Posts Tagged 80s
Shonen Knife | S/t
Shonen Knife Day. They got a new record out. I don’t have it yet. Next paycheck. But time marches on, and with so many horrible things in the world, there’s this band. It’s maybe kinda dumb that there is a Shonen Knife Day. I didn’t say that. Did you say that? I’m glad there’s an excuse to write about them just now, myself. And listen to the album. I’m gonna listen to the album, then write about it, that’s the order of things that I will be doing. Then maybe I’ll listen to it again but that doesn’t concern you.
This is not strictly a real album released by the band. It compiles their first two albums from the early eighties on Zero Records, Burning Farm and Yama-no Attchan and also includes tracks from the Zero comp Aura Music. Apparently these tracks are on the reissue of Burning Farm as well as the K Records cassette so maybe this is too much information. I’ve never bothered getting these other more official versions, but I’ve heard them and they just don’t seem as good to me. I mean the sound quality’s probably better, but I just love how this thing is sequenced. It really feels like one long album; it’s the definitive early history imo. It’s not like breaking up the two albums restores some kind of distinct conceptual arcs, they are just collections of songs they had at the time. And the level of songwriting and recording had yet to progress so it all matches. (They have a technically have a demo album before all this but that is really raw and not that great to listen to.)
The members of the band themselves may disagree but the recordings as they appear on this release are perfect. (They even re-recorded Dali’s Sunflower, I love that one in particular. Maybe there’s a guest on it they can’t credit?) It’s not exactly an Albini-type puritan affair of strictly live recordings, there’s some studio experimentation and sound effects thrown in here and there, but it accurately records (unless it doesn’t, I wasn’t there) what the band was at the time, which is what any band starting out should strive for. Altho I admit when I first heard it I was shocked at the difference in sound from the very modern Rock Animals and polished surf-punk of Let’s Knife, it grew on me pretty fast. It’s like instant nostalgia for something I never experienced before, there’s just a weird mood to it. Right from the version of Watchin’ Girl that sounds like the tape is changing speeds. It’s just as good as the later version but for different, unexplainable reasons. And I could be remembering this wrong, but I think it’s the first album I heard that’s all in Japanese. I remember falling in love with the sound of the language. It has a certain unique rhythm. Supposedly they prefer singing in English because all of their influences do, but before they learned English, they found it way to make their native language fit naturally in this early punk/pop soundscape. (Unusual song topics may have helped.)
Plenty has been written on Shonen Knife’s song topics, but what about that early soundscape? Ramones and Buzzcocks are the obvious precursors whose influence is carried on more or less to today. But here there’s the trebly, minimalist sound of the late-70s girl post-punk like Delta 5, Kleenex/LiLiPUT, maybe even The Slits. There’s an unmistakable reggae vibe to several of the songs which they really never went back to. In their book Shonen Knife Land they each have a top 20 albums list and the closest thing mentioned is a Beat Happening’s You Turn Me On, which is really not that close! That was from departed bassist Michie’s list and I talked about her contribution to the band before. But Naoko tries a lot of weird stuff too on this record: the cartoon industrial of A Day at the Factory, the tribal jam of Burning Farm, the melancholic Bye Bye—obvious album closer that ends Yamo-no Attchan, but the tacked-on Parrot Polynesia with its upbeat island vibe is an even better way to sign off. Seems totally planned.)
A whole generation of SK fans now is probably not familiar with the old stuff and/or just listens to streams and doesn’t care so much about the feel of an album. You are objectively wrong, first of all, that whole system is on it’s way to crashing and burning and does not care about you. Second—there is no second, this is their best early album and you need to listen to all of it.
%
V/A | Female Fronted Heavy Metal: 1976-1989
So I wrote a few reviews of internet mixtapes some of which after they weren’t available for download anymore. Who knows why I do things? Well, here is a massive multi-volume offering that as of this writing you can actually hear for yourself.
I argue this project is actually more essential than the one that inspired it: Kangnave’s Reference of Female Fronted Punk. (Also amazingly still available, but get on it quick if you haven’t.) Punk is hardly gender-balanced performer-wise, but much more so than Metal, and besides, there’s nothing conceptually about Punk to exclude women, where Metal is commonly seen as realm of the Manly Man and/or the Womanly Man. Often the female voice, when present, is in the form of a backup singer who isn’t even in the band. Recently, we’ve seen Female-led Metal bands like Arch Enemy become hugely successful (in Europe), but it’s important to remember they’ve existed almost since the birth of the genre.
Over a period of a few years (2010-13) the Female Fronted Heavy Metal blogspot added volume after volume to the series, reaching 15 in all. It seems safe to say the project is complete. I’m not sure if it’s fully exhausted every single example because I’m not prepared to do dig further than guy has (it was a guy), but looking for full albums by some of these bands I really like will be work enough for me.
I’m tempted to run down all my favorites but I’ll be here all night. And what’s the point? You’ll find a lot to like yourself, if what you like is Metal. I’m mostly interested in the Japanese bands, I think none of which I had heard of before. Guy’s crawling all-Japanese message boards to find these. There’s even a Korean band. (Only a handful of the American bands were familiar to me: Leather, Bitch, Crisis, 45 Grave, Warlock/Doro, Girlschool, and of course, Heart.) I have mostly gone for stuff from the 90s and later in my general Metal listening (except for the big obvious bands), but the genre gets murky or extreme (if you go for the latter, highly recommend the Hymns to the Dead Goddess podcast). A lot of this old stuff is pretty good. If you’re a fan of the Fenriz mixes, or you’re just…old, you know there’s a lot of good, obscure stuff from the era. (There may even be some overlap.) But some of these bands are really forgotten. Some of the people in these bands probably forgot. This is a public service right here.
The sound quality is decent until disc 8. It’s not all lo-fi after that, but there’s some deep, deep cuts. Vinyl and cassette rips, some warped, some live bootlegs of bands probably formerly only rumored to have existed. Rehearsal tapes? There really should be a book.
%
Minutemen | Project: Mersh
My long overdue mission of owning all of the Minutemen records that are not Double Nickels on the Dime begins with this, the cheapest one. When I set out on this mission, I realized why I did not already own these records: they are not readily available as dirt cheap used copies. (A large bulk of my collection.) It’s not hard to figure out why. People who buy Minutemen records tend to know what they are getting into, first, and once they have the records, they are actually good, second, and third, the band is consistently well-regarded over decades by fans and critics alike, so their records are non-embarrassing to own and therefore resistant to purge, even if you never listen to them.
This is not a very typical record for the band, it’s more of a proof-of-concept EP, which I like. In particular the opening track The Cheerleaders, because it illustrates perfectly why I hate the band Cake so much. Here they take all of the political message of their earlier work over a much simplified and easy to swallow version of their music. The band Cake would then take this kind of sound, with the semi-funky clean guitar and the trumpet, and remove the political message, which is not the worst music in the world by any means, but what’s the point? I guess the point is that is the kind of thing that could get mainstream radio play. Not this so much. It’s like they took all the notes that people had been telling them was “wrong” with their music and applied them literally. No one really wanted to say they didn’t agree with the message, or the overall package so they would pick apart the rough edges of the music. Remove all those rough edges and there should be nothing holding it back!
There’s some other songs—they cover Steppenwolf, they were a good band, it’s not entirely ironic. C’mon.
Tour-Spiel is my favorite track. The words alone, repeated as a mantra, could almost be any words without reading along. I heard “torch me out” the first several times. I dunno what it means, but it seems evocative of what happens when you jam econo too long. The jam turns literal(ly figurative) on More Spiel, which seemingly runs the concept off the rails, but is similar to the ‘Bonus beats’ tracks of the day, which also turn up on Watt’s collab with Sonic Youth The Whitey Album, but that’s something else entirely.%
buy mp3s on amazon 4 cheap or I guess it's regular price, there's only 6 songs
繕った [records tumblr]
Visitors
Recent Comments