Week 11: Recrap

This week I was going to write about the Avett Brothers, but even though I’m sure you are all sitting on the edge of your seats waiting for this, I’m going to put it off another week. This week I will do what I do best, be redundant. See, I believe in words and I enjoy playing with them, toying with meanings, twisting and turning the nouns and verbs until they tune in to the right frequency and get that crystal clear reception of something that is completely contradictory, but filling nonetheless, a languich you could call it. And I eat any variety of languiches I make up myself and digest them for hours before passing them on to you as the doo doo you mostly see on these my posts. But the act of playing with my own crap hasn’t bored me yet and I still laugh alone when my food turns into shit. And sometimes I have to eat my own words and there is some fun in that doo. So searching for the perfect languich I will jump on DDs suggestion from last week like I like to jump on things – for no good reason at all.

Last week DD commented: “Personally, I’d love to have heard you say a bit more about some of the things you’ve linked, either why they’re important to you (though that’s come out sideways) or some contextualization.” I would love to have paid attention to DD’s verbal conjugation in the Perfect Conditional, but since English is my second language, I heard it as a Simple Future and I’m therefore responding in the Progressive Present. So I am writing this and I hope DD will love to hear it. And that being tensed, let this be a warning to all who do not like extreme verboseness, excessive nonanity, or superlative adjectivation, and who might be entertaining the idea of asking me for synonimization of any kind, be it clarification, explanation, detailing, contextualization, or any form of elaboration, improvement, melioration, amendment, emendation, correction, revision, reform, replacement, rehabilitation, reviviscence, or revival. However I will make any form of palingenesis short and sweet. I will not bullshit when I’m palingeneticising.

So DD, since I dedicate these posts only to snake gang members and I am aware that New Zealand has been battling the inevitable snake invasion, I hereby poison you, D Snake Invader. And D Snake Invader, this one goes out to you buddy, go get yourself a jean vest.

• Week 1: Rodrigo y Gabriela – I saw a flyer for these guys on a street post, kind of a run of the mill local flyer, that was the first I heard of them. Never could I have imagined what Gabriela can do on the guitar. In Gabriela’s hand the guitar seems to just float in between her arms as if suspended by the magnetic field created by her hands as they move at hummingbird speed around the guitar. I felt like I did when I was 13 and finally got a full set of 6 strings to replace my previous set of 1 string. It would border on being a circus act if it wasn’t for the fact that they can write damn beautiful instrumental pieces combining melodic structures that act as hooky traps in the midst of rhythms that seamlessly meld the intricate patterns of both flamenco and thrash metal. Go see them if they play live near you.
• Week 2: Café Tacvba – These guys have been around for a while now, and they are a major act, filling stadiums all throughout Latin America, but to me they still put out some of the best material Latin American music has to offer (though some waning was detected in their last record, which not surprisingly immediately won them a Grammy). Los Tacvbos have done music the way I’ve always felt it should be done – they’ve explored the boundaries of traditional genres, and have stepped right over them, always finding some worthwhile reward on the other side. Basically they’ve succeeded while doing musically whatever the hell they want. If I would recommend just one record it would be the Reves/YoSoy double album which includes a completely instrumental disc that is very easy to wade into, but which has a lot of very deep trenches.
• Week 3: everybodyfields – From the Appalachian mountains, Johnson City TN. Constantly touring, they will play anywhere. They just got signed to the label the Avett Brothers run (which I will discuss next week). Basically they are two songwriters writing with the wisdom of 100 years, but singing with the spirit of their youth. Many of their songs have a cinematic quality to them, like old movies dug up from some lost attic in the mountains. In ‘TVA’, a song about a family being forced to move to make way for a hydroelectric dam, Sam begins “When I was a boy back in Tennessee, I was told I was too young to understand, but I can remember just like yesterday, watching daddy’s head sink deep down in his hands.” In ‘His Pontiac’ Jill starts, “Mama there’s a boy outside; he’s come to take me away, that old Pontiac, looks like a Cadillac today.” They have two records, both of which are a must, Halfway There: Electricity and the South, and Plague of Dreams.
• Week 4: Shredders – I’ll say it again, the only valid reason to play electric guitar in the 21st century is to shred on youtube.
• Week 5: Waterdigger – I just love their ‘Piece of Shit Volvo Station Wagon’ song. I find there aren’t’ enough funny songs about cars out there getting plugs, so I plug this one.
• Week 6: Dexter Romweber – Dexter was one half of the Flat Duo Jets who some of you might remember, he has gained some recent notoriety because Jack White mentioned him as his principal influence, but he has influenced countless artists who’s primitivism and attention to musical history can be traced back to Dexter’s explorations (musical and otherwise) thru the darkest corners of 50s rock and roll and its roots. But the bottom line is that Dexter has been a truly admirable musician. A tireless performer and recording artist who will play anywhere and record into anything with anyone who might be around as if his life depended on it, which might be true. A documentary about the Flat Duo Jets has just been released. And Dexter just released a record of solo piano compositions appropiately titled Piano. He plays with mad conviction and surrenders to the music in a way that has made people think he is crazy. This has earned him comparisons to the usual crazies with guitar (Erickson, Johnston, Barrett, etc), but this misses the point as it usually does, because Dexter might be a bit tortured and impulsive, but not crazy since he somehow managed to avoid the real madness of the musical big time by breaking up the Flat Duo Jets right after their first major label record came out. That record, Lucky Eye, however, may be his most accessible one and it is the one I would recommend.
• Week 7: Billy Sugarfix and Brian Risk – I’m not familiar with any other work by Brian Risk. But Billy is a songwriting maniac. His band Evil Wiener puts out some of the most charming pop I’ve heard since de Schmog and they will get a post here one of these weeks. He also has a custom song writing business and I commissioned him to write a song for Ms. Anaconda’s birthday a few years back, which made for a gift that I still think I will never be able to top. His take on songwriting is refreshing, unpretentious, cute, fun and simple, combine that with his sense of humor and you got some of the cutest stuff imaginable. I mean who else writes a rap song about their tiny hippie town. I recommend you commission him to write a song for your honey or your mom.
• Week 8. Roberto didn’t recommend anything, just made us read all his crap without giving anything back. Bastard.
• Week 9. Can’t recommend and predict at the same time. But I can’t believe no one said anything about my awesome snow globe!! You all better start giving Electramummy some props.
• Week 10. Lots of recommendations last week, and you can still see it on the sidebar, so go to it and ask me a question if you have a question about any of the stuff listed on my top 10. Right now my vowels are empty, and my consonants are getting cold.

That’s it. Have a great weekend. Remember next week, The Avett Brothers.