I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: FOOTSTONE-Wobbles from Side to Side EP (1994).

Footstone is like Dromedary’s punk brother of cuppa joe.  Their guitars are loud and heavy, their songs are fast and very catchy.  And yet, their vocalist almost feels out of place in such a heavy outfit: he’s almost soft spoken.  And this makes their whole sound very compelling.

This EP, available as a free limited time download here, was originally a 7 inch with two tracks. The download offers an extra bonus track.

“Mountain Man” is the a side and it opens with a blast of guitar heavy punk.  As it progresses, intertwining and harmonizing vocals add an amazing depth.  The b side, “Belly” opens with a wonderfully almost sinister guitar riff that is quickly discarded for some straightforward powerchord verses.  (Yes, the cool opening riff comes back at the end).   Although the band sounds in no way like R.E.M., I find the occasional backing vocal that pops up to be oddly reminiscent of Mike Mills’ great harmonies.

The bonus song, “Airbag” is 5 minutes of poppy guitar rock.  The opening chords remind me of Sabotage -era Black Sabbath, but the poppy bridge changes the direction altogether.  This song might do being a little shorter, but how can you complain about a free bonus song?

I have a hard time figuring out what any of these songs are about, although clearly in “Belly,” they don’t like something anymore, and there’s a very clear line about stuffing something back into his Levi’s, although exactly what is a mystery.

Footstone has a full length available from Dromedary too, and they put on a mean live show.

[READ: February 17, 2010] “Praise to the Highways”

This short story comes from the soon to be translated collection Antwerp. Natasha Wimmer (who translated The Savage Detectives and 2666) does the translation here too.

I’ve read a few of Bolaño’s short stories, and I have to say that as a group, I’m more than a little confused by them. Sometimes they seem to be about very specific incidents which I know very little about. Other times, they seem to be very abstract:glimpses of scenery that speed by and then vanish.

This story, which invokes highways in the title is one of these latter type of stories. It’s only two pages in the magazine and it is broken into 5 sections: “Cleaning Utensils,” “The Bum,” “La Pava Roadside,” “Summer,” and “Working-Class Neighborhoods.”  Each section is a paragraph.

I’m a third of the way through 2666 and the style is very meandering. It works well for a super long book, but it seems odd for such a short story.

I enjoyed “The Bum” section for its visceral language, but I’m unclear if any of the other sections are connected or not.

It seems a collection of interesting images, but little more.  As I’ve felt with other Bolaño pieces, the language of the individual words is quite powerful, but the overall picture is a bit fuzzy.

Ah, I just read that Antwerp is a novel, not a collection fo stories.  So, presumably this excerpt leaves an awful lot out.  I won’t condemn this piece then, without knowing everything else in the book.

For ease of searching I include: Bolano