Low Country Audio

It takes a lot of people to build the house of jam Read story.

Man of Mystery

Friday, June 30, 2006
Who is this Justin Bailey and why does he have a sticker on every surface in the city? Read story.

The sentimental motherfucker probably still has the VCR too

Sufjan Stevens' "Romulus" off the Michigan album just made me tear up a little. Goddamn manipulative painful youth and all your naked vulnerability! I wanna push him in the pool now just to break the tension.

Once when our mother called,
She had a voice of last year's cough.
We passed around the phone,
Sharing a word about Oregon.
When my turn came, I was ashamed.
When my turn came, I was ashamed.

Once when we moved away,
She came to Romulus for a day.
Her Chevrolet broke down.
We prayed it'd never be fixed or found.
We touched her hair, we touched her hair.
We touched her hair, we touched her hair.

When she had her last child, Once when she had some boyfriends, some wild.
She moved away quite far.
Our grandpa bought us a new VCR.
We watched it all night, but grew up in spite of it.
We watched it all night, but grew up in spite of it.

We saw her once last fall.
Our grandpa died in a hospital gown.
She didn't seem to care.
She smoked in her room and colored her hair.

I was ashamed, I was ashamed of her
I was ashamed, I was ashamed of her
I was ashamed, I was ashamed of her
I was ashamed, I was ashamed of her

Sufjan Stevens - "Romulus"

Damn that is such a good song. I can get lost in his filigree and twinkliness but then I forget that there is always a dagger hidden inside his frosted birthday cake songs.

There are not many songs that choke me up, but the ones that do, do so consistently. here is a list of what comes to mind:

Lou Reed - "The Kids" off Berlin. I know this is his big "suicidal" album, but most of it just comes off as pretty corny compared to soem of his heavier songs like "Coney Island Baby" and "Magic and Loss". But on "The Kids" when he sings about the junkie woman whose kids are being taken away, and the baby crying in the background, Jesus, I can't take it. This is one of those places where Lou Reed's genius really shines, in the callousness or the production. he's just enough of a prick to go there and show you that teh world is cruel fucking place.

Hüsker Dü - "Hardly Getting Over It" off Candy Apple Grey. This album is often dismissed as the beginning of the end for the Dü, but I really think it's among their best work. There is a stretch of songs in the middle running from "Sorry Somehow" to the sortof unconvincing rave-up final solution of "Dead Set on Destruction" but Bob Mould's acoustic heart wrencher is devastatingly, deeply sad.

American Music Club - "Johnny Mathis' Feet" off Mercury. Mark Eitzel is one of the most effective sail-deflaters out there. His strained delivery and weeping baritone pull you into the black murky water from which he frequently emerges to catch one more breath of life before almost-drowing in it again. Here, he's looking at all his accomplishments and placing them at his idols feet, whose only advice it to learn how to evapoarte before they don't care anymore. Harsh dude. And to think, Johnny Mathis is the guy our parents used to have sex to in the back seat. No wonder we are as messed up as we are.

Chris Bell - "Better Save Yourself"from I Am The Cosmos. This is one of the most glorious bummer albums ever, but its on this track that the Big Star guitarist reveals his own plan for salvation through Jesus that history, always quick to point out when you were wrong, bears out as ending in the big Jackson Pollock/James Dean/Albert Camus speeding-car-meets-tree endgame.

Drive-By Truckers - "Little Bonnie" from A Blessing and a Curse. Patterson Hood's tale of the spectral persistence of a cousin that died at 4 is too heavy because its all too plausible. the world is hard and unyeilding and full of peril and when Jesus or whoever said suffer the children, thing like this make me think that awkward phrase was actually The children will suffer and got purposely garbled in the documentation, because this truth was too much to bear straight on.

So, in the unlikely event that anyone in this cold unfeeling universe is even reading this:
What songs make you cry?

Guilty Pleasure: The Gnsotic Death-obsessed Anglo-faerie rock of Current 93

Thanks to the fine work of the Bit Conjurer, an innocuous entry on a local music board and my tenacity that comes witha rekindled cult-rock flame, I have acquired most of the recorded output of Current 93, the umbrella under which operates one David Tibet. Current 93 is a difficult sell to the uninitiated. Sure, Tibet has perhaps the most breathless, antiquarian poetry slam delivery in the underground, and the music usually swings widely between set-the-effects-pedals-to-11 Industrial sludge, or melodramatic Celtic-esque folk delivered with such passion that it makes Tom Jones seem reserved.

But I unabashedly love it. Tibet somehow does gothic perfect. I feel sad for the Death of the Corn! I am calmed to my sinews with the 22-minute harmonium drone on "Sleep Has Its House." I want to join in his Maypole insouciance at nah-nahing Christ one minute, and weeping in the ivy covered ruins of the Early Church of Anglia over His wounds the next. Current 93 speaks to some unrealized gothic "GAVE UPON MY OTHERNESS" pretention I will not release.
The album that did it for me was 1988's Earth Covers Earth, which according to AMG, is one of the albums least popular works. It happened at a transition between Throbbing Grstle-ine niose and his obsession with Gnosticism, whihc seems to be , in Tibet's practice, the 180 from populat agnosticism (an intellectual disinterest in God) - Tibet is VERY into Christ. Not Jesus, mind you, there are trace few parables to be found in the Current 93 librabry, but an endless train of John the Baptist wild visions and exhortations about the blue gates of heaven and what not. There are children singing on one of the early tracks, which is an understandable deal-killer to most, but track two "Hourglass for Diana" still does it for me. Its a simple enough thing at the beginning: stridently strummed guitar, a lone cello playing up the spook noir factor and Tibet's unrelenting sermon which gets angry at teh 3:30 mark when violins and tin whistles join in the weirdness. I listened to it this morning agin for the first time in a decade, and it still stirs the blood like when I first played it on a whim during my afternoon slot during my college DJ days.

To me it epitomises the Current 93 thing. Feral and wild yet delightfully, Englishly contained. Flowery and furious. Ancient and Contemporary.
Current 93 - Hourglass For Diana