Saturday, August 30, 2014

DYNAMITE HEMORRAGE RADIO #44

Can't pick a more inauspicious time to post a new show than smack in the middle of Labor Day weekend, but we at Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio don't operate according to your rules. We had bands we needed to play for you, we had a free Saturday night, we bailed on something like five quality live music shows happening in the San Francisco Bay Area this evening and instead we made ya this podcast. It's a little over an hour and it might blow your goddamn mind.

Let's start with brand new material from HONEY RADAR, SNEAKS, OCTAGRAPE, SYNTHETIC ID, PY PY, TERRY MALTS and THE BILDERS. We stack from there with reissued stuff from CRIME. We slide in library material from VAIN AIMS, GARBAGE AND THE FLOWERS, COME, FLESH EATERS, DEAD CLODETTES, THE GERMS and the awesome KING TEARS MORTUARY (pictured here) - among others. Like the other 43 hours of podcasts before it, it all comes with my personal guarantee of quality - the music, not the blatherings of the inane host. That's what the slider on your iPhone is for. 

Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #44 here.
Stream or download the show on Soundcloud here.
Subscribe to the show on iTunes here.

Track listing:

HONEY RADAR - A Ballerina in Focus
HONEY RADAR - Alabama Wax Habit
SNEAKS - New Taste
BEYOND THE IMPLODE - Lassitude
VAIN AIMS - You
KING TEARS MORTUARY - Crash Report
DEAD CLODETTES - Flou
THE NIGHTS AND DAYS - Diddy Wah Diddy
CRIME - Terminal Boredom
GERMS - Sex Boy
TERRY MALTS - Let You In
SYNTHETIC ID - Random Shocks
THE FLESH EATERS - Plastic Factory (live)
OCTAGRAPE - Ono Cyclone
PY PY - Pagan Day
COME - Car
THE GARBAGE AND THE FLOWERS - Nothing Going Down At All
THE BILDERS - The Utopians R Just Out Boozin'

Some past shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #43    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #42    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #41    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #40    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #39    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #38    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #37    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #36    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #35    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #34    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #33    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #32    (playlist)

Saturday, August 16, 2014

BOOK REVIEW: "MUDHONEY: THE SOUND AND THE FURY FROM SEATTLE" by Keith Cameron

My personal temperament toward music, both live and recorded, was so hotly maniacal and all-consuming in the 1980s that naturally, my memories, connections and tendency toward nostalgia are rooted in the years 1981-89 more than anywhere else. Mudhoney were central to my sickness at the highest point in its bell curve. Having already been a Green River aficionado while they were around, when that first Mudhoney 45 came out, me and several of my pals were so blown away by their dramatic supercharging of the “long-haired punk” formula, with its the new emphasis on distortion and wide-grooved volume, that we instantly hatched a plan to see the band 4 times in a row in late ’88 (as their “Superfuzz Bigmuff” EP was just coming out), from San Jose to Los Angeles to San Francisco and Huntington Beach. In between, I sheepishly asked Mudhoney’s tour manager Bob Whittaker if the band would play my college radio show on KCSB in Santa Barbara on their lone day off, promising beer, a good time and a place to stay. Offer accepted, it set up a nice acquaintanceship w/ each of the band members & a friendship w/ Whittaker that continues to this day, and prodded me - as if I needed prodding - to see several dozen Mudhoney shows throughout their 25+ years of existence.

Has my intense rabidity for the band’s music, forged at age 20, waned a bit since 1988? Of course it has. I can look at Mudhoney critically and place them very much as a vital and still-awesome cog in their scene, which extended well outside of Seattle and encompassed other late 80s champs like Pussy Galore, Laughing Hyenas, Lazy Cowgirls, Sonic Youth, Dwarves, feedtime, Scratch Acid and so on. Their records rocked, their live show was better, and there really isn’t a single record they’ve put out since those early years where I haven’t really gravitated to 2 or 3 intense and raw tunes, especially in the 2000s starting with “Since We’ve Become Translucent”. So my approach to reading Keith Cameron’s well-composed biography was to marinate deeply in the nostalgia more than anything else, and yet when I exited the book, it was with a deeper appreciation for the individuals in the band, and the choices they made, than I’d even had before.

More to so than even their songs or stage presence, it’s Mudhoney’s complete and utter disregard for the trappings of fame and the sick machinations of the music industry that was so compelling. These are 5 people (counting later-period bassist Guy Maddison) who’ve always been eminently approachable, friendly and just as wildly excited about obscure 45s and bands as you/I am. Cameron does a terrific job capturing and coming back to that, as he relays tales (all with the full participation of and many interviews with the band members) of early obscurity, the pendulum-shift bedlam of the 1988/89/90 explosion of the “Seattle scene”, drug use, sobriety, major label weirdness, Sub Pop financial shenanigans and some extreme record collecting as well.

If you read Mark Yarm’s book about “grunge” (“Everybody Loves Our Town”) you’ve already seen chunks of this, but this one’s fully centered on the only arguably great band to come from all of that nonsense. It’s rare to find a group of musicians in any genre who’ve stuck together as long as they have with their reputations as individuals and musicians fully intact – and it almost never happens in rocknroll, certainly not on the shoestring independent level that Mudhoney’s pretty much operated on for more than three-quarters of their career. More so than even the indie documentary that was made about them recently (“I’m Now: The Story of Mudhoney”, which, uh, yours truly has two brief speaking parts in), this book is the right sort of exploratory & explanatory angle to expound upon how these people as individuals engineered their lives to keep playing the music they wanted, and keep their collective and personal integrity very much intact.

Friday, August 15, 2014

DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #43

Are we living in the middle of a full-on, gnarly-ass, rock and roll revolution? Because it sure feels like it to me. I think you'll know what I'm talking about when you sample the breadth and depth of DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #43, my latest phony radio show recorded on a laptop somewhere in the wilds of Scandinavia. Here we have all manner of dangerous and even sweet sounds, more new than old, and fully deserving of every bit of the next hour that you have. 

New stuff this show includes winners from LOS CRIPIS (pictured); the PROPER ORNAMENTS, BUCK BILOXI AND THE FUCKS, COLD BEAT, AUSMUTEANTS, MIRIAM (Linna!!), WET BLANKETS, MUSK, APACHE DROPOUT, HONEY RADAR, SYNTHETIC ID, and yes, MR. BISCUITS...!. But that's not all we did for you. We also threw together some raw and raging stuff from the ROB JO STAR BAND, THE MIRRORS, HARRY PUSSY, CLAW HAMMER, THE REACTIONARIES, FEEDTIME and even MUDHONEY, baby. Oh look - you've already started listening.

Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #43 here.
Stream or download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #43 on Soundcloud.
Subscribe to the show on iTunes.

Track listing:

ROB JO STAR BAND - Acid Revolution
SYNTHETIC ID - At an Impasse
HARRY PUSSY - Youth Problem
WET BLANKETS - Dieter Caught My Bus
BUCK BILOXI AND THE FUCKS - I Ain't Going To Church
BLACK JASPERS - Smart Car
AUSMUTEANTS - Fed Through A Tube
LOS CRIPIS - All My Friends Are Dead
MIRIAM - My Love Has Gone
HONEY RADAR - Scorpions Bought Me Breakfast
PROPER ORNAMENTS - Step Into The Cold
COLD BEAT - Wave
MUSK - Drag House
THE SHAMES - My World Is Upside Down
MUDHONEY - Paperback Life
CLAW HAMMER - Self Destruct
APACHE DROPOUT - Trash is Treasure
THE REACTIONARIES - Innuendo
FEEDTIME - Don't Tell Me
MR. BISCUITS - My Plums Are Ripe
THE MIRRORS - She Smiled Wild

Some past shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #42    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #41    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #40    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #39    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #38    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #37    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #36    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #35    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #34    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #33    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #32    (playlist)

"ANOTHER EARTH"

This US micro-indie from 2011 helped launch the career of indie dreamgirl, screenwriter and producer Brit Marling. I keep seeing that she gets typecast in some pretty weird sci-roles roles as a cult leader or astro dreamer, and that's great; she's got decent acting chops and plays "oddball" quite well, in spite of her off-the-charts looks. Yet "Another Earth" trips up just as often as it succeeds. It's about a young woman on the verge of starting her first year at MIT (Marling's "Rhoda") who gets drunk and plows into a family of three while she's intently observing the newly-discoved phenomena of a "second Earth" – outside her car window, while driving. We then flash-forward four years later, as she's getting out of prison, and Earth 1 is still no closer to having made contact with "Earth 2", despite the latter (and its moon) now looming over our earth like Lars Von Trier's collision-course planets in "Melancholia".

There are some fantastic sci-fi elements to this one, and enough eerie close-ups and disjointed speechifying from off-camera scientists about the nature of Earth 2 (over droning synth music, no less) that really hints at how mind-blowing this could have been – and actually is, in parts. Yet there are so many cinematic cliches in this one that I found myself straining to finish the film. What happens when the going gets rough with her new boyfriend, who happens to be the surviving father in the family of three she hit four years ago? Of course, she dramatically pukes in the toilet, just like everyone does in movies for some reason. Oops – she's not supposed to be poking around his house, but there's his son's picture, right where she could guiltily come across it, and yep, he just happens to be standing nearby right when she finds it. Whew, that was a close one. That never happens in film! Oh, and sex is so wildly passionate and hot sometimes that you just want to get down to it on a coffee table with your shirt on, while the dude keeps all of his clothes on while wildly humping you in a hot frenzy, after a big 15 seconds of delicious foreplay. Man, I can't even count the times.

Perhaps you'll distract yourself something batty trying to remember where you've seen the male lead, William Mapother before. He was Ethan from "Lost"! Remember that guy? I guess I do – but his face, if not his acting ability, is instantly memorable. Of course in his grieving, slovenly, late 40s, alcoholic state he'd have no problem seducing the most beautiful 21-year-old on the planet. So yeah - "Another Earth" has some holes as big as the craters on Jupiter's moon, and yet has enough redeeming qualities to not be a total washout. I just regret not seeing the film this might have otherwise been without the ham-handed swipes from the last forty years of mainstream flicks.

Monday, August 11, 2014

BOOK REVIEW: "MY STRUGGLE, BOOK ONE" by Karl Ove Knausgaard

An absolutely exhilarating ride through one man’s memoirs that breaks as many conventions as it makes up on the spot. Karl Ove Knausgaard, you may have heard, is Norway’s literary cause célèbre – though, having myself lived in Norway for 15 weeks this most recent summer, the reports of him being omnipresent and discussed ad nauseum there are fully overblown. Most people don’t read good  books, remember? That said, his “Min Kamp” - yes, that means “My Struggle,”, and yes, he’s well aware how the title helped drive much of the book’s initial hoopla - series of six volumes of personal memoirs had sold extremely well there. As of this writing, the first three volumes are available in English and are getting raves everywhere, including from me. This book is straight-up my favorite thing I’ve read in two years, easily.

Let’s marvel at it all a bit before digging in. Knausgaard wasn’t, before these book, famous in any way; his experiences in “My Struggle, Book One” aren’t particularly unique nor exceptional; and the guy’s even younger than I am by a couple of years, having been born in the very late sixties. Yet his prose is absolutely pulse-quickening no matter how prosaic the subject matter. Knausgaard brings details of his childhood and current life as a parent of three children into being by hypnotically weaving in everything from his life’s most minute details to grand theories of death, art and existence. Death, in fact, is the key theme of the book – mainly our hypocrisies in how we describe it, sanctify it and shrink from it. The second half of the book is almost entirely about his own father’s death by alcoholism, and how Knausgaard and his brother Yngve worked to bring some closure and order to the house in which he violently died. Detours are taken throughout, without warning, sometimes returning to a theme being explored, sometimes not. One goes deep into an unrequited teenage love affair, another into early life as a cultural aesthete, trying to be cool and yet a stolid “writer” in the Norwegian city of Bergen, and still another into his utter terror of his father’s judgment and reproach while growing up.

His somewhat masochistic relationship with his brother, whom he adores, is especially poignant, and arguably the best part of a nearly perfect book. Visiting Yngve at his university in Bergen while Karl Ove was still in high school is utterly life-changing, and the distance between his idealized self there vs. the reality of his humdrum life back in Kristiansand is mammoth – which helps set him, clumsily, onto the literary path he ultimately followed. Taking place in the 80s as much of this does, Knausgaard is even a bit of new waver, and self-consciously styles himself after Ian McCullough from Echo and the Bunnyman. Once in Bergen, he writes for various music and literary magazines, and interviews bands like Wall of Voodoo and Tuxedomoon. One story of interviewing Norwegian poet Olav Hauge is hilariously tense; a tale of three college kids trying to wrest information from a cantankerous literary lion that somehow comes out all right in the end.

There are several things working for Knausgaard in Book One that make his stories so wildly compelling. First, their universality. He describes teenage years in ways so familiar, I frequently wished I’d been taking notes on all the things I’ve been slowly forgetting over the years, in hopes of trying to wrestle the same action-packed punch from the seemingly mundane. Second, his own character. This is a man who fails, tries to learn from it, fails again, and yet he does not suffer from false modesty on many fronts – nor is his book a litany of problems. Quite the opposite. He loves his children, but in a riveting section of this book enumerates his own shortcomings and the nerve-rattling impatience his own brood bestows upon him. He mostly does the right thing by his wife and his family, but lays out some of his frustrations for having done so out on the page. His father drank himself to death, and he’s horrified by its circumstances – but also hints of his own issues with alcohol, which one assumes will be a subject in later volumes. One gets the sense of an ethical, introverted, exceptionally smart everyman who happens to have immersed himself in culture and ideas without at all being a pompous prick nor a navel-gazing mess. The moment I finished “My Struggle, Book One” I put it down and headed to the laptop to order “Book Two”, which I plan to devour as soon as it arrives. I shall report on it in this very space, presently.

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

"THE KID WITH A BIKE"

I'd been reading about the Dardenne brothers' films for somewhere upward of 15 years and figured it was probably time I got around to seeing one. Outside of 10 minutes of 1999's "Rosetta" - stopped because the extreme shaky-cam was making my wife physically ill - I'd never seen any of these critically-worshipped Belgians' uber-realist pictures. "The Kid With A Bike" from 2011 was an excellent place to start, and it packs a wallop in its 87 minutes. It's a portrait of the choices a troubled, abandoned boy makes on the precipice of his adolescence; the ramifications of those choices; and a vivid illustration of the volatile lives of the world' foster children.

Cyril is the youth in question. Abandoned out of the blue and without any warning by his father (we never actually hear of a mother), he's placed into a group home. Cyril stews over what's happened, and after ultimately tracking down his deadbeat dad, comes to realize he's truly on his own. This is devastating to him, and he claws at his own face with his fingernails and performs all manner of antisocial, youth-in-revolt acts. Luckily he's somewhat magically taken in on weekends by a benevolent hairdresser named Samantha, who's recovered the bicycle his dad sold off to help pay his own bills. This is where the divergent paths are set up, telegraphed from a mile away: will Cyril embrace the good-hearted Samantha and the good life she offers, or lead a teenaged life of misery (drugs, prison, the whole lot)?

Naturally, he's a sullen preteen and has significant issues articulating the pain his father has wrought. Samantha struggles mightily with her communication as well, and when she's asked point-blank by Cyril why she took him in, the best she can come up with is, "I don't know". Sometimes more tension can be wrung out of people saying the wrong thing in what could be psychologically life-altering situations than all the marital spats, chase scenes and killers in closets combined. And yet the Dardennes don't do anything particularly surprising nor shocking in the film - it all unfolds more or less as you'd expect, with some fairly violent events moving the narrative along and wringing even more tension out of the proceedings.

It doesn't, therefore, hit many bum notes. I thought the "him or me" ultimatum from Gilles, Samantha's barely-formed boyfriend, was a little hard to believe, and a rare dramatic misstep in an otherwise well-timed drama. It's pretty minor in the face of the Dardennes' simple, measured, medium-pathos and moderately uplifting approach, which splits the difference between the two paths quite well and leaves one curious as to where this boy will ultimately end up.

Monday, August 4, 2014

DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #42

After a three-week absence, we're back with another hour of quality tuneage from noisemakers old and new. For once, let's start the brief recap with the old-timers. Pere Ubu (pictured), Bill Direen & The Bilders, The Dicks, Vacuum, The Creation, The Screamers and the Nig-Heist, anyone? There's a set of "soft sounds for gentle people" (sorta) in the middle, bookended by new stuff from The Proper Ornaments and Cold Beat. There is other new material from The Nots, Apache Dropout, The Coolies and Dark Matter. In short, there is much to like.

Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #42 here.
Stream or download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #42 on Soundcloud here.
Subscribe to the show via iTunes here.

Playlist:

VACUUM - Kicks
APACHE DROPOUT - Heavy Window
THE CREATION - Midway Down
WURLD SERIES - What Would You Do?
THE NOTS - Modern
THE NIG-HEIST - The Last Generation
PROPER ORNAMENTS - Magazine
THE GIRLS AT DAWN - Come Here To Die
FAT TULIPS - Nostalgia
WILDERNESS CHILDREN - Bad Taste In My Mouth
COLD BEAT - Out of Time
DARK MATTER - Dark Matter
THE COOLIES - Mothers in Mantis
PERE UBU - Cloud 149
THE SCREAMERS - Vertigo (Let's Go)
BILL DIREEN & THE BILDERS - Retail Trade
VIRGIN PRUNES - Twenty Tens (I've Been Smoking All Night)
THE LEWD - American Wino
THE DICKS - Lifetime Problems
45 GRAVE - Black Cross

Some past shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #41    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #40    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #39    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #38    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #37    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #36    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #35    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #34    (playlist) 
Dynamite Hemorrhage #33    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #32    (playlist)