Waiting for a Sign from You

When it comes to music-geek jousting, one sure sign of weakness is admiring a song without realizing that in fact it’s a cover of another song. (When caught out, you must fall to your knees, lower your head, and quietly wait for death.) And yet uncovering previously unimagined sources must also be one of the sweetest music-geek pleasures there is. And it keeps on giving. I don’t remember how exactly I learned that Joan Jett didn’t write “I Love Rock and Roll,” but it was only within the past year or so. Still have never heard the original, though, by some people called the Arrows.

Anyway, the other day I was poking around online & discovered Slapp Happy, a German band from the early 1970s, & discovered as well that they’re the originators of a little song called “Blue Flower,” which Mazzy Star covered to great effect on their She Hangs Brightly album. This may solve the mystery of why “Blue Flower” is the only Mazzy Star song I’ve ever cared about or been able to remember.

That said, I still prefer the Mazzy Star version by a longshot – it goes down much smoother, and this just seems like the kind of song that should go down smooth. On the Slapp Happy original, the clipcloppy rhythms and showy sound-plinks seem designed to announce, This isn’t just some conventional rock & roll song, you know. Except that it is, & not that there’s anything wrong with that.

• Slapp Happy, “Blue Flower”
• Mazzy Star, “Blue Flower”

(Buy Sort of ... Slapp Happy here and She Hangs Brightly here.)

Take This Message to My Brother

Because one of our loyal readers has pointed out that the Wedding Present covered Butterglory’s “Waiting on the Guns” in the mid-1990s, and because said cover is surprisingly understated and starts off with some nicely ominous guitar churn moving from right channel to left & back again, here it is.

• The Wedding Present, “Waiting on the Guns”

And because thinking of the Wedding Present always reminds me that when they were doing that single-a-month project back in the early 1990s they covered the Close Lobsters’ great “Let’s Make Some Plans,” here it is.

• Close Lobsters, “Let’s Make Some Plans”

And because “Let’s Make Some Plans” is as mentioned great but really the definitive Close Lobsters statement is their first album, Foxheads Stalk This Land, and “I Kiss the Flower in Bloom” is one of the more instantly lovable songs thereon, here it is.

• Close Lobsters, “I Kiss the Flower in Bloom”

And because the Close Lobsters remind me of a friend who was into them before I was, they also tend to remind me of another one of said friend’s faves, another purveyor of offhand pop brilliance who seems more or less forgotten today, and because I’m always happy for an excuse to play “Southern Mark Smith” for myself or others, here it is.

• Jazz Butcher, “Southern Mark Smith”

And because we’re on a bit of a UK-pop thing here anyway, and because during a five-hour delay at Pearson Airport for my flight to Washington, D.C. last week (eventual liftoff 1:30 am, eventual arrival at hotel 3:30 am) one of the few things that kept me sane was having Lloyd Cole’s “Patience” come up unexpectedly on the iPod and falling in love with it all over again (so taken was I that at the time I didn’t even notice the convergence of song title & situation, even as I was gritting my teeth at yet another perfunctory “thank you for your patience” announcement), here it is.

• Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, “Patience” (live)

My other rediscovery on the D.C. trip – this one courtesy of a cabdriver’s choice of lite-rock radio station – was the Doobie Brothers’ “Takin’ It to the Streets.” Man, I thought, I can’t believe it, but right here, right now, I’m fucking loving this.

But I’ll spare you that one.

(Buy some Wedding Present here, some Close Lobsters here, some Jazz Butcher here, and some Lloyd Cole here.)

Fly Like an (American) Eagle

• Pell Mell, “American Eagle”

See the American eagle – how majestic a figure it cuts! So assured, its feathers bristling. Almost aggressive in its ease & entitlement, almost furious.

Anyway, I’m off to the city of Washington for the rest of the week, for the annual big American book convention. A work trip, but I’ve been to D.C. – or are you supposed to signify wannabe familiarity with “the District”? – a couple times before, so I won’t miss the sightseeing too much this time. Would be nice to get to the Lincoln Memorial again (awe-inspiring) or to see Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross again (likewise), but we’ll see.

On another note, Jeff has pointed out this group. My Internet connection’s acting all pissy lately, so I haven’t been able to access their streams, but I trust his recommendation & I sure do like their name. (I always thought “Call Me Ishmael” would be a good name for a band, too.)

And I noticed Matt Suggs in the lineup list, which prompted me to go look at my Butterglory albums. Butterglory was Suggs’ mid-1990s Pavement-influenced band, and while I sometimes ask myself “How the hell do I own three Butterglory records?” when in a certain mood, I listened to their first again last night & it holds up very well.

Especially these two songs, but then they always were the highlights.

• Butterglory, “Waiting on the Guns”
• Butterglory, “The Skills of the Star Pilot”

(No buy-here links this time, sorry. See aforementioned pissiness of Internet connection.)

New Yo La Tengo, etc.

Here’s our first taste of the upcoming Yo La Tengo record, due out in September, their first proper album in three years. (Title: I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. I’m guessing obscure sports reference.)

Dunno what I was expecting but this wasn’t it. And I mean that in a good way. Feedback-leaking rock & roll would have been just fine, or hushed pretty balladry would have been just fine, or jazzy improv would have been just fine. (My fave songs on the past three records have been the ones that most folks seem to consider the Designated Room-Clearers: “Let’s Be Still,” “Night Falls on Hoboken,” “Spec Bebop.”)

But this is something else again. A short & punchy pop song that recalls their earliest records. A pneumatic-but-earthy sound. Thick slices of horn, bouncing piano, all of it thick & chunky but still wafting around like a breeze (it’s, like, a Retaining Wall of Sound). And it never sounds like they’re playacting, as some of the funkier efforts on Summer Sun did.

So anyway, I dig it.

• Yo La Tengo, “Beanbag Chair”

And a propos of nothing Yo La-related, here too are a couple delicious, delirious, trance-inducing round-and-rounds.

• Rev. Louis Overstreet, “In the Morning (Holiness Dance)”
• Antonio Carlos Jobim & Luis Bonfa, “O Nossa Amor”

(Go to Matador Records’ Yo La Tengo page here (that’s where I got the mp3), buy some Rev. Overstreet here, and buy the Black Orpheus soundtrack here.)

Overheard Streetcar Haiku

then they came over
and him and his wife kissed and
his wife looked at me

When Elf Power Comes

I was hopeful but apprehensive going to the Elf Power show at the Horseshoe the other night. That whole guitar-bass-drums paradigm has been feeling pretty played-out for me lately, and I’ve had a slow start getting into the band’s new album, Back to the Web – on the first few listens, it seemed bland & anodyne. The record did start clicking for me a couple days before the show, though, with its Middle Eastern sounds & Celtic ballad sounds & sea shanty sounds all sewn together into, well, the Elf Power sound.

The show was really good, in any case. Lots of stuff from the new album, lots from the last one, the band seeming a tad reserved but affable & engaged. And the keyboards & other musical garnishes sure do enliven that aforementioned guitar-bass-drums paradigm; I especially liked the reworked keyboard flourishes on “Let the Serpent Sleep.” Andrew Rieger’s songs, too, are unusually spry & affecting in their simplicity. Unlike many people these days, he can even go sappy & still bring me along as a believer, as he does in the live version of “Arrow Flies Close.”

In the end I could have done with more covers (I could always do with more covers, especially since Elf Power has a whole excellent album of them), but they did encore with Eno’s “Needles in the Camel’s Eye,” which is a guaranteed shortcut to my heart.

Autobiographical aside: This was my first time seeing Elf Power. I was supposed to see them open for Neutral Milk Hotel in 1998 (also at the Horseshoe), but both bands were staggeringly late getting to the venue for some unexplained reason, so NMH went on first, & by the time they finished I ws exhausted enough & sufficiently dazzled that I decided to skip Elf Power. I was marginally less tired at work the next day, I suppose, but it probably was’t worth it.

• Elf Power, “Let the Serpent Sleep”
• Elf Power “Arrow Flies Close” (live 2004)
• Elf Power, “Needles in the Camel’s Eye”

(The Eno cover is from When the Red King Comes, and “Serpent” is from 2003’s Creatures. The live track is from a tour-only odds & sods grab bag that the band was selling at the show, and it was recorded, coincidentally enough, at the Horseshoe two years ago. Buy Elf Power’s new record here and some of their other stuff here.)

Thought That I Was Over You

Sad news today: Grant McLennan of the Go-Betweens has died at the young age of 48. McLennan and fellow Go-Betweens principal Robert Forster wrote all kinds of amazing pop songs over the years, from dry & wry to unashamedly sentimental. McLennan always seemed like the classical-tunesmih McCartney to Forster’s slightly more acerbic Lennon, though there’s of course plenty of overlap in those categories with both musical teams.

Here’s a Go-Betweens classic from their 1980s heyday (and make no mistake, they had a run of great albums back then that stacks up well against anything); something from McLennan’s first solo album, Watershed (1991); and something else from ’91, from an album McLennan recorded in collaboroation with the Church’s Steve Kilbey under the name Jack Frost.

• The Go-Betweens, “Cattle and Cane”
• G.W. McLennan, “Haven’t I Been a Fool”
• Jack Frost, “Thought That I Was Over You”

(Buy some Go-Betweens here and some Grant McLennan here.)

I Am the God of Hellfire!

Saw the movie Darkon a few days back – it’s a documentary about a live-action role-playing game in the Baltimore area, played by people who drive out to parks & forests every other weekend, dress up in medieval costumes (and makeup, too, if they’re playing, say, dark elves), make rousing speeches about defending the realm, and charge into battle wielding fake swords, fake shields, etc.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie & would recommend it, yet still found myself vaguely unsatisfied. Part of this was on the micro-level of logistics – my editor’s antennae were quivering with unanswered questions about the back-end workings of the game. (How do you sign up? What does it cost? Who ultimately calls the shots? What’s the mechanism for dealing with cheating, bad-faith players? Etc.) To be fair, though, I’m probably in the minority in wondering about all that stuff, & I can’t really blame the filmmakers for focusing instead on the on-the-field action.

But I also wanted more big-picture stuff, I guess. The film trotted out or hinted at a few insights as to why a game like Darkon would captivate its players, but they all seemed to be of the common-sense variety: people feel that their real lives are dull, that they have no control over the day-to-day demands of their existence, that their actions & decisions are of no real import, etc., and all of that is turned on its head in live-action role-playing (I’m told the acronym is LARP).

But the movie didn’t really ask what makes LARP different from other forms of escapism & entertainment, and it didn’t ask (except in the most offhand, roundabout way) whether LARP is in some way unhealthy.

I’ll take pains to note that this isn’t actually a criticism of the movie. Maybe my own perspective is skewed and there’s no reason to think LARP is unhealthy. Certainly the filmmakers seemed to be on the “good clean fun” side of the issue, and it’s hardly my place to begrudge anyone their fun, clean or otherwise.

Yet the whole LARP phenomenon still seems mildly depressing to me.

It’s not the escapism – believe me, I’m all about escapism. I’ve spent countless hours as a voyeur to other lives real & imaginary, via books & movies. (And I’ve often rationalized all those hours by telling myself that I’m not just passing the time & amusing myself, I’m worshipping at the altar of Art.) Nor is it the aroma of geekdom that clings to a game in which people dress up as elves. Anyone with enthusiasms of any kind, after all, is a geek in their own way, and believe me, I’m well aware that I’m geekier than most.

But it does seem to me that there’s something that makes LARP different from sports (player or spectator) or stamp collecting or sci-fi fandom or German board-game playing or blog bloviating or the many other ways in which folks pass the time. The difference is that this pursuit seems to explicitly involve your sense of your self – the rejection of your “real,” everyday self in favour of an invented but purely fantastical one that’s thought to be preferable.

That seems creepy to me.

(And by creepy I don’t mean, “One day those people are going to lose all sense of reality and go on a rampage, just like in that movie Mazes & Monsters.” By creepy I simply mean, “Not really conducive to long-term happiness in the real world.”)

The sheer physicality of the game might be a factor, too. You have to actually get yourself to the game site and dress up and interact with actual other people, but presumably in the role of your character much of the time. On the one hand, this introduces a social aspect to the game that seems pretty cool (especially compared against, say, videogame roleplaying). On the other hand, it would be interesting to know whether or how the in-your-face corporeality of the role-playing affects that whole sense-of-self thing.

Keep in mind that all of this is coming from someone who’s never played a game like this and who undoubtedly got from Darkon a pretty selective & limited version of what goes on. (Though again, that’s not to imply that the filmmakers are anything but supportive of the Darkonians.) So this, well, unease, let’s say, may be eminently rebuttable; if you’re a gamer coming across this via Google or something, rebut away.

In the meantime, oh, right, music. Games & theatricality have been on my mind, and I think all three of these very different songs are fantastic in their own way, whether they play for the team of freakform cabaret or jokey sixties pyschedelia or gorgeous seventies pop-soul. (If you don’t know these songs already, I’ll leave it to you to discover which is which, & you’re in for a treat.)

• The Spinners, “They Just Can’t Stop It (Games People Play)”
• Man Man, “Monster”
• The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, “Fire”

(Buy some Spinners here, some Man Man here, and some Arthur Brown here.)