SOUNDTRACK: POTTY UMBRELLA-4 Tracks on MySpace (2007).
The internet is a fascinating thing. While looking up Basia Bulat, I stumbled upon a Polish music website. That site featured a review of an album by Noël, Pleszyńskiego, Maćkowiaka. It turns out that Artur Maćkowiak was also in a band called Potty Umbrella. And Potty Umbrella have a MySpace page with 4 songs on it from their 2007 album Forte Furioso.
Potty Umbrella is a (mostly) instrumental band that plays pretty great alternative/psychedelic/ jazzy rock. I suppose they’re a jam band, although the Polish language SavageSaints blog (technically called … którędy pójdą dzicy święci) describes them as “New wave of Polish post-jazz.”
The songs are wonderful. “Gone” opens with the waving guitar and delicate riffs of an Explosions in the Sky song. But it soon shifts with the propulsive bass of a jazz song. It’s a wonderful medley of the two styles. And when the keyboards come over the top, it adds yet another layer of musical stew to this mix.
“Jet Lag” continues the manic fun with a 6 minute (actually most of the songs are 6 minute) blast of energy. Crashing drums open a sinister spy-movie theme (with wicked-sounding guitar lines). By the middle of the song, wah wah guitars and super fast keyboards have converted this into a cool jam.
The track “Dr. Pizdur” is wonderfully wild, with some great keyboard sounds over the top of the funky guitar/bass lineup. And the live track “Nymph’s Song” (sung in rather forced English) rocks really hard.
Potty Umbrella will never have a big following in the States (although there are YouTube videos of them playing in Canada), but the underground fanclub can start right here.
[READ: June 24, 2011] “Gravel”
Readers here know that I love Alice Munro. I think that she is one of the best short stories writers around. Of course, if you know what other kinds of writers I like you might be surprised by this declaration–because I love florid prose. But Alice Munro is the antithesis of that. She writes succinct stories, with very little in the way of flourishes. Sometimes they have action, but usual there’s very little and, like in this story, the action is not the point of the story. And yet for all of that, the stories are quite powerful.
This is the story of a young girl (written from the point of view of the girl when she is an adult). When her parents separated she, her mother and her older sister Caro moved to a trailer park (with their dog Blitzee). The reason her parents separated is because her mother became pregnant. And she told everyone that the baby was Neal’s. Neal was an actor in the town’s summer theater troupe (he drifted from job to job but always had enough to get by).
Caro was a headstrong girl, but since this is her sister’s story we see Caro’s actions from her sister’s perspective. On two occasions, Caro sneakily brought Blitzee to their old house (where their father still lived)–pretending that he had run back to the house. The parents were amazed and perplexed at first, but caught on when it happened again so soon. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 