i might like you better if we slept together...

Been well over a month since my last music blog. Too long, I say. Too long!

Let’s start with the shows.

Wire.

Badass Brits Wire (heyday: 1977-1979, a three-year span yielding three of the greatest albums—Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154—of all time) performed a free* concert at the Fillmore on October 9th. Only problem?

*tickets required for entry.

Naturally—no surprise, really—I found out about the show four days too late, meaning every last ticket had been released/issued to the general public ‘neath my unsuspecting nose. Shit, I wailed, forehead in palm. One of the greatest bands of the past thirty years playing a freebie in MY city and I’ll be sitting at home o'er a bowl of mac ‘n’ cheese!

Craigslist. Please, I pecked out, my tears messing the screen. Please! I’ll giveya 10 apiece for the pair, whatdya say? No takers. All’s I encountered were greasy opportunists asking 35 or 40 bucks or even higher, yellow bastards the lot of ‘em. Mike’s morale made for the cellar. Day of the show I spent the better part of the afternoon scouring Craigslist for one of those kindly samaritan types I’m always reading about, my hopes snorkeling about in a muddied puddle reserved for wagon tires.

But lo! a white dove nestled square on my checkered beret just as the clouds parted like a biscuit, revealing soft, buttered skies and all the nectars of the world. Some dude in Brooklyn responded to my desperate pleas via electronic mail, reaffirming—in one fell swoop—my faith in humanity. You want ‘em? he said. Come an’ get ‘em, but make it quick. Leaving for the Village in 20 mins. I Billy Ellioted to the train, heels clicking all the while in cartoonish fashion. Sure ‘nuff this swell fellow, an altruist of the highest order, handed over two golden tickets, two of ‘em, one and then another, a pair! What do I owe you, bub? I coughed out, weary from all the heel-clicking. Nada, said he. They were free, I didn’t pay nuthin’. Enjoy the show.

So no time for dalliance I rang my buddy John quick as you please, burbling all over the place: “John I gotta ticket for ya to Wire you know them right of course you do you were the one ‘ntroduced me anyway free Irving show tonight in ‘bout an hour let’s go I’ll meet you ‘round Union ‘fore sundown eh?” He bit. Sure Mikey, he said. I’ll be there.

Wire. One of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Top three even (Iggy's still #1). Wire were professional, tight. Nary a stray note, nary a wasted motion. All these Nickelback shits and pansy Daughtry dreamers could learn a thing or two from Wire. Rock is work. Rock ain’t easy. Rock is not G-D-A and then a chorus and some carboned Perry-esque falsetto thrown in for good measure. Rock is precision and energy and INNOVATION and sweat and subversion and determining when to scrap convention for five or ten or twenty seconds of sinew and grind and unhinged whammyage. Wire (all three of the attached pics, btw, were taken at the Fillmore show) exceeded all expectations, foregoing slower numbers in favor of aggressive, bass-heavy pulls from their early catalogue. For those new to Wire, I recommend you start with Chairs Missing, their 1978 sophomore release. Sonic perfection. Bands don’t get much better than this.

Here's "Heartbeat" from Chairs Missing.



A Place To Bury Strangers.

Saw these fellas twice during CMJ week (Oct. 21-25). In a fitting close to the summer, I attended both shows with my buddy Lucas, a dear friend of mine who I met ‘round five months ago at, um, an outdoor Strangers concert.

These dudes are super loud. So loud, in fact, that they’ve taken to distributing earplugs at the door like My Bloody Valentine. Faint of heart and faint of ear ain’t welcome in their parts. They’re damn proud of their well-endowed sound, too, proud enough even to (self-)proclaim themselves The Loudest Band In Brooklyn, a tag which ain’t misleading in the least.

Lucas and I (and Travis, who joined us for the second show) rocked the free earplugs, but I’d be lying if I said those mufflers were entirely necessary. During the second show (2 a.m. on the morning of the 26th, a mere eight hours after their afternoon set) I said sorry, ears to my ears and discarded all that foam after the third or fourth song. You know what? I didn't go deaf. No ringing/tinnitus. I’ve gone plugless at an A Place To Bury Strangers concert and lived to tell the tale.

To be fair, though, we were forty feet from the stage. My testimonial might not jive with those who braved the stacks full-on from three, four feet and had their ears blown off.

But, shit, enough about their volume. Great, Mike, we get it. Their amps go to 11. Why don't you tell us about their SOUND?

Well, they’re the real deal. Call them what you will, genrenize them how you will, but there's no denying they're one of the more intriguing noise acts emerging from the New York scene.

APTBS are NOT a shoegaze band, and to label them as such is to misrepresent them. They’re onto something else entirely. Yes, they’re into crunch and fuzz. Yes, they’re noise obsessives. Yes, they’re out to challenge and disrupt. That said, they have one thing that shoegaze bands, by definition, sorely lack: wicked stage presence (see top pic!).

Guitarist Oliver Ackermann tears a few pages from the notebooks of Sonic Youthers Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo (and Hendrix and Townshend and...), raping his vile instrument and wresting from its strings an irreverent, incendiary attack directed at the brain’s very core, probably the part that processes wonder and sublimity.

They make great use of strobe, too.

Check the vid.



Sure, there’ve been other shows, but none I feel like documenting at the present time.

Rather, I’m gonna list a few songs that have been rockin’ my world:

Soft Cell—“Insecure Me”
COIL—“The Last Amethyst Deceiver”
Queens of the Stone Age—“Never Say Never” (cover)
Caribou—“Melody Day”
Yo La Tengo—“Moby Octopad”
Suicide—“Ghost Rider”
Yeasayer—“Wait For the Summer”
Grizzly Bear—“Knife”
The Doors—“The Soft Parade”
Gillian Welch—“Ruination Day (Pt. 2)”
Beach House—“Master of None”
CAN—“Vitamin C”
Morphine—“Let’s Take A Trip Together”
Paul Simon—“Slip Sliding Away”
Charles Manson (yes, THAT Charles Manson)—“Look At Your Game, Girl"
...