Kommissar Hjuler / Mama Baer - 'Amerikanische Poesie Und Alkoholismus' (Feeding Tube)

I'm not sure what this became a roadblock to the project because while it's certainly a slab of extremely dissonant art-brut Fluxus madness, it's not the most difficult thing to write about. The truth is, I found myself listening to side A, by the Kommissar and Frau ('Once Again Concrete Poetry') repeatedly, injecting a musical reading onto something that probably was not intended to be seen that way. But this side-long live performance, a mixture of American poetry records, static hiss, and shouted readings through a low-quality amplifier, somehow succeeds in attaining some sort of mantra-like resonance. Hjuler's voice often resembles a comedic parody of a James Bond villain (like something out of Austin Powers) and it's lurching into 'ONCE AGAIN! CONCRETE POETRY' approximately eight million times starts to take on a visual element. By the end I feel like I'm there, imagining this surely big, sweaty and hairy German bounding across the stage behaving badly in the tradition of all central European performance art. And then on the flip is his partner, Mama Baer, though this is properly a split LP and not a collaboration. 'Alcoholisme - brut' parts 1 and 2 are somewhat more obtuse. It's collaged from tape material, in the greatest of pause-button edit styles, with splices and other distortions providing the rhythmic muscle like a Tall Dwarfs song on downers. Over this are various found materials, high pitched howls and whistles, and likely the wooden recorder on the cover. Baer sings in places, in English, and it's ragged and haunting, with words that comes surprisingly fast and deny any attempt to find narrative. A good use of the stereo field too; the little bursts and buzzes of static dance back and forth across the field and the tape-manipulated squealing making a lovely counterpoint. The second part builds in intensity, with Baer's chant of 'anymore, anymore, anymore' (I think) becoming hypnotic, and the recorder getting as aggressive as you've ever heard such an instruments. Through it all lies a good deal of space, however, and both sides of this record are remarkable in how they maintain a sense of control, never piling things on even when the aesthetic often drives towards it. I give the nod to the Mama Baer side here, as it seems to offer the most encouragement for repeated listens, even though I gave Kommissar & Frau more time myself.

Simon Joyner ‎– 'The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll' (Sing, Eunuchs!)

My copy actually has a white sleeve, but it's so much easier to steal these images than to scan them. I hope that this brief excursion into early Simon Joyner records is as rewarding to read about as it is for me to listen to; this is an intensely beautiful body of work from a gifted songwriter whose talent only further expanded over the subsequent two decades, though for some reason I only have his early ones. The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll is a nice hybrid of the ragged approach found on his Iffy cassette and the somewhat most contemplative singer-songwriter vibe of the subsequent Room Temperature cassette. This is his first LP release and it's spread across different sounds and styles, with some band work and scarring electric guitar playing, perhaps by Joyner or perhaps with a band - no one else is credited but I'd guess Chris Deden is the drummer. Joyner is a natural with an acoustic guitar but over his career he has resisted attempts to pigeonhole him into the coffeeshop/open-mic genre. Here, electricity brings a darker cadence, especially on songs like '747', 'August (Die She Must)' and 'Fallen Man'. There's a lot of personal pronoun work here, and it's neither intensely soul-baring nor character work, which is maybe one of the reasons that Joyner's never found major commercial success. Instead, he writes songs that are rich in imagery, oblique enough to have an air of mystery, and relatable in fleeting passages. 'Appendix' is a long and somewhat surreal travelogue, which is quite compelling in it's manic strumming; it's the acoustic mirror of side one's 'I Went to the Lady of Perpetual Healing', which seems to describe a mystical experience but is maybe a bit tongue-in-cheek. These are great, ragged indie rock accompaniments, Omaha style, and they perfectly complement Joyner's unorthodox voice; the scratchy violin on 'Cole Porter' can act as a symbol of the whole scene he came from at this time, which stretched to the West Coast to include the Shrimper label and artists like Refrigerator and the Mountain Goats, who Joyner shares an obvious musical affinity with. It comes to a head with the final track, 'Joy Division' (where have we heard that name before?), which is an electric guitar and voice tune, sung to a father and with the same sense of mild desperation that rings through the whole album. It crescendos into a brief moment of cathartic rocking out, before ending with a tape splice. It's sudden, but suddenly moving as well, and there's still a glimmer of teen angst despite the more sophisticated approach to lyric writing. This style of arrangements is right up my alley but it set these artists aside from more commercially-minded songwriters; I clicked with it as an adolescent in the mid-90s because it felt intimate, homemade, and inviting. If the songwriting is pure then there should be no need for big studio production, and I think I still believe that today.

Ici La Bas (Black Noise)

A prized possession here, Ici La Bas would be normally filed under H for the Homosexuals, or maybe a bit deeper down in the Is for 'Les Incroyables' (credited as the producer), but I'm going with the Discogs.com hierarchy here – they have it as a self-titled release by the artist Ici La Bas (their only release, of course).  All six of these tracks appear on the indispensible first disc of the Homosexuals Astral Glamour compilation, though most are pushed towards the ass-end of the sequence. And this is a prime slice of the experimental side of these guys, with 'Regard Omission', 'Galore Galore' and 'Cause A Commotion' all experiments in reverbed guitars and other studio assemblages. I mean, it's all studio assemblages - 'Nippon Airways' is a dub song, getting away with it in the way that so many UK artists of the late 70s were able to do. The middle cuts from each side are the most coherent songs; I've listened to 'The Total Drop' so many times that it feels like a part of my own heartbeat, though it's a bouncy and bubblegummy entry for the Homosexuals canon and probably not one many others adores as much as I do. 'Flying' is a bit more on the jagged, sneering side of things but it's propelled with a beautiful momentum. In many ways, the genius of this broken collective only comes together when compiled as a larger body of work. Had I only this 12" to go from, I would find it occasionally brilliant and slightly frustrating, which is of course exactly what the Homosexuals were, but hardly anything to build a religion around. There's no 'Hearts in Exile' or 'False Sentiments' here, but knowing those cuts from the other releases it congeals into something magnificent, work that inspires not just in the mysterious nature of their public identity, but in the music itself, which is timeless and brilliant. Tiger makes it better.

Game Theory - 'Lolita Nation' (Enigma)

And here it is, the record that Game Theory's reputation is really founded upon, and Scott Miller's truest and most unencumbered statement of purpose. This is one of those cases where the notorious difficult double album really is their masterpiece; I'd say it's their Trout Mask Replica, except the length of Lolita Nation isn't due to impenetrable density (despite the bizarre avant-experiments on side three, one of which I will cut and paste the full title of here to make this post unnecessarily longer: 'All Clockwork And No Bodily Fluids Makes Hal A Dull Metal Humbert / In Heaven Every Elephant Baby Wants To Be So Full Of Sting / Paul Simon In The Park With Canticle / But You Can't Pick Your Friends / Vacuum Genesis / Defmarcos - Howsometh - Ingdotime - Salengths - Omethingl - Etbfollow - Afternoo - Ngetprese - Ntmomonti - Fthingswo - Ntalwaysb - Ethiswayt - Bcacausea - Bwasteaft - Ernoonwhe - Neqbmeret - Urnfromsh - Owlittleg - Reenplace - 27'). No, it's just kind of a LOOONG record, and new guitarist Donette Thayer is promoted to co-songwriter here, contributing a few like 'Look Away' and co-writing the brilliant opening hit 'Not Because You Can'. This is still an 80s pop record, so if you came expecting Schoenberg-influenced skronk, you've chosen incorrectly. Side one is about a perfect of a takeoff as you can get - the by-now standard Game Theory opening flash of amusical oddness, a brilliant first proper song ('Not Before You Can', which is all angles and tension before the singing finally delivers the money shot), and then it starts to get weird. But not too weird - the fragmentary 'Go Ahead, You're Dying To' is more like a hint of future worlds (some of which will be ruled by a certain Emperor Robert Pollard), and 'Dripping With Looks' is one of Miller's finest achievements ever, a fierce and soaring monster with a simple, drum-free arrangement that casts the song in a perfectly inappropriate heavy metal glow. As much as I've listened to Lolita Nation, I must confess side 1 has received about thirty times as much airplay as the other sides; 'We Love you Carol and Alison' and 'The Waist and the Knees' close it out, both amazing songs, and it would be a perfect, perfect EP if the other three sides were blank. But I'm not trying to diminish the rest of the record, which is consistent throughout, though there are a few dull spots (Thayer's 'Mammoth Gardens' is truly unremarkable, reminding me a little bit of Cyndi Lauper actually, and the instrumental 'Where The Have to Let You In', written by drummer/guitarist Gil Ray, feels like a wasted opportunity). The Thayer-sung contributions are mostly fine, if typical pop songs of the era, and neither can hang with heavyweight cuts like 'One More For St. Michael' or even 'Chardonnay' - there's an inventiveness, not just lyrically, but in how the songs fit together and are delivered, that is the Scott Miller Sound. Side three is the 'weird' side (aren't 'weird' sides always side 3??) but it just means there's more short experiments in between the 'real' songs, some of them perfect and some of them (such as the aforementioned  'All Clockwork And No Bodily Fluids Makes Hal A Dull Metal Humbert / In Heaven Every Elephant Baby Wants To Be So Full Of Sting / Paul Simon In The Park With Canticle / But You Can't Pick Your Friends / Vacuum Genesis / Defmarcos - Howsometh - Ingdotime - Salengths - Omethingl - Etbfollow - Afternoo - Ngetprese - Ntmomonti - Fthingswo - Ntalwaysb - Ethiswayt - Bcacausea - Bwasteaft - Ernoonwhe - Neqbmeret - Urnfromsh - Owlittleg - Reenplace - 27' being primitive and inconclusive, and not in a good way). The shorter song fragments are something Miller returned to years later for Loud Family's Days for Days, and a few (such as 'Exactly What We Don't Want to Hear') don't need to be any longer. Production-wise this is a bit glossier than Real Nighttime, with the keyboards and vocals even more prominent. The keyboard sound here is about as far away from the retro-hip analogue synths that became popular a decade later with bands such as Stereolab, Broadcast and the American Analog Set, and that's also part of the charm. Nothing here could ever sound like it wasn't made in 1987, but it's still somehow a unique beast that transcends the limitations of the zeitgeist. Miller's best work, probably, is really this, and it's not a concise or perfect vision - it's a sprawling, slightly messy cornucopia of ideas. But some artists are just more successful that way.

Destroyer - 'City of Daughters' (Tinker/Cave Canem)

I don't have the privilege of seeing the Soundscan figures, but I'd guess that latest Destroyer album at the time of this writing, Kaputt, had to be his biggest selling. Maybe I should actually say biggest 'hit' because popularity probably has little connection these days to actually 'moving units' or whatever they used to say. I feel like everywhere I go nowadays, I encounter some kid playing it through laptop speakers. Good for Bejar, cause he's been churning out great music for a long time and I'm happy for him to find an audience, even if I'm personally yet to click with Kaputt. City of Daughters is from the other end of his career - it's not his first album but his first really good one. This is almost as stripped-down as his debut, based mostly around acoustic guitar and voice, though with some Emax synthesiser interludes and a nice backing band here and there. The Emax interludes aren't just filler - 'Emax II' is a lovely bit of electroacoustic residue.  It's tough for me to write about Destroyer as I find him to be the Canadian indie-rock reincarnation of Wallace Stevens - difficult as all-fuck to 'explain' but more than easy to be moved by. The musical cadences are the bonus that Mr. Bejar has over Mr. Stevens, so there's added non-meaning through emphasis and catchiness. For example, 'I Want This Cyclops' is a wonderful jaunty ride, but it's something about two sisters on a plane and an actual saskwatch with one eye, and the fuck if I can figure it out. But that's modernism at it's best - I can put my own meaning into things, and I've done that a lot. Maybe I just like singing along about the 'new heretical dawn'. Did I mention I love Destroyer? I've been immersed in his work since Streethawk: A Seduction, which we'll get to soon enough on the CD blog, and I've always seen City of Daughters, Thief, and Streehawk as a trilogy even though there's not much to link them besides a similar sound in the backing bands (though the lineups aren't consistent). This is a less ambitious Destroyer - before the big production of This Night, the midi experiments of Your Blues, the temporary 'return to form' of Rubies and of course Kaputt's 80's disco coke gloss. But again, what makes these records so different? The lyrics are always great, so it really comes down to my own personal tastes - I like the simplicity of songs like 'School, And the Girls Who Go There' more - they're somewhere in-between coffeeshop troubadour and indie pick-up band. Jennifer's halter top is a consecrated altar, after all. Like Queen, he actually saved the title track for his next album. This also has 'No Cease Fires! (Crimes Against the State of Our Love, Baby)' which should have been a smash hit anthem in an alternate universe (how many times do I type those words in these pages?). It's a confident record, a real portrait of a Canadian 1996 at least as I imagine it, and the start of something great.

Anti-Pop Consortium - 'Tragic Epilogue' (75 Ark)

These guys should have been so awesome. The music media proclaimed that "hip-hop" and "experimental" had finally found their place together, 'cept whenever I listen to this (or, come to think of it, anything else ever described as such) there's too much of the former and not enough of the latter. What makes this so "experimental"? That these guys are kinda nerdy, like weird words, and employ more stoner/lo-fi production methods than radio-friendly rap? I guess I must accept the reality: I just don't like hip-hop; if I want experimental + language I'll go to Robert Ashley or Henri Chopin. The instrumentals are probably my favorite part, which, I know, says more about me than about the music itself. Maybe I'm being too hard on them, but I don't think time has been too kind to this; there's a few 'interesting' elements, but interesting in a Logan's Run kind of way. Maybe they're talking about slingshotting into the sun and walls turning inside out, but it still has that rap diction. That masculine affect is a turn-off; it makes me think that the real radicals are the white kids doing sound poetry in the basements of Columbus, OH and other such dens of weirdness. Saying 'Control-alt-delete' in a rap song was probably a little more edgy in 2000 but now you might as well rap "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC." The Wire used to jizz over these guys if I remember correctly - well, mission accomplished cause they opened up for Radiohead on tour and thus ensured their audience would be eternally white kids who went to college round the turn of the millenium (well .... I must admit, my hand is raised there). Not that there's anything wrong with that - far be it from DUSAET to suggest that hip-hop must have some radical communicative purpose; we're even less keen to engage in stupid debates about 'authenticity' or 'keeping it real' or whatever. And I hope I don't sound too hung up on the white audience thing - there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. My point is that out of the 1,100 or so records that will ultimately get their time here, I feel like I can connect to just about every one of them. This is one where I cannot; and like all 'reviews', this says more about me than the music.

Amon Düül II - 'Wolf City' (United Artists)

We continue our look at "every other Amon Düül II record" with Wolf City, from '72.  Post-Lemmings AD2 should really be Amon Düül III, as there's some lineup switcheroos and a fairly new direction, though the Internet informs that there actually was an Amon Düül III in the 1980s, also known as Amon Düül UK.  Maybe instead of a new direction it's better to say that Wolf City continues the evolution of trends that are audible back in the Phallus Days.  The main trend is really 'songwriting', as this conforms more to a classic pop/rock album, or maybe defining prog-pop (in a dude way, not like Steely Dan).  The vocals are way up in the mix and there's a lyrical swing that carries through the whole record.   Something feels "tighter" despite the element of 'space' still thick in every song - Germanic space, not American-style open-form space (they're different, really!).  The instrumental jam has a bunch of Indian musicians creating a microtonal soup,  classic appetizer of the early 70s; somehow it feels like the missing link between the earlier records and this.  With all the singing in English, crisp production, and fairly accessible structures, this doesn't feel like das Sellout.  Actually the rhythms are crunchy and thick enough that this almost feels like a proto-metal record, reminding me of a band like Budgie.  The vocals on some tracks are pure N.W.O.B.H.M., and maybe were heard by a few German kids (the Scorpions?) even if Chuck Eddy calls this later period their "prog-rock downfall".  Another stunning gatefold, though this one is less spaceship and more bad trip.