today’s listening and new releases
The Human League: Reproduction – If all you know of The Human League is “Don’t You Want Me”, then you, my friend, are missing out, because before that they were a fierce, weird, twisted electronic outfit who sang songs about evil clowns controlling circus sideshows with mind-control pharmaceuticals, someone deciding they want to be larger than human so they set their mind to growing as tall as a building, or the world descending into a Dark Ages Hellscape. Of course, after this album, the band split within, with some becoming Heaven 17 and the other guy hiring the stage dancers to replace them.
Ours: Mercy (Dancing for the Death of an Imaginary Enemy) – a definite return to form after the lamentably poor Precious. They remind me of a more restrained version of Muse.
Holy Fuck: LP – Yet another of the galaxy of satellite bands of Broken Social Scene (well, technically lead dude Brian Borcherdt was only in the pre-BSS band By Divine Right, but let’s not split hairs here). Great fun, totally ballistic electronica/punk/rock madness. I bet they’d be a riot live.
House of Pain: House of Pain – Wow, this is just insanely, hilariously bad. Favourite line: ‘You make me sick like strawberry Quik!’ Hahaha, 19 songs about being Irish and white and rapping and loving pot and beer, but we’re not stereotypes at all. Awful.
Howard Wales & Jerry Garcia: Hooteroll? – Okay hippie jazz from the head Deadhead circa 1971.
Hood: Cabled Linear Traction – Shoegaze-y lo-fi rock, pretty good, but their later stuff is miles ahead.
Mazzy Star: Among My Swan – A classy concoction of 1/3 country swing, 1/3 shoegaze, 1/3 torchy chanteuse. Rather charming.
Danzig: 5 – Blackacidevil – This is the industrial-leaning Danzig album that apparently is hated by Danzig fans to which my first thought was, wow, really, The Satanic Elvis actually has fans who care about what musical direction he takes? That’s a conundrum that I don’t think I can work out. Anyway, it’s okay if you’re into mediocre industrial.
Today is Tuesday which means New Releases Yaaaay.
Picks for today are:
Atmosphere’s new album When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, which is a downbeat and kind of depressing hip-hop concept album about everybody in the world being just overrun with personality problems and worse. I picked up the nifty deluxe edition that comes packaged in a children’s book Slug wrote, with a DVD full of bonus stuff. Two videos out already, for “Shoulda Known” and “Guarantees”
Elbow: The Seldom-Seen Kid – only listened to it a bit so far but it seems like it has more character than Leaders of the Free World, with a weird hard rock-meets-classic showtunes vibe. Good stuff, and “Mirrorball” is likely to be one of the best songs all year. First single/video is “Grounds for Divorce”
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