NO-CORE blog

Amoeba Men "Worried About Your Wiring?"

This album kinda kicks ass. I’ve listened to it about 4 times today and I think I’m going to play it again now! You know, when I first heard this, I had put it into a playlist of some new and old music. The Ex-Models were playing and I was thinking the following: When the Ex-Models guys were around I dug them but kind of took them for granted. Another “spazzy” Brooklyn band doing that post-punk sound. About that time everyone wanted to sound like that first Liars album so it seemed like there was plenty of that going around. (Ex-Models were way better than the Liars though) But now I just recently tortured myself by listening to all of the buzz-worthy indie bands of today and let me tell ya, how that made me appreciate them! “Where, oh where have all the high-energy, spazzy post-punk bands gone, and can we PLEASE get them back now?”

Next up in the play list? AMOEBA MEN come out of the gate swinging with a “One, Two, Blackout!” – EXACTLY what I was looking for! Every song sounds like they are jacked on caffeine and flipping out. Dense, rapid-fire drums, jittery buzzing synths, scathing guitar attack, and yelped out vocals. They’re not as mathematically precise as the Ex-Models, but all the herky-jerky energy is there. There’s also some new-wave oddball flavor, particularly coming from the keyboard and vocal delivery – almost a DEVO or, heck, even an Oingo Boingo vibe. But where Oingo Boingo or theatrical bands like them can come across a little self-consciously “aren’t we soooo arty and weird?” the main purpose of the Amoeba Men would seem to be to ROCK OUT. I’d also compare them to the Silver Daggers who share their focused but raw, rock’em sock’em vibe.

So these Amoeba Men are another Richmond, VA band featuring Mr. Jason Hodges, and I know I keep talking about his projects but hey, if you want to form a half-dozen killer bands and send me a new awesome album every month then maybe I’ll keep talking about you too. One of the most amazing things about this album? It was given away free! You can still get it too. Just follow this link, click the “download” link on the page you get to, and I think you need to add a “.zip” extension to the file you download.

http://cnproachmotel.blogspot.com/2010/08/amoeba-men-worried-about-your-wiring-cd.html

Be sure to leave a comment and thank them! I also found this 51-second YouTube clip of the Amoeba Men in action to give you a taste. Check it out.

Update: You know who else the Amoeba Men sound sort of like? Dazzling Killmen! Really!

I’m sure this has already been posted all over the internet, but I still can’t resist putting up this video. Brian “Narwhalz (of sound)” and Jonathan “Shams” (also a member of infant-core band Adult Moan) face off against some Baltimore scene kids, including Kate Levitt of Teeth Mountain, on TV’s JUDGE JUDY. (By the way, looks like Shams plays this Saturday in Brooklyn at Death by Audio!)

No need to feel bad watching this, I have a strong feeling that no cats were actually killed in the making of this case. (I can believe that some TVs were smashed) And check out those nice, new leather jackets that Narwhalz & Shams are sporting! The actual show sequence is a little slow, Her Honor Judy doesn’t allow for much improv (Narwhalz tries) but the closing interviews are great.

You’ll want to check out the comments too, some of which are also hard to judge as real or fake. Highlights include:

“They are a tribe of sickos and should not be allowed to have a cat, and definitely not televisions.”

“Quit trying to promote your stupid band, and find a new acting coach”

and of course: “DEWD SHES HAWT. UR GAY LIEK THOSE DUDES LOL”

Captain Ahab: the Captain Ahab of, um, music?

Since this falls vaguely in the same category (weirdo musicians appearing on TV shows) I thought I’d throw it into the same post. Except that this news item, cool as it is, is completely appropriate and UN-strange, considering how uber-PRO-fessional Captain Ahab are in their approach to music. Captain Ahab, who are on the Deathbomb Arc label and are like some kind of Ween of electronic music, have a new song of theirs prominently featured in the latest episode of the SciFi (I refuse to call it “SyFy”) show Caprica. I’m embedding the clip below, but if it gets taken down, you can watch the full episode HERE.

You can also hear the track and download it free from Captain Ahab’s Bandcamp page. (Haven’t I heard that beedley-deep-beep sample in another Ahab song?) A little browsing on Youtube also reveals plenty of examples of Ahab tracks appearing in other shows.

Alright, I may as well close things out with a classic, which the above Judge Judy unavoidably brought to mind. Joe, (ex- of The Fugue)’s closing comments on the People’s Court. Enjoy.

* Okay, okay, I know neither Narwhalz nor Shams are really “noise” but I enjoy bugging serious harsh-noise dudes by polluting “their” genre with goofballs.

Realicide - Detroit 2009

Everyone loves free mp3 albums right? So maybe you’ve already found these, but it can’t hurt to spread the good word. The gabber/noise/omni-core group Realicide have made a whole bunch of music available for you. They’re frequently compared to Atari Teenage Riot, which is not far off the mark, except they often make ATR sound like, I don’t know… Jesus Jones?

Anyway, you can get no less than THREE collections of stuff, a mega-mix of samples from the latest album with live stuff and b-sides here:

http://www.lunaticfringe.org/~schizoid/dtrashrecords/digitaldownloads/135.html

and a 20-minute tape of misc. live material turned digital release, directly linked here:

http://ia311020.us.archive.org/1/items/Wild063-Realicide/Wild063-Realicide-DigitalScraps2008.zip

and basically a whole live album, with interviews and photos! This one’s pretty awesome. Here:

http://www.digitalvomit.com/dvr048

Rose for Bohdan

And next up, Brian of Foot Village/Deathbombarc pointed out in the comments to another post that his band Rose For Bohdan’s last album was made available as a free download, but since I figure few people saw it there, I’m reiterating it here. 3 members of Foot Village, recently reviewed, were also in this band. Get it here:

http://deathbombarc.com/sound/r4b/creepingmoraldecay/creeping.htm

And not just from some unknown punks neither, but some danged “luminaries.”

XBXRX have made their new album, “Un Usper,” available for “FREE” download direct from their website:

http://www.xbxrx.com

This album is a nice mish-mash of punk rock moves, noise-rock attitude, free-jamming, synth sounds, and is that a xylophone? Nice.

Those quotes around free are, however, intentional. While you are permitted to download it for free, XBXRX ask that you make a donation in return. I know that sometimes it feels like digital music should be completely free, but I reasoned with myself as follows: I would blow 4 bucks just to make a round-trip subway ride to the record store, and that’s more than most bands on a label get from each CD sale, so heck, it seems reasonable to throw those few dollars to XBXRX and support really, truly DIY music. But hey, don’t let me discourage you from donating more… or less…

Next up, AIDS Wolf “Pas Rapport”:

It’s a tour-only tape of improv jams, or maybe they’re not totally improvised. The boombox quality recording is not too much different from the blown-out sound on their album proper and the tracks are all punctual full-band jams. So if you liked the albums, you will definitely want to grab this while the download link still works.

Get it here!

AIDS Wolf ask for nothing in return, but you might consider following their blog (http://aidswolfs.blogspot.com) so you can find out about things like this, and of course go see them when they come around on tour!

ENJOY.

As a policy, I avoid writing about things here that I’m actually involved in. But this is such an odd album, and since I was only one of 100 people to contribute some sound to this, and since you can download it for free*, I figured this was worth mentioning.

I also don’t usually have any interest in Phish, or jam bands of that ilk, but here we have some kind of rare Phish concept album, covered in its entirety. Nat Hawks, mastermind of the Little Fury Things record label, got the idea to take a recording of this Phish piece, chop it into 100 segments of about 15 seconds to a minute and a half each, and get 100 different artists to cover each chunk.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have not heard much Phish and the chunk I heard sounded pretty indistinct. Random noodling without much of a tune to speak of, and some kind of rambling story being spoken over the top.

So it’s kind of strange to me that the final result actually seems pretty cohesive and is a really enjoyable listen. I am willing to bet it’s about a million times better than the source material. I don’t know how much it turned out this way due to the selection of artists, or if everyone really did a decent job of keeping the vibe from the source material intact. Almost everyone is doing something experimental, ranging from loose rock to free-folk to electronic to ambient to whatever, but it all turns out pretty chill and trippy and a little edgy. Which happens to be the vibe of Little Fury Things in general also.

Many of the tracks blend smoothly into each other, some have distinct breaks in-between. At times I wish they were all merged and blended together a little more completely, but it would have been difficult since some artists seem to have covered their piece of music as though it were a stand-alone song, with a beginning and an end. I’m amazed this whole thing actually got completed, and I sort of suspect that several of the credited artists might actually be Nat under different aliases, but even if so, there are a huge variety of sounds and approaches at work here. Just a few of the credited names that seemed familiar to me: Scissor Shock, Holzkopf, say no to architecture, Teeth Mountain, Video Hippos, Robe., Yellow Crystal Star, Sperm Whales.

Anyway, this is a huge and totally weird project and I recommend checking it out.


Download it here.

Read more about it at Little Fury Things on MySpace.

And about that asterisk next to the word “free” above: Nat suggests that if you appreciate this, you might make a 5 or 10 dollar donation to Explore Charter School’s (Brooklyn) trip fund http://www.firstgiving.com/exploretrips

I got this press release from Philadelphia label Badmaster Records specifically stating that this compilation would be released as a free download on Thursday, Feb.26th. So it only makes sense to post something about it on Feb.26th and see if we can overload their bandwidth.

If “it’s free!” isn’t enough of a reason to go download the comp, then here’s why else it’s cool. Philly has one of the best music scenes going on right now. All the current artists I know from there (and those I learned about on this comp) are totally DIY, unpretentious, sincere, hilarious, and good-natured. I mostly know about the noise/weirdness scene, but there’s also plenty of bleed over into punk, indie, art-rock, etc. – which is also a reason that the scene is cool. And this comp covers some examples from all of the above mentioned genres. “Something for everyone” also means “not everything’s for everyone” and there are a few tracks here which I’m not personally into, but I’m also not into doing negative reviews so I’ll just mention some of the highlights for me. Besides, it’s a free mp3 comp! Just delete the tracks you’re not crazy about!

First of all, this is worth downloading for the new Mincemeat or Tenspeed track, which is a top-notch example of his stuff and has these bizarre melodies that crop up which you almost feel you could sing along to. Noise music you could sing to! A bunch of bands fall into the category of “noise-pop” which falls nicely (for me) on the noisy side, for example Hot Guts and U.S.Girls. (Hot Guts would probably be way too heavy for most to classify as noise-pop, but I call it like I hear it, and that’s a pop hook!) Pretty much all the bands share some kind of element of noisiness or a lo-fi edge. The prog/noise-rock band Satanized does a cool cover of NON’s “Total War.” There are a handful of bands which fall into some kind of post-Unsane sludgy-noise-rock category, like Talk Me Off, The Blacks And The Blues, and Rawar. I might have believed someone if they told me that the Birds of Maya track was Guitar Wolf – except that guitar solo was a little too fancy. The track by Fun Dogs was a cool surprise, being really hard to pigeonhole with elements of metal, noise-rock and post-hardcore, with a strong melodic sense – closest thing I can think of might be Killing Joke. There’s also something from a personal favorite, Drums Like Machine Guns, a weird little song by them which leans more heavily on electronic beats than noise. No Tickley Feather track, but we do get the Serpents of Wisdom, who lives in a similar foggy Casio-goth world.

There’s more too, but hey, free download. Check it out for yourself. Go to the Badmaster website:

http://www.badmasterrecords.com

Oh yeah, and someone did a smart mastering job on the whole thing so that you don’t have to hover over the volume control as you listen, which is much appreciated in a comp.