bubblesandgutz

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RIP Sly Stone

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Nitzer Ebb

Industrial band running from something was a definite motif in the late 80′s early 90′s

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"ICE not welcome in the central district"

Posters seen in Seattle

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Every Record I Own - Day 854: Seaweed Weak

Sometime in early 1992, MTV ran a short feature on the Pacific Northwest music scene, including a brief segment on this band called Seaweed from Tacoma. They stood out from all the grunge bands in the feature as they had some obvious hardcore leanings in their sound, style, and philosophy. I made a mental note and bought their Weak CD at a record shop in downtown Honolulu a few weeks later. They weren't as heavy as Soundgarden or as catchy as Nirvana, but they had an obvious affinity for the Discord Records sound of the mid-to-late '80s, and that was enough for me to be a fan.

A couple of months later my dad got assigned to Fort Lewis, WA, just south of Tacoma, WA. It was the summer before my sophomore year of high school. Coincidentally, my older brother was going to college in Tacoma at the time, and a few weeks after we arrived on the mainland, he invited me to see Seaweed at the historic Temple Theater in downtown Tacoma. The full line-up was Seaweed, My Name, Flop, and Sage---a very stacked bill if you knew anything about all ages shows in the Puget Sound area at the time, but a pretty nondescript bill for the rest of the world.

The Temple Theater holds 1600 people, and my memory of the night is that it was a packed house. It was a rare all ages show in the Puget Sound area headlined by a hometown band that was riding the grunge wave, and it was happening in a seated venue. Consequently, by the time My Name played, the first three rows of seats had been ripped out of the floor by patrons to make room for a mosh pit. Before Seaweed's set, the promoter came out on stage and pleaded for the crowd to respect the venue so they could continue having shows in the future. He was booed off stage.

And then Seaweed went on and the crowd erupted. It would be nearly a decade before the Temple Theater hosted another show.

My first year on the mainland was tough, but I was stoked to live somewhere that a band like Seaweed called home. I liked that they had hardcore energy with an introspective lyrical depth. I liked that they only played all ages shows. I liked that they seemed like ordinary people. Their subsequent albums Four and Spanaway were even better than Weak. The melodies were stronger; the riffs were smarter; the production had more punch. And consequently, Weak slid out of rotation and I'd get my Seaweed fix from their later records.

But this LP arrived in the mail yesterday after trading some 7"s with a friend, and it gave me the opportunity to revisit this gem from my adolescence for the first time in several decades. And while, yeah, Four and Spanaway are my favorites, Weak is still a solid album. It just leans way more into the melodic hardcore aspect of their sound. The songs seem more focused on live energy and momentum than vocal hooks and polished production.

I can understand why vocalist Aaron Stauffer ranks this one below their later records, but there are earnest, youthful, anxious, and forlorn elements unique to Weak that resonated with me at 15 that still translate 32 years later. Stoked to have this one back in rotation.

[bubblesandgutz]

Went for a quick dunk on our hike yesterday.

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 853: Jesu Silver

I was on week five of a Russian Circles tour last fall and had been hearing the title track off this record on a nightly basis as it's on a playlist we play over the PA once doors at the club open. I've had Silver on CD since it came out back in 2006, and here I was 18 years later, still hearing it on a regular basis and enjoying it every time. So I ordered a vinyl version of the EP off of Discogs.

"Silver" is easily my favorite Jesu track in their extensive catalog. It contains a lot of the project's signature components: lurching mechanized beats, layers of dense guitar, buried atmospheric vocals, morose melodies, etc.. Yet there is a grandiosity achieved on "Silver" that is unparalleled by anything else in their discography. Every time the 4:33 mark hits I get goosebumps.

The song's chorus, "silver's just another gold / when you're bitter and you're old," only reinforces its power. Is it a lamentation on aging? Or is it commentary on our culture's obsession with youth? Or is the song about failing to meet expectations?

I reckon it's a little bit of all of the above. I always thought the song was a push back against the notion of fading into irrelevance, whether that fade was due to aging or to other's ambivalence. But as far as I'm concerned, Silver still carries all the emotional weight it did upon its initial release eighteen years ago.

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I love your unpretentious sharing of both music and your lovely family (and that hot bod). It’s objective and personal at the same time, which really makes your musings stand out. It kind of makes me feel that I know you a bit and strangely some kind of relation. That and the previous question made me wonder if you experience that people feel you are more approachable, to the point that it affects you? If I ever met you I would like to say hi and express my gratitude for all your creativity have given me, but on the other side I don’t want to encroach or anything.

Also, please write more.

Thank you so much for the nice message!

I started sharing my records here as a writing exercise back when I was a freelance writer for a few different outlets (mainly The Stranger and Noisey / VICE). A big part of music criticism is eliminating the "I" from your work---you don't need to tell the reader "I think this record is good," you just need to say "this record is good." It makes a certain amount of sense---the readership doesn't need to be reminded that they're reading one person's opinion---but I always had a couple of qualms about eliminating the "I."

Sometimes the reader really does need to be reminded that this is one person's opinion and not the opinion of an entire media outlet or the larger press world. Also, I think criticism could stand to be more personalized. As a reader, I'd love to know more about the credentials of a writer. Am I reading a review written by a nineteen-year-old or a fifty-year-old? Because I would expect those two people to have vastly different perspectives on any given piece of music.

And beyond that, I'm more likely to discover a new artist or album from someone I know in real life. Someone whose frame of reference is closer to my own. Someone with shared interests. The more I know about someone who's discussing or suggesting an artist, the more context I have for understanding their perspective.

And more specifically, sometimes hearing about someone's personal history and connection to a piece of music can help me find my own path to appreciating it.

So I guess that's why these little write-ups tend to be so personal. As far as public perception goes, I don't really know how to gauge that sort of thing. Based on the number of notes my posts get, I assume only a couple of people read these posts. But then I'll have random folks come up and talk about a piece I wrote here, or something I write here will get picked up by a music website, so I really have no clue as to how many people pay attention to this blog and even less of a grasp as to how people perceive me based on what I write here.

All that said, I'm always happy to hear someone's appreciated my work, so please don't hesitate to come up and say hi if you see me out and about.

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 852: Jeff Özdemir Jeff Özdemir & Friends Vol. 3

I love eccentric record store employees and I may have met the most eccentric of them all a few weeks ago.

I was on tour in Berlin and between soundcheck and doors I decided to stop by a record shop around the corner from the club that looked promising on Google Maps. Walked to the shop with my bandmates and when we got there the doors were locked, though there was a sign in the window saying to ring the doorbell. So we hit the buzzer and a few seconds later a guy answers the door.

"I only have soul, jazz, and indie music," he says to us apologetically, eyeing our heavy metal t-shirts.

"That's fine," we reply. He lets us in to a little room that straddles the line between a residential space and a modest cafe. He leads us through that room into another small room crammed full of records. It's a bit of a mess... the bins are so full that he's now got records randomly leaning against shelves on the floor.

"First, I have some rules for the shop," he says, stopping us before we get to the bins. He pulls out a few hand drawn signs he's made. The first one says "No cellphones." Weird, but okay. Then he pulls out a couple of other signs that demonstrate the way he'd prefer customers to handle the records to ensure they don't get damaged. This is all very stereotypically German---lots of rules despite a general lack of practical order---but he's also very polite so it's not necessarily a deterrent. Once we approve of his rules, he lets us dig.

He puts some music on and it immediately catches our attention. Sorta like a more brooding and austere Stereolab. "What is this?" one of us asks.

"Oh, it's a compilation of local artists," he says, and hands me an LP. I investigate it, make a mental note of it, and put it back on a shelf. It's a small space, so he's kinda hovering over us the whole time. But he's friendly, and whenever we pull a record from the bin he immediately begins talking about our selection and plays it over the record store stereo. I love the enthusiasm, to be honest.

In the 30 minutes we're in the shop, he plays roughly a dozen different records for us, including several selections from a local label that does compilations featuring Berlin artists. I wind up buying one of the comps---the one with the song that sounded like Stereolab---along with a Gábor Szabó LP and a reissue of a '70s Egyptian funk LP.

Once we're outside the shop, one of my bandmates looks up one of the records the owner had been playing on Bandcamp. The page loads and... it's a picture of the guy from the record store. The comp I'd bought? It's a compilation alright, but it's a compilation of the record store owner playing with other musicians. Is this why cellphones weren't allowed in the shop? So we couldn't figure out that the guy was trying to sell us on his own music?

I'd feel a little manipulated by the situation if it wasn't for the fact that I actually really enjoy this 2xLP. Aside from the Stereolab moments, there's a little bit of a less-dour Portishead / Beak> vibe at times, maybe a little neo-soul and '60s pop here and there too. Not every track is a hit but overall it's a solid collection and I've given it quite a few spins since getting home.

Well played, Jeff Özdemir.

[bubblesandgutz]

In Oct 2023 I visited Seattle to see The Armed and you stood right next to me for their entire set but I was too nervous to say how much your career has meant to me. I’m a gay man who plays heavy music and I didn’t feel like I had many folks to look up to growing up but you were definitely one of them.

Also you rocking the half-open button down and ripping bass is sexy as hell.

Awww... thank you! I tend to be a bit awkward with compliments but please know that I appreciate all of this!

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 851: Hailu Mergia Tezeta

I've probably listened to Tezeta---the debut album by Ethiopian musician Hailu Mergia---more than any other album in the last three or four years. It's just good music to have playing in the background, whether you're cleaning the house, entertaining guests, or driving on a road trip. When I want music playing but get overwhelmed by option paralysis, I usually reach for Tezeta.

Originally released in 1977 on cassette tape, Tezeta captures keyboardist Hailu Mergia and his compatriots in The Walias Band doing instrumental versions of regional standards and popular tunes of the time with a distinctly soulful and funky flair. It's very lo-fi, which adds to the overall charm of the record. Instrumental music wasn't considered marketable in '70s Ethiopia, but given the censorship faced by artists with lyrics during the Derg regime, Mergia and the Walias Band had a distinct advantage. As a result, their music gradually found placement across regional radio and television programming.

This is one of those records that the internet algorithm threw my way, and now I listen to it regularly. Interestingly, I purchased another copy as a gift for someone at my neighborhood record shop last year, and the cashier told me that they sold more copies of Tezeta than anything else in their store. So either the DSP algorithm is pushing Mergia hard on everyone, or there's just something universally appealing about these sunny, uptempo instrumentals.

Either way, it just makes me happy that this scrappy little recording is having its moment nearly fifty years after its creation.

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Swing Kids Benchmark Climbing, Berkeley CA 05/03/2025

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SUMAC & Moor Mother — The Film (Thrill Jockey)

The Film is a counterintuitive name for a collaborative record from Moor Mother and SUMAC, bands that are as musically immediate and overwhelming as they are sonically complex. Sound is the medium, not the visual register intrinsic to film. But metaphorically speaking, there has always been a “cinematic” quality to the sounds generated by these creators: Moor Mother’s SF hellscapes and Afro-Futurist elsewheres, all of which compel visual imaginings even as they recede over horizons of possibility or empty into nightmare; the experimental colorings that insistently emerge from SUMAC’s improvisatory doom (see “Yellow Dawn” for a recent example) and the suggestions of ritual movement that run across their records’ capacious narratives. A record that invokes the apparatus and structure of film turns out to be suitable conceptual terrain for these formidably talented musicians to meet on.

And The Film asserts its filmic elements. Song titles include “Camera,” “Scene 2: The Run,” “Scene 5: Breathing Fire.” Even “The Truth Is out There” invokes visual narrative through its reference to The X Files (1993-2002), the charmingly harebrained television series that made FBI agents sort of sympathetic (it helps to have Gillian Anderson frequently in the frame). The Film has no such illusions about Executive Branch powers. Early in “Scene 1,” the record’s first track, Camae Ayewa asserts, “I want my breath back.” The clause makes its own allusion, to the last words of Eric Garner, choked out and murdered by the NYC cops. A little later in the song, Ayewa snarls, “You didn’t demand more from a democracy of monsters / They told you to turn down that music or they’ll shoot you,” which sounds like a reference to Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old black kid murdered in a Florida parking lot for playing rap too loud; just before shooting Davis, Michael David Dunn, a 45-year-old white man, told his girlfriend, “I hate that thug music.”

The musicians respond to that miasma of hate by playing very, very loudly. “Scene 3” concentrates SUMAC’s capacity to coordinate doomy textures into a slow crawl. The band incrementally increases the atmosphere of dread as Ayewa moves her lyrics into images wrought with the force of her own rage and disgust (“America pissed and shit itself, no diaper / Obituaries and death don’t need no writer”). The accumulated intensity is visceral; you know a break is coming, and you want it even if you sort of fear its shattering, deafening blast.

Moor Mother and SUMAC are all adept improvisers, uncannily able to gather impulses and sounds that verge on chaos into aesthetic forms that feel saturated with meaning and intent. That’s an intrinsically human ability. The Film summons, with nearly apocalyptic dread, the contrasting sound of the machine on one of its most forceful tracks, “Camera”; a mechanical voice intones, “I am a smart fellow, as I have a very fine brain of 48 electrical relays.” Is that you, ChatGPT? Actually, it’s Elektro, the robot Westinghouse engineered for the New York World’s Fair in 1939. A year to conjure with: Europe and China in flames, fascism ascendant, the machines advancing amid relentless slaughter. The song descends into some of the most intense dissonance that Aaron Turner, Brian Cook and Nick Yacyshyn generate anywhere on the record.

Something like order comes back into focus ten minutes later, in “Scene 5: Breathing Fire,” as Ayewa asserts, “We had meaning / We had meaning.” The emphasis on that last word is as consoling as the past tense Ayewa uses is chilling. Through the first four minutes of the lengthy composition (“Scene 5: Breathing Fire” is the longest track on the record, at over 16 minutes), Ayewa unleashes breathless strings of lyric complexity as the band plays with powerful stop-start, doomily disjunct precision. Just after the four-minute mark, the song breaks through — the film is penetrated. The music is all onrushing thrill, Ayewa’s voice surges and snarls, “Take off running / Take off running.” She urges and inveighs. She breathes poetical fire, in answer to Garner’s cry of mortal agony. The song suggests that we all need to break through the film; just sitting back and watching is inadequate to our moment. And if we do? Take off running. The machines, the fascists and their various minions are already here.

Jonathan Shaw

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Still here.

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Every Record I Own - Day 850: Concrete Winds s/t

This is one of my favorite records of 2024.

No other metal record released last year was as punishing as the latest full-length from Finland's Concrete Winds. As with their last album, Nerve Butcherer, I don't have much to say about this record. It's fast, frenzied, and heavy as fuck. There's nothing to pontificate about here. It's just a short, mean, mangled blitzkrieg of machine gun tempos, brutal riffs, rabid vocals, and manic solos.

That is all.

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