Thursday, April 06, 2006

I'M ON THE FLOOR LIKE "HOLY SHIT"

The new Ghostface album has so many lines on it that will make you wanna shake a random stranger passing by and scream "Listen to this fucking shit!" that I could fill the whole front page of this blog with 'em. But I think the two that are destroying my world with the most vigor right now are both from "The Champ":

"He's a bulldozer! With a wreckin' ball attached!"

"Niggas want me dead but they scared to step to me/Rippin' out they guts like a hysterectomy"

Go buy Fishscale right now. Come back and read the rest of this entry later.

Other things that are kicking my ass, to a much lesser degree:

First, the new Boris album Pink. (Pink should have called her new album Boris. Missed opportunity there. Oh, well.) Boris have bored me in the past; I tried to like Amplifier Worship and Absolutego and their Merzbow collab Sun Baked Snow Cave because all the right people worshipped them and I wanted to be down wit it, but they were just pastiche artists like too many Japanese performers, grabbing random riffs from the Seventies Hard Rock bag and making sure they had just the right amps and guitars and pedals and haircuts. This became even more clear when I saw them live at the Knitting Factory. They wanted to be Grand Funk Railroad so fucking bad that night, and simply weren't. I bailed about half an hour in. My buddy swears they got better after I left, but he said that about the Mars Volta, too, and the first two hours of that show were possibly the greatest live rock experience I've ever had, top five easy, so I know he's lying because if they had actually gotten better after what I saw, he would have dissolved into pink goo and been unable to report back to me. But anyway, Pink is a really good album. The first track is beautiful almost shoegazery psych-doom, then the majority of those after it are ultra-fuzzed but also skull-powderingly heavy garage-rock stomp-attacks. Everything you've always read that they are, they actually became this time. It'll be out soon on Southern Lord - it's currently available, with no extra tracks, as a pricey import. Hold out.

I'm also digging Rodrigo y Gabriela. They're a pair of Mexican acoustic guitarists who play what sounds like flamenco influenced by Yngwie Malmsteen, and the latter comparison is probably more accurate than the former; inside the CD, they swear they're not flamenco players. They cover Metallica's "Orion" and Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" on their new CD, but their originals will make you wanna peel off your skin and jump into the nearest stucco wall.

Dub Trio remind me of Blind Idiot God; their new album New Heavy has big riffs, nice cymbal/hi-hat work during the dubby bass breaks, and vocals by Mike Patton on the weakest cut.

Nuru Kane is a guitarist from Dakar who plays music that's somewhere between the North African desert and Junior Kimbrough's trance blues. His album Sigil (Riverboat) is fucking gorgeous. Etran Finatawa do something similar, with a little more Tinariwen to 'em; they're just okay.

I bought the Bug's latest thing, the 2CD set Killing Sound, credited to Razor X Productions. If you wish dancehall sounded like someone setting off a shape charge in your transverse colon while a belt-sander gently caresses your ears, this is your album. The first disc is crazed singles featuring deejays like Daddy Freddy, Warrior Queen, Mexican and a bunch of others; the second disc is dub versions. The louder you play it, the more your neighbors will gnash their teeth and dream of setting their dogs on you in your sleep. Especially if they like "regular" dancehall.

2 comments:

Chris said...

You really need to to hear Flood and Heavy Rocks. Flood is one of those perfect albums and previous to Pink, Heavy Rocks was Boris at their most furious pace. Though now it probably doesn't sound quite so relentless.

Akuma No Uta is excellent too.

Absolutego, Sun Baked Snow Cave and Amplifier Worship are definitely 'acquired tastes'.

Anonymous said...

That line from "The Champ" is from Rocky. On the unreleased leak, they actually used Mickey (Burgess Meredith's) speech.