http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/ en Copyright 2009 Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:45:58 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Calculating Infinity and of course there's still loads of turned-up-loud slowcore much of which don't get me wrong I can totally groove on a lot of the time no matter how boring it generally is but pretty much the only stuff that seems to crack open the brainpan right now is grind. If like me you thirst for grind that reaches for the stars because it wants to burn off its own hands just to see how that would feel then I recommend the new album by these guys to you because it is a record which challenges itself to reach for excellence in the field of grind even though most of the stuff on it is two years old. It's on Willowtip and I will pretty much go to the mat for Willowtip these days because three times outta five they are bringing the hairpin-turn stuff that doesn't sound weak or contrived. This in 2009 is an accomplishment because so many records sound like the engineer was actually using his anus to move the faders. Helpful hint from LPTJ, don't use your anus to move the faders. Just listen to the new Defeatist. Thank you.]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/06/breaking_it_down_for_you.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/06/breaking_it_down_for_you.html Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:45:58 -0500 Skin of Evil is one of my favorite albums of the year; it has personality. I love things with personality. Sometimes people use the term as short-hand for "filled, to a fault, with quirks," but that's not what I mean. I just mean, there isn't much out there that sounds like this; the first comparison I think of is Suicide, only less frenetic and more organic. But that's just the beginning. Skin of Evil has lots of looks, and musically, they're all winners. I'm especially partial to the grand karaoke choral groove of "Nineteen, One God, One Dull Star" & how it codas out into a more despairing version of Youssou N'Dour at the end of "In Your Eyes," but that's just one moment. The album is tremendous and does not skimp on its peaks. The one thing about it is the concept around which its beautifully-crafted lyrics turn. I'm not sure about it. I'm not sure how I feel about a heroine named Donna who is worshipped and feared by all the men in her life. Or, rather: I am sure how I feel about the attribution of mystical siren-like powers to a woman in a story. I feel suspicious. I'm pretty sure all the political stuff I feel suspicious about is also in Mercer's mind as he writes - the few real glimpses we get of Donna seem more human than the version of her we otherwise get from the album's narrating voices, who elevate her to the status of a cartoon god. "We quickly came to love her/but I most of all came to love her," one boasts, and to my ear this sounds like Mercer calling bullshit on the narrator. Is it? One hopes. Sue me: I'm a hand-wringer by nature, and I hate to think of indie dudes getting further encouragement for the idea that it's somehow romantic to wear your essentializing obsessions on your sleeve. Still, I wouldn't bother to say anything if it weren't an album-of-the-year candidate, which it is. Each listen peels back another layer and finds something even shinier beneath. Find it, listen to it, give it the close attention it deserves. Reflect on its characters, but scrutinize their motives, and ask yourself whether what they feel is love - is it? Or is it rather the reflection of their own faces, which is a building, which is on fire? I suspect yes, in the end. I hope these characters, before they evaporate, share my suspicions.]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/06/woe_indeed.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/06/woe_indeed.html Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:35:51 -0500 Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue with the Stars is a masterpiece. It is both exemplary within its discipline (black metal, duh) and forward-looking; it attains the latter quality without coming off like a grade-schooler desperate for attention. Plenty of the black metal one hears praised in recent years is just fine but not really all that special in the broader context, but Memoria Vetusta II keeps truly elite company and could hold its own on a shelf made up only of the acknowledged milestones. On vinyl, its four sides suggest an inner development that can be called "symphonic" with a straight face. By the time I got to the soloing on the fourth side I was cheering. If you like black metal, past or present, you should seek this one out.]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/05/rises_applauds_hoots_hollers_s.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/05/rises_applauds_hoots_hollers_s.html Tue, 19 May 2009 11:55:08 -0500 Too many birds in one tree. Too many birds in one tree, And the sky is full of black and screaming leaves; the sky is full of black, and screaming. And one more bird, then one more bird. And one last bird, And another. One last black bird without a place to land. One last black bird without a place to be turns around in hopes to find the place it last knew rest. O black bird, over black rain burn; This is not where you last knew rest. You fly all night to sleep on stone - the heartless rest that in the morn will be gone. You fly all night to sleep on stone, to return to the tree with too many birds. If. If you. If you could. If you could only. If you could only stop. If you could only stop your. If you could only stop your heart. If you could only stop your heart beat. If you could only stop your heart beat for. If you could only stop your heart beat for one heart. If you could only stop your heart beat for one heart beat. Someday you will brag that you were around when stuff this good was being written.]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/05/remaining_aware.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/05/remaining_aware.html Sun, 10 May 2009 11:47:33 -0500 I would care more about the news you send me if you didn't send me news five times a day. In the days when it cost you money to send stuff, I'd get packages from you once or twice a month, and dutifully listen to everything you sent. Now I delete most of your emails without reading them, because you email me three to five times a day. Am I the only person who feels this way about being constantly bombarded with news about whatever up-and-coming band you're promoting? That's not a serious question, is it?]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/04/also_on_the_subject_of_publici.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/04/also_on_the_subject_of_publici.html Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:50:32 -0500 Psychocandy? Shoot the moon, young one-sheeter: compare them to the Velvets, invoke Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. Do I have a specific artist in mind? Yeah, I do. Am I gonna get even more petulant than I already am about it and call them out by name? No, I'm not. Their press kit compares them to the Cure and Joy Division. LPTJ is here to call bullshit on that. This particular artist sounds like Cabaret Voltaire ca. The Voice of America (like, exactly like specific Cabaret Voltaire tracks from that era, specifically "Jazz the Glass"), and like Clock DVA, and generally like a whole lotta Sheffield stuff. Which is an awesome thing to sound like. And would be a lot more interesting name-drop than the nth Cure comparison this decade. The same press kit uses the word "Brooklyn" three times in two paragraphs, at one point doing so twice in two lines, but that is a subject for another day.]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/04/lptj_providing_gratis_comparis.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/04/lptj_providing_gratis_comparis.html Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:04:35 -0500 metal album than the new Cattle Decapitation released this year. It's that there probably won't be a better album, period. Metal (like most every other genre right now) is treading a lot of water; which is fine; it keeps you afloat; but it's hardly exciting, or worth working oneself into a lather over. Cattle Decapitation are an exception. The Killing Floor, their new one, is a masterpiece. It reminds me of those natural formations you see driving through Wyoming, big old weird-shaped rocks against a blank sky. They come into view, and you say: "what the fuck, dude, that shit is awesome." Maybe somebody in the car mentions Close Encounters or 2001 or some other lame Hollywood comparison, so you throw food at him and tell him to shut up and look at the goddamn awesome rock. Because the awesome rock is sort of its own description of itself. It's sufficient. It's enough. That's how it is with The Harvest Floor; it sounds like some other stuff, it's not in any new genre. It is not past comparison to other bands or albums. It's just better at what it's doing than all of them; than any of them. I hear a lot of metal albums, and I like a bunch of them, but not many new ones do the job of transporting me from point A (Earth) to point B (some distant planet that's not on the charts). This one does. It is rare and wonderful and we should all be grateful for it.]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/04/all_superlatives_ever_all_at_o.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/04/all_superlatives_ever_all_at_o.html Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:01:03 -0500 Sardine in Bastard Suit. For a long time, my position on it was a simple "not as good as Mississippi Luau." And obviously that's true. Nothing is ever going to be as good as Mississippi Luau. That sort of thing comes along once in a lifetime. If an artist actually had two of them in him, how would be even be able to walk around? He wouldn't. The force of that stuff inside him would not be sustainable. He would collapse. But that doesn't really say anything about Sardine in Bastard Suit, which, as it turns out, after long reflection, is totally excellent. Really totally and completely excellent and long underrated by me. Well, not any more. These songs are great. They're less manic and more depressed than the stuff on Mississippi Luau, but so what? Sometimes we're mellow and depressed instead of hopped up on sweet rum drinks. I feel bad! I have sold Sardine in Bastard Suit short for too long. At the very least, I ought to have alerted you to its incredible title. Do you expect to run across a better album title in your lifetime? I don't. It's free here, anyway, from the people who released it, one of my favorite tape labels ever. The undersung meet the underappreciated in a battle to the death! I hereby promise not to underrate any Chas McAl stuff that is actually top shelf. Vowed this 13th day of March, 2009, etc., by your faithful and penitent parishioner, etc., John D. ]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/03/extremely_important_update.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/03/extremely_important_update.html Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:16:29 -0500 American Idol, and the thing I have to say is a question, and the question is: do you really think people are that stupid? I, personally, do not. The rule change is about one thing only: conversations between the show's producers & industry executives who see, in the show, one of the only bright spots in the business. The judges will rescue people at the behest of labels or production houses who think they can make money off of people whom the viewing public have rejected, or, possibly, in whom they've already invested too much to see them lose. Can I prove this? Let me answer the question with a question: am I fucking Sherlock Holmes? No. Sherlock Holmes is not my type and is rumored to be a selfish lover. So I am not fucking Sherlock Holmes, and I'm not going to find a smoking gun. It just seems obvious what's at work here: other interests. It seems so obvious that it hardly needs proving. "The music business will game any system it thinks it can rig" hardly seems kin to any radio-controlled-planes-hitting-the-towers theories. It seems, to be frank, obvious. Or, to put it another way: Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken. Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua. Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? ]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/03/lets_be_clear_about_something.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/03/lets_be_clear_about_something.html Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:33:24 -0500 please translate this book into English. Somebody, anybody. OK, not anybody. Somebody competent and awesome. Thinkin' maybe of you, Gerald Turner, because you did an awesome job on Europeana, a book so completely rad in all ways that I can't even begin to talk about it. There are enough books by almost any author you can name; "of the making of many books there is no end," etc. But there's only the one by Ourednik in English, and it's not enough at all. Begging you here, translator people. More Ourednik into English. Anything I can do to speed the process, you know where to find me.]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/03/a_pointless_gesture_is_a_beaut.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/03/a_pointless_gesture_is_a_beaut.html Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:10:42 -0500 x but would surely have more y; but I wouldn't put together such a compilation, because I know an assload more about music than any of these suit-wearin' types who select stuff like this for the poor deprived noobs whose taste will never equal mine, no matter how hard they study or how much they buy; they cannot catch up with me; I know all kinds of shit; also, wtf is going on with that cover design; I knew Photoshop better than that when I was still connected to my mother by the umbilical cord. These people, among whose ranks I bet I would/will totally count myself if/when Starbucks comes out with a "soothing sounds of doom metal" disc, tend always to have a point underneath their snobby posturing, though the point is kind of a stupid one. Primers are boring once you're already educated in a subject. Some point-of-purchase Best of Freak Folk isn't going to probably do much for you if you've been Devendra's roadie since Oh Me Oh My. So, right. If you are an expert, entry-level's gonna look kinda dumb, and because experts always butt heads, you're going to disagree with another expert's choices, and in the field of Thinking Wise Things About Music, everybody with a high-speed connection is an expert by age fourteen. I say all this by way of telling you that I do not know anything at all about Indian popular music - when I listen to Indian music at all, it's usually devotional music from the early 16th century, and the last time I listened to any Bollywood stuff was when the Luaka Bop compilation Dance Raja Dance came out - and to further tell you that, pace my relative ignorance in the field, this Putomayo compilation India is 100%-awesome-zero-duds-play-twice-in-a-row great. Where will you see this comp? At the checkout counter at Whole Foods. Are you too cool to dig that? Do your thing, I have nothing but love for you, on another day I'm your brother in the cause. On the other hand, do you want to hear a ten-track mix that is so completely chilled and mellow that you seriously for-real actually-did-this put the whole damn thing on repeat because it is exactly the thing for a cool evening in the living room? Then you must cop this, because I am telling you, every song is good and the sequence is killer-mix-tape fantastic. ]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/02/straw_men_snobs_take_multiple.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/02/straw_men_snobs_take_multiple.html Sat, 28 Feb 2009 18:57:30 -0500 Skeletor: you said to yourself, "I bet that is a badass villain because how is he not going to be with a name like Skeletor," and even though he could not quite serve up the whoop-ass to some chump named He-Man like you might have expected given the severe disparity on the Coolness of Names scale, you had a definite hunch that really the game was rigged: and that if the writers of the show had actually described reality instead of some good-guys-rule universe, there would only have been one battle between the two, one which ended quickly and bloodily, after which a barely-winded Skeletor might be seen chewing the gristle from one of He-Man's detached legs while a still-breathing He-Man looked up in horror from the burnt ground on which he lay. You can't judge a book by its cover but judging it by its name is a little different. So it is that when I heard there's a band called Vulture Whale I said to myself "self-fulfilling prophecies be damned, a band called Vulture Whale has gotta kick ass." And indeed my brethren the shit is live. They sound like Silkworm. Then after a while they sound kind of like the 3Ds a little. Mainly though there is a heavy Silkworm injection here. That is 100% OK by me. There should be more bands who sound like Silkworm and less who sound like they think they have something original to contribute to the field of Rocking Dionysiac Abandon. That shit is straight played out, man. Vulture Whale is not played out. They groove like Silkworm and I, for one, will take it.]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/01/further_proof_of_childhood_ass.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/01/further_proof_of_childhood_ass.html Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:21:42 -0500 Autopsy this morning, interrupting the badly-stalled Reviewing Everything...Near the Stereo project. (Update: there is now more stuff stacked up near the stereo.) While I will cop to a some nostalgia here - I first heard this band because they shared a split 7" with Neanderthal; I am nostalgic indeed for the days when Neanderthal splits weren't history, but news - I don't think that's all of it. After all: I wasn't really that young when I first heard Rorschach; the music that soundtracked my teenage kicks sported bigger hair & more makeup than most Gern Blandsten bands did. But there was something going on in the early nineties, and if it's nostalgia to say so, then I'm guilty of it, as much as it pains me to say so. (I hope it goes without saying that if we had a slogan here, it'd be "nostalgia is toxic.") Complexity had always been something of a bad word in punk rock - moral complexity, sure; aesthetic ambiguities, political ones, too, why not; but short-fast-loud, that was the rule. Against this, Rorscach took an audible love of Greg Ginn's macho Sabbath-isms and turbocharged it with real depth. That they'd spent their earlier years listening to thrash seems apparent, but the days of crossover were already passed by the time they came on the scene, so there was no place else to turn but inward. They sounded very interested in reconciling the mandate to Get Pissed Off (a mandate which, in 2009, seems no less obedient to institutional norms than "Conform" or "Get a Job") with ideas of beauty: specifically, the idea that beauty is what I say it is, and that any aesthetics worth its weight in vinyl will boast some coherent notion of beauty that it can truly call its own. You can't really say this of their predecessors. Rorschach brought their own dice to the game and proceeded to roll them, spectacularly. They weren't the only band working this side of the street back then - there really did seem to be something in the air - but their impact seems to have been possibly the greatest (it's hard to imagine metalcore without them, for better and worse) and their music has taken on a pretty lustrous patina. Is it the guitar tone? the tempo shifts and unabashed rolling fills? those super-sweet bass breaks? the vocals, which always sound like they're going through a chorus pedal? I don't know; it's the vibe, you know, like I'm always wanting to say - the groove, the feeling, the character. The voice. Not of the singer but of the band. The footprint. The signature. They had something nobody had then and that nobody's got now, which makes listening to them less an exercise in nostalgia than a celebration of a quality that exists outside of nostalgia or engagement and above past and present. They had an idea. I won't claim for it some huge historical resonance. I will claim individuality for it, though, and that's enough to make their strongest tracks throb with a dark energy all their own. ]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/01/do_you_feel_the_guilt.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/01/do_you_feel_the_guilt.html Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:13:54 -0500 Mors Orbis Terrarum (Debemur Morti, 2008), which has been out since at least September but I haven't had a chance to hear it 'til now. It's a collection of early demo tapes. Like everything else Peste Noire does, it is awesome. I get the impression Peste Noire are totally cool with it if they never even get heard by 9/10 of the people who might otherwise love their music. I get the impression, just from the sleeve here & the overall vibe of the band across their other also-excellent releases, that Peste Noire would actually prefer that their whole enterprise remain an act of friendship among like-minded people, a gesture of aesthetic intimacy inseparable from the personal bonds forged thereby, not actually fully comprehensible to anybody outside the circle except as an outward sign of some more general concept, the incandescence of which should indicate just how furious the source must feel to its hosts. I get the impression that Peste Noire kick more ass than most other black metal bands and that this album is exactly what you'd expect from a band known for kicking ass. ]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2008/12/reviewing_everything_that_happ_3.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2008/12/reviewing_everything_that_happ_3.html Sat, 27 Dec 2008 12:06:29 -0500 Stacie Ponder, one of my favorite writers online (I refuse to say "favorite bloggers") who's also a regular at the AMC blog, got the notion to have a "who's the best final girl?" poll. It's a good question - the Final Girl as an archetype is loaded with all kinds of sociocultural baggage which, in most contexts, can only be discussed in the driest of terms. When horror movies are the springboard, though, the unpacking's actually fun to do; the political content of most horror movies gets to take a backseat to what they tell us about political context, and the basic text gets put through more passes than the Kirov at Christmastime. That's critical reading at its best. Anyhow, all that's not either here nor there, I hope everybody reads Stacie Ponder 'cause she is the raddest, etc. The point is that Sally Hardesty is not winning the 'favorite final girl' poll. This is unacceptable. I know that saying this probably dooms my chances with Jamie Lee Curtis forever, which completely bums me out because I have been in love with her since I was eleven and not even my decade-long happy marriage has been able to quell the fire that burns in my heart for JLC. (And not just the young JLC, either, you buncha creepy youth-cult people who should go live in Logan's Run World where you belong: she is as hot now as she was thirty years ago, possibly hotter.) But I am a lover of truth and justice, and Sally Hardesty is the permanent queen of all final girls. The sound of her victory, the crazed sound of her survival as the truck that carries her speeds down the Texas highway - the look on her face. If you can't see that Sally Hardesty is every doomed person who ever lived to fight another day, then you aren't looking hard enough, although Tobe Hooper is kind enough to make sure you have nowhere else to look. You people need to go vote for Sally Hardesty right now. This entry is not here to spark discussion as to why you wanna vote for Ripley, or for rehashing any sub-poisoned-Halloween-candy level urban legends about Jamie Lee. This post is here to make sure you all do your civic duty. The text next to her radio button is a little messed up, but it shouldn't be that hard to figure out. Don't just sit there. Get right with God. Vote Sally. It's the right thing to do. ]]> http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2008/11/get_out_the_vote.html http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2008/11/get_out_the_vote.html Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:55:32 -0500