melting igloo - propertyistheft.com

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Careless Writing
Sometimes I write for this really excellent music magazine from Britain called Careless Talk Costs Lives. The following were published in CTCL. Umm... or at least submitted.

The Big Bang Festival (Day 3)
418 Project, Santa Cruz, CA, Sunday, September 22, 2002

"This ain't no 'fuck you' revolution! This ain't no 'fuck you' revolution!" yells Hugh Holden as his group, the Lowdown, kick major ruckus through the dance studio acoustics. And in this one phrase he sums up both the evening and the Big Bang festival as a whole. Where our other (American) indie fests - bless their hearts - go bigger and brighter and draw the out-of-towners, Oliver Brown's curatorial style is more of a celebration of the town for the town. Small bands play small venues for small crowds for eight, nine, ten nights in a row. So thus, this Sunday night show is somewhat of an aberration bringing together Detroit, L.A., Portland, Santa Cruz: the noise-skronking Monitor Bats, the rock-scene-oriented-but-still-dead-serious-but-not-boring-in-fact-really-affecting dance troupe Janet Pants Dance Theater, the torture-by-volume duo 25 Suaves, the sublimely strange and beloved Deerhoof (super musicianship coupled with repeatedly falling off the drum crate and lyrics in a sub-Seussian dialect). The variety of ways to challenge and engage the audience kept getting affirmed over and over again. I don't know - did I miss something? It was three dollars. It was awesome. "This ain't no 'fuck you' revolution!"

CD Reviews
Some of these reviews originally appeared in Careless Talk Costs Lives

Deerhoof -- Reveille (Kill Rock Stars)
Imagine a rock band, a real rock band. Something on the order of the Who or the Buff Medways. Slashing and crashing style. Now put them in a puppet show from, say, 1968 and add insane little (really little) melodic (really melodic) vocal and organ bits and narration. The singer's hitting the drummer over the head. Stop it Satomi! Now she's in the tree and won't come down without the punch buggy valves. Don't get me wrong, I really hate clever things and cute things but Deerhoof evokes a strange and dark reality amidst the cute puppet theater sets. I mean, they mine some of the same nostalgic deposits as Stereolab, but rather than going for the lull-out they pull the rug out. An affecting collision of childhood with adulthood on the order of the Melvins' Eggnog.

Various Artists If The 20th Century Didn't Exist It Would Be Necessary To Invent It (5 Rue Christine)
Slim Moon works for the government. He works for the FBI. He figures out who all the freaks and troublemakers and malcontents are. The ones who refuse to sing in tune, who won't shut up, who turn good guitars into shovels. He infiltrates their ranks. He gains their trust. He gets them to reveal themselves ON TAPE. Then he compiles a report for his superiors. (Lucky for us he also presses a few extra and sells them on the side.) There are a lot of fucking troublemakers on this disc - 24 bands, or whatever, including Orthrelm (over-the-edge abrasive metalhead jazz-rock), Quintron (bread machine rewired for butter funk), Wolf Eyes (incoherent electronic mumbleism) and Octis (guitar anger abstractions turned inward). But the worst, I mean best, troublemaker of the bunch is VV and Hotel with schoolyard handclaps, an insanely hooky guitar line and we-got-the-power bratgirl vocals. Troublemaker Underground!

The Cannanes with Explosion Robinson "trouble seemed so far away" (Slabco)
Life is strange: you dance to a single so perfect you can't believe it exists -- all hum and defiant mystery, just acoustic guitar and a gripping voice -- and you consider risking it all and falling in love. Life is strange, and it all comes crashing down around your head, but the album arrives, all shambling pop, both wistful and vengeful. And life continues to be strange so that your friends become memories and your enemies become friends and digital recording gets invented and your clueless, shambling heroes team up with a producer who gives them lush '80s synth beds, crispy drum pitter-patterns and some strangely official-sounding mainstream radio arrangements. But you can still hear the wistful, the vengeful, the defiantly mysterious, and you can almost see that long Australian horizon and you know life is strange and this time you decide you'll go along with it.

Steven Future Home of Burbank Elks (Slabco)
A few years ago Steven Nereo was living in Seattle, battling the rain and gray, occasionally showing up for his job at Up Records and putting together the deep bass slo-mo beats and bratty interludes for his Volume All-Star CD, "Close Encounters of the Bump and Grind" (released in the UK on Too Pure). But Los Angeles, from where Steven currently runs his Slabco label, seems to be treating him so much more nicely: "Future Home of Burbank Elks" is a drip-hop gem, full of bright sun streaming through the window, mellow beats, organic-sounding electric piano and layers of looped acoustic guitars. Half the tunes have Steven's dreamily resigned vocals, the others skate by on ingratiating synth hooks. So go ahead, pretend you've got a nice job, a nice car and there's a nice beach nearby; now just take the rest of the day off and lay in the sun. Nice life, isn't it?

Young People (5 Rue Christine)
Those of us who just can't sit at the same table with the alternative-country-adult-contemporary scene (all that downhome neo-conservative drawling and oooh alternative atmospherics) might just find a place setting here. If there is a scary movie about Appalachian field recording this will be the soundtrack. There's something in the shed - and it's got a drumset! Meanwhile, Katie Eastburn's broken yodeling and acres of menacing feedback. Those who appreciate the Microphones' slo-mo aesthetic will thrill to an inverted polarization of it at work in "The Pier". All bands should be this messed up!