THERE'S A PLACE YOU MIGHT WANT TO GO

My favorite Halloween carol is Halloween by Dream Syndicate. It stumbles around with murky menace, rather than simply going splat, and is all the better for it.

When I was a kid, we used to go on family car vacations, usually up to New England, and I was strangely comforted whenever I saw a street name that matched one of the streets back home.

It was not as if I thought that one of my familiar home roads had somehow snaked its way 300 miles north—it just had an odd way of making the unfamiliar seem local.

That sensation pretty much sums up how I felt about the first Dream Syndicate album…

NATTY DREAD DRINK

I was thumbing through my back pages, and came across this:


The Day Bob Marley Died

I sat on a glacial rock
In Central Park,
Drinking warm beer
Through a red
Bendy straw,
Sun illuminating
The Heineken bottle


I kind of like this.

I think the main reason I like it is because it's true-- this is exactly what I did on May 11, 1981.

I cut out of school that day and went into Manhattan (you'd be forgiven if you pointed out that this appears to be a bit of a trend)-- I was amazed that I could walk into a deli abutting the park and buy a six pack, which was all my friend and I could afford. Back on the Island, I had to lurk outside the local Super-X waiting for someone sympathetic enough to facilitate underage drinking by making a purchase for me.

The beer was warm because we'd heard that you could catch a buzz quicker by drinking it off the shelf. We drank it through straws for the same reason.

But I also like the poem for reasons other than its accurate reportage of my youthful profligacy. I like the simple riddim of it-- the "glacial rock" and "Central Park," the "Sun illuminating/The Heineken bottle."

I like how it begins with an image of strength and permanence (that glacial rock), and ends with illumination.

I like how it uses the word "bendy"...

And although it's a bit of a parlor trick, I like how I weaved in the Rastafarian red (the straw), gold (the sun), and green (the Heineken bottle).

My goal with poetry is (was?) always to pack as much as I can into a small space, and this is one of the rare occasions where I think actually succeeded to some small degree.

A thousand pardons for crawling so very far up my own arse today...

ODESSEY & ORACLE

At last it was retrieve-the-repaired-car day. Content tomorrow...

THE SKELETAL GHOST

"Aluminum Tunes"
This is a wicked good double-disc comp of some of the stuff I mentioned yesterday, plus some equally incandescent stuff that I didn't. Their version of One Note Samba/Surfboard is the apotheosis of a slightly jaded brand of groovy...

And as with the albums, it is around here that things get a bit dodgy. I cut "The First of the Microbe Hunters" some slack, seeing as it was strictly an odds and sods affair. [As enticing as an outtake from Dots and Loops seemed in theory, in practice I Feel the Air (Of Another Planet) didn't do much more than show that it deserved to be taken out.]

"The Free Design" EP was due south of inspired. Escape Pod (From the World of Medical Observations) at least had an interesting title, but was as gripping as listening to someone count.

Long Life Love
This is abidingly odd, like a bunch of tiny ill-formed revelations in search of a unifying epiphany. I think I would have liked it better in French...

The Super-It
Who does stuff like this? I mean, who releases their best and brightest as a vinyl-only tour single? It still hasn't been officially digitized to this day, but it's sure to sparkle on the next Switched On...

ABC Music and Oscillons from the Anti-Sun are both very useful buckets of ashes, sweeping up BBC sessions and most of the EPs. But it is telling how much looking back this forward-looking bunch has been doing of late.

While my obsession has closed its loop, I'm sure I will continue to buy anything new the group puts out, prepared, as I have been of late, to be nonplussed (Instant 0) or pleasantly surprised (Kybernetica and Interlock from the new singles)...

ONE SMALL STEP

Super-Electric
Early evidence that the marginalia would not be marginal, that the effluence would not be effluvia. Released initially as a limited edition of 10 copies scraped onto the underside of a portobello mushroom, playable only by pulling the legs off a cricket.

John Cage Bubblegum
Avant pop bubblegum pop soda pop lollipop.

Revox
A trip through a page in a French rhyming dictionary, a trip through an amplifier tube...

Lo Boob Oscillator
The best Stereolab manages the trick of pulling you back into the past and nudging you into the future simultaneously, which this does in spades and dark shades. It percolates along like moon cabaret, and then turns into Neu! out of nowhere. Book your flight today.

"Music for the Amorphous Body Study Center"
This rivals Dots and Loops as the most cohesive sustained recording the group ever produced. 25 minutes without a slip.

"Fluorescences"
Another virtually flawless EP, although Soop Groove #1 does grow a bit of a skin on top.

Brigitte
A sweet tribute to a kindred spirit. Makes the word "Brigitte" sound like both a seduction and the entire plot of a children's book...

Check and Double Check
Verges on inspirational, verges on invisible, verges on impeccable. This is the true sound of a beating heart of glass...

Iron Man
Give the drummer some. Somebody should mash this with the Sabbath song of the same name.

Spinal Column
One of the flat-out prettiest things the group ever dropped hides its light under a bushel as the last track on the Miss Modular EP.

Damn, they wore me out, and I'm only up to about 1997. More tomorrow-- sorry haters!

THE SUN THROUGH FILTERS

What keeps the Stereolab story interesting—what makes it more than “boy meets band, boy loves band, boy wanders from band’s clutches”—is the staggering amount of non-LP material the group has produced over the years.

I haven’t even touched on the other regular-issue discs predating MAQ, specifically Peng! (aborning) and Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (coalescing), but I can’t think of a modern band that has released more high-quality music outside the confines of the traditional LP format. (If you’re listening to Push Barman to Open Old Wounds right now, I could bear an argument.)

Next week I’ll touch on some of the one-offs, flip-sides, comps, side projects, tour singles, and other assorted gewgaws and baubles that helped deepen my obsession…

THE MOST INOPPORTUNE

Field trip today-- I'll be back behind the glass tomorrow.

GOODBYE MARY

Stereolab’s music had become something that I experienced more through the prism of memory than I did in the moment. I heard them now in unbent white light.

Margerine Eclipse, with its Margerine Rock and Margerine Melodie and Dear Marge was clearly a heartfelt tribute to Mary Hansen, who had been killed in an accident after the release of Sound-Dust.

Mary brought warmth to the group, and served as a counterbalance to Laetitia's husky world weariness. While Laetitia occasionally treed herself with aloof theory, Mary exuded openness and simple humanity. Much of Margerine Eclipse is an effort at reconciling the “Let live what must live, die what must die” philosophy of Sound-Dust with the reality of a friend's death.

And while objectively I knew this was at least a partial return to top Decision Rock form, I could never muster much enthusiasm for it.

Because I tend to travel in cycles of obsession...

BON BONS

Sound-Dust is not ephemeral, which connotes something brief, fleeting, and wonderful. It is not even transient…

It is, rather, ephemera: something of little lasting value. And as is the wont of dust, it can even be a bit of an irritant.

However, the cover art is fascinating.

There is a dark green castle set against a bubblegum pink sky. The castle is being buffeted by curly white waves, and at the heart of the castle is a pink death’s head.

For once, Stereolab’s album art transcends the music within, instead of complementing it. And just to be clear, that’s not a good thing.

It’s too bad they couldn’t muster anything more trenchant than the half-steeped relativism of “Let live what must live, die what must die.”

It’s too bad they couldn’t make the music that really goes with that cover…

PAUSE

Happy 5th Anniversary brain coral!

The least of what you've done is inspire me off my ass to tend to my graying gray matter, so that my own creative impulse doesn't atrophy.

I mean, to supply the depth and breadth of content that you have over these last five years (and these last two years with notes), well it's pretty damn impressive. I'm on post 59 now, and sometimes I look back on the halcyon days of post 27, when it all came so easily...

So thank you for the peek inside your brain, for the mix tapes, for the links, for the photos (and for the record, my favorites are the ones where you focus on an everyday industrial object to the point of abstraction, but also include some words printed or embossed on the object so that it swings back to the everyday again), and for the inspiration.

THE FRAGILE DEFENSE OF WORDS

When I saw that the title of the next Stereolab disc was going to be Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, well, first I laughed a little. Then I grew concerned…

This seemed a symptom of some of the less-attractive Decision Rock impulses run amok. Dots and Loops had been clean, like its title, and green, like its cover. But this title bespoke an apparent lack of focus. The cover, a muddy brown plate interrupted by several swiping wisps of orange electronic smoke, did nothing to dissuade me from this notion.

This marked the first point in my cycle of obsession where I began to question my faith, as it were. I overcorrected initially, and couldn’t warm to Cobra and Phases at all.

As time passed, its merits became clearer, as did its faults.

Chief among its faults is that the thing is too damn long. Just because a CD makes 78 minutes available to you doesn’t mean you have to threaten to use them all. A couple of months after it was released, I burned a new version that shaved off about 20 minutes by dropping two songs.

Blue Milk is the kind of song that would have been better served as a tour single or some other breed of limited release; Caleidoscopic Gaze would be a bore at any length, but is an insufferable bore at 8:09.

So, the ground rules had changed. Stereolab was making me work for my pleasure, and with Cobra and Phases it was worth the effort in the end. But where would we go from here?

VIVE LES HARMONIES

Dots and Loops is Stereolab’s Decision Rock masterwork. It is a unified field of well-considered sounds.

Those sounds are the greens of wet flora and the patina of copper rust.

I cannot locate an album in my memory that was a more precise mirror of the sights and sounds in my head at a given time.

And I carry its whorled fingerprints on me to this day...

ANONYMOUS COLLECTIVE

By the time Emperor Tomato Ketchup rolled around, I was aware of Stereolab's canny design sense. Each album/CD/7" cover is a well-considered depiction of the sounds inside.

The repeated use of the Cliff image in the group's early iconography was an apt reflection of the pop-art cartoon-revolution noise they were making at the time. The fact that he graced a number of covers in different day-glo color schemes was a cool conveyance for the fact that there were but subtle tonal differences from release to release.

They stretched their legs and left Cliff behind, and the covers grew more evocative along with the music.

ETK is a sunrise/sunset moment, with geometric, muted oranges and yellows. A record needle sits on the point of convergence of a white sun and the horizon, and then spirals dizzily out of the range of vision. It is a fractionated Warholian version of the Japanese flag with a flourish of rhythmic gymnastics.

And the genius is that you can take that description of the cover and apply it just as fittingly to the music on ETK...

TURN ON

I tend to travel in cycles of obsession.

I discovered while I trawled through Stereolab’s back catalog slowly but determinedly that Mars Audiac Quintet is a line of demarcation. It is the point at which they become clear proponents of Decision Rock.

Now maybe one day I’ll take the time to draw up a more complete exegesis of that term, but this’ll do for now: It is the sound of decisions being made.

Given my general tilt away from music that emphasizes craft over passion, I suppose it’s a little surprising that I took to it as avidly as I did…

IT'S NOT ETERNAL

I tend to travel in cycles of obsession.

I discovered Stereolab one late summer day in 1995. I was lounging on a borrowed recliner in an airy rented house. The walls were white, the windows were numerous, the sun was earnest, and this all combined to have a sweet narcotic effect. I had the TV tuned to MuchMusic from Canada, and the video for Ping Pong came on. Interesting.

I bought Mars Audiac Quintet a couple of days later, and found myself in the same chair, evening now, absolutely hypnotized by the drone of the first three tracks. Obsessed.

“What is this?” my wife asked, not in wonder, but rather with a slight air of resignation that she would probably be spending the next several years in its midst…

TOMORROW IS ALREADY HERE

Downloaded the new Stereolab singles a couple of weeks ago, and I’m loving Kyberneticka Babicka. Mostly because it feels like the soundtrack to an early 60s Czech cartoon about robot grandmothers and the girls who love them, but then realize they love their flesh and blood grandmothers better.

I also love it because it pulls off the sweet trick of no doubt sounding repetitious and pointless to the haters, while sounding nuanced and triumphal to the faithful...

ON THE VERGE OF BEING OBSCENE

Some recent discussions with a friend about whether I curse too much when I write lead me to this stream-of-consciousness swim through a stream of epithets...

Of course, every other word out of Little Richard’s mouth was obscene, but this was obscured by his scat scatology (“A wop bop a lu bop, a wop bam boom!” indeed).

Louie Louie

“Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” is nice and pithy. It’s a shame the MC5 didn’t have the songs to go with it.

The Stones didn’t get really down and dirty on official releases until Exile, near as I can tell. But then each of the first two songs had a bomb in it (“Plug in, flush out and fire the fuckin' feed” and “Well they're gonna hold some shit for me”), although both occurrences are pretty slurry. The “Got to scrape the shit right off your shoes” stuff in Sweet Virginia, however, is articulated and repeated.

Pink Floyd’s Money and its “Don't give me that do goody good bullshit” used to be a litmus test for just how progressive your local FM station was. If they were, you know man, cool, they played the “bullshit” version—if they were tools of The Man, they played the “bullBLEEP” one…

The Steve Miller Band’s Jet Airliner was another benchmark for this. If you heard the Casey Kasem approved “Funky kicks going down in the city” instead of the “Funky shit going down in the city” well Lance, it was time to spin the dial.

For some reason I always contrasted Aerosmith’s “And all the things you do, motherfucker, come back to you” in the live version of Dream On with Zep’s Bilbo-baiting “Does anybody remember laughter?” tomfoppery from the live Stairway. Aerosmith always looked better in the light of that contrast.

It’s really hard to top the “Fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat” explosion in Bodies.

Um, Prince, was that “funk” or “fuck” that you sang 136 times in Erotic City?

And then the next thing I knew, Tipper Gore was masturbating in a hotel lobby with a magazine, and the whole obscenity thing got freighted with the PRMC and stickering, and cursing was well on its way to being codified...

CUCKOO

Listening to the Magnetic Fields' Reno Dakota today, and amid the dizzying "You know you enthrall me/And yet you don't call me/It's making me blue/Pantone 292" and among the cleavingly clever "Reno Dakota/I'm no Nino Rota/I don't know the score" sits the shitty little line "You have just disappeared/It makes me drink beer."

Only it's not so shitty in the context of all the best-damn-showtune-ever! lyrics swirling around it. The bastard starts to shine, and struts along elegantly in its $50 coat.

He might be too this, he might be too that, he might be too "too too" but damn that Stephin Merritt is good...

IS IT ANY WONDER

Scientists working at Oak Ridge and RIKEN recently announced their findings that the only song of the rock era that is actually too short is You Are the Sunshine Of My Life.

"Fuck, I would've thought there was at least one punk song that made the cut, but it turns out the best of them are just right," said Dr. Ryuichi Kawamoto.