BLACK TAMBOURINE - BLACK TAMBOURINE

In my review of Black Tambourine’s Complete Recordings, I made a mention of the album soon being re-released with some bonus tracks and the whole nine yards – liner notes, unseen photos of the group, beautiful gatefold sleeve, and high-quality vinyl pressing etc. etc. However, this beautiful reissue is still not in my hands, but I have heard the bonus tracks and I know the album well enough. Besides, these are music reviews! If I wanted to spend hours talking about album artwork, I would probably just write another article, but who has time for that?


For those who aren’t on the Weekly Sunday Nite Record Reviews e-mail list (of which you can always be added, just ask), Black Tambourine was an interesting group. The members all came from some other bands (Whorl and Velocity Girl) and they drafted in a friend named Pam to sing for them. Throughout the brief two year existence they released two singles and a handful of compilation tracks until 1991 they broke up. 8 years later, the handful of tracks was compiled for the album Complete Recordings, featuring a whopping 10 songs in about 23 minutes. What is so amusing though is that even though Black Tambourine were by no means prolific songwriters or performers (throughout the 2 years they only did a couple of gigs), to this day you can hear their influence of groups such as Vivian Girls and pretty much the rest of the Slumberland Records catalog.



The music itself is hard to pin down – loud guitars and drums, vocals that sounded like they were recorded in an echo chamber and melodies that present a perfect and non-embarrassing pop influence. My friend Matt Verticchio says that it sounded like “the Vaselines recorded underwater”. While I might not agree 100% with that, I can say that it’s accurate enough.



Like the original Complete Recordings, all 10 songs from there are here, and they are still in the order they were on Complete Recordings, meaning non-chronological. This rubbed me the wrong way the first time as it’s harder to show the progression of the group. But since it was only a side project, and the sequencing is strong this way (another album like this is Switched On by Stereolab), it still works.



As for the bonus tracks, you have two demo versions (one of “For Ex-Lovers Only” and another for “Throw Aggi Off the Bridge”) and some cover songs. The demos aren’t necessary but the covers sound good enough. I mean, it’s all an added bonus to make sure that people would want to buy it, but since the material is high quality (in regards to reissue standards), and the fact that it’s been out of print for a few years now, I can say that I am eagerly awaiting the day Black Tambourine arrives in the copy center.



OVERALL RATING – Bag of hats/toaster strudel.

KEY TRACKS – For Ex-Lovers Only, Throw Aggi Off the Bridge, Pack You Up

MILEY CYRUS - THE TIME OF OUR LIVES EP

(REVIEW FOR APRIL FOOLS ISSUE OF "THE PENGUIN")

Am I allowed two word reviews? If so – sheer exhilaration!



If not, then prepare to listen. On this here EP, Miley seems to abandon those early country-rock leaning (undoubtedly influenced by Uncle Tupelo) and drops the acoustics in favor of slash and burn electric guitars. I mean, listening to the first track “Kicking & Screaming”, I was convinced that she hired Phil Manzanera (the man who played on Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) to play guitar throughout the album. Man, that would’ve been sweet!!!! But she did not. Turns out it’s some other guy, but I actually wouldn’t be surprised if Miley played guitar on the album herself. She’s quite a talented instrumentalist who spends months on end experimenting for the ultimate guitar tone for her little Wal-Mart brand FirstAct guitar.



Another unknown fact about Miley is that she actually has this power (much like Albert Oppenheimer) where she can sing in 4 different voices at the same time, making Auto-Tune non-existent on the entire album. And upon perusing Wikipedia, it appears that other people wrote these songs, but I have to disagree. I mean, what would Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald know about being a 16 year old girl trying to “Party in the U.S.A.”? He was a guitar player in the Saturday Night Live band for crying out loud! And while Hillary Lindsey has written songs for Faith Hill and Taylor Swift, I doubt she understands the heartbreak that Miley conveys in the tear-jerker “When I Look at You”. I mean, c’mon! Everyone knows that if anybody understands the true feelings of love and loss, it’s not going to be Steve Albini, it’s going to be some 16 year old girl who enjoys dancing on top of ice cream trucks.



The rest of the extended play is more of what you expect from her, but that’s not bad because it’s all SO GOOD! Both “The Time of Our Lives” and “Obsessed” are both lyrically witty, instrumentally strong and inventive and able to cut to the core of the American heart. Her lyrics are like a modern day Randy Newman, instead of writing about murderers, she’s writing about boys that she kind of likes, but not “like” likes, just, “likes”, you know? It’s with this you remember that she isn’t just some teenager that has within the same year, drawn criticism from families across the world due to her Vanity Fair photo shoot, candid photos taken in Japan, and the fact that she made this EP exclusive to only Wal-Mart. But me, I’ll stick with Miley thick and thin. It’s not even a guilty pleasure – as long as Albert Oppenheimer and I can dance and sing to these songs days on end, I’ll still reach for my old Hannah Montana 45s and relive all the days that I was a 11 year old girl.



OVERALL RATING – Rainbows and dirtbikes.

KEY TRACKS - Party in the U.S.A., Talk is Cheap, Before the Storm (with the Jonas Brothers)

THE BEARCUBES - BLUE EGG BLUES

(no artwork)

Usually I hate music. I don’t like it. I hate writing it, I hate listening to it, I hate thinking about it. Wanting to have a career that revolves around it seems useless and I can’t help but think that musicians are the worst people in the world all the time. But sometimes you find some group that is just so pleasant, it reminds me that “Oh hey, I go to music school, and music is some pretty great stuff.”



The group from what I can tell is a bunch of folks from Oberlin playing some enjoyable ditties using strings, banjos, oboes, and a woman singer who sounds like a wonderful person and can sing quite well. Maybe it’s just because I’m in my Songs: Ohia “anything with acoustic guitars or banjo or mandolin sounds AWESOME” mood or maybe it’s because it’s such a short release (4 songs, 13 minutes), but it sounds great. It doesn’t appear to be some group that’s just chilling and saying “Oh yeah, you know what would be GREAT (wink wink, not really) – A BANJO!”. This group sounds genuine and the musicians clearly have the chops to be pulling this off. I was listening to this while enjoying the nice weather and machine-made breeze of my fan yesterday and yeah, it made me smile.



Albie says that he saw them perform without the strings, but TWO OBOES!! Hear that?! TWO OBOES, LAUREN! AT THE SAME TIME!!!



OVERALL RATING – Catch of the day!

KEY TRACKS – “Blue Egg Blues”, “Houseboat”.

FLIPPER - GONE FISHIN'

Every jack-hole calls this “Flipper’s “artsy” album”. I’m not going to. This is Flipper’s super macho football player album that beats up artsy kids and shoves them into dumpsters, covering them with old socks, cockroaches, and squirrels who’ve recently ingested glow sticks. Remember “Generic Flipper” and the drunken mess it was? We used to dance to it, Albert Oppenheimer and I, hand-in-hand, crying about the future while singing “SEX BOMB BABY! YEAH!” and “LIFE! LIFE! LIFE IS THE ONLY THING WORTH LIVING FOR!”. Actually, Albie and I never did that. I was usually just me. I showed the Pilch folks Flipper a few times…not sure if they enjoyed it. Garret, let’s listen to Flipper together. Then Thin Lizzy. CAN YOU SMELL “MALE BONDING”?


Where was I? Oh yeah…

Some highlights still to come this year are An Evening at the Bouffes-Parisien, April 21 and 22, which features three Offenbach one-act operettas that poke delicious fun at Classical, French and Italian opera. And on April 7, the NEC Philharmonica, conductor Hugh Wolff and cellist Narek Haknazaryan take over Symphony Hall for a brilliant concert with works by Barber, Schumann, and Shostakovich. There’s also the track “First the Heart”, which like “Sex Bomb” has a dual sax solo, but this one is surprisingly tuneful and really awesome. “Talk’s Cheap” wouldn’t sound out of place on “Generic Flipper”, and “Sacrifice” was covered by the Melvins. Really, the whole album is great. And it sounds like it was recorded in a swamp.



Flipper were quite tune-smiths. When listening to them, I tap my feet and smash bricks and eat rocks, all the while thinking “Man, when I get out of this quarry, I’m gonna listen to some FLIPPER”. They were also drug addicts, and they all died when they released this album. Well, not all of them, but one did at one point…WHEEEEE!



OVERALL RATING – lots of buttons. And waffles!

KEY TRACKS – “First the Heart”, “One by One”, “The Light, The Sound, The Rhythm, The Noise”.

PAVEMENT - BRIGHTEN THE CORNERS

Life takes you funny places. You see, when you should be practicing for a keyboard exam, you start playing the same two chords over and over again. You start to think, “Hmm, this sounds familiar…” and you clunk them for another 2-3 minutes. It starts coming back…you remember listening to this when driving, when picking up your sister from school, right in the middle of winter break your senior year of high school, but god, WHAT IS IT?! Well, it turns out to be the song “Blue Hawaiian” by Pavement. Off of “Brighten the Corners”. But, I haven’t listened to this album in MONTHS! I mean, it’s good and all, but it’s not “Slanted & Enchanted” or even “Terror Twilight” for that matter. It’s the bastard stepson of Pavement’s discography. The critics will say that “Wowee Zowee” is, but it isn’t. “Wowee Zowee” is an LP that goes and explores all kinds of Pavement – the punky (“Serpentine Pad”), the transcendently beautiful (“Grounded”), the epic jams (“Half a Canyon”) – it’s an album that distills everything you’ve loved about Pavement into little under an hour. “Brighten the Corners” serves its spot as Pavement’s own “Bossanova” or “Down” – a great album, but when compared to others by the group, it lacks.



First off, what’s this?! A song with a lyric about Geddy Lee? Sign me up! Yeah, the sound’s a little slicker, but listen to that semi-ironic chorus that’s made for blasting out of speakers in the summertime. A lyrical romp too – the chorus contains the line “my baby baby baby babe gave me malaria hysteria”. You think all is well with Pavement…and then….the slick sound stays. And it’s all mid-tempo. And where’s the distortion pedal?? Where’s Bob’s yelling?!! Is Scott still in the band? Why does everything sound so frickin’ relaxed?!



And here’s the problem – Pavement accidentally became another one of those slacker bands of the 90s…they didn’t practice, the recordings were covered in a glorious layer of fuzz, their first drummer was a drug-addled hippy , and yet, they still wrote some of the best music around from 1989-1992. But now it’s 1997 and what do we get? Middle-aged Pavement. (Johnboy – this is the equivalent of “Wilco (The Album)”, but not as terrible.)



Now this isn’t a bad album…but when you compare it to anything else in the Pavement discography, it doesn’t shimmer like a burning man drowning in Lake Michigan – it glistens with an ant’s eye on a slip and slide. Scott’s songs are good this time…



I’m sorry for that review. It was terrible.



OVERALL RATING – nachos with jalapenos – good, just stuff you gotta pick off.

KEY TRACKS – “Date W/ Ikea”, “Starlings of the Slipstream”, “Embassy Row”

KURT VILE - CHILDISH PRODIGY

You know how this goes:

you're being all cool and stuff and trying to listen to the new Times New Viking album before it comes out because you have a review for the Penguin due the next day, but your copy still hasn't shown up in the mail. What the hell? you wonder...so you go on Lala.com and start listening to the tracks to right this review. Before you know it, you can only hear each song once and you're left with only 30 second samples. So while basing an album review on 30 second samples of songs you kinda know, you start getting distracted. Then you see on Lala "If you like blah blah blah" and etc. and you just start clicking through albums. You find an album by this guy with long hair, but for some reason, you hate him. You don't even have to hear his music. You just seem him, some young kid with long hair, and think "You, my friend, SUCK." But, you listen to the songs and enjoy them. You feel kinda guilty, but life happens, you're roommate moves out, you buy a record player, and time goes on.

FLASH FORWARD to 2010!!! ------------->>>>>>>>>

You're just hanging out, relaxing on spring break. You do some bopping around on the intranets and remember good friend Gary (Young) Kriston's http://solidlittlerockjams.blogspot.com and you pilfer through the reviews. You find one about this Kurt Vile guy and you decide "Well, other than "Raditude" and Incubus, Gary's usually spot on with music" and you start looking around for albums. The first one you find is this guy's most recent, and that was the one I listened to back in October.

And how did I feel?

Conflicted.

Full of swimmer's ear.

Spitting soup into snail shells.

Buying a car.

Wearing peanuts.

Watching both Twilight films.

And that was my spring break, BUT NOW BACK TO THE REVIEWWWWSSSS!!!!

But here I am, enjoying this album by this guy that I hate. Man does he write some sweet jams. Kind of an even split between full band hooplah and bedroom acoustic pop thats just fantastic. The band stuff is cool, but the bedroom stuff always has a distinct feel that he pulls of well.

The main reason why I'm all crazy about this is because of tracks 7-8, "Heart Attack" and "Amplifier". "Heart Attack" is just a bedroom guitar ditty that segues into "Amplifier" which starts quite similar, but then the whole band falls in and, oh boy, there's a trumpet that blows in and then you just fall over and say "damn". there's a song after, and then it ends.

thats the album.

and its good.

I'd say check it out. It's got the NM "Thumbs up and away" stamp of approval.

OVERALL RATING - FLYING CACTUS!
KEY TRACKS - "Amplifier", "Heart Attack", "Freak Train".

REMA-REMA - WHEEL IN THE ROSES

So this band existed for all of one year. Their lone release has a whopping 4 songs. One of their songs was covered by Big Black a whole bunch. It's that one that goes "REMA-REMA! REMA-REMA! REMA-REMA! HAHAHAHA!!!" for 4 minutes. And is that a darn catchy song. The other 3 songs include the 7 minute opener "Feedback Song", and 2 live tracks, "Instrumental" and "Fond Affections".

So half of this is studio and the other half live? Christ.

But its noisy!! And awfully British sounding. That makes it kinda silly. Silly Brits.

And the song "Rema-Rema" has a whole bunch of silly sound effects during it that sound like leftovers from a Kraftwerk album. And "Instrumental" actually has some lyrics! But I can't understand them.

Basically, this was a glorious mess of mid-tempo noisy grade school ballads for ice fishers everywhere. And boy oh boy, do I wish I was an ice fisher.

OVERALL RATING - squiddidly bop!
KEY TRACKS - "rema-rema", "instrumental"