Music for lazy summer weekends

Memorial Day Weekend is a bit early for a post like this, but since my friends and I chose not to get our usual summer house I'm suddenly feeling nostalgic for the endless string of lost weekends this week traditionally marks the beginning of. Swapping the ocean breeze for the subway's urine-stench-infused heat blasts fills me with dread for summer on a number of levels, but the essentials - stifling heat, a smattering of friends to idly bullshit with, ample booze and good music - are readily available wherever you are.

Not just any tunes will do though. Some music just meets the oppressive heat head on and elevates late day lounging in the sun to a glorious zen-like state of alcohol-fueled inertia. I suppose I could extol the virtues of The Allman Brothers in this regard or, conversely, mock the brain-damaged jackholes who pollute the air with aural flotsam like reggae, Jimmy Buffett or hacky sacking trustafarian monkeyboy jam bands. But this is my nostalgia trip and my fricken' blog, so I'm just gonna force feed visitors a heaping helping of relative obscurity on account of what is either my insufferable pretentiousness or my generous urge to share.

KOSTARS - Never so lonely
The Kostars' album Klassics with a K was a one-off side project by two members of Luscious Jackson. That's a band which probably merits a spot on this list in its own right, but the Kostars are more subdued in a 70's AM radio from a parallel universe sort of way. The album positively oozes summer. A little girly, but sublime.



DANDY WARHOLS - Godless
The Dandy's have had modest commercial success over the years, but their music for the most part is more moody and evocative than straight up pop. They're so right when a hot summer day begins to slip into twilight that having the gayest band name in the history of rock seems of precious little importance.



BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB - Shuffle your feet
In August you have the really stupid idea to go on a very long road trip with your girlfriend. The air conditioner is on the fritz. The car is overheating and you're in the middle of the desert. You finally happen upon a service station and get help (like in every road movie ever). Then you head into the adjacent bar full of shady characters to cool off and pass the time. Someone hits on your girlfriend so you puff out your chest like an idiot and end up walking funny for weeks due to the pool stick Cletus rammed up your ass while "Tiny" was knocking your teeth out. This is the band that was on the jukebox. You should have just stayed home and gotten drunk on the porch.



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YO LA TENGO - Autumn sweater
Just put the song title out of your mind. It's more like the soundtrack to watching the heat rise from the street while you put a cold beer on your forehead and wish you weren't too lazy to stand up and open the umbrella on the patio table. Also doubles as good late night music for pitching woo. Or maybe I just like saying "pitching woo."




JUDE - Save me
I don't know that Jude is evocative of summer in the way others on the list are, but singer/songwriters ranging from Jim Croce to Cat Stevens to Freedy Johnston merit a place in a lazy summer rotation. And in addition to much of his music being beautiful with an airy, hypnotic vibe, he's openly conservative in the left-wing artistic cesspool that is LA. That moves him to the head of my list - especially compared to a Jihadist nutbag like (whatever name Cat Stevens currently goes by).



WHITEST BOY ALIVE - Inflation
Three cheers for Euros imitating Anglo music in English with English-language band names! Look at me! Notice me! love me! Increasingly, our little brothers across the pond who eat unthinkable animal parts and think dimly of us while desperately seeking our approval are producing fresh and interesting music. Whitest Boy Alive is a good example. Summer urban-style, evoking empty streets (like the video!) as people hide inside or frolic at their weekend getaways, leaving the streets to the young with no money for escaping and a smattering of confused Canadian tourists.




LUNA - Tiger lily
An otherwise corny term, "dreamy" is nonetheless the first word that comes to mind in describing Luna. Like a meal where every bite reveals a different flavor combination, they feel less like a cohesive unit than individuals emitting beautiful sounds which complement one another and drive a song forward. A low key sonic bombardment melded perfectly with Wareham's urbane lyrics and singing voice which eventually grows on you.



ROBERT MITCHUM - From a logical point of view
Yes, it's calypso. But it's Robert Fucking Mitchum. With a Caribbean accent! After terrifying two little kids in Night Of The Hunter, this dope smoking wingnut upped the ante with the greatest ill-considered celebrity musical venture this side of the cast of Star Trek. And you're not gonna get sand between your toes, whip up a pitcher of Rum Punch and listen? Bullshit I say.



Well, my nostalgia itch is scratched. Part II when the weather is more appropriate.

RIP Alex Chilton

I'm not going to pretend I've spent a lot of time listening to Big Star over the years. Innumerable poseurs will tend to that at a moment like this. But as with the Velvet Underground, their influence on a lot of the musicians who've been the soundtrack to my post-adolescent life has been profound. So in spite of their lack of commercial success - which I contributed to by getting cassettes from friends - Alex Chilton has attained a kind of quiet immortality.

Finding out true love is blind.

Honestly, I think that even if Louis XIV wasn't one of my favorite new bands of the last five years I'd love them for their lack of political correctness alone. It's a pity they've already broken up (or gone on an interminable hiatus). In an era of fey, castrated emo turdblossoms masquerading as rockers, what could be more punk than a heaping helping of female objectification and (equal opportunity) racial insensitivity? I'm half-joking, but there is undeniably a certain amount of pleasure to be derived from knowing they rub the right people the wrong way.

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A moonbat factory tour.

I don't remember why I found myself at their Wiki page, but I couldn't be happier that I did. It was like setting foot on a planet where society doesn't need any productive members but endures on rage and masturbatorial weeping. Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington is rather renowned for its overabundance of far left nut jobs. Sort of like Oberlin College on the weirdo scale I suppose, only at dear old Evergreen the quirkiness of the student body is trumped by their unambiguous stupidity. This is, after all, the college that produced failed physics student Rachel Corrie and once bestowed on Mumia Abu-Jamal the honor to be their commencement speaker.

Looking over their list of "notable" alumni* really drove home the capacity for delusions among leftists. As embarrassing as it is that a presumably school-monitored list includes criminals and activists among their notable alumni categories, even more absurd, if not atypical of the left, was choosing to include a murderer and a convicted arsonist in the activist category! Just another bread crumb on the mind trail of people who find something huggable about leftist totalitarian thugs.

I took the first screen shot below yesterday, and amusingly enough some anonymous winger person updated it today to place the criminals in their proper category. (S)he also added a few more felons to the list who'd been deprived of their rightful place among the ranks of distinguished alumni. In a sane world the arsonists would have all the meaningful work they could handle without venturing outside the campus. But in the world which actually exists Evergreen will continue to breed and let loose an army of termites into the world.

Evergreen State College. We came as morons, we left as morons. But with 50% more rage!


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* I will give the school credit for producing Matt Groening. And Sleater-Kinney:

Somebody let the devil out

Popa Chubby is a longtime fixture in the NYC blues scene, such that there is one. He wrote this song after 9/11 though I'd never heard it until stumbling upon it on Youtube the other day. A much longer live version is available here.

Monkeys gone to heaven.

The Pixies played a few gigs in NYC last week and my head was apparently up my arse when the shows were announced and subsequently sold out, so alls I gots is some stinkin' youtube. It has been a long time since I've had them in heavy rotation. They sort of slipped out of my consciousness because the air was silly with great bands putting out albums around the time they broke up. Not the least of the bands filling the void in their aftermath were Pixies front man "Frank Black" and Kim Deal fronting The Breeders. But lately I've been atoning for the short attention span of youth by overdosing on Pixies concert videos on youtube like a full-blown fantard. The similarly inclined can also avail themselves of a free live four song EP at their website or watch a documentary about their recent reunion which is pretty entertaining.

Band pimping

Superdrag is a band I never gave a moment's thought to until seeing them live some years ago. Their few songs I was familiar with due to modest MTV rotation were just listenable, dime-a-dozen power pop and when they were scheduled to open for Guided By Voices at the Stone Pony (of Springsteen fame) they were clearly an afterthought for the assembled patchouli stink betas. But when GBV was forced to cancel at the last second due to a family tragedy, Superdrag took up the slack, played for hours and blew the doors off the place. Not only was their own material kickass live but they played assorted covers that opened my eyes to their various influences and earned a fan in me. "Aspartame" is a recent release after a long hiatus for the band, and the moronic politics aside it captures the energy of their live shows better than their past videos have.