records du jour

Elvis - All Shook Up

left: cheapo discs - Austin, TX / 5.99; right: waterloo records - Austin, TX / 4.99

Elvis - Elvis’ Gold Records Volume 1 & 4: hey, whattaya say, Elvis Wednesday?

Julia Holter - Goddess Eyes

NOTES ON THE NEW

Poo Bah Record - Pasadena, California / $13.99

Julia Holter - Tragedy (2011): threading along with best-ofs… best sleeper album of the year? quite possibly. although i know next to nothing about this artist all i need to know is in a brief description of this album: a conceptual treatment of Greek tragedy. yes, please. ‘nough said. done. although i’m partial to tracks that tumblr will not allow to be featured due to size, the song above does have a kind of stage to it… it is missing the reverberating & archaically captured (and/or rendered) orchestrations that trudge this album along like whirlpools indiscriminately filing artifacts of culture into a hole. there are strings here, chorus’, harps, dialogue, Eno-isms, and bestly, in my opinion, sounds of climbing loss, “double grief” and the echo of universal pang that plagues not just protagonist, and his or her fall, but to all. this is a record that exudes its designs, and that’s why i like it… the genuineness, ingenuity and agency. want a copy? hmm…. tough one there. only 300  came out (i did a little research and ordered one of the last copies from Poo Bah records… snagged copy 015/300)… and most them sold in a day when boomkat.com featured the record as their must-have of the week. sometimes being without tragedy is the greatest tragedy of all’ - Anonymous.

Girls - Love Like A River

NOTES ON THE NEW

waterloo records - Austin, TX / $18.50

Girls - Record 3 / Father, Son, Holy Ghost (2011): a declaration: a MASTERpiece! another declaration: ALBUM OF THE YEAR? quite possibly! words, paltry & small, will only underwhelm & lessen this epic & epoch. unfortunately, the tongue sometimes spasms, like waking up a funny bone, so i’ll say three things: 11 songs about the only line ever worth anything in the English language, “love is all you need;” country & blues at its modern BEST; & a monumental close with,  “maybe it’s all right, I mean, I went and found the modern world, but I miss the way life was when you were my girl.”

yes, & ahem, i miss that girl, too. sometimes, we all get around to thinking: remember when we were young & believed in love? yea, i miss that, too. among many other things, this album is that, too.

furthers:

well worth reading: http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/8669-girls/

tour dates:

09-03 Los Angeles, CA - FYF Fest
09-14 Atlanta, GA - Variety Playhouse
09-15 Asheville, NC - Orange Peel
09-16 Nashville, TN - Mercy Lounge
09-17 Carrboro, NC - Cat’s Cradle
09-19 Washington, DC - 9:30 Club
09-20 Philadelphia, PA - Theatre of Living Arts
09-22-23 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom
09-24 Boston, MA - Paramount Center
09-25 Montreal, Quebec - POP Montreal Festival
09-27 Toronto, Ontario - Mod Club Theatre
09-29 Chicago, IL - Lincoln Hall
09-30 Madison, WI - Majestic Theatre
10-01 Minneapolis, MN - First Ave Nightclub
10-04 Vancouver, British Columbia - Biltmore Cabaret
10-05 Seattle, WA - Neptune Theatre
10-06 Portland, OR - Wonder Ballroom
10-08-09 San Francisco, CA - Great American Music Hall

11-04-06 Austin, TX - Fun Fun Fest (i’m hoping to be there)

Kate & Anna McGarrigle - Kiss And Say Goodbye

breakaway records - Austin, TX / $4.99

Kate & Anna McGarrigle - Kate & Anna McGarrigle (1975): what better way to escape fire than to not finish Robert Lowell’s For The Union Dead and drive your gold 88’ Honda accord with a dented fender to the local record store and find a gem of a record that you’ve been looking for for far too long. sometimes things do work out despite what Faye Dunaway will tell you while clutching on ears of corn in the movie Barfly. this record is the perfect end-of-summer-to-autumn record; no, this is the perfect summer record; no, this is just a perfect record. i heard this record for the first time quite a few years ago, forgot about it (despite my best elephant’s memory impersonation), and then recently re-found it again when i procured my friend Tony’s old ipod. my first listen through happened while greening my thumb alongside my father while we mulched the flowerbeds around his house. i remember it as one of those times where you suddenly notice the existence of silence as if it were some sort of new and useful phenomenon. after spending a few quiet hours swilling down ice cubes and picking up and dropping the earth like wind, i decided to give it a return listen. this album has every root, shade and spread that a folk album should have: part-americana, part-tradition, part-bluegrass, part-religion, part-folksy soul, part-confession, part-tale, part-true. i remember giving up any resolutions i had planned for the past when i heard the lines, “and my love for you is like a sinking ship / and my heart is like that ship out in mid ocean” in “Heart Like A Wheel, and then feeling as renewed as the gym membership of a guy who has just finished a self-help book by Phil Donohue hearing “Capac,” and then being brought back to the ever ebbing brood of someone who loves his blue just as much as his rue by the time the song, “Tell My Sister” came as indiscriminate and sweeping as a broom; which, if you listen to the whole thing, explains what happened, and where your heart went, while you were looking for it around your room.

The Olivia Tremor Control - Courtyard

Show & Tell: The Olivia Tremor Control

photo courtesy of Josh Brasted @ Brooklyn Vegan / OTC in New Orleans

Austin, TX / Mohawk’s (8/31/2011): let’s, first and foremost, declare that this has been one of the best, if not the best, show i’ve seen so far this year. The Music Tapes preambled The Olivia Tremor Control with the use of a 7 foot metronome, organ-playing tower, saw-bending heart-dropped ballads and excerpts & tidbits about Romanian circus performances that were passed down from generation to generation by song; the latter making me think of a certain Lorelei, that was, at one time, going to appear on records du jour but found herself quarantined in another dream, much like, i think, a certain un-last named Alice. The Music Tapes is helmed by Julian Koster, a contributor to Olivia Tremor Control, so check out his side work too, like an overwrought restaurant manager meticulously shadowing his dodgy teen-waitress employee. then Olivia Tremor Control took the stage, and i mean took, and all was arrested like that aforementioned dream where the potential beauties of the world became the actual world rather than an impression of it. i didn’t know much about this 60s-pop, haywire world-music infused group from the Elephant 6 90s, but by closing time (amidst their protests over Austin outdoor music curfews because newly erected yuppie-diseased condos nearby), i knew all i needed to know: they are an order as essential to the ears as clown faces are to symbolizing themes of tears and cheers. a wide array of players to the band——including a plump shorter fellow with a great bushy white beard and fedora to boot—with a wide array of instruments playing a wide array of their discography including the 1-9 parts of the Green Typewriters song from their Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle album, in a row. i read, i think, an apt description likening their concepts and sound to The White Album, but i’m going to also ante that with the Village… of the Kinks , and a little Meatmen-punk-y leanings, too. nonetheless, descriptions are poor wishes, so just unsink your sea legs and wobble on down to their next show. there’s a whole heap of education in their sound that, if you were to map it out like one of those i’m-going-to-go-here-one-day maps on a wide-eyed college kid’s wall, you’d find yourself as equally in the clay pot cracking sounds of the tundra as in the soundless voice of the no-future no-past existence-less winds of the desert as in the pops of far galaxy sun spots as in the wandering bands of empty footprints that when retraced back the same sounds for home as they do for roam.

Dead Moon - Where Did I Go Wrong

waterloo records - Austin, TX / $14.50

Dead Moon – In The Graveyard (1988): after an absence (a move to Austin, TX), what better record to return with but one that stamps & stomps itself into your ear like weighted beeswax. it’s worth mentioning that this is the first wax release of this album that i’ve ever seen available in stores, and not surprisingly, it was put there by the good folks at Mississippi records. what’d i do? picked it up immediately—like a concerned mother would a baby posted in the “free” section on craigslist. this is one of those records, that right now, is being copied by scared white kids all over america. one of them records that defines a generation it wasn’t even around for. one of them records that, upon discovering, reminds us what the phrase “rock n roll” once stood for. (well, the more contemporary fitting of the term.) reigned by a husband and wife duo, Fred and Toody Cole, this is one of those groups of the late 80’s that would have been credited for spawning the ensuing decades of grimy, grungy, groggy rock n’ roll, if they, like Van Gogh or Tillman the skateboarding dog, just would have been more appreciated in their time. the album begins with a song that takes the “grave” concept of the blues and turns it into an actual living anthem: we all, already, are in the grave in some way. um, huh? yea… now that’s some true grit. ‘nough to put down Jeff Bridges’ country guitar and make him just: sit. the one that reeled, pulled and drug me in was Toody Cole’s version of “Can’t Help Falling In Love.” although partial to the original in general, i think this version has a consummate common honesty to it that gives it that entrance into the bones where it seems to squat and occupy. it’s like you are walking down a dirt road from a makeshift party you just attended in the boondocks of Tennessee when you hear this inebriate-wearied girl make of her heart a plea and you can’t help but also want to contribute your love to her confession in hopes that you will help her win her beloved in some fashion. or, the song is just like this really tiny cat you want to hold in your hand and take anywhere. “dead in the saddle” is another standout. with an instrumental lead-in conjuring up some kind of dusty, dingy alley somewhere where you once saw the ghost of Don Juan lean under a rusted faucet and wait for water that no longer exists. the rest of the album is as solid as the opposite of a fault line. it’s perfect for ruining dinner parties, or starting dinner parties (a la the food fight), or sitting on some porch somewhere that needs to be swept with a tetanus-contaminated aluminum can and a graying, sleepy dog that knows the blues better than any casual cemetery or hole-y heart.

Emmylou Harris - Big Black Dog

Show & Tell: Emmylou Harris

Camden, New Jersey / xponential festival (7/24/11): like profit for companies after receiving part of the bailout, Emmylou’s still got it. no better way to spend a sunday night by the river where steamboats are stretching their throats out than to see a living legend ( for only 17 bucks, i might add) make ravens out melodies. i know records du jour readers might be tuckered out with all this Emmylou exposure, but we all have our phases don’t we. and if we don’t then we’d be just as common as a vacation in the Bahamas. i think. and if i were not to think then you’d probably find me enjoying myself while listening to an Alabaman-belle sing the grazes and graces out of Merle Haggard, Louvin Brothers and other country staple tracks. the best part of the show was an a capella ballad with the rest of her band. someone yelled something about the Pandora sequestered in Emmylou’s voice box and i couldn’t have agreed more. also during the show she talked about a big black dog she adopted near Nashville; and to tell you the truth, i like this song so much that i wish it were a dog so i could adopt it, too.

photo courtesy of xpn.org

The Misfits - Skulls (1982)

this is going to be the last (grieve) RECORD DU SEMAINE for a while…why? because i’m busy doing less important things

armageddon records - Cambridge, MA / $9.99 (original Plan 9)

The Misfits - Collection I: i don’t like skulls. i have one, and i generally don’t try to extract it, but I never got into the whole “i like skulls… on my stickers, on my car, on that spot on my bicep where a celtic cross wasn’t gonna quite do it” thing. hence why i haven’t really listened to the Misfits until, well, now; when my head is closer to becoming an actual skull rather than what easily entertained people want to pet and ground their coffee-breathed mouths on. The Misfits, i think, are one of those, for me, “guilty by association” groups. meaning, people generally decide whether they like them or not by deciding whether or not they like their fans (before actually listening to their grinded-grim-hosing tunes, what does that term mean? i don’t know… something about grim being grinded through a hose onto the listener… huh?). i’m thinking the Grateful Dead here, i’m thinking Pink Floyd, I’m thinking most groups from the 90s—that grew up in the suburbs, told pretty girls at parties that their favorite book was Catcher in the Rye and then sang about the whole experience, or in the 90s case, screame—and i’m also thinking into the future here: Lady Gaga. maybe. i’m guessing most records du jour readers have spent their teens chewing on pop rocks and chasing it with blue soda while etching the anarchy A into every tree that grew in brooklyn while listening to this album, but i have not, so let me take my bag of Doritos, bang my door closed (with the Trent Reznor poster on it), start composing a poem with 23 different rhymes for the word, “crestfallen,” and listen to this record until my head falls off and Danzig can have what he really wants, which apparently is… my… skuuuuuuuuulllllllll.

Guy Clark - That Old Time Feeling

Guy Clark - Old No. 1 (1975): i inherited a whole catch of a batch of 70s Nashville-era country records from a good family friend that used to play with people like Kitty Wells and has commentary about how nuts Mickey Newbury was, and this record was in the midst of myriad choice LPs. suffice it to say, this stuff, as this album is, is the real deal. in fact, when i was late-night-wondering through Austin a week ago i stumbled into a neighbors’ yard where some dirty Texan folk were havin’ quite the time with some drinks and nothing left to do but to find the night some shade and i talked to a guy who saw Guy Clark “a few weeks ago.” strange how things come, because i only first heard of this “Guy,” and this record just shortly before i went to and met this Lone Star-er. i had to give this record a few spins to really get into it, but the song above rested everything assure for me. i shant talk too much on this song as to predict the experience mitigated, but i will say that the line “like an old man with his checkers, dyin’ to find a game” makes me want to find that fellow and indulge into the ole red & black until that “old time feeling” becomes so new it turns every one of our moves blue.