Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 11

2010 Recommended Albums Roundup

by

There’ll be no more hemming and hawing – here are my recommended albums of 2010. I just have to get it out 50 days sooner next year :)

Thanks to my friend Melissa W. for inspiring/encouraging this endeavor, and for all of my office-mates for enduring my many rounds of listening ;)

Top 10 Recommended Albums of 2010

1. Sara Bareilles – Kaleidoscope Heart. A gleeful, big-voiced, piano-pop record not unlike what I expected from Kelly Clarkson fresh off of Idol. (full review)

2. The Black Keys – Brothers. Turns basic two-man blues stomp into a sonic wet cement that will fill up your ears and harden to stone, never to exit. (full review)

3. Robyn – Body Talk. Prickly-tongued dance pop that picks up directly where Cyndi Lauper left off with She’s So Unusual, both in voice and coquettish feminism.

4. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs. Evokes the washed out echo of America’s abandoned suburbs – dingy lawns, faded vinyl siding, and a hopeless tranquility.

5. The Bird & The Bee – Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates. Transcends “carefully crafted tribute” to become a valuable reimagining of these classic songs. (full review)

6. Sia – We Are Born. Send a Britney Spears CD back in time along with an emotionally-unhinged, unintelligible cyborg lady from the future, both to the attention of the disco band at your local club; enjoy the results.

7. Corinne Bailey Rae – The Sea. A riveting, jazz-tinged journey to the bottom of the ocean, where an intent to drown transforms into a raison d’etre. (full review)

8. The Roots – How I Got Over. A pinnacle of hand-crafted hip hop, merging sure-handed classic soul with introspective and uplifting rhymes.

9. Vampire Weekend – Contra. Dizzingly smart, giddily smart-mouthed Paul Simon pop pretends it’s facile and heartless, but it’s anything but. (full review)

10a. Menomena – Mines. Found sound rockers take over for the waylaid Kings of Leon as the best back-to-basics rockers in America, sans basics.

10b. Blitzen Trapper – Destroyer of the Void. A fantasy land where Neil Young continued adding his “Y” to the acronyms of ever more classic rock acts after ditching Crosby and company.

10c. Hindi Zahra – Handmade. I spit “world music” like a curse because it never means this but it really ought to – international influences brought to bear on finely crafted pop songs.

—

Keep reading for 32 More Recommended Albums of 2010 (in alphabetical order by artist). [Read more…] about 2010 Recommended Albums Roundup

You Sound Like a Vulture (an Arcati Crisis adventure)

by

For the past few months Gina and I have been rehearsing with Zina, who is also the drummer in E’s band Filmstar.

It started as a speculative exercise – what would Arcati Crisis sound like with drums? We got our answer pretty quickly, as Zina is a ridiculously fast study. We’re already eight songs into drumming up our repertoire, and last night Zina polished off “Bucket Seat” after only a second rehearsal of it.

“Bucket Seat” has been one of my favorite songs from the moment I finished writing it in 2003. When Gina and I made Arcati Crisis formal in 2007 it was the second new song I brought to her to add to the repertoire, and in minutes she found the off-kilter chords that tangle with my staccato diminished stabs. Now the song sounds nude if I play it solo.

Zina was proving to be equally as intuitive on it. After our first run with Zina we fine-tuned a few spots and ran it twice more. It was solid, and we were playing it at the right tempo, but I felt like it was over too quickly.

I turned to Gina. “I think you need to play a guitar solo out of the fast part after the key change.”

One of my favorite aspects of the drumming process is that rather than constrict arrangements around our guitar playing, drums have opened up more space. Zina’s rhythm takes the burden of the two of us. These are songs we’ve played literal hundreds of times, but we keep finding new spaces inside them.

That said, nothing’s structure has really changed yet. The songs are all the same shapes they’ve always been. We haven’t added any funky breakdowns. Or guitar solos.

“A solo?” Gina asked, a little tentatively.

“Sure. You know, like what you play in the intro. Try it.”

We tried it. Gina stopped after four notes, two of which were pretty cool. “It doesn’t quite fit.”

“Yeah, but if you keep the two that worked, and descend…” I started imitating her guitar with my voice, wailing a solo. “raw wah, whear wheh wah, rah weh wah,” I paused for a breath between phrases, “and then a lower ascending line.” I climbed back up the scale, “until it resolves!” I shouted, wheezing and wailing until I reached a bent note at the top.

I finished my performance and looked at Gina expectantly.

“You sounded like a vulture,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You want me to play it like that?”

“Well, you know. That’s the general shape of it.”

She regarded me skeptically while Zina looked on from behind the kit, bemused.

“I could draw it for you,” I offered, “like David Bowie did for Mick Ronson on ‘Moonage Daydream.’ I could go get crayons.”

“Oh, sure,” Gina mimed with her hands what I assumed to be an elaborate David Bowie crayon drawing, “that might work. Or we could just try to play it a few times.”

And that was how “Bucket Seat” acquired a guitar solo.

You can stream or download our full-length Live @ Rehearsal, Vol. 4 LP for free. Hear “Bucket Seat” and other rocked up Arcati Crisis songs at Dorian’s Parlor Neo-Victorian ball on Saturday March 12. There will be steampunk costumes. We’re also working on a ninja weeknight gig for February. Stay tuned.

Crushing On: The Hunger

by

The first book I ever read was a children's version of Dracula, so I'm sure you can understand if I find all this Twilight business to be a bit annoying.

I think vampires could possibly be on their way to wane. It’s hard for me to be sure, as I am generally oblivious to their ebbing in and out of favor, having loved them since age six.

Age six was when I read my first book as I sit on my front porch in the summer sun. That book was Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Seriously. It was an abridged version for kids, and the few extremely terrifying dreams that I still remember were a small price to pay for a lifelong love of reading.

By the time of my reading of Dracula I was already an established David Bowie fan, so please understand that (a) I was not your typical six-year-old, and (b) I might have loved 1983’s The Hunger even more at age six than I did this weekend.

As opposed to his stunt-casting in many films, David Bowie is actually the perfect person to play this character.

Have you heard of this movie? It’s insane. From a novel of the same name, it’s like a retroactive Lynchian remake of Black Swan with literal vampires instead of metaphorical birds, where David Bowie and Susan Sarandon split Portman’s part (complete with homoerotic touches), but replace her ballet dancing with cello playing and smoking cigarettes, respectively.

The Hunger is exactly as disorienting, awesome, and disturbing as that description suggests.

In one of his strongest cinematic turns, David Bowie plays an androgynous vampire musician who is a little touchy about getting older – so, essentially, he is playing himself. Catherine Deneuve is his sire and very long-term domestic partner, as well as a sex enthusiast and classical pianist who is a dead ringer for Lady Gaga.

As the pair begin to fret over Bowie’s gray hairs, they independently obsess over Susan Sarandon, a young doctor trying to unlock the secret of aging by experimenting on some very temperamental monkeys. When the two of them aren’t busy fucking and killing (usually in that order, but not exclusively) the swingers they pick up from the local goth club they teach music to an adorable neighbor girl.

This movie … words just fail me. From the first minute it’s both disgusting and gorgeous. It’s beautifully sparse, with lingering shots that made me gasp and short, clipped dialog that’s hardly necessary. Honestly, it would work almost as well as a silent film. Unlike a lot of movies from the early eighties, it does not feel dated to me – the only hints of its age are electronic music cues and perhaps an overuse of slow motion.

Most importantly, every time The Hunger reached a point where E and I exclaimed “wouldn’t it be awesome if x” or “surely they’re not going to x” that exact thing happened. We’re talking about three of the most transgressive plot twists I have seen on film outside of shock/horror movie.

I mean – yes, this was shocking and horrifying – but on the whole it was more of a sexually-charged arthouse flick than it was Saw.

Did I mention David Bowie AS A CELLO-PLAYING VAMPIRE? Oh, and, if I may be a total dude for a brief moment (maybe the first ever on CK): the breasts of a young Susan Sarandon.

The current vampire craze has resulted in talk of a remake, but there is no way it could be as erotic and thought-provoking in the present day. Even with Lady Gaga.

I might need to buy a copy.

Tattooed Mom’s Bumper Cars and Textual Healing

by

Rocking my song from the Textual Healing soundtrack, "End With Me," upstairs at Tattoo Moms in a vintage bumper car. Photo courtesy of the incredible @MikeyIl

A long time ago – like, about half a life – I attended a birthday party upstairs at Tattooed Mom on South Street.

That is the sense-memory that struck me in the face Friday night when I trundled my two amps up the stairs to the Textual Healing book release party and took in the room with its two pool tables. I’ve been to Tattoo Moms several times since then, but that was the only occasion I had ever been upstairs.

Now I have a second indelible memory of Tattoo Moms – me, standing inside one of the vintage bumper cars in the upstairs back room, singing and playing squelchingly distorted acoustic guitar licks from my place in the back seat.

The whole story of Eric Smith and his book is a sort of hazy dream to me. I can’t believe I wrote a song to the first chapter, or sent it to him a minute later, or wrote another one, or then wrote AN ENTIRE BOOK inspired by his manic and infectious “GO ARTS” energy.

That’s why I was so thankful to be playing for him, for his book, and for a room of people I’ve come to really love and cherish – literally too many Twitter folks for me to try to remember and collect their handles into this single post post.

What I do remember is finishing “Curves Sketched In Letters” and starting up my super-secret cover of “Fuck You” and watching the entirety of the room on my right – including Nan, Schmidt, Linzy and Jess, and a slew of other people – sing all of the callbacks every time I stopped for a breath.

The entirely too beautiful Allie with a copy of Textual Healing and author Eric Smith, courtesy of @MikeyIl.

(Also, intriguingly, the couch in front of me bore a girl I’m quite certain I went on a pseudo-date with in high school. I couldn’t tell if she was enjoying me or not, or if she even recognized me. Would someone from that birthday party recognize me now, playing guitar, if they hadn’t seen me in all of those intervening years? I was sorry she left early, as I sorely wanted to see if it was really her (and, if it was, have her experience how hot my wife looked).)

After my brief set half of Venice Sunlight took the stage bumper car to play a few songs acoustic. I had a grand time chatting VS’s Jay and Dave up well into the night about their band and brand new CD, released on Saturday and just-about-free to download.

Otherwise, the weekend was uneventful. I was couch-bound on Saturday with a howling backache (thanks to all the amp-trundling), and Sunday was spent cleaning and rehearsing solo music.

Now for a new week! Rehearsal, Freelance Whales show, Black Swan (!!), rehearsal, night off, and my tenth appearance at the Shubin Theatre Holiday revue – serving as the house-band with Gina. We’ll debut a cover of Counting Crows’ “Long December” in the long, proud tradition of sad Christmas songs as helmed by Judy Garland’s original “(Have Yourself) A Merry Little Christmas.”