February's Music Writer Exercise Pt. Deux
The 2nd week in of an album I have not heard before, listening to it from start to end and then writing about it
Seven days. Seven more always I have not listened to from start to finish before.
Saturday, Feb. 8th, 2025
CELL\BORG Smash Blips • A transcontinental (B\CELL: Brooklyn. J\CELL and M\BORG: Los Angeles) jaunt. It's not a quick journey so the three equipment with analog bleep & bloop makers and Michael Rother guitar treatments for sustenance. The click and clack of the tracks the vessel is rolling on provide a beat moririk. The landscape passing by starts to appear Eastern European. Station stops along the way find them engaging with boarding passengers John Foxx and Gary Numan, discussing what if JG Ballard found peace in managing a video arcade located in a roller rink.
Sunday, Feb 9th, 2025
SHOES Present Tense• I've always had a soft spot for power pop. When I was a preteen just starting to get into music, something to call my own, I didn’t want to just listen to whatever my junior high peers were into. It got boring quick hearing them play Seger, Styx, and Skynyrd cassettes on repeat. So, bands like Cheap Trick, The Knack, and The Romantics (their second album, National Breakout, still gets regular spins in my record stacks) became my thing. That, in turn, cracked open the door (and my ears) to other music beyond what was played a hundred times daily on rock radio, setting me up for a lifelong, voracious appetite for sound.
The thing with power pop, though, is that plenty of bands could crank out a great song or three, but when it came to making a full album? Pretty mid. Too many wimpy love songs, too much Beatles worship (which I know sounds kinda dumb to complain about, since they were the blueprint for the sound but c’mon, a decade after they broke up and even longer since they sounded like that?) and too many songs that just sound blended together.
It’s been decades since I last heard Tongue Twister, Shoes’ second Elektra album, but I remember having that exact impression of it. I never got around to their early self-released records, and honestly, I’m not even sure if I ever heard Black Vinyl Shoes (the one that got them signed). But for today’s music writer’s exercise, I went with their first Elektra record, Present Tense, because I recently found it in the $3-or-less bin at a local record store—and I’d never actually heard it before.
It kicks off, like most power pop records do, with a rave-up—“Tomorrow Night” comes in swinging with windmill power chords, a couple of chewy hooks, and harmonies that are lush but still a little scruffy around the edges. Then, also like most power pop albums, it follows up with something Merseybeat-tinged and full of yearning. Yep, “Too Late” is exactly the kind of song I’d scoff at and call “a song for chicks.”
The thing is though, this album doesn’t have all that many duds really. Tracks like “Hanging Around With You” and “I Don’t Miss You” have a solid glitter rock stomp/clap thing going on, “Somebody Has What I Had” would not feel out of place on any post 1990 Redd Kross record and “Cruel You” sounds like it was recorded with the idea of it being of it being heard cranking out of ‘72 Ford Torino.
Monday, Feb. 10th, 2025
ROME STREETZ Noise Candy 3: The Overdose• I first got hipped to Rome Streetz through his association with the Griselda camp. His album last year with long time Griselda producer Daringer, Hatton Garden Holdup, became of bit of an obsession of mine. His delivery is often like buckshot, words splattering hitting bystanders with recklessness. Others, he’s a one many army of semi-automatic 12 gauges blasting it all to smithereens. It’s braggadocious dark tales of illicit trades. The fortune it brings, the unfortunate things it brings. It is boom bap covered in grime. A lot of death, very little remorse and less redemption and some darkly clever twists of phrase. What music he chooses to deliver it over aren’t necessarily beats but sonic beds and woozy soundscapes. Clipped snippets of 70s jazz records, static, noise. They all set a mood. Like soundtracks to his lyrical short films.
Now wanting to go back a little further, it was suggested that I check out 2019’s Noise Candy 3. It’s Rome Streetz solo and running the game by himself here. Pretty flute lines float, providing contrast and paradox of the lyrics on “Seizure”, “Blood All Over The Money” and “Foot On Ya Neck 4ever.” Noise and chaos give “Rotten.com” and “Heart On Icepack” a full on rush of anxiety. The glitchy folk blues loop that makes “Voodoo” all wobbly. The same for the stop start chopped up strings on “Rich Porter or Pooky.”
While this does fall under the wide umbrella of hip-hop, I definitely recommend this to buffs of OG noise and fans of cassette tape collages that outsiders made in the 1980s.
Tuesday, Feb 11, 2025
PAVEMENT Twilight Terror• I adore the first three Pavement albums. I did not spend all that much time with their fourth album, Brighten The Corners, though and have never spent any with their fifth one, Twilight Terror, for whatever reason.
Ok, so I can’t say I haven’t heard anything off this record. It opens with “Spit on a Stranger.” I know that song. So much so about a decade and a half ago, I was at a brewpub when Nickel Creek’s cover of it came on. I turned to the friend I was drinking with and asked “Is this a fucking Pavement cover? Damn hippies!”
This was the band playing by the rules. I think they had to. The guy who produced Radiohead was put in charge. It was a now or never moment. It would be their last album.
Songs like “You Are The Light” “Cream Of Gold” and Carrot Rope” are dang fine songs. I think “Pavement with a Radiohead production. That's kinda cool.” They’re all buffed up and clean. A starry glare shining off it. Also“Ugh. Pavement with a Radiohead production” moments. “Folk Jam”, “Major League” don’t sound completely devoid of Pavementness, they just don’t sound right being Radioheady.
Wednesday, Feb. 12th, 2025
DROP NINETEENS National Coma• The Drop Nineteens first album, Delaware, became somewhat ubiquitous in the latter half of 1992 in the circles I ran in. You’d be at someone’s place or car and spot the CD.
”You listen to the whole thing yet?”
”Yeah, “Winona” is a great song. There’s a couple other cool ones on it too.”
Naming those other songs may have taken looking at the artwork to check. The thing is about there being so many copies spotted at the time, no one bought it new it seemed. I swear Caroline must’ve blitzed the Midwest with a semi trailer full of 25 count CD boxes of promos and left them in any town that had a record store. “Winona” is part of the Shoegaze (US division) canon. My personal picks for the “couple other cool ones” is the torrential storm of “Rebberrymemberer” and how “Kick The Tragedy” feels like a brisk, windy spring at twilight.
A year later, the band released National Coma. The album starts with not by starting at its feet. “Limp” stares straight out, taut with a 60s influenced riff, an awkward aggression that alternative rock had before it became a tagline in a JCPennys back to school sales mailer and the strange perceptions of what constitutes a pop hook like contemporaries of the time such as the Breeders.
It’s an album that is much more focused. The sheets of guitars churn heavier and brighter. The rhythm section hits hard. The vocals more confident. Songs that would’ve meandered and make the listener wonder if it the band was making art or just filler on the first album are limited and those that are on it are given a sheen as well as a roadmap of how to get there from here.
Sure you can hear ghosts of Sonic Youth on songs like “Skull” and what have you but there’s also tracks like “All Brothers Are Swimmers”, “Martini Love” and “My Hotel Deb” that are of a band coming into their own. It would be 30 years until they released their next album.
Thursday, Feb. 13th, 2025
SLUT HAIR Roll Your Own And Save Your Roll• I've been a big champion of Durham’s NC Obliques for almost a year now. Their demo had a blare, blaaang shows are rare (and usually in a family garage) and are on semi-hiatus now because they all finished high school and have gone off to college.
Recently, three of them got together and laid down some live direct to two-track recordings.
Sure, they make a cover of the Stones “Satisfaction” sound like something from Supercharger and they make the Replacements “Waitress in The Sky sound like a proper poor cowboy song but that’s just fun on the weekend. It’s the KBD, the Godz (ESP-Disk ones, not the Ohio biker bar band), damaged blues and other references that they may not know what yr talking about what’s going on here. It’s lo-fi and obnoxious. It’s brilliant at it! Where’s all the budget rockers? Get on this.
Friday, February 14, 2025
MAGAZINE Secondhand Daylight• Released in 1979, Magazine’s 2nd album finds itself further disassociating from the punk rock rule book that the singer Howard Devoto had been lumped in with a few years earlier. I will forever and always love John McGeoch’s inventive, atmospheric & outre’ guitar playing and bassist Barry Adamson will always be cool. Magazine was one of the first New Wave bands before the term got pinned on anything that was kinda catchy and a bit quirky. The only single released from the album, the McGeoch/Adamson penned “Rhythm Of Cruelty” defines such a sound. It’s a nod to the jet age sounds like Roxy Music and Be Bop Deluxe that led them terminal to their departure into their own chrome plated future. It’s moody and nervy. Devoto sneers lines and coos others. Space age disco synth swells from keyboardist David Forumla give it alluring, tarnished glitter. “I Wanted Your Heart” falls along these same lines (but with almost a rollicking classical piano line.) “Talk To Your Body” does as well but thoughts of Wire come to mind too.
Where this album loses me though are some of the more prog elements. I’ve maybe wanted to listen to Dark Side of the Moon three times in my entire life. I’ve heard it a billion more times than that. The album opens with Formula’s “Feed The Body.” It sounded like something by someone who always wants to hear the album. There are a few other times through the album too where I ask myself why didn’t I just assign myself some Gabriel era Genesis album today instead.