Awoken From My Slumber…

…by Mentasms, who I fear is going to be vaguely disgusted at my unregenerate rockism:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

Evidently this one has been doing the rounds for quite a while – I think my spring has already been quite extensively shaped and is now sitting there looking as ugly and misshapen as countless seasons past. 

1. “These Foolish Things” – Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra, Lady Day: The Master Takes & Singles

There’s been a little flurry of bloggers outing themselves as not liking jazz now that Steve Albini has taken the curse off it.  But really, what is it that you’re saying you can’t get your head round? The musicianly polish and tastefully funky jams on Blue Note leave me pretty cold, doubly underwhelming because they’re so rafted with all the signifiers of jazz sophistication. But Black Saint & The Sinner Lady? Coltrane Live At The Village Vanguard? A Tribute To Jack Johnson? Or what about something as warm and full of life as this? The grain and phrasing of every second of this song knock me out.

2. Percy’s Song – Bob Dylan, Biograph 

I’ve been listening to Fairport Convention’s cover of this on Unhalfbricking for years now without finding anything remotely memorable about it – if anything, it was a major bringdown after the shimmering high of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”.  Maybe it’s just too cluttered arranged for a full band, and it’s the intimacy of this recording of a very young Dylan that makes it work.  

3. “Power” – The Dead C, Vain, Erudite & Stupid

Kicking the corpse of rock music uphill.

4. “Lontano” – Ligeti/Nott/Berlin Philharmonic, The Ligeti Project Vol. 2

First fruit of the list from The Rest Is Noise. If the Rite of Spring was so insurrectionary, what would that audience have made of this? At least the Rite has roots in folk dance and pagan ritual, but Lontano and Atmospheres have something unearthly about them, something ominous and implacable in their sinuous, alien textures.

5. “So I Si Sa” – Super Boiro Band, African Pearls 2: Guinee – Cultural Revolution

Although fundamentally the work of the devil, mp3 players redeem themselves every time they cough something like this up from the depths of random shuffle, something that I must have heard half a dozen times before without ever really registering just how hot it is.  Exhibit B – that Quintete Sextete track that is a dead ringer for an early Pentangle track off the self-same disc.  

6. “I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream)” – Pissed Jeans, Hope For Man

Pure genius.  The more you look around, the more you realise that people in western society can no longer muster enough super-ego to keep the bruised, self-indulgent child side of their character in check.  I can’t believe that Pissed Jeans decided not to stick with the name Unrequited Hard-On…must have felt they couldn’t live up to it.  It’d be a lot of pressure, having a name that good.

7. “The Big Takeover” – Bad Brains, Bad Brains

Look, I didn’t say it had been a great spring.

I’m not sure I even read seven blogs which haven’t already been infected and it seems a bit pointless asking all the Frank’s Apa people but let’s say: Inuit Scarlet Bikini Carwash, Lexicon Devil, Accentmonkey, any of the lads from Soundtracks For Them but especially Krossphader, Chocolate Court, Old Style Rabbit Tales Of Furry Fury and Undersea Community.

You Guys Want It Quieter? Or Louder?

What some people will never understand is that noise is compelling, that noise is a crucial vector for the unpredictability that is necessary to make the hoary ritual of the rock gig vital. Being a shambles does not make you unpredictable – incompetence is the flipside of buttoned-down professionalism, predictably piss-poor, routinely disappointing. Noise overloads your synapses, swamping your brain in a sensory deluge. It carries the risk inherent in introducing sound that can’t wholly be controlled, gambling the certainty of harmony and melody on a flight into the abyss. Noise is half the story with Pissed Jeans – it bleeds from every amplifier, feeding back through every mic and pickup in a coruscurating scree. Even when Dave Rosenstrauss’ bass amp cuts out (as it did for the first two songs) leaving only the Bradley Fry’s guitar and Sean McGuinness’ drums, it sounds like there’s a dozen people playing. When the bass comes back, the sound takes on a belligerent thickness that sinks deep into your innards. On the night, Pissed Jeans favour their slower songs, dragging the lurching, bludgeoning riffs out their instruments like every note pains them. It’s grinding, abject stuff, music to drown out the hell of the outside world. When they erupt into something closer to standard punk speed, you’re blindsided, knocked back by the distortion that’s lashing around like a downed power cable. This is something compelling, something that demands your attention and can’t be readily assimilated or ignored.

The other half of that story is Matt Korvette. Like Iggy Pop, or maybe more relevantly, David Yow, he plays on the revolting plasticity of human flesh, absentmindedly squeezing and folding the slippery flab hanging over the waistband of his jeans. Twisting, kicking out his absurdly long legs, contorting his body around the mic stand, howling his lyrics like a mushmouthed drunk screaming in an alley, he embodies the wrenching discord of the music. The threat implicit in a sweating, half-naked man towering over you as he staggers around the stage draws a wary eye, just as there’s a queasy, uncomfortable fascination in hearing him expose the emotions we usually keep tightly under wraps.

Judging from what others write about them, I’m not alone in seeing in Pissed Jeans the return of something I’ve been missing in rock music for a while. People have drawn a wide range of comparisons, be it to the Birthday Party (I don’t hear it), Flipper (getting warmer) or Black Flag (in “Damaged I” mode, definitely), suggesting that people are hearing what they want to hear, or else that noise offers a wide-open field for interpretation. The name Stickmen With Rayguns shows up like clockwork in every description of them but I suspect that most are cribbing that straight out of the press releases…it’s a name so good you can’t resist dropping it in, but in twenty years I don’t think I’ve even so much as seen it on an actual record. Clearly it’s time to fire up Hype Machine and see if there are any mp3s out there. Pissed Jeans blew me away on Wednesday night, even as they were blatantly struggling with their equipment, even when members of the band were making hurried exits from the stage to puke. The music was a visceral, cathartic blast and I still can’t figure out the reason for the dismally muted response from the admittedly thin audience. But as I say, some people will never understand.