MORE NERDERY

As every good music nerd already knows, the '06 Voice critics' poll is out. Even more exciting (if you're me, not so much if you're anybody but me), I am namechecked in Simon Reynolds' essay. Hah! Fame and glory are surely mine own!

My ballot is here. And the post where I called out Simon and Matos for being too lazy/shut-in to recognize the musical awesomeness all around them (mostly in metal, though I mention Calle 13 and Pitbull, too) in '06 is here.

TIME TO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT PRINCE AGAIN, I GUESS

If you were as brain-raped by his Super Bowl performance as I was, you need to do what I did and get someone more obsessed with the little guy than you are to send you a copy of The Undertaker. It's a bootleg, half studio and half live. The live stuff is hot, including a great version of Stevie Wonder's "Maybe Your Baby," but it's kinda poorly recorded. The studio half of the disc, which comes up first, is the revelation. See, what was so great about the Super Bowl show was that all you could hear was the guitar and the drums, and The Undertaker is Prince in power trio mode - guitar, bass, drums, end of story. And he's tearing it up. The first song, "The Ride," is 11 minutes long, and the title cut is nearly 10. There's a cover of "Honky Tonk Women" on here that, in terms of joyful demolition of the original, is somewhere between Eddie Hazel's take on "California Dreamin'" and Neil Young's version of "On Broadway" from Eldorado. "The Ride" is like the Band of Gypsys rhythm section playing for narcoleptic strippers while Prince feeds his guitar into a wood chipper on top. If this and the Black Album are any indication, Prince hasn't been right about what to release vs. what to shelve since Sign 'O' The Times. He should have forced the label to release this as a full-on album, if as the story linked above asserts they wouldn't let him give it away to Guitar Player. Critics would have shit gold Twinkies.

ANNOTATED 12 FOR 2/6

The Strokes, "What Ever Happened" (1)
Isis, "Gentle Time"
Roky Erickson, "White Faces"
Sly & The Family Stone, "You Can Make It If You Try"
The Stooges, "T.V. Eye" (2)
Little Richard, "Miss Ann"
Alarm Will Sound, "Prep Gwarlek 3B"
Larry Young, "Evening"
ZZ Top, "Dust My Broom" (3)
The Mars Volta, "Haruspex" (4)
Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey And His Inter-Reformers Band, "Eyi Yato/Elere Ni Wa" (5)
Grateful Dead, "The Eleven" (6)

Notes:
1. This is the only Strokes song on my iPod; it's from the Marie Antoinette soundtrack.
2. This is the version where Iggy pretends to be a Detroit wrestling announcer before the song starts, and even if you cut that part off it's just an unbelievably over-amped version; it's hard for me to believe it wasn't the one chosen for the album, given the sheer ferocity of the guitar soloing. An utterly breathtaking piece of music.
3. It continues to horrify me that Degüello is out of print in the U.S. What the fuck is up with that?
4. I bought ScabDates the week it was released, because I'd seen the Mars Volta deliver a totally mind-roasting set at the Roseland in May '05; they were like a combination of Miles Davis's Agharta band, Afrika 70, and the Santana band from Lotus. But something went horribly, horribly wrong between the actual live performances the band is more than capable of delivering and the compiling of ScabDates, because it's a terrible album. They really should release the Roseland show as a 2CD set (as I recall, it was slightly under three hours of music). I wonder if there's a bootleg...
5. This is a ridiculously addictive 11-minute slab of Afro-funk, that starts off with a sort of droning noise I can't exactly identify, but it reminds me a whole lot of Aretha Franklin's equally addictive "Rock Steady." It's the first track on Lagos All Routes, one of a pair of killer compilations put out not long ago by Honest Jons/Astralwerks. The other one's called Lagos Chop Up. Go get 'em both.
6. The version from Live/Dead.

RIPPING OFF CASPAR BROTZMANN = AWESOME

THE AUTUMN PROJECT
"Between The Smoke And Mirrors"
from A Burning Light (Deep Send)

What to say about one more post-metal album with a late 2006 release date? Especially when one has only pitched the review with the self-imposed restriction that the big names of indie post-metal must at all costs not be called out by name or cited as referents? Well, here goes: the Autumn Project’s "A Burning Light" is pleasingly sugary, with loads of flow but not much ebb—once it gets going, it only builds, never receding until the very end and that’s more like a waterfall than a draining away. [Read the rest here.]

HELLO, BOSTON PHOENIX READERS

Dir En Grey filled the token “foreign-language weirdos” slot — former home of Rammstein — on last year’s Family Values Tour. A Japanese band affiliated with the glam-like “visual-kei” movement in their homeland, they started out dressing like something out of a William Gibson novel, with anti-gravity hair, make-up reminiscent of the late-’80s act E-Z-O, and androgynous, mostly black clothes. [Read the rest here.]