I've never read this thread, is it worth my time?

Michael Stanley's looking older than I remember...we all used to drive up for the New Years' eve shows when I was in high school.

Not really.

Nah, Duff's right, nothing to see here. Although some pithy interesting observations are made within, and I think its existence is justified, I wouldn't bother reading it as a capital T "Thread."

Keep in mind this is coming from someone who's never set foot in the Now Playing thread.

Lodger's a lot better than I remember it.

Who is this "Deadmau5" asshole?

My friend, Doug McKean And The Magpies, is playing Quenchers Saloon in Chicago tonight. Then a number of other road gigs. Tell 'em Hannibal said hi.

Toki Wright - By The Time I Get To Arizona (Redeux)



A remake of the old Public Enemy classic with lyrics updated for modern times.

haha

"a vulgar situation"

I strongly support vulgar situations. That's probably why I decided to listen to Betty Davis this morning.

Don't even get him started on "Cock in my Pocket"

Anyone know this?



Jarvis Cocker has a show on BBC 6Music here, he played a track from it last week. Seems like a fullblown collaboration with Fripp rather than a Hall vocal with an eccentric producer. Sounds like something Scott Walker might have done at the same sort of time - moody, abstract - and JC himself acknowledged this by cueing up some Scott straight after. I am intrigued.

^ Think that came out about the same time as Fripp's Exposure in which Hall contributed many of the vocals. Been a long time since I've heard it. Now I'm wanting it. Damn you.

It's pretty awesome.

The song he played was 'the farther away I am'. Is that typical of the album - sort of ambient-weird?

Tracklist for the whole show is here - its a winner
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sf99j#synopsis

Most of the album is more straightforwardly rock based, I suppose. Not too insane but still slightly wacked out prog pop (Roxy Music-ish, maybe?) with the occasional idiosyncratic vocal arrangement, crazy fractured lead guitar contributions from Fripp (lots of this on "NYCNY," which was written by him and is apparently an Exposure song with different vocals/lyrics... haven't heard that record, though), etc.

Much better execution of Hall's experimental tendencies than a lot of what H&O were trying at the time (Beauty On A Back Street, in particular) and probably predicted a lot of the more focused and adventurous production choices of the Voices/Private Eyes era.

Good to know, thanks man

I find myself skeptical that Andre 3000 has actualy apologized to Ms. Jackson one trillion times.

Man, Mezcal Head is a damn good album.

Yeah, it's pretty much fantastic.

Tame Impala got best new music today...aside from Cut Copy, I'm pretty sure that's the only time an Australian band has been BNM'd since The Avalanches. Could well be wrong though. But good to see them finally getting some recognition.

What did they say about "Paint it Black"?
Did she ever tell her dad?

I may head over to Metro to catch the Jonestown Massacre tonight - I've seen them (him) enough & enjoy their (his) records just fine but they've got an opener named Elephant Stone...I gotta know what they're about.

They were great - sort of on-time-ish and played a long set, uninterrupted by stark rating lunacy, fisticuffs or nodding out. And Joel Gion's back, front & center playing tambourine, as entertaining as ever.

I'm not really following the storyline on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

One day, I may start a thread on hilariously awful Scorpions lyrics. For now, I submit the following:

The wolf is hungry
He runs to show
He's licking his lips
He's ready to win
On the hunt tonight
For love at first sting

A wolf with a stinger? Is this some sort of hybrid Napoleon Dynamite creature like the Liger? Scorpiwolf? Wolfion? Or are we to understand that the wolf is looking for a scorpion or other stinging predatory arthropod with whom to mate?

maybe he's just falling in love with the band? Being that they're The Scorpions?

pretty nonsensical though.

My understanding is he wrote a lot of these lyrics with a German/English dictionary. Not sure if that makes it more or less funny.

i came across this album:



and now i'm thinking, what are some other unfortunate album cover/title combos?

Hunting Accidents: Being The Further Adventures of Guided By Voices

Chapter XIX: The (First) Time Guided By Voices Recorded With Steve Albini, Part One of Two

by James Greer

When we were preparing to make what would turn out never to become The Power of Suck, which was to be the album after Alien Lanes and the first one recorded expressly for our new label, Matador, at some point it was decided that we should record four or five of the songs with Steve Albini in Chicago. In addition to being a well-known engineer, best known to the listening public for his work with Nirvana, the Pixies and P.J. Harvey, Steve had also fronted or played in a number of very great and influential Chicago bands, the best known of which is still probably Big Black.

He had over the years developed a reputation for prickly behavior and a talent for delivering stinging insults to other bands, musicians, or random passersby in interviews and letters to fanzines. Because these insults were often hilarious in addition to mean-spirited, it was often difficult to tell whether Steve was being entirely serious. He had a contrarian bent, that much was clear. For instance: he refused to call himself, a “producer,” even though he had a distinctive sound that was instantly recognizable no matter what band was recording with him, because in his mind a producer was someone whose job was essentially creative, and a) Steve did not believe a band should allow any outside input into their own creation, and b) he did not feel that simply recording a band a certain way using certain mics in a certain room should be construed as creative, at least on his part. Towards that end, he would not discuss availability or price with anyone other than the band itself; in other words he would not deal with management people or record company people, even when he knew those people personally, or at least better than he knew the band that wanted to record with him.

For that reason, and maybe a few others, there was at the outset some indecision about calling Steve. We tried to make our manager do it, but Steve wouldn’t talk to her. It was clear we would have to call him ourselves. Bob didn’t want to call him. He was scared, for the reasons cited above. He told me to call him. I was even more scared than Bob, and I said as much, but an order is an order, so I did as I was told. I called the number our manager had provided. I don’t remember if Steve answered the phone himself, I think it may have been someone else, and it was pretty clear judging from the background noise that I had interrupted a recording session. But after I said who I was and what band I was in and that we wanted to talk about recording there, with Steve, he got on the phone right away.

He immediately put me at ease. This was not the caustic, bitter recluse I had been afraid to call. This was like the friendliest guy I’d ever spoken to out of the blue on the phone. We talked about what dates we wanted to record, he told me that sounded fine, said we could stay at his house, which at that time was also his recording studio, but that we would have to stop recording about 10PM every night because of complaints from the neighbors. We then got to the thorny subject of money. For the record, I am really bad at negotiating anything. I will ghostwrite your life story for one dollar and a bag of potato chips, even if you are Bill Gates-like in your ability to pay. I will, unprompted, offer to pay double what you expect to get for that black velvet painting of Elvis, and I don’t like black velvet paintings of Elvis, or Jesus, or rabbits, or anything else for that matter. I don’t like ironic art, which is ironic because I tend to specialize in ironic art almost to the point where people never know whether to take me seriously or not (the answer is not).

I confessed upfront that I had no idea what was a good amount of money to pay for three days in the studio with Steve Albini, or with anyone else, for that matter. Steve explained that he had a sliding scale, based on the band’s ability to pay. He would even do sessions for free if you were just starting out and he had the time and thought you were worth recording. But he knew we were signed to a label, and had a budget, though not to a major label like Nirvana, and did not have a Nirvana-sized budget.
“Let me ask you this,” said Steve, “How much would you pay to make the album of your dreams?”
I’m not sure I could put a price tag on that question, not then, not now. The album of my dreams was somewhat different from the album we were preparing to make, but that’s obvious, because if the album you make in your dreams isn’t completely unrealistic to achieve, then what’s the point of dreaming? But I had been told by our manager that a fair price would be a thousand dollars a day, including studio time and Steve’s services.
So I said, timorously, expecting rejection or at least derision, “A thousand dollars a day?”
“Okay,” replied Steve. And that was that. We had agreed to terms and the dates were set.
The dates were sometime near the end of January or early February, I can’t remember exactly (in 1995, I should add), and on that day we packed up our gear into either Mitch’s van or a rental, because maybe Mitch’s van by then had lost the ability to drive as far as Chicago. We made the five-ish hour drive just fine, but had a little trouble (okay, a lot) negotiating the suburban Chicago streets where Steve’s house/studio was located. I don’t know what we were looking for, exactly: some kind of neon sign out front with maybe a cartoon arrow pointing down at the roof. The sign would say “Steve Albini's Secret Hideout” in bright, blinking, blue fluorescent letters. This was not the case. Steve lived in a nondescript house on a nondescript street, where all the houses looked pretty similar, and we who were about to rock were not very good at following directions. This was before the Google, and the Google Maps, and the G.P.S. lady who calmly tells you to drive off an unfinished bridge. All we had were a hand-written series of scribbles that ended at an address on a street with an unfamiliar name.

We eventually made it, and found Steve there alone. At that time he often worked without an assistant, despite which the session moved much quicker than a “normal” session in a big pricey studio, because Steve is super-capable, and very quick, too, which is unsurprising considering that he is not a big man.

We were instructed to pull around back and unload our equipment down a short flight of stairs into the basement, which was also the live room, where we would be recording the drums. The control room was upstairs, actually up two flights of stairs, on the second floor of Steve’s house, and the only communications link between the two was via the board mic. I think this must have been part of why Steve was so thin, because he was constantly running up and down those stairs to make minute adjustments to the microphones, or to tune the drums (for instance).
If I remember correctly, we didn’t do any actual recording the first day, or not very much, at least, because we had to set everything up and Steve, after listening to Kevin’s drums, kindly offered to tune them for him, which Kevin didn’t really think was necessary but reluctantly allowed. Steve has a very good ear for drum sounds. That is one of his most impressive talents, and partly through this tuning and partly through mic placement, he achieves the kind of drum sound that makes most bands drool. Guided By Voices is not a droolful band, for the most part, and Bob has often confessed that he doesn’t know a good drum sound from two six-year-olds banging on old garbage can lids, but that wasn’t Steve’s problem. He did his job. He always did his job.
Part of that job was making us comfortable in the recording environment, and since that environment was his house, we spent a lot of time in the kitchen, where Steve would tell stories about anything we wanted to hear: recording with Nirvana; what it was like to record with Nirvana; how the session with Nirvana went; these were just three of the topics we covered in our broad-ranging kitchen table talks. He did not drink, or take drugs, but he didn’t care what anyone else did, and so we drank, but did not take drugs.
Because of the drinking, I like to think (and not congenital clumsiness, as my mom always insists), I accidentally broke Steve’s gold record for recording P.J. Harvey, but I will have to continue that story Monday because I am a busy man, frankly, and have a lot of things to do, including water the magnolia tree in my backyard.

http://jamesgreerbooks.blogspot.com/

man, thanks for that. some fine writing. please post part 2 here cause i'm sure I'll forget to look.

A good read.

have those Albini sessions ever surfaced? i'd buy that shit

A few surfaced on Under The Bushes..., but not until after they were dubbed back to 4-track cassette and tampered with.

A few other stray tracks ended up on B-sides and comps, like this one:

This is one of the better articles I've read in Pitchfork in a while. Some good thoughts articulated here.



http://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-fre...t-frequency-71/

I enjoyed a few paragraphs from that. Funny to read yesterday because that was right when I found out that The Five EP's is getting an official release this September.

I suppose most of what he's saying is relatable and spot on but I always picture Mark Richardson just sobbing his goddamn eyes out when I read his articles. Dude is such a fragile snowflake of a music writer.

I've always enjoyed that column, though it bothers me at times because his tastes seem to overlap with mine more than any other writer or person I've found online. I've also tended to think about and tried to write about music in the same way he does -- maybe even since before his column debuted -- but I suck and can't ever articulate any of my thoughts in the clear and relatable way that he does.

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedCon...;threadid=79848

A lot of records have leaked that no one is talking about...Roots, Wavves, Women.

Paging music fans...

Wait until the Pitchfork reviews get published.

downloaded two of those three, but still haven't had time to listen to them yet. i'm weeks behind on my listening right now.

Here 'tis:

Monday, June 21, 2010
Hunting Accidents: Being the Further Adventures of Guided By Voices

Chapter XIX: The (First) Time Guided By Voices Recorded With Steve Albini, Part Two of Two
by James Greer

Picking up the thread of the narrative, he said, sipping from his cup of very strong coffee, annoyed that he slept in until 8AM this morning, when we unpacked and set up our gear in Steve Albini’s basement — drums, amps, guitars, beer — we (most likely) then went about establishing levels, making small adjustments in tone, etc. Steve scurried from amp to amp fussing with mic placement. He mentioned “That’s an unusual bass sound,” to me, and he was right. He implied that we could maybe change it to something more conventional, but I said that it was the sound I used live, and it seemed to work, so I’d rather not mess with it. He nodded as if that were some kind of reasonable argument. In retrospect I wish I’d let him work on the bass sound more, because when someone as experienced as Steve Albini offers to work on your bass tone, you always accept the offer. He is smarter than you. When I hear the Albini recordings now, I hate the fucking bass sound more than I hate anything else. But that’s me. Bob hated the vocal sound, Toby thought the mixes were a little dull, and Kevin and Mitch: well, it’s not really important what Kevin and Mitch thought. I think Kevin was pleased with his drum sound, because who wouldn’t be, and Mitch was in love with his mostly two-note guitar solo on... where’s the matter-of-fuck track-listing? That one song. You know.

Let’s see. We had (very unusually) not only learned but rehearsed the songs we recorded at Steve’s place. We knew our parts. We were supposed to know our parts. We were all gathered in one little room with the amps, isolated to some degree from Kevin, who was in the bigger drum room, although he was within sight. Bob played guitar, too, as he usually did on Guided By Voices recordings. I think we tried the song “Pantherz” first.

I should at this point briefly note what everyone already knows: Robert Pollard is allergic to the recording studio. He hates every aspect of recording in an actual studio, from fiddling with amps and mics and drums to get the right sounds, to playing the songs through mistake-free, to overdubbing guitar parts, to mixing... I think you get the idea. We had two days, and the songs we were trying to record were “Pantherz,” “Sheetkickers” (that’s the one with Mitch’s solo!), “The Color of My Blade,” “He’s the Uncle,” “Bughouse,” “Superwhore,” and because we ended up finishing early, an improvised instrumental that at that time Bob called “Girl From The Sun.” Despite the relative brevity of the session, Bob grew more and more impatient with every false start or fuck-up that meant we had to start over. Doing more than one take is anathema to Bob, and I mean seriously anathema (“something or someone that one vehemently dislikes” says Mr. Webster). Ironically, I had more experience in the recording studio than anyone else in the band at that point, and I knew how nervous people can get even if they have rehearsed their part a thousand times, so the fact that Kevin kept fucking up neither surprised nor annoyed me as much as it did Bob.

Still, it did get a little old after a while, because these were not rocket-science songs. Part of the problem lay in the fact that Bob was playing guitar and not singing a guide vocal, so that Kevin, who usually relied on Bob’s vocals as cues, had to actually understand the structure of the song without vocals, and I’m not sure that he entirely did. To the point where Bob had to sing a guide vocal instead of playing guitar on, for example, “Bughouse” and “Sheetkicksers,” at least. In my admittedly porous memory.

By anyone else’s standards, we tore through these songs, cleanly and efficiently, but by Bob’s standards the whole thing was a major drag. Once we had finished the basics, we had to do some overdubs, and clean up a few “bubbles,” as Steve was in the habit of calling minor flubs or bum notes. A few more of Steve’s verbal quirks: he called everyone “Senator” in the headphones, as in, “You ready for another take, Senator?” And he would constantly say things like “It sounds really good to me, but then again I’m high,” even though he neither drank nor took drugs, at least not in our presence.

We did. I mean, we drank. I remember drinking lots of cheap red wine; I’m pretty sure everyone else drank beer, except Kevin, who at that time was still sober except for the occasional joint or pain pill for his back, which was always, always killing him. When we were in the control room between takes or between overdubs, Steve would quiz us on things like “favorite Who album,” (everyone said Who’s Next, except me, I said Quadrophenia, which is stupid, Who Sell Out is my favorite, I don’t know what possessed me to say Quadrophenia except a pure contrarian impulse). Steve thought “He’s The Uncle” sounded like the Kinks, and “Girl From the Sun” like Cheap Trick, sort of. But then again, he was high.

When were done the first night or the second night, I can’t remember, I was given the couch in Steve’s living room to sleep on. He invited everyone to go shoot pool with him, but only Mitch and Kevin were foolish enough to take him up on his offer. I don’t know the end result, but never shoot pool with a man who carries his own stick around in a custom case, is sort of a common-sense thing in my brain.

Steve was very (and justifiably) proud of his collection of vintage mics. He had two he liked especially for recording vocals: the “Hitler” mic, because it was German and dated from around the time of WWII, and the “Stalin” mic, because it was Russian and you get the idea. I think we tried both. Steve favors a dry sound on vocals, and Bob does not, which is when I sort of began to feel that these tracks were not going to turn out to Bob’s satisfaction. When Bob requested slap-back echo on... one of the songs, can’t remember which, Steve went to the trouble of creating actual slap-back echo using tape delay, the way the Beatles would have done. He was really a great engineer, and if, as some people warned us, he’d lost a bit of high end in his hearing over the years, it was not in evidence.

Steve also convinced us to let his pal Jim O’Rourke come over and put overdubs on two songs with Jim’s home-made guitar-noise making machine. He made a bunch of noise on “Bughouse and “He’s The Uncle,” and though I could tell Bob wasn’t pleased with the results, we paid him $200 anyway. He was a really nice guy, too.
Oh, and right, at some point during the second day we were all lounging around the living room and I went over to a bookshelf to examine closer Steve’s gold record from P.J. Harvey, with whom he’d recorded the album Rid of Me. I swear I didn’t so much as pick it up, I barely even touched it. It was just propped against the wall on top of a chest-high bookcase. Behind which it subsequently slipped with a loud crash that left little doubt it had shattered.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Steve immediately. “I don’t care about gold records.” Or words to that effect.

We also spent some time around Steve’s kitchen table during which the Nirvana sessions for In Utero came up. Steve thought the band was okay, probably in the top hundred of bands he’d recorded, but he was very unhappy with what Kurt and the record label had done afterward, re-mixing and in some cases adding parts to the songs. Steve felt this was a clear violation of trust, though he understood, and put most of the blame on Nirvana’s label and management. He offered to go get the unadulterated version for comparison’s sake, but in truth none of us was a particular fan of the band, and really didn’t want to hear any version of the record. We took his word for it that his version was much better. It probably was.
The upshot of all this was that Bob and Toby stayed on an extra day to mix while the rest of us drove down to Memphis, where we were to record the bulk of The Power of Suck (which it might already not have been called that by then), and when Bob and Toby arrived the next day or so after, Bob was unhappy with a) his vocals, and b) some other things, like the Jim O’Rourke noise (which for the record I thought was kind of cool, but in that respect I held a minority opinion of exactly one).

I’ve heard this session referred to as aborted or truncated in some way, but that's completely untrue. We recorded exactly what we meant to record with Steve, plus one more. The Memphis session was cut short, that much is true, but that’s a whole different story —though not altogether unrelated to Bob’s impatience even with the relatively swift Albini experience.

Later, when we got home, Bob decided he wanted to double his vocals on a couple of the songs on four-track, and add a guitar solo over the “noise” section in “He’s The Uncle” (which was supplied by Tripp Lamkins of the insanely great Memphis band The Grifters). Mindful of Steve’s disappointment with/sense of betrayal by Nirvana, Bob called Steve to explain what he was going to do, and to make sure it was okay with him. Steve, in Bob’s telling, was a little confused. No one had ever asked his permission to make his recordings sound worse.

Only two of the Albini session recordings made it onto what would eventually become Under The Bushes, Under The Stars (“Sheetkickers” and “He’s The Uncle”), but all of them have been released one way or another via bootlegs or Suitcases by now. I made a video for “Bughouse” a while back, using left-over footage from my short film Diegesis. Unfortunately I lost the original video files in a hard drive crash, so all that remains is this really poor quality version of the original. I think a snippet may have been used on The Devil Went Home and Puked, but to my shame I have yet to watch that DVD yet. Instead you get this. You’re welcome!



http://jamesgreerbooks.blogspot.com/2010/0...ing-furthe.html

i like the Wavves record. got a link for that Women?

Every time I listen to Pony Express Record, I think I have a different favorite song. Right now: "Earthquakes Come Home"

hey Sid, have you read Greer's GBV book? is it worth checking out?

It's fairly entertaining. Nobody dishes any real dirt, unfortunately. Greer is still friends with Bob, so I get the impression a lot of juicy stuff never gets mentioned. He's a good writer, though, so... yeah.

PM me if you want to borrow my copy.

There's a terrific interview with the band in the latest issue of The Big Takeover.