My mother has been cleaning out closets and finding all kinds of embarrassing stuff, including this silly poem which I must have wrote at 13 or 14. (I’m sure someone told me the Phoo Bird joke. I just set it to rhyme.)
You can all see what a tragedy it was when I quit writing poetry.
The Phoo Bird
By Jennifer Kern (now Kelly)
Once there were three hungry girls
Went out to stalk the cold, hard world
When they stopped to take a rest
The Phoo bird rose from his Phoo nest
Smelling warm and human blood
The Phoo dove down and spewed his crud
The first girl ran off crying “Eck!”
The Phoo bird shit upon her neck
The second shouted out “Beware!”
The Phoo bird shit upon her hair
The third waited for the Phoo to pass
The Phoo bird shit upon her dress
When the Phoo had finished work
He settled down to wipe and smirk
All three girls were scattered far
From any local grill or bar
Where they tell their recent troubles
And wash them down with drink that bubbles
Instead they gathered by a stream
A tired group with spots of green
Dotting their neck and hair and dress
It annoyed them to some excess
The first on knelt beside the stream
To wash her neck and get it clean
As soon as water hit the spot
The Phoo-dew slid off in a clot
The girl stood up and clutched her head
And then fell over cold and dead
The second girl was none too bright
And so with the corpse in her sight
She washed away her own Phoo shit
But started back as if it bit
When she saw how the others died
The youngest for ten seconds cried
The Phoo bird’s gift to her remained
On her own dress (otherwise unstained)
The girl led a long, happy life
She met a slob, became his wife
She has advice if you can bear it
She says, “If the Phoo shits, wear it.”
Okay, that's it. Music stuff in a little bit.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
I miss Sunday covers
Here's a temporary link to Volcano Suns (that's Peter Prescott's post-Burma outfit) covering Prince's 1999.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/971cve
It's on a reissue of The Bright Orange Years, which will be out in January on Merge
http://www.sendspace.com/file/971cve
It's on a reissue of The Bright Orange Years, which will be out in January on Merge
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Warped trad and trippy-pop...
Couple more reviews up today, a long one from Dusted about Micah Blue Smaldone, who swims in the same pool as Death Vessel, Fire on Fire and Larkin Grimm, and a shorter one about a very nice, vinyl-only pop psych debut from Texan Matthew Gray of Matthew and the Arrogant Sea.
Micah Blue Smaldone
The Red River
(Immune)
Like his sometime tour mate, Joel Thibodeaux of Death Vessel, Micah Blue Smaldone has been moving towards music that is rooted, rather than confined, in 19th century folk. His first album, 2003’s Some Sweet Day, was defiantly old-time-ish, rooted in populist folk and protest music and played on a resonator guitar. Two years later, he offered Hither and Thither, a bit more modern in its references and scope. And now with The Red River, his best yet, richer, more fluid arrangements tip his songs from straight folk blues into gospel, soul and even hints of R&B.
More
His MySpace
Matthew and the Arrogant Sea, Family Family Family Meets The Magical Christian (Nova Posta Vinyl)
Here’s a self-imposed challenge: how to write about Matthew and the Arrogant Sea’s psyche pop oeuvre without referring to LSD. Instead, let’s stick to lysergic landmark comparisons—Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In an Aeroplane Over the Sea. Family Family Family Meets the Magical Christian is by no means in the same league with these classics, but it is an impressive debut. It shares these records’ lucid dreamlike quality, its songs filled with bright colors, luminous melodies and bizarre but friendly imagery. Consider casio-paced, acoustic guitar’d “Pretty Purple Top Hat” which spins into its own universe with the opening salvo, “I was sitting on an orbit floating off in space/when your pretty purple top hat/hit me in the face.” From there it’s all glowing electro-keyboard flourishes and sighing vocals, surreal “hippo-sized balloons” floating by in the distance. Or take the foot-stomp-and-clap rhythmed “Mock Origami” with its swooning, much harmonized chorus of “And we all wave our hands goodbye.” It is not so much strange as an alternate reality, bounded by its own set of rules and sciences and oddly inviting. A willing suspension of disbelief, of logic, of linearity is required to enter into this world, but once you’re in, the water’s wonderfully warm. Not many young songwriters are constructing their own universes, right off the bat, so substance-assisted or not, let’s give songwriter Matthew Gray his due. This is a fantastic and phantasmagoric outing into alternate reality, and well worth checking even if you’re stone cold sober. [Amazon ]
Check out the MySpace
Micah Blue Smaldone
The Red River
(Immune)
Like his sometime tour mate, Joel Thibodeaux of Death Vessel, Micah Blue Smaldone has been moving towards music that is rooted, rather than confined, in 19th century folk. His first album, 2003’s Some Sweet Day, was defiantly old-time-ish, rooted in populist folk and protest music and played on a resonator guitar. Two years later, he offered Hither and Thither, a bit more modern in its references and scope. And now with The Red River, his best yet, richer, more fluid arrangements tip his songs from straight folk blues into gospel, soul and even hints of R&B.
More
His MySpace
Matthew and the Arrogant Sea, Family Family Family Meets The Magical Christian (Nova Posta Vinyl)
Here’s a self-imposed challenge: how to write about Matthew and the Arrogant Sea’s psyche pop oeuvre without referring to LSD. Instead, let’s stick to lysergic landmark comparisons—Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In an Aeroplane Over the Sea. Family Family Family Meets the Magical Christian is by no means in the same league with these classics, but it is an impressive debut. It shares these records’ lucid dreamlike quality, its songs filled with bright colors, luminous melodies and bizarre but friendly imagery. Consider casio-paced, acoustic guitar’d “Pretty Purple Top Hat” which spins into its own universe with the opening salvo, “I was sitting on an orbit floating off in space/when your pretty purple top hat/hit me in the face.” From there it’s all glowing electro-keyboard flourishes and sighing vocals, surreal “hippo-sized balloons” floating by in the distance. Or take the foot-stomp-and-clap rhythmed “Mock Origami” with its swooning, much harmonized chorus of “And we all wave our hands goodbye.” It is not so much strange as an alternate reality, bounded by its own set of rules and sciences and oddly inviting. A willing suspension of disbelief, of logic, of linearity is required to enter into this world, but once you’re in, the water’s wonderfully warm. Not many young songwriters are constructing their own universes, right off the bat, so substance-assisted or not, let’s give songwriter Matthew Gray his due. This is a fantastic and phantasmagoric outing into alternate reality, and well worth checking even if you’re stone cold sober. [Amazon ]
Check out the MySpace
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Reptiles, girl-rockers and lawyers in love
Still struggling with internet/computer problems, sorry about yesterday’s AWOL…lots of stuff going up at PopMatters this week, though, a full-length review of NOLA funk-soul-country-Katrina survivors The Iguanas, a shorty on Friggs’ frontwomen Palmyra Delran’s solo EP and a long, overthought meditation on the fourth season of Boston Legal. (TV is one place where I seem to have fairly mainstream taste.)
Okay, so let’s get to it.
The Iguanas
If You Should Ever Fall on Hard Times
(Yep Roc)
US release date: 30 September 2008
UK release date: 13 October 2008
by Jennifer Kelly
Good Times, Bad Times, You Know I've Had My Share
In 2005, as Hurricane Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast, busted through the levies, and stranded New Orleaneans on rooftops and highway underpasses, New Orleans’s Iguanas were in Massachusetts playing a show. That didn’t mean they escaped the damage, though. In fact, even after they had reconnected with family members (no easy thing), the band’s members faced a precarious existence in exile in towns like Houston, Austin, Memphis… anywhere but home. And for a band whose sound is so inextricably linked to the polyglot, multicultural heritage of New Orleans—a mix of funk, soul, jazz, Latin, and zydeco—anywhere else must have seemed particularly lonely.
As a result, you might expect If You Should Ever Fall on Hard Times, the band’s first album since the Hurricane, to be kind of a downer. You would be wrong. This is an album that has its darker moments, certainly. Some of these darker moments—“Okemah” and “Morgan City”—are its clear highlights. But is ultimately irrepressibly, defiantly alive, a survivor who may be a little drunk and a little seedy, but is so very happy to be here.
Read more
You can listen to a stream of the title track here
Or visit the MySpace
Also hella fun, the new Palmyra Delran EP…
Palmyra Delran, She Digs the Ride (Apex East Recording)
Everything that’s old is new again. Case in point: the Friggs, one of Philly’s wildest 1990s girl bands was decidedly only old until earlier this year, when a reissue called Today Is Tomorrow’s Yesterday gave a new lease on life to songs like “Bad Word for a Good Thing”. Now, Friggs’ frontwoman Palymyra Delran is back for more, with the first batch of material she’s written since the 1990s, a septet of crunching, grinding, surf-rocking garage tunes will take you straight back to the girl-powered days of the Muffs, the Fastbacks and Kathleen Hanna. Backed by Scott Treude on guitar and keys, Frank Maglio on bass, Nancy Polstein on drums, and even canine Lulu on occasional vocals, Delran proves that you can mature without softening.
From first thumping of drums and the Dick Dale guitar storm that opens “Love Has Gone Away” through the last Ventures-esque riff and manic puppy arf of “Lulu’s Theme,” Delran pushes the line between classic garage riffs and estrogen-powered rock. A final hidden track, lyrics in pig latin, show her goofy side, but the whole record, even the love-doubting “Baby Should Have Known Better”, is 100% good times. Between chiming guitars, sweet harmonies and rock-raucous drum fills, Delran lets us know why she’s still in the game after all those years and all those grotty clubs. “She digs the ride,” and who wouldn’t?
Her MySpace
The Friggs reunion show in Philly this summer…”Bad Word for a Good Thing”
And, how about that Boston Legal review?
Boston Legal: Season Four
Cast: James Spader, William Shatner, Candice Bergen, John Laroquette, Christian Clemenson, Saffron Burrows, Tara Summers
(Fox, 2004)
US release date: 23 September 2008 (Fox)
by Jennifer Kelley
Dickens was right. The law is an ass.
Every episode of Boston Legal concludes with the same scene. Star attorney Alan Shore (James Spader) and past-his-prime partner Denny Crane (William Shatner) luxuriate in post-prandial comfort on a balcony overlooking Boston, drinking Scotch, smoking cigars and talking. In a show that spends much of its time in way-over-the-top-ville, these intimate scenes are strikingly real.
The two discuss their cases, their lives, their politics and their histories with wonderful sympathy and understatement. It is not unusual for Crane to come right out and say, “I love you” to Shore, nor for the romantically-inept Shore to observe that, even without love or family, at least the two of them have each other.
In every episode (even the opener where Shore performs this scene in full-drag as a Lennon sister), these scenes are essential, grounding and humane. Without them, Boston Legal could easily devolve into a sit com.
Gotta have more?
Okay, so let’s get to it.
The Iguanas
If You Should Ever Fall on Hard Times
(Yep Roc)
US release date: 30 September 2008
UK release date: 13 October 2008
by Jennifer Kelly
Good Times, Bad Times, You Know I've Had My Share
In 2005, as Hurricane Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast, busted through the levies, and stranded New Orleaneans on rooftops and highway underpasses, New Orleans’s Iguanas were in Massachusetts playing a show. That didn’t mean they escaped the damage, though. In fact, even after they had reconnected with family members (no easy thing), the band’s members faced a precarious existence in exile in towns like Houston, Austin, Memphis… anywhere but home. And for a band whose sound is so inextricably linked to the polyglot, multicultural heritage of New Orleans—a mix of funk, soul, jazz, Latin, and zydeco—anywhere else must have seemed particularly lonely.
As a result, you might expect If You Should Ever Fall on Hard Times, the band’s first album since the Hurricane, to be kind of a downer. You would be wrong. This is an album that has its darker moments, certainly. Some of these darker moments—“Okemah” and “Morgan City”—are its clear highlights. But is ultimately irrepressibly, defiantly alive, a survivor who may be a little drunk and a little seedy, but is so very happy to be here.
Read more
You can listen to a stream of the title track here
Or visit the MySpace
Also hella fun, the new Palmyra Delran EP…
Palmyra Delran, She Digs the Ride (Apex East Recording)
Everything that’s old is new again. Case in point: the Friggs, one of Philly’s wildest 1990s girl bands was decidedly only old until earlier this year, when a reissue called Today Is Tomorrow’s Yesterday gave a new lease on life to songs like “Bad Word for a Good Thing”. Now, Friggs’ frontwoman Palymyra Delran is back for more, with the first batch of material she’s written since the 1990s, a septet of crunching, grinding, surf-rocking garage tunes will take you straight back to the girl-powered days of the Muffs, the Fastbacks and Kathleen Hanna. Backed by Scott Treude on guitar and keys, Frank Maglio on bass, Nancy Polstein on drums, and even canine Lulu on occasional vocals, Delran proves that you can mature without softening.
From first thumping of drums and the Dick Dale guitar storm that opens “Love Has Gone Away” through the last Ventures-esque riff and manic puppy arf of “Lulu’s Theme,” Delran pushes the line between classic garage riffs and estrogen-powered rock. A final hidden track, lyrics in pig latin, show her goofy side, but the whole record, even the love-doubting “Baby Should Have Known Better”, is 100% good times. Between chiming guitars, sweet harmonies and rock-raucous drum fills, Delran lets us know why she’s still in the game after all those years and all those grotty clubs. “She digs the ride,” and who wouldn’t?
Her MySpace
The Friggs reunion show in Philly this summer…”Bad Word for a Good Thing”
And, how about that Boston Legal review?
Boston Legal: Season Four
Cast: James Spader, William Shatner, Candice Bergen, John Laroquette, Christian Clemenson, Saffron Burrows, Tara Summers
(Fox, 2004)
US release date: 23 September 2008 (Fox)
by Jennifer Kelley
Dickens was right. The law is an ass.
Every episode of Boston Legal concludes with the same scene. Star attorney Alan Shore (James Spader) and past-his-prime partner Denny Crane (William Shatner) luxuriate in post-prandial comfort on a balcony overlooking Boston, drinking Scotch, smoking cigars and talking. In a show that spends much of its time in way-over-the-top-ville, these intimate scenes are strikingly real.
The two discuss their cases, their lives, their politics and their histories with wonderful sympathy and understatement. It is not unusual for Crane to come right out and say, “I love you” to Shore, nor for the romantically-inept Shore to observe that, even without love or family, at least the two of them have each other.
In every episode (even the opener where Shore performs this scene in full-drag as a Lennon sister), these scenes are essential, grounding and humane. Without them, Boston Legal could easily devolve into a sit com.
Gotta have more?
Monday, October 20, 2008
Very exciting...my Roy Harper piece is up
I have not been doing a lot of interviews lately, but this is a good one. Some guy named Michael Duane gets quoted late in the piece, who the hell is that?
Hats Off: An Interview with Roy Harper
[20 October 2008]
Jimmy Page wrote a song about him. Paul and Linda McCartney sang back up for him. And now, after decades of languishing as "the longest running underground act in the world", Roy Harper is reissuing his entire catalogue to a world that may just finally be ready for him.
by Jennifer Kelly
Roy Harper never had any interest in traditional folk. Even in the mid-1960s, playing at the legendary London club Les Cousins, surrounded by earnest pickers and song catchers, he had something else in mind.
“I was never really a bone fide member of the folk scene,” says Harper, whose 1960s and 1970s albums, including Stormcock, Sophisticated Beggar and Flat Baroque and Berserk are now considered classics—and precursors to today’s alternative folk genre. “I was too much of a modernist, really. Just too modern for what was going on in the folk clubs. I wanted to modernize music, but more than that to completely modernize people’s attitudes towards life in general. I was involved in trying to bring meat to the folk music, which is a big mistake anyway.”
Yet though Harper never enjoyed the mass popularity and commercial success of his contemporaries in Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, his work has drawn fervent admirers. A self-taught guitarist, he is known for eccentric and sophisticated blues-into-folk accompaniment. And, as a poet inspired more by Shelley, Keats and Coleridge than Dylan et. al., his lyrics have always been striking—full of riveting images and confrontational salvos. This is an artist who can spend half an hour explicating the politics and philosophy behind Stormcock, and who still, nearly 40 years after the fact, remains passionate about the injustices that inspired its songs.
More:
“Me and My Woman”
Hats Off: An Interview with Roy Harper
[20 October 2008]
Jimmy Page wrote a song about him. Paul and Linda McCartney sang back up for him. And now, after decades of languishing as "the longest running underground act in the world", Roy Harper is reissuing his entire catalogue to a world that may just finally be ready for him.
by Jennifer Kelly
Roy Harper never had any interest in traditional folk. Even in the mid-1960s, playing at the legendary London club Les Cousins, surrounded by earnest pickers and song catchers, he had something else in mind.
“I was never really a bone fide member of the folk scene,” says Harper, whose 1960s and 1970s albums, including Stormcock, Sophisticated Beggar and Flat Baroque and Berserk are now considered classics—and precursors to today’s alternative folk genre. “I was too much of a modernist, really. Just too modern for what was going on in the folk clubs. I wanted to modernize music, but more than that to completely modernize people’s attitudes towards life in general. I was involved in trying to bring meat to the folk music, which is a big mistake anyway.”
Yet though Harper never enjoyed the mass popularity and commercial success of his contemporaries in Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, his work has drawn fervent admirers. A self-taught guitarist, he is known for eccentric and sophisticated blues-into-folk accompaniment. And, as a poet inspired more by Shelley, Keats and Coleridge than Dylan et. al., his lyrics have always been striking—full of riveting images and confrontational salvos. This is an artist who can spend half an hour explicating the politics and philosophy behind Stormcock, and who still, nearly 40 years after the fact, remains passionate about the injustices that inspired its songs.
More:
“Me and My Woman”
Sunday, October 19, 2008
If I'm not around as much...
...on last.fm etc. it's because I've had a fairly major disaster with my main desktop computer. All my music is safe, because I moved it to a portable hard drive a few weeks ago, but most of the programs, the audio drivers, the printer, etc. don't work and I'll probably have to buy a new one fairly soon.
I have a laptop, but it's got Vista, so is basically useless on dial-up. I'm expecting to spend a fair amount at the WIFI place and the library during the transition.
The worst thing I lost was a bunch of financial records...I'm going to have to hope that everyone sends out correct w-9s this year, or I'll have no idea how much I made.
I have a laptop, but it's got Vista, so is basically useless on dial-up. I'm expecting to spend a fair amount at the WIFI place and the library during the transition.
The worst thing I lost was a bunch of financial records...I'm going to have to hope that everyone sends out correct w-9s this year, or I'll have no idea how much I made.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
I'm not going to CMJ but...
I just made my plane/hotel reservations for SXSW...and, here's the cool thing, I did the plane ticket with miles.
This plastic baby will kill us all, more later.
This plastic baby will kill us all, more later.
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