The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (The Band), Episode 1: My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Could Be

A Sound Design and Assembly Original Miniseries
Produced by M. Martin
Tonight: 1994's My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be
Written by Charlie Pauken

My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be is arguably the first Harvey Milk record, and I say arguably because technically, the first Harvey Milk record is the self-titled one (aka "the Bob Weston one"), and the first three and a half minutes of the record, which is only the first half of the album opener, "A Small Turn of Human Kindness", combined with the front cover would probably make those unfamiliar with the band think that they just bought a damned art school record: It's a pastiche of china cymbal, a tape flub, a false-start on an electric piano than an arpeggiated chord repeated over and over on said electric piano, cymbal swells and fluttering slide guitar work, the odd bass chord for good measure after a brief tom-tom solo that leads to a sonorous, droning cello. That's all in the first three and a half minutes, in that order.
But the thing is that it's not some dick-off attempt at music concrete. No. This was orchestrated that way. (Creston Spiers, the front man for the band is? was? a high school music teacher.) From there, the song moves into just the very stripe of dirge metal that casual fans usually cite when referring to them as a stoner metal or sludge metal or doom metal band or when people make the half-assed comparison to the Melvins, a band that lives to piss people off and revels in its own in-joke-ness even as they phone it in. Harvey Milk, however, are beyond any of that nonsense. So earnest in their work and composition are they that I'd go so far as to piss you off and suggest that this is a jazz band playing heavy music that sounds nothing like jazz. (Sorry, I watched all twenty hours of Ken Burns: Jazz last week.) There's real passion for song and consideration for arrangement in this music, mon petit illiterati, and even when shit gets weird, you can tell they're getting weird not for the sole sake of getting weird but because if they didn't get weird, the song would be incomplete. So it's necessary, just absolutely goddamned vital to the existence of all eight and a quarter minutes of "A Small Turn of Human Kindness", to have four movements to the song, in a linear, rollercoaster fashion of quiet weirdness, loud asphyxyiating dirge, quiet somber weirdness, and a loud mid-tempo recall of the opening movement played flawlessly on the bass by Steven Tanner replete with a one note guitar solo courtesy of Creston.
Hello. This band's name is Harvey Milk. You probably missed the part where this was an instrumental.
After that brief tutorial in what the hell to expect from now the hell on, you can hang with "Women Dig It" where, after a lengthy, crawling drum intro courtesy of Paul Trudeau, you are finally treated to the sound of Creston's voice. And I won't lie: I was turned off at first, you might be as well. Trust me, the man can sing, we'll get to that later, but here it is a pained and pitchless howl, the kind of screaming any singer worth their salt would kill to be able to do. It's gruff, broken, rough around every edge, but it aint Tom Waits's signature rasp, if I dare say it, it's closer to Louis Armstrong. That kind of gruffness. It is the sound of a man who is absolutely determined to empty his lung capacity with each syllable. It is not the sound of a voice, it is the sound of a man pushing air out of his body in a manner that has to pass by vocal chords to do so. In short, it's power. And as that voice grew on me, I realized that it was the sound of power. (Hyperbole!)
The third and fourth songs rank among my three favorites on this record. The third song on this record is "The Anvil Will Fall", one of the most pained and beautiful songs I've ever heard. It showcases classical / jazz guitar structures and delicate, lilting singing. You can hear the words here, and this is one of the very things I like about Harvey Milk as a "metal band": They don't deal with subject matter that is typical metal. There's no doom and gloom, there's no Satan, there are no bongs or easy lays or hard times on the road. Here are the opening lyrics:

My mama's first love was a vile ex-Marine
But the blood and guts in her heart could have washed Pilate's hands clean
Her lips were like an anvil dropped from a cliff
The fall had almost killed him and then that anvil hit

Who writes lyrics like that? Jesus, did you read those? And then, after a big distorted clanger, the band samples Gustav Holt's "The Planets: Jupiter: The Bringer of Jollity" and has this choker-upper of a line: "Let my love be the lantern that guides your ship through night." Again, who writes lyrics like that? And then, even after repeated listens, I can't tell if they used a pitch-shifter on Creston's voice or if they brought in a child singer to hit the soprano notes at the end of that passage and I could give a flying fuck either way. It's goddamned moving. And to cap off this big sweeping emotion-fest? The most bombastic piece of metal music you've ever laid ears on, one big soaring crescendo over and over again with that pained howl pushing all that goddamned air out to sing, "Your love is like an anvil, cold and black as me." It's enough to make me want to strip naked and jump off a cliff. (Hyperbole!)
I mean, let's get right down to it: If you don't like this band, we seriously have to reassess our friendship.
And then the band switches gears for the fourth song, "Merlin is Magic", which, seriously, is the sound of joy. I can't put this shit into words. Fuck. Damnit. Just trust me on this, OK? "Merlin is Magic" is seriously the sound of happiness. What fucking metal band plays the sound of happiness? None. Not a damned one. I mean this song... fuck. It's like this, when I saw Harvey Milk at the Triple Rock two summers back, I made it a point to shake Creston's hand after the set (he was the last guy on stage) and say, "Thanks for playing 'Merlin is Magic', that's one of my favorites."
Yeah, am I some sort of creepy super-fan? No, I just love the shit out of this band. So there. When was the last time you loved a band?
After that, you have "My Father's Life's Work" which begins as a gentle lullaby with doubled guitars and harmonized vocals and then moves into quite possibly the loudest the blues have ever been played. And even as the "low point" on the record, it's hardly a misstep. And it could hardly be considered generic. Maybe it's just that it's a straightforward rock number after two of the most unique and stirring rock songs ever composed. (Yes. Composed.)
"Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I" is a master class in tumultuous, swirling arpeggios - and not the Dave Mustaine variety, either, no, think Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - played over and over again at break neck speed by the guitar and bass simultaneously, basically the sound of whiplash. Like I said, some folks lump Harvey Milk in with sludge and stoner and doom but if they had paid some actual attention, they'd see that this band works outside of those categories more frequently than they work within them. Take "Jim's Polish", for example. The acoustic guitar intro on that sounds like something that should have been on Led Zeppelin I, a piece of classical, Segovia-via-Page-esque work and then, yeah, OK, so it moves on to the big goddamned metal-fuck-you music. At first it's a dirge, then it's another Indy 500 time trial. It should be interesting to note that when the band play slow, they play incredibly slow and break everything down to the bare minimum of chords needed and play just as much with silence as they do with sound; when they play fast, they'll convince you that they have seven fingers on their left hands. It aint wankery, though, it's exactly the notes that need to be there; again, I'll bring in Bird Parker and Gillespie. Every band should want to be this heavy, sure, but - and this is the most important part - every band should want to be this smart.
"F.S.T.P.", for all the Melvins comparers out there, sounds closer to Shellac than anything else. You want to make comparisons, buster? There. I gave you the right one. And then there's the dissonance of the thing... Within each thrust of the dissonant chord blasts that break up the silent rests, there are the harmonics that ring out that shape a collection of chiming sounds, making the blasts of noise palatable. The length of the song, twelve and three quarter minutes, is only made to feel excruciatingly longer by the start-stop pulse of the song which, to casual listeners, make the song seem almost tuneless until the eight twenty mark when the song shifts into its melodic second movement. And, really, there's no other way to describe the sections in these songs than "movements".
And you want to get your weird on? Then look. The fuck. Out, hoss. Because you know how we're ending this shindig? With "All the Live Long Day", a retelling of the twelve apostles as a John Henry-esque rail crew. This is the one I tell everybody about, and is the third of my favorites on this record. The opening is a repeated, distorted bass note, some drums, but at the very forefront is a sledgehammer pounding a pipe while Creston rattles off the biblical names and the various tasks they perform: surveying, laying ties and setting rails, tapping spikes... You know, what a rail crew does. Again, the material being mined here isn't typical metal bullshit. It's brainy, it's inventive, it's out there, it's fun and godawful beautiful. And we're only a third of the way into the song. After that, can you guess what happens? Yeah, the heavy gets brought, son. A great big nasty lurching heavy, the kind that's almost fuck-to-able. It pulses and lurches and throbs and just gets down to biscuits (yes, I meant to say "biscuits" instead of "business" because, come on, biscuits) making the most heavy, clattering use of only two notes since Big Black's "Steelworker" (to be clear, I'm talking about the Pig Pile version, not the Lungs version).
Now, while I would start off any Harvey Milk virgin with Special Wishes, you won't get hurt or be disappointed by My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be. In fact, if you're nerdy about music and bands and records and want to trace Harvey Milk's evolution, than this is, obviously, the one to start with. It's a perfect balance of weird and heavy and smart and it commands every bit of your attention.

Next time on "The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (The Band)...
1996's Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men

It seems like I've been writing everywhere but here, lately.

I had a pretty decent stretch of record reviews there for a minute (and by "decent stretch", I mean I did two), and M. and I have this plan to review the entire Harvey Milk discography starting sometime before 2014 but I haven't really written anything here in a few weeks. Stories About Prince is still going strong and I'll import the latest ones later today, and you can see in the right hand column that I've been tweeting pretty decently because all I need to do anymore is get one little dinky thought out here and there, and I just wrapped up the first draft of my third (technically my fifth but the first two sucked so don't count) novel the night before last and began editing last night and then I started a tumblr which I'm really using only as a second twitter but I'm not really writing here as much as I used to. (And, hey, I did warn you about that nearly a year ago.)
But as far as some leisurely writing goes, I've been over at the EA Forums and, lately, in the dream thread, I've been recounting some of my finer, more surreal, more star-studded moments. Let's enjoy them together...
I swear I'm not making any of this shit up, but I am editing a few things for the context of SD&A readers as opposed to EA forum members.
26 December, 2009 (I do not remember this.)

Last night I dreamt that I got the deluxe edition of the new Jesus Lizard record. After Lance Reddick (The Wire, Fringe) gave me an application to the Burger King he managed (replete with a psych-eval wherein I was described as "subject prefers two drinks"), I ran home to play it. Track one was a "making of" featurette where David Yow explained to John Lennon (played by John Cusack) how this record was recorded. It was recorded in one take with the band in the back of a box truck parked in the warehouse next to the Wikipedia building. The rest of the record sounded like Rage Against the Machine. I was indifferent to it.

5 November, 2012 (I have a vague recollection of half of this.)

Night before last, I dreamed that I was on a woman's volleyball team, only I wasn't a woman, I was that guy with Down Syndrome who wrote that open letter to Ann Coulter. And instead of volleyballs, we were using light bulbs. It was weird.
Last night, I had a dream that I was watching the special features on the Pig Pile DVD. Apparently, according to my subconscious, there's footage of Steve [Albini] working in a White Castle, slowly and clumsily putting together ten sliders for Lori Barbero from Babes in Toyland.

14 January, 2013 (I don't like remembering this one.)

An elderly Korean lady was trying to seduce me in the basement of the house I grew up in. While this was going on, there was a torrential down pour outside and I figured that I'd rather not go to work.

5 February, 2013 (This one was just weird.)

Last night, I had a dream that [forum member] Mandroid made me a ginormous double cheeseburger at my grandfather's house, which is odd because I have never met her in the flesh. Also, when I picked it up, it turned into a slider. That whole thing was weird.

20 March, 2013 (I actually had a pretty good time right up until I was mortified.)

It was the 90s and I was working on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Last night, two bands played, Breeders and Deftones. I ran sound for the Breeders and they were pretty good. They wrap up playing "Cannonball" and we cut to commercial and we start setting up Deftones' gear. I'm under the impression that I'll be joining them on stage playing guitar so I go up to Stephen Carpenter and ask him, "Hey, Chino, what are we tuning to, tonight?"
He gives me a shitty look and I say, "You know, in case you need to use my guitar... or... pedals... or anything you need." He continues to give me a shitty look until I slink off stage.
It wasn't until maybe five minutes ago that I realized that it was probably because I called him by the singer's name.

18 April, 2013 (You want a fun ride, man? Eat a Vietnamese sandwich before bed.)

I had a few different dreams last night, a lot were weird, probably due to the bánh mì I ate before bed. The first I can remember was that I was in Barter Town, waiting to go into Thunderdome against Baron Harkonnen. Then it was determined that my punishment - for whatever crime I'd committed - was that I was to have to watch the entire series run of "the most boring sitcom in New Zealand", about a wolfman and his roommate, while playing a board game with arbitrary rules and pieces that changed from chess pieces to checkers to key tags. I actually wound up getting pretty good at it.
Then there was some shit with my old boss and the girl from the liquor store going through a box of my old shit, nothing personal, just some old guitar tab books and the driver's manual for my old Ford.
I then wound up bunking for the night with a prematurely balding hippie girl and her talking dog. She disappeared and I got stuck with the talking dog who would not shut the fuck up and go to sleep; he just kept rambling about how he was a shitty sleeper and how he was probably going to be up all night, chewing on things. I put my shoes on the night stand.
Then there's some shit I can't remember.
Anyway, I had to go to the supermarket to put in an application, got shot right down. I got out side and it had blizzarded while I was inside, my bike got covered in snow. I brush off my bike and walk out to the street to assess the situation and determine that it's going to be a lot easier / safer if I call a cab. So, I go back over to the grocery store to get the building number off the building so I can give it to the cab company I'm about to call. Well, other people are calling cabs, too, and nobody can find the goddamned building number, everybody's spazzing. In the fracas, a mailman bumped into my bike right after I spotted the building number. I mean, I have the phone in my hand and I'm about ready to dial the cab company. This mailman, though, starts yelling at me, "Wipe that mud off my boot!" "Wipe that mud off my boot!" His friends are holding him back telling him to calm down, it's just mud, just an accident, this mailman yells back, "I don't ever let another man scuff my boots!" He points at his boot and tells me to wipe it off.
Me? I try to diffuse the situation and say, "OK, OK, let me get a napkin or something."
He yells back, "I don't want you to use a napkin!"
I ask him what he wants then.
"Use your hand!"
Now, two things happened at that point. The first was that I recognized the mailman as Matt Dillon. The second was that I made up my mind to tell him to fuck off.
I was just about to do that when I woke up.
But I am curious, now, as to what is the most boring sitcom in New Zealand.

27 April, 2013 (I'd like to know what these records were.)

I have no idea what the fuck my subconscious was on last night. I know I had more than a few scotches before bed in anticipation of my day off today.
WARNING, this one is pretty star-studded.
ANYhoo...
So, my brother landed a gig as Bette Midler's unpaid assistant, which, as I witnessed while visiting him and Ms. Midler at my grandfather's house in NYC (y'know, instead of Waterville, OH), is a thankless series of chores and tests from a verbally abusive sociopath. Note that that sociopath is not Ms. Midler but the young, white, suburban, gangsta rapper wannabe she keeps around; Ms. Midler herself is usually pilled the fuck up, like Judy Garland.
So after the last test, something about fetching a magazine from the kitchen table and then having the magazine constantly be the wrong one, I say fuck this and tell my brother he's quitting and we're going back to Chicago (where neither of us are from) and he needs to grab his stuff and go to the bathroom because we have a long drive, I'll handle Steven Tyler.
Yeah. Steven Aerosmith Tyler. Apparently, that's who I need to talk to about my brother quitting working for Bette Midler.
Steven Tyler looks positively emotionless as I list the various offenses against my brother on behalf of the suburban rap-dude and, by extension, Ms. Midler.
My brother tells me he's ready and I tell him to wait up while I grab my vinyl records. There was a green one with red writing on it one top of the stack, and a black one with fire on the cover on the bottom. I don't remember what the middle one was.
So my brother and I take off from NYC, there's this big, sweeping crane shot on my car crossing the bridge. (Is the Brooklyn Bridge still a thing? I think that's the one we were crossing.) My car, in this instance, is a leopard print low-rider Caprice with 22s. Riding along with us, for some reason, is the dad from The Wonder Years as portrayed by Peter Stomare.
As we drive along, I begin telling my grandmother (who is not with us, by the way) that we'll have to get a place to stay because there's no way we can make it from NYC to Chicago in a day. And then, no, wait... Chicago's only six hours from Toledo and I had some friends in high school that made it from Bowling Green (half hour south of Toledo) to NYC in twelve hours (that actually did happen), so, no, grandma, I take that back, I think we can pull this off in one shot.
The only problem? Well, aside from not looking at a goddamned road map before getting in the car, I'm now driving from the backseat and this fat kid's head keeps flopping in my line of sight every time I look around him at the highway interchange. I keep pushing his fat head out of my way and I have to make a choice soon between the R20, some other one, and US65. Well, between dealing with his fat head and traffic, I wind up on the R20.
The R20 immediately brings us into a travel plaza with a bunch of Empire Records and TGI Fridays and shit where I grab the fat kid by the head and throw him out the window and park the car.
I see his brother run up and then just stand there. Doesn't do anything as the fat kid starts crying. I get out of the car and the fat kid comes running up to me and asks who's on my t-shirt. I tell him, "Black Sabbath," as I walk inside the travel plaza to check a road map.
Well, I'll be a fucked duck.
The bad news is that the R20 runs south to Philadelphia. The good news is that we have our options: We can pick up St Rte 16 in Philadelphia and head west from there or, you know, if we want an option that makes some kind of goddamned sense, we can still turn around and pick up US65.
So, my brother comes in and I explain to him what's going on. When I turn around, I find I'm in one of my high school class rooms with all the lights turned off and there are some aging hair metal guys and Tawny Kitaen - hood-of-a-car-Whitesnake-video era Tawny Kitaen, not whooping-motherfuckers-with-a-shoe era Tawny Kitaen, mind you - are having this fancy roast beef dinner. Both of these hair metal guys look like a cross between Howard Stern and Geddy Lee. They're laughing and I tell them about how, when I threw the fat kid out of the car by his head, that Ratt's "Round and Round" was on the stereo.
This instantly ingratiates me into their company and the one Geddy Stern comes over and extends to me a spoon, on the end of which is a blue balloon covered in mashed potatoes sitting atop a Salisbury steak. I take the balloon and begin slurping the potatoes off and this Geddy Stern says to the other Geddy Stern in a horrible fake cockney accent, "Just like a tit!"
Then we all smiled.
Then I woke up.

Compare that to the simplicity from the night before when all I dreamed was that [forum member] Erawk was my high school bus driver. Me and some of the guys made plans to ask her exactly what bus drivers do between the time they drive kids to school and drive them back. That riddle was never solved.

5 May, 2013 (For all of the hullabaloo surrounding it, I never did get into Arrested Development. I'm a 30 Rock man.)

I hope you're a fan of Arrested Development-esque sitcoms, because one of those debuted in my subconscious last night. It's called This is the Son of a Bitch that Killed my Sister.
The premise is this: I'm new in town and the pesky girl scout from down the block takes a shine to me, nothing untoward. Think Dennis the Menace and Mr. Wilson. Well, one day, after I shoo her away, she gets smacked by a bus.
Racked with remorse, I go to the family to seek forgiveness, turning the tables on myself. Now I'm the annoying neighbor and the girl's father is the "Mr. Wilson", if you will. Each episode, replete with laugh track, features my repeated and nearly successful attempts at gaining forgiveness from the girl's father until her brother walks in, introducing some new member of the community - his football teammates, the PTA, the priest - indicating me with the show's catchphrase, "This is the son of a bitch that killed my sister," causing the father to snap to and remember that he hates me as well as stirring ire in the heart of whichever new community member is featured this week. A Benny Hill style chase ensues until I am eventually caught and beset upon by the angry mob.
It's a little one-note but I think the pilot will really sell it.

6 May, 2013 (I ate four classic roast beef whatever fuckoff whatchamacall'ems that night. Some nights, I have neither a sense of shame or dignity.)

You know those big ass buildings that you see at county swap meets? I was in one of those, last night, except this was the size of an acre and all the doors were open, revealing vast prairies. Part of the building was a cage, large enough to hold several elephants, with a concrete floor. Inside the cage was a man, smoking a cigarette, and outside of the cage, with me, was a rancher.
A pickup truck pulls into the building and four men get out, three are Hispanic, one of them being exceptionally short (though not a midget). The fourth man, the white man, is lead over to the cage door, which I am unlocking. I guide the man in and close the door behind him, turning to ask the rancher if he wants me to lock it. He says it won't make no difference.
The first man inside the cage stamps his cigarette out on the floor and taps the white man on the shoulder and says, "Hey, man," as they both walk over to where the three Hispanic men are standing. The first man blindfolds himself and the white man is looking confused. The first man produces a dagger and says, "Here, man," tossing the dagger to the white man. As the white man goes to catch it, the first man pulls a gun out of his pants and shoots the white man in the face, once. He then takes his blindfold off.
The first man, the rancher, and the two tall Hispanic men look at the short Hispanic man who wipes a tear from his eye and nods. The three Hispanic men left in the pickup truck.
Don't eat Arby's right before going to bed.

10 May 2013 (Nonagon John uses his real name as his online handle so while I'm pretty sure that he doesn't mind his identity being public, I'm still going to err on the side of caution.)

Last night, I invited forum member John [redacted] to a barbecue. Then I remembered he's a vegetarian. My attempt at making veggie burger patties from scratch involved a lot of carrots and a lot of pulsing the blender. It was seriously close to something like twenty minutes (in dream time) of peeling, chopping, and blending these damned carrots.

14 May, 2013 ("Jumbo Danzig" was coined by Steve Albini in reference to Type O Negative's Peter Steele.)

What do you get when you put a teen comedy in the underground dome from Vic & Blood, replete with crazed, cultish Earth repopulation scheme? You get the perfect setting for my new Danzig cover band where I, as Zach Galifinakis on vocals*, am joined by forum members RSMurphy on keytar and Mason on triangle during our rendition of "Cantspeak" where I needlessly sex things up with a sassy little strip tease. Then, when a bunch of jocks from the high school show up (remember, this is a teen comedy after all) to make fun of us, the joke. Is on. Them when the club's capacity audience rallies around us as we perform "Mother", with [RSMurphy] now on bass and Mason on guitar and, I can't be sure, but I think Ty Webb was on drums.
It was actually pretty awesome.

* Would that count as Jumbo Danzig?

28 May, 2013 (Nobody here gets to use the title Soft Taffy. I'm keeping that.)

Last night, I was the company rep for a trashbag manufacturer and I faced off against 30 Rock character Devon Banks in a trash-bag triathalon. Round one was seeing who could use a plunger to extract the most crushed beer cans from the pile of french fries and chicken nuggets sitting under a heat lamp. I won. Round two was folding garbage bags in the manner specified by the committee; nine times over, all length-wise. Well, I blew that shit. Round three was an obstacle course for taking out trash and I would have loved to have run it but the next thing I knew, I was dressed in a kimono and in a sequel to some cheesy 80s teen-sex-romp, the title of which I never hear. Like the fifth in the series or some shit.
Apparently, the box office returns for this franchise were pretty low and the producers, whoever they were, were desperate to try anything to avoid another flop. How do I know this? Enter my cousin, 1980s Anthony Michael Hall with a pompadour who passed by me with a Don LaFontaine voice over - "You loved him as Rufus in..." Anthony Michael Hall walks by dressed like Ducky from Pretty In Pink - "Then Rufus came back in..." Anthony Michael Hall's character has become more defined, now; the pompadour's bigger and he's been given a pimp cane - "You had to have more Rufus so..." Anthony Michael Hall apparently went Hawaiian in the third one, still looking like Ducky or Buster Poindexter or something but now in a Hawaiian shirt - "Rufus sent shivers up your spine in..." Anthony Michael Hall, still with the pompadour and the round sunglasses and pimp-cane, but now wrapped in gauze like a mummy, the fourth installment in this series was either something along the lines of Scooby-Doo or a bad slasher flick - "And now, Rufus returns as your cousin."

I was in a Xmas flick with whoever the fuck this Rufus character was, who was supposed to be my cousin. Rufus is wearing a kimono similar to mine, has bling all over his fingers, the cubic-zirconia tipped pimp cane, the round sun-glasses, and has a Santa cap on his ginormous pompadour while a black bikini clad woman sits on his lap.
I can't remember what he asked me to get, but it was in - wait for it - a trash bag. So now I'm wondering, "Is this the obstacle course? I have to be in a bad Xmas movie dressed in kimonos with Anthony Michael Hall as fucking Rufus?" But anyway, I go digging for whatever Rufus wants out of the trash but I get distracted by a fully in tact, brand new, glossy Asian porn mag titled Soft Taffy. So I say, what the hey, and decide that I'm going to peruse the pages of Soft Taffy. That's when my aunt Pam (and she's a real person) storms in and demands to know what I'm doing.
I tell her, uh, I'm reading Soft Taffy.
That's when aunt Pam starts slapping me with her purse like Ruth Buzzi and demands to know where I got my hands on Soft Taffy. I tell her that its Rufus's. So she storms off to Rufus's room and proceeds to beat the shit out of him, calling him a smut monger.
Meanwhile, I go to the kitchen, still in my kimono, and explain to my parents what just happened. My father laughs and my mother shrugs and then I woke up.

13 June, 2013 (There's just something about Carrie Brownstein dressed as an Indian chief...)

Last night started off as a Portlandia sketch - you know, quirky, smart, but not laugh out loud funny - about Little Big Horn. In the sketch, an extra and I, as Indians, were dueling on a log over a pond as Carrie Brownstein, our chief, was prepping us for the arrival of the 7th Calvary. It was then that a tornado siren went off, ruining the sketch - or maybe that was the point, to make it a sketch within a sketch - and all the extras had to stop what they were doing until the siren stopped.
But then the sky grew dark and we could hear a faint rumbling* and, out of nowhere, this huge gang of sparrows, pheasants, pigeons, and peahens just encircled the pond and the surrounding trees and we realized, oh, shit, there's an actual tornado coming.
So all of the cast start looking for cover and all we can do is duck down around these trees, there's nothing but open prairie surrounding us, this pond, these few trees on one side of the pond, and all these fucking birds. I'm running back and forth looking for cover but none of the birds are letting me near the trees and bushes they're sitting in.
For some reason, a giant white cinder block building with maroon and navy accents appears in the near distance and I shout to my castmates over the rising wind that we should take cover in that building.
So we run over to it and, as we come up to a large, open bay door, there's a parade of navy and maroon clad baseball players and cheerleaders coming out, laughing, yelling, spraying champagne on each other, just having a good old time.
My recall here gets a little hazy but the gist is that I'm Clint Eastwood, a retired NYC cop moving into this small town that, unbeknownst to me, is run by this retail magnate played by Powers Boothe. Like I said, shit gets fuzzy around this point. I think my former partner got murdered in the middle of it and there was Ruth Wilson (aka the hot red head from Luther) and I think I had a daughter and I'm not sure that those all weren't the same person.
ANYhoo, in the end, the sheriff's department and I are held hostage in one of Powers Boothe's WalMarts, trying to get out, and Powers Boothe's brother / lackey takes a handful of over the counter pain meds and starts dousing the store in gasoline before covering himself, forcing Powers Boothe to run away in fear, thus allowing for us to escape before he lights himself ablaze.
As the sheriff's deputy - played by Gary Cole - and I are walking to my place, he asks me what I'm thinking of doing now, I mutter some cheeseball action movie line about moving back to New York City where it's safer. Gary Cole and I laugh and get in my super tiny roadster - it's so small that I have to stick my head out of the roof and I have to reach around Gary Cole to put the key in the ignition, and hightail it out of town as it burns behind us. Ahead of us is a pickup truck containing the aforementioned Ruth Wilson and immolated brother / lackey, now without even a scratch on him.
Right about where there would have been end credits was where I woke up.

* I just remembered, one of my fellow extras noted that a tornado really does sound like a train coming through. Then he smiled and made some smart ass remark about, "Do you think it will whistle too, Charlie?"
I told him to shut the fuck up and look for cover.

So, if you've ever wondered what goes on in my brain, that's what it does when it gets to run riot.

It's Friday: Let's Piss Off Republicans!

I'm watching last night's episode of Hannibal and Eddie Izzard gave a guy a Colombian necktie, which was pretty awesome. So I Google Image Search Colombian neckties because, fuck it, why not. And in the "similar searches" space, I spied this...

Charlie Eats Spam for the First Time

Pretty self-explanatory.

Prince Can't Go To Art-A-Whirl

Prince Has Trouble Meeting Women

Prince Lets Himself Go

LIAR! LIAR! LIAR!: Bodycop, "Bodycop"

Bodycop, Bodycop [Cassette], (Fan Death, 2010)

Today we're going to discuss a band you probably haven't heard of, but might appreciate if you're into the sonic equivalent of being beaten about the head and shoulders with a folding chair. This band is, or rather was, Bodycop. They were a quintet from Washington, DC who really liked early Swans, Throbbing Gristle, go-nowhere self-loathing and possibly Side B of My War, and all of that pretty much means I'd be into them from the get-go. Now, I know almost nothing about who was in this band at all: I know there was a singer by the name of Kiki, a guitarist, a bassist, an electronics operator, and a drummer, but that's pretty much it. But what I do know is that they made some truly punishing noise, as befitting a group filled with early Swans fans. They only released this 29-minute, 5-song cassette - which I guess makes this a mini-LP? or EP? - and then broke up amid a welter of strange rumors about the reasons why. (Sometimes I think punk rockers are worse than sewing circles.)

Bodycop's music is repetitive as hell. "Sisyphus" spends nearly five minutes twisting around a lone, almost ridiculously sour and backbiting guitar riff - and that's when the guitar and bass aren't coagulating into an almost totally atonal mass of rhythmic noise that sounds like nothing so much as someone breaking up granite with a hammer. This kind of thing happens a lot on this cassette, or mini-LP, or EP, or whatever - Bodycop aren't much on tunes. But the sound is deeply compelling. "Loaves" features one or two atonal bass chords being smashed again and again for nearly 7 minutes until you feel your brains slowly melting into a puddle of muck, and "Pay Up" hammers one half-there riff into the ground for nearly 8 minutes until breaking into an absolutely pulverizing groove for the last minute. What makes this willfully noisy stringed-instrument abuse work is that it's all strictly rhythmic - there's no attempt at all to go into free time, and there's no attempt to improvise. (This might be a noise album, but it's not anything like, say, guitar-era Ramleh or Skullflower.) So the guitar and bass stay rigidly tethered at all times to the extremely powerful, often rather tom-heavy and creative drumming, and the result is an EP full of very tight and mostly atonal playing. Even Norman Westberg was more melodic than this, and to say the effect is bracing is an understatement. I hate to keep on trotting out the blunt force metaphors, but this band really is pummeling. You almost expect to lose a few teeth by the time the EP is over.

The other elements of this EP, though, are what make it so distinctive. Kiki's weirdly blank, groaning screech is often subtly fed through a harmonizer, which has the effect of making her sound both strangely processed and strangely anonymous; it's as if the rage being expressed has already lost nearly all meaning for her, but is as much a natural function as breathing. It's as if there's no choice but to feel this way, or that feeling such overwhelming rage at all times has become ingrained. Either way, it sounds like she has almost no emotional investment or payoff in her rage. It just exists on an even level, a pure, dead, amplified hum. Her screaming is fairly odd and unique - I don't think I've ever heard another singer like her, and I've heard a lot of angry screamers at this point - and coupled with the completely oblivious, gurgling, deadening, mindless electronics that smother every song on the EP, the overall effect is pretty unsettling.

Overall, Bodycop is one of those bands where I really wish they'd stuck around long enough to record a proper album or two - they might not have felt like they could have developed any further, but with such a devolved, degraded, and individual sound in place already, who knows what depths or heights they could have explored? Or what they could have evolved into? Anyway, I've always found it somewhat futile at best to speculate on what if's with a band, and what exists here is the EP, and that's enough. If you've been having a really, really, really terrible day, this band makes for one hell of a soundtrack, and I get a real kick out of hearing Kiki bellowing "Liar! Liar! Liar!" again and again on the last song here even when the sun is shining and it's a beautifully optimistic spring day. After all, as Woody Allen said, the heart wants what the heart wants. And sometimes the heart wants nothing more than abusive sensory overload, even during warm spring days.

Recent Love (Nothin' but a Load of Bloody Irish Bollocks Edition)

Girl Band, France 98
Buckle up and fix a cocktail, kids: This record is fucking loud. Good goddamned wall of noise fuck you rock.
I was hipped to this record by Jake, the Welsh (and therefore questionable) half of Pink City and one third of She Ripped, when he posted about them on his wall. If you're new to these parts, you should know that those two bands I just noted are bands that I really like, so I'm inclined to trust Jake's judgment... even if he is Welsh.
Now, I'm late to the party on this record, as I generally am with most music, but not as late as usual; this came out last October. Chances are you probably already know about this thing. You might already be listening to it. And, if you are, good on you.
Anyway, I heard this record for the first time a week after the review I did for China's Pussy, you know, last week, and not only have I been floored at how much good noise rock I've been hearing these past few weeks, Girl Band are currently blowing up my headphones, in tight contention with China, actually. But I'm only kind of not exaggerating when I say they're blowing up my headphones. France 98 is loud as all fuck, nearly deafening me as I gave it a first proper listen while drinking a bloody mary on the patio and read The Torture Garden, a book which, by itself, is already a brainsplitter. Pick up where you left off reading beautiful descriptions in translated French about the foliage while listening to "You're a Dog" at full blast - and believe me, the only reason your brains don't run out your other ear is because the other earphone blasting them back in (just not back into place) - and it will make sense when you "meat" the little Buddha man who rearranges (live) people's body parts just chilling in the garden, wiping off his saws. It will make sense. (In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if there's any other way this record could be enjoyed, but I'm a pretentious sodding git like that.)
But by the third listen, my ears had already adjusted to the punishment. Sure, I should've turned it down but hey.
So we've established that this record is loud but is the volume warranted? Yes, it is. With maybe one or two exceptions, this record wouldn't work with understated acoustic pieces. "Second One" could be on the band's MTV Unplugged set if A) Girl Band were slick MTV bullshit material and B) MTV even had music on it anymore. (To be honest, that last bit might be unfair; I haven't watched MTV in years but I'm pretty sure that the reason last year's return of Beavis and Butt-Head poked fun at reality shows more than videos had to do with M(usic)T(ele)V(ision)'s lack of music programming.) "Handswaps", immediately after "Second One", deals with quiet-quiet-quiet build ups but is still, well, loud. You get me? Aside from those two, though, you can't really play these songs in a subdued quiet manner.
That's not saying that Girl Band are using threshold-of-pain volumes as a gimmick, no. The type of music they're making pretty much requires that decibel level. That is to say, if it wasn't loud, it wouldn't sound right.
And how does it sound? Well, take the opener, "You're a Dog". This is the drunken hip-swinger on the record, the ass-shaker. It really dares you to not dance, even if you dance badly. You're going to want to climb the damned furniture and jump off of it. And it's also one of those openers that makes you wonder, "Can the rest of the record be this good?"
Thank fuck, yes.
"Busy at Maths" is just as fun, just as memorable, but brings the tempo down and gives us an in-out-hi-hat swing more suited for scissor or reverse cowgirl fucking than for jumping around like a maniac. I mean, it has a melotron on it. How you going to smash anything when there's a melotron? No, that's an instrument a band uses for when they want you to toke a hookah and/or fuck.
"That Snake Conor Cusack" is perfect for that midtown traffic-dodging bike ride and the title track is the last thing you want to hear in the middle of a bad trip; if mclusky's "Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues" had an Irish cousin that drank more, had homemade knuckle tattoos, ate speed at a consumption level to rival Lemmy's or Hunter's, and had a batshit crazy girlfriend with two vehicular assault convictions to her name, it would be "France 98".
The last two "quiet" (in quotes because it's really only by comparison) songs are down right beautiful to listen to. "Second One" is actually very relaxing, the valley amid all the peaks, and "Handswaps" is the big epic closer that every record tries to have, the difference is that, out of all the big epic closing numbers ever, "Handswaps" belongs in the minority of those songs categorized as being "done right". The elements are all there, the cathedral echo and the brief and conservative flashes of psychedelia and techno sub-bass booms.
You can drink to this, you can dance to this, you can fuck to this, you can road rage to this, and, yes, if you find yourself in the position to do so, you can read gory 19th century political satire written employing the collage technique. I might not recommend that last one, I'm just saying that it worked for me. Maybe it will work for you, too. I reckon the best way to find out is to go check it out.