Wednesday, February 16, 2005

I'm starting to get really excited about the Blitzen Trapper CD release show, taking place this Friday at good old Berbati's Pan. I booked the whole thing myself, which I don't usally do. I'm very stoked about how the lineup came together - varying degrees of "artsy" and "poppy" overlapping in nice ways. These are three of my favorite bands in town on one bill and it feels good to be a part of that. Check out the long-winded press release I wrote for it here.*

Here's my first ever MP3-bloggy link:


Here's the awesome poster, designed by the B.Trap:


Do get there early so you can catch the Graves, who never play out and are very talented in a low-key way. Just listened to their first album again this weekend, and yeah it's still very nice. The Kingdom are great too, and I'm not the only who thinks so - they just got signed to the only biggish label in town.

Steve and I (CUM LAZER) will be in full effect too, dropping poorly mixed heat between bands and afterwards. I'm hoping to instigate full-on dance party action before the night is out, which would would be a first for me in those vaunted Greek halls.

Sort of funny story: the wonderful lady who books Berbati's, Chantelle Hylton, took the liberty of putting us on the venue calendar as "special guest superstar deejay duo CUM LAZER!!". I thought that was cute. I also mentioned us in the press release for the show as CUM LAZER DJs - so as not to imply bandness. The end result? The "superstar" bit made it into all the calendar ads in the papers, and the Mercury listed us as CUM LAZER DJS (which sounds like the lazer coming back from the future to save the present). Thus my attempts to avoid confusion only create more weird ambiguity, which makes perfect sense. CUM LAZER: it's all in yr mind. TRIPPY!

Also, ramen actually smells really good after all the water in the pot has evaporated due to compulsive blogging whilst boiling noodles, some of which are now cemented to the bottom of said pot in an appealing brain-like pattern. They smell like mac 'n' cheese when you leave it in the stove longer than you're supposed to, which I do, because Grandma always made them that way. In short: I *heart* burnt noodles. Not sure about the band though (figure 18).


*(I don't think I've mentioned this yet on the ol' blog, but I do music-related publicity for my (meager) living, and one of the things I'm doing right now is promoting this album. I booked this show and sent out a press release, hoping that local music scribes might take the occasion to get PUMPED on the Trapper and inform the public, thereby causing all of Portland to realize the pop genius lurking in our midst. The cynical/smart among you will be reading $$$ into my enthusiasm, but trust me: I feel this band, LOTS. They are indeed wonderful and they deserve to be heard. This is my mission.)

2:09 AM, 2 comments

Monday, February 14, 2005

Very soon now TRMW will be moving over to Urban Honking (here), and I'm really really excited about it. UrHo, as they call it, is a local Portland blog community of sorts, which also includes a show calendar and message board. It's a very special thing, with lots of great creative stuff going on. There's talk of Team Tinnitus moving over there too eventually. My music will stay here on Metem, where it belongs, but this rambling all-about-me stuff will be gone. Stay tuned!

Just got around to reading this (it's been shortcutted on my desktop for weeks) and quite enjoyed it. That last sentence is me to a T - it's almost creepy. Probably the only blog that's really managed the YobNik stance would be this one, which sets it apart from pretty much every other music blog out there.

Stuff like this is why I like blogs (well, one of them); serious thought about music and how it relates to society, totally divorced from release dates and totally, wonderfully pretentious.


1:11 AM, 0 comments

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Woke up today, got in the car, and a billion tiny metallic noises took off. That was the CD player firing up where it left off last night, in the middle of the third track off the new Mahjongg album. All that banging and scraping was too much for the morning, but it was over soon, and the next track was JUST what I needed.

It's called "The Stubborn Horse" and it's wonderful. It starts like it should, with a horse neighing sample (for more equestrian sampling fun see: the Ponys), and kicks right into this dead simple and perfect little stones riff (really just one bent guitar string) accompanied by sighing synth pads, a bouncy beat, and a faux-Bowie singing something about how if you don't do this or that "this horse won't go".

That song had me smiling as I turned left onto Albina en route to the best coffee shop in the world (along with the other one). Amazingly, the next track was almost better. It's called "Thegg" and it 's got this stomping motorik beat with layers on layers of propellant guitar riffs with dubby feedback skree going off in the background. I parked the car and sat there like a dork waiting for the song to end. Some hip girls walked by and I triend to look busy with the cellphone, as opposed to just weird. The pay-off was a section of long 'n' fuzzy one-note riffage, closing out with some Make Up-syle boogieloo. It was worth it.

The opening phrase "nigger is the woman of the world" (thank you, John Lennon) is confrontational and seems to imply more "meaning" than the rest of the mumbled jumble-talk on this track. I'd call that phrase the only thing marring an otherwise perfectly blank jam out. I'm all for feminism in music, but back it up like John-o did if you're going to throw those words out there, because they're loaded. Maybe I should just listen to the lyrics harder but that doesn't seem like the point here.

All in all tho, two great incoherent art-rock messes. Everything else I've heard off the album has fallen flat in comparison; the next song starts out with the lyrics "Get high / Get stupid / Get AIDS" and that's just... stupid.

11:27 AM, 0 comments

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Wherein I finally post something resembling my favorite records of 2004. I have a reputation for showing up ten minutes late for everything, so I suppose it only makes sense that I should be about a month late to the end of the year. But fuck it. As a music obsessive, I feel compelled to compile these annual best-of lists, even if I do feel a little conflicted about the whole thing, for many of these reasons. I've been waffling on whether or not to do it this year, but, after reading and enjoying other people's lists (click click click click click click click + magazines + emails), it only seems right that I should "give back", or something.

That decided, I started my list, and quickly found myself in the odd position of having only three two solid favorites for 2004. Which seems really weird to me. I heard shitloads of music last year; how can it be that so little of it left any real impression on me? I'm thinking maybe it has something do with listening to too much music (by the time I finally get around to downloading/buying that album I needed to hear there's five more in the queue, repeat), and something to do with spending a lot of time searching out old records. So what then, a top 2? Seems kind of anticlimactic.

Also, I have a hard time assigning rankings to music I like, and I'm lazy, and I like to avoid things I have a hard time with.

All of this leads to the semi-compartmentalized, not-really- hierarchical un-list you see below. I feel this format allows me to more accurately reflect the stuff I heard and how I felt about it, and prevents me from tossing in a bunch of stuff I wish I heard and half-like into something like the traditional 10.

In the end, the point of all this is really just to turn you the reader on to some good music I think deserves attention. This is what many of the lists I've read these past couple weeks have done for me; I hope this one does the same for you.

The Big Two:
Brooks Red Tape (Soundslike)
The Ponys Laced With Romance (In The Red)

Wish I'd listened to More:
Joanna Newsom The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City)
Kanye West College Dropout (Roc-a-Fela)
Animal Collective Sung Tongs (Paw Tracks)
Green Day American Idiot (Reprise)
Youssou N'Dour Egypt (Nonesuch)
Viva Voce The Heat Can Melt Your Brain (Minty Fresh)

Honorable Mention:
Cut/Copy Life Like Neon (Modular People)
Juicy Panic Otarie (InPolySons)
cry.on.my.console Rum Loving Bass Pirate
Soundhog As Heard on Radio Soundhog Volumes 4 & 5
boom selection
20 Jazz Funk Greats

Portland, Oregon (recorded, albums):
Strategy Drumsolo's Delight (Kranky)
Blitzen Trapper Field Rexx (Self Released)
Viva Voce The Heat Can Melt Your Brain (Minty Fresh)
Adelaide Adelaide EP (Self Released)

Portland, Oregon (recorded, songs):
YACHT "I Love a Computer"
YACHT "SHTML"
Blitzen Trapper "Pink Padded Slippers"
Dykeritz "The Fountain of Youth vs. Everlasting Life in Heaven"
Alan Singley "Seem To Have Forgotten" (anyone know the real name of this song?)

Portland, Oregon (live):
PDX POP NOW!
Nice NiceAlarmist CD Release Party (The Fritz)
The Snuggle Ups PORCH P*L*U*R 2004 (The Orange Room)
Wet Confetti PDX POP NOW! (The Meow Meow [R.I.P.])
Portland General Electro KPSU Fundraiser(Some Dude's House)Menomena, The Joggers, talkdemonic (Lola's Room)
Mirah PDX POP NOW! (The Meow Meow)
The Hunches The Triggers' Second-to-Last Show(Jasmine Tree)
The Triggers, Electric Eye The Triggers' Last Show (Berbati's)
Clorox Girls Easter BBQ Party (PRA House)
Easter Beer Hunt (Laurelhurst Park)

Seattle, Washington (live):
The Girls Secret Bumbershoot Show (The Funhouse)

Killer Singles:
M.I.A. "Galang" (XL)
Air "Run" (Astralwerks)
The Thermals "How We Know" (Sub Pop)
Junior Boys "Belona" (KIN)
CASH "My My My" (BlackGround / Universal)
Mario "Let Me Love You" (3rd Street/J
Snoop Dogg "Drop It Like It's Hot" (StarTrax)
Jammin95.5

Killer Single + Best Video Ever:
Ludacris "Get Back" (Def Jam South)

Old Stuff I Found and Loved in 2004:
Swell Maps A Trip to Marineville (Secretly Canadian)
Swell Maps Jane in Occupied Europe (Secretly Canadian)
Caetano Veloso Caetano Veloso [1968] (Philips)
King Sunny Ade Juju Music (Mango)
Au Pairs Playing With a Different Sex (RPM)
Alice Coltrane Huntington Ashram Monastery (Impulse!)
Brian Eno Discreet Music (Editions EG)
The Monks Black Monk Time (Repertoire)
Plaid Booc EP (Warp)
The Seeds "I Can't Seem to Make You Mine"
13th Floor Elevators "You're Gonna Miss Me"

CUM LAZER's Fave Mid-to-Early Nineties Party Classix:
Skee-Lo "I Wish"
Montell Jordan "This Is How We Do It"
Freak Nasty "Da Dip"
Tag Team "Woomp! There It Is"
Salt n Pepa "Push It" (ok, late 80s)
Naughty By Nature "Hip Hop Hooray" / "OPP"

Steve Winwood Song That Nobody Realizes Is As Funky As It Is:
Steve Winwood "Higher Love"

NO, really. At the tail end of 2004 I performed kareoke to this song, as it is one of the few songs I know all the words too. My mom had a tape of it growing up, and I distinctly remember being left in the car, playing this song on repeat, memorizing the words, and singing my pre-adolescent heart out to it over and over again. I hadn't heard it for quite a while, but when the backing music came up it all came rushing back. And I remembered: this song has the wickedest pseudo-Afro synthetic percussion / fake-ass orchestral synth combo going on, like, ever! People don't realize this. I told my girlfriend as much, and now the phrase "nobody realizes how funky that song is" will live on forever as the supreme indicator of my complete and total music geekiness.

Here's to a geeky 2005!

5:39 PM, 4 comments

And it don't stop:

*O*L*D*S*T*U*F*F* February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 December 2003 November 2003 August 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002 January 2002 December 2001 November 2001

© 2004 Matt Wright