From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V6 #87 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Thursday, May 11 2006 Volume 06 : Number 087 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [loud-fans] Chris Prew's currently unseasonable swap disc [2fs Subject: [loud-fans] Chris Prew's currently unseasonable swap disc Way back when it more plausibly could be described as apt, a CD from Chris Prew called All My Winter Songs made its way to my mailbox as part of the last swap. (Yes, there will be another shortly - been busy...) Here is the contents of that disc, with briefish commentings: *1. Teenage Fanclub "Winter" - A good kickoff to the disc - not all that wintry, of course. Sounds like Teenage Fanclub spirit. 2. A. Graham and the Moment "Cold Scene" - At least I think the initial is "A": I made my own cover art for the CD, which for some obscure reason began with a faux-Soviet-looking scene of, uh, robots with guns, and so I wrote out the song titles in a Cyrillic-looking font. So that's either an A or a D. Anyway, the song: 6/8 time, sort of a busy arrangement with interweaving bass and guitar lines, a tinking piano, and double-tracked vocals that kinda remind me of Scott crossed with some other singer I can't quite place... *3. Marmoset "Winter" - Ah good - I like Marmoset! Their typical sort of snaky chord sequence, and vocals that sound kinda like if an insinuating Colin Newman had grown up in Indiana. 4. For Stars "NY Gets Cold" - I have a few tracks by these folks - but I can never remember what they sound like, possibly because "For Stars" is an awful name, if for no other reason than I confuse it with other "stars" bands or even that pan-flash For Squirrels band (were they the ones that died?). Anyway: slow, quiet number whose first line is "it's pretty here" - and it is! I'm trying to decide if it was a good idea or a bad one for the singer to use so much of his very highest register. 5. Ween "Cold and Wet" - On this one, Ween merge a sort of Devo-does-Western-boogie rhythm with vocals that are the aural equivalent of a dog suffering the titular malady, plus a squally lead guitar. V. short. 6. Oneida "The Winter Shaker" - Great, clangorous guitar opening. Takes quite a while to get going - not sure it's worth it, but I suspect that playing this really loud would annoy the pants off my neighbors. Not that I want them pantsless. Well, not most of them anyway. 7. Roy Montgomery "It's Cold Outside" - Unlike TFC, Montgomery's music usually sounds as if it's winter. But since he's from New Zealand (what do you call people from NZ - I mean other than "Kiwis"? New Zealandish? Zealies?) that means it's summer here. Very confusing. Anyway: cold, sepulchral reverb on RM's guitar, an organ playing sometimes curious chord voicings, that's it. Nice. Good for a slightly melancholy evening. * 8. Yo La Tengo "Winter A-Go-Go" - Taylor Doose's faves in a somewhat Esquivelian mood. (And damn that this isn't "All My Summer Songs" and this track called "Summer A-Go-Go," because then I could have written "Esquivelian estivation" or some such. Or could have if it were sleep-inducing, as opposed to just being pleasantly relaxed and sleepy-sounding. Georgia sings lead - yay! Plus vibes.) * 9. Apples in Stereo "Winter Must Be Cold" - Sounds like an Apples song - that is, it is, and quintessentially so - but with more Hilarie vocals than usual (as in: she sings lead - and, I just found out, wrote it). 10. Doleful Lions "All Winter Long" - From the Lions' first album, when their sound was a bit less distinctive and quirky than it became. Follows the Apples' track quite well, though - fast-rockin' p-pop. 11 Exhaust "Interlude" - Someone tries to tune a radio, but none of the stations are in range, and all of them are playing Metal Machine Music - except one with someone babbling about Indonesia or something. 12. PG Six "Come in, the Winter it Is Past" - Stark banjo, strange background burblings and fiddlings, and the Six guy (whose name I can't be bothered to look up right now) darkly singing. Flying Saucer Attack coined the term "rural psychedelia," I believe (and it fit them) but this sort of thing really is that (although it sounds little like FSA). Oh - here's the second part of the song: acoustic geetar strum, electric accents, and a modulation to a major key, but only some of the time: keeps landing back on that doomy minor chord at the end of each prhase. 13. Molasses "Our Lady of Winter" - A voice like sheaves of wheat stacked in the back of a muddy pickup truck. Then there's a subtle string chart, and then, uh, the singing saw and an enormous bass drum someone stole from a passing circus or funeral. 14. Dwindle "No. 1 Winter Priority" - Ooh - that feedback at the opening sure wakes one up after the last track's solemnity! Suddenly the band starts tumbling downhill, too. The vocals are curiously low in the mix, as if someone kinda forgot they were there - yet it's not that sort of "just another instrument" treatment. We go into a slightly slower section - the shift isn't complex enough to be "math rock," so maybe it's, uh, "accounting rock" except that sounds like an insult. Still, I'm not entirely persuaded that the song wouldn't work better being slightly less complex. It kinda sounds like some of those bands in the early '90s that (a) Thurston Moore championed and (b) thereby got signed to Geffen/DGC and (c) nearly bankrupted the company by selling 17 copies each. * 15. The Fall "Winter, pt. 2" - Most people don't know that Mark E. Smith is also an accomplished jazz-rock flautist. Anyway: typical Fall nonchalance: although this performance is clearly the second part of two, and it was split in two originally to accommodate an LP (which, for you youngsters, has two sides that play, and you have to flip it over yourself!), the remaster never bothered to go back to the source tape and present the track uninterrupted. Or maybe the source tape is actually someone's cassette player, which itself had to get turned over halfway through the track. Who knows? 16. Mineral "Waking to Winter" - Snowy Day Real Estate 17. The Microphones "I Want to Be Cold" - Curiously, I recently downloaded the other "I Want..." track from this album (from another mp3 blog). Anyway, it's the Microphones: distorted guitars, overheard vocals, but somehow a bit greater than its parts separately might suggest. 18. House of Large Sizes "Cold-Train" - Doesn't do much for me. Not quite boogie, but not much else really. Sorry. 19. Lorna "Snow Song" - Substitue an "l" for the "n." No, not "Snow Solg." Geez. Anyway: it's pretty, but it doesn't quite work for me. 20. The Pernice Brothers "Snow" - I hadn't noticed before, but there's something rather Go-Betweens-ish about the Pernices, and this track particularly. It may be that this week, I'm more attuned to hearing Go-Betweens moments, though. Regardless, they've surely made their own reputation. This one's a bit more rocking than I would have expected, with a nice, noisy, reverby guitar break in the middle, along with...omigod, is that a cowbell I hear? 21. Low "Last Snowstorm of the Year" - Before I write about this song, I'm going to write a bit about The Great Destroyer, Low's most recent record. I think I know what it is that kept Low songs compelling to me, even though their surface of slow, doomy downcastness might have turned me way off. What that something is is that there's also a real edge there, a raw anger that's kept tightly wrapped - but it comes out on The Great Destroyer which is, sonically at the least, a very mean record indeed. Quite often, it sounds like the guy next to you at the bar who's been nice enough till now but suddenly turns on you, smashes an empty bottle, and holds it up against your throat. Then laughs and claims he was just kidding. Anyway: it was good that Alan Sparhawk got past that "mopey nice guy" thing. Probably helped (or rather, didn't help - for Sparhawk personally) that he had been in fact suffering from crippling depression. So, to this track: it's amazing, given all that, how like a carefree, sunny snowy winter's day this song is. Fred Frith "Spring Any Day Now" - Indeed! Several guitars and a piano in unison lines that leap and frolic, somewhat unpredictably. A jazzy sort of interlude - this could have been on the soundtrack to a Peanuts special, but without the horrific kiddy choir crap. Then there's a chorus of those munchkin saxophones that were apparently shipped in great numbers to Cambridge in England during the early '70s, and back to the theme. There's a second, jumpy interlude in some odd meter, 5/8 or something (it's already over, and I wasn't counting), and once more to our joyous little Spring theme. And now, what do you know, it actually is Spring. Which you can tell, here in Milwaukee, because it's cloudy and raining. Any comments from the five or six of us still on this list? - -- ...Jeff Norman The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.blogspot.com ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V6 #87 ******************************