Self-titled cassette release. This kid Nathan Williams loves the Beach Boys and lo-fi noisy acoustic punk type stuff. The final result, something like Panda Bear meets Eat Skull I guess. Buy the tape now, or the CD/LP reissues in a couple weeks, from Fuck It Tapes.
Wavves (2008)
Wavves - Wavves (2008) 10/31/2008
CapaRezza - Le Dimensioni Del Mio Caos (2008) 10/19/2008
CapaRezza is an Italian alterna-hip-hop artist. This is his fourth album, released this April. Check out the video for his super-catchy hit "Fuori Dal Tunnel" (from his second album) here:
Fun stuff.
Le Dimensioni Del Mio Caos (2008)
Hookers II - Black Visions Of Crimson Wisdom (1999) 10/17/2008
So you know that part in "Heavy Metal Parking Lot' where the kid in the full Zebra pattern spandex suit declares "Heavy metal rules! Twisted Sister, Dokken, Ozzy, The Scorpians. They all rule!" Well he was right on three counts. Heavy metal. Twisted Sister and Ozzy. Had the Hookers been around at that time then he would of only needed to mention them period!
Death To False Metal!
Hookers II - Black Visions of Crimson Wisdom
Promyshlennaya Arkhitektura - Love & Technology (1988) 10/15/2008
Promyshlennaya Arkhitektura (Промышленная Архитектура, "Industrial Architecture") was a short-lived project founded by Dmitri Selivanov, who had previously worked with Yegor Letov in Grazhdanskaya Oborona and founded, then almost immediately quit, the band Kalinov Most. While the Siberian punk scene of the 80s is frequently labeled as "suicide rock" (less frequently, "existential punk") for its fatalistic lyrics and dark sound, Promyshlennaya Arkhitektura appears as the only example of "post-suicide rock." In a universe of Ian Curtises, Selivanov was the double-Ian Curtis.
Some were singing about the adamantine grass that covered the sticky banks of the river called Death, but others settled on those banks, since existence is more hopeless than any death.
The Promyshlennaya Arkhitektura project recorded one normal album and a live one, both in 1988. They would be officially released only in 2001. Selivanov hung himself in April 1989 at the age of 23.
The album, Love & Technology, is a self-conscious attempt to take the suicide rock into a newer, more innovative, but still very dark direction. It's existential Soviet new wave, with obnoxiously simple keyboard lines that remind of Devo swamped out with paranoid singing and drones. The influence of Joy Division is also obvious, especially on the album's closer, "Children Of Hospitals."
Love & Technology (1988)
Modey Lemon - four albums (2002-2008) 10/13/2008
Great loud garage rock band from Pittsburgh. I've been listening to this band since hearing "Ants In My Hands" years ago on the radio, but somehow they fell off my radar and I didn't realize they had released a new album this summer. So here's all their full-lengths so far, bluesy indie/punk/garage with a lot of Moog and occasionally forays into noise rock (especially on Thunder + Lightning). A post-math rock Rolling Stones power trio from Pennsylvania? Maybe.
Modey Lemon (2002)
Thunder + Lightning (2003)
The Curious City (2005)
Season of Sweets (2008)
Burnt By The Sun / Luddite Clone SPLIT (2000) 10/12/2008
Burnt By The Sun / Luddite Clone SPLIT *link fixed*
Churning, punk-tinged metalcore/grind. Featuring Dave Witte of Discoradance Axis, Human Remains, Melt Banana, and Municipal Waste. Amazing expression in Mike Olander's vocals. Better than anything this genre has released since. When I was 15 this and the BBTS EP got me to start listening to metal.
Luddite Clone is decent as well, but don't confuse them with Burnt By The Sun, please.
Listen to "When Corporations Rule Your Mom"
Chain of Strength - True Till Death (1989) 10/11/2008
Chain of Strength - True Till Death
Classic second-wave straight-edge hardcore. This is a vinyl rip of the original sound version. There was a remastered version with a stupid intro to the title track and crappy sounding guitars. This version, however, sounds like it's blasting through a moldy pillow (a good thing)
Chain of Strength was a bunch of jocks making music about not doing drugs and drinking... while the band still continued to drink occasionally. Apparently they had a somewhat loose interpretation of the Straight Edge creed, which is pretty respectable/rational in my book... considering the militant claptrap they were surrounded by.
Youtube: True 'til Death
Yegor & Opizdenevshiye - One Hundred Years Of Solitude (1992) 10/10/2008
I'm bumping this post after 8 months because a) I just re-ripped the CD in better bitrate so I'm replacing the long-dead link and b) the original post was made when pukeskywalkerblog was only about a month old. This is one of my favorite albums and one that left a pretty serious mark on my music tastes; personally I believe that in the future it'll be recognized as one of the greats in a more globalized canon of rock music. But I'm a dork.
Album got plugged a little while ago in an interview with the dude from Pink Reason.
The original post was made on February 21, the day Yegor was buried.
*****************************
Russo-Soviet punk/psych rock legend Yegor Letov was buried this morning after dying of a heart attack on Tuesday. He was 43. So ended the life of the man whom the eXile called "perhaps the last great genius of Russian literature" in an obituary.
Letov was from Omsk, an industrial center of some 2 million souls in southwest Siberia. He formed his first punk band, Posev (Посев, "Sowing") in late 1984. After a few short weeks the drummer's mother reported them to the KGB. The group was arrested and convicted of conspiracy to commit industrial sabotage. Letov attempted suicide in prison, was transferred to a psikhushka (mental asylum, in the USSR they were often used as holding places for political dissidents). There he learned to play guitar and drums, and after escaping he formed his most famous band Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Гражданская Оборона, "The Civil Defense") and lived a nomadic, illegal punk lifestyle until freedom of speech restrictions were loosened in 1989. He also released several solo albums and was involved in the side projects Yegor & Opizdenevshie (Егор и Опизденевшие, "Yegor and the Fuckups") and Kommunizm (Коммунизм, "Communism").
After the collapse of the USSR Letov struggled to find a new ideology and briefly fell in with Edward Limonov's neo-fascist National Bolshevik Party before adopting the stance of a "world Christian" and "ecological anarchist." In an interview a few months ago in the Russian edition of Rolling Stone magazine he lamented that politics in his country would never be anything but a "useless and foolish business."
This album, Sto Let Odinochestva (Сто лет одиночества, "One hundred years of solitude") was the second of three by the Yegor & the Fuckups psychedelia project and, in my opinion, the peak of his career. It was recorded in pieces in 1991 and 1992, just after the suicide of Letov's first wife the folk-punk poet Yanka Dyagileva, during a period when Letov spent most of his time wandering around the woods in the Ural region dropping acid. It's a powerful exploration of political nihilism and Slavic mysticism through punk energy and keyboard-soaked psychedelic rock.
We'll miss you Yegor. Пусть будет земля тебе пухом.
part1, part2
Henry Flynt - Back Porch Hillbilly Blues Volumes 1 & 2 (2002) 10/05/2008
Henry Flynt is a philosopher and anti-art activist, proponent of the ideology of "cognitive nihilism"; allegedly he was also the first to use the expression "concept art." While Flynt made himself famous by his radical anti-art protests in the 60s, calling for the destruction of museums and galleries and the liberation of man from enslavement by aesthetic beauties and tastes, he also very aggressively worked for the creation of a "new American ethnic music," blending his political and philosophical aims with bluegrass and rock in a series of experimental recordings that did not get wide release until the 2000s. From his "The Meaning Of My Avant-Garde Hillbilly and Blues Music":
The “youth” craze of the Sixties became increasingly dubious (from flower power to Altamont), and the Beatles and their imitators morphed, leading their fans to a mystique of consumerist dissipation. (Carnaby Street and “Yellow Submarine.”) For me, the Beatles’ consummate song was “Revolution,” which begins “If you wanna make a revolution, count me out.” It served as the anthem for all the mediocrities who responsed to the stresses of the late twentieth century by embracing institutional co-optation.
After the Beatles seized the market, white pop ceased to interest me except for the flukes. When Bob Dylan added electric instruments and blues chops to his act for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” that impelled me to my initial rock efforts of 1966 (with Walter De Maria on traps). Given my political engagement, I had been waiting for an impetus to try songs with “revolution” lyrics.
In general, the ascendancy of the Beatles, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., ended ethnic-rock—the ethnic impulses reverted to the segmented R&B and C&W markets. After the mid-Sixties, rock-pop no longer had ethnic chops—could I have been the only one who was musicological enough to realize that? Rock-pop became uniformly loud in a way which was vulgar, mechanical, and bloated. (There was no more of the profundity, and I mean profundity, of a Chuck Berry or of “Be-Bop-A-Lula.”)
...
But ethnic music has a unique significance in contemporary society. Again, let it be clear that I am not speaking about what the ignorant call “folk music,” but about Hindustani masters such as Ram Narayan, about Buddy Guy or Coltrane, even about African field recordings which were never ensconced in any canon. Simply, such music preserves heights of the spirit which cannot be rebuilt from the sterile plain of modernity. Commercial-mechanistic-impersonal civilization is progressively crushing people’s spirit. What emerged [in the late Sixties] is a culture devoted to fads and synthetic identities, a culture of smirking self-disgust and degradation. Mass culture is a facet of the horrible symbiosis which exists between the manipulators and the underlings.
Ethnic music has a vision of human possibility which has not been impaired by the demeaning forces of modernization. (Yet again, let it be clear that I am not speaking about what the ignorant call “folk music.”) These repertoires are the voice of the unsubjugated autochthon. In certain times and places, non-privileged autochthons did not have a separate language, or a visual art, or an architecture, and music was the only creative medium which they made their own. The best of the musical languages which embody the tradition of experience of autochthonous communities are uniquely valuable for their specificity of sentiment and passion, their holistic engagement, their expression of extra-ordinary and elevated human possibilities. They transmit something which I am not willing to ignore.
Flynt briefly ran with the Velvet Underground in late 60s New York, filling in for John Cale on violin at a few shows before Lou Reed booted him from the band for not being pretentious and urban enough. Reed did, however, teach Flynt a few guitar chords before getting rid of him. Good he did.
Buy these and other archival recordings of Henry Flynt from Locust or Boomkat.
Back Porch Hillbilly Blues Volume 1 (2002)
Back Porch Hillbilly Blues Volume 2 (2002)
The Dead Milkmen - Big Lizard in My Backyard (1984) 10/05/2008
The Dead Milkmen - Big Lizard in My Backyard
So I was at my buddy's house in west Philadelphia last night, and someone decides to let these two drunk girls come in. They had lived in the house before and wanted to come see it again
After talking for a while the girls mentioned that The Dead Milkmen used to live in the exact same house, many years ago. The didn't seem like your typical Dead Milkmen fans, so I'm inclined to believe them. They also said the landlord has the lease framed in his office, which gave their story some credibility
Anyways. This is the Dead Milkmen, an awesome punk-ish band from Philadelphia. They had a small hit in the 80's called "bitchin camaro" that you may have heard. They're very sarcastic, very stupid-funny, but they also have some depth to their lyrics.
The title track is probably my favorite, it's about having some sort of godzilla-creature as a pet that he can't afford to feed and it shits a lot and the government wants to destroy it. It's good, I swear!
Videos:
Big Lizard In My Backyard
Bitchin' Camaro
Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers - L.A.M.F. (1977) 10/02/2008
The Heartbreakers - L.A.M.F.
I just finished the book "Please Kill Me" which traces the roots punk back to the sixties, using only pieced-together interview segments from various important persons. The book touches on The Velvet Underground, MC5, Iggy and the Stooges, Patti Smith, The New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Dead Boys, and a few others.
It's an awesome book that you should probably read. I didn't realize that most of these bands knew each other on a personal basis, lived in the same places, were all heroin addicts, were occasional male prostitutes, etc. Go figure...
Anyways, this is Johnny Thunders' band after the New York Dolls. I'd never heard of them until now. Dee Dee Ramone was in the band long enough to claim authorship of the single "Chinese Rocks," which is one of the good ones here (Johnny claimed he wrote it). Almost every track on this album is a keeper though. Really fantastic stuff here. Johnny Thunders was so fucked up, it's a miracle this thing even exists, let alone be as awesome as it is. All of these bands were extremely fucked up. Honestly just check out the book and this album... I'm to tired to write coherently about this
This is "The Lost '77 Mixes" mix, the best of the three available versions.
Myspace
Myspace 2
Wikipedia Article
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