Rating: 8.5
My introduction to Rob Crow was through one of his side projects, Thingy. I was sitting in my living room listening to the Songs About Angels, Evil, and Running Around on Fire album (incidentally – highly recommended) when a friend walked in the room and asked if I was listening to one of the Rob Crow bands.
Rating: 1.0
The Broken West, a bright-eyed well tanned quintuplet hailing from the musical paradise of Los Angeles, have recently released their full length debut on Merge records, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, an album that I currently have the dubious pleasure of holding in my hands right now. It really is quite bad. I am finding right now that mere words, the only tools currently at my disposal, may very well be insufficient to describe the unfortunate noises entering my ears. So instead I encourage you to picture a modern day Sisyphus sitting on a chaise lounge in his living room sipping a brimming martini and sucking on an olive smartly plucked from the bottom of his glass. And instead of the rock that we may rightly have expected him to be pushing on his uphill treadmill, he is forced to walk, hands trembling, towards the stereo where he will push play, auto-repeat. And as I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On falls from the speakers and thrusts itself upon unwilling ears in a manner that could pierce the hymen of the most virtuous of virgins, he covers his face with his hands and settles into eternity.
Yes, that does seem to sum it up quite nicely – but don’t take my word for it, give it a listen yourself.
Rating: 6.0
I don’t know how many of you have experienced this situation in your adult or childhood lives but picture for a moment, if you will, sitting in a classroom surrounded by middle schoolers all impatiently tapping their feet on the ground trying desperately to reign in the imperturbable insanity that you can clearly see is roiling just below the surface and, all the while, you desperately have to pee. It would not be my intention so early in this review to share any story of incontinence, and rest assured that all evacuations were made in the perfunctory manner without the need of either towels or shame – sometimes there is such a thing as a happy ending! – however we are at times dealt certain hands, and we must live with the cards which we are given. These hands can vary according to the day and the game, from sitting surrounded by twelve year olds while a constant pressure exerted from inside your body makes you seriously question the quality of your composition to reviewing the new Jesse Sykes and The Sweet Hereafter album, like, love, and the open halls of the soul, not that these two hands are entirely dissimilar.
Listen to songs off the new album HERE
Crocodile Cafe
Seattle, WA
January 19th, 2007
I am relatively certain that the black lips will one day be famous, snorting conspicuous quantities of cocaine off some ecstatic groupie’s ass while everyone from Ira Glass to Lou Barlow congratulate them on their stunning performance at the most recent Grammy awards show. I say this not necessarily because it will happen, or even that the Black Lips think it will happen, but when you have a man who can repeatedly spit four feet in the air and without fail, catch it back in his mouth – well, there’s something about that action that makes me feel like my entire body is suspended in a pool of grandma’s warm oatmeal. I just feel safe despite my fear, and raisins, and my fear of raisins. But grandma was awesome.
Not A Problem mp3
The Black Lips on MySpace
As many of you have noticed, Myspace™ is now home to legions of bands, teens, artists, children, predators searching for children, children posing as adults for the period of time it takes them to close their fingers around quiet places, adults posing as teens and pre-teens in order to fulfill a desire to be treated once again like a child or at least to not have to live up to the lofty standards of adulthood, and all the rest within the amorphous group that makes up the unwashed masses. For this brief moment, though, we will focus on the bands. What follows is a selection of music found on Myspace – some bands are new to me, others have been found only in passing, and yet others remain noteworthy simply because they are about zombies. Zombies that eat brains.