MY LITTLE 7 INCH

I went to Reckless Records yesterday and bought a buttload of cheap 7”s (is there any other kind? maybe for you.)

It’d been awhile since my stylus tasted fresh petroleum, so I thought I’d sit down tonight, spin a few of ‘em, and record my reactions here...

The Ponys, “Prosthetic Head” b/w “How Does It Taste?” (In The Red ITR-108, 2004) [$3.99]

New garagey-sounding Chicago band. Sort of like mid-period Flesheaters crossed with a really scuzzed-out Echo & the Bunnymen rehearsal tape from 1979. The B-side is particularly cool, but not as good as the song I heard a couple months ago on WXRT (!). Aw, look’out.

Brain Donor, “She Saw Me Coming” b/w “Shaman U.F.O.” (Impresario IMP 007, 2001) [$1.00]

Julian Cope’s psych-punk project. One song is from his superbly-titled album Love, Peace, and Fuck. The colors on this picture disc are almost as eye-searing as those on Head Heritage, Cope’s entertaining, crit-oriented website. I already knew he could do a pretty good Iggy 1977; here he does a pretty respectable Iggy 1970 on the A-side over some earhair-raising Ron Asheton-style gtr squall. Not bad. The solo on the B-side could only have been achieved through a keen understanding of druidic architecture.

Cinerama, “Pacific” b/w “King’s Cross” (Elefant ER-210, 1999) [$1.00]

Someone please jilt, cuckold, or otherwise rebuff David Gedge – his post-Wedding Present output has been uniformly dull. It’s like he’s been recording in a mental hospital where he swallows a cup of happy pills every morning and he doesn’t have access to any instruments with strings on them for fear he’ll hang himself. Pink Time-Out-Room-colored vinyl.

Hula Hoop, “Butterfingered” b/w Dreamsicle” (Silver Girl 013, 1994) [$1.99]

Surrender the pink! More pink vinyl from the Louisville indie-soft-rock band of minor repute that featured Rachel of the overrated Rachel’s. The only other Hula Hoop song I’ve heard is on that double 7” of Louisville bands that Britt Walford gave me, the one with the photo of Robert Nedelkoff petting his cat on the cover. Some okay tunage here. Remember when people used to use wah-wah pedals without being ironic OR serious? This might grow on me with a few listens.

Ligament, “Thank You for My Pumping Heart” b/w “Hawg Jaws” / "Ligamentary Canal 65” (Flower Shop 003, 1994) [$1.00]

I want to listen to this louder than my neighbors/girlfriend/lease will let me. The riff on the A-side is a physical impossibility, a unison two-note high part that constantly lapses into this ascending turbine whoosh: half–My First Riff–territory, half-Steel Pole Bath Tub if they were any good, with the kind of understated pathology that tells you this riff is the guitarist’s hobby. As in, “So, what do you do in your spare time?” Answer: “Aw, y’know, this” [plays aforementioned riff for 17 hours straight]. Lyrics: “Thank you thank you for my pumping heart” (repeat x 48).

The Cannanes, Simple Question 4-song 7” EP (Ajax 047, 1996) [$1.00]

I like the title track okay, but everybody knows these guys peaked on A Love Affair with Nature; in fact, I probably even like African Man’s Tomato a little more – Randall could pick a melody out of a car alarm that’d make your eyes well up. I think Tim Adams is now bordering his garden with these leftover singles. “A production of 1996,” it says on the back cover.

Wah! Heat, “Seven Minutes to Midnight…(To Be Continued)” b/w “Don’t Step On the Cracks” (Inevitable INEV 004, 1980) [$1.99]

Cockney vocals always seem to mean business. “Seven minutes to midnight / I’m hungry and I’m cold / Seven minutes to midnight / I feel old!!!” Damn, I want to track this guy down and ask him what happens at midnight. Excellent proto-c86 shit. In the ending fadeout the guitar overtones sort of erode away, leaving in their place this congealed electric clang that really does almost sound like a bell tower about to explode. And the Leslie’d-out whammy bar overdub on the B-side is itself worth the price of the record. I can’t believe I’ve overlooked these guys until recently.

Breadwinner, “Tourette’s” / “Ditch” b/w “Kisses Men on the Mouth on the Mountain” (Merge MRG 010, 1990) [$2.99]

Pen Rollings of Honor Role, and boy does this slay. This is kind of of-a-piece with that first Ruins 7” on Public Bath. I guess it’s “Math Rock,” but the kind of math you use to calculate the cut in angel dust or build skate parks. These riffs are so pinched-off and deliberate they’re like a manic glossolalia, a language on the verge of telling you something.

Fragile, Worlds Apart 4-song 7” EP (Apricot APRIVIN004, 1998) [$3.99]

(or, what is called pop-rock?)

If you look at the obvious, that rock music is a direct product of the Industrial Age and consumerism (i.e., the result of musical instruments that can be manufactured mechanically and bought cheaply and widely), you then have to conclude that rock’s default mode is post-modern – chronologically speaking, of course, but also in terms of the aesthetics of how it’s produced as art. Lots of people can now buy instruments for the sounds they make rather than the forms they can make with the sounds, or the ideas, sensations and history that these forms imply. That’s post-modern.

And this is why pop-rock, as a subgenre of rock, is actually pre-modern (there’s no “classical” mode in rock). Pop-rock is like the “window on a wall” paradigm in painting: pop-rock isn’t about the sounds that comprise it (like, say, Bo Diddley or Van Halen), but the way in which those sounds transcend their context and begin to delineate real things. Even as this new miraculous universe exists in dialogue with the material context that’s enacting it the whole time.

This is one version of why I like guitar pop.

posted at 2:45 AM