Pretty Goes with Pretty

Maurice (Pre-Slint) Demos Now Available

If you've read my book on Spiderland, you know that one of my main arguments in the opening chapter is that the significance of Squirrel Bait in the pre-Slint soup is somewhat overstated, considering David Grubbs wrote the majority of that band's music and lyrics and that Brian McMahan and Britt Walford were not really in the band at the same time. But there's a recorded documentation of Squirrel Bait and all those names are in the liner notes, so there you go. Rather, in my interviews for the book, it was made pretty clear to me that another band had a much more direct tie to Slint: Maurice.

Maurice was a heavy, aggressive metal band originally started by Britt Walford, Brian McMahan, and Ned Oldham and featuring Sean "Rat" Garrison on lead vocals. That early incarnation lasted not very long—Oldham was replaced by a guy named Mike Bucayu (who along with Rat would later form Kinghorse), and McMahan was replaced by David Pajo. I've written a little about this on the blog before, and you can still read an excerpt from the book detailing the earliest period in Slint's history at the 33 1/3 blog.

The thing about Maurice, though, is that they never did any proper recordings, so their place in Slint's history is easy to overlook. That's why I'm happy to report that David Pajo has recently made their one and only demo—recorded on a boombox at the specific request of one Glenn Danzig—available  to all.

As with most things Slint-related, you should prepare yourself for something that sounds nothing like Slint whatsoever. Maurice was a metal band. The songs on the demo hardly hint at the Slint you most wish you could have more of (ie, Spiderland). Here and there, like toward the end of "The Struggle," you can hear small hints of things to come on Tweez—Walford's insane drumming and Pajo's compulsive need to play as many artificial harmonics as possible—but even so it's not made transparant that this band might turn into Slint. (It is a fact, however, that the final song Maurice wrote became the first Slint song, "Pat," but this demo predates that song. To my knowledge, the Maurice version of that song was never recorded.) It is worth keeping in mind, though, that everyone playing on this demo was about fifteen years old at the time.

Not to be a shill (okay, a little bit to be a shill), but there are a lot of great stories about Maurice in the book, if you haven't read it, including their brief tour with Samhain, with Will Oldham in tow. (Oldham came close to joining Slint right after the group splintered off from Maurice—can you imagine?) So, you know, go buy the book. And buy the Maurice demo here.

Favorite Downloads: May

Every month after I do my album rundown, I like to put together a mix of all my favorite random new-to-me downloads. Well, I guess I didn't spend much time surfing the blogs in May because it turns out I barely downloaded anything all month. So, here you go—four whole songs! (And a note re the Eleanor Friedberger song: what can I say? The chorus sucked me in too deep, I couldn't reject the song once the sax came in. I guess it's the exception to the rule.)

• Television: Glory (Early Version)
• Eleanor Friedberger: My Mistakes
• The Easybeats: Wait a Minute
• Buffy Sainte-Marie: Guess Who I Saw in Paris

The Pre-Slint Era: Languid & Flaccid, Maurice, Solution Unknown, Squirrel Bait

The first chapter of my book on Spiderland deals with the primordial period in Slint's history, discussing the obvious touchstone of Squirrel Bait (who Dave Grohl just singled out in a list of great 80s hardcore songs for Rolling Stone), but also the less renowned pre-Slint bands the Languid and Flaccid, Solution Unknown, and Maurice. Since the book doesn't contain any images or (duh) audio, consider this a supplement to that first chapter.

The original pre-Slint band was the Languid and Flaccid, formed by classmates Britt Walford and Brian McMahan when they were in 6th grade. Also in the band was Will Oldham's older brother, Ned, and two other friends, Stephanie Karta and Paul Catlett. You can read an excerpt from the book at the 33 1/3 blog which goes into some detail on this band. I'm not aware of any recordings existing for this band, but here's an amazing picture of the group hanging out outside the Beat Club before an all-ages matinee (via Louisville Punk).

L-R: Britt Walford, Stephanie Karta, Ned Oldham, Brian McMahan, Paul Catlett

By the time the band reached junior high, the Languid and Flaccid splintered into two projects, with Walford, McMahan, and Oldham forming a second group, Maurice. This was a much more aggressive and heavy band, and eventually the Languid and Flaccid evaporated.

Maurice was fronted by Sean "Rat" Garrison, who I interviewed in depth for the book. He is such a strong personality, and eminently quotable (I think my favorite was "Music is like being on a viking ship; I have come to humiliate you with my band!"); his presence in the book definitely makes this early chapter much more vivid, especially since awareness of Maurice doesn't really extend beyond Louisville.

Maurice quickly turned into a kind of incubator for ideas that would later wind up in Slint. Both Oldham and McMahan left the band early on, replaced by Mike Bucayu and David Pajo. It was the collaboration between Walford and Pajo in this band that eventually led to the creation of Slint.

I've done my best to describe Maurice's music in the book. They began as a straightforward hardcore band, then morphed into a metal band with lots of flashy guitar solos, before ultimately evolving into something more odd and obtuse—essentially Tweez-era Slint but with a screaming rage-aholic on the mic. This description is based partly on a few demos and live songs I've heard and partly on descriptions of the band given to me by Garrison, Pajo, and Todd Brashear, who was a fan of the band before he knew any of them personally.

Unfortunately I don't have any Maurice audio which I'm at liberty to upload, but given Garrison's strong presence in the book I wanted to at least give a sample of what he sounded like, so you could imagine this voice over a song like, say, "Charlotte" or "Warren." So, in lieu of Maurice, here are a couple of samples from Kinghorse, the band Garrison and Bucayu formed after Maurice broke up. Kinghorse was positively huge in the Louisville scene, pulling in hundreds and hundreds of kids to their shows and eventually landing a record deal with Caroline Records. Their debut album was produced by Glenn Danzig, who Garrison was chummy with (as readers of the book will learn, Maurice did a short string of dates around the Midwest opening for Samhain). "Caged" is a track from that debut. The video below is an early version of a song called "Freeze," performed at the legendary Louisville club Tewligan's Tavern (now known as "Cahoots" and quite a bit less legendary) back in Kinghorse's formative days.

• Kinghorse: Caged

 

Toward the end of Maurice's run, the bassist Mike Bucayu decided to start a second band in which he could put forth more of his own songwriting ideas (Maurice's songs were totally controlled by Walford and Pajo). The band was Solution Unknown, and David Pajo joined up as well—as the drummer. Midway into this band's brief run, Todd Brashear joined up as second guitarist. This band was in many ways formed as a reaction to Maurice, who were venturing into weirder and weirder musical territory. Innovation was absolutely not the name of the game in Solution Unknown. They really just wanted to be a hardcore band that whipped large crowds of kids into a frenzy. They recorded one album, Karen, with Don Zientarra.

• Solution Unknown: Used To Be

Concurrent with Maurice, Squirrel Bait was making its name in the Louisville and national scene. The band, I feel, is given too much credit for leading to Slint. The majority of the songs, both music and lyrics, were written by David Grubbs. People see the liner notes to their self-titled debut and see both Britt Walford and Brian McMahan's names and thus jump to the conclusion that that if half of Slint was in the band, it follows that Slint evolved from here. It's really not true. In fact Walford and McMahan were never in the band at the same time. Walford was in the group only briefly—long enough to record a demo which was never released. A year later, well after Walford was gone, the band pulled two tracks from this demo to add to their debut because they couldn't afford to re-record them. Here's another track from that same demo, which didn't end up on any official Squirrel Bait albums. You can clearly hear how the band was much more influenced by hardcore in these early recordings.

• Squirrel Bait: Insult to Injury

McMahan joined the group after that demo was recorded and Ben Daughtery was brought in as the group's permanent drummer. Still, he wasn't the primary songwriter. His only songwriting credit on the debut, to my knowledge, was the opening track, "Hammering So Hard." The rest came from David Grubbs—about which I'll say more in a future post.

• Squirrel Bait: Hammering So Hard

My Listening Hours: Best of 2010 So Far

Harry Nilsson: Pandemonium Shadow Show
After living with two different Harry Nilsson greatest hits comps for many years, last year I finally got around to picking up Nilsson Schmilsson, widely lauded as his best album. It's good—it's great!—but it also left me a little cold. Perhaps it was simply a matter of knowing so many of the songs already from the comps. Still, there were two other minor strikes: the songs I didn't know were mostly just good, not outstanding. And the songs I did know, aside maybe from "Gotta Get Up," are not among the upper echelon of my favorite Nilsson songs (that echelon being pretty fucking high up in the atmosphere). Nevertheless I know that Nilsson is too much of a genius not to warrant more full-length acquisitions. So I went with an earlier album, Pandemonium Shadow Show. All that is a preface to this little secret tip: Pandemonium Shadow Show is way better than Nilsson Schmilsson. From the biblical "Ten Little Indians" to the Kinks-like "Cuddly Toy" to what must be the first-ever mash-up "You Can't Do That," which is a Frankenstein's monster of disparate Beatles lyrics, Pandemonium is a fun, funny, breezy album that is also an incredible display of Nilsson's mastery of pop craft. Shit, I need to go get another Nilsson album.

• Harry Nilsson: Ten Little Indians

Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets
As with Nilsson I've been slowly but surely filling in my Eno collection, this being my third Eno acquisition in the last couple of years after Another Green World and Before and After Science. Though I thoroughly love those records, this might be my favorite of them all so far. Warm Jets is Eno's first solo album; whereas an album like Another Green World plays like a 50/50 transition between his rock past and ambient future, Warm Jets is pretty firmly rooted in the rock world he came from, with dashes of Brian Ferry and David Bowie-isms sprinkled all around. Incidentally I just finished Geeta Dayal's book on Another Green World, which only makes me want to hear more Eno, stat (specifically On Land, Discreet Music, No Pussyfooting, and Music for Airports—none of which I expect to sound like Warm Jets; so, Taking Tiger Mountain [by Strategy] too.)

• Brian Eno: Some Of Them Are Old

Radio Dept.: Clinging to a Scheme
It took me a long time to realize that the Radio Dept.'s first album, Lesser Matters, was my favorite album of 2004. It took me a little longer to realize it was possibly my favorite album of the last decade. No, it doesn't feel "important" like Kid A or Funeral or some Animal Collective record, but I sure did play the shit out of it consistently for years. Still do. It's a rare record that can go three, four, five, six years and still never feel played to death. I was much cooler on their followup, Pet Grief, which has a couple of terrific songs and a lot of atmosphere. So when it came to their latest I really wasn't sure which way they were going to go. Happily, I'm realizing this is my favorite new release of the year. Just like Lesser Matters, I just keep listening to it! Need there be more justification? It's hazy and poppy and cool and warm and light and spacey and fuzzy and fun and melancholy and great.

• Radio Dept: This Time Around

Josh Ritter: So Runs the World Away
Dr. Dog: Shame Shame
Two more favorite new releases of the year, both of which I've already gone on about. (Shame Shame, So Runs the World).

Cluster: Soweisoso
Silver Apples: s/t
Telling, perhaps, that of the seventeen krautrock albums I picked up in the last six months, only one makes it into my "best" category. Blame Faust IV, but the bar is fucking high. This is my first Cluster album and man do I hope the rest of their discography is as good as this. Soweisoso is an essential album for anyone interested in the history of electronica—utterly ahead of its time. Even more impressive in that regard is the Silver Apples' debut from 1968, an otherworldly psychedelic electronica. The album gets a little tedious toward the end—I swear the duo is recycling rhythms on a couple tracks—but their best ideas are still astounding, especially considering when the album was made.

• Cluster: Zum Wohl
• Silver Apples: Oscillations

Spoon: Transference
There are two kinds of Spoon fans in the world—first-time fans and long-time fans. Every Spoon album is just similar enough yet just different enough to keep the long-time fans happy; every album also serves as a perfectly acceptable point of entry for the uninitiated. You might have your favorite Spoon album, but it's not essential that some newbie start with that one. Girls Can Tell, Gimme Fiction, whatever. Start where you like. Right? Well, I think that was true up to the newest. Transference is a great album but I think it's made for the long-time fans. It's the Spoon recipe—Britt Daniel oozes cool, the rhythm section drives every song, the guitars play only the minimally required amount, the production is so detail-oriented as to be more interesting than the music in spots—but it seems to require just a little more patience. It took me a few listens to identify why that was so. At first I thought it was the production—the fact that the band interspersed a lot of raw demo material with the more polished stuff. But that wasn't it, because Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, my favorite of theirs, actually has more production tricks and is a sonically weirder record. With more listens I realized that Transference contains more drawn-out instrumental vamps and jams than their other records. "The Mystery Zone" feels like it could end around the three minute mark but instead goes on, without a lot of variation, for another two minutes. "Out Go the Lights" does too, and "Nobody Gets Me but You." It bothered me at first. Bored me, I mean. But with more and more listens—awesome tracks like "Is Love Forever" and "Who Makes Your Money" kept me coming back—the vibe of Transference really sank in. Which is to say I love the album but I'd recommend almost any other—more specifically, Kill the Moonlight or Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga—to the uninitiated.

• Spoon: The Mystery Zone

Wire: Pink Flag
Like Harry Nilsson above, I've lived with a couple of Wire compilations for a long time, the pleasures of which somehow barred me from getting around to their proper full lengths. Pink Flag is, of course, terrific. Acquiring this album around the same time as the new Spoon brings home to me what that band has taken from Wire: the elemental nature of rock—a few chords, a simple beat, a lot of attitude. I look forward to picking up more proper Wire albums in the future (I have a feeling I'll like Chairs Missing more).

• Wire: Three Girl Rhumba

Vampire Weekend: Contra
Contra is not too different from Vampire Weekend's debut, but that's okay with me. First and foremost these guys are an excellent guitar pop band, their songs full of perfect melodies, witty lyrics, bounding rhythms, effervescent guitar runs. Who can complain about that? It falls short of the debut, partly because Contra doesn't benefit from feeling "new" the way the first album did, and partly because Contra falls off toward the end. "Giving Up the Gun" is too polished and the closing track, "I Think UR a Contra," sounds almost like a Coldplay song. (Honestly can't be a good thing when I hear a song and think, "I wish Coldplay were singing this instead.") Those aside, songs like "White Sky" and "Cousins" and "Run" are as great as anything they've done before.

• Vampire Weekend: White Sky

Mountains: Choral
Along with all the krautrock the other genre I've gotten deeper into this year is ambient/drone. Of the handful of such albums I've picked up, Choral is probably the most spacious and most elegant. The group paints vast, open landscapes through a combination of Stars of the Lid-like guitar drones and occasional, more traditionally played acoustic motifs. The best kind of ambient music is the kind that lets you sink into its atmosphere yet doesn't bore; this is exactly what Mountains accomplish.

• Mountains: Telescope

Talk Talk: Spirit of Eden
Writing my book on Spiderland I was reminded of a common claim I've long heard about the so-called genre "post rock"—namely that the genre tag was originally coined in an attempt to describe Talk Talk's later albums a few years before Slint came along and the description was sort of co-opted to describe them instead. Seeing as I'd never really heard Talk Talk before, it seemed like imperative that I do so. Thank God I did. Spirit of Eden is a gorgeous album, almost like a song cycle. Its six songs drift along, ebbing and flowing like one cohesive work. Spirit of Eden is moody without being morose, inventive yet humble, really a (softly) glowing album.

• Talk Talk: Eden

Could There Ever Be Another Fugazi?

 

No.

My Listening Hours: Favorite Downloads, July–September

I must admit I bookmarked a ton of good-looking blog posts with every intention of going back to listen and/or download the mp3s, but I utterly failed to follow through. Still, I did manage to find eleven new-to-me songs that really knocked me out. Many of these tracks came from the Cargo Culte and For the Sake of the Song. I recommend you follow them if you're not already.

Don't forget, there's a convenient little mp3 player down in the lower-left corner. just press play and kill forty-five minutes. The songs might look a little random but I actually think this makes a pretty cohesive playlist.

• Wooden Shjips: I Hear the Vibrations (2009)
• Steve Young: One Car Funeral Procession (1981)
• Theoretical Girls: You Got Me (1978)
• Phoenix: 1901 (2009)
• John Vanderslice: Too Much Time (2009)
• Guru Guru: Next Time See You at the Dalai Lhama (1970)
• The Delmore Brothers: I'm Lonesome Without You (1946)
• Cowboy Junkies: Working On A Building (1988)
• Cluster: Caramel (1974)
• Harmonia: Watussi (1974)
• The Modern Lovers: Government Center (1976)

My Listening Hours: The Best of July–September

The Byrds: Ballad of Easy Rider
This album has only grown in my estimation since I last wrote about it, to the point that it just might be among my three or four all-time favorite Byrds albums. Of their overtly country albums, I like this more than Sweetheart of the Rodeo. That said, it only ranks that high when I do a little re-jiggering to the track list—not exactly re-ordering things, but substituting here and there. Here’s my recommendation to you should you pick up the version of this album that comes with bonus tracks:

Ballad of Easy Rider
Fido Oil in My Lamp [alternate take]
Tulsa County [alternate take]
Mae Jean Goes to Hollywood [bonus track]
Jack Tarr the Sailor
Jesus is Just Alright
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
There Must Be Someone I Can Turn To
Gunga Din
Way Behind the Sun [bonus track]
Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins

• The Byrds: Ballad Of Easy Rider

The Fall, Hex Enduction Hour
My first Fall album! I’ve always meant to dig into the Fall but have never really understood where to begin with their fairly impenetrable discography. This turned out to be an excellent recommendation and now I’ve got four more Fall records saved at eMusic for future consumption.

• The Fall: Hip Priest

Harlem Shakes, Technicolor Health
I think every six months or so I need one new catchy indie guitar pop album. Last year it was Vampire Weekend and Dr. Dog; the year before that it was Peter Bjorn & John and the New Pornographers; and before that the Little Ones and I can't remember who else. But the thing is, I can't have too many of these kind of bands at once. I just want to sink my teeth into one and revel in all the melodies and harmonies and bouncey rhythms. So right now it's the Harlem Shakes (who, unfortunately, just broke up). Technicolor Health is one of those albums that had, on one listen, one outstanding song and the rest solid but hard to discern from each other. And with each listen that ratio shifts in the other direction. As of today I think it's about 50/50, and I feel optimistic that it'll continue to turn since there are no out and out duds to be found. It's just a terrific little record.

• Harlem Shakes: Strictly Game

Yo La Tengo, Popular Songs
Despite thinking And Then Nothing Turned Inside Out is one of the best albums of the decade, Yo La Tengo is not a band I typically get excited about. I'm not totally sure why that's the case. At any rate, Popular Songs magically came into my house through no effort on my part. What was I to do but put it on? It's not on the same level as And Then Nothing... (not even close, really), but it's good. Good enough to underline how irrational my relationship to Yo La Tengo has been all these years. All of the shorter songs—the first two thirds of the record—are great, with at least a couple of truly fantastic tracks (like the opener, "Here to Fall" or the fun duet "If It's True"). Things kind of drift off the rails with the last three tracks, each around ten minutes or longer. Any of them would've made a good closer, but all three feel like overkill, especially in light of how effervescent the preceding tracks are. I'd imagine that Popular Songs might work better on vinyl, where each side of the record could show off its own personality. Played straight through, it puts a drag on an otherwise pretty solid album. But the first nine songs are enough to make this an album I continue to return to.

• Yo La Tengo: If It's True

Cass McCombs, Catacombs
Though I still stand by everything I said in my original review of the album, Catacombs has stalled for me. I don’t know if I just wrote it out of my system or if I simply acquired too many new albums since then, but it’s fallen out of rotation. When I consider putting it on I reflexively think “that record’s a bit of a slog,” but if I do put it on, or if the songs come up on shuffle, I get way into it. So, mixed feelings but a good record nonetheless.When I bring my self to listen to it, I remember that it's one of the better 09 albums I've heard thus far.

• Cass McCombs: Harmonia

My Listening Hours: The Best of January–March

Neko Case: Middle Cyclone
I can't think of another record that made a better second impression than Middle Cyclone. on first listen I thought the album was too long, too ballad-heavy, to monotonous. Midway through my second listen a couple days later, my ears hooked into the lyrics of the title track—a sparse number comprised of Neko Case's voice and guitar, accentuated by angelic backing vocals and a tentative music box. Suddenly I was tuned into Middle Cyclone—an album I've quickly realized is the best of Case's career so far.

Much of Middle Cyclone seems to detail fundamentally flawed relationships—lovers who love passionately but without ever hearing each other. "Just because you don't believe it / doesn't mean I didn't mean it," she sings in "The Next Time You Say Forever"; "I'm a man-eater," she says in "People Got a Lot of Nerve"—"but still you're surprised when I eat you." Later a character in another song admits "I'm not the man you think I am." In "The Pharoahs," Case details a sixteen-year-old who falls for and marries a man who "said you like girls in white leather jackets... that was good enough for me." These are songs about men and women hurtling through affairs—the opener is called "This Tornado Loves You," if you need more evidence. Perhaps this is why the album overcomes that initial feeling of being too long and too slow: Middle Cyclone is full of passionate people—blindly, stupidly, violently passionate—caught in quiet moments of lucidity. The line from the title track that first caught my ear distilled this to four lines:

Can't give up acting tough
It's all that I'm made of
Can't scrape together quite enough
To ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love

The song is one of many flawless moments—"Magpie to the Morning," "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth," and "Prison Girls" are a few others. It's too early in the year to talk best of 2009 (though that hasn't stopped others from claiming same for Animal Collective). At any rate, this is a contender.

• Neko Case: Middle Cyclone

Andrew Bird: Noble Beast
My review of the record probably says it all. In short: I love the record, though not as much as the previous two. Bird is still my favorite musician working today, hands down, though I have burned out a little on the record; I think it's less to do with the album itself and more to do with listening to Bird, period, for the better part of the last two-plus years straight.

• Andrew Bird: Oh No

Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
Merriweather Post Pavilion and Noble Beast came out on the same day, January 20, and together the two albums have taken up the bulk of my listening concentration. Maybe it was the competition for my time between the two records that resulted in my hot-and-cold relationship to this record, but I started white hot—loved this record—for the first week or two; then the glow wore off in a big way, not to be rekindled until I saw them live. Now I'm right there with most the rest of the bloggers and fanboys out there who think this is the best album of Animal Collective's career.  

• Animal Collective: Bluish

Faust: Faust IV
Is there a better feeling than buying an album by a new-to-you artist and being blown away by it, then buying another album by the same artist and finding it even better? Such was my experience with Faust. I went on about Faust's first two albums last year—Faust So Far, their second album, was particularly terrific. I picked up Faust IV in January, expecting it to be as good as what I'd come to expect, but this album shattered those expectations. From the opening head-expander that is "Krautrock" to the subdued masterpiece "Jennifer" to the So Far-reprising "Picnic On A Frozen River, Deuxieme Tableux." everything about Faust IV is more focused, more muscular, more cohesive than their other albums. Yes, that means it's also a little more accessible, though no less daring. This is a must-own album.

• Faust: Jennifer  

Mission of Burma: Vs.
I summed up my feelings on this record already, so I'll just quote the last line: "Still, it burns me a little each time I hear the records: a little voice inside me nags, 'This record should be old news to you. It should have long been part of your vocabulary. You should have listened to everyone who ever recommended them to you.'"

• Mission of Burma: Trem Two

Josh Ritter: The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter
In a way, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter doesn't feel like a new acquisition for me. Back at the end of 2007, when the album was popping up on a number of best-of-the-year lists, I managed to pick up six or seven mp3s—about half the album—without really trying. I liked what I had, either despite or because it was incredibly straightforward—Ritter is a song-crafter in the most traditional sense, content with a good turn of phrase built into a clear melody with a satisfying level of structure and repetition. Really great pop songs, in other words, without the unnecessary clutter of experimentalism or epic scope. Ritter has a sandy voice with a tinge of southern charm, and his songs are colored by strings, horns, or subtle electronics as often as they are stripped of everything but his voice and guitar. The album—easily the best of his ouevre—is pure twenty-first-century Americana; but for all his traditionalism, he's also refreshingly confident. I was satisfied for the last year with what I had, but I'm much more glad to finally have the whole record now. 

• Josh Ritter: Mind's Eye

Del Shannon: Greatest Hits
I feel like I've talked about this before but I can't recall: I have an "awesome" playlist in my iTunes library, which I update every time I do one of these quarterly posts. The playlist currently stands at 910 songs strong, and is made up of anything in my library that is five stars and upbeat and fun and happy and basically any song, regardless of era or genre, that makes me or my brilliant wife go YES when it comes on. In this post-Indie 103 era in Los Angeles, the playlist is more essential than ever as it's pretty much become my radio station. Some artists are almost custom-made for this playlist: Harry Nilsson, for instance. Spoon. The Lovin' Spoonful. When he's joyous, Cat Stevens. The Beatles, duh. Not long ago my brilliant wife picked up Del Shannon's greatest hits for $2.99 and one listen in, we pretty much just shoved the whole record into the Awesome Mix. "Runaway," of course—who doesn't sing along full-tilt when Shannon Wa-wa-wa-wa-wonders why, why-why-why-why-why? But there's so much more: "Little Town Flirt," "Two Kinds of Teardrops," "Hats Off to Larry," "The Swiss Maid"... the list goes on. Probably the funnest record I've picked up all year.

• Del Shannon: Little Town Flirt

Missing Burma

Picking up where yesterday's post left off, the flipside to taking my time, letting my discovery of music happen in what I've manipulated myself into thinking is an organic way, is that sometimes I come across albums that make me punch myself in the face for not hearing ten or fifteen years ago. The last time I felt that acutely was when I heard Television's Marquee Moon for the first time three or four years ago. The album was like discovering a missing link in my musical awakenings as a seventeen-year-old in Fresno who was flipping his wig over the Rollins Band's punk/blues jams and Drive Like Jehu's precision-focused fury. Marquee Moon would have sent me over the moon back then! When I listen to that album I think about what it would have led me to. I probably would have gotten much deeper into the 70s New York scene—Talking Heads, Richard Hell, Patti Smith. It might have eventually led me to the No Wave New York of Mars, DNA, Glenn Branca. All stuff I eventually dipped into (but have never been obsessive about), but what if I had discovered it all when I was still at my most impressionable?  Who knows.

The same has happened more recently with Mission of Burma, a band like Television that I'd heard about starting back in my earliest days of caring about this music, but who I just never got around to hearing for no good reason. Well, one good reason is that I don't think their albums were in print, or at least available in my record stores, during the years I was in high school and college; but that still doesn't excuse waiting until 2008 to finally hear them I chalk it up to that irrational suspicion I talked about yesterday.  I was finally spurred to pick up Signals, Calls, and Marches, which collects their first EP and early singles, after reading about them in Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life. While perhaps not quite the revelation that Marquee Moon was for me, Signals was still a kind of "missing link" record, in the sense that it totally recontextualized how I heard Fugazi and a lot of other late-80s early-90s Dischord bands. Burma was clearly influenced by Gang of Four, who were a couple years ahead of them in terms of that angular, discordant sound, but they were also four, five, eight, ten years ahead of the bands who defined what punk and indie sounded like in the late 80s and early 90s.

• Mission of Burma: Academy Fight Song [from Signals, Calls and Marches, 1981]

A couple weeks ago I picked up their first full-length, Vs., and was even more blown away by their sound. Though Vs doesn't contain a song as catchy as "Academy Fight Song" or "Devotion" or "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," it succeeds as a fuller, more ambitious work. Many of the songs reach a positively cinematic zenith, foreshadowing bands like Sonic Youth or Unwound. Both those bands might be a little darker, at times heavier or more experimental, but their template is there in Burma.

I don't know what hearing either Burma record back in 1994 would have altered for me; unlike Television, Burma didn't really come from a scene that took on the same mythic qualities nor begged to investigated the way the CBGB scene has. Still, it burns me a little each time I hear the records: a little voice inside me nags, "This record should be old news to you. It should have long been part of your vocabulary. You should have listened to everyone who ever recommended them to you."

• Mission of Burma: Dead Pool [from Vs, 1982]

My Listening Year: Blind Spot Edition

In 2007 my blind spot interests were fairly monogamous: my love of the Byrds morphed into a fascination with the Laurel Canyon scene, opening basically into a lot of 60s and 70s folk and rock. (Also, Elvis Costello.) That interest continued in 2008, though moving into a more country-rock direction—the Lovin' Spoonful's Anthology, for instance, was on of my favorite records of the year. I didn't listen to it a lot on its own, but nearly every track made its way into one iTunes playlist or another. I need to start picking up their proper full lengths.

• The Lovin' Spoonful: Me About You

Unlike last year, however, my interests diverged in a few directions in 2008. I started moving toward more experimental and/or less pop music: I resparked my interest in krautrock, finallybegan dipping my toes into contemporary composers, and enjoyed one or two more psychedelic albums. Toward the end of the year, mostly inspired by Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life, I also filled in a few blanks from punk and early indie bands. (Also, Elvis Costello.)

I didn't have any major obsession-sparking experiences with my purchases this year, the way I did with Big Star's #1 Record and Elvis's Imperial Bedroom. Still, there were pleny of great finds. I finally filled in the gaping blind spot that was Brian Eno. Another Green World was partly what I expected and partly a total surprise--highlighting, if nothing else, how clueless I actually was about why Eno is so great. I knew he was an ambient pioneer, but I sorely underestimated him as a pop auteur. This was reinforced when I picked up Before and After Science, which sounds like a proto-Talking Heads record.

• Brian Eno: I'll Come Running (from Another Green World)

My understanding of krautrock, previously defined mostly by Can, one or two Neu! songs, and the vague "motorik" sense of the word as it applies to bands of the last decade, also came in for reconsideration. Neu!'s warm but desolate electronics, Amon Duul II's ramshod improv, and—best of all—Faust's brilliant deconstruction of rock have me eager to find more, to really get deeper inside this genre.

• Faust: It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl (from So Far)

Part of that journey through krautrock led me to the Monks, who really aren't remotely kraut; they're garage, or proto-punk. Black Monk Time easily ranks as one of my favorite purchases of the year.

• Monks: Complications

One of my prized acquisitions of the year the United States of America's sole album, from 1968—an early example of rock incorporating electronica elements such as tape splicing and other studio-as-instrument techniques. Absolutely worth seeking out.

• The United States of America: The American Metaphysical Circus

It wasn't all experimental shit for me in 08, though. Les Paul & Mary Ford's Best of the Capitol Masters has fully ingratiated itself into numerous playlists in my iTunes. I have a soft spot for music from the 40s and 50s that evokes a real sense of G-rated optimism; Les Paul & Mary Ford fit right in alongside my Doris Day and Fred Astaire albums.

• Les Paul & Mary Ford: The World is Waiting for the Sunrise

I also continued to fill in holes for artists I've been developing a listening relationship with over the last couple of years: two albums each by Elvis Costello (Armed Forces and Get Happy!!), Neil Young (Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and Rust Never Sleeps), and David Bowie. The Bowies I picked up weren't too hot (the dreadful Young Americans and the good but not mindblowing Station to Station), but Costello and Young both were predictably terrific. 2009 will likely see more purchases of albums by all three of these guys, including albums that I know are among their best but which I've still never heard.

• Elvis Costello: Oliver's Army (from Armed Forces)

At the tail end of the year I went headlong into a punk and classic indie rock spell, picking up a bunch of never-heards by the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, and Buzzcocks along with a bunch of re-buys, returning to albums I sold many years ago on some destitute afternoon trying to pay rent and eat a burrito while I was in college. Mission of Burma is great—I've got Vs. on hold for a future eMusic purchase. And the Buzzcocks—one of those bands, like the Lovin' Spoonful, who I realize I've heard many times over the course of my life but never understood "this is the Buzzcocks." I was expecting something a little more snarly, a little more Sex Pistolsy, but I was pleased to find an album full of pop songs about love (okay, and also orgasms).

• Buzzcocks: Ever Fallen In Love?

Later today, my real favorite album of the year. Tomorrow, my official "top ten new-to-me albums discovered in 2008"—which will somehow manage to include still more albums I haven't even touched on this week so far.

More Monks

Here's a bunch of Monks performances from an appearance on German TV in 1966.

"Monk Chant" and "Oh How They Do"

"I Can't Get Over You"

"Complications"

"Boys are Boys and Girls are Choice"

The Monks: Black Monk Time

I'd never heard of the Monks until earlier this year, when I came across their song "Monk Time." The track is immediately visceral, as singer Gary Burger shouts "You know we don't like the army. What army? Who cares what army? Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam? Mad Viet Cong. My brother died in Vietnam! James Bond, who was he?" It's part stream-of-conscious spew, part protest, part undirected rage. When the rest of the band attempts to chime in with a discordant volume swell, Burger says to them "Stop it! Stop it! I don't like it!"—as if he truly were a man on the edge of cracking; even his own band might break him. The song stinks of paranoia and distrust.

That feeling permeates all of Black Monk Time, the Monks' 1966 debut, for which "Monk Time" is the opener. Unlike so many other U.S. bands of the era, protesting the war and the administration from Laurel Canyon, Greenwhich Village, or Haight Ashbury, the  Monks weren't hippies: they were vets. The band came together while they were were GIs stationed in Germany. Many of the songs on the album are full of barely articulated rage and conflicted interests ("Do you know why I hate you baby? Because you make me hate you, baby! But call me.") Most songs are made up of a single verse at most, if not just a few words, yet you can feel the swirl of conflicted thoughts running through them. "Complications," in all its brevity, points to the band's unique perspective on the country's protests of U.S. military action:

People cry,
People die for you.
People kill,
People will for you.
People run,
Ain't it fun for you.
People go
To their deaths for you.
Complications!

The song seems to be pointed directly at the hippies, despite the Monks' "dislike" of the Vietnam War itself. None of the songs on Black Monk Time arrive at any kind of clear statement, but in a way that makes them feel more genuine than, say, Joan Baez or the Byrds righteously tolling the chimes of freedom. Complications!

The second time I heard about the Monks was about a month ago, in a thread on ILM about the origins of krautrock. Apparently the Monks factor into the birth of that genre. On paper, it seems plausible: nearly the full extent of the Monks' success in their day was in Germany, the only country in the world where Black Monk Time was released at the time. The band toured all over that country, and in a German documentary about the band, called Transatlantic Feedback, Faust's Hans Joachim Irmler apparently describes seeing the band at a local club, where he had a musical epiphany—maybe it's no accident that the cover of Faust So Far is so similar to Black Monk Time. (I haven't seen the documentary—anyone know where I can find it? I heard about Irmler's comment from yet another thread at ILM.) Julian Cope's book Krautrocksampler makes a similar claim, I'm told. (Ditto the book—I can't find a copy.) On record, though, I'm not hearing it. The Monks clearly come from garage rock roots, and certainly are part of punk's foundation. If someone can better elucidate the kraut connection, please shine a light! 

• The Monks: Monk Time
• The Monks: Complications