Looks like someone had the grand idea to let me DJ in public again. Find me in Chicago at the Empty Bottle playing records around the wonderful Hélène Barbier and (I think) National Photo Committee on Monday night, Sept. 21st. Mondays are free at the Bottle and so am I and so are you.
Other cool gigs coming up around these parts: Water Damage at the second Sound & Gravity Festival this Friday, 7pm (can’t afford the time or cost for the whole festival but maybe they can sneak me in a kick drum); United Stare coming through Sat Sept 5th (ask a punk), and FACS with Jim the Kid playing a freebie at Tone Deaf on 9/19 to celebrate the shop’s 7th anniversary. I found a great dollar binner there the other day (the Ashford & Simpson record with “It Seems to Hang On”) and I wish you all the luck in that as well.
Send in that music: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 // [email protected]
TOMOYUKI TRIO High Oxygen Blood LP (Feeding Tube)
Guess I wasn’t looking hard enough for the first two installments from this flaying power acid-psych trio of Up-Tight’s Aoki Tomoyuki and Anglo guardsmen Dave Sneddon and Mike Vest. But here’s album number three, and even by the standards set within the tenka of ruling Japanese psych units over the last 50 years and change, this one’s a true monster, so fazed, so glazed, so absolutely drenched in the corrosive oil sweat of the ceaseless. The suite of five songs is slow, then slower, then pulling through a hash pipe made out of lead, metallic in only the most poisonous of manners. Extreme fuzz-wah damage, the blues reduced to a durban dirge of parthenogenetic scum. Up-Tight knew what they were doing with their downers but High Oxygen Blood pulls from a move of heroic/demonic heavy rock that stretches out the Les Rallizes Denudes maximalist shock towards the realm of the stoners’ final toke. Very dark, doomy, absolutely fried output – highly recommended.
CHANGE LIFE s/t LP (Meritorio)
This year the schism splitting forever faves from PDX, The Woolen Men, gave us debut albums from The Grebes (Raf Spielman’s new act with Bob Desaulniers from Lithics), and Lawton Browning’s new collective, Change Life. You get more of the spine of Woolen Men’s songcraft here, extended out to a sort of ‘80s art rock/community radio utopia where the Gavin Report never shut down, where flange and chorus are the dominant effects modes. Out with a wholly new quintet, Browning’s songwriting and lyrics hit a new frontier of clarity, that same sort of danger and worry that only a healthy amount of acid (or spending a lot of time in the stead of those who took the hits so you didn’t have to) could invoke. These qualities were always in the mix for Browning’s earlier output, but foreground in a generational connection, like Mike Nesmith being really into new wave, like Adrian Belew hanging out with the SST undercard. His pop stings more now; it worries, it reads and writes, it dramatizes itself in its urgency and careful movements forward. Takes a little bit of adjustment but you realize this is history rewritten to support itself (“Radio Ragazza” the prime example). If you were to tell me this came from Lincoln, Nebraska and had contact with “the crystal” I would absolutely believe you, so wide open and without context. This always leads to the lack of being understood in one’s own time, but we have opportunities to change that line of thought now. Change life.
I WILL DIE IN THIS JEAN JACKET Hang From a Cloud LP (Swami)
Was recently thinking about Green / Blue, the very fine band from a few years back concerning Blind Shake/Michael Yonkers side guy Jim Blaha, in particular their first one on Slovenly. That project is on the shelf, it would seem, in favor of the fantastically-named I Will Die In This Jean Jacket, which pushes in a Creation Soup angle to the steady, nighttime sounds this Minneapolitan’s been at for a while. Wide open vistas are traded for claustrophobic, overdriven production, all the better to beat against until it flows out of the holes punched in the walls and covered with Cure posters (you know the one, the “Boys Don’t Cry” era) and eyeliner. Even in name this music associates with a forever life choice, paths that don’t erase, hair dye that doesn’t wash out. And you know what, it absolutely should. You can sense the entire root structure of Jim Blaha and the times and actions he holds close. If the band itself doesn’t believe it, how can you be expected to? That’s a quality that seems so obvious, many miss it entirely. But now it’s just you and the guy making this stuff, from him to you, and to your mixtapes for someone else.
Back to the work — Doug M
