In the interest of rampant fanboyism, check me out.
The critical information I'm struggling vaguely to convey to you is that I'm not only an online friend to Subtle mastersmith and sincere musical hero Dax Pierson, I am also amongst the company of his top three closest musical neighbours.
Ipso facto, I am in essence the newest member of Subtle and I am to depart from this harsh locale for the sunny shores of Vancouver, there to weave hushed and terrible secrets into music with my new best friends and hangers-on.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Friday, September 28, 2007
The Ends
It begins with all white, in a sound-proofed hallway,
your staring down the empty eye slits of a lowsocket,
waking on the floor at the foot of the bright light,
blocking and locked hundredth door of luck.
At the opposite end of the hall sits a pair of empty pay public binoculars,
slumped, facing your way.
In the dead of their stare you marvel about,
until you eye this one door that appears to be both half open and closed.
and are drawn moth to the bulb,
head down, as if reeled round a gear by the guts,
inching toward your intuit-picked portal of choice.
Now knelt, yet not without nerves in this moment of mostly glory,
you look for the knob, and see nothing but healed shut keyhole.
Dax-strong in this dream you begin to cut key,
in the furthest corner of a clearest skull,
when you feel your kneecaps being nursed by a white on white welcome mat.
you tilt your skull to read "WOE-BE-GONE"
only written wrong or in mirror.
Your hands and heart full of edge, you lift the mat gently,
and there beneath it's omen embroidered,
sits an intact wishingbone.
You carefully lift your instrument of certain luck to the door,
and it slowly unclenches the scar seem set where it's keyhole would be,
and so you snap bliss bone, cut wish and begin to lock pick.
Until you hear through the thick of the door the deadbolt caughing loose.
Suddenly the fear black above your skull,
beneath your skin goes wild,
as the door of your choice opens itself slowly,
sealing off your face with perfect stripes of rising bone and angst,
of alabaster and pit,
allowing the bright right light of luck
to completely believe
and eclipse you.
your staring down the empty eye slits of a lowsocket,
waking on the floor at the foot of the bright light,
blocking and locked hundredth door of luck.
At the opposite end of the hall sits a pair of empty pay public binoculars,
slumped, facing your way.
In the dead of their stare you marvel about,
until you eye this one door that appears to be both half open and closed.
and are drawn moth to the bulb,
head down, as if reeled round a gear by the guts,
inching toward your intuit-picked portal of choice.
Now knelt, yet not without nerves in this moment of mostly glory,
you look for the knob, and see nothing but healed shut keyhole.
Dax-strong in this dream you begin to cut key,
in the furthest corner of a clearest skull,
when you feel your kneecaps being nursed by a white on white welcome mat.
you tilt your skull to read "WOE-BE-GONE"
only written wrong or in mirror.
Your hands and heart full of edge, you lift the mat gently,
and there beneath it's omen embroidered,
sits an intact wishingbone.
You carefully lift your instrument of certain luck to the door,
and it slowly unclenches the scar seem set where it's keyhole would be,
and so you snap bliss bone, cut wish and begin to lock pick.
Until you hear through the thick of the door the deadbolt caughing loose.
Suddenly the fear black above your skull,
beneath your skin goes wild,
as the door of your choice opens itself slowly,
sealing off your face with perfect stripes of rising bone and angst,
of alabaster and pit,
allowing the bright right light of luck
to completely believe
and eclipse you.
Monday, August 06, 2007
Now Get Back To Work
Does anyone else remember those eight seconds back in 2002 when Interpol were going to revolutionize rock music and everyone was using the term "electroclash" like it actually meant something? Halcyon days were they.
I bring this up not to spite those fine young gentlemen out of NYC but as a sincere invocation of bafflement as Our Love To Admire spins before me: bafflement over scene, taste, and the great ambling amnesiac mob that the internet, may it live forever, has gifted unto our generation. Or made our generation into. Or something.
To wit, Interpol has for the second time - zing, motherfuckers - released a tight, gorgeously orchestrated record of honest to goodness rock music, and at the same time they've released something that is going to be ignored, chewed out, defecated on, and generally loathed by the people it was made for a priori, solely on the strength of its progenitors. It's not something any reasonably enabled Interpol fan didn't see coming miles off, the machinations of indie rock critics and fans, if that delineation means anything, very often possessing all the unpredictable grace of zeppelins locked in their elephantine maneuvers, but it's still a genuine shame.
I won't pretend I wasn't right in that bristling phalanx of smarm myself, awaiting Paul Banks and Company's inevitable crash upon our invulnerable wall of sharp taste and pious scoffing, but I'm beat and perfectly willing to admit being taken at an unexpected angle.
Our Love To Admire is a great album, a cohesive and attractive amalgamation of good songs which confidently tread the uncomfortable gap between 2002's infallible gothic Turn on the Bright Lights and 2004's awkwardly upbeat Antics. The production, which utterly failed to capture Interpol's myriad strengths through virtually all of Antics, represents a triumphant resurrection of Turn on the Bright Lights's gotham city poem sensibilities. The tones are resonant, deep, and dark - precisely the aesthetic Interpol needed to perfect. Banks's songwriting retains much of the ineffable cheese it did since he fumbled through "I submit my incentive is romance", but herein his trademark baritone, the whole vibrant sound of it, succeeds gorgeously on its undeniable instrumental quality. Delivered without a hint of self-consciousness or ego, Banks is hypnotic at his weakest and indie rock's magna cumme laude at his best. Even better, the frontman has found a comfortable niche serving as instrument, his greatest strength, and less of a persona, Interpol's greatest distraction, and instead leaving room for the band's always scintillating guitar tones to paint the real textures on these eleven songs. It's refreshing and immediately powerful to hear Banks and Daniel Kessler's signature guitar downstrokes let loose to meander and glow like they did on Bright Lights, notes too often crowded out or hurried in hopeless search for dance rock poignancy last time around.
The downside is we receive no haunting lyricism to match "I'm going to hold your face / and toast the snow that fell", the tradeoff being that we can take this band seriously again. Fair enough, I say.
The rhythm section of Carlos Denglar and Sam Fogarino, for the most part, embrace Banks's instrumentalized voice as a vital rhythmic device, raising songs like Wrecking Ball from enjoyable tonal romps to truly visceral rock gems. This beautiful interplay of musicians, this real sincerity and fusion of endlessly talented individuals, combined with the band's never ending noodling with synthetic effects and a newfound love of more earthly orchestration - the band finally discovered the piano for god's sake - come together incredibly well, very clearly the result of carefully focused skill but producing a record affording listeners so much more than Just Another Album.
The author is far too cool and surprised to dissect individual tracks. He's working on something else, but he can't remember where he left it.
I bring this up not to spite those fine young gentlemen out of NYC but as a sincere invocation of bafflement as Our Love To Admire spins before me: bafflement over scene, taste, and the great ambling amnesiac mob that the internet, may it live forever, has gifted unto our generation. Or made our generation into. Or something.
To wit, Interpol has for the second time - zing, motherfuckers - released a tight, gorgeously orchestrated record of honest to goodness rock music, and at the same time they've released something that is going to be ignored, chewed out, defecated on, and generally loathed by the people it was made for a priori, solely on the strength of its progenitors. It's not something any reasonably enabled Interpol fan didn't see coming miles off, the machinations of indie rock critics and fans, if that delineation means anything, very often possessing all the unpredictable grace of zeppelins locked in their elephantine maneuvers, but it's still a genuine shame.
I won't pretend I wasn't right in that bristling phalanx of smarm myself, awaiting Paul Banks and Company's inevitable crash upon our invulnerable wall of sharp taste and pious scoffing, but I'm beat and perfectly willing to admit being taken at an unexpected angle.
Our Love To Admire is a great album, a cohesive and attractive amalgamation of good songs which confidently tread the uncomfortable gap between 2002's infallible gothic Turn on the Bright Lights and 2004's awkwardly upbeat Antics. The production, which utterly failed to capture Interpol's myriad strengths through virtually all of Antics, represents a triumphant resurrection of Turn on the Bright Lights's gotham city poem sensibilities. The tones are resonant, deep, and dark - precisely the aesthetic Interpol needed to perfect. Banks's songwriting retains much of the ineffable cheese it did since he fumbled through "I submit my incentive is romance", but herein his trademark baritone, the whole vibrant sound of it, succeeds gorgeously on its undeniable instrumental quality. Delivered without a hint of self-consciousness or ego, Banks is hypnotic at his weakest and indie rock's magna cumme laude at his best. Even better, the frontman has found a comfortable niche serving as instrument, his greatest strength, and less of a persona, Interpol's greatest distraction, and instead leaving room for the band's always scintillating guitar tones to paint the real textures on these eleven songs. It's refreshing and immediately powerful to hear Banks and Daniel Kessler's signature guitar downstrokes let loose to meander and glow like they did on Bright Lights, notes too often crowded out or hurried in hopeless search for dance rock poignancy last time around.
The downside is we receive no haunting lyricism to match "I'm going to hold your face / and toast the snow that fell", the tradeoff being that we can take this band seriously again. Fair enough, I say.
The rhythm section of Carlos Denglar and Sam Fogarino, for the most part, embrace Banks's instrumentalized voice as a vital rhythmic device, raising songs like Wrecking Ball from enjoyable tonal romps to truly visceral rock gems. This beautiful interplay of musicians, this real sincerity and fusion of endlessly talented individuals, combined with the band's never ending noodling with synthetic effects and a newfound love of more earthly orchestration - the band finally discovered the piano for god's sake - come together incredibly well, very clearly the result of carefully focused skill but producing a record affording listeners so much more than Just Another Album.
The author is far too cool and surprised to dissect individual tracks. He's working on something else, but he can't remember where he left it.
Friday, July 27, 2007
They're fighting for what?
Trying to explain the Beastie Boys to my father was the hardest thing I have ever tried to do. This conversation did not so much teeter on as plunge headfirst into the unkind maw of the generation gap, and neither of us made it out with any sort of sensical conclusion. What do I tell him?
It's like trying to explain what a clown is. Yes, they do know they look like that, and it's.. it is meant to be funny, but no it's not really that funny and... goddamnit they're the Beastie Boys. Fuck!
It's like trying to explain what a clown is. Yes, they do know they look like that, and it's.. it is meant to be funny, but no it's not really that funny and... goddamnit they're the Beastie Boys. Fuck!
Friday, June 08, 2007
If I ever saw one of those for real I'd immediately die as a self-defense mechanism
I found this and immediately started laughing and crying simultaneously.
Josh
JESUS DAMN WTF
Jess
OMGWTFWTF
Jess
WTF
Josh
LOL
Josh
IT'S USED TO KILL DINOSAURS
Josh
JESUS DAMN WTF
Jess
OMGWTFWTF
Jess
WTF
Josh
LOL
Josh
IT'S USED TO KILL DINOSAURS
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