The Terminals - Disconnect (1988)

This is an EP recording by a band. The music is some bouncy Flying Nun type shit that will stimulate your unpolished idiosyncratic pop boner. Or maybe that's not it at all, I have no idea. Been tired as fuck all day and all I did was cut the sleeves off one of my dope rock tees, watch my DVD copy of Wild Things: Unrated Edition, and not eat.

Rating: I don't know.

Download Link: "Batwing"

Plush - More You Becomes You (1998)

When we last left our pal Liam Hayes, he was busy offering up the recordings that would introduce his surprisingly fully formed aesthetic to the world: two finely crafted Beatlesque pop gems with restrained production that never interfered with the songs' hazy drifting through the clouds quality. Four years later, Hayes released this full length LP that is clearly born of the same mind that came up with "Three-Quarters Blind Eyes" and "Found A Little Baby." He's still that same songsmith whose influences stick conservatively to Bacharach, Nilsson, Wilson, Harrison, and pretty much zero post early '70s musical developments. His edginess level never rises above "baroque" and the tempos of his songs never accelerate to the point where you can't accurately describe them as "dreamy."

However, Hayes approaches his first album not as a collection of more singles but as a cohesive work that gives the listener a reason to experience it as a whole, which makes my response to More You Becomes You a somewhat conflicted one. Aside from a minimal horn arrangement on the penultimate "Instrumental," the record is all solo piano and vocals. If you love this man's melodic sensibility, voice, and number one favorite tempo (ballady), then you are in for a pleasing listening experience that fortunately reflects an awareness of 28 minutes being quite enough for this sort of thing. Because while "this sort of thing" might bring to mind Brian Wilson and like Pet Sounds this record's foundation is built upon slow songs with complex chord progressions that nonetheless always manage to sound awfully fucking lovely and pleasant in a good way, it's much closer to being a "suite" or "song cycle" or some bullshit like that. No one is going to be able to look at the tracklisting after even ten listens and based on the titles, be reminded of even one or two snatches of melody that may have floated into their brains while listening. This shit runs together. And Hayes clearly intends for it all to do just that, considering that many of those titles exist merely to provide track indexes for "songs" that spill into one another like they're Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh or something, whew!!!

As evidenced by his debut single and then this full length album, his aesthetic was firmly established and in place as the foundation for his work at this point in time, yet there is also something about how the four year gap between releases and the fact that Hayes was attempting this type of music during the mid to late '90s with such perfectionism suggest a brand of distant self-awareness that his most obvious influences had practically zero familiarity with. The "single" is just something that he tries on for size, releases only one of, and then moves on from to the next stop, which happens to be 28 minutes of solo piano/vocals compositions. It doesn't move too far beyond just being a good sound to lose yourself in for this particular length of time, so while the record might bring to mind that original demo of "Surf's Up" (scaled down, gorgeous, elaborate in structure, still too fast for Liam Hayes), a song like that is still on a whole other level of melodic enjoyment. What you ultimately get with More You Becomes You is calculated pastiche with a nice vibe, but that's good, too.

Rating: Inoffensive. Or slightly more than that, probably.

Download Link: "More You Becomes You"... the title track from this recording. You'll like it just fine.

Mount Carmel - Mount Carmel (2010)

Wednesday night in the downstairs DePaul University Student Center computer lab was a quiet one. A few nondescript white sluts checking their Facebooks, two or three preteen kids hanging out for some reason, and a frumpy, gender ambiguous, troll-like being watching YouTube videos of Ten Years After. So, sir or madam who loves the real classic sounds, if you are reading this, I heartily recommend that you get on this Mount Carmel LP. This thing is 40 minutes of vintage no frills blues rock for all you totally edgy record collectors out there who fetishize shit like the Groundhogs and Speed, Glue & Shinki. Just three solid bros jamming out. And they're almost as funny looking as Henry's Funeral Shoe. Just imagine "'70s hard rock played in a guitar/vox + bass + drums format" and you probably won't even have to listen to this record but it's still perfectly enjoyable with great playing from all three guys.

Rating: Above average, in my opinion. Leaves lots of room for growth and that's a good thing. A fine addition to the '07-present Siltbreeze catalog, regardless.

Download Link: "Still Listening"

The Fall - Your Future Our Clutter (2010)

I'm playing a few songs from this album this morning. They're awesome. This band makes rock music with balls and powerful production and you probably listen to stuff that's worse than them. Get fucked!

Rating:

Download Link:

Oneohtrix Point Never - Returnal (2010)

Holy fuck, this is great. Yesterday this dude was just some "space music" fag with a bunch of Klaus Schulze records. Now he's a professional with a full length on Mego of balls deep ambient genius that basically crushes. This shit was made to crank is what I'm saying. Almost as glorious as stumbling upon Solar Bridge back in late 2008 but he's on some whole other thing, with these occasional clicks and whirs and other sounds that just slay you on top of the mind enveloping synthscapes. Not sure why the vocals on "Returnal" sound like a Silent Shout homage but even that's cool. A good friend of SLRJ also hears "Bach, Xenakis, plums, elephant songs of the Ituri forests." I've been playing the fuck out of this album and I don't think there are many reviews of it yet so that's why I'm publishing this.

Rating: ABSOLUTELY WORTH GETTING EXCITED ABOUT.

Download Link: "Describing Bodies"

Vile Gash - Vile Gash (2010)

Remember last summer when I reviewed Vile Gash's second demo tape? Of course you do. It was a groundbreaking piece. Well, anyway, that recording was pretty awesome. Way better than their first one! You had some really fast fucking hardcore tracks that flew by in like three minutes and then a six minute long two chord Flipper/side two of My War thing. I dunno, I liked it. Then they put out a cassette called Leech and it was okay. And now they have a full length album with ten whole songs, all under a minute long except for the epic closer that's about two minutes long. It's just killer punk rock that kicks your ass for seven minutes and sounds pretty good doing it. The three songs from the second demo are here and the song "Leech" is here and then the five others are brand spankin' new. I guess this is actually classified as a 7" but that's really just the format that they released it on so consider it an album released on the 7" vinyl format 'cause it sure as hell ain't a single, man, 'cause singles have an a-side and a b-side and an album shorter than Blood Guts & Pussy is still an album. Once again, they do the thing where they play all the fast ones and then end with a slow one. They're good at doing that, especially here when "Incapable" starts up and suddenly there aren't any guitars and you just hear this slow drumbeat that's dominated by open hi-hat and it's kind of like listening to the beginning of "Damaged I." Whatever.

Rating: Fun record. Play it back to back with the Aerosols s/t some time. Or don't.

Download Link: "Who Are You Today?"... ten seconds of total fury!!!

Pat Metheny - Zero Tolerance For Silence (1994)

Last Monday night, my parents and I ended up witnessing a Pat Metheny performance in Chicago's Orchestra Hall because my aunt and uncle convinced us to drop 150 dollars on it, I guess. Apparently Metheny was there to show off some new gadgets, an incredibly complex system of automated sound-generating doohickies that coalesced to form what he called his "Orchestrion." Basically, Metheny chose from an arsenal of guitars throughout the night on which he would play in front of a wall of drums, vibra/xyla/marimbaphones, piano, some weird bottle things, and a number of other instruments that were all triggered to respond to tones that Metheny played or foot pedals that he controlled. I'm pretty sure he worked on it all with a team of brilliant engineers to get everything just right. This massive setup served him in both his composed and improvised pieces. It was so remarkable and complex that he and the audience's more enthusiastic contingent seemed to think that it was worth listening to for two and a half hours. It wasn't, though, and ultimately didn't amount to much more than Pat Metheny's New Age MIDI Orchestra. That's right, boringass music that consists of a guy happily shredding over what were more or less backing tracks that, despite Metheny and his little helpers' attempts to choke some slightly more human dynamic range out of this inherently stiff robot technology, still sounded like unengaging Casiotone demo tracks blown to widescreen proportions.

This guy, though. He's always been known to test people's patience in between the good shit. Wait, does he even have good shit? Who the fuck listens to "Pat Metheny"???? "Jazz" fans??? LOL. I bet he has a lot of "fusion" albums to his name. Hoo, that's rich.

Back to the patience testing, though. The guy is fond of exploring uncharted territory and taking YOU, the listener, along with him! Sometimes this means subjecting people to the Orchestrion and sometimes it means dicking around with weirdass custom-made eastern double neck 200 string guitars. It does not always mean "decent music" or "an ensemble unit conjuring some killer energy that might make things at least the tiniest bit engaging" or anything like that.

And sometimes it means "BLOWING YOUR MIND WITH WICKEDLY ABRASIVE NOISE BULLSHIT," which brings us to the classic recording Zero Tolerance For Silence. It's from 1994 and nobody liked it except Thurston Moore, so you know that it's maybe okay or maybe horrible but almost certainly indulgent as all fuck. The thing consists of our boy Pat Metheny overdubbing distorted guitars like crazy, turning them into five distinct "pieces," all atonal and all based around the same angular post-Magic Band guitar tone. The result occasionally brings to mind such respected elite music powerhouses as Metal Machine Music, Matt Bower/Skullflower at his/their/its most brutal (I'm thinking Tribulation here), "black metal," The Flying Luttenbachers, the aforementioned Magic Band, Mick Barr, and even Deerhoof's more obtuse work (particularly the achingly freeform masterwork known as "Look Away.")

But keep in mind... this is still Pat Metheny we're talking about here. For the most part, he's still a much bigger square than Sonny Sharrock and this stuff is about as academically wooden of a take on harsh guitar stranglings as you might expect from the dude. The moments where he slips into some bluesy leadwork are particularly hilarious and also prove that while Metheny was clearly interested in sculpting a dense pile of ridiculous noise, he could never do so with the drainingly persistent minimalism of Bower or Barr. And yet at the same time, that's what makes this album not really all that terrible and most likely preferable to, say, an Ocrilim record or some crap. For all the relentless clanging/dicking around, there's still some organization and effort to keep things somewhat diverse. Breaking out the acoustic for the fifth track, exploring slightly more calming melodic territory on the second, devoting a decent chunk of the 18 minute album opener to a surprisingly black metal-ish wall of white noise... you know what, I kind of dig it. At 39 minutes, anyway. Something tells me that while I'm not sure if hearing the Orchestrion tackle Zero Tolerance For Silence would be worth 50 bucks, seeing all the upperclass Symphony Center membership holders struggling to pretend that they enjoy it most certainly would.

Rating:

Download Link: "Part 5"