"Nails Dig In" writing-soundtrack....

I recently finished the first completed draft of a piece of short fiction that I'd had in the works for quite a while. I'm in the process of sending it out to some gracious readers willing to provide some feedback for future edits, help me get it out of my own head for a bit...

In the meantime, I figure I may as well share an idiosyncratic yet essential aspect of my writing-process. Many of my pieces of writing are composed to a dedicated "soundtrack;" as a musician and a writer in whose writing music and sound tends to play a large role, it's essential for me that the piece that I'm working on maintain a particular "sound" in the style that it's written in. Most of the "tone" of my writing is based first-and-foremost on sound. Therefore, I make a playlist of the sound and tone that I'm trying to achieve (often, like this one, including songs of my own that were composed exclusively for the purpose of capturing and understanding the "sound" of the piece of writing at hand [not all of my own pieces on this list were composed explicitly for that purpose however, some just fit the mood well] ) and listen to that exclusively while writing and editing.

Here is, then, the "soundtrack/ playlist" for a piece titled "Nails Dig In (In The Mouth of the Wolf)."

(wink/ hint/ wink to those who stumble on this while helping me edit/ reading for submission/ reading the work if it happens to get published somewhere; these tracks also feature/ include a few easter-egg internal-references within the work that add additional layers of meaning.)

1) LeVautourEnsemble- Physical Consent

2) The Stiletto Formal- ...tastes like black licorice

3) Placebo- Protect Me From What I Want

4) LeVautourEnsemble- Hybrid Eyes

5) Crystal Castles- Not In Love (feat. Robert Smith)

6) Miike Snow- Plastic Jungle

7) LeVautourEnsemble- Mamihlapinatapei; Searching For Words In Other Tongues. 

(Sorry, this one is currently unavailable. It's slated for a forthcoming compilation as a "previously unreleased" track, and it wouldn't quite be "unreleased" if I dropped it here, now would it? ;) )

8) Bright Eyes- Lover I Don't Have To Love

9) Yeasayer- O.N.E.

10) LeVautourEnsemble with Antoine 518- Wave (Our Confusion Is Just What We Need)

(this is another in the previously-unreleased category, this one a recent collab-track, but I'm dropping this one here. That's right, this is exclusive-type-shit. Brand new, just for you.)

11) Bloc Party- Like Eating Glass 

12) The Strays- Life Support

13) The Mars Volta- Ilyena

“Fasciinatiion” with flavors of moments past, still lingering on our tongues.

iFlavors of the minute, at various moments in time, are not intended to last or taste good on your tongue after their moment is gone. Musical flavors of hipster moments, although “indie” and hypothetically less “intentional” from a marketing stance, usually prove no exception to this idea.

When a past temporary flavor happens to accidentally prove its staying-power, however, the critic and culture find themselves at a crux. The very short-lived couture that made the act or work of art so monumentally popular for a time itself provides the basis for discounting the credibility of the act’s bid for longer-term pertinence.

I can think of a fair number of examples of this phenomenon off the top of my head, within the loose walls of “indie” music of the past decade alone. These are records that self-righteous, fashion-jumping hipsters will grumble and cringe to hear someone playing, with complaints of the listener being slow on the uptake or strangling out the last hold they had on a passed and expired moment, but popping in in their own cars when they know that no on else can hear, or getting a pang of guilty joy inside when a dj at a trendy club spins a track as a “throwback.”

The Postal Service’s “Give Up.” Hot Hot Heat’s “Make Up The Breakdown.” Bright Eyes’ “Lifted, or…” Bloc Party’s “Silent Alarm.” The Faint’s “Danse Macabre.” Just a few examples.



With the recent release of “Fasciinatiion,” The Faint has made my mind presently turn to these paradoxes of past popularity, the “where do we go now?” aspect of being a flavor-of-the-minute of a moment past.

After “Wet From Birth,” the decidedly hit-or-miss follow-up to “Danse Macabre,” I wasn’t sure what to expect from the new record. Like so many of these releases that resonate nearly instantly as every-art-scene-kid’s-temporary-new-favorite-band, many of the aspects that made “Danse Macabre” so popular proved either absent or less accessible on “Wet From Birth,” and the fervour of and for the music consequently diminished. (“Elevator,” the follow-up to Hot Hot Heat’s “Make Up The Breakdown,” seems like an accurate parallel in this regard. Both “Elevator” and “Wet From Birth” are solid records in their own right, but both took a few listens to warm up to, and either altered or removed elements of the records that they followed that were important factors in what made those albums so irresistible.)

“Fasciinatiion” definitely does not come off as The Faint attempting to return to their “Danse Macabre”-era sound as a mere attempt at recapturing the pinnacle of their past moment of fleeting-chic. The band has, however, reinstated some of the elements of past records that were conspicuously missing on the last release. For only one instance, some of the poetic lyrical sensibilities from earlier records are added back to the mix, combined with, rather than completely replacing, the jarringly- honest, realism-to-the-point-of-superficiality material that dominated most of “Wet From Birth” (the “I was standing at the merch-booth putting on maaaake-up” moments in the song “Desperate Guys” are only one apt example of this; I was able to warm up to the record much more thoroughly when I began to wonder if the majority of the songs were written from the perspectives of deeply superficial fictional characters, and, whether this idea is right or wrong, I still have a much easier time listening to the album when I assume that they were).

Instead, “Fasciinatiion” is a well-written and exceedingly listenable record on its own; the current stage of evolution of a band with an actual career discography, not merely the hangings-on of a temporary flash in a proverbial pan that the listener was intended to have forgotten by now. The elements of the act’s prior works combine to form the canvas on which the new elements of the band’s progressing sound are placed on top of as collage-elements. The poetic stylizing and incessant, dirty sexual dance-energy of “Dance Macabre,” the electronics-first focus and club-kid social realisms of “Wet From Birth,” and even some of the vocal-melody stylings that the band hasn’t really revisited since “Blankwave Arcade” are all evident here. Rather than being a mere conglomerate of their past catalog, however, “Fasciinatiion” also adds increasing creativity in the skill of electronics production. Compared to the beats constructed for “Wet From Birth,” which seem at times fairly sterile, The Faint’s techno-prowess has expanded tremendously. Another welcome change comes with the sort of dance-beats chosen this time around. The band has this time nearly forgone the pulsing pogo-robot click-tracks that were the accepted rhythm of dance-punk when their first couple of records were released for something more often like hip-hop-inspired grooves that invite a more break-dance-friendly sort of energy, which seems more accurately in tune with the way that the indie-electro movement has progressed around them over the course of their career. There are moments on “Fasciinatiion” when the influence of electro acts that are closer to the current hipster flavor-of-the-minute seem probable. In certain tracks, I hear production reminiscent of the current Brooklyn scene (a couple of songs have a definite LCD Soundsystem vibe to my ear) and some of the dirty-synth clippiness that makes an occasional appearance reminds me of certain tracks by French acts like Justice.

This isn’t to say that “Fasciinatiion” sounds like The Faint is merely band-wagon jumping to get another shot at being part of the current “big thing.” It sounds, rather, like they are coming to terms with developing a recording catalog with a different paradigm of success, one less concerned with regaining their scenester-chic, and more interested in acquiring a longer-term respect and viability. To do so, they have combined on their most recent outing elements that they have learned to be successful for them in the past, along with present-tense influences of an evolving electronic music community.

If thinking about The Faint makes you reminisce pleasantly about their “Dance Macabre”-era height of popularity, and the urgent sexual-scenester-energy that accompanied it, a pleasurable flavor that you enjoyed in a moment past, “Fasciinatiion” offers the best opportunity since then to take another, and possibly a longer-lasting, taste.



In other news... The Stiletto Formal (whose last EP I reviewed in a past entry) have released two new tracks from their forthcoming LP on their Myspace page. Check them out, I like them... they're mighty eclectic, and make me look forward to hearing the new record quite a bit.

My Metro-Grime/ dirty/noisy electro-rock act Tipsy Cougar recently posted two new tracks to our Myspace site as well. One of them is a track called "USOCS," which I wrote about recently on this blog in another past entry. The other is a song that was previously posted as an acoustic track on my solo music profile. Check them out, let me know what you think, and feel free to download the tracks from the sites for free.

"Hun, this is just syntax and prowess;" A Literary Look at The Stiletto Formal's "This is My Boomstick."

After more of a delay than I had anticipated (it’s been a pretty strange week), I’ll try to attempt to pick up where I left off in my last entry.



The first time that I saw The Stiletto Formal, I was familiar with their name, the sort of audience they tended to attract, and several of the bands that they habitually played shows with, and based on these alone I was prepared to dislike them fervently. (See my description of the third sort of band discussed in my prior entry and you’ll know what I’m talking about. The whine-whine-scream, slanty-hair bit.) I went to the show at Modified Arts in Phoenix to see TheStart, an electro-rock act from L.A. that they happened to be playing with that I have been a fan of for quite a while. I thought the choice of billing was strange for one band or the other, which definitely peaked my curiosity a bit.

To be brief, what I saw from the Phoenix-based act proved to be far from what I had expected. The instrumentation was diverse, the performance energetic and dramatic in a way that had more in common with an opera than a hardcore show, and the songs were extremely well-written. This was a far cry from what we’re used to hearing 15-year olds who think themselves “fashionable” erroneously calling “screamo” post-Thursday and Blood Brothers. (When I hear the word “screamo” I still stubbornly think of band like Small Brown Bike, The Casket Lottery, Coalesce, etc… which are a far cry from Atreyu from the standpoint of sound…)

I’ll admit, the moment that completely sold me on the act came fairly late into the set… singer Kyle Howard announced that they were about to play a “new” song called “Tastes Like Black Licorice”… to which a white-belt-wearing high-schooler near the front yelled “Yaegermeister!” Mr. Howard looked down at him, with an expression somewhere between perplexion and contempt, and stammered in a ‘Like, duh’ tone into the microphone “Uh, no… absinthe.” I tucked my hands deeper into the pockets of my tweed coat, smirked, and nodded. There was definitely more to this band than a good portion of the trend-jumping facet of their crowd seemed able to process and appreciate. To me, that’s always a positive sign.

Shortly after this show, I picked up a copy of the band’s “This is My Boomstick” EP, which had been recently released around the time.

I would love to be able to take this EP and conduct a song-by-song in-depth analysis, viewing the musical context as creative utilization of objects in the act’s diverse poetic toolbox, but I fear that would prove far too long-winded for this medium; I can only cross my fingers that this band becomes as popular as they deserve to be so that I can someday pitch a longer form of this to some University Press or other as “pertinent” cultural analysis. Pipe-dreams from all angles, I know. But this is a possibility for music crit. that is able to be approached as lit. crit., which is far more rare than I wish that it was. This is what I live for. This record is Literature written without the confines of writing with mere words alone, and this hybridity, to my ear, suggests its staying-power, although as more of a museum-specimen of Art with a capital “A,” (destined most likely, as most of the sort, to be truly appreciated only long after its appearance) than as a commercially-viable object of current “music” alone as it is currently produced, bought, and sold.

In continuation of a past discussion of how a critic’s marginalia can be criticism, and thus Art, itself, I present here a sample-page of my scribbles on a print-out of the lyrics to the record.

Yes, once again, I am well aware that my hand-writing is atrocious.

So, visit the band’s website, pick up a copy of the EP (which, if you haven’t noticed yet, I highly recommend) and give it a few really close listens.

Pay attention to the way that the music is sculpted in such a way as to ebb and flow with the meaning and tone of the lyrics, how Kyle’s voice (which, I will be the first one to admit, takes most people a bit of time to warm up to) rises and falls in intensity and emotion with an operatic sense of melodrama and attention to detail that very few acts would even consider putting the effort into achieving (after getting to know the songs, you’ll find that every time he slips into the falsetto shrieks that will most probably seem jarring at first, it is completely appropriate and necessary to thoroughly express the purpose of the piece). Pay attention to how accurately the overall experience of the song “Tastes Like Black Licorice” captures the foggy lucidity of a good absinthe-buzz, and how the escalation and climax of the song’s plot, the turn from tender to sinister, affection to threat, situates the band as a torch-bearer of a poetic tradition that has been utilized in the past by artists with such names as Poe, Tolstoy, John Fowles, Nick Cave, and hundreds of others. Listen to “The Fall of Ambrose Bierce” with a mind to the work of Bierce himself, who, from what I can gather, the song is written from the perspective of, and replicates the ideas and verbal stylings of extremely well. (For those who aren't familiar with the idiosyncracies of Bierce's biography, and thus the civil war scenarios that lend the song its substance, check here.) Listen closely to “I Sing The Body Electric” and try to figure out what the Whitman connection is that the title implies. I have some pretty good guesses, but I’m not positive. If you have an interesting idea, I’d love to hear it, discuss, and try to piece it together further.

My guess has something to do with this-

“4

I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop on company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any on, or rest my arm ever so lightly
Round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as a sea.

-Walt Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric"

Lamenting a Lack of the Eclectic; A Preface to a Record-Review.

I never would have thought, prior to leaving Arizona, that I would be spending a clear and cold New England winter evening sitting on a spot on the bank of Manchester’s Lake Massabesic familiar to me for mostly forgotten reasons from years past, lamenting the local lack of certain types of musical acts that I had taken a bit for granted for the time that I was in Phoenix.

To be rather blunt, some conversations with varied musician-acquaintances in New England since my return have not proven terribly optimistic. It seems that the musical situation in these parts has stagnated quite drastically; for all my digging around to see what’s new and what various players are up to, it seems that nearly every act falls into one of three categories, none of which I can seem to get particularly excited about.

There’s a peculiar sort of distinctly “American” (*cough* redneck) shout “metal” that doesn’t seem to exist to the same extent anywhere besides here. This sort of thing is mostly perpetrated, apparently, by musicians who were playing in bands heavily influenced by Korn and The Deftones back when that sort of thing was viable, and, in an act of collective panic when nu-metal proved outmoded, added a dose of influence from Slayer and Pantera for the sake of “credibility” so that they could claim (in a naive bout of angry irony) “Hey look, we play real metal now”… this is something that I could rant on for pages, but I‘ll spare you, with just the reminder that, if you look at its history and formative influences, Heavy Metal is a distinctly European phenomenon. I know, to legions of guys who are much larger than I am with Kerry King goatees and tribal tattoos these are fighting words. Oh well.

There seems to be a bizarre revival of mid-’90’s-Boston-style tough-guy hardcore and street-punk, played mostly by guys who were a bit too young to have been terribly involved in those scenes the first time around (I mean, I was pretty young when I was listening to the older guys lament about the good-old-days, and I could have baby-sat most of this new crop…), with some acts and performers who have apparently been hanging on through the last decade and are now seeing their popularity unexpectedly resurface (the number of recent “reunions” that I’ve heard about by bands that I saw at Café Savoi and The Elvis Room when I was fifteen boggles my mind).

…And then there’s the glut of bands playing a cookie-cutter form of “screamo” that passed its flavor-of-the-minute lifespan at least two years ago. You know the type… whine, scream, whine-whine, scream…octave-chords, octave-chords, breakdown, octave-chords, breakdown, breakdown… Slanty-hair, girl-pants, white-belts... you know the cliches, you get the drill.

(Of course, I’m leaving out the “I was on a music-based reality-TV show a year ago and now I play acoustic cover-songs to drunks and draw big crowds who think I’m a ‘celebrity’” phenomenon… This is by far the most disturbing to me of all, but it’s a different cultural animal entirely that needs a much wider scope to tackle adequately)

Add to this what seems to be a near-complete lack of consistent or reliable venues, lack-luster and clique-ish crowds, etc. (sound familiar, Phoenix? These seem to be national concerns right now) and I’ll admit that I’m in no particularly educated position from which to review the state of the “scene” around here, as I have yet to get wind of any shows or performances that sounded even remotely worth attending, or any new act worth giving a listen to and getting excited about. (If anyone in my readership feels able to help me out in this regard, I’m all ears… but I’d prefer to steer clear of anything that falls formulaically within the aforementioned categories, which, I know, makes your task considerably more difficult.)

In short, what the New England music scene north of Boston seems to be lacking right now is the emphasis on ecclecticism that I earnestly felt was in the air in the area when I left a few years ago. There was a time, in fact, shortly before I left Manchester, when I might have even complained that a potential problem with the state of New England music was that everyone was trying a bit too hard to be different, to the extent that most of what was going on was almost "artsy" to the extent of being unlistenably abstract. I am utterly confused as to how things have apparently headed in such a polar-opposite direction in such a relatively short period of time.


These thoughts lead my mind to early scribbles in a “blogs to write” list that I jotted down when I first started posting here.

When I initially thought to review it, “This is My Boomstick” by Phoenix’s “The Stiletto Formal” was a bit closer to being a “new” record than it is now. I kept putting it off, however, as new ideas found their way to my pen, and thus this page, faster.

At this point, it’s a bit late, but seems a pertinent undertaking, if based on my personal present local-music-woes, if for no other reason.


…to be continued.