Posts Tagged digital

Screaming Females | Chalk Tape

Here’s a nice little EP that made my “to get to” list in the 2013 post (I have since purchased all these records but still have yet to listen to all of them…holy shit.)

This band is way too cool to call this the Poison Arrow EP and put that song first but it’s clearly the hit and worth the price of admission. In fact, I’m a little bummed they didn’t put it on a full album. Because I don’t have any of their full albums, and I feel a little guilty. Cause they’re from New Jersey, not even simply New Jersey but New Brunswick and I kinda feel like “that’s my scene, man”, even though clearly it’s not anymore and even was it ever? Not really. But I’ve heard them, and I like them. Which should be enough to buy a band’s records. I shouldn’t have to feel obligated because I might run into them at a party or something. It could happen. The kind of party I don’t really expect to be invited to, but then when I am, I don’t show up anyway. Because I got some stuff to figure out, man. There’s just so many bands. And so many old records by old bands. This may even qualify for some people in both of those categories. I never really got that attitude.

But this is hardly a monolith of relevance as a release. It’s good as a starting point, but I’m going to have to get more if I really claim to give a shit. I mean, come on, me. We got a tracklist with 7 songs, but everyone that isn’t Poison Arrow is under 3 minutes. They’re just collecting the songs that don’t belong on a proper album, maybe they don’t even consider them finished. You got midtempo groover Sick Bed, the quick melodic hardcore-ish Crushing the Kingdom, acoustic ballad Bad Men, angular noise rock of Wrecking Ball—some great screams here, frontwoman Marissa has a great singing voice but the moniker’s not too ironic—also the quieter but still tense bongo rock of Into the Sun and a nice little end ditty feat. Shellshag, another one of those bands I should know real well from 10 years back, but I do just barely.

And the artwork doesn’t merely look like a demo tape as a retro gag, it really came out on tape. Only a hundred copies. I never really got that either, I’m not that kind of collector. Download is fine. %

We all know you're gonna get it from Amazon if they got it even a dime cheaper cause that's just how it be, man, but you can get it direct from Don Giovanni for cheapest.

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DJ 0.000001 | Racin’ Music

Here’s one from March of ’10, actually released some time in ’09. Originally had it under a V/A credit, but it’s one of those gray areas where it’s mostly remixes of remixes, but there are some original tracks and it all has has the same stamp on it that it feels enough like a real album to give him marquee credit.

I heard of it through the Daly City Records mailing list, which I was on just for Mochipet, who I knew through MySpace, and/or maybe he used to post on Giant Robot. The website credits Mochi, but oddly the album itself doesn’t on any individual tracks. I know he did the Easy-E track. Thought it might be some alter ego in-joke thing like Madlib/Quasimoto or Kool Keith/Dr. Octagon/Etc. It is but only in the case of Th’ Mole/DJ 0.000001 who is real separate person, with his own website. Mochi’s credit just got lost in the shuffle. Enough. The songs:

Captain Ahab starts it off with Ride, or rather dude starts it off with a remix of such. I am not familiar with this song or group, it might as well be another alias. (It’s not, and last.fm is telling me I have listened to them on some of DJ Donna Summer’s Cock Rock Disco comps. I find the name unfortunate; I think some of the tracks I scrobbled may be another band. Whatever.) It starts of pretty good, with triumphant trumpet samples. Then the vocals start out pretty bad, but the momentum of the thing takes it into so-bad-it’s-epic, like “yeah, man, conquer your own terribleness, I can dig it”—I was getting back into bike riding when I got this, which is something I need to back into again now, and this did the trick of getting pumped right out of the gate. I’m probably going with something else in the future cause it kinda loses steam halfway through. In fact, the whole thing sounds different than how I remember. If it was on tape I would think it was the tape wearing out, but mp3s do not age, only the music itself and (I guess) me. I think it was also partly early 00s nostalgia. A few years ago I was thinking I had merely stumbled and needed to get back to where I was then. Now I’m pretty sure I was a total moron—not about everything, but yeesh, I can do some other stuff, what the hell am I thinking.

Anyway, it recovers and goes on. It never really lets up, there are just moments of exhaustion, even if you are sitting still, mentally so. Sidenote: this is all breakcore as far as I’m concerned, some of these artists went onto dubstep but if the music on this album can be considered dubstep, I don’t know anything about anything. And the only reason I might know anything about anything is from Jason Forest a/k/a DJ Donna Summer’s show Advanced D&D on WFMU. Things get much more hardcore than this record, but I think it’s the same style, even if this one crosses over into a bit lighter, fun, pop direction.

What was said about the Captain Ahab vocals go double for those of Th’ Mole himself. He goes for dumb and gets there. Altho I like the force of his delivery and he records better. It sounds like a real song, like he’s sampled from another recording and blended it all together. But there’s really only a couple tracks like that and it’s still mostly a mixtape. I don’t need to run it down track-by-track but highlights include Bone Thugs-N-Harmony outroing into an explosion of shitty stock drum machine cymbals, an appearance by the music of Jean-Jacques Perry, JJ Fad even tho they are pretty played out… Foxdye’s One Leg in the Booty Shorts sounds has some Venga Boys in there; Enya gets mixed with the steel drums from 50 Cent’s Wanksta—pure stunt mixing. The Drumline soundtrack is a nice inclusion, marching band music is classical maximalism; man vs. machine, that whole thing. And the Easy-E track, this is a much different version of 24 Hrs. To Live. Ridiculous.

Closer Bouncy Ball crosses the line into pure annoyance, but it is the last track so it’s not so bad. I kinda like an endurance test sometimes.

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Unlike my other dumb mixtape posts, this one is still available from Daly City Records so you are not like reading this for no reason.

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Major Lazer | Get Free

get_free I don’t love everything Diplo does and am not really a Dirty Projectors fan but when you combine this goofy Major Lazer project with psudo-serious (or I-don’t-know-what) singer Amber Coffman the result was pretty nice. I fell in love with the song after seeing the video and pretty soon it was stuck in my head 24/7.

This goes on for a while. I need a copy of the song before I lose my mind but the album is not out yet at that point and am I really going to go for a full Major Lazer album? Hell no, who am I trying to kid. I make the rare single purchase from Amazon before realizing I already had a copy of the song on my hard drive which I downloaded before they even made that video. So that happened. But I got the full release with the remixes. It turned out I had also downloaded them before too. Hell. Some impression they made, huh? I listened to them enough times now to feel like I got my money’s worth and I feel fine about it. Fine. According to wiki, Amazon gypped me a remix. I don’t know what that’s about but probably wouldn’t have noticed if I didn’t just check how many there were.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re fine remixes. It’s hard to screw up a song with a nice lilting melody like this one, but they’re all uptempo versions which undermines the slo-mo post-party mood of the original. I also like the low synth sound on the verses, the fake tuba bass line that is a direct stylistic lift from whatever but it sound good, man. None of that in the remixes. They just make up whole new backdrops for the vox, whatever. Nice, but not really revelatory. I’m sure they would sounds great in a club after you are sick of the slow version being played out. Weirdly (or not) the slow version is more uplifting emotionally if not adrenaline pump-inducing.

It’s a good little record first thing in the morning to slowly ramp up your mood into consciousness and some kind of physical activity. (If that’s your thing.) %

PS: I noticed there are some performances where Ms. Coffman omits what some have dubbed “the Tarzan yell”, probably because someone told her it was racist right before she went on stage or something. Dude? It’s a Morricone reference. Good the Bad and the Ugly? Are you ok, dude?

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