I've been a music fan since my parents gave me a record player for Christmas when I was still in grade school. The first record I remember owning was "Sesame Street Disco." I've been a professional writer since 2004, but writing long before that. My first published work was in a middle school literary magazine and was a story about a zoo in which the animals could talk.
Coming back after a cancelled show back in the spring, The Smithereens had an enthusiastic crowd to greet them in Fort Wayne on June 18, 2022.
Walking in with my daughter, my immediate reaction was, “That sounds like an R.E.M. cover.” Sure enough, the opening band was a local R.E.M. cover band called Driver 8 (named after the song from R.E.M.’s 1985 album Fables of the Reconstruction). I didn’t know who was going to open for The Smithereens, but a cover band wasn’t among my ideas. That being said, Driver 8 were solid. It was the singer’s first gig with the band, and he showed no signs of nerves and knew how to work a crowd. Hearing a live version of “Superman” was a treat, as I hadn’t heard that song in years.
Driver 8
Thanks to someone forgetting to put a microphone on the stand for lead singer Marshall Crenshaw, The Smithereens’ Jim Babjak, Dennis Diken, and Severo Incarnacion started the show with a drum solo by Diken (who has always been one of the steadiest rock drummers of the last few decades) and a Link Wray cover while Crenshaw found a microphone backstage. The first Smithereens song they played was “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” and, despite Crenshaw forgetting some of the first verse lyrics, they were off to the races.
Jim Babjak still shreds, and it was great to hear them play a lot of tracks from the Especially for You album and to just watch them remind everyone how they’re still America’s Rock Band after forty years. They closed with a couple Beatles covers, delighting my daughter and everyone else.
They still cook, and they still have many, many hits that you love to hear.
Starting with ambient sounds of bird songs, traffic, and other things you can’t quite identify, Vapors of Morphine‘s latest, Fear and Fantasy, is at times lush, other times haunting, and other times exotic.
“Blue Dream” certainly is dream-like, combining those ambient sounds with Dana Colley‘s signature smoky saxpohones, Jerome Deupree‘s subtle drumming, and Jeremy Lyons‘ sly vocals. Colley shares vocals with Lyons on “Golden Hour,” originally a Twinemen track (another band Colley was in after the death of Morphine lead singer Mark Sandman), and VOM’s version here is somehow trippier than the original. Listening to “Irene” is like slipping into a warm bath while surrounded by sage smoke. The sound that Colley produces with his saxophone on “No Sleep” is somewhere between angry bees and horny hummingbirds. It’s layered with so much reverb and distortion that it’s hard to describe…which means it’s great. Lyons’ love and influence of Appalachian blues comes through in his guitar work and vocals on “Special Rider,” exuding both sorrow and menace.
Tom Arey takes over on drums on the second side of the album, since Deupree left the band in 2019. Arey’s work can first be heard on “Lasidan,” an instrumental flavored with Middle Eastern flair (a sound VOM explored before on A New Low). “Drop Out Mambo” continues the band having fun with sounds and styles from around the world. A new version of Treat Her Right‘s “Doreen” is a fun treat for us long-time fans of Morphine and THR. It somehow seems sweatier and sultrier than the original.
“Ostrich” is a fun track with a honky tonk swagger that has Lyons wishing he could become different animals in order to avoid having to deal with the blues. “Baba Drame” is a blend of Middle Eastern and what sounds like Celtic styles with Lyons shredding on what sounds like a mandolin with riffs that sound like a callback to “Red Apple Juice” from A New Low. VOM get psychedelic on the instrumental “Phantasos & Phobetor,” because, why shouldn’t they? The name of the track refers to the Greek gods of surreal dreams and nightmares, respectively, and also to the name of the album. The closer is “Frankie & Johnny,” a fun floor-stomper that goes back to the band’s love of blues and bluegrass, with Ayers doing a fine job snapping out beats (with brushes, I think) and some of Lyon’s best guitar work on the album.
I love how Vapors of Morphine continue to salute their past and embrace new sounds in the present. Fear and Fantasy is more fine work from them.
This fun compilation released in the US by Runt Records (and originally in Italy by Abraxas) showcases the work of Francesco De Masi, Bruno Nicolai, Lallo Gori, Mario Migliari, and Vassil Kojucharov. The first three composers make up most of the compilation, with Migliari and Kojucharov only getting one track each on the album.
The sixteen tracks span films ranging from many of the Sartana franchise including Nicolai’s gorgeous title tracks to C’e’ Sartana…Vendi la Pistola e Comprati La Bara! (There is Sartana…Sell the Pistol and Buy a Coffin!) and Buon Funerale Amigos…Paga Sartana (part 1) (Have a Good Funeral, Friends…Sartana Will Pay). “Stranger,” with its bold vocals, is a fun track.
Many of the DeMasi pieces are collaborations with famous Italian guitarist and composter Alessandro Alessandroni, whose fine guitar work is all over tracks like “Monetero’s Plan” and “Vento e Whisky” (which has a great horn section that sounds like it wandered from the set of an Italian crime thriller to play on the score for Stranger).
Migliardi’s title track for Prega il Morto e Ammazza il Vivo (Pray for the Dead and Shoot the Living) sizzles like a rattlesnake on a warm rock. Nicolai’s title track for Gil Fumavano le Colt…Lo Chiamavano Campsanto (They Call Him Cemetery) is a classic with its expert whistling, symphonic strings, hollow-body guitar work, and vocal chorus all mixing together for a perfect blend. The vocals on DeMasi’s “Gold” are so bold they’re almost over the top and ridiculous, but they hold back just enough to make them amazing in their own right. His title track for 1963’s Il Segno del Coyote (The Sign of the Coyote) could fit on practically any John Ford film.
It’s a collection that’s over too soon, even with sixteen tracks on it, and a good reminder that Ennio Morricone (God rest his soul.) wasn’t the only formidable composer of spaghetti western soundtracks.
I did a deep dive of the music of Midnight Oil in celebration of their final tour. Don’t miss them if they come close to you, or drive eight hours to see them if you must. Here’s the set list from the show:
Australian punks The Chats announce their new album, GET FUCKED, out August 19th on the band’s own label, Bargain Bin Records, and share a new single/video, “6L GTR.” The announcement arrives in the midst of their North American tour (tickets on sale now). Their debut full-length, High Risk Behaviour, dropped just as the pandemic struck, and The Chats have duly been through the same frustrating two years of broken dreams and shredded itineraries as every other combo. Undeterred and now stocked to overflowing with frustration and fury, they strike back with GET FUCKED, an incendiary, hyper-adrenalized blitz from punk heaven, showcasing a rockin’ new guitarist, and an electrifying all-killer-no-filler 13 tracks which perfectly capture the band’s explosive energy. It is, quite simply, another laugh-out-loud, pogo-through-the-floorboards stroke of motherfucking genius.
The Chats took lockdown as a chance to plan their next move, which is when they enlisted Josh Hardy after the departure of their last guitarist. Sometime in ’21, Eamon Sandwith, Matt Boggis and Hardy decamped to southern Queensland to write at their friend’s place, Vinny’s Dive Bar. Once they’d worked up a rollicking batch of new tunes, they had actually planned to record again near Melbourne, with Billy Gardner, who produced High Risk Behaviour, but due to pandemic border closures, they nailed it instead in six days at Brisbane’s Hunting Ground facility with Cody McWaters, who’d worked on a single for Eamon’s other band, Headlice.
“They weren’t like hardcore working days,” Eamon reveals, “we would start at 11 and finish at 4, and in the middle of that we’d go to the pub for lunch for two hours, and have a few beers. Then we’d go, ‘Oh shit, we better go back and do some recording!’ Our work etiquette wasn’t great.” Consequently, GET FUCKED, while tackling umpteen eminently relatable beefs ranging from surfer-dude racism to the usual dire impecunity, feels like a classic high-velocity punk-rock party album like they just don’t make ’em anymore – think early Ramones, think MDC’s debut, think invite your mates over and rock hard all weekend.
GET FUCKED opens with “6L GTR,” a swingeing takedown of a speed-crazed status-symbol driver – a critique piqued when Eamon spotted the titular licence plate in an airport carpark. “I don’t even know if the car itself was actually a six-liter GTR or anything,” he chuckles. “To be honest with you, I don’t even know what a car like that would look like! I can’t drive! That was the thing, we were just trying to get into this dude’s head.” The video was made by animator and illustrator Marco Imov who spent days creating the band in character form. “They hinted that it would be cool if instead of being directly about the car, it should be about the band wanting the car,” explains Marco. “From there it kind of wrote itself down.”
The more you listen to it, the more you realize that there was only one plausible title for this second Chats album. After all the incarceration and boredom, The Chats are in peak match fitness to deliver the excitement we all crave for the months ahead.
GET FUCKED TRACKLIST 1. 6L GTR 2. Struck By Lightning 3. Boggo Road 4. Southport Superman 5. Panic Attack 6. Ticket Inspector 7. The Price of Smokes 8. Dead on Site 9. Paid Late 10. I’ve Been Drunk In Every Pub In Brisbane 11. Out On The Street 12. Emperor of the Beach 13. Getting Better
THE CHATS TOUR DATES Mon. Jun. 27 – Paris, FR @ La Maroquinerie Tue. Jun. 28 – Brussels, BE @ La Botanique Fri. Jul. 1 – Werchter, BE @ Rock Werchter 2022 Mon. Jul. 4 – Amsterdam, NL @ Melkweg Tue. Jul. 5 – Berlin, DE @ SO36 Wed. Jul. 6 – Hamburg, DE @ Moltow Backyard Thu. Jul. 7 – Cologne, DE @ Gebäude Fri. Jul. 22 – Adelaide, AU @ Adelaide Showground Fri. Jul. 29 – Luxembourg, LU @ Rotondes Sat. Oct. 8 – Sacramento, CA @ Aftershock Festival
Keep your mind open.
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Today, composer/producer Alexis Georgopoulos (Arp) has announced New Pleasures, a new album slated for release on July 15th. With the record,Arp sculpts angularities into fresh, alluring shapes, expanding and contracting song form into brain-teasing sound design. The sensation the music offers is almost rubbery; it makes you feel as if you could flex, bend and squeeze your body inside out – a vivid, deconstructed take on high-definition pop, avant-garde, and dance music forms. Drawing on the promise of futurism, New Pleasures reflects the slipperiness of time, the multidirectional, non-linearity of memory; how our minds shift millisecond to millisecond from past to present to future and back again.
Lead single “New Pleasures” comes alongside a striking video directed by acclaimed filmmaker Adinah Dancyger.
“That space between idea and reality, fact and fiction—which drives ‘New Pleasures’—is so often inhabited by commerce, which conjures our fantasies for us,” Georgopoulos explains. “And there we find desire. For connection, luxury, distinction. We think we’re immune to its psychology because we’re conscious of it, but in some ways, it drives everything.”
New Pleasures is the second chapter in Arp’s ZEBRA trilogy and advances the narrative begun with 2018’s acclaimed ZEBRA; pastoral in mood, expansive in style, the record acted as a dawn on a nascent, Edenic landscape, reminiscent of a beautiful, long-lost Fourth World album. In this world, the music approximated the patient cadence of geological time – the way time suspends when you watch a river in motion. There was, nonetheless, the presence of something alien on the horizon.
Now, Arp drops us deep into the grid of the city. New Pleasures fast-forwards a few centuries, locating listeners in a post-industrial Sprawl (to borrow an expression from William Gibson’s Neuromancer) of concrete and glass, imbuing the album with the flinty glow of commerce, the sleek rhythms of industrialization, and the cool finesse of brutalism. The result is a collection of futuristic pop interiors with glinted exteriors; a prismatic inquiry into machine sentience, the economy of desire, and myriad forms of possession.
“Sometimes the most alien thing is simply seeing what we take for granted from a slightly different angle.” – Arp
Keep your mind open.
[It would bring me new pleasures if you subscribe.]
