Music: Schoolly D(emon)

What with side projects, day-job obligations, and whatever else distracts one from one's creative outlets, it took the indie rock outfit Rival Schools a decade to get their new album together. For the first video of this much-delayed platter, lead singer (ex-Gorilla Biscuts/Quicksand frontman) Walter Schreifels and the boys pay homage to a horror classic.

Music: "Yeah, sure Satan rules. But that doesn't mean that I can't be practical."

Apparently the Future of the Left plays Haxan in the background when they play "You Need Satan More Than He Needs You." So here's the two things put together.

Music: "As a person who has always said that more pop music should sound like 'Handsome Western States' era Beulah . . ."

Poised to become the next big band that hipster media vultures decry as a pure product of Internet hype until such time as market saturation hits the point that it triggers the vultures' obsessive need to experience cultural products as a groupthink and they start busting out phrases like "As a person who has always said that more pop music should reference the charm of Oomalama Fire label original release era Eugenius . . ." to preface their sadly tired reviews, Yuck was recently described thusly by a profile in Guardian:

Any idea of Yuck as "saviours" is further tempered by the fact that the sound they are making in 2011 is pretty much the sound a band of indie-loving kids who weren't interested in dance music would have made 20 years ago: a cocktail of Dinosaur Jr noise, Lemonheads melody and Teenage Fanclub's wistfulness. But, by getting excited about music that hasn't been fashionable for years – and matching that enthusiasm with some truly terrific songs – they are making a road-weary sound fresh and exciting.

Here's the video for the Yuck's "Holing Out." It features the band, visuals distortions that remind me of trying to watch scrambled cable, and a sometimes naked woman being chased by a monster. The basically recreated a coming of age moment - trying to glimpse boobies through video signal encryption - that now seems as archaic as hand fan codes or banyans.

WARNING or ENTICEMENT: Flashes of nudity, upstairs and down. Not safe for work or children; especially if you work with children, or employ children, somehow, at your workplace.

Yuck-"Holing Out" Music Video from VIDEOTHING.COM on Vimeo.

Music: But I wanna know for sure.

For Siouxsie and the Banshees, 1980's Kaleidoscope was a do-or-die release. Guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris, collectively half the band, had taken off. The remaining members, the eponymous Siouxsie and founding member Steve Severin, decided to quickly reform the band and, in less than a year, release a new LP. To refill the Banshees' depleted ranks, the duo tapped former Sex Pistol guitarist Steve Jones and former Magazine guitarist John McGeoch. For the engine room, the drafted ex-Slits drummer Budgie. The result was a an expansion of the S&B sound that wed their trademark bleak proto-gothic tones with hints of lush synth arrangements and psychedelic flourishes. It was a strong indication of Siouxsie and Co.'s move towards the more elaborate and dreamy instrumentation that they'd pursue for the next three decades.

But Siouxsie hadn't completely forgotten the angular, rhythmic post-punk sound of the early S&B work. She and Budgie, love interests and well as bandmates (they'd later marry), started a side project called The Creatures. Unlike S&B increasingly dense sound, The Creatures would feature a more minimal, but not necessarily spartan sound.

One of their early was a fantastically brutal cover of the Trogg's much abused "Wild Thing." The Creatures paired it down to a tribal beat, Siouxsie's voice, and little else. The result is something more haunted than celebratory, more haunted than horny.

The Banshees would remain the primary focus of Siouxsie and Budgie. The Creatures would appear only intermittently throughout the years until Sioux and Budgie divorced in the mid-00s, ending The Creatures' sporadic career.

You can hear The Creatures' "Wild Things" at The Devil's Music blog.

Music: Jaws 5 - This time, it's a pain in the ass.

Music: Give the old man a thrill.

When I'm 90 years old, I hope somebody still thinks of me this way. NSFW.

Music: Throw them into the pit!

With their smartly stupid sound, which fuses Black Flag-ish hardcore with sludgy arena rock, and their wry humor, which is an ironic piss take on the trendy pop flavored consequence-free fauxmosexuality that is the radical chic of our modern straight white male hipster, Gay for Johnny Depp is the new Nation of Ulysses. Here's their "Shh, Put the Shiv to My Throat." There's blood and an allusion to Twin Peaks, so I'm countin' it legit as a horror bloggy thing, though it probably ain't.

Music: "This is what they make you take the medication for."

Aesop Rock and John Darnielle are so zombie that they sneeze tombstones and poop simplistic social themes.

Music: Henry's downloaded it like 50 times already.

Now you to can sing along with Glenn! Download yourself "On a Wicked Night," a free Danzig tune and howl away.

Music: "The girls are saying that you're wrapped too tight."

In the world of horror rock, the B-list rarely sees love. There's more Drac, Frank, and Wolf Man tunes than you can tip a Marshall stack at, but you don't run across a ton of tunes singing the praises of the Blob, for example. (Though the Latin-jazz influenced bubblegum of The Five Blob's "The Blob" is nice, it doesn't have the presence on Halloween mixes that lesser vampire or werewolf tunes do.)

Today, we get snippet of one of the best songs about the Mummy, another under-represented baddie from the filmland. I Was a Teenage Mummy a 1992 indie that aped the teen-horror schlock of the '50s. One of the highlights of the flick is the wonderful soundtrack filled with fuzzed out modern rockabilly garage groups. Below is the trailer, with the A-bones squonked-out sax-enhanced theme song "Mum's the Word."

The full song's available on iTunes and Amazon for download.

Music: Lux and Ivy's Favorites

WFMU's Beware of the Blog has an amazing page that, well, I'll let them tell you:

Ok, I got kind of sick of repeating this story 1000 times. So figured I'd include this in the latest volume. I'm the guy who compiles the Lux and Ivy's Favorites Compilations.

It started as a way to keep track of some of the songs Lux, and or Ivy, mentioned in THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE MUSIC BOOK. It was never really intended as anything but a way for a friend of mine and me to have 2 really kick ass compilations.

So we went about the arduous process of finding all the songs mentioned in that interview. It took a loooong time. We used the file sharing program, Napster, as well as our own personal collections. So, one thing lead to another and when word got around that these compilations were out there, they started being traded from fan to fan to fan. So, at some point I decided to put them up on Napster and let anyone who wanted them have them. As the years went buy, more interviews with Lux and Ivy kept popping up, and the list of songs they mentioned got longer and longer. This resulted in new volumes.

They're up to 11 volumes of music that The Cramp's name-dropped as influences, faves, and curiosities. Enjoy.

Music: An American Werewolf in America.

I'm not hip enough to the symbolic economies that regulate the balkanization of popular music to actually know, but I'm going to theorize that every cultural movement instantly produces a mirror image to counter it. Unlike a physical shift, these opposite forces are rarely equal. Case in point: The rise of post-sincere corporate pop, epitomized by figures like Lady Gaga, to something like a national style has, oddly, coincided with the resurgence hardcore punk. The latter's sudden shot in the arm has hardly raised it to the level of significance of the former. It's hard to imagine, no matter how far this trend might go, that sponsors will ever scramble to pony up cash for product placements in a ten-minute short film featuring Toronto's Fucked Up. (Whereas LG's "scandalous" video features three direct pay-to-play placements and at least two placements that are the result of corporate connections between her label and other corporate entities.) Still, this unexpected boom in hardcore sounds might be the best thing Gaga LLC did for music.

Today's twin blast of of hardcore comes from the All American Werewolves, a nicely ragged unit from Lexington, Kentucky. The first tune is "The Devil Rolls On;" the second is "Alligator." Neither feature autotuned vocals or conspicuous Miracle Whip placements.

Music: Just another afropunk neo-soul goth jazz rock single.

So I've got this musical genre that, prior to this post, only two people knew about. It's called Mr. Norrell music, after the fantasy doorstop Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

See, perhaps my most embarrassing hobby, aside from my love of coating stray cats in epoxy adhesive to see what random bits of street clutter they'll pick up (there's an early-career Hans Arp-ish aspect of giving up some control over you creation process that appeals to me) or calling up randomly selected elderly people and reading them selections from Story of the Eye (El Granero's death gets them crying every time), is making up needle drops for the soundtracks of films that don't exist. It's to music coordinators what fantasy league baseball is to owning a team. Sometimes the not-a-movie is a fairly abstract thing, like a generic heist film set in the 1980s or a romcom set against the backdrop of the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror. Sometimes it's very specific, like a movie adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

For those who have never read the book (which includes me, oddly enough, I only know it from what my wife's told me), it's tale of rival magicians set against a Napoleonic War Era Europe were the magical lands where fairies live are accessible and treated like any another geo-political entity. I don't know how I got on the idea (like I said, I never bothered to read the book), but slowly I started to gather needle drops on the premise that there would essentially be two soundtrack plans. In the human world, period correct music would be used: Hummel, Beethoven, Méhul, and so on. In the fairy lands, however, the music would be wildly anachronistic - as if the fairy folks didn't have the same sense of time and all styles were simultaneously available to them. The result was a darkly sexy fusion, preferably an anxious patchwork of musical styles that seem like they shouldn't hang together. Songs that could fall into this category got dubbed "Mr. Norrell" music.

I finished that un-soundtrack several years ago, but every now and then I'll hear something that's Mr. Norrell. Janelle Monae's sexy, creepy, nuanced fusion of jazzy, garage rock, punk soul is very Mr. Norrell. Not a real video, sadly; but it is really the song that's the draw anyway. Here's her "War of the Roses (Come Alive)."

Music: "I shed the blood of the Saxon men!"

So the always classy Christopher Lee is releasing a "symphonic metal" concept album.

For real. I shit you not.

It's rock opera about the life of Charlemagne.

Here are some excerpts.

Music: The preference of monsters.

Classical pianist and blogger Jermey Denk ponders the role of classical music in horror flicks, with an emphasis on scenes from Twilight: New Moon and Silence of the Lambs.

As you can imagine, most of the music of Twilight is a spool of new age melancholy-lite with interchangeable aspartame chords and a spectacular disregard for monotony and cliché: the sort of thing you run across 12-year-old girls playing, to express themselves, on upright pianos in junior high chorus rooms after the last tater tots have been shoved down the last pimply gullet of the last smug bully before the last bus creaks out of the parking lot, sending wheezes of diesel sadness into the dusk as yet another chalky day of teaching scrawls to an end . . .

I was just settling in with my movie nachos, just getting used to this aural upholstery–anything that does not kill you, etc. etc.–when (suddenly!) a few notes reminded me that there might be a better world. Bella gets knocked against a wall, her arm’s bleeding and in a flash Dr. Cullen–a vampire who has virtuously pulled back his fake hair and steeled himself to resist his blood-urge–dismisses his weaker, ravenous vampire relatives, and prepares to stitch up her gaping wound. As he stitches, we hear [Schubert's setting of one of Goethe's poems, original post contains an audio file - CRwM].

This was no nacho hallucination! There really WAS a Schubert song lurking in this teen vampire romance … and not just Joe Schubert Song, but a setting of one of the greatest Goethe poems. But why this song? And why Schubert? My mind immediately and shamelessly ran after musicological ramifications: “Schubert is sucking at the neck of the subdominant, to demonstrate vis-a-vis the fangs of his modal mixture the inadequacy of conventional polarities of dominance” . . . Though I dismissed the notion of a hidden musicological agenda I suddenly wondered how many vampires take refuge in the musicology faculties of our nation’s universities.

This was one of these moments where Popular Culture decides for a capricious instant that Hundreds Of Years Of The Western Canon are temporarily useful for appropriation; it does classical music a huge favor by Noticing It. Lovers of classical music are supposed to beam and pant like a petted dog, grateful for any and all attention. Wag wag, woof woof, good boy, go play in your cute tuxedo now! Classical music often serves an iconic, representative, dubiously honorable purpose in popular film, and this instance of classical quotation–besides reminding me what a steaming load of crapola I had been listening to previously–reminded me very much of the famous scene in The Silence of the Lambs, where Hannibal Lecter brutally murders and partly eats his two guards to the strains of the Goldberg Variations.

In both these scenes, classical music becomes an emblem of distance and detachment. Cullen is looking directly upon blood without giving in to his hunger; he is practicing Zen-like separation from desire. Lecter has a very different detachment, the detachment required to kill perfectly, ruthlessly, without regret or remorse; his is the detachment, the disconnect, the absence of “normal” emotion which marks sociopathy.In both scenes, the music is ironic. It’s effective in a way that horrific or disturbing, i.e. “appropriate” music would not be. Its meaning lies in its otherness … While Lecter commits one of man’s darkest taboos (cannibalism), behind him rings the decorum and organization of Bach, with its peerless canons and schemes and rules; the Goldbergs whisper to our ears all the connotation and comfort of human Enlightenment, while the Dark Ages scream at our eyes from the screen. Cullen is stitching a raw wound; he fills a bowl full of blood … The camera lingers on both, in the way we imagine Cullen’s eyes unconsciously might; meanwhile the song proceeds in uncanny calm, a calm which feels strange against our sense of a repressed murderousness. The calm is a classical music calm, an alien calm, it evokes the price and pressure of Cullen’s self-repression. I have noticed often that the forces of Hollywood cannot use classical music to express “normal” emotions, but only extremes, only things that must be seen weirdly, in reverse.

In both scenes, blood. Both Lecter and Cullen traffic in blood, and their bloodiest scenes bleed classical music. Yes, we can say, the director is suggesting that classical music is “beauty” against which the horrors of bloodlust are seen more starkly. But if the music is supposed to be the opposite of the bloody scene, isn’t the implication somehow that the beauty of classical music is “bloodless”? Lecter is a soulless monster, and he loves Bach; Cullen is a soulless vampire, who uses Schubert to calm himself while he repairs a wound. Always soulless; always other; always anachronistic; classical music is the preference of monsters. I can see how the age of the music connects to the immortality of the vampire, I can see how the Bach connects to Lecter’s genius, but why must classical music be the language of monsters, of the fringe?

Music: "A working example of faith versus physics."

El-P and Nine Inch Nails.

Pairing Mr. Reznor with Mr. Meline - post-industrial music's iconic one-man army with the mad genius ringleader of DefJux's left-field circus - is one of those ideas that so obvious that nobody thought to do it for an embarrassingly long time. Though I imagine everybody involved wondered if putting two artists with such distinct production approaches was letting one too many cooks into the kitchen, the result - "Flyentology" off of El-P's excellent I'll Sleep When Your Dead - successfully fuses Reznor's droning, crunching death disco dirge with EL Producto's cubist take on the driving, propulsive Bomb Squad Era thumping that once served as the engine room for band's like Public Enemy.

It works, is what I'm saying.

Plus the paranoid sci-fi horror invasion cartoon that serves as its is nifty.

Music: Neo-prog taco-eating werewolf.

And he fights a vampire.

Here's Bear in Heaven's "Werewolf."

It's like two dudes who got too old and got kicked off the set of New Moon had a drunken brawl outside a Motel 6 in Rich Creek, Virginia, while a Catherine Wheel tribute band attempted its first Lungfish cover in the background.

At least, that's what I thought it was like.

Bear In Heaven - Werewolf from Hometapes on Vimeo.

Music: Limblessly in love.

Been digging through my old records lately.

For my money - and I'll admit that, given the state of my bank accounts, that's not saying much - The Scream, Siouxsie and the Banshee's debut album, is one of the great "missing links" between chaos of punk and the angular post-punk that followed. Because Siouxsie and company later became one of the foundation groups of Goth, The Scream's best qualities are misinterpreted as failings - its thrashing guitars, for example, aren't praised for their energy but criticized as the undeveloped beginnings of a more lush later style. Though that linear historical view doesn't give The Scream enough credit. The LP was the band's debut, but it wasn't really a novice effort. SS&B had been a going concern for years before a label snatched them up. When any shambling gang of lad's with even the slightest chops was getting signed, SS&B was getting passed by. The upside of the benign neglect was that the unit one hears on The Scream was a well-practiced, road-tested outfit with a strong set of fully evolved tunes. The reason it sounds so odd in retrospect is that it was ultimately a sort of evolutionary dead end. The group went Gothic. They ditched the jerky proto-Gang of Four sharp corners and the grimly tangled vision of modern social life that shared more with Elvis Costello's concept of emotional fascism than it did with the Romanticism of Goth.

Anywho, here's some great footage of the band from 1977. The sound quality os atrocious, but the footage is neat if only because it shows everybody looking so damn young.

Movies: The Cat Piano

I owe this gem of a find to commentator Emazzola who left a lead to it in the comments to my post on the grotesque katzklavier, a keyboard that plays cats. Check out "The Cat Piano," a short film from The People's Republic of Animation, directed by Eddie White and Ari Gibson. A trippy beat fable set in a fabulous musical Interzone between Disney's Aristocats and Pépé le Moko's Algiers; "The Cat Piano" uses jazzed up Silverstein-esque narration to tell a dark fairy tale of music, love, and a giant katzklavier.

Dig, Screamers and Screamettes. You wont be disappointed.

Thanks Emazzola.

Music: Torture tunes, part 2.

Previously, my dear Screamers and Screamettes, we discussed the use of music to torture people. Today we flip the script and discuss using torture to make music.

Screamers of all ages and genders, I give you the nadir of musical inventiveness: the Katzenklavier.

From the wikipedia description:

It consists of a line of cats fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard. Tails would be placed under the keys, causing the cats to cry out in pain when a key was pressed. The cats would be arranged according to the natural tone of their voices.

This is actually less brutal than the original design by the 17th Century monk and cat hater Athanasius Kircher, which was to have induced the cats to make noise by repeatedly driving spikes into their tails. Kircher's gorier model was never built. But not for lack of interest: German physician Johann Christian Reil believed that Kircher's instrument would be a wonderful therapy tool for mentally ill patients suffering from severe wandering attention. His argument was that you couldn't help but focus if somebody played on of these things in front of you.

The 1877 book Musiciana, extraits d’ouvrages rare ou bizarre describes a version of the instrument in action:

When the King of Spain Felipe II was in Brussels in 1549 visiting his brother the Emperor Charles V, each saw the other rejoicing at the sight of a completely singular procession. At the head marched an enormous bull whose horns were burning, between which there was also a small devil. Behind the bull a young boy sewn into a bear skin ride on a horse whose ears and tail were cut off. Then came the archangel Saint Michael in bright clothing, and carrying a balance in his hand.

The most curious was on a chariot that carried the most singular music that can be imagined. It held a bear that played the organ; instead of pipes, there were sixteen cat heads each with its body confined; the tails were sticking out and were held to be played as the strings on a piano, if a key was pressed on the keyboard, the corresponding tail would be pulled hard, and it would produce each time a lamentable meow. The historian Juan Christoval Calvete, noted the cats were arranged properly to produce a succession of notes from the octave... (chromatically, I think).

This abominable orchestra arranged itself inside a theater where monkeys, wolves, deer and other animals danced to the sounds of this infernal music.