Looking back.

MP3: Best Coast - Sun Was High (So Was I) (Daytrotter session)

Today, Daytrotter released a session from Best Coast that was recorded back in the year of 2009. It's all old songs, pre-drummer and pre-Crazy for You and it reminded me of why I fell for this band in the first place. And you should download it, it's really great: http://www.daytrotter.com/dt/best-coast-concert/20031236-3738209.html

And I do like Best Coast, I truly do. I had a great time buying the first pressings of the vinyl singles as they were released and thought that the songs were truly special. "Sun Was High (So Was I)" is still an incredible track, their best even. "Crazy for You", while polished, is still a cool album. But eventually the whole thing feels shtick: like yeah your cat and weed are cool, but maybe it's time to try writing a new type of song? I mean we all have cats.

But did anyone else (bloggers, fans, brahs) feel betrayed by this chick? It's like she used the "cred" of P4K/Gorilla vs Bear/Stereogum/Fuck yeah! Go team! to basically become an "indie" (ugh) pop star. It seemed like she was trying to make all the mainstream things and people that she was into okay to like so she wouldn't be judged by a set of friends and peers that had been acquired from her time in Pocahaunted.

Don't be surprised when the full length gets a re-release on Atlantic or some shit corporate label and we're being force fed products with "Boyfriend" played over the adverts.

In fact, I just got wind of the new video from her upcoming major label debut. Let's watch:


Our retort?

The return of the mighty Mos Def?

STREAM: Mos Def - Life In Marvelous Times (via RCRD LBL)

Typically when delving into the pasts of my fellow bloggers, most of them found or fell in love with hip hop from the Wu-Tang Clan or any early 90's positive mc group that made a minor splash. For me, I was sucked in by Black Star's self-titled Rawkus debut (and sadly, only record) featuring Mos Def and Talib Kweli. From there, I not only followed their careers, but most of the Rawkus roster, as well as enjoying mix tapes from my friend in high school who would fuel my thirst for quality flows.

Soon after graduation, the mix tapes stopped, and everybody I was following had lost the spark that made them special and unique, mostly falling into the same troubles that made mainstream hip hop so boring and insipid. Mos Def followed up the phenomenally brilliant debut "Black On Both Sides" with a strange and beyond lackluster mess in the rock/blues/rap album "The New Danger". It was so hard to stand behind the man, as he seemed to be distracted by his new acting career, content to phone in what made him so special and promising to begin with. Things only seemed to go further downhill on 2006's unlistenable and artless "True Magic".

He then left Geffen, who had acquired MCA who had acquired Rawkus for Downtown Records, a very credible and very consistent record label. There seemed to be some freshness in the air but it still didn't seem enough to forgive the sins of the past.

When I saw the news today of a brand new Mos Def track, I found myself curious but expecting the worst, a dramatic change from my late teens when the news of anything Mos Def would stop the world and fill me with such excitement. Clicking without paying attention, I was then treated to a whispered promise fulfilled in "Life In Marvelous Times", with it's spastic future-like beat and a man who sounds well rested and hungry for the promise he once held. I fucking love it, I really do. It feels great to have faith again, and if a second song can follow up on this feeling, I will be his biggest fan once more. One can only hope the forthcoming "The Ecstatic" can bring everything I dream of and more.

Photographic evidence.

Recently, Anti released the album cover for Jolie Holland's upcoming "The Living and the Dead", and it looks excellent as always. She has always put herself on her album covers, mostly in photographs but once in a drawing. The point is I can't imagine seeing some other design without her in it because she has established this trend so well, it's pretty much set in stone.

Most solo artists do put themselves on the cover, and bands get in on the fun too. I'm not sure which I prefer, because a nice photograph can really tell you about who's craft you're listening to and really set the tone, but there is so much wonderful art in the world to be shared. I guess I could go either way, but it depends on the artist. If I were to personally record and release a record, which choice would I make?

What about you? What kind of album covers do you dig on?

Paul Westerberg for 49 cents only.

As some of you may have heard, earlier this week musical jesus Paul Westerberg released "49:00", an album that's almost 49 minutes of a musical collage, to be purchased digitally for only (...wait for it...) 49 cents. Insane right? I've never bought a song for that much, so to get an album's worth of gold is quite the deal.

It's been about an hour since I got this, and now I am here looking back at what just happened: despite it's running time, "49:00" comes and goes like that. The whole thing is one mp3, to keep you from skipping ahead, in case you don't like music, and I think it strangely works here. It's easier to treat it as a song than an album. Despite the fact that certain songs start before one even stops and can sound completely different, this has a lot of flow. Even the covers medley that just about closes up shop makes sense here.

I've also read that people are finding that Paul has come into his own with this one, and I can see that. It's been a long time since we've heard any output from him (due to a screwdriver going through his hand, how metal) and now he hits us with this, a little more rock than we've seen from him in awhile, coming through as effortlessly as ever, doing something for fun but really being worth a damn aka succeeding at all troubles musicians seem to have lately.

Basically, you should buy this. Even if it was awful, it's 49 fucking cents. The worst band on Earth is probably almost worth that... almost. But it's not the worst band on Earth: it's Paul Westerberg.

{purchase 49:00 from tune core}
{more information from paul's page}

Tilly and the Wall's newest trainwreck: not just audible bile anymore!

In an effort to stay current, I've decided to delay my planned mp3 post to focus on a video that came to my attention via the always wonderful Stereogum.

Today, they premiered a video for the new single "Beat Control" by Omaha's Tilly and the Wall. Now I must say, this is a real backwards leap in pop music, with rhymes written like they taken from a high school girl's diary who just discovered 80's night at her local teen center. I will shamefully admit that at one time I enjoyed the group's first record, but I mean seriously at this point, it's time to come clean: all of this cutesy rubbish is a gimmick right?

Take the video itself: their smiles look painted on, goofy for the sake of a teenage fanbase, dressed like complete retards peddling recycled keyboard drum beats and a lazy organ line. They even resort to pounding "the beat" into our heads forcefully instead of taking the time to actually write a respectable hook.

For what looks like 2 records now, the band took what people liked about them and saturated it into an unrecognizable mess, accepting the fact that they will never write anything timeless or worthwhile in their recording careers. I mean honestly guys, your fans are going to grow up and leave you for better records... are you prepared for the future? Judging from "Beat Control", I think it's safe to say not even in the slightest.

However, there is a small beam of hope: this is only a 7 inch single track, with no plans to put it on the band's upcoming full length, though something tells me that it will still be more of the same throw up they've been calling songs all this time. Pick this up? Fuck no.

Judge for yourself: @ sterogum

Welcome to the overhypedome!

NOTE: Today's essay comes from our boy Matt Giordano. To check out past essay "Cheese Metal - A Brief Memoir", click here. We'll be posting more of these in the future, and if you'd like to contribute shoot an email to unicorntastic@gmail.com. Word.

The vittula that is blog land has been squeezing some nasty shit out of its urethra lately. At first I expected it caught another case of blogmydia, but then I saw it was a new virus called "Vampire Weekend", presumeably the result of way too much PR money being inserted into that little hole. This "Vampire Weekend" virus may take a little while for the negative side effects to show, but once they do, you'll want to beat the fuck out of the twat that gave it to you. No topical solution can cure it, and in a few months, you'll become as soulless as the creators of it. Diagnosis: FUCK NO!

Cheese Metal - A Brief Memoir

NOTE: Today's blog comes from our bro Zach Hangauer, who is a world renowned hero of Lawrence, Kansas. Fuck yeah.

I'm trying to remember what my favorite songs were before I heard any cheese metal. "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off" - that was hot. I think Madonna was rocking "Open Your Heart" and Huey Lewis had "Stuck With You". "Parents Just Don't Understand" - what a joint, especially to a 5th grader, and how true - they really didn't. I wonder what my parent's pillow-talk was like when the Poison posters started going up...?

Two songs reached out of the boombox speakers with polished nails and pushed me hard against the wall: "Shot Through The Heart" and "Talk Dirty To Me". Choicer cheese metal songs were to come, for sure, but these were the sudden, startling Paul Revere's. There in my bedroom, listening to the Top 10 countdown instead of doing Social Studies homework, "Shot Through the
Heart" and "Talk Dirty To Me" made the purpose of my life clear: I was here to Rock! (That and do cab-slides down the driveway.) It's funny how rocking gets funnelled down to air-guitaring - I remember air-guitaring to the point of exhaustion, jumping off the bed, working miracles out of the frets of my imaginary neon Ibanez like some miniature C.C. DeVille. Well, maybe not min-... nevermind. I have to admit: all told, Poison was my jam. In retrospect I wonder if it wasn't because they were so over-the-top, so corporeally confident at the same time they looked like cartoon characters. It never once occurred to me that their bag-of-tricks was suspect, that their tough-guy-tattoos and flouncy-eyeliner played a debauchee's game between testosterone and estrogen, or that I, by the time I was their age - early 20's, mid 20's - would see the world not just fundamentally differently but kaleidoscopically so. I have no memory of ever looking at my wall of Poison posters and thinking "Well that's weird - they all look like chicks..."

Maybe it's because cheese metal perfectly aligned with the "fast" crowd in middle school, circa 1987. All the hot girls loved their long-haired, ripped-denim Supermen. All the cool guys loved all the hot girls. Next thing you know there's some grassy funk wafting around your 100th row seats at the Ampitheater and your girlfriends breasts are pressed against you hard cause the lights just went down and Poison, yes Poison, glorious Poison is about to twist your middle-school brain out of a tight jeans roll into a zippo sprayed with Aqua Net. Was it just a dream or did I see Kiss, Faster Pussycat, Warrant, Slaughter, and Poison in the flesh - ok, not flesh, but striped spandex - (or, for the tough-guys out there, what in their baggier form became Zubaz) - and love every screaming, strutting, breast-pressing minute of it?

To be fair, Poison had a great melodic sense. They were unabashedly major chord. They rocked you, but not too intensely. They tugged your heart strings from time to time. They perfectly navigated around every small explosion, not missing a note. Which isn't to say that I was right when I got in an argument with my best friend's older brother about the greatest guitar players of all time. Maybe, by 8th grade, I was old enough to know better but my crown went to C.C. DeVille. My best friend's brother thought maybe "Hendrix" was better, though his words were hard to make out through his floor-dropping heaves of laughter. Whatever. He also got a pretty good kick out of being informed I had a bunch of cheese metal posters up in my bathroom. Literally had to see it to believe it. The moment he hit the ground laughing that time - at my own house, with his '67 Mustang left idling in my driveway - I think I got the picture: time to get me some Bob Marley and some Doors. Yeah, I still had a year or two of penance to pay...

But this isn't supposed to be about the crash and burn of cheese metal in my life. It's supposed to be about the lift-off and the majestic heights we hit. Like those babes flashing in the "Pour Some Sugar On Me" video. Or that boa constrictor Slash pimps in "Patience". Or the MTV countdown to the premier of the "Sweet Child O' Mine" video, which gave me a fucking sanctuary of butterflies in my stomach and which was - maybe objectively? - pretty fucking all-right. Sleep-overs and "Headbanger's Ball". "Kickstart My Heart" with Mick Mars on that weird microphone. Samantha Fox in Playboy. The Counting Crows - wait, that was later. How about all those power ballads that somehow bridged an adult's juvenility with a kid's wonder. What was the apex? In my corner, it's "Every Rose Has It's Thorn". "I know that you'd be here right now/ if I could've let you know somehow." That's exactly what I wanted to say to every girl I loved and lost in puberty. But Brett Michaels gets the credit. I just put it on a bunch of mixtapes.