Merch: July 17, 2008
Beck Modern Guilt (Interscope)
As always with Beck, engagement with this haul of brilliantly trendy genre rags and tonal bones depends upon your degree of painful alienation from the world outside. The rock critocracy is even now busy chewing over this eighth album for whatever juice of Relevance licks their tongues and the Guardian bitches feelingly about the want of a single, but so what? It isn’t like Beck’s magpie act makes him any kind of Generational Voice and the appropriation of DJ Danger Mouse as collaborator for this 10-track rummage through first-gen U.K. psychedelia is in the spirit of a second-story man selecting a crowbar with finical care. This stuff will probably seem awe-inspiringly original to heathens unfamiliar with Blossom Toes, Procol Harum or Mighty Baby, but that’s rather the point, I suspect. Yes, that’s Chan Marshall of Cat Power on “Walls,” yes, this LP represents the end of Beck’s contractual obligation and, yes, I think the whole Beck thing is about over.
– Ron Garmon
Musee Mecanique Hold This Ghost (Frog Stand)
This band is named after a museum (of the same name) housing a huge collection of antique arcade games and mechanically operated musical instruments. Included in the collection is the downright bone-chilling “Laffing Sal,” a septuagenarian animatronic “greeter” that makes Chuckie look charming. Hold This Ghost has a diverse, multifaceted sound, but Musee’s fascination with the oddly chilling funhouse aesthetic bleeds through frequently, and so much the better; spine-prickling moments like these help keep the sound freshly unsettling. Near the beginning of the album, the tinny tink of anachronistic toys, the minty ding of tubular bells, and the tender, crystalline, falsetto vocals transport the listener to a po-mo indie psych carnival where creepy synthesizer winds rattle through PVC trees. The musical milieu of “The Propellors,” for instance, is a smooth puree of the epically sweeping soundscapes of Pink Floyd and the catchier acid-indie sensibilities of the Flaming Lips. Tempering the midway whimsy is a host of more understated instrumentation. Solemn steel guitars bleed beneath sparse acoustic picking in the bleary track “Fits and Starts”; a triumphantly long-winded accordion sighs with wise melancholy and dissolves into a pool of tragically upbeat strum ‘n’ bass in “Sleep in Our Clothes”; there’s even a subtle nod to dubstep in “Nothing Glorious,” with its shivering soft synth leads and snowy, long-bowed string notes. As a whole, Hold This Ghost is a trippy carousel of alternative western, straight-ahead indie rock, neo-psychedelia and classical sauce; a solid album evoking witching-hour creeping through abandoned fairgrounds.
– Daniel Stainkamp
The Black Ghosts s/t (Southern Fried)
This album triggers my Attention Deficit Disorder bigtime. As is common in this nouveau-electropop genre, the Black Ghosts sell electronic nostalgia draped in dark Romantic design (as in 19th century, not Harlequin), which looks bitchen on the CD cover/MySpace page, but is somewhat incongruent with their milquetoast sound. I saw The Black Ghosts at a Vice magazine/Colt 45-sponsored promo night, where they were giving away, you guessed it, free Colt 45. Uncanny! Apparently that stuff has some sort of anti-dancing chemical (one that also makes people smell like beer) because no one could be bothered to do much more than shift their weight in a quasi-rhythmic manner. Scenesters be damned: Their spinning was inspired, and the Black Ghosts mixtape stayed in my car stereo for weeks (there’s a fantasic remix of Frankmusik’s “Three Little Words” on it). As for this release, it’s not that it’s bad. I really should like it, much like I should like peanut butter banana and brie sandwiches. I like all the individual ingredients, but (as with any balanced meal) if there’s no Cholula, it just tastes sorta bland. To describe it another way, this record sounds like something to play in the early afternoon, during that awful time when you still have a hangover, but it’s not yet a socially acceptable hour to start mixing gin into your electrolyte replacement beverage. To review: The Black Ghosts’ album needs Cholula; go get their mixtapeinstead; Colt 45 is not a ‘dance drug’; and finally, never use grape-flavored Gatorade as a mixer, you’re better off with the kind that tastes like ‘power’; oooh, look, a squirrel! – Ramie Becker
The United States of America s/t (Sundazed)
Joesph Byrd was a Kentucky-born, Cage-besotted academic musician associated with the FLUXUS movement and othersuch avant-art before helming this well-remembered, oft-bootlegged 1968 excursion into post-Sgt. Pepper psychedelia. The US of A’s sole album is an audacious weld of satire, leftist politics, otherworldly meander and proto-noise pop that ranks with such foundational psych as A Saucerful of Secrets and Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. Among many innovations was Byrd’s deployment of an early ring modulator, a newfangled Frankensteinian contraption then the toy of a few chartered boffins like Beaver & Krause. American experimental psych of the period tended toward exquisite jazzy noodling (Silver Apples), novelty dumbness (Lothar & the Hand People), or punky earscrape (Fifty Foot Hose), but Byrd’s high-art neo-classicism crackled with enough exemplary razzle-dazzle to (barely) dent the Top 200 Album chart, quite a feat at the height of the rock LP era. The band spent most of its brief life in L.A., toured little, played the Fillmore East, and dissolved in the usual ego-bath. Singer Dorothy Moskowitz landed in Country Joe & the Fish, while the main man went on to form Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, whose The American Metaphysical Circus was a spacier-still exercise in Great Society gothique and probably the greatest still-obscure rock album of the late-1960s. In 1996, Portishead thanked the USA for inspiring “Half Day Closing” off the former’s eponymous second album. – Ron Garmon
Published: 07/16/2008
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