#william plays rhythm guitar in the band ^^

[epicfroggz]

my design for Glamrock Spring Bonnie ✨ finished it just in time for Ruin heck yes

Faz Engineer: “Sir, we may have accidentally revived William Afton…”

Faz CEO: “Wh- AGAIN?! HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN TWICE?!”

[dollveis]

hey! saw your requests were open :) could you do a story (modern or current au) where joel owns bar and sometimes lets bands/people play and a f!reader is singing (and playing gutair) while ellie is there and once the reader is done with her set she goes up to the bar (where ellie is) and they flirt? or maybe ellie starts coming to the bar more often only to hear the reader? il your work your so talented!

⠀⠀⠀𐚁 ͏͏ ᳝˚ ͏͏𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬' 𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐤. | ellie w. ׁ ׂ ✦

✿ 𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆 : modern!ellie x fem!reader.

✿ 𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐘 : ellie's too drunk to drive, the music is nice and you're too.

✿ 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 : ellie is crushing so bad it's cute, kinda insecure ellie too, love at first sight, mostly fluff, mention of fingering (i couldn't help myself).

✿ 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓 ; 1.2k

⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀✿ ﹙ 𝐕𝐈𝐕𝐈 𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐀𝐊𝐒﹚: I ABSOLUTELY FELL IN LOVE WITH THIS REQUEST, IT'S SO CUTE, so i hope it fulfills your expectations. sadly lately im having a block but i had fun writing this. pd: i don't know how i always make shy ellie until she gets affected by some substance.

⠀⠀⠀

captivating. that's the word ellie williams would use to describe you and your presentations, but mostly to describe you. you captivated her attention since the first time she saw you even if she would deny it everytime joel whispered in her ear how mesmerized ellie was by you, the kinda cute girl with a pretty voice and pretty hands playing the guitar like she would call you in her mind.

"if you keep looking at her like that i think you're gonna erase her face." he mocked the auburn haired girl, who as answer just protested and stood up with her drink in hand, the gray-haired man let out a throaty laugh and walked away to serve a drink to some man who called him.

she was not looking at you, not like that. she was just admiring how talented you were. and fuck, you really were, a relaxing and silvery voice accompanying the sweet tune of the acoustic guitar playing a recognizable rhythm for ellie, take on me by a-ha, and she couldn't help herself but think about how attractive you seemed under the yellowish lights of the old west thematic bar. well, maybe she was looking at you like that but she refused to admit it because ellie was really far away from being a hopeless romantic (probably the opposite), but since joel introduced her to you like an old pupil of his she fell like a fool, at first sight.

"she's good, isn't she?" joel came back, lying against the bar, looking at you, the girl who he taught to play guitar when she was 8. ellie hummed in response, absorbed by you. "since she started coming here to perform you're also coming more." he pointed.

"i'm not, liar." she barked defensively, and that made joel chuckle. "i come when people play..."

"yeah, but always come when she's here." he could barely contain his cocky smile, for joel seeing his 'anti love' kid was the funniest, cute too. "you should talk to her more, she's a good girl."

"what?!" her body becoming stiff at the thought of talking to you, she looked at him with wide eyes. "there's no way i'm doing that. no, like, no fucking way, joel, she's out of my league." ellie rambled, with nervous voice and red ears.

"who's out of your league?" there you were, with a shy smile and your guitar in it's case.

"who? no one!" she layed back against the bar with her beer in hand and an awkward smile avoiding looking directly to your eyes. "hey, yn... you did good." scratching her neck, she tried to look at you.

"thank you, els." you said, putting your weight on one leg, with your head facing down and your eyes looking at her.

"els?" she said with a dorky smile, red ears and brilliant eyes.

"you don't like it? sorry, it was not my intention, i didn't wanna-"

"no, i mean, it's not that-"

"no, really-" you were a nervous wreck just by the thought of her hating you.

"i like it." she said confidently, confident that disappeared in seconds, leaving a reddish ellie with wide eyes who took her whole beer in one sip trying to calm herself. "joel, serve me a whiskey!".

she wanted to disappear, she embarrassed herself in front of you, or that's what she thought, but you laughed attempting to be as discrete as you could, making her laugh shyly. you walked next to her, ordering a drink.

you didn't know how it happened, but you were entering ellie's room with her, holding hands with interlocked fingers and your heart racing fast.

joel asked you to drive the affected ellie, who drinked anxiously trying to calm her nerves, to her house, and you accepted concerned about the freckled girl. she was not that bad, but she was drunk enough to don't let her drive.

"okay, i'm gonna bring you some water and a bin just in case." you breaked the contact between your hands, leaving a cold and empty sensation. "and i'm gonna leave." you smiled, with traces of sadness in it, hoping she won't tell you to don't go, because you didn't wanna leave the warmth on your heart caused by her.

ellie just looked at you, analyzing the situation, should she ask you to stay for a while?

"uhmm..." she cleared her throat, walking towards her desk, with awkward movements. "before you go i want to show you something, if it's okay." she picked up her guitar, that was supported by the desk.

if she was honest with herself, she lost motivation about music a while ago, she stopped playing tunes in the guitar, writing songs at the moonlight. but when she saw you a few weeks ago, it felt like all the songs started to mean something again and unconsciously, she learned can't take my eyes off you thinking about you because she couldn't take her off you even if she deny it.

you nodded, impatient, leaning against her desk as she sat on her bed with space themed sheets.

ellie started to sing, with a shaky and nervous voice, genuinely afraid of your reaction because well, maybe you would take the hint, maybe you would realize she was confessing to you driven by the alcohol on her blood,

"i love you, baby,"

her words started falling over you like rocks,

"and if it's quite alright,"

her sweet stupid voice making you so conscious about your heartbeat,

"i need you, baby."

and her partially chapped lips encouraging you to think about how good they could feel against yours, how well her fingers would make you feel and in general how much you wanted her in every definition of the word.

suddenly the guitar stopped and her voice hissed, "god, don't look at me like that..." one of her hands covering her -probably red- face.

"how i'm looking at you?" pretending innocence you took a step forward in her direction.

"you're looking at me in a way..." she swallowed, collecting herself, she was gonna say it directly. "you're looking at me in a way it makes me wanna kiss you, can i? " she left her guitar away, standing up to face you and gently tilting your chin so your eyes locked.

"kiss me." before she could react you already kissed her, not in a suggestive way, just enjoying how she her hands caressed your cheeks, both of you melting in a sweet kiss, slow.

once your lips finally separated from hers, you looked directly to her eyes, "i can't stop looking at your eyes, they are like stars." she blushed and chuckled for your words, going for another kiss, kiss that slowly started to tone up.

and without realizing you both were laying on her bed sharing a intimate moment, facing each other with your fingers interlocked again.

caressing her knuckles you asked "how many people you've kissed?" shame invading you immediately, why you asked that.

"very few." her answer was indifferent, she didn't care about anything more than you in that moment.

"then why you offered me a kiss?" your pupils tried to avoid hers, ashamed by your own questions.

ellie giggled.

"because i wanted to." said while her free hand roamed around your collarbone, examining every beauty mark you could have there, trying to memorize it.

and you did the same, analyzing her features, her eyes, her freckles, everything about her.

"so... you accept going on a date with me?" she kissed your forehead.

[sichore]

I've been rattling around my own version of pre/earlyklok so here's what I've got so far:

Pickles has been chewed up and spat out by the industry after SnB, in ruin after faulty contracts made when he was too young to know what he was getting into. He's also extremely burned by not getting the residuals that he should have when he fucking made SnB what it was, and he's a struggling addict.

I don't know yet what all Magnus' deal is, but he never even made it that far and time is not on his side as far as the industry is concerned. So you've got a has-been and a would-be rock star meeting through the guy who would be Dethklok's first manager who think that hey, they could get something going here.

So you've got two guitarists, and maybe at some local joint, they hear a cover band, and holy shit this kid's got pipes. They approach Nathan and everyone gets drinks and he shares that he's always wanted a band (and deep down he knows that he has to have it), so fuck it, they're gonna make a band. And William's there too, I guess, because he's Nathan's buddy somehow, and they don't wanna waste energy on finding a bassist.

So they've got the start of a good thing but it's not quite there yet. None of the drummers they try have the right sound so finally Pickles is just like "fuck it, I'll do it" because he's had to do Sammy's parts so many times already, and... oh, hey, why the fuck is he bothering with the guitar again? This is where he belongs.

So now they gotta find another guitarist, and finding Skwisgaar is akin to finding a temple to a forgotten god. It's a crime that someone so talented should be regulated to rhythm guitar, but Pickles' last bit of money is fueling this, and Magnus has to have his way, so that's just how it goes.

And turns out Magnus' manager buddy who manages Skwisgaar seems a hell of a lot more competent than their current guy, so they got a new manager now. And it's rough, but it works. For a while.

Pickles runs himself ragged after Magnus is kicked out because it's all on him, this is his last shot and they've gotta make this work. And they give this scrawny kid from Norway a chance and he has Skwisgaar's approval, and then... everything starts to fall together.

Their growing fans become fanatic. People flock to them for work that borders on servitude, and money starts flowing in, and maybe now Pickles can relax a bit. Sure, the drugs may still kill him, but things are better now. He doesn't have to fight and scrape for what's rightfully his. He actually owns Dethklok this time along with the others, and life is... as good as it's gonna get.

And during all this, Nathan grows more confident in seeing his dream come true. No one knows when the shift happens, but he stops playing mediator and starts demanding things go this way and that way. Because it's his band.

And Pickles just lets him take over because sure, it's actually their band, but he's tired, man. He's just so tired of having to do things himself.

The rise of Dethklok happens over the span of 10-12 years, anywhere from 1994 to 2006. Snakes 'N' Barrels only lasted about 4-5 years and Pickles spent a handful of years remaking himself between gigs. Nathan and Murderface graduated high school in the late 80s/early 90s, and Toki is in his late 20s by the time the show starts.

[wilbursoot-updates]

LOVEJOY: “WE ALWAYS LIKE TO BE CONSTANTLY PUSHING OURSELVES”

Lovejoy is in this article!

We speak to the Brighton quartet about their recent US tour, their career so far, and what it was like being involved in Spotify’s recent Our Generation pop-up.

Nowadays, it can feel like an increasingly rare sight to see an independent guitar band rise rapidly through the album charts; so when Lovejoy’s EP ‘Pebble Brain’ reached Number 12 in late 2021, it certainly caused a few ripples.

The Brighton quartet - who recently released their new EP ‘Wake Up & It’s Over’ - have had the luxury of an in-built fanbase from day one, thanks to the sizeable audience that frontman William Gold had been able to build through his own Twitch and YouTube channels, but as their music so far indicates, Lovejoy are more than worth their early success.

Charged by their Top 40 single ‘Call Me What You Like’, there’s an infectious, ebullient energy to their music, spearheaded by the soaring riffs of lead guitarist Joe Goldsmith and the rock-solid rhythm of Ash Kabosu’s bass and Mark Boardman’s drums.

As if to cement the hype, last month, the band released a Spotify Singles project that included a stripped back version of ‘Call Me What You Like’, alongside a cover of beabadoobee’s ‘The Perfect Pair’, and they also played a rare, intimate acoustic show as part of Spotify’s Our Generation pop-up event in London.

We caught up with the band halfway through a string of US dates that are the biggest shows of their career to date, to discuss their recent shifts in sound, making sense of their early success and the joys of playing such small shows.

You’re in the middle of a US tour, playing the biggest shows of your careers so far out there. How’s it been going?

Will Gold: It’s been really cool, and very different. It’s really nice to be going to different states that we’ve never seen before. I never thought I’d ever see Tennessee, and yet here I am, sat in Tennessee!

Ash Kabosu: In Dallas last night, we had, I think, the loudest crowd we’ve ever had. On the decibel counter on the sound-desk, it hit over 120. The previous record was Glasgow. It was crazy.

Will: 120 is what you get when you’re stood next to a jet engine.

Ash: It’s fine, when we go back to Glasgow, they’re just going to have to scream louder.

What is life on the road like with Lovejoy, what’s a normal day in the life?

Mark Boarman: It’s really fun, we’re having a fucking blast. Nashville was awesome, we went out on Broadway and we watched a bunch of country bands, they were all really fucking talented. And just the vibes were great, everyone was just singing and dancing and having a fun time. Nashville just loves music and it was really cool to see that, but then also to play there. It really felt like a bit of a proving ground for us. To be able to put on a show there and actually impress people, that’s amazing. The calibre of stuff that they’re used to is very high, so that felt like a crowning moment, for me at least.

Can you sense the difference in crowds between the UK and US?

Will: I feel like I’m performing more in front of American crowds, which isn’t a better or worse feeling, but it’s very different. In Europe, especially when we were in France, it felt like a big party that I was invited to, whilst here I definitely feel a bit more of a ‘being on stage’ kind of vibe.

As we speak, your EP is about to be released, and it’s the first one you’ve released in 18 months. Do you think listeners will be surprised by what they hear from the new stuff – do you feel the band has moved on sonically since 2021?

Ash: Yes, very much so. This is an entirely new era of music for us. I think we’re pulling from some slightly different influences; overall, it’s a bit heavier and a bit dirtier and grungier than what came before. And it feels like we’re kind of back on track. It’s a lot closer to our first EP in tone and style. It feels like ‘Pebble Brain’ was perhaps a bit of an experiment into a more summery, playful sound, whereas this is a lot more, not serious, but cooler. We’re cool now!

You mentioned new influences – who did you have in mind?

Ash: I’d say we’ve always been inspired by the likes of Arctic Monkeys, but I feel like we’re really wearing that inspiration on our sleeve for at least a few of these new songs. And also bands like The Strokes. Especially with Joe’s guitar riffs, we’re very heavily inspired by those bands.

If you think back to when you guys first formed this band, is this what you imagined it was going to be like? Ash: I had no expectation at all! It’s far beyond anything that I thought would be possible.

Will: Exactly the same, we’ve been blown away by all the support. It feels humbling and it feels like we can’t owe it back to them enough for the support they’ve given us. At the same time, it’s validating for how much work we’ve put into our previous two records, to have this kind of support for the next one and to have all these people showing up. It’s really touching, all of our hard work is coming to fruition.

“The [Spotify Our Generation] gig opened our eyes a little bit to hopefully doing some more intimate shows in the future.”

— Ash Kabosu

One of the things that is particularly distinctive about Lovejoy is that you do have this huge and dedicated fanbase for the stage of career that you’re at. I guess that must also come with a certain level of pressure?

Ash: I guess that’s one of the reasons that it’s taken so long to get this next record out, we want it to be the best thing we can do.

Joe Goldsmith: We thrive on that kind of pressure. The desire to want to write songs for people that are fun and exciting is something that we like and enjoy. It pushes us, and hopefully we can make better songs as a result of that.

You’ve just released the Spotify Singles recently, and played a very intimate show for the Spotify Our Generation pop-up event. That’s a very artist-focused project, was that an enjoyable experience?

Ash: It was really cool to be given that opportunity. That gig was really nice. It opened our eyes a little bit to hopefully doing some more intimate shows in the future, maybe with acoustic setups. We’re obviously on this trajectory now of live shows where we’re slowly ramping up the size of the venues, but to play for maybe 70 or 100 people, it was really cool. We really, really enjoyed it. There will be more of those in the future.

What do you get from a crowd that size that you don’t get from a bigger one?

Ash: I think there’s a connection there. When you’re playing to a thousand people, there’s a certain level of detachment, it’s too many people for stupid monkey brain to process, and so it can be a bit overwhelming at times. But when there are fewer people in the room, you can actually make eye contact with them and engage with them on a much more personal level. You’re all singing the songs together and it’s just a lot tighter knit.

Are you constantly surprising yourselves? You’ve spoken about the shifts in sound over time and the growing live shows, do you feel like you’re still developing quite rapidly?

Will: I think art without experimentation is just formula. You’ve got to constantly experimenting and trying new things, or you start going a bit mad, or bland. We always like to be constantly pushing ourselves. Coming into the space with the audience almost already established – we dropped our first single and a lot of my previous audience moved across, and it was lovely of them to do so – I feel like we’ve almost done it backwards. Most bands have to write the good songs first, and then get the audience. We started with the audience first, and now we have to write good songs to prove ourselves.

Ash: It definitely is strange to be doing festival headline sets and playing on main stages when we’ve got twelve songs! We play our entire discography at every show.

[thanotaphobia]

prime defenders band au. i simply think we are lacking one

ashe on drums, dakota on lead guitar, vyncent on bass, william on rhythm and vocal!!! it was originally just vyn, dakota, and will but then ashe transferred in sophmore year and joined up. they go play at random little tiny gigs and practice in mark's garage, and once a year they always try and win a battle of the bands that the city hosts- they nearly won last time, but got beat out by some seniors :(

...but this year? this year they're gonna WIN IT!! <- dakota every time someone asks. william thinks he's delusional and writes angsty lyrics about it. vyncent and ashe just throw soda cans at each other whenever dakota and william get into it during practice

[yunhsuanhuang]

LOVE SONGS IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE | YH HUANG

With apologies to A.L.

When I'm seventeen, I put a picture of Loretta Lynn in the back of my clear phone case. With the same care my best friends take in decorating trading cards of Jungkook and Jisoo, I get a pair of tweezers and my most expensive stickers, and make an afternoon out of sticking little daisies all over a glossy black-and-white printout of Loretta in the 70's. In the picture she's leaning against a tree, her dark hair long and thick, smiling at the viewer with the same unshakable confidence she's always had.

The next day, I slap my phone face-down on the cafeteria table. My friends go oh-my-god and you-actually-did-it and wait-that's-kinda-cute. We propose swapping some of our cards–I get Minho, she gets Randy– until the conversation derails to exams and teachers and the presentation that's due on Wednesday but none of us have started.

Then it's two weeks later, and when I wake up, thirteen hours after Kentucky does, I read that Loretta Lynn has passed away. A clickbait news site uses the same picture for her obituary.

Sometimes I feel like everything I love is already gone and I just don't know it yet.

-

so why do you like country music, my friend Alex asks me once.

Alex is American, but the South is as alien a place to him as it is to me– he grew up in suburban New Hampshire, after all, in an impossibly huge house bursting with beach-themed paraphernalia. America, to him, is Dunkin' Donuts and perfectly manicured lawns and the pale foam of the Atlantic cutting itself open over and over again against the sharpness of the rocks.

I squint at my phone. It's late, and I'm probably supposed to be asleep by now, but I'm fifteen and the year is 2020 and time stopped mattering somewhere in the middle of March. It's not like I have school tomorrow, anyway.

I type and retype my message for a while. Then, because it sounds about as good a reason as any, I say, idk i just like the fiddles

It's true. I do like the fiddles, and the steel guitar and the autoharp and the banjos too– the joyful clatter of it, the melody so much like flight. During quarantine, I spend a lot of time lying on the bedroom floor with my headphones on, blaring bluegrass at ear-destroying volumes. Maybe if I play it loud enough, if I squeeze my eyes shut hard enough, I can transport myself into the real thing: a honky-tonk with wood-panelled walls, heat and whiskey in the air, some familiar rhythm reverberating through the floorboards. Sometimes I even imagine myself there in the crowd, singing along.

–

In 1957, a song called Geisha Girl by Hank Locklin topped the country and western charts. It's about this American guy who arrives in Japan, falls in love with the titular Japanese geisha, and leaves his American wife for her. Well-trodden ground, both in art and in reality– after World War 2 ended, tens of thousands of Japanese women married American men for love, for money or for everything in between. Locklin's Geisha Girl became so popular that a song was released in reply to it–Skeeter Davis' Lost to a Geisha Girl, in which Davis takes on the persona of the man’s lover back home, scorning her fickle-hearted husband. As is common in reply songs, lyrics from the original are changed to fit the new perspective:

Locklin sings, Have you ever heard a love song that you didn't understand / when you met her in a teahouse on the island of Japan?

Davis sings: Why a love song with no meaning makes you happy, I don't know / I've lost you to a geisha girl where the ocean breezes blow.

A song you don't understand.  A song with no meaning. A song in a language you don't speak. What's the difference, anyway?

In post-war Japan, a whole plethora of country music bands sprung up around the country, playing American hits for homesick soldiers: Tennessee Waltz, Lovesick Blues, Your Cheatin’ Heart.. The closer they were to the originals, the better. They'd bill themselves as the Japanese Hank Williams or John Denver or Patsy Cline. The catch? Some of these singers barely spoke English. painstakingly memorising each lyric until their L's and R's sounded just right. Yet, every Friday night they'd get up on that stage and sing songs they didn't understand about a country they'd never been to. 

Just a few years ago, America had been Japan's worst enemy. But here their sons and daughters were, singing American songs, working in American jobs, marrying American men. In the present day, you could almost argue that the tables’ve turned: middle-schoolers debate anime at the cafeteria table; red-blooded blue-collar workers drive Toyotas and ride Kawasakis.

One thing that's stayed the same, though– American boys, Japanese girls. Love songs in a foreign language. Kind of a funny thing.

–

For hundreds of years, the West has been fascinated by the geisha. In Puccini’s 1904 opera Madama Butterfly, fifteen-year-old Butterfly is making her living as one when she’s bought by an American soldier named Pinkerton. He marries her, knocks her up, then ditches her in Japan while he marries an American woman. The whole time, Butterfly’s left to pine for him, and when Pinkerton returns to Japan with his wife, Butterfly stabs herself so that her son will be able to live in America with his father. 

(Pinkerton, as you can probably tell, is kind of an ass.)

I keep thinking about Butterfly in that lonely, empty house in Japan, waiting for someone who didn’t love her back. I keep thinking about Alex: Alex and his horrible stupid round glasses and his old embarrassing love of Panic! at the Disco and his stupid cringe emojis, Alex who’s still the smartest person I know, Alex who was the first guy to ever pay attention to me. When I’m sixteen, I think about him almost constantly, a constant hum of obsession in the back of my head. I know I’m in love with him because that’s how all the songs go: Randy Travis declares that it’s deeper than the holler / stronger than the river; Deana Carter says it’s bittersweet / green on the vine; Keith Whitley confesses that it’s what I hear when you don’t say a thing.

Alex asks me, so what do you like about country music? And I don't know what to say to him, so I say nothing at all.

–

They read it in the tea leaves and it's written in the sand

I found love by the heart-full in a foreign distant land

–

Alex likes Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, the outlaws and the jailhouses and the pistols at the hip.  My classmates like the feminist murder ballads, where they think she did it but they just can't prove it, where afterwards the girls sell Tennessee ham and strawberry jam / and they don't lose any sleep at night. I personally have a fondness for the silly and unserious: Alan Jackson extolling the virtues of grape snow cones, George Strait selling me the Golden Gate.

In the end, though, what I end up listening to most are the old songs– the really old ones, all the way back to the dawn of recording, the Golden Age of the radio.  These songs, collected in the 1920s and 30s, are impressively varied in lyrical content: you’ve got the ones that are basically a soap opera stuffed into three minutes flat (Lorena, My Heart’s Tonight In Texas); the religious ones (Anchored in Love, Will the Circle Be Unbroken); the relatable ones (Give Me Your Love); the unrelatable ones (The Dying Soldier, No Depression In Heaven). What I like about them, I guess, is the familiar hiss of the vinyl, the way the lyrics are both specific and universal at once, their ability to make a time and a place that you’ve never been to before feel, inexplicably, like home.

Alex and I aren't anywhere near poor– his parents are both surgeons, and I spend my evenings trying not to fall asleep in increasingly expensive private lessons. But then again, neither were the Japanese country singers of the fifties and sixties, mainly college kids from elite families who could afford custom-made cowboy hats and genuine guitars. Hell, even the prince of Japan was said to be a country music fan in his youth. None of us have worked in the fields or in the mines, none of our parents have had to tell us here's your one chance, Fancy, don't let me down. We're the people Garth was referring to when he sang about that black-tie affair, those social graces, the ivory tower.

What does it mean to understand a song? How do you sing something and really, truly mean it?

–

When I'm sixteen, my fun fact on the first day of school is that I listen to country music. When I go out with my friends, I wear ankle-length denim skirts and lacy blouses and tie my hair in twin ponytails. I beg and beg them to listen to Loretta, to Dolly, to Patsy. In response, they buy me a Cowboy of the Month calendar and save me in their phones as "the horse girl".  In one inexplicable picture that we've since lost, I've got my face in my hands, trying to hide my laughter, as my friends gleefully blast a Fox News clip about Randy Travis' drunken escapades.

So maybe my taste in music is the most interesting thing about me. What else is there? I'm not very pretty, only sometimes funny, and, to my eternal embarrassment, not good at all at being Asian. If I was smarter– fine, if I was Alex, Alex with his books and essays and critical theory– I might say that I do everything I do because I don't want to be the whitest girl in a room full of Asians (lame, boring, suck-up) but the most interesting thing in a room full of white people (exotic, rare, unique). A geisha girl, dressed in Oriental style. 

Even so, I don't like to think that that's all there is to it. You can shrink the world down to words on a page, map out the complicated intersections of nations and culture and war that make up the popular imagination of America, call it pentatonic scales, the mixolydian mode. Of course there's value in that, I know– but all that stuff's a foreign language to me. You can try to explain why music sounds the way it does, but in the end you just have to hear it for yourself.

–

For a genre obsessed with authenticity, modern country music's chock-full of performers: Toby Keith singing We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way, Hardy singing My small town is smaller than yours, Jason Aldean singing, I sit back and think about them good ol' days / The way we were raised and our southern ways.

A geisha's a performer, too, in a way. She trains her whole life to sing, to dance, to entertain. In yet another adaptation of Madama Butterfly, David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly, a Communist actor seduces a French man by pretending to be a woman for years. When the actor's finally caught, he's asked how he got away with it. He responds: Because when he finally met his fantasy woman, he wanted more than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman.

Don't tell this to anyone else, but when I curl my hair and put on lip-gloss and toddle around in heels, wondering if Alex would like what he sees, I feel like I'm a walking caricature in the shape of a girl. When I’m online with him I simper, I preen, I ask stupid questions just to keep him talking to me– and he likes it, or at least I really hope he does. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wonder what'll happen if I stop performing. I wonder if there’s anything left of me below the performance.

I used to worry that I fell in love with something that doesn't exist: the myth of America, the barbeques and the cornfields and the porches, the honky-tonk and the church social and the choir all singing, the cowboys on their vast, empty ranches. A place that's already gone, or else never existed at all– but what does that matter? An unreal place for an unreal girl. If everyone's performing, then no one is.

–

How much of this is true, then?

It's true as backroads and cold beer and pickup trucks. True as private jets and cowboy hats and exaggerated drawls. True as Nashville and Wallen and the CMAs. Which is to say, it's as true a story as you want it to be.

–

Tell the home folks that I'm happy, with someone that's true I know

I love a pretty geisha girl where the ocean breezes blow

–

In the months around my eighteenth birthday, my parents start screaming at each other. Suffice to say, they never really stop. I take up temporary residence in the school library instead, and spend my afternoons staring at maths textbooks while regretting every decision I’ve ever made. My exams are drawing closer. I’m sure I’ll fail them. It doesn’t feel real. Nothing does. I can’t bring myself to look at my future, I can’t, and yet like the long black train / coming down the line I know what’s going to happen when it hits me, and I know, I know– it’s not gonna be good. I start learning how to fall asleep to the background noise of things getting thrown. When my friends come over to study, they call the house beautiful. I guess it is.

On the way back from school, pressed into a corner of a sardine-packed bus, I put one earphone in and watch the sunset fall over the expressway, the heat turning the sky a gorgeous, deadly pink. Loretta Lynn sings: Well, I look out the window and what do I see? / The breeze is a-blowing the leaves from the trees / Everything is free, everything but me. The Chicks sing: She needs wide open spaces / Room to make her big mistakes. John Prine sings: Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery / make me a poster of an old rodeo / Just give me one thing that I can hold on to / To believe in this livin' is just a hard way to go.

Meanwhile, in my headphones, a thousand different stories unfold, familiar missives from some far-off place:  a son buries his parents. A wife kills her husband. Two childhood friends fall in love. A girl convinces her father to let her marry her boyfriend. A woman pins a runaway to a motel wall. Somebody calls his ex, even though he shouldn’t. A mother sells her daughter to an older man. A traveller gets on a train. The unfamiliar place names rush past. Amarillo, Charleston, Jackson, Cheyenne, Chattahoochee: evidence of an existence outside of calculus and grammar and pushing my desk against my door to block it. In my head I picture as if through a window some wide, sprawling prairie, some open starry sky, and think of Mary Oliver – so this is the world. I’m not in it. It’s beautiful.

–

(Meanwhile, online: it’s a different story.)

–

If it was a breakup, would it have been better? There's no shortage of breakup songs in country music, after all. Like, What right does she have to take you away / when for so long, you were mine? Like, I'm crazy for loving you / Crazy for thinking that my love could hold you Like, Nothing much for us to say / One last goodbye and you drove away.

Instead, it’s the stupidest, most mundane of reasons: we just stop talking. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. For me, I’m wrapped up in exams, family stuff, a clown car full of childhood friends crashing their way back into my life without warning; for him, he’s busy at Harvard, busy with his new friends and new projects and new– 

Okay. Fine. His new girlfriend.

I can’t blame him. I don’t have any right to. I still don’t know whether I actually loved him or I was just sixteen, lonely and looking to write myself into a song. Still, after I learn that he’s dating her, I fall into a haze of social-media stalking: I scroll through their Instagrams, their Twitters, anything that’ll tell me more about who he was, who they are. She’s cute, I’ll give her that, and they’re cute together, the kind of forever and ever, amen couple whose profiles are full of heart-shaped chocolates, of candid kisses and in-jokes I’ll never get to hear.

(A love song with no meaning. A language you don't speak.)

For weeks and weeks on end I dream of him, but the really funny thing is that even in these dreams he’s nothing but a spectre: texting me, calling me, writing long-winded letters in the mail.  The closest I ever get is this dream where I’m walking through his hometown, the one I looked up in Google Earth in a fit of desperation. It’s just like I thought it would be, every house gorgeous and stately and ancient, the trees barren but still grand. My hometown’s always been warm. It’s the one thing I have in common with the people in the songs, that overwhelmingly oppressive heat, the kind that sucks all the energy out of your bones. Even though Alex lives at the edge of America, Stephen King and sweaters country, in the dream it’s not cold at all– Georgia hot, hometown hot. As I run from house to house, ringing every doorbell, the roads seem to stretch out beneath my feet until the next door seems oceans and continents away. Nobody’s home. Nobody’s there. In the dream, I’m not surprised.

Sometimes I worry that everything I love is already gone, but I guess I knew that already. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love it. 

–

When I'm eighteen, my parents spend a small fortune on a family holiday to America, some last-ditch effort at holding the household together. I miss most of it, however, because the moment I step off the plane I come down with the worst cold I've ever had in my life. Thankfully, during the last couple of days I begin to feel a little bit more like a human being and not just a collection of symptoms, so I manage to go down with my family to the shore.

Maybe it's the ghost of the fever coming back to haunt me, or maybe it's just December, but the beach is bitingly cold, the evening light only just poking through the clouds. Standing there, I find myself thinking– predictably– of Alex. We haven't talked in months, at this point: the last thing I texted him was im in the us lol to which he responded Haha enjoy, and that's about it.

On some other shore, so far away we might still be in different countries, Alex is at Harvard writing essays about America– learning how to understand it, how to shape it, how to make it somewhere he can love without reservation. But I'm not him. I know, now, that I know nothing at all about America: not the blue and far-off one in my songs. but the real place, full of contradictions, land of guns and welfare and Walmart and the Free.

I keep going back to what Alex asked me when I was fifteen, when we barely knew each other: so why do you like country music? And it's only here, now, freezing in a down jacket on the California coast, that I finally have an answer for him.

I think: because every good country song is a love song in its own way.

I think: because country music is the only thing I've ever known how to love.

I think: I have stood and watched the sun rise from the waters of the sea / and I've wondered how much beauty in this cruel world can there be / My dreams are all worth dreaming and it makes my life worthwhile / to see my pretty geisha girl dressed in oriental style.

I think: does there really need to be a reason, A?

From somewhere behind me, I hear someone call my name. I turn. It's my mother yelling: “Come back to the car! It's getting cold!”

“Coming!” I yell back, and run to her.

–

Before I have to go back home, I manage to get my hands on a Shania Twain t-shirt, which honestly makes the entire trip worth it.

[dustedmagazine]

Grails — Anches En Maat (Temporary Residence Ltd)

More bands should make music that sounds like Tangerine Dream. It’s hard to imagine music more evocative, precise and crisp. Their music communicates not only mood, but season. The late William Friedkin knew what he was getting when he asked them for a soundtrack.

Anches En Maat is the latest from Grails, the band’s tenth album but the first in five years. They’ve undergone quite an evolution from their early days at the margins of doom-inflected drone and folk, the sounds drummer Emil Amos would pursue with the legendary Om. Their new album is focused, meticulous and unlike anything they’ve done. It’s one thing to try to sound like Tangerine Dream; it’s another to actually do it.

What makes this so special is how unexpected it is. If you’ve been following Grails for the last 20 years or so, you’ll be surprised how polished this album is. When “Sad and Illegal,” begins, you can picture a wet, reflective streetscape, lit by mercury vapor lamps. The music envelops you in its world. Anches En Maat distills and synthesizes their earlier work into an electronic prog masterpiece.

If you follow guitarist Ilyas Ahmed on Instagram, you get a behind-the-scenes look into where his interests and influences are taking him, but unlike his more ambient solo work, the scope here is vast and expanding. A sonic universe explodes during “Sisters of Bilitis.” Likewise, Amos has always exercised restraint on drums, but this is different, more subtle and nuanced. It’s not simply a tribute to Amos’ talent, but also a reflection of the band getting together to record the album, versus piecing everything together separately.

It’s not an indulgent album. There’s a discipline to every song. No note sounds wasted or out of place. It so perfectly captures the spirit of those gritty 1980’s psychosexual thrillers, at once lush and foreboding. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the aptly titled “Black Rain.” The song pulsates in rhythms that play up the tension and paranoia that characterize the late 1980s and 1990s neo-noir period in cinema. The album closes with the crystalline sounds of the title track, guitars fading into the night.

It’s a soundtrack to summer becoming autumn, rain blanketing cities everywhere, with wet leaves papering the streets beneath your wheels.

JT Ramsay

[tayley]

Paste Magazine prematurely posted a review for 'This Is Why', they deleted it, but someone from reddit retrieved. here it is:

# This Is Why Is a Highlight Reel for Paramore's Many Eras. by Grant Sharples [@grantsharpies](https://twitter.com/grantsharpies)

Paramore is one of the few bands of their era that has withstood the test of time. Many of their fellow Warped Tour-adjacent compatriots dealt out heavy doses of misogyny, a defect that frontwoman Hayley Williams herself has acknowledged and expunged from the band’s music. Even within their own camp, they endured a homophobic guitarist and antagonistic bassist, the latter of whom departed the band twice and was inexplicably removed from the band’s 2013 album artwork last year.

*This Is Why*, the group’s sixth album, is the first in their catalog to feature the same lineup as its predecessor. Paramore has been through a veritable shitstorm, and they’ve emerged with a stronger resolve, steeling against whatever life throws at them with a hardened exterior.

“After 15 to 20 years of fighting like a bunch of brats in front of the world, you eventually learn some coping skills and communication methods,” Williams told *The Guardian* last fall. Now, the pop-punk powerhouse comprises three people: Williams, guitarist Taylor York, and drummer Zac Farro. Despite Paramore’s shifting lineups and disparate stylings across their discography, their influence on music writ large is palpable: from the hooky panache of Meet Me @ the Altar to the earnest songwriting of Olivia Rodrigo; from the iconoclastic pop of Billie Eilish to the plaintive belt-a-longs of Julien Baker. The Tennesseeans’ blueprint reigns supreme, so much so that Williams and ex-guitarist Josh Farro got a writing credit on Rodrigo’s “good 4 u.”

There’s no doubt that Paramore’s appeal reaches far and wide; they’re playing basketball arenas now, after all. It’s that cultural ubiquity that’s yielded them stages this big, yet it’s also due to their multifarious approach to art. *This Is Why* captures that interdisciplinary spirit with cohesion and flair.

***The title track*** kicks things off on a stunning note, playing like a blend of Williams’s 2020 solo album *Petals for Armor* and the groovy rhythms of 2017’s *After Laughter*, minus that album’s neon sheen.

***“The News”*** harnesses the punchy verve that makes for some of the best *brand new eyes* cuts, albeit Carlos de la Garza’s production feels abnormally thin, diluting what could’ve been acerbic and menacing.

But that misstep is compensated for immediately after: ***“Running out of Time,”*** like the title track, strikes a balance between atmospheric textures and syncopated buoyancy that is, simply put, really fucking fun. *This Is Why*, as its first three tracks show, accomplishes a feat that connects the band’s diverging sonic pathways without succumbing to whiplash. It encapsulates Paramore’s voyages into piercing pop-punk, glossy New Wave, heartfelt ballads and anthemic paeans.

Some of the record’s best moments encompass an amalgamation of these eras. ***“C’est Comme Ca”*** could’ve been an *After Laughter* single had that record contained more of a pronounced grittiness and Strokes-esque guitar tones. Hearing Williams try her hand at spoken-word verses is a total delight, too. But the song’s most affecting moment comes toward its sung bridge, with Williams’ soprano gradually unfolding into a shout: “I hate to admit getting better is boring/But the high cost of chaos, who can afford it?”

On the penultimate track, ***“Crave,”*** York’s guitar work summons the twinkling emo of their *Twilight* songs like “Decode” and “I Caught Myself” while Williams’s voice soars above the chorus, howling the song’s title and longing for simplicity.

She keeps up the momentum on the closer, ***“Thick Skull,”*** evincing her wide vocal range, shifting from a subdued lower register in the verses until she unfurls into her signature emo burst in the final chorus à la fan favorite “All I Wanted.” This concluding one-two punch marks the strongest run on the album.

However, *This Is Why* sags ever so slightly in the middle, namely due to the mawkish whims of its centerpiece, ***“Big Man, Little Dignity.”*** Though thematically potent and containing one of the record’s best lines (“You keep your head high / Smooth operator in a shit-stained suit”), its lukewarm instrumentation, evoking alt-radio fodder like Young the Giant and Walk the Moon, hinders its potential. There’s also the fact that Paramore makes little use of one of its greatest assets as a band: pure intensity. Occasionally, the trio reins themselves in for arrangements that signal hushed tastefulness, whereas catchy catharsis is what this band is known for.

Still, it’s not like they haven’t shown they can write compelling softer material, as songs like “Misguided Ghosts” and “26” demonstrate. Yet this album’s muted breaks leave little impact compared to the immediacy that’s been a major draw for revisiting Paramore’s work. Albums like *After Laughter* and *brand new eyes* were also punctuated with infectious adrenaline rushes, which Paramore does like no one else; *This Is Why* has fewer instances of drastic sonic contrast, lending it coherence and mild inertia all the same.

But the album revives itself with ***“You First,”*** an instant highlight that merges indie-rock and pop-punk in equal measure. “Turns out I’m living in a horror film where / I’m both the killer and the final girl,” Williams sings over Farro’s pummeling percussion and York’s discordant, post-punk guitar.

Throughout each of its 10 tracks, Williams navigates fatalism and a world where war, disease and climate change run amok. Whether she’s hiding from the public eye on “This Is Why,” lamenting the pervasiveness of a 24-hour news cycle on ***“The News,”*** or roasting chauvinists on ***“Big Man, Little Dignity,”*** Williams once again proves herself a formidable writer, and York and Farro are there to lend their craftsmanship to yet another captivating record.

After the seemingly endless volatility this band has weathered, it’s a miracle that they exist, still making incredible music. Here, they sound self-assured and steady, like a group that understands what they have and makes the most of it. On *This Is Why*, Paramore have found land after a years-long trip at sea, grounding their ship and claiming all the accolades they’ve accrued in their time away. They deserve them all.

**6.5/10**

*Grant Sharples is a writer based in Kansas City. He has contributed to* MTV News\*,\* Pitchfork\*,\* Stereogum\*,\* The Ringer\*,\* SPIN *and others. Follow him on Twitter* [*@grantsharpies*](https://twitter.com/grantsharpies)*.*

[kemetic-dreams]

William Correa (February 28, 1934 – September 15, 1983),better known by his stage name Willie Bobo, was an American Latin jazzpercussionist of Puerto Rican descent. Bobo rejected the stereotypical expectations of Latino music and was noted for combining elements of jazz, Latin and rhythm and blues music.

Born William Correa to a Puerto Rican family, Bobo grew up in Spanish Harlem, New York City, United States. His father played the cuatro, a ten stringed guitar-like instrument. As a teenager, Bobo taught himself the bongos and later the congas, timbales and drums. In 1947, Bobo started working as a band boy for Machito in order to gain entrance to the band's concerts, sometimes filling in on percussion.

At age 12, he began his professional career as a dancer and two years later made his recording debut as a bongo player

[scotianostra]

George Redburn Young was born on November 6, 1946 in Glasgow.

George was the fifth born son of William and Margaret Young, the family lived at 6 Skerryvore Road in the Cranhill district of Glasgow in 1963 and Scotland had just endured the ‘big freeze’, the worst winter on record in Scotland with snow eight feet deep and an advert came on the TV offering assisted travel for families for a different life in Australia, so off the family went in June that year, 15 of them in all, they even left two behind!

The family originally stayed in a immigration camp in big nissen huts near Sydney, it was there George met Dutch immigrant Harry Vanda, the two would go on to form the band The Easybeats and have a massive worldwide hit with Friday on my mind in 1967, the magazine Australian Musician magazine selected this meeting as the most significant event in Australian pop and rock music history.

The Easybeats were the first Australian band to have a big pop hit overseas – the significance of this must not be understated. They were the band that told the world they needed to pay attention to Australia, that little country that must have felt so inaccessible in a time where travel was onerous and computers were practically a pipe dream.

George wasn’t just content on playing music, with his help, his wee brothers formed AC/DC, George would later recommend Bon Scott become their new vocalist after their original one left in 1974. With Vanda, Young produced Let There Be Rock, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, T.N.T., Powerage and High Voltage, five of the most influential rock'n'roll records of all time. George also produced AC/DC’s 2000 album, Stiff Upper Lip on his own. The band would later admit, “Without his help and guidance there would not have been an AC/DC.”

George also wrote the worldwide hit Love Is in the Air for fellow Scot immigrant, John Paul Young, who was no relation. After retiring from the music industry in the late 1990s, Young resided mainly in Portugal with his family. 

George Young died of undisclosed causes on October 22th, 2017, aged 70.

The song is George and wee brother Malcolm from the album  Tales of Old Grand Daddy by  Marcus Hook Roll Band, George sings lead vocals on this pre AC/DC record. Many of the details surrounding Tales of Old Grand Daddy remain forgotten due to excessive alcohol consumption during the recording sessions. According to George Young, "We all got rotten (drunk) – except Angus, who was too young – and we spent a month in the studio boozing it up every night." The album features rhythm and lead guitar from both Malcolm and Angus, although whose parts are whose is a detail long forgotten. It was the first time the younger brothers had been in the studio.

[odk-2]

Hugh Cornwell and Robert Williams: “White Room”

Hugh Cornwell and Robert Williams - White Room (1979) Jack Bruce / Pete Brown from: “White Room” / “Losers in a Lost Land” (Single) "Nosferatu“ (LP)

Post-Punk | Goth

Cream Cover

JukeHostUK (left click = play) (320kbps)

Hugh Cornwell, The Stranglers Robert Williams, Captain Beefheart's Magic Band

Personnel: Hugh Cornwell: Lead Vocals / Lead Guitar / Bass / Moog Bass / Chamberlin Mellotron Robert Williams: Drums / Timpani / Backing Vocals David Walldroop: Rhythm Guitar Ian Underwood: Sonar Yamaha Synthesizer

Arranged by Hugh Cornwell / Robert Williams Produced by Hugh Cornwell / Robert Williams

Recorded: @ The Cherokee Studios @ The Sunset Sound Studios @ The Village Recorders and @ The Davlen Sound Studios in Los Angeles, California USA 1978

Single Released: on October 25, 1979

Album Released November 16, 1979

United Artists Records (UK)

[fuckyeahvanhalen86-95]

Van Halen had more than their share of contradictions.

They began life as a party band but were also home to one of rock's most inventive musicians in guitarist Eddie Van Halen, who spent countless hours toiling in isolation perfecting both his craft and instruments. Their fun-loving music, videos, fashion sense and personalities served as the template for a generation of bands, yet they were also at the center of two of the nastiest breakups in rock history.

So, yeah, things could get weird around Van Halen sometimes. They had an unparalleled gift for blending hard-rock chops and pop smarts and a knack for staying creatively ahead of their peers. Bold and sometimes strange musical experimentation played a role in that success, as you'll note in the below chronological look at the 10 Weirdest Van Halen Songs.

"IN A SIMPLE RHYME/GROWTH" (1980 - WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST)

Van Halen's first two albums were comprised of songs written during their club-performance days. On 1980's Women and Children First, they took advantage of their chance to write new material, expanding their palette and exploring more complex arrangements. One of the clearest and most distinctive examples is the LP's closing track, "In a Simple Rhyme." It's a poppy, progressive and somewhat weird rock song that sounds like Rush attempting to write a romantic ballad. After the song's gentle fade-out comes another surprise: a 30-second instrumental featuring a brontosaurus-sized guitar riff. According to The Van Halen Encyclopedia, the plan was for "Growth" to be expanded into a full song that would kick off the band's next album. That didn't happen, but they would occasionally play the song at their concerts, including a 1986 version featuring both Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar on guitar.

"SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN THE PARK/ONE FOOT OUT THE DOOR" (1981 - FAIR WARNING)

After sneakily replacing his guitar with an electric piano on Women and Children First's "And the Cradle Will Rock...," Eddie Van Halen dove deeper into synthesizers with the following year's Fair Warning, using an inexpensive Electro-Harmonix micro-synthesizer to come up with "Sunday Afternoon in the Park." It's a funky and creepy two-minute instrumental that sounds like George Clinton's idea of a John Carpenter film score. The tempo switches to a hyperactive electro-boogie for the conjoined "One Foot Out the Door," as David Lee Roth tries not to get caught with somebody else's wife. It's all topped with one of Van Halen's fiercest guitar solos, which fades out too quickly.

"BIG BAD BILL (IS SWEET WILLIAM NOW)" (1982 - DIVER DOWN)

One of the main sources of friction between David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen was over the latter's use of keyboards. Roth feared it would upset the band's fans, who wanted only to see Van Halen in "guitar god" mode. (As "Jump" and the band's string of keyboard-based '80s hits proved, Roth was wrong.) But it was Roth who suggested that Van Halen's father, Jan, play jazz clarinet on the band's cover of the 1924 Milton Anger and Jack Yellen song "Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)" on 1982's covers-heavy Diver Down. "He was nervous as shit," said Van Halen, recalling his dad at the recording session. "We're just telling him, 'Jan, just fuckin' have a good time. We make mistakes! That's what makes it real.' I love what he did."

"HOT FOR TEACHER" (1984 - 1984)

The final single of David Lee Roth's first tenure with Van Halen was the sorta weird "Hot for Teacher." How many hit songs can you think of that start with a 30-second drum solo, followed by an extended guitar solo? Roth doesn't appear until more than a minute into the song, speaking to his "classmates," rather than singing, as Eddie Van Halen suddenly shifts to chicken-pickin' rhythms. A traditional verse-and-chorus structure finally appears, but the band never stays in one place for long, blending speed-metal riffs with high school humor and a big Broadway-worthy chorus. It was all too perfect to last: Soon after the song's release, everything went to hell.

"INSIDE" (1986 - 5150)

"Man, what kind of crap is this?" That's the opening question Sammy Hagar asks on the closing track of his first album as Van Halen's new singer. After using the first eight songs on 5150 to establish the new lineup as a commercial and artistic force, Van Halen cracks open the fourth wall and directly if obliquely addresses the controversy that ensued after Hagar was hired to replace Roth. Over a thumping synth-rock groove, Hagar gets meta about what he's learned from his new bandmates: "Now me, look, I got this job not just being myself," he says. "I went out I brought some brand new shoes, now I walk like something else." He gets more serious as the song goes on, hitting some wild vocal heights while singing about feeling the need for "something special, someone new, some brand new group to sink my teeth into."

"MINE ALL MINE" (1988 - OU812)

After proving they could use keyboards to craft hit pop singles and ballads, Van Halen took a more serious step with the opening track of 1988's OU812. Clocking in at over five minutes, the complex "Mine All Mine" treads near jazz-fusion territory and showcases a new lyrical depth that almost drove Hagar past the breaking point. "It was the first time in my life I ever beat myself up, hurt myself, punished myself, practically threw things through windows, trying to write the lyrics," he told writer Martin Popoff in 2010.

"PLEASURE DOME" (1991 - FOR UNLAWFUL CARNAL KNOWLEDGE)

For the most part, 1991's For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge marked a return to straightforward guitar rock for Van Halen. The hit single "Right Now" was the only song to feature keyboards; almost everything else follows a Standing Hampton-on-steroids formula. But the seven-minute "Pleasure Dome" takes a weird turn into progressive rock, with the Van Halen brothers and Michael Anthony daring each other to go deeper into King Crimson-style madness. Hagar's cosmically themed vocals are fine but seem almost beside the point. When the band performed the song live, it was usually instrumental.

"STRUNG OUT" (1995 - BALANCE)

Ever wanted to hear Eddie Van Halen destroy a piano? According to the Van Halen Encyclopedia, while renting composer Marvin Hamlisch's beach home in 1983, Van Halen "threw everything he could find into the piano and raked various items across the strings, including ping-pong balls, D-cell batteries and even silverware." Supposedly, there are hours of tapes documenting this, but Eddie Van Halen mercifully selected the best 90 seconds for inclusion on the band's final album with Hagar.

"CROSSING OVER" (1995 - BALANCE [JAPAN IMPORT])

Van Halen released only one non-album B-side, and it was a pretty strange one. In 1983 Eddie Van Halen composed "David's Tune," a tribute to a friend who died by suicide, handling all the instruments and vocals. After joining Van Halen in 1985, Sammy Hagar was eager to flesh out the track, but Van Halen kept "Crossing Over" in the vaults for nearly a decade, until the death of the band's manager, Ed Leffler. A full-band take was recorded and then blended with the guitarist's original version, which can be heard in the left channel of the released recording. The sonic effect is otherworldly, a perfect match for the song's subject matter.

"HOW MANY SAY I" (1998 - Van Halen III)

Van Halen III is the most criticized album of Van Halen's career, and much of the scorn is directed at the closing "How Many Say I," which features Eddie Van Halen on his only lead-vocal performance. The piano-based track is reminiscent of a late-era Roger Waters ballad and is an odd creative choice for the band, which was in the process of introducing its third singer, Gary Cherone. "They forced me," Van Halen told Billboard at the time. "Don't be shocked when you hear the vocal." "Maybe we were being too artsy-fartsy," Cherone later admitted to Rolling Stone. "But I thought it was great."

[blixtbaby]

We have just received word about the death of Ted “Kingsize” Taylor. A contemporary and rival of the Beatles in their Liverpool days, Taylor and his band played the Cavern Club and found themselves an appreciative audience in Germany, where they also released records. Prior to their Hamburg debut, Cilla Black often guested on vocals with Taylor and his band.

Nicknamed because of his size, the 6.5 ft (2.0 m) Kingsize was born Edward William Taylor, on the 12th of November 1939, in Crosby, Liverpool. The Dominoes were originally formed in North Liverpool, in 1957, from a skiffle group called the Sinners. The original members were Arthur Baker (vocals), George Watson (guitar), Charlie Flynn (guitar), Sam Hardie (piano) and Cliff Roberts (drums). The following year, Ted Taylor joined, as lead vocalist and guitarist. Over the next few years Baker, Watson and Flynn all left the group, to be replaced by Bobby Thompson (bass and vocals) – with whom Taylor had played in another skiffle group, the James Boys – and John Kennedy (rhythm guitar), with Geoff Bethell standing in for Hardie on piano.

The band played local clubs and Taylor developed a reputation as one of the best rock and roll singers in the Liverpool area, as well as becoming known for his vivid chequered jackets. By summer 1960, the group were being billed as Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes. They first performed at The Cavern Club in January 1961, when they featured 17-year-old singer Cilla White, who was mistakenly renamed Cilla Black later that year by Bill Harry in an article in his magazine Mersey Beat.

Soon after that appearance, Kennedy and Roberts left the band to join another group, Ian and the Zodiacs, and were replaced by John Frankland (rhythm guitar) and Dave Lovelady (drums). At the beginning of 1962, the band were placed sixth in a Mersey Beat readers’ poll, topped by The Beatles. Cilla Black sang regularly with the group until 1962.

In early 1962, Ken Shalliker replaced Thompson on bass for several months when Thompson temporarily joined Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. That summer, the band (without Cilla Black) went to Hamburg, where they began making regular appearances at the Star-Club. Lovelady left later in the year, and was replaced briefly by Brian Redman and then by Gibson Kemp, after Ringo Starr turned down the opportunity to join having been offered more money to join The Beatles.

[mannytoodope]

John William Cummings (October 8, 1948 – September 15, 2004), known professionally as Johnny Ramone, was a guitarist and songwriter best known for being the guitarist for the punk band. the Ramones. Johnny was one of the founding members and remained a member throughout his entire career. Johnny was considered one of the 100 greatest guitarists by Spin and Rolling Stone Magazine. Johnny was mostly a rhythm guitarist he was notable for solely using downstrokes whenever he played. Johnny was never a fan of the guitar solo and never attempted to gain much skill in that area. Despite  of never being a fan of the solo Johnny did play simple leads on a number of the Ramones’ songs. Johnny’s unique guitar playing style has been an influence on many punk bands today.

[crypticsalutations]

Hello my lovelies 🥀 Today we are honored to bring you Part 2 of this special Cryptic Salutations exclusive! Continuing our in depth interview with Jonathan Lemon of Jesus Couldn't Drum, in this section he shares details about the band's equipment set up, the life changing feeling of emerging into the music industry, and the unexpected cult popularity that arose in countries other than their own! We hope you thoroughly enjoy it! 🔥 Track: Jesus Couldn't Drum's Even Roses Have Thorns Stay tuned for Part 3, coming on August 13!

Cryptic Salutations: How many of the singles were originally pressed?

Jonathan Lemon: I believe the minimum amount was 1000 in those days. They would have pressed less if it was possible! They were distributed by The Cartel which was a co-operative group that included some of the most notable labels of the 1980s UK post-punk and indie scene such as Backs, Rough Trade, Red Rhino and Nine Mile. Apparently, they could sell anything.  When we did the free flexidisc for the first album, they made 50k in many different colors and gave them away with ZigZag magazine which went out of business the next issue which was disappointing because famous rock journalist William Shaw had done a long in-depth interview with us which has now been lost to time.  The first album was 3k if I remember correctly.

CS: Do you recall what your equipment set up was? What make of synths, guitars, pedals, etc?  

JL: A Fostex X-15 multitrack tape player, a Roland SH101, a very primitive echo chamber, a couple of used Boss effects pedals, a Gibson copy guitar, a melodica, a Shure SM58 microphone, a Black Box fuzz module, a Sound Master Memory Rhythm SR-88 and a small box filled with various percussion instruments and fluty pipes.  Later we had a Roland TR 808 and a Boss Dr Rhythm DR55 and very importantly an EM-U Emulator 1 sampling keyboard that used to belong to Tears For Fears. It had “TFF” stenciled onto the flight case.  It currently belongs to Fat Boy Slim.

CS: Do you consider your time in Jesus Couldn’t Drum as an exploration of your artistic limits, or was it simply a fun hobby shared between friends?

JL: I think we both couldn’t quite believe the speed of what was happening and consequently we just rolled with it rather than had any expectations or strategy.  Maybe it was pretty small beans to most people but it felt quite life changing to us, and we were suddenly serious young people in important trousers, and people were sniffing around us hoping we’d be the next big thing. There was definite conflict between the band and the label over musical direction.  The label kept telling us to get a big hit before doing more “challenging” stuff. We were more interested in doing something different. “Different” to use just meant not being like any of the other bands we were aware of at the time which was a pretty small pool admittedly. The second JCD album was very self-indulgent but in a way I think it’s also the only one I can really stand to listen to anymore. 

CS: Did you take the single and subsequent EP’s and albums on tour? If so, to where, and what kind of criticisms were you met with? And what compliments?

JL: We didn’t coincide tours with the releases.  We would just go if someone offered to pay us, usually an enthusiastic promoter in Belgium or Germany. We had no oversight really. In England, already at that time there was an expectation that the small bands would PAY to play to get the exposure or if lucky, play for free. Once the records came out there was a lot more interest in our music from(mainland) Europe. Incredibly, we would go off on the ferry in a car packed full of equipment and band members, and there would be a little venue in a small, picturesque town in Switzerland for example, with posters for our gig everywhere and a hall packed with people wanting to see us who knew our songs. There were four of us and a drum machine and mostly we went down well.  I think the set only lasted about 30 minutes. I don’t recall JCD having any bad gigs actually but many of my later bands did. Once in Italy some people threw coins at us.  We were later told that it was a sign of appreciation, but I’m still not convinced. It was all pretty thrilling because none of us had ever really traveled outside of England before. It was all a bit rushed and low budget but we had a lot of fun.

[mikestrikesback]

Pool Kids - "Pool Kids" Album Review

I often describe Pool Kids as “Paramore with math rock riffs,” but that’s mostly just to get my friends to listen to them. In reality, the Florida emo quartet are much more than that — and they make it explicitly clear on their incendiary, emotional and appropriately self-titled sophomore album. 

Hayley Williams (who famously shouted the band out in 2019) has certainly never wailed lines as bitingly specific as “I don’t think I have the energy to make it out of my bed today / it’s not even a bed, I’ve been sleeping on an air mattress with a hole for almost three months” like vocalist/guitarist Christine Goodwyne does on “Arm’s Length,” an exuberant anthem about pushing people away. And while Goodwyne, guitarist Andrew Anaya, bassist Nicolette Alvarez and drummer Caden Clinton can go note-for-note with any of their mathy scene contemporaries, there’s a level of mature restraint in their performances that makes this a record of great rock songs first, and shredfests second. Whereas debut record “Music to Practice Safe Sex To” — written solely by Goodwyne and Clinton — has moments that seem to throw as many notes at the listener as possible (“$5 Subtweet” is an absolute ripper, but still), new songs like “Swallow” see the band’s entire lineup channel their aptitude into focused, triumphantly big riffs and even bigger choruses. 

Fiery album opener “Conscious Uncoupling” perfectly encapsulates Pool Kids’ evolved songwriting, as Goodwyne softly and bluntly mourns a past relationship (“I bet I’m never gonna clean this house again / I bet I’m never gonna see your mom again”) before the whole thing bursts into the swirly, harmonized guitar work that the band does best. The quartet fearlessly journeys through different musical palettes from there — experimental standout “Almost Always Better” blends electronic waltzes and sudden, industrial-tinged key changes, while “Further” flirts with dancey indie rock. Bouncy emo banger “That’s Physics, Baby” and moody alt-rock rager “I Hope You’re Right” are both begging for radio play, and “Talk Too Much” does pop-punk better than some bands that are dedicated to it. It all culminates in closer “Pathetic”, which starts off with a folky vulnerability that would be right at home on Williams’ recent solo effort “Flowers for Vases.” That is, of course, before the whole thing explodes, with Goodwyne pleading “What can we make of this?” — ending the breakup story that began on the intro track — while her bandmates create a crushing wall of sound. 

It’s all immaculately produced by Mike Vernon Davis, with enough gloss to fit in on the rock charts but still raw enough to preserve the four-piece’s lively performances. The band aren’t shy about layering on extra instrumentation — including some chorus-boosting pianos and an awesome vocoder moment — but the real stars of the show are Anaya’s shreddy guitars, Alvarez and Clinton’s airtight, adventurous rhythm section work and Goodwyne’s vocals, which are equally captivating whether she’s quietly crooning or letting all hell break loose. 

A self-titled record is a bold proclamation of confidence — especially when it arrives as early into a band’s career as “Pool Kids” has. But this is a band whose prodigal pop songwriting and punchy prog shredding belies their relative youth. It’s wild to think they’re just getting started.