the Smiths

When I got to college in 1985, college radio opened up a new realm of musical sounds to me. Some of the major strands were: R.E.M. and other jangle pop from the Southeast, synth/dance pop from UK/Europe (best exemplified by New Order), various strains of heavier music from the U.S. (Dinosaur Jr., Husker Du, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, the beginnings of grunge), but another unique sound that stood out by itself was the Smiths. This was a blend of three crucial elements: Johnny Marr’s guitar sound (like Peter Buck of R.E.M., he stripped rock down to the basic instrument and built up something completely new), Morrissey’s lilting voice, and Morrissey’s sophisticated, literary lyrics. The band (especially Morrissey) has taken a lot of crap over the years for being too trendy or too melodramatic, but musically no band has ever really sounded like them before or since. There’s a sad sweetness and beauty that they own.

Here’s the first Smiths song that I ever heard, “Cemetry Gates”, which contains all the crucial elements (I couldn’t find the original video, but the sound on this one is good. You can ignore the two dorks who made the film, or not; they are kind of endearing actually.)



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrissey

I Ain't Ever Satisfied - Steve Earle

I just picked this up yesterday at the Best Buy (a compilation album, not the one pictured), using a gift card my brother gave me for Christmas. The whole compilation disc is really good, but this tune in particular is sweet. Earle writes and plays crisp, poignant roots/country rock. Very simple structures. Pure and authentic.

Sorry I couldn't embed the song (disabled). Click here for the link.

Creative Hybridization II

And speaking of hybrids involving Led Zeppelin, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the great Dread Zeppelin. Catch them live if you can; they're really good.

Creative Hybridization

Speaking of Zeppelin, here's a very clever (and quite good) hybridization of Zeppelin and the Beatles that made the rounds on college radio a decade or so ago and has made it to Youtube (although not a video - but the sound is pretty good). Enjoy.

The Rain Song - Led Zeppelin

Houses of the Holy is my favorite Led Zeppelin album because it's the most varied and mature. There are a lot of great ideas there that go far beyond hard rock, and they are brilliantly executed. Since it's rainy today here, I thought I'd post this flash animation that someone did for "The Rain Song".

Dig for Fire - Pixies

In the late 80s and early 90s, the Pixies owned college radio, inspired a generation of bands that would come along a few years later, disappeared for a little while, then came back last year with a huge tour during which the entire rock music world rightfully lauded them as the most influential band of their time. Meanwhile, I was listening to their stuff the entire time (thanks to my friend Dave K in Durham who originally turned me onto them and gave me tapes of all their albums). The bands I have been in have also reflected the Pixies influence, although more in the instrumental sound than in the songwriting. I wish I could write like them. Anyway, here is my favorite Pixies song, "Dig for Fire"

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!

Sister Havana - Urge Overkill

This is the only UO song that I've run across that I really like. But it's an awesome one. I don't really get the cheesy Cuban political theme, but that doesn't matter. It's a perfectly constructed, guitar riff driven rock song with great breaks. Come around to my way of thinking...

Warrior - Public Image Limited

John Lydon's post Sex Pistols outfit Public Image Limited produced some of the best dance tracks of the late 80s/early 90s. One of the best is "Warrior". The sound on the embedded clip isn't the greatest (there are much better mixes of this song; e.g. on PiL's greatest hits compilation) but you can still catch the things I really like about this song: complex machine-like underlying rhythm track with plenty of interesting auxiliary percussion, great long slow synth washes enhancing the narrative content, Lydon's urgent vocals. The drum breaks are great, emphasizing the multilayered texture when the various tracks come back in. This song has the three things that make a song great: rhythm, atmosphere, and good-sounding chord changes. It gets me there.

Singapore Rice Noodles of the Month

From Chong Sar in Rocky Point, NY. Excellent mix. The meat is very fresh and the angelhair pasta is nicely snipped into more mouthful-manageable portions. A little on the salty side, but I'm more sensitive to that these days. This SCMF is highly recommended.

Everything But the Girl

Been busy and a little tired lately. I've been wanting to blog about Everything But the Girl for a while. This band has a lot going for it: great songwriting, Tracey Thorn's strong and engaging vocals, excellent range across several pop subgenres. I really like their house tracks. I find them to be very atmospheric and sophisticated. This is music I want in the soundtrack of my life.

Here's "The Future of the Future":

My new favorite blog

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

It's about architecture, ideas, and the future. Lots of stuff about climate change, recycling, green materials, energy. Very well written. Beautiful art. Check it out...

New band name idea...

Mercy sakes alive.

Looks like we got us a convoy!

on TV

We basically skip network TV and head for deep cable. Here is what Mrs. Slig and I are watching these days:

Project Runway (Bravo) (BTW; a Canadian version of this show is in its first season; you can watch the episodes on Youtube.)
Top Chef (Bravo)
Iron Chef (Food Network)
The Next Iron Chef (Food Network)
Good Eats (Food Network)
Two Dudes Catering (Food Network)
Dinner Impossible (Food Network)
World Poker Tour (Travel Channel)
Weird Foods (Travel Channel)
No Reservations (Travel Channel)
One Piece (Cartoon Network)

Covers

In the shower this morning I managed to hear Placebo's cover of Kate Bush's timeless classic "Running Up that Hill". In my opinion it's pretty odious. It got me thinking about why bands choose the covers they do. Covering a well known song (and in international pop, there might not be a better known song than "Running...") seems to be done either as a tribute or as an implicit admission that you are out of original material and looking to score an easy hit (and there has been a lot of that lately). Covering obscure songs is a different matter.

Here are the bands that cover "Running up That Hill" and for which the song is available in the Itunes music store (I'm sure there are more): Placebo, Faith And The Muse, Re-Touch, Icon & The Black Roses, Danielle French, Jenna Myles, Elastik Band, Kiki & Herb, Visnadi, The Lund Clements Churchill Trio, Thomas Mery, The Baltimores, Kevin Slick, Dave Rummans, Isadar, Kenny Moran.

Most of these sound like fairly loving covers of the tribute variety. Few of these bands are ever going to make it big with Kate Bush's or any other material. The one by the Baltimores is not particularly respectful of the original song. The one by Icon & The Black Roses, which is a hard rock version, sounded the most interesting to me. Your mileage will of course vary.

The deal with this particular song is that the original is so amazingly good there's no way anyone could improve on it:

Songs that Write Themselves

Similar to the sculptor's concept that the sculpture is inside the rock and the artist just needs to remove the unnecessary material, some songs seem to already exist in ideal Platonic song space and simply await emergence by writing them down. This is no slight to the songwriter, since it takes a talented inner ear to find these songs and to know them when they materialize. Here's a song that strikes me as this type. It just flows out, probably like it did when they first put it together. "Caroline" by Concrete Blonde.



Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving.

Upcoming superhero movies

Movie versions are on the way for Sub-mariner, Captain Marvel, Luke Cage, Thor, and Green Lantern. Funny (non-optimistic) preview article.

Superheroes I'd like to see movies of:
Firestorm


Doctor Strange

FSM

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is hitting the mainstream! Long may He writhe!!!

Some Stevie...

...for your Thursday. I grew up singing along to her songs. She and I gravitate to the same stock chord progressions.

Bow down...

...before God Slayer!

Friday drum blogging...

... with the best pop drummer of all time, Stewart Copeland.

Bands I get mixed up...

Not because their music is similar (actually I don't know much about any of these bands but have heard them occasionally) but because of their names (or something...).

Mudhoney and Chickasaw Mud Puppies
Cake and the Wedding Present
Big Head Todd and the Monsters and Big Drill Car
Radiohead and Stereolab
Damn Yankees and Skid Row
the Verve and the Verve Pipe

When R.E.M. made great music

Lots of bands are really good in their first few releases and then get bad (sometimes really bad) after that. R.E.M. is the perfect example. Their first five studio albums, Murmur (1983), Reckoning (1984), Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), Lifes Rich Pageant (1986), Document (1987), in my opinions, are all masterpieces, although of slightly declining quality chronologically. And their pre-Murmur EP Chronic Town (released in 1990) shines above them all, in terms of a new exciting sound. This sound was dominated by Peter Buck's jangly electric guitar and Michael Stipe's oblique, often murmuring and incomprehensible lyrics. And it's steeped in the band's Athens, Georgia surroundings and folk influences. This IS the R.E.M. sound, and it's why they became titans of college/alternative rock. The international stardom that came after that somehow (the band themselves? production? I don't know the cause) ruined their sound. The guitar tracks became a mishmash of strummy acoustic pap and the songs became pretentious, unlistenable anthems.

Here's my favorite R.E.M. song, "Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)" from Chronic Town. This is from a TV dance show, but they are actually playing live.



[edited by Slig 11/5/07]

Singapore Rice Noodles of the Month

From Tangerine in Port Jefferson Station, NY. Very tasty with a good veggie mix and just the right amount of oil. Spicyness is good; a little up front and a little delayed. A touch on the salty side but overall a quite nice Singapore Chow Mei Fun.

Book of Love

New York's (originaly from Philly) Book of Love made the best synth pop in America in the 80s and possibly ever. They were also a very fun show to see live (saw them in early '89 in a dining hall at the University of Rochester). The combination of crisp, bold rhythm tracks and the low-pitched vocals of Susan Ottaviano made for a rich sound that suited the dance floor scene very well (contrasting with the likes of New Order, Depeche Mode, and the Smiths). Their studio production was perfect. And the band had a lot of fun with the music.

Here's their biggest hit "Pretty Boys and Pretty Girls", which actually got some pop radio airplay:



For Halloween, I wanted to link to the song "Witchcraft", but I couldn't find it on Youtube. So here's a cover by a duo called Ejector. I recommend picking up Book of Love's original (much better but just as fun)...

Opera

This morning, NPR had a story about an opera commissioned to celebrate five paintings by Edward Hopper. Great idea; certainly his art is well deserving. The problem is the genre. Opera, especially contemporary American opera, in my opinion, is one of the least beautiful, in fact I would even use the term ugly, uses of the human voice imaginable. Listen to the clips from the radio piece and tell me you don't agree. I like classical music a lot. I especially like to hear contemporary classical music becuase it's interesting and often explores new musical territory. But putting that dissonant caterwauling over the top of it makes it unlistenable. Yes, this is art. And art doesn't have to be about beauty. But for me, music has to be at least somewhat about beauty, or I simply don't have time for it.

Jane Wiedlin

Have I mentioned yet that Jane Wiedlin rocks?

She just does.

Bands I have been in...

(that have played at least one gig; in chronological order)

Modern Vision
RSVP
Any Colour
the Skanks
Sleestack Embassy
Rubber Curtain
Seed Pod 17
U-Pump
Minus Paul
Megachild

Rush

As the last post of my series on good music by cliche-ishly popular bands, I have to briefly mention Rush. Coming of age male in the 80s in the Northeast, listening to AOR radio, Rush was unavoidable. Anyone in the other gender (generally, but there have been exceptions) and with a different background, has a much less likely chance of "getting" Rush. Rush is a lot of musical punch from three guys who are virtuosos. It's rock and roll glory, of by and for introverted geeks. You have to spend a lot of time in your bedroom emulating this stuff to play like this (and armies of introverted guys have done this, even myself on keyboards occasionally). You have to have grown up in this lonely existence (or among fellow lonely travellers) to understand what Rush is about and to appreciate their music. This is the soundtrack to a certain type of existence. Rush (and their fans) take a lot of undeservered crap from people who have never been there (those people have other brands of patheticness in their backgrounds and have migrated to other music, which, in turn, Rush fans don't understand).

Here is a live version of my favorite Rush song, "Analog Kid". It gives a good look at how three guys can produce such a big sound onstage:

Round and Round - Ratt

SD/LA’s Ratt was a transitional 80s metal band, self identified as “glam” metal. They were transitional musically between the early 80s harder metal of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden (actually in retrospect, a lot of this material doesn’t sound so hard today) and the like (by whom they were surely heavily influenced) and the full-on hair metal glammers of the late 80s and 90s. I mention them here because of a single song, their best known, “Round and Round” (1984) which stands out. The rest of their material that I’ve heard is pedestrian stuff. Hundreds of bands were playing this sound in garages and small bars all over the place. But “Round and Round” provides evidence that somebody in that band (if they indeed wrote the song; nothing on their Wikipedia pages indicates who wrote it) could write songs. There are unconventional chord changes in both the intro/chorus (an A flat augmented E flat major to a G flat augmented D flat major to a B major) and verse (E flat major to G flat major), providing for possibly the most unique hooks in any metal song that I’ve heard.

The video stars Milton Bearle and is pretty funny.

Ace of Base

Might as well make this a Scandinavian pop trifecta. I haven't followed them after their first U.S. album The Sign (1993) (they have since become international pop superstars), but Sweden's Ace of Base impressed me a lot, not with the singles off this album, which were catchy but did not stand up to massive radio overplay, but with several of the non-singles (or non-US singles). In particular, I recommend "Young and Proud", "Dancer In a Daydream", "Wheel of Fortune", "Happy Nation", and "Voulez-Vous Danser". Hooky, atmospheric dance music with great vocals and textures.

Here's "Happy Nation"

a-ha

While we’re on the subject of Scandinavian pop, I have to mention Norway’s a-ha, who although taken somewhat lightly as pretty boys at the time, cultivated a unique sound through some really nice songwriting in the late 80s. They broke through in 1985 with one of the most innovative videos ever; Take On Me remains probably the only well known a-ha song, and it’s a good one. Each of their first three albums contains gems, that at least in the states, were pretty much undiscovered by anyone close to the mainstream. Off 1985’s Hunting High and Low there were “The Blue Sky” and “Dream Myself Alive”. Off the 1986 album Scoundrel Days there were “We’re Looking for the Whales” and “The Weight of the Wind” and off 1988’s Stay on these Roads there were “The Blood that Moves the Body”, “Hurry Home”, and “The Living Daylights”, which was the theme of the 1987 James Bond movie of the same title (this was the first Timothy Dalton Bond movie and is my second favorite of the series - Maryam d'Abo rocked my world in this movie; but still, my favorite Bond movie by far is For Your Eyes Only)

While the backing instrumentals and production of A-ha were prone to the synthetic affectation and overproduction of the times, the alternately high and deep vocals of Morten Harket, the highly varied songwriting, and the ever so slightly Nordic atmospherics that are injected around the edges make the sound worth revisiting.

Here’s a movie version of the video for "The Living Daylights". Easily my favorite theme of the Bond movies.

ABBA

Most people know ABBA from Dancing Queen and maybe Take a Chance on Me and like to dance to these tunes at parties but otherwise kind of laugh the band off as lightweight pop by 1970s Euros, unaware of the full oeuvre. Yes, they made a lot of clunker songs (the ones that made their two disc ABBA Gold greatest hits set were notably: Thank You For the Music, When All is Said and Done, and The Way Old Friends Do). Their massive worldwide popularity allowed them to be easily dismissed as not musically noteworthy, but again bland homogeneity or pure unsophistication of the fandom shouldn’t by itself condemn the music.

Admittedly, I discovered ABBA like almost everyone else in the U.S. did: Dancing Queen was played hourly on every AM Top 40 station in the country (or at least the ones in Rochester) through the winter of 1976. In the early 80s I got the TV-advertised 8-Track The Magic of ABBA, which contained their quintessential hits repertoire, and I listened to it incessantly.

The good songs are really well written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, who of course became world renowned composers of musicals. But the most important aspect of ABBA’s sound are the rich vocal harmonies by Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog. These are often multilayered in the studio tracks, with complex, often slightly discordant chord configurations evocative of Eastern Europe. The production and arrangement of most of their songs are superior for their period. They later got caught into the vortex of disco and later pop trends (but note that Dancing Queen, which became identified as a disco standard, came out about two years before the period in which disco dominated pop. Pretty visionary considering that disco evolved from American soul and funk.)

Three songs that emphasize the best of the ABBA sound are

S.O.S. (1975)
[embedding was not available for this video]

The Name of the Game (1977)



and Chiquitita (1979)

Def Leppard

Sheffield UK’s Def Leppard managed to get its version of early metal-pop into heavy rotation on both rock and Top 40 radio well before hair metal came to the fore and they did it (at least for a while, from 1981’s High ‘n’ Dry, through virtually the entire 1983 album Pyromania, clearly their best, to a few good tracks from 1987’s Hysteria) with uncomplicated hard rock that was directly in the lineage that Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath forged in the previous decade. Def Leppard also appears to have drawn from the orchestrality of Queen, evident most in their backing vocal harmonies. Queen had a long reign in the late 70s and early 80s as one of the most popular rock bands worldwide and probably influenced just about every rock artist of the 80s one way or another.

Photograph was one of the first 45s I ever bought and is a pop/hard rock masterpiece. Def Leppard’s sound perfectly evokes the always gothically romantic sound of metal but in a shorter, poppier format than either goth or metal bands. And it’s clear in their videos that the band itself never took things too seriously, which looking back is refreshing considering both the utter lack of songwriting talent that the later hair metal bands demonstrated and the clichéd heaviness and faked sinistrality that most metal likes to couch itself in.

Coming Under Fire (embedded above – sound only) is a quintessentially structured pop-metal track. Solid hooks, tight (but not overproduced) coordination between bass and drums driving the rhythm, and the urgent atmosphere of metal.

Yes, this band had (and likely still has) probably the most unsophisticated fan base imaginable. But that’s for the hipsters to hate. Enjoy the songs.

Jesse's Girl - Rick Springfield

I’ve decided to do a series of posts about good songs residing among hugely popular, so popular as to be considered cheesily clichéd, music. Bottom line: sorry hipsters and alternative music purists, radio overplay and massive popularity are not universal markers of bad music (just most of the time).

Aspiring songwriters could learn a lot from Rick Springfield (in fact I wish most “singer-songwriters” I’ve ever heard in my life actually had). Springfield created beautifully crafted (and in most cases perfectly produced) pop songs, period. Whereas most songwriters are lucky to write a hook or two in their entire career, most of Springfield’s hits have three or more hooks per song. Do yourself a favor and pick up Rick’s Greatest Hits and listen to any of the following songs: Don’t Talk to Strangers, What Kind of Fool Am I, Human Touch, Love Somebody, Bop ‘Til You Drop.

Which brings us to Rick’s greatest hit, Jesse’s Girl (video below), which in 1981 dominated the US charts for a long time. Why most people liked it at the time, I don’t know. Why I liked it then and now, is that it is simply one of the best pop songs ever made in the rock idiom. Songs this good are immune to overplay in my brain. I could listen to them forever.

The genius in this song begins immediately: the basic guitar riff is simple but perfect, immediately guiding us into the initial verse hook. The verse has a B part that introduces a new vocal hook, with nice high harmonies. (Only Springfield could work the lyric “And she’s lovin’ him with that body, I just know it.” into a single line so seamlessly.) Then we have the central hook of the chorus. After the second chorus a completely new hook enters that you would have to call a bridge. Then we return to the guitar riff underneath the chorus, which works as a kind of new intro, ushering in the most cleanly-entering guitar solo you’ll ever hear (according to the video, played by Springfield himself. The guy is one of the most fascinating figures of his era: Australian pop star, international TV star, rock star, and he writes his own songs and plays both rhythm and lead guitar on them. I wanted to be him when I was 14. I still want to be him.) This penchant to introduce an entirely new musical hook in the middle or toward the end of a song is reflected in some of his other hits and is seen in several songs by Journey, another artist on whom undeserving scorn is heaped by people who simply know nothing about good music.

This is great music folks. Empirical fact. Listen and learn.

Singapore Rice Noodles of the Month

From the China Tea House in Centereach, NY. Not a lot of curry here, but that's OK. A nice delayed spicyness and a very balanced mixed of meat (pretty fresh) and veggies.

I'm back

Don't really want to talk about the health issues here. But things are going well.
For now, here's a new band name/logo concept.

Another hiatus

I'm going to have to take another hiatus for a while. I'll be back when I'm feeling better.

Prefab Sprout

For some Wednesday morning sweetness, try the whimisical, jazz-steeped pop of Prefab Sprout. This is some of the best songwriting in 80s/90s pop, with many embedded dynamic changes (although not in the posted song) and unconventional tempos and rhythms. The vocal of Paddy McAloon and high, airy harmonies of Wendy Smith are also fantastic. Looking for Atlantis from 1990 is on the pure pop end of their spectrum. Enjoy.

In My House - Mary Jane Girls

While we're in this genre (sort of; I guess the 80s derivation of 70s soul/R&B), here's a song that got a large amount of airplay on Top-40 stations but because of this I thought never really got taken seriously. The Mary Jane Girls were a Rick James joint through and through (right down to their name, apparently). In My House (1983) is just a really well-crafted pop song, from its strong synth-breaks to the tight vocal harmonies, demonstrating that at the time, the Rick James orbit was a pretty good place to be.

Turn of the decade

And by this I mean the transition from the 70s to the 80s. This was possibly the most varied and interesting time in the history of pop music. I began this period as a young lad who had been listening mostly to top-40 on AM radio, which means everything from motown to country to disco to rock. Here's a song that, like most on AM, got massively overplayed, but which in this case I never got sick of: Deja Vu by Dionne Warwick (co-written by Isaac Hayes). I really like the mellowness and laid back tempo and the atmosphere evoked by the instrumentation. And it looks like Paul Klee was resurrected to make the video.

Rainbow blogging

Photo taken by Mrs. Slig as we were driving north on I-87 south of Albany the day before Christmas last year.

Let's Dance - David Bowie

I fully stipulate that David Bowie is one of the most important and influential musicians of the rock era. However, a true Bowie aficionado would tell you that I am not worthy of being called a Bowie fan because my favorite Bowie album, in fact the only segment of his oeuvre that I listen to with any kind of regularity, is Let’s Dance (1983). My impression is that many Bowie fans view this as somewhat of an 80s pop sellout. (Admittedly, production by Nile Rodgers, who helped invent the Funk/R&B sound that would come to be called disco in the late 70s with his band, Chic, likely adds to this impression. But this is a feature, not a bug, in my view.) I view it as a genius pop album that never gets old even after massive radio overplay of its major hits (the title track, Modern Love, and China Girl – a remake of a Bowie/Iggy Pop tune). Bowie’s voice is all atmosphere, and that’s just the beginning here. The oblique lyrical references, excellent hooks, guitar work (including solos on several tracks by Stevie Ray Vaughan), mark this as possibly the best pop album of its era. Unfortunately, my favorite song from this album, Criminal World, is not on YouTube. So here’s an excellent live version of Cat People (used in the 1982 movie of the same title).

Twinkie Cortex

So many band names, so little time...

An Entrance To Hell

I found an entrance to Hell.



The Portal of Cehl Flegyyyyyyya is currently only large enough to admit small humanoids or demi-humans but has been much larger in the past. It was last used by the minor demon Sha La Na Boixx as she fled back to the Abyss after defeat at the Battle of 1000 Azure Oysters in 320 A.D. A small cult worshipful of Fincevung III, the victorious leader of the Funblech Colony hoplites (a civilization that was wiped out by a large hurricane several years after the battle), has persisted since that time and occasionally leaves colorful strings of beads as tribute, like those seen in the picture. On the night of every (approximately) 1000th full moon since the battle, a thin stream of yellow smoke can be seen emanating from the portal, along with a barely audible, high pitched scream, believed to be the battle cries of several Funblech hoplites who chased Sha La Na Boixx throught the portal and hence achieved immortality.

Other Entrances to Hell can be found here.

[h/t to memepool.com, one of the great early blogs of eclectic sites on the internet]

Leiothrix

Some more art for an unused band name.

Hurricanes

Every late summer/early fall I turn into a bit of a weather geek, ever since we moved to Long Island several years ago. There can and have been direct hits from hurricanes here. A great site to keep up on the latest hurricane events is at the National Weather Service/ National Hurricane Center. There are up to the hour/minute predictions and images there, which are fascinating to delve into. Perhaps the ultimate site for weather nerds is the Weather Underground, which hosts a hurricane blog run by meteorologist Jeff Masters. This is the best way to get the latest info on storms. The comments section of the blog is very entertaining, but sometimes the amateur comments (it does not appear to be thoroughly moderated) are a little tedious.

Dr. Masters noted in yesterday’s blog post that one of the Hurricane Hunter aircraft had quite a nasty surprise with turbulence flying into Hurricane Felix that day. These are flights run by NOAA that provide vital close-up data (impossible to get from satellites and ground radar) on storms that are necessary for accurate forecasts. He then linked to a narrative of the most harrowing (and last, apparently) flight he was on in a Hurricane Hunter, into Hugo in 1989. This is an absolutely gripping read and I highly recommend it. I freaking hate even minor turbulence on commercial flights. I cannot imagine what the Hurricane Hunters go through routinely.

In my opinion you have to be stone crazy to do that. But I’m really glad those guys do it, because the data they provide saves lives and enables vital ongoing research into the dynamics of hurricanes.

Strange, disturbing, haunting...

yet I can't help watching it when it comes on. This Heineken ad with the neo-cabaret robot women dancers. Their molt-like form of reproduction is particularly disturbing.

Dream-Pop Concepts

If I ever start a creative consulting/graphic design business, this will be its name and logo (I'll probably get someone to replace this line-drawing faerie with something more artistic). So far Dream-Pop Concepts has only produced one Christmas card.

Singapore Rice Noodles of the Month

Jen's Chinese Restaurant in Port Jefferson Station, NY. Lots of curry but still not spicy enough for me (wo xiang chu hen la shi wu). A very serviceable SCMF, very typical of takeout places in these parts.

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.