Howlin' Wolves

Guys, I promised you a double post and a double post is what you're gonna get.


I have to tell you, if you haven't heard this song in the last year...I feel bad for you. Its nothing short of a knock out. Its bad, man. Super bad. The kind of bad that makes you feel like you need to be doing something a little more grimy and gritty whenever it comes on. It has this old school feel that makes it feel timeless and instantly familiar but a fresh energy and buzz that makes you feel alive when it comes on. I'm talking about 'Howlin' For You' by The Black Keys.

I honestly think I hear this song more from my better half rocking out than I ever do in my own iTunes shuffling, which I hope speaks more of her taste than it does my ear-to-the-ground cultural awareness. It's one of those tracks that you hear and think "Damn, has this been out and I've been missing out on it?" In testament to her latent hip factor, though, the better half kept telling me how great the song was whenever it came on and would subsequently crank up the volume. Really all it took was a single listening, but since then I just let her turn up the song cause its fantastic and sounds better with some bass.

The Black Keys are phenomenal. One of the daring two-man-band types, they make a sound that's both a throwback and inherently modern in its simplicity and urgency. Its bluesy, simple rock that gets you by the cojones and holds on, instead of overwhelming and exhausting you with too many cooks and too many tricks. Their songs are stripped down and minimal, relying on quality songwriting and balls rather than gimmicks and guest spots. So a song like 'Howlin' For You'  works due to the few elements it has - there's some thumping drums that are reminiscent of stadium stompers, a guitar line that sounds like its being played through a phone and vocals that are as dangerous as they are appealing. The literally and figuratively distorted guitar lick that permeates the song is super catchy, especially for the solitary little part at the end of the song where it drops an octave for a single bar. Listen for it.

The video for the song is just as fantastic. While the song hasn't been officially announced as a single, the band made a video for it that's in the style of a trailer for a sleazy exploitation flick. Drawing on all of its Grindhouse-summoning imagery and faux-trailer aesthetics, they combine to make a clip that screams to be made into a real movie. The way Hollywood works today, that is entirely possible.

'Howlin' for You' by The Black Keys is huge, and deserves even more love than it already gets. This duo acutally sells albums in this modern era, how much of a seal of approval is that? See what you've been missing out on and listen to it. Its unbelievably good.

Clock Towers

Happy Weekend, kids!


How about something fun for the weekend? Something a little left of center to amuse you? You guys ever heard of Overclocked Remix? I love this site, both for the content and the concept. My neighbor in college told me about it, telling me if I had any love for video games at all, I simply had to check it out. At that point the site was already seven or eight years old. What I found there blew my mind.

Overclocked ReMix is ostensibly a place where artists take music from video games both new and old and reinterpret, remix and reconstitute it into amazing new works. The results are astounding. Name a game and its probably there. There are the heavy hitters of the video game world, like Final Fantasy VI or VII, which boast hundreds of respective remixes, or Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, anything Mega Man, Mario or Sonic related. There are thousands of high quality, mind blowingly original re-contextualizations of memorable music that will really make you step back and reevaluate the idea of music in gaming. The sheer volume of content hosted on the site is staggering - over 2,000 mixes by over 500 artists, all organized in searchable databases or listed by gaming platform.

This is something that you really owe it to yourself to check out, regardless of your stance on videogames - you may not care for them, but how can you deny that the music produced here is gorgeous? Not only does the source material vary widely, from pre-8 bit to modern symphonics, but so do the results - everything from techno and trance to thrash metal to jazz arrangements and classical compilations. Furthermore there are conceptual groupings and albums done by individual artists and the community as a whole. Entire soundtracks get re-worked and released for free as declarations of love for the games that spawned them. There's even a Youtube channel to flip through selections if you don't want to download anything.

Not only have the artists and members of the community received praise in print and across the web, they've received accolades and kudos from the originating artists themselves. The OC community always credits the source material and doesn't profit from the endeavor - this is all about love of the games. In the ultimate stamp of approval, the community was tasked with creating the official soundtrack for Street Fighter II HD Remix, a modern update of the classic fighting game, by the developers themselves. In fact the music for the game was one of the best received elements of the new game.


I adore this site. In the years since being turned on to it I've been consistently amazed at the work produced. It's made me really appreciate the music in games I love and better understand how the composers affect my experience. Old games I've loved have had new life breathed into them. Friends have loved music I've played for them, having no idea the songs originated from a 16 bit game. Normally they'd scoff and think me a geek. Instead they ask for a copy of it. I just want the world at large to know about this amazing community of artists and the crazy work they do. Give 'em  a look and see if your old favorites are there.

Breathing

Hey gang, what's the good word?


I know this is where I normally would post a review of something amazing and under appreciated by the world at large, but at the moment I'm on the go and unable to sit and write the normal amount of appropriate text. So to ease the burden and remain consistent, here's another bit of fiction, picked pure from my mind. I promise that to make up for the lack of music I'll do a double post tomorrow. In the meantime enjoy this little fiction...






They only move when I move, he thought. Silence hung in the room, unmoving and thick, save for the monotonous electronic drone of the wall mounted clock on the north wall. Each second that passed felt forced and deliberate.  He ran a hand up to his short black hair and rubbed the fur in frustration. At the same moment, 24 students and a middle-aged teacher mimicked his movements, right hand sliding up the side of their bodies, rustling their hair, letting out the same barely audible sigh; with 25 people sighing at once the level of the sigh was thicker, a ghostly rush of air from all around him. Tom was growing weary.

Fading Out

Dear, sweet lord. It's the weekend.


Sometimes life is a grind. Sometimes we feel like we have to grind away just to get through the week. Sometimes I don't want my peaceful, quiet trip hop and techno tunes. Sometimes I want the gritty, folksy down-to-earth rock of a songwriter. Someone who can tell a story. But it has to have some teeth, as well. There's a fantastic old album no one seems to listen to anymore that I love to put on for a little relief on a day like this. That album? Sparkle and Fade by Everclear.


Everclear are a strange band. They had a big hit in 1995 with 'Santa Monica', the biggest single off of their major label debut, Sparkle and Fade. This album broke them out in a major way. Their followup So Much for the Afterglow had a few hits but since then it's all been downhill. The band basically hit it big in the late 90s and never hit those heights again. While the sole consistent member, front man Art Alexakis, has toiled away on the band and their albums over the years, this first big album of theirs, with it's California Surf-tinged elements, has always had a special place in my heart. 

Is that a weird thing to say about a seemingly random grunge album from 16 years ago? Maybe. But I like it anyway. It's very du jour - it amazes me the songs were singles and played on the radio and MTV. Hearing what's popular now makes the songs in question here feel so normal and straight forward. In a way, though, that's exactly what it is about this album that I love. It's that simple ability to write and play these songs with no pretension and complication that I love so much. The band is a very nuts and bolts outfit - drums, guitar, bass. That's it. Nothing too fancy, just catchy mid-tempo riffs. Oh, and a songwriter who shone quite brightly for an entire album. Alexakis wrote from the heart here, pulling pieces of his childhood out of his memories and using them to craft these deeply personal and human songs about broken people and their hopes. It sounds corny, I know, but hearing it from such an earnest performer makes it work.

From the dirty little lick that opens the album in 'Electra Made Me Blind', you know what kind of album you're getting into. The songs have some balls. Art sings his heart out. The band plays with steadfast conviction, making simple songs sound strong. Alexakis mines the personal tragedy of his brother's death from an overdose to add terrible weight to 'Heroin Girl', a tragic song that buzzes and drowns in distortion. The mega-pop of 'You Make Me Feel Like A Whore' and 'Santa Monica' take what are quite bleak topics and makes them irresistibly catchy and rocking numbers. The guitar riffs are huge and cliched in the best way only the 90s could produce. There are also sweet and heartbreaking songs, like the saccharine poison of 'Strawberry' with it's shimmering, strummed acoustics. 'Nehalem' is a punchy little punk number that barely clocks in under two minutes but paints a full picture of a breaking couple in a small town. The stealth breakout number, though, is the tragic 'Queen of the Air', where Alexakis tells a story about a man realizing he witnessed something horrible as a child. It's a fantastic song with some personal and haunting lyrics, despite the dreamy alt-rock that backs it. 

Sometimes I wish Everclear were still huge. I'm okay with their decline, though. I still have this great, under appreciated album that makes me feel better after a long week. Life is better when you have something secret and personal to give you a little hidden pleasure. No one I know knows about this album other than the big single. That just makes me love it that much more. So I thought I'd share it with you - to let you in on a secret in the hopes that it means something to you like it does for me.

Pepper Shaker

Alright, fine.


Let's get weird with it, shall we? Let's get a little oddball. After yesterday's halfhearted impugning of Metallic despite my love of some of their singles, let's take a look at a band that completely lost their minds. An equally distant band who never the less had a single I still love that people don't really know about today. Although I suppose if one were to look deeper into the mythology of their careers it could be inferred that they never had proper minds to begin with. I'm speaking (with some trepidation) about the Butthole Surfers and their biggest mainstream success, 'Pepper'.

The Butthole Surfers are a band with a hell of a reputation. They are quite simply infamous for...being themselves. Established back in the early 80s, the band would make a horrifying yet captivating spectacle out of their stage shows. Outrageous outfits and bizarre costumes. Rampant and encouraged drug use. Nudity. Open flames. Prat falls and fake blood to accentuate them. Then there are the rumors about sex on stage which have yet to be confirmed. In the midst of all this the band was making avant-garde noise rock, punk rock and just straight up, weird, jammy stuff. Front man Gibby Hanes got to the point where he had a massive rack for noise effects which had little rhyme or reason, he just liked to switch things up for the sake of weird. I learned all of this after the fact, of course, but I did love their most mainstream release.

In 1996, some fifteen+ years after they got their start, the band released their album Electriclarryland. A single released from the album, 'Pepper', became a bit of a runaway hit with the alternative crowd at the time. This was of the era where Beck was still more of the 'Loser' sound than the 'Lost Cause' sound he later embraced. The music world, especially MTV, was much less nuanced and outrageous. A single like this stood out for its weird sound, the spoken/rapped sections in the verses. The plodding beat and the backwards vocal snippets. We were easily shocked, my friends. Something as pedestrian as 'Pepper' stood out as bizarre in a sea of Bush and Joan Osborn. Hey, I was young and sheltered, okay?

The song is a fantastic example of alternative music in the mid 90s. It's that mid-tempo shuffle, no bass to speak of but a simple drum loop and some fuzzy guitars. It's really a great song made of a handful of parts. Gibby intones about a list of odd characters who all die in bizarre ways. The chorus is awesomely poppy, just a single chord with Gibby singing "I don't mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows. I can smell you on my lips and smell you in my clothes. Cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies. You never know just how you look through other people's eyes." Other than a small guitar solo and the backwards vocal piece, that's the entire song. That's it. It's incredibly simple, another example of how producers and execs are screwing up by packing in sounds and cluttering songs with blips and bloops. This is catchy simply because it's so simple and stupid.

The Butthole Surfers are still technically around and, I would wager, just as insane. This song, as great as it is, is the rare commercial bright spot in their canon. If you love this, you probably won't like anything else they do. Still, I love it for its absurdity and du jour elements. It's a great 90s alternative track you owe it to yourself to dig up.

Unsung Hero

So it has come to this.


In my chronicling of the music that I swear up and down is fantastic yet forgotten, it is now time to overturn the stone that is Metallica. People, do not judge me too harshly. 


I’ve always had a bit of a complicated relationship with the Gods of Metal. My older brother, bastion of all that was cool in my youth, had their black album, the one that made the band insanely popular and began breaking them away from their thrash-metal roots. Tracks like ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Nothing Else Matters’ showed the world that beyond the breakneck pace and endless guitar wankery there may actually have been the lurking spectre of talent. As a young kid I was naturally frightened of the growling and howling, the menace and the metal. Still, once I hit my teens I felt like it almost instantly clicked. Suddenly I felt a connection with the absurd heaviness of ‘Sad But True’. So when the band went all left-field and cut off their hair and started playing bluesy stuff, I was curious but uninformed. I was not aware of the canon they had produced up to that point. I had no idea of the sacrilege the band was committing in the eyes of their fan base. I just thought it was more accessible, less pummeling. I thought it was an improvement, to be honest.


Despite this shift in the band’s tone, I still could never really get on board with them. Even with more nuanced material like ‘Until It Sleeps’ and ‘Mama Said’ I felt like the band wasn’t for me, as though I had no solidarity with the legions of dudes wearing black t-shirts with inscrutable logos and old album covers printed on them. It just didn’t gel with me, although given my predilection for things like Portishead, Bjork and Colin Hay, I suppose that’s hardly a surprise. Later albums only reinforced this notion; seeing the band’s faltering attempts at re-invigoration and relevance in a vastly changing world didn’t help any. Further, their absurd fights against Napster and literally suing their fans didn’t ingratiate them in my mind, especially when the same older brother got his ip banned from Napster. What kind of band doesn’t want their fans to listen to their music? Anyone who has done any research what so ever will tell you a band makes money off of tours and shows, not albums shipped. A band makes more in licensing fees than they do on CDs. But I’m veering off topic.

There are a handful of songs by Metallica I do love. One in particular is off of the controversial Load, the album that saw them really shake loose from their thrash roots to get all introspective and weepy. The song in question, ‘Hero of the Day’, is actually one of the few songs that the band wrote in a major key. I feel like that distinction alone shows that I am not in their target market. Still, I love this song. 

The nuts and bolts of 'Hero of the Day' are what make it so great. There's no big gimmick or central conceit to the song - it's just a great little chord progression with a savory melody. The verses are these swirling and building bits of an A Major guitar riff that ascends to a place of (gasp!) potential happiness. When the band gets to what serves as the chorus in the song it drifts back to the dis-tempered and aggressive with lots of hurtling drums and palm-muted chords suggesting anger, only the lyrics suggest its more about the sadness of realizing you're not the angry young man you wanted to be. In fact, while they're hidden behind hooks and riffs, the song is quite a sad number about a man asking why he can't be a better person, hiding away from problems until they just go away. 

Metallica may be a guilty pleasure for me, at times, but I still get genuine pleasure from hearing this song. As odd as it sounds, it's great in the morning with the main riff serving almost as an introduction to the day. It might be melancholic but it's still somehow positive. I know the band has a reputation for being arrogant and self-righteous. I'll forgive it, though, just to have this song. It's really great. Check it out.

Toad in the Hole

Here's a fun new thing to add to my list of awesome things. When I get the itch for putting fiction through my fingers, I'll post it here and compile them under the fictions heading. How about a story?

The gray-blue doors of the elevator stood hard and unmoving.  There was a sign on the right-hand sliding door framed in beige masking tape – “Out of order”.

“Shoot.”

I hit my head against the wall.  I didn’t feel like doing anything, let alone walking up five flights of stairs.  My bag was weighing heavily on my back and shoulders, pulling my arms back and knotting muscles from the weight of my cleats, clothes and books.  I was still slick with sweat and had a dirty mix of blood and mud caked around my calves.  My intramural team had gotten soundly pounded in another game, and the loss was draining.  I had nearly passed out from the heat and humidity in the game, but kept on playing from a lack of subs.  I had worked a full shift at the bar, and had a paper to write for the next day.  Today was too long.  I thought the end was in sight, but it was five floors up.  I wanted to shower terribly, wash the stink and grime of a hard day off of me.  But the elevator was out.

Fly Paper

Working on something novel, so here's a thing to tide you over.


I've covered a fair bit of the 1990s and the alt rock contained there in. One of my favorites one hit wonders deserves a little love, so I thought I'd spend today's allocated space on something distinctly turn-of-the-century. Something that contains some elements that are distinctly indicative of the period. I speak of The Flys. 

Rocking some bug-eyed shades, this band was full of late-90s attitude. Their big single, which peaked at #5 on the Billboard charts, was 'Got You Where I Want You', off the album Holiday Man. Their songs were featured on not one, not two but three terrible teen movies from the end of the decade. One, The Crow: Salvation, is hardly worth mentioning despite featuring a young Kirsten Dunst. Teen movie two was the oddball cheerleader heist flick Sugar and Spice, which had a cameo from Conan O'Brien, of all people. The third was the forgettable Disturbing Behavior, featured a young Katie Holmes as a heroine and unsuspecting future wife of Tom Cruise. The big single for the band was on this soundtrack, whose video also featured Ms. Holmes making an appearance, which sadly seems to be the sole claim to fame for the clip. I still dig it, though. The song is still great.

The song itself is a fantastic slice of late 90s alt rock, too. It's built around a solitary, octave riff that plunks back and forth on the low E and A strings, a simple little lick that's memorable and easy to play, which established it as an easy, "Oh yeah I remember that!" kind of a cover for budding bands to pull out of their hats. The verses are long, drawn out calls of teen angsty "What's the point of this?" and "I think you're smart, you sweet thing - tell me your name". Nothing revelatory or incredibly insightful, just fun to sing and easy to learn. The hook is just the band's singer crooning in falsetto and howling the title. I'm being quite reductive here, in all honesty - the song is a pretty solid, catchy piece of alt-rock, even if it's a tad dated. It still works really well, despite the requisite du jour white-boy rock-rap breakdown in the middle section. We can cringe all we want but we still made Limp Bizkit (ugh) famous. So this seems quite tolerable in comparison.

I love this song, in fact. See how I've warmed up to it, even in the short space of writing about how endemic it was of the era? It's simply that catchy and accessible. Not everything needs to be over-wrought and anguished insight, giving way to a secret on the human condition. Hey, the band's Wikipedia page is short enough to be an indication of their cultural footprint; but it's no big crisis, just saying not even a member of the band beefed it up for vanity's sake (which is more common than you would think). Sometimes a guy just wants to rock, and if it requires a song from some bad teen movie soundtracks, so be it. I'll deal with the consequences myself.

Bad Wolves

What's good, gang?


I'm back in the saddle, comfortably in the world of wireless internet. Sad how fidgety I could get without it, but it makes things so much easier to have it. Another beautiful day out, went for a longer run when I got home from the office. Another great album from a mid 90s punk band came roaring through my ear buds and I thought 'Good lord, why don't I listen to Rancid more often?'


Rancid are a band that has always enjoyed a reputation of harder than the poppy fore-bearers of Green Day and The Offspring, but have never broken as widely as their counterparts, either. This is not to say Rancid wanted the audience. They just never got to the same level of selling out/buying in that these other bands did. Rancid, in fact, had great success and mainstream press with their seminal 1995 album ...And Out Come The Wolves. I love this album.

Released on Epitaph amid the mid 90s resurgence of commercially popular punk, Rancid's third album was an instant classic in the genre. There's a vibrancy and touch of life to ...And Out Come The Wolves that was lacking in other albums at the time; even now, fifteen years hence, the album is alive with warts and blistering guitar squeals and the vocal dissonance of Lars Fredriksen and Tim Armstrong. It's as though this album, with it's flaws and heart worn brazenly on it's sleeve, was a counterpart to the clean and mass-marketable appeal of Green Day's Dookie. Dookie was the Frampton Comes Alive! of my generation. This album is more like Black Sabbath's Paranoid - more dangerous, a little more left field, a little less calculated.

Look, for example, at the opening. Clocking in at a scant minute and twenty five seconds, 'Maxwell's Murder' is blistering and manic, from the staccato blast-beats to the strung-out bass solo that centers the track. Singles like 'Ruby Soho' and 'Roots & Radicals' were slightly more radio friendly, but still had the band's cracked vocals and loose, live-wire playing. The reggae/ska influenced 'Time Bomb' is as infectious and memorable today as it was when it was released. It's a song that makes you think you've already heard it before, like it's somehow based on another more famous song. The deeper cuts are fantastic, too. 'Journey to the End of the East Bay' is a magnificent exercise in the punk genre, showing what the band can do when given free range to be as anthemic as they please.

Sure, Rancid has released plenty of solid, quality punk albums over their massive and prolific career. None of them hold a candle to Wolves in my eyes, however. This album is so amazing, end to end. The passion never ebbs, the vibrancy never waivers. If you've never heard it, you've missed a huge part of where modern punk, post-punk and hardcore all get their moves from. Listen to it, you'll be astounded at how real and relevant it feels, all these years later.

Your Land, My Land

Sunday night is quickly escaping me.


Still stranded in the life of no wifi. The outage continues and I struggle to survive, my information addicted brain confused by a drop off in data input and a sudden jump in sleep. Still, I have to credit the clarity to being able to run again. I went jogging down the trail by my apartment yesterday - it was gorgeous. A clear sunny day, one that I could really savor while I ran. I admit I blocked out the natural ambiance by using headphones but an album came on that actually pushed me faster and gave me momentum boost. The day was even more amazing, the faster I ran. My knee hasn't felt this good in a long time. I again thought back to soccer practices starting up during high school and how I would listen to all this intense punk music to pump myself up.


The album that gave me the boost yesterday was one I picked up with strange expectations. Knowing he band had a specific, consistent sound, I picked up the album with no raised hopes. Over the years it's kind of stayed with me, but as good as it seems, it still feels kind of odd and distant. That my be due to the timing of the release. But we'll get to that.

Land of the Free? was released by Pennywise in June of 2001. I bought it right as my team was starting their two-a-day practices. I wanted something new to listen to as I drove in and got my gear out. It was distinctly Pennywise - socio-political lyrics over hurtling hardcore. What any fan of the band would expect. There was plenty of stuff on the album about America and some of it's less flattering qualities.


Then the big attack happened, and I always started to look at the album a little differently. 


Without getting too deeply into my personal beliefs I found it strange to listen to an album so critical of Western living while simultaneously experiencing one of the most outspoken time of patriotism I'd ever seen. Regardless of how you feel, to anyone around at the time, the album would have stood out among a sea of pro-Americanism. It was kind of jarring to hear the contrarian tone. Despite the uneasy discord the album created in my head at the time, I've really come to appreciate Land of the Free? for what it is.

I love the passion and momentum the band has, they play with conviction. The production, given the source material, is pretty solid. It never works for a band in this vein to have a weak, thin sound. The whole album is absolutely Pennywise. From the opening notes of 'Time Marches On', you know what you're in for. Even though it can feel oddly like there's never a distinct melody, the songs are darkly catchy.


These late summer days when I run always bring me back to that time of my life when I became so much more aware of the world outside mine. The world had a new element of flux that I had not been conscious of; permanence become relative. Music may be static on record, but constantly changing in how I absorb it. Listening to Land of the Free? has been a lot of different things. 

Now when I hear it as I speed past the lake, my legs exhausted, approaching ten years since, the nature in which I perceive the world has changed. The album feels somehow more relevant. Apparently despite the change in me, some problems can stay consistent. Give the album a listen for yourself and see if you get what I'm saying - think about how it would feel to hear it back then. Strange business, how it's changed over the decade.