Gorillaz, Insomnia, Electronics, and the God of the Internet

I can't read The Sleepers enough, here, 6am, and I wonder if it's more of a sin against the night to not sleep through the night than it is to sleep through the night. and I wonder if failure is the only thing I write poetry about. And I wonder when that came to be, since I remember a time when I wasn't writing about failure. And failing at it. But night, and headphones, are good for music. Quiet, sad music, for not sleeping.

Mini-mix-tape time. I've been far too long in the lo-fi post-folk, let's get some electronics and high production values.


Gorillaz - Hong Kong
His Name Is Alive - Go to Hell Mountain
Momus - Nervous Heartbeat


"Hong Kong" is the prettiest thing I've heard off the indie wire in ages. Damon Albarn sounds old and tired, there's emptiness and claustrophobia and East Asia, it's long and sparse and sad. The chinese harp playing for the whole seven minutes -- quiet, arrhythmic, harsh attack with no sustain -- almost sounds electronic. The aesthetic, that is. Guess everything digital has an organic basis. Also says something how Gorillaz, which isn't even a band at all you know, nevertheless has a sound. This could be an old Blur song, and yet, and yet, there's still that Demon Days feel, over the guitars mostly.

Which plays nicely into the new His Name Is Alive album. Halfway through, "Go to Hell Mountain" breaks into a solo, a strange, fuzzy, processed-to-hell solo. and yet it works so nicely in the song, testament to how good Warren Defever is in making uncomfortable mixes of organics and inorganics. The song, like a lot of Xmmer, goes right to the edge of plausibility, being almost too cute and happy to be a song about heartbreak. But irony has always been a part of the HNIA mix -- not irony like sarcasm, more like going "Oh my god nothing goes right ever" while smiling, looking straight up, closing your eyes and spinning in circles.

And let's end with the lord of irony himself, with the "big ballad" off last years's Ocky Milk -- an operatic and sweet little love song that might be the first use of the Cher-autotuned-vocals that doesn't sound like Cher. How'd he do it? By fucking with it. Momus is fairly much all electronic by this stage in his career, both in terms of music and himself -- a fast-blogging globe-trotter zipping from cultural center to cultural center faster than you can say "gentrification". If there is a god of the internet, I bet it at least looks like him.

Poet's House Farewell Toast, Lotsa Wine, Jean Valentine

I was a little too sick to be drinking, and yet, free wine @ Poet's House farewell celebration


philip levine




Jean Valentine is so old her face is curly.

Hiro Ballroom, Mr Flash, Passing Out on the Floor, Good Times

Last night was free Lucky Beer 10-11 at Hiro Ballroom, with some DJs or something behind the beer -- whatever, I wasn't paying attention. The stage has been replaced by a small faux-Japanese altar with a single mac laying upon it, bright white apple shining for all to see and worship, some tattooed dude administering to it like a high priest.



Open Bars, of course, are a science. One beer per person at a time for an hour isn't all that much beer, especially when they don't let you in for a half an hour. However, after downing two beers in frenetic desperation I come upon the formula: one beer per person at a time, spread out over four bartenders is like, a beer every three minutes, without drawing too much attention. So I clear out some table space for my stash and muster about seven beers, and figure I'll be good for the night.





I did manage to drink all the beers I hunter-gathered for myself and still managed to leave early. The only one I didn't drink was the one given to me by the other dudes at the table, a set of three older fellows in their 30s, one asian, one a large man who could have been hispanic or greek, the last one white. They were literally smoking cigarettes under the table, flirting with the URB magazine intern taking photos. All the while I'm thinking, shit, I'm totally hanging with the dirtiest dudes in town.

Meanwhile I'm snapping photos of random shit just in case anything cool happens. Well, nothing cool happens.





Mind you, I get pretty friggin' drunk and stumble all the way to the 6 with the help of a few well-placed phone calls, two crunchy tacos, and a spacious inner jacket pocket for the remaining beer (which, I find, made it all the way home and is still on my bookshelf, half-full, in the morning).



What I didn't do is make it to work in the morning, since I woke up on the floor of my room at 9 and realized I couldn't move without assistance. So: single remaining steady source of income finally blown off, and we are once again floating in the breeze

Misanthropy, Porno Mags, and the Battle of the Crazy Foreign Guys

One thing that Serj Tankian (of System Of A Down) got, besides a cool name, millions of fans, and interesting facial hair, is a really weird voice. Which is only thing that gets me to listen to System every so often, as a guilty pleasure. But he's even better when singing for other people, like his guest spot on the Deftones, or this song: a duet with, of all things, Les Rita Mitsouko, one of France's most important bands (so I hear). In a song about, get this, reading skin mags at a drug store.

In moments of pure misanthropy (misogyny?), which are happening more frequently these days, I can listen to "Terminal Beauty" on repeat, waiting for his weird little "la la la la la na na na" towards the end, which is about as maniacally misanthropic you can get without saying anything. Serj should be cast as the bad dude in some crazy action movie, as a sort of anti-300-Gerard-Butler.

In fact, the movie should just be Serj and Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hütz screaming and hitting each other with sticks. I'd sit through two hours of that. Hell, I'd buy popcorn.


Les Rita Mitsouko - Terminal Beauty (yousendit)


vs.

Okkervil River, Webster Hall, 9/28/07

If you had asked me what are my favorite artists making music right now, Okkervil River, Midlake and Shapes And Sizes would top the list. Now I've been able to see all three within the space of a few weeks, and damn does it make me happy. If I never see a show again -- well, I'd be really pissed off so let's hope that doesn't happen, but at least I'm happy now.


For more pictures, check out Impose magazine coverage.

Shapes and Sizes, Cake Shop 9/27/07

This must be the first show I've paid for in at least eight months, what with a summer of freebies and hitching rides with three publications. I wrote such a glowing preview for them in the Onion for this week (last thing I did before my term ended), I hope they're proud. Plus Cake Shop is $7 for four bands. And I only stuck around for two.

Though, I thought the benefit of actually paying for a show would be that I wouldn't have to write about it. Well, here I am, writing about it.







Though my love for Caila knows no bounds, what's best about S&S live is how they all seem to move together. Makes sense: three out of the four of them write the songs (poor, lonely drummer), three out of four sing (though Mr. Bass Player usually just provides harmonies). When the three of them scream together it's a thing of beauty.





The other amazing thing is Caila's dancing. Maybe the more intimate setting brought out more of the little kicks and shimmys than when I saw her last year at Irving (they and The Blow opened for Architecture in Helsinki at CMJ, perhaps the most fun night of music I've ever experienced.) or maybe she's grown as a performer. Or maybe she was drunk. But it was dang cute.



Also played: The Forms. Quite rockin'.



Flickr stream

Twilight Sad, Radiohead, and Farming Nostalgia

The indie/rock playlists have led me back to The Twilight Sad, a Scottish through-and-through band that realizes you don't have to be quiet to be depressed. The enveloping loudness reminds me oddly of the Rosebuds, whose Birds Make Good Neighbors also has that sort of nostalgia that you can feel palpably on the Sad's debut Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters. But the Rosebuds occasioned into electronics, Twilight Sad is all instruments and intensity, occasionally screaming, lead singer James Graham sounding eerily like an out-of-control Craig Ferguson

"Watching that chair painted yellow", a b-side off the first single, has now become one of those songs, along with the Rosebuds' "Boxcar", that I can leave on repeat for a day and a night.


Watching That Chair Painted Yellow (yousendit)
That summer, at home, I had become the invisible boy (eachnotesecure)
Talking with fireworks / here it never snowed (musicforants)







Also: Looking for tracks lead me to Stereogum's compilation OKX: A tribute to OK Computer, a compilation of covers for the 10th anniversary of the greatest album of the '90s. Not only do the Twilight Sad do a utterly claustrophobic version of "climbing up the walls", check out John Vanderslice on "Karma Police", a very spooky "Exit Music" by Vampire Weekend, and the Cold War Kids on "Electioneering". Among others. Hell, they're all brilliant.

The Lamentations of the Women

The quality of the female voice at its most subversive -- what do I mean by subversive? Well, I guess a particular form of irony. A non-funny kind. I think currently the best male voices are doing irony, a funny irony, in a faux-honest way -- Art Brut, Stage Names Will Sheff with his phony autobiographies, the ghost of The Unicorns haunting the latest Strokes-clones (Vampire Weekend, Tokyo Police Club, etc). But with females, my personal favorite trend is the simple, ironically "weak" subversion of a voice like St. Vincent ("What me worry? I never do, I'm always amused, and amusing you..."), or my two current favorite voices:


Caila Thompson-Hannant of Shapes and Sizes



Not only can she squeak like a seagull, when she sweeps from a talky-low to an uncomfortable, almost nasally sustained high it sets my teeth on edge like a deliciously dissonant string harmony. Live, there's a quizzical disparity between her voice and her physical presense -- a slightly frumpy, boyishly charming girl with short hair and an endearing, lopsided grin. Is she really belting out this stuff? And yet there's something ever so sexy about her chuckling "Ho ho ho, my little cauliflower, I got plans for you..." on the just-released b-side Annihilator.

Shapes and Sizes - Anhilitator

Perennial favorite "Alone/Alive", along with the seaguls, has two great choruses: the band repeating "tonight I learn that I'm alone" or "tonight I feel that I'm alive" while Caila lamenting or celebrating in cute little couplets then sweeping up into lilting, wordless vowels, mimicing the guitar's plaintive bends. But it's the lyrics that keep me coming back, no matter the mood.

Tonight I learn that I'm alone.
The cat don't love me, he told me so...
Tonight I learn that I'm alone.
A homeless man won't even come to my home...

Shapes and Sizes - Alone/Alive


Emma Louise "Scout" Niblett



The new Scout Niblett album (This Fool Can Die Now) is due the beginning of October and boasts, among other surprises, four duets with many-named Will Oldham. The first released is "Kiss", which, though the guitar is dangerously similar to her also brilliant "Just What I Needed" cover, is gorgeously sad, and their seemingly incompatible voices play with each other like a dog and a cat in the rain. The track feels much more produced than her usually slap-dash albums, even with a bit of strings at the end (A Scout album, with instruments not actually played live by Scout herself? Preposterous!)

Scout Niblett - The kiss

My favorite track off Kidnapped By Neptune is "Lullaby For Scout In Ten Years", a song dedicated to her future self. I love her transitions, how she goes from soft to screaming -- which is what I'd probably be doing if I got to have a conversation with myself.

Are you still a chauffeur,
driving your body around?
Are you still a hunter for your sound?
Cause Honey, if you're still around...

Scout Niblett - Lullaby For Scout In Ten Years

Boredoms, Dave Longstreth, Momus as King of the Ghosts

77BOADRUMs There was still two blocks worth of packed people trying to get into Brooklyn Bridge Park when they shut the gates at the full capacity of 4,000. Many gave up, some went to the neighboring park, but a large number of enterprising souls walked up Brooklyn bridge and stood on the tower decks, getting a bird’s-eye view of this once-in-a-lifetime installation/event/concert: 77 drum sets arranged in a spiral, all playing at once, for one day only, 07/07/07.


This Week:
Dave Longstreth and his Dirty Projectors will be playing for free at the Whitney on Friday. I, honestly, have never been to the Whitney (American art? what's that?). The show is part of a series curated with the "Summer of Love" exhibit, bringing in musicians "inspired by the radical spirit of the 1960s... a tapestry of new work that is intrinsically connected to the sounds and visions of the psychedelic era." Yeah, right. The Dirty Projectors last LP was a cut-and-paste mashup of Don Henley lyrics and unfindable Longstreth juvenalia (I wrote about the amazing short videos made of it previously). The newest album Rise Above, which won't be out until the Fall, is, I shit you not, Dave's attempt to rewrite the entire 1981 album Damaged by Black Flag -- from memory. The press release says he was helping his parents move out of his childhood home and found the old Damaged cassette case sans cassette and proceeded to recreate it on a four track. It compares this endeavor to Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", the guy who tried to rewrite Cervantes from memory.

1) When the arena of music journalism starts referring to borges... well I don't know what exactly it means but it's sure weird. 2) What the monkey does this have to do with psychedelia and the "spirit of the '60s"? A show like this might make sense at the Whitney, since the pastiche, the utter lack of connection between word and music, is terribly, uh, post-post-modern, and Longstreth seems more likely to get support from the art world than the music world, though the music world is remarkably into subtext these days. Or maybe they'll just put up with anything. He's no Momus though, and it's doubtful he'll disappear into pink clothes, white noise and Japanese girlfriends anytime soon.

It's important to note just how different Rise Above is from Black Flag. It's not merely the gap between original and cover. They really have nothing at all to do with each other, and the knowledge that one came from the other is only like an extra intellectual layer of listening.

Mind you I had no idea he was covering Black Flag when I saw the Dirty Projectors open for Deerhoof a couple months back. I just thought he'd gone crazy. The first time I saw Longstreth it was in a shitty Greenpoint bar that I had trekked to in order to see Ramona Cordova (who was so much fun to hang around with, I'm sad I didn't get to run into him again before he left for the West Coast). Longstreth was alone, unknown (most of us were there to see Ramon), unfamiliar with his acoustic guitar (said he hadn't picked it up in months) and generally unkempt. He did play the first bit of the Getty Address, which floored me, but otherwise he was just another dude, one of us. Which is why the Deerhoof date was so eyebrow-raising. There he was again, decked out like Prince in a shiny suit and sleek lacquered electric, bookended by harmony-singing girls and backed by an actual drummer and not a laptop. Playing these, weird, fast, ear-bending songs that made no lyrical, musical or harmonic sense. Has he simultaneously gone glam and deaf? What's with the rockstar getup?

Now I hear "Six Pack" and "What I See" and it's brilliant. Peppy and tricky songs with weird guitar riffs (certainly no one would play something like that on purpose, oh he's playing it over again!), then you realize the words are "I wanna live! I wish I was dead!" or "I'll get a six pack in me and be all right." My favorite right now is "Police Story", which is, in the Dirty Projectors version anyway, a sad, slow song with gentle guitars floating around flute orchestrations, and is about flipping off the cops, getting beat with a billy club and being thrown in jail.

Longstreth also screams a bit in that song. Now, there are many kinds of screams a male can use. You can scream, like Rollins, out of 'roid rage. Or like Kurt Cobain, because it's the only way your voice can get out of your nasal cavities. You can scream like Will Sheff, because you're a New Englander trapped in Austin, or like Rock Plaza Central, merely because you're Canadian. But when Longstreth screams it's far more primordial. When he screams it's exactly like he were being pinched, or given a purple nurple. Or stabbed with a pencil right in the middle of a phrase. Like, "IiiOOOOWWWWwwaa walk down the street..."

The Album Recommendation of the Indeterminate Time Period

is...

Anathallo
Floating World

Easiest way to describe Illinois-based collective Anathallo is as a less-jokey Sufjan Stevens, just instead of midwestern iconography and the New Testament, Anathallo uses Japanese folklore as its theme. Apparently, Floating World tells a japanese fairy tale complete with poems over its 14 tracks, but it'll take me a few more runs through with or without lyric sheets to extract the actual storyline. In the meantime, the music only gets more interesting with each repeat. All sorts of instruments are tossed in, from bells to flugelhorns, but they're not afraid to step back and let it all melt into claps and footstomps and whispers. The album captures that sense of playful mystery and wonder that make folk tales worth repeating.

Recommended tracks: "By Number"; "Hoodwink", which starts with an Adolph Eichman quote; "Hanasakajijii Four: A Great Wind, More Ash", the most Sufjan of the bunch; "Hanasakajijii Three: The Man Who Made Dead Trees Bloom"

Listen:

YouSendIt - Hanasakajijii 3: The Man Who Made Dead Trees Bloom
Last.fm
Myspace
PureVolume
Amazon

Dear David, You Suck

Many of you who regularly read The Ticker, whether you pick it up between class, online or off the floor of your birdcage, know me as part-time writer of humor articles and near- to semi-factual opinion pieces. What you may not know me as, is a humanitarian. In an effort to give back to my community, I have decided to dedicate this week to answering some of the many impassioned questions people have asked me about life, love and the pursuit of hipness.


Dear David,

College is hard. I just got an internship, and am balancing six classes with twenty hours of work plus clubs and activities - I can't keep up. I don't get enough sleep, I get sick often and my bowels move with alarming disregularity. What can I do?

- PanicInTheRestroom

Dear Panic,

Ah, I've heard this complaint a million times (minus the bowels bit, which I will ignore). Let me introduce you to a concept which I call Dave's Law of Simplicities. In the Middle Ages it was known as Occam's Dave Razor and in the Renaissance as the second law of thermodavedynamics.

The bitterness of love was never far from the minds of Greta and Werther

Simply put, it states that the simplest course of action is always the best. Or, to use more metaphysical terms: do not multiply entities. Because when your entities start to multiply they tend to toss stuff around like in that movie Poltergeist, which was scary.

So if you're faced with school, a job and activities, just ask yourself, "Which of these activities can I slack off most on?" The answer is usually school.

Sometimes, one's mental health requires one to sleep through a class or two. This is fine, as potential employers will understand.

To drive the point home I recommend periodically checking one's self into a hospital for "exhaustion," that way employers know you're serious.

If female, don't be afraid to add flashes of "crack-whore" to your wardrobe; men should down some aromatic alcohol before all interviews. This creates an image of weariness which is impossible not to excuse.

Also, you'll be delegating things all throughout your professional career, so make a point to start early. Remember, there are literally millions of homeless persons in this very city that you can induce into your homeworkforce. But if you do take advantage of these human resources, be sure to hire another one to recheck the first's work just in case. It's not like you're going to run out of bums.

If you have Spanish homework, I recommend finding a Spanish bum. If you have English homework, I get one from England. They're harder to find but totally worth it, and the way they pronounce things is funny.


Dear David,

I am graduating in a few months and still don't know what to do with my life. I have no job lined up and didn't learn anything at all. How will I be able to face the future?

- SuperSenior

Heil SS,

Remember, you are young. College is the time to be irresponsible, and there's no reason not to prolong that for as long as you possibly can.

Instead of trying for dead-ends like "internships" or "grad schools," I recommend a carefully researched plan of mooching and freeloading. Remember, you can always thank your friends and family later in your tell-all autobiography.

Some people can't be held responsible for their actions

The art of freeloading is all about timing. Know how long your buddies will put up with you on their couch. At the same time, don't be bullied. If they want you out immediately, just fall deathly ill and they'll relent for at least a few more weeks.

As for family: you owe them everything, so it just makes sense that they owe you too. Taking advances on familial love now while you're young is a great way to avoid having to deal with them when you're older.


Dear David,

What is the domain of f(x) = (9x -2 )^3/2

- MathManManhattan

Dear Algebra-face,

If we understand, as Freud did, that f (x) represents the father, and the power of 3/2 is the self-image as relates to the prepubescent, this formula is clearly about your latent desire to have sex with your second cousin.

Since your second cousin is a dude, I recommend you balance this equation with a dose of repression. Take the formula within yourself, and with your digestive juices break it down into its residual parts, absorbing what is useful and expelling the rest.

If the formula is not on an easily-chewed piece of paper and instead on a computer, I recommend doing the same with all or part of the motherboard.


Dear David,

I read a bi-weekly column on thinking positively, and now it seems that I'm thinking positive all hours of the day, all days of the week. My friends have noticed and are beginning to question me, asking me if I'm "all there." It's like happiness is taking over my life, little by little. I don't even remember who I am anymore! What should I do?

- PowerOfPositives

Dear PoPo,

Happiness is a debilitating and awkward disease affecting the personal, social and professional lives of many persons. While there is no cure for happiness, most experts recommend you just "suffer through it," since it rarely runs longer than 24 hours. More often its effects last between 5 and 20 minutes.

Chronic happiness, however, is more devastating. If you find your friends and family avoiding you, whispering behind your back, or making wild gestures with their hands behind you while you're talking, you may have a problem with chronic happiness.

The best way to snap yourself out of an episode of happiness is to sit in a dimly lit place and take a quiet account of your life, your career, your relationships, the state of your country and the failure of the United Nations in hedging nuclear proliferation.

There, don't you feel less happy already?

A little "reality check" like this goes a long way to curing you of long-term happiness. Without this grounding you may be lost in your own schizophrenic fantasies forever, or at least until you stub your toe, lose a pet in a sewer grate or get dumped for a performance artist.

Recommended reading: Ecclesiastes, On Melancholia by Keats, the Odyssey Book IX (The Lotus Eaters) or your local newspaper.

Let's Go Get Bitter!

The Day of Depression salute can be learned by young and old alike

It's official: the most depressing day of the year has come and gone. This year, it fell on Monday, Jan. 24, according to British psychologist Dr. Cliff Arnall. He formulated this by calculating the weather, average debt, time passed since the holidays and time since New Year's resolutions were broken, all divided by average motivational levels and the need for change.

While Arnall's warm and fuzzy math looks like it involves calculus and the square root of beer, the conclusion is impossible to deny. Sometime, somewhere, in the early part of the year, life totally sucks.

Which makes me wonder if such an important date as "The Most Depressing Day of the Year" has gone by without enough celebration. I'm sure that many of us were celebrating already, just by being depressed, but such a momentous day deserves a real, honest celebration.

It's about time, too. We've already forgotten the forced smiles of Christmastide, where the only real things to hold on to were those precious, precious receipts. We're well used to writing '07 on our checks to the credit card companies. Not even Groundhog Day could cheer us up. Since there are no groundhogs in Central Park all we could do was watch to see if a subway rat saw its shadow in the lights of an oncoming train. Oops, looks like another six weeks of winter.

Therefore, I hereby declare, by the power of Grayskull, the introduction of International Day of Depression. Occurring next week.

The IDOD will be a whole day dedicated to being miserable. See, most people can only find the time to be miserable for a few hours each day, the rest of the time being spent asleep, playing video games or plotting revenge. But on IDOD, you can pull out all the stops. Stop wearing makeup (it's gonna run). Stop making sense (no one listens to you anyway). Start looking up synonyms for "inadequacy." You'll be too bleary-eyed to check your thesaurus later.

The first of many events will be the Parade of Loneliness. Participants will each find a random street corner of their choosing and from there proceed in no particular direction, muttering to themselves and giving all passer-by the official Day of Depression salute. Along the way, they may stop off at a drugstore for fudgesicles or a pack of smokes.

After that, we can exchange Depression Gifts. We're like secret ninja Santas of sadness, spreading joy in the form of anonymous e-mails, flaming "mystery bags" and accusatory suicide notes.

Then will be the world-famous Depressing Poem Contest. This is where the celebrant, in a drunken or other such stupor begins to extemporize their innermost feelings in free verse. These will be placed directly into their favorite outlet, be it their blog, Facebook, MySpace, Livejournal or open-mic night (extra points if all five), and delivered without a second glance, second thought or spell-check.

Winner is he or she who gets the least amount of replies/applause, with zero being the starting point. Good progress is shown if the poem is immediately removed or cut off by admins; something inexplicably catching fire, such as your hair or a server, is also a promising sign. Last year's winner was murdered in his sleep by a horde of chipmunks, who, after the bloody work was done, each committed seppuku.

All of this is culminated by watching the Depression Ball drop at midnight. There is no actual ball, nor does it drop at midnight, but sometime during the night you must stop, look around, and wonder if you've already missed something, and did everyone else notice it but you, and would it have been all that great anyway.

I hereby declare these events to be scheduled for Wednesday the 14th, the first International Day of Depression. Nothing else is going on that day. If you already have plans for this evening - one, you suck, and two, that's fine, bring them along. Believe me, there's no better contributor to the International Day of Depression than your significant other. Bring your family too.

Remember, you can take the power of positive thinking and let it channel your energies all the way to the inevitable breakdown, incarceration and extensive media coverage due to the horrific nature of your crimes. Or, you can embrace depression now, while you're young enough to fit comfortably into the fetal position.

So my friends, rise up for being down! Make a stand for staying in bed!

I salute you all!