The Stooges: Fun House (2CD expanded edition)

Roll: 6-3-11
Album: The Stooges, Fun House (2CD expanded edition)

A lot of people cite The Stooges‘ self-titled, proto-punk/garage rock debut as their best. For others it’s the glam-rock third album, Raw Power, a platter I have never been able to understand the appeal of. I’ve always fallen into the equally vocal third camp—those who understand Fun House (1970) is probably not only their best offering, but is possibly the best album from an era chock-a-block with seminal titles.

Placed against it’s contemporaries, Fun House sounds conspicuously timeless. Great as they might be, albums such as Led Zeppelin III, CCR‘s Cosmo’s Factory, Velvet Underground‘s Loaded, and Curtis by Mr. Mayfield all sound cemented to the knees in their own era. Not only do both albums issued by Sabbath that year sound positively dated in comparison, Fun House makes MC5‘s Back In The USA sound like The Bay City Rollers. 

Let me say that again. This album makes the god-damned MC5 sound like The Bay City Rollers.

But that’s not the only sacred ground this juggernaut tramples over. The free-jazz freak-out that closes the album, “L.A. Blues“, utterly destroys the idea Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders were fearless cosmic travelers and reveals the borders they stepped back from. It’s simultaneously a sneering condemnation of jazz expressionism being placed on a pedestal and supposed “rock’n’roll” music being made palatable for suburban living room stereos. It’s like The Stooges understood that The Who were best while destroying their instruments for shock value and all they needed was a saxophonist having a seizure to make it art. They also clued-in that Coltrane just needed a blown-out Marshall stack to make Ascension punk rock.

Not that Fun House doesn’t have it’s share of late-60’s psychedelic trappings—wah-wah abounds in a way that, until recently, would have been seen as a trifle old fashioned. Perhaps that’s what makes the album feel so fresh. When today’s young psychedelic rockers look to the past, they’re not looking to Zeppelin, Sabbath, and Floyd (and certainly not Hendrix or The Doors), they’re looking to tunes like “T.V. Eye” and VU’s “Sister Ray“—equally as psychedelic as “Dazed and Confused” but with a stripped-down, stream-lined, modern approach that time rolls off of like water on the proverbial duck’s back.

If these tunes sound dated at all, it’s how they sound like Mudhoney or early Nirvana could have recorded them twenty years later. Or Human Eye and Destruction Unit a full 43 years later.

The second disc of this expanded re-issue  doesn’t offer up any surprises, or previously unheard compositions, but it does toss in some nice treats such as a nearly 12-minute version of the title track in among a plethora of alternative takes of every song except, unfortunately, “L.A. Blues”. These alternates range from trashy to messy, but are all of surprisingly decent quality, even when they shudder to a halt. Like many reissues, the essentiality of the second disc comes down to weather or not if you always felt the original album was far too short at 36 minutes and change in length. An unquestionable high-water mark for punk, psychedelia and just plain rock’n’roll in general, you can decide if you require another 70 minutes of material after you listen below…

Jesus and Mary Chain: Darklands (1987)

Roll: 3-9-16
Album: Jesus and Mary Chain, Darklands — 2011 2CD/1DVD reissue

Until Stoned and Dethroned (1994) came out, Darklands (1987) was always my least favourite Jesus and Mary Chain record. It didn’t deliver what I wanted from JAMC. Sure, “Happy When It Rains“, boasts the mechanical post-modern rock’n’roll sound I loved on Automatic (1989), but not to the same extent; like it was a demo for that later album’s whole sound. But more importantly, and more detrimentally, Darkands famously abandons the “savage noise-pop” of Psychocandy (1985). To me Darklands was always a sort of nebulous, half-formed, netherworld of an album. So, in a way, one of their most aptly titled collections.

Over the years I’ve remained eternally hopeful and every time I listen to Darklands I expect to hear something in it I’d previously missed. Some hint of the magic and brilliance that’s been ascribed to it by music journalists, fans and bloggers in the years since it’s release. And though I’ll admit it never sounds as bad as I remember, I’ve never been able to hear it as other than a lethargic, boring mid-tempo folk-rock record marred by some pretty glaringly cheesy ’80s production.

I’ve never been sure if it’s just the song arrangements that never worked for me, but the John Hughes-style drum machines really don’t help matters. And I normally love me some grandiose ’80s drum machines, yet somehow I’ve always felt they sound entirely out of place on Darklands. To my ears, the album begs for an organic Sam Phillips/Sun Studio-style production. The songs are essentially a post-punk take on The Everly Brothers and deserve a more human touch.

The Organ: Sinking Hearts (2002)

Roll: 4-8-15
Album: The Organ, Sinking Hearts

It would have 2002, shortly after Sinking Hearts came out, I was standing beside my buddy Andrew, between the bar and the stage of The Cambie in Nanaimo watching The Organ. He was, at the time, my boss at the record store so he knew I had been crushing hard on the band for a while.

He said, “Still in love?”

I said, “Yeah,”

He said, “I don’t think you’re their type.”

Taking his meaning, I said, “I think you’re probably right.” If all five members weren’t clearly lesbians, at least some of  them were. A few might have been just “arty” but who’s to say and who cares? It was irrelevant to me as I had mainly been seduced by their melancholy Cure-meets-Smiths post-punk indie-pop.

Andrew, hadn’t been.

He said, “This isn’t for me. I thought I’d be able to do this, but I can’t. Enjoy,” patted me on the shoulder and then left to kayak to a small island he was living on with a goat.

For myself, it was exactly for me. I was in school after a hiatus, studying graphic design, and newly single so a lyric like—

Oh goodness me
We’ve got to meet
I need someone to have fun

—sung in a morose monotone resonated with me to the very core of my crush-crazy and romantically jaded heart. No one had spoken to my inner arrested adolescent so profoundly since Morrissey. I was lost and looking for answers to unspoken questions and The Organ seemed to have them.

So someone snuck into your room
And it got back to me
Now, I lie here in my room
And there is nothing I can do

They were one of the bands at the cusp of the millennium’s first post-punk revival and, as a result of Sinking Hearts, I looked for answers in the music of a dozen or so bands riding the same new wave; bands who also borrowed from The Cure, Joy Division, and Gang of Four.

I hung onto my Organ discs, but over the years I discarded albums by Metric, Radio 4, Bloc Party, Moving Units, and The Rapture as they proved to be style over substance (similar to what the original movement was often accused of being). Where the Organ were influenced by new wave and post-punk, these other bands took a more carbon-copy approach, seemingly as much or more interested in the fashion and graphic design of the era than making honest music. Remove the staccato guitar lines and funky beats from a Radio 4 or Bloc Party song and you aren’t left with much.

Conversely, much like the songs of The Smiths which they do somewhat mimic, The Organ’s songs could have been strummed on an acoustic guitar and been just as affecting. They speak to universal experiences—though not necessarily happy or healthy ones. It really was only icing on the cake that they were wrapped in the sounds and textures of my youth. Sounds which, as it happened, I’d already been immersing myself in like a bath of nostalgic wallowing.

It really shook you when I said
“No one has ever looked so dead”
Well, it’s over and I can’t go there anymore

And in the backseat of your car
You showed me every single star
And how the zenith and the sounds
Change in every single town
Well, it’s over and I can’t go there anymore

I’m pretty sure I spent quite a bit of time literally wallow in a bath listening to those lyrics on repeat.  “Well, it’s over and I can’t go there anymore.” Well, fuck, if that doesn’t boil it all down the essence of the situation. The sheer banality of a broken heart; the conscious admittal that the ego crushing experience of lost love is existentially meaningless.

Remember when I left you
I couldn’t say your name
or other crucial things like I love you,
oh, that’s a shame
I don’t know if you’re hearing
my voice or the reprise
our hearts didn’t come together
but I saw the two collide

Every once in a while a record becomes a door leading into the corridors of your own heart, and when you open it, the light comes in and things look brighter. You can’t ask anymore from a pop record than that.

Bardo Pond: Set and Setting (1999)

Roll: 1-3-4
Album: Bardo Pond, Set and Setting

I’m not sure if Set and Setting is the heaviest Bardo Pond record, but it has to be one of the fuzziest. Any fuzzier and it’d sound like a room full of broken TVs. Not a criticism at all, I like a fuzzed-out jam. I’m just saying this record has the fuzz turned up to eleven. That’s a good thing. Twelve might be a problem, but for the ultimate brain-blending, sludgy, fuzz-rock experience, well, anything less than ten really isn’t sufficient. Eleven is a good amount of fuzz.

It took me a long time to get into Bardo Pond. Mostly because they’re a bit of a difficult band to pigeonhole—their records range from tightly focused psychedelic indie-rock to sloppy stoner jams that slide out from under you—so I was always labouring under a misconception about what kind of band they are. In the ’90s I was under the impression they were just a lesser alt/grunge unit I didn’t need to bother with. In some ways, that’s a fair description. They hit the scene a bit later in the game (1994), never wrote pop songs and consequently never really made a splash in the public consciousness like Sonic Youth or Mudhoney did. In fact, they were pretty easy to ignore and since no one in my circles championed them, I forgot they existed for about 20 years.

Then a few summers ago a champion finally came along. My buddy Stephen told me that (since I was lamenting how I’d pretty much emptied the desert rock, shoegaze and krautrock wells) my next musical excursion should be a dive into the depths of the Bardo Pond catalogue.

Eric’s Trip: Peter (1993)

Roll: 3-1-6
Album: Eric’s Trip, Peter

Sometimes life, and being an utter pillock, conspires to keep you from enjoying a really great band. Let what follows be a cautionary tale.

The year was 1993 and despite being into other “Halifax Pop Explosion” bands such as Sloan, Thrush Hermit and Jale, I didn’t really take to Eric’s Trip. It was partly for the rather shaky reason I was leery of bands named after songs. Rightly or wrongly, I instantly associated Eric’s Trip with the tribute bands that’d come through the local rock club on their perennial circuit.

• Cold Gin: a KISS tribute
• Black Dog: an evening of Led Zeppelin classics
• Comfortably Numb: the songs of Pink Floyd and Roger Waters
• Freebird: a celebration of Lynyrd Skynyrd 
• Eric’s Trip: playing the hits of Sonic Youth 

Obviously, Eric’s Trip were never actually a Sonic Youth tribute band. Though in true ’90s fashion they did emulate the Pixies/Smashing Pumpkins/Sonic Youth gender roles.  And if the name wasn’t a giveaway, you could easily surmise from their noisy take on the pop song that the band had listened to their fair share of Sonic Youth records.

At any rate, Sonic Youth (who I’d mysteriously—and temporarily—decided were talentless hacks) were at the forefront of my mind when I heard Eric’s Trip for the first time. It was at a record store where I asked about Sloan’s self-released EP, Peppermint (1992), and the dude behind the counter sneeringly said, “Yeah, I guess we can get that in for you… but have you heard Eric’s Trip?”

So he tossed Peter on the listening station for me and I gave it an optimistic listen.

I regret to report I simply didn’t get it.

Medicine: The Buried Life (1993)

Roll: 4-2-15
Album: Medicine: The Buried Life (2CD reissue)

In my previous post on Lilys I detailed how in 1992, late to the party, I got the shoegaze bug. Once I was infected, I started dosing myself with all the albums where My Bloody Valentine were mentioned in the reviews. Taking this metaphor to its logical conclusion, I should now say Medicine‘s The Buried Life was the cure for my new affliction but, if anything, the album made me a terminal case.

In 1988, if some reviewer was going to describe MBV’s Isn’t Anything, they might have said it was a combination of Cocteau Twins’ dreamy atmospherics and The Jesus and Mary Chain‘s primitive white-noise pop. That would be an apt appraisal but it even better describes the extremes of Medicine’s music.

Lilys: In The Presence of Nothing (1992)

Roll: 4-1-1
Album: Lilys, In The Presence of Nothing

Everybody has this experience. There’s records that used to be your favourites you just can’t listen to anymore. Not because you overplayed them, but because they conjure a painful memories of a specific time in your life. They place you back to some bitter situation as surely as if you’d been teleported in some infernal time machine. For me U2‘s Achtung Baby (1991) and Depeche Mode‘s Songs of Faith and Devotion (1993) both play like soundtracks to a rich and varied selection of bad memories surrounding my first serious girlfriend, Tikki. To this day, the opening guitar noises of “Zoo Station” fill me with an odd mix of dread and nausea.

Other albums, such as Lilys’ 1992 shoegaze classic In The Presence of Nothing remain unmarred by such associations. Perhaps because by the time I’d immersed myself In The Presence of Nothing, the halcyon days of constantly listening to those U2 and Depeche Mode tapes together were long past us.

As things got worse, as simple communication became a minefield of passive aggression and resentment, I retreated further into my own private headphone world. And if  I wanted an album to sweep me away into the depths of oblivion, there aren’t many better suited than In The Presence of Nothing with it’s swells, swirling eddies and multiple layers of fuzzy haze.

Somewhat ironically, it was Tikki who discovered the album for me. At some point around ’92, when things were still pretty good between us,  we were shopping in Nanaimo’s Fascinating Rhythm record store (in their first Country Club Mall location). They were playing In The Presence of Nothing on the overhead and, though it now seems out-of-character, Tikki said to me, “This is the kind of stuff I like.”

I hadn’t been paying any attention to the drifting waves of white noise but, of course, as soon as she said that I decided I liked it too.

It reminded me vaguely of the Posies, Teenage Fanclub and House of Love tapes I’d been enjoying but mixed with a little bit of the fuzz-obscured dreaminess I loved about Hüsker Dü‘s New Day Rising (1985). Not knowing My Bloody Valentine except as a name that got dropped in reviews of bands I didn’t particularly like or know (at the time), those were my closest reference points. And maybe not knowing its direct lineage made In The Presence of Nothing all the more mesmerizing that afternoon. It was dense and shimmering and soft and harsh and melodic and magical and like nothing I’d heard before. It threw the shutters off the windows of noise rock and let in the bright, hazy light in a way Sonic Youth hadn’t been able to do for me.

In an instant, primarily just to impress a girl, I became a shoegazer.

Depeche Mode: Black Celebration (1986)

Roll: 2-5-8
Album: Depeche Mode, Black Celebration (expanded CD/DVD)

This album marks another chapter in my emotional growth and sexual awakening as a teenager. Or I suppose it’s more accurately a new subheading in the exact same chapter on being a closeted synth-pop fan wearing a heavy metal beard.

The year was 1986 and I was effin’ LIVID this “fagotty bubble-gum pop band” that all the girls were all crazy for, Depeche Mode, had such an awesome, dark, drop-dead cool looking cover for their new album with the coolest, darkest, delightfully cynical title, Black Celebration.

How dare they use this before a more deserving metal or punk band had a chance? What could these dreamy pretty boy airheads do with such a powerful idea? What was going on? Aren’t the culture police monitoring things? How could this happen? Who do I write a letter to? How can we make this right?

Needless to say, I didn’t listen to the album.

Not that I had much of leg to stand on if there had been a Department of Artistic Control I could lodge a complaint with.

Do you wish to file a report?

Yes, that pop band Deepish Mood or whatever stole an awesome album title.

Really, from whom?

I dunno. Anthrax or SNFU. Or somebody else who didn’t think of it. Anyway, a band that isn’t like synthesizer gaylords, man.

I see. And what is that I hear coming out of your Walkman headphones?

Please by the Pet Shop Boys. What’s that got to do with anything?

I was, if nothing else, a highly nuanced fourteen year old headbanger.

Anthrax: Persistence of Time (1990)

Roll: 1-2-17
Album: Anthrax, Persistence of Time

Anthrax‘s fifth album, Persistence of Time (1990), was the very last heavy metal tape I ever bought.

Heading into the ’90s, I eschewed “stupid, meat-head” metal bands for what I considered to be the “intelligent, sophisticated” sounds of college radio rock. You know, the completely not-metal-at-all sounds of bands like Ministry, Godflesh and KMFDM. And rap-metal hybrids, those were okay too for some reason. Grunge bands like Soundgarden and post-hardcore bands like Helmet? Those also passed muster. Totally not metal. Metal is for morons and I was a fine arts major brainiac—ipso facto anything I listened to was not metal.

And my Lard clone band, Neo-Psychotic Mind Rape? Totally not metal. I dunno what you’re talking about. Not metal and not completely juvenile and moronic. No siree.

Anyway, Persistence of Time was also one of the first metal CDs I bought when I started getting back into speed and thrash metal earlier this year. I’m not sure what triggered this specific kind of mid-life crisis. Actually I place all the blame on the For Those About To Rock podcast’s episode on Anthrax’s Worship Music (2011). I think that’s what disturbed the sleeping beast. But however it happened, I awoke one morning with a hunger for all the tapes I owned as a teenager.

The three drawers in the captain’s bed I’d had since childhood didn’t hold clothes, as my mother intended, but cassettes from labels like Combat, Restless, Nuclear Blast, Relativity, Metal Blade and Megaforce. Many of these releases were available through Canada’s Banzai Records which (like Fringe Product did with punk) licensed titles not domestically available. Sometimes I’d just look on the spine of a tape and if it sported the Banzai logo, I’d buy it never even having heard of the band before. Banzai was a name you could trust. Just look at this discography.

Culture Club: Kissing To Be Clever / Colour By Numbers

Roll: 2-5-17
Album: Culture Club, Kissing To Be Clever/Colour By Numbers

Just in time for Pride Week here in Toronto, the dice served up this budget double-disc set of Culture Club‘s first two albums.

Though this happenstance shouldn’t really surprise me since, for the last year, I feel like everything’s been coming up Boy George. Every time I read an autobiography by a new wave or punk icon, without fail, he features in at least one anecdote. Either he got out on the town a lot more than any other UK pop star of his generation or he was simply the one who was able to make an impression strong enough to survive years of drug and alcohol abuse that the authors’ brains inevitably suffered. The anecdotes usually do involve him being a bit of a twat, so the latter is probably at least partly true. This goes for his own autobiographies as well, by the way.

I would have been in grade 5 the first time I saw the “Karma Chameleon” video and it was undoubtedly my first experience with the very concept of drag. You’d expect that my mind was blown like bits of paper from a confetti canon with the realization that she was a he. But it wasn’t. Kids tend to take things in stride unless they’re instructed not to. Except for a joke my dad made about George being “prettier than Cyndi Lauper” (to which I agreed), I don’t remember having much reaction at all.

Perhaps it could have been because his form of drag was oddly benign and asexual. More of a David Bowie-esque gender-bending androgyny than the highly-sexualized cross-dressing of Priscilla Queen of Desert.