Punk rock died when the first kid said: "Punk's not dead..."

Thunder-storming.

'"...incandescent...haunting..."'

The explosive, belching roar is so imposing at first, causes you to hunch your shoulders, disorients you, impresses you...until it crackles away all too suddenly, a fleeting echo dispersing... ebbing.

Call me a romantic, but, like a fine summer night's rolling thunderstorm, I think we can be similarly enchanted with the brutish dynamism of things like, say, punk rock.

And, these last few days, I've been trying to remind myself about what that is, or rather, what that should still be. What does it (...'punk,') mean, anymore?
~

I want to tell you about the wads of mucus intermittently jettisoned from Shawn's mouth every six lyrics or so, or about the way Steve spasms his way away from the microphone, wriggling his way out into the crowd as though his long brown curls had transformed into serpents and he was trying to de-fang them with his hands whilst pugnaciously serenading them away with a yowled melody...
I want to tell you about Sheefy's audacious disregard for his own well-being by jumping off of walls and falling onto floors that are already soaked with beer while he holds a live microphone to his mouth. I want to tell you about cops busting in doors and pulling amplifier plugs or about Ryan drumming in a cramped and already cluttered rectangular room near the kitchen with only about five people in the "audience."

Why limit yourself to such passe adjectives: "Dude, this is so 'punk-rock...'"

Somewhere in this last decade, Punk rock become just another Wikipedia page; all but tamed into stale compartmentalization, or something like a now-lifeless wolf, frozen in its last growl, mounted on the walls of taxidermist executive-types who knew how to sell it for a year or two until it was exposed as more sheep-than-anything-else.

The real punk rockers don't know (or never knew) that they're doing it.
Influence is deceptive. If you're ready to say you're influenced by Radiohead, then wouldn't it be more purist-of-you to dig deeper and find out who influenced Radiohead? And subsequently worship/study/mimic 'them' more-so?

I have only a minimal (-say it again, minimal) inkling of the nuances of the songwriter's experience... But if it's anything (say it again, anything), like writing-about-music, then I'm sure it's quite difficult not to refer...

Refer back to what's come before... 'This Musician's current sound and style' is demonstrating behaviors and flavors and manners that seem to recall what 'This-other-Musician had done just a few years earlier with this-other-quasi-style/approach-that-was-also-thereby-mined-and-manipulated-by-a-whole-other-scene of songwriters.'

Put another way: This band has elements of "punk."

Well... give me more!

I don't want music journalism to be so lazy, anymore. (Did the internet make that hopeless?)

But...set that aside.

Here's the point: One hurried shuffle through any drug-store will wrought disturbing revelations into your ears - that the world is so numb that they think the drivel peddled on outlets such as 96.3 is actually legitimate pop music that thereby must be enjoyed.

Do I react (retch) to Bruno Mars' song about getting up one ideally-ignorant-boosting morning and deciding that he's "not doing anything" the same way that some (perhaps old fuddies from 1959 who yelled at stick-ball-playing tikes to stay-the-hell-off-his-lawn) might have turned their noses at the Silhouette's song "Get A Job (Sha-na-na)" (...which is now revered, if just in a quaint-PBS-580-memories-nostalgic sense as quintessential "doo-wop" and thereby "classic").

And worse - all the people here, in this drug store purgatory are singing along! Singing along to a song about not-doing-anything. This stirs up doomsday-paranoia in me matching that of soylent-green-pod-people-type levels.

Here's the final point: It makes me all the more glad to be at the edge of a stage (these stages, our stages) and have a musician fall off of it, and on to me. Or to be shoved from behind when a Kommie Kilpatrick song reaches it's third chorus (in under 58 seconds). Or to get goosebumps when Dan Kroha belts out a blood-curdling traditional gospel ballad under a summer night's sky.

To be here. To see and experience all of this...

It's just like that thunder-clasp... (call me romantic).
When it happens, I feel electrified. When the moment's passed, it seems to echo with a fading crackle. The audience regains composer, stands back up, looks around, rubs their ears.

Walking through drug stores and hearing the music they blare day in, day out, makes me want to go storm chasing.

Writing about music is a delicate act and needs to be respected as such; it should happen as soon as possible after the writer is struck by that metaphoric lightning -

If it lingers too long, you just start reaching back to the storms of your past, the big tornadoes you keep telling stories about, the ones that everyone remembers best (like 70's 'punk').

Don't discount the storm from which you just dried off - maybe it does have elements of "punk," but it's got to have an element all it's own. Doesn't it?

You just have to make sure you listened to it's distinctive belching-roar, closely enough.

Well...
...it's stopped raining for now. G'night

Thoughts on Writing (Despair is Boring)

I tend to over-think things...often to a fault.

One hopes that it is an asset, when it's come to writing about music.

Anyhow - Author/historian David McCullough researched letters (you know, the snail mail paraphernalia?)- written by artists through the mid-19th century for his latest book. TIME Magazine recently interviewed him about the quaintness of letter writing.

We don't write letters on paper anymore. How will this affect the study of history?
-The loss of people writing--writing a composition, a letter or a report--is not just the loss for the record. It's the loss of the process of working your thoughts out on paper, of having an idea that you would never have had if you weren't [writing]. And that's a handicap. People [I research] were writing letters every day. That was calisthenics for the brain.

We often can't understand how people in the past could have owned slaves or not educated girls. What do you think people will wonder about us?
-How we could have spent so much time watching TV.

~

Before reading that, however, I had had an electronically-facilitated conversation with local musician John Bissa about the usefulness of: "considered criticism" in helping "raise up a lot of things" and potentially spur on the continued traditions of meaningful art and highlighting relevant new talent in the community.

"Certainly," I responded. "But, I worry that few things are considered in the Internet age -
too many writers will just look, briefly listen, load the chambers and fire off."

(Set aside that we now are sorely sated with 'writers' out here on the blurring, bohemoth Internet's icy, antagonistic plains).

"We also risk stumbling over our own shoelaces" by processing/half-analyzing a glutton of data, be it news, or be it music. "Jumping all jittery across a hopscotch/taunt and flaunt playground of sites and blogs."

~

So that made me dig up this story from NPR's Fresh Air:
"How The Internet is Re-shaping Music Criticism" - an interview with music writer Ann Powers. Thus giving me insight and helping me relax a bit, with added perspective, when our state of literary intellect seems to be either dizzying or disconcerting.

Powers acknowledges the notion that the blogger brigade threatens sustained thought.

"Forget having your life changed by a great music book, the way mine was by Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train in 1985. We can’t even trust anyone to tell us whether the new Justin Timberlake album deserves five stars.

"But," she continues, "I think despair is boring. It lands the worrier in the time-travel trap of longing for the past while fearing the future. It obscures the present. The present is unstable, but that’s what makes music writing—and all cultural writing, in fact—so exciting a practice these days. We have to dump our expectations and try to use our voices and our minds in different ways."

Listen to the story here.

At the end of the day, I try not to over-think myself-writing-about-music; since I spend too much time already over-thinking-the-music-itself. The internet is going to shape our habits no matter what - but nothing can change the interaction between a listener and an album; it's only up to the listener to how great an extent they open themselves to said-album (and hopefully long enough for it to have an impact).

"Music itself is a call that demands response," Powers writes. "It organizes desire, sorrow, and joy into a form both primal—the ear is the first sense organ to begin working when we are in the womb—and intensely communal; in every known culture, some form of music has been a constant in everyday life. Making music or listening to it is part of how we grow; sharing music is what helps us create community."

Let It Begin...

Pops

Ted Leo has little to do with Father's Day. But, for the sake of "music news," I can tell you that he has a new song, ("The Little Smug Supper Club") recently performed (and produced) via something called Room 205 (...which, for the Detroit scene, could compare to our Throwback Media, in terms of mission, mode and mentality). + -a new song from Mr. Leo likely means that the soulful punk-folk/articulate agitator will likely be unveiling a new album within a season or two.




Now then, what does have-(plenty)-to-do with Father's Day is NPR's All Songs Considered's special program "Songs for Father's Day." Listen.
Listener's Dad's and Grandpa's cooked up personal playlists. I'm a sucker for such endearing things.

~
My dad's personal favorite? As always, for him, it's the Ventures.

Assorted curiosities... here's to summer

Lost in the Shuffle -or- (still) Listening

I'm actually writing this for myself. I've never gotten terribly personal on this...blog...because often I'm writing about someone else, something else, some place else...or even further into the intangible, writing about music.

Which, as Mr. Costello's echoing words in my head have never stopped reminding me, is about as feasibly translatable/comprehendable as "dancing about architecture."

I'd really love to indulge surreal satire here - and fabricate fantastically funny and frightening epilogue-esque explanations, -but motorcycle crashes aren't funny, alien abduction is a tired cliche and I've not yet made any LP's for you to experiment with playing backwards to decode secret messages I've left behind.

I'm not going anywhere. Yet. That I know of.

It's more of a "back-in-5-minutes" sign, left on the ye olde blogshoppes's front door.

I'm not taking off my writer's apron, but I am wandering out, away from the kitchen and out -down the street, for a little while. I'll leave some stew simmeirng on the burner for you...just make sure to stir it here and there and when you're done, seal up the leftovers and store em in the fridge.


I need some kind of vision quest. I need to just put headphones on again and listen to music for the sake of listneing to music. I don't ever want to become numbed or unfeeling; I don't ever, nor have I ever, just put a record on to churn out a review. But still, reviews can feel dirty, hollow - and writing too many of them can be anesthetizing to the tingly receptors in one's heart, the ones that palpitate when you hear that perfect sound...

The thing is: I've been posting every day (sometimes twice) for.....I've lost count. (Or was too busy writing the next thing to count). I just want to try, once, or twice, to listen to a record and not write about it. Oh, I'll be listening. But I'll be writing something else...

My self-examination was spurred by my being moved by passages from Steve Martin's memoir, Born Standing Up, where he talks about the depression he fell into, in 1981, tied to a soul-crushing tour schedule. His words, like "exhaustion," "isolation," and "creative ennui" just happened to scare the shit out of me.

"I couldn't imagine abandoning something I had worked so hard to craft," he wrote, about his stand-up act. He admits that he "saw that the only way I could go, at best, was sideways. I wasn't singing songs that you hum forever, I was doing comedy, which is as ephemeral as the daily newspaper."

I'm not writing songs. And,... the word: "Ephemeral" also scares me. Or, it at least makes me want to go out into the desert and start sculpting something, ...or at least makes me want to seclude myself in a Paris loft with a typewriter and a bottle of absinthe and not permit myself outside until I'd churned 50 pages of mind-melting profundity and heart-swooning majesty, or at least makes me want to go to Vegas and have some kind of soul-searching lost weekend.

What I believe:
-in love
-in myself
-in Detroit music.
-and, of course, in my friends, (see, above).

I believe my dad is hilarious. And I believe my mom is inspiringly compassionate. And I believe in broken cliches like: music soothes the savage beast --and that music is the universal language.

But I don't ever want to even have a hinted inkling that what I'm doing, even here-now--as I type these words, is "ephemeral."

"Music is essentially what memories feel like," my sister once said.

It can, thus, give feeling to the ephemeral.

But...... the risk: "Oh yeah, I remember when I first heard that song... I was sitting at the coffee shop, in the middle of writing-about-that-song, when I first...heard it..." ....oh.

I'm going to go get lost in some delicious, psychedelic, transcendent, head-hurting, heart-wringing, feet-moving, eye-opening memories...

By just listening.

"In my 27th year I set out to confront my fears and found the role of a lifetime..." -Cass McCombs - "Hermit's Cave"

~

Afterward:
I'll still post here when the spirit moves me and that might end up being consistent, but it might also end up being more sporadic. I'm going up for air, that's all. But before I dry off, I'm cannon-balling back into the water.

I know I'll be writing about Urgh...
and more to come, still...

Urgh's the Word

Jen just told me she wanted to read this piece... before I'd even started writing it.

"Because, at some point last night, everything started moving too fast."

I tell her I wish I'd gotten to the compound in time for her band's set...but I was begrudgingly waylaid by the jackassery of gridlocked 19-year-olds with self-stenciled t-shirts ga-ga-ing their way towards Ford Field for the Taylor Swift concert.

She assures me it was fun. "Crazy-loud guitar," she says, "(a) crunchy tone."

And then she speaks for almost everyone involved last night in the Urgh! Detroit Music War extravaganza: "Felt really good to play all sweaty too..."

It was probably not even above 71 degrees on this summer's eve, but the more than 200 bodies giddily sardined inside rose the Lager House's collective temperature to about 94 - making it thus that every performer (upwards to 70 if you split up between the 18 bands on the bill) came up on the stage still looking their hipstobohemiothrift best, dry, kempt and cool, and wound up coming off the stage as though they'd taken multiple face-first belly dives across a slip-n-slide; hair ruffled, voice crackly, shoulders arched and heaving.

The camera crew - the vital videographers of the Urgh crew - needless to say, were pretty well sluiced with sweat before the 3rd band had even finished.

It was a beguiling scene - if you stood in one spot, perhaps out on the patio, for a moment, you could attain relative inner tranquility and observe around you the not too uncommon sequences of a serenely spilt-out house party. But if you turned to the rest of your periphery or just took six steps toward another corner, you saw the surged scuttling of camera holders, eyes bulged with fitful squirrel-like glints, ducking between circles of talkers and imbibers, under arms or between legs, to get into position as the next band hauled gear on crossing the last band hauling gear off...

Having met their Kickstarter goal just a day or so before the actual big night, the Urgh! crew set to deliver on what they'd originally dreamt up - merely capturing energy; the energies of a decent spoonful of Detroit's current crop of musicians--their styles, sounds and performance manner - and thus mirror/honor the cult documentary of similar titling, from 1982, which documented the rise of New Wave (and it's intermingling with punk, psychobilly, reggae and satirical novelty).

"I don't know...it's just great though..."

"I don't know...but this is amazing..."

"I dunno, but, man, the whole night's been really amazing..."

"I, uh...man, it's crazy...I don't know... It's exhilarating."

300-ish people. 18 bands. 30-some-odd guitars, 6 or 7 film cameras... ricocheting like flourished corn kernels in a steamy kettle cooker... And those^ were the answers one would get - as one lily-padded from one buzzed circle of revelers to the next and asking for thoughts or reflections.

That they, we, didn't know quite what to make of all this, didn't know quite what it all meant, didn't know quite what to say... Still don't know. And that's crucial to preserving a delicate purity.

Needless to say, we all got drunk off each other. We got drunk off of the energy of the night. It was, let's admit it, a legitimate house party. Everyone's inner-22-year-old came out and conjured their own weird mutant endurance levels (for dizzy and distracted sprints deep into the two o'clock hour as well as for a disconcerting amount of downed beers-per-person), -and yes we were giddy idiots....who wouldn't be with a camera in your face? These aren't rock stars with images who are already tired of paparazzi...no...everyone in the room has an inner geeky-fan-boy-or-girl inside...and it was turned out in many of the jovial faces shunted together last night.

Yes it was gruff and un-graceful, but it was surprisingly...well... efficient. It was as smooth as chaos could be, I suppose. Set times were kept and stage breakdown was fluent and no amps exploded and no one suffered dismemberment...maybe just a sprain or two and an epidemic of hangover-headaches. And some broken eye glasses.

A caveman played atop an 11-ft wall; Darth Vader stumble-danced in front of Carjack; the Satin Peaches performed a ravenous set for what could well be their last Detroit appearance (ever?); there was body surfing and swigged-beers-between-snare-hits and numerous other heroic, hellish or sloppily swaggering antics one expects at an undeniably jumpin' rock n' roll concert. (Lots of people jumped, from stages, from walls, from chairs and from car roofs).

But we shouldn't have to know what it means...we're already self-conscious enough about what we have...we shouldn't give it a name yet to thereby scrape its sanctity...

Because it will be over, at some point...and who knows when?

It felt climactic, in a way; like white blocky credits would start rolling across our eyes, in real time, when last call let out and the sun started to rise.

But talking in absolutes is just for people who are too easily overwhelmed or perhaps too intolerant of the unassailable hope of courageously naive inspirado - Too many fests? Too many bands? Crowded scene?

Maybe.

You live (or near) in a city where it seems like there's a music fest every three weeks to accommodate the spillover of bands... Anyone feeling exasperated about that might be wise to be-careful-what-they-wish-for... We could just be a town with a multiplex and a bowling alley and a shooting range.

Instead, friends get together and play music for each other. To what end? Hopefully Urgh! helps us find out.

But back to it feeling climactic - I think the word should, or at least could (be considered): paradigm shift. Forget 'fests' - because this is just how Detroit's rock music scene operates now - Forget 'scene' while you're at it - because a funny thing happened in the last two years leading up to Urgh! -the bands seemed to stop caring about edging each other. Last night felt like a ferocious family picnic - even if it has aspects of self-glorification, why not? That's what every family does at their great gatherings or reunions or shared outings - they celebrate what they have...

We may not know what it is we have, but it's weird how familial it's feeling.

Total family picnic, though, the same way you'd wig out and start making fish-faces and distend your popsicle-stained tongues, roaring wildly when your crazy uncle brought his Super 8 camera over to your side of the swing-set... These bands poured their hearts out, obviously trying to match the zaniness of their heroes, the Cramps, or Gary Numan, or Pere Ubu or whoever else from the original, but then, also giving nods to the other bands in the crowd.

Friends and family.

Urgh.

(Et Tu,) Brute Heart

Wherein, I ramble about Brute Heart, Computer Perfection, and Bad Indians

Classical instruments... be it the violin or be it the human voice... can have an imposing darkness to them; beautiful, haunting, and, in a way that seems to conjure ancient demons or past lives or merely flicker with the gossamer glow of candles, can be primal.

(see: City of Music)

Brute Heart's brand of spooky baroque-punk, richly evocative despite its minimalist ingredients (violin/viola/drum/bass/voice), makes me consider it psychedelic - only in that these trips, buoantly rhythmic, droney, chant-like, with "serptentine melodies" wrapt with moderately macabre imagery of eclipses and dubious charms of evil eyes -make one feel like their on some kind of spirit jounrey. Dash in a little proggy art-rock takes on torch songs and you've got this trio from across Lake Michigan (Minneapolis), putting out this, Lonely Hunter, (their 2nd LP) out on Soft Abuse.

Listen: Brute Heart - "Blindfolded"

~

But also...

"Recording happens in fits and starts. There's no such thing as a quiet house. I like to think about the days when I'll be old or gone - that (our daughter) Penny will have our music. Maybe it will be a puzzle for her to try to figure out what was going on in our lives, or in our minds, when we were relatively young. Or maybe it's just for me, when I get old, to remind myself that I had strange things in my head..."

Singer/guitarist Gene Corduroy - speaking of his band, Computer Perfection, in an interview with The Patch, detailing their current work upon a "sophomore" LP, to be released later this year.



I Need a Serious Love by thestrangeecho

Computer Perfection - June 11th @ Isaac Agee Downtown Synagogue - with High Speed Dubbing and Car Parts.

~

But, ...but, also---

Bad Indians (who you can see, June 18th at the New Center Park Stage), just released a new demo-EP -- The Rebel Kind - Take a listen here.

Part of Being Human

"Music is part of being human, and there is no human culture in which it is not highly developed and esteemed."

Neurologist, Author and Professor of Psychiatry, Oliver Sacks, wrote about the curious powers of music upon the brain in his 2007 study, Musicophelia...

"It's very ubiquity may cause it to be trivialized: we switch on a radio, switch it off, hum a tune, tap our feet, find the words to an old song going through our minds, and think nothing of it."

And now that I've read it, these lines impacted me. Or, maybe just thinking, intensely, soberly, appreciatively, about the impact, over all, that music can have... ...it's disturbing how easily it could go unappreciated.
Since...

"...to those who are lost in dementia, the situation is different. Music is no luxury to them, but a necessity, and can have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and to others, at least for a while."

GLOSSIES - Phantom Films - ~ - June 12 @ The Loving Touch

Anyone familiar with the work of OFFICE knew that singer/songwriter Scott Masson was capable of crafting, competently, keenly, almost inherently, minor masterpieces of pop-rock pizazz.

A bemusing and subtly calculating mind that meticulously, discernibly considered the minute merits of numerous sonic nuances and knew how to still give some edge to the grinning disposition of major keys.

Anyone familiar with the work of OFFICE, also knew that certain words replicated themselves upon the write-up sheets churned out by the weeklies in their hometown Chicago or on blogs across the burgeoning Internet-scenes of the mid-00's... that the sound was "glossy."
Dig the latest single (and, also, my personal favorite "glossie" track: "The Opportunist")GLOSSIES - The Opportunist by DC/Milo

You can read the full interview with Scott in a forthcoming post on The Patch - wherein, the Milford, MI-raised songwriter talks about the combustion of his old band in the face of major-label-wrought compromises and scene politics, as well as his descent into a nervous breakdown that left him bedridden for majority time of a calendar year.

In this detachment from the scene and all other similar distractions, he worked himself back to health, physically/mentally -even writing while under the fleeting bleakness of those bed covers- and started crafting a heavily surreal "pastiche" of songs, with no set guidelines for composition and with an elevated inflection upon some more diary-esque (more pesonal, if you will) lyrics, but dashing in dips into the deep-end of out-of-body/self-effacing "character studies" -some kind of musical montage.

Thus - GLOSSIES' - Phantom Films - which will see a proper release asap - and has its completion tacitly celebrated June 12th @ the Loving Touch (with The Pop Project and Jeremy Messersmith.)

Masson is ready to return, now, with a full band backing these glossie tunes. "It's funny, because the record is a study in narcissism. So, you would think that spending time alone in my basement would lend itself to even more narcissism but that's the ironic part about this whole thing - in literally cutting myself off from life - and youth culture, and all that, I was able to really grow up, finally."

"(A nervous breakdown) forces you to just stop what you're doing. You have to back out. So you can then take a step forward into the future. It all ended up being a very positive thing."

A surreal slide into the kaleidoscoping persona's, peaks, valleys and boundaries of the subconscious... Masson has done it again.

A different kind of glossie........

Spring is Ever-Becoming: These Trails

This is just what I needed to get into the summer mood...

-The cherubic jig of recorders -The hazy grin of dulcimers -The warped wring of slide guitars -Bubbly vocals crooning and cooing out coaxing folk ballads

Where has this record been all (our) lives? Most of us weren't even alive when it was recorded... These Trails are yet-another-long-lost/bottom-of-the-treasure-chest gem, yanked upwards by Drag City (the same way they did with Detroit's garage-fathers, Death).

This record begs to be listened to outside...or at least on some idyllic shoreside cottage's porch with the windows open; the gentle acoustic guitars elucidate the flicker of sunlight through verdant green leaves flapping in the warm breeze; the vocals are a delicate balance of sublime and spiritual, soothing and ghostly...and the eclectic blend of instrumentation (including an arp synthesizer simmering under an often dazzling, but not dizzying, cascade of acoustic dances) gives it an air of something alien... or, you know, -just a substantially spaced-out, blissed-out acid-folk trip.

Not that I want to drudge up eye-rolling "genre" pre-occupations... But...but... This record might be the missing link to the, er, "freak-folk" troubadors from the mid-00's... see: Joanna Newsom / Devendra Banhart. The intriguing kick here - it's bemusing delivery of Os Mutantes-flavored obscuro-pop (if it were high on hammock-swayed tranquilizers) with a uniquely Hawaiian-tinged vibe. These are the day-dreamy pennings of singer/songwriters Margaret Morgan and Patrick Cockett, as they wander the hills and mountains of Honolulu and Kaua'l, a way-out-west perspective churned in the dying days of hippie-dom.

You need some sweet sounds to quench your thirst for groovy-yet-cerebral chill-out music?

Here.

And listen to "Psyche I & Share Your Water" -from The Rising Storm