The Sound, The Speed, The Fucking Glory

Sometimes it’s a very tactile thing we associate. Marcel Proust had his madeleine cookies and tea moment that spurred on a copious rush of long forgotten childhood memories (many volumes, to the delight of modern literature the world over).

There are chilled times, especially around Christmas that the most hardened of us stop and do half turns, around and around a shopping center, sounds of noels shrinking us back to a much older time when we can feel the peculiar warmth from wearing rubber boats and three socks while trudging, soaking wet through the snow.

When I listen to Mission Of Burma, it carries me to a time in life when I assumed knowledge of nothing. Each word I didn’t know, I looked up in the open dictionary on my desk. If a person or place were referenced, I’d dig into the 23 volume, gold and maroon encyclopedia set that lined up neatly above the cookbooks in my mother’s kitchen. She got it in exchange for stamps she got at the grocery store (the same store, I note, that had a ‘Cookie Credit Card’ for kids, redeemable for one chocolate chip cookie, the likes of which I’ve not had since). Those books were limited, something I see now. Those encyclopedias were worn out around Presidents and baseball: subjects I was curious about almost preternaturally.

When I brought a Mission Of Burma cassette tape home to that kitchen at the age of 14, I looked up the country referenced in the title. I can still smell the gold leaf paint on the book pages that lived on fingertips hours afterward. The way they cracked as a new binding opened and I learned something new. Almost 20 years later, I still recall cross-legged on their hardwood floors. The band from Boston brings me there.

Mission Of Burma album review: The Sound, The Speed, The Light

Captain Barlow, Hero

I comfort myself with the lonesome delusion that almost everyone out there anticipates conversations they might have. At some point. Some day maybe. Morning commute fills with anticipated conversations. That ex-girlfriend might happen to run into the same bakery on the same day. Your boss asks what are you truly feeling. The police officer — hesitates.

He’s not quite sure if you were really speeding.

Recently, I’ve had a constant vision of being asked the question: “what kind of music do you like?” Perhaps it’s my dour, self-important and secretive nature indulging itself over its favorite agony. The music writer yearns to describe his milieu? Maybe it’s anticipation of oncoming family dinners over the next six weeks that pulls on me a little bit, the time of the year when people ask too many questions in order to fill time they were never meant to spend together consecutively. Opportunity for a concealed identity, revealed. Enough to make them wonder.

Thee Oh Sees

Facts are, I couldn’t quite tell that imagined stranger what it is that I like to listen to. There is no comfort zone, no 71 degree, sunny Sunday. One day it’s laconic folk (yesterday). Today while cleaning the house, I needed the radio’s randomalia (XMU channel 43). In general I could point to the two albums with reviews linked here as the types of records that I shudder and giggle in the face of. Music that I find myself adoring in secret. When I listened to Lou Barlow, it makes me happy, his ability to endure the vastness of his obscure gifts and bristling personality; to a band like Thee Oh Sees, how earnestly they approach nuanced, sonic disasters.

Some days it’s the grandiosity of Elton John.

I’d tell that person, my music tastes aren’t something I can easily hem into an aisle at the music store. The answer would — will — give me power, such power. I’ll dive into my iPod and listen to the new Kings of Convenience album and pine for my days of liberal arts and college radio DJ work.

That I’m certain is a familiar refrain.

http://www.kevchino.com/review/thee-oh-sees/dog-poison/1914

http://www.kevchino.com/review/lou-barlow/goodnight-unknown/1905

Remora's Album "Reversion"

Affection. Not every release elicits this rare blush or its companion emotion. So it’s even less frequent when the entire catalog from a particular label brings forth the feeling of joy and discovery.

Silber Records is that label for me and it has been for some time (I’ve even forgotten how I discovered them). Their collective aesthetic isn’t for everyone. It is subtle, often deliberately obscure, their releases without much fanfare beyond an organic groundswell. The Silber Records artists are largely local to North Carolina and purveyors of experimental, electro/anti-rock.

My favorite Silber incarnation is Remora (an imprint of the label’s leader, Brian John Mitchell). There are a half-dozen or more “records” under the name Remora (many of them available on archive.org for free download). As a whole band, Remora is almost indescribable. There is a better chance at talking about each release as a distinct work of electronic/drone rock.

The newest release from Remora is called Derivative. It’s a studio marvel. A few weeks after first listening to it, there are still uncharted places the songs take me.

http://www.kevchino.com/review/remora/derivative/1884

The Cover of "Sewn Together"

I have a terrific memory for some visual things. It is especially keen when it has to do with music and my experience in seeking and finding it. Band names in the gritty papers that my Dad and I would pick up around town leap off the page — they still do. Smashing Pumpkins. Big Daddy Meat Straw. The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Meat Puppets. All of these arose from the sidebars and gave my youthful imagination vivid pictures. When I finally went to see Big Daddy Meat Straw in concert, they were as outlandish as their name, a sort of Gwar cum Flaming Lips show with blood covered stuffed animals raining in from the stage. My friend (a future double PHD) dove all over the slick, filthy La Luna floor in search of a decipitated kitten.

At fifteen, being hit with a debased bunny is the essence of rock.

Years later I need a Google search and the navigation between pages to see if Big Daddy Meat Straw is still around. However, I seek the return of the Meat Puppets. While Sewn Together isn’t a exactly a return to the doe-eyed halcyon days of II or Too High To Die (albums with permanent places in my rotation) it is has an affectionate place in the band’s vast, serrindipitous catalog. I do not dive all over the floor anymore. I do, however, boast of the good works.

http://www.kevchino.com/review/meat-puppets/sewn-together/1875

Superchunk's "Leaves In The Gutter"

When I started writing music reviews more than nine years ago, I received albums in CD form. Anywhere from five to thirty per week. They’d arrive in packages and padded mailers, filled with discs and lots of paper: label propaganda, clippings from other media outlets. Sometimes there would be stickers or other goodies to ostensibly increase the chances of my giving the album good review. One label always put Sour Patch Kids in their mailers. My girlfriend used to say to people who asked: “it’s always Christmas at our house” meaning that packages in the mail are gifts themselves.

Nine years ago, a music reviewer looked to the mail with hopeful eyes.

Not so much anymore. Very few albums come in material form. Not more than 10%. I get a .zip file of the recording from my editor or the label PR rep. Packages are rare anymore (in fact, only the most amateurish and unappealing arrive this way). Format is streamlined. I get to download and unpack the .zip file and within seconds there are a dozen or more .mp3 files in a folder that I end up putting into my iTunes folder and listen at my discretion.

My hands touch nothing other than a keyboard.

Why this prelude with Leaves In The Gutter? What’s curious about Superchunk’s reviewed work is that they’re calling it an “EP” in that arcane descriptor, an “Extended Play”. Extended play of or off of what? Where there are hardly album proper anymore, the EP is impossibly less valuable to delineate.In another nine years there will be merely packets of tracks intended to be played at random.

That isn’t to say that what Superchunk is offering on their five song packet is anything short of amazing pop/indie rock songwriting. I haven’t loved this band this lovingly in a very long time. Each song reminds me of what it was that drew me to them in the first place.

http://www.kevchino.com/review/superchunk/leaves-gutter/1862

The Cover Of "King of Jeans" by Pissed Jeans

I’m a terrific fan of the angry young man complex. The further I find myself in an inevitable egress from that trait as an element of my life, the more I seek to indulge in its musical trappings to keep it at least close enough to relate to. I’m thirty-three years old and I have absolutely no qualms with living vicariously through punk and hardcore. I’m tragically iconoclastic. Black t-shirts work for me in certain moods as “statements”.

Time however has made my sense of that ethos sharper, more precise in what I’m seeking. Just being loud and angry isn’t enough for me anymore. I absolutely loved Pissed Jeans’ first album, “Hope For Men”. It was a lot of droll and bored and angry about it. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination — I would have never used the word, ‘classic’ — but I felt like the band from Allentown approached that elusive craving. Now their follow up record “King Of Jeans” has arrived and it feels  like a small step backwards — maybe. A lot of what I felt was original about “Hope For Men” isn’t here.

Again, I’m a music consumer who listens to albums of a middling quality over and over again (sometimes I rescue a good feeling from them and they become more than just middling). I’m obsessed with knowing exactly why I’m getting an uneasy feeling about it. Below is my review of the album as published on Kevchino. I wouldn’t divert anyone’s gaze from the potential of tremendous anger from Pissed Jeans. I’d simply ask them to consider this record in comparison to its preceding effort.

http://www.kevchino.com/review/pissed-jeans/king-of-jeans/1852

Cover of The Fruit Bats new album "Ruminant Band"

I was sent a message from a friend last night. It was a short email at the end of a day of us bouncing them back and forth. Less than 100 characters, it amounted to a “Tweet” (a phenomenon that I’ve yet to indulge in and may never). He was reporting on his status from five blocks away: freshly showered, clipping his toe nails and listening to the new Fruit Bats album. My response was apropos of, hopefully loud.

I applaud all of these things in my friends. Especially the latter trait whereas I’m always “pro-hygiene” there is an ever stronger part of me that finds itself pro freak/folk rock from Seattle.

From its Chris Ware cover artwork inward (interesting yet somehow dischordantly  modern for the Bats whose sound is arcane) the record amounts to a summer afternoon delight. My prevailing context for music is time of year and time of day. Maybe I’m getting older, having seen too many sunsets. I was somewhat disillusioned to know that Eric — mastermind of the Fruit Bats — is now a regular member of The Shins a band whose appeal has receded dramatically in recent years (from a band who I held in high esteem for a long time). It makes me wonder if whether or not the newest incarnations of The Shins are preventing me from both a re-dux of their defining work, “Oh, Inverted World” as well as more great Fruit Bats creations.

http://www.kevchino.com/review/fruit-bats/ruminant-band/1843

Japandroids Album Cover

I haven’t opened the record yet. It feels like something I want to keep in some “mint condition.”

Anyone who hasn’t heard this recording yet, it borders on the unabashedly brilliant. A friend connects them to Janes Addiction. I make a less ornate connection (although perhaps the first XXX is apt). It isn’t quite as laden with Perry Farrel’s mysticism.

I’ve been talking about it for two solid months now. It’s great summer garage (hell, it might bleed out into the fall and winter and spring as well) filled with the sort of drink/find girls ethos that make me feel younger than my years. The Japandroids are from Vancouver BC, and are a two-piece: guitar and drums, vocals and a fuck-load of “sing out loud” enthusiasm.

Now’days, I appreciate that.

I won’t trump the review. Here it is.

http://www.kevchino.com/review/japandroids/post-nothing/1813