Sex, War and Robots

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship: Lucille Bogan - Shave 'Em Dry (1935)

This new recurring feature looks at odd footnotes in musical history. It's called Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship because I decided to call it that. For the first installment, I shine a (flesh)light on this filthy 1935 blues number by Lucille Bogan.

People were as dirty-minded in the 1930s are they are now - it was just harder to get away with it in public. The pre-war blues singers would record innuendo-laden come-ons in the studio, but these would turn into bawdy single-intendres in the clubs at night. These were the sort of rowdy places where, legend has it, people would regularly try to beat up Memphis Minnie and she'd break a bottle over the bar and give them what for.

For this song and some others Lucille Bogan just said "fuck it" and jettisoned any commercial pretense. It exceeds the 3 minutes typical of pre-war blues songs in case it takes you that much longer to see what she's getting at. Indeed, whatever she was trying to communicate through such abstruse lyrics as "I fucked last night and the night before, and I feel like a wanna fuck some more" is lost to the ages. It also includes the line "I've got something between my legs that'll make a dead man cum", imagery that would show up in 1976 on Tom Waits' "Pasties and a G-String" and then again in 1981 on The Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucille_Bogan

Friday, June 29, 2018

Petal - Magic Gone

The "confessional" album is sought after, but the human desire for secondhand absorption of the artist's personal turmoil allows empty posturing to slip through the net. Formless angst became an aesthetic, an affectation, because we let it; we made it profitable. Still, we know the real deal when we hear it. We treat such an album like a cipher through which the artist's psyche can be decoded.

Kiley Lotz would save you the trouble. She's been upfront about her struggle with mental illness which intensified in between Petal's debut Shame in 2015 and Magic Gone. The lyrics don't sugarcoat it and it's not a stretch to say you can hear it in her performance. In "Comfort", Lotz details in real time the point when she realised a long term relationship was over, and when she wails "I don't fucking care anymore!", you believe her. And yet Magic Gone never feels like a confrontational exercise, staring at you to see who blinks first, because Lotz's melodic acuity won't allow it. It's more downbeat than Shame, - never dirge-like in a way that would make a line such as "I wished the truck on the overpass would tumble down upon me" relentlessly morose, but never trivialising it either.

Saturday, June 16, 2018

The Breeders - All Nerve

The Breeders are not a band burdened by the idea of a legacy. All Nerve comes ten years after the middling Mountain Battles and is just the band's fifth album in 28 years. It also makes this lineup - the same that recorded 1993's Last Splash - the first to record more than one album (although, including The Amps, everyone involved has appeared in at least one other iteration). Last Splash was commercially successful in large part due to a confluence of factors such as how "Cannonball" fit in perfectly with MTV's alt-rock agenda at the time and British label 4AD doubling down on its decision to sign American artists, but it endures because of Kim Deal's songwriting and the band's musicianship. 25 years later, there's still so much to unpack in "Cannonball", not to mention the sublime power-pop of "Divine Hammer", the batshit dirge "Mad Lucas" and the alternately boiling and simmering "Roi" and its brief reprise, the latter ingeniously placed at the end of the album after a cover of Ed's Redeeming Qualities' country & western song "Drivin' on 9". But for all that, All Nerve is no attempt to replicate past glory.

Free from expectations and historical context, All Nerve is free to take its time. Opening track "Nervous Mary" uses the same slow-fast structure as Last Splash's opener "New Year", and could have been recorded the day after that album's last session, but the album soon carves out its own identity and indulges in slower tempos more than any other Breeders album, never more so than "Dawn: Making An Effort", which creates a wall of noise out of delayed guitar and cymbal splashes. Josephine Wiggs' bass is prominent without being overbearing, and supplies an intangible, nervous energy, but her standout performance is on "MetaGoth", which puts her in front of the mic and pairs her on guitar with Kelley Deal. Co-written by Wiggs and Kim Deal, it recalls Deal's Pixies contribution "Into the White" in tone, but transplanted into darker, plodding Breeders territory and replete with ominous guitar figures. Wiggs' untarnished English accent and deadpan delivery only amplify the effect. A cover of Krautrockers Amon Düül II's "Archangel's Thunderbird" keeps the album's back half from slipping from languid to sonorous, and is perhaps the highlight for Jim MacPherson, whose raw, spirited drumming has truly been missed. In fact the interplay between these four musicians has been missed, and it's easy to point to them collectively as the proximate cause for All Nerve being the most vital Breeders album in 25 years.

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Parquet Courts - Wide Awake!

A Parquet Courts album produced by Danger Mouse is a no-brainer on paper - the pairing of a band not content to release the same album twice and a producer who's a popular choice for artists looking to switch up their sound. The good news is that Wide Awake! is a triumph in practice. The album revels in previously untapped influences that the band leans into to the point where if, say, "Violence" was the first Parquet Courts song you ever heard, you might well assume that these four white guys were always this indebted to black artists of the past. That one is a rumination on numbness to violence as an unfortunate but necessary response to its prevalence in present day America. Andrew Savage sounds like James Murphy after 12 cups of coffee, while musically it recalls Funkadelic, both in its specifics (especially the pitch-shifted monologue in the final stretch) and the way it makes an inherently bitter pill palatable. Unfortunately the Talking Heads pastiche title track is a bridge too far, which is odd considering how well they sell the almost Jackson 5 bounce of "Tenderness". The idea of weighty themes appealingly packaged is not new to Parquet Courts, but with their most eclectic set of tunes and broadest emotional palette, Wake Up! is the band's most engaging album.