Showing posts with label The Gun Club. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Gun Club. Show all posts

10.22.2012

Halloween- HalloWoman Edition

Halloween- yes! The best international holiday ever, easy.
(except for maybe Thanksgiving, which I just learned Canadians also celebrate)
(and except my birthday)

So to help you celebrate- because I'm a giver, see?- I will put up a slew of unholy holiday-related songs.
Now, this song musically is not so dark or spooky-ooky. But, it is by the great (late- that's sorta Halloween-ish) Marty Robbins.

(download Devil Woman- Marty Robbins as you watch below)

Now, you kids these days, with your John E. Cash, or what have you... Sure, he's who all those kids- who are demanding candy already- would post for their Halloween songs. Sure, sure, "Ring of Fire"- but you already know about that song. Lord, you probably already have that song! So I give you this instead.

Or rather, these instead:


(maybe you can snag that one too.

And this one, you just gotta hear.



Listen to it- it's nuts! It has killing, stampedes, lightning, Mexico, lightning which performs a miracle, and the face of Jesus Christ- the OG Zombie- Respek!


12.07.2011

Infamous Anniversary

Since today's is an anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I am throwing this at you. Put it on blast-
Team America!; Team Isley!



Download Isley Brothers, "Ballad of the Fallen Soldier" here

I didn't say "blast" to be funny. It was an accident; yet, since it is a little bit funny, I will leave it.
Another happy accident: I googled 'peral harbor' first (to check if today was the day or not ... shameful not to know, isn't it?). What if it were called "Feral Harbor"?
Wouldn't that be wild?!?!

That's a feral pig, dummy.

Jay-Z sampled the Isley Brothers' "Ballad of the Fallen Soldier": the keyboard hook and some guitar...


And you know what? The hell with Jay-Z. That's right, I said it. Why is that fool rapping about marriage?
Just because he is married is not a good excuse!
I do not want to hear songs about marriage right now- that is why I am listening to the hip-hop radio station.
Only NPR stations give you less about marriage than hip-hop radio. Well, NPR talks all the time about GayMarriage (...liberals...) fair enough. But I thought I could count on rappers to uphold their fine tradition of pretending like love and ruinous heartbreak simply never happen.

What the fuck rap?!
You blew it.

10.30.2008

Futurist Revelations - the Second (secular) Coming - Be Thankful!

Yeeeeuh... another mix, matched so mean! This one is the originally planned mix for The Second (Secular) Coming: this one deals not with my colossal narcissism, but rather with the purity of spirit which is my Divinity Proper.
HELL YES!

Link it up : The Second (Secular) Coming.zip

As a mix, it moves from slow-burning but intense/driven (1-3), to sprawling dirty grandeur (4-5), quietism without passivity (6-8), a darkness (9-11) pefiguring The End and Resurrection (12-13). Quite a history here...


Here is the cast of characters, in the order in which you ought to listen to them:
1 Eternity Is Here *The Gun Club* Danse Kalinda Boom
2 Coded Language *Krust (Featuring Saul Williams)* Coded Language
3 The Prophet *The Make-Up* Untouchable Sound—Live
4 Revelations *Panthers* The Trick
5 Dead Souls *Joy Division* Permanent
6 My Body Is A Cage *The Arcade Fire* Neon Bible
7 City Of Refuge [Acoustic Version] *Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds* B-Sides And Rarities Volume I
8 Be Thankful For What You've Got (orignially by Devaughn - live cover) *Yo La Tengo*
9 Death To Everyone *Bonnie "Prince" Billy* I See A Darkness
10 Share the Fall *Roni Size and Reprazent (Grooverider's RMX)*
11 I Swear *Tulipomania*
12 Back *Alpha* Come From Heaven
13 I Am The Resurrection *The Stone Roses* The Complete Stone Roses

DOWNLOAD : The Second (Secular) Coming.zip


Share the Fall- sparse and epic. Like Fitzgerald, as 'read to me' (i.e. quoted) by Deleuze:
"twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No problem set — simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing." The sound of a faraway, lifeless planet: it bakes during the day and it freezes at night.

Body is a Cage: Church organs, giving the grand sweep, the operatic heights, appropriate to the Declaration of Divinity.


Eternity is Here: Once started, this song begins to instantly, insistently proclaim itself. Whipcrack drums, plaintive guitars. Its insistence is almost a prosyletizing.

Death to Everyone: see the cover for a picture of the aforementioned planet.



Lyrically, this songs does this:
"Stars turn, balls burn / Coming kids are raging

Death to everyone is gonna come / And it makes hosing much more fun"

"So strap me on and raise me high / Cause buddy I'm not afraid to die
But life is long and it's tremendous / And we're glad that you're here with us".

Dead Souls- Joy Division made this song, which later was covered by NIN (on "The Crow" Soundtrack). You know what this one sounds like. It sounds like JoyDiv, so how could it not go on a mix about the Second (secular) Coming?:
Ian Curtis died by his own hand (as did Jesus- well, His Dad asked Him to die, and He consented - since He is, in a mysterious but essential fashion, His own father. He consented to His own death: that is, He is a suicide),
and the Crow character COMES BACK FROM THE DEAD to avenge wrongs done him. And what is Divine Justice if not supernaturally aided punishment of the wicked?

DOWNLOAD : The Second (Secular) Coming.zip

Back- Alpha is always slept on: I told you this already. Some fantastic male crooning here; you'd do well to check it out if you like Rufus Wainwright, or the more sedate Morrissey even. This song has a hazy quality: incense floating through a still afternoon.
But In A Barn.
A barn with a record player. And records (for sampling): old ones, very scratchy and mellowed with age.

I = Resurrection- Manchester Madchester : Woodblock like the cowbell in a Will Ferrel SNL skit. "I put my raver-sized corduroy pants on the same way you do, mate: except when I put on my pants, I make GOLD RECORDS!" (cue laugh track)
(please?).

Coded Language - Man, when this one breaks, it B R E A K S out for real. Massive world consuming clattering drums. Some lyrics (By the great poet Saul Williams):
"Motherfuckers better realize, now is the time to self-actualize.
We have found evidence that hip hop's standard 85 rpm, when increased by a number of at least half the rate of it's standard, or decreased at a third of its speed, may be a determining factor in heightening consciousness.
[somehow, he is actually rapping all these words -
- believe, brudda, It Works]
Thus, in the name of:
Robeson, God's son, Hurston, Ahkenaton, Khalo, Kali, Whitman, Baldwin, Ghandi, Gibran, Shabazz, Hamer, Holiday, Davis, Coltrane, Morrison, Joplin, Gaye, Hathoway, Nostradamus, Nefertiti, Shiva, Ganesha, Yemaja, Kennedy, King, four little girls, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Marley, Cosby, Shakur, Those Still Aflamed, and the countless unnamed!"


By this point of the song, trust me, we are all aflamed. Lit up by millenia of song and millenia of thought, all compressed into (the Coded Language of) quantized drums. INTENSE.

DOWNLOAD : The Second (Secular) Coming.zip

Be Thankful- a mellow little interpretation of the ol' soul-ish/reggae-ish classic. Be Thankful that I put this on there. (You might even snap your fingers during it!) Yo La Tengo is supremely good at covers- get into it and see what I mean...

Revelations- Panthers started out super-Futurist, very much in the vain of !Nation of Ulysses!. The Kids wanted their revolution, by gum, and they were going to knock on the squares until they got one. Now, Panthers seems more gripped by the ennui of being a hipster who knows that he's a hipster, and who also knows what this means: they have become nearly paralyzed by awareness of self-awareness. But the music hasn't frozen - oh no - they have moved away from any formulaic punk and added that rad heavy stoner drone psych grind that the Kids these day like so well: more Black Sabbath and less !Nation!. It's a good mix- heavy, but still with momentum/propulsion.

DOWNLOAD : The Second (Secular) Coming.zip

DEATH TO ALL KINGS
LONG LIVE THE PRINCE OF PRINCES

9.26.2008

Mystery at the Gun Club

I know that you have all been slavering at the mouth, waiting for my next blog. It would have come sooner, but I have been busy. Busy traveling, and reading, and buying more music.

Download The Gun Club's 'Come Back Jim' on Mediafire

or, maybe Download The Gun Club's 'The Fire of Love'

I was recently chided for ‘still’ buying music, but I don’t mind.
Because I know I’m right; I'm in the black and all that. (See below for an apologia of music purchasing- it's not what you expect...)
Thinking that it is goofball to buy music is simply false; in fact, I might go so far to say it's a LIE!!

Download The Gun Club's 'The Lie' on Mediafire
Or watch it !LIVE! on Youtube:


Plus, what would I spend my money on instead? I am running out of room for thriftstore kicks. I have already constructed a Foucaultian counter-archive (that means ‘lots of odd books’ about prisons, sexuality, state institutions, ‘abnormal’ individuals, militaries, and history history history). You know that I would just spend the $16.25 (no sales tax) on stickers from the dollar store (or worse, dollar store hardware/tools), caviar from Asian Invasion, SEPTA tokens, ceramic knickknacks or bric-a-brac, etc.
(just reflect for a moment upon how good this last part of this last sentence sounds and looks: “Caviar from Asian Invasion” [‘a’ and ‘i’ make such a good vowel-team!], and just say “Ceramic knickknacks and bric-a-brac” out loud. “My, what a Pleasant Blog!”)
I don’t need that junk.
Oh, what $16.25? I got *3* CDs in Portland for that paltry sum. All by one of my new favorite groups: GUN CLUB .



Right?!?!?




Big dramatic sweep. Wild-eyes and Snake-eyes. Very American: Blues, Country, Skuzzy, 'end-of-the-road' Guitars. My understanding is that Gun Club sort of helped spawn rockabilly (while not being rockabilly themselves), and the lead singer, Jeffery Lee Pierce (he’s one of those who writes almost all of the songs too) died young: drugs, prolly.
Listen to the way he sings, and tell me it’s not drugs that killed him. Look at him, and tell me if he doesn’t look like Brando crossed with Gerard Way.








Kid Congo Powers is in the band too, of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds fame, and also The Cramps.

A surprising amount of the Gun Club that I have is live; two full albums, and half of two more. Related to his death, and to label-related issues and troubles (some of their stuff is released on “Sympathy for the Record Industry”, as in, sympathy for the Devil). More interestingly, however, it’s probably related to how good they were live. A singer that sounds like he IS drugs, actually high, in front of you, live?: gots to be good, right?

Here’s the liner notes- in their entirety- from “Danse Kalinda Boom”:
”Yes its true kids, this is an authentic “live” album for the first time. In response to the overwhelming amount of illegal & incorrect recordings purporting to be “live” Gun Club albums, Kid Congo, Patricia Morrison & myself have found it necessary to release an “Authorized” live album representing the Gun Club experience at its best and as it truly went down. So guaranteed this is not an album of poor quality tapes licensed clandestinely to some dodgy label by disgruntled & frustrated ex-members. I can promise this record features the Gun Club at its “live” best and definitive line up. Rest in Peace. [signed] Jeffery Lee Pierce”

Funny- signed “Rest In Peace” to us ( but he dies); “disgruntled ex-members”; “how it truly went down”; “dodgy labels”. Plus, did he misspell his own name? Or did someone else write the whole thing- seriously undermining all the rhetoric of “authentic”- since the CD’s copyright date is 7 years after he died? A Real Jeffrey Lee M Y S T E R Y.



As promised, here is the apologia of buying music 'in this day and age':
First, if you just download it all, you are guided only by what you already know you like, or what someone else ‘knows’ to be ‘good’.
(On the other hand, presented with a random assortment of used CD’s or vinyl, you can find new stuff, get reminded of old stuff, and with CDs at least, give a little listen before a wholesale acquisition an entire downloaded back catalog, which, it may turn out, you don’t really like that much anyhow.)

Second, used music isn’t even really random, is it? It's better than random. Because someone had to like that CD enough to purchase it, so you actually have a built-in regulator of quality, although it’s far from failsafe: Cf. “ ‘knows’ to be ‘good’ ”. Whereas with mp3s, all that can be shown in someone else having it is that they probably have 'heard about it', and have the internet. Not a stellar recommendation, is it?}