From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V16 #340 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Monday, September 17 2007 Volume 16 : Number 340 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Christopher Gross - please explain! [kevin ] Re: Christopher Gross - please explain! [2fs ] so lovely to be wanted [Jill Brand ] Re: fegmaniax-digest V16 #336 [Rex ] Re: Christopher Gross - please explain! [Rex ] Re: Christopher Gross - please explain! [2fs ] Re: so lovely to be wanted [Rex ] tl;dr episode iv: fat bob strikes back [Rex ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:52:21 -0700 (GMT-07:00) From: kevin Subject: Re: Christopher Gross - please explain! >> I don't quite follow: pretty clearly, anyone who wants OJ to go to jail >> feels that way because they think that, despite the criminal verdict (and >> in accord with the civil judgment and his gorram fucking obscenity of a > book), he himself is a murderer. Amen. >I know it's a cliche, but: two wrongs don't make a right. But three lefts do. >Of course that >partly depends on what really happened in Vegas, but from what I've read so >far it's not exactly clear. Well, it's like the current ad campaign says - what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Hopefully for 20 to life. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:06:37 -0700 (GMT-07:00) From: kevin Subject: Re: Christopher Gross - please explain! >if everyone waited until >they'd settled all misgivings before making momentous decisions, no one >would ever make a momentous decision: there's *always* something unsettled - Yup, if I'd been swayed by all my misgivings about getting married (lots) I wouldn't be looking at a 25th anniversary next week. >Their goodness or evilness (still not defining >those terms, are we...) come from *their decisions*. I think this is the core of your existentialism - another contribution of the despised Frogs. >Oh: this good/evil thing? I'll go along with Kurt Vonnegut: "Goddamn it, >you've got to be kind." Speaking as the person who apparently triggered this teapot-sized tempest, my basic operating principle is Be Good To People. All I was trying to do earlier was to suggest that intellectual honesty requires us (or at least me) to keep in mind that the standards of My Tribe aren't necessarily universal, however much they may matter to me. A lot of this mideast trouble originates precisely from people losing sight of that reality. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:09:48 -0700 (GMT-07:00) From: kevin Subject: RE: Christopher Gross - please explain! 20 years >later, and I'm _still_ trying to figger out what happened to Jack Lemmon at>the Dakota... Maybe that's where he first met Walter Matthau. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:29:15 -0400 (EDT) From: Capuchin Subject: Re: Christopher Gross - please explain! On Mon, 17 Sep 2007, kevin wrote: > All I was trying to do earlier was to suggest that intellectual honesty > requires us (or at least me) to keep in mind that the standards of My > Tribe aren't necessarily universal, however much they may matter to me. > A lot of this mideast trouble originates precisely from people losing > sight of that reality. All of this cultural relativism is going to get you nowhere fast. You're falling into the great Liberal Fallacy that all points of view are valid and equal. If everyone thought that way, there would still be slavery in this part of the USA and the civil rights movement never would have happened. When you encourage people to drive less, recycle, or just stop dumping toxic waste into the rivers, you are imposing your values upon them. And that's the right thing to do! Respect people enough to argue with them and let them know when they're being stupid and respect yourself enough to open your mind to their counterarguments. I think people, for the overwhelming majority, agree on the fundamentals of what is goodness and the desire to be good. Therefore, whenever two people disagree, at least one of them is miscalculating or making some poorly supported assumption about the impact of their behavior. We can't know unless we hash it out and we can't hash it out of we don't confront it. If it turns out there is a disagreement about base assumptions that cannot be reconciled (well, first, I'd be quite surprised!), then we can start talking about what it means for an ethical system to be valid. But I don't think we've gotten anywhere near that far. You usually don't have to scratch too far below the surface until you find some wildly unsupportable statement underlying at least one side of an argument. J. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:38:50 -0500 From: 2fs Subject: Re: Christopher Gross - please explain! On 9/17/07, Capuchin wrote: > > On Mon, 17 Sep 2007, 2fs wrote: > > On 9/17/07, Brian Huddell wrote: > >>>> PS. Who's hoping OJ will really go to jail this time? > >>> Um, only the people who are sympathetic to murderers, kidnappers, and > >>> torturers. > >> Well, this should be fun. > > > > > Okay - I think I know where this is going: jail itself is an inhumane > > form of punishment. > > That's about halfway toward an accurate reading of my intention. > > There's no such thing as "humane punishment". The whole idea of > punishment is to inflict evil upon someone. You can try to justify it by > saying your evil is for a "greater good", but everyone who ever did evil > thought that at the time. Traditionally, there are three aspects to dealing with someone who's committed a crime: punishment of the criminal, protection of the public, and rehabilitation of the criminal. (Some would add a fourth - vengeance for the victim or those who knew the victim - but I think we can agree this should be disregarded as, essentially, aiding another crime in itself.) We've tilted so far in favoring the first of those criteria that it seems as if it's the only way to deal with the second one - while the third one is generally just laughed out of consideration. But the second one still exists, even if we favor the first one. As for the first - I address that below. > I would tend to agree, with the exception that some people pretty > > clearly are an imminent threat to others and certainly need to be > > prevented from harming others, however that might be accomplished. > > Ah, the "he needed killin'" argument. Who said anything about killing? (You did - I certainly didn't.) There are any number of ways to prevent, say, a serial killer from killing again other than killing him. Prison isn't the only kind of restraint, either - in 99% of cases, some sort of treatment in a secure facility would be better. That's in 99% of the cases where someone needs to be kept away from the public for the public's protection - probably 90% of people in prison do *not* fit that category at all. At least when they go in. When they get out, many more of them do. Again, that's a matter of point of > view. And a world in which violence and threat of violence is an > appropriate response to unwanted behavior is a clearly not a world that > considers violence to be unwanted behavior. It's a paradoxical cycle. How are we defining "violence" here? I suppose (and I'm using this because it's the clearest example) that it's "violent" to prevent a serial killer from freely moving about in public. What should be done instead, if not preventing him from freely moving about in public, given the very strong likelihood that (a) he'll kill again or (b) he'll be killed *by* the public if they know what he's done? > But in context, I think the question really is, "how many people are > > happy that OJ's finally going to get some sort of punishment more > > appropriate than having a few less million dollars to play golf with?" > > What kind of people do you think we are? Those who relish the suffering > of others? That's insane... or at least sociopathic. So, uh, it's okay that O.J. Simpson killed two people (stipulating for the moment that as fact) and, due to his fame and wealth, is free to play golf and sell books about his killings (even if any profits do go to the victims' families)? I mean, okay: Simpson probably isn't quite an imminent threat to others in the way a repeat murderer arguably is. And acknowledging the necessity for some form of punishment is hardly the same as "relishing" it. I think it's highly unlikely that humans will ever be so forgiving as to allow someone who killed two people to just wander freely about - even if for whatever reason it was known h'ed never kill again. If there are to be any such things as values held generally in a society, those values need to be positively held up - but if no harm whatsoever comes to those who clearly violate those values, how are they values at all? Doesn't a belief that people have, at minimum, a right to live require that *some* action (not sure what, for purposes of this argument) be taken in response to those who violently prevent the exercise of that most basic right? To put it another way: if we say we value life, we can't react to murders by saying, oh, well, it would be cruel to inflict any punishment on him. What does it mean to value something if nothing is done to give it value? I guess I'm saying something like: some form of moral disapproval is necessary in order for any form of moral approval to mean anything other than words. Those words themselves are meaningless in such absence, so that rather than saying "We value life," people might as well be saying, "We fretchnor vetnugit." It's meaningless. PS: I have no clue whether OJ's guilty of this break-in business. Do I have to say I think he should be tried on that accusation separately from the other? - -- ...Jeff Norman The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.blogspot.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:58:16 -0400 (EDT) From: Jill Brand Subject: so lovely to be wanted Well in fegmaniax-digest V16 #339, half the subject lines read "Christopher Gross - please explain" (which I initiated) and the others read "Something for Jill". I'm feeling kind of odd about all this. Anyway, the "Red Sox Suck" autograph was kind of juvenile as is the chanting of "Yankees Suck", especially because it isn't true. I must say, though, that the whole stadium does not partake in this particularly unattractive display of idiocy...although it might well be half the stadium. Anyway, when the Yankees were 14 games back, and most of the NY press had them buried, I said that they would be in 1st place on September 1st. Well, I may have been wrong, but I was damned close. I wasn't destroyed when the Yanquis won last night because I was more focused on watching the Patriots methodically trounce the Chargers. Yeah, yeah, I know, now they're cheaters and all...but it felt mighty good anyway. As for this Xander thing, I don't watch any of these shows, but for some reason I've always been annoyed by the nickname Xander. It seems pretentious to me. There is no basis for this annoyance. Any signs of Robyn on the east coast (I haven't checked the museum for listings)? Jill, hoping she can inspire more subject headers ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:07:42 -0700 From: Rex Subject: Re: fegmaniax-digest V16 #336 On 9/17/07, Bachman, Michael > >Oh, and as for truly awful movies that are relieved by the appearance > >of Jamie-Lee Curtis, may I offer "True lies"? > Rex: > >Almost relieved... that there is one of the squickiest, most > discomforting films ever passed off as mass entertainment. > > It pissed of a lot of Arab Americans as well as the movie generated a > lot of controversy with it's Arab stereotypes. I'd even forgotten that part. The part that creeped me the hell out was the bit where the "hero", thinking that his wife is cheating on him, arranges to meet his wife in a hotel posing as her "lover", and anonymously humiliates her into stripping for him without knowing who he is, forcing her to *be* cheating on him. Yech. And that's my Governor. It was especially annoying coming from Jim Cameron, who at the time seemed pretty progressive for an action film director. - -Rex ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:20:32 -0700 From: Rex Subject: Re: Christopher Gross - please explain! On 9/17/07, 2fs wrote: > > > Yeah, but Lennon was trying to be imagistic and surreal...the other two > lines seem to want to be realistic but metaphoric...and fail miserably. > The > GnR line is much worse, in being laughably incongruous... I had never noticed that line before, but it is wretched. I've tried to pay as little attention to GnR as possible... it's rather lame that they are now sort of revered as the only "good" hair metal band, and/or the precursor to Nirvana by many. At least the one time I saw them live, squeezed between Living Colour (who dissed them from the stage) and the Stones (who had better things to do), there was some dorky drama to it, as Axl was rumored to have "quite the band" after the previous night's dustup with Corey Glover. Alas, he was all too present, and even played two awesome notes on the bass to prove it (the crowd went wild). Slash's guitar solo-- literally a solo, just him standing there for five or six minutes wanking as fast as he could-- was one of the most lamest-assest thing I ever did see (and hear). - -Rex ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:27:26 -0500 From: 2fs Subject: Re: Christopher Gross - please explain! On 9/17/07, kevin wrote: > > > > >I know it's a cliche, but: two wrongs don't make a right. > > But three lefts do. As, coincidentally, illustrated here: < http://spanghew.blogspot.com/2007/09/driven-to-distraction.html> > Well, it's like the current ad campaign says - what happens in Vegas, > stays in Vegas. > Except, apparently, for roaring jets of flame erupting from the cars' rear ends. (See, Chevy should've glommed onto that: Chevy Vegas: The Car That Guarantees Your Privacy...because what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.) - -- ...Jeff Norman The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.blogspot.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:37:20 -0700 From: Rex Subject: Re: so lovely to be wanted On 9/17/07, Jill Brand wrote: > > > As for this Xander thing, I don't watch any of these shows, but for some > reason I've always been annoyed by the nickname Xander. It seems > pretentious to me. There is no basis for this annoyance. All names with x'es in them seem pretentious. Nature of the beast. - -Rex ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:39:36 -0700 From: Rex Subject: tl;dr episode iv: fat bob strikes back The Slits, "The Peel Sessions". Was cranking this in the car this morning the only decent record of the early "punk" material, some of which would be reworked for "Cut". I've read little factoids about the Slits' naove approach (specifically, many times, about how The Clash supposedly had to tune their instruments for them on tour) put forward as either insults or praise of the band. So apparently we're supposed to fetishize their primitivism. And yet, here they are, live on the radio, doing their earliest material, and it hardly sounds like "Pablo Picasso" or "Sister Ray" nope, this shit is complex. Staggeringly complex, in fact. I can play Clash songs, and I can't play stuff like this. God knows what the time signatures are, but the band never even veers close to falling apart; the vocal interplayit's nowhere near harmony, but far more convoluted than call and responseis pretty amazing, especially considering that all of the singers are actually playing these insanely structured things at the same time, often in counterpoint to the lyrical asides. Viv's guitar parts are much fiercer here than the latter brittle art-damaged reggae riffs she would use you get power chords, and thus a passing resemblance to regular punk, but deployed in completely different structures; on the earliest songs Pollitt's bass betrays no dub influence at all, but it's sharp as hell, and the band stops, starts and turns on a dime effortlessly. By its nature, it's a less coherent collection than either of the proper albums, but in a way it's just as astonishing. If there's any record of The Slits who could supposedly barely play, or the ones who sounded like girls playing plain old punk rock, I have yet to hear it. I think it was Clive Davis who said of Television, "This is not Earth music" if he'd said it about The Slits, he would've been simultaneously spot on and dead wrong. Rank & File, "Sundown". Seemingly a bit more of a casual, freewheeling '80's take on the country-rock idea than a lot of what I've heard recently, the songs on this record tend towards two-steps and sometimes humorous subject matter, and some of the vocals sound a little jokey. So in a way it sounds more like a band likeThe Replacements or Young Fresh Fellows doing a pisstake on roots rock; certainly The Knitters can't help but come to mind, and at times I even flash on They Might Be Giants' country experiments. But it's not entirely a joke the band sounds committed to the style and the songs, and while the don't bring the chops and instrumental finesse of The Long Ryders (or the spooky drive of Green on Red) to the table, they also don't trip themselves up with earnestness the way the later No Depression bands would do. Might be a more honest idea of "cowpunk" in the end. I have this and a compilation, "The Slash Years"; it's definitely fun to hear, but I want to immerse myself a little more to make sure it's not a put-on. A Certain Ratio, "Sextet". More on that funky side of postpunk, from Manchester, no less, but way earlier than the "baggy" scene, causing me to wonder why that whole indie-dance thing was such a big deal when rock-dance fusion had been around such a long time. Also reminds me that I've been meaning to get more Shriekback for a long time now (I only have the dodgy remixy compilation "Dancing Years"). I love this sound, which is not that surprsising given that "Remain in Light" was probably the first record that I totally obsessed over (alongside some Beatles, I guess), and I love discovering hidden caches of "that sound" from the same time period. I also forget how a really active, even sometimes slappin' bass sounds pretty good to me when it's the driving force in a mix, whereas it just bugs the hell out me when it's mixed like a regular bass on a regular song, and only played that way because it was cool to do so at the time (I'm still recovering from that Drop in the Gray album). This is a proper ACR album, as opposed to the 2-disc "Early" compilation which I got into last year. It also divines from a period when the band were trying to integrate a female vocalist, but she's not much of a presence, ethereal yet off-key; when she sings along with the guy, it almost approaches a funky version of X, but really lacks the punch to pull it off. The queast horn charts are pretty cool, thoughinstead of the improvisational squalor of The Pop Group or the solo saxophonists of varying skill levels in a lot of contemporary bands, they seem happy to write conventional if simple horn charts and them play them not entirely in key, and leave it wisely at that. As a result the musical settings are great, though, but compilations may well be the way to go with this band. Mazzy Star, "She Hangs Brightly". The first album, and the one between Opal and the odd kind of superstardom that came with "Fade Into Me". It's a step away from the overt rootsiness of some of the Opal material, sometimes in the direction of the later acoustic lament, but also back towards the droney-but-hooky psyche of The Rain Parade (at one point a guitar lick straight out of "I'll Be Your Mirror" shows up), and it's pretty coherent. Sandoval does sound good on these songs, relatively peppy, even, and she brings a nicely consistent POV to the songs she's fine; I don't know what I was bitching about before, other than liking Kendra, having heard that one Mazzy song too many times, and, yeah, that Chemical Brothers track. The whole package sounds mightily assured, like a group that's figured out exactly what it wants to be, having tried out a number not-quite-right identities and finally worked out how to synthesize them. It probably would have been very cool to see Mazzy Star live at this point, before their eventually fanbase coalesced around them, because I have a feeling there would be some irritating people in the crowd a few years later. But this is actually a very nice moment. The Cure, "Phonography". Well, yes, this is a wee bit intense. The fragmented lyrics (I do actually have a "hard copy" of the album on hand) actually remind me in a way of early Throwing Muses there are a few more literal references to pain and suffering, but thankfully nothing as meat-headedly gothic-grim as, say, The Mission or Sisters of Mercy. Smith, like Hersh, seems to be, yes, depressed to the verge of madness, but the wailing that results isn't a whine or a rallying cry; it's more like an attempt to find a language to describe what's happening to him, and the hope that having found the words and sounds to express it, become, at least in some way, free from it. There's a beauty in that you know, a terrifying kind of beauty, of course, but something far more real and recognizable to me than a Nine Inch Nails- (or presumably, My Chemical Romance)-style pain cartoon. It does strike me that almost any record of this type released today would almost inevitably contain a lot more well pornography, which is to say explicit language no, that's not right, this language is plenty explicit, so let's just say cuss words, without being especially more scary or dangerous-sounding for it. The examples are legion, but for some reason Arab Strap is the first name to leap to mind. Basically, I wonder why, acknowledging that there's been a fair amount of cursing is rock music from early on, it seems so much more prevalent now than even 20 years ago. Christopher Gross, please explain! Meanwhile, back on this album, "Siamese Twins" unfolds as a brilliant lyric than can be viewed from, or as, a number of different angles and hold together no matter what; it threatens to become my favorite Cure song (at least until the next time I hear one of those perfect pop singles), and the stunning guitar break and playout on "A Strange Day" contain every last element of every Interpol song in a more precise way than anything else I've ever thought that of (which encompasses a lot, including even the entire Chameleons songbook). This album may be the most fully-realized and articulated expression of the early, terrifying Cure ethic, which makes it pretty damned brilliant, and it seems like the actual sound of the band from here on out comes into being halfway through. But, at least until that chilling closing song, it still demonstrates a great amount of control, which "Seventeen Seconds" doesn't, and so that one remains the hardest to swallow for me. Once again, and of course, in a good way. The Rain Parade, "Beyond the Sunset: Live in Tokyo". Nice. Very well-recorded, if short, high-energy live album from I can't tell what year, but it's pretty damned timeless, which is a fair summary of this band's body of work. Plenty of signposts point to the garage-psyche and pop past, and occasionally even earlier in the spooky slide work, but there's also a big arrow indicating the future, and one assumes Kevin Shields was paying attention. The amazingly faithful cover of Television's "Ain't That Nothing" does not fail to endear the set to me. I just wish the full concert were here it's only 9 songs deep. As an aside to anyone who's still paying attention to my developing infatuation with this band, I still haven't been able to scare up a copy of that "Explosions in the Glass Hotel (erm, Palace)" EP, so if anyone can point me in the right direction for that one, you know where to find me. LCD Soundsystem, "Sound of Silver". Reading about this, it didn't seem like something that would interest me all that much, but at some point last year I heard these guys doing a live set on the radio and rather liked it. I've had the album for a while since then but keep forgetting to listen to it all the way through, but what I heard on the radio at that time seem postpunkfunky enough to sit alongside what I've been listening to lately, so it is, I suppose, time. I expected the recoding to sound a lot more electronic or "big beat" than the live band, and in places it does, but the songs that grabbed me from that performance are here in not-that-different forms. Some bits sound like Eno, Berlin-era Bowie, or Talking Heads (I know, such range) "North American Scum", which is either an immediate classic or a gimmick of the highest order, evokes Mark E. Smith and Jonathan Richman at the same time, which is to say it might be sort of like a funky version of Art Brut. And I suppose there's an unusual combination of humor and intelligence that they share with Art Brut as well, but there are also leanings toward that "unstupid-anthem" phenomenon that I blathered on about a few weeks ago, here in a form that parallels Arcade Fire and echoes New Order (again, not that big of a leap, but there it is). I can't help but think of the ringleader of this group as some kind of less egomaniacal, more playful version of Moby I have no idea why, it's jut an impression which persists for some reason. And again I am encouraged to seek out some Shriekback, and reminded that a new Underworld record is on the way. That probably speaks rather highly of this album, doesn't it? ESG, "A South Bronx Story". Pretty cool and unlikely story behind this band, worth looking up because I'll probably mangle it in the attempt to summarize it. They're apparently one of the most-sampled artists in hip-hop history, but also considered one of the key NY No-Wave bands, and highly influential in the development of British postpunk, dance divisionand all of those things actually do make sense once you hear themtheir origins as a neighborhood sister act wouldn't seem that closely related to any of those genres. But everything they do is both funky and minimalist enough that it makes sense in every last one of those contexts even the vocal yelpery seems to be on a path of parallel evolution with both Ari Upp (who now officially plays Springsteen to my Hilburn) and those South African female vocal groups that Paul Simon "discovered" for "Graceland" (quotes around "discovered" connote mutual dismissal of claims of "discovery" and "cultural imperialism", allowing I haven't actually reviewed any Township Jive lately). This sure does sound cool, although God knows whether or not I'm hearing it for what it is after it's been recycled, literally and influentially, through so many years of music since it was created. I guess in this case I'm in the position of the hypothetical youth of today listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time, so perhaps rather than puzzling out what he or she would actually hear, I'll just wish for 'em to enjoy MBV as much as I enjoy ESG. (Sidenote/fegtech: this is a compilation which I think has close to all of the band's original output, but I also have the original album "Come Away with" as OGG files; I was able to plug that OGG reader into iTunes, and it does allow me to play the OGGs in iTunes, and it allowed me to translate one album's worth of them into mp3's, but every time I try to do that with the ESG record, it iTunes hangs up and stops "responding" two or three tracks in. Any ideas about why that might be? Do I need to just do 'em one at a time or something?) Essential Logic, "Fanfare in the Garden: An Essential Logic Collection (Disc 1)". Another thing with a whole bunch of curious cross-genre and cross-decade connections. Lora Logic was the X-Ray Spex saxophonist and pretty much the only constant in Essential Logic, although she also was in the UK-postpunk version of the Red Crayola, which had only Mayo Thompson in common with its '60's Texas psyche version (filled out by Epic Soundtracks and Gina Birch of The Raincoats), one of whose tracks shows up here. It's a pretty odd collection, two discs that present most but not all (as Greil Marcus insists on pointing out in the liner notes) of the band's recordings from 1978 -1983, then jumps to 1998 or so for a too-generous group of less interesting later recording that must've been some kind of concession to Logic in order to ensure her participation, or something. (In this case I obviously have the physical packaging in front of me, and damn it, I can't help but getting caught up in the liner notes, even though I've been having ever so much more fun only knowing half of what I'm listening to.) Some of the earlier material is a fairly direct continuation of the X-Ray Spex sound and lyrical concerns about consumerist hell, with a little less pop and a much more idiosyncratic voice in a word, artier. Time signatures and tempos shift, and while the grooves the guitars and rhythm section land on for a minute or two at a time are reminiscent of that jagged British funk sound of the time (and are still pretty distinctive within that idiom), Logic seems to have been too restless to have settled into a sound for the course of an album, and often not even within one song. As it moves forward in time, it gets even artier it is always interesting, sometimes exciting, rarely what you'd call "accessible", and its herky-jerky qualities sometimes feel a little more labored-over, for better or worse, than the more visceral or instinctive-sounding maneuvers on Raincoats or Slits albums (interestingly, all of the members of every iteration of EL were male, except for Lora herself wait, that sounds like I'm just comparing those bands because they're female-identified, but if I may protest too much, I'd compare The Slits to PIL and The Raincoats to Talking Heads, but I can only really compare Essential Logic to The Slits and The Raincoats.) Somewhere in mid-1982 things get extra interesting the vocals become a little more languidly drawn out and more comprehensible, but again, approaching normalcy only highlights how unusual the material is in its purest formyou get a few very strange chord changes just at the end of the relatively melodic "Rat Alley", and then "Martian Man", which is hands down one of the weirdest and coolest things I've ever heard, reminiscent ofyou guessed itTownship Jive, rather a bit before Paul Simon discovered it. It's like a really fucked up version of Bow Wow Wow, in fact, but that's another story altogether. ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V16 #340 ********************************