workoutwednesday

Or, with apologies to Reb Hillel: “I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.”

146 bpm 1: Show Me The Ropes, Kid On the Dance Floor – Juliet Live With Me – Massive Attack with Terry Callier Daft Punk is Playing At My House – LCD Soundsystem Jump Into The Fire – Harry Nilsson Ooh La La – Goldfrapp Frustration – The Whip Love Vigilantes – New Order Rio – Duran Duran The Back Of Love – Echo & The Bunnymen Police On My Back – The Clash (cooldown) The Dynamite Lady - Big Country

The first, oh, half of this mix comes courtesy of Fluxblog, I think. The Juliet track definitely does. The tempo’s been cranked pretty seriously here, but it’s still the same great single that sank without a trace here. I love the six-over-five of the chorus hook, the cycling mantric phrases, and the whomp of the bass. Mike Watt calls his electric bass the thud staff. Yeah.

I’m inordinately pleased with the synth-into strings crossfade into “Live With Me,” but the manic grin really lights up my face as the LCD Soundsystem choon kicks in, and it never leaves as I run harder on the elliptical.

I don’t remember why I segued into Nilsson then, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t know that LCDS had actually been covering “Jump Into The Fire” in live shows. Doesn’t surprise me in the least, though. Great minds thinking alike, I spoze.

It takes a lot of stones for a new band from Manchester to sound as much like New Order as The Whip does here, but damn if they don’t work it to their advantage. (I tweaked up the tempo on this’n, too.) And of course I couldn’t resist following it up with the genuine article, which led to a full-on trip in the Wayback Machine for the rest of the mix.

Thought: You figure all the homopanicky comics fanboys currently wetting their own pants over the contents of Citizen Steel’s were traumatized in their childhoods by the vision of Simon LeBon’s grape-smugglers in the “Rio” video?

Finally: There are lots of reasons to love The Clash, and while compiling these mixes I’ve discovered another: explosive intros, just made for crossfade segues.

Keep running down that one-way track.

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126 bpm 2: Talk In the Shower

Big – New Fast Automatic Daffodils Sweet, Sweet Baby (I’m Falling) – Lone Justice In The Morning – Razorlight Arkham Asylum – Sasha A Girl Like You – Edwyn Collins Teenage FBI – Guided By Voices Tahitian Moon – Porno For Pyros Better Than Nothing – Jen Trynin The Planetarium Scene – The Ocean Blue (cooldown) My Secret Place – Joni Mitchell with Peter Gabriel

Joe over at the White Noise Revisited has some good words about the New Fast Automatic Daffodils’ Pigeonhole. The Daffs were on the fringes of the “Madchester” scene, although to my ears they had more in common with the early-80s dance-punk bands. In particular, I hear a lot of “Cavern” (a.k.a. “White Lines”) in “Big.” The interval in the bassline’s not quite the same—a whole step vs. Liquid Liquid’s minor third—but the infleunce is clear, especially when the congas kick in.

A related open appeal to musicbloggers: Can we please stop referring to “New FADs” when “NFA Daffodils” is obviously so much cooler? kthxbye.

I still dig this Razorlight song, even though they are widely reviled in their homeland as a pack of self-serious rockist wankstains, often by the same music press that once fawned over them. Of ocurse, I’ve written at my other podcast blog about the British pop scene’s tendency to eat its own young. Whatever: I still think this song sounds like Big Country, and in my book that’s a good thing.

Dig the ridiculous clip for “Tahitian Moon”—it’s Perry’s vacation videos! The sarong and the china-doll haircut are doing him no favors, but it doesn’t matter—Watt fucking PWNS. The weedy vocals and scrawled-on-an-envelope lyrics are only there to serve the bass, my friends, oh yes.

So here’s what I love about Jen Trynin: she writes like a guy.

See, rock has a gender problem. every cover band knows this: if they’ve got a girl singer—especially one of the tough rock-chick variety—she’s gonna end up doing some songs originally performed by guys, partly because the pool of tough rock-chick songwriters is pretty limited and unless you actually want to start billing yourselves as a Pretenders tribute band you’ve got to draw from a number of sources, and mostly because guy songwriters pretty much have the luxury of disregarding gender when they write, and guy’s songs are more adaptable to woman singers than the other way ‘round.

Which leaves guy cover-singers—even feminist guy cover-singers like me—in a bind. Chrissie Hynde can sing Ray Davies or Jimi Hendrix, but I can’t sing Chrissie Hynde—at least not straight-up; the performance of gender would overwhelm and be detrimental to the performance of the song itself. And so there are hundreds of terrific songs that are off-limits to me, even if I swap the gender pronouns in the lyrics. I mean, I can sing “Shotgun Down The Avalance,” just about, and one or two Aimee Mann songs, and not much else.

But I can sing “Better Than Nothing,” and tear the roof off it. Indeed, some of the imagery—whiskey, a westward drive—seem so stereotypically masculine as to make it inevitable. Watch the video: see Jen with her low-slung Les Paul and her rack full of effects pedals, the accoutrements of masculine rockin’ out.

Now look at the comments on that YouTube page: some of the posters question her gender. She’s obviously a woman—her voice is a woman’s voice, her body a woman’s body—but her embrace of a couple of superficial othergender signifiers manages to confound a few (admitted dunderheaded) YouTubers. I think that’s neat.

Lastly: How cute are Peter and Joni in their matching hats and serapes?

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Good for a run on the treadmill…

152 bpm 3: Moving Forward, Using All My Breath

The Chain – Fleetwood Mac I Melt With You – Modern English Roadkill – Concussion Ensemble Who Are You – The Who Rags – The Waterboys June – Unrest Waka – Camper Van Beethoven The Saints Are Coming – The Skids Helter Skelter (live) – U2 Bang Bang Rock and Roll – Art Brut Grandelinquent – Klark Kent (cooldown) I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain – Tim Buckley

This one keeps up the energy pretty nicely, I think.

It took me a long time to feel comfortable about loving Fleetwood Mac, and “The Chain” was one of the songs that helped me get over the hump. Rumours, though one of the greatest pure-pop records ever, really brings the creep on some tracks. I love the tension in the build-up to the coda; I almost wish it went on longer—the release seems a little rushed.

“Melt With You” never gets old, does it? Ever since its release, it’s had a little radio revival every couple of years. Curious little song.

You know, I’ve loved The Waterboys for years, and viewing them through the filters of their shifting influences has brought me to a lot of great bands. And until just this moment, I hadn’t considered that for a while there, they were trying to be The Teardrop Explodes.

I got “June” from Fluxblog. I somehow managed to get through the 80s and 90s without ever listening to many of the seminal American indie bands (see also: Superchunk). I like this one, though I start getting tired at about this point in the mix and this throws me off because it slows down as it goes on. I’m sympathetic: I used to play with a drummer like that. he’s always start too fast and then run out of steam. It was a bitch when we were playing “Wipeout,’ I’ll tell you that: the first drum solo would be dynamite, but the third would be pretty sad.

(The Skids track has a bit of the same problem, to be honest.)

Klark Kent was a side project, an outlet for Stewart Copeland’s songwriting during his Police years. What’s funny is that the same riffs keep showing up, even today, in his soundtrack work. He’s spun quite a career out of what is really a very limited palette of musical ideas. He makes up for it in sheer energy, I think: and energy goes a long way, especially to a purpose like this.

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It’s hurrah for the life of a country boy, and me ramblin’ in the new-mown hay! This week’s a good one for the elliptical cross-trainer; the missus likes it for an easy run.

148 bpm 3: Town and Country

Hokkai-Bayashi (Hokkaido Rhythm) – Nihon Daiko Medicine Bow (version) – The Waterboys Nightjoy – Kubichek! Ohio – Devo Cattle & Cane – The Go-Betweens Lovers In A Dangerous Time – Bruce Cockburn Lost In The Supermarket – The Clash Pilots Of Beka – Cactus World News Where Were You Hiding When The Storm Broke? – The Alarm So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry) – R.E.M. Home – Iggy Pop (cooldown) Love’s Lost Guarantee – Rogue Wave

Notes:

Without getting too New Age-y about it, there’s something really intense about ritual drumming. It’s exciting—it gets your blood going—but it’s grounded, too; every musical gesture is enjoined by centuries of repetition and tradition. As explosive as it is, there’s nothing spontaneous happening here. This has all happened many times before, and it will happen many times again. And there’s a certain comfort in listening to the taiko while you’re at the gym; as hard as you’re working at exercise, you know the guys playing the big drums are working even harder.

I vacillate on the question of a favorite Waterboys record, with This Is The Sea and Fisherman’s Blues regularly flip-flopping the #1 spot. This is an alternate version of “Medicine Bow,” with a different verse and an extended break featuring the sound of a piano being dropped down a mineshaft.

I’m generally not keen on bands with punctuation marks in the name, but this Kubichek! track leaped out of the speakers when I heard it at Who Needs Radio? (I quite liked that Dega Breaks track, too, and like it still: Paul was in fine form that day. Damn, I miss Paul the Anglophile.)

I missed out on the Go-Betweens first time around—I knew Grant McLennan primarily from his work with Steve Kilbey in Jack Frost—and the last year of discovering their work has made me richer. There’s something about the tone in this—that melancholy, the way that childhood and nature and colonialism all get tied together, an invocation of the landscape, so dear to a child but not the land of his fathers; the sense of making something new, as recollected years later. It’s a quality of voice: it’s hard to pin down, but I hear it in many songs by Not Drowning, Waving (especially the lovely and heartbreaking “Willow Tree”), and in the writing of Nadine Gordimer and the young Doris Lessing, and it moves me.

For some reason, I will always associate “Lovers In A Dangerous Time” with autumn in New England, blazing skies and livid trees, every shadow sharp and clear, the air pleasantly crisp and winter more than a rumor.

I can’t really defend my lingering affection for the Alarm, I suppose (although I’ll note that my ten-year old likes ‘em, too, so it’s either genetic or universal); I will say, though, that of all their songs this one probably has the greatest profusion of quotable lines.

And Iggy… well, what with recent events, Iggy’s been a bit of an earworm round our place.

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