Franklin Bruno - “Cat Scratch Fever” (mp3)

This (an original song, not a Ted Nugent cover) came to mind Monday night, during my second emergency room visit of the month. The first time, I’d had Molly keeping me company; the second time, I was alone. I had always taken “Do you end at your skin?” to mean “Are you located entirely inside your body, or do you realize that outside events can affect you?” Lying around waiting for a CAT scan, it finally occurred to me to think of it the other way around– do you begin and end with your skin and other sense organs, just a machine for perceiving things, or do you accept your body as part of yourself even when you can’t understand or control it?

“Cat Scratch Fever” is one of a truly huge number of great out-of-print Franklin Bruno songs, but almost everything of his you *can* find is good too. A Bedroom Community comes closest to this early bare-bones style.

[Note: I've taken down most of the mp3s posted previously-- no big reason, just cleaning house. Let me know if this thwarts you at all.]

Northside - “Take 5″ (mp3)

At age 14 I hated and feared the loose, druggy (not like I would know! but that was what they said about it on MTV), half-dancy music coming out of Manchester. Most frightening were the Happy Mondays, which I feel better about now knowing that I’ve come to like a lot of Madchester music and the Happy Mondays still scare me.

That scene hasn’t seen much in the way of revivals or aftereffects, though the Stone Roses’ “Fool’s Gold” figured prominently in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (I think it’s at the end, the scene on the bridge). Northside’s “Take 5″ is thin even by Manchester standards, but 15 years is way too long to go without hearing this song. And are those bongos?

[From Chicken Rhythms.]

R.E.M. - “Academy Fight Song” (mp3)

Despite cultivating an air of mystery in their early days, R.E.M. rarely hesitated to lay their influences on the table with a cover. I discovered Gang Of Four when Stipe used one of their songs as intro to “World Leader Pretend” on Tourfilm, and I’ve always felt grateful for that.

In fact, when it came to covering their immediate predecessors in the world of post-punk, I think R.E.M. usually improved on the originals. That Gang Of Four song (”We Live As We Dream, Alone”) sounds much better as an a cappella interlude than as rock music; Wire’s “Strange” went, in R.E.M.’s hands, from an awkward slow song bogging down side 2 of Pink Flag to a brightly-lit tension party. This song is originally by Mission Of Burma, covered by R.E.M. on a fanclub 7″.

Cobra Verde’s website proudly announces that a critic called them, among other things, “pop nihilists”. It’s hard to imagine that they’re serious, but they are; they’re serious about everything, including the boneheaded (but common!) idea that rock music has some essential spirit requiring a facade of sleaziness. But they write good songs, most of the time, and John Petkovic’s voice marks him as not wanting to be a tough guy, even if he likes singing about terrorists and blood.

A covers album, though? At least their habit of cheap transgression gave them a good title for it.

Their weird confidence fixes the problem a lot of covers albums have, but it doesn’t mean the ideas work– they make Pink’s “Get The Party Started” sound like Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing”, and take a stab at playing New Order’s “Temptation” as though the slightly bouncy “up, down, turn around” section is the song’s whole point. Actually, you know, a whole record of covers that interesting, might have left me more than lukewarm; instead, they go on to cover their more obvious influences (Mott The Hoople, the Stones, the Undertones) unimpresively and just peter out. And a version of an early Fall song (”The Dice Man”) does the one thing Cobra Verde should not even risk: exposing the limits of Petkovic’s voice. It’s not surprising Petkovic likes The Fall; among other things, they share unobtrusively high-culture names (The Fall got their name from a Camus novel, Cobra Verde from a Werner Herzog movie). It’s somewhat surprising how little he seems to understand them.

Nine Inch Nails - “Maybe Just Once” (mp3)

A song from Trent Reznor’s 1988 demo CD. I’ll probably write more about the whole demo soon, but I genuinely like this song, except for the huge amount of time it takes to get moving. What I can’t get my head around is how much the chorus sounds like top 40 dance pop of the time– I mean, even the lyrics. Not the vocals, of course, but that only makes it more interesting; I can’t help imagining an A&R guy listening to this demo and wondering what was going on. Did some unstable kid steal Taylor Dayne’s synthesizer?

I didn’t trust my own memory, so I had to go look up the dates on the first albums by Debbie Gibson, Taylor Dayne, and a few others… and yeah, this was right in the thick of it. It certainly sounds more like them to me than like Depeche Mode or whatever. If only he’d stuck with it, this guy could have been huge!

The Ropers - “You Have A Light” (mp3)

In music criticism “mature” usually refers to songwriters or their intended audience more than the music itself. Given how intensely loaded people’s ideas about correct adult behavior are that’s probably for the best, but it leaves me with a few songs I can’t talk about in the words which immediately come to mind.

The Ropers deal in a kind of standing-wave pop music that probably owes most of its existence to Unrest (though there are precedents farther back, including the riotously ill-named Savage Republic). This song, with a sense of forward movement that’s unusual for them, uses held cello notes and jangly guitar bits to create a weird sense of vertigo, as though, for all its exuberance and romantic optimism, this is how all conventional rock music sounds to people who would rather be standing still.

[From 1995's All The Time.]

Prolapse - “Black Death Ambulance” (mp3)

More evil shoegaze from 1994, twisting back toward early goth. There was arguably not much more point to Prolapse than the fact than nobody could understand much of what vocalist “Scottish Mick” Derrick said. With the urgency stirred up by the rest of the band, though, that was enough; he gives every impression of veering between threatening and warning, equally desperate in both modes, while Linda Steelyard intones “Skin a lampshade / Head a paperweight” as though rehearsing to work at a department store.

[From Pointless Walks To Dismal Places, their first album and most irritating to find.]

I recently decided to try eating meat, to see whether my stomach got accustomed to it. I have no idea whether that can even work or not (I’ve been vegetarian since birth except for consistent fish intake), but I’m trying. First step: things with animal fat in them, but no actual pieces of meat.

Chicken-based soup tastes really good, but upsets my stomach a little bit. Here’s the odd thing: if I’m right about what various restaurants are using in their food, pork fat doesn’t seem to upset my stomach (or taste particularly distinctive) but does consistently make me light-headed for a while. This is unexpected and kind of entertaining, plus scary.

Anyway, I’m looking for suggestions of grocery-store food items (soups?) that taste good and have a meat-fat base, but without meat lumps in it. Bonus scientific-method points if the item has only *one* kind of animal fat.

Stiffs, Inc. - “Quick, Watson!” (mp3)

Stiffs, Inc. would have done infinitely better had they existed fifteen years earlier or ten years later, when nervous, sharp punk rock had/has more of an audience. Their concept: they played at being post-Victorian blackguards of some kind (grave robbers? confidence men?) while writing panicky three-chord songs with a mishmash of anachronisms in them. This one depicts Sherlock Holmes in a drug frenzy, blaming himself for Moriarty’s death at Reichenbach Falls while trying to rationalize away his own addiction. Stiffs, Inc. had all the menace missing from the 00s revivalists tilling some of the same ground like the Futureheads and Bloc Party; sadly, they broke up after two albums, with one member going on to, uh, business school.

[Only a dollar plus shipping from Amazon for this album, 1995's Nix Nought Nothing.]

Via Carrie Cappizano…

Chop and caramelize two large onions, and fold them into a pound of goat cheese with black pepper and rosemary to taste. Use a lot of rosemary if you want to be able to taste it.

Bake a 9″ pie crust and fill it with the mixture, then bake again at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Tastes great. Is great. Serves about 10 as a side dish or 4 as an entree. The latter is less prudent, though not less enjoyable. M and I made this after coming back from a long car trip and mostly just wanted to collapse, which meant that having huge amounts of flavor in every tiny bite worked for us.

My notes for next time: (1) Chop onions smaller or use higher heat so it doesn’t take over an hour to caramelize them. (2) Maybe warm the goat cheese before mixing onions in; as it was the mixture was tough enough that trying to mush it down into shape in the pie plate damaged the crust a little. (3) The crust was slightly underfull– more filling or a smaller crust (8″?) wouldn’t hurt.