Men Without Hats

Some bands are so much better than their most well known song. Case in point, Montreal’s Men Without Hats, one of the quintessential 80s new wave pop bands/ The Safety Dance was of course a piece of pop genius. But that was just the tip of the iceberg of this band’s sound and ideas. I’m only really familiar with their material through 1987’s Pop Goes the World, but their first three albums ( Rhythm of Youth from 1982 and Folk of the 80’s (Part III), from 1984, are the other two) offer a complex landscape of pop songs that most bands can’t achieve in twice that many albums. There are a lot of interlacing themes among the songs (Pop Goes the World is a concept album with many refs between songs) which are hard to describe without many listenings (which are always fruitful). From a musical standpoint, the two most unique aspects of the M w/o H sound are the extremely atmospheric keyboards and lead singer Ivan Doroschuk’s voice, which has an extreme urgency to it, like he’s been to the top of the ferris wheel alone, seen the destruction at the edge of the universe, and knows there’s no way to describe it to you.

Here’s a live clip of their song Where Do the Boys Go off Folk of the 80's (Part III). Note the fans. This is exactly the kind of people who I remember were into M w/o H. Those are my people. And ya gotta love a band with two keyboardists. Ya just gotta…

Post Surgical Ankle Porn

Got the splint-cast-thing taken off yesterday. Now I'm in for 4 weeks of cam-boot + crutches with gradual weight bearing (not much) and daily mobility work. Here are a couple of pictures of what it looks like. The stitches will dissolve (good thing) and we don't even have to remove the tape. The doc said to let it fall off on its own. Still can't get it wet. Have to shower creatively for a month. Fun fun.

The Sherbs

The Sherbs were an early 80s reincarnation of a very successful Australian rock band of the 70s, Sherbet. I’m not familiar at all with the Sherbet material (there's some on Youtube) and unfortunately there’s not much Sherbs material available online. I got to like them from a couple of songs (I’m Alive and We Ride Tonight) that got decent airplay on album-oriented rock stations. They can be loosely classified as a progressive rock band. Vocalist Daryl Braithwaite had a subtle but distinctive sound that was not falsetto, but still ranged up toward that territory, vaguely reminiscent of Steve Perry but much more restrained. The Sherbs sound was somewhat atmospheric, with synthesizers playing a prominent role. The songs were on the poppy end of prog-rock, but this was nowhere near Top-40 (at least not in America). Overall, the sound was of the same flavor as a lot of local progressive rock bands in the Rochester area at the time. Nothing earth-shatteringly novel, just a sound of its times and some interesting rock songs. Rock music took off for many distant lands after that time and has never returned to this rather simple, maybe slightly pretentious at times but not ostentatious, sound.

Here’s a song from the Sherbet era:



Here’s the 80s Sherbs manifestation (same personnel, according to their Wikipedia entry). Quite a bit different, but you can see where it came from:



I’m really glad that people are archiving all of these old TV show appearances of bands on Youtube. Of course, the bands in these shows are lip syncing these songs (or something close to that). But you get a flavor of their studio sound and what they looked like.

Remind Me - Royksopp

Everyone I know loves this song. Most of us discovered it as the music behind the Geico commercial with the cave man on the moving walkway in the airport. The song is wistful, atmospheric, catchy. A breath of fresh air compared to most contemporary pop in America. Royksopp (sorry, I don’t do umlauts) is two guys from Norway and has been around since 1998. They have two albums and a bunch of singles out, and thanks to the internet, many folks in the U.S. know more about them than this one song.
Having listened to a good portion of their material, I would say that within the electronic form, they are quintessentially modern and European, squarely in the Kraftwerk lineage. The video for Remind Me (below) is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a long time. It encapsulates their ultramodern, Bauhaus- and De Stijl derived aesthetics. It’s beautiful – and yet the wistfulness, even sadness, of the song questions everything that the modern, urban, metropolitan, cosmopolitan world has become. And who we are living in it.

Morning Megachild

Good Mushroom Year

The last few weeks have brought an amazing bloom of mushrooms in these parts. Here’s me in the middle of a faerie ring of Russula. We don’t know the species, but this one appears to be an ectomycorrhizal symbiont of oak trees (as are many of the common basidiomycetes around here). The outbreak of mushrooms has been a boon for my lab because we have started some studies on native mushroom feeding Drosophila. We collected some of these Russula and placed them in a container as a bait in order to trap the flies by netting them. (You can also use store bought mushrooms for this, but for the purposes of the experiment, we wanted to use the same kinds of mushrooms as the flies had already been eating [as larvae].) Males of the mushroom feeding species also use the mushrooms as lekking sites.

It has always mystified me why so many people have the urge to eat wild mushrooms. Given that some are incredibly poisonous, it never seemed to me to be worth messing around with them. Of course, many of them are edible and some are incredibly tasty. Still, I’m happy with the ones from the store.

Stupid species names

Most of the hundreds of species of Drosophila, the organism my lab group and I work on, have perfectly good names (here is a list of the small subset of Drosophila species that are in a database of hosts of known endosymbiotic bacteria; Mateos, M., Castrezana, S.J., Nankivell, B.J., Estes, A.M., Markow, T.A., and Moran, N.A. (2006) Heritable Endosymbionts of Drosophila. Genetics 174: 363–376.).

Some really nice names are: D. albomicans, D. melanica, and D. palustris


But some species names are just stupid. These are often species named after people, but the Latin suffix system for species (seemingly not manditory for species but compulsory at the family level) is frequently, I feel, cumbersome and ridiculous.

Today's winner: Drosophila busckii

I really have no idea what the species is named after (a person perhaps; it was originally described by a taxonomist named Coquillett in 1901 and had the original name buskii; I don't know why it was change later or by whom). No offense, but whatever it was: bad move. Somewhere there are some "rules" for naming new species, either descriptively, by geographic location, or after people. It seems pretty arbitrary to me, so I think there should be an obligation to make species names that roll off the tongue and are easy to spell. Anyone who refuses to do so is kind of like someone whose name is Bartholemew and insists on being called Bartholemew and not Bart. Probably not a person I would want to hang out with.

Greatest Hits

CNN.com had this story up yesterday about the conflicts that artists and labels have surrounding greatest hits compilations. I’m a little torn on this issue but I ultimately side with the artists on this. Hits compilations are certainly a money grab by the labels. They do make money. I have a lot of them (although a lot of my collection I’ve gotten as used discs). Because for me it’s “about the songs”, for many bands I’m mainly interested in just a few songs (usually their better known songs, since I occasionally DJ parties and these tend to get requested).

The main point of the article is that labels are pressuring newer artists to release GH compilations early, which is pretty ridiculous. A number of both newer and classic artists have resisted the GH pressure. AC/DC is the most interesting band in this list. The artists correctly hold that albums have integrity (and sometimes, songs that are big hits for a band are not that band’s favorite songs, e.g. Don’t You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds)(Their 1985 Live Aid performance of this song is posted above. I don’t remember them playing this when I saw them in Buffalo in early ’86.). iTunes has changed things quite a bit, for those artists whose material is available there (coverage is still pretty spotty or completely absent for many, which I would guess is probably mostly attributable to artists and labels not liking the terms[?]).

The CNN.com story also amusingly calls out Aerosmith and U2 for releasing egregious numbers of hits compilations.

Some art

for your Thursday morning...

(Ankle is doing much better. Basically pain free at this point. Thanks for everyone's well wishes!)

The Three O'Clock

Since the folks over at PowerPop posted the Conchords (excellent and hilarious) lampooning of Psychedelic rock, I thought I would blog about the Three O’Clock, my favorite psychedelic revival band from the Paisley Underground scene in LA in the early-mid 80s. Led by vocalist/bassist Michael Quercio, these guys brought a pretty unique hard-driving guitar edge to the sound (which seemed to be absent from the other bands of that scene that I have been exposed to, e.g. Dream Syndicate and Green on Red). Quercio’s high, lush vocals lent a sort of hyperactive plaintiveness to the sound. In terms of pure songwriting, this band was one of the best in the 80s, in my opinion. Every one of their albums is laden with novel pop music ideas and repays virtually continual relistening. I owe my love of this band to my friend Dave, who introduced me to a ton of alternative music in Durham, NC in the early 90s. Sadly, the Three O’Clock had broken up by that time.

I’m not sure exactly how influential the neo-psychedelic sound/aesthetics have been. Prince (whose Paisley Park record label put out the last Three O’Clock album, Vermillion, in 1988), the Bangles (part of the 80s LA neo-psychedelic scene), and the Church (see their 1986 album Heydey) all had mainstream success with the meme. This was one of many undercurrents in pop/alternative music that were percolating in the 80s, which give the lie to anyone who complains that 80s music was boring or monolithic.

Happily, there is a decent Youtube footprint for the Three O’Clock (ignore the first link). Here is the video for their song Her Head’s Revolving, from their 1985 album Arrive Without Travelling.

On Recovering

I had outpatient surgery today to (hopefully) fix tendon inflammation that I've been battling for almost a year. Don't know what started it but we have an interesting (and bizarre) hypothesis that the doctors actually find plausible, which I might blog about in the future sometime. Things went well except for trying to get up our front stoop on crutches for the first time. For about a half second my weight was on the ankle. Not good.

The pain after the surgery has been exquisite, as I had a couple of hours between when the anesthesia wore off and actually downing the pills that the doctor prescribed. Oxycodone, the "safe" kind of hillbilly heroin (because it has acetaminophen in the mix, which apparently makes it hard to abuse due to some pharmacology I don't understand). It took a while to kick in. I should say the pain is exquisite, because it's still there, just hiding behind a thin veil. The drug is a house of cards and the pain, in the shape of the throbbing flesh under and behind my ankle, is a fat, writhing slug inside it, threatening to bring the house down. Sleep turned out to be the glue that keeps the house up at all. But it's still fragile. Sand castle would be another good metaphor for it.

I like to go to sleep to a story (usually unabridged CDs of Tolkien which take years to get through as bedtime stories a few nights a week). I found online the complete text to Gibson's "Burning Chrome". the quinitessential cyberpunk hacker story, and had my laptop read it to me in one of its synthetic voices. Good stuff.

And Mrs. Slig is an angel, by the way.

Message of Love - the Pretenders

In my post below on Pat Benatar, I forgot to list the Pretenders as a major female-led band at that time. American-expat-in-the-UK Chrissie Hynde can arguably claim to have become more legendary than any of the woman rockers I did list. I've liked the Pretenders' sound ever since Brass in Pocket hit the radio in the U.S. in 1980. Their first three albums, Pretenders, Pretenders II, and Learning to Crawl (my all time favorite album cover), are as good or better musically than the first three albums of any other artist in the history of rock.

Message of Love, from their second album in 1981 (was released earlier on an EP), exemplifies the rock solidity their songwriting. Hynde's completely unique vocals, combining passion with gutsiness, overlie a decepively simple guitar track that wrings extreme beauty out of its chord-rhythm work and fits perfectly over the classic, almost walking, bassline (not a little out of tune in the live clip below). It's poignant to realize that bassist Pete Farndon and guitarist James Honeyman-Scott both died of drug overdoses within two years of the release of Pretenders II. Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers added guitarist Robbie Macintosh and bassist Malcolm Foster for 1984's Learning to Crawl. After that, further personnel changes and less stellar material tended to drag the band down into the general mainstream rock/pop decline of the late-80s/90s, but nothing can tarnish how original, and absolutely trenchant for rock music, the Pretenders's early songs were.

Dusted - Belly

Tanya Donelly’s post- Throwing Muses, post- Breeders band Belly had a hybrid sound mixing hard-edged punk stylings with her rangy, expressive vocal (which could alternately evoke Sundays singer Harriet Wheeler and Siouxsie Sioux). Their sound was pretty much par for the alternative music course of the early 90s, but their one song that I really like is Dusted (studio version here as backing for someone’s home movies involving Tigers, a child, and other random stuff; a live version here, after their song Slow Dog) from 1993. This is a fast, guitar driven track that is perfectly balanced by the sweet high vocals. There is a really good counterpoint between the lead guitar line and the vocal. Melodic punk at its best.

Dept. of Bad Food Ideas

Casseroles almost invariably gross me out. Why eat mushy, overcooked food all mixed together? Why not cook and serve things separately? (Or if you're gonna mix things up, cook quickly in a wok, not slowly in an oven.) Skip the crusty bread crumbs or crushed up stale crackers or whatever they are. Don't need the extra carbs. And casseroles are even more disgusting when they are a vehicle for leftovers.

New Lyrics

(no song yet; as you can immediately see, it's kind of a meta thing)

Not Enough Words

v1
Party back porch becomes a stage
Only a mirror
If you could just figure out
Stanza and verse

v2
Useless poetry on summer nights
Light pollution of the town
Rain for her on dance floors
You're not around

v3
You'll take up smoking
Like you took up D minor
Chords of long suffering
Bohemians

Ch1
There's not enough words that rhyme with girl
Not enough words in the world
She's oblivious to this
Flaw of the universe

v4
You'll never do the drugs or crash
The car you need to figure tragically
You'll just hoist longnecks beneath the moon
Smartly rehydrate for work before noon

v5
Goddesses seldom know they are
Though they all seem to share that Greek ruin statue stare
Angels are only under your nose
Never think to write songs for those

Ch2
There's not enough words that rhyme with love
Armies of poets curse god above
She's so oblivious to this
Grand joke of the universe

v6
Holy of holies the chance it requires
Brownian kiss of disavowed desires
The idea may need to dissolve, an orphan
When the 8-ball shake drags you away

Ch etc. out

Hooks

Hooks, the things that make songs “catchy” (and to some extent “accessible”) are the sine qua non of pop music. I’m really interested in precisely studying the characteristics of hooks. One phenomenon I notice now and again with a pop song is that it will have multiple different kinds of hooks. The 1983 song Shy Shy by British synth-popsters Kajagoogoo is a good example. It’s also a good example of some hooks working better musically than others. The hook that sold this song commercially is of course the chorus, which few who were aware of pop music in the 80s could forget, even if they wanted to (which is most of the time; and I apologize for the earworm I’ve given you by even bringing it up). However, I’ve always thought that the intro and verse of this song are much stronger musically with their atmospheric interplay between the bass line and the synth washes and rhythmic guitar work. The vocal part is underlain by a nice chord progression as well. (The resemblance to Duran Duran is no coincidence. The song was produced by Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes. But in actuality, this song was a hit before any of Duran Duran's.) However, as soon as the bridge arrives “Hey girl, move a little closer…” the song loses everything. It sounds like a different song. It’s even worse when it hits the chorus. It’s almost forcably inserted into the song seemingly from another (far inferior) song. There is some rhythmic complexity in the chorus, but with me it has no staying power. I probably liked it the first few times I heard it, but since then I simply yearn for the (all too brief) verse sections of the song. Anyway, without dwelling too much on this particular song or band (a one hit wonder in most analyses, at least on this side of the pond), I just think this is a nice example of simplistic hooks versus actually musically effective (or at least good-sounding) hooks. Your mileage will no doubt vary…

Chromatic Aberration

I'm currently doing research for a book on insect pigmentation, which is fun because I'm learning a lot about things I never studied before, like vision, which involves several kinds of pigments. Here's something amazing that I found out reading about animal visual systems concerning chromatic aberration , which refers to the phenomenon that different colors do not refract identically in a lens, resulting in slightly different focal distances and colored "fringes" around images. This is a problem both in photography and in biological vision (where it may interfere with depth perception).

this is from: Kirschfeld, K. 1982 Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. B 216: 71-85

"...we [humans] see over the whole range from 400 to 700 nm, and to reduce the incidence of short wavelength light therefore cannot, in principle, overcome the problem of chromatic aberration , which from 400-700 nm corresponds to more than 2m^-1. This aberration is considerable and corresponds e.g. to a change in the distance of an object from our eye from 100-40 cm. Indeed, there are many kinds of psychophysical experiments that demonstrate the existence of chromatic aberration, which our nervous system has obviously learned to deal with. Among the most convincing demonstrations are experiments in which human observers wear prism glasses that artificially introduce a kind of chromatic aberration: all edges viewed through the glasses appear with coloured fringes. These fringes diminish and disappear over a 3 day period, and if the prisms are removed complementary 'phantom' fringes are seen (review: Stronmeyer 1978). Such observations indicate that our nervous system should be capable of matching the different 'colour extracts' of an optical scene detected by the three different cone types in such a way that the chromatic aberration does not become conscious."

Weird eh?

The Stronmeyer reference is:
Stronmeyer, C.F. 1978 Form-color aftereffects in human vision. pp97-142 in Handbook of Sensory Physiology Vol. 8, eds. Held, R., Leibowitz, H.W., and Teuber, H.-L. Berlin, Springer-Verlag.

Band Names

Latest band name ideas (would also work as album names) that occurred to me as I was driving uptown for a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee (best fast food coffee in the universe, by the way):

Contrail Kabbalah
Contrail Rosetta

I like the first one a little better, probably because of the alliteration. Of course, I am not in need of these right now, so if anyone would like them, they're yours.

Jailbreak - Thin Lizzy

Thin Lizzy is a staple of the Classic Rock format in the form of their two major hits, both from 1976, The Boys are Back in Town and Jailbreak. But I bet few American radio listeners know that they were from Ireland. Their sound, from guitar riffs through Phil Lynott’s vocals, is quintessentially American. In fact they were doing this early enough to arguably lay claim to partially inventing a sound that later Southern Rock bands like 38 Special were still mining well into the 80s. It would make an interesting musicology master’s thesis project to quantify exactly what makes Thin Lizzy sound this way and what mix of influences produced such an iconic result. The live version of Jailbreak linked above is a little too fast and doesn’t quite capture the simple power of its central guitar riff. I recommend picking up the studio version. But on the other hand, as a document of the live hard rock experience in its heydey, the video is perfect.

Motorhead

Like many in the states, my first exposure to Motorhead was their appearance on the classic BBC comedy The Young Ones. These guys absolutely rocked then, and they rocked about 15 years later when my bandmate (in U-pump) Matt and I saw them play in Madison, WI. Lemmy cruises above it all like a larger than life hood ornament leaning into the heavy metal future at 95 mph.

Unused art for a previous band

Megachild used to be called Minus Paul. Here's some old art from that era I had sitting around my hard disk.

Synthetic Classical

My knowledge and appreciation of classical music is pretty pathetic, especially given that I am a “classically trained” piano player. I like listening to classical music that is either off the beaten path (as much 20th century and contemporary classical music is) or that is interpreted in an unconventional way. My favorite examples of this are the pieces on this album of classical music performed on an early Moog synthesizer. For some reason, my parents (not great music collectors) had this LP when I was growing up and I really fell in love with these pieces, as well as the sounds used on this album (especially the version of Lecuona's Malaguenya, which makes my spine tingle every time I listen to it). I had looked for this on CD for a long time, to no avail. It turns out that this music has never been marketed on CD and has been out of print for a long time. Luckily an aficionado digitized a reel to reel tape of this album and made it available for free on the web (click link above). This is a great example of what should happen with all music that is long out of print.

A Rant

Among others, there are three CDs I’ve been wanting to get for a long time: Everyone Loves the Pilot by John Astley, Bombs Away Dream Babies by John Stewart, and The Very Best of Jane Wiedlin. None of these are apparently in print and the prices for these as used CDs on Amazon.com are currently very high. This is a ridiculous situation. The music industry expends exorbitant resources making sure it recoups royalties for its artists and labels, and yet important vintage music is essentially unavailable. No one begrudges reasonable royalty rates (and thankfully reasonable and less greedy heads prevailed, at least temporarily, recently to save internet radio), but copyright holders have a responsibility to make their material available for purchase in current formats at reasonable prices. For most music made since the 80s, it costs virtually nothing to market it online (because it is already digitally mastered), on Itunes Music Store or similar sites. Abdicating this responsibility should result in losing the right to make royalties on the music. Music that has been out of print for five years (hell, I’ll be generous and say ten years) should automatically become public domain.

Science (Fiction)

Even though I have Science as one of the subjects of this blog, I haven't talked about science yet and I probably won't talk about mundane science (i.e. what I do for a living) very much, if at all. I do intend to talk about more speculative aspects of science now and again. A good way to get into these topics is through science fiction, which has been an interest of mine all my life.

In my impressionable late teens I discovered William Gibson, who co-founded the subgenre of cyberpunk. The cool thing about the cyberpunk fiction of Gibson (and Bruce Sterling, among others in that genre) was that the stories generally took place in the near future and the extrapolations from current technology and settings were quite direct and believable. Even though at the beginning Gibson knew little about computers (still used typewriters well into the 80s, according to interviews) and even less about things like genetic engineering, he had a talent for "namedropping" all kinds of real and/or very believable tech into his text, which meshed well with his slangy, fast-paced, and poetic literary style.

I have a lot of things to say about Gibson's stories, but here I'll concentrate on one SF trope, the alien encounter, that I think Gibson got right and virtually all of classic SF gets wrong. From a purely scientific point of view (obviously there are other reasons to write alien stories they way they are written) if humans ever meet intelligent life from elsewhere in the galaxy/universe, there is very little chance it will be anything like us. In fact, it will be so utterly strange that it will be literally psychologically toxic to come in contact with it. William Gibson's short story Hinterlands (the link has the complete text) depicts this, as well as the desperation of the humans who are obsessed with becoming contactees and those who are psychologically crippled after being "rejected" as potential contactees. This is one of the best SF short stories I've ever read. I highly recommend the entire Burning Chrome (1986) collection, which represents the bulk of his published writing before his breakthrough novel Neuromancer came out in 1984.

Here's an exerpt from Hinterlands. The main character is ruminating on the story of the first human to make contact with the aliens:

"Hiro didn't trust me to get up on my own. Just before the Russian orderlies came in, he turned the lights on in my cubicle, by remote control, and let them strobe and stutter for a few seconds before they fell as a steady glare across the pictures of Saint Olga that Charmian had taped up on the bulkhead. Dozens of them, her face repeated in newsprint, in magazine glossy. Our Lady of the Highway.

Lieutenant Colonel Olga Tovyevski, youngest woman of her rank in the Soviet space effort, was en route to Mars, solo, in a modified Alyut 6. The modifications allowed her to carry the prototype of a new airscrubber that was to be tested in the USSR's four-man Martian orbital lab. They could just as easily have handled the Alyut by remote, from Tsiolkovsky, but Olga wanted to log mission time. They made sure she kept busy, though; they stuck her with a series of routine hydrogen-band radio-flare experiments, the tail end of a lowpriority Soviet-Australian scientific exchange. Olga knew that her role in the experiments could have been handled by a standard household timer. But she was a diligent officer; she'd press the buttons at precisely the correct intervals.

With her brown hair drawn back and caught in a net, she must have looked like some idealized Pravda cameo of the Worker in Space, easily the most photogenic cosmonaut of either gender. She checked the Alyut's chronometer again and poised her hand above the buttons that would trigger the first of her flares. Colonel Tovyevski had no way of knowing that she was nearing the point in space that would eventually be known as the Highway.

As she punched the six-button triggering sequence, the Alyut crossed those final kilometers and emitted the flare, a sustained burst of radio energy at 1420 megahertz, broadcast frequency of the hydrogen atom. Tsiolkovsky's radio telescope was tracking, relaying the signal to geosynchronous comsats that bounced it down to stations in the southern Urals and New South Wales. For 3.8 seconds the Alyut's radio~image was obscured by the afterimage of the flare.

When the afterimage faded from Earth's monitor screens, the Alyut was gone.

In the Urals a middle-aged Georgian technician bit through the stem of his favorite meerschaum. In New South Wales a young physicist began to slam the side of his monitor, like an enraged pinball finalist protesting TILT".

Megachild

Before my hiatus this spring, I removed the posts about my band Megachild with the possible idea of reorganizing and reposting them in some form. Well, now is the time, so I though I would post stream links to some basement recordings of ours from this summer. More Megachild stuff to come in the future...

City Detective Montage (071607)
Driving around town in a 1976 Ford LTD chasing down an anonymous tip.

City Detective II (071607)

Concentration (070207)
Not the game of the same name.

Covered Bridge (071607)
Not many of us have been over one, but here's a song about one.

Darqbrite (070207)
Two songs and an entire gothic sci fi romance all packed into a single mp3 file.

Devo Skunkape (071607)
A new wave punk version of a Megachild classic.

Devo Skunkape (072307)

Elegy (071607)
Ahhh, but for whom?

Elegy (072307)

Homecoming (072307)
A veteran returns from an off-planet war, which may or may not have actually happened.

Homecoming II (072307)

Last Paltz (071607)
One of the songs for which the song Minus Paul (below) is meant as an apology.

Last Paltz II (071607)

Late in the Day (072307)
One of our Neil Young inspired tracks.

Loungex (070207)
A hotel lounge near the airport where you wait for a private detective to bring the photos.

Loungex Redux (070207)

Lurch of Night City (070207)
Could be the soundtrack to the opening scene of William Gibson's "Neuromancer".

Mammasan's Ninja (070207)
The martial arts movie for which this is the theme has not yet been made.

Milky Way Blues (070207)
More about the candy bar than our galaxy.

Minus Paul (070207)
About the previous name of our band.

My Woman (071607)
A blues song about not getting any pie.

My Woman (072307)

My Woman II (071607)

My Woman II (072307)

My Woman III (071607)

Pokin Around (072307)
A typical first jam of the evening.

Porno 4 Sushi (071607)
A poignant song about bartering a dead friend's porn DVDs.

Porno 4 Sush (072307)

Sex = Yes (071607)
A punk song with many different flavors.

The Lagoon (070207)
Not the blue one.

The Pig (070207)
An experiment that got out of hand somewhat.

The Pig- Postlude (070207)

Up Into Bombay (071607)
A bittersweet yet bouncy selection about what we yet know not.

Up Into Bombay (072307)

Valkyrie (071607)
Originally this sounded like Lou Reed, but it's been evolving.

What Eats What_ (071607)
A song about food webs

You and Me - The Cranberries

The Cranberries are my favorite band of the post-80s era. I’ve always been a big fan of Sinead O’Connor’s first couple of albums for encapsulating modern Irish life, worldview, and angst into truly original pop music ideas. The Cranberries seem to have taken this inspiration and expanded it through five consistently excellent albums between 1993 and 2001. Dolores O'Riordan’s swooping and soaring vocals certainly evoke Sinead’s (as well as Kate Bush around the edges, who of course is not Irish but had a very influential pop/traditional fusion sound, along with bands like Clannad , The Waterboys, and The Pogues). The songwriting and instrumentation range from sweet traditional sounds to novel modern rock. You and Me is a beautiful song with an unconventional tempo. The video in the link is the studio version synced to live footage from one of their European tours.

Singapore Rice Noodles of the Month

The standard Chinese take-out recipe for Singapore Chou Mei Fun tends to be a rather bland, yellow, powdery recipe with the noodles a little too al dente and a very bland curry. After all, this dish seems to be on the menu of almost every Chinese restaurant I've been to in America, and in a couple of cases where it wasn't, the chef was able to make it for me. Within the range of what I would call "standard run-of-the mill" SCMF, there is a spectrum from not very good to pretty good. Win Hing Restaurant in Port Jefferson Station, NY is on the pretty good end of the spectrum. This tends to be correlated with how good their other dishes are, which in this case are very good (we've tried their Moo Shoo Pork and Kung Pao Tofu). The meat and vegetables are fresh and the curry is not overwhelming. There is a nice delayed hotness as well.

Treat Me Right - Pat Benatar

No one made straight ahead rock in the early 80s better than Pat Benatar. There weren’t that many female artists doing this at the time (the pantheon included Heart and Joan Jett on the rock side and Blondie, Stevie Nicks, Quarterflash, the Go Gos, and later on the Bangles on the poppier side) but I’m not just talking about female artists here. Benatar’s songs and production were among the best stuff that any rockers were putting out. There was a very nice fusion between guitar and keyboards in these songs (also true of the first few Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers albums) that disappeared in the 90s and really has never come back. Things got way too guitar oriented (both toward electric/distorted/lead sounds and jangly/acoustic/rhythm work) and the production values got too bass/drums heavy and overorchestrated. Plus, at least in America, there eventually was a general reaction against 80s synth pop which led to an overall dismissal of keyboards and, in my opinion, an overall degradation of pop and rock sounds that inevitably affected the songwriting (and still does today). Anyway, I digress…

Treat Me Right, from 1981, is one of Benatar’s less well known hits, although it got a decent amount of airplay on rock and pop stations at the time. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the video of this on Youtube. So you’ll have to settle for this bizarre fan scrapbook of anime, Harry Potter, Capt. Jack Sparrow, and random other stuff that was set to the song (sound quality is pretty good, actually).

Favorite recent song

It's from a year or two ago, but one of my favorite songs of recent years is All This Love, by the Swedish band the Similou. It's upbeat (but not too uptempo) dance pop at its best. Not much lyrical content but just great pop songwriting and production. And the best keyboard work I've heard in a long time.