Earth - Phase 3: Thrones And Dominions

The internet is a truly magnificent tool for the burgeoning muso - a vast, aggrandizing, jungle of history, subjectivity, and enough illegal audio to consume a lifetime or two. The latter in fact, is exactly my problem, as I've owned the paragraph-adjacent album for over 1 1/2 years now but have only in the past weeks given a proper listen. On one hand, I feel like a spoiled grifter with my complete Residents and Current 93 mp3 discographies; on the other hand... let's face it - I missed out on tasting any hint of accessibility these records may have had in their original run at ye local wax shoppe. Beyond that, I'd probably be a bit more than bitter and jaded had I spent the small fortune necessary to acquire the stockpile of nuclear horseshit you may know as "inessential Residents". Need a head on that brew? Whatever Happened To Vileness Fats, Our Finest Flowers, The Tunes Of Two Cities, Diskomo 2000, both American Composer Series albums and plenty more. Yeck.

But anyway, I digressed a while ago, and the point is: while the internet is a fantastic (albeit overwhelming) resource, all too often it leads me to utterly neglect some of the tastiest pies on my windowsill - on this occasion it's drone-doom heroes Earth's 3rd full length, the aptly titled Phase 3. About 3 years back, I decided to give drone-doom a chance, and with my love of chronology, started with the Extra-Capsular Extraction EP and the Earth 2 full-length only to be slam-fucked in the face with boredom. I couldn't imagine how anyone could enjoy this stuff and moved onto Sunn O)))'s White 1 with a slightly better outcome. Skip ahead another 2 years and I've garnered up quite a bit of patience through extended Merzbow and Khanate sessions - enough to get through Earth 2 without a nod of the head or a droop of the eyelids. As for enjoyability however, I can't bite my tongue for indie-cred, it's a boredom sandwich with average condiments; the meat of the affair being the song "Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine": 27 minutes of fuzzy nothingness. Why? Regardless, I was intrigued by a few reviews on metal-archives.com for Earth's followup, the decidedly more "rockin" Pentastar, so I picked up that and the aforementioned Phase 3 for cheapsies at a barrel scraping rec-shop upstate.

BUT THEN. The Nurse With Wound list rolls into my life on it's bodacious 2-wheeler and consumes my life with bad-boy sex and wild nights lit by the glow of my monitor.

And here we are today, talking about the greatness that is Phase 3. If you skipped every bit of text up to this point, I should advise you that we have reached THE SLIGHTLY MORE IMPORTANT SECTION OF THIS ENTRY: the descriptor!

If Earth 2 was a monolithic block of fuzz and Pentastar was rockin', then Phase 3 is what we could solely consider a monolithic block of rock. Essentially, this record combines the weight and droning atmospheric touches of the debut with the plodding, fuzzed-out rock tendencies of the sophomore release to completely blow my mind with awesomeness. Seriously, the mix of primordial sub-Sabbath riffage with the noise of Skullflower and the panged contemplation of Fushitsusha makes this disc an aural cake frosted with guitar fuzz par deliciousness.

http://www.mediafire.com/?xzejnddmxjz

Hey, is it just me, or has my writing become a lot less anarchic and a lot more stuffy than it was when I started? Have I sold out? I'll hold a poll later.
In the meantime, both Lexicon Devil and DAR took their final bows just a day apart, so I suggest you give 'em both a look. They both gave me a lot of good reading, albeit of entirely different varieties.

Dawson MEGAPOST Addendum

I have impending blisters on my heels. Or my... lower calves? The area of foot-relative flesh adjacent to my wayward toes. I can't remember whether the term "heel" is in reference to the bottom of the foot or the you know what no one gives a shit I'll start over.

I have new boots! They're 20-eye towers of excess from legendary podiatrist Dr. (Acronym) Marten himself - currently digging their crisp, plastic-y folds into the aforementioned mystery regions of my feet with a tireless abandon only patience and big, horribly infected blisters will tame. With that, I feel obligated to imbibe from the text reservoir to bring to your attention how overtly punk rock this boot transition has been. Y'see, my last pair were purchased at the semi-local Army/Navy shoppe a week prior to beginning my first semester at the community college I haplessly agreed to enlist in after discovering I was too damn poor to afford any of the top-tier art colleges I was accepted to (40K grants notwithstanding). Little over a year and a half later, those 150 USD kicks built to protect America like foot-condoms for our chillun' on foreign soil fucking SPLIT from the soles like I'd spent the past year on a rocky plane of heightened gravity. So then I was like "SO MUCH FOR AMERICA, HUH?", dropped out of school, began working full time and picked up these working man's boots to conquer the remainder of my life with. Oi!

S'anyway, I just realized yesterday what a disservice I did to the few readers I have by not including this delicious little morsel of scratchy, vaguely funky, crispy, post-punk perfection in my Dawson MEGAPOST of a few months prior. "MEGAPOST"?? YEAH, MORE LIKE MEGAFRAUD!!! I don't know, shut up. This EP is great, albeit arguably inessential if you own the holy trinity of Dawson lengthy-players already. What I didn't realize until recently however, is what the missing ingredient from my Scot-Punk equation was - the UK's bIG fLAME. If I'm not just 100 years late to figuring this one out, I urge any fans of the Minutemen, The Ex, or Dog Faced Hermans to give their post-humous compilation Rigour a listen - I'll probably give it a place here in the near future, even.

http://www.mediafire.com/?52wiajygmwk

Romping Egos is a not-so-hefty 6+ minutes, so it may confuse you that it required such a surplus of text to introduce it, but on the other hand, most of you just skipped directly to the link. YER SCROLLING FINGER ACHE, HUH? FUCK YOU! Listen to that insane guitar tone, though. Sounds like it would lacerate your fingertips and give you tetanus, no?

Rites Of Spring - s/t

So you might notice that I haven't updated in forever.

As such, here are a list of things of unfortunates you may attribute to the reasoning behind this:

1.) Detoxing
2.) Friend dying a pointless and abrupt death
3.) Dropping out of college
4.) Working constantly
5.) Having my license suspended for not obliging to a court date I was never informed of through the reliable ol' postal service
6.) Having that court date as a result of an extraordinarily rare production anomaly that wouldn't allow my car to pass inspection via the computer that reads my odometer since last battery replacement
7.) General disillusionment, loneliness, and unrest due to distaste for the tradition of American life, ongoing lack of companionship, and the sloshy, ugly, mess that defines a New York winter, respectively

NOW MIX AND MATCH FOR MERRIMENT

Needless to say, I'm not really prepared to deliver my usual stew of lame wordplay and awful strikethrough-text based jokes - but wait, here's one that would've predated this sentence if I hadn't called attention to it's absence beforehand:

Needless to say, I wonder if anyone has made a lame pun involving the word "needless" and the phrase "needle-less"

So we're all really anticipating the next round of those ever-rib-tickling strikethrough text gimmicks, but today you'll just have to settle for one of those albums I feel is topical at the moment - Rites Of Spring's s/t album. 13 songs of disillusionment, longing, nostalgia, hopefulness, introspection, sentimentality, and heartache, all conceived with a gorgeously undated sound that "kicked off the now glamourized "emo" subculture".
- Me, 2006

No one actively participates in the "emo subculture" anymore, do they?

http://www.mediafire.com/?ncu3ynnno2y

Oh, and if it makes any difference to you, this goes up on my figurative "top numeral of all time" list since it's been keeping me company since I was 16.

Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender

I've been planning to detail and share the exploits of early Shimmy Disc quynamic quintet Fly Ashtray and their first long-player, Clumps Take A Ride for a week or two, now, but when one witnesses a multitude of mud wasps take up residence in a grown man's urethra finds a deliciously engaging new album saturating his earbuds, one is obligated by the laws of human nature to cancel any prior engagements to share word of one's find on one's shitty, inconsistent music blog. Anyhoo, today's star is the less-than-obscure, likely Pitchfork approved, Jimmy Kimmel Show-guest-starring, and certainly less eardrum battering debut by Joanna Newsom - a harp strumming 20-something lass WHO CAN STRUM MY HARP ANYTIME YOUKNOWUDIMSAYIN' HEUHVFHf with a mouthful of wonderfully poetic lyrics and a throatful of Betty Boop's vocal chords. Sound like an unappealing trait? Try braving The Crucifucks' discography beforehand. It'll certainly make her unconventional timber and cadence a walk in the park or atI'D TAKE A WALK IN HER PARK IF Y - alright that's quite enough blue commentary masked with strike-out text.
The music itself alternates between beyond delicate harp picking world music-esque folksy numbers to noisier, oddly tuned piano and harpsichord based songs (if that gives you any indication of the harp tracks' fragility) without a dabble or a venture into the percussion realm.
So why the EXTRAORDINARILY SOUGHT AFTER place in my blog?
The songwriting, maaaaaaaaaaan. Totally top-fucking-notch songwriting here. As much as I love being Mr. Subversive To Mainstream Culture, there's not a sour note on here. Brilliant little shards of harp twinkles and vocal/lyrical hooks get caught in your cranium on first listen like little aural thistles and help anchor the listener (me) down for future listens, during which the full majesty (hyperbole) of the songs come to light (penis).
Without further uh-dew:

http://www.mediafire.com/?dcimyojmrym

Also: I urge you to slap down a few greenbacks to pick up her catalog. Newsom's an active artist with an easily obtained handful of albums to ingest - you'll have no excuse when the ePopo bash in your head with internet justice if you don't use my upload as a sampling, then be rid of it. Saying these things will lift my responsibility in the matter, right?

Alsoalso: the entirety of the web is seemingly obsessed with her hindquarters.
Yep.

The Thrown Ups - Melancholy Girlhole

Before we begin, I have a little experience I'd like to share. Like anyone who's ever scoured the internet for sessions of brain-expansive acculturation, I opened youtube and headed for the Linkin Park videos. In my quest to befriend kindred spirits across pre-teen America, I accidentally let slip what I now know is a particularly unpopular opinion amongst Linkin Park fans. Observe, if you will, my stance on the song "Hands Held High":

Ha ha ha ha ha... this is the cheesiest heap of bullshit I've heard in a looooong time. AHHHHHHHHHH MEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNN AHHHHHHHHHHHHH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNN - Are you fucking serious?

Now instead of kindly agreeing to disagree, those who were near unfathomably at ends with my harmless comment rebutted with libelous claims about not only my intellect, but my sexuality, interpersonal relations, and even my psychosomatic development! What shame I felt! But it was the following that lanced my heart with truest aim:

god you must one of the f*****s that cash their check at the back laughing asking for respect

As well as:

shut the fuck up you must be one of the bitches that cash their checks and sk all the others for respect

Two individuals distanced by miles - one accusation skimming across their souls. Maybe I'm just a tad outside of the Linkin Park hip-mispelling-fluent fan club, but what the fuck am I reading? Shouldn't insults be somewhat universal when directed at strangers purely for retort? Or at least, be topical enough to make sense of? I mean, if it weren't for the context, I'd find it pretty damn impossible to to feel derided by these words at all. What's even more unsettling to me is the fact that I have - believe it or not - cashed hundreds of cheques at the bank (where else?) and mayhaps, once or twice, emitted a bemused chuckle or two at the fact that I have money to do stuff with. But "respect"? If by "ask" they're implying that I verbalize my desire to be treated in a dignified manner by the clerks, than no, I have never hit the spirit. Of course I expect courtesy, and as far as I'm concerned, the tellers deserve the same.

But enough puzzling over life's greatest mysteries, let's talk about The Thrown Ups.

What we have here is the sole LP-size recording of the band best known for assembling the prime components of Mudhoney - Melancholy Girlhole. Now everyone in the entire universe knows that Mudhoney was a monotonous waste of time for the majority of their career, but don't let that chafe your keister - the Thrown Ups were an entirely different breed of punk-reactionaries, caught up somewhere in the primordial murk of Harry Pussy, the first Meat Puppets album, and the retarded blues-rock of Jon Spencer and Pussy Galore. Throw in some Happy Flowers-esque psychosis, too while you're at it also as well if you'd prefer. Melancholy Girlhole is 13 songs in little under 26 minutes of prime-cut, scatological rock-slop garbage that sounds a whole lot more fun and listenable than you'd expect from a collective whose initial goal was to "be a band that never practiced or wrote songs".
See for 'yaselvz:

http://www.mediafire.com/?nmyngmnnow3

Oh yeah, I also added an entry for Noothgrush, but since I started writing it in September, it didn't show up right after my post on Universal Congress Of. Shucks.
Oh, and here are the boys in adorable flower costumes:

Universal Congress Of - s/t

It's pretty rare that an album totally floors me upon first listen, but as far as exceptions go, this is the peat and the moss all in one. Little did I know when I ILLEGALLY DOWNLOADED THIS ALBUM FROM WITH NO INTENTION OF DELIVERING ROYALTIES TO THE LABEL OR ARTIST RESPONSIBLE that it was in fact, Saccharine Trust axeman Joe Baiza at the helm, laying down some fantabulously non-Greg Ginn-esque jazz-fuzz-noise madness. The selling point? Saccharine Trust is in the running for the "Steve Hyewz Top 10 Favorite Bands" list (of which I have not composed, nor have any immediate plans to), and by the end of their reign in '86, they'd never hit a sour note. And of course, I mean the "selling point" for you: my dear readers who take every bit of my internet indoctrined armchair-hipsterisms with blind faithfulness that could only described as "of biblical proportion".
Bullplop aside:
Universal Congress Of oddly enough, don't sound like much of logical progression for the Trust's awesome parting gift, 'We Became Snakes', but perhaps like the mythical 5th or 6th album if they were to continue their progression in the avant-jazz-rock vein sans Brewer's nasally weirdo vocals. In essence, Universal Congress Of was from the future!!! Like 1990 or something. I don't know.
But anyway, this album is an epic if I ever saw (heard) one. Composed of one mammoth sized track and a shorter, calmer exit track, to give you an idea of just how ridiculously epic this album is, the former -"A Certain Way"- looks the limitations of the 12" format right in the eye and mutters "I say fuck no to rules, man" before doing an hardflip 360, chugging a gatorade, and continuing its reign of awesome on the B-side. Aurally, it's pretty difficult to pigeonhole, with a dense, spaced-out, quasi-improvised jazz rock feel and a whole lot of crazy-ass soloing from Baiza and a cold, contemplative (yet groovin') atmosphere advanced strongly by the murky (not muddy) production values.

http://www.mediafire.com/?mm2ezk3xexx

Prior to this entry, I had no idea Universal Congress Of continued to put out albums after the followup EP, 'This Is Mecolodics', so expect an update concerning the remainder of their catalog's quality at some point. Next on the list: Noothgrush's Erode The Person LP

Noothgrush - Erode The Person

PRESENTING:
The "My Most Loathed Song Of The Day" feature!
Today's winner: The Heights - How Do You Talk To An Angel Lyricist Stephanie Tyrell: "Well! Now that I've penned some of the absolute most repugnant and posed lyrics of all time, who wants to croon them in an embarrassingly pussy manner?"
Vocalist Jamie Walters: "Ooh! I do!"
Lyricist Stephanie Tyrell: "Great! How's the music coming along husband Steve and composer Barry Coffing?"
Composer Barry Coffing: "Oh, just fantastic. We've already thrown in a bunch of sax to give it a caucasian r'n'b air the kids are sure to adore, but it still feels a little too consistent..."
Composer Steve Tyrell: "I think I've got it: why don't we strew emotionally irrelevant cock-rock guitar solos throughout THE ENTIRE SONG??"
Lyricist Stephanie Tyrell: "Great idea, honey! Just make sure they sound like stock sound samples that pay no mind to the overall composure."
Wikipedia: In 1993, the song was nominated for a FUCKING EMMY for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music and Lyrics".

In other news, Noothgrush were a Californian sludge-doom band who formed in 1994 and according to research from the finest institutes on the East coast, phuckin' rawked. If you've ever been subject to the filthy, druggy, frowning antics of sludge Machiavellis Eyehategod, you've essentially heard a less contemplative version of Noothgrush with far fewer odysseys into uptempo punk rock riffage. Despite treading through a bunch of rubble (ie 'broken ground' hurrrr...), these guys did a damn good job of taking a relatively limited style, honing it into something fresh and powerful, and then releasing it to the blessed in ridiculously limited quantities.
Erode The Person is 5 tracks of king-tier sludge truckin' it like molasses through the fog of the distinctive New Orleans sound (ie ugly, plodding, drug-influenced punk-ish doom metal with raspy screams and southern tinged riffage) in a way I'd rate above even the primordial soup of Buzzov*en and 13. In other words, prime Sabbath
But not Grief. Those dudes are a forkin' goldmine to themselves.

http://www.mediafire.com/?iwzzznmn24j

@ Señor N∅: I scooped up the Extreme Music From sets up to Women, and they're all pretty excellent! I'd say the Africa set is probably my favorite thusfar, but I haven't been able to find a download of Russia yet. I think I'll end up buying 'em all by the end of the week, though.

@ Everyone else: [conclude post]