The 2011 Countdown Continues with No. 23, Bass Drum of Death

Continuing today, and culminating with REVERBERATIONS number one album of the year on December 31^st (if my math is right), we’ll be counting down the top twenty-five records of 2011. I’m referring to this countdown as Twenty-five Faves because I have no pretenses about telling you what’s “best.” Sure, I think my taste is better than yours. But nobody died and made me Lester Bangs. And Lester could be arrogant, but I kind of think he would come down on the favorite side of the fave/best dichotomy. His criticism was nothing if not personal.

I've reviewed the majority of these selections. In the event that I have I'll simply recycle the original reviews, sometimes with a little new commentary. If it's a selection I haven't reviewed previously, I will dash off a new, brief, introductory review just for perspective.

 

This year, like most in recent memory, saw the release of several scraggly-ass garage-grunge-punk-pop records (hyphens, no charge) - new releases from mainstays like Ty Segall, newcomers like Hanni El Khatib, download only entries from fixtures such as Reigning Sound and King Khan (a sign, albeit an ironic one, of the times) – heck, the admittedly loosely construed genre even spew forth reissues and anthologies from the Reatards, Lost Sounds and the aforesaid Mr. Segall, a sure sign of, uh, maturity.

All of them were pretty good, but none resonated from bang one to final decay as records like Reigning Sounds’ Time Bomb High School or King Khan and BBQ Show’s debut had in years past. For me the best representatives of the idiom are those records that have an appeal that preaches beyond the converted. In 2011, one album has kept insinuating itself, despite my initial dismissal; that album is GB City the distortion-saturated opus from Oxford, Mississippi’s Bass Drum of Death on Fat Possum Records.

The 2011 Countdown continues with Fountains of Wayne at No. 24

 

Continuing today, and culminating with REVERBERATIONS number one album of the year on December 31^st (if my math is right), we’ll be counting down the top twenty-five records of 2011. I’m referring to this countdown as Twenty-five Faves because I have no pretenses about telling you what’s “best.” Sure, I think my taste is better than yours. But nobody died and made me Lester Bangs. And Lester could be arrogant, but I kind of think he would come down on the favorite side of the fave/best dichotomy. His criticism was nothing if not personal. 

 

I've reviewed the majority of these selections. In the event that I have I'll simply recycle the original reviews, sometimes with a little new commentary. If it's a selection I haven't reviewed previously, I will dash off a new, brief, introductory review just for perspective.

Here's a link to my review of "Sky Full of Holes" by Fountains of Wayne:

http://stevemahoot.blogspot.com/2011/08/fountains-of-wayne-sky-full-of-holes.html 

 

The 2011 Countdown begins with Kurt Vile at No. 25

Starting today, and culminating with REVERBERATIONS number one album of the year on December 31^st (if my math is right), we’ll be counting down the top twenty-five records of 2011. I’m referring to this countdown as Twenty-five Faves because I have no pretenses about telling you what’s “best.” Sure, I think my taste is better than yours. But nobody died and made me Lester Bangs. And Lester could be arrogant, but I kind of think he would come down on the favorite side of the fave/best dichotomy. His criticism was nothing if not personal.

I've reviewed the majority of these selections. In the event that I have I'll simply recycle the original reviews, sometimes with a little new commentary. If it's a selection I haven't reviewed previously, I will dash off a new, brief, introductory review just for perspective.

 

My introduction to Kurt Vile was as Adam Granduciel’s chief cohort on Wagonwheel Blues a quietly mesmerizing album by Granduciel’s band War on Drugs. With lush guitar atmospheres that straddled genres and generations, Wagonwheel Blues had vocals that sounded like a mixture of Neil Young and Jason Pierce (Spaceman 3). The songs were good enough to emerge from the fog of the music, but sometimes you didn’t care if they did.

Rolling Stones - Some Girls (Deluxe Edition)/(Republic)

A broad critical consensus has emerged that 1978’s Some Girls was the last great Rolling Stones album. A case can be made. Sure, the Stones have done spotty work for the last, oh, thirty-five years. But Tattoo You – that was pretty good. Personally, I thought Undercover was underrated. And their last record A Bigger Bang from 2005 was about 2/3 great. But back to Some Girls. Yeah, it’s really good. The relative mediocrity of the three studio releases between the venerated Exile on Main Street and Some Girls (Goat’s Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Black and Blue) left a still sizeable and devout Stones fan base ready for love. Some of those fans could have given a rat’s ass about punk rock. Others, however, moved by the racket that had blown out of New York and London during the (Sucking in the) Seventies, had a sense that the back to basics blood and guts of punk had thrown down to the Rolling Stones.

The Stones knew it. Mick Jagger in particular has always been, for better or worse, extremely sensitive to trends. Central to the energy behind the hard, fast and rockin’ tracks on Some Girls was Jagger’s own rhythm guitar playing. More square, less syncopated than Keith Richard’s playing, Jagger’s assertive guitar gave the album much of its foursquare thrust.

But wait, I don’t really want to review Some Girls. Been done. In summary, I think it’s terrific, but maybe rated too highly, and primarily by a lot of the same folks who have an unnecessarily dim view of the Stones’ subsequent output. What I really want to talk about is disc two of the deluxe edition of Some Girls.

Thee Oh Sees - carrion crawler/the dream ep (In The Red)

 

Ah, it’s sweet really. The noise generation is meeting me half-way. I remember back in 2003 when a young pal tried to introduce me to Pink & Brown. I try to keep an open mind. Really, I do. My shelves are full of records and discs with music that the average listener would call noise. But I always viewed noise as something that best served as energy and expression tools for … I dunno, songs? From the MC5 to Sonic Youth the racket was seasoning and juicing to rock ‘n’ roll. So, all this Pink & Brown, Lightning Bolt shit left me perplexed. I love a racket, but this was a new kind of racket – primitive, artless, tuneless. Meh. Was I missing something?

Well, the answer is: a) not really and b) maybe a little something.

Which leads us to our man John Dwyer, he’s the prolific force behind Pink & Brown, the Coachwhips, Hospitals, and most recently Thee Oh Sees (among others). The Coachwhips wanted to be the Oblivians but were without the limited skills and lyric sensibility required for such homage. But they were better than Pink & Brown. The Hospitals? I never listened to them enough to have much of an opinion. When I heard Dwyer had yet another band - this one called Thee Oh Sees, I approached them with trepidation.

But from the beginning I kinda liked what I heard. In addition to the annals of noise racket, Dwyer seemed to have absorbed lessons from psychedelia (the kind with spaces between the noises) as well as the urgent, fuzz-toned rhythms of the bands that were featured on Crypt Records Back from the Grave compilations. Thee Oh Sees release something new every four months (okay, close to it). Seriously, they’ve put out about thirteen records in seven years (under various monikers, relying on TOS for the last four or so years), depending on what you count and who’s counting. The band’s latest offering carrion crawler/the dream EP (lower case is theirs’) is an arresting synthesis of the various strains that run through the band’s music, especially a combination of Help’s psycho-trips and Castlemania’s Cali-garage-pop, music that sounded touched by San Francisco garage peers like Ty Segall and the Fresh and Onlys.

Rocket From the Tombs - Barfly (Fire Records)

 

When David Thomas dubbed Pere Ubu “Avant-garage” he did so in a playful, facetious manner, mostly to give rock critics something to chew on. Of course, as Bryan Ferry observed, throwaway lines often ring true. Pere Ubu, especially in the Seventies, combined primitive, aggressive guitar based rock and primal emotional expression with a unique performance (especially Thomas’s vocals) idiom and lyrics that derived from intellectual abstractions not common to the “Nuggets” generation that inspired the band. It’s hard to imagine the Shadows of Knight arriving at lyric conceits like “Non-Alignment Pact” (basically a desperate plea for fidelity built on a diplomatic metaphor … but still) or “Final Solution.” You know?

Ubu, arguably one of rock’s greatest and most important bands to remain little known, was an offspring of another tremendous band. That same band birthed the Dead Boys – a group that had everything and nothing in common with Pere Ubu. That mother of a band was Rocket from the Tombs. RFTT existed for about a year, straddling 1974 and 1975. They played a handful of shows, mostly in their native Cleveland. They never released a record.

But from Rocket From the Tombs' repertoire Pere Ubu took “Final Solution,” ‘Life Stinks,” and “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” while the Dead Boys derived “Sonic Reducer,” “Ain’t it Fun,” and “Down in Flames.” In other words, a chunk of the core repertoire that helped establish two pretty important punk era bands originated with RFTT. And it’s noteworthy that their sound could, pretty easily really, inform two outfits as rocking, but divergent as Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. And you, by God, could call them Avant-garage.

Mott the Hoople - Live at Hammersmith Apollo 2009 (4Worlds Media)

If you blog (and isn’t that a savory verb?), you’re supposed to keep content fresh. You’re supposed to make new entries frequently. Well, it’s been a good two weeks since my last post. I shan’t bore you with tales of the intrusion of so-called real life on my activity. I assure you, though, it’s a factor.

Honestly, I haven’t been that inspired by recent releases. I’ve found plenty to enjoy, but nothing that suggested spending the requisite three or four hours to listen carefully, take a few notes, draft a review, and finally shape into a finished product. Now, I’m not going to name names; after all, some of these heretofore-desultory platters may prove stimulating enough to provoke the above process. Who knows?

Still, I’m reminded of the rhetorical laydown offered by David Bowie in the song “Young Americans:” ‘ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?’

I’ll tell you what did make me cry. And I preface this by admitting that this dates me and risks making me seem like an enormous sap. What the fuck – I’m strong, really.

I wept while listening to Live at Hammersmith Apollo 2009. It’s a live recording taken from Mott the Hoople’s five-night reunion stand in London in 2009. So, why was I blubbering? I shall endeavor to explain.

Dum Dum Girls - Only in Dreams (Sub Pop Records)

Well, here we are. Reverberations is fond of the Dum Dum Girls. We’ve covered every release of their short, sweet career except for their initial seven-inch on Hozac. Let’s see, that includes their debut full-length I Will Be, the follow up extended play He Gets Me High, and now the feature length release number two Only in Dreams.

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Kristen Gundred (aka Dee Dee) is still Dum Dum Girl number one. But she’ s no longer the whole show that she was on I Will Be. She’s taken her road band, a trio of accompanists who give credence to the band’s plural name, into the studio for Only in Dreams. There were no credits given for He Gets Me High, but the sonic similarities between that EP and the new album suggest that her band mates either joined her on those sessions or have modeled their performance on Gundred’s work from those sessions

Where I Will Be had a gauzy, aural cubist mix, He Gets Me High cut the distortion in half, focusing more on Gundred’s increasingly expressive singing. These new sessions accelerate that shift. Touring has made Gundred (Dee Dee) a more muscular singer. In my review of He Gets Me High I referenced a vocal similarity to Chrissie Hynde, which the new album only accentuates. 

Jack Oblivian - Rat City (Big Legal Mess/Fat Possum Records)

 Memphis has long been the place where the rural cultures of the Deep South meet and mix. It was surely the case before Sam Phillips put the ignition in the mighty motor of Sun Records in 1952. But Sun does provide the most obvious and optimal example of Memphis’s place in American musical experience. While Phillips first recorded the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, he made his fortune discovering white performers whose influences were reflective of an emerging South where, prior to but anticipating the social convulsions of the Sixties, whites were being entertained by black performers and vice versa. Well before schools and lunch counters integrated, Southerners radio dial and record shop preferences were crossing racial lines.

What’s this got to do with Jack Oblivian? Lots, as it turns out. Oblivian (or Yarber as his ma and pa know him), is a modern day Memphis mixer, putting together stray stands from Fresno blues to Carolina beach music, from the Stooges to Springsteen and the Clash, he’s a working class musical magpie, and in top form on his new release Rat City.

With Greg (Oblivian) Cartwright and Eric (Oblivian) Freidl in the Oblivians, he became an icon of the (re)emerging garage-rock genre by blasting grease pit , r ‘n’ b infused rock ‘n’ roll at punk tempos. As a soloist (and with his nominal ‘band’ the Tennessee Tearjerkers) Oblivian has purveyed a slightly grown up version of the same thing. He’s become a better singer and musician, and it sounds like he’s running his beloved cheap Jap guitars through better amps in better studios (actually, the portability/affordability of good recording gear is probably the bigger change). But he’s still a thrift shop recycler. And his uncanny ear for sweaty hooks and grooves is sharper than ever. 

Wild Flag - s/t (Merge Records)

Well before the release of Wild Flag’s debut album on September 13^th, videos of the band began to surface on youtube.com. Live versions of the songs from the album, certainly, but more telling was their selection of covers. I’ve seen their takes on Patti Smith’s “Ask the Angels,” the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden” and “She's My Best Friend” from the  Velvet Underground. What these choices said was that Wild Flag wasn’t going to be limited by any parochial notions from the indie-rock world. Nor were they going to pursue any express political agenda. Instead, Wild Flag get that the most powerful statement they could make as women and musicians was to flat rock out. And that’s what they do on Wild Flag.

After all, what can a poor girl do ‘cept to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band? By the time Sleater-Kinney came to the end of their road in 2006, singer/guitarist Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss had already borne the burden of dreams for a generation of young rockers, especially young women. Mary Timony’s career as soloist and the force behind the group Helium was less visible, but no less connected to the preconceptions that animate the alternative-rock world, i.e. a non-star, one-of-us demeanor, aversion to “hooks” (Sleater-K had already broken that one a few times), and  indifference to commercialism and wider popularity. Keyboardist Rebecca Cole from the Minders arrived at the rehearsal studio for Wild Flag’s first practices with the least baggage, and her musicianship and spirit is critical to the success of Wild Flag. Her expressly garage-rock  keys signal Wild Flag’s connection to a rock ‘n’ roll world that spans “Nuggets” style Farfisa organ sounds, John Cale’s playing with the Velvets and the late Greg Hawkes work with the Cars. She can suggest the howling growl of “Sister Ray” or the pizzicato whimsy of the solo from the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard” – as she, by God, does expressly on “Future Crimes.”