Counterpoint: PTL for Jack White

It's been a good day.  Usually the earworms infesting my brain are just horrible, like they were yesterday, but today everything has been set to this new tune from Jack White.  This business meeting, for example, was set to "Lazaretto."  In my brain.  Nice.

And SRSLY, thank sweet baby Jesus.  You know why?  Because I saw this stupid fucking meme on facebook yesterday:

And so OF COURSE this stupid song had to be stuck in my head all day and all night.  I had forgotten about this song, actually.  But yeah, it existed.



At least YouTube has a killer live studio version of this song.  There's so few of those for the antiquated gems such as these.

Knock knock!  What do Jack White and Kenny Rogers have in common?  Earworms ahoy.

(And PS, in case you don't know what PTL refers to, here.  I would hate for any reader to feel excluded from the lexicon.)

earwurm du jour: werk version

I werk at a children's hospital and we get a lot of insane child names up in here sometimes. In particular I work in a unit where we have "frequent flyers" or children who return for therapy again and again. Some of them have names that just trigger my internal radio to start playing certain songs. It doesn't necessarily have to be the name of a song although that happens. It is often a rhyming name, or sometimes even a drug name with a particular cadence that matches a melody of a song.

Today our patient Deandre came up. I always instantly hear this song when I see his name. Instantly. 

dont ever let it a child named Layla pass thru my queue, or I will instantly hear this riff, and be losing my motherfucking mind by the end of the day. 

and the cadence of the drug Amlodipine perfectly matches this shit. Thankfully I now see this drug so often that the madness has stopped, somewhat...

finally a coworker named Frank inevitably summons this song onto internal radio (thank god he is only working like every other weekend or I might go insane)


There are loads of other workplace song association examples I could present to you here, but I'd rather test the waters and see exactly how crazy I appear after this. Does this happen to other people? Surely it must, but to this degree? Worse? How do you cope with it? I mean I always have some lil jam rattlin around in there, but the ability of certain names/drugs to conjure is noteworthy. But as far as earworms go you could do worse than fucking L7! 

Dammit Woods!

To properly engage in this blog post, please click the play button below and listen while you read!  We are interactive!



Nice, huh?

OK, Woods is a band that opened for Dungen in 2009, which is really the only reason I knew about them ever.  I bought their 2009 album "Songs of Shame," which is such a great name for an album btw, but I wound up not really liking it very much.  And srsly, can you blame me?  Pause the above now and listen to this shit for a second.



INORITE?  You can hardly believe it's the same band.  Neither can I.  Lead singer Jeremy Earl's voice sounds like some whiny castrato, and frankly, it sounds like they are all just barely learning to play their instruments.  Which I actually love to hear from new bands sometimes, but this was their fourth album.  Also, as an aside, this video sucks and it reminds me of when Dawg sent me that article on Katherine Knight.  Wait!  Are they Australian?  Oh no, nevermind, they're from Brooklyn.

OK, resume playing the first song now.  It's all going to be alright.

Oh, I mean it's going to be alright for everyone except me.  Why?  Because I had no idea that they are incredible now, and not only did I miss them playing at Austin Psych Fest, but I also missed them playing here in Atlanta at Masquerade on 4/29.

(BTW, what's up with the awesome bands suddenly playing Purgatory? That used to be the shit hole bar for local bands to play for drunks while the awesome bands drowned them out.)

Goddammit Woods!  Why did you have to go and get all awesome suddenly and not tell me about it beforehand?  Now who knows when they will be back here.  I am loving almost every song on their new release "With Light and Love," which came out on tax day.  They have mastered their instruments and the vocal production sounds superb.  I love the hit single (above) because it sounds like one of those Important Songs because it talk about Us, and because it has a great kum-ba-ya hippie vibe to it.  Great, great melody also.

I also am loving the title tune because it is 9 minutes long, rambles all over the damn place, and has some great solo work.


Unfortunately, they look kind of unfortunate.  Here goes Woods:

But whatever, man.  Their album art is cool and their music RAWKS.  So pleased to hear them mature into something really worth listening to.  But dammit!  When will they be back in Atlanta?  They seem to play here all the time, but now that I love them I bet they will never be back.  DAMMIT.

no jet lag? well what now?: jamz du jour

man, so the hostess of one of my fave radio programs is not on tonight! shes been gone for a sec but she had a substitute host/ess while she been gone, but with prescribed playlists for our listening pleasure. but not tonight. and man! i was ready to jam! and thats ordinarily no big deal, but i had left my ipod at home in my other purse, and i have presently played out all my cds in the car. and tapes. yes, i have a tape player in my car and actively listen to tapes.

NOW WHAT?

(behold: tonight's jams du jour):

quicksilver messenger band: fresh air



so i have these...playlists....

back in the day i used tomake mixtapes. like, so many motherfuckin mixtapes.

here they go (well, some of them, the ones i didnt give away):

and then when computers happened real good, i made playlists, but i burned them to CD, (stored them in cd books!) like so:

but anyway.

so basically, the moral of this all is, i had to resort to my youtube playlists ive been cobbling together slowly lately. its just borne of necessity really, and convenience. i think i first started just making these lists of shit i wanna watch again later, like when time permits. and as i shazam shit on my radio shows, i just find them on youtube and stick on them on these nonsensical lists, that in hard times, musically, i have something (semi) new to listen too and love. its like prescreened jams. like as in i heard it once and thought enough of it to tag it (generally drunkenly) and add to some playlist somehow. and ive enjoyed them again and again on many occasions, that were musically times of need. like at our sleazestaxx rehearsal in the mountains, after we were all over practicing and drunk, and needed jams, but had only some wee speakers to hijack, i just popped these on and i realized these will work . 

suck (from the righteously named album "Time to Suck"): (a cover of donovan's) season of the witch



i know many of these i heard on radio programs that i like on wras 88.5, and it makes me sad about all the drama going on with them and the university right now. i have much more to say about that, but thats another topic, for another time....

so forgive me for kind of making a playlist/mixtape of songs i heard elsewhere, but, really, thats how you hear anything, yes? through others, right? well anyhow, through the magic of youtube.....

 ...i got really stoked on this other youtube channel: this dude richaftersabbath posts all this great sort of obscure heavy rock shit and i just dig it! i dunno how i found his channel first- perhaps from that Fat album I go tin the redneck riveiera? like i think i googled that album to listen to it (after i had bought it just to be able to hear it on my phone or some shit) and he had posted it. so i looked at all the other shit he puts up and its great. plus he does all these other playlists and shit and its great!

so perhaps the mixtape is not dead, just... transformed? modified? evolved.....


jpt scare band: sleeping sickness




i got a guitar lesson from Isaiah from Earthless for xmas from my amiga buena, Teresa! he taught me the basics to three songs and this stooges song is one of them. and its really cool actually because a few weeks ago, when the drummer of the stooges passed away, a blog I like to read a lot, the Obelisk, featured this album as his "Monday full-length" (thats what she said), and i really, really dug this album. i played it like a bunch of times again and again, so its timely and fun to learn it. and easy. most importantly kinda easy...

the stooges: i wanna be your dog




i dunno, i feel like just sharing some jamz du jour tonight. i got an bunch of other stuff to RawkTalk about, but its so much to synthesize, and regurgitate, and whatnot, and i really just wanted to jam. i feel real bent out of shape about the shit with the radio station, and i got a lot to say about it. but another day. i also want to finish telling you all about pysch fest- the last day was great! i never felt tired there, and i really, REALLY never wanted to come back home. well not back to work ever, thats for sure. i could psych fest for the rest of my life.

and theres that highly anticipated Kadavar show at the masquerade like a month ago, with the totally mortifying, botched interview.i couldnt eat for like two days after that. thats a tough blog to write. but the show was killer, and i really dug Mothership, the tour partners. i really wanna RawkTalk all about it, but gimme some time, yall. lets just jam tonight,

 christopher: dark road

I Fell in a Hole While Shopping for Vinyl in Austin

We had a pretty packed weekend, really. But no weekend getaway can be properly deemed complete without a trip to a used record store. We came close to missing it, but as fate would have it, there was like a 90 minute wait for brunch on Sunday morning, and there just happened to be a vinyl shop a block away. Score!

We popped into Friends of Sound on S. Congress -- well, no, it has an address on S. Congress, but it's really on the back side of the block in the alley, and the ingress is really, really creepy. iwishuwould pointed out the newly cleaned bloody rags hanging on a rack outside the door, and I noticed underneath there were all these empty Jelly Belly dispensers... as if someone had been trying to lure children or maybe people with the munchies... In any case, Friends of Sound! Clean it up! Be friends of vision as well! Once we got inside, it was full of dusty records and filthy, music-lovin' types just like any record store. They had a pretty amazing selection, tons of records, but it was a little pricey. New Arrivals (to-be-sorted) were $25! That's too much for a used record that's not some special collectors' edition or something. I guess they change the price once they sort them? And the $25 is just if you have to have it before they have time to price it properly? Also I wasn't really excited about the prospect of taking vinyl back on the plane, and I was dragging pretty hard from getting out of bed before noon, so it was really more of a window shopping thing. But the way they had everything organized was kind of nuts. I always find the different used vinyl stores' taxonomy / etymology of the discs interesting. I was fairly amused to begin with, but then I ran across this:

Dad Rock?  WTF?  The thing that made it more hilarious was that I didn't recognize any of the bands in that group, and I don't mean to brag, but I Know My Bands.  I was just going to post this picture and say "Look everybody!  At this hilarious thing!  Tee-hee!"  But then, like a good journalist should, I did some half-assed, cursory research.  Dad Rock is a thing!  What?

Yeah, that's from the Oxford American English dictionary, so I guess I'm the last to know...

But this instantly clears it all up for me for a second.  All I have to do is think of Larry and his love of dinosaur bands, like his favorite, Grand Funk Railroad, plus other faves like Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night, and America.  OK, yeah.  Dadrock. 

But wait, aren't there some Dads that aren't 70?  Kevs is a Dad in his 50's, and he has a totally different taste in music.  Johnny Foos just turned 40 and he's a Dad, and again, his music taste is completely different from Dad or Kevs.  My nephew Alex is also a Dad and he's just turning 21 this month.  And again, completely different taste in music.

Like many people my age, I turned to Jeff Tweedy for all the answers.  But I thought he came off sounding like a defensive, grouchy old Dad about it.  So then I turned to a stranger called dad-rock on tumblr to see if he could light my path.  He defines Dad Rock as "a genre of rock music popular among boomer-aged dads."  Which would be fine if he didn't then go on to define "the holy trinity of dad-rock: Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page" because that just makes it all super confusing for me.  I've said this before and I'll say it again:  Eric Clapton is the most overrated musician in the history of space and time.  I am insulted on behalf of all Dads everywhere.  Second, you would have to be deaf to not love Jimi Hendrix, no matter how guilty of a pleasure it may be.  I feel like both he and Led Zepplin have too much of a timeless appeal to be nailed to boomer Dads.  So, thanks for nothing, tumblr stranger.

Apparently, the National has been fighting the Dad Rock label, so it must be something good. (Sorry Zach, couldn't resist myself)

So then I popped over to flavorwire to check out their list of 20 Dadrock albums that I should listen to in the car with my Dad on a road trip, and I can assure you that this list would mainly just piss me and Dad off completely.  I think this list was written for someone who has a Dad that's about my age, but with crap taste in music.

I think I've spent enough time in this hole, the stupid articles just go on and on listing bands that don't make any sense to me.  I'll stick with the dictionary definition, but not necessarily its example sentence.  Dad Rock is just music that you can't like beyond a guilty pleasure because your Dad liked it.  Which would, eventually, include all rock music.

APF Live! Bo Nanigen and Loop

Loop!

Man, Loop, that used to be my eardrums. Those things you just decimated with your crunchy ass fuzz. Those little crumpled head holes that I used to listen to the laughter of my children through. Right on man!

Before we got over here we heard the tail end of the Bo Nanigen set. They played really hard for a long time. The ending was just epic waves of Rawk. 

Now we're sitting up here on the platform listening to Loop, the last act of the festival. It's perfect, mate. 

APF Live! Sleeeeeeepy Sun and Earthless

I think I might have caught a cold from my baby before I left home, either that or I'm just a snotty mess from all this damn dust! But in any case after that giant brunch I passed out all afternoon. I feel so bad! Sorry iwishuwould!

But we just got done listening to Sleepy Sun, a big Kevs favorite for a long time now. Man they didn't help me with my drowsiness much. Their jams were long and sludgy. There was some good sludge in there, for sure. Weather is amazing, btw. Oh and we got the pleasure of watching some freak in medieval pelt garb dancin with hisself. Good times. 

But now, finally, what I've been waiting to see - Earthless!

We rolled up in here about 30 minutes ago and they're still on the same guitar solo. And it fucking rules! They are so wild and free. This is what Emerson was talking about. It is some wicked, paint peeling guitar up in here, and so much fuzz, and manic drumming.  Yessssss

Austin Pysch Fest: day número dos!!

Day two! 

as if there was not enough facemeltage Friday, we went back for more on Saturday! A quick google search indicated the best pizza in the city was to be found on South Congress (which i am assuming is the hipster district) at Home Slice Pizza.  so we went there to get fortified for the night.

we got some garlic knots and a pizza margherita (my favorite!) as well as a few beers. Everything was delicious and our bartender looked like Mattias, of Dungen (bonus!). 

lots of fun murals and public art shit in this area of town (to be fair we have only seen a teeny lil sliver of the actual city, as we have been huffing dust all weekend out at that ranch)

back at the ranch for more rawkin!

we arrived to hear Temples on the main stage. this was a band i was not previously familiar with, but area.personality has been hearing the on satelitte radio for a while. i did enjoy their set, although i would say it is more mellow than what im typically into. They were quite cute, but they looked young as hell!! and i dunno if it was just their englishness, or the heat, but they seemed awfully sour during soundcheck. it was a good lil set tho! here they go:

after temples we had planned to wander over to the stage by the river to catch dead meadow. evidently so did everyone else! it was a mass exodus in that direction and its a cool stage with an amphitheater down by the river but seating is limited i would say. so i said fuck it, lets wander over here and scope Medcine in the other tent for just a second, see whats in these art tents, and then go struggle over there. and lo and behold: A BLACKLIGHT TENT!!! 

on my recent trip to amsterdam i was disappointed to learn that the blacklight museum I had planned on visiting was closed on mondays :-( but here was a lil tent o' blacklight to make up for it! nice!

next up we finally made our way over for dead meadow. we had recently seen them play in atlanta at 529 (no review for that yet either, what can ya do) so i would say we did not feel super presured to go over there. and it sure was crowded, but we found us a lil patch of ground and spread out our blanket and let the sound wash over us. we were way far from the stage and it was quite dark over there, so i didnt get any photos of dead meadow, but its fiiiine. the crowd really enjoyed their set and so did I. 

Up next that we wanted to see was Acid Mothers Temple, from Japan. we had a few minutes before they went on so we took a stroll up to hear part of Unkown Mortal Orchestra (the crowd was really feelin it for them! i recognized one song they played, otherwise I am completely unfamiliar with them)  after a quick tour of the festival grounds we went back down to the river for acid mothers temple. I have been hearing about them for many years, I feel like they tour constantly. when you try to read about them on Wikipedia you leave with more questions than answers. they are a band that is more of a collective, and they have constant lineup changes and even many different names under the AMT umbrella. they do a lot of great long jams, building and swirling and screetching and all around wailing. they had less of a crowd than dead meadow, but at the same amphitheater down by the river, so we got slightly closer for their set and i took this lil snap:

the weather at this point was perfect: cool and breezy down by the river. They had these kickass lights going on for this stage- some twinkling projected up into the trees which gave off a firefly effect, as well as this swirling kaleidoscope light projections onto the woods across the river- it looked like some crazy paisley swirl what with the trees blowing in the breeze, and it was reflected on the surface of the water, and was just really fun to watch. they festival organizers really have done a wonderful job with this thing- aside from all the great various light decor and the vendors and food trucks, its just really well organized and its just small enough to not be a pain in the ass to navigate. here is the best photo i could possibly take of the light effect during acid mothers temple:

at the end of their set they did a shameless merch plug, which i can totally appreciate. before they went on we had seen them around a little merch table all by themselves, and he mentioned that they sell all of their merch "from their hand". right awn.

after acid mothers temple we wandered back up to the main stage to check out the horrors and brian jonestown massacre. again two bands i am unfamiliar with. Although i have read a little bit about BJM recently and i knew they are from the 90s, i still was totally unfamiliar with their music. the horrors were still playing when we went up there and i honestly kinda liked their set better. they were def more hard rockin and had some good guitar action going on. BJM was more folky or mellow than i like, but im glad we got to see all these bands that are new (for me). the stage was lookin all cool tho, so i snapped some quick fotos of them and here they go:

this is the view of that stage from the lil platform thing (which is awesome! its a great vantage point of the main stage) but its worth sharing so you can see how many people are there for the main shows! this festival is srsly great becuase its not too big, yet there are plenty of people here. i havent seen any bad festival behavior here yet (no drunks, no people way out in outerspace on drugs, no bitches with flower crowns), its pretty cool that looks like everyone here is srsly just stoked about the music. i cant ait to head back again tonight for one more round of rawkin!!!

APF Live! Night Bloggin' With Brian Jonestown Massacre

Yeah!

There they are! The other night when we were interviewing Kadavar I thought home boy said "brunch" when he was starting to say Brian Jonestown Massacre, so then I kept asking him about brunch because I was wasted and hungry. 

Man, how many people are in this fucking band? I feel like I got suckered into seeing Noot d' Noot again. Oh except BJM sounds good. They got horns and keys ahoy. I have a couple of their CD's but I don't remember all this rich instrumentation. But the bummer is they keep asking the sound guy to tweak shit and now there's a big feedback mess. Anyway, that's annoying, but we got a sweet spot on the back of the VIP deck thing and the sound is great here, as well as the view. Except when I'm night blogging!

APF Live! Some other stuff happened

So then Dead Meadow played one song that was like 45 minutes long and I got lost in the light show and it was righteous and good. That shit is what I came for. Same bass line twisting all up with a screeching guitar line forever and ever. 

Then we stumbled back over to the VIP area and caught the end of Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Well Known. We met tonight and I was taken by the canned percussion. Not very psych? But enjoyable nonetheless. 

Now we are at Acid Mothers Temple. I love their long space jams but the vocals are off-putting. 

UaaaaHhhhheeeeehhhhh!

Back to the light show. Thinking about how great it would be to meet back up with Kadavar and anoint them with our sacred oils. C'mon man. 

APF Live! Oh Dead Meadow...

... why won't you let me get close to you?

I snapped this picture to show how far away we are, but it captured another key phenomenon of our journey: chronic dust storms. The southern plains are still blowing around I reckon. 

Once again Dead Meadow won't let me sit in their lap while they play, but they are doing a light show on the river for us while they play a slightly more mellow set than what they played for us at 529. It's niiiiiiice... Take a break from focussing my eyes...

#microblogging

Austin Psych Fest Live! Temples

ROCK ME DAMMIT

Austin Psych Fest!!! : day uno

shit yeah!!!! we made it to austin!!! we picked up our rental car and we got upgraded to a motherfuckin Dodge Avenger: sweeeet (LOL).

first things first: TexMex. area.personality googled the best mexican restaurant in Austin, which was only open for dinner. so then she googled the second best mexican restaurant in Austin, which was Curra's Grill. So we went there and the parkng spot we pulled into has a mural with Roky Goddamn Erickson on it! its a siiiiiign...

sweet!!! psych fest on the cover of their equivalent of the Creative Loafing!!!

hot n spicy margaritas...

cheesy cheese dip

pork marinated in coke, milk, and orange juice is magical

ok. now that sustenance is out of the way: RAWKIN. we got to the festival just as Graveyard was coming on. they are swedish and they totally brought the blues rock. they were great and they also had a saxophonist in there. although i would say they didnt do a lot of stage theatrics they certainly sounded great.

now, we saw other acts throughout the day but i didnt make photos of them all. following graveyard we also caught white hills, who did an awful lot of hair tossin for not a whole lot of shredding, but they were good and fuzzed out and i did dig it. Then we listened to Black Lips as we staggered around the festval grounds as well. Then over to the other tent for KADAVAR!

Kadavar rules because they have equal parts shred and hair tossing. they dont spare any facemelting in the name of hair tossing, and its heavy doses of both. i love thier big bouncy basslines cause they make you wanna pop yer ass all around, but then they are also shredding making you shake yer head all around too. they souunded gret last night, but the sts are really short here, maybe a half hour? they only played liike seven songs, but it was awesome. while all the facemelting was going on I got this text from ol Spancer:

why, yes, we are rawkin, gourl.

oh yeah- this is how fucking gorgeous the wether was yesterday- so fucking nice and cool, i was so happy for the cool, dry weather. The the moon came out for Kadavar's soundcheck, and it was magical.

after kadavar we cruised the merch, although i didnt see merch for all the bands? what the hell. we gotta go get a better dig in today. 

last years posters, this years are there too, may have to score some today as well.

this is what the stage looked like during the zombies set. that was kinda cool because we heard all their hits, although they sounded really different these days. 

$8 Brussels sprouts: no.

instead we got some fucking delicious sweet potato and black bean quesadillas with tomatillo sauce and a draft kombucha, which was fuking perfect. however after all that rawkin, wandering, eating and boozing, we were pretty zapped. We heard some of the dandy warhols, which was new for me, but sounding pretty good, and then we tried to sit through brown sabbath, a local act, which was a funk black sabbath cover band. while an intriguing concept, we couldnt manage anymore than like two songs before we had to call it a night. transit and figuring things out and boozin make for a tiresome day, so we had to throw in the towel. but we'll be heading back tonight!!!