My labor of sloth, the often immature veil of cruelty and unneeded pop culture over-literacy, the glowing divide between Earles-Can’t-Really-Write-So-Hot-And-Bullshits-It-With-Joke-Saturation and Dunlap-Can-Actually-Write-Well-But-Needs-To-Unpack-Some-Of-This-Nonsense, the “comedy journal” enjoyed immensely by 50 or 60 people WORLDWIDE (to the joyful end that a couple of them went on to become, or were at the time, magazine editors), the footnote that won’t get written…..
These are reviews (my CW credo: “I’ll Review Anything!!!”) that were slated for the lost, or some may say, aborted issue, written amid an unconscious but furious effort on our part to keep a finished product from surfacing. They probably date from ’00 ‘til early ’02. Who doesn’t LOVE to read out of date reviews? Who?
(Warning: Does not hold up)
(Warning: We’re much better writers now)
U.S. Maple Acre Thrills (Drag City) Stalwarts stray from the avant-tedious ditch they were digging and you were loving, further into bubblegum land and turn out a record that I would pay money for. Used. Some of it really triggers the good stuff, melodically, and to their credit, they have a slithering trademark sound that garners them a much less depressing slot than any other band trying to do this stuff in the year 2001.
The Gospel According To Philip K. Dick: A Documentary (Written, Directed, Produced, Botched To Fuck by two complete imbeciles)
I give you the Freddy got Fingered of documentaries. A documentary so hilariously bad, that it may prove to be the most entertaining thing you’ve ever witnessed. I will put my writing skills to the true test in trying to accurately describe this debacle. A well-fed cast of the most boring people on earth share their memories in an almost universally disjointed fashion: Paul Williams synapses are almost firing out of his eye sockets, causing his speech to shoot floor-ward every five seconds. There’s this revisited female anti-depressant repository that I forget the name of, a frosty-haired spinner of yarns that would turn a crank-soaked bloodstream into gelatinous sleep-friendly goo. Oooh…….I can’t forget the various forgettable webmasters of a coupla different Dick websites……….fish in a rather restrictive barrel of course, so I mustn’t waste your time with tails of their flowing manes and Club Cracker encrusted beards. Nor can I blaze witticisms across Robert Anton Wilsons formidable cranium, no doubt housing that breed of over active imagination that keeps the best of them from ever getting laid. Rounding out the visible cast is some innocuous convention floor-licker that does that same aging-sci-fi-geek schtick that you’re seen so many times over……the hyperactive “holy-shit-not-only-is-someone-actually-listening-to-me-but-I-have-camera-on-pointed-at-my-wing-like-jaws-so-I-must-cram-as-much-double-speed-irrelevance-into-my-segments” type that will trap you in a corner with his baby-back rib-laced breath. None of these variables painted my face the color of surprise, no, no, no, no. It was something else altogether that had me gasping for air, reaching for the phone to call whomever would listen to a frantic yet poor description of this utter miscarriage. Well, two things actually.
At first it will just seem like an intro, a misguided backdrop for which to present the opening credits. (review never finished)
Bones, Riding In Cars With Boys, and Joyride – all movies that I saw in the theater.
I’ll go see anything. Anything. Just to be sitting in a theater, preferably alone, but I’ll shell out the bucks for anything if it’s playing in a theater. Namely anything remotely comedy or horror based. This particular string of disparate dookie contains not one, but two movies with Steve Zahn…….the next Joe Pesci. We’re getting Steve Zahn in a lesser Raging Bull moment now, before he goes off to make The Super or something. No, that’s for too much credit. Bad comparison. (review never finished)
The Convocation of………. Pyramid Technology (Tiger Style) This is the good, logical rock made by people when they are finished with children’s music (you know it as “hardcore”). People in their mid to late 20’s rarely choose to continue with the oxymoronic “dignified hardcore” route, and I consider that one of life’s little nod’s to good judgement. Throngs of half-wits in their Gutter Garanimals, crammed into a closet, pretending to pay attention to someone barking a half-researched pop-quiz about travesties that conveniently occur thousands of miles away – this will be laughed at by my children. This rock and roll band, led by a man who is/was a hero to thousands of people who share the common thread of smelling like an eight-day old Happy Meal, is a crafted breeze of wavy, whining, semi-urban-psych guitars tensing out in front of the requisite first-wave post-punk rhythm section……..and I can certainly deal with it. You can hear the care that went into this, and I don’t mean the kind that someone is trying to force down your throat.
Jon Wahl and the Amadans Sour Suite (Birdman) The mid-to-upper echelon is always trying to convince you that something “unassuming” is “really good.” These “unassuming” artists of yore are at times so very precise in their awfulness. Little Feat is a good example.
The Willard Grant Conspiracy/Telefunk go to bat with the ninth In The Fishtank EP (Touch and Go)
Two roommates at the tail end of co-existence, not having spoken a word to one another for weeks, try to drown each other out from separate bedrooms, armed respectively with some early Al Stewart and Portishead. Nobody is going to like this record.
The Chair and the The Chamber
These primetime TV (or, as I like to call it, the “Playtime of the Gods”) fiascos are the first (?) contenders in a genre that I have coined “Torture Trivia.” Blink and you missed it (especially by the time this fucking magazine…..er…..”journal” comes out). The Chamber has already been cancelled, allegedly due to its dangerous nature, but my cheddar is on the fact that it was just Too Funny For Network TV. (review never finished)
The Black Dice
The band and their music
So noise records get people laid these days? The people who make the noise records of 2002 aren’t poorly dressed nutballs living in their aunt’s basement? I’m sorry, I must have just awoken from an extra long nap to a day when ultra-hipsters can fart out a skree-fest and get it released on a revered label to nudge-nudge are-you-in-the-club? acclaim. Maybe I’ll go do that. Ok, I’m back. I just made a record.
Just so I am not writing out of my loaf-pincher here, I performed a little experiment. Call it research. Call it caring, for you, the reader. Being a method writer, I sat in the middle of the room flipping through an issue of Bananafish and trying to mentally convince myself that I had not touched a woman’s vagina in over a year. Suddenly I was transformed into a piles-stricken ball-gag taste-tester who sells Amway and prefers his floor carpeted. Nah……not really…..oh wait!!! They’re spazzing out now!! Neato. Never heard this before…no…..totally fresh. Bark through a phase shifter some more in the name of groundbreaking art. I also live unbeknownst that, from 1985 – 1998, about a trillion albums that sound exactly like this were spit out in editions of five hundred with “paste-and-apply-pictures-of-doodoo” Kinkos artwork. Can I be in The Black Dice now? Though I got the LP for free, and because I don’t see it handing me back my 23 minutes on fiestaware anytime soon, I tried to at least turn the experience into a tioletside read (wipe with it, and it can house the next Caroliner LP!!!).
“Clever” movies for stupid people
This increasingly popular and profitable genre includes the following as touchstones: Almost Famous – actually, anything by Sir Crowe could qualify. High Fidelity – I worked in an independent record store for five years, and Jurassic Park III struck a stronger chord with me.
Todd Solendz is here to tell it like it is.
Hey, I’ll bet you didn’t know that the suburbs where all fucked up. Todd is here to expose the dark underbelly, hey maybe he should get a job turning the equally as predictable Feral House Publications catalog into a bunch of insufferable documentaries. What a mind blower. Todd really sticks it to ‘em. The glossy magazine coverage loves to make reference to his “trademark thick horned-rimmed glasses and sweaters and buttondowns” that “fool you into thinking he is a biology teacher instead of a ‘groundbreaking’ filmmaker.” No, he looks exactly like what he is: An eternal indie-rocker making paint by numbers shamesploitation (I did not coin that) that people like to call “shock” cinema. Esquire Magazine even called his ass out. Todd is so “intense”, you know, like a Mike Patton project. “In your fucking face.” I hate to break this to you, but I can handle it. I don’t need some one-trick pony filmmaker to show me how fucked up life is.
This Is Next Year
A Compilation of Brooklyn NY based-bands
On Arena Rock Records
Oh god….this is the best news I’ve had all day!! Nada Surf are on this, so, if next year is 1993, I HAVE A LOT OF THINGS TO DO DIFFERENTLY!! Then there’s They Might Be Giants, so, if next year is 1988, (review never finished)
Rope Fever (Family Vineyard)
Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. (Squealer Music)
Snowglobe Our Land Brains (Bardot Records)
San Agustin with Suzanne Langville Passing Song (Family Vineyard)
John Wilkes Booze “Marc Bolan Makes Me Want to Fuck” / “Whiskey and Pills” (Family Vineyard)
The MX-80 Sound “So Clear” / “Lights Out” (Family Vineyard)
I’m reviewing/blathering about all of these releases in one long breath because that’s how I was exposed to all of them for the first time……over a 24 hour period. It could be said that this selection adopts a psychedelic bent, but Rope are not a psychedelic band unless you gain an otherworldly essence from falling down a rotting staircase somewhere in Manhattan circa 1987. Nicky Cave’s From Her To Eternity is not a “fucked up” record by any stretch of fuckeduptitude, but these guys really want it to be and they have…….well…….they have made the record that Polish shut-in’s that relocate to Chicago make. Let me elaborate: It’s suffocating, quietly violent, and devoid of a drummer…..so it’s exactly what the press sheet says it is (therefore receiving an A Fucking Plus for existing in descriptive harmony with its one-sheet)……the sound resulting from a 90’s cuddling up to much of the Amphetamine Reptile catalog, a new millinium licking at the drunk sweat of The Dirty Three, and a tomorrow distilling worth out of the tireless Michael Gira. That’s not a quote, that’s me. Only the names are the same.
Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. — The Japanese do it better. This is why they can get away with names like (review never finished)
Maserati The Language Of Cities CD (Kindercore)
Next time, do not send the photo-enhanced one sheet. A release will not be reviewed if I am conscious of a member’s ponytail.