memorable reviews

http://www.thestranger.com/2001-01-18/cd_revue.html

(to all)links would be encouraged so I can experience directly what yr referring to...

Also, Monica Kendrick on the Stooges' "Fun House Sessions" box, from the Chicago Reader.

Incidentally, yes, the Slits' untitled record really is that good.

"Yes? Maybe." -Lester Bangs, on everyone's favorite prog rockers.

Rough Trade (I think) released a Lipstick Traces album containing many of the songs in the book. After reading the book, which I loved, I bought the album. I've listened to it about three times--on none of those occasions have I heard the Western value system crashing around my ears, unfortunately. The Slits track was particularly disappointing, actually.

This didn't make me like the book any less. But for the most part, I do enjoy Griel Marcus' work more for the writing and the ideas in themselves than for any relation they may have to the music under discussion. (See also: Marcus on Bob Dylan).

ron, the piece i was thinking of was penman's essay in the wire, which is here. there's also penman's "demolition" of zappa here. simon reynold's on 2- step (one of the best pieces of "scene writing" i've ever read) and UK pirate radio (the transcript of DJ dialogue alone is worth it.) mark s on cecil taylor. frank kogan's Death Rock 2000. Tom and Maura's I hate indie kids rant. Tom on Morrisey. Tracer's piece on peggy lee which may be my favorite thing FT has ever published.

for stuff not online...too much to mention. i am not a fan of richard meltzer by and large, but "vinyl reckoning" is just massive: a cry of loss and pain and resentment across forty years. bangs, blah blah: the usual suspects, "james taylor m for d," "psychotic reactions...," his pieces on Metal Machine Music...

That Christgau piece on The Eagles is really, really good. Which surprised me a great deal because (something else that interests me about Robert Christgau is that) I hate him.

Also, we just had this pop music conference at the Experience Music Project here in seattle, and as I was trying to tell anthony the other day, something about the whole thing bugs me, but I can't quite put a finger on it. I thought it might be that I feel that some things should not be analyzed, but now that sentiment doesn't seem right at all. Maybe I feel that in the same way advertising has worked its way into more and more little cracks in society, (i remember feeling so offended the first time I saw an ad at the beginning of a movie!! nevermind that previews are ads) academics are focusing their magnifying glasses in places where they maybe don't belong and I'm getting fried like an ant on the sidewalk. I really don't know what's eating me about this. is it writing about music is like 'dancing about architecture' what are the roots of popular culture as a subject of serious academic concern??

well, yr thoughts are appreciated, i hope i do not offend, im just trying to decipher my emotions on this...

OK, take the Mazinquaye piece. It is very well written and should be admired as such. It has the effect of making me want to hear the Lp, and I did in fact dig it out. But in the end I'd much rather just hear the music than read all of the theorizing about it's relevance, etc. It is very much like how i feel about art books: I buy them because I want to have images of the artwork to look at at my leisure. I do not enjoy reading the accompanying essays, which are impenetrable jibberish most of the time. I don't want to be told what to think about a piece of art. I think I value art (incl. music) more as beauty and self-expression than as cultural expression, so all of the extra baggage is not necessary. i dunno

that means yr a lot better off than some of us ron, for whom the writing about most music is more exciting than the finished product. call it raised expectations or general disillusionment or too much free time. ;)

i suppose i became "interested" in music crit when i realized that my interest in music was reaching heretofore bizarre and unprecidented levels. also when i realized that writing fiction (until then my main vehicle) was proving more and more unsatisfying. i had always read a lot of punk and indie zines - the usual suspects - and spin and rolling stone in the early to mid 90s. but i never thought much about the writing itself as anything more than news or a sort of hazy buying guide (arguably the two WORST things one can look for in music writing in retrospect). it wasn't until i started -reading- more about music (we dont want to talk about my early, botched attempts at writing about it) that the names of certain critics kept popping up and i began to follow/dig their old work up. it was then that i started viewing the writing not only as writing about music but writing on its own terms. which is arguably when it all went downhill for me. i'd put this at around 19 or 20.

for me - now, these days, although a pop critic/fans main perogative is to change his/her mind on a daily basis - music writing is at its best a precarious ledge between "talking about music" (in any form) and "thinking" (and yes, that can be as broadly defined as you wish.) a lot of my interest in writing about music and reading writing about music does stem from an overarching desire for "understanding" in whatever arena of life/culture. i still think most of the best non-fiction writing is being done via music.

Lester Bangs's piece on Astral Weeks has some absolutely beautiful passages, but the album itself has never done anything for me.

Who was this pundit? Who, for that matter, comprised GTR? Seems like Steve Howe was a likely culprit.

"Life is like a SHT sandwich. The bread you have, the less SHT you gotta eat."

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0314/kogan.php

"Brain Salad Surgery [Manticore, 1973]
Is this supposed to be a rebound because Pete Sinfield wrote the lyrics? Because Certified Classical Composer Alberto Ginastera--who gets royalties, after all--attests to their sensitivity on the jacket? Because the sound is so crystalline you can hear the gism as it drips off the microphone? C-"

http://www.citypages.com/databank/21/1037/article9072.asp

And I just love this Pitchfork review of the first Headcoats record. Very creative:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/t/thee-headcoats/headcoats-down.shtml

"October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine's "Gummo" as the worst film of the year." (October 17, 1997)

Yeah he didn't say that, actually, I just didn't want to say the album title twice.

Everyone else sucks.

For some reason I find myself quoting Christgau's review of RHCP's Californication whenever discussing the band now: "New Age Sex Maniacs."

That Kid A review is a PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT!! That guy is, like, the worst writer ever!!

no shit sherlock award - "the meltzer piece may be good writing but it's piss-poor thinking by an embittered old man

-- jess (dubplatestyl...), April 1st, 2003 11:27 AM."

One reason Bangs gets off so easy is that he didn't hang around to be so embittered and wrong (although he almost did - "rap is nothing or not enough" and that 81 p&j rant. considering most of his career was spent anticipating and then reveling in punk, things got ugly quick as soon as the revolution moved on, and they were just gonna get uglier for bangs. guarantee he'dve been the worst reactionary 'everything's bullshit man' polemicist reactionary (hell some people wish he'd been around to be just that) out there, occasionally dropping trou for yer sonic youths and the like, but increasingly more and more wrong and more and more playing to 'the legend'.

I don't think he'd have turned on his past the way meltzer did, but then bangs was always a total romantic, completely obsessed by that whole sappy kerouacian vision of rock (and also tragically aware of how hopeless it was), and the whole point of meltzer's writing is that he quit believing in anything after 1966 and has been haunted by the demons of his idealism ever since.

NEW ORDER 'TECHNIQUE' - from Melody Maker (1989?)
It begins. It thumps with glee, it swirls with lackadaisical intensity. "You're much too young to be a part of me, you're much too young to get a hold on me." And never have veterans sounded so brilliantly arrogant, masters so eager. Jesus. "Technique" is so effortlessly GREAT, so languidly heroic, so vibrant and thrilling despite itself, that one wishes one could weep. As the Austrian philosopher Rose Royce once commented: "I'm in love (and I love the feeling)." That's what this is like. I first hear it on a train from Waterloo and as the power stations and football pitches fly past, I want to get out and race the train to the sound of this perfect, perfect music. New Order know that the times throw a malfunctioning grey electric blanket over our emotion, but also that the slightest wriggle could be the one to turn it on again. They do this wriggle repeatedly, on every jauntily fatigued song, like they've done it many times before. Only on "Technique", they do it more skilfully and confidently than ever. This leads not to plushness or sumptuousness, but to a tumbling pumping river of their strengths, their weaknesses, their glib grandeur. Never have New Order sounded so little like people from Manchester, so much like gods.

It's clear by now that, though they seem able to clean up in any medium, there are two bas(s)ic New Order modes of transportation - the pop one which is like The Cure ripping off New Order, and the disco one which is like Shannon ripping off New Order. Both are severally represented here without any falling between two stools. Their feel is whisker-fine, their surges are princely. Albrecht's fragmented and victimised, but resilient, paper-mache poetry hauls itself up for what stings like one final summation of the shameful agonies of being male, of being prey to love and lust with equal sincerity/severity. Of acknowledging a bewildering sense of futility but still for some reason writing things down. When I say "male" I don't mean to imply that a "female" couldn't have written these simple yearnings and elegies, but that she wouldn't have started from the same angle. Undoubtedly "Technique" is inspired by a vulnerable, peculiarly boyish, somewhat petulant romanticism. from start to finish, from (heart on) sleeve (a cherub) to beaty monster inside.

"I can't find you, I can't find my peace of mind without you." As ever New Order temper Barney's pseudo-metaphysical couplets with a deceptive flippancy. (this is what always made them better and deeper than Joy Division.) "Fine Time " bubbles in, fascistically and facetiously making you dance. "Sophisticated lady, you got style and you got class, but most of all..." We strain to hear the punchline. We want to hear the punchline. We need to hear the punchline. "...Love technique." Ah, that'll be the title then. I am fully prepared to believe the lamb bleating at the end of this track is Christ applauding.

From then on it's irresistible, New Order marching through eight effervescing asphalt plains. There isn't a sub-GREAT moment to be found. When the majestic swooning "Run" "takes it down" you know that if the modernist ensemble come rushing back in with all swooshes blazing before the song fades, you'll start giggling at how marvellous all this is getting. They do. You do. you're sold. you're buying. You're coming out for spring. "All The Way" is gently awesome, precision guitars and rhythms levitating Albrecht's camp grandiloquence: "It takes years to find the nerve to be apart from what you've done, to find the truth inside yourself and not depend on anyone." There are many confessionals regarding strain, age, doubt, determination. "Love Less" and the probable next single "Round And Round" (a shimmering white funk whirlwind, if whirlwinds can shimmer, which I'm sure they can) build an apposite bridge between sentiment and dynamism. The latter is again evocative of travel, of flirting with life's hugeness. New Order are all about those minutes when you feel like a winning underdog and you knew all along you could do it. Of course, there's some miserablism. The beautiful (no other word) "Vanishing Point" and "Dream Attack" allow the lights up at the end of the party and, well, things are really quite manageable. They don't get morose. They get serene. Authentically. Before this there's a snarling "Guilty Partner", a bloodrush rather self-effacingly called "Mr Disco", and the aforementioned and utterly regal "Run", possibly their most poised and potent sculpure since "Thieves like Us". Play it loud and obsessive. Ultimately New Order are a subjective experience. A hundred lines here provoke productive self-examination and the hygiene of the sound encourages more anima projections than "La Boheme". I'm not being indulgent here (not by my standards) but you should be when you listen to it. And it swings, did I say it swings? "My life ain't no holiday, I've ben through the point of no return. I've seen what the man can do, I've seen all the hate of a woman too." Yes Bernard, we're all growing up. England's finest reluctant pop poet. I mean it. When he hits menopause there'll be a hell of a novel in this man. Meanwhile, the propulsion of the grooves is crisper than ice, more active than anarchy, swaggering on crutches. When New Order are this GREAT, this effortlessly, the rest might as well go home and peel onions or something. "Technique" is the state of the embers of the Eighties, mystique and mistakes merging, kissed by the ruby lips of God. "Technique" is a rare and ravishing triumph.

ugh! that's a little much, isn't it?

That's exactly the point, though. Give me over the top enthusiasm over jaded hipster cynicism any day.

One reason Bangs gets off so easy is that he didn't hang around to be so embittered and wrong (although he almost did - "rap is nothing or not enough" and that 81 p&j rant. considering most of his career was spent anticipating and then reveling in punk, things got ugly quick as soon as the revolution moved on, and they were just gonna get uglier for bangs. guarantee he'dve been the worst reactionary 'everything's bullshit man' polemicist reactionary (hell some people wish he'd been around to be just that) out there, occasionally dropping trou for yer sonic youths and the like, but increasingly more and more wrong and more and more playing to 'the legend'.

was anyone even talking about bangs?

Kodwo Eshun On Nerd
www.hyperdub.com/softwar/nerd.cfm

Mark De'Rozario on Destiny's Child & Missy Elliot
www.hyperdub.com/softwar/funky.cfm

anyway, bangs would have a perfectly realized home at the wire, 2003-division, pissing about with david keenan on "squares" and climbing deeper inside his own asshole annotating lathe cut japnoise 10". it'd be a basquiat-warhol relationship!

critics should only be anything but overtly mean when they have the writing abilities to pull it off

the bloody obv. answer: 't depends on the critic, pretty often. i'd say, frinstance, the stud brothers in melody maker used to be v.V.V.mean every now & again, but it mostly made for highly enjoyable reading - well yes, rather frequently i tended to agree with their choice of the targets too...

then again, i.p'nman, whose writing i certainly admire, sometimes - s'prise, s'prise? - can't be arsed to back up his "meanness" (if it's to be called that), or so it's seemed occasionally over the few past years

http://www.furia.com/twas/twas0293.html

This is the greatest goddamn review I've read in quite some time.

revive, to mention that.

And the other two tracks are entitled 'Nor All Thy Piety Or Wit Can Lure It Back To Cancel Half A Line' and, yes you've guessed it, 'Nor All Thy Tears Wash Out A Word Of It'. So the question isn't 'does this suck?' It's 'how much'? Well, that's hard to say because this record sucks so much that eventually it prolapses space and enters a reverse-universe where suck rules and rules suck and people walk around on their hands with their underpants on their heads and like the taste of Brussels sprouts and think that Chris Evans isn't a total dick. You dig? It's basically one note that gets ever so gradually louder and more distorted until, eventually, your head just like fucking EXPLODES and your fucking BRAINS shoot out of your EARS! Oh my giddy aunt, it's actually getting louder! AAAAAAAARGH! I'VE STILL GOT IT ON AS I TYPE AND THE PAIN IS ALMOST UNBEARABLE! CAN YOU HEAR ME!? OH SWEET JESUS, IS THAT BLOOD ON THE KEYBOARD! UH! ONE OF MY EYEBALLS HAS POPPED OUT! OH FUCK! THERE GOES THE OTHER ONE! THIS IS BRILLIANT! OH, HANG ON, I THINK IT'S GETTING QUIETER AGAIN! YES, sorry, yes, there it goes. Wow! It's like Mogwai at 2rpm! It's awesome, fantastic, brilliant and I never, ever want to hear it ever again. Ever. Oh, go on then, just one more time... hang on, here it comes... AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!
-Steven Wells, NME c.2000

(I went and bought it after reading that, the review is OTM)

http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/pavement/albums/album/238394/rid/5943554/

http://citypaper.com/music/recordreview.asp?id=7614

Ahhhhh good old reliable Rolling Stone magazine: where every single album gets either two-and-a-half, three, or three-and-a-half stars (unless it's a reissue in which case it gets five stars no matter what).

Hmm. Interesting. The opening track, "The Eye", consists of some vaguely spooky noises over which British foreign secretary Robin "Shagger" Cook rambles on about the historic opening of the Gaza Strip border. Oh, hang on. I've left the radio on. That's better. So, just some vaguely spooky noises, then. How interesting. No, really. How FUCKING interesting.

Moving rapidly along, "Square Rave" doesn't so much "bang" as sort of rattle around like an insecticide-overdosed late-summer wasp trapped in a large paper lampshade. Far out! "Dedicated Loop" is the sort of sucky ambient soundtrack that sucky film students choose for their sucky time-lapse Warhol pastiches. Hilarious! "Tomorrow World" is Enya gone drum'n'bass. Groovy! "Cool Veil" is ten seconds of aimless muso-masturbation. How witty! "Schizm Track #1" is like "The Rockafeller Skank" heard from the bottom of a 200ft-deep shit-filled pit. Great! Oh sweet Jesus! Do we have to go on!?

Look, synthesisers, sequencers, samplers and drum machines are fab, gear and groovy. Hey, the Prodge, Atari Teenage Riot and Fatboy Slim swear by them! But what if this new tecknologie were ever to fall into the wrong hands? What if it were used to produce evil music? Like, music with no balls, soul, energy, aggression, passion, tune, danceable beats or apparent function? You know, the sort of pointless, irritating, self-indulgent, avant-garde-a-fucking-clue bollocks that a certain sort of especially annoying student pretends to be "into" in order to look "cool" shortly before he (and it's nearly always a he) gets a job in vivisection, Conservative politics or the music press? What, in other words, if these wonderful, shiny, new instruments were used to make art-wank jazzzzzzzzzzzz?

Oh, wait! This is a pisstake, right? I'll bet this 'Tom Jenkinson' doesn't exist at all, does he? I bet it's those wacky blokes from The Fast Show who've slung all the ropy cack they recorded for their hilarious Jazz Club sketches onto a CD! Ha! You wags! You really had me going there! For a minute.

I will kill anybody who plays any track off this CD in any building where I am present. You have been warned.

I found it in the NME's archives. ILM hates on the NME waaayyyy too much. Any magazine that would print a review that funny is OK in my book!

lol @ this headline

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/red-hot-chili-peppers-im-with-you-is-a-buffet-of-preposterous-noise/2011/08/26/gIQAlumynJ_story.html

didn't bother reading the review

Can think of a couple. JD Considine review Nelson's "Because We Can:" Still, we would prefer if you didn't. Considine again on Pink Floyd's "Delicate Sound of Thunder Live:" Further proof you can't listen to a light show. Or something close to those.

Also, my friend Mark once reviewing a proggy band with the pithy: "Kind of like Yes, but no."

xp - i do not want to think about Anthony Keidis in connection with anything I like to put in my mouth.