Monday, March 18, 2024

SXSW '24 Pics

SXSW 2024 has come and gone, and the overwhelming feeling about the festival this year is that it's dying.  The whole thing went corporate long ago, but with the sale of SXSW to a billionaire a couple years back, and all the military contractors and arms dealers being in town last week for different panels while a genocide they're supplying weapons for goes on in Palestine, a large number of the artists pulled out of their official shows.  Instead, they played the unofficial day parties that go on all over the city, and the general consensus was "fuck SXSW."  I'm right there with them.  While i still managed to see some great bands, SXSW like so much of Austin has sold out.  I doubt i will try to attend things in the future with the same zest i used to have, and that makes me sad.  Guess we'll always have the memories.

Anyway, here are some pics of the shows i saw last week.  Highlights include the dreampop of Akira Galaxy, the bombastic sonic assault of Lip Critic, my wife winning us VIP tickets to see Sunny Day Real Estate, and Fat Dog baby.  Check 'em out below and we'll see what happens in the coming years.


Friko

Perennial

Squirrel Flower

Joyer

Native Sun

Faux Real

Omni

The Pretty Flowers

Akira Galaxy

DAIISTAR

Chanel Beads

Cumgirl8

Lip Critic

Mugger

The Belair Lip Bombs

Wishy

Cast of Thousands

Vera Ellen

Miranda and The Beat

TV's Daniel

The Courettes

Near Beer

Hinds

Shower Curtain

Fat Dog

They Are Gutting a Body of Water

Allegra Krieger

Mamalarky

Ekko Astral

Die Spitz

The Get Up Kids

Sunny Day Real Estate

Villagerrr

Being Dead

Fat Dog (again)

 

A Country Western

Here's some cool indie rock from Philly band A Country Western that has all the vibes of the kind of stuff we might have been listening to 25 years ago.  Listen to "Ridgeline" below and pre-order the band's great new "Life on the Lawn" LP here from Crafted Sounds.


drowse & Lula Asplund Cover Low

The Flenser continues to drop songs from their upcoming Low tribute album, "Your Voice Is Not Enough," and the latest tease comes from drowse and Lula Asplund, with the duo covering "Hey Chicago."  Check it out below and download the track here.


Yoo Doo Right

Spacey, proggy post-rock band Yoo Doo Right just released "The Sacred Fuck" EP, a collection of pieces using found sounds and field recordings for extra textures and layers to the band's quasi-cosmic vibes.  Check out "FULL HEALTH (BBB)" below and grab one of the last cassettes here from Mothland.


Daily Jam - The Wooden Song

There was this point in the early 90’s, due to the success of Nirvana and the burgeoning punk and alt-rock scenes in the Pacific Northwest, when the major record labels commenced a signing free-for-all, gobbling up all the weird little fringe bands around the nation in the hopes of capitalizing on the next big, alternative hit. Suddenly, bands like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, The Flaming Lips, and more were thrust into the mainstream, these dissonant, eclectic, and peculiar acts getting the kind of attention they never could have imagined while touring the country in shitty vans to play to small rooms of fans. I can’t think of any other time like that within the music industry. And sure, there was many an artist who was chewed up and subsequently spat out by these same major labels, but it also introduced so much good and weird music into the cultural lexicon…which is why your dad knows that there’s a band called The Butthole Surfers.

So, thank you for that record industry.

The fact that a band like The Butthole Surfers, one of the most absurd, noisiest, drug-fueled, and chaotic acts to ever grace our radios, televisions, and performance halls, ended up on Capital Records with a hit song, boggles the mind. These guys spent years in the underground shattering eardrums, torching stages, and ingesting copious amounts of booze, hallucinogens, and narcotics, reveling in this kind of punk rock Dionysian performance art. And then they got signed, and then they worked with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, and then they had a hit single, and then they were referenced on The Simpsons. When an asshole like Don King says “Only in America,” the prevalence of The Butthole Surfers in the 90’s is what comes to my mind.

It could be a strange and wonderful time.

The band’s 1993 record, Independent Worm Saloon, which I’ve written about before, an album of shredding guitar hooks, bombast, and juvenile delinquent antics, also produced an absolute audio gem for the band, the majestic and Spaghetti Western-indebted “The Wooden Song.” Beginning simply enough with a gently strummed acoustic guitar and plain, sing-songy vocals, the song sways like a minstrel’s ditty, albeit one that’s been dragged through the dust, overexposed, and sunburned, like some psych-tinged Americana for the slacker set. But as the song progresses, the Western elements begin to seep in, blasts of Morricone-inspired surf rock guitars and ominous bell chimes soundtracking some tense showdown or gunfight, a Mexican standoff that no one survives. It’s fantastic. And I’ve never been able to turn it off.

Amid all of the smoke and noise, the nudity and drugs, and the absurdity and mayhem, people sometimes forget that The Butthole Surfers were always capable of creating something more conventionally (but still uniquely) beautiful. And “The Wooden Song” exemplifies that. It is my favorite among an entire career full of favorites, the ugly, catchy, alluring, repulsive, dissonant, cacophonous, and glorious sonic tomes purveyed by a band of Texas weirdos and maniacs.

And all of this happened on a major record label. For a brief moment in time in the 90’s, anything seemed possible.

Listen below, our Daily Jam.


Sunday, March 17, 2024

Cold Cave

Here's a gothy new jam from Cold Cave.  Check out "She Reigns Down" below and download the single here from Heartworm Press.


Daily Jam - The Hurdy Gurdy Man

For the longest time, I didn’t know what a hurdy-gurdy was. I just assumed it was some sort of nonsense phrase created by The Butthole Surfers for their song “Hurdy Gurdy Man” from 1991’s Piouhgd. I also did not realize (until college!) that it was a cover of a song originally recorded in the 60’s by psych rock troubadour Donovan.

I later found out that a hurdy-gurdy is a musical instrument.

And that’s just boring.

For some reason, I had a really sinister notion as to what a “Hurdy Gurdy Man” was supposed to be. Donovan’s psych classic, from the 1968 album of the same name, has such an undercurrent of menace to me, that I just assumed it was about a stalker, or killer, or monster of some kind or another. That trippy tremolo effect creating this kind of spooky dissonance (an effect The Buttholes went a little wild with on their own version), lyrics about “shadows cast” and “the crying of humanity,” and the all too serene, chilled vibe of the song make for a disarming kind of siren’s call, a luring lullaby before the serial killer stabs you in the belly, or the beast eats you whole.

But no, it’s really just a minstrel of sorts…singing songs of love.

Sigh.

“Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy gurdy.”

Listen below, our Daily Jam.


Saturday, March 16, 2024

Fat Dog

There is a lot of hype swirling around Austin this week about UK band Fat Dog.  I got to see them yesterday, and the hype is well deserved.  They kicked all the asses, a mix of post punk, synth pop, industrial, and exotic sounds.  Check out latest single "All the Same" below and get the 7" here from Domino.  And then listen to last year's "King of the Slugs" too.





Daily Jam - Of Course

Way, way back in the long ago, when I spent a few years in a (poorly named) band that would eventually dissolve because I was an asshole, we had a veritable bevy of cover tunes we liked to play around with during practice and sometimes perform at shows. We regularly touched on songs from Pulp, James Kochalka Superstar, and Cyndi Lauper, but one of my all time favorites to play was “Of Course” by Jane’s Addiction, a violin-laden, exotic and trippy jam taken from the band’s 1990 album Ritual de lo Habitual. None of us were versed in the violin, so we just upped the droney, psychedelic aspects of the song instead, played it as loudly as possible, and dragged it on and on, a fuzzy, loopy caterwaul for our deadened eardrums.

It was fun.

I remember getting Ritual de lo Habitual when I was fifteen or so, a few years after its release and the (first) breakup of the band, one of my selections from one of those CD clubs where the first nine cost a penny…and then my everlasting soul after that. Pretty quickly, it became one of those albums that I listened to over and over again, the singles I initially purchased it for (“Been Caught Stealing” and “Stop” respectively) falling to the wayside and the deeper cuts becoming my favorites. “Of Course” was always the glowing, standout.

Years later when I was performing the song with my band, I kind of got to where I preferred our take of the track more, in all of its reverb-drenched, droning, repetitive goodness. Then I listened to Perry Farrell and company’s original version again and realized how stupid that was. It’s like a tune from some twisted, Bizarro World version of Fiddler on the Roof. The fact that a song as weird and different as “Of Course” was on an album that sold over 2 million copies is just astounding.

On a side note, I used the “clean” cover for this article since that’s the version I had…and in some ways, I think it’s more powerful and subversive, the First Amendment text being a little “fuck you” to the retailers that refused to carry the original because of a little artistic nudity.

Listen below, our Daily Jam.


Friday, March 15, 2024

Hinds

Admittedly, nothing from Hinds, the girls from Madrid, has ever quite grabbed me like their first single "Bamboo" back when they were still called Deers.  But they're still kicking it, making good music a decade later, and i love them for that.  Here's their latest single "Coffee."  Check it out below and download it here from Lucky Number.