simply a 30-minute collection of eight tracks, all but one of which would appear on Chemical Playschool 1+2. The tracks are: Onward, Peace Krime #2, Dolls' House, Voices, Stars on Sunday, The Wedding, Professional, and March. The last track is a bleepy, uh, march, with vocoder that would eventually see re-release on 2004's archive CD Crushed Mementos.]

Chemical Playschool Edition 2

To make matters even more complicated, highlights of Chemical Playschool 1+2 were combined onto one cassette with additional outtakes in 1982 under the name Chemical Playschool Edition 2. Only a handful of copies of this cassette existed, but it was released in its entirety on vinyl as part of the 5-LP box set The Legendary Pink Dots from Vinyl-on-Demand in 2007.

Trance

Professional

Frosty

Voices

Donna's Blitzed Again

The Wedding

Sensory Deprivation

Dying for the Emperor

Amphitheatre Stomp (aka Amphitheatre Shuffle)

War Krime (aka Witch Hunt)

Peace Krime #1

Brighter Now

Break Day #2

City Ghosts

Who? Me!

Temper Temper

Strolling Along Another Promenade

Misfortune (aka Misfortunes)

Before the End

MPNMEP CTPAHA

It's Biological

Brighter Now #2

[Attention Discography Geeks! This release was particularly well thought out, because none of these tracks overlap with the tracks that are on Ancient Daze, making it an ideal addition to a growing vinyl collection. "Voices" does appear on both releases, but this one is a later recording. "Break Day #2" is not actually the song "Break Day", but a devolved excerpt. In addition, this has "Frosty" and "Before the End", both of which go back to the original Only Dreaming cassette but did not appear on Ancient Daze.]

Chemical Playschool Edition 2 doesn't really work as an album in its own right, but I don't think any of these early collections are supposed to do anything but showcase the breadth of what the Dots were doing in their early years while filling in the gaps for fans and collectors. In its favor, this one has new remastering and is probably the best these tracks will ever sound. The sequencing can be jarring at times but otherwise offers some nice stretches of entertaining musicianship.

Kicking off the proceedings with "Trance" (unique to this release) is a very strange decision, as the track is five minutes of vocoded speech with a gentle lulling synth line behind it but not much of a song. The piece lives up to its name, but it is impossible to tell what is being said as the vocoding is so strong that the words primarily buzz together. A nice rubbery bass synth enters halfway through, giving the track a cartoonish boingy quality as if it is threatening to stretch apart. It is evident by this piece that the Dots were learning to experiment with construction and subtlety, rather than just throwing a bunch of noises together as they layered one racket on top of another.

The Dots have a reputation for writing unsophisticated synth waltzes in their early days and though we haven't seen much of that yet, "Professional" is perhaps the first example. While some bands default to a generic 4/4 beat, the Dots begin to default to a 3/4 beat here, which gives their sound a much more stereotypically classical European feel. "Professional" is kind of sluggish and still contains some manic keyboard work that agitates rather than enhances the song. The immediate switch to the upbeat super-pop of "Frosty" is jarring, but the song is not unwelcome and it demonstrates Ka-Spel's flair for the macabre underneath a happy facade. Again showcasing the band format, the song includes a pretty backing vocal by April Iliffe, plus evidence of real drums, bass, and even tambourine in the mix. The last time I saw the Dots in concert was 2002, and at a point later in the show when the band seemed to be on the verge of taking requests, someone shouted out, "Frosty!" Ka-Spel's expression was sheer disdain, but the audience broke out into laughter, indicating how everyone recognized the ridiculousness of it.

The encore presentation of "Voices" makes a strong follow up. At this point, the song is their most fully developed, and this re-recording sticks to the structure of the first. The vocal is a bit lower and less manic but otherwise there aren't obvious differences. The instrumental coda that closes the song is actually quite lovely, one of the first times where the band truly gets it right. If the modern indie band Of Montreal were to write a song about witchcraft, it might sound like this. The slight "Donna's Blitzed Again" is an extended instrumental, layers of keyboard washes and a repetitive blip that recalls the earlier experiments from Only Dreaming yet is more languid and considered. There is definitely a drunkenness to it.

"The Wedding" is surprising. Clearly written on a piano, the song is a conventional ballad with Edward singing his heart out. The lyrics are still a little too written rather than felt, but it's a change of pace that shows how willing to perform in different styles the band were when they started. As if to prove my point, next up is "Sensory Deprivation," literally a boogie with funk stylings including wah-wah guitar and double-tracked vocals, plus a series of calls to "Get down!" in the lyrics. The retreat to bleepy amateurishness is disappointing after all that, but "Dying for the Emperor" is a catchy song with a slight East Asian feel about... playing Space Invaders? ("Gotta destroy those aliens, gotta destroy the aliens, it's painful when he's doing well but they keep coming back.") Remember, this was 1981. The song slows down into a vocoded funereal bit that must indicate the game is over, and is followed by two experimental pieces. "Amphitheatre Stomp" follows the chord progression of "Amphitheatre" but is lacking a vocal and has choppy effects added; "War Krime" is a short blast of Ka-Spel lamenting about being burned at the stake.

Opening up the second record, "Peace Krime #1" is an interesting montage of British citizens talking to journalists about the royal family. Amusingly, one woman suggests that Elizabeth should retire and let Charles take over; of course, 30 years have passed and this still hasn't changed. The track closes with Margaret Thatcher's famous declaration that IRA convicts undergoing a hunger strike must continue to suffer because the men committed a crime, and "Crime is crime is crime; it is not political." The ballad "Brighter Now" follows, and it is a full band performance where everyone is playing a little too much, but the melody itself has a slight medieval feel that the Dots would use to better effect later in their career. The guitar-based song "City Ghosts" is almost rock, a straight up hippie number complete with references to paganry and magic mushrooms. "Who? Me!" is a noise piece based on an extended dialogue sample, which isn't particularly interesting, interspersed with shards of synthesizer. "Temper Temper" is the kind of cloying pop song that benefits from amateurish performance and lo-fi production; it would be unbearable if it actually sounded like anything other than a pisstake. It also includes a racist verse about Mexicans who get angry when you mash their sombreros and jumping beans, but it's cartoonish enough not to be altogether offensive.

The final stretch includes three of the band's best early pop experiments and some instrumental filler that is unique to this release. "Strolling Along Another Promenade" is an instrumental keyboard piece with an Eastern European folk feel. "Misfortunes" is another surprisingly conventional pop ballad, though this one has more overt and poppy melodies than any thus far. It would be an ideal track for the Dots to resurrect three decades later. "Before the End" is the band's quintessential early synth waltz, with an easy arrangement, a memorable melody, and such cute lines as, "Before the end, in a crowded store, Miss Demeanor broke the law." The Russian (?) titled "MPNMEP CTPAHA" is another attempt at a modern rock song that only sabotages itself halfway through when Ka-Spel repeats a bratty "Nyet!" one too many times. It ends with hypnotic pitch-shifted chanting. "It's Biological" is a textured and sculpted bleepy track unique to this release, but it is obviously an outtake. Likewise with "Brighter Now #2," an instrumental version of the messy ballad that benefits from a more minimal approach.

After this point, the Legendary Pink Dots began sculpting their collections into bonafide thematic works, so hopefully my analysis will be less about running through track descriptions and more about overall artistic accomplishment. The haphazard placement of all these early tracks really is rather exhausting and has always been one of the most overwhelming aspects of LPD fandom.

GO FORWARD to Kleine Krieg ----->
<----- GO BACKWARD to Ancient Daze

The Legendary Pink Blog: Ancient Daze

2010-10-27T22:15:00.024-05:00

Welcome to the Repurposed Postmodern Accident.

As this never quite became the blog I had envisioned, mostly due to my time spent doing other things, I think I am going to perhaps focus on the one thing I did well here, which was write about music. I hear you yawning already. But I think if I commit to certain projects, like I did with the end of 2007 best-of countdown (and then failed to do the following two years), then I will amass a certain reference after some undetermined period of time that might be quite useful to my friends and not-so-friends who may be actually reading this.

As you can tell by the history of this blog, I’ve written about Nurse With Wound two or three times and those reviews came across rather passionately, so I’ve considered writing about their entire back catalog. But instead of focusing on that project for the time being, I’m going to go back to a somewhat comparable act—The Legendary Pink Dots—who once meant a lot to me but lost some momentum in my life over the last decade. I’m going to begin doing this where it makes the most sense, at the beginning of the Dots’ career, and maybe through reevaluation I’ll stumble onto why I loved them so much and adequately convey it here for those of you who don’t know.

Whatever you do, though, please don’t refer to this as an oeuvreblog. The Dots’ oeuvre is so fucking huge that it’s too intimidating to think I might set out on covering all of their albums, so we’ll just set forth as far as I want to go and see what happens.

Tonight, I’m going to start with an album I’ve bought three times to date.

Ancient Daze

Front cover of 2006 CD edition

Violence *

Thursday Night Fever *

O(ri)fice *

The Chemical Playschool *

Voices *

Break Day *

Only Dreaming *

It Rots Your Liver *

Black Highway *

Phallus Dei *

Game *

Guess the Politician *

Dolls' House **

Louder After 6 **

Spaced Out ^#

Amphitheatre **

Candlelight or Fullbeam? ^†

West Side Story (The Forgotten Version) ^†

Odd ^†

* These tracks appear on the 1981 cassette, Only Dreaming
** These tracks appear on the 1981 double cassette, Chemical Playschool 1+2
^# These were previously unreleased until the 1997 CDr, Ancient Daze
^† These were previously unreleased until the 2006 CD, Ancient Daze

For all practical purposes, this is the material that best represents the band’s very first release, a cassette-only thing called Only Dreaming from 1981. The original cassette sequence does not exist intact in digital format but can be recreated using most of this CD and a few stray tracks from others. I actually knew Only Dreaming first, due to an illicit copy that was bootlegged and “remastered” by a friend of mine (who didn’t like the Dots) for another friend of mine (who did, and who turned me onto the band). Of course, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting into the band based solely on this material, but for fans already in the know, it was certainly intriguing... but I digress.

A couple of years into my fandom (around 1997) the bulk of Only Dreaming was cleaned up, burned to CDr, and sold via mail order as Ancient Daze by the Dots themselves to crazy fans like me, who sent a money order to the Netherlands for two copies (one for me, one for aforementioned friend) but didn’t consider the exchange rate and ended up stiffing the band a few bucks. They still sent the order, god bless them.

What arrived were two very informal burns with handwritten tray cards and no labels on the discs themselves, with handmade cover inserts. They looked the same on the outside, but one copy was tracked differently than the other; obviously in 1997 CD burning was still a tricky devil. I think I kept the one that most closely followed the printed tracklist, though I think both were indexed weirdly at points. I have scanned this release for you here.

1997 CDr front cover (above), tray card and disc (below)

Now before I begin describing this music, let me first explain how influential I think this band has been. Indie rock of all shapes and sizes owes something to them. Their DIY ethic for their first several years of existence, releasing homemade cassette releases with handmade sleeves containing crude electronic pop music, is the stuff of legend. There are new genres built around artists like this, and new names from new generations of kids to describe it. Bands like the Mountain Goats and Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti started out this same way. And that doesn't even touch upon the band stylistically, who were arguably the first ever to combine the experimental techniques of Krautrock, particularly of the Neu! and Faust varieties, with slightly cloying pop music manufactured primarily on keyboards and synthesizers and the psychedelic swashes and drones created by Pink Floyd. The Dots basically made heady, progressive, psychedelic synthpop. Who else did this in 1981? Their music began like Dave Gilmour performing on a Depeche Mode record produced by Conny Plank. And by sheer circumstance alone, they were eventually assimilated into the late '80s gothic/industrial club scene but they never really belonged there. Their weird mutant electro-psychedelia predated the Flaming Lips, and MGMT could not exist without them.

The fun thing about listening to Ancient Daze now is that I can imagine this is the first time I've ever heard this music, which must have sounded just absolutely batshit weird, like futuristic sci-fi Doctor Who music interspersed with sing-song and genuine desire to play actual music. It isn't high brow or avant garde in the serious sense, and yet is uncompromisingly uncommercial in its naivete and exuberance. Most importantly, it wasn't digitally edited. Every sound appears where it does because somebody grafted two tapes together, or in the case of "Thursday Night Fever" perhaps the song on the other side of the tape bled through while remastering and the band decided to leave it there. Whatever the case, it is clear from one listening that the band were already pioneers in the field of using cassettes for home recording.

[An aside for those of you obsessing over discography details: Ancient Daze begins with the entirety of Side B of Only Dreaming, minus one song, and then continues with Side A, minus four others. Four additional tracks from the era were added to the end of Ancient Daze's first incarnation in 1997, and the album gained three more when it was remastered and professionally released on standard CD by Beta-lactam Ring Records in 2006. Of the songs from Only Dreaming left off this release, one of each appears on the three other archive compilations released on CD in 1996/97 and two have only been released in alternate versions. These songs will undoubtedly be called out in the entries for these other compilations and linked back to here, when I get to them, if I get to them.]

The first song, "Violence" (aka "Another Kind of Violence") is an unsophisticated dirge, and an odd way to start. The songwriting here is so bad that the vocals follow the melody line of the bass synth tones exactly, but this quality is almost unnoticeable when matched with the slow tempo, which just gives the piece a doomy mood. The beat is syncopated to roll along like Iggy Pop's "Nightclubbing" and throughout the song is an onslaught of dubby effects. Bandleader and vocalist Edward Ka-Spel's way with lyrics, which hasn't changed in 30 years, is already perfectly in place. He has a way of pacing his delivery so that rhymes fall at odd intervals, allowing some lines to run longer than others yet the words never sound like doggerel. Here's an example: "Think I'll bip round to the bird's house 'cos I've heard that her mum's away. I'll raid the neighbor's garden, present her with a nice bouquet. She'll be so pleased, we'll go upstairs, and up and down on the eiderdown." It's all sort of juvenile, but has a natural British whimsy to it. Ka-Spel is a lyricist from the Lewis Carroll school, which has always worked for me because I have always held both Alice books in the highest regard.

"Thursday Night Fever" follows, and though it doesn't pick up the pace much, the dubs and edits throughout are disorienting. This one is possibly the first psychological Dots song, and it conveys a man's jealous obsession with his lover to the point of stalking in a semi-ironic way that is alternately amusing and scary. When Ka-Spel shrieks in a ridiculously high voice, "You're my girl, I OWN YOU!", you can't help but wonder who he was dating at the time. (This track would evolve spectacularly over the next few years, but I'll get to that later.) Next up is "O(ri)fice," one of the most amateurish songs imaginable and yet its innocence is its charm. There are no overt audio tricks here, just a cute song about the fantasies of an office staff who all want to get away from the doldrums, accompanied by Casio chords. But it's the mind-bending pulses of the following instrumental track, "The Chemical Playschool," which really set this band apart from the beginning, as it showcases the work of main synthesist Phil Knight (aka Phil Harmonix aka The Silverman). It sounds alternately like electrical noise and blood streaming through veins.

"Voices" is the quintessential track here, and features a full band performance, with synth, drum machine, guitar, voice, and all sorts of effects. It is still rudimentary and strange (and contains a lyric about "decaying manpiles") but it is fully realized and does not sound like an experiment. "Break Day," on the other hand, is straight-up synth pop, but it purposely breaks melodic formula whenever it can. It demonstrates sophistication of the pop format for the first time on the release. Two more tracks of beeping/pulsing noise follow, and if you're not paying attention, they become undiscernible. "Only Dreaming" is a minute long, and makes little impression, but "It Rots Your Liver" features Ka-Spel screaming inaudibly in the background (save for "Why? WHY?") and, based on the title, one or more members of the band may have been quite drunk at this point. This track in many ways does conjure up the abrasive sound of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, pioneering acts who were both already quite active at this point.

"Black Highway" is second only to "Voices" in its fully developed feel. The rhythms and sounds all build into something catchy, perhaps the best the Dots could do to create a driving song this early on. The lyrics steal from all sorts of sources, many of them classic '50s rock-and-roll songs from the likes of Jerry Lewis and Little Richard. Cleverly, this creates the illusion that perhaps these songs are playing on the AM radio in the car. "Phallus Dei" and "Guess the Politician" are more examples of Casio-pop recorded with soft-rock presets. The former offers a co-vocal by early bandmember April Iliffe, whose voice sounds typically young and fresh, but also like a folky leftover from the late '60s. The latter includes Ka-Spel singing, "I hate Britain!" which is especially significant because in a few years time he would leave it permanently. ("Game" is another bleepy fragment that only runs about 50 seconds.) All in all, the music of the entire record sounds like an extension of late '60s values dressed up in the DIY punk ethic married with the new technology of the time.

It was not my intention to write a sentence about every song, especially in chronological order, as this kind of review (on Amazon, iTunes, etc.) is always my least favorite to read as they often sound like no consideration was given to the work as a whole. The bottom line is that these pieces all sound very similar to one another, despite the tension created between melodicism and abrasive experimentalism. The Legendary Pink Dots would benefit as they eventually began to work with more elaborate recording equipment and put out market-oriented records, but these early songs do portray a young band playing furiously and uniquely with the tools they have at their disposal.

The final stretch of tracks, three of which did not appear on Only Dreaming but were available on another cassette at the time, tend to showcase the rougher edges of the band's production ability. Both "Dolls' House" and "Louder After 6" are smothered in hyper electronic keyboard noises (which translates into unbearable chirping sounds in the latter, burying any detectable melody). Fortunately, these songs would not languish long in these particular arrangements. "Amphitheatre" benefits by pulling back the instrumental histrionics a bit, and hints at things to come. "Spaced Out" is an instrumental collage of rhythm and white noise dug out of the archives in 1997. The three previously unreleased tracks added in 2006 are hissy rehearsals ranging from piano ballads to industrial jazz; only one ("Odd") contains a Ka-Spel vocal, but it is hard to follow.

A sturdy, limited edition vinyl version was released in 2007 by Beta-lactam Ring. The copies are numbered; I have #198 of 200.

The five songs listed below appeared on the original Only Dreaming cassette but do not appear on this release:

Soma Bath

Before the End (appears on the 1996 compilation CD, Prayer for Aradia)

Waiting for the Call - You 'n' Me

Defeated (appears on the 1997 compilation CD, Stained Glass Soma Fountains)

Frosty (appears on the 1997 compilation CD, Under Triple Moons)

"Before the End" and "Frosty" also appear on the double-LP Chemical Playschool Edition 2.

GO FORWARD to Chemical Playschool ----->

Nurse With Wound - Paranoia in Hi-Fi Users' Guide

2010-06-05T13:47:00.005-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident.

The following was written for a friend who picked up the release Paranoia in Hi-Fi by Nurse With Wound but was having great trouble getting into it. After spending the time putting this together, I decided that it was too indispensable not to make public. I am fairly certain that as of right now, there is nothing else like this anywhere on the web, and it's the absolute best I can do based on my own knowledge and music collection.

First of all, the tracks on this disc are irrelevant. They appear to be arbitrarily indexed, as if to say it doesn't matter what point in the piece you skip to -- you're going to hear something different. In fact, there have been four editions of this CD and they have all been tracked differently. I think one version has the piece on 4 tracks instead of 79 tracks, and that may be closer to the way the piece was initially put together. For practical purposes, I have separated this description into larger chunks of tracks, which theoretically you could group together and rip as-is from iTunes if you think that will help you digest it. The bottom line is that I do not believe the knowledge below actually helps you appreciate the music, although it might act as one of those self-guided walking tours that you can get in professional art exhibits.

Tracks 1 to 4: Cooloorta Moon
The album begins *briefly* with the guitar scribbles from "The Six Buttons of Sex Appeal," from the first album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979), played over the top of a radio broadcast introducing the 1989 single "Cooloorta Moon." This same radio broadcast has been used in NWW pieces before to describe the band with this tagline: "Think jazz, think punk attitude." Then this segues directly into "Cooloorta Moon," which plays for the bulk of the section. This is the samba-like track with the slide whistle and the mooing. Toward the end, some of the noise from 1979 comes back, but only briefly.

Tracks 5 to 9: Easy Listening Nightmares
This is predominantly "(I Don't Want to Have) Easy Listening Nightmares" from the 1995 mini album, Alice the Goon. This was recorded on site at a festival in Nevers, France and released in a limited edition until its standard release came out, around the year 2000.

Tracks 10 to 21: Sylvie and Babs/Hot Catz
Throughout track 18, this is essentially the album The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion from 1985, edited into smaller bites. At the time this was a legendary surrealist take on the Rat Pack swing era. The first bits are from "You Walrus Hurt the One You Love" but this transitions into "Great Balls of Fur" in the midst of track 12. Most of that track is defined by the drum sequence (with a slight horn melody) that sounds like a beginning player practicing, but is in fact the basis for an earlier rendition of "Old Man River" that NWW recorded entitled "Elderly Man River." This is of course spliced up into all sorts of sound bites. In track 18, this transitions into a newer piece from 2008 called "Groove Grease (Hot Catz)" from the album Huffin' Rag Blues. This is more Lynchian swing music and one of the most accessible albums the band has recorded (to its detriment, I think).

Tracks 22 to 25: Mary Jane
After a brief interlude, these tracks predominantly compose "Mary Jane" from the 2000 album Santoor Lena Bicycle, a collaboration with avant violinist Aranos—which I do not own and have never heard in its entirety. It was released only in an art edition in a custom painted board package that I typically can no longer afford.

Tracks 26 to 31: Bone Frequency/Astral Dustbin Dirge/Two Shaves and a Shine
These are miscellaneous pieces from all over the map. The metal-sounding piece is a collaboration with Peat Bog (Steven Stapleton's son-in-law, I think) recorded under the name The Inflatable Sideshow, from 1998. The second, an abrasive cut-up piece, was originally an outtake from early 1982 masterpiece Homotopy to Marie. It first appeared on an outtakes album in 1987 but was restored to the original work in the CD era. Finally, "Two Shaves and a Shine" was a bouzouki piece from the 1999 stoner opus An Awkward Pause, which was granted a lot of awkward remixes, including this one that quotes the classic Contortions no-wave anthem "Contort Yourself."

Tracks 32 to 38: Spiral Insana/A Piece of the Sky Is Missing
Most of this, through track 35, is the 1986 album Spiral Insana edited down to new form. This album is an experiment in ambient dynamics, on which all the tracks segue together and are hard to discern, though much of it originally appeared on side two of the LP. Some of the material toward the end did not appear until CD release in the mid-'90s. Around track 36, this transitions into the percussive "A Piece of the Sky Is Missing," a track from 1989.

Tracks 39 to 42: Rock 'n Roll Station
This is predominantly the title track to the 1994 album, another magnum opus in the NWW oeuvre, in which rhythm and vocals are explored; consider this the Nurse With Wound approach to hip-hop. This is a reworking of a track by French musician Jacques Berrocal, who also contributes the vocals.

Tracks 43 to 65: Rhythms and Blues
After the late '80s ambient phase, NWW turned to rhythm experiments. This selection begins with "Creakiness," an exploration of cartoon sound effects from 1991, then transitions into "Two Golden Microphones," the centerpiece of 1994's Rock 'n Roll Station. Around track 48, this becomes "Subterranean Zappa Blues," a Waits-like outtake from the same album. Tracks 51 to 55 revisit the first collaboration with Aranos, from 1997's Acts of Senseless Beauty. This is "A Window of Possible Organic Development," and the only truly rhythmic track from that experiment (you can identify it by the violin). Next up is a montage of pieces from the 1996 album Who Can I Turn to Stereo?, another accessible album that takes the rhythms of Rock 'n Roll Station and expands them into a trippy new piece with an "exquisite corpse"-style narration by a man with a foreign accent. The primary work featured here is "Yagga Blues," but the montage ends with a guitar lick from "Monument for Perez Prado." Around the beginning of track 58, the piece switches gears completely... The glass crunching is the opening bit from "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs Are Laughing and I Am Blind" from 1982's Homotopy to Marie, an album that presents suspense and tension in dark atmospheres, like touring a mental asylum after dark. At this point, the montage of pieces becomes so layered and complex that it is hard to distinguish all of them, but for the most part this section finishes with an untitled drum-n-bass piece from the 2006 outtakes record Rat Tapes One, sandwiched between parts of the Shipwreck Radio project from 2005 that includes a Deadhead from Lofoten, Norway talking about his favorite band and a woman pretentiously discussing art.

Tracks 66 to 79: Women and Atmospheres
The album ends with a blend of mood pieces and various European women singing, chanting, whispering, and reciting from throughout NWW's career. This begins with Laetitia from Stereolab and a full-blown Stereolab collaboration from 1993 called "Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason)." You can hear the Kraut-like prog kick in around track 69. Much of the following section is built upon the track "Dada x" from the 1980 album Merzbild Schwet, a lost classic and one of my favorite early NWW works. The following juxtaposition of a French woman and a hypnotic German woman incanting something about death in the night is from the various Echo Poeme sequences released in 2005, particularly The Little Dipper Minus Two and Sand Tangled Women. By track 73, the sounds recede into the swaying textures of 2003's Salt Marie Celeste, a longform piece about a ghost ship; it appears to be laid over the electronic humming that defines 1988's ambient triple-album masterpiece Soliloquy for Lilith, then fades out.

Countdown a Coming

2009-12-17T07:38:00.004-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. As a publishing entity, we did next to nothing this year and now the year's over. We love blogging soooo much.

THE MUSIC OF 2009

It's telling that of Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2009 so far, I only own two. The first, I bought two weeks ago. The other, I bought months ago but have never bothered to listen to it. Meanwhile, I have five albums in their honorable mentions list, some of which I really like and may rank high on my own personal countdown. So if this isn't a sign of my tastes diverging from that of the kids nowadays, I'm not sure what is. I did next to nothing this year and now the year's over. I love approaching 40 soooo much.

The striking thing for me is that for some reason I think 2009 has been a good music year—much better than 2008, which I whined about here. Thus I feel compelled to talk about some of my favorite releases. I don't know if it will be a top 15 again, or maybe a top 10, or even an 8, but it will be typically postmodern and generally out of fashion, so stay tuned, if anyone at all is still even paying attention to this blog.

The Pomax hiatus is ending soon.

2009-08-09T13:53:00.004-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. I didn't mean to leave it lingering listlessly after two epic posts about 30-year-old bands, but hey, what exactly have I missed in the meantime?

I suppose I should have mentioned the Throbbing Gristle show. Oh, wait... I'll get me coat.

Sounds of the Universe

2009-04-05T17:12:00.003-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. Or maybe I should say Post-Emo Precedent, because this week’s postmodern topic is Depeche Mode. That’s right, Depeche Mode: the terminally unhip synth-pop band that was barely relevant even in the ‘80s outside a circle of black-clad introverted art girls and their gay-but-not-out boyfriends.

Pushing my obvious sarcasm aside, let’s start by venting.

DEPECHE MODE IS NOT STRICTLY AN “80s BAND”

Notice how nobody calls U2 an ‘80s band? Regardless of when a band gets started, successive decades of consistent and boundary-pushing work have a way of liberating them from time while individualizing them from their peers. More importantly, if a band single-handedly gives birth to a number of (admittedly terrible) subgenres, they become something other than pop-purveyors defined by a single moment in time.

But even on the simplest terms, technically Depeche Mode had their greatest commercial successes after the 80’s, including their most successful album, Violator, and its most successful single, “Enjoy the Silence.” The band has had five albums since then, all of which debuted near the top of the album charts, and all of which spawned successful Hot 100 singles, including “I Feel You,” “Barrel of a Gun,” “It’s No Good,” “Dream On,” and “Precious.”

DEPECHE MODE IS NOT STRICTLY A SYNTH-POP BAND

They are postmodern musicians in the truest sense; they incorporate other styles into their sound, which is a futuristic hodgepodge of everything nostalgic and influential to them. They did this with goth and industrial. They did it with arena rock and dance music. They did it with grunge and gospel. They did it with country and electronica. They’ve had elements of lounge, show-tune balladry, blues, and even jazz. So why are so many of their so-called fans stuck on their simplest productions?

A lot of fans—especially those based in Europe and South America—seem to be deeply invested in the clubbier side of Depeche Mode. They enjoy trance and house and weird cross-bred fusions of the two like “futurepop,” on which Depeche Mode undoubtedly had some influence but to which they never directly contributed. For example, they’ve never done a straight up dance record, and after their Vince Clarke-authored debut album, they’ve never really done pure synth music, either. By album #2 (the transitional A Broken Frame), they already started incorporating found sounds and weird slow tempos that threatened to tear the otherwise simplistic music apart. In the long run, Depeche Mode may not have set out to make progressive synth rock, but that’s essentially what they accomplished. How else can one explain such signature tracks as “Pipeline,” “Blasphemous Rumours,” “Stripped,” “Clean,” or “In Your Room”?

And now I move on to the heart of this article, and the reason why I brought up Depeche Mode in the first place. Last night, I was browsing blogs and music sites, looking for reviews of the new Depeche Mode album, Sounds of the Universe. It leaked to the internet last week (perhaps unfinished?) and the fan community is reacting. After a few minutes of scanning some additional reactions today, I sent my friend and fellow DM fan (hi, Cybil!) an e-mail that said:

“I've read a ton of reviews of this album and they all say the same thing.
Worst Depeche Mode album ever, no songs, some interesting sounds, no
songs, waste of time, no songs, Dave is a horrible songwriter, no
songs, etc. It's a bit overwhelming. I have not yet seen one positive review of the record.”

So now that I have presented all the facts, I have an admission to make. In a moment of desperate frustration after reading the relentless onslaught, not knowing how to react to all these flitty narrow-minded naysayers, I launched a bit-torrent application and downloaded the album. I am NOT condoning the leak nor do I support the free distribution of an artist’s music unless of course an artist wants it that way… but in my defense, I have already purchased and paid for the album via the iTunes Pass option (a great new marketing scheme for fans that is completely baffling to everyone else on earth, apparently). Now I am going to take the opportunity to turn a seemingly-illegal download into an attempt to counter some of the negative coverage the album has garnered since its leak. After all, I have a minor background in music criticism and I’ve written reviews from promotional copies before; I fail to see how this is any different.

Here it is, folks: Sounds of the Universe is without question the best Depeche Mode record since Ultra. I know I can’t see straight when it comes to my love for that record, so it is probably even the best since Songs of Faith and Devotion. And I’m not just saying this to be contrary to the popular reaction. If I genuinely agreed with what all the early reviewers are saying, I simply wouldn’t be writing this right now.

DEPECHE MODE FANS ARE CLEARLY ON CRACK

My initial reaction to the album was one of shock, for two very distinct reasons. I haven’t been surprised by the sound of a Depeche Mode record since the first time I heard “Barrel of a Gun” (and really, that song was completely within the realm of expectation). But this entire record surprises me. Twenty years on from Violator, Depeche Mode should be phoning it in. (Remember what U2 did a few years back?) I would have never expected to see so much progression from this band in decade #3 of their career. Dave Gahan and Martin Gore are really bringing out the best in one another now, and undoubtedly at the root of such potent creativity lies an incredible friendship. They are really combining their voices and their styles much more than ever before (going so far as to electronically merge their vocals at key moments on the album), sending Depeche Mode to completely new places. (For the record, I still have no idea what Andrew Fletcher does.)

That initial shock has faded with repeated listenings. The other element of my shock, which continues to grow, is one of utter disbelief: how do fans all around the world think this is bad?!?

The epic opening track, “In Chains,” has one of those killer choruses that seems to come out of nowhere, and the way it is artfully woven throughout the song indicates to me that Martin Gore is drawing from the same songwriting well that produced “World in My Eyes.”

“Hole to Feed” features a jaunty rhythm and a unique sound (including counterpoint vocals throughout) that are all the more impressive when you learn, as I did a few minutes ago, that this is a Dave Gahan composition. Like the previous album’s “Suffer Well” but not as familiar sounding, it’s an absolute killer.

Next up, the somewhat undeniable “Wrong” sounded fresh upon its debut as a single a few months back and it sounds even stronger in the context of the album. Though I initially found it anemic, I’ve grown to recognize how its repetitions sharpen its attack and its flourishes of analog synthesizer really represent the album well. It’s also matched by one of the best Depeche Mode videos ever produced, perhaps because they opted to stray outside of familiar Anton Corbijn territory. The band’s presence in the finished film is so understated that it makes the song feel even more like a signature track of theirs; with no obvious need to push the song with starpower, the song’s sound and message efficiently stand on their own… with a little cinematic help, of course.

The next few tracks establish the warmer and more overtly melodic central section of the album, with “Fragile Tension” boasting one of Gahan’s all-time best vocal performances against a backdrop of rolling synths and (wow!), a lot of guitar. The fact that I didn’t even notice the guitar upon initial listenings is a testament to the overall production of the album (by Ben Hillier), which betters his work on Playing the Angel in every possible way. The swaggering “Little Soul” is pure duet, but feels a bit heavier on Martin content and as such demonstrates so many of Depeche Mode’s disparate non-rock influences all at once; it’s a smooth, recognizable concoction that is both noirish and comforting at the same time. “In Sympathy” is the closest the album comes to the kind of synth-pop that most Depeche Mode fans apparently want, lying somewhere between “Halo” and “Lilian” and featuring the kind of anthemic-but-humble chorus that makes the band inimitable. The pure electro-pop of “Peace” continues in the same vein, bastardizing the typical cliché of heavy-handed rock by turning its message inward: “Peace will come… to me.” It is the only other obvious single contender on the album.

The pleading ballad “Come Back” initially gained some exposure from an internet broadcast showing the guys playing the song live in the studio. It’s absolutely worth watching and showcases another Gahan composition:

The studio version of the track sounds nothing like this, instead sounding a little more like Playing the Angel’s fairly generic “I Want It All.” This makes me think that Gahan and his co-writers, Christian Eigner and Andrew Phillpott, don’t write with arrangement in mind, and that perhaps dressing up the songs with Depcche Mode’s stereotypically lush arrangement doesn’t serve them the way that a spare accompaniment might; this is a minor quibble, however.

After the vaguely French-sounding instrumental “Spacewalker,” the album continues with the gentle “Perfect,” showcasing Gore’s writing at the top of its game. Though lyrically he continues to run with the trial metaphor that he introduced on “Condemnation” a decade and a half ago, here it is exemplary of how roots music has saturated most aspects of Depeche Mode’s sound rather than feeding stylistic exercises as it once did. The soaring chorus here is striking, and could lend the song to single material.

“Miles Away / The Truth Is” is the last of Gahan’s three contributions, and like the other tracks he delivers, it mirrors his input on the previous album. This one is a low-key rocker that isn’t far from “Nothing’s Impossible.”

“Jezebel,” the lone Martin vocal track on the album, is one of the best latter-day solo Gore contributions, with a better sound—a torch singer on a space station—than he’s had so far this decade. I would pay for an entire album of material like this from him, instead of another collection of misfired covers.

The sinister “Corrupt” ends things on a devilish note, driven by the same sort of rock crunch that propelled “I Feel You” but toned down to match the serpentine aura of their version of “Dirt” by the Stooges.

In the end, with so many fully developed songs, it becomes clear that Playing the Angel was merely a transition into the new age of Depeche Mode’s craft. Though the new record follows the same template almost exactly, its greater success stems from a clearer sense of purpose. After all, just look at the title… Just as Music for the Masses stepped up the band’s stadium palatability and Songs of Faith and Devotion pulled the band’s spirituality out of ironic territory, Sounds of the Universe states its intention and direction up front.

My moment of surrender...

2009-03-15T12:51:00.010-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. Welcome to 2009. Welcome to my bashful confession.

I FELL OFF THE WAGON

The U2 wagon, that is... After declaring War upon these bombastic Boys for the better part of the millennium, they started working with Eno again, commissioned Anton Corbijn to churn out heaps of visual product faster than Vicky Pollard can churn out illegitimate chav babies, and Adam Clayton graduated to "silver fox" status. So how was I to resist?

THEY FELL OFF THE BANDWAGON

Supposedly the almost-excellent No Line on the Horizon is already underperforming, especially when compared to the huge immediate success of its predecessor, 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Why haven't all these corporate analysts figured out yet that the major difference so far is that U2 garnered a blow-out iTunes campaign for the last one? Isn't it pretty obvious to those industry types by now that iTunes can spin straw into gold?

WE DIDN'T GET ON OUR BOOTS

Okay, maybe not the only difference. (Lukewarm) lead single "Get on Your Boots" has deservedly underperformed, especially when compared to previous leads... "Vertigo." "Beautiful Day." "Discothèque." Whether one cared for them or not (for me: eh, nay, yay, in that order), it's hard not to see those songs as major entries to the U2 canon. But the new song has that glaring sound of an old band trying far too desperately to sound hip. When it conjures up memories of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," you know there's an obvious problem.

I'll admit the slightly Middle Eastern tinge appealed to me at first (hello, Brian) but something kept nagging at me, and like thousands of others, I quickly realized what it was—its overt familiarity. Please see the following:

80's

70's

60's

ALL THAT THEY COULD LEAVE BEHIND

So with all this evidence brought forth, why on earth did I submit? It sounds as if I'm making fairly strong arguments for the continued irrelevance of U2 in the 21st century.

Well, shucks. I'm only human.

My love/hate relationship with U2 (and that thing called Bono) is well-documented in my life, not least of which is the time I traded in 8 of their CDs for $40 to buy two used sport coats. Mostly, as much as I loved their continued experimentation throughout the '90s, I grew tired of them... and THEN they had the nerve to release two overhyped, overly safe records in a row. I didn't even pick up HTDAAB until last year, out of some misplaced sense of curiosity after the awesome reissues of their early '80s records. (And you know what? That record is *much* better than the previous one.)

The media covering No Line on the Horizon prior to its release repeatedly confirmed that U2 had begun experimenting again, with the right architects on the job to make it happen... Brian Eno and, to a lesser degree, Daniel Lanois. So despite the weak single, I felt obligated to give it a shot. And it's true -- the band seems to have finally left behind the need to leave behind what made them interesting in the first place. Does that make sense?

The title track rocks hard; Bono's performance here is astonishing. Truly, it's the best thing they've released since Achtung Baby. The third track, "Moment of Surrender," sounds like a soul-baring gospel song from outer space. It's magical, and not by coincidence a little bit like a track from Eno's 2005 record Another Day on Earth. "Fez: Being Born" is the most hallucinatory, atmospheric piece they've recorded this decade—and possibly since The Unforgettable Fire. Most importantly, there isn't a hint of bland balladry on the album until the 9th track, which at least showcases Bono's rich lower register (I have to admit, he's in fine form throughout the whole damn album). Ultimately, though it doesn't break any new ground (beneath her feet) for U2, No Line on the Horizon does carry its creators' greatest strengths from one interesting moment to another, reminding those of us who'd given up how we'd gotten hooked in the first place.

Imminent Immanent Eminent Immanant

2008-12-29T23:52:00.004-06:00

Our language is stupid. These words confuse me.

In memoriam of 2008, I'd like to say a few words about the state of music at the moment. Much like 10 years ago when "alternative" had been supersaturated into the mainstream and thus rock music had become a staticky gray nothing, the music that is happening today is both post-indie and post-irony, and therefore rather dull. I can't remember a year since the year 2000 when I felt this unenthused about everything; I'd chalk it up to age and cynicism except I've already seen firsthand the great things that happen to my enthusiasm when there is truly something worth getting excited over. Even 10 years ago there were Radiohead and the electronica threat to keep things jumping. Right now, I don't care what it is—hip hop no longer innovates (like rock, it just absorbs other genres), everything has been done in the electronic realm, and the best rock can come up with is unnecessary regurgitation from weak acts like Vampire Weekend, who were only big this year because nothing else of interest is stirring things up. I get no sense of where this music is *going*, no feel for how the music of days past is influencing the now, no headkick of wonder that I have tapped into the pulse of something that keeps the world's blood pumping, and least of all, I get no sense of boundary pushing. The fact that Pitchfork named Fleet Foxes the best band of the year is quite telling; as lush as it may be, their sound is deeply rooted in something 40 years past. Perhaps it's the fact that the post-punk music that I've always held so dear to me has been reappropriated ad nauseum by today's artists and as such I have nothing left to look forward to, but realistically I think each genre and subgenre have just spiralled inward to the point of irrelevance. Bring on 2009!

Congratulations, America!

2008-11-04T20:59:00.004-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, wherein your host in smug giddyness is celebrating the fact that it looks like Barack Obama has just been elected one of the most esteemed leaders of the free world. At the moment I am writing this, Obama has taken Ohio and Pennsylvania both, which more or less clinches the election.

MISGUIDED FRIENDS

I am very pleased to say that despite the fact that most of my extended family lives in Missouri with their heads securely up their asses and some of my best friends proved themselves hopelessly out of touch with the needs of the country (and thankfully said friends wasted their votes in the deep blue of California), those of us who believe that Obama represents a change in our country's international standing and hope for our future have prevailed.

I have to scratch my head in complete bewilderment at anyone's support of John McCain at this point, who has run a terribly negative campaign based on discrediting his opponent with false and cheap fear tactics rather than emphasizing his own strengths and ably demonstrating his ability to lead. His horrific selection of a running mate should have been a red flag to you that his judgment was impaired.

MISSING FRIENDS

Although I have certainly enjoyed watching Diane Sawyer giggle as she shimmies across the floor of the ABC News studio in Times Square, I am forced to consider that this is the first presidential election in which I've taken part where I haven't had Peter Jennings as my evening's guide.

You were a class act, Mr. Jennings, and sadly a casualty of your love for cigarettes. ABC News is not the same without you.

But this evening is not about sadness!!! Leave it to RTW to find a reason to mourn tonight.

In honor of a great day, the blog is turning blue for a time.

“We’ve made such advances…”

2008-11-01T17:53:00.005-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, where enquiring minds want to know: how exactly does the new Legendary Pink Dots album measure up? Now that I’ve had more than a month to absorb it, will it ultimately help me recapture my love for the band, or am I ready to write them off entirely?

BLINDER

Unlike what the Dots have been doing for much of the last 10 years, Plutonium Blonde focuses first and foremost on studio craft, rather than attempting to reproduce their live sound on record. The best pieces, such as the opening “Torchsong,” the nostalgic “Faded Photograph,” and the chaotic “An Arm and a Leg” may not break any new ground, but the studio experimentalism conjures up an earlier direction once passed over rather than expanded upon; within the first five minutes of the sinister chopping of “Torchsong,” I feel I am listening to Shadow Weaver Part 3. With Ka-Spel declaring, “So much to kill for!”, the album opens on a darker note than anything the Dots have done previously. The electronic effects have the same sort of uber-digital, clean detail that has been all but missing from the band’s more recent organic forays. Considering that 1994’s 9 Lives to Wonder, as good as it is, truly marks the beginning of the Dots’ obsession with their live performance rather than their records, this emphasis on studio wizardry is a welcome development, even if the band remains entirely oblivious of recording trends and modern gimmickry.

BLANDER

That being said, I wish Ed and Phil would occasionally let Niels sit out for a few rounds. I respect his place in the band’s history but the throwback hippie sound of his horns in certain contexts still horribly irritates me. His work on the otherwise guitar-oriented “A World with No Mirrors” really isn’t terrible, but when coupled with Edward’s somewhat strangulated vocal performance, the track overemphasizes both the band’s dated approach to songwriting and the production constraints that have left the record sounding of slightly lower fidelity than just about anything the LPDs have recorded since The Golden Age (their golden age?).

This is a small gripe, though. The album really is remarkably better than anything the band has done in a decade. Its most common relative is probably Your Children Placate You from Premature Graves but other than perhaps the brief “My First Zonee,” it never really seems to be pandering specifically to children and girlfriends. “Zonee” is in fact quite weird. It’s the album’s “Crumbs on the Carpet,” or possibly “When Lenny Meets Lorca.” Overtly poppy and based on a major chord arpeggio, it exemplifies those moments when the Dots don’t seem to realize that they’ve mutated into aliens who are completely unaware that nobody on earth is truly clamoring for music like this.

BLENDER

Once again, the Dots have produced a record with a mind-bending variety of stylistic twists and turns, often within the same song. “Rainbows Too?”, which perhaps takes its name from the classic Tear Garden epic “You and Me and Rainbows,” has a nine-minute, three-part format that allows it to switch gears dramatically from a percolating pop song to a slow-pulsing, ambient space passage and back again. Although they’ve done this kind of thing before (“The Andromeda Suite,” for starters), the song is a strong and adventurous track that helps establish that the band might be back on course. Similarly, “A World with No Mirrors” drops into a dark ambient passage just as it starts to wind up, and “An Arm and a Leg” is a spoken spaz-out piece—like “The Saucers Are Coming,” but with the stoner rock jams reverting to bleepy electronic freak-outs that are more in line with Ka-Spel’s solo work.

BLUNDER

Despite its strengths, I’d go so far as to say Plutonium Blonde could possibly be the worst-sequenced album in the Dots’ long career. Once upon a time, they released nearly everything as a concept album, no matter how muddled or overlabored, or else they meticulously edited everything together to produce an ever-flowing suite of sometimes-disparate pieces. Here, they bother with neither, following epic synthscapes with odd, sappy folk experiments unfortunately carried over from the All the King’s Horses era. A simple playlist reshuffle can remedy the problem of the sequence but not the frustration it inflicts. As is, “A World with No Mirrors” and the sing-songy, banjo-laden “Mailman” feel completely out of place, when they could have been so much more effectively positioned elsewhere. For example, if the slight “Mailman” segued directly into the mighty “Torchsong,” the creative juxtaposition would prove unbearably evil.

As it stands, only the last third of the album flows well, dominated mostly by languid and tranquil (tranguid?) electronic instrumentation. The trance-inducing “Oceans Blue” finds the band almost in Eno mode but with a patented LPD spin, putting forth repetitive ambience (which could be loop-based) for nearly 8 minutes only to interrupt it suddenly with an ominous, rickety motor that rudely jolts listeners out of their comas. This kind of brilliance proves that the Dots’ most boring excursions of the recent past have been primarily the result of laziness by not tending to the finer details. After the brief “Savannah Red,” an instrumental blip that showcases the album’s only musical bass line/rhythm combination, dissonance returns in the perfect album closer, “Cubic Caesar,” which is so saturated in listless barbiturate haze that I find it extremely difficult to muster the energy to hear another song immediately afterward.

BLONDER

In conclusion, I’m more surprised by this record than I am disappointed, and though I’m not going to run out and buy it in 20 different physical formats as I might have done a few years ago, I’m perfectly happy with my $10 digital download. Make of that what you will...

And see you next time!

Dig Out Your Smurfs

2008-10-12T21:06:00.005-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, wherein I shall now discuss two completely unrelated things in a somewhat bizarre collision of epiphany-fueling thought processes stuck inside my head.

FOOKIN' O-AYE-SIS...

...have somehow miraculously just put out one of the best records of their long and unvaried career. And somewhat more miraculously, even though five of Noel's six contributions to the album are stone cold classics, the best songs on the record are two of Liam's three. Yes, I know there were a lot of naysayers when "Little James" first reared its ugly Hey-Judish head eight years ago, but I always saw the promise there, and now the Gallagher Minor has delivered. Expect the Beatlesque (no, really) "I'm Outta Time" to knock the tired "Don't Look Back in Anger" out of future setlists, and for the entrancing "Soldier On" to plant the seed for Liam's inevitable solo album in 5 years' time.

The album doesn't offer much in the way of surprises—they've been honing this "full band contribution" approach for two or three albums now. It's just that Gem and Andy have really fully taken hold now, and as a result this one feels more consistent, even if a bit top-heavy; all of Noel's songs are positioned at the front. In some ways, this allows for the album to act more like a psychedelic journey (something Oasis have always wanted), because it starts with the familiar and gradually works its way out to other textures.

Refreshingly, though, Dig Out Your Soul is never TOO familiar, which has been the shortcoming of all Oasis records since 1997. Granted, nobody ever thought the band would pull a Kid A—they absolutely haven't—but from the starting gate this is a rip-roaring version of Oasis unlike any version previously heard, who absolutely plow through every sonic hurdle in the book without losing any momentum whatsoever. Subtle details often link the tracks together, adding that much more to the overall cohesion. Most of the sonic success here probably goes to producer Dave Sardy, returning after his masterful work on the last Oasis record, Don't Believe the Truth. Here, his touch is similarly clean and powerful, keeping Oasis from getting bogged-down in their own vortex of late-'60s muck.

And now I'm going to move on to a new topic before this one devolves into a discussion about digital music file formats and Apple's apparent inability to get the other major labels to contribute to their higher bit rate, DRM-free mission. I'll save that complaint for a later day.

GNAP!

Completely switching gears here, do you remember the purple Smurfs? I have never forgotten them. Of course, part of this might have to do with the fact that my friend and I had a tendency to parade around our junior high school shouting GNAP! at any convenient opportunity we could find.

The story, which falls in line with any classic story about zombies or vampires or fascist thought control, goes something like this: One day Lazy Smurf is sent into the woods to do some tiresome chore when he's caught napping on the job, and in the process he comes across a dreaded (gasp) purple fly. The fly bites him on the tail, and he immediately turns purple *and* evil, and his full vocabulary is replaced by a single word.

GNAP!

One by one the Smurfs bite each other on the tail, turning one another purple, until gradually the remaining blue Smurfs are outnumbered. Papa Smurf is the last one left, and of course he has spent most of this time trying to formulate the remedy in his smurfy little lab. He actually does get turned for a brief second, but his vaccine has already been released into the air and all the Smurfs are saved.

So why do I bring this up now? Because there's something about all those little blue dudes eyeing up each other's asses and biting one another that reminds me of homosexual behavior in quarantined societies, such as prison. No, seriously. I mean, the first Smurf that Lazy goes after? Hefty Smurf, with his gruff voice and tattooed arms and manly demeanor. Just look at the expression on Lazy's face, and look at *where* he's looking:

There has always been something gay about the Smurfs, and not just in that "La, La, La-la-la-la" way. Ninety-something adult men living together in harmony with their Daddy. (I hear you now: "What about Smurfette?") Well, yes, Smurfette is present in this particular cartoon but she is completely sidelined as she didn't exist when the story was written for the comic books, and as such we're not even graced with the sight of some hungry purple dude sizing up her ass. But guess how many guys sizing up guys we see?

I rest my case.

Now, as a famous TV commercial once said, "Boboli. See you next time!"

Whatever happened to (my love for) the Legendary Pink Dots?

2008-09-08T19:36:00.004-05:00

Well, folks, you can't get much more psychedelic or indie than the Legendary Pink Dots, who have been releasing albums (LPs, CDs, cassettes, box sets, special packages, live concerts, etc.) prolifically—no, make that maniacally—since 1980. And those of you who have known me for a while know that, like other LPD fans, I was into them almost exclusively and obsessively for at least 10 years.

Buzz is now starting to build for Plutonium Blonde, their first record in 2 years ("just a lifetime" in the scheme of the LPDs' release schedule). Pre-release descriptions so far have referred to it as their most commercial-sounding album ever, shocking and delightful, etc., though there hasn't been much in the way of official reviews or samples, even on their newly revamped website or myspace page.

To these reactions I say, in muted disbelief, "Really??"

YOU CAN'T JUDGE [AN ALBUM] BY ITS COVER...

The new millennium so far has seen the Dots mired in a strange, almost dull place between mature songcraft and dad rock, reserving their more experimental sides for Ka-Spel's solo projects and their rarer outtakes and companion albums. Their 2002 album All the King's Horses ranks as my least favorite in their oeuvre, while 2004's The Whispering Wall sounded like a retread of their late '80s work. And though 2006's Your Children Placate You from Premature Graves holds a unique low-key spot amongst their albums, it's not particularly memorable nor exciting, and it holds the proud distinction of having one of their worst titles and worst album covers. So one would think that in 2008, the guys would want to dazzle us with something new—if they can. Thus far, here's what we have:

Now I'll be the first to admit there's something charming about this cover, namely its pastel artwork and the dated look of the woman on the cover. Who is she? Why does she resemble a mother from the late '50s who is likely living a double life as a hotel prostitute? And what does she have to do with apocalypses, premonitions, and poppies?

But on the other hand, it concerns me a bit. The Dots roped me in first and foremost because their music was very exploratory. Most of their songs start in one place and take you somewhere else, whether lyrically or sonically, and I hate to say it but they've been leaving this side of their sound behind for nearly 10 years. In my opinion, 1997's Hallway of the Gods is the last time they broke any ground at all, though the quality and symphonic depth of the two albums to follow obscured what was truly happening.

I get that the band has grown older and that most bands can't stay edgy forever, especially those who are based in technology. What has Brian Eno done of serious interest lately? Which of Richard H. Kirk's side projects expanded upon his initial Sandoz ideas? I mean, Kraftwerk didn't release any truly new material between 1986 and 2003; when they finally did, it was a record based on a 20-year-old song.

But the Dots seemed different. Their ability to do their thing while continuing to function outside of the flux of whatever scene they were orbiting always made them strangely relevant—and their live shows are still, for lack of a better term, legendary. Whether traversing the halls of New Romantic synth-pop, descending into the goth ghetto, or aspiring to some sort of high-brow free-jazz mutation revered by graduate students and stoners, the Dots were always interesting and surprising.

Until they weren't.

BLONDE BOMBSHELL

As a disgruntled fan with lowered expectations, I suppose this is where I express my needs for a new Legendary Pink Dots album. Does it truly need to blow me out of the water? Stun me with its kaleidoscopic depth? Lull me into a blissful coma? Scare me?

Yes.

Well, no. All I really want is an album that Edward hasn't written for either his introverted girlfriend or his children. From here we'll watch the world go by and I'll report back once I've absorbed the damn thing.

Pussy Queen

2008-06-18T23:37:00.003-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, in the court of Her Majesty Marathon.

Millennium Hallucinogenium

2008-06-18T22:49:00.010-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Acid-ent. Pardon the following miscellany, but my brain is a bit fried at the moment.

TAKE A TRIP IN CHICAGO!

The following series of pictures was taken on a brisk day back in February when my friend Dave Schwartz came to visit.
One thing that my recent Journey to the End of the Night experience has taught me was that I should take much more pride in the city and flaunt my urban exploration as much as possible. So while Schwartz left Chicago nearly 8 years ago (we are OLD!) and hasn't really had a chance to see all the recent developments in Millennium Park, I have constantly lived here and yet have rarely taken the time to just go down there and walk around. I am therefore pleased to present these cool, escapist pics, perhaps as a reprieve from the harsh realities of flood-damaged farming towns and depressed economies. Are you ready to freak out?

These pics are slightly more recent, from a beautiful night in May.

And remember... LAKE SHORE DRIVE? = LSD!

Journey to the End of the Night

2008-04-20T13:40:00.013-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident.

EXPERIENCE YOUR OWN ZOMBIE MOVIE

Last night, I did this:

The whole evening was unspeakably awesome. Quick summary: About 150 players with blue armbands made their way out of Wicker Park to visit a series of checkpoints all over the city. Players in red armbands chased them. When caught, blue were turned red. Some red were on bicycles! Blue could only walk, run, or use the train. Areas around each checkpoint were safe zones. Trains and train stops were also safe zones.

The six checkpoints had to be visited in order. At each checkpoint, an agent would sign your manifest. You did not get a description of the agent at each checkpoint until you visited the previous one.
The six checkpoints were:

1117 N Elston - the exterior of a bar on a semi-deserted stretch between Divison and Augusta, along Goose Island. Not a lot of access, with only a couple of ways to get under the expressway.

Green & I-90/94 - literally an underpass in the middle of nowhere, near the intersection of Grand, Milwaukee, and Halsted. Getting to and from this one was the scariest part of the night.

Hubbard & Michigan, lower level - essentially, the Billy Goat Tavern, which was still open, and a welcome rest stop.

Exelon Plaza - the executive park outside the Chase building, on the block between Madison & Monroe, Clark & Dearborn. Getting here was likely the easiest stretch, as the loop is well-lit with lots of people and numerous routes to use.

Roosevelt & Canal - just to the west side of the Roosevelt bridge crossing the river. Getting here was the longest and most difficult stretch of the evening. We lost teammates, we split apart, we ran like hell.

Field Museum Lawn - this one got moved, likely due to police interference, over to the grounds behind the Shedd Aquarium. The entire section of Grant Park to the east of Lakeshore Drive was a safe zone -- but with 100 chaser zombies accumulating there, how would we make it??

The full recap for the SF0 website (who sponsored the game) is HERE.

Posting just to post

2008-04-12T12:59:00.007-05:00

Sorry, POMAX frenz -- I seem to have gone AWOL. New exciting responsibilities in the real world of book publishing and all that... not to mention a re-submersion into all things Fall, as I prepare for the imminent release of Imperial Wax Solvent (a Batman reference).

Here is my favorite pic of Mark and Brix, by the way. The page it's from is a compilation of photos by Michael Pollard from the This Nation's Saving Grace time period, and they're all roundly excellent.

1.

2008-02-27T00:07:00.010-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident’s Best of 2007. Now you can all just kiss off into the air.

Let’s begin the final installment of the countdown by reiterating my choices for best album of the past several years. I think it’s the best way to illustrate my mindset in making these selections.

The best album of 2003 was in fact Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief. I tend to think of that year as having an embarrassment of riches when it comes to strong individual songs, but only a few major contenders in the album category. At this point, I was still floating from the slow, syrupy fix of Amnesiac a few years before, and it may have clouded my judgment. Big apologies to Mew, and Muse, and Tangiers, and the Rapture, but none of you seemed to push the boundaries of your capabilities; Radiohead, on the other hand, managed to go even further into the experimental abyss while still maintaining an exceptionally identifiable sound.

The best album of 2004 was Liars’ They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, and I knew it the first time I heard it, and I never wavered from that decision. This is the album that nobody likes except for me, except of course for all of us who say that this is the album that nobody likes except for us. This was the sound of a band completely shattering the expectations of every last one of their fans, all the while challenging themselves. I reward nothing more than fearless adventurousness, especially in bands that already fit neatly into a box. (Additional bonus points for sampling Einstürzende Neubauten.)

The best album of 2005 was the Dandy Warhols’ Odditorium or Warlords of Mars. This is the album that nobody likes except for me. Really. Google it if you don’t believe me! For me, it’s the sound of a highly talented pop group going completely off the rails. It’s perverse, trippy, long, and nobody else likes it; in other words, the perfect album.

The best album of 2006 was Hot Chip’s The Warning. This one almost seems like a conservative choice for me, but I was constantly stricken by its intelligence and its playability, plus it marked the culmination of my three-year obsession with all things produced by the DFA. “Over and Over” is dirty, “Boy from School” is charming, and “No Fit State” is hypnotically alluring. I still listen to this album frequently, and no, their new release Made in the Dark doesn’t hold a candle to it.

And the best album of 2007? It shouldn't take a nihilist with a good imagination to figure it out.

The problem with “best albums” is that they’re the ones you least want to talk about. This year, I could go on about Kevin Barnes’ transformation into a bona fide rock star, his use of the record as a therapeutic outlet for his depression and as a document of his recovery. I could make long statements about how I am still completely uninterested in Of Montreal’s shady past of twee, children-being-indulgent pop records, with titles like The Bedside Drama, The Gay Parade, and Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies. I could even lash out generally against the painfully unadventurous Elephant 6 collective, while pointing out how this album marks Of Montreal’s evolution beyond such earlier constraints.

And you know what? Kevin Barnes is weird.

But none of that really matters. Mostly, I just want to play the album... repeatedly. Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? struck a chord in me immediately, as it takes just one listen to hear its magic. Barnes is a stunningly great melodicist and lyricist, and the music—something akin to synthesized glam rock, complete with glorious dollops of Sparks and early Eno—is kaleidoscopic in its constant whirl of color and energy. Barnes moves effortlessly from sunny, histrionic pop like “Suffer for Fashion” through the epic driving menace of “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal” to the crunchy manic rock of “She’s a Rejecter” in such a way that you can tell he’s reached some sort of catharsis. (Or possibly several of them: emotional, mental, sexual...) Every time I go back to the album, I discover new moments; the simple fact that I’ve heard such gems as “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” and “Gronlandic Edit” hundreds of times and yet still feel like I’m listening with virgin ears is a testament to how fun and fresh the record remains.

Oh, shit. You probably just went to YouTube and watched the video for either one of those songs and now you think I'm fucking mad. This could be the music of a million crack-addled street musicians, vying for attention. You and your Wilco New Pornographer ears have now lost all faith in my musical credibility. That's it, folks. Game's over; the countdown is done, and it was all rendered meaningless by a quick, harsh judgment against music that sounds completely inane to you on the surface.

I won't lie: Hissing Fauna is overwhelmingly self-indulgent, but here's a key difference between Of Montreal and, say, Dan Deacon. Most artists indulge after a taste of success; buoyed by confidence, they lose their ability to self-edit and produce disastrously misguided material as a result. Of Montreal, however, has done the opposite. Their indulgence has brought about their success, and Barnes has delivered his finest album to date on the heels of severe self-doubt. I can only hope that the massive confidence boost he received this year (especially evident in their live show) does not cloud his vision for the future. I have ranked Hissing Fauna as the #1 record of the year because, more than any other record, it demonstrates remarkable growth in an artist whose future could not be brighter.

2. Radiohead - In Rainbows

2008-02-24T10:07:00.004-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident’s Best of 2007:
“…for my family.”

Look, I am as sick of this as you are. I am aware that it is no longer 2007 and that 2008 is slowly creeping by. Another Valentine’s Day has come and gone that meant nothing to me whatsoever because I am a loveless black-hearted fool who is always obsessing about the year before. Musically right now I’m excited about a number of interesting things that have nothing to do with 2007. And most importantly, I have pictures and experiences that I’d like to post that have nothing to do with this inane countdown that nobody seems to be reading anyway.

And so, you might ask, why not just finish up? And so, I might ask back, is that really the way you expect things to run in my world? Of course you don’t… There are death flus and catalog copy and friends visiting and IDM from 15 years ago and all sorts of things that have commanded my attention in the interim. I even considered just not finishing the countdown, because it somehow seems strangely appropriate.

Earlier this month I made a point of establishing a distinction between favorites and the selections on this list, and by that standard the following artist has absolutely no right to be anywhere near the countdown, and really, nobody wants to hear me talk about them again after 10 whole years of hyperbolic fanboy blathering.

Radiohead keep breaking everybody else’s rules; I’m not sure why I expect them to adhere to mine.

Despite the three years of hype that followed OK Computer and the documentary film that I saw at the Music Box behind that big-headed guy and the complete immersion in Kid A that made me sound like I was proselytizing to everyone I knew and the traveling across the country to see the band perform at Liberty State Park and the downloading of a bazillion live bootlegs and the rapture that followed when “True Love Waits” was finally released on a record and 4 years of listening to one particular bootleg that contained an unreleased live track called “Reckoner” that was somehow reminiscent of Led Zeppelin “being pulled apart by horses,” I was convinced that Radiohead were done. It was taking far too long for them to record a follow-up to Hail to the Thief and Thom’s solo record oddly failed to affect me.

“Radiohead are done,” I told my friends, as many of you know. And if they weren’t done, they would surely suck. They would somehow unwrite the fact that “There There” still managed to qualify in my mind as the best single of 2003 and that if I had gotten my cat two years later I would have named her “Myxomatosis” and that “The Gloaming” is still in my head, always, every day, and that there are a LOT of inappropriate situations where you should not sing out loud, “They will suck you down to the other side.”

As you can imagine, it took me all of 8 seconds to decide I was going to shell out the $80 for the In Rainbows Discbox when the band made the announcement that changed everything.

You’re rolling your eyes.

But before you write off my comments as a true believer, please hear me out. I understand that the band’s “pay what you want” approach to downloading sub-par MP3 files was not really as cool as it sounded, and that the skeptics in the audience see it as not much more than foregoing the traditional avenue of distributing free promo CDs to stores and publications around the world. But Radiohead understood that the greatest, fastest form of spreading information was via the Internet, with which they came of age, and ultimately they didn’t need a dinosaur business industry to help them with this part of the task. Rather than just leaking their own album, they offered up an alternative that made people think about the value of music, the value of artistry, the future of the music industry, and the responsibility that goes hand in hand with an awareness of their own power.

In other words, Radiohead took the opportunity to show everyone in the industry that there are other ways to proceed rather than to simply adhere to a dying model. And if the record itself weren’t possibly the finest they’ve recorded to date, this fact alone might be enough to justify their inclusion near the very top of my 2007 countdown.

But, oh, that record…! I was sick as a dog the night it became available for download. Actually, it was about 8 in the morning in the UK. Knowing this, I went to bed early and got myself up in the middle of the night to download it as soon as possible. I transferred it to my iPod and carried it back to bed, and lied there mesmerized and feverish for 40 minutes, entranced, absorbing the whole thing.

What I recall from the haze: the shouts of the children at the end of “15 Step,” the unprecedented high note that Thom holds at the climax of “Nude,” the weird switch in dynamics 3/4 of the way through “Weird Fishes,” and the endless wait for the pile-driving guitar momentum of “Reckoner” to interrupt the swoony, sophisticated tapestry of noodles and bleeps and synths that was dominating the record, which of course never happened because “Reckoner” developed a soul and became something else entirely.

It's an awe-inspiring record by a band who has creatively surpassed themselves so many times now that I have difficulty understanding why anyone still considers the stalemated U2 to be the best band in the world. And my Discbox has proven to be worth every penny, as the vinyl is mastered at 45 rpm to allow for more information in its grooves and the bonus CD has a number of additional gems on it like "Down Is the New Up" (sultry, minor-keyed rock), "Last Flowers" (desolate beauty, like "True Love Waits" or "Like Spinning Plates") and "4 Minute Warning" (gentle, ghostly).

Then why isn't In Rainbows the best record of 2007? Because I think it hijacked the year somewhat. Radiohead are currently bigger than charts and countdowns; even their baby steps are noted by major news networks and cultural commentators. Despite my crazy fandom for a decade, I always felt that their music was somehow "mine." But not anymore; Radiohead truly belong to everybody.

So there's another record, by another artist, who defined 2007 for me so much more profoundly than this did...

(Oh, here's the marvelous clip for "Jigsaw Falling Into Place"...)

3. M.I.A. - Kala

2008-02-10T10:42:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident’s Best of 2007:
“…for my heartache.”

I cannot think of any working artist right now who feels more vital than Maya Arulpragasam; her music has an absolutely perfect balance of universal appeal, intelligence, political weight, and forward-thinking production. Her basic style, best described in muso terms as grime infused with ragga and electro pop, makes her the first artist in my mind to show that hip-hop will ultimately prove to be a genre of music even more comprehensive than rock. The fact that I am even covering this record on Postmodern Accident is a testament to its breadth. M.I.A. references the Clash, the Modern Lovers, and the Pixies on Kala, and she brings in such disparate elements as ABBA-esque Bollywood pop and a group of aboriginal boy rappers. It is a truly astonishing assortment of sounds, approaches, and—most importantly—cultures.

Last year I remarked several times that M.I.A. had produced the album of the year. If we were speaking strictly on musical terms, I might still feel that way, but I think middle-class American guilt actually keeps me from upholding it so highly. The problem is that Kala is so earnest in its multiculturalism, and so readily tuned to the NPR set, that despite its relevance to my musical tastes (think dancy, edgy, electronic, British, sarcastic, etc.), it makes me feel phony, like some sort of silent passenger on its wild ride. I mean, who am I? Just some dull, overeducated, thirty-something white male who has been surrounded by cushions his entire life; I know more about British men with teased hair and lipstick than I do about militant struggles for Tamil independence. So what right do I have to declare that M.I.A. rocked my world more than everyone else in 2007??

When it came to compiling this list, the bottom line is that she didn’t, no matter how much I wanted her to. Kala is an extraordinarily fun record that somehow makes me want to dance and listen to non-American newscasts at the same time. It makes me want to be a better person. But I am not yet that person, and last year, two other artists—far more predictable in terms of little ol' RTW—rocked my world even more.

Here is Postmodern Accident’s choice for song of the year, “Paper Planes”:

4. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam Panda Bear - Person Pitch

2008-02-09T11:40:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident’s Best of 2007:
“…for my headache.”

Did you ever watch the MTV Top 20 Video Countdown that was played on Friday nights at 7? I think it was aired again over the weekend, so you didn’t have to cut into your Friday night mall time to watch it. I most frequently remember the show hosted by Adam Curry, possibly China Kantner or Carolyn Heldman occasionally.

WOW. Remember Kevin Seal? There are, like, NO pictures of these people online. For personalities who were so pivotal to suburban teen life in the late ‘80s, they sure seem obscure now.

Anyway, my point is that as the countdown reached its higher realms, there was almost always a video that everyone, without exception, was just completely sick of seeing, and instead of playing out the whole damn thing again, they’d show an excerpt from it and move on to something else. I mean, why watch all 7 minutes of “The Way You Make Me Feel” if you could gloss over it in 30 seconds and avoid the crotch-grabbing altogether? This was especially important if a song were moving down the chart, though I’m fairly certain MTV never failed to play the entirety of “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”

I’m not exactly sick of Animal Collective, and their standing on my list hasn’t faltered in any way. But as I already spent
an entire post back in October blathering on about Strawberry Jam and Avey and Panda, I don’t really need to say much about them now.

Here’s the video for Panda Bear’s “Bro’s,” but don’t expect to be able to watch the whole thing because even as an edit it’s still 6 minutes long, and it’s so swirly that it kind of makes me sick. There’s a cat and a long haired (boy?) showering and something else but I don’t have the mild dose of ketamine handy that would undoubtedly slow my visual processing down enough to figure it out. Still, it’s a good example of Panda’s unusual Brian-Wilson-meets-Brian-Eno variant of postmodernism and deserves to be exalted here.

5. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver

2008-02-03T15:16:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident’s Best of 2007:
“…for my lonely.”

James Murphy’s 2005 full-length debut as LCD Soundsystem established that he could be as good as his mighty influences: Daft Punk, Brian Eno, the Fall, Talking Heads. Since then, his newfound status as tastemaker and trailblazer has allowed him to grant careers back to long-forgotten groundbreakers from 25 years ago: Liquid Liquid, Pigbag, Pylon, This Heat. His ever-growing legacy as a remixer has enabled him to keep company with seemingly untouchable contemporaries: Gorillaz, Hot Chip, the Rapture, Soulwax.

Opening with the best dance number of an already-incredible career and resonating emotionally with its audience for much of its remainder, Sound of Silver raises the stakes considerably for James Murphy; it proves that he deserves his ongoing position atop that high, high pedestal. Other than dropping a few more names, what more could I possibly say?

6. Shocking Pinks

2008-02-03T14:30:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident’s Best of 2007:
"...for my sorrow."

DISCLAIMER: The following artist is from New Zealand, and yet has absolutely nothing to do with anyone named Finn.

I think I trust the DFA too much. Ever since the one-two of “House of Jealous Lovers” and “Losing My Edge,” I’ve been picking up just about every release that has that stupid little hand-drawn lightning bolt logo on it—and almost without exception have enjoyed them all. But in a year where the DFA may have spread themselves too thin (focusing on their flagship, signing new bands, reissuing old ones, licensing 12” singles from across the sea), it’s reassuring to know that Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy are still capable of utterly surprising me with their outright coolness, snatching up a fantastic, little-known lo-fi independent act from one of the farthest corners of the world and sharing it with the rest of us.

DISCLAIMER: This album is a compilation of tracks from two prior records released only in New Zealand. Although the bulk of it is composed of tracks from their latest record presented in the same sequence, in some circles this might disqualify it from inclusion on any 2007 list. If you are a member of such circles, fuck you. This record trumps any of that New Pornographers shit to which you keep clinging.

If you think the DFA affiliation means that this album is going to be chock full of white electro-funk and disco beats, think again. Shocking Pinks is basically the outlet for self-confessed reformed heroin junkie Nick Harte to indulge his fascination with the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, and it shows almost immediately. “This Aching Deal” and “Second Hand Girl” could be outtakes from New Order’s Low Life. “How Am I Not Myself?”—a great title undoubtedly stolen from I Heart Huckabees—sounds like an attempt to emulate the Smiths’ famous riff-and-warble combo. And “End of the World” and “Emily” have a melodic romanticism that has been missing from most alt-rock since the gritty ‘90s turned the Psych Furs into Love Spit Love.

But the two greatest things to know about Shocking Pinks are that (1) Harte is a drummer first and foremost, so the record bears an overwhelmingly hot live-drum sound that sets it apart from everything else on the DFA roster and (2) Harte seems committed to a strictly lo-fi approach that frees these songs from a distinct time and place and gives them all a common denominator. The end result is a record with an embarrassment of riches in a number of disparate styles that sounds like a smartly sequenced greatest hits and plays like a cultural touchstone.

There’s a transcendent moment in the video for “End of the World” where an electric saw is throwing sparks as it cuts through the door of a crashed car in order to reach the passengers inside. The sparks are strangely beautiful despite the circumstances, and I like to think this element is part of what makes Shocking Pinks so appealing, and why I rate it so highly.

Not 6. Liars

2008-02-01T00:18:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. This is not number six. Six. Six is still coming.

Whenever I compose lists like this, I have to be especially careful not to confuse my “favorites” of the year with “the best.” There are certain artists who have crossed some sort of threshold in my mind that essentially disqualifies them from the year-end best lists, simply because they would always rank there. I am forced to admit a certain degree of subjectivity; I can no longer judge clearly whether I am judging these records clearly. Otherwise, my list would have Depeche Mode, the Fall, and something Damon Albarn-related on it every year.

Liars have probably ascended to that level. For me, they remain the most consistently unpredictable and refreshing band of the 2000s. Yet after I heralded their 2nd album They Were Wrong, So We Drowned as the best of 2004 ("Foot in the grave!" The album is all about witchcraft…), I just kind of stopped talking about them. So please allow me a moment, in the midst of this year’s countdown, to reflect upon the state of Liars today, how they measured up in 2007, and what it means to be a Liars fan.

My friend John, who typically likes laid back singer/songwriter types and countrified rock bands like Wilco, went to see Interpol back in October, with Liars opening up. The morning after the show, I asked him what he thought of it. “Interpol were okay,” he said. “But that opening band? They weren’t even music.”

Of course, Liars are music, but I know what he meant. Liars are so driven by their own contrarianism that they’ll spend two years making noise just to make up for the previous two years in which they composed songs. Most of the time, they focus so heavily on hovering near the outer fringes of convention that the brief hooks and choruses that inevitably pop up on their records come across as extreme moments of experimentalism. Somehow after six or seven years of making severe left turns in their career, the decision to tour with Interpol—a much more refined and palatable band—just seemed like another bizarre and shocking move for the trio. After all, these are the guys whose biggest hit to date is called “The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack,” and who grafted their own heads onto an explicit gay porn photo for the cover of one of their singles, even though I am fairly certain they’re all straight. These are the guys who named their debut album They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top and yet named their fourth album Liars.

The self-title is appropriate, though. This record qualifies as one of my favorites of the year, not because of its experimentalism, but because it incorporates all the elements of their previous albums into one: '70s punk rock, sinister synth drones, percussive experiments, and remarkable pop songs. Even though 2006's Drum’s Not Dead restored the band’s esteem within the indie community, it remains their weakest record overall. Liars, however, is a clear return to form, a form that the band will likely blow wide open the next time they emerge from the darkness of the woods.

Warning: weirdness follows, but we Liars fans wouldn't have it any other way. We spit upon the Wilcos of the world.

9. A Place to Bury Strangers

2008-01-27T23:54:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. Not the kind of accident where you end up listlessly waiting for the emergency squad to saw through the car door while the warm blood flows down your chest from the sizable piece of glass protruding from the top of your head… I’m strictly referring to the other kind.

My friend David has always referred to my taste in music as “foot in the grave,” and he’s persisted to call it that for years even after I renounced most things goth. It’s pretty funny, actually, because through the 2000s there have been a number of bands—Death Cab for Cutie, the Dismemberment Plan, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, the Rapture, the Killers, the Knife, etc.—that nominally seem to lend credence to his theory, even though there’s nothing technically goth about any of them.

In fact, when Brainwashed started to champion A Place to Bury Strangers over the course of the year, I successfully disregarded what they had to say. Though the site has really grown in recent years to accommodate many other kinds of alternative music, I still equate them first and foremost with 4AD and Soleilmoon and World Serpent. Subsequently, I imagined that the band must be three guys from New York barely out of high school with Robert Smith hair, playing pop songs about Helena, Lucretia, and Charlotte to girls with yarn dreads.

Yet eventually APTBS became inescapable. The painful slabs of feedback on “Missing You” and the familiar churn-and-hurl guitar dynamics that separate the verses of “Don’t Think Lover” are pure Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, respectively. But whereas every other band that summons these influences ends up sounding like a knock-off trying to cater to a built-in audience, APTBS is actually building on their accomplishments. Where the Reid Brothers would have smothered their songs with noise, APTBS use the noise strategically to heighten the dramatic impact of their brilliantly palatable songwriting. Where Kevin Shields would have twiddled a knob to obscure a song’s clarity, Strangers’ mainman Oliver Ackermann actually customizes effects pedals for a living. In other words, for many of these songs, the sounds came first.

A Place to Bury Strangers is the only record in my collection that requires me to turn down the volume on my iPod in order to listen to it.

The album chugs along from strength to strength, all the while stewed in a sumptuous darkness. Is it goth? Not exactly. But the guitar drone that dominates my favorite track, “The Falling Sun,” will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever gone to a darkwave club night. Let’s just call it “foot in the grave.”

For your undead pleasure: “I Know I’ll See You.” Get a load of the bassline in all its Gallup-ish glory.

8. Deerhunter - Cryptograms

2008-01-26T20:29:00.000-06:00

Jrypbzr gb Cbfgzbqrea Nppvqrag. Va ubabe bs zl pubvpr sbe gur rvtugu orfg nyohz bs 2007, V nz cerfragvat guvf ragel va ebg-13. Fbeel gb or bofpher, ohg gung’f whfg zl jnl. Vs lbh jnag fbzrguvat shpxvat fgenvtugsbejneq, gura tb ernq CbcZnggref.

Guvf frrzf gur nccebcevngr nggvghqr gb gnxr va n cbfg qvfphffvat Ngynagn’f Qrreuhagre, jub unir nyy fbegf bs vffhrf gb jbex guebhtu, nyy gur gvzr. Qba’g nfx zr nobhg gurve qrnq sevraqf be onaq zrzoref yrnivat be snvyrq erpbeqvat nggrzcgf be trargvp qvfbeqref be inthr frkhnyvgl. V whfg yvfgra gb gur zhfvp.

Naq thrff jung? Guvf erpbeq vfa’g shpxvat fgenvtugsbejneq rvgure. Erpbeqrq va gjb unyirf, vg nygreangrf orgjrra fcnprq-bhg fbhaq cvrprf gung fbhaq yvxr Fbavp Lbhgu cebqhprq ol Rab, naq oyvffshy vaqvr cbc gung pebffrf gur Jeraf jvgu fubrtnmr. Gubhtu n unccl nppvqrag, gur pburerapr vg zhfgref vf oevyyvnag, gung bs bar tvtnagvp ohg qryvpngr cebt-cbc nqiragher gung genafsbezf vgfrys nf vg tbrf. V qba’g pner vs gurl fhccbfrqyl unir n qrohg nyohz pnyyrq Ghea Vg Hc Snttbg naq V qba’g pner vs gur arkg bar gurl znxr jvaf n Tenzzl; jung znggref urer vf gur beqrerq punbf gung unccraf orgjrra gur ubaxvat fcnpr-ntr nynezf bs “Vageb” naq gur tragyl eulguzvp fvat-fbat bs “Urngurejbbq.” Tnentr ebpxf fjveyf, jngre sybjf, gncr ehaf bhg, fbzr haoryvrinoyr tbqyvxr zrff pnyyrq “Ynxr Fbzrefrg” gnxrf cynpr, n pbecfr fcvenyf bhg, naq gura jr’er tvira gur bar-gjb chapu bs “Fcevat Unyy Pbaireg” naq “Fgenatr Yvtugf” yvxr znaan envavat qbja hcba gur fgneivat, qebhtug-fgevpxra znffrf.

Pelcgbtenzf erfhygf sebz gur xvaq bs pbzcebzvfr orgjrra qnzntrq negvfgvp vagrag naq hapbbcrengvir bhgfvqre crefbanyvgl gung nyjnlf tenof zr ol gur arpx. Vg cerfragf gur bayl inevngvba bs vaqvr ebpx gung V pna gehyl fgbznpu gurfr qnlf, naq enaxf ba zl lrne-raq yvfg sbe gung irel ernfba.

Naq vs lbh qner, pyvpx urer sbe “Ynxr Fbzrefrg” naq cvmmn.

7. Burial - Untrue

2008-01-23T21:42:00.001-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. I have skipped numbers 8 and 9 because I wanted to wax eloquent about #7.

A couple of years ago, I was an active member and contributor to a tight-knit community of online music fans, from which I basically divorced myself once I began working two jobs. I met a lot of very cool people through the boards, both in the States and the UK. Some became friends in real life, especially if I was able to meet them in person. But some—especially those in the UK—sadly remain relegated to that particular time and place in my life.

One such friend—let’s call him BOB—had a successful career in the television industry and a happy family life in London with his beautiful wife, a renowned music journalist and published author in the UK, and their two young children. He was considerably older than I, possibly mid-40s, and yet spectacularly seemed to go clubbing all the time. In fact, he seemed to thrive on it, and indulged in the sort of drug use that a 19-yr-old guy might happily endure. This didn’t seem to slow him down at all; in fact, BOB was sharp, and he had the sort of clearness of vision that qualified him for guru status. (He also seemed to understand boys in clubs, and his gay-friendliness certainly allowed for a better friendship between us.)

One common argument I found online throughout that time, especially amongst British fans of the Fall, was that no “produced” music could possibly be any good. They all favored rootsy, lo-fi rawk, blues, and rockabilly, and were particular enamored by anything American. And as I was rekindling a lot of my interest in electronic music at the time after several years indulging primarily in indie rock, I found myself constantly on the outside of the general consensus. My musical kinship with these folks was limited… except for that with BOB. (And with Jake, who also liked the Hafler Trio, but that is a different story.) BOB was constantly encouraging my exploration into electronic music, and his pedigree as an elite London clubber was certainly helpful. So naturally, with the onslaught of such “pop” artists as Dizzee Rascal, M.I.A., and Lady Sovereign, I had to ask about grime.

But BOB knew I wasn’t invested in hip-hop, and steered me in a different direction. “Grime is okay, but what you really want to check out is dubstep.” I ended up buying all sorts of recommended stuff, from Rephlex’s first Grime compilation featuring MarkOne, Plasticman, and Slaughter Mob (all of which is actually dubstep) to a peculiarly dark and relentless album of slow-motion breakbeats by Vex’d. Good stuff, but a bit esoteric for my tastes at a time when I wasn’t looking for even more interests to set me apart from the rest of the Chicago populace at large.

Fast forward to 2007. London’s Burial releases his second album, Untrue, and quickly becomes the poster child for dubstep. How ironic, considering his baffling anonymity! Yet, once you hear this release, it is completely understandable. Untrue is haunting and soothing and almost unbearably soulful, but before I can explain this, I have to establish that it sounds like house music that has been melted in a microwave. Except for the crisp rhythms produced by the drum tracks, the sounds all smear together, like warm musical chocolate morsels in a giant crispy cookie. I mean, I want to buy the vinyl and set it in the sun for an hour and then play it again and see if it sounds even better.

Ewww… That may be the worst string of sentences I have ever written. Blog writing is certainly liberating, compared to the self-editing one must constantly undergo when writing for someone else’s publication, but it also leads to the production of some really craptastic metaphors.

So back to the soulfulness… like house music, this has innumerable vocal snippets and repeated melodic catchphrases that heighten the emotional impact of the songs, but they are skillfully pitch-shifted so that they warble everything mournfully. Little half-sentiments like “Love you” and “It’s all because you lied” end up sounding like monumental truths or devastating accusations that cut right to the core, not a trait commonly found in dance music.

But the vocals aren’t what make Untrue so great, at least not exclusively. As a concentrated collage of moody sounds and feelings, it perfectly qualifies as a masterpiece of electronic urban soundscape, one that belongs beside the Future Sound of London’s Dead Cities and Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. More importantly, it feels undeniably authentic; though it sounds like nothing that came before it, its ancestry from soul to reggae to drum-and-bass is evident in every note.

All the haters out there will tell you that the hype garnered by this release marks the end of dubstep as an underground phenomenon and that Untrue can’t possibly be an adequate representative of the genre. I certainly won’t argue, because it’s not. But I can only attest to this because Burial’s success has single-handedly caused me to go back and revisit Skream, Kode 9, Distance, MRK1, and other contributors to the sound; isn’t that what any worthwhile genre spearhead is supposed to do? BOB would be so proud.

Listen:

10. The Field - From Here We Go Sublime

2008-01-20T23:29:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. No more stalling. I now have 112 power stars in Super Mario Galaxy. Time to get cracking on the Top 10 of 2007.

Much has been said about the Field this year, and yet I’m not sure I have anything to add, though I’m definitely keen to reiterate. I have been following electronic music fairly closely for more than a decade and had never purchased anything on the Kompakt label before (Note to self: Why???), but upon reading that one track on this remarkable album (“Over the Ice”) was composed almost entirely of digital edits of a great song from Kate Bush (“Under Ice”), I had to check it out.

What is my thing with Kate Bush and electronic production? More importantly, anybody remember this old chestnut from the rave era?

Thankfully, the Field is nothing like that. Despite an emphasis on thumping beats and pulsing repetition, it has much more in common with Fennesz and Ulrich Schnauss: beautiful waves of electronic ambience that simply wash over its audience. Is there such a thing as organic bedroom trance? Actually, the way it depends on rhythm owes a little bit to Everything Is Wrong-era Moby, a source of influence that more musicians should allow for themselves. I am guessing that the track “Mobilia” is, quite appropriately, named after him.

For the most part, I can’t recommend this album enough, and I keep going back to it. While many tracks are built upon bits and samples from recognizable pop tunes, most of them are vaguely familiar without actually being recognizable, giving the whole mix a warmth and an immediacy not usually common in the realm of minimal techno. But when the samples are identifiable, such as the ghostly use of the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You” deep in the center of the album’s title track, I am inclined to believe that I am listening to the music of the future, when the 20th century is barely a memory and faint traces of it resurface only in dreams.

This fan-made video is fantastic. Stay with it at least until about 1:45 to hear the Field's sense of development.

[And to my friend Dario who has a super mega car... actually, I mean my friend Ned who has been bugging me to get Okie Dokie It's the Orb on Kompakt for some time now... I swear it's going to happen.]

Drum roll, please...

2008-01-17T22:40:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident.

I know you're all waiting with baited breath for my top 10, but I've been busy!! Sorry.
Blame Michael and Mary and Dexter and Devon, dinner with Stacey and Leslie and Kevin, Marathon mewing, and most of all, Mario woohooing.

Here's a glimpse at what's coming up:

an electronic act with hypnotic, repetitive tunes made from digital edits of pop songs
a brash and infectious power trio who do for the Jesus and Mary Chain what the Jesus and Mary Chain did for the Velvet Underground
a psychedelic album recorded in two parts
and a special follow-up on what's going on with the band who had my favorite album of 2004.

Coming soon!

11. Justice – Cross Digitalism – Idealism

2008-01-13T23:52:00.000-06:00

Welcome to P-O-S-T
1-2-3-4-Fight!
Then to the M-O-D-E
Get ready for the site
R-N-A-C-C-I-D
Spelling songs are trite
Just easy as E-N-T
I'm posting out of spite

Fuck Justice.

~~To be fair, Justice~~ Digitalism are excellent producers/remixers from ~~France~~ Germany who ~~took~~ didn’t take the indie world by storm this year because some Pitchdork or other decided to ~~exalt~~ trash them, and it’s ~~not~~ hard to see why. I was a big fan of ~~“Waters of Nazareth”~~ “Zdarlight” last year, as I’d finally crossed the final frontier into buying straight-up dance music and was buying all the digital 12” singles that I read about. The track had an unusual two-part structure to it, with a ~~lo-fi~~ straightforward tech-house intro overcome by a big chord progression of ~~gothic church organs~~ buzzing electronic pianos in the second half. And based on remixes of songs from ~~Soulwax, Franz Ferdinand, and Death From Above 1979~~ Cut Copy, the Presets, and Test Icicles, the band seemed to know exactly how to fill the floor with a signature sound. ~~But~~ Though the full-length album released this past summer ~~spent~~ spends ~~too much~~ a lot of time ~~simply aping~~ paying tribute to ~~Discovery~~ Human After All-era Daft Punk, ~~albeit with a dose of synthetic disco strings and Jackson-like rhymes to somehow make da funk feel da funkier~~ it actually betters their #1 influence's approach to robot rock, unveiling other creative ancestors in the process, such as the Cure and New Order.

~~With~~ Despite a fashionista video (of ~~creatively animated T-shirts~~ spinning girls in bodysuits) for their ~~sugary pop song~~ post-punk hit ~~“D.A.N.C.E.”~~ “Pogo” as well as a featured spot ~~in Cadillac commercials~~ on video game soundtracks, both hipster girls in ~~leg warmers~~ tube tops and hipster boys with ~~Motley Crüe-inspired mullets~~ barely pubescent-looking ‘staches were ~~entirely~~ hardly impressed. ~~Justice~~ Digitalism ended up on ~~everybody’s~~ nobody's year-end top 10 lists ~~while other relevant electro auteurs were subsequently overshadowed~~, not even my own, where it places at #11... but only because it was an incredible year for music.

"D.A.N.C.E." (Click if you must.)

"Pogo":

13. Arctic Monkeys or Maxïmo Park ? 12. Maxïmo Park or Arctic Monkeys ?

2008-01-12T01:39:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Indecision.

Part of the reason why this list is moving forward so slowly is because I haven’t finalized it. Essentially I’m locking in certain choices as I go, swaying my own decisions according to whatever criteria I'm using at the time. As a result of my strangely organic method, my ranking is gradually taking on extra dimension, a second vector that curves back and forth while the numbers descend.

Arctic Monkeys and Maxïmo Park are both sophomores who got up and running in 2005. Both have released deeper, more complicated follow-ups to stellar debuts, yet both are just conventional enough that I really couldn’t consider either album for my top 10 this year. Still, I couldn’t stop listening to them, and both bands have quickly become favorites.

Arctic Monkeys briefly held the record for the fast-selling debut album in UK history, all the more impressive when considering they had considerable stateside success as well. Initially seen as everyman kids saved by guitars from the dole queue, they’ve unleashed one massive single after the next and quickly become a national institution, something akin to the 2000s version of Oasis. This year's Favourite Worst Nightmare builds upon their success while significantly widening their sound to include more minimal and rhythmic arrangements.

Maxïmo Park were late entries in the post-punk revivalist game, unveiled upon the public after the high profile influx of peers and competitors such as Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, the Futureheads, and Bloc Party. By that time, the public was tired, but critics gave the band well-deserved credit anyway. More unapologetically middle-class and pop-oriented than the Arctic Monkeys, their popularity has remained modest. They are the sort of indie college band with a huge student following that never suffers from overexposure or media hype. Their album Our Earthly Pleasures tries to tone down the hyper urgency on which they originally made their name, but it ends up a bit like caging a tiger.

Both bands are fronted by literate writers and play music that feels simultaneous retro and fresh—sculpted sounds dominated by razor sharp angular guitars. And yet the end result is entirely different. Alex Turner of the Monkeys has already ascended to deity status in the book of British songwriters, a working-class social commentator on par with Paul Weller and Damon Albarn in front of a brash and beloved band. If Arctic Monkeys are descendents from Oasis, derivative but fully-formed right out of the gate, then Maxïmo Park are early Radiohead—undeveloped but undeniable, with a white-hot future. Paul Smith is a somewhat demure guy who sings of Russian literature, unpacking books from boxes, and girls who play guitars (after all, anyone can play guitar), yet he’s a frantic, aggressive monster on stage, exhibiting passion and near-crazed intensity that make him impossible not to watch. Simply put, Maxïmo Park was possibly the best live act I saw last year, and anyone who attended a different show with me knows there was some extremely tough competition in the category.

So which album do I pick for #13? Whichever one I happen to be listening to at the moment. Which would you choose? For your deliberation, I give you the classic Clown-vs-Non-Clown video for the unstoppable “Fluorescent Adolescent” by Arctic Monkeys, up against a bootleg video of Maxïmo Park performing my favorite song from Our Earthly Pleasures, “The Unshockable.”

14. Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future

2008-01-09T22:44:00.000-06:00

Welcome back to Postmodern Accident's Best of 2007 countdown. First, an explanation.

WHY 15?

Essentially when I went to assemble my list, I realized that I was using two sets of criteria to determine my favorite releases of the year. On the most fundamental level, I wanted my top 10 to be the works that impressed me the most. However, the reality is that the selections I picked weren't necessarily the albums I listened to (i.e. continuously appreciated) the most. Thus I offer this expanded list. I didn't want to simply list selections 11 to 15 as "honorable mentions," because they're certainly more substantial to me than that.

Despite its status as winner of the 2007 Mercury Music Prize, the debut record from Klaxons might be the closest thing to an "honorable mention" here. Obviously, I've always loved electronic punk music, which this record enhances with science fiction, mythology, apocalypse, Aleister Crowley, Thomas Pynchon, the occasional dance beat, a rave whistle, and a massive dose of pop thrill. It is a heady and breathless mix, produced by James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco. Pair this with the fact that these photogenic young guys come close in artistic spirit to the studious experimentalism of the Cure at their most aesthetic (pre-1983), and this should be my record of the year.

Yet after "Golden Skans" stopped popping up everywhere and the rush of "Atlantis to Interzone" died down, "new rave" never really took off as either a media catchphrase or a new subgenre of music, leaving behind a record of somewhat dirgey art rock that manages to blend a lot of disparate influences together irresistibly but stops just short of developing any single idea into the monster it's begging to become. As if to underline this, Klaxons' live show is trim and straightforward, a powerful set of hooky rock songs that unfortunately lacks the vitality and versatility occasionally on display here.

More than any other artist, Klaxons rank highly for me this year based on what they'll undoubtedly become, rather than what they're already doing. They have now gained an all-important confidence that will push them to develop all of these wonderful ideas even further, and with a band as creative as this one, there is no such thing as "too far." Expect a kaleidoscopic masterpiece in the Near Future... later in 2008. Until then, here's the wild video for "Magick":

15. Von Südenfed - Tromatic Reflexxions

2008-01-07T23:41:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident...

...and Happy New Year. We interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming (namely the long-overdue account of my trip to Mexico, ::blush::) in order to bring you 15 musical reflexxions on the year that just passed.

Let’s face it: the last three Fall records were boring. I never liked the sorry excuse for a replacement band that Mark E. Smith assembled around him back in 2001—failed pub rockers and football hooligans who seemed to be in it for the wrong reasons and who complained about being in it the whole time they were doing it. Jim Watts struck me as whiny, Ed Blaney as dishonest, and Ben Pritchard as untalented. Thankfully, last minute addition Steve Trafford pulled out his best Steve Hanley impression and gave the band a fantastic, elastic bass-driven car commercial called “Blindness,” the closest thing to a legendary Fall track all decade by a band who used to turn out ten such masterpieces each year.

It’s no wonder that MES jumped at the chance to collaborate with German techno rebels Mouse on Mars. Though they’ve been releasing records nearly every other year since the early ‘90s, they’ve never really followed fashion, which is unique amongst electronic artists whose sounds depend on state-of-the-art production and equipment. More importantly, MoM have never quite sounded like they give a rats ass about rock, which makes their collaboration with the king of devolved, lo-fi rockabilly racket quite surprising.

The strength of Von Sudenfed’s album is that it sounds like neither of its parent bands, despite the fact that the Fall have tried a record in nearly every alternative style imaginable and Mouse on Mars have used vocalists before. Tromatic Reflexxions melds arrhythmic, bleepy music to MES’s space alien storytelling in such a way that the pairings seem almost arbitrary and incompatible, like two opposing musical forces crashing together in chaos and cacophony. Its success lies in the fact that neither element overcomes the other. The Fall have failed in the new millennium because MES hasn’t been able to find bandmates who are truly his peers; Von Sudenfed marks his first real artistic collaboration in a decade.

Thus, in honor of this album placing at #15 on my best of 2007 list, I am pleased to present the video for “Fledermaus Can’t Get It.” Admittedly, I have never been enthusiastic over drag queen routines and likely never will be, though here it is obvious that these men, whoever they might be, are in way over their heads. The beardy one with Sarah Michelle Gellar hair is fabulous, though he fares quite poorly (and hilariously) as the white-haired mop attempting to keep up with MES’s vocals.
G-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g. Enjoy.

Porque no tengo, porque me falta...

2007-11-14T23:10:00.000-06:00

Welcome to PreMexico Accident.

¿POR QUÉ VENDO LOS LIBROS PARA LA VIDA?

So I'm headed to Mexico for the Guadalajara book expo a week from Sunday (right after Thanksgiving) and instead of feeling excitement, I'm lost in a mire of preparations. I know next to nada about Mexico, I have no idea what I'm taking with me (or even what I *can* take), I've had to stress out and expedite my passport renewal for a sudden $127 that I didn't really have, etc. Oh, and did I mention I'm staying at a "gay-friendly" bed and breakfast while I'm there? Should be muy interesante. Maybe I'll take my copy of El Kama Sutra del Hombre Gay with me and flaunt it at breakfast.

I'll post more when I've got some time. Meanwhile, enjoy this picture of Nicole in front of a Jesus freak family; not only do I really love the photo, but it's the first thing I actually had to salvage using Time Machine when I accidentally deleted it!

Changing Its Spots

2007-10-27T14:50:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Post-Leopard Accident.

My Apple whoredom continues. Yesterday at promptly 5 o'clock I went to the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue and stood outside in a four-block line (I was in the middle of the third block) in order to grab up Apple's new system software as soon as it became available. I ended up waiting 45 minutes just to get into the store, but the process moved quickly after that. More importantly, I was able to grab the free "special-edition" Apple T-shirt.

Installation was a breeze; it took my machine about an hour to scan the DVD for consistency (?!) and then install the upgrade. I believe this would have taken much longer if my hard drive were even remotely full, but I have almost 80 gigs free, so the installation required no defragmenting or optimizing.

I've spent most of the morning becoming acquainted with the new features, and without further adieu, I offer my own personal guided tour. Click on the screenshots to see larger images.

DESKTOP

This first image illustrates some of the most basic cosmetic changes. The Aurora desktop image is the only new "official" image I've noted, but it matches the look of everything else Leopard-related. You can't really see it here, but the menu is translucent, and all the menu lettering is clear without being obstructive to whatever is behind it. On the right side of the menu bar, I have added the Spaces pull-down menu, which allows you to choose from several different sets of windows that you have open (so that your desktop is not cluttered with everything at once). More on that below. You will also note that I have a "backup drive" icon underneath my hard drive icon; this is the external drive I have attached that it is constantly utilized by Time Machine (also more below). The dock is a bit different, too—note the 3D look and the way the application icons stick up into the atmosphere.

In this second image, I've reset the desktop background to the image of the molten strawberry I've been using... This more clearly illustrates the see-through quality of the menu bar and menus.

COVER FLOW

Mac OS X has now implemented the cool Cover Flow feature from iTunes into all of its Finder windows. In fact, now all Finder windows more closely resemble iTunes. In this example above, I am flipping through the files in my Documents folder using Cover Flow... You can see web pages, PDFs, Word documents, etc. represented in a visual format that flows very smoothly. The Cover Flow button is right next to the other View options: icons, list, and columns. Other window differences: the sidebar now resembles iTunes, and includes "smart" searches for items from particular times and of particular file types. Shared external drives now appear over here instead of on the Desktop.

QUICK LOOK

If seeing a thumbnail preview in Cover Flow isn't good enough (PDFs even allow you to flip through pages in Cover Flow!), you can now view files using Quick Look. When you right-click on a file and open Quick Look, a special viewer window pops up, in which you can read/see the entire document, regardless of what application created it. Thus, if you just want to read a Word file, you don't have to launch Word, etc. You can also cycle through your files in Quick Look mode, or view them in full screen. This is especially helpful if you're looking for a particular document but don't remember what you've called it.

SPACES

Spaces is simply an organizational mechanism by which you can put particular windows into groups. This simulates the effect of having several available desktops at once. In the above example, I opened a bunch of web pages in Safari and then switched to a second space, where I've got iTunes running, and then a third, where I'm playing with Photo Booth. This way, if I'm doing something with photos or music and suddenly want to look something up online, I can just switch back to the first space and browse; nothing needs to be closed or shuffled in order to see what I'm doing. The pull-down menu that I added to the menu bar allows you to choose between spaces; you can also set a function key (i.e. F8) to pull up the view that is featured in this screenshot. Like Exposé, you can just click on the space in which you want to work.

TIME MACHINE

OK—Time Machine is most definitely Leopard's star feature and the reason why you might want to upgrade. It *requires* an external drive. Once you've upgraded, it will perform one major backup, copying your entire system to the external drive, and then at regular intervals it will copy the changes you've made, so that you have a continuous index of your files going back in time hourly for a 24-hour period, then daily, then weekly. When you launch Time Machine then, this screen comes up. The window you have open gains a third dimension - and you can literally view it progressively back through time to find the snapshot that might unveil a file you've accidentally deleted or an earlier version of something you've changed. This state is then completely restorable - so you basically will never lose another file again.

If you don't have an external drive, you really can't use this feature, as it won't work directly on your startup drive. If you don't have an external drive, I'm not sure I'd recommend Leopard, but at the same time I might recommended buying one so that you *can* upgrade.

PHOTO BOOTH

Photo Booth has added some fun new effects. Most of these include adding backgrounds to your picture. You can also film brief movie segments as well as snap photos. This roller coaster effect is pretty funny in still shots, but it's even better in motion. Some day I will learn how to post/stream video clips.

Similarly, this picture features a background in space, which matches the Leopard theme. This one doesn't look very good; the quality of these images depends on how carefully Photo Booth can render out your actual backdrop. If anything moves or the lighting changes, it won't really work. But the picture shows off my Leopard T-shirt a little better! (The back of the shirt features a tiny white Apple logo near the top, over a caption that simply reads, "Add a new Mac to your Mac" and a tagline introducing Leopard.)

VERDICT

All in all, I'm enjoying the upgrade. I feel that the new features fit seamlessly into the look and feel of the OS, but I can't say it feels like a major step forward. Yes, everything on the Mac is starting to feel even more consistently stylized and coherently integrated than it has been in the past; most applications are beginning to depend on their abilities to function with the others. But all of these improvements are ultimately just a streamlining toward something more impressive and enjoyable to use without actually adding many incredible new functions that weren't there before. Mail and iChat have also undergone some new upgrades, but the main reason to get Leopard is for Time Machine.

Sinister Whimsy for the Wretched, Revisited

2007-10-24T22:11:00.001-05:00

Welcome to Utvaer—no, I mean Postmodern Accident.

"LISTEN TO THIS LSD-HASHY-FIXY-JOINTY SOUND!"

Nearly 14 years ago, when I had just broken out into my most experimental phase musically, I purchased an unusual CD called Large Ladies with Cake in the Oven by a "band" called Nurse With Wound. It was put out by a label called United Dairies, of all things, and featured an impenetrable subtitle: Gyllensköld / Mawsookedorwranj / Brained. The whole presentation just seemed so irrepressibly strange and bewildering!

This was not my first Nurse With Wound CD, but it was the first I was ever able to begin to digest, as their "music" was so noisy and unpredictable and overwhelming, yet here it was broken into several short, approachable pieces with titles like "Bearded Lady" and "Red Flipper" and "Head Cold." And though I no longer remember my first reactions to these pieces, I do recall the day I discovered that one of the longer tracks on the disc—called "Glory Hole," I kid you not—was mostly composed of bits and pieces sampled from the soundtrack to David Lynch's cult film Eraserhead, of which I was a big fan at the time.

Thus began my love affair with Nurse With Wound, ultimately just the sonic art project by one Steven Stapleton, a brilliant hippie who loves Futurism and Dada and Surrealism and esoteric '70s music, who lives on a rural farm in Ireland with his performance artist wife and their dozens of children. Stapleton has remained a visionary auteur for three decades now, and while he may not necessarily be my favorite musician, he has surely become my favorite artist.

Large Ladies with Cake in the Oven remained a cornerstone of my Nurse With Wound collection, which now amounts to about 46 compact discs and 14 vinyl LPs, for more than a decade, until the one horrible day several years back, shortly after United Dairies' distributor went bankrupt and all the discs went out of print, when I sadly realized that my copy had succumbed to DISC ROT.

I've since tried to buy it on eBay a couple of times, but the bidding always climbs into the $50-$75 range and, frankly, I can't be sure that another copy hasn't already begun deteriorating as mine did, so I haven't taken the gamble. And all along I have continued to pine for a way to reacquire this music, cheaply, legally, and in a way that supports the artist...
And now I've finally got it...
Sort of.

"TAKE A TRIP TO YOUR INNER LIGHT!"

United Dairies reestablished itself in 2005 with the help of Canadian label Jnana Records. Owner Mark Logan appears to be a great guy with a true passion for Nurse With Wound, Current 93, and related projects, and the relationship thus far has been fruitful. After rereleasing deluxe versions of Nurse With Wound's best-selling record (1988's Soliloquy for Lilith) and possibly best record (1999's An Awkward Pause), plus an album that had never been released on CD before (1987's Drunk With the Old Man of the Mountains), Jnana has now released the 1982 masterwork Homotopy to Marie and its spooky follow-up, 1984's Gyllensköld, Geijerstam and I at Rydberg's. Now look back up at that Large Ladies subtitle again.

The tracks from Gyllensköld, an EP which introduced Stapleton's ongoing collaboration with David Tibet of Current 93, did appear previously on Large Ladies. The catch? The tracks were remixed and their titles were abridged. Prior to the arrival of the new CD in my mailbox yesterday, I had never heard them in their original form. This disc features both the original versions and 3 of the reworked tracks from Large Ladies, offering the perfect opportunity to compare and contrast them, which I shall now do.

SEVERAL ODD MOMENTS PRIOR TO LUNCH

The track begins with an ominous voice, which could be David Tibet's, heavily flanged and treated so that it is unrecognizable. I cannot tell what he is saying. A brash gong almost interrupts him. It is a repeat of the hard, cold, rattling death chime that was all over Homotopy to Marie. Then a man with a gentle voice sings. He is also flanged and treated, but it is a gentle song. Is it a love song? No, he is singing about "mountains of dead."

More gongs. There is Gregorian chanting in the background. Wait! This sounds like early Current 93. I recognize sounds from both "Falling Back in Fields of Rape" and "Maldoror Is Dead". This is terribly unwelcome in this context, but when put back into its time frame, it certainly makes sense. It falls in line with everything else Stapleton and Tibet were doing together at that time, and as such, it is extremely discomforting and dark compared to Stapleton's previous work. Gong. More chanting, then howling. It is David's piercing, high-pitched screech.

Gong. "When my way was true, wild for you... over mountains of dead." The pleasant man singing the dire song is suddenly interrupted by a sort of throat-scratching, spitting sound, followed by whirs that sound like snores. Gong. An amelodic series of notes plays from a kazoo, with something raspier wailing in the background. "Mountains of dead" comes back on the right, with the ominous voice we first heard on the left. Everything cuts to a brief silence. Now a woman is quietly sobbing... or is she gasping for breath? She is nearly drowned out by masculine groaning. A sing-songy woman's voice comes in, repeating, "We do not hope to turn again, we do not hope to turn." Over and over. Underneath that, she is saying, "It turned out nicely, the ending..." This is quieter, and also repeated.

More groans. David is intoning something. The sobbing woman suddenly turns absolutely hysterical, shrieking with wild, uncontrollable laughter. The groans intensify, and now the woman is crying. Laughing. Crying. "We do not hope to turn again, we do not hope to turn." The hysterical woman is disturbing. David intones, "And then the wild beast showed its claws." Snort. Bleat.

PHENOMENON OF AQUARIUM AND BEARDED LADY

This track begins with some sort of horn or woodwind that plays a slight minor melody over and over. A motif has been established. It is intermittently interrupted by dissonant, muted banging on piano keys. The motif repeats and changes, sounding something like early Coil. The improvisation is almost jazzy in nature. Piano bangs. For a few seconds, a weird, nearly comical humming appears in the background. Bangs. We hear a trickling melody, a hollow sound, apparently plucked on very short strings. It is a nagging sound, tinged with elements of the Far East.

It gets faster. The motif remains in the background, and the piano bangs accelerate, panning from left to right. The nagging sound becomes a bumblebee. It slows again. A crank is turning. Two cranks. Musical gears. A jazzy, high-register saxophone squeals. Everything is going nuts with fast noise and chaos. The nagging is a bumblebee again. All sounds continue in a disorienting hodgepodge. The patterns change but the intensity doesn't leaven. The piano bangs are pitch-shifted upward, as is the motif.

DIRTY FINGERNAILS

The energy shifts and flows into the next track, where a low hum and a high pitched screech are joined together by electric scraping. The screech burrows in deeper, with the whole piece sounding scratchy and electrical. The voltage shifts, on and off. There's a buzz with intermittent screeches. It's an unpleasant and arrhythmic atmosphere. The scratchy, electric scraping, the nonstop screeching, and the bass buzz all make your hair stand on end. The radiation causes cancer. Dr. Frankenstein is drilling holes into your brain. And a chorus of aliens are singing in unison, suddenly. Alien chipmunks. They are the lifeforms brought into being by this excess of electricity. One of them mumbles something, then they chant in chorus... or are they arguing?

From the distance we hear a whiny scrape on one side, and a high pitched squeal on the other, with a whirring scrape behind them both. It's a rhythm now, rocking to and fro, as the sounds get louder and more dissonant. It's a scary and unbearable experience, like digging yourself out of a deep grave, buried alive and panicking, getting dirt under your fingernails. A loud rhythmic buzz simulates your heart as panic sets in. This is followed by a crunching sound, like something being crushed. The squeal and the scrape finally stop.

Now the gentle section of the track begins, but it's hardly a respite. The crunching sounds continue, muffled and metallic. Somebody is trying to break through chains with a shovel or a clipper. A low rhythm grows distant but remains, while wet rocks occasionally bounce off the ground. The wetness can't be water; the moistness is thicker, and more restrictive. A low cranking sound starts up. All the sounds remain gentle, but it just creates tension. Having given up the fight, you are slowly dying as you asphyxiate underground. A muffled gong sounds occasionally against the quiet trickles and scrapes. A gigantic bug must be trying to dig its way into your tomb with its pointy little legs. Something much larger is groaning... or scraping... or erupting. Rhythmically. Caught between the scraping trickle and a groaning rhythm, a creepy little voice starts to break through.

Then static, like on a radio, suddenly bursts forth. A brief snatch of music? No—it's DEEP groaning now, something is vocalizing, and it's not a recognizable language. Something is going to eat you. The atmosphere hurls and churns, but that something is still in control. The groaning is now a chanting, it's pained and unhuman, and it's rising, it's waking. A screech grows loud and hollow as chaos descends, whirling, flanging, rumbling, disorienting. Then silence.

"SEE THE HALLUCINATIONS OF REALITY RISE TO THE RYDBERG VIBES!"

Wow. The Gyllensköld experience is rather daunting. Most Nurse With Wound albums have a thread of darkness throughout them, but in this form, I think that this one exceeds the others. Even something like Salt Marie Celeste, which is essentially the soundtrack of a haunted ghost ship, has a passive ambience to it; this is aggressive in its darkness. And darkness is not the reason I listen to Nurse With Wound. I enjoy the juxtapositions of one sound against the next, the brilliant editing, and most of all, the wonderfully eccentric sense of surreal humor.

Revisiting the reworkings of these tracks is a revelation. Large Ladies featured four reworked tracks made up of Gyllensköld parts: "Bearded Lady," "Odd," "Aquarium," and "Dirty Fingernails." I always wondered how these approximated the original tracks, especially with the abridged names. Only three of these appear on the new CD, as "Bearded Lady" is nowhere to be found.

Other than its length, he biggest difference between "Odd" and its original version is the mood. It begins with the same ominous whisper, which is apparently saying something about the first flowers of summer. Then another throaty sound is quickly followed by a male voice asking, "Did you notice that?" A class of third graders decides to come in and play what they've learned in their Suzuki violin class. The melody plays through, then shifts up a key, to play again. This is the part that really differentiates the versions. The original version doesn't have the Suzuki class at all, though the kazoo part could be a greatly altered version of it, mixed to sound much more sinister. (Come to think of it, you can almost hear the violins very faintly in the background of that part.)

Snort. Snort. Ah, "Mountains of dead" reappears! Then a surprising piano plays a jaunty tune, which may be a Russian folk song. Another scraping throat, then a piano plinks randomly. "Mountains of dead" makes its final appearance. The track ends, and the most noticeable thing about it now, which I never could have noticed before, is that all of the material that sounds like Current 93 has been gutted. At the time this was originally re-released, Current 93 was trying to move beyond their early dark industrial sound to become something folkier and more positively spiritual. Perhaps that was Stapleton's consideration at the time: a favor for a friend.

"Aquarium" is not all that different. The essential difference is an echoey, cyclical, tribal drum track that grows out of the central motif, giving the whole thing a new dimension. The feel of the track becomes, yes, more aquatic, and somewhat lighter. Swirls of banging piano and snippets of overlying melody are thrown from the spinning rhythm, which now grounds the piece by giving it a much deeper, fuller sound. There are sudden breaks to the nagging, melodic cranking, then the high saxophone and the noisy chaos. The noise dances repeatedly. The percussion breaks out again, intensifying everything. It's hypnotic and trancey, occasionally interrupted by blasts of sound, sax, and piano, yet never fades. The piece gains a bit of closure by bringing back all the earlier elements in more dramatic ways. It ends with a woman screeching, "Leave this place, and bring out the wrath of demons upon innocent heads!"

All the electrified elements return in the edit of "Dirty Fingernails," but they are not as immediately disorienting. The screech is most prominent, broken occasionally by the alien ranting, some buzzing, then back to the scrape/squeal combination, rocking and intensifying. It truly is the sound of something horrible coming closer... and closer... Screech scrape screech scrape. Your memories, the ones that make you who you are, are being unwritten by electric tools, rewiring your brain, making you a listless machine. A buzz starts, rhythmic like an alarm, then the crunching sounds return. The quiet interlude is similar to the older version, though the occasional wet trickles, or miniature splashes, become the sound of a dead heart being punctured in a desolate laboratory.

Now someone is breathing, leaning over your dormant body and working furiously. More breathing and scraping and the occasional sound of puncture. Once the bug starts trying to dig in again, and the groaning rhythm starts to press in, I have a profound realization: This is the most claustrophobic music ever recorded. The groaning again becomes deep and guttural, the weird little inhuman voice pipes up, and the digging starts to feel like stretching and pulling. After the short shock of radio static, and the hint of music, the Lady in the Radiator is singing, "In Heaven." A very different ending from the original, and an obvious tie-in to "Glory Hole," which is still lost in the ether of out-of-print records.

For what it's worth, the now-lost "Bearded Lady" is essentially a remix of the last two and a half minutes of "Several Odd Moments Prior to Lunch." The sobbing woman on the verge of hysterics is overlaid by an extended groan in a higher voice, which sounds out in mangled pain, while the "We do not hope to turn again" lady barely gets her words out, and the "turned out nicely... the ending" woman comes back in partial waves, each one louder. There's a better sense of editing here. The sobbing woman never gets hysterical, though, and David intones about the wild beast in perforated fits.

"I'm not really a pacifist; I just don't know how to be violent!"

Entering Valhalla

2007-10-21T13:13:00.000-05:00

Accine to Postmodirn Welcodent. Norse Edition.

FAME OR SHAME

I've tweaked the blog a bit today, as Blogger has a seriously limited number of templates available and I was begining to feel self-conscious about the similarities between my board and others. In the process, I can still taste Paula Abdul in the back of my mouth (eww, not like that) and figured I should use the opportunity to cleanse the palate a bit.

Thus, I give you the Pomax Valhalla, a list of interesting musics/people/things that are somewhere in my thoughts. This list is subject to change each time I post, and if you piss me off, you might make the list. You can also buy me flowers or chocolates.

PEACEBONES AND PANDAS

Animal Collective is currently at the top of the list because their name begins with A. But as I am currently obsessing over Strawberry Jam, as I did with Feels and Sung Tongs, I feel obligated to elevate this band to a certain new level of prominence in my personal musical landscape. Not only do they keep pushing and surpassing themselves, but the individual strengths of each member continue to strengthen (whether Panda's percussion or Geologist's sounds or Avey's all-encompassing weirdness), and the resulting tension in their songs has become almost unbearably immersive. (Immersive tension? Does that make sense?)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the creepy/weird/silly video for "Peacebone":

Avey Tare released an album earlier this year with his new wife, one of those twin girls from Múm who graced the cover of that Belle and Sebastian record that no one likes except for Ben. I didn't think I'd ever again buy anything Múm-related, but this record is pretty cool. They recorded a number of gentle, acoustic, and somewhat rambling songs together and then digitally reversed them. When you buy the album, you can use a sound editor to turn them back around if you wish, but they're MUCH better backwards. Take, for example, the extended coda on "Sis Around the Sandmill," which kind of goes nowhere on the regular song but acts as a very cool lead-in to the haunting sounds of the album. By eliminating lyrical meaning and traditional structure, the backwards tracks emphasize the sounds and the moods that these two conjure up, and anyone familiar with Kría's voice from those Múm records should know how effective she can be in a wash of sound that overrides her simple preciousness.

So now with Avey's record, and Panda Bear's magnificent Person Pitch (the swirling 12-minute centerpiece "Bro's" will seduce and entrance you with its lushness and beauty), and the full band's thrillingly accessible (is it?) Strawberry Jam, 2007 is truly shaping up to be a banner year for Animal Collective. This comes as a relief to some of us who, once upon a time, felt that Sung Tongs might have been the peak of their creativity. (You can read my leaden PopMatters review, bad metaphors and all, here.)

HEROES AND ZEROES

Considering how long I just babbled on about one of the items in my new Valhalla list, I certainly don't have the time to go on about all the others. Let's just say that the longer someone remains on the list, the more you'll probably hear about them, and if anything up there goes unspoken about, feel free to ask me and maybe I'll make it a point to write something. For now, I'll just say that despite my obvious affection for Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam is *not* my current choice for album of the year. And neither is Radiohead. But you'll have to wait till December to see how it all plays out.

.noitidE esroN .tnedocleW nridomtsoP ot eniccA

Rainbows and the Promise of a New Day

2007-10-16T10:36:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. Initials: P.A. Remember those initials.

HEAD ÜBER ALLES

In honor of Radiohead, who are yet again singlehandedly destroying the music industry with their revolutionary marketing techniques and stupid universally-acclaimed album In Rainbows, I have decided to revisit some real music, from back when the industry was securely in power and all the wheat was appropriately threshed from the chaff.

HEAD OVER HEELS

I think I first heard Paula Abdul's "Knocked Out" on some sort of Saturday dance-remix thing on pop radio, or maybe at Six Flags or on that old show Club MTV. At the time, it wasn't a big success, and I know why... it seemed like generic dance-pop fluff. Then "Straight Up" showed up *everywhere*. This had the perfect kind of attitude that made teen girls feel sassy but didn't really threaten the boys, because Abdul was kinda hot. Not everybody remembered her from her cameo in Janet Jackson's "Nasty" where her hair was kind of permed and silly-looking. Now her hair was all straight, and I think the video used that weird stretch-effect you get when you film in a wide aspect ratio but convert it to 4:3, so she looked tall and slender. And if I recall, the lighting made her look whiter than I think she actually is and her hair was a brassy color: an obvious marketing ploy to nab the suburbs. I believe next was "Forever Your Girl," which is subpar, as it focuses mostly on sweet pop and abandons the dance element that gave her attitude. By this time, though, it didn't matter -- the song was a massive hit in that Debbie Gibson-ish teen pop format and Abdul was a genuine superstar. Then she did the smart thing - she unleashed the Madonna-esque "Cold Hearted." This reconfirmed her dance strengths, and solidified the attitude with a genuinely sexy video, one that was deemed too steamy at the time for kids to watch. (How things change...) This song remains at the core of Paula Abdul nostalgia for an entire generation. After three massive chart-topping hits in a row, she re-released "The Way That You Love Me." Catchy, but nothing special, and the song only went to #3. But nothing could prepare the world for what Paula unleashed next... a duet with an animated cat. Called "Opposites Attract," the song was a trailblazer that won over even the most reluctant pop fan, and rightfully restored Abdul to the top of the charts. Not only was she a pop superstar, but she also managed an urban, artsy cool. It was only on the tail end of this winning streak that a remixed "Knocked Out" found some success, promoted as the key track from her second release, a remix album.

After all that, the backlash started. Could Paula Abdul really sing? Note that she didn't have a ballad in her catalog, the true test for a pop star. Well, she quieted the naysayers when she released the delicate "Rush Rush" upon the world, buoyed by a drag racing video featuring Keanu Reeves, who was just on the cusp of breaking out of his teen stardom. And Abdul proved with "Rush Rush" that she offered something for adults as well. Sadly, even though it would become her biggest hit, it also became her last, as "The Promise of a New Day" offered nothing new, the moody "Blowing Kisses in the Wind" made its biggest impact as elevator music, and the clubby "Vibeology" failed to make anyone care. Ace of Base was much more interesting.

"He's been telling lies."

More skin than you can shake a... errrr... stick at

2007-10-11T18:39:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. Now Rated R. No children under 17 will be permitted without parent or guardian, but if they bring their fathers donning only body paint, I might make an exception.

GIRLS ON FILM... errrr, no... GIRLS IN PRINT

I had the pleasure on Friday night to be invited to the launch party for a new book that we distribute, Mr. Skin's Skintastic Video Guide. This is one man's life project, documenting all the T&A there is to be seen in the wide world of mainstream film. In other words, if Charlize Theron has borne a breast in her young life, it's in here. And I'm lucky enough to be a "special sales" person, which means I get to sell books to Playboy. Thus, I was one of only 10 people or so fortunate enough to make the guest list at the company. I took good ol' Cici with me.

These girls aren't wearing very much. Frantically, I looked around for men wearing painted-on bikini bottoms, but alas, I saw none. This is a great book, but I think it is a SEXIST book and it was a SEXIST party, clearly discriminating against naked men. More rights for naked men! (There's got to be a club for this. Robbie will be president.)

LIPSTICK CHERRY ALL OVER THE LENS AS SHE'S... errrr... PEEKING

Lookit! It's a masquerade party! And my wonky eyes make this last picture even better!

IN EXPLOITATION'S NAME WE MUST BE WORKING FOR THE... errrr... BOOK TRADE

The party took place at Level, a two-floor club in the Gold Coast. Cool club, but come on, they were playing the worst music I have ever heard. Mostly lame booty-call top 40 pop crap, but not even brand-name pop crap like Timbaland and Kanye. I deemed one song in particular as the Worst Song I Have Ever Heard, and I truly mean that, and I wish to hell I knew what it was, because when you come up with a superlative as definitive as this, it needs to be remembered. Sigh.

But before we tried to hit the dance floor despite the awful tunage, we hung out at our VIP table. This is Cici with the publicity girls, Jen and Elisabeth.

And I was psyched to see John and Kathleen at the club, as they weren't originally going to go. Thanks to the Mr. Skin people for these pictures, and for the good time.

"OH MY GOD - WHAT'S THIS??"

Cici and I were glad to cleanse our musical palate by heading out to Darkroom, where Life During Wartime were spinning, though it was admittedly a mixed blessing. The best moment for me was also the worst moment... These kids take pride in their mixing, and yet they ruined a stomping good Blur song ("Girls and Boys") by suddenly transitioning into... wait for it... a 12" remix of "Sussudio" by Phil Collins. AUUGGGHH. From Skintastic to Craptastic in seconds. Fucking ironic hipster hell!

"Ah, I've just got to have her, have her now
I've got to get closer but I don't know how
She makes me nervous and makes me scared
But I feel so good if I just say the word..."

Empty rooms and their occupants

2007-09-30T16:55:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident.

REFLECTING UPON TIMES PAST

So a few days after my birthday, some friends from work took me out for drinks at Nacional 27, where they serve the most heavenly mojitos known to humankind and apparently get quite jumping with salsa dancing, etc. after dark on weekends. In this instance, however, it just reminded me very heavily of the interior of a Howard Johnson's somewhere in 1979. My deep-seated memories are weird, okay?

This is Mary. It was her idea to go here. She had a very specific story about her gay husbands at this bar, but I cannot remember the details.
¡O dios mojitos!

The heavenly glow instigated by the mojitos quickly took over the entire room, and the faux-executive table at which we were sitting lit up like a christmas tree. Or a menorah. In attempting to take a picture of Michael, I realized I was getting a pretty cool reflective effect.

Berianne, captured here in mid-sentence (sorry, Grrremlin!). She makes a nice playing card, don't you think?

This is John, looking peaceful. He was all excited excited excited excited about the Wilco show. Yeah, I know, Wilco isn't worth such excitement, but I wasn't going to tell him that. I had previously ranted about the vacancy of Tori Amos's artistry the last time we'd gone for drinks, and I'm afraid poor John is starting to get the idea that I detest everything he likes. Can you imagine somebody thinking that about me?!?

This one is actually the coolest... First, there is Miraida, god bless her soul. No, she's not dead, but she did defect back over to Perseus. Then, there's McG, who I *really* want to dress up like Abraham Lincoln.

My friend Joe was with us as well, but he was getting over a bit of food poisoning from the day before and, like a vampire, I couldn't catch him on camera. He had no soul, you see, because he had puked it up at about 4 in the morning.

GETTING INTO THE SPIRITS

Thanks to everyone for a fine birthday this year.
Here's a little token of my appreciation.

(I should have posted those pictures weeks ago, but I got caught up in the Hafler Trio again. Sigh.)

34, and goths still unlive.

2007-09-09T11:33:00.000-05:00

Welcome from Mr. Postmodern Accident, now in his 34th year.

THE ROAD TO BIRTHDAY BLISS

First and foremost, I must speak up about Alhambra Palace, a relatively new restaurant in Chicago. And palace, it is. Apparently this place has a capacity of nearly 1000, so they can accommodate your party of 90 without blinking. The interior of the restaurant is just breathtaking, centered around a sizeable entertainment stage that puts most of the venues I frequent to shame. We were fortunate enough to witness a couple of different performances, from flamenco dancing to the more expected Moroccan-flavored house band. I should mention, too, that the service was excellent, and our waitress seemed amazed and impressed that we were interested in such un-American items as the lebna (garlic yogurt dip, which I could eat by the bucket) and the kefta.

This is Cici and Trybil. They look like such good girls here, don't they?

Apparently Lily Pulitzer from Dan's party thought so, or maybe she was afraid that we would infiltrate and corrupt. Cici and Trybil approached Dan's party after the meal but now seem to think that Dan and his friend were more interested in *my* whereabouts. Anyway, happy birthday, Dan, wherever you are!

A MOMENTARY DETOUR

So I should take a moment to lament about how I'm still Apple's bitch. This is relevant, I promise. On Tuesday, Apple announced their new line of iPods, something I've been awaiting for years (my 3G is still working well but is on the last legs of its second battery and often feels more like an albatross around my neck than a cool, enjoyable gadget). Of course, I bought one that day, the silver 160 GB "iPod Classic." I'm already having dreams about it, and will undoubtedly post about it when it arrives in the mail next week.

I opted for the Classic due to its capacity, obviously, but the iPod Touch was tempting. I figure I'll get a future generation of iPhone and have all my inner touch-screen needs fulfilled at that point. So how is this relevant to last night's carousing? Well, I must say my RAZRmaxx continues to impress, especially with its camera, which can take great pictures in DARK environments. You'll see.

GETTING OFF AT THE NEXT EXIT

After a brief layover at the Pucci Palace, we headed to Exit. Not much to say about the club, except that it hasn't changed much, beyond filling the upstairs dance floor with tables, ensuring that the Saturday night industrial dance holdovers from 1988, or 1992, or 1997 (pick your scene) no longer show up. The music remains exactly the same (Thrill Kill, Revco, Puppy, Ministry, KMFDM, etc.), with a few new welcome twists (Muse! The Dandys!), and the shackles remain on the wall.

Sadly, not all the artifacts from Exit's yesteryear make much sense in the current context. Like the sign on the wall that reads, "DANGER: Unguarded Pit." So we did what we had to do to *make* it make sense.

And then the good girls went bad.

I like this one, a twisted tied-up tango:

Now I'm literally older than Jesus.

I am sooo Apple's bitch...

2007-08-25T14:22:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, brought to you by corporate sponsorship and commercialism. Is it in you?

SLATHERING DEVOTION

Happy New Year! This year I bought a new 15" MacBook Pro, an Apple TV, an Airport Extreme, a .mac account, yet another LaCie hard drive to back up all my crap, and spent hundreds of thousands of hard-earned dollars on iTunes.

The following widgets are nowhere near as cool as I thought they might be, but knowing Apple, they will evolve and become something better. Naturally, what is represented here is not exactly indicative of my tastes in music, as it is only part of the picture, but most of you would know that already.

ADDENDUM

No, I don't have an iPhone (yet)! But my good friend Ben does. You can almost see what a proud papa he is:

In other news, I finally read High Fidelity. Courtesy of Nick Hornby: "You can see this everywhere you go: young, middle-class people whose lives are beginning to disappoint them making too much noise in restaurants and clubs and wine bars. 'Look at me! I'm not as boring as you think I am! I know how to have fun!' Tragic. I'm glad I learned to stay home and sulk."

Of course, my friend Berianne and I aren't that kind of people. She reminds me, constantly, that genuine fun can be had, and usually makes it happen.

No man on earth could say that he don't wanna...

2006-10-29T20:17:00.000-06:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident. Time to let the cat out of the bag.

CONFESSION

I have officially lost all of my musical credibility, something most of you know is very important to me, which most of the time has allowed me to skate through life with little else to go on. But this week I purchased RUDEBOX, by Robbie Williams, and I love it.

Williams is a 32-yr-old pop star who has conquered the world, one of the biggest household names everywhere—except in the United States, where his variation of post-Oasis pop/rock balladry has never quite broken into the commercial zone. In the UK, he started as a teenage "dancer" with the oddly homoerotic boy band Take That, and for the most part, he was not the star, nor did Take That make much of an impact in the US. This was in between the days of the New Kids and the Backstreet Boys, and Take That were likely far too British and far too gay to have any real success in the American alternative market. Not that they deserved success; the only tracks I've heard from them are abominable teenybop crap.

But apparently Williams decided he was tired of being a packaged pop star, and after lots of public infighting with his bandmates, he and Take That parted ways. Williams floundered for a bit on his own, but by 1997, he had teamed up with co-writer and producer Guy Chambers to craft a number of songs modelled after the Britpop craze that had hit his home country, an era of rock-and-roll that has always had a strange charm over me, as evident by my everlasting passion for Blur and Pulp . Still, he was a boyband guy, and his songs had a shiny radio sheen that had absolutely nothing to do with my tastes in the 1990s, the 2000s, or truly, even now.

RUDEBOX is a change of direction for Williams, however, and it falls much more in line with what appeals to me, and I'm guessing with America on the whole as well. A knowing, tongue-in-cheek testament to '80s electro, the record features—amongst other things—collaborations with the Pet Shop Boys, Lily Allen, and William Orbit; covers of songs by Tin Tin, the Human League, and My Robot Friend; lyrics about Madonna, prescription drugs, and autobiographical narratives that sound like the Streets. The album is definitely an experimentally mixed bag, and it has garnered just about the worst reviews any album has ever seen in the UK. Just watch Robbie ham it up, like never before, here:

Keep in mind, though, that Williams' audience as he began his solo career was primarily teen girls and their moms; as he grew artistically, he did what he could to age gracefully with his fans, and produced an overwhelming amount of adult contemporary schlock in order to keep them happy. Much of it is amusing and humorous schlock, as Williams is intelligent enough never to take himself too seriously, but as a music fan who prefers cult artists that cater to every creative whim they have, I can't say housewife schlock has any effect on me whatsoever.

On RUDEBOX, the housewife schlock is gone, and both fans and critics are *angry* about this. Despite the defensive nature of this post, I don't actually give Williams enough credit to stick to his guns and continue in this direction, but for now, he has rightfully earned his place in the Postmodern Accident hall of fame.

ABSOLUTION

Why then?

2006-08-09T19:16:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident.

I STARTED SOMETHING I COULDN'T FINISH

"For a few disorienting seconds, I could feel my brain much the way you can feel when someone is stepping on your foot."

Why Postmodern Accident? Why now?

2006-08-03T19:22:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Postmodern Accident.

THE INCEPTION

I suppose the reason why I've decided to become a blogger is because as I get older, I try harder to repress and conceal my all-encompassing disgust for everything and everyone, yet it somehow keeps overtaking me and winning out, contributing to my overall existence as a sad sack. Actually, I'm trying to get back into the daily habit of writing and possibly reawakening my creative drive, which has been mostly absent since I wrote a pretentious short story 7 years ago about a somewhat goth couple who maintained a handcrafted candle business and ended up possibly murdering their graphic designer. (Remember, I never said my creative drive led to worthwhile product!)

As many of you know, I've just ended a job working for a popular web magazine (www.popmatters.com), first as a music reviewer and second as the advertising director, and now that I've got extra time on my hands I figured I must do something. I've also just ended a two-year span of active involvement in a couple of online forums, consisting primarily of British frenz who I met through my love of a legendarily prolific and eccentric post-punk band called The Fall. Sadly these forums devolved into cliques and paranoid factions (rather appropriately, actually, as the band often tends to do the same...!), and I lost much of my outlet for writing online and chatting about music, movies, sex, drugs, and all that other fun stuff. So come back here often to read about the trials and tribulations of a lone gay music-obsessed wolf as he tries to navigate being the age of Jesus in the big city, getting by with a little help from his friends and a lot of help from his beer.

THE INTENTION

This shall not become a daily diary of my lame activities. I rarely, if ever, do *anything* interesting. My purpose is to offer a handful of creative and entertaining regular features that will keep me writing and keep you reading. Naturally, I reserve the right to spout off for several sentences, or possibly even paragraphs, about the music that is currently entertaining me. Perhaps I will post an occasional "first sentence," meaning a potential first line from an unwritten short story, on which I welcome and encourage feedback. I may try to feature a daily picture, either of my own or something else found on the web, along with a commentary that explains why I've included it. Don't be surprised if many of these focus on hot men, as I constantly find myself surrounded by straight men and lesbians and I don't think there is enough appreciation for men in my world. If you don't like that idea, fuck you and your girlfriend!

THE INVITATION

A blog is nothing without feedback. I have enabled comments from anyone who wishes to post them, so post away.

THE EXPLANATION

Why Postmodern Accident? What does that even mean? Well, if I have to explain what postmodernism is to you, you probably shouldn't be reading my blog, but ultimately it won't really matter. The term was simply a criticism I threw out at the retro-electro husband/wife duo called Adult. (the period is part of their name) when I first saw them in concert about 4 years ago opening for another postmodern accident called Trans Am. Although I immediately hated Adult. and their inexplicable hipster popularity, I grew to love them--but then they changed their sound and now produce slightly inferior replicas of Siouxsie & the Banshees' Kaleidoscope album from 1980.

"You will see me one more time if you do good. You will see me two more times if you do bad."