The Post-Rockist

The Budos Band - Budos Rising
The Budos Band - Ride or Die
(from The Budos Band II)

Mulatu Astatqe - Yekermo Sew
(from Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974)

When the music of the Budos Band comes through your stereo it’s as if you’re being transported to a dimly lit bar, wearing dark shades, a lavender pin-stripe suit, and skinny black tie. The brass moans and bays, the organ flashes and dips around a subterranean, coal-burning groove. It sounds untouchable, noir, and worldly. It sounds, well, cool.

But for all the exotic reference points for this music, straddling a line between west African instrumental funk and northeast African jazz with a punch of Memphis soul, the Budos hail from Staten Island, the dumping grounds of New York. And, in its own way, this humbling admission is reassuring. After all, if a group of 11, racially-mixed Staten Islanders who met at an after-school community jazz program can find a way to express their deep and devoted respect of the various strains of Afro-soul, why can’t I, a white kid from middle America, do the same?

Looking back, it seems odd to think that there must have been a distinct moment in my suburban upbringing where, for instance, the Afro-beat polyrhythms of a Nigerian political prisoner could become a subject of extraordinary interest to me. To think that my unhealthy musical obsessions could grow so desperately far-reaching that I could listen to a track like “Ride or Die” and be instantly struck by its similarity to the Ethiopian jazz arranger Mulatu Astatqe’s “Yekermo Sew” (which the film geeks among you will identify from its prominent use in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers)? And it’s true, both songs share a languid, descending pentatonic melody complimented with enough outlandish flourishes to make Addis Ababa sound like the home of Ali Baba, but isn’t there something more useful I could be doing with my time, like learning the basics of home plumbing?

(Continued)

As reported in yesterday’s New York Times:

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body.

In related news, western Pennsylvania’s heavily-vocodered, hypnotic pop superconductors Black Moth Super Rainbow will be extending their tour from September through Thanksgiving-time in support of their much buzzed-about third album, Dandelion Gum. While initial research is still sketchy, preliminary findings are showing that the perceptual experiences of being present at a Black Moth Super Rainbow live show are such that the senses appear to “cross over,” whereby individuals hear colors, see sounds, and feel sensations that do not necessarily exist. In other words, it would be enough to put even Terry Riley into an epileptic shock. Compounding this effect, the Super Rainbow will be hitting the road with the Flaming Lips and Aesop Rock. Tour dates, mp3s, and more BMSR research after the jump.

(Continued)

Keren Ann-”It Ain’t No Crime”

(from Keren Ann)

Monday, August 20, 2007

Washington, DC

Dear Reader,

Have you by any chance gotten around to hearing Keren Ann’s new self-titled album?

It’s… Jesus, I’ve been wanting to ask you for weeks, or what by now has felt like weeks. More. Just to ask if you’ve heard. I’ve delayed asking because I keep failing to find the right word, the right word, to find it, the right word to describe it, to find what it is.

It’s… (prematurely speaking now) that album that’s always been in your collection that you never got around to listening to because other albums kept getting in the way: gladfully, gleefully, and as pests – some of which you went as far as to keep as pets, then you (sometimes) regretted it. And then, when you do, finally get around to it, and you want to kick yourself for not having gotten to it earlier. The responsibility of listening: Weighing. (This seems to happen to me with Dylan. Album after blessed album. It may be a shame, but it’s exhausting, more than anything.)

As a whole, from first tremors to last sighs, I’m tempted to say it has the aura of a classic in some genre of the hip – for which I am no doubt not qualified to judge, but will. This sort of quality usually takes longer to notice. But I can’t stop listening to it. So experience has been fastforwarded, so to speak. Every time it plays a new and indispensable detail emerges. Loops, minor riffs, chanting, whateverda’fucks, whathaveyous, and All: they all leave me… (Continued)

After witnessing Scotter’s recent cry for help, lamenting the lack of a proper sequel to Beck’s magnificently funky Midnite Vultures, I grew concerned and did what any good friend would do: I consulted with a professional. Through word of mouth I encounted a nice Jewish doctor by the name of Funkenstein, who was quickly able to identify Scotter’s troubling symptoms: restless legs, agitation, eye dilation, hip gyration, back aches, and heart breaks. In layman’s terms, he had the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie woogie blues. Dr. Funkenstein, being ever so preoccupied and dedicated to the preservation of the motion of hips, quickly wrote up the following prescription. Scotter, I certainly hope your insurance policy covers this:

Prince - Partyup
(from Dirty Mind)

I’ve been told that dancing occurred prior to the existence of Prince, but, between you and me, I find that proposition a little hard to swallow. The throbbing beat on this four-track funk masterpiece is guaranteed to jumpstart any fledgling dance party, and the non-sequitor political one-liners (”That army bag, such a double drag”) only heighten this song’s relevance in today’s day and age.

Munk & James Murphy - Kick Out the Chairs
(from Gommagang 3)

Cowbells, rubbery basslines, skittery guitars, and cheeky lyrics that simultaneously pay homage to (mock?) the MC5, James Brown, and Snoop Dogg - what’s there not to like? It’s as if this song was designed with the sole purpose of getting you to clap your hands with swooping gestures and wiggle your hips in the general direction of any warm-blooded body within a 30-foot radius, proving that if white guys can’t dance well, they can at least dance vigorously.

(Continued)

In an era when music critics trash albums simply because they sound like the artist’s previous album, I think that we need to be able to recognize that when something’s done right, it bears repeating. For example, the severest criticism I’ve heard of Interpol’s new album, Our Love to Admire, is identical to its highest praise: It sounds a lot like their old stuff.

And their old stuff is great. So there.

But I write to you today, my dear Post-Rockists, to laud another album, Beck’s Midnight Vultures. Every year since its release in 1999 I’ve come back to it, usually in the late summer, and it has revived me from fatigue, brightened nasty moods, and filled me with vigor and energy. It does something to me that music doesn’t really do to me: It makes me feel kind of sexy, or at least sexual. It makes me walk fearlessly and full of moxie. It gives me an indefatigable confidence. My dancing transfigures from clumsy, Steve Urkel-like thrustings to downright James Brown ecstasy-inducing funkifying fleet-footings (or at least it feels that way).

I’m not sure what Beck was smoking when he wrote this album, but I want some and I want some more of this album. His creativity is undaunted on this album. He devises lyrics that shake their asses in the face of conventional phrases and dry hump the English language into exhaustion. “I’ll feed you fruit that don’t exist. / I’ll leave graffiti where you’ve never been kissed.” These and others are quite literally the coolest lyrics I’ve ever heard. They make no sense, but they exude an attitude and a reckless abandon that is thrilling.

If you listen to the album carefully, you’ll find that it’s extremely complicated, layered, and inventive. Absurdly so. For example, the sound of a sword pulled from its sheath at the beginning “Pressure Zone” makes absolutely no sense but for the fact that it sounds really, really cool. Wait, I take that back. I didn’t realize until re-reading that last sentence that the sound is more suggestive than I had thought. Just goes to show that this album is also all about the dirty.

I could write more, but that’s not why I’m putting words to internet right now. I’m here to ask for help. Beck hasn’t made anything like Midnight Vultures again. One might consider Sea Change a kind of sequel to Mutations, and I would say that Guero wasn’t so much Midnight Vultures 2 as much as it was Odelay 2, if it was even that. I like The Information, but much like Guero, the album leaves me with a feeling that Beck is being experimental for the sake of being experimental. Not since Midnight Vultures has Beck been so much fun, and since he’s older and wiser, it’s doubtful he’ll every make an album like Midnight Vultures again.

So what I want to know, so what I need to find, so what I need from you, dear readers, is some album or band with the dancetastic verve, energy, and fun of Midnight Vultures. Please comment or email. Throw a dog a bone. The closest I’ve come is Junior Senior’s D-D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat and the best of George Clinton and James Brown, but there’s got to be some other alternatives out there. The Scissor Sisters are close, but not quite it.

Help. I want more Midnight Vultures.

–Posted by Scotter

Peter Bjorn and John, ft. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
The Pageant
St. Louis, MO: Aug. 7, 2007

The black-and-white “PETER BJORN AND JOHN BACKDROP” faded to black, while the pentatonic Asian riff of “Young Folks” was played out on a pre-recorded sitar. Before long, the PETER BJORN AND JOHN BASS DRUM began to kick, and the respective PETER BJORN AND JOHN bass and guitar amps opened into the elementary pop sophistication of “Let’s Call it Off,” complimented with an edge of distortion and Peter Morén’s Swedish swagger, giving the song an overall rock’n'roll vibe that was not entirely present on the version on Writer’s Block.

In fact, the whole opening looked quite a bit like this:

Except that it wasn’t at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles. This show took place at the Pageant in St. Louis, which is the first venue I’ve been to in a long time that didn’t appear to be in violation of numerous health codes, sported a security staff that unflinchingly grabbed at any suspicious bulges in your pants, and actually physically cordoned off the boozers from the minors. But I had just moved to St. Louis over the weekend and all of this was new to me. In fact, I may have missed the show entirely if it weren’t for the free weekly alternative paper, The Riverfront Times, interviewing Björn Yttling, who stated, among other things:

“We decided on this record we didn’t want any tambourines,” Björn says. “We were kind of fed up with tambourines. People always push the tambourine on the chorus of the song, they record with maybe no thought behind it. Maybe we ourselves did that before, so we were bored with the tambourine thing and wanted more maracas.”

This quote kept coming back to me during the show, because I couldn’t help but think that the opening band, the Missourians Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, were deliberately trying to tick off Yttling. While both bands share an affinity of clean, melodic indie pop and an unthinkable disdain for proper comma useage, SSLYBY splits from PB&J with their unhealthy fixation on the tambourine. There was one man in the band whose sole function was to stand, unmoving, and just handle tambourine duty. Poorly, at that. And if perchance one of the guitar players had nothing to play on a particular song, he too would pick up a tambourine, thus doubling the presence of totally unnecessary tambourine. This is not to say their performance was bad; in fact, quite the opposite. Their smart, innocent songs reminded me of a Midwestern Death Cab. But while Boris Yeltsin played up the earnest angle, Peter Bjorn and John came out as poised and sure-footed as bona fide rock stars.

(Continued)

An organ begins the show with a long, steady whole note. A timpani-like thudding introduces time to the note, thus creating music out of a noise, offering an entrance for guitarist Daniel Kessler to begin playing the opening notes to “Pioneer to the Falls,” the first song on Interpol’s new album, Our Love to Admire. Kessler is illumined by a steel-blue blade of light from the rafters and stands in an inverted bow-legged posture, nearly crouching, twisting his torso with a motion that conjures a picture of an oarsman heaving a paddle through heavy waters, against the current, the neck of the guitar his oar.

Then Paul Banks delivers his first words with a brassy moan which is not sharp-brassy like a trumpet but smooth-brassy like a French Horn. The crowd moves along with the music, ecstatic at the band’s entrance, and just as bassist Carlos Dengler (currently mustachio’d) and drummer Sam Fogarino join in, I see fists airborne in the front row, and a straw cowboy hat, rising above all the other hands, beating up and down in time.

(Continued)