SOUNDTRACK: WILD FLAG-SXSW April 1, 2011 (2011).
Wild Flag has released one of the best albums of 2011. I can’t stop listening to it. So, it’s funny that this show has been sitting on NPR’s download page for months without me checking it out because I didn’t know who the band was until the album came out. Wild Flag is Carrie Brownstein, Mary Timony and Janet Weiss (and a keyboardist who I will never remember because I never heard of the band she was originally in).
This show at SXSW is one of their earlier shows. It’s so early that one of the songs in the setlist appears on the album with a different title. And the band is full of raw energy and passion.
Although research shows that they’d been touring since November, Mary Timony seems somewhat hesitant in a few songs. But Carrie Brownstein seems fired up to be playing again, and she rages and jumps around the stage, her voice as aggressive and fun as it was in Sleater-Kinney. Janet Weiss, as ever, kicks massive ass on the drum kit. man can she wail–she is a vastly underrated drummer.
The band has great cohesion and they seem like they’re really enjoying themselves.
In many respects this band sounds like Sleater-Kinney (2/3 of the band are here). But the addition of Timony’s lyrics and more gentle voice bring a cool change. And the keyboards flesh out the songs in wonderful ways as well–for a band with no bassist, it’s funny that the most pronounced keyboards riffs are at the high end of the register.
There’s a few flubs during the set, in one of the more pronounced keyboard riffs, there’s a pretty major gaffe. And sometimes it seems like they don’t know exactly how they should be harmonizing with each other (not true on the record at all). And during the extended soloing of “Glass Tambourine” (6 minutes), I’m not really sure what Mary is up to. But that’s okay. The band is all about rawness, so that can be forgiven.
While the album is better, this live show is a good introduction to the band.
Since Carrie Brownstein worked for NPR I almost expect all of their shows to be available here. But for now, watch the whole show here.
[READ: January 17, 2012] “Old Mrs. J”
Stephen Snyder translated this story that was originally written in Japanese. It’s interesting to me when a work is translated from another culture. Does the translator intend to keep the other culture obvious or does the translator try to make the story, in this case, more European or American. There’s some inevitability in that, since the language is changed, and yet the sensibility of the original often remains.
I bring this up because I tend to think of Japanese writing as being very distinctive. And yet this story didn’t really “read” very Japanese to me (Kiwi fruit aside). It did read a little bizarre, but that was the fun part.
The story starts out simply enough: a young writer (who is a woman, although you don’t find that out until very late in the story unless, unlike me, you assume the main character is a woman because the author’s name is Yoko). The author works late and sleeps in til noon or so. It’s a quiet, peaceful place. The landlady is older and somewhat feeble. Until, that is, she gets into her garden and then she seems possessed by a fire.
The landlady hasn’t really talked to the writer. Then one day the writer hears the landlady in the garden cursing at a stray cat. The landlady hates cats and curses them up and down. Finally the writer tells her to put pine needles down, that cats hate prickly things on their feet. This I did not know.
And they strike up a friendship. The landlady reveals that her husband was no good and that he left her. She also reveals that she gives massages. And she begins leaving the writer vegetables from her garden. Then one day, the landlady brings her a strange carrot with 5 “fingers” coming off of the central stalk. The carrots are quite special. And she keeps them a secret until sure enough, she begins growing lots and lots of them. Even the newspaper comes to take a picture.
This idyllic story is interrupted in the last few paragraphs. First by what seems like metaphorical scariness and then, ultimately, with reality. It is a wonderfully realized story, wonderfully told and with enough hints of magical realism throughout that the ending isn’t totally unbelievable–even if it is quite unexpected.
SOUNDTRACK: BLUE ÖYSTER CULT-compilations and live releases (1978-2010).
For a band that had basically two hits (“Don’t Fear the Reaper” and “Burnin’ for You”) and maybe a half a dozen other songs that people might have heard of, BOC has an astonishing number of “greatest hits” collections.
This doesn’t include any of the “budget price” collections: E.T.I. Revisited, Tattoo Vampire, Super Hits, Then and Now, The Essential, Are You Ready To Rock?, Shooting Shark, Best of, and the 2010 release: Playlist: The Very Best of).
The lesson is that you evidently won’t lose money making a BOC collection.
And, although none of them have “Monsters” for the average person looking for some BOC, any disc is a good one.
Then, in 1994 we got Live 1976 as both CD and DVD (which spares us nothing, including Eric Bloom’s lengthy harangue about the unfairness of…the speed limit). It’s the most raw and unpolished on live sets. 2002 saw the release of A Long Day’s Night, a recording of a 2002 concert (also on DVD) which had Eric Bloom, Buck Dharma an Allan Lanier reunited.
They also have a number of might-be real live releases (fans debate the legitimacy of many of these). Picking a concert disc is tough if only because it depends on the era you like. ETLive is regarded as the best “real” live disc, although the reissued double disc set of Some Enchanted Evening is hard to pass up. Likewise, the 2002 recording is a good overview of their career, and includes some of their more recent work.
If you consider live albums best of’s (which many people do) I think it’s far to say that BOC has more best of’s than original discs. Fascinating. Many BOC fans believe that if they buy all the best of discs, it will convince Columbia to finally reissue the rest of the original discs (and there are a number of worthy contenders!) in deluxe packages. I don’t know if it will work, but I applaud the effort.
SOUNDTRACK: Future Soundtrack for America (2004).
This CD came with the McSweeney’s Future Dictionary for America. It was released on Barsuk Records (home of Death Cab for Cutie and other great bands) and it was compiled by Spike Jonze and one of the Johns from They Might Be Giants.
