ShortWaveRockin

“Much Madness is Divinest Sense” – Emily Dickinson
“Emily Dickinson is more bad ass than your shitty uniform punk band” – Adam W

Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa – Operation Spacetime Cynderblock: “Four Riddles of the Spheres” Starcleaner Records (2009)

Listening to Operation Spacetime Cynderblock, I get the same feeling as when I listen to God Bless the Red Krayola… or Soldier-Talk. The same feeling as The Fugs Second Album or Virgin Fugs. More recently Failed Musician by Nutsak or anything by the Unknown Instructors. No matter how many times I listen to any of these albums, the next song, the next riff, sometimes the next second is a surprise. Like those others, Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa is impossible to categorize or genre, but that’s what makes ‘em good. The only category I can come up with is madness, and you can’t label something madness because that’s a goddamm paradox. Looking at the album cover and reading up on these Florida now-California psych pioneers, I don’t think they spend too much time pondering paradoxes. Paradoxes are for the sane.

Madness is a hard thing to capture no matter how many tracks and how many hammers, accordions, keyboards, mandolins, saws, fiddles, gongs, 1970s elementary school teachers, 1980s televisions, 1990s radios (boomboxes?), tambourines and window screens you have to make noise with. All of these things might actually be on this album, with at least half residing in the song “Workaholics Paradise Lost and Found.” When the album is sweet, it’s a cavity (the perfectly titled “Sickly Sweet” and “Spaceship”), when it’s heavy, it’s Bad Brains (Everything…? and “New World Order Society”), when it’s nostalgic, it’s not for the San Fran psych scene or some greater time in rockroll history, it’s for The Facts of Life. “Mindy Cohn” is a half cover of the Facts theme song and part ode to the annoying one with the big cheeks, Natalie. It’s a weird ride. I recommend it for Friday afternoons, home from work, strung out, cracking that first beer.

Here are some more instructions. Don’t pay any attention to the tracklisting or song titles until later. It will ruin the fun. Now I shouldn’t tell you this because it will be doing just that, ruining the fun, but I feel I have to. I’ve been scared shitless twice on this album. The interludes “Danse Bastard Danse” and “Spacejam 92 Revisited” have struck fear into my usually tame heart. For the first, I thought my computer had been infected with a vicious adware campaign for strippers or shampoo. For the second, I thought I was being abducted by aliens again. Man was I glad when I realized it was just music and a happy song about Mindy Cohn was next.

To end the review, I think I’m going to take back everything I said. I’ve done this before, but THIS time, it’s for real. At the end of the instrumental weirdo bass space surf song with violins, “A.R.P,” you hear two voices who I assume are Kreamy’s brainchildren Robert Price and Priya Ray. These two lines just about sum it all up:

“That was a really funny song.”
“Yea it was weird. It didn’t make any sense.”

I’d post an MP3, but you can go here and listen to a bunch of these songs: http://www.kreamy.org/kls_html/mp3.html

-ADAM

Sometimes while I’m listening to Boris, I wonder if I cut them more slack than I do American metal bands. I think I do. I let them get away with a lot more. I shouldn’t. So as of now, I’m going to get past any ethnocentricisisms and review Japanese Heavy Metal Hits Vol. 1-3. It’s great, but not that great.

Japanese Heavy Metal Hits, Vol. 1

I know metal is big in Japan, but I hardly know any of the bands. Today, I did get an album from this Gwar/Poison looking metal band called Sex Virgin Killer. I also like Lite, but that’s more math metal and I don’t know if they are big in Japan. Ignorance aside, Boris has to have some balls to name these 3 singles Japanese Heavy Metal Hits. That’s pretty much saying all heavy metal hits from Japan are theirs, there are only three of them, and oh yea, there are B-Sides that are better than the other japanese heavy metal songs that aren’t hits, and on top of that, some of those B-sides, I’m looking at you “Hey Everyone,” are not even metal. I guess all that thinking can be done in the first 1 minute and 34 seconds of the whole fucking lot because it’s mostly silent for that amount of time and the exact amount of time to read until this point. At 1:35, Boris kicks in and it’s a killer Boris song and it’s called “8.” The vocals sounds like the Beach Boys, which is hard for any band to accomplish, let alone a self-proclaimed HEAVY METAL one. The solos remind me of Boris, which is Boris’ best quality: sounding like no one else.

Japanese Heavy Metal Hits, Vol. 2

“H.M.A.” is the centerpiece of the three discs. The middle tryptych if you pardon the asshole art history class vocabulary. The song is based around a simple metal riff, but it’s nothing to brag about. A thousand metal bands in a thousand moldy basements have that riff. The difference is, a thousand metal bands don’t sing lyrics anywhere in the ballpark of “HEAVY! METAL! ADDICT!” and splatter noises around like a drunk high schooler with a cracked glowstick which also happens to make sounds like a broken guitar. WORSE. ANALOGY. EVER. or really, because I’m feelin’ clever: HORRIBLE! METAPHOR! ASSHOLE! or better yet HIDEOUS! METAPHOR! ADAM! The song is addictive. There’s clapping, a steady rave bass line, weird rusty merry-go-round noises and plenty of Super Fuzz. Side B’s “Black Original” is not an original. It is a Joy Division song that somewhere turns into an Orgy song with much more interesting guitar sounds than the latter and not nearly as much heart as the former.

Japanese Heavy Metal Hits, Vol. 3

The Wata solo song, which is what I call the A SIDE “16:47:52,” is not as great as the actual Wata solo song “Angel,” but it’s definitely useful if you are in the need of a soft and murky Boris song (of which there are few that remain truly soft). There is no beautiful guitar solo and the steady hi-hat is a little annoying. There is a little oooh-aaaah Beach Boys thing going on again. I don’t think I’m crazy about the Beach Boys. Boris has studied Pet Sounds and Smile. If I could speak Japanese, the first thing I’d ask them would be “How fucking great is ‘Good Vibrations?’” And just there, while typing it out, I think I’ve figured out Boris. The same way the Beach Boys invented unabashing in rock music (umm they did right?), Boris carries that torch into metal. Or maybe their just from Japan. And thought Smile was a funny album title.

There is a Vol. 4 add-on exclusive cover of Earth and Fire’s “Seasons,” but I don’t have it. Did you catch that Orgy reference in there? I apologize for putting them in the same sentence as Joy Divison, but geez, where the fuck did that come from? There was a kid I was in middle school with who had an Orgy T-shirt and really liked Our Lady Peace and liked to smoke flavored cigars. I wonder what happened to him.

—-ADAM

The last time I wrote about Double Dagger, in my ignorance and failing attempts at being clever, I completely dismissed a major part of the band: no guitars. How this slipped my mind, I am not sure. The bass sounds like a damn guitar sometimes. The dude plays bass chords that could easily be a guitar with Not Even Slinkys played via a Blues Driver into an Ampeg bass amp, which is what I do. It’s not, though. It’s just a bass. I paid much more attention to it on the bands new EP, Masks, which I bought on iTunes because I was drunk and impatient and needed something new. To my surprise, the digital copy came with art and a booklet. I think this is great. It even opens in my iTunes. Now, if only I could get digital booklets to all the less than legal albums I have on my computer. Someday.

My review of the EP and this band can be summed up with my feelings for the song “Sleeping with the TV On,” a 6 minute and 41 second kick ass punk song. There aren’t many of those. I am of the Minutemen philosophy of cutting the fat, but this song keeps it interesting the whole time. I concentrated on his bass sound, which is one of the most different bass sounds I’ve ever heard. It’s pretty cool to hear him click one pedal off while playing the same bass line. He does cheat with some dual bass tracks towards the middle, but its excusable. The lyrics are the best I’ve heard from this band: starts up in the clouds (when you live two lives, which is your own?) lands on the couch (I’m ready for an all new season of sleeping with the TV on), and ultimately brings the philosophy to real life (you said we’re most beautiful when we struggle/ well sometimes my life has more beauty than I can handle…this beautiful jacked up rent). I need more music like this: honest and different, yet when you listen, you know right away it’s this fucking band.

I see it coming, like a bus around a corner in the rain. I know it’s for me, it’s got my number on it: Bx 2027. The first is the borough, the second, the year. Already the cool-poor and dirty have left Manhattan for Brooklyn- at least 10 years now. And the push for culture and revolution is pushed north, past Queens to the fat little unchartered land of nobodies, the Bronx. Down on Bruckner Boulevard. factory stretch I can already see the smirks of 22 year olds who desperately want to be part of something important. So they suck on mamma’s tit and dadda’s dick for food and rent, a rent that doubled since they showed up simply because of the color of their skin. They don’t work jobs and if they do, it’s at coffee shops and record stores and it’s ironic to them, working every day for money so they bitch more than the bitches who have had sore backs since 16. The rent will be something insane like $2500 for a studio with a leaky ceiling and no door on the bathroom. Many crappy poems will be written about cockroaches and mice, because these people have never dealt with those things to this extreme ever before. Those good souls there now will be forced to move to Brooklyn and occupy the apartments of the evacuees.

The reason is Brooklyn is too Brooklyn. It’s almost there right now. Describing the sound of something or the style of something with Brooklyn as the adjective is no longer a positive and whether it ever was to the sane, who fucking knows? The first immigrants will be those that really feel connected to Brooklyn. They will have had discussions and maybe even written crappy essays on the true Brooklyn or what Brooklyn means to them. They will feel they were at the heart of the happening when it was happening and everyone they talk to will know it. They can describe to you for hours what Brooklyn culture is and we will know they are sincere in their delusions because they will use the word culture like its the only word they know. It will be the first thing from their mouths after they say they are leaving because “Brooklyn is getting too-Brooklyn.” Brooklyn 2027 will be filled with lateness. Like those assholes who finally gained the courage and money to move to Manhattan from Wisconsin or South Jersey only to find Manhattan was not cool anymore. It is a graveyard.

Bronx Park will be the center of the epicenter of the cultural United States of America. It will be McCarren Park times 50. Anyone into music or clever art or being gay will hang in Bronx Park, Crotona Park, Poe Park. The only thing keeping the violence down between the regular inhabitants of these places and the new enlightened ex-Brooklynites is weed. Marijuana will be legal by now so it will keep things civil between the black guys sitting on benches drinking chocolate milk and Hennessey and the young hairy white girls and boys who think Pavement is classic rock.

The factories and abandoned warehouses will be turned into apartments and galleries and ironic bowling alleys. No one will ever score above a 92 and games will cost $14. Shoes $19. By the time this happens the New York Times will finally catch onto what’s happening (the lower underground rags will already have claimed to be there from the beginning), the rent will spike so much, black people and Hispanics and Yemenese and Chinese will be forced to leave. They will start moving to Brooklyn and Queens and maybe even Staten Island, though many will find that trash heap very uninviting. Only Mediterraneans are allowed to live on Staten Island without being harassed by the neighbors and cops and priests. You have to have divine right to live in one of those tiny brick houses with sun stained pink roofs. After the first wave of Bronxians hit Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Washington Heights, the trouble begins. Riots start.

The riots are silenced by the mayor and the police and the peace pushin’ community activists. The hatred is still there, though, and soon the smart figure out the problem: the Bronx. The Bronxians feel it is their duty to fight back so some return and they return with Molotov cocktails and baseball bats. The Brooklynites pre-”Brooklyn is the center of coolness” were pushover. They thought they could make easy money on these kids watering down drinks, opening up bike shops and pizza places. The Bronx learned from Brooklyn’s mistakes. The newbie hipsters had no idea what they were walking into. These people didn’t know what they were getting into when they decided it’d be cute to move to the Bronx to revamp a cultural revolution. In the beginning, July 2027, it’s just a lot of talk. But by August, the first factory blows up killing 30. All white. All wearing clever bright neon clothes. The Daily News puts a burnt 21 year old on the front page. The kid is burnt to crisp with his bright neon green glasses melted to his eyeballs.

Riots break out on Bruckner and head outward in all directions like an ink stain. The delis won’t serve anyone white in their 20s, they get beat up on a regular basis by everyone not their kind. And then their kind becomes something of the past. The hipster community collapses on itself and little groups form out of the rubble. It’s gang violence, only they don’t know how to fight with fists, so they do it with poetry and music and art and graffiti. The art output in New York has never been better because it is practical. The gangs deny ever having been hipsters or ever having been part of anything to do with their enemies. The music gets angrier and the bombings keep happening. A gallery is blown up while a band is playing and it becomes the Altamont of this Century.

The Fordham chem fucks develop a dirty bomb and let it off on Fordham Rd, killing hundreds. The mayor steps in and he is killed by a car bomb. There is no police anymore. The people police themselves with machetes and Molotov cocktails. The hipster gangs, who hate being called hipster gangs, start to get inventive, falling back on that private school upbringing. They blow up a bus yard. Now there’s no way to get laterally across the Bronx because even in 2027, the MTA will have added more unnecessary subway lines to Manhattan and left the people on Gun Hill and Allerton alone to rot on a packed bus with no heat or air conditioning.

What was a police state to the world, even with no police around, becomes a warzone. Riverdalians leave for Florida. The Eastchester crowd by Jacobi have more pride so they stick it out and mostly die when a badly executed H bomb vaporizes the Einstein Center and surrounding hospitals. The economy plunges back to 2011 depths and mamma and dadda have no money left to support Junior’s war against a once relatively peaceful bunch of Bronxians. The National Guard steps in and the hipster gangs relocate to Cincinnati and Austin and Denver. The Bronx is in ruins, worse than after Robert Moses cut the fucker in half. Some under-underground fucks hiding up in Kingsbridge start making incredibly angry music and another wave of extreme music is born. It rivals the rockroll scenes of San Fran 67, Detroit 69, S.California 81, DC 83, Seattle 89. This reaches into the deep rooted Bronx population of high schoolers and malcontent middle schoolers. Race is erased, even as angry as the scene gets. Everyone agrees on one thing: hate the poser. Every year the middle schooler gains an inch, the scene grows bigger and the real cultural revolution starts spreading. The hipsters claim they founded it and try to mimic it in Ohio, Colorado and Texas, but the youngins step in there, too. They take it over and put to shame anything a hairy white kid in tight jeans and a Casio keyboard can do. On the alternate side, hip hop gets dirtier than ever. It goes back to the street, starting where it all started, in the Bronx. Yet instead of rehashing that old shit, they go back to older shit like bebop and free jazz. Hip hop brings in jazz drumming and bebop skatting. Some great music is made in 2028 and 2029 and by the time the first snowfall of winter hits, a day after New Years 2030, it will all be dead and lifeless. For years, kids will try to mimic what happened there at that time and fail fail fail miserably.

- ADAM

I think the most uncharacteristic album cover of all time. One of the best.