The sad thing about Cave’s new album, Neverendless, is I can’t imagine when I’ll listen to it again. I don’t smoke pot or drop acid anymore, and I don’t sit around looking at black light posters trying to bang college chicks. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But that’s what this kind of extended jam-based music is really good for: Trippin’ out and gettin’ weird.
But this isn’t your Grateful Dad’s kind of jam music. This is fuzzy, edgy, psychedelic rock for fans of Sonic Youth.
Here’s a slightly out of focus vid of them performing WUJ. Great stuff.
Y’know what was cool in the late 1960s? Frank Zappa. Y’know why? ‘Cause he’d discover lunatics like Wild Man Fischer, a paranoid schizophrenic who attacked his mom with a knife and was discovered by Frank Zappa wandering the streets of L.A. And Arthur Brown, too, whose only hit was “Fire.” Dude used to get naked on stage and light his own hair on fire.
Dave Cloud brings to mind dangerous, crazy people like that.
Cloud’s band, The Gospel of Power, is a collective of musicians from bands like Clem Snide, Silver Jews, Lambchop, and Lone Official, who back Dave Cloud’s bizarre, gruffly spoken songs. This is edgy, experimental blues that still has music to it. It’s not just noise, but it is noisy. With lyrics like “Baby I love you! Give me that razzmatazz!” and “I can see those wonderbra super lift cups working out.” Along with weird narratives like “Surfer Joe,” which says: “When it comes to a place to go where it’s hot and dangerous and extremely cheap, I would guess you would be talking about going way deep down south to Mexico. Surfer Joe. Way down in Mexico.” And “Party Party Party,” which sounds like he’s saying “Potty Potty Potty.” It’s extremely weird. Psychedelic weird.
Psychedelijazz doesn’t get a lot of play here, so if I’m going to write about it, it’s got be very good. Tame Impala fits the bill. Let’s start with “It Is Not Meant To Be.” It’s got Beatles-ish vocals, like from the Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds era, but the music has elements of Yes, modern electonica, crashing cymbals . . . It’s complex, but’s got a groove. And it’s pretty much the standard for the album. “Desire Be Desire Go” may have more fuzz and a harder sound, and Alter Ego may have more Pink Floyd than the other cuts on the record, but the sound remains similar throughout. A definite, high-quality album by a band to watch.
For fans of: Yeasayer, Flaming Lips, Dungen, and The Beatles.
At $6.99 for a CD Baby digital download, “Tearing Down Paisley Garden,” the sixth album from long-standing Seattle’s The Purrs is quite a bargain. The band’s sound mines a rich and fertile area between dreampop and an edgier early 1970s sound. Like the heroin-rock of Velvet Underground, bass player and lead singer Jima has a talking/singing style, which is accented by Dr. Robert and Jason Milne (the two guitarists) who play off each other with slightly fuzzy, whammy chords. There’s no real hooks here–just a lot of grooving atmosphere. I mean, there are definitely hooks in the songs, but you won’t notice them. You’ll be too overwhelmed by everything else going on. This isn’t an album, it’s a world.
The opener, “Only Dreaming,” is a cover of a one-hit-wonder (original by Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry), and there’s another cover here as well (Lee Hazlewood’s “I Move Around”), but the rest are originals. Every song is good, but there’s one I want to mention special: “It Could Be So Wonderful.” It’s not that the song stands out or apart from the rest of the songs on Paisley Garden–the album has a definite sound and theme, and doesn’t waver–it’s just that it is so . . . Perfect. Building drum riffs (I haven’t mentioned drummer Craig Keller yet, and he deserves a name-drop for sure), keyboards adding to the urgency, and Oasis-style soaring harmonies . . . It is wonderful indeed. I can’t imagine how tremendous it must be to hear this live.
I’ve listened to this album three times since I received it, and each time I find more here.
First things first: If you don’t like Black Mountain, old Black Keys, or Pink Floyd’s bluesier material, you won’t like Mondo Drag. Oh, and if you don’t like those things, you also should get the fuck off my blog. Because they’re awesome.
Second: Mondo Drag’s latest foray into extended psychedelic, wandering jams that go on for days and days is just as good as anything this band has ever done. Is it self-indulgent? A little. But that’s the price of long, fuzzy blues guitar jams over heavy, steady basslines and thumping percussion. There’s a reason this band has been around for years and survived its name change from “Holy Spirit:” They rock. Most songs clock in at over 6 minutes, yet you don’t notice the time go by because they seem to take that long just to rev up. Each song stretches, cries, screams, and tears itself apart.
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WHAT THE HELL IS BERKELEY PLACE?"Berkeley Place" has been a blog since 2000.
Berkeley Place is also 6 blocks of Brooklyn real estate, emerging from Sackett St. and ending at Banana Hill, a small park that grows a foot each year from dog shit and the corpses of dead rats. Though its residents have gotten wealthier over the decades, Berkeley Place still houses folks of all backgrounds with interests in, well, everything.
WHAT THE HELL GOES ON HERE?Ekko reviews independent music, comic books, and whatever else interests him.
WHAT THE HELL IS INDIE MUSIC?An independent record label (or indie record label) is a record label operating without the funding of or outside the organizations of the major record labels.
- Wikipedia.org
That means they ain't in the RIAA, dude.
At $6.99 for a 
First things first: If you don’t like Black Mountain, old Black Keys, or Pink Floyd’s bluesier material, you won’t like 
