Peggy Lee and Cole Schmidt, Forever Stories of: Moving Parties (Earshift Music)
Meanwhile, out past Pluto into the Kuiper Belt, we arrive on the asteroid I usually don’t bring up in this space, experimental pan-jazz that no one knows about and mostly never will. For the most part, as you may know, jazz is at its heart a “conversational” art, which, in our capitalist context, usually involves one-upsmanship, but this sort of borderline-avant expressionism is a whole other duck, capturing the musicians’ moods at the time of recording. Peggy Lee (cello) and the hilariously overextended Cole Schmidt (Sick Boss’s guitarist) are from Vancouver, and this is their first effort as co-leaders. There are electronics afoot here, as well as guest contributors playing such instruments as bassoon, violin, trumpet and piano to various effects. “Blame” opens the record on a genial note, evoking not the rather dark titular subject but a friendly group walk to an urban coffee shop that’s preparing to close for the night. “It Will Come Back” has a lot of melodic appeal past its borderline dissonant intro; “Absences” offers more sonic schizophrenia, a mixture of afterparty steez and gaslit oddballness. Surprisingly listenable. A
DQFI, “Changes” (Nub Music)
This Saint Albans, U.K.-based band’s acronym signifies “Don’t Quite Fit In,” does that sound familiar to anyone who’s ever stanned a rock band before, anyone at all? I committed to giving this release a look-see before discovering it’s a single and not an LP, so I took it as an exercise in self-punishment and “at least you’ll learn something out of it,” like, I knew there wasn’t going to be much going on. And there isn’t. The band’s trip is sounding exactly like The Runaways did in the 1970s, but with a twist: They’re into positivity, man, because there’s so much, you know, negativity in the world! Have you heard about that? OK, OK, I’m not going to douse all you nice eyeball-equipped people in redundant nihilism; after all, the Brady Bunch band was singing “Sunshine Day” in 1972, the year the Watergate scandal broke and the Olympics were interrupted by a rather unsightly terrorist incident, so why not sing about “holding up a light” and building unity in a world where _____ and ____. I mean, why not, Ben Kweller’s a millionaire, so that old broken clock in the sky is completely right twice a day, you know? B
PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases
• Time to go buy your frozen turkey and hope it’ll be thawed within the next few days, folks, because this Friday, Nov. 22, is the last Friday before Thanksgiving, when you and your uncle will yell at each other about politics and your dog will amble over to the den to get away from it, because although Rover avoids reading any decent, informative political books just like you two do, he chooses not to start trouble over it! Awful, isn’t it, but the good news is that Ice T is back with his rap-metal band, Body Count, remember when their first album was the coolest thing in the world, before the ole Ice-man became a car insurance salesman on the teevee? Merciless is this album’s title, and — OMG, OMG, this is simply too awesome, it includes a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” but because the Ice Monster is awesome, it starts with the cool guitar solo instead of making us sit through any boring preliminary nonsense, and then he starts rapping low and menacingly about how tough it is in the hood, like, you know how it is when your local Whole Foods doesn’t have any [censored] organic avocados and you [censored] have to walk out empty-handed, with your teevee car salesman money still in your Gucci wallet, don’t you [censored] hate that [censored] [censored]!
• If you ever take a drive to Cancelville and take a walk downtown, mayhaps to stroll around the hilly, well-kept paths of Harvey Weinstein City Park or pop into Cosmo Kramer’s Tast-E Freeze to grab a yummy chocolate frappe, chances are good that you will run into one or more celebrities who can no longer show their faces in public or post things on social media without getting yelled at by everyone who sees them! Why? Because all those celebrities are canceled, like industrial-pop circus clown Marilyn Manson, who, all you ’90s kids will recall, (allegedly) stole his “monster-dude-on stilts” gimmick from Skinny Puppy, without ever asking permission. He was (allegedly) never sued for that, but it doesn’t matter because, as all you People magazine readers know, he eventually got his, but good: He got in so much trouble for all the stupid stuff he (allegedly) did to his former girlfriends that he had to move into the Motel 6 on Johnny Depp Boulevard until he could find new digs, in Cancelville’s tony upper east side! But the plight of celebrities who (allegedly) came out as morons and got mightily canceled by people on the internet is not why we’re here, we’re here to talk about Marilyn’s new album, One Assassination Under God – Chapter 1, please try to be civil! His big record contract was voided because, you know, obviously (allegedly!), so now he is on Nuclear Blast Records, an indie label that also puts out albums from, um, well, Green Lung and 100 other bands you’ve never heard of, it’s all so sad, fam. The single I’m listening to is “Sacrilegious,” a tune that tries to revive the glory days of “Beautiful People” but just sort of flops around, and he doesn’t sound very enthusiastic, but neither would you if your next-door neighbor was Kevin Spacey.
• Irish arena-pop band U2 has a new record, How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, which is a “shadow album” of 10 discarded songs from 2004’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. “Country Mile” is one of these new songs, a microwaved meatloaf of uninteresting ideas that only serves to prove that even the mighty U2 can write amazingly boring songs, as if we didn’t know.
• Lastly it’s Kim Deal’s new album, Nobody Loves You More, which features the single “Crystal Breath,” a perfectly fine no-wave grinder, do go listen to it.