Monthly Archives: October 2016

Sometimes I’m ashamed for my fellow music critics. Take their rude treatment of Bauhaus’ 1980 debut, In the Flat Field. An NME writer described the LP as “nine meaningless moans and flails bereft of even the most cursory contour of interest,” while a Sounds writer dismissed the LP for having “No songs. Just tracks (ugh). Too priggish and conceited,” before writing the LP off as “coldly conceited.”

I’m no Goth fan because I have a pulse, but I think the writers above are idiots. I will concede that In the Flat Field is cold, but I also happen to find it brilliant—one of the finest LPs of 1980. Clamorous and loud, it’s a wonderful example of the sonic possibilities of carefully controlled noise, and its wild sounds and angular riffs provide the perfect backdrop for the chilly vocals of Peter Murphy. Take “Dive.” Daniel Ash’s guitar playing and saxophone work are brilliantly crisp and menacing, the tune proceeds at a breakneck pace, and Murphy’s vocals are a marvel; he stutters, shouts, does it all. Or take LP opener “Double Dare.” It commences with some heavily fuzzed out riffs, then the drums kick in, and this is metal, people. Murphy is as his dark best, producing nonsense noises when he isn’t shouting, the rhythm section is heavy as Flipper, and what we have here is a drone rocker as good as any by No Trend.

The title cut is a racing rumble of distorted guitar, with great percussion and Murphy singing about who knows what (“black matted lace of pregnant cows”???), although the chorus is clear enough: “I do get bored, I get bored/In the flat field.” My recommendation is to ignore the lyrics about “spunge stained sheets” and hone in on Ash’s shredding sheets of guitar noise, the wonderful percussion, and Murphy’s vocals, which climb to an apocalyptic pitch while Ash’s guitar howls and howls. “A God in an Alcove” opens with some tentative guitar and Murphy sounding like he’s been gagged, before the song’s angular riff takes over. Ash’s guitar is ominous, someone joins Murphy on vocals, and together they make a wonderful noise, and then the song takes flight, 100 mph in a 55 zone. “Silly,” repeats Murphy, before the song’s close, but there’s nothing silly about the tune, which rocks.

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The post-punk band originally lasted only five years, but the work of Bauhaus continues to have an influence on a host of bands that would come after them. Drawing on the darker sounds of The Velvet Underground and glam, Bauhaus was credited with starting goth rock, possibly because its groundbreaking first single in 1979 was the nine-minute “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” about the chap who played the most famous vampire.

Composed of singer Peter Murphy, guitarist Daniel Ash, and brothers Kevin Haskins on drums and bassist David J, Bauhaus reunited to great acclaim just twice—in 1998 and again at Coachella in 2005. 

Fitting for a band named after an art movement founded 60 years earlier, Bauhaus left behind a visual trove that included not only its striking logo, but various flyers, posters, and cover art along with a load of unseen sketches, photos, and set lists. Many of them are jammed into the new coffee table book, Bauhaus Undead: The Visual History and Legacy of Bauhaus. Its author is drummer Haskins, who would go on to join Ash in Tones on Tail, and with David J joining those two, the band Love and Rockets which lasted three times as long as Bauhaus. 

We talked to Haskins, 56, from his studio in Los Angeles, where he’s lived for 25 years about the book, Bela, his beats, and Bauhaus.

There have always been a lot of Bauhaus fans in L.A., right?

Yeah, there are. Actually, last Halloween, Daniel and I DJ’d at a bar in L.A. and there was a line around the block, people couldn’t get in. So we do have a good fan base here, yeah.

Halloween is the time for “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” after all.

You always hear ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ on the radio. And we get offers to perform and DJ around this time. So yeah, I guess people think about us around this time.

What’s the story behind that song? It may be your best known, but it was also your first. How did that come about.

Well, David had just joined the band and we hadn’t rehearsed with him at this point. He called up Daniel the night before the first rehearsal and told him he had this lyric about Bela Lugosi, you know, with a vampire theme. And Daniel said, well, that’s good because I came up with these haunting chords today, so maybe those two things will go together well. So we got to rehearsal, David gave Peter the lyrics sheet, Daniel started playing the haunting chords, and David started looking around for a bass line.

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“As a kid I never had vinyl around me, it was strictly cassettes and CDs, and I believe this led to me becoming a serial ‘skipper.’”

“I would never really listen to albums in full as it was so easy to skip a track on a Walkman or hit fast forward in the first few seconds, and so I only got to know key tracks on a lot of records due to my own impatience.

It wasn’t really until I moved out of student halls and in to a flat with my good friend and producer Joe Wills that I understood vinyl and developed a love for the format. It wasn’t the biggest collection, but it was a great one, and there was no greater feeling putting on a record, turning up the volume, and just going about my day and chores listening to albums in full.

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Sure, he’s a gun control advocate’s worst nightmare, and his music has always leaned heavily towards the stupid, but I happen to like both guns and stupid—as I’ve noted before, during my formative years my younger brother and I used to get drunk and take our dad’s .22 cat rifle to the basement of the house, where we’d fire it at the brick wall maybe 8 feet away in a game we called “dodge the ricochet.” So I can sort of relate to Ted Nugent, although you’ll never catch me shooting deer, moose, or darling little chipmunks, or whatever else happens to be in season at the moment, with a bazooka.

Me, I prefer Nugent’s unique brand of stupid to the Kiss brand of stupid, or any other brand of stupid (Grand Funk!) that comes to mind. That said, I can only handle it in small quantities, which is what makes 1998’s Super Hits so nice. Ten songs, all of them stump dumb in an addictive sort of way; who needs, or even wants, anything more? Granted, both the sublimely dim Masters and Johnson primers “Yank Me Crank Me” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” are MIA, but we all have to make sacrifices for brevity’s sake.

You can say what you want about crazy Ted, but I love the sound of his guitar, and the fact that his songs don’t mess about: most of them are jacked up on crank, even if Ted the anti-drug advocate isn’t. And he knows how to write a decent melody, too, which is ace. Why, I would almost go so far as to say I don’t see the downside, except that Ted is, well, an asshole. But he’s asshole with wango tango, capiche? As is evidenced once again by the generically titled Super Hits, which covers must of the bases, although it does include a few tunes that are both dumb and lame.

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Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

The Airborne Toxic Event – America
The March Divide – I Might
Bad Reed – Stained Glass
Pussy Riot feat. Desi Mo & Leikeli47 – Straight Outta Vagina
The Burgeoning – Loud Dreams
Kristoffer & The Harbour Heads – Nervous In Berlin
Monster Rally – Moonlight Chase
LEØ – Us
Nick Pes – Sunsets
Enzo Bennet x Will Gittens – Trap Queen
elkkle – Don’t Look Down
Brooke Hummel – Queens of Nothing

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Morricone Youth – “Night of the Living Dead” EP

The Chainsmokers – All We Know (Hook N Sling Mix)
Henry Pope + Littlefoot – Swans
James Blake feat. Bon Iver – I Need A Forest Fire (COFRESI Remix)
Du Tonc – Keep Movin’
Madeleine Chartrand – Ani Kuni (2nd Class Citizen edit)
Cryptolect – Punished
David Starfire – Shock (feat. Ragga Twins)
EXSSV – Doomsday
Blank Face – Don’t Give A Fuck
Shaz Illyork feat. Blank Face – Make Way
Doctor P & Flux Pavilion – P.D.S. feat. Jarren Benton (Debroka Remix)
Felmax & TYNVN – Grail
AutoErotique – Run For Cover

You’re alone in the dark, and the only voices of reason you have are your thoughts. Don’t be fooled; darkness is not a place of solitude.

Sounds that are ordinarily mundane, like a dripping faucet or a creaky wood floor, become amplified, grabbing your undivided attention. If you’re devoid of light for too long, these sounds might completely betray you. Welcome to the sadistic and moribund world of Halloween. Below we’ve compiled a list of song with lyrics and situations that will make you look behind your back and perhaps leave you scared…shitless.

Megadeth – Go To Hell | Don’t fear the reaper? That’s nonsense when your soul is wagered on a game of eternal blackjack. The Charon, the ghastly oarsman who shepherds souls, bears little comparison to the fateful entity that has dominion over the realm of fire and brimstone. Uncorrupted minds everywhere—if you hear Dave Mustaine’s verses, rebuke them immediately. Or damnation will be upon you.

Audra – You’re So Pretty | The acoustic scales over the chamber alone are chilling. The sequence of the four-note motif cycles in this tune like the seconds along a clock. What’s the fate of this woman trapped in the basement? What will happen to her? Only time will tell.

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Any shelf dedicated to classic California punk requires representation by the Flesh Eaters of Chris Desjardins, aka Chris D. Never a bad record has he made under that moniker, but the finest of them remains the talent-drenched and enduringly brilliant 1981 LP A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die. It’s just been given a welcome reissue by Superior Viaduct of San Francisco.

I first learned of Chris D.’s work in the latter portion of the 1980s, my discovery largely aided by the diligent underground music press of the era, in particular the scribbling of Byron Coley. While numerous zines featured reviews of both the Flesh Eaters and Chris D.’s band of the period The Divine Horsemen, it was really Coley that helped to put Desjardins’ art in proper context.

In fact, Coley’s such a determined champion of the man’s work that his new liners for this reissue aren’t an extra so much as a prerequisite. And the insight was found in more than just reviews, articles, and prior sleeve notes, as Coley and Forced Exposure publisher/writer Jimmy Johnson conducted an extensive interview with Desjardins for issue #12 of their reliably hefty “quarterly” mag. The duo also provided space in the back for “Chris D.’s Video Guide,” an enjoyable and extremely enlightening tour of the guy’s VHS collection.

I’d already sized Desjardins up as a major part of the USA’s roots punk brigade, his output landing in the same rough region as The Cramps, X, The Blasters, The Plugz, and The Gun Club, but the conversation in FE presented him as an uncommonly astute member of the punk community (especially when compared with the average Flipside chat).

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“I am from Washington, D.C. and recently moved just a couple of miles out into Virginia, and now I live very close to an amazing record store called CD Cellar. It has an extensive collection of music and I feel spoiled rotten that it’s so close.”

“I have a vinyl wall in my apartment where I display twelve albums, which I’ll change from time to time, but right now the albums on display are; ANOHNI’s Hopelessness, Father John Misty’s records I love you, Honeybear and Fear Fun, Tribe Called Quest Midnight Marauders, Radiohead In Rainbows, Tame Impala Currents, Niki & The Dove Instinct, Jamie XX In Colour, Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Prince Purple Rain.

When I am figuring out my own album artwork the real test for me is asking myself, “Would I want to hang this on my wall”? If it won’t look beautiful as a 12” then it isn’t good enough to be the album art.

My earliest obsessions were Michael Jackson and The Carpenters. I had a Fisher price Tape recorder that basically became another appendage, as I never wanted to be without music. This dependence with music was a learned trait because my family was the same way. We moved, on average, every two years due to my father’s occupation in the military and my mom wouldn’t let the movers take the stereo system.

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Well I’ll be damned. I didn’t think Bob Weir, the eternal boy howdy of the Grateful Dead, had it in him. After decades of coasting—his last great solo offering, 1972’s Ace, was released a shocking 44 years ago—here comes Weir, looking as weather worn as Grizzly Adams in his white beard, or like the great D.B. Cooper finally emerging from the Washington state wilderness, with an album that is not just good, but downright excellent. It just goes to show you—never count a fellow out until he’s six feet underground, and for at least three days at that.

2016’s Blue Mountain is an album of “cowboy songs,” according to Weir’s collaborator Josh Ritter, and was inspired, according to Weir, by his days as a 15-year-old ranch hand in Wyoming. But this is not a collection of other people’s music; Weir had a hand in writing the music for every song, while Ritter both contributed to the music and penned the better part of the lyrics. And so far as the descriptions of it as “campfire music” go I disagree; many of these songs are far too lush and musically sophisticated to cook weenies on a stick to. But two things they are for sure: beautiful and thoughtful. They demonstrate that the eternal Peter Pan of the Dead has finally grown up and gotten wise, and has honed his songwriting skills in the process. Compared to his previous solo outing, 1978’s Heaven Help the Fool, which utilized lots of studio hacks and frankly sucked like an industrial vacuum cleaner, Blue Mountain is a cool breath of fresh Wyoming air.

Blue Mountain is the work of a man who has finally come face to face with his own mortality, as Weir demonstrates on the elegiac and lovely album closer “One More River to Cross,” in which he acknowledges he’s tired but nearing that final home in the bye-and-bye. And the very rhythmic “Lay My Lily Down” is an unreconstructed death ballad complete with rattling chains, and has Weir singing, “Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow/Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground/Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow/To lay my Lily down.” Weir, whose vocals during the Grateful Dead years generally left me cold because, well, he never managed to make the words he was singing sound convincing, sounds like the real thing here, just as he does on the great “Only a River,” a somber but utterly sublime paean to the Shenandoah River. “Only a river gonna make things right,” he sings, longing to see that lovely river once more.

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Electro rock, dream pop, electronica, whatever you want to call it, Phantogram have enjoyed a slow burn over the past decade to emerge as a supernova in 2016. The stars are truly aligned for the Greenwhich, New York based duo of Josh Carter (vocals, guitars) and Sarah Barthel (vocals, keyboards). A brilliant new record simply titled Three finds them at the top of their game with some of their best songwriting to date.

While their early material was very Cocteau Twins-esque, Phantogram continue to evolve their sound into something much more organic. I would guess that the years of touring and expansion of the live band have played a role in achieving a much more holistic view of songwriting. This was the first time that I’ve seen the band live and I would say that they have virtually perfected the live show.

The House of Blues in Boston is such a fantastic venue. Even when it’s sold out it’s not miserable like many other venues that continue to jam people in at capacity. The show opened up with a sort of semi-transparent black screen with the band lit up as silhouettes projected to the crowd. Although I feel like I’ve seen this before, it really added an element of mystique, and when the curtain finally dropped for song number four, Phantogram were locked and loaded.

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