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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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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Urban decay on the elliptical machine, and the bright lights of my hometown won’t be getting any dimmer… 144 bpm 3: Bright Lights Big City The Lighthouse – Amon Tobin City of Blinding Lights – U2 IT – Genesis Shattered – The Rolling Stones Futures – Zero 7 with José González In-Between Days – The Cure London’s Mine – White Rose Movement Hymn From A Village – James Moaner – Underworld One of Us Is Gonna Die Young – The Ark (cooldown) We’re In Yr CornerI – Cornershop

Yeah, okay: This mix didn’t come together entirely by accident. But I didn’t have to massage the tracks too much on the technical end.

I’m a little disappointed with the way that “It”—excuse me, IT—works in this context. The (second-) most tuneful and straightforward rock song on all The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, it—I beg your pardon, IT—suffers from a bad mix; the drums have no punch, and the bass just sort of meanders around when it should be driving the song.

Note the segue from the line “It is only rock and roll, but I like it” into a Rolling Stones song. Is very clever, yes? Is funny joke! Everyone please to laugh now!

There’s a neat symmetry to José González’s collaboration with Zero 7. González, of course, first made a name for himself (in the States, anyway) with his cover of The Knife’s “Heartbeats,” taking a heavily electronic song and turning it into a folky ballad: now one of his original folky ballads is transformed into piece of a glitchy electronica. Is very clever, yes?

To accompany “Moaner,” I almost linked to a YouTube clip of a segment from The Vagina Monolgues with the same title. Is very clever, yes?

I’ve worked out to this mix for months, and the unexpected entrance of “One Of Us Is Gonna Die Young” skunks me every. Single. Time.

Lastly: I cannot vouch for the reliability of those Cornershop lyrics; yeah, they’re from the official artist site, but I wouldn’t put it past Tjinder to fuck with us, would you? Sing along if you dare.

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A huge, unashamed retro-bash, this one, reeking of hair mousse and shoulder pads. Good for the intervals trainer or a gentle run. Or, you know, dancing.

148 bpm 2: Turn It Up High, Captain Vertigo – U2 Mickey – Toni Basil 88 Lines About 44 Women – The Nails China – Red Rockers UnAlone – Translator Space Age Love Song – A Flock Of Seagulls She Sells Sanctuary – The Cult Hazy Shade Of Winter – The Bangles That Demon Jive – An Emotional Fish Mr. Jones – The Psychedelic Furs Sultans Of Swing – Dire Straits (cooldown) Dream Brother – Jeff Buckley

Lots of video links this time around. It wouldn’t feel like the Eighties if we couldn’t look at the haircuts, now would it?

“Mickey” was out at about the same time as Josie Cotton’s “Johnny, Are You Queer?” and it took me forever to realize that they’re basically the exact same song, except “Mickey” is miles dirtier.

God, I love “China”—all the interlocking guitar and bass riffs, and that huge chorus. Years ago, I worked out a solo acoustic arrangement that I still bust out from time to time. Red Rockers never really got their shot. Maybe their politics made people uncomfortable; they wanted to be the American Clash, and the leap-and-bounds musical progress they made from their first rote-hardcore record to the spaghetti-western pop glory of Good As Gold makes me think they had it in them. Jim Riley, the drummer, made his bones in Stiff Little Fingers; he and Rockers bassist Darren Hill eventually went East and ended up the rhythm section for Boston also-rans the Raindogs—another band that didn’t get a fair hearing.

When people remember Translator—if they remember them at all—it’s for “Everywhere That I’m Not,” rather than for this power-pop gem, though “UnAlone” is, to my ear, a far better song, and the one that I remember getting radio play back in the day. Eh. Whaddayagonnado?.

I’m inordinately pleased with the transitions in the first half of this mix, by the way.

Flock of Seagulls: GAH! THE HAIRCUT! The Cult: Captain Jack Sparrow sings! Both: Man, that’s a lot of smoke.

Not very coherent today. Shut up and dance, I guess.

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