What is your snowmageddon soundtrack? now playing RAGNAROK edition

[ellaguru]

Really, though, at Machinefabriek's release rate, Nick's only barely keeping up.

[narlus]

Personally, I find the early stuff a real mixed bag. Some good stuff, a lot of weird, uninteresting, and unpleasant stuff. 

Revising my earlier recommendation: Start with Julius Caesar. Don't stop.

interview w/ Callahan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/31/bill-callahan-apocalypse

[auto-da-fey]

my lady just texted me from the gym with some lyrics to ask what shitty song she was hearing.

it turns out to be Pink Floyd's "Learning to Fly."

my god, this song is the lamest thing I've ever heard. maybe this is why I despised the band so much as a teenager? probably not, but I could create a plausible narrative around it.

[fishjim]

"Learning to Fly" is their worst, IMHO.

[ellaguru]

Yeah, part of me wants to note that Gilmour wasn't Floyd's lyrical mastermind and that A Momentary Lapse of Reason is far from their height.

But really their lyrics were never very good, even on the stuff that I like a fair bit.

[RavingLunatic]

Red Apple Falls is my favorite of his, with Knock Knock close behind. I seem to be one of the few people who love late Smog but hate the Bill Callahan stuff. His most recent stuff bores me to death.

how can this song POSSIBLY be labeled as 'boring'? it's one of the finest songs I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXHmWxuRxJk

I like that one quite a bit, and I think it's on a completely different level from any song off of Woke On A Whaleheart, which to me is maybe the nadir of Callahan's discography. I probably didn't give Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle a proper chance, mostly because I hated Whaleheart so much. I may revisit that one.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Yeah, part of me wants to note that Gilmour wasn't Floyd's lyrical mastermind and that A Momentary Lapse of Reason is far from their height.

But really their lyrics were never very good, even on the stuff that I like a fair bit.

I liked most of Syd's.

[edison]

Red Apple Falls is my favorite of his, with Knock Knock close behind. I seem to be one of the few people who love late Smog but hate the Bill Callahan stuff. His most recent stuff bores me to death.

how can this song POSSIBLY be labeled as 'boring'? it's one of the finest songs I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXHmWxuRxJk

I like that one quite a bit, and I think it's on a completely different level from any song off of Woke On A Whaleheart, which to me is maybe the nadir of Callahan's discography. I probably didn't give Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle a proper chance, mostly because I hated Whaleheart so much. I may revisit that one.

I love, love, love Woke on a Whaleheart. It's a bit like those later Leonard Cohen albums so many people hate because of the arrangements and production, I think. And it does have a couple of not-so-great songs, but "A Man Needs A Woman Or A Man To Be A Man", "Honeymoon Child", "Sycamore", "Diamond Dancer"... All classic, to me.

[Nick Ink]

Wow, this Kurt Vile sounds a lot like Grant lee Phillips

[coldforge]

"Learning to Fly" is their worst, IMHO.

The video is so much worse than the song. Solo's not bad, if you're in that kind of mood.

[auto-da-fey]

while I have, as previously noted, long been over my teen-punk Floyd hating, I have never been in that kind of mood, ever.

since I have 15 minutes to kill and a stack of CDs to put away, maybe I'll log my recent "now playing"s:

The La's, s/t: "There She Goes" is lovely, but this is one boring-ass album. blame Steve Lillywhite?

Steely Dan, Everything Must Go: haven't played this much in the past six years, but I dig its breezy, confident flow; sure, the 70s are over and the Dan's relevance with them, but lyrics like "It's high time for a walk on the real side/Let's admit the bastards beat us/I move to dissolve the corporation/In a pool of margaritas" are timeless.

Hanoi Rocks: Self Destruction Blues: midway between New York Dolls and Warrant, there is something irresistible. every time I listen to this--which is rare--I'm taken aback by how solid the songwriting (and harmonies) are. they just look like they should be a worse band than they are.

Nothing Painted Blue, Power Trips Down Lovers' Lanes: in 17 years of listening (!!!) I've never been able to love this band as much as I love the idea of this band. but "White Bicycles" is one place where the two come close to converging.

Bright Eyes, The People's Key: am I a little ashamed of hitting my thirties and listening to Conor Oberst? sure. but this album, filler notwithstanding, is the best sounding thing he's ever done, and I can forgive his folkie-soothsayer nonsense in the guitar crunch and keyboard swirls of this album. I like it more than REM's new one.

Butterglory, Crumble: was 90's lo-fi really this dull? because it didn't seem so then, but man does this make me not to want to revisit other things I hold dear from tenth grade.

The Elected, Sun Sun Sun: the dude from Rilo Kiley does early-70s L.A. folk-rock. as bad as it sounds, but I feel kindly toward it. 2006 was a pretty good year until I left Los Angeles, guess that's why.

Screaming Trees, Dust: wow, this one holds up--pretty tight all the way from "Halo of Ashes" to "Gospel Plow." never got into these guys beyond this, but almost makes me consider it.

Posies, Every Kind of Light: this felt like a bummer when it came out in 2005, but listening to it now, it's aged quite well. except the weird Adrien Brody/Shaq diss on "Sweethearts of Rodeo Drive," I never got that.

[ellaguru]

Steely Dan, Everything Must Go: haven't played this much in the past six years, but I dig its breezy, confident flow; sure, the 70s are over and the Dan's relevance with them, but lyrics like "It's high time for a walk on the real side/Let's admit the bastards beat us/I move to dissolve the corporation/In a pool of margaritas" are timeless.

I never moved on to that one, as I didn't find Two Against Nature appealing. It didn't really seem like a bad album, so much as I found it confusing that those guys could have so totally ignored that any music at all had been made by anyone since Gaucho.

[coldforge]

Coincidentally enough, I just had a massive sustained Danfest this morning. And nary a single post-Gaucho track made an appearance. I was gonna queue up Jack of Speed, but then I forgot. Sometimes I think that I'm missing out on like, what, three records? by my favorite band ever, and sometimes I think it's just best to pretend they sailed out in 83 and never came back.

[jm]

Man, reading back a few posts, gilmour-era floyd is some straight garbage. Then again, I think that this ironic* love of syd-era floyd is pretty fucking obnoxious, honestly.

* go ahead and tell me it's not ironic, liar.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Are you serious? Syd Barrett era Floyd stands so far above any other Pink Floyd in my mind that I will sometimes forget that I can't just mention to other people that I like Pink Floyd, because they'll think I'm talking about Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall. I don't even LIKE that stuff much, but I LOVE Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, and am even more enamored of the non-LP singles from that era. For example:

Pink Floyd - See Emily Play

Go ahead, tell me that song's not awesome, liar.

[Babar]

Yeah. I think Dark Side is the best album but dude, Syd-era Floyd was great. The post-Syd pre-Dark Floyd was very interesting. I'm gonna end up having listened to everything in the PF discography not because I think everything they've done is brilliant (most of it is probably bad) but because their history is so unique and fascinating to me.

[coldforge]

Nuts to Syd. Shit is hella precious and dated. Wish U Wr Here!

[Andrew_TSKS]

I'm totally cool with other people who do not enjoy Syd's stuff as much as I do feeling the way I do, but I am rather sensitive to charges that I am pretending to like what I like, esp. when it's supposedly because I'm being ironic. I can barely perceive irony--expressing it in that fashion would be quite difficult for me.

[davy]

I've given it three or four really solid attempts, but in the end, the Syd stuff just kinda sails by me without making much of an impression. Mark me down for the 70s stuff.

[jm]

Are you serious? Syd Barrett era Floyd stands so far above any other Pink Floyd in my mind that I will sometimes forget that I can't just mention to other people that I like Pink Floyd, because they'll think I'm talking about Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall. I don't even LIKE that stuff much, but I LOVE Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, and am even more enamored of the non-LP singles from that era. For example:

Pink Floyd - See Emily Play

Go ahead, tell me that song's not awesome, liar.

I'll grant that See Emily Play is pretty much the best thing Syd-era Floyd cranked out. I just have a hard time believing anyone coming down hard against later stuff but expressing any kind of genuine appreciation for the earlier (specifically Syd-heavy) stuff. Is it because they sound like they don't know how to play their instruments? Is it because the lyrics are precious and nonsensical? Is it because people have to like a band with an unhinged person in it (cf., Moby Grape, which I do genuinely enjoy)?

Also, I do find it interesting that people seem to assume that when you say you think non-Syd Floyd is superior, they assume you think Dark Side is the be-all end-all. There's a shitload of non-Syd, non-DSoM Floyd that is extremely well-constructed music, the means of producing which being significantly ahead of their time, etc. All of this, of course, makes me sound like I enjoy evangelizing about Pink Floyd, but I really don't, so much as I just plain don't get either of the extremes.

[jm]

Also, totally agree with adf re: that La's record. Really like the one song, the rest is nebulous britpop mush to me.

[Andrew_TSKS]

I just have a hard time believing anyone coming down hard against later stuff but expressing any kind of genuine appreciation for the earlier (specifically Syd-heavy) stuff.

Lots of people fucking love stuff I hate. I may have even felt this way about some of it (the kind of barely-perceptible ambient stuff that Nick Ink loves, or alternately, extreme noise) at points in my life, but these days I think it's kinda shitty to take that attitude. I have come to find appreciation for at least some small facet of almost everything, and even if I can't appreciate certain hugely popular genres much at all (modern R&B, modern mainstream country), I wouldn't go around calling millions of people irony-obsessed posers, ya know? And I don't think you would either. However, it does seem to reach a certain level of acceptance, once a form of music is outside the mainstream enough, to make sweeping generalizations about all fans of said music as hipper-than-thou posers who just want to have something to point to when they make the argument that they're better/cooler/have more obscure tastes than you do. I won't deny that some people adopt "tastes" of a relatively extreme sort just to seem cool and edgy or whatever, but in my experience this is the province of teenaged System Of A Down fans who get grumpy when "Chop Suey" becomes a radio hit, you know? It's immature. I don't think people are actually acting that way on this board. God knows I'm not.

As for your specific questions:

Is it because they sound like they don't know how to play their instruments?

I'm widely on record as being deeply suspicious of musical proficiency. I generally find that it produces overdone wankery, and that the best pop music is made by people who either can't play their instruments that well, or realize that it's better not to do so. This probably marks at least the dozenth time that I've made the assertion that "Psychotic Reaction" by the Count Five is better than anything Emerson Lake And Palmer ever did, and if that really is the direction my tastes run, how weird can it possibly be that I think songs like "See Emily Play" or "Candy And A Currant Bun" are awesome? I think that's probably in character for me, you know?

Is it because the lyrics are precious and nonsensical?

Sometimes that sort of thing is really fun! In "Candy And A Currant Bun," Syd sings "Ice cream tastes good in the afternoon." That's an awesome turn of phrase, even though it's profoundly unimportant and obvious as a sentiment. And then later on, when he got really whimsical, he sang shit like "Down by the riverside, feeding ducks in the afternoon tide" (a lyric from "Apples And Oranges," which was actually listed as my location in my LPTJ profile for something like three years) and ended a verse in "Bike," during which he'd described in detail how awesome his bike was, "I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it!" That's awesome. Seriously, I know some of those goofy, whimsical lines descended from encroaching madness (more about that in a moment), but they are funny and entertaining and enjoyable to listen to, at least from my personal perspective. So yeah, maybe "precious and nonsensical" is something I like about Syd-era Pink Floyd. What, is that weird?

Is it because people have to like a band with an unhinged person in it (cf., Moby Grape, which I do genuinely enjoy)?

In all seriousness here... yes and no. I don't particularly enjoy the exploitation of the mentally ill for musical entertainment, and I feel like some mentally ill musicians have fallen under that spell at times, especially in the post-punk era (see Wesley Willis). But what I do find interesting is the way their mental illnesses sometimes lead them to make very unique music. You can see that all over the place in Syd Barrett's work, especially on solo songs like "Octopus"/"Clowns And Jugglers." Those links are two different versions of the same song, which he recorded on both his first and second solo records. You'll notice that the song structure, which is loose at best, is totally different from one version to the next. Syd--like, by the way, Daniel Johnston, another incredibly talented mentally ill musician--had a very loose idea of how to put riffs and verses together, and would tend to change to the next riff, or not do so, based on whatever he felt like doing at that moment. It made it really hard for backing bands to follow him, because he'd sing a song differently every time he played it, so they couldn't learn the rhythms, really. But it also makes for an interesting and unpredictable listening experience, and there's something great about the way the choruses still contain that awesome melody, which makes the whole song work, even when he's pretty much disassembling and reassembling the rest of the song as he goes. It's mental illness at work, and it's nothing to laugh at or take any kind of weird attitude about. For some people I'm sure it's an impossible listen. But I find it immensely interesting and enjoyable to hear.

Getting back to Syd's time in Pink Floyd, which was over before he started really getting into this sort of midsong deconstruction, he nonetheless created some incredibly bizarre pop songs as part of his time with them. There's the above-linked "Apples And Oranges," which wanders incredibly far afield after the second chorus, into something that stretches the definition of a bridge/middle-eight section so far that it snaps, only to suddenly jump back into a third verse with the jaunty cry, "I thought you might like to know! I'm a lorry driver, man..." Wait, what? But that rules! The final Pink Floyd session with Barrett on guitar is even weirder. There's Richard Wright's "Remember A Day," which has both Syd and Gilmour on it, and features a complete non-sequitur of a lead guitar line running through the entire song which seems to have nothing to do with anything else going on at any point. That's Syd, basically taking free reign to do whatever he wanted in the moment. And yet, it makes the song, as I'm sure the rest of the band recognized, or they would have rerecorded it for release on A Saucerful Of Secrets. There are two songs that were never officially released, though they've been bootlegged to death--the proto-punk "Vegetable Man," featuring an awesome overdriven rhythm guitar part that sounds like prime era garage rock, and which was later covered by the Television Personalities, who learned it from bootlegs; and the positively ridiculous "Scream Thy Last Scream (Old Woman With A Casket)." This song features a second vocal track that is basically David Seville's Chipmunks singing along with Syd. No idea why, and yes, it gets ridiculous (like when the band, in the midst of tracking this part, crack up laughing, then leave the giggles in the finished song), but it's totally out of nowhere, and probably nothing you'll ever hear someone in perfect possession of all mental faculties do. Plus, it's entertaining and fun, and the rest of the song is really fucking catchy, with an awesome false ending most of the way through. And then, finally, there's "Jugband Blues," the only Syd-penned track to actually make the second Floyd album. On this song, Syd changes the riff every two bars or so, and there have got to be a dozen parts of the song, including a line stolen from a Patti Page song, a twenty-second spaced out psychedelic breakdown that sounds like someone's mind coming apart, and which is invaded by an actual fucking JUG BAND playing, swirling around from speaker to speaker, before the whole thing stops like someone scratched the needle off a record, only to be replaced by 30 seconds of the saddest folk song ever, ending with Syd asking "What exactly is a dream? What exactly is a joke?" That's insanity, sure, but it's also one of the coolest songs I've ever heard, and the last line breaks my heart a little bit.

So, does mental illness give the band a certain cachet that makes their music more desirable? No. If anything, it's fucking tragic, and I really wish Syd could have gotten it together and come back to the music world at some point--the way Roky Erickson, by the way, has (a fact that overjoys me--he's another mentally ill musician who also happens to be fucking brilliant). But does it perhaps open the door for brilliant shit that the world would never have otherwise seen? Sometimes, yes, and I would argue that, in the case of Pink Floyd, the brilliant, insane shit Syd Barrett did during his two years in the band is more interesting and BETTER than anything else they ever did without him. It's just an opinion, but it is mine, and clearly (based on the amount of virtual ink I'm able to spill about it at a moment's notice) I feel strongly about it.

[narlus]

ihave been digging the jazz reinterpretations of the Jesus Lizard song book.

they even kept the 4 letter title convention...Horn, and Keys.



http://www.shinygreymonotone.com/2011/01/jazzus-lizard-horn.html

[Babar]

I just have a hard time believing anyone coming down hard against later stuff but expressing any kind of genuine appreciation for the earlier (specifically Syd-heavy) stuff.

Lots of people fucking love stuff I hate. I may have even felt this way about some of it (the kind of barely-perceptible ambient stuff that Nick Ink loves, or alternately, extreme noise) at points in my life, but these days I think it's kinda shitty to take that attitude. I have come to find appreciation for at least some small facet of almost everything, and even if I can't appreciate certain hugely popular genres much at all (modern R&B, modern mainstream country), I wouldn't go around calling millions of people irony-obsessed posers, ya know? And I don't think you would either. However, it does seem to reach a certain level of acceptance, once a form of music is outside the mainstream enough, to make sweeping generalizations about all fans of said music as hipper-than-thou posers who just want to have something to point to when they make the argument that they're better/cooler/have more obscure tastes than you do. I won't deny that some people adopt "tastes" of a relatively extreme sort just to seem cool and edgy or whatever, but in my experience this is the province of teenaged System Of A Down fans who get grumpy when "Chop Suey" becomes a radio hit, you know? It's immature. I don't think people are actually acting that way on this board. God knows I'm not.

As for your specific questions:

Is it because they sound like they don't know how to play their instruments?

I'm widely on record as being deeply suspicious of musical proficiency. I generally find that it produces overdone wankery, and that the best pop music is made by people who either can't play their instruments that well, or realize that it's better not to do so. This probably marks at least the dozenth time that I've made the assertion that "Psychotic Reaction" by the Count Five is better than anything Emerson Lake And Palmer ever did, and if that really is the direction my tastes run, how weird can it possibly be that I think songs like "See Emily Play" or "Candy And A Currant Bun" are awesome? I think that's probably in character for me, you know?

Is it because the lyrics are precious and nonsensical?

Sometimes that sort of thing is really fun! In "Candy And A Currant Bun," Syd sings "Ice cream tastes good in the afternoon." That's an awesome turn of phrase, even though it's profoundly unimportant and obvious as a sentiment. And then later on, when he got really whimsical, he sang shit like "Down by the riverside, feeding ducks in the afternoon tide" (a lyric from "Apples And Oranges," which was actually listed as my location in my LPTJ profile for something like three years) and ended a verse in "Bike," during which he'd described in detail how awesome his bike was, "I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it!" That's awesome. Seriously, I know some of those goofy, whimsical lines descended from encroaching madness (more about that in a moment), but they are funny and entertaining and enjoyable to listen to, at least from my personal perspective. So yeah, maybe "precious and nonsensical" is something I like about Syd-era Pink Floyd. What, is that weird?

Is it because people have to like a band with an unhinged person in it (cf., Moby Grape, which I do genuinely enjoy)?

In all seriousness here... yes and no. I don't particularly enjoy the exploitation of the mentally ill for musical entertainment, and I feel like some mentally ill musicians have fallen under that spell at times, especially in the post-punk era (see Wesley Willis). But what I do find interesting is the way their mental illnesses sometimes lead them to make very unique music. You can see that all over the place in Syd Barrett's work, especially on solo songs like "Octopus"/"Clowns And Jugglers." Those links are two different versions of the same song, which he recorded on both his first and second solo records. You'll notice that the song structure, which is loose at best, is totally different from one version to the next. Syd--like, by the way, Daniel Johnston, another incredibly talented mentally ill musician--had a very loose idea of how to put riffs and verses together, and would tend to change to the next riff, or not do so, based on whatever he felt like doing at that moment. It made it really hard for backing bands to follow him, because he'd sing a song differently every time he played it, so they couldn't learn the rhythms, really. But it also makes for an interesting and unpredictable listening experience, and there's something great about the way the choruses still contain that awesome melody, which makes the whole song work, even when he's pretty much disassembling and reassembling the rest of the song as he goes. It's mental illness at work, and it's nothing to laugh at or take any kind of weird attitude about. For some people I'm sure it's an impossible listen. But I find it immensely interesting and enjoyable to hear.

Getting back to Syd's time in Pink Floyd, which was over before he started really getting into this sort of midsong deconstruction, he nonetheless created some incredibly bizarre pop songs as part of his time with them. There's the above-linked "Apples And Oranges," which wanders incredibly far afield after the second chorus, into something that stretches the definition of a bridge/middle-eight section so far that it snaps, only to suddenly jump back into a third verse with the jaunty cry, "I thought you might like to know! I'm a lorry driver, man..." Wait, what? But that rules! The final Pink Floyd session with Barrett on guitar is even weirder. There's Richard Wright's "Remember A Day," which has both Syd and Gilmour on it, and features a complete non-sequitur of a lead guitar line running through the entire song which seems to have nothing to do with anything else going on at any point. That's Syd, basically taking free reign to do whatever he wanted in the moment. And yet, it makes the song, as I'm sure the rest of the band recognized, or they would have rerecorded it for release on A Saucerful Of Secrets. There are two songs that were never officially released, though they've been bootlegged to death--the proto-punk "Vegetable Man," featuring an awesome overdriven rhythm guitar part that sounds like prime era garage rock, and which was later covered by the Television Personalities, who learned it from bootlegs; and the positively ridiculous "Scream Thy Last Scream (Old Woman With A Casket)." This song features a second vocal track that is basically David Seville's Chipmunks singing along with Syd. No idea why, and yes, it gets ridiculous (like when the band, in the midst of tracking this part, crack up laughing, then leave the giggles in the finished song), but it's totally out of nowhere, and probably nothing you'll ever hear someone in perfect possession of all mental faculties do. Plus, it's entertaining and fun, and the rest of the song is really fucking catchy, with an awesome false ending most of the way through. And then, finally, there's "Jugband Blues," the only Syd-penned track to actually make the second Floyd album. On this song, Syd changes the riff every two bars or so, and there have got to be a dozen parts of the song, including a line stolen from a Patti Page song, a twenty-second spaced out psychedelic breakdown that sounds like someone's mind coming apart, and which is invaded by an actual fucking JUG BAND playing, swirling around from speaker to speaker, before the whole thing stops like someone scratched the needle off a record, only to be replaced by 30 seconds of the saddest folk song ever, ending with Syd asking "What exactly is a dream? What exactly is a joke?" That's insanity, sure, but it's also one of the coolest songs I've ever heard, and the last line breaks my heart a little bit.

So, does mental illness give the band a certain cachet that makes their music more desirable? No. If anything, it's fucking tragic, and I really wish Syd could have gotten it together and come back to the music world at some point--the way Roky Erickson, by the way, has (a fact that overjoys me--he's another mentally ill musician who also happens to be fucking brilliant). But does it perhaps open the door for brilliant shit that the world would never have otherwise seen? Sometimes, yes, and I would argue that, in the case of Pink Floyd, the brilliant, insane shit Syd Barrett did during his two years in the band is more interesting and BETTER than anything else they ever did without him. It's just an opinion, but it is mine, and clearly (based on the amount of virtual ink I'm able to spill about it at a moment's notice) I feel strongly about it.

qft

[jm]

Andrew TSKS, that was awesome.  Thank you.