Saturday night

My motivation to write in this blog seems pretty lackluster. Maybe the "cd review" format is too formal. I'm always sitting around drinking and listening to my CD's, so I'm going to try out just randomly narrating those two things.

Can - "Halleluhwah" from Tago Mago. Only Can CD I've listened to. Fucking awesome song, that's all I'm going to say. I need to listen to this album more.

Continuing the krautrock thing, Amon Duul II - "Phallus Dei", title track. I can see how this would be a great album to namedrop for some street cred. Kind of obscure, sweet album cover. Really experimental for 1969. And it's called Phallus Dei. It hasn't done a lot for me yet though. Sure it has a really cool aesthetic but it just kind of meanders. When the vocals come in with lines like "They broke my magic stick" I get annoyed. For me, the tongue-in-cheek aspect breaks whatever vibe they were building up - I much prefer bands to take themselves overly seriously. See Yes and Jethro Tull.

Then again, Faust has the line "Daddy, take the banana. Tomorrow is Sunday". And that definitely grew on me. I probably haven't listened to "Phallus Dei" enough to judge, but as of now I find it pretty comparable to "Faust So Far" and think the latter is a lot more focused and just better.

Samuel Adams Dunkelweizen

I don't know that I've ever had a dunkelweizen before but it tasted pretty similar to the Bavarian hefeweizens I've had, except darker in color. It was OK but seemed pretty one dimensional by the second half and I got pretty sick of the taste. Maybe I don't like wheat beers enough to enjoy anything other than really great ones.

Everybody always says bavarian hefeweizen tastes like banana and clove. I have to wonder how much of that is just people jumping on the bandwagon. I can't be the only one who doesn't know what the fuck a clove tastes like. As for banana, I don't know, I think if my beer tasted like that I would spit it out. I can see where someone would find a faint resemblance to banana but somehow in the world of beer geeks this leads to tasting apricot in your PBR. Whatever.

Obviously I have an inferiority complex about my beer palate.

Jethro Tull - "A Passion Play", part 1. Kind of the rambling younger brother of Thick as a Brick. There are some good parts but it seems kind of cut and paste rather than a thoroughly conceived 20 minute song. The same thing could be said about Thick as a Brick to an extent, but the individual sections of that album are just way more enjoyable. But again, I haven't listened to this exhaustively.

Tool - "Third Eye" from Aenima. I first got into this album back when CD burners were new, and my friend's apparently couldn't do the full album so he left off this track. So it's the only one I don't know that well now that I own the CD. Pretty great, and the Bill Hicks quotes about drugs are preaching to the choir.

Incantation - a few tracks from Primordial Domination. I just found out they are putting an album out this year for the first time in 6 years, so I wanted to revisit their latest album. It's kind of like I remembered; not that great. Definitely their worst release. The songwriting probably isn't drastically different, but the atmosphere was always what set this band apart and Primordial Domination is just too clean and contained. Hopefully this upcoming release will be a return to form. In the right mood, I'm a drooling fanboy for most of their stuff.

Tom Waits - a few tracks from Mule Variations. The only Tom Waits I've listened to. Started with Eyeball Kid; that was musically more interesting than I remembered. Picture in a Frame was just boring. Chocolate Jesus...I don't know. Is this supposed to be funny? Generally when I listen to this album I just don't see the point to any of it. Not that I think music should have a point.

I only decided to do this blog thing halfway into the night. The whole time I've been writing the above I've been listening to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. I haven't been paying that much attention, but it seems like something I could probably get into. I'm really into listening to important and influential albums lately.

Samuel Adams - Hazel Brown

I thought this beer was fucking gross. It says "ale with natural flavors added" and it tastes like the natural flavor was a mixture of sugar and ass. 

Now I'm drinking bourbon to get these weak flavored, 5% abv beers out of my mind. It's the last of my bottle of "Old Weller Antique 107 proof". Really good stuff - it's the "house bourbon" of K&L wines in Redwood City (awesome store, maybe I'll blog about it later). The guy at the register was raving to me about how creamy and sweet and full bodied it was. I guess it's all relative but I don't know if I'll ever get used to describing bourbon like it's a glass of milk. When I first opened the bottle I thought it was unbearably strong but I must have gotten used to it. By now I can taste more of the sweetness behind the alcohol. Full bodied and creamy, not so much. Baileys is creamy.

Sunn 0))) - "Ra at Dusk" from 00 Void. I fucking love Sunn 0))). I know a lot of people don't. But with most of their songs, within 5 seconds I'm thinking "they could do this for 20 more minutes and I wouldn't even get tired of it". And then they do.

In all seriousness, it's a really good album. About an hour of nothing but droning guitars and swirling ambience. Their later stuff gets more eclectic but it's kind of nice to hear an example of their music stripped down to its essence. I actually only bought this because it was packaged with a remix album from Nurse with Wound. I thought it would be awesome to hear the aesthetics of Sunn 0))) coupled with the compositional quirks of Steven Stapleton. As it turns out, the remix album is literally unrecognizable from its source material. Oh well, still a nice ambient/experimental album.

P.S. Ugh. I hate when a reissue has a different cover than the original album.

As I'm droning out I'm drinking Old Rosie cloudy scrumpy cider. Got introduced to this while I was in Cambridge, and it's the only cider I've had which I really like. It's pretty sour and has 7.3% abv. I only found some after filling out a survey about how annoying and incompetent BevMo employees were. The manager emailed me back and said he would personally drive over the last of the Old Rosie from his other branch (I had also mentioned they were out of it). I pick it up and they're like "oh you're that guy". Hell yeah bitches.

God, I got sick of that stupid droning shit that I previously said was awesome. Trying to get drunk and be witty is not the right mentality for that music. This is always my dilemma about writing a music blog.  The intention to write about it inevitably changes the way I approach and perceive music.

Anyway, Swans is awesome and they have a new album coming out on tuesday, The Seer. It's nearly 2 hours and undoubtedly very artistic. But I'm not going to have much time to devote to it with Katatonia's Dead End Kings coming out the same day. Addictive prog-pop-metal ear candy brilliance vs Michael Gira bleeding onto my face. There's the album I would wear the t-shirt of and there's the album I'm going to wear into a plastic stub. Sad but true.

Also both bands are playing SF the same weekend in September. I already saw Katatonia but they didn't get to play very long because we needed to devote the time to an Opeth set which was seriously boring enough to drive me to the bar just to avoid listening. It reminds me of 7th grade algebra when I would go to the bathroom mid-class for the hell of it. This time Katatonia is headlining.

As for Swans...from everything I've read, it seems like their show will be unbelievable.

Anyway My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky was a damn good album. I feel like a fraud that I haven't even listened to their iconic early albums yet - Cop, Holy Money and so on.

I got Surrealistic Pillow the same day as Loveless. I don't think I had a single pink yet album so two in a day had a few ounces of symbolic weight. I haven't listened to most of the album yet, but damn the first song smokes. That droning guitar line, the counterpoint between the two vocalists. In a weird way, the biggest effect of hearing this song was to make me value The Velvet Underground & Nico a little less. It's that realization that arsty but accessible rock was not unheard of in 1967.

Listening to old albums like this is weird because you can come across a song like Somebody to Love which you've always been conscious of but didn't give the time of day. It's pretty nice other than the number of times that damn chorus is repeated. Typical "single" in that sense.

Full disclosure: I only got this because I thought the album title was cool. I also kind of hate myself for saying "full disclosure".

(edit: thinking back on this later I guess the comment didn't make total sense considering Revolver was already out. And this is closer to The Beatles than The Velvet Underground anyway.)

One of my earliest memories relating to Jimi Hendrix was when I briefly had lessons at Guitar Center, probably 8th grade. It was metal or death for me back then, and I remember asking my kind of nerdy guitar teacher who he thought were the best guitarists. Dave Mustaine was the right answer. He went with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. It's just so stereotypical and to this day I kind of think: you're just giving a textbook answer.

Well, at 25 I've finally realized that Jimi Hendrix is mind-blowingly awesome. It's one of the first times in many years when I've listened to someone and really felt that it was a fundamentally different way to view the guitar. I guess I'm just discovering what lots of people already knew. Doesn't make it any less a revelation though.

Balast Point "Sculpin IPA". Possibly a bad idea to drink this so late in the night, but I already poured it. Besides the 7% abv, it's a pretty assertive and hoppy IPA. Sometimes that kind of thing can taste almost sickening when I've already been drinking for a while. According to some connoisseurs out there, this is a masterpiece. But I don't know, to me it's just a pretty good IPA. 

I'm always looking at beeradvocate ratings and generally if something is in the high 90's it blows me away as well. But it seems like my tastes don't run with the consensus when it comes to California IPAs and double IPAs. Pliny the Elder is another good example - infamous beer around here, and Justine loves it. I have this great desire to "understand" the hype, but maybe I should just accept that DIPA's are not my thing. Then again I had Stone's Ruination IPA the other day and surprisingly really liked it this time.

I definitely like the beer, but there are tons of IPAs floating around, and they all kind of blend together. The ones that actually stand out to me are Racer 5, Ninkasi Total Domination, Anderson Valley Hop Ottin' IPA, and Deschutes Inversion IPA. I need to do a big comparison of all those because it's been a while for most of them and all I really remember is that I liked each a lot.

Epilogue

Prescient comment about that beer being a bad idea, but not for the reason I thought. I passed out in my chair some time after pouring it, apparently only a few sips in. Someday I'll learn. Back in college knowing my limits meant not puking in the dorm hallway.

Now it's 9:30 AM and I'm faced with a tough call...drink it or dump it?

Tool - Aenima

"Albums I should have bought years ago", Part 2.


There's only one album that I was more overdue on buying than Reign in Blood: Tool's Aenima. It holds the distinction of being the only music that I was equally infatuated with as a 13 year old as I am as a 25 year old. Most of the songs on here were played on the radio at the time - "46 and 2", "H", "Eulogy", "Aenema", "Stinkfist". I loved all of them. I have particularly fond memories of hearing the long intro to "Eulogy" come on the radio. But, combining the fact that I already knew half the album with the fact that for some reason it always cost $17-$18 at the CD store, I never ended up buying it.


I don't really know what finally pushed me over the edge this year. I know I was listening to Meshuggah a lot the previous week - maybe because they have the same sort of self-important fanboys. Either way, I'm glad I stopped being such a tool.


It's pretty lame how many people out there don't take Tool seriously because of their image and their fans. On the other hand you've got underground metal or prog fans who would act like this or that obscure band blows Tool out of the water, and you would realize this if you had heard of them. It's all a bunch of crap. Indisputable band.

Slayer - Reign in Blood

"Albums I should have bought years ago", Part 1. 

The first time I ever heard Reign in Blood was in middle school, in my friend's basement. Ah, middle school. That was the only time all my friends liked metal. The start of my lifelong journey, and little did I know it was just a phase for all those other preteen dweebs.

At this point in middle school I had recently discovered Sepultura and Obituary, and after all the hype about Slayer I think I just let out a big fart. It was no heavier than Metallica. I wasn't interested.

The next phase of my relationship with Slayer was high school, when my best friend Jimmy would constantly try to argue that they were better than Megadeth. I wasn't having it. He said it just depended on which band you "grew up" on. I said he was an idiot.

I appreciate Slayer more now than I did then. But I still can't imagine any of their albums usurping Rust in Peace, So Far...So Good...So What?, or Peace Sells...But Who's Buying? at the top of my thrash list (or Beneath the Remains). 

I actually bought South of Heaven last year and I still think that album may be better. But either way, Reign in Blood is a classic and everyone knows that. It's kind of laughable that it took me this long to add it to my collection.

The Beatles - Revolver

I grew up on The Beatles - mostly albums like Rubber Soul, Hard Days Night, and Help! - but until now I had never saw down and listened to an album properly. I decided to pick up Revolver, which I was pretty sure was another that I grew up on, but apparently I was only familiar with about half the tracks.

One of the tracks I had never heard was "Tomorrow Never Knows", and coincidentally I bought this only a week after hearing that song featured in Mad Men. I'd been thinking of buying a Beatles album for months, but who knows, maybe Mad Men unconsciously pushed me to it.

It's not like I'm going to add anything to the written discourse on The Beatles here, but I was interested to realize that for the most part all the songs I recognized the most were from Paul McCartney, but all the songs I liked the most were from John Lennon or George Harrison.

Paul's songs: "Eleanor Rigby" is indisputable, and most of his others are very good. But you've also got "Good Day Sunshine;" pretty much a cheesefest. And "Yellow Submarine". I guess it's endearing, in a sort of...fuck it, I might as well listen to Raffi.

George's songs: 3/3, some of the best songs on the album. 

John's songs: "Doctor Robert" is cool but doesn't blow me away. Otherwise all of his songs destroy."And Your Bird Can Sing" is definitely the best song on here that I didn't already know (and one of my favorites period).

I'm pretty glad I've finally broken my cherry on buying cliche, iconic albums. I recently met someone who said he makes a conscious effort to avoid listening to bands everyone has heard of. Most people aren't so transparent about it, but I think it's true that some people treat a band's fame as a license not to explore their back catalogue. You get a false sense of familiarity with a band based on a few famous tracks. Personally I've always felt that you need the context of an album to fully appreciate a song anyway.

Erik B & Rakim - Paid in Full

Paid in Full was the third hip hop album I got, after 36 Chambers and Fear of a Black Planet. I immediately thought I made a mistake in buying it. The beats were simplistic and super repetitive, and literally every line of the entire album is about how good Rakim is at rapping. They were also (apparently) one of the first groups to start the obsession of hip hop with materialism - as seen by the cover. Paid in Full is definitely a "true" hip hop album - not a lot of obvious crossover appeal.

There's something to be said for musical shock treatment, because after a couple days of listening to this, I started to really like it. It's completely true that Rakim talks about the same exact thing the whole time, but he's such a good rapper that you don't really care. As for the music, it's full of 80's sounding samples and scratching. That actually gives it a cool atmosphere (at least for someone who's heard only one such album). Erik B was apparently influential and very good at what he did, but I'm not in a great position to judge that. The stuff is pretty memorable though. On certain tracks the beats sound kind of jagged with the scratching and accents not always falling right on beat, which I liked. There are also a couple instrumental tracks on here which are relatively complex.

Ultimately, my experience with Paid in Full is the reason why I like buying albums on the strength of reputation without heavily listening to them first. If I had downloaded it, I probably would have listened to Paid in Full a couple times and then written it off.

One last thing to say about Paid in Full: it reminds me of John Cage.

A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory

Here's another hip hop album to go along with my last post, but this time it's the candidate for my least favorite album I've gotten this year. The Low End Theory is an undisputed hip hop classic. But despite liking a few of the songs a fair amount, I can't seem to make it through the full album without feeling really annoyed and sick of it.

The "beats" on this album (ok, I still really hate that term) are a lot more minimalist and one-dimensional than most of the other hip hop I've listened to so far. For the most part the music just consists of a simple bass line. The album is usually considered "jazzy" by fans, although it's a pretty superficial resemblance. Nothing wrong with minimalism, but in that case the lyrics really have to carry the songs, and for me they just don't.

For one thing, there's the cringe-worthy choruses of a few songs, like "Butter" ("It's like butter baby, it's like butter" etc) or "Jazz (We've Got)" ("We've got the jazz, we've got the jazz" etc), or some terrible R&B style vocals on one of them. 

But besides that, the lyrics themselves just don't sit well with me. I'm not going to pick through it, but I can barely think of a line that stands out as being especially cool or interesting. The overall vibe seems to be that A Tribe Called Quest are normal guys who are good at rapping and successful with women. Whatever. It seems really middle of the road. It's also weird that most of the (few) swears are edited out. As far as I can tell, all versions of the album are like this.

I'd give it the benefit of the doubt that it's a good album and it's just not what I'm looking for right now.

GZA - Liquid Swords

At the beginning of the year I had the intention of blogging about every album I bought. Clearly I'm a little behind, but I think I can catch up. Especially since there are several albums which I have no desire to drone on about.

Exhibit A: Liquid Swords. All I really want to say is that it's probably my current pick for best CD I've gotten in 2012, and the one I've listened to the most. In retrospect 36 Chambers may have hit me so hard just because it was a musical revelation for me. But much of it has a kind of light hearted party atmosphere which isn't my typical aesthetic choice.

On the other hand, Liquid Swords is something I seem to be constantly in the mood for. It's a lot darker, more atmospheric, even sinister in parts. GZA is pretty untouchable throughout, but probably my favorite verse on the whole album is RZA's in "4th Chamber". Really makes me want to check out some of his solo stuff, although I have a feeling it's a lot different.

Basically this album completely rules, and nearly every Wu-Tang member sounds better to me in this context than they do on 36 Chambers. Eg Method Man on "Shadowboxin'". The only downside is that I have to go around like a tool muttering the lines. By this point Justine can easily answer the question: "What do motherfuckers think?".