Tuxedomoon - Half Mute

With Brian Eno busy riding the nuts of every no wave band he could get his hands on, it's easy to believe that the first generation of post-punk bands were all slumming it in the same loft in New York City. Au Contraire mon frère! Open your ears to the sounds of Tuxedomoon, San Francisco's hottest new band since Chome and The Dead Kennedys.

Much like their kindred spirits and occasional rivals The Eagles, Tuxedomoon appreciated the finer things in life. You won't find them tearing apart perfectly good guitars or ripping their clothes to shreds, unlike their fellow Artforum readers on the east coast. Their wicked choons were infected by haunted lounge music, cool jazz and scrappy socal punk... a sound that suited them better to a life of playing high-class European festivals, French cabarets and art galleries. These guys wouldn't be caught dead riding in a conversion van to a gig, a fact which wrote them out of Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life and relegated them to the snobby margins of 80's indie rock. Pretty sure they could care less as they sip down bottles of 1975 Lafleur on the balcony of the Castello Del Nero while getting handjobs from farm-maidens summoned from the Tuscan valleys below, their tender hands stained a dark red from years of working in the fields. The thousands... no, millions of Canaiolo grapes they plucked from the vines, one by one, all under the unforgiving eyes of their father and his cruel, lecherous hired hands, in the hopes that one day a gentle man would rescue them from their life of sweat and toil. An artist, a visionary, a man with a boiling passion for life whose only remaining desire in the world would be to give all his love to just one woman...

Half-Mute was their first album, released in 1980 after a couple of EPs. When California governor Ronald Reagan was presented with a sealed copy by a supporter during a routine stop on his Presidential campaign, many onlookers recall seeing him overcome by emotion, eventually retreating into his tour bus for several hours before returning to his scheduled appearances, shaking hands and kissing babies, but visibly shaken.

Rating:

Download: the whole album

Nerf Herder - Nerf Herder

Much like how everybody will eventually come to their senses regarding use of the terms "bloghouse" and "shitgaze," the notion that "geek rock" could ever have been seen as a legitimate genre of music hopefully now stands as a regrettable embarrassment to anyone who ever celebrated such a worthless non-culture of awful bedwetting taste. Ever since the guy from Weezer wore glasses and said pop culture references and had the bassist who invented the MOOG synthesizer, the public would never have to worry about the post-grunge landscape lacking in its share of real dorky shit like Ben Folds Five and Where Is My Mind: A Tribute To The Pixies. I dunno if sad ugly kids these days have their lives changed by Motion City Soundtrack videos or not, but believe it or not there was a time when Superdrag literally ruled the earth/used bins like the gods they were.

Put down that Ozma CD for one forkin' second, though! Back in the glory days of 1996, there was one band that put every last one of its fellow Buzz Bin titans to shame. Not only is their name an obscure reference to The Empire Strikes Back, their only sort of hit single an ode to the recorded output of David Lee Roth era Van Halen, and their most widely heard song the instrumental theme music to Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Nerf Herder possessed a raw pop-punk awkwardness that only made their "nerd" shtick seem more genuine, which works wonders towards helping their pretty basic power pop musical stylings to not devolve into dull repetitiveness over the course of a half hour long album.

That particular album is the band's self-titled debut and it sports some wholly non-descript playing and arrangements, as well as a handful of fairly horrendous CD packaging decisions. Singer Parry Gripp sounds and looks like your dad but doesn't let that stop him from rocking out, a philosophy that would be rode to the bank by Craig Finn a decade later (plug both gentlemen into Google Image Search and try to understand what I mean here.) Surely you gathered as much from exposure to the alternative rock classic "Van Halen," but does the rest of the album measure up to those heights?

Incredibly, yes. While displaying much of the Cars and Cheap Trick worship that Weezer made no attempts to hide on their debut LP, there's a primitiveness in their sound that brings to mind the more tolerable Lookout! Records acts such as the Mr. T Experience and Screeching Weasel. And like the MTX, Nerf Herder can't say no to a sickeningly catchy melody to carry their songs about girls and being a social outcast, even if it means disgracing whatever punk credentials they probably never even had in the first place. While no other song is a nonstop barrage of references like "Van Halen," Rush manages to get a shoutout in "Golfshirt," while the legendary middle section of "Nosering Girl" includes a virtual grocery list of vegan food items. Even a tragic love story such as "Diana" manages to include the line "She sat on his face and the rest is history!" and namedrop the band's drummer. Don't dismiss it as "joke rock," this was the alternative era when bands still took chances.

Rating: Balls out all killer no filler 10/10 classic.

Download Link: "Sorry"... the underappreciated second single. Catchy chorus, hysterical lyrics, a video starring Mark Hamill... this is what music is all about.

Pissed Jeans - King of Jeans

Really just the most boring shit.

Listen to Shallow and delete the other two.

Not much more advice I can offer on this subject, sorry.

Rating:

Download Link:

Harry Pussy - In An Emergency You Can Shit On A Puerto Rican Whore

If there's one thing that Miami noise rock legends Harry Pussy understood better than any of their envelope pushing peers from the always controversial "'90s grunge scene," it's that there's nothing more punk than defecating on minorities. And that is exactly what Adris, Bill, and possibly nobody else do on this delightfully brief Long Player from 1993.

20 excessively brutal minutes of free jazz bullshit. "Harry Pussy" is a funny name for a band and "Fuckology" is a funny title for a song and while honorary avant noiselords Peter Brötzmann and Iannis Xenakis deserve every ounce of the sort of serious music beard stroking bestowed upon them over the years, sometimes you just gotta let loose and revel in the ridiculousness of shaping one's musical identity around creating such a purposely unholy racket, not to mention knowing that somebody somewhere is actually going to want to listen to it.

And who says you need to have jazz chops or a written philosophy in order to dick around like this and not have everybody assume you're full of shit? Like Whitehouse, Big Black, and that other "pussy" band before them, Harry Pussy puts an admirable amount of effort into making every aspect of their music's presentation as over the top and abrasive as possible. There are "songs" here, sure, but all they do is sort this lo-fi diarrhea spewage into digestible 2-3 minute long portions. The cymbals are bashed as if there's nothing in the world that sounds better than cymbals. The guitarist seems to be strangling out some sort of minor key melodic lines here and there but mostly just ends up making a mess that's somewhere between Lick My Decals Off, Baby and that video from the CD of The Ascension. And the vocals... well, they're a bunch of god awful shrieking. Spastic freakouts are interrupted by melancholy slow parts. The ugliest Kraftwerk cover ever gets played. The woman behind the drum kit apologizes for knocking a glass over. And my god, if it isn't all simply free noise nirvana.

Sometimes there just isn't much like treating yourself to a good ol' assault on the ears. It's why we have D.R.I. and early Napalm Death and it's why In An Emergency You Can Shit On A Puerto Rican Whore is able to do its job so efficiently. This is confrontational freeform noise rock performed with as much joyous energy as you're going to find in music. I can only imagine how special a band this willfully cacophonous sounded during the mid '90s, especially one that managed to not get sucked into the trappings of (occasionally entertaining) hyperactive Gravity Records scenester nonsense. Even after their influence has burrowed a labyrinthine network of tunnels throughout the underground, Harry Pussy remains fresh, original, seminal. So do Couch and Arab On Radar. AIDs Wolf and Eat Skull, not so much. There's a point where tuneless garbage actually becomes tuneless garbage and it's downright unacceptable. Only settle for the finest!

Rating: Filth!

Download Link: "1986"... a str8 banger.

Jay Reatard - Watch Me Fall

In the year 2009, Jay Reatard turning out an album of 12 well-produced guitar pop songs is a more audacious move than most anyone is going to realize. This isn't to say that the era of the solid pop/rock Long Player is long dead, that three decades ago it was just plain easier for artists to make that perfect four note hook materialize out of nowhere using the simplest yet most unfathomably infectious combination of musical elements because all the good ideas hadn't been used up yet. Remember just how fucking hard an instant classic song like "Nightmares" managed to dispel any such notions during that special period of your life spent between the quiet late 2006 release of Blood Visions and the realization that half the reason you didn't end up with every one of those Matador 7"s was due to every subsequent new song's ability to make you care less and less.

It's just that after hearing where the man was going with the more blatantly "pop" leanings of his 2008 output... well, there's the strange thing about the arc of Mr. Reatard's solo career thus far. Handy descriptors such as "more accessible" and "less noisy" and "constantly refined pop craftsmanship" aren't so handy when dealing with a songsmith whose startlingly brilliant solo debut LP was such a headspinning blast through some of the most refreshingly tuneful punk/pop/whatever-the-fuck songs anyone has managed to come up with this decade. Throw in "Let It All Go," "Hammer I Miss You," and the glorious "I Know A Place" and you'll be forgiven for spending that year and a half naively thinking, "How the hell could whatever this superhuman genius machine comes up with next not be such a triumph of devastating catchiness that it actually manages to claw its way up the charts and into the hearts of millions?"

In light of the soul-crushing reality illuminated by the Matador singles, Watch Me Fall should have seemed inevitable. What other choice did Jay have, really? Was he going to somehow not put out an LP of two and a half minute long songs that manage to retain his previous work's garagey punch while peeling back some of the fuzz to make way for a greater emphasis on his much talked about Flying Nun fascination?

Therein lies the somewhat disappointing news. Jay cleaned up his sound, included more songs that actually approach the four minute mark and less that barely scratch 120 seconds, sang lines that may have previously been filtered through throat mangling shouts... yet despite such streamlining, Watch Me Fall isn't the sort of concise power pop record demanded of a less vicious Reatard. His pop smarts were as firmly in place as they could possibly have been circa "My Shadow" and "Oh It's Such A Shame," so of course those previous achievements are going to be difficult to transcend, let alone come close to matching. Even with many easy to detect differences, the new material is far less of a 180° turn from Blood Visions than it needs to be for Jay to have a second start to finish classic on his hands, a defined second chapter in his solo career.

Such a criticism wouldn't even be valid unless the album didn't feel like an artistically purgatorial mess. While the production sports more listenability than one would expect from anything described as "one man garage punk circa 2009" and every song contains at least one borderline anthemic hook, it's not exactly The Cars in terms of the kind of absurdly consistent melody surpluses that an album like this should aspire towards. While I am of the opinion that Mr. Reatard's earlier work stood out so much due to its ability to strike the perfect balance between screaming abrasiveness and pop songcraft of the sugariest order, I have no problem with him attempting to smooth out the more razor sharp edges. There are a number of moments on Watch Me Fall where Reatard seems well-equipped for a bright power pop future. "My Reality" updates the "Hammer I Miss You" verses so that they can happily coexist with a chorus that is all chiming guitars and stomping bass drum rhythm, you'd swear you were listening to an actually not terribly boring R.E.M. song (well, not really, but what else are you going to compare a song with "chiming guitars" to.) "Rotten Mind" finds Jay giving a vocal performance in what sounds like the ordinary range of his speaking voice, bringing out a melodicism within the track worthy of the first couple Wire albums. While the pacing and sequencing of the tracks isn't quite as perfect as on Jay's first album, the anxious multipart rush of "Hang Them All" into the surprisingly sweet sounding (yet with enough triumphant bombast in the wordless chorus to make it a choice closing number) "There Is No Sun" makes for a skillfully presented conclusion, while opener "It Ain't Gonna Save Me" storms right out of the gate, announcing that the new Jay Reatard Long Player has been completed and you're hearing it, damnit.

While those songs all rock efficiently, the album's most troublesome spots come when Jay doesn't reign in his more abrasive tendencies. In the context of this album, the verses of "Faking It" don't quite fit, seeming like an attempt to force the stop-start racket of "I See You Standing There" and "Puppet Man" into a place where they have no business being. Likewise, the chorus of "Men of Steel" contains a bit too much Blank Dogs-esque ugliness for my tastes, not to mention an instrumental breakdown that just has me longing for the brilliant you'd-swear-somebody-had-just-thrown-on-a-Slowdive-record outro of "Oh It's Such a Shame." And I'm not sure what the hell is going on in the verses of "Nothing Now," but it's simply not enjoyable to listen to (even if it does sound like the album cover, for better or for worse (well, the latter, sadly.)) Occasionally, I can't help but feel that Jay's conscious decision to follow his Tall Dwarfs/Clean muse by making the poppier moments as blatantly melodic as possible results in certain songs being more twee than I can personally handle, particularly the midtempo keyboard driven "I'm Watching You." Yet there is a sense that Jay is testing the waters in terms of how far he can really take his bubblegum ambitions... how much fuzz he can strip away and what the best way to go about doing so is. We can only hope that he lives to craft another album or two. The mix of good and less good ideas here only makes me eager to hear what Watch Me Fall is serving as a transition towards.

Rating: I've said a lot of negative things here, but really, Jay Reatard is still the reigning king of this sort of bratty garage pop. He might have a goofy voice and maybe the songs would get on the radio if they were just a bit slower, but this stuff is still some of the only modern pop/rock music worth listening to. It isn't just a bunch of lo-fi bullshit that all runs together. There's a great deal of care and skill put into these songs and while Watch Me Fall isn't the sort of perfect album that came into my life at just the right time like Blood Visions was, Jay Reatard's confidence and commitment to songcraft remains unparalleled during the second half of the '00s (except by The-Dream (that was a joke, but it's probably true.)) Seriously, what are you going to do, listen to the fucking Smith Westerns? I've played this album more in the past two days than anything else I've heard during the first seven and a half months of 2009. It's good.

Download Link: "Rotten Mind"... awfully good song.

Underworld - Pearl's Girl

Underworld's run between Dubnobasswithmyheadman and Beacoup Fish is some of my favorite music of the 90s. To this, you may cross your arms and type out a resounding "LOL!" with your toes as you breathe a contented sigh that your evening plans -- perhaps taking in the afterparty of the Diplo/Major Lazer/Dam Funk show and then getting a few chicks there to take you in, just another ordinary night -- don't involve any music so stale, nostalgic, or inextricably bound to such rockist traditions as Britpop or 90's alt. rock radio. You're a young turk and if you're in a generous mood, maybe you'll toss us a few tantalizing Tweets throughout the night so we can vicariously join you in your adventures as we sit at home playing Wipeout XL. So why am I wasting your time with this shit? We'll get to that soon.

I'd go to bat for the surprisingly-dismissed A Hundred Days Off from 2002, but I won't push my luck and will settle for summarizing the five juiciest years of their career within this paragraph. From 1994 to 1999, three great albums, two of which Allmusic gives the perfect 5-star Crash and Rollover rating to (Stephen Thomas Erlewine himself personally blessing Second Toughest In the Infants). Dubnobasswithmyheadman peeled away the shitty INXS-isms of the band's previous work and fused their synthpop stylings onto scraps of techno and acid left over the fallout of the UK rave scene. Must have been ridiculous to hear this in 1994! These dark soundscapes were stepped up into rolling electrofunk floorburners in Second Toughest In the Infants, when they struck it rich with the non-album single "Born Slippy." If their fans were once a future-obsessed or introspective group (no idea if this was the case or not, tbh), their ranks were now swollen with an up and coming new generation of chavs digging their larger-than-life sounds. Beacoup Fish arrived in 1999, riding the final waves of the electronica boom and producing what was probably their last radio hit in "Push Upstairs." This aerobics anthem would mark the end of their success in the United States, as follow-up albums failed to yield any radio-friendly unit shifters. Adding insult to injury, the existence of the blockbuster 2003 movie displaced the group's very existence from the minds of most Americans, who would eventually come to hear the name "Underworld" and only think of Kate Beckinsale in leather. Well into 2009, a quick Google search confirms this is still the case.

In between those albums, though, the band released a few really great EPs. The various Born Slippy discs being the most coveted and best known, comprising some great remixes -- something about these feel so much more natural and uncontrived than the "look at all the interesting friends we have/artists we can summon with a mere wave of our hand" that Nine Inch Nails began to employ at around the same time, a big selling point that Animal Collective smartly picked up on as their cult has grown in recent years -- and solid b-sides and alternate takes that make a lot of their album tracks sound like the throwaways. Pearl's Girl is heavy on these tracks, more than an hour of the hottest jams that might have flown "under the radar" for most fans. Still not convinced? If you like Pavement, Clouddead, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, or those William Burroughs "cut-ups" or whatever they're called, then just imagine their lyrics set to a throbbing techno beat! If you enjoy the sound/repetition of certain words together more than their actual meaning, then Underworld has what you want, when you want it!

My copy came with a card you could mail in to get a Wax Trax! catalog. Spoofing advertisements or making subversive commercials was a hot trend in 90s electronic music. So was using the image of the "random Asian guy," as seen in the Pearl's Girl CD tray.

Rating:

Download: "Cherry Pie"