Dreamend - So I Ate Myself Bit By Bit

     Ryan Graveface, a quiet and modest young man, has just released his newest Dreamend album, “So I Ate Myself Bit By Bit (SIAMBBB),” and what a fine work it is. Graveface, Dreamend’s prime architect, is also the mastermind of Graveface Records. Additionally, Graveface is an integral part of Black Moth Super Rainbow (BMSR), of which you may have heard. What is of major import is the substantive quality of Graveface’s work as Dreamend on SIAMBBB. This concept album brings to fruition the aural incarnation of a supposed serial killer’s diary, which Graveface allegedly purchased at auction some years back. The shadowy circumstances and hearsay of murder surrounding this release only adds to the album’s mysterious nature, a nature that exudes ethereal eeriness and cuts to the bone like the fog of pre-dawn tall tale-ing at the ol’ lake house.

     Lest previously cemented notions or expectations from either Graveface Record’s back catalogue or by BMSR sway you, rest assured, SIAMBBB stands, firmly balanced, all on its own. Inevitably, there are those who will prematurely draw comparisons to BMSR. Certainly, successive Black Moth member solo releases further demonstrate each player’s individual styles. These solo divergences serve not only to illuminate each member’s discreet, yet familiar, bases of contributions to the merged BMSR sound but also highlight individual talents in a “pre-formed Voltronic” sense. In fact, while Graveface’s style is immediately apparent it also shines like a lighthouse beacon in the rising for of an autumn eve.

     While Dreamend’s newest release is a prime example of that piecemeal sound, this album exceeds expectation and displays a soulfulness one is unlikely to expect from an album whose basis lays in serial murder. Most striking were the transient thoughts, ebbing and flowing throughout my listen, of John Wayne Gacy, Steve Martin, Sufjan Stevens, and myriad other seemingly disparate source materials summoning intangibly delightful emotions.

     Where the BMSR connection truly emerges is in the production of the established BMSR/Dreamend high quality lo-fi sound. While critics argue that production style seems substantively tenuous, it ascends to the role of ‘band member’ adding richness and texture. This album sounds, at times, as if Dreamend hand cranked tones through a phonoautograph, pushing the sound thorough blown speakers, underwater, through two tin cans. It whirls in twangy and hollow modulation; instantaneously harkening Graveface’s singularly identifiable banjo and guitar melodies from BMSR’s “Eating Us.” The crackly vocals, similarly, add an authenticity that is at once foreign and recognizable.

     This album’s conceptual nature and being a musical iteration of a deliberate tale caused me to focus with greater attention to the story’s details, track by track. Thus it seems appropriate to review the album as I listened to it and as, I assume, it was intended to be listened to.

CHAPTER I

     “Pink Cloud In the Woods” introduces some, or rather assists some in the regression, to the campfires of youth. Cicadas chirp and embers pop and the humidity and smoke are palpable. Unbeknownst to what is in store only increases the psychic devastation of what is to come. The snare begins to brush and the wispy banjo, daintily picked, gently sweeps us into a whirlwind that ultimately cannot be undone. I forget, momentarily, that I am listening to music and, based on my research of the album’s origins, begin to feel complicit in something frighteningly foreign.

CHAPTER II

     The breathy organs of “Where you belong” swell the general tone of a pleasant progression. I allow myself to be continually misled through an air of happiness. I can taste the sun of July Saturdays in 1993 while I listen to this song. This nostalgia further overwhelms my senses, gleefully disorienting me for what follows.

CHAPTER III

     “Magnesium Light” is as brilliant as its namesake and stands out as exemplar even amongst SIAMBBB’s best offerings. The phased swirls paint cracked orange loops which form a blurred vision of our greatest star. This is tantamount to staring at the sun from an active merry-go-round. Never have I been so susceptible to the hypnotic abilities of creepy modern folk music, which incidentally is meant in the most flattering of ways.

     The combination of reverberating twang and alliterating vocals “I looked at the sky today and said, I said hey ah and I looked in your eyes today and said I said hey ah. I looked at the stars tonight and said, I said don’t go, I looked at the stars tonight and said, I said don’t go away,” are a culmination of compounded joy brought on by the album’s opening tracks. This happiness, which as we soon see was induced with purpose, fades like the accuracy of distant memories. If by design, this is extremely clever.

CHAPTER IV

     “Interlude” serves as a frequency-oscillated transition from a brightly shimmering place of tranquility to mentally deep decrepitude from which one can never return. In retrospect “Magnesium Light” and “Interlude” are forceful reminders of how quickly contentment may be dulled by a single moment of reality. “Interlude” is a descent into madness, obsession, violence, and ultimately unending torment resulting in the ultimate corporeal cessation, death.

CHAPTER V

     Guilt seeps from “Repent” in tangible drips of emptiness and loss. The slow guitar picking, sparse bells, and harmonies are a sound of sorrowful beauty. Any living being may have difficulty listening to this track without evoking some type of depressive teenage empathy and feelings of failure, or worse yet, depressive adult empathy. Art of this variety is evocative and bittersweet, successful in rousing emotion, for better or, here, for worse.

CHAPTER VI

     “A Thought” conjures dark, fuzzy wizardry and instills feelings of deep concern and paranoia. Repeating “I cannot, I cannot, stop in the middle,” this must absolutely describe the obsessive inability to willfully cease a deeply engaged behavior. This is the clearest, and most disturbingly direct, example of this concept album’s stated theme. This track is effective in its simplicity and I listen through cupped hands as a child watches a horror movie, through barely spread fingers.

CHAPTER VII

     “Pieces” embodies desperation and behaves as a deep-seated terror would, managing to push deeper the floor of we once believed rock bottom to be. For that reason “Pieces” robs the title of “most despicable Dreamend song” from “A Thought.” Mind you, this is a beautifully crafted robbery, which in this story telling incarnation is hopefully without victim.

     Following directly from the hypnotic fury and an uncontrollable zone of purposeful monotony of “A Thought,” “Pieces” snap you from the act violence suddenly into a stroll through a summer’s lane, raising spirits only to crush them along with bone and sinew.

CHAPTER VIII

     “My Old Brittle Bones” perpetuates the longing developed in the album’s second half. Graveface wails “And I wait and I wait and I wait for you, like you waited, and waited and waited here for me. And one day and one day I’ll be set free, but your ghost oh your ghost, oh your ghost it will find me.” These are the words of a victim embracing death thereby transforming into a taunting force of vengeance from beyond the grave.

     Whether or not this voice, I imagine as a disembodied force of supernatural origin, is within the killer’s mind or independent of the murderer, is of little importance in the grand scheme. A song of repentance, the bewilderment of what has recently transpired draws little sympathy for the protagonist. The story and Graveface’s falsetto vie for my attention, but neither wins.

     This battle for my graces is disturbingly peppy for its content yet I am distracted, longingly awaiting the next chapter in the story. How wonderful to have immediate concern for mental safety outweighed by the curiosity of what follows.

CHAPTER IX

     Aching Silence, in my estimation, is an attempt by the killer to explain his poor lot in life. His aim, trying to convince us that he is not truly the abhorrent thing of which we are absolutely certain he is. The arpegiated ghostly twitches pulse and further aggravate our perception of the killer. Again, I know not whether these notions originate in the mind of from beyond the grave. Is this the voice of the truly dead or the almost dead as a result of psychic numbness from within?

CHAPTER X

     As the story winds up, the killer describes, in sufficient detail, the lifeless, bullet ridden, and soon to be dismembered corpse of his victim. “An Admission” ends with grumbling bass and has a frenetic pace throughout, emulating the end of a horrific tale. Yet again, the album’s theme is the unfathomable violence of humans and the constant battle within a madman’s mind.

     The dilemma here is to hate the actor while being enchanted with the beauty of the music. In this respect, Graveface succeeds immensely. I am mesmerized and disgusted throughout the album. The timbre forces regressions to youthful frivolity yet the words are horrifying. The album evokes a spectrum of feelings. Never would I have suspected this type of fare from the label, had I not been a supporter of Graveface records for such an extended time, particularly since this is less in your face psychedelia than those works that brought initially drew me to the label. However, I implore you to listen to this album, actively. You will be a richer, and possibly, more conscientious person, two qualities most people will do well by to deepen.

      Support Graveface, browse the new releases catalogue, and purchase Dreamend records here...http://graveface.com/nr.html

Pink Skull - Endless Bummer on RVNG.

Holy smokes and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, dance music is alive and well. If only Charles Darwin were alive to witness the inception, refinement, and never ending evolution of what originated as 4 x 4 Berlin-Detroit machine music; he’d flip his wig. Well here we have it folks, the synthesis of indie rock, no-wave, techno, and dance punk from our friends at RVNG Matt and Josh.

Like my mama always said, “anything worth doing, is worth doing right.” Well bubba, RVNG releases quality product, and nothing bears that sign more proudly, in my opinion, than Pink Skull’s “Endless Bummer.” While, Pink Skull has hit us with mini-nuggets of wonder, “Endless Bummer” is their first full length and a helluva go, to be sure. For Christ’s sake, for a limited time you could even customize the album cover for a nominal fee. Much to my brother’s chagrin, our copies read “Can’t Keep A Pompa Down.” Brilliant! No matter, the first track, “Peter Cushing” (synonymous with Star War’s Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin for a generation, and you know who you are) with its lofty flute and Liquid Liquid-esque live bass line makes you want to muddle home-made cocktails on a warm summer’s eve and get into it. The funs don’t stop there though, homey. The second track (a-side), “Chicken Dream Inside Egg” is a show-stopping, panty-dropping straight up indie-house hit with a subtle shuffle and a catchy “Boo Doo Dee Dah Dah Dah Dah” vocal. This track compels otherwise skinny boys to grab the closest babe in short shorts on the dance floor and whisk the night away. The reversed bass, in selected sections, combined with the reverb guitar twangs and Saxaphone scream, “two men enter, one man leaves,” with its refined jazziness and raw juiciness.

From here the album progresses to straight up weirdness, but in a loveable electro-dancey way. Imagine Human League, Tina Turner, Stars of The Lid, and the Rapture huddled around a makeshift table made from a piece of plywood and a used keg at a Larry Levan loft party and you’re growing ever so close to an idea of what this album aspires to, and often achieves.

B-Sides, baby, that’s where it’s really at after all, and this one done brought it. “Endless Bummer” shakes the rafters. It jangles with its minor key synths and simplistic bass, but the twitch-glitchiness, acidy synths and the track’s tweaked Laurent Garnier inspired sax screams “take my to the rave.” “Oh, Monorail” follows with a funky underpinning and its rhythmic vocals force you to dig out your old EMF and Jesus Jones records and scour those little bastards for their inevitable redeeming qualities. After all, mid 90’s electronic forays were the basis for where you are now, like it or not.

Why stop here, right? You want to know as much about this damn record as you can before you spend them hard earned greenbacks, yes? “Fast Forward Bolivia” begins with a combo of Indian screeches that sound like Prince Rama fighting with R2-D2 at Altamont (WTF, we’re already invoking Grand Moff Tarkin, what’s a droid or two?) ending in a psychedelic stew of flautisto terrorism, Native dance, and delay that smacks of awesome. Still reeling from the Charlie horses from dancing my ass off, I finish the album the way music is supposed to be listened to, which is as the artist conceived it and in the order conceived. Nevertheless, I am taken aback at “The Inconsiderate Neighbor” and “Fired, So Fired.” While not the strongest of finishes, I forgive Pink Skulls like you forgive your best friend for asking if you’re still dating that high-school sweetheart he knew you were still into. Bittersweet, yes! However, it didn’t really matter too much because he was, in total, way cooler than she ever was. These last two songs are that girl, and the album, your best friend. We can all dig deep to forgive minor shortcomings, when what lasts is infinitely more memorable. The Skulls are Pink. Long Live The Skulls.

Oh, yes, lest I not forget, the digital download comes with three additional tracks… “Gonzo's Cointreau,” “When Falling Straight Through A Goat” and, in my opinion, the most magnificent “Several French Revolutionaries Standing on the Back of My Neck.” “Several French Revolutionaries Standing on the Back of My Neck” is creepy and beautiful and frightening and despite numerous requests by your author to the label is still unscheduled for pressing to vinyl. However, I shall remain persistent in this endeavor. Until then, let Julian Grefe and Justin Geller dazzle you with their fantastic skills as Pink Skull.

Buy the 12" or digitals from RVNG. here

Magic Lantern - Platoon on Not Not Fun Records

What the funk? ”Maggot Brain,” was, is, and will arguably forever be an unparalleled bundle of tremendous funk. Indeed, as a result, I would be forsaking my duty to proselytize the good word of music that isn’t rubbish, if I did not beseech you to dive into Magic Lantern’s hazy bucket of tar -“Platoon.” Clinton it ain’t, but “Platoon” strives for, and hits dangerously close to, the benchmark heart of true funk.

Sans any real vocal track “Platoon,” picks up where “Maggot Brain” slowly fuzzed out and I am in love with it. The opener – “Dark Cicadas” - is so frigging fonky that my mind could not override my lower appendages from shucking and jiving. The sultry “Moon Lagoon Platoon” conjures images of the ubiquitous Vietnam film scene where the wayward soldiers blow off steam before heading back into the ”shit,” painting imagery as thick as chilled Jager shots in the jungle night.

If I hadn’t snatched the record from the new releases stack, I’d have sworn sideways that it was a human impossibility that this ill sludge had been recorded after 1973 or 1976 (maybe). Guitars and organs twitch and crescendo and heavy waves reverberate through warm analog tubes. Unlike previous releases, this album is much darker and has a narrower focus. This business is as dark as pre-Christian Samhain rituals on the solstice - just oozing with sludgy psychedelic funk.

Now, I know cats are slinging the word “psychedelic” around like pre-pubescent girls talking about “Justin Beiber” at the “American Girl” Store, but Lantern has earned the title through funk, sweat, and tears. Fret not though, children, this is not sloppy psy-funk, but truly mind-bending, old school, organic bad-assery. Note band images, easily culled from the network, and you will see these lads, heads bent and shoegazing - not at their pedals (though one can imagine the magnitude of incessant toe tapping that must occur to produce this fog) - but as a result of being totally zoned into the ethereal. These corporeal vessels channel, rather than just merely produce, slurries of face-melting rhythms.

Now “Platoon” is Magic Lantern’s most recent 12” following a series of cassette and limited pressings and displays a stoic maturation. Prior releases ran the stylistic gamut from dub, prog, Kosmiche-pastiche, drone, and various other elements on a song-by-song basis. Here however, Magic Lantern fuses, successfully in most instances, varying elements within each song’s loose borders. For example, in lieu of an arguably unbridled jam out on “At the Mountain of Madness” (containing a b-side of Warholian noise art reminiscent at times of Stephen Stapleton’s NWW works) the band has honed their compositional craft on “Platoon.” Yet another example of their tighter, new direction, presents itself upon listening to their album “High Beams” followed immediately by “Platoon,” both on Not Not Fun Records, incidentally. On the one hand, “High Beams” varies from sounding like a Can homage on “Vampires in Heat” or older Pelican on “Deathshead Hawkmoth,” while “Platoon” cruises consistently throughout the album with an enticing but violent calm. “Platoon’s” B-side contains two tracks that, together, run a healthy 20 minutes plus. “On The Dime” maintains the solid groove of the album while amping up guitar stabs and organ wizardry. On “On the Dime” Chip Knechtel and Gavin Fort blast their gear, drums and bass respectively, into a sonic flow like a river of mud and sound very much like Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding doing what they did for James. These are the raw materials that you wished Bristol junglists would use to fashion their own tracks. Finally, while “Friendship’s” guitars now share headspace with eerie horns and what can only be described as some bizarre East-Asian clarion call to things that can result in no good. The track never relents on trying to bury you in the thickness. Here, Magic Lantern sinks deeper into the abyss, oozing sludgy funk. The reverb machine is still cranking overtime but the gears and pistons have been power cleaned and re-lubricated.

This album howls and snarls and creeps clandestinely into your mind. The mayhem inducing chugginess must be what it’s like to wake up in your barn, clothing tattered, only to find out that you have no recollection of last night’s events and that your village has been ransacked by a wolf-monster that dispatches groups of armed townspeople in short order. Yeah, it’s that heavy. Get lost and enjoy.

Javelin - No Mas on Luaka Bop

Not too shabby for a mid-day impulse buy, especially considering the three deep bloody Mary perspective from whence I made the trade of dollars for vinyl. How the hell could I refrain? After all, the cover has a Kris Kristofferson looking apparition with snow leopards pouncing from a mountain of ice behind ol’ Kris’ face. Mind you, this is all before an actual listen to this album, nay, even before ever hearing nary a whimper of cousins George Langford and Tom Van Buskirk, purveyors of reigned weirdness that is actually perfectly far out music for kids. One can’t even begin to imagine the joy of hearing the wildly varying contents within.

“No Mas” glides out on the good foot with a hazy down tempo, distilled embodiment of the feelings one has of summer mornings before the big trip to an amusement park or the “festival of the season.” Surely, you can empathize with the spirit of “Vibrationz.” You can’t sleep the night before so you anxiously toss back can after can of PBR dreaming of what the weekend may hold. From the jump off, the listener believes, incorrectly, that what they hold in their hot little hands is the typical Luaka Bop fare--- (after all, sometimes you buy by label, and sometimes you gamble and lose)-- worldly drenched amalgams ranging from East India to Chile. Alas, Javelin is sufficiently savvy to anticipate that expectation, and pitches several delightful, and yes, a few sometimes predictable, curves. For example, “Oh Centra,” a little ditty previously released on Lal Lal Lal, with its sub bass funkiness and its almost offensive Alvin and the Chimpmunk-esque pitched vocals manages to endear the listener, perhaps for its Salt-n-Peppa bass break, but maybe just because it’s cool, whether you care to admit it or not.

Anyway, brethren, the constant dynamism tends to give “No Mas” the aura of lacking focus, but on the positive, samples out Javelin’s warez as though they were a tag-team, compilation machine. Hell, that’s why I bought it. I inquired as to what was playing, on my weekly binging spree, and mistakenly thinking that it was several different artists, was politely corrected…”Nah man, it’s Javelin.” Ignorant me, it sounded like a Numero Group release, followed by Basement Jaxx, and then as I zoned back in from an impenetrable wander through the experimental section, something Motown sounding. Well, now you know why it was an impulse buy, but I digress.

Now, after aurally consuming some of their earlier releases, as we junkies are oft known to do, this album seems polished, like boots at the airport. Yes, the hiss and fuzz and lo-fi, which we’ve all grown to love, has been toned down, but in the most loveliest of ways, and not all that much. If you need proof, come to my basement and listen to “We Ah Wi” as we shimmy and shake,

So, to avoid any implications of impropriety and to be thorough in my job, it’s only fair that I address the B-side as well. As if the variation on the first side weren’t ample, “Moscow 1980” sounds like M83 and Luomo’s love child dancing in a field of daisies and synthesizers, in a pure electro-pop heaven, sliding you off into a personal Indian Summer day dream. Further progressing on a similar trajectory, though seemingly divergent, the late 60’s funk style “The Merkin Jerk” continues on the quest for the ultimate dreaminess. Here, however, the day dream is more of a Haight-Ashbury thing, and, unfortunately, seems incomplete, leaving the listener wondering if the remainder was stashed in a retro-future time capsule or if someone accidentally smoked it.

To round out the series of, what I believe to be, a fairly thorough first LP proper, are the monotonous “C Town,” the ersatz chamber music and xylophonic “Off My Mind,” the back-track for a Mos Def-like interlude, “Susie Cues” (sure to become an effective transition for the DJs and producers out there), and several more, which deserve their own treatment. “Shadow Heart” and “DEP,” in particular, invoke a longing and homesickness for the corridor, because of their likeness to Motown and P-Funk throwbacks that seem to age gracefully, gaining rather than loosing flavor. In fact, I’d wished that my friends were with me here as I pen this piece. Yet, my worries are short-lived, for if you are concerned with my opinion, than we too are friends, and sharing with you is tantamount to being with friends near and far. It is for this reason, the warmth inducing familiarity of an old friend that this album conjures, that you should give this record a listen. After you have well spent those 80 plus minutes, you too will be a convert to Javelin’s diversity and wit.

I can't stand it anymore more!

Oh, Lou Reed. What I love most about Lou Reed is that, whether he internalized his true feelings or not, he never really appeared to give a good God Damn about what anyone thought of him. How could one possibly think that he did? An often drugged out, New York gay who spoke-sang, but not really, fronting a so-called Avant Garde, noise band with classically trained and not-at-all trained musicians. Friend of Warhol. All around freaky weirdo. Fantastic!

I appreciate, what I believe to be, the man's aspirations to make his brand of sonic art without care for, ostensibly, anything. Perhaps he was an ego-maniacal jack-ass. That fact is moot. It is my perception of the quality of the man's principles that guides, and inspires, my reverie.

So, why am I talking about Lou Reed? Get comfy, because explaining, in detail, my thought process, can be somewhat involved. Obviously, it's involved.

My intention was to re-start my writings, for the one hundred and fifty second time, with a 'one a week' theme. The 'one a week' theme being that I should write, at the very least, once a week, surprising yes? Mind you, more is better. Once a week is the base.

Could I do this, should I? Maybe more opportunity, professional and personal, would spring forth from my creative expenditures. If only I could create with more frequency and without the constant intrusion of work. In either case, I decided to start writing at the exact moment that I did, this morning, out of sheer frustration with the incompetent, busy-bodies with whom I work. These interlopers have counterparts everywhere and are similar in substance to your co-workers that burgle your time in like manner.

Nevertheless, when I thought about writing, at that exact moment, a vision of Lou popped into my head, jeans, leather, and all, singing "I can't stand it anymore, more." Thus, in my extremely round about synaptic firings, we progress from the theme of being exhausted by office politics, to music, to writing, to explaining it all. Little doubt that I find a way to bring everything back to music, as it is my belief that life is music, and vice-versa.

In any case, this whole attempt of explaining my process is... well, cathartic, and didactic. It purges the negativity within, simply by removing the thoughts from mind, placing them in some medium. Further, explanation elaborates and memorializes my thought patterns, from which I can later glean life-improving facts and lessons, hopefully.

Furthermore, I am a disciple of a particular school of thought, followed by others, I am sure, that posits the creation of art begets the creation of art, i.e., the more you do, the more you will do. So, now that I think of it, "I can't stand it anymore more" applies to both my inability to suffer my co-worker's ineptitude and meddling as well as my failures to develop a routine for creating art. Both problems which I have temporarily solved merely by expunging these thoughts. Jerks =0, Me = 1.