Random Old Records Podcast #4

Episode 4 of the Random Old Records Podcast is hot off the, eh, encoder. This is the longest one to date, at a whopping 61 minutes, and is dedicated to Shane West, for pulling off the rare feat of starring as Darby Crash in a major motion picture and not coming off like a clueless putz. For maximum effect, watch What We Do Is Secret before listening, and try not to be too pissed off at the Bronx as Black Flag. Really? The Bronx? That's the best Black Flag facsimile the director could come up with? The singer is too fat to be Henry Rollins, too bald to be Keith Morris or Dez, and too white to be Chavo. For shame, Rodger Grossman.

Download the podcast, and hear classic Germs tracks, songs from Black Flag and X that are featured in the movie, and other Cali punk gems from the Weirdos, Avengers, and Fear. There's also a set of 2008's best power-pop and punk tracks from the Wax Museums, Gentleman Jesse, and others, along with more from Girls In The Garage, and some obscure funk from Black Nasty and Union. The track list is inside the zip if you get lost along the way.

Grab it here!

Random Old Records Podcast #4 - http://www.mediafire.com/?jonzln5zmwz

Revolutionary Suicide

After two days off work thanks to the blizzard of '09, I sure am glad to be back, getting paid to dick around on the internet. One thing that's gotten on my nerves already: If you call a school, and a HUMAN BEING answers the phone, then wouldn't it stand to reason that it is open? Also, how am I supposed to know how the roads are? Oh yeah I forgot, I flew to work in a traffic copter this morning.  I don't know how the full-time switchboard operator does that day in and day out. No wonder they call off all the time.

So, in a manner befitting an IT professional, I'm sitting here reading a transcript of the mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana. Last night, I watched Guyana: Crime Of The Century, a super-cheap cash-in movie that came out mere months after the tragedy. Directed by Mexican crap auteur Rene Cardona Jr. (who also made the first exploiter based on the Andes plane crash cannibals, Survive!) and starring trash TV vet Stuart Whitman as Jim "Johnson," its actually closer to the real-life chain of events than you'd imagine. Not sure if the real reporters that accompanied the Congressman to Guyana were really a bunch of mustachioed Mexicans with pancake makeup and dubbed voices, though. 

The sets in particular are pretty spot-on from the pictures I've seen, including the "those who do not remember the past" sign above the pulpit. It was filmed on-location in Guyana and Southern Mexico, so the sun-bleached mud, palm trees, and sweaty air makes you really feel like you're trapped in the jungle with a madman. The cruddy film stock and awful supporting cast actually add to the atmosphere, with the action scenes in particular looking like surpressed snuff films. Whitman hams it up as "Johnson," popping pills and spewing paranoid, messianic screeds that get more unhinged as the movie goes on. Of course, the most awesome thing is the re-enactment of the mass suicide at the end, where Whitman's dialogue seems to be taken directly from the audiotape found at the site, and screaming, crying kids are force-fed the poison kool-aid. A bit overlong, and nowhere near as good as the History Channel doc on the subject, but this is Grade A trash that's worth checking out. Here's the trailer, which for some reason isn't on the DVD.

Porcelain Death Powder

So, today I woke up around 11:30 AM, thanks to a snow-induced day off work. The last time it snowed around these parts, someone cracked their head on the sidewalk outside of the college, so I figure they were trying to err on the side of caution. It was the last day of the term (FINALS!) so I'm sure it will play hell on the rest of the week, but for now I'm content with my turkey nachos, library books, and 6 hour playlist, along with watching morons "brave" (ha!) the elements to go earn money to spend on their ugly spouses and overstimulated children. I just spent 20 minutes peering out the venetian blind, while some moron tried to get himself unstuck after running off the ice-coated road, jumping the curb, and ending up in the neighbor's front lawn.

No, the urge to help this poor sap never crossed my mind. I was able to take the multitude of school and business closings, various city/county snow emergencies, and predictions for further damage all afternoon at face value. I'm an excellent poor-weather driver, so the best course of action is to STAY HOME! Now, that might seem a little confusing, but with local news drive-cams showing traffic jams on the highways, a parade of slip-sliding idiots cascading down the avenue outside, not to mention the brave warrior I mentioned above that nearly ended up in my living room, I don't feel the need to get out, as the chance of me getting maimed or killed by one of those OTHER panicky, caffeine-addled yokels is a real, frightening possibility. So, forgive me for not giving that marooned traveller assistance. People are never accountable for their actions anymore, as we've seen idiots get rich by suing other people for their own negligence. This guy (and I'm assuming it was a guy by the model of car driven) was the victim of his own stupidity, so rushing outside to help would, in essence, be rewarding him for his actions. Of course, he would totally ignore the lesson he should have learned, and undoubtedly, run off the road again a few blocks away. Fuck that noise. 

Speaking of people who almost ended up in my living room, there was some unexpected pounding on my door a few hours ago. I slithered to the eyehole, and saw a squat, hairy, beanie-clad dirtbag of indeterminate origin on the doorstep. He knocked a few more times and went away, then came back like 15 minutes later and resumed his pounding, even having the gauche nerve to knock on the living room windows. What the fuck is that shit, honestly? It was obviously no one I knew, and I was home alone, so there's no way in hell I would open that door, so I hid upstairs in my room both times till the knocking subsided and the little troll-like beast went away. The bar two doors down was broken into recently, and the convenience store down the street gets robbed 3-4 times a year, usually at gunpoint. Also, there's the neighborhood, 40-something transient methhead that occasionally pounds on the door at odd hours, screaming in withdrawal pains. Again, forgive me for not treating everyone that darkens my door like the Three Wise Men. Undoubtedly, it was just another fool driver trying to take advantage. Next time, he'd do better to get a fucking Triple A membership. 

OK, nevermind. I just stepped outside, and it turned out the crazy psycho pounding on the door was actually the mailman, who dropped an unexpected birthday present from a far-away friend.

Oops.

My playlist for today's odd mix of relaxation and cynical deconstructions of humanity:

--Sandy Salisbury - Sandy
"Lost" solo album by the go-to vocalist in sunshine-pop master Curt Boettcher's studio army. A great mix of sunny optimism, unrepentant cheese ("Once I Knew A Little Dog"?), and massive hooks.

--The Now Time Delegation - Watch For Today

Ballsy blues-punk featuring the whisky-drunk-Aretha Franklin wail of Bellrays singer Lisa Kekaula and guitars from legendary Big Boys guitarist Tim Kerr. I wonder why this one isn't as well known as it should be. "Layin' On The Ground" is one of my all-time favorite mix CD standbys.

--Au - Verbs
I can't describe this, except with words like "great" and "hypnotic." Some sounds like gypsy folk music, and my room mate once came in the room with this blaring and called it "circus music." Sounds about right.

--Voxtrot - Raised By Wolves EP

This band got huge hype quick after a few brilliant EPs like this one, so of course they fell off the radar almost instantly after a poorly-produced full-length and a bunch of tepidly received live shows. Really? This five song EP is better than most bands' entire recorded output. A lazy layman might call them Joe Pernice fronting the Strokes, but this is much better than that description sounds. I hope their second album kills the world.

--Air - Moon Safari

A classic I ignored for way too long.

--Califone - Roomsound
I never really liked this band after multiple failed attempts, but I have to say its perfect laying around music.

Random Old Records Blog is go!

I've finally decided to take the plunge and transfer my internet ramblings over to Blogger, mostly because Myspace is a sinking ship who likes to block the links to my podcast. I'll be cross-posting some of my older blogs in a "greatest hits" format, but mostly this will eventually be a companion blog for the Random Old Records print zine I've been slaving over for the past couple months, which I hope will be done in the spring. It will be 40 pages of epic length reviews of great albums relegated to the cultural trashcan. Excerpts and bonus reviews will be posted here. 

Random Old Records Podcast #4 will be posted here in a week or so, with a set of classic LA punk rock inspired by Shane West's not-so-completely terrible turn as Darby Crash in What We Do Is Secret, some of the best punk and power-pop of 2008, obscure soul and funk, and more of the same whacked-out trash movie trailers, soft psych, subhuman '60s garage rock, and freakbeat you've come to tolerate over the first three episodes. Speaking of that, here are the official links for those:

Random Old Records Podcast #1: http://www.mediafire.com/?owzonwyzzhk

--featuring tragic country murder ballads, brain-melting soft psych from the Spike Drivers and Michael Blodgett, and glam by Warwick and the expertly-named Running Jumping Standing Still Band.

Random Old Records Podcast #2: http://www.mediafire.com/?gmnegmihzql

--Punk rock from the Rezillos, Undertones, and Gun Club, proto-metal from Budgie and Dust, more from the Soft Sounds For Gentle People and Rubble compilations, Bohemian Vendetta, The Seeds, and more!

Random Old Records Podcast #3: http://www.mediafire.com/?lmaxnmnmdmb

--Classic Dischord Records jams from Rites Of Spring, Void, and Fugazi, inspired by my reading of the DC punk book Dance Of Days, a set of classic glam by Sweet, Mud, Sparks, and others, tracks from the Girls In The Garage comps, and lots more rare, random rock n' roll.

Each one runs about an hour and has the track listing in a txt file inside the zip. Do check them out, as the links will be dead before too long! In the meantime, here's some more media that's been keeping me busy as of late.

--The Fiery Furnaces - Widow City

This album makes me happy because it makes so sense whatsoever, and sounds like no other band (or demented brother/sister duo, in this case) I've ever heard. Brother Matthew Friedberger is apparently a multi-instrumental whiz-kid, while sister Elizabeth provides pretentious Patti Smith-styled howls, talk-singing, and occasionally, jaw-dropping classic vocal melodies stolen directly from your favorite Beatles and ELO tracks. It creates a world that constantly puts you in a delerious, disorented state. I hate to bring up the brother-sister dynamic again, but through a bloated, overlong 16 track album, it often sounds like a pair of underattended siblings fighting for attention. As a listener, I switch between admiring Elizabeth's vocal gymnastics and confounding non-sequiturs (seriously, what the fuck is she talking about? corrupt statehouse juries, drunken uncles, and completely made up worlds and lives?) and Matthew's ADD shifts between gorgeous piano balladry, tight funk beats, crazed one man band psych jamming, and early '80s keyboard pop. I picture an indifferent mom watching the kids try to one-up each other by doing crazy shit off the high dive at the community center pool. There's at least 10 albums by 5 different bands' worth of ideas here, and who can blame them for stuffing this album with all of them at once? No other band I've heard recently can match this feeling, and this album is like seeing a how-to documentary about dragging and dropping random bits of GarageBand or ProTools sine-waves into random creations, or it could be just a pair of insufferable jerks creating works of art out of crap fished from Frank Zappa's dumpster. One idea sounds completely brilliant, and the other sounds like a pair of semi-retarded weirdos being paraded around by knowing overlords. Like I said, it sounds like nothing else I've ever heard, born from insanely prodigious creativity, leavened with a mysterious blood bond I can't begin to understand.

--In Heaven, Everything Is Fine by Josh Frank and Charlie Buckholtz

Author Josh Frank was assigned a quickie cash-in book about the Pixies, and ended up with a life's mission: examining the life of an obscure singer/songwriter that wrote the pivotal song in David Lynch's Eraserhead, which the Pixies happened to discover and cover at all their shows. Peter Ivers cut a Forrest Gump-ian swath through the pop culture landscape of the 70s, as the Harvard-educated pal of Doug Kenney (founder of the National Lampoon and writer of Animal House and Caddyshack), blues harmonica ace who studied with Muddy Waters and Little Walter, failed esoteric art-rock star who opened a 70s Fleetwood Mac show wearing only a diaper, early performance art pioneer, and pronounced influence on the Dead Kennedys' Jello Biafra. After floating just out of reach from his friends who all ended up becoming millionaires, he introduced Lampoon stars like John Belushi and Harold Ramis to the punk scene, hosted the massively influential punk rock doc show New Wave Theatre, scored Eraserhead, co-wrote hit songs for the Pointer Sisters, and was found bludgeoned to death in his downtown LA ghetto loft the day after his ambitious sci-fi/punk musical was greenlighted by a major studio. The book sets up with intensely detailed narrative chapters, followed by Please Kill Me-style oral history and quotes by ignorant LA detectives, cold case investigators, and private detectives hired by Ivers' intensly loyal circle of celebrity friends and lovers. Thankfully, this isn't some kind of book-length CSI episode, and the love of Peter Ivers from the cast of characters really drive the story, which completely sucked me into the life of someone I've never heard of before. Most fingers point to the sociopathic creator of New Wave Theater as the murderer: an intensely creative, posessive hippie freak named David Jove. He had an equally improbable backstory, but it seems like small change compared to the Zen-master philosophy and lifestyle of Ivers. What makes this book great is the lack of sensationalism, making his lurid murder an afterthought, and instead presenting the improbably perfect life of an artist that only his friends really cared about. I had to download everything he ever recorded the second after I finished the book, obviously.

--Holly Golightly - The Good Things

Sometimes I wonder if I've chosen the right career path, as if my Level 1 Help Desk expertise is wasted, when I could be writing capsule album reviews for websites or quickie paperback album guides. This capsule: a studied attempt to copy '60s American girl-group garage, kept from perfection by the singer's sense of English manners and melancholy, although the stark simplicity and slyly hidden intelligence puts this solo debut high above the loads of mouth-breathing stateside (coincidentally all-male) copyists that grabbed all the attention back in 1998. I'm happy with that as a sentence, but I know that 1998 was really a cultural wasteland, perhaps the most awkward moment in American culture, where the boy bands finally, completely took over. While Holly Golightly was making simple, honest garage rock, America's Alternative Nation followed the path of Nirvana by way of Green Day by way of MTV ska-punk by way of No Doubt until their supposed musical revolution died a humiliating death that I personally blame on Rancid taking a million dollars of Epitaph money to Jamaica to make their version of Sandanista. They're more at fault than Disney or Lou Pearlman, I reckon. Holly Golightly and her male alter ego "Wild" Billy Childish, don't make statement records like Life Won't Wait, and I've quickly become obsessed with both of their complete discographies. This album was the gateway drug though, and it sounds pretty damn good while resetting peoples passwords on the cheap.