Re: A Record a Day. « Reply #196 on Jan 26, 2011, 12:59pm »
1/26/11
Ween - Pure Guava
Gettin' brown in honor of what promises to be an interesting Ween show tonight. When people ask me what my three favorite bands are, I tell them: The Residents, They Might Be Giants, and Ween. We've covered the other two; the day of a Ween show is as good a time as any to do the third.
There are quite a few parallels between TMBG and the mighty Ween. Both bands consist of a core duo, old friends who have known each other for most of their lives. Both bands were heavily influenced by the experimental music of the late 70's and early 80's that I am so fond of, most notably The Residents. Both recorded a handful of entirely unique albums at the beginning of their careers using not much more than a couple of guitars and a drum machine before expanding and their sound to incorporate a full band. And both are entirely fucking awesome.
As the story goes, Dean Ween (a.k.a. Mickey Melchiondo) and Gene Ween (a.k.a. Aaron Freeman) met in an eighth grade typing class. They formed 'Ween' almost immediately, and in their early drug-fueled days were visited by the demon god Boognish:
who commanded that they be the brothers Ween until death stopped them from doing so. Many of their earliest demos (which are out of print and extremely rare) are so bizarre and childish that they can be difficult to listen to. Whether or not it is actually true (I think it is), Deaner and Gener happily perpetuated the legendary myth that they were heavily into huffing glue around the time they recorded their first couple albums, particularly 'The Pod', whose cover art is a hilarious, near-perfect re-creation of 'Leonard Cohen's Greatest Hits', except the man on the front of 'The Pod' is wearing an elaborate gas mask which they say was designed to shotgun Scotchguard fumes directly to the brain:
'The Pod' is full of shrieking, distorted babbling, gutbucket blues and a weird conversation between two stoners and a guy at a Mexican Restaurant. 'Pure Guava' was their follow-up to 'The Pod', and their first major label album, released by Elektra in 1992. Now, you'd think that for the transition to a major label Ween might have gussied themselves up just a little bit, maybe toned down on the acid freakouts and feedback. Not so, of course: 'Pure Guava' is nearly as brown as 'The Pod'. They took the slightly increased budget and fancier production facilities to take the same seizure-inducing weirdness they used on 'The Pod' and give it a weird studio sheen.
The first part of the album is just incredibly bizarre. 'Little Birdy', 'Tender Situation' and 'The Stallion Part 3' goes through a whole library of off-sounding voices, sped up and slowed down and twisted and garbled, goofy falsettos and a kind of terrifying version of Grover from Sesame Street. Right in the midst of this, and right at home with all the madness, is what is probably Ween's best known song, 'Push Th' Little Daisies'. Ween found their mainstream audience by way of this song and its appearance on an episode of 'Beavis and Butthead'.
'Pure Guava' is a huge album, with nineteen tracks clocking in at just under an hour. The songs jump from the electrified live staple 'Reggaejunkiejew' to the slack-jawed 'I Play it Off Legit' to the downright lovely Gener ballad 'Sarah' without giving you time to catch your breath. One of Ween's most mind-blowing pieces arrives in the final stretch of the album; 'Mourning Glory', probably the brownest thing they've recorded. It's a beautiful, pastoral account of a pretty intense drug trip told from the inside of the experience, absolutely drenched in feedback and nearly incomprehensible. For years I didn't even think it was a song, it just sounded like noise. I had a moment with it myself, though, on a drug trip of course. There's a gossamer thin piano part buried under all the scraping and screeching, and once your ears find that the structure of the song reveals itself.
That moment, the moment when I was finally able to comprehend 'Mourning Glory', is the moment I live for -- the moment when appreciation transforms into enjoyment. Sometimes it takes years... It sure did in this case. I've been listening to 'Pure Guava' since I was in eighth grade, and I was in college before 'Mourning Glory' made itself clear to me. They did right by our mutual heroes, The Residents, in that instance. I was telling a friend last night that whenever The Residents release a new album, I have a period of at least three months where I won't listen to ANYTHING else trying to Dr. Garbanzoure out what statement they are trying to make. They really make you work for it, and that's a big part of why their music is so valuable to me. It's almost more like a collaboration than a listening experience.
The final stretch of the record gets pretty goofy; 'Touch My Tooter' is exactly what it sounds like, 'Hey Fat Boy (Asshole)' is pretty much just a dude with a vaguely Hispanic accent drunkenly yelling HEY FAT BOY! ASSHOLE! COME HERE! YOU KILLED MY MOTHER! I'M GONNA KILL YOU!. 'Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)' is an homage to Prince in a very Ween kind of way.
'Pure Guava' is similar to 'Apollo 18'. It was the last album recorded just by Deaner and Gener, the last time they recorded to a 4-track until their most recent album, the last Ween record before they changed course and became an actual rock band. It is concentrated Ween, actual pure guava. This is one of the records that made me who I am.
« Last Edit: Jan 27, 2011, 12:10pm by Horned Gramma »
Re: A Record a Day. « Reply #197 on Jan 27, 2011, 12:52pm »
1/27/11
Nice - S/T
This one is very special to me, and I am very excited to finally be able to write it.
How did we discover new music before the internet? There's not even an answer to that question, or at least not just one. We read music magazines I guess, but at the time that seemed like the LEAST reliable way; who wants to READ about music? We had MTV, when MTV played music videos, and then MTV's spunky little brother MTV2 and 'Insomniac Music Theater' on VH1 late nights, as long as you didn't tell anyone that you were watching VH1. The best thing was just hearing a song playing somewhere and having to start the months-long process of the 'Who is that song by?' game. We made mixtapes for friends, we mowed lawns to earn enough money to go down to the mall and buy the new Peter Gabriel album. Basically, building a personal sense of taste was something that you really had to work for. It was a lot more fun that way.
The tireless hunting for the name of an artist or a record store within a hundred miles who would be willing to special order that new, import-only James album is a thing of the past since the birth of Google and Amazon. You don't have to know much more than a handful of words to a song and how to use Limewire to get pretty much any song you can think of.
My final hunt ended yesterday afternoon when the internet at long last brought to my computer screen the image you see above you. Nice was a short-lived jangle pop band from Australia who were active for less than two years in 1990-1991. Their sound is very similar to early-era R.E.M., the 'Chronic Town' and 'Murmur' R.E.M. that was the sound that everyone was striving to imitate at the time. I became a fan of Nice because they had a piece of music that was used as incidental music in a couple episodes of 'The Adventures of Pete & Pete' (incidentally, this is also how I became a fan of the Magnetic Fields). The creators of 'Pete & Pete' used music just masterfully in that show, and the names of the bands whose music was in the episodes - and even some that I think WEREN'T in the episodes and that they just happened to be listening to at the moment - were listed in the credits. At around the same time that I was getting into Modest Mouse and Neutral Milk Hotel, I made a point of buying albums by as many of the artists listed there as I could find.
I bought Nice's self-titled album in mid 2000. For such simple, straight-forward, kind of derivative music it really connected with me at the time and has become a kind of musical security blanket for me. I lost the CD case for this album almost eight years ago, and until yesterday I had almost completely forgotten what it looked like because although I looked and looked and looked endlessly for years on the internet for an image of the album art, I could never find it. The image you see above is a screen capture from a Youtube video, one that has all of three views. It was posted by a friend of a friend in a conversation elsewhere about Australian bands, and when I saw it I shouted for joy. I couldn't believe my eyes.
In fact almost no information at all exists anywhere on the internet about this record. I'm glad I lost the CD case but not the CD, because I've all but given up on ever finding another copy of it.
Now, this part is entirely true: this album, Nice's self-titled and only record, is the reason for the existence of A Record a Day. I conceived the idea for A Record a Day as kind of a conservatory for this kind of 'lost' record in general, supposing that when the column did eventually move to a blog space it could serve as an archive for people who found a copy of 'Optiganally Yours Presents Exclusively Talentmaker!' or 'A Journey to Happiness Island' in some dusty old record store, and went uselessly googling trying to find any substantial information on the album and finding themselves empty-handed like I did for so long with Nice. Alternately, I was hoping that if I were to mention the Nice record in that space, perhaps someone who had found their way to A Record a Day by trying to research some other record might have some information on it, or - hope against hope - a jpg of the album art.
I feel a sense of loss today. My last great hunt is over. Information on most any other band I could want to know is only a couple keystrokes away. I think I may have felt yesterday, for the last time, that blast of euphoria that comes when I could hold a CD in my hand that I have been looking for for months or years and think, I finally found it, all that work paid off and now it's mine.
This has been a story not so much about the album itself, but about loving music and finding music and how the absence of a crude drawing of some kind of cow thing and a naked woman can drive a person insane for nearly a decade. I'd feel bad if I sold you too hard on the music itself, because it's not likely that you'll ever hear this music unless I personally burn a copy of the CD for you. Which is too bad, it's a great, great album. Songs that I love very much are on this record, including the creepily evangelical 'Christiana Amore' and the bestiality-themed 'Head in the Hay'. Linked below is album opener 'Dear John', which gives a pretty good idea of the R.E.M./Nick Cave hybrid that is the ever-mysterious Nice.
I fucking found it guys. There it is, right up there, and it was worth all the years of searching. That's a great album cover for a great album. That picture is the dying dream of yesterday's brand of music geek.
Thanks for indulging me. Here's 'Dear John'.
« Last Edit: Jan 27, 2011, 6:56pm by Horned Gramma »
Re: A Record a Day. « Reply #198 on Jan 28, 2011, 12:48pm »
1/28/11
Moxy Früvous - Bargainville
There's an episode of the classic sitcom NewsRadio in which Dave Foley's character is approaching his 32nd birthday when a trio of his friends (played by Bob Odenkirk, David Cross and Brian Posehn) arrive at the radio station waving an old Denny's placemat on which the four of them had, once upon a time, written and signed a contract which states that if each of them were to still be bachelors by the time they turned 32 they would reform their old college a capella group and make an attempt to storm the American radio charts. It becomes apparent that most of the members of the group, which they called 'Chock Full o' Notes', have reservations about walking away from their established lives to pursue this dream, most of them having to do with the fact that most people consider all-male a capella music to be "extremely gay, or in some other way distasteful."
I was thinking about Moxy Früvous during our conversation about Canadian Content laws a couple weeks ago. These guys were great, and (apparently?) they made at least a minor splash on Canadian airwaves back in the 90's. So as I write this, I'm conscious of seeming like I'm maybe talking out of my ass - I've never even been to Canada and I'm a huge Früvous fan, which kind of makes me a poser. Because in America, literally nobody knows who the hell Moxy Früvous is. For one thing, their shtick is pretty thoroughly Canadian - they sing about hockey, they bag on American politics and pundits, and they are determinedly uncool (sorry Canadians, we love ya, but...).
As was the case with Chock Full o' Notes, though, achieving airplay because of Canadian Content laws and/or a successful performance at BeaverJam '88 will never translate into success in the good ol' USA. Früvous labored for a straight decade, releasing half a dozen albums and literally touring non-stop from 1990 until 1999 before they realized they would never find the success they deserved.
'Bargainvile' is their first album, and it is kind of a classic. They started with pretty much the same makings as the Barenaked Ladies; same sense of humor, same goofball approach to songwriting and strong vocal harmonies. The sound of the Früvous boys - Mike, Dave, Murray and Jian - harmonizing together sounds like a choir of Canadian angels, even if they are singing their hosannas to a video store clerk or a reclining chair instead of the eyeball in the sky.
'Bargainville' is grimly political half the time, and unabashedly dorky the other half. It opens with 'River Valley' and its clunky environmentalist message, and closes with 'The Gulf War Song', which is entirely hamfisted but lovely and poignant just the same. In between are odes to broken love ('Fell in Love'), societal gridlock ('Stuck in the 90's') and a gap-toothed goof on the classic tale of the Prince & the Pauper - the infamous 'King of Spain'. The melodies are vicious earworms, terminally hummable.
Früvous best song, 'The Drinking Song', was the anthem and then the funeral march for one of the most significant relationships of my life. My old girlfriend Bethany - who directly or indirectly introduced me to Früvous as well as Optiganally Yours and The Residents, as well as probably half the bands I've written about here - had 'The Drinking Song' playing on her stereo when we met. In hindsight, I suppose a pint-hoisting meditation on the life of a dear friend who has just drunk himself to death was the perfect choice to be 'Our Song'. It's on this song that the Früvous boys combine the jokey riffs with the wide eyed horror of realizing what turning into an adult entails, and the result is like the nervous laughter of a group of friends who just realized how close they just came to blowing themselves up at a barbecue. It's powerful, and sincere, and beautiful.
Later in the album, they do an a capella cover of the 'Spider-Man' theme.
There's a little too much 'golly gee willikers' clowning on this record for it to appeal to some people. It's a lot of fun, though, and the oil-and-water combination of tenth grade humor and somber hand-wringing makes for a unique listening experience. And like I said, their voices are immaculate.
The opportunity to see Moxy Früvous perform is something that I miss; I caught them on their very last tour. They did the instrument shuffle all night long, trading each others' guitars and accordions and drums back and forth after every few songs. They were talented, and they were loved, but as Chock Full o' Notes learned those are the two least important factors in most success stories.
Joined: Jan 2011 Gender: Male Posts: 2,726 Location: Auburn, WA
Re: A Record a Day. « Reply #199 on Jan 28, 2011, 1:23pm »
Damnit damnit damnit. I got some headphones so i could check this stuff out... Lo and behold, not only do the speakers not work on this PoS, It won't output to headphones either! Damnable piece of ::mutters incoherently::
Re: A Record a Day. « Reply #200 on Jan 28, 2011, 2:10pm »
I love that you are obviously seeking the most obscure shit you can find. Moxy Fruvous is definitely one of those bands! CANCON made them stars here. At least, we all knew who they were, but somehow I always knew that wasn't making it further south than Toronto.
Re: A Record a Day. « Reply #201 on Jan 28, 2011, 4:49pm »
I wonder what would happen if Gramma spent an hour listening to an album he dislikes and writes a review? Do you think he would spend the rest of the day posting friendly comments like his wife does, or do you think he would be extra super pissed off? Either way, giving this guy an hour to explain how much he dislikes Mumford & Sons would be a pretty entertaining read.
Re: A Record a Day. « Reply #202 on Jan 28, 2011, 4:52pm »
Those of you waiting for me to turn into a huggy bear because StormyPinkness is here are gonna have a long wait. And those of you who think I'm going to spend even five more minutes listening to the hoedown from hell that is Mumford & Sons are just plain wrong.
Those of you waiting for me to turn into a huggy bear because StormyPinkness is here are gonna have a long wait. And those of you who think I'm going to spend even five more minutes listening to the hoedown from hell that is Mumford & Sons are just plain wrong.
I didn't think anyone thought you would turn into a huggy bear, regardless of the circumstances.
Those of you waiting for me to turn into a huggy bear because StormyPinkness is here are gonna have a long wait. And those of you who think I'm going to spend even five more minutes listening to the hoedown from hell that is Mumford & Sons are just plain wrong.
How about the new Modest Mouse album? Or Arcade Fire? Or dare I say...
Ohhhh, I love Moxy Fruvous! I practically grew up on them. My dad played them in the car all the time. Sad I never got to see them live because I was so young then.
I listen to Bargainville all the time still though.
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