Quick Hits, Vol. 289 (cleopatrick, Dee Gees/ Foo Fighters, Japanese Breakfast, Guided By Voices)

Random Non-Musical Interlude That Later Becomes About Music: I read an interesting article advocating against the K-Zone thing during baseball games.  I agree with the article, because I was definitely frustrated while watching the World Series this year, yelling about balls and strikes despite those being subjective things that only the ump can call.  In the midst of the article, the writers went into a bit about a music book by David Byrne that I thought was cool.

Technology has a habit of ruining our brains like this. In his book, How Music Works, David Byrne catalogs the history of recorded music, and how much the first word in that phrase affected the second one. When Thomas Edison popularized sound recordings in version two of his patented phonograph, the effects were immediate and widespread. The wax records of the time could only store 3 ½ minutes of music per side, making existing classical music virtually unmarketable, and forcing songs into adapting the length that now, to our generation, seems pre-ordained.

It also changed how music was played, and what was going to be used to play it. Instruments with heavy low notes tended to vibrate the records as the impressions were made into the wax, forcing them to play farther away or be eliminated entirely. To make up for the distortions in the surface of the record (and thus in the sound), vibrato, a technique rarely used prior (and even seen as kind of tacky) became standard; if a bad record made a perfect note sound wrong, a warbling voice would at least still hit the range often enough for the brain to fill the correct note in. Now, singing devoid of any vibrato sounds wrong, or at least automatically twee.

Cool!  This is why no band uses the bassoon to rock out the low notes!  And why 3 minutes songs are the norm!

cleopatrick - BUMMER.  Big fan of these guys.  I know they're under the radar, I only found them because of ACL.  Sounds like Royal Blood or Nothing But Thieves.  Or another new fave the Blue Stones.  And I know, a large number of people haven't even heard of the comps I just used - but what you're talking about here is bruising, fuzzed-out, pure rock and damn roll.  Just two dudes - a guitarist/singer who had about 78 different pedals on stage when I saw their live show, which allows him to change the tone of his guitar in myriad ways, and a drummer who seems deeply pissed off at the skins on his drums.  The old track "sanjake" is one that will make me run through a steel wall.  Just an amazingly hype song.  So, this is their first real album - released in 2021 - and it sticks with that same tried and true method.  "THE DRAKE" and "FAMILY VAN" both crush in fantastic ways - and the latter of those is a good example of how he makes the guitar sound like a bass in one second and then a guitar in the next, to really good effect.  "GOOD GRIEF" is the top streamer for now with 4.4 million.

Good tune, but a deeply terrible video.  Like, I guess you got a video made for zero dollars and all, but that video blows.  The thing that bums me out about this band is how few streams they get - I think this stuff absolutely rules.  But I guess its not in vogue right now to make rock and roll.  The first four tracks fire up over a million streams, as does the second-to-last tune, but then five of the tracks have less than 600k.  Too bad, because I think they should be the next big thing.  I've got tickets to see them in 2022 and hope that the show will be as good as the ACL performance.  Definitely will keep pumping the disc.

Dee Gees - Hail Satin / Foo Fighters - Live.  This is some deeply goofy shit, with the Foo Fighters playing five classic Bee Gees songs together in relatively pitch-perfect recreations of the originals.  It's funky and funny for a little bit, and then the falsetto fest starts to grate a little bit.  "You Should Be Dancing" and "Night Fever" are pretty solid, but "More Than a Woman" is where the bit goes too far.  Unsurprisingly, the top track is the first one, which people checked out and got enough from.  Feels like the joke could have been accomplished with just one tune, thrown out into the world as a lark, rather than creating a full on EP of it.

They are soooo serious in that video, which definitely makes it more funny.  But I definitely don't need to save any of those disco songs.  Funny for a sec and now they can move on.  Then you get five "live" versions of tracks from Medicine at Midnight.  I say "live" because it sounds like they aren't live in front of an audience, but more just raw cuts the guys put together in the studio before they got polished up by the producer.  Although "No Son of Mine" pretty much just sounds like I remember the studio version sounding?  "Making a Fire" has been in super heavy rotation on the radio here in Austin recently, which is odd, but also a good thing.  I guess it's just the new single and I haven't been paying attention.  More rock and roll for me!  But that album wasn't my favorite Foos disc anyway, so I don't much need these redux versions for my collection.

Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee.  Her last album was a tasty one as well, and this one has a little disco sparkle on top of an otherwise great indie rock sound.  "Be Sweet" is a sunshiny pop nugget of an aspirational love song.  The top track for sure with 12.5 million streams.

Kicks off kinda funky, and then the guitar and drums start to edge closer to disco, before the chorus kicks in and you are required to groove to the track and decide to honor synth-pop as cool.  It just bangs with bouncy happiness.  Jenky ass video too.  "Slide Tackle" also has that disco pop feeling.  Other tunes on here are less poppy and more indie, like the nice one that follows "Be Sweet," called "Kokomo, IN," which sounds like something you'd find on some indie budget movie's soundtrack.  "Savage Good Boy" is another standout track that makes me think of Neko Case.  This is good music.  You usually find me on this blog whining about how overly long albums are, but in this case I wish it was even longer!

Guided By Voices - Earth Man Blues.  I've heard of GBV for many moons, but I honestly don't know that I have ever heard any of their music.  Their top song overall is called "Game of Pricks," from a 1995 album, but it rings no bells at all to me.  They feel like the indie alternative rock that the critics love but the masses never figure out.  Well, jumping in to their catalog at their 33rd album (just counted that up on Wikipedia) seems like an odd move, but either way, this disc is legit good.  If I hadn't just pushed play on it myself, there are multiple songs on here that I think sound like Pearl Jam.  The first three songs especially so.  "The Disconnected Citizen" absolutely sounds like it could have popped up on one of the later PJ records that I forgot to deep dive on.  Despite the critics probably loving this disc, there are literally only two tracks with more than 100k streams.  "Trust Them Now" fires up 159k.

Nothing about it sounds new or novel, but it definitely sounds like a really good alternative band jamming some jangly rock and roll into my jangle-hole.  Fast paced and good.  Insistent drumming, jagged guitars, even some good background ooooohhhhhs!  The cover says something about this being a John H. Morrison Musical Production of Earth Man Blues, which makes it sound like a special thing, but I think its just a regular album.  Either way, I like it!