GO TEAM: Say My Name Triumphant

 

MP3: Say My Name - La Cygne

ALBUM STREAM:

Say My Name returns with Say My Name 2, an album that finds the Kid utilizing a grandiose pallet of intentions and ideas that hit the mark every single time.

Each track tells a story unique to your imagination, bursting with back handed pimps, gash fountain babes and drugs that haven't even been invented yet... or at least that's what I hear. Honestly what is so fascinating about SMN's music is that it's entirely open to interpretation, but is so brilliant that even the biggest village idiot has boost towards "getting it".

Take for example two of the Kid's all-star collaborators on this LP: Kenneth Kupfer's long fingered, skull cane ladden artwork for the cover makes complete sense, as does Range Life Records honcho and not-frequently-enough FY!GT! contributor Zach Hangauer's Wonder Woman vs. injustice video for single "La Cygne" (available for viewing below). It's seriously worth investing in a project of Say My Name inspired art projects, but in the meantime it's beyond worth investing in Say My Name 2 - and you can September 20th when it's available for digital consumption.

"German Love" by Starfucker

MP3: Starfucker - German Love

NOTE: Today's contribution comes from Zach Hangauer, who has been missed around these blogging parts. Hopefully he is enjoying some love at this moment, German or not. Fuck yeah!

If the mid-70's Kraftwerk boys sang a verse without the vocoder and then Weezer, a year before the Blue Album, sang the octave-up response, you'd have the gist of "German Love". That there is anything more going on, any brilliance in the structure or a mixologist's melange of sounds and styles - much less drums on full-blast A/C, much less that Portland art-collage wink wink - is gravy, frosting, whipped fucking cream.

"German Love" is the only Starfucker song I've heard, so I have no idea if they are one-hit wonders, but the more I think about it, the more I'm certain they know what's up. Even the words, "German Love" spark sparks. The "German" part is famously literal, wracked by philosophical passions but incapable of expressing them casually. And the "Love" part is the most open, earnest, vulnerable passion we feel. So Starfucker channels Kraftwerk to sing "German Love, I will give it to you/ give it to you/ give it to you" like hungry robots, as though repeating the desire will fulfill it. And then they bop their mop-tops and froth their Weezer falsettos into "But she won't have a thing to do with me/ to do/ to do with me", full of teenage - twenty-something - universal longing, howling wolves by way of a boy's choir. Need a cherry on top? Having set the stage, Starfucker throws the two themes together, the Capulets and the Montagues, desire and defeat, all intermingled like it ain't no thing, like indie-rock pulls off drama like this all the time, so effortlessly, so puzzle- solving-perfect.

So what is this? Synth-pop? Indie-rock? Ganking tween from the tweens for a stoned and boozy Art School party? Acoustic guitarelectronica? There aren't more compressed drums mixed with more diffuse cymbals anywhere on MySpace Music - they've totally flipped it. 10 years of digital Portastudios and we're finally making sense of the way it sounds. I'm wondering if this is the palette for the rest of the record too? D.I.Y. pumped through the digital makeover machine except now there's bands that are too fucking savvy to let it neutralize them.

"German Love" sounds like a glass ceiling busting, like the romance between digital and analog is finally getting past the sniffing-butt stage. It's "Power to the People" seized by people ready to wield it. And they're three kids from Portland! And they're packing maracas!

"Starfucker" is released September 23rd from Badman Recording Co.

GO TEAM: Dri

MP3: Dri - Don't Wait

NOTE: Today's contribution comes from Mr. Busy: Zach Hangauer.
I asked him to do a write up on "Don't Wait", a song from Dri's "Smoke Rings", which came out today. He released this record and I wanted to support it in any way possible, as it is beyond fantastic. It also introduces a new but long overdue feature here on the blog, the companion to our "FUCK YEAH" posts: GO TEAM. These will pop up every now and then, varying from hometown heroes (aka anything Connecticut) to words from the people involved with the jam. So without further delay, enjoy this post. Go team.

"Don't Wait" by Dri
Produced by Josh Powers
from the album "Smoke Rings" out now

The way we did this record was by picking out tracks a few of our talented local producer and deejay friends had put together and then arranged them so Dri could step up and slay them. Some we had for six months before recording and by the time we recorded they were pure flow. A few others we got very last minute and "Don't Wait" was definitely one of those. Josh Powers, bless his old-school soul, is a procrastinator and he promised, promised, promised and then - finally - delivered.

At the time Dri was recording "Smoke Rings", White Flight was finishing recording his next record in Catskills, New York and was getting ready to make his first visit back to Lawrence in two years. Justin and Dri, as all you Anniversary fans know, were not only a couple once, but a couple who, by virtue of their coupling, broke up the band. You can feel the weight of their history in "Don't Wait", especially in the second verse where Dri takes a step back and sings, all Sly-Stoned, my favorite round of lyrics on the record: "The Universe couldn't stop it/ And it didn't try", and "I love you more/ because you are the one who set me free."

She had just talked to Justin on the phone. She was thrilled, as we all were, to see him after two years. She hung up the phone and knew she had to write this song. I imagine that's where the chorus came from - being filled with this flood of feelings and thinking "If I don't take care of this now, it could get lost forever." "Don't wait", she thought to herself. And she didn't.

{purchase dri recordings from the range life shop}

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.

Casiotone For the Painfully Alone

MP3: Casiotone For the Painfully Alone - Graceland

NOTE: Today's blog comes from the amazing Zach Hangauer, who runs the brilliant label Range Life. They released White Flight's self titled debut, which I talked about right here. Fuck yeah.

Man, I love the song "Graceland". The way the melody ebbs in sadness and flows in anticipation, expressing exactly what's being sung. Hearing it as a kid - did anyone's parents not own this? - it made me long to be grown up and to know girls who could crush you by "brushing their hair from their forehead". Listening to it now, it's a diamond-in-the-rough, a gleaming, chiseled jewel of pure American Pop: road trips, Elvis, movie stars, fathers and sons, love and loss. It's almost too perfect.

Which makes it perfect for CFTPA. If there's a common thread to Casiotone songs it's that his heart is in the right place but something's forever awry. Like Thom Yorke in "Everything In It's Right Place", Owen Ashworth can make you feel like even the possibility of order is disconcerting. And grant him this: if he wanted to, he could rip this fucking song apart, singing it in a roar instead of a growl, shattering every little poetic line with a wrecking-ball of desperate, raw feeling. You can sense him wanting to - a grown man crushing a childhood relic, taking his world-weariness and busting up the nose of everything Sophisticated and Sensitive. But as much as I would enjoy the catharsis of hearing that (perhaps live? - Casiotone fans should conspire to get Owen totally bombed before playing and see if he won't shatter - I mean absolutely fucking demolish - this song), the tack he takes, I think, is the savvier one.

Gone is Paul Simon's baby-boomer crushed idealism, sad and sweet, and in it's place is a voice so aching it's agitated, honoring a lullaby of lost love through barely-contained gritted teeth. And isn't this us? I mean, think of the real Graceland now, how sold-out, dumbed-down, corrupt and lame it's become. It's about one step cooler than Disneyland. It's silly to even fathom it now as a place of redemption. Perhaps it's disdain for the way our parents, the Baby Boomers, have allowed things that were once cool (including themselves) to become so selfish and tasteless and shallow. Think of how different they are from how we are - how they all joined fraternities and sororities and got married in their 20's and voted for Reagan and brought their kids up on McDonald's. And think of how it impossible it seems sometimes to really find love. And how embarassing and shadey our Government is. And how little we get paid compared to what we have to pay. And all the commercials that bombard us. And how so much of what we know is meaningful somehow keeps turning to mush.

Casiotone knows all this. And by covering "Graceland", he's taken it upon himself to fight back. Nothing's sacred, Boomers. His "Graceland" isn't as pretty, sure, but it's real and that, right now, is our currency. It's for us that the drums come on like a staccato march, some home-brewed Timbaland, a lo-fi call to action. For us that lovelornness is recast as nerve-wracked. And for us the ending cacophony which would never be "received" by Memphis or Paul Simon or our parents. Fuck Graceland, seriously, shit's getting way too heavy. We've got to find somewhere new, start fresh and do the whole shebang right this time.

I wonder what Casiotone calls his apartment?

{buy casiotone for the painfully alone recordings on insound}