Hole - Pretty On The Inside (1991)

Reading up on this album leads one to believe that the popular grunge rock band Hole fronted by Courtney Love was first introduced to the world as a group that let its more abrasive tendencies run wild, embracing the elite sounds of the Sonic Youth and the Teenage Jesus and the Pussy Galore rather than trying to write "hits." What it really sounds like is Mudhoney minus whatever grasp of songwriting that band displayed on such catchy North American underground rock classics as "If I Think" and "Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More." In terms of vocal approach, Love favors impersonating the oh so cool jaded tunelessness that co-producer Kim Gordon pioneered, alternating between that and the wretched screams that would become somewhat of a trademark over the years. All of this is done over a backdrop of unassuming grunge racket that never really crosses over into the anti-music territory of NYC namecheck rock but doesn't have much success with its more traditional songwriting aspirations, either. If you're looking for something more than nostalgia for dated dollar bin classics, I can't imagine you'll come away with much.

Rating: Eh.

Download Link:

Billy Bao - Urban Disease (2010)

Beyond having heard this album, I ceased trying to stay up to date on Billy Bao two years ago when I dismissively threw Dialectics of Shit into a pile with Rusted Shut, i.e. like Brainbombs but not as funny and without the killer riffs. Just pounding headache inducing garbage that I don't particularly enjoy listening to. The 7" and 10" that came before weren't all that different but they were certainly shorter, which is always a good thing. There's a story behind this band but I don't know which parts are true, if the singer is some Nigerian guy howling at oppression or when Mattin joined or if he just fabricated that entire backstory as part of his "conceptual art" schtick that he has going on. All I have is the internet to inform me about these things. There's only so much vague bullshit that I'm willing to wade through.

Let me try, though. This two sided vinyl adventure contains the earliest Billy Bao recordings? Maybe? They're from almost a whole half decade ago, perhaps? The press release said something about Mr. Bao inviting people over to perform Psychedelic Underground in its entirety. Maybe that happened. Maybe the music on here is something else that isn't that. And maybe Mattin fucked with it a considerable amount and that's why there are long stretches of silence jarringly ripped open by primal noisemaking with even more noisemaking smeared over it.

The only thing that puts this within the previously established Billy Bao aesthetic is that it's so listener unfriendly. The music itself has little to do with the sort of punishing downtuned racket that is normally found on the records released under the Billy Bao name. And perhaps this is where the Amon Düül fascination comes in, considering that it begins with a brief passage of inane yelping drum circle freakout bullshit. After all, isn't Psychedelic Underground about as fuzzed to shit as the stuff happening within the grooves of Urban Disease? "Ein wunderhubsches Madchen traumt von Sandosa" began with a stream of white noise blasting its wad out of the mix and it was almost as painful as any of the torturously blunt editing choices that Mattin (???) makes on here.

I'm not sure if this album proves that Billy Bao's roots lie in freeform psych or what amount of influence Mattin has over the group's recordings or anything at all. The sawing power electronics brutality at the beginning of side B certainly reminds me of side B of List of Profound Insecurities, his recorded collaboration with Drunkdriver. But then I hear that followed by two minutes of retarded ELP style prog jazz wankoff and I have no clue what to think. And then ending it all with a synth/drum machine dirge that sounds like Supersilent finally laying down a rough demo for their early Cure recalling goth pop crossover smash... fuck. Urban Disease suggests that there is a hell of a lot more to Billy Bao than "noise rock." There are plenty of moments identifiable as being grounded in some kind of junky but highly dynamic approach to improv but then there's the matter of Mattin, and if he really is responsible for arranging such a bizarre assortment of sounds into a two sided Long Player format... well, kudos to him. Whenever he did this. If he did this. I've never heard an album quite like Urban Disease and it's easily 2010's most confounding releases, but also one of the best.

Rating: Excellent.

Download Link:

Flaming Tunes - Flaming Tunes (1985)

What exactly did Gareth Williams bring to the table during his tenure as a member of This Heat? For people who try to talk about that band, his presence provides a great amount of convenience, allowing for a binary to be established with Williams on one end and Charles and Charles on the other. Two formally trained musicians finding their voices within the British prog scene team up with a "non-musician" who serves as their foil. Take away Williams and they could have been Steely Dan. Throw him into the mix and shit gets totally crazy like if Brian Eno had been around to overdub his squishy farts all over Avalon.

But no, that's probably not actually the case. This Heat was just a band of wild and crazy guys, music theory scholars or not. The free improv faceshredding of "Rainforest" was probably born more out of Bullen and Hayward's desires to infuse their prog-rock pedigrees with genuine nihilism than whatever Williams was all about. They must have been thrilled to have him along for the ride, dicking around with keyboard sounds and tape loops and what have you, coming with a background in untainted primitivism that helped his more inescapably cerebral bandmates arrive at something more purely visceral.

To nobody's surprise, Gareth Williams's post-This Heat work isn't some kind of brainily orchestrated Univers Zero recalling RIO odyssey. Not that Charles Hayward's recordings made under the Camberwell Now name were either, but you did kind of get the sense that one of the main draws was the band element, three or however many individuals hammering away all workmanlike at those sexy mathematical grooves. Collaborating as Flaming Tunes, Gareth and friend Mary Currie created music that truly feels "assembled," as if they started by laying down four minutes of one sound and then adding another and another, resulting in music that depends on the ability of its repetitive, simple melodies to be honestly transfixing. I can't say whether or not that accurately describes how Williams and Currie worked, but it's a method that I've often fallen into as a musician, partly due to laziness and partly due to a natural curiosity to see respectable work built up from nothing.

This is the sort of composition style that I get a sense of whilst listening to the recorded output of Flaming Tunes, originally released on cassette 25 years ago. They were often misinterpreted by people as being "This Heat's final demo tapes" and the recordings are awfully crude sounding, but in terms of composition as well as sonics. There are vocal melodies but the closest thing to pop that the songs might resemble are very rough demos for some of the Another Green World vocal numbers, being more about how the drum machine rhythms and plinkety plonkety piano lines and whatever sounds are lurking behind them all manage to just kind of hang in the air as long as they need to, doing what they need to do, which isn't much. Mix that in with the arcane Britishness of it all (something I can't even begin to properly articulate) and I can't help but be reminded of other deconstructions of UK art rock like D.I. Go Pop, early Shadow Ring, Position Normal... yet rather than utilizing "found sounds" (even though they constitute a significant chunk of "Raindrops From Heaven" and probably pop up elsewhere, too), it's the music itself that ends up having a certain "found" aura about it. Maybe that's just the shitty recording quality, though, who the fuck knows. What I'm trying to say is that this CD is pretty all right.

Rating: I enjoy it. Bought it out of This Heat fandom and was kind of underwhelmed at first but it's a grower! I was always under the impression that Gareth's duties in This Heat did not cross over into the realms of the singing/writing of the vocal melodies but the tone of his voice and the things that he sings with it kind of suggest otherwise. Flaming Tunes doesn't quite reveal to the listener who brought what to This Heat but it does provide some fuel for speculation.

Download Link: "Beguiling The Hours"... maybe it's an okay example of what I've talked about so far, maybe it isn't quite that, but the melody is nice and coupled with the vocals it sort of reminds me of Syd Barrett's solo work. Which is a good thing.

Defektors - The Bottom of The City (2010)

Hey, this band plays "punk rock." It's easy to get excited about because the slave driving beatz and rhythm guitar action often recall the Wipers, not to mention the fact that the production is clear as a bell and you always get the sense that you're hearing the sort of melodically minded music that is well executed to the point that it deserves to be put up there with all your favorite late '70s classics that have proven to be timelessly listenable through the ages. However, it's not that great and I'll probably never listen to it again once this year has passed. Or hell, once I've finished writing this. I guess they have a neat sound but where's the unavoidable infectiousness of the hooks? Where's the danger? Where's the scummy, cruddy "vibe"? I just hear some solid dudes with some cool records and not much else. Maybe it's a slight cut above those Busy Signals and Daily Void albums that I listened to one time but not much. Still pretty empty shit. I'll nod in recognition at the extended noisy guitar odyssey during the last five minutes of "Burning Light" but that shit ain't "Youth of America." It ain't even Hot Snakes, for that matter. Those guys brought the heaviness and catchiness, whereas the Defektors' game is pretty limp dicked. Might be cool to see live, though.

Rating: Whatever.

Download Link:

Aerosmith - Toys in the Attic (1975)


there's so much thought i want to put into dissecting this towering rock classic that beats the pitiful living shit out of appetite for destruction but it'd take a gigantic dedicated block of time that i'm not feeling up to. either way i can't emphasize enough how badly i want people to hear the first decade of aerosmith albums and get their heads out of their asses about some video game cash-in or rollercoaster or whatever. i know y'all love at least rocks which is fine but some intangible quality about this one does it for me the most. this is like the ugliest, brownest fucking album in the world, the coked out titty bar bender with a harvey milk album cover always looming in the horizon, and obv it defines this band perfectly. title track in particular is just this tidal wave of stale smoke and sewer sludge but the guitars and harmonies are still so sharp -just some dudes realizing they could stay the same hopeless hedonistic junkies of five years ago and take over the world with it. and unlike any of their other albums they manage to pull off that attitude back to front, through a seriously, kind of bizarrely creative and dynamic album given the knucklehead type dudes who put this thing together.

track by track rundown cause i got nothing else:

most of the cred for 'uncle salty' goes to whoever engineered this thing because there's no way these fucking slobs could have arranged a song like this. harmonies on the bridge are perfect, all the emoting in general is spot-on no matter how many countless takes there must have been

'adam's apple' is feminist rock with a great riff. this and 'big ten inch record,' they may be all about the loud fast dumb thing but it's safe to say no one who tried to pull this kind of shit off was as knowingly smart-ass or clever or self-aware. generally you think this is an ac/dc-caliber meathead band but of all the songs to make you change your mind somehow it's these two

sweet emotion/walk this way i don't listen to these anymore but obviously they're incredible. the 'sweet emotion' riff is my involuntary mental soundtrack to a lot of daily activities. also i like watching those vh1 hip hop countdowns where they insist that the aerosmith/run-DMC collab was one of the defining moments in american racial relations

i know half this post has been backhand compliments which is completely unfair to a band i love and a catalog i celebrate in its near-entirety so i'll go on record as saying 'no more no more' is at least one of the best rock songs of all time. i don't know why i go for this one over toys or uncle salty but it's like, point out one even slightly objectionable thing about this song. there are two billion examples of 'no more no mores' in this genre and this is no doubt the textbook flawless standard. it'd been floating in the aether since 'satisfaction.' they walk around strung out covered in blood in shitty clothes fucking countless anonymous women with death always lurking around the corner and they're so grateful for this perfect life, this american dream. this song is like walking on sunshine

'round and round' sounds like vanilla fudge i guess, it's good, sounds like it should be a get your wings b-side

'you see me cryin' is pretty catchy, producer kind of fucked it up with the overmixed strings but it's about as good as a song like this is gonna be. steve tyler is a great singer, no homo but dude is insane and this one is kind of his deserved diva moment

all in all i treasure this album dearly and would take it over let it bleed and beggars banquet all day, not to mention whatever other received wisdom bullshit you can come up with. the faces or whatever

here's this but just go get it out of your dad's basement