The label Cock Rock Disco was started by a guy who performs breakcore under the name Donna Summer, and their catalog includes an album by Duran Duran Duran. Some of these hijinks are pointless or worse*, but unlike other groups of folks slashing records up on their laptops, you never get the feeling that their irony is directed at the concept of music itself. The best of CRD’s roster are as dedicated to cleaning up after themselves as they are to iconoclasm.

So here’s About, who writes cute, awkward, abrasive pop songs which sound like five things going on at once– and usually those five things are THINGS, not songs. My one complaint is that he doesn’t seem to like choruses much, though maybe that gives all the wild sonics a chance to hold their own against the melodic (conventional, even!) vocals.

The first and last songs have the most roughness to them, and they both feature the same stuttery sample of a woman saying “rock-starrrr-boyyyy-friend”, which might be a hint to what About is about. Or, I don’t know, it might just be a stab at cohesion on a record that only lasts 32 minutes and has two jarringly anti-rhythmic instrumental pieces breaking up the momentum of the 11 other catchy bits. Try these and see: official homepage with downloadable “Think Niles Drink” and “Strike You As The Enemy”.

[*] After downloading a free mp3 sampler from Cock Rock Disco’s website, I discovered that the second-stupidest thing about Pisstank’s “Punching Your Girlfriend’s Cunt Til It Bleeds” is that, as drill’n'bass goes, the music itself is harmless. I’ll stick with the faction of CRD artists who care more about Erik Satie than about shocking people, thanks.

Best Tullycraft album yet– whatever Sean Tollefson’s voice can or can’t do, it’s no longer irritating, which means his obsessive re-synthesizing of 90s indiepop can be pretty great.

But… when I heard the line “my heart beats faster than those techno beats you played me”, I thought eh, okay, they accidentally swiped a Milky Wimpshake song title. Then the phrase “bus route to your heart” (the name of Milky Wimpshake’s first album) showed up two songs later. Tollefson does pack his songs with references to other bands, but it’s usually direct, not sidelong. I call foul.

From Epicurious:

1 pound onions (2 medium), chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 to 1 whole jalapeno or serrano pepper, seeded and minced
1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano or 1 teaspoon dried
8 large Spanish or Italian green olives, pitted and chopped
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons capers, chopped if large (tiny ones can be left whole)
2 1/2 cups peeled canned low-sodium tomatoes
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 pounds red snapper, sea bass, halibut, or cod
Juice of 1 lime

In a nonstick pan, saute the onions in hot oil until they begin to soften and color. When they color, add the garlic and jalapeno and cook for 30 seconds.

Add the oregano, olives, cinnamon, and capers to the onion mixture and stir. Squeeze the tomatoes between your fingers and add, with the bay leaf. Simmer for 10 minutes. Refrigerate.

To serve, wash the fish and squeeze the lime juice over it. Refrigerate for no more than 1 hour.

Reheat the sauce slowly. Arrange the fish in a large skillet, spoon the sauce over it, and cook according to the Canadian rule: measure the fish at its thickest part and allow 8 to 10 minutes to the inch. Remove the bay leaf and serve the fish with its sauce over boiled potatoes or rice.

Our substitutions were minor: Thai red pepper for jalapeno, a mixture of black and Kalamata olives for green ones, and perch for the fish. Also, the tomatoes were already diced, so if there’s so magic to squeezing them, as the recipe requests, we missed out.

How much you cook onions is a matter of taste, of course, but we took ‘begin to color’ as meaning translucency, figuring they’d cook more as the sauce simmered, and they didn’t really. I would have sauteed them longer for less crunchiness.

When we put the fish fillets into the saucepan, they immediately curled up into arch shapes, with the center ridge of each fillet almost an inch above the pan along its whole length. Why did that happen? Skipping the refrigeration? Some quirk of perch skin? Leaving the lime juice on too long beforehand? (The surface of the fish visibly started to ‘cook’ from the acid.) The fish required substantial abuse before it would lie flat enough to cook somewhat evenly.

Fish texture aside, this tasted good. I fell in love with this kind of sauce at Ole in Inman Square, and I know I’ve made it once before with even better results; I wish I could find that recipe. Perch is not an exciting fish, which is fine on the face of it, but I think a slightly different kind of not-exciting might have meshed better. Some restaurant (Naked Fish?) made it with grouper, and that worked. Where does one buy grouper?

Katie The Pest - “Sober” (mp3)

I’m not sure whether this would sound like shoegazer if it had been recorded ‘well’, but that’s what I like about it. The voices can get piercing in tone without actually grating on the listener. Plus, “sleepy and angry” is an under-explored emotional state.

[From the self-released 2004 EP This Giant Will Kill You.]

It turns out I’ve been wrong for years about something I posted last night– Michael Clark had nothing to do with the videos for “True Faith” and “She Drives Me Crazy”. They were both done by a French choreographer and video artist named Philippe Decoufle. Oops.

As penance, here are my favorite dozen of the videos that New Order have done over the years. The band’s longtime associate Michael Shamberg produced many of them, drawing directors from the worlds of art and mainstream cinema. Jonathan Demme directed “The Perfect Kiss” (and I believe Barbara Kruger made a poster for it); William Wegman co-directed “Blue Monday ‘88″. If you only have the patience for a few, watch those two, “Round and Round”, and “True Faith”.

The Perfect Kiss / Bizarre Love Triangle / True Faith / Touched by the Hand of God / Blue Monday 88 / Run / Round and Round / World in Motion / World / Spooky / Here to Stay / Krafty

Shamberg’s memories of making the videos

Michael Clark’s modern dance troupe made two music videos in the late 80s before deciding it wasn’t for them. I don’t have a ton more information about them, though I know they’ve done more with contemporary rock music in their stage shows, particularly dancing to songs by The Fall and even collaborating with Mark E. Smith and crew for I Am Kurious Oranj. Clark is kind of great.

Fine Young Cannibals - “She Drives Me Crazy” (video)
The Fall - “Cab It Up” (performance footage)
New Order - “True Faith” (video)

The dancers were edited down into more of an incidental feature in the Fine Young Cannibals video, but for New Order they seem to have had free rein or a sympathetic producer. The first time I saw “True Faith”, I was 13 or 14 and happened to have the VCR running; I think I watched it three more times in a row that same night.

Playable online and downloadable for Mac & PC

In the old days, the technical limitations of arcade games– and presumed minuscule attention span of players– led to harsh noises and bright colors. As possibilities expanded, everyone assumed video games would become more realistic, as opposed to just being more complex representations of the garish Video Game Reality that many of us were getting used to. (A notable exception is Williams’ excellent Blaster.)

This is one situation where a lot of fun can come from nostalgia’s habit of (accidentally?) exaggerating the things it revives. Gamma Brothers bips, whirrs and gargles at you, but also stays quiet when it needs to, giving a sonic range that I’m pretty sure Pac-Man could have had if he’d wanted to– he just didn’t. The bright colors taper off into darkness, creating an effect that’s more like “neon in the rain” than “angry fruit salad”.

Gamma Bros. also plays exquisitely. You need to use the edges of the screen as much as the center, but enemies very rarely blindside you from offscreen. The dynamic of Galaga, where aliens first parade around the screen and then fall into formation, is even more fun when you have complete freedom of movement. And while the number of enemy types could be larger, there are enough to prevent complacency, and the boss battles more than make up for it.

A good player can probably reach the final space-octopus/mother-of-demons fight in two or three hours, so the time commitment isn’t huge. (Neither is replay value, unless you want to try again on Hard difficulty.)

[This might or might not be the first in a series of attempts to see whether records by Scott Miller say anything different to me now than they used to.]

Seems like a ‘crone’ record: ‘I don’t have to care what you think anymore!’ Opening track “720 Times” appears to be throwing in the towel, smashing the guitar, etc. but then at the last second, it steps to the side:

Something old better fall and die when you ride in on something new
That’s the deal that’s been made between death and you

YOU, not me; Scott is no party to this deal. Can you really cheat Death just by never cashing in that voucher for youthful vigor that he handed you at age 15? Maybe, maybe…

What do you do after you’ve decided dropping out of the system is a reasonable price to pay for not being accountable? Here the answer (as with H.G. Wells’ Griffin or Nicholson Baker’s Arno Strine) is: you go look at things. Twice on Attractive Nuisance, Scott’s persona finds himself in the audience at a concert rather than onstage; in “One Will Be the Highway” he leaves the in-crowd to enjoy their own world and goes off to ponder death, while in “Soul D.C.” he stays put, adamant that it’s possible, in theory, to enjoy things of beauty and yet avoid buying in.

Detachment is even deeper elsewhere. In “Save Your Money” it’s an Ancient Mariner resigned to failure, riding back and forth on airport walkways instead of handing out a warning that nobody would listen to anyway. In “No One’s Watching My Limo Ride” it’s a voyeur cruising around behind tinted windows, lacking the patience even to graduate to stalking the girl who catches his eye at the beginning of the song. “Backward Century”’s main image is brains in vats, the future Matrix-style. “Blackness, Blackness” has unusual balance to its heartbreak scenario– the voice repeating “Oh, baby, I guess I just am” has to be the partner who instigated the breakup, but he sounds so cripplingly sad himself. And so on.

(At some point, if I recall correctly, Scott was supposed to have a song called “Waiting Only” on a suicide-prevention benefit album that never came out. Since “Controlled Burn” contains those words, I’ve always taken it to be a revised version of that piece, which may or may not mean that it itself is about suicide. But the cryptic lyrics have some kind of isolation thing going on.)

But for all this, the record is musically scattered, exploratory. Maybe he was trying to narrow down the scope of just what he wanted to opt out of; the record ends with “Motion of Ariel”, which (in retrospect more unquestionably than before) says goodbye to making music. In 2000 I refused to read it that way, in part because I didn’t want to believe it, but also because the album as a whole sounded too comfortable in its looseness to be a last album. I wasn’t hearing how withdrawn the rest of it was. Even more: I wasn’t thinking about what deciding to stop making records might inspire… for example, one last spin through the old haunts so that just in case you never come back, your last memories feel like last memories.

(Warning: stuffy, longtime-fan review.)

Barbeau and the Loud Family work well together on a practical level, but the songs by Anton and by bandleader Scott Miller don’t actually have much in common. (The one song they co-wrote, “(Kind Of) In Love”, is mediocre.) So after I’d played it a few times, the urge to skip tracks was unhampered by any sense of the record as a coherent entity that I ought to listen to straight through.

But when Scott retired from music six years ago he sounded very done, and sick of the whole thing, so while his three new songs don’t overflow with ideas, I’m pretty happy with them just being catchy and unforced.

“Song About ‘Rocks Off’” and “Mavis of Maybelline Towers” both call up the smarmy cad who wanders through Miller’s past work. I’ve never been sure if it’s a shadow, the thing he’s scared of becoming, or if it’s just his running metaphor for being a musician– mixed feelings about ‘making’ people listen to his songs were apparently a big part of his giving up in the first place. His narrator is even more unrepentant than usual in the former track, maybe because it really is about the Rolling Stones song (a cover of which starts the record). “Maybelline Towers” is much more equivocal, though; his screening-out of details seems to be protecting someone (a daughter? girlfriend?) from real external misery, with the question being whether that’s different enough from dropping cheesy pickup lines to be an acceptable theft of someone’s right to find their own way in the world.

Anyhow, it takes effort from the listener to make this really worthwhile: not because it’s deep, but because it’s… preliminary. On the other hand, it’s not a coincidence that people who know Miller’s old records will be inclined to put in that effort. [Out July 11.]

A new band boasting vocals by Erlend Oye of Kings Of Convenience, who, a few years ago, started DJing and made a great Postal Service-style pop record. The label’s defensive press kit says

Even though a few tired pop journalists who expect a DJ Kicks by Erlend Oye 2 might get disappointed (which would be their problem and definitely not ours) [...]

This won’t fly. How are you going to convince critics they just aren’t open-minded enough to appreciate Oye singing over conventional instruments when that’s how most of them heard him IN THE FIRST PLACE? This album might be better than it seems to me after hearing it twice, but sadly, that wouldn’t be hard.