Black Moth Super Rainbow

I've got a live review of Black Moth Super Rainbow and Soundpool up now at Blurt.

Check it out here, if you like.

Jim Carroll RIP

Great poet, definitive punk rocker, but who'd a thought he'd make 60?

The obvious choice, though really I like "Catholic Boy" better.

Who gives a shit about the Beatles remasters?

Not me.

This is obviously Tim Cohen’s year…

In addition to releasing two full-lengths as the Fresh & Onlys, he’s also dug a very fine collection of lo-fi weirdo folkery out of the vaults, which I reviewed for Blurt. It’s a lot more like his Black Fiction stuff than Fresh & Onlys, though without so much beat-making.

Here’s my review.


You’ll probably have to check the MySpace if you want to hear it.


Hah, it’s Friday, isn’t it? Tomorrow we all get to sleep until it’s light out.

Still more distortion…

Great band name, Meth Teeth has. Not a bad album, either, though even I’m getting a little sick of the shitgaze aesthetic.

My review at Dusted today closes, “Like Eat Skull, Meth Teeth wraps fragmented bits of pop in a mesh of obstacles – cavernous distortion, buried leads and undecipherable lyrics. The songs win out most of the time, in a clattery, indistinct sort of way, though whether they’d sound better if you could actually hear them is anybody’s call.”

The rest of the review.


I first heard Meth Teeth at Raven Sings the Blues.

Daniel Johnston cleaned up

Okay, here's the thing. The idea of Daniel Johnston making a studio album with a professional producer and session guys doesn't immediately sound like a good one. After all, what we want from Johnston is a kind of purity, of unfiltered creativity untouched by artifice, rough and a little crazy. But in this case, the producer is Jason Falkner, whose Author Unknown is one of my favorites (I can listen to "She Goes to Bed" a dozen times in a row...and have), a guy who, incidentially, worked with Brendan Benson on another of my favorites, Lapalco. The Johnston/Falker collaboration -- Johnston's songs and Falkner's guitar, bass, keys and sound work -- is called Is and Always Was. It will be out October 6 on High Wire Music. One listen in, it's maybe my favorite Daniel Johnston ever...almost enough to get that image of that airplane fiasco out of my head.

Here's an mp3 of "Freedom"

The long weekend

Hey, nice weekend?

We saw Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock on Sunday, which I enjoyed much more than I expected to. (I have had enough Woodstock nostalgia to last me until …well, forever.) Apparently a lot of the crowd scenes were filmed in Brattleboro, which is basically populated with Woodstock extras…so it makes sense.

Friday, we watched to Sean’s first football game, kind of discouraging because a) he didn’t play because it was varsity and b) they lost 47-0 and c) their best player got a season-ending injury on the third play. But on the bright side, as long as Sean doesn’t play, he can’t get injured, right?

We rented 2001: Space Odyssey, which I enjoyed very much, but Sean thought was kind of slow and the Ligeti music freaked him out. On a somewhat related tack, I got to page 550 of The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross’ absolutely brilliant history of 20th century classical music…I knew a lot of the composers in the early chapters and I’m getting to the point (Cage, Reich) where I recognize names again, but lots to do about the middle.

Oh yeah, and my not very positive review of Susanna and the Magical Orchestra’s 3 ran on Friday at Dusted.


Here’s a video of “Palpatine’s Dream”