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Category Archives: Rock/Pop

Dec 08 0 comments
Lee Mavers, Rock/Pop, The La's

Feelin’

Feelin12082009Woke up with a feelin’ last Tuesday, and there I was lyin’ on the floor. Bears in hibernation, cats on the prowl, moles scurrying for their lives… the whole scene opened up before my eyes. I wrote it down. It became “Kitty’s First Words, Part 2.” I wrote a rock opera, basically.

But I am not yet in stride with this blog. It needs a kick start. I lost it a while back, the momentum. What can I write that others will even care to read? Well, for a start I can remind everyone of what I (and you certainly) have learned in this life: it does no good to dwell on such questions.

Lee Mavers and the La’s give this blog another kick start with “Feelin’” from a 1990 BBC session. A short testimony of terrified, elated inspiration. From Lee to you.

The La’s: Feelin’ (1990 BBC Radio session)

Sep 08 0 comments
Rock/Pop, Roxy Music

Virginia Plain

roxymusic

I’m back, and the best way to come back is to come back unexpectedly, which is just how this track hits us. For a hit single, it has a strange opening, hooking you in almost subconsciously, and then hitting you full force with glam splendor. Its driving rhythm is accented with brass bursts and Eno squibs, and just as you’re getting the hang of it, it ends abruptly. Such is the visitation of a Catbirdman ejaculation. This particular outburst is our the third installment of the linear progression from the Velvet Underground to Duran Duran. It’s Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain,” and there’s nothing quite like it. Enjoy. More later.

Roxy Music: Virginia Plain

Aug 10 0 comments
Indie Music, My Dear Disco, Rock/Pop

My Dear Disco

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My Dear Disco want you to dance and think. According to guitarist/co-producer Robert “Squirrel” Lester, “this term called dance think, it’s an idea of music that is as good to your body as it is to your mind, multi-purpose music that you can listen to by yourself in the car and enjoy it as much as you do at a show when you’re letting yourself liberate physically.”

I can attest to the fact that their music accomplishes both, and it’s uncanny how the experience is markedly different in each context. I hadn’t ever heard them before last Thursday night, when they played a low-key show at Baltimore’s Hexagon Space. The venue was BYOB — bring your own booty. And shake it. So sez rock star keyboardist Joey Dosik: “booty booty dance rock booty booty dance rock booty booty booty booty booty booty dance rock.”

Start with Mew, take away the Jon Anderson-influenced vocal, replace it with an aesthetic borne of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, and let some kids who couldn’t care less who Mew are play it with youthful, unhindered, but impossibly perfect, abandon. When lead singer Michelle “Mich.-Ella” Chameul adds a smooth, soulful voice to the party, the picture is complete.

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It boiled down to that simple formula on the floor of the club, and it felt good. But at the same time, there were astonishing things going on musically. Theirs is music played to Steely Dan-level intricacy, with disjointed bursts and spurts, always playing with the time, never out of time. When listening in the car it almost becomes stripped of all its immediacy and becomes a cerebral prog experience, but with lyrics about chasing a girl in a club.

It makes sense given their evolution. Drummer Mike “Regal” Shea: “We formed in an academic institution [The University of Michigan School of Music], in an intellectual environment, and our values there were oriented around composition and recording, and then we put an album out, and our focus shifted to the performance aspect of our live show.” In this transition, their music has stuck a deeper groove, and they fool you into thinking that the songs are catchier than they are. In the car, they’re not catchy at all.

That is a bit of a problem for me. This music makes me beg for that big Duran Duran chorus. And it doesn’t come. The closest moment is on “Amsterdam,” which bounces along like Lily Allen, but not quite as hummable. The brilliantly-titled “M.Y.F. (Move Your Feet)” accomplishes its purpose, but in an exasperatingly geek-rock way. When the chorus comes, the dynamic swells perfectly, and I want an anthem, and what I get are crazy chord changes, followed by a math-rock instrumental breakdown for a middle-eight. Mind you, I didn’t experience this frustration at all in their live show. It was too much fun, and as advertised, it played with the brain, trying to keep up with all that was going on.

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But much of it is yet only potential. Their mentality is honorably inclusive and humble for such a young group starting out. Joey: “The best show we can play is one where there’s a tangible exchange between us and the audience, and the club, back to us. If you put us in a room full of people, we will make them feel good.” They’re careful not to call themselves the “greatest band in the world” and they speak of “paying their dues.” I would actually like to see them grow into a bit more selfishness, not forgetting the crowd, but allowing themselves a sod-all pursuit of crazy, sick spectacle. This is a band that could do spectacle. If I were their manager, I would push them all toward makeup and glitter. They stand in such sharp, refreshing contrast to so much of the mediocre, pseudo-emo obscurity that pervades indie rock today, so why do they look just like everyone else?

I hate to hold it against a group for being nice guys, but the band needs a George Clinton-sized personality. Joey and Michelle are the most likely candidates, and Joey seems on his way there, projecting an intense, yet aloof coolness. But Michelle struck me as a calm before a storm. It’s hard to read someone in 30 minutes, but I get the feeling she’s in a cocoon, brewing, stewing, not sure of her ability to swoop like a mad moth. She carries it on stage but she doesn’t kill it. And she could.

For now, the band are progressing nicely, especially considering how young they are. If they come to your town, they are not to be missed. They will dazzle you, and they will make you feel good. Here’s hoping the band puts together a real Disco Demolition as they take it from here — sticking with the virtuosity and precision, but sweetening it more often with sugary hooks — and goes after world domination. Until then I’ll shake my booty and marvel at the time signatures.

My Dear Disco: The Way
My Dear Disco: Amsterdam
My Dear Disco: M.Y.F. (Move Your Feet)

Aug 08 0 comments
Duran Duran, Rock/Pop, T. Rex

T. Rex

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The next step on the journey toward Duran Duran leads us into the early ’70s and the formation of glam rock. Right away, music becomes more than just music; it’s an image-consciousness that seeped into the young minds of John Taylor, Nick Rhodes, and countless other British kids who dreamed of becoming pop stars. This goes some way toward understanding Duran Duran as the band they evolved into. When your roots are in glam rock, you naturally develop an allegiance toward the artificial as legitimacy. Thank God these guys weren’t raised on grunge rock or emo or anything else purporting to be “real” or “earnest.” That would have been disaster for the synth-art they eventually pioneered. Pop stars can’t readily get around the fact that they are at least four steps removed from real life: first you have the murkiness of one’s interpretations of what goes on in this world, then you have the step of getting that into a song, then you have to get it on wax, and then into the minds of the listening, scattered public. Creating and sharing art by its nature has a tenuous relationship with immediacy and credibility. Too much gets lost in translation.

In the case of T. Rex, who started in a genre more conventionally-accepted as “real,” folk-rock, they didn’t really find their feet until they shortened their name. “Tyrannosaurus Rex” became too much to write out time after time (even I had to check the spelling just now), and an approximation proved helpful for writers and readers alike. They reinvented their sound, moved toward electric guitars and flamboyance in the presentation. It was this change that brought on the music that the world now remembers from them. The “Ride a White Swan” single in 1970 was the pivotal moment.

John Taylor (Duran Duran’s bassist) remembers: “It all began to get under my skin, certain songs — ‘Starman,’ ‘Virginia Plain,’ ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’ and ‘Ride a White Swan’ — had been like beacons to me, beckoning me out of isolation, with promises of something more interesting and sexual.” This promise — does it ever come to fruition? Does music speak directly to our lives or are there assumed layers of disconnectedness? The same questions can be asked about our relationships with other people. Many people hold out for a “soulmate,” one who can trace the deepest matters of the heart in one glance. Others accept a layer or three of interpretation, and look not to the other, but to themselves, as the source of fulfillment and actualization. I’m not sure where I fall, but at least my head knows it: it’s up to each one of us to live our lives, and the packaged, glossy output of others can lend pleasure and inspiration in that process.

T. Rex: Ride A White Swan

Aug 03 0 comments
Rock/Pop, Velvet Underground

All Roads Lead to the Velvet Underground

Campbellssoup

My recent posts on Duran Duran have prompted me to mine the past a bit, trying to trace a path backwards to a suitable origin. I ended up at the Velvet Underground, which is typical, for nearly every pop-art musical road ultimately leads either to or from the Velvet Underground. They are the crossroads.

I dare say that few bloggers, if any, are currently ruminating on the connection between the Velvet Underground and Duran Duran, but that, after all, is why God gave the world Catbirdman, I suppose (hopefully that’s not the only reason). I shall, then, humbly take up the role and fill the void. In the words of Adrian Monk, you’ll thank me later.

And so begins yet another continuing series of posts here on Subanimal Sounds (I seem to keep starting these things and never finish them…). This one will last 22 posts, will weave its way through the 1970s, and will culminate in Duran Duran’s first single. Every entry will have two things in common: 1. the artist will be one cited by a member or members of Duran Duran as a formative influence; and 2. the song will be, by Catbirdman standards, absolutely fabulous.

And so we begin, as have so many would-be musos, with the Velvet Underground. If any group has been more pivotal than this, I challenge anyone to name them/him/her. We’ve heard it all a hundred times or more: the band hand-picked (more or less) by Andy Warhol, coupled with Nico, ignored commercially, embraced critically forever after. Not many people listened to the Velvets at the time, but those who did formed a band, talked about forming a band, bla bla bla.

One of those people was the young Nick Rhodes, née Bates, the future stylist par excellence of each individual (and every one was different, which remains a true feat of genius) Duran Duran offering, be it a bum-pumping single or a cerebrum-thumping album cut, of the 1980s. Nick was a late convert to the Velvets, having had to overcome an early prejudice against the lo-fi, deceptively off-key scrapings of the primitive sound. He learned quickly, as did all of those artistically inclined, that the primal was subtle, dressed in unconscious sophistication, and ultimately essential.

The Velvet Underground is essential for any musical education. As countless others have testified, here is a seminal track that lies at the root of countless other seminal tracks… from the Velvet Underground’s third album, I give you, “What Goes On”…

The Velvet Underground: What Goes On

Jul 22 1 comments
Marvin Gaye

Abdul Raheim

The South Baltimore Learning Center stands empty tonight.

The South Baltimore Learning Center stands empty tonight.

Last night Abdul Raheim passed away in his sleep. I had known him since April of this year, when I began serving as a classroom assistant with the South Baltimore Learning Center. Together, we were trying to help young adults get their high school diploma. He was “Mr. Raheim” to his students (“learners” as we call them), and simply “Raheim” to everyone else. When greeting Raheim, you would say “How are you today?” Invariably, he would say, “I’m blessed.”

I said we were helping people get their high school diploma. But that’s an incomplete assessment. As Raheim always stressed, we were doing more than that. We were trying to help people develop critical thinking skills, and to slough off the weights that had irrationally hindered their lives. We were trying to help them become whole.

Raheim brought a holistic approach to his teaching. A math problem would often lead into a discussion about self esteem and the inner child. More than anything, he wanted to see his learners blossom and become the people they were meant to be. He worked tirelessly at homeless shelters throughout the city, and in his “off hours” he would teach classes. He often felt like he was pushing on the ocean. He often lamented that his people, African-Americans, were not becoming all they could become. Yet each day he would get up and do his part.

I have little to no inspirational wisdom to impart right now. Yet I feel it’s important to tap into the core of the idealism that leads us as individuals to get up and do our part. All I have is Marvin Gaye’s “Save The Children.” Raheim, this song was given to me this evening to help me carry on. It’s the basic truth that led you to keep trying: the belief that in the face of a world that’s “destined to die,” no matter what evidence stacks up, that it’s wrong to despair, and it’s right to make efforts to “save the babies.” Those babies can be infants, they can be high school dropouts, they can be 50-year old men and women. Healing the inner child. I know lives were affected by your presence on this earth. Let me then follow your example and save the babies, and let me consider myself blessed.

I will keep reaching out to the members of your class, offering my help with tutoring this summer and whatever else comes this fall. Life will go on down here. Thank you for all you did. I miss you already.

Marvin Gaye: Save The Children

Jul 21 0 comments
Duran Duran, Rock/Pop

Union of the Snake

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The song is supposedly about the intersection between the conscious and the subconscious, with the latter gaining a surprise advantage with a late surge. When it was written, Duran Duran had already achieved worldwide fame beyond any reasonable human necessity. I was late to the party (see last post), and it wasn’t until the band had plunged into an eddy of drugs and glamour that I caught on. I only heard what was played over the small town radio station on the school bus on the way to school. I had never seen the videos. I had never read the tabloids. It was only the music for me.

When “The Reflex” hit, it transformed my summer. When “The Wild Boys” hit, I made my way to the record store. It was my first ever purchase. I bought three cassettes: Rio, Arena, and Seven and the Ragged Tiger. Seven especially was what I was after. I experienced my first thrill of ownership, and the sanctity of the package. I caressed that cassette J-card and memorized its folds. I drank in the smell of the plastic and cherished the nuances of blank tape at the end of side two and the series of high-pitched tones announcing the Dolby XDR (Expanded Dynamic Range). It was the same thrill Morrissey must have had when he bought his first record (a Sandie Shaw 7″ perhaps?). But this was all my own.

I’m too embarrassed to center this post around those first few months, because I didn’t know what I was listening to, and my tastes were crude. I actually liked a lot of the live Arena versions of the songs better than the originals. My interest grew, and naturally I sought out others who shared the fever. I started hanging out with a few girls at my school, Betsy, Heidi and Robin, all of whom sported badges, t-shirts, and suitably dyed locks. They introduced me to teen mags, lyric books, rumour and gossip. I was giddy, yet at the same time I felt uneasy. This wasn’t the other world I had heard in the music. This was pedestrian.

My subconscious had been tapped into, and I was looking for a cryptic rendering of what that meant. What I got was stories of screaming girls, wrecked cars, and yacht races. Success fell upon the members of Duran Duran before they ever had a chance to grow up. Under the direction (in my opinion) of the goal-oriented Nick Rhodes, the group dedicated itself to excellence in both musicianship and fashion. The fashion part has stumped many in the audience. Hordes of zombies took to it like moths to a flame, while anyone fancying themselves a “thinker” (members of the critical establishment especially) was self-righteous in indignation. What both groups missed was the music.

The music is textured, colorful and evocative. Evocative of lens flare, dark chambers, strobe-lit back rooms in the mind. Ennui 1980s style. I didn’t like to acknowledge it at the time, but the truth was the lads were flush with success, unprepared, cramming in as many shags and lines of coke as they could fit in a single sitting. I think they knew fame was fleeting. I think they lived in denial. I think they forged ahead, and I think they tried to find that one single moment when the belief that it wouldn’t end overshadowed the essential human dilemma of mortality.

Duran Duran recorded the demo for “Union of the Snake” in the south of France, where they rented a hideously huge mansion and partied nightly in their efforts to follow up their last album (still regarded as their best), Rio. At this point they were preposterous individuals. At least Rick Wakeman’s visions of world tours on ice were routed in noble intentions of serious achievement; Duran Duran on the other hand wanted spectacle for the sheer sake of having said they could. They flew in a real tiger for the album’s photo sessions, but the smoke bombs spooked it too much and it wouldn’t pose properly.

All the same, they were human beings, fallible and gauche. A sense of hysteria was setting in, as the human beings realized they couldn’t live as gods forever. Seven and the Ragged Tiger is an insane album, full of torrid dreams and mad screams. “There’s a fine line drawing my senses together and I think it’s about to break.” Or from another song: “Shackled and raised for a shining crowd / They want you to speak but the music is louder than all of their roar / And the heat of the planet’s core.” Yegads, why bring the flippin’ planet into it? Also from the same song (“Shadows On Your Side”): “Scandal in white on a tangled vine / With everybody to say that you’re having the time of your life / When your life is on the slide.”

Having experienced only the ascent, Simon Le Bon knew instinctively that privately, a “slide” is inevitable. The “union of the snake” was a creepy crawly portending slide that threatened to bring the whole party crashing down. The snake lived in the back corners of the mind, where Simon and the lads had tucked away that knowledge of mortality. “Give me strength, at least give me a light / Give me anything, even sympathy,” Simon’s subconscious mind pleaded.

I was young, too, when I first heard these songs. I didn’t understand the knowledge of death then and I understand it only slightly better now. But Duran Duran’s music, in spite of the humans behind it, served for me as a channel to the unknowable networks of the subconscious and the fine line that hovers over us all.

Duran Duran: Union Of The Snake
Duran Duran: Secret Oktober (Original B-side)
Duran Duran: Union Of The Snake (The Monkey Mix)

Jul 20 1 comments
Duran Duran, Rock/Pop

New Moon On Monday

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Those of you who know me knew this was coming eventually. Hopefully you’ve prepared yourselves for it. I don’t jump into this sort of thing halfway, either. This is a full blown tribute to my first, and most enduring, favorite band: Duran Duran.

They’re supposed to be a “guilty pleasure” or whatever, but they’re the reason I’m writing about music today.

As a kid, I was always running around the playground, breaking my glasses and losing my gloves; I wasn’t the usual “sit still and ponder” type of individual that I am today. But I had caught the wave of the power of music before this, in glimpses. I’ll lay my low cards on the table here: I remember feeling a pang when the airwaves announced we were “reunited and it feels so good.” Another pang with the declaration: “Hector believe we are magic” (a misheard lyric from Olivia Newton-John). And I was knocked out by that bright, funhouse organ in “Funky Town;” Yes! please take me there! My ears were unsophisticated, but each new sound created a parallel world that I knew I would one day explore.

Fast-forward to 1983, at Magic River Skateland, and the large video screen. I had ogled Sheena Easton (where can I board this “morning train?”) and softened half-heartedly to Boy George, but nothing prepared me for Simon LeBon’s wail in “New Moon On Monday.” So much about it drew me through a wormhole, far from the small town I lived in. All I remember are shadowy scenes and lots of torches waving, but the visual was never the point for me. It was the unseen visual that came through the music. This wasn’t the usual romp through fast times America, burgers and fries. This was something other. It felt vaguely evil to me, like the Occult, and it didn’t happen on the literal plane. On another channel was Billy Joel, working at some freaking car wash or other, taking the baton from the prosaic brightness of “Crocodile Rock,” chasing after an uptown girl. On my channel was something I had never seen before.

Looking back, I can’t quite pin down the reason why this particular tune did it for me, as there were plenty of New Wave oddities and faux-Gothic bug-eyed absurdities to choose from during the time. But here is where it sunk in, and perhaps the irresistible melody placed on top of the bizarre scene was what pulled me in. Duran Duran knew how to write a chorus. Their verses (and this song is a perfect example) often ramble, keeping you in a mood, slightly off balance, setting up the chorus. Then it’s Simon at the top of his range, whining and chirping about satellites and lizards and stuff that has absolutely no earthly reference point. The lyrics are naff, but to a young, surprised mind, they served their purpose.

I was taken in by that melody and the sound of that whine. I was taken in by the guitar (or is it a keyboard, I never can tell during the 80s…) arpeggio during that chorus, and the elevation of the suspended fourth made me soar, long before I knew the term. And the lads, for all their insistence on surface matters, could approach their music with depth and even subtlety. During the instrumental bridge (featuring “thunder” sounds courtesy of Nick Rhodes crumpling newspaper) and in the final chorus fade, Roger Taylor hits his snare just a sixteenth note earlier than the usual downbeat. It took me years to actually hear that was what was happening. It makes you lurch slightly, disorienting the ear.

“New Moon On Monday” was then, and is now, considered one of the group’s minor singles, and there are much better examples to illustrate why Duran Duran are an underappreciated talent (don’t worry, I’ll get to those later). But it came to me at the right time in my life, caught my ear, and a few months later led me to purchase my first album and started me on a path that eventually led here to Subanimal Sounds…

Duran Duran: New Moon On Monday
Duran Duran: Tiger Tiger (Original B-side)
Duran Duran: New Moon On Monday (Catbirdman Remix)

Jul 08 0 comments
Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, Rock/Pop

Sleep; Part 1

brian1969Sleep thought/association #1 (first in a nightly series), regarding Brian coasting through his day: Gentle soul, poking his head out the door, he wrote slices of his life. Priceless and small. There in the park at 10:30, when the sprinklers went on, and Brian wrote it down. He gave directions to his house in another song. Meanwhile Dad sold the rights to all the old hits. We’ve lost that commercial edge. Mike and I argued over Redwood, he was mad. Deep and wide! Then Brian said with the voice of a bird, “my magic transistor’s been blowing my mind.” Some group was playing a musical song just before I saw a sign and turned left (it’s a bumpy one). Brian came down in his pajamas and later I read it in a book how he gave up after SMiLE. Hang on to your ego music. I wrote a number down, but I lost it so. Zzzz.

The Beach Boys: I Went To Sleep

Jul 08 0 comments
Animal Collective, Beach Boys, Belle And Sebastian, Grandaddy, Indie Music, Pedro The Lion, Rock/Pop, Throwing Muses

Summer Songs

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Here are some summer songs to chronicle the warm night on my back deck as I contemplate blogging, creating, and living under the bright sun.

Grandaddy: Summer Here Kids

Grandaddy’s take on summer is an understandable bristling against the commercialism of the boardwalks and beach spots, compelling us to stay at home and listen to our favorite records. OK, I can see that, to a point, but I do want to get out there with like-minded celebrators. While I’m home, though, it’s not a bad idea to put on some records…

Pedro The Lion: Indian Summer

Moving gently from the cyncial starting point, we begin with Pedro The Lion’s nod to “ultra-violet rays” spreading over a bleak, commercial suburbia bloated with “corporate cum.” The announcement that “it will never rain again” is classic indie-rock sardonicism. Well, whatever, I can’t really deny the truthfulness herein. But I’m still in search of some light-hearted fun…

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Belle & Sebastian: I Know Where The Summer Goes

Stuart Murdoch takes us into lighter territory, if not altogether fun, but he helps us reconcile the humid, laconic wistfulness with the unspoken hopes of triumph. “The boy came from nowhere to steal the hearts from lassies in the lavvies of the club tonight.” What could be a more satisfying Cinderella story than that?

Throwing Muses: Summer St.

Let me state right off that, as usual, I’m not entirely sure what Kristin Hersh is on about here, but the feeling is right. In the haze of summer, the body is lonesome, and yet not. This, I think, is a song of solitary, gentle hope. I will take the exhortation to “drink to the sun” literally.

Animal Collective: Summertime Clothes

Ah, this is getting closer. Sweat everywhere. Mosquitos too, probably. And then the call of a summer girl. “I want to walk around with you.” Yes, let’s.

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The Beach Boys: All Summer Long

Could I have ended this post with any other song? Absolutely not. It starts and ends with Brian Wilson’s majestic celebration.