Sunday, July 28, 2002 -- 07:02 p.m.

OMG

ES: I hear you're going to hook up with Dan the Automator to produce a beatstrumental album. Have you got any ideas of how you're going to realize the project?
EL-P: Yeah, we kind of wanna do a Mantronix / Bombsquad in the future type shit. It's real sort of complicated, hardcore, just funk hip hop shit. Who knows if it will work but I think that between the two of us, we might be able to do it. We'll see what happens, it will be interesting.

This just made my day week month year. More here.

-Nate

Friday, July 26, 2002 -- 02:48 p.m.

I'm probably just going to leave that previous entry unfinished because I'm not sure where to go with it. I'm also probably going to drop the "review an album every day" because I'm already getting burned out and writing when I don't necessarily feel like I'm up to it makes me crank out stuff that I don't really have a connection with months later. I'll periodically review stuff when it really moves me, though.

-Nate

Friday, July 26, 2002 -- 1:47 p.m.

N*E*R*D, In Search Of... (Virgin 2002)
It took me forever to realize what great production the Neptunes are capable of, and for that I feel like a chump. But at the risk of being called gasp shock horror oh no a "rockist", I have little to no interest in braving Britney Spears or Jay-Z to hear it. I'm assuming, therefore, that the Neptunes have done better work than what they bring on the N*E*R*D album simply because I haven't heard it. (Except for "Bouncin' Back" and "Got Your Money" and a few other stray things which I have heard and actually do think are better, but anyways.) Not like that's really much of a dig at them since a mediocre Neptunes album is still ridiculously fun and a huge handful of the tracks on this record will get stuck in my head without warning. There's a severe Goofy Shit quotient at work too, intentional or otherwise: first off you've got the beats, which are churned out with these rinky-dink sounding keyboards that sound like they're garage sale finds from the '80s -- and that's what makes them so damn great, the tinny outmoded bleeps and gronks suddenly sounding rejuvenated when they're put through the paces of a straight-up party jam. It's the sort of thing your typical ex-Grand Royal b-teamer or Eighteenth Street Lounge act wishes they could do. On top of this the Neptunes decided to rework the sound of the album to sound more "live" and brought Minneapolis jazz-fusion group Spymob in to play live drums and Steely Dan keyboards over the tracks. The result is almost like a car wreck, but one of those fun kinds staged by H.B. Halicki where a gleaming '70s sports car is reduced to scrap in an exhibition of stuntman slapstick.

-Nate

Thursday, July 25, 2002 -- 09:51 p.m.

Well, now that I've edited the bejeezus out of the preceding article, it's time to relax, sit back and check out this archive of laughable band promo photos. Count the brick walls! Of note is a special guest appearance by a local band and friends of Demorama named Psychopop (NOTE: website has little to no content), who fortunately get off with little more than a minor "sci-fi nerds" quip. Yeah they look kinda ridiculous but their music is the bastard child of Devo and Jello Biafra and they do a song about Robert DeNiro's character in Brazil so they're OK with me, right on. (Band photos link via Fimoculous)

-Nate

Thursday, July 25, 2002 -- 09:37 p.m.

Radio Birdman, Radios Appear (Trafalgar 1977/1978)
The silver and white and red poster in the window of Let It Be records in Minneapolis looked pretty sharp out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look closer: it advertised "The Essential Radio Birdman 1974-1978" CD newly released on Sub Pop. "Sub Pop? They're still putting out albums? Well, as long as it's better than The Go, I might as well give it a listen."

And I did. I don't know if it was the sweltering surroundings -- the summer heat of an end-of-the-workday downtown Minneapolis teeming with motion -- that drew me deep into the record's atmosphere. It might've been. It also could've been the backstory of the band, laid out intriguingly in the liner notes: Detroit proto-punk enthusiast Deniz Tek decides to study medicine in Sydney and forms a band with a bunch of Aussies. The band brings in a Canadian kid literally from the crowd of a live show and hires him as a guitarist, they put out an underground EP, then a couple albums, then self-destruct in mid '78 shortly after releasing Radios Appear, the bulk of which appears on the Essential comp. I skimmed through the tracks on the listening station, catching just enough of a song to judge whether or not it was good enough to carry a CD, deciding that it definitely was, and then skipping on to the next to repeat the process again, getting hit broadside with yet another new-yet-familiar blast of '70s garage-punk. You're damn right I bought the CD. But whenever I had it in my Discman from then on, I would always stop listening after track 14, and as it turned out that's where the last of the 12 tracks from the two versions of Radios Appear cut off. In essence, I had bought a "best-of" reissue but had come away being infatuated with just one album.

Radios Appear (an album named after a line from a Blue Oyster Cult song, released by a band named after a line from a Stooges song) was largely ignored by the music press outside of Australia (it still isn't in Christgau's Consumer Guide), and reissues notwithstanding it's still undeservedly obscure, sort of a "cult album" with a following that makes the number of people who own a Velvet Underground release seem like the teeming masses of The Eagles' Greatest Hits buyers. The fact that Radios Appear ineptly marketed outside of Australia probably has more to do with it than anything, since it can't be the music (at least not today; the band was persona non-grata in '70s Oz clubland) -- singer Rob Younger's voice sounds like the halfway point between the Clash's Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the guitars rumble with the same throwback rock'n'roll that Wayne Kramer made his bread and butter, and Tek's lyrics are a veritable laundry list of memorable pop song subject matters -- girls and escape and the pull and the fury and the grueling momentum of rock itself. In other words, it's at least as accessible as its contemporaries, with a great deal in common with the Ramones' fun and the Buzzcocks' ennui and the Jam's populism. But the unusual international make-up of the band is another big part of the sound -- Motor City disciple Tek's lost-in-the-future lyrical prophesies of alienation (like the Poe-inspired "Descent Into the Maelstrom") and revolution-via-rock ("New Race", "Do the Pop") careened into Rob Younger's surfer sensibilities and the result was an unholy matrimony of words and voice forging an uneasy but airtight dichotomy, encompassing both the percussive rumble and bouncy melodies of surf rock and the hellbound banshee grind of Michigan proto-punk. Tek's lead guitar, meanwhile, played in slick tandem with aforementioned Canadian Chris "Klondike" Masuak's rhythm, giving every riff and solo a pulse that raced breathlessly without stumbling over the line into thud-rock excess. And when the fury is toned down for midtempo offerings like "Love Kills" and "Man With Golden Helmet", another notable element comes in -- the piano work of Pip Hoyle, who handles the keys like a reigned-in Ray Manzarek and brings an unusually mellifluous nature to the aforementioned songs. Radios Appear itself is only available stateside as a moderately costly import (around $20 or so), so your best bet might be to simply buy the Sub Pop reissue and then go MP3-hunting for the three singles not included on The Essential: the unfortunately-titled yet amazingly epic "Monday Morning Gunk", the pipeline-riding growl of "Hit Them Again" and a cover of the 13th Floor Elevators' "You're Gonna Miss Me" that stares the Clash's 1977 singles in the face and dares them to blink. You. Need. This. Album. Now.

So after this album things like I said more or less fell apart and the band split up, which is pretty much a shame except for the fact that it did free up Tek, Younger and bassist Warwick Gilbert to do a live album with Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and MC5 drummer Dennis Thompson for a 1981 tour as "New Race" (later captured on CD under the title The First and the Last). I have got to get me some of that action.

Bizarre trivia: Deniz Tek served as a jet pilot in the Navy under the call-sign "Iceman", which the screenwriters of Top Gun noticed while visiting his station in Hawaii while putting together the script. Yes, the man who wrote "Murder City Nights" and "Love Kills" had a cinematic namesake who traipsed around to Kenny Loggins and Berlin.

-Nate

Wednesday, July 24, 2002 -- 10:49 p.m.

Glorious Noise has a decent (if a little narrow in scope) list of song lyrics they find great. And hey, even though it centers around canonical rocknroll stuff, they're all pretty cool (except for the Beasties stuff, which as I have implied earlier sound better as voice than they read as text. MUCH better). And yeah, I added my own candidates, which if you know me at least a bit are fairly predictable (Cannibal Ox, Beck, Bikini Kill, the Clash, Outkast, Richard Hell) but great lyrics is great lyrics, yeah. And I probably coulda gone on forever, really...

-Nate

Wednesday, July 24, 2002 -- 09:06 p.m.

Oh shit. Oh shit. OH SHIT:
"A draft bill seen by CNET News.com marks the boldest political effort to date by record labels and movie studios to disrupt peer-to-peer networks that they view as an increasingly dire threat to their bottom line. Sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman, D-Calif., and Howard Coble, R-N.C., the measure would permit copyright holders to perform nearly unchecked electronic hacking if they have a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is taking place. Berman and Coble plan to introduce the 10-page bill this week. The legislation would immunize groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America from all state and federal laws if they disable, block or otherwise impair a "publicly accessible peer-to-peer network."
To sum it up: Oh shit!

-Nate

Wednesday, July 24, 2002 -- 02:13 p.m.

Beastie Boys, Hello Nasty (1998 Grand Royal)
This album irritates me -- not because it's musically grating or because the "Boys" in question are in their thirties, but because its cheeseball Catskills b-boy vaudeville charisma compells me to like it even if the lyrics are butt in half the songs. Everything that makes the Beasties great is here (nimble tag-team rhyming, big big chunky-ass robo-funk beats, oddball nonsequitorial pop-culture references), as are most of the things that often made them lame in the past few years (a dearth of storytelling and thematic structure*, buzzkill preachiness, mid-late album fatigue, oddball nonsequitorial pop-culture references). Here the Beasties also introduce a good new thing and a bad new thing: Mixmaster Mike and their supposedly newfound singing abilities, respectively. The former is a definite boon, if more during live shows than on record (he only scratches on some four or five songs); the latter is also thankfully sparse and if you're in a generous mood it's not all that worse than say Lou Reed's talk-singing. But again, we come back to the lyrics -- most of them seem like they're coasting; the album's first line is "Well/it's/fifty cups of coffee/and you know it's on", which sounds like the habits of someone stricken with writers' block. And while gratuitous out-of-nowhere references sound great when used properly (like on Paul's Boutique: relentless, eclectic and simultaneously high-and-lowbrow), toss-offs like "Sometimes I like to brag/sometimes I'm soft-spoken/when I'm in Holland I eat the Pannenkoeken" and "I'm the king of Boggle/there is none higher/I get eleven points/off the word "quagmire" are ha-ha funny but they seem more cutesy than clever.
But to hell with that -- this record bumps. If nothing else, the Beasties know how to get shit movin', and if that means dropping in some Lurch-style harpsichord or a fuzzed-out garage rock guitar or a sample of Rachmaninoff as tweaked by father of "exotica" Les Baxter then so be it. And even if the words can be kind of corny ("I'll stir-fry you IN MY WOK!" O...kay), the RUN-D.M.C.-derived hot-potato mic-passing and the jovial "we have come to turn this mother out and get ridiculous and make you move that thing" benevolence are enough to make me not really care. Yeah, this album irritates me. It also entertains me to no end.

*"Intergalactic" boasts that they got an "A from [Kool] Moe Dee for stickin' to themes", though (a) that was in 1987 and (b) he gave them C's and lower for nearly everything else. I think the Beasties had revenge of sorts, though, since legend has it one of them (Mike D?) was hanging out with Rick Rubin looking through demo tapes, listened to one, said "hey this guy sounds like Kool Moe Dee and he's dope, get him signed or something" and thus began the career of Kool Moe Dee's biggest rival -- LL Cool J.

-Nate

Tuesday, July 23, 2002 -- 09:47 p.m.

My turntable's broken, but I've got Soulseek fired up and Goldwave set to tweak the pitch: time to play In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida at speeds it was never meant to be heard.

-Nate

Tuesday, July 23, 2002 -- 08:14 p.m.

I was feeling all crap earlier today (writers' block, people talking shit, possible upcoming dearth of grocery funds) but you know what cheered me up? Atmosphere's Slug writing into the Village Voice and mocking Scott Seward's logorrhetarded El-P review. Hahaha BURN.

Since I started suffering burnout from the QCPM project I've realized that I haven't been bringing much in content except hastily-written teardowns of stupid music articles and quick, shabby synopses of various albums I've been listening to (and hell, without QCPM that's basically all this site is). I should probably start bringing some serious critical content starting... tomorrow. I figure I have an hour for lunch and I can probably write a concise yet detailed overview of a different album each day. We'll see how it goes.

-Nate

Monday, July 22, 2002 -- 07:38 p.m.

Well I'll be damned, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was sampled -- on some song called "18 Strings" by some act called "Tinman" (or maybe it was "Tinman" by the act "18 Strings"). It was also used in Credit to the Nation's "Call It What You Want", another song I am unfamiliar with, but is apparently (from what I've read) not very good. ILM can be strangely useful sometimes.

-Nate