Orca Team

Just poking around the inter-web-thing (listening to Brian Turner's show on WFMU mostly), and found this very appealing video by a band called Orca Team, from Portland. It's called "Let It Go" and I have now played it four times in a row without getting the least bit tired of it.

Want to have a go?




Things I like about this video, in no particular order, include:

1. The tuxedo.
2. The balloons
3. The hand-made, orca-themed drum-head covers
4. The bassline
5. The dreamy clarity in a world of un-thought-through commitment to fuzz
6. The song itself...which is really, really nice.

So yay, Orca Team...why not get the hell off the west coast and come see us out here?

Oh, my god have I been wasting time today…

This is embarrassing. I got this app that lets you upload images into iTunes for all the records that iTunes doesn’t recognize, which is a pretty good chunk of mine, and I’ve been doing this ALL FREAKING DAY, can you believe it? I feel sick and obsessive and vaguely criminal. (It is especially time-consuming and pointless on dial-up.) But on the bright side, I believe I’m finished now. It all looks really nice. Thanks for asking.

Meanwhile, Blurt’s got a review of Streets on Fire This Is Fancy, which you might recall from my mix CD, but otherwise check the Myspace.

The single’s called “No One’s Fucking to the Radio,” (which is probably true, because all I can ever find is talk and sports call-in shows and crap like that, and who wants to do the nasty when Rush is on or some meathead is droning on about the Red Sox?). Anyway, I really like this band, which is from Chicago and influenced primarily by post-punk but in so ragged and desperate a manner that it seems less a pose than a necessity.

Here’s the first paragraph:
The Streets on Fire missed the dance-punk revival by some five or six years, about the ideal span to forget how tired everyone had become of the manic, pounding beats, the epileptic arm flailing, the hip-jutting, the tortured yelping, the relentless onslaught of hi-hat and bass. It's good timing on the part of this Chicago four-piece, because there was never anything wrong with this sound, not when it was done with conviction. The Streets on Fire have that in spades. It sounds like their hair really is on fire here on this debut, and that is always, always a good thing.

The rest is here.

Acid Eater

I’m not sure how I missed this, but my review of Acid Eater’s brilliant Black Fuzz on Wheels ran sometime a week or two ago at Dusted.
Acid Eater is a such great name for a band, especially this band, evoking as it does, the corrosive effect of acid on any kind of surface, the mind-expanding properties of LSD and, just to top things off, the Ramones’ one and only covers album. Black Fuzz on Wheels, the second album from this Japanese punk band led by Yamazaki Maso (also known as Masonna), is a virulent onslaught of crusted garage punk sound, growled and grumbled in indifferent English, fed through echo-plexy distortion mirrors and adorned in an oddly festive way with manic trills of Farfisa. Like Guitar Wolf, Acid Eater takes everything you know about garage rock and turns it up 10 notches, in a sound that is a cartoonishly brilliant exaggeration of what you’ve come to expect.

The whole review

Jim Jones Revue

Veteran rocker Jim Jones (ex of Thee Hypnotics) has a pretty kicking five-piece now…crazed like the Stooges but way swampier and rootsier (they do Little Richard’s “Hey Hey Hey” for instance, and the piano sounds awesome).

You can listen to their live set on WFMU here (it’s a streaming MP3)


Or catch the video of “Rock & Roll Psychosis”

New Arab Strap song, two reissues coming

Chemikal Underground is reissuing Arab Strap's first two albums, The Week Never Starts Around Here and Philophobia and, as a teaser, has made this previously unreleased track available...it's called "Daughters of Darkness," and it's really good. Enjoy. TGIF.

Mahjongg

I've been a huge fan of Mahjongg's for five, six years now, since I saw them open for Macha in NOrthampton in 2004. I interviewed Hunter and Caryl there (she's not in the band anymore), and which you can read about that here, if you want. My copy of Raydonkong, I am very proud to report, is a CDR burner with Hunter's address scrawled across it.

So, yeah, of course I wanted to review the new one Long Shadow of the Paper Tiger, their second on K. I was a little put off by the production, but it's still pretty great in parts.

For this, their third full-length, however, this gang of musical anarchists dips into a new cache of sonic material—multi-platinum sounds like auto-tuned vocals and sleek dance beats. The process is the same—chopping blippy bits of tone into Afro-funky rave-ups—but the source material is disturbingly commercial. It takes a little getting used to, especially on the uncharacteristically shiny front half of the album.

The rest

I put "Devry" on my last mix, and since it doesn't look like they're giving anything away, better check that out if you're curious.

Crap, my dulcimer is hammered again…

I’ve been dipping in and out of a really remarkable record called Travel er’s Advisory by Matthew Young, which is out now, jointly, on Drag City and Yoga Records. Recorded originally in 1986, this was Young’s second record, following Recurring Dreams. He played all the instruments, most strikingly a hammered dulcimer, which is present on almost every track and the dominant sound on most of the instrumentals. There’s a really haunting, spooky cover of Michael Hurley’s “Werewolf” – for that one, he switched to banjo – and an odd, kind-of-anticipating-chillwave home-made dance-rhythmed track called “Dummy Line”, which Drag City is offering as a giveaway.