From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V13 #307 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Thursday, October 28 2004 Volume 13 : Number 307 Today's Subjects: ----------------- RE: Red Sox ["Bachman, Michael" ] Re: ...and in a globe of Fegs ["Brian" ] Cubs=Kings [Jeff Dwarf ] Re: but they're my bunch of records ["Gene Hopstetter, Jr." ] Re: Origin of "the curse"? [Jeff Dwarf ] Bush wins a crucial vote... [Jeff Dwarf ] Bringing People together (temporarily) [Jeff Dwarf ] Re: ...and in a globe of Fegs [2fs ] re: Peel [Eb ] Swap mix review: Laminate/Animal [Rex Broome ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 09:32:37 -0400 From: "Bachman, Michael" Subject: RE: Red Sox Max wrote: >Congrats to the Red Sox fans, anyone can have a bad century. I bet some Chicago baseball fans are eager to erase a bad century as well. Chicago Cubs last won the World Series in 1908. The Chicago White Sox last won in 1917. The White Sox would have won in a breeze in 1919 had not a core group of players took gamblers money and agreed to lose the series. They have been cursed ever since. The excellent John Sayles movie "Eight Men Out" is all about the 1919 White Sox. Not to pick on Chicago, but they are also the longest on the clock in the NHL as well, as the Black hawks last won hockey's Stanley Cup in 1961. The Detroit Lions haven't won the NFL championship since 1957, and have never been in the Super Bowl. The NFL Cardinals are even worse, but they have moved the franchise a few times to different cities. Not sure who is the longest on the clock in the NBA for basketball. Michael B. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:01:33 -0400 From: "Brian" Subject: Re: ...and in a globe of Fegs Matt Sewell said: > Last week saw our very own Brian Nupp visit the UK - we had a very > pleasant dinner here in Oxford with Brian and Tanya, with my fellow > Oxonian feg Jim Davies joining us later. Just a note to say if any of ye > fegs find yourselves passing within meeting distance of Brian (or for > that matter Jim. Or me!), I'd recommend it - Brian conforms to the old > saying "fegs are the nicest people"! Yes, I'm just back in regular mode from getting away. Matt is great! He knows of a little Indian restaurant with tastey dishes which is where we met. I love restaurants that let you supply your own alcohol and thank you Matt very much, for bring all the fine beer! Extra special meeting Jim Davies, who knows everything about everybody in the world of music. Uncanny. Meeting Jim was a nice surprise on Matt's part. Why the hell do the pubs stop serving at 11??? The trip started w/ seeing Scarlet's Well in Brighton. 8 people on stage and every instrument from mandolin to accordian to tuba to trombone to of course bass and guitar. It was insanely great. Highly recommended for all UK fegs. They ended up playing 3 Monochrome Set tunes, the last one I somehow ended up playing bass on, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens. The last night I was in London, we were lucky enough to catch a rare performance by The Would Be Goods. Anyone know them here besides Jim Davies? Spectacular! I really need to get back to England and explore more. I loved it! > Also Anton Barbeau has been playing a number of gigs over here - I've > seen a couple and have to say I'm increasingly convinced of his > greatness... highly recommended, you N. Californian fegs... actually who > are the NoCal fegs? Hands up... Hey Matt played me some Anton. One of the songs reminded me of J Lennon's Gimme Some Truth. Apparently Anton is a Robyn fan too, I hear. The album Matt was playing was pretty darn good. > Lastly, I just can't contain my excitement - the first gig I play as a 33 > year old will be in Northampton, courtesey of Pat Fish - Hurrah! > http://www.jazzbutcher.com/htdb/gigs/2004/Nov5.html Best of fun Matt! - -Brian "You slash my gortex" Nuppy - -- Brian nightshadecat@mailbolt.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 07:53:06 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: Cubs=Kings "Bachman, Michael" wrote: > The Detroit Lions haven't won the NFL championship since > 1957, and have never been in the Super Bowl. The NFL > Cardinals are even worse, but they have moved the > franchise a few times to different cities. Same ownership in Chicago, St. Louis, and Phoenix though (the Bidwell family). They did finally win their first playoff game since 1947 a couple years ago before falling back to being wretched. > Not sure who is the longest on the clock in the NBA for > basketball. The Philadelphia-San Francisco-Golden State Warriors last won in 1975 (as GS). The New York Knickerbockers last won in 1973. Milwaukee Bucks (NBA) last won in 1971 but that was only their 3rd year in existence so they deserve to suffer. The Milwaukee-St. Louis-Atlanta Hawks (nee Tri-Cities Blackhawks) last won in 1958 in St. Louis. But the grandaddy of NBA droughts is the KC/Omaha-Kansas City-Sacramento Kings who last won an NBA in 1951 as the Rochester (later Cincinnati) Royals. Also, since I wasted some time this morning at work rifling through to find out that shit up there: Franchises with no NBA titles; first year in league Phoenix Suns; 1968-9 Cleveland Cavaliers; 1970-1 San Diego-Los Angeles Clippers nee Buffalo Braves; 1970-1 New Orleans-Utah Jazz; 1974-5 Dallas Mavericks; 1980-1 Charlotte-New Orleans Hornets; 1988-9 Miami Heat; 1988-9 Minnesota Timberwolves; 1989-90 Orlando Magic; 1989-90 Toronto Raptors; 1995-6 Vancouver-Memphis Grizzlies; 1995-6 Charlotte Bobcats; 2004-5 Old ABA Franchises (all established 1968) who haven't yet won an NBA title: Denver Nuggets nee Rockets (no ABA titles) Indiana Pacers (3 ABA titles) New York-New Jersey (soon to be Brooklyn) Nets nee New Jersey Americans (2 ABA titles) ===== "[The Bush administration] deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride." -- President Aleksander Kwasniewski, Poland "I wonder, even when Kerry gets elected can Bush still be impeached? I would love [for] him to be humiliated after all he's done." -- Elvis Costello Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 20:51:33 -0500 From: "Gene Hopstetter, Jr." Subject: Re: but they're my bunch of records > From: Tom Clark > Subject: Re: but they're my bunch of idiots > > NOTE: The following does not apply to Gene Hopstetter. Fuck you Tom Clark! > Bob Seger? I don't own a single Bob Seger LP or CD. I've got a few MP3s lying around. Does that redeem me? ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 00:26:37 -0400 From: "Maximilian Lang" Subject: Origin of "the curse"? When did all the talk of the Curse of The Bambino start? I don't recall hearing it until the early 90's. I didn't follow baseball from 1983-88, I certainly never heard word one about it in the 70's. Max _________________________________________________________________ On the road to retirement? Check out MSN Life Events for advice on how to get there! http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=Retirement ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 08:38:08 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: Re: Origin of "the curse"? Maximilian Lang wrote: > When did all the talk of the Curse of The Bambino start? > I don't recall hearing it until the early 90's. I didn't > follow baseball from 1983-88, I certainly never heard > word one about it in the 70's. A Boston Globe sportswriter named Dan Shaughnessy wrote and sold a lot of books about it after the 1986 World Series . ===== "[The Bush administration] deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride." -- President Aleksander Kwasniewski, Poland "I wonder, even when Kerry gets elected can Bush still be impeached? I would love [for] him to be humiliated after all he's done." -- Elvis Costello __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 09:14:49 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: Bush wins a crucial vote... http://www.itv.com/news/entertainment_57683.html Bush: 'Best villain in a film' 9.34AM, Thu Oct 28 2004 George Bush has topped a crunch poll ahead of next week's US Presidential elections - Movie Villain of the Year. Perhaps not the vote he's looking for, but the US leader has been awarded the title for his unintentional and very un-actorish part in Michael Moore's controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. He beat off Spider-Man 2's Doctor Octopus, played by Alfred Molina, and Lord of the Rings' pixellated character Gollum. Kill Bill's Elle Driver, the eyepatch assassin played by Daryl Hannah, was also shortlisted. Total Film editor Matt Mueller said: "It is possible that people have been a little bit tongue in cheek here, but they are also saying that Bush was very scary in Fahrenheit 9/11. "He was absolutely terrifying in that film. He looked like a man who had lost control - the famous scene where he sits there in a school, absolutely paralysed, after being told about the twin towers, is just one example. "Fahrenheit 9/11 was a huge box office hit. Lots of people saw it and movie-goers are saying that there's no one like George Bush to strike fear into people's hearts." ===== "[The Bush administration] deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride." -- President Aleksander Kwasniewski, Poland "I wonder, even when Kerry gets elected can Bush still be impeached? I would love [for] him to be humiliated after all he's done." -- Elvis Costello __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 09:30:03 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: Bringing People together (temporarily) The Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus in India. Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq. The Germans and the French. And now, Moby and Eminem... http://www.moby-online.com/index.asp?DiaryID=2116 ===== "[The Bush administration] deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride." -- President Aleksander Kwasniewski, Poland "I wonder, even when Kerry gets elected can Bush still be impeached? I would love [for] him to be humiliated after all he's done." -- Elvis Costello __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Y! Messenger - Communicate in real time. Download now. http://messenger.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 07:30:27 -0500 From: 2fs Subject: Re: ...and in a globe of Fegs On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 13:00:10 +0100, Matt Sewell wrote: > Also Anton Barbeau has been playing a number of gigs over here - I've > seen a couple and have to say I'm increasingly convinced of his > greatness... highly recommended, you N. Californian fegs... actually who > are the NoCal fegs? Hands up... I'm not a NoCal feg (or a lo-cal feg) but I am an Anton Barbeau fan. Curiously, while it may have been a NoCal fan who turned me on to him (and briefly a feg), I'm thinking more likely it was an Ohioan, of all places. Barbeau is collaborating with Sc*tt M*ller on some new stuff, btw. (ps: what was Eddie Tews talking about with that otherwise blank post about #1 google?) - -- ++Jeff++ The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.blogspot.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 08:46:27 -0700 From: Eb Subject: re: Peel Anyone have a link which would include a soundclip of Peel's VOICE? I've observed all the "Peel Sessions" imports, of course (the only one I actually own is the Billy Bragg disc). But I've never heard a moment of Peel's actual voice, beyond seeing him on old "Avengers" reruns. Saw "Waking Life" two nights ago. Jeez, why was I so eager to see this film? Like being trapped in a late-night freshman dorm again. Oh, and my impression was that the "Babe Ruth Curse" talk started long before the '70s, but maybe I'm wrong. Eb Np: The Long Winters/When I Pretend to Fall ("I'm counting on you to throw...more than...SHAPES") ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 13:17:06 -0700 From: Rex Broome Subject: Swap mix review: Laminate/Animal Having tired of endless discussions Baseball and Politics, I count myself lucky to have come into possession of some exciting new music about which to blather endlessly to myself. Join me, if so inclined. Here in front of me: a double-disc mix compilation prepared by Mr. Jeffrey Norman, entitled "Laminate/Animal", or perhaps the reverse, as in "Fables of the Reconstruction of the Fables" etc. I won't say much about it as a whole since I used so very may words below to describe the individual tracks, although I will note that it is good, very good indeed, and Jeffrey's liner notes would be worth reading even if you didn't have the discs themselves to play. So here we go... Disc 1 (or perhaps Disc Laminate): 1) Majesty Crush, No. 1 Fan: From 1993; I know nothing about this artist, but I like this very much. Vaguely shoegazer-y I suppose; subject matter suggests that they might be American, although I guess Peter Gabriel wrote a sympathetic song about a Presidential stalker, too, didn't he? I've always wondered how a songwriter decides that a single chord sequence is great enough to carry an entire song... it's never happened to me, but it works in plenty of noteworthy cases. Pure balls? Laziness? Too much weed? My bandmate Charlie would love this one. 2) A.C. Newman, Homemade Bombs in the Afternoon. Non-album track which reminds me I probably haven't given Newman's recent album as many spins as I should before cobbling together my year-end best-of list. Very nice. 3) Electric Light Orchestra, 10538 Overture. I know practically no ELO, although I have a smattering of stuff by the Move and some late-'90's tracks mysteriously ascribed to some outfit called "The Beatles". This is pretty cool, really. Interestingly, hearing this slightly harder-edged but orchestrally ornamented track after the less brazen chamber-rock sounds of the previous one suggests that ELO may be the missing link between AC Newman and the New Pornographers, but that can't be right, can it? 4) Lilys, Precollection. Don't know much about these guys/this fellow. A bit Barrett-esque in the vocal department, eh? Nice chord changes in the verse... organic enough that it doesn't immediately strike you that the whole thing is like, 20 bars long without repeating itself, making this damned well the polar opposite of track 1. How far back does this band go? The only place I recall seeing them before is on the Just Say Roe compilation, and I remember that mainly because of the cognitive dissonance created by having a band called Lilys on a record with a song called "Lillies of the Valley". 5) Swervedriver, How Does It Feel to Look Like Candy? The title sounds like every song the Velvet Underground and The Jesus and Mary Chain ever wrote all at once. The song itself quotes Bacharach. Hmmm. It's good. I know Swervedriver's first album and from that viewed them as second-string shoegazers blessed with standout singles, and I'd heard their second album and thought it was dreadful faux-grunge. I guess they found themselves sometime thereafter, huh? 6) Sonic Youth, Within You Without You. From the 1988 Various Artists play Sgt. Pepper's compilation, which I do not own. As Jeffrey points out, if it was the late '80's and you were confused as to whether or not what you had was a tribute album, all you had to do was look for the SY contribution to confirm it. But was that a bad thing? Their choices of what they covered seemed as unimpeachable as their proper albums were in those days. This is a perfect fit, maybe even better than their letter-perfect re-imagining of Neil Young's "Computer Age", and this is one of the best Thurston vocals I've ever heard, I do believe. 7) Macha, The Nipplegong. Erm, dunno about that title . But this is pretty cool. Continuing the faux-Easternisms of the previous track in a slightly more glidey, less skronky idiom, downstrokes on the fuzzbass notwithstanding. A few sly chord changes and textural instrumental flourishes keep it out of flat-out drone territory. Incidentally, SY was actually doing faux British faux Indianisms, so there was even more easterly drift there thanyou were giving them credit for, Jeffrey! Anyways, Macha is a name I see from time to time without having heard much by them... do they normally sound like this? 8) Hugo Largo, Fancy. Now this I do own. Although I doubt it's easy to come by these days, seeing as how Mimi Goese is probably best known as the chick on Moby records from before Moby got big enough to "upgrade" to Gwen Stefani. There was a fair amount of goodness to Goese's album Soak, which occasionally comes up in Fegmaniax threads about the Best Ever Records With Medusae On Their Cover Artwork. For the record, I'm pretty sure that I didn't know this was a Kinks cover when I first heard it, and then when I did hear the Kinks version (probably within a few months) I didn't recognize it as a song Hugo Largo had covered. I got it all worked out a few years back, though. 9) The B-52's, Give Me Back My Man. Good stuff. Jeffrey posits this as a more "serious" B-52's tune than we might normally think of it as, and in this context, I can see what he means. I'll join the chorus of the benighted in never having noticed the Rosemary Clooney reference in this tune, but I still wonder about "I'll give you FISH!", particularly since I had someone I was dating sing that line to me before I'd ever actually heard this song, and, well, you can see where that might be confusing. 10) Rosemary Clooney, Come On-a My House. On her house? I mean, usually it'd be a part of the body, but even if that's not where she wants it, for sanitary reasons or whatever, you'd still think a smaller subsection of the dwelling would be specified... wall, carpet, or some such. These are the jokes, I don't dance. I've always liked this song and this kind of tune from afar... I'll find stuff like this in, like, my friend's iTunes who has maybe about 1/10 as many records as I do, but her list of "genres" is about three times larger, which makes me feel kinda like a snobbish asshole. And then I remember that she has a fair amount of Bon Jovi in there, so one of those genres must be "suck". Well, that was fun. Let's move on, shall we? 11) Sparks, Amateur Hour. Okay, this band confuses the shit out of me. I've read career overviews of them which have utterly failed to clear things up to my satsifaction. Sometimes they are referred to as "new wave" but I'm pretty sure they predate punk. I think I've heard that they are from LA, but nobody ever talks about them in the course of mentioning great LA bands, and I swear that on a few of the tracks that I've heard ("National Crime Awareness Week", maybe?) the guy is singing in a British accent. Very few of the scattered tracks I've heard by them sound remotely similar. A friend of mine played me most of their last record, mostly orchestral-sounding and kind of snidely arch; I've heard other tracks that sound like, I dunno, maybe early Split Enz, and then a synth-pop thing or two, and this... well, this sounds like a mildly roccoco spin on the middle-period Mekons, Sally-Timms-on-vocal flavor, but maybe that's not even a female singer. Anyways, yes, I know I could look the band up and learn all kinds of things about them, but I've done that before and I'm still confused... could a human being have a go at straightening this out for me? Thanks! 12) John Sharples. That's Just Part of My Charm. This is good fun. Only real obstacle to complete enjoyment is, and hey, weren't we just talking about this, the faux-British accent employed on some of the backing vocals, which sound like they think the track is more punk-rock than it properly is, pushing it into novelty territory when the song is strong enough to survive without the gimmick. Far from a fatal flaw, though. 13) Futureheads, Hounds of Love. Fun, punky Kate Bush cover. Vocalist has a vaguely Billy Bragg-meets-Robert Smith vibe. I'm giving up on sorting out the fake accents from the real ones for the time being. 14) Hypnolovewheel, Bridget Because. Vocal melody reminds me of several mid-period Wire songs at once, but the overall vibe is much more in the crafted-pop realm. I have a tendency to be prejudiced against sings with titles like this one's, although I couldn't tell you what I mean by "titles like this one's". Maybe this is more like an early Posies tune? Pretty good, actually. 15) The Mystic Tide, Frustration. Nice vintage garage-psych tune with which I'm not familiar. Really can't go wrong serving me up a bowl of this kind of thing. The psoup that eats like a meal, or psomething. Tasty. 16) Julian Cope, 24a, Velocity Crescent. Well, this is just nutty. Kind of fun, but probably more fun to have played than to hear. Weird raveup and slide-guitar type thing. Copey mostly intones gibberish... one of the few clear proclamations goes "Inna gadda da vida... when the music's over... white rabbit... that's an F-minor." I think that if there were much truth to demographics I'd love everything Cope did, but he really only connects with me about 45% of the time, so I spend years without even sifting through his output, and consequently forget how much I love some of his stuff... should really do my own compilation of his material. Hey, has anyone ever noticed that the first track on the Dandy Warhol's "Come Down" album has almost the same words as "Charlotte Anne"? And I don't even think it's an intentional ripoff... 17) Sixteen Horsepower, The Partisan (French Version). Jeffrey is apparently really into these guys, about whom I know little... the overall vibe here is reminiscent of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds with someone other than Nick Cave singing, but no less intensely... thus, I suppose, Crime & the City Solution. It's a good song, of course, but an original might've given me a better read on the artist. Might have to do some digging. 18) Television, Marquee Moon (TVKQ Mix). Not properly a "remix" since my understanding is that that means the individual tracks of an original recording have been monkeyed with, and not quite a "mash-up", as (A) I believe that to indicate a combination of two distinct compositions, and (B) I would guess the ages of the person responsible and the person listening would preclude us truly knowing when the hell something is "mashed up" and when it's not. This is Jeffrey's homemade cross-pollination of the original album version of the Television song and the Kronos Quartet's instrument chamber-music version, replete with notes on how he did it and why (answer to the latter part: he heard someome else had done it, so this remix-based-on-the-concept-of-someone-else's-remix must be some kind of first). At first I wished he'd been more liberal with sprinkling the string quartet bits over the band track, but on a few subsequent listens I've come to appreciate the subtlety he employed, as shimmery little slivers of violin and viola weave in and out of the guitar lines without you noticing they're there until they're about to fade out again. This is a very cool thing for a Verlaine obsessive like myself to have and hear, and it can't have been easy to create. I idly wonder if I've spent more time listening to this song than any other composition... it would seem likely, since I've probably listened to Marquee Moon, the album, far more often than most, have heard this live and on bootlegs many times as well, not to mention that among Television tracks, this is one of the most likely to crop up randomly in one's life... and then there's the fact that it's so much longer than most other songs I've voluntarily played to death that each spin carves out a longer chunk of my life than most of my other favorite songs, and I'm thinking of cumulative listening time over number of times I've dialed it up. Perhaps a Neil Young epic like "Cortez" could lay a similar claim on my frequent flyer miles, but I sort of doubt it, since when the time comes to choose a classic Neil album to play, you have, erm, rather a few more options than you do with Television, even including Verlaine's solo records. Disc 2 (or perhaps Disc Animal): 1) Nova Social, Fingerprints. Nice piece of twitchy, lyrically mininalist and somewhat paranoid guitar stuff. Not necessarily galvanizing on its own but does a good job of kicking things off here. 2) Frank Black, I Heard Ramona Sing. Hey, something else I own, although I haven't listened to this for quite some time. Have been meaning to, since Miles keeps advocating for the first two FB albums as nearly Pixies-worthy. But I just saw the Pixies, so this may be the wrong time to check that hypothesis. 3) The Sugarplastic, Dunn the Worm. Hey, these guys still exist! Or at least they did four years ago... I haven't heard them since their debut (I think)... I am glad to hear they have outgrown their need to remake Drums & Wires down to the last note but still do okay in the melody department. Jeffrey draws attention to a tricky middle section which is indeed a very arresting spiderweb of tricky but unpretentious guitar. 4) Jeff Kelly, Mrs. Nelson. Nice slab of midtempo powerpop... could perhaps use a bit more variation in its guitar texture, which seems to be two identical fuzztones panned left and right which alternate between silence, Husker Du-like buzz, and '70's rawk harmony-leads. Backing track a bit reminiscent of REM circa Up and/or whatever you think that was in turn evocative of. Melody and words put me in mind of "Throw Your Arms Around Me", the Hunters & Collectors song that Neil Finn has played more frequently than Hunters & Collectors ever did. 5) Klaatu, Sub-Rosa Subway. Always been curious about this band-that-could-have-literally-been-the-Beatles. This really kicks ass. Jeffrey says this is far and away the height of their repertoire, but even so that might make the record worth my attention. Bit florid, perhaps, but in a properly evocative fashion. 6) Tarwater, Seven Ways to Fake a Perfect Skin. Liner notes say they are German, and one supposes one kan hear some Kraftwerk in this gently pretty retro-synthpop, but the vocal sounds like a barely unreconstituted punky sneer, making this seem to point more to the period when Devoto, Shelley, Colin Newman and everyone else left their punky bands, dialed down the vocal vitriol and started toying with synths. Which is not a bad place to be at all. 7) Schneider TM, Reality Check. Despite the acoustic guitar bit, this thing lands a little closer to its Krautsynth heritage than the previous track. I burned out on the resurgence of the vocoder a few years back, but this has a serious melody to it, and some interesting Aphex Twin-ish updates welded to its vintage chassis and a nice air of mystery hanging overhead. Good in a spooky way. 8) John Greaves/Peter Blevgrad/Lisa Herman with Robert Wyatt, Kewm Rhone. Jeffrey's liner notes trumpet, "This is our title track. And its' (bwah hah ha ha!) PROG." (All punctuation and capitalization his.) And it's all true. The key phrase is some kind of palindromic thing that starts off "Peel's foe"b& bet Jeffrey feels bad for that one now! Okay, I don't hate this, but there's one really irksome smooth-jazz change under the melody bit. 9) Pere Ubu, Drinking Wine SpodyOdy. This of course kicks ass with mocking disdain over all, including such latter day pretenders as Prince's "Sexy Spodyody", Superchunk's "Slack Spodyody", and even the Rolling Stones' "Star Star", which was or course originally entitled "Star Ody". Honestly, though, always nice to hear these guys again. 10) Ex Models, She Blinded Me With Science. Sort of an early Gang of Four-style cover of the Dolby tune. Good fun! 11) Graeme Downes, Sunday Kickaround. Stately track with some nice changes, dropped beats, and lead/rhythm guitar interplay which takes some interesting turns, both changing their minds from moment to moment as to whether to drone they're riding is in a major or minor key. Sparse, evocative vocals. Reminds me that, since I just discovered that one of my Verlaines records was not lost, just creatively re-filed by my kids, I should listen to it, huh? 12) Pond, Filterless. I suppose you could dig up less interesting artifacts from the grunge era. This isn't bad at all, actually, but the overall sound does compel me to try to rein in my bitching about the breakthrough indie bands of 2004, seeing as how they come a lot closer to representing "my indie rock", in superficial sonic terms at least, than the mid-'90's crowd. Which is not to say that this might not be a better-written tune than anything on the Franz Ferdinand album. Or that it would matter anyway. Huh? Was I typing out loud? 13) GRNDNTL BRNDS, Wind (v.4) Jeffrey has apparently met few songs with extended sections in 7/8 that he didn't like. This is freaky. I am comforted by the fact that as recently as four years ago someone was able to come up with a keyboard sound that makes me go, what the fuck is that? 14) Air, Cherrry Blossom Girl. Kinda lost track of these guys after loving their first album to deathb& I think it was the profusion of ep's, soundtracks, reissues and such, all leading up to a second album that didn't do much to expand on the things I liked about the first one, which burned me out, at least in terms of spending cash on their records. But it's good to catch up with them. Some of my friends just saw them at the Hollywood Bowl and said it almost put them to sleep; I had the same experience years ago seeing them at the Ford Amphitheatre, but it was an experience which I enjoyed very much and found to be more or less the point. Sidenote: I recently had my car painted, and in the process lost the Air bumper sticker I'd had since that show at the Ford. Which is okay, not just because I don't necessarily want to be pegged as an Air "fan", but because I'd placed right next to it a sticker for my buddy's band Project K, and that sticker basically presented as a big purple "K" butting right up against the other sticker and giving the general impression that I was a big booster of something called "KAIR". 15) Genesis, Lamia. Okay, everybody, story time. I submit to you the following, entitled "Don't Talk to Me About Steve Hackett, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Pink Bicycle T-Shirt", by one James R. Broome. Sit back and relax. We're gonna be here a while. Yes, yes, once upon a time I listened to Genesis. It's true! It's kind of my brother Jeffrey's fault. Jeffrey is two years younger than me and he was always the "cool" Broome Brother.. Both of us spent grades 1-6 at New Creek Elementary, a real backwoods school, before moving on to the "big city" halls of Keyser Middle School for grades 7-8 and then on to Keyser High for the balance of secondary school. New Creek kids were mostly country folk, and we Broomes were pretty much raised on, albeit not terribly interested in, the commercial country radio of the late '70's and early '80's, but what I, self-styled intellectual snot that I was, really listened to were film scores and stuff like that, mostly nerdy science fiction films, but whatever, really; this led to a minor interest in the "high tech" sound of synthesizers, albeit generally outside of the pop sphere. Anyways, I made it through Middle School and into my freshman year of high school without being much impacted by the pop music of the mid-'80's except to act like I hated it. But at about the time my brother moved to the "city" school, they finally ran television cables to our house in the sticks. My brother, being better at adapting socially than myself, started paying attention to pop radio and watching, yup, MTV. This I could kind of get into as a film geek, so I liked stuff like the "Sledgehammer" video and kinda started to enjoy the songs that had cool, weird, or creative videos; meanwhile the shitty videos provided ammunition for making fun of people for liking the shitty artists responsible for them. Simultaneously a few other weird things happened... I don't know why, but the 20th Anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's made a big impact on me. Could've been as a result of some current record by Harrison or McCartney, I dunno...maybe because I had listened to the 45's of "Nowhere Man" and "Come Together" a lot as kid, and oh, wait, I remember reading the Beatles bio "The Love You Make"; my dad had just finished it and I was out of beach reading material. Chronology is hazy. Anyway, '60's music was beginning to impinge on my consciousness, and I was devouring rock encyclopedias and "100 best whatever" issues of Rolling Stone, trying to get up to speed. So there was that. My tastes in contemporary stuff still ran marginally towards the synthesized, requiring a little bit of weirdness but stopping shy of what was referred to, and stigmatized as, "pinhead music"-- stuff like Depeche Mode, of whom I doubt I'd even heard at the time... so I'd go in for, say, the Pet Shop Boys or Art of Noise. I was still trying to suss out genres. I knew '60's tunes were cool. I knew hair metal sucked. Punk seemed to be something that not-too-bright skateboard kids owned outright. Pinheads seemed to be more concerned that their music disturb their parents than that it be good, and I really didn't want to freak out my parents, since I was odd enough already. I knew some "classic rock" was good, but some of it sounded like metal to me and thus clearly sucked, or was at least the roots of future-suck. So I liked the sci-fi throb of synths, but not in anything *too* weird (pinhead) or *too* normal (pop). Shortly after I started absorbing this stuff, my brother joined the Columbia House Cassette Club. While more normal than myself, he still had an interest in some oddball music, so while he was casting about for albums to fill out his introductory package, I reminded him of a couple of bands we'd both found interesting, and he ordered an album apiece from them: Talking Heads, whose video for "Once in a Lifetime" we'd seen on SCTV reruns, and R.E.M., whose song "Fall On Me" I'd heard back-announced on the local classic-rock station as "what the Byrds would sound like if they were still recording today", and I thought I probably liked the Byrds, and definitely liked the arty video for the song. The rest of his introductory package consisted of, if I can remember correctly, Huey Lewis, Billy Ocean, Nu Shooz, Dire Straits, Club Nouveau, maybe Sting and perhaps the Human League, and lots of Phil Collins and trio-era Genesis. Jeff was big on Phil Collins. I kinda dug his synth-ier things, too, at first. Anyways, this was the shit that was lying around to listen to and I listened to it all for a few months, usually while playing videogames or writing. And, while the Talking Heads stuff was my favorite by far, I actually got pretty damned hardcore about those Genesis albums. Yeah, this is me we're talking about here. I particularly liked the really screwy, borderline scary stuff like "Mama", the long version of "Tonight Tonight Tonight", "In The Air Tonight", the Tony Banks synthstrumental epics, and also the fact that the half of Collins' lyrics that weren't pure cheese seemed to be written from the point of view of institutionalized mental cases. Meanwhile, I genuinely like Peter Gabriel for reasons other than his videos by this point, and I'd done enough reading on rock history to know that Gabriel used to be in Genesis, and that they were considered "art rock" (as were Talking Heads, natch), were theatrical and had more guitar in those days, so I was thinking that if I liked the weirder aspects of the current Genesis, and older psychedelic rock, that old Genesis stuff with Gabriel would be frickin' awesome. Remember, this was all happening very quickly... probably half a year tops between me becoming interested in "rock music" at all and this phase. But let's set that aside for a moment. My friends in my little small-town world were the other hardcore nerds, but, this being before computers took over, we were more art-and-creativity nerds than tech-geeks. And we did everything creative, to varying degrees: films, videos, comic books, novels, haunted houses, drama, the whole deal. Getting on into the teen-angst years we were naturally gonna form a band. One guy (sort of my rival for alpha-nerd status) played keys and had a decent synth; another guy was in the marching band drum line and bought a trap set, and I... had access to my dad's old guitar rig, which beat the hell out of what anyone else was gonna score at Keyboard World. So I was the de facto lead guitarist, and I was gonna play it to the hilt. I got Dad, a folkie and a strummer, to show me what he knew and kinda made up the rest, although I think that, at the time, I underestimated how much his approach, and the music I'd heard his band play for years, had shaped my my thinking about music (or more specifically, songs)already. It was, therefore, this odd accidental choice of instrument that made me start thinking more about guitars than synths, and I had to start looking for role models. I knew the guitarist from Genesis was in Mike and the Mechanics, so I checked that out and found it if anything even soppier than Genesis themselves, so I was kinda working with the Beatles and Talking Heads and not much else. U2 kinda crept in there as well, I guess. Anyways, the local classic rock station had a show where at midnight they'd play an entire "classic" album, and I heard that they were gonna play "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", which I'd read was the pinnacle theatrical acheivement of the Gabriel version of Genesis. For a week ahead of time I was totally psyched and set to stay up late and record the whole thing... switching sides and tapes when necessary. The night rolled around and I started listening to it... and just about when to vocals kicked in... "Broh-huh-hoadway", really?... I just sorta collapsed, because what I was hearing just seemed so deeply, deeply lame. I had been investing a lot of conditional hope in this whole Genesis thing, being an apologist to myself for the sappy shit and assuming that the motherlode of the later artier strains lay back in the days when Gabriel was still around, but this... anyway, I left the tape recording and went to bed, thinking, well, I'll listen to it later and if it gets better I can always buy the whole thing later. What happened instead was that I started playing the ass out of Lifes Rich Pageant and figured out that I wanted my musical artsiness and weirdosity delivered in a more visceral form, or something that echoed the roots of the music I'd grown up with, just... stranger. So, basically, a line starting at the Kingston Trio and drawn through REM pointed squarely at punk rock, at least conceptually, for me. And I never did finish listening to that dub of the first half of the radio broadcast of the album from which this track is extracted. All of which is to say that, while I know that my bitching about Prog Rock sounds like the parroting of the rock-crit party line, I at least am fairly satisfied for my own purposes that it's not... I was as pretentious a young twit as you could ask for, and thought I yearned for something which fit the description of Prog almost exactly... yes, Prog Rock should have saved my life-- based on my personality, it was far more likely to do so than Punk or Post Punk or whatever-- but it just fundamentally didn't work for me... maybe it just ran up against too many years of unregistered country-folk synapse-shaping, or some deeper Appalachian genetic tic, but there you go. It should be noted that among my next major musical obsessions after REM were Television, Neil Young, and the Church, so obviously pretention, guitar wankery, and epic song lengths were far from anathema to me... there was just... something else. Plus, Yes always sounded like crap to me. The moral of the story? Send me a Prog Rock song, get a Prog Rock review. Oh, and this song isn't too bad. Sounds kinda like early Peter Gabriel. I do like Peter Gabriel! 16) John Cale, The Jeweller. The "alternate version" from the CD issue of Slow Dazzle, as opposed to the one on "The Island Years" compilation. Ironically, this is the only one I really know, having completed my Cale import collection before acquiring the compilation from Columbia House to fill out a membership requirement and figureing, hey, better mastering and a few odds and sods... thus I've only ever listened to it as kind of background music... yeah, yeah, I know this... and never clocked in that this song was different on it. Hey, Jeffrey, did you like the new Cale record, or did I build it up too much for ya? Well, there you go. By the way, vote Kerrey, and go Sox. Or have I been writing so long that both of those things are over? - -Rex Broome (drums and vocals, Genesis) - -- "Maybe baby election twelve who I really am!" - -Miranda Mellbye Broome ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V13 #307 ********************************