workoutwednesday

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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I’m writing this on a Monday, and yesterday read an interesting article about LCD Soundsystem/DFA mainman James Murphy. I like Murphy’s style. I like his forthright anger and confusion. I like his aesthetic, his refusal to recognize the boundaries between rock and dance music. I like that a self-described “fat guy in a T-shirt” is determined to work his way back to fighting weight. I may not be a musical genius, but we’ve got that much in common, at least.

126 BPM: Looking For A Sound That’s Gonna Drown Out The World Mofo (Popmart remix) – U2 Come Out (Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone) – 120 Days Twins – Linda Lamb Talk – Coldplay There’s A Drink in My Bedroom And I Need A Hot Lady – Lindstrøm Hustler – Simian Mobile Disco Electric Avenue – Eddy Grant Orange Alert (DFA remix) – Metro Area

What’s best about compiling music for sessions on the StairMaster is that the tempos—the high 120s—are a breeding ground for funk. Where most of my faster mixes veer towards the dance-y side of rock, the StairMaster stuff tends to the rockin’ side of dance. Not that there’s a bright dividing line; but it’s a way for me to hear a lot of great music that I’d somehow missed before.

The U2 track is something I cobbled together myself; the band used a recording of their cover of “Pop Muzik” as entrance music for their 1997 Popmart tour, the segued into “Mofo” as their opening number. Eventually they released “Pop Muzik” as a B-side: that version had a long fade of an ending, dissolving into a wash of crowd noise, electronic swoops and rumbles, and occasional dubby fragments of melody. The edit wasn’t difficult: it took a couple of careful listens to find the entrance point, and a minor tweak to put the two tracks in the same tempo.

Pop isn’t my favorite U2 record by any stretch, but it’s for my money it’s their last album to succeed more than it fails; lyrically, it’s the last time Bono really put himself on the line (“Mofo” is as nakedly personal a lyric as he’s ever written), and musically it’s the last time the group were looking forward to find new ways to be a rock band, instead of running through a catalog of the tried and true. The record makes more sense now, ten years on, than it did at the time: it’s really not a million miles away from what James Murphy et al. are doing now. And if nothing else, it finally does something worthwhile with Bono’s fucking hamronica.

I got 120 Days from an mp3blog (the name of which escapes me now), knowing nothing about them. I still don’t, really, except that they’re associated with Lindstrøm; the kind of electronica that I dig is, I’m discovering, not so much a small scene as a highly cross-pollinated one, with favorite artists forever collaborating, influencing, responding to one another. I like that.

The last time I heard Linda Lamb, she was collaborating with Vitalic under the name Silures; that jaunt yielded the squawky, juddering “21 Ghosts.” This one, even sans Vitalic, is similarly mighty. The riff takes the quintessential boogie riff—that slinky, John Lee Hooker-derived sequence that powers songs as diverse as ZZ Top’s “La Grange,” Goldfrapp’s “Ooh La La,” and (yeah) LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House”—and turns it inside-out, making it fearsome instead of insinuating.

This is the Coldplay track primarily notable for its wholesale rip-off of a Kraftwerk song, by the way. (U2 must have finally sent a case-and-desist.) Neither Kraftwerk nor U2, though, would have allowed the rhythm section to be buried by such a murky mix. For that we have to thank Radiohead—or, more properly, Coldplay’s incomplete understanding of Radiohead, and their mistaken application of murk to what should be a crisp, forthright rock song, in the mistaken belief that it will lend the song some gravitas.

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