OTHER MEN

Dear these guys, let’s kick it!


I went home to Oakland, CA a few weekends back. Before having dinner with my family, I downloaded about 90 songs from non-BRILLIANT-but-still-awesome MP3 blogs. I’m becoming more and more pleased with these things. They work as increasingly amphibious discovery tools. I say this because that night I wasn’t just looking for album leaks or new releases. I was looking for year-old boutique label electronica. I was looking for Carla Bruni, an ‘80’s era supermodel who now sings (and shreds) in French. And—as always—I was looking for Prince songs. Blogs have these things. Between Elbo.ws and Hypemachine I found about 90% of the stuff I was curious about. That’s what I mean by “amphibious”: Old-and-new are the new land-and-sea.

That doesn’t mean my favorite discovery that Sunday was old. Quite the contrary, the track that sent me spinning is Rob Crow’s newest thing, which happens to be out now. It’s called Other Men. It’s the best new math rock I’ve heard in a while. If you’ve been wondering why Nave seems recomposed lately, it’s because I played him the track “False Positives” (BRILLIANTMP3 below). His face melted off and we had to recompose it.

Mr. Crow seems like a cool dude. He writes all the songs in Pinback. He played on The Ladies record (with Zach Hill), one of my favorites of last year. He does a zillion other projects a year that I can’t keep up with but want to. He has fan sites! There is video somewhere of him dancing at a Tera Melos show, front and center and holding a six pack. (I'm pretty sure you can look that up by Googling “definition of street cred.”)

I don’t know much about Other Men. I know the album came out March 20 on Mr. Crow’s label, Robcore. He plays bass and sings.

One thing I’m certain of is that Other Men sounds like Faraquet. Coming from me, that’s about as high as praise gets. It is not a comparison that will ever bother me. Faraquet was more of a watershed moment in my life than just another cool band. Like Other Men, Faraquet featured three prodigal musicians making ambitious—and generally accessible—music. I don’t remember my first experience with Faraquet (I think it was an Epitonic thing), but I remember listening over and over again, trying to rationalize all the riffs and notes and melodies. I’m posting an extra-BRILLIANT Faraquet MP3 below. Dust off your worship robes, pagans!

I feel reassured that music this technical is a genre that isn’t quite a “dirty word”: that genre is math rock. (A “dirty word” genre might be “nu-metal,” or “screamo.”) I guess genres are sort of personal, but that doesn't change the fact that I've found math rock to facilitate a lot of invention. At times Mr. Crow sounds a little like a weirder Neil Young (and something about the effects on his voice remind me of the Autolux guy). Which is to say he has a spectacular and confident voice, a voice that sounds greater and more confident over atypical (i.e. math-y) arrangements. And these Other Men guys rock to a strange beat. I recently wrote 200 words on Tera Melos (also math rock impresarios, though more circus-core than most) for Metal Hammer (which I’m pretty sure MH won’t use). I related Tera Melos’ music to video game music. That’s not much of a stretch if you listen to how complex a lot of video game composition is. The same analogy applies to Other Men: there’s a distinctive 8-bit feel that sounds fantastic when attempted by dexterous humans limited by muscles and synapses and stringed-instruments and band practice.

When the computers finally develop feelings and start forming bands and have no more use for humans, Other Men will be taken prisoner just like the rest of us. But instead of being turned into fuel and robot pâté like everyone else, Other Men will probably be kept alive to perform at computer comedy roasts and cocktail parties. Which will make them our only hope for infiltration and collusion.

I already treat bands this good as if they’re an only hope, so this isn’t much of a stretch for me.




Right click-and-save to download “False Positives,” from the album Wake Up Swimming by Other Men.


Right click-and-save to download “Uhhhh...,” from the album Wake Up Swimming by Other Men. Good grief this song rips!


Right click-and-save to download “Cut Self Not,” from the album The View From This Tower by Faraquet.


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BATTLES

Never assume placidity.


What a strange yesterday, which I summarized thusly in a personal email to my friend Dave. I started like this: “I'm having a horrible day, Dave.” This was before the day became much better. Normally I would keep my lengthy inter-personal exchanges away from this blooming public forum, but I made an exception, because this is a relevant tale depicting the less glamorous aspects of, well, being me. Here we go:

“I’m having a horrible day, Dave. We played a shit show at UC Davis. I knew it would be shit when, a week before, they moved the location from the center of campus to a far off corner of the school map that no one looks at, much less goes to. We played a half an hour in front of nobody until one of the troglodyte underlings that was "running sound" tripped over the one, non-grounded power cable that was providing electricity for all our instruments and the monitor-less PA. We were stopped mid song and thought, ok, that's enough. Also, we thought that whatever just happened to the sound (i.e. it disappearing instantly and completely) was not good for our gear.

“So, then, like 10 minutes later, this girl shows up with our paltry performance pittance ($100) in hand. The first thing that goes wrong is that she is here "on behalf" of the girl who booked us, an acquaintance of Nave knew from college who, you know, didn't think to come support the band she booked. So her doppelganger approaches and says, you know what guys I have your money but I can't give it to you until I find out why you didn't play for the whole hour we contracted you for. I'm so sorry, she adds, but we've taken a lot of heat lately for paying bands that didn't play for the contractually obligated amount of time (Girl Talk —who gets at least $5,000 per show and was flown into Davis to play in front of 200, maybe 300 people—is her example).

“Later that day I told Nave and Noah that while listening to this girl question why we didn't finish performing a set that she didn’t watch after experiencing the embarrassment of all sound stopping mid song by no fault of our own, I thought to myself: "I've never really lost it in public, but maybe now is the time, maybe this is it, maybe it's really going to happen right now." What I meant is that I’ve never just unhinged, started screaming murder and doing the bezerker dance, smashing shit and lighting valuables on fire just to see what everyone looks like under the spell of fear. No: usually just take it and make the most of whatever experience is letting me down; or I do what any good songwriter does: I internalize and save the real vitriol for what matters—the music. But I thought this was it.

“Somehow, this wasn't it. I said, look this isn't our fault; their gear failed and it's making us nervous and lunch is over now anyway. It's $100. That’s nothing and we could care less. That’s our side of the story. Tell your boss and send us some money eventually. Nave and Noah were pretty far away, but knew something was up. I thought it was handled.

“10 minutes after that, two more people that didn't watch our set show up and we had to go over "what happened" again, just so this girl knows exactly what to tell her boss. I basically walk away from this for fear of some sort of brain embolism. Nave and Noah take the reigns. This one guy that showed up tries to blame us for "not supplying the extension cord that one of his people kicked out of wall.” “You should bring your own stuff in the future," he says, like we've never done this before. "Did any of you even come watch us play?!" I blurted out from about 10 feet away. Achieving a tenuous level of calm that balanced a micro-fiber’s length from becoming a brawl, Nave and Noah explained again that we didn't do anything wrong. Finally the girl gave us our money, which was probably one ten thousandth of the budget of the event we were booked to promote: Picnic Day, which draws over 50,000 attendees and features, among other things, live kangaroos. I wonder what the kangaroo guarantee is.

“What a stupid, integrity-less situation. Lot's of additions to the list of people I'm sending 10,000 obnoxious copies of the (eventual) issue of Rolling Stone that features Brilliant Red Lights on the cover. (For every gloating copy of that magazine I'll also include a fortune cookie with the fortune: "Thanks for nothing." I know that's not a fortune, but that annoyance is part of the appeal.)”

That’s what I wrote to Dave, but then—post vent—my day got a lot better. I had some vocal coaching. I ran two miles, did some stretching and some crunches in the sun. I ate some catfish and some cous cous and the salad equivalent of a “Pimp My Ride”-ed vehicle: bleu cheese? Tomatoes? Avocado? Sprouts? Spring mix? Raspberry vinaigrette? It was all there for me. Also, I used a paid vacation day, so Schwarzenegger-sponsored the Davis disaster and the proceeding calm of a warm Thursday afternoon.










Right click-and-save to download “Race : In,” from the album Mirrored by Battles.


Right click-and-save to download “Race : Out,” from the album Mirrored by Battles.



Battles’ WEBSITE.
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THE FIELD

Imagine this, only on as a faint vision on pavement. Found here.

On the way to this coffee shop, I saw a stain on the ground that looked like Burt Reynolds. It was just some leaf residue or something, but I stopped to stare.

Then while I ordered, this guy behind me asked the barista girl if she had “notes” on her wrists. This man was over 60, kind of a lumberjack-biker-Santa type. The girl was old enough to be tattooed and she had two tats on her wrists. She had strange symbols, neither meaningful nor obvious to a midday purchaser of iced coffee like myself, but hopefully significant and pleasing to her. She was tending to my change ($2.52) and Lumberjack-Biker-Santa’s question caught her a little off guard. Before she could answer what the “notes” were, he lifted his sleeve and showed her his wrist.

“It’s a little paper cut,” he laughed.

That remains a deceptive description. He had eight inches of thick scarring—a long slice—along his left wrist. It was longer than most tragedies might impart on their victims. No one pressed the man for details—too many taboos, I suppose. Or maybe the symbology on the girl barista’s arm communicated something that Lumberjack-Biker-Santa understood and related to. Maybe they had a bond. Maybe he sees his scar as a kind of tattoo, or her tattoo as a kind of scar.

I was in the middle of it and not a part of it all at once. Lumberjack-Biker-Santa is long gone now and girl-barista’s shift ended a while ago. I have a few more suppositions and questions than normal.

It’s a nice day.



Right click-and-save to download “A Paw In My Face,” from the album From Here We Go Sublime by The Field.



The Field’s WEBSITE (Who isn’t a Twin Peaks fan, really?).
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!!!

I had a great pic of this guy doing his best Travolta, but it is blurry. This pic is from here.

The story of my first !!! experience is one of my favorites to tell, though barely related to !!!. (For the benefit of at least one brilliant reader—my dad—I’ll deign to mention that !!! is a band, not just a Spell Check-confusing sentence interruption. The exclamation points are meant to summon “any three consecutive sounds,” the most popular pronunciation being “Chk Chk Chk.”) The experience of that moment in time—it was Labor Day, 2002—outweighed my first experience of the band a million to one. But that the band was there at all, with me—with everyone—remains significant.

It was my first trip to New York City. I traveled alone; I think my family came to meet me after a few days of duo-nomadic exploration. I just derived the term “duo-nomadic” to describe how, until my family arrived, my only compass was one Mr. Jordan Bass. I believe Mr. Bass was, at that time, a Yale sophomore—a Bulldog, as it were. Regardless of his class, he was far more interested in two-hour-train-rides-begetting-endless-adventure-in-NYC than his curriculum. Mr. Bass met me at Penn Station, that booming gateway to the separate dimension that is Manhattan. We trained to Brooklyn where Black Dice played to a small crowd. Both tired from travel, we yawned through the weirdness and left early, back to Manhattan’s upper west side. The next day would do us in.

That mild September must have been minutes before—or seconds after, I can’t remember—“Brooklyn” became a dirty word for a significant musical moment. Brooklyn’s cheap, productive, and attractive artists were blooming through the brick cracks. Warehouses were show spaces; tenements became studios and coffee shops and vintage boutiques and eateries; there was a “free” store, where everything was free. The whole area seemed dosed with peace and lawlessness. Stencil artists covered their sidewalks with ideas. I have a photo of one sidewalk square depicting a stack of money transforming into a flock of birds, escaping in spray paint at my feet. The stenciled caption reads: “Give away your nest egg.” Everything was incredible.

The Saturday after I arrived, Brooklyn—Williamsburg specifically—was proud host to overlapping “block party’s.” One party took place in an abandoned lot at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge. There was no solid footing to speak of, just weeds grown tall in debris from whatever history collapsed there. Revelers crowded along the Bridge and the surrounding rooftops. Orthodox Jewish children stood on the decks of a towering brick building across the street, curious as to why the Yeah Yeah Yeahs didn’t observe the Sabbath. Four or five bands played this party—I must have missed a couple, but remember enjoying Oneida and Liars, when Liars still sounded like it could take credit for the dance rock revival. And, of course, there was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the most enormous little band in the country at the time. This was maybe a year before “Maps” made you cry and hug your significant other a little tighter. People were onto the YYYs; MTV’s Gideon Yago stood side stage with a camcorder during the set. It was four in the afternoon.

Eight blocks away—south, I think—was another party. For those who’ve smiled through Dave Chappelle’s “Block Party” film, this second party took place in what easily could have been the same huge, brick alley Chappelle used. Of course the lineup Chappelle curated was vastly different from what Mr. Bass and I saw; instead of good hip hop and R&B, there was good noise and dance rock. The party featured a dozen or more bands on a stage and the ground in front of the stage. The earliest acts (Andrew W.K. was one of them) overlapped with the hyped (and free) YYY show down the street. Mr. Bass and I trekked back and forth a few times. But after the YYY ended, we found a meal and a spot in the alley and waited patiently for Lightning Bolt to change our lives.

Before Lightning Bolt could do that, we sat through Les Savy Fav and—back to back—!!!. I didn’t connect with these bands that day; I’d landed 30 hours ago, slept on a couch, and already seen 20 other bands. I’m making excuses for my five-year-old tastes, which would be less necessary if I didn’t like those bands so much now that I feel ashamed of myself then. But to my credit, patience and openmindedness prevailed, albeit many years later. LSF would win me over at the Fillmore in San Francisco when the crazy singer roped 1,000 people with a hundreds-of-feet-long microphone cable. !!! would win me over a few years later when I realized the band is incredible.

Seriously: incredible. This band cares more about the synthesis of performance, physical interaction, and recording than anyone else I’ve heard in the genre. I’d love to make a late night advertisement for !!!:

“Is your dance music making you yawn? Does Bloc Party sound to careful? Do New Order and Depeche Mode sound too precise and too imitated? Do The Faint and Interpol sound like New Order and Depeche Mode with more advanced recording qualities? If so, you should try out listening to !!!. It’s just the right distance outside of the box and a real groovy time all around. The band wants you to feel a part of the experience of the band wanting to experience you. Together!”

I know, it would be the coolest late night ad out there, especially if it was themed "Day-Glo.” You might not understand how sure I am of this until you check out the personalities exhibited in this Youtube:



Firstly, you’ve got 8,000+ Europeans partying like the war is over. Then you’ve got the ultimate rhythm section, rock solid and loving it. (The bassist tours with LCD Soundsystem—he must be good!) Then you’ve got this guitarist who records the band (in NYC and Sacramento, where !!! began). There’s also this guest vocalist who turns up on the bands new album, Myth Takes, and this guy has some serious boho soul. Like nine minutes into the Youtube he’s in the crowd singing “I know you want more; I know you need more.” He’s down, man! Then you’ve got Nic Offer, !!!’s ringleader who acts like he’s the lead in first-time-director-David Lee Roth’s remake of “Saturday Night Fever.” Offer has space-age dance moves (those hips don’t lie). He’s the commander in chief of !!!. Watch that Youtube again: he covers every inch of both stages, chants gibberish for two minutes, and simulates sex atop a stack of speakers. Jesus.

Jesus is actually a pretty strong cross reference for !!!, something that Wikipedia fails to mention. Since critics have claimed every available scriptural adjective to mis-describe Arcade Fire, I’m not going to sweat calling !!! “transcendent.” The perfect !!! music video would have the band grooving on the surface of the ocean surrounded by a nation of party-goers and lots of flying fish and friendly dolphins. That same video would hopefully just be a live take of Myth Takes in its entirety; every song is a potent variable. There are some predictable funk-trances, some pop-gems, a “shuffle,” a rap or two, and plenty of experimentation, most of which is percussive. I’d be remiss to not mention that our drummer Mr. Noah Scott Clark—leaping forward with his quest for the ’07 MVP—composed some marching-style snare work for two of the tracks, including the single “All My Heroes Are Weirdos” (brilliant MP3 below).

None of this changes the fact that my favorite song on the record has no percussion. It’s this song “Infinifold” (brilliant MP3 below), which is a ballad of sorts. It’s beautiful. If I had $20,000 and a better Rolodex I’d commission the DFA remix myself just so I could enjoy this song in the club. Since I can’t do that, but immodestly recognize the ingenuity of the idea, I decided to throw down a beat myself (using Garageband and Cubase, if you really want to know). I had this thought the first time I heard this track; I had to remix it. So I spent a week on this little groove. The MP3 is below. “Infinifold” becomes “Fierce Infinifold.”

Even though my first !!! live experience as a dyed-in-the-wool fan will come in four weeks (be there), I’m happy that the band was part of that life-affirming moment I had in NYC. The rest of my Labor Day ’02 story hinges on the primal insanity of Lightning Bolt. I’ll finish that tale in a week.


Click to download “All My Heroes Are Weirdos” by !!! from the album Myth Takes.


Click to download “Infinifold” by !!! from the album Myth Takes.


Click to download “FIERCE Infinifold,” re-dubbed by yours truly.



!!!’s WEBSITE.
!!! on MYSPACE.
!!! on LAST.FM.
!!! on WIKIPEDIA.
!!! on HYPEMACHINE.
!!! on ELBO.WS.
Support !!!’s LABEL.