ShortWaveRockin

Nothing is new. Nothing is original. Rock nRoll is great if you’ve got epicycles. My theory on all of life, actually: EPICYCLES! You are doing it all the same as everyone else, but you make a little turn, a little spin. It’s amazing how big this little spin can make or break a band. And the Vivian Girls have this little spin. They are running the same pattern as My Bloody Valentine and Sleater Kinney and the Vaselines (not exactly the same style these bands, back off) but they do it without shoving their influences in your face. It’s impossible for me to nail it down, but I think this band has that spin. They’ve got epicycles.

Their first album, rereleased by In the Red, who I’m very weary of as a record label, just came out last month and its everywhere! Are they evil? Are they “indie” too cool for school? Are they real? These questions apply to both the label and the band. I like listening to the album. Good bass licks. Nice fuzz. Vox are hidden and echoed to oblivion, but that’s kinda the thing, right? The entire fact this album exists make me nervous, which is GOOD, don’t worry! I’m nervous because Im straddling the fence between really cool hipster music bandwagon and actual good music. I’d like for them to prosper and record their Call the Doctor, but I have a bad feeling. No one is going to care about the Vivian Girls in 1 year, just like no one gave a shit about them a year ago when they opened for Golden Triangle who opened for King Khan and BBQ in Bushwick. I pressed play and started typing to the VIVIAN GIRLS S/T LP and I need to stop because the music stopped. Decent debut. We’ll see where it leads us. Bleh.

Concerts are boring.  I think I first realized this at the back of a widening mosh pit at NIN a few years ago.  Trent Reznor was up front flexing his muscles and fisting himself, much of the crowd doing the same.  I swore off concerts that night.  My neck hurt.  The beers were small and $30.  My back hurt.  My feet hurt.  My eyes hurt.  I was disgusted with the whole scene.  My one man strike didn’t last long.  I don’t remember why but I went to a show a couple weeks later.  I have never stopped, and I know I never will.  Some kinda drug, eh?  Why the hell do I do this?  Why the hell do we do this?  Pay good money, even a small show for 5 or 6 or 7 bucks, that’s a four pack of 24 oz. CoorsLights, my favorite, to stand and stand and shift our weight and try to talk and listen over some fuckin shitty Buckcherry album playing to “warm” us up.  I can turn the lights out and listen to Beefheart drunk for that price.  And yet I return.  I go because out of every 10 or 20 or 30 shows that are “eh, pretty good” I get one that’s really worth it. 

Enter BORIS.  BORIS who has been in my head since seeing them two times earlier this year.  BORIS who has been sitting idle in my head for months, unable to comprehend their shows, until this morning when I started writing this in my head in the shower.  Oh and to make myself look ever dorkier- I was head banging and playing the drums, simultaneously!

BORIS makes me feel bad about America.  I feel embarrassed.  I feel bad for England.  I feel bad for those other weird European countries where metal runs their blood.  I feel bad for the entire Western World.  The early metal Brits should have cut ties with us and headed east, to that island I know nothing about except Pokemon, showering teenager manga books, BB guns in bars and BORIS.  Where did they hear about metal?  And this band has been around.  Around for 10 years around.  Around since Pantera in their prime around.  What     the     fuck!?  The word is ethnocentric.  Americacentric.  I can feel the stares already.

So there I was at BORIS for the first time having only listened to PINK for about 15 minutes.  Waiting.  Waiting.  I was stuck under the low ceiling at the Knitting Factory, stuck behind a lot of impatient sweaty people.  Why the fuck do we do this?  Then boris comes on and its boring.  15 minutes boring.  Slow drone…. But….THEN.  THEN…

BORIS knows how to set the table.  I’m in a band and I can’t do it.  I’m a premature ejaculator like most of the metalheads and punkheads and hardcoreheads of this Western World.  We’ve got a baseball bat and we’ve got a table and we smash it.  Sure, it’s fun: loud- wood on wood- exciting, but it’s the same thump, the same crack and you break your wrists doing it.  BORIS sets the table first.  Discipline is a damn good word to use for it.  BORIS takes their time.  They set nice antiques on the table, soup bowls, Norataki China plates, 3 kinds of spoons, 2 kinds of forks, salad and meat, butter knives and steak knives, thick glass pitchers full of dark red wine, wine glasses, water glasses with ice, napkin rings, linens white gold and red, and its really BORING.  It’s so fucking boring, but it’s all worth it.  They get out their baseball bats, 5 bats, 2 for the drummer and he stands on the center of the table and screams into his Madonna mic headset smashing with both hands, both bats, the glass and metal and silver and wine splattering against the walls.  They are all doing it.  And one’s a girl!  Wata!  THIS is not boring.  THIS is BORIS and its GLORIOUS.  Sorry for the cheap rhyme to end this, but I did it and I’m proud of it.  BORIS makes me proud to be on this Earth, but still disgusted I’m American.

BORIS shows in and around the City:

November 9 @ Maxwell’s

December 3 @ Williamsburg Hall of Music

What the fuck! Boris is opening for NIN now? Well, the article officially comes full circle now. Take that, you fucks!

Since 2003, Continuum Books have been releasing a music series called 33 1/3.  Each book focuses on one single album released in the past 50 years or so.  There aren’t many rules for how the writer handles the album, other than the length: about 100 pages of 7 by 4 inch paper.  So far, I have read about ten in the series.  Each has been interesting enough to keep my attention for a round trip bus ride across the Bronx to work, about two hours. 

What’s the problem, then?  They read like drawn out album reviews.  Some use a lot of quotes from the band members and friends and managers and girlfriends.  Some dribble on about its importance in the evolution of rock music or even worse, the importance of the album in the band’s extensive catalog.  They are littered with adjectives, the most unholy of all being the most dangerous word a reviewer can ever utter: “greatest.”  

I may sound harsh, but let me explain myself.  If I had been asked one week ago to write a review of every 33 1/3 book I’ve read so far, I probably would have given them all above average reviews.  Not the case any more.  I just read John Darnielle’s Master of Reality and now all I have to say is: Why the hell can’t they all do it this way?

The way I am referring to is not only fiction, but guts.  I understand it is interesting to dissect an album scientifically, (Dai Griffiths’ OK Computer) culturally, (John Dougan’s The Who Sell Out) or sonically, song by song, (Michael T. Fornier’s Double Nickels on the Dime and many more) but what really matters is how the album makes the listener feel.  Does the album have any guts?  If it does, can the writing even attempt to match that?  This one does.  Darnielle writes his 33 1/3 book about Black Sabbath’s 1971 sludge metal masterpiece Master of Reality through the story of a 16 year old boy named Roger who is sent to a mental institution in 1985.  It’s Sabbath fiction. The entire book is written through Roger’s journal entries he is forced to write as well as a series of letters from later in life.  

From the start, you know this isn’t your typical album review.  Instead of starting the book with a line like: “Tony, John, Bill and Terence started playing together in a Birmingham garage back in the brisk spring of 1968,” this book starts with diary entry #1: “FUCK YOU ALL GO TO HELL.”  Perfect.

 As unconventional as it may already seem, the book works.  Not only did it urge me to look at Master of Reality closer (I’ve always liked Vol. 4 the best), it made me look at Sabbath in an entirely different way.  I put the book down 5 days ago and “Children of the Grave” is still looping in my head.  I can’t shake it.  And I’m listening to the lyrics, really listening.  I don’t know what it was about Sabbath, but of all my favorite bands I never put an effort into the words.  ”Children of the Grave” is about love?!.  The last verse, except for the “Children of the Grave” line, reads like something from “We are the World.”  ”After Forever” is about letting Jesus into your life.  How did I miss that?  Roger has his music taken from him in the institution and all he wants is for Ozzy to do the preaching, not the shrinks.  He’s singin’ about love, man!  They never give him his tape back, so he plays it in his mind where Ozzy makes more sense than ever.  He uses his diary to explain why the album means so much to him, hoping they will give it back.

What I was most skeptical about in the beginning was how the story and the music would fit together.  Would the music stuff seem forced onto the story or vice versa?  The Mountain Goats dude pulls it off (oh yea, Darnielle is the guy from the Mountain Goats who I’m not too familiar with. This is when you say “He wrote a book on Sabbath?!”)  The insight into the album and everything Sabbath is profound.  This kid has no idea how it was recorded or the little anecdotes behind certain songs or lyrics, but he doesn’t need to know.  All he has is the album and how it makes him feel.  It’s the listener who makes the judgments.  Try this:

“Ozzy always ALWAYS sounds like they just grabbed him off the street and stuck him in front of the microphone…No matter what he’s singing, Ozzy always sounds like he was going to sing that anyway, even if there was nobody listening, even if everybody hated it, even if nobody was even going to put his record in the stores.”

Good or bad, I can’t get enough of the 33 1/3 books.  My big hope is everyone reads this one and realizes their potential.  Well, too much written and not enough said.  Fuck you all. Go to hell.