Friday Night Record Party : September 2017

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Nightwalker: In Shop We Build Electric Chairs: Professional Music by Nightwalker

Nightwalker: In Shop We Build Electric Chairs: Professional Music by Nightwalker

1999

Fading Captain Series/Luna Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Drum Solo 2.The Fink Swan (Swims Away) 3. Kenneth Ray 4. Dogwood Grains 5. Amazed 6. Signifying UFO 7. Ceramic Cock Einstein 8. U235 9. Weird Rivers & Sapphire Sun 10. Trashed Canned Goods 11. Those Little Bastards Will Bite

Sorry, about the lack of posts recently. I got really sick and have just been Hibernol-ing it. I'm finally feeling human again and so I'm going to celebrate my wellness by treating myself to a half hour of caustic noise...

" In Shop We Build Electric Chairs: Professional Music by Nightwalker" is Fading Captain #3. I actually don't own a copy of Fading Captain #2, which was the Lexo and the Leapers EP. If I track down a copy of that, I'll go back and do a post on it. Remember, I said I had a lot of Robert Pollard, but not all of it. Cos bills and groceries and shit...

Alright. You get home from a long day at work...You stopped by the local record shop on the way home and picked up the latest Robert Pollard album. You fix up a martini, throw the album on the hifi, loosen your tie, stare at the album cover and read, "Track 1, 'Drum Solo.' Ah, this ought to be good..."

You prepare yourself for some sweet Ginger Baker cannonades but wait! This isn't eight-armed Keith Moon flailing! This isn't even a Peter Criss Side-3-of-Alive level drum solo. It's just some dude ineptly banging away at a drum kit. Like when your drummer steps away from the stool for a minute and the guitarist swoops in and has a go at it. Loping, stumbly and unsteady. And that's pretty much the world of Nightwaker...

Y'see, this is one of those late night noise jams that are a hell of a lot of fun to participate in but probably not as much fun to listen to. If you've ever listened to any of those Guided by Voices "Suitcase" releases you'll be familiar with the style immediately. The dank, bleary, tuneless, incoherent fucking around where you have to ask yourself, "Why did he see fit to release this?" Well, this is a whole album of those...

I can see why some people were pissed off at this release. I can imagine if I bought it when it came out and paid $15.00 for it, not knowing what I was getting into, I would been pissed off too. Luckily, I bought it off the Rockathon website for $5.00 years later, knowing full-well what its reputation was. I'd say there's about $5.00 worth of entertainment here...I actually sorta enjoy this type of thing but I can easily imagine how something like the squalling feedback and irregular, sporadic drumming of "Ceramic Cock Einstein" might put someone off...I tend to focus on the positive things, so here are they are:

The Pros:

1. The vocal melody of "The Fink Swan (Swims Away)" actually gets stuck in my head from time to time. Which I suppose is good, cos the song is really nothing but a (very loud) vocal melody.

2. "Dogwood Grains" is a much needed oasis in the middle of the junkyard. Just a lovely, little acoustic ditty, where the "living in an airport" theme (which would later be explored on later records) first pops up. Probably the most enjoyable song on the disc.

3. "Ceramic Cock Einstein" is nothing but a bunch of aimless fucking around until a song-ish type thing eventually emerges from the muck. And that song-ish type thing just happens to be the noisy snippet that opens "Paper Girl" from the "Self Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia" album! Awesome!

4. This album ends with the 11-minute epic "Those Little Bastards Will Bite" which is (surprise! surprise!) more aimless, feed-backing, fucking around until suddenly 7 minutes in, you realize you're witnessing the live birth of "Postal Blowfish."

And there you have it. There are the 4 good things about "In Shop We Build Electric Chairs." No, wait, the cover is cool. That makes 5 good things...

I'd recommend this only to the hardest of harcore Pollard fanatics. In fact, while I was listening to this, my wife (who is a GBV fan, but not as rabid about the whole thing as I tend to be) made a disgusted face at the ear-splitting feedback and muttered, "This is horrible..." But if you're fascinated by grimy, audio weirdness this might hold your interest. I find I bust it out once a month or so, when I'm feeling particularly antisocial and un-song-like...

Alright. Let's listen to some music. I'll go easy on you. Here's "Dogwood Grains." Acoustic guitars. Gentle singing. No screaming feedback and random drum hits...

Here are the updated rankings. This one was a no-brainer. "In Shop We Build Electric Chairs" goes straight to the bottom-ass bottom and there's a fair chance it's staying there. "Devil Between My Toes" has much more to recommend than this album. As a look back at this list, I can't shake the feeling that I have "Kid Marine" ranked too low. I dunno. What do you guys think?

1. Guided by Voices: Alien Lanes

2. Guided by Voices: Bee Thousand

3.Guided by Voices: Under the Bushes, Under the Stars

4. Guided by Voices: Propeller

5. Robert Pollard: Waved Out

6. Tobin Sprout: Carnival Boy

7. Guided by Voices: Do the Collapse

8. Guided by Voices: Same Place the Fly Got Smashed

9. Robert Pollard: Kid Marine

10. Guided by Voices: Tonics and Twisted Chasers

11. Guided by Voices: Sunfish Holy Breakfast

12. Robert Pollard: Not In My Airforce

13. Guided by Voices: Mag Earwhig!

14. Guided by Voices: King Shit and the Golden Boys

15. Guided by Voices: Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia

16. Guided by Voices: Vampire on Titus

17. Guided by Voices: Sandbox

18. Guided by Voices: Forever Since Breakfast

19. Guided by Voices: Devil Between My Toes
20. Nightwalker: In Shop We Build Electric Chairs: Professional Music by Nightwalker

Saturday, September 9, 2017

Guided by Voices: Do the Collapse

Guided by Voices: Do the Collapse

1999

TVT Records

Format I Own it on: Shiny Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Teenage FBI 2. Zoo Pie 3. Things I Will Keep 4. Hold on Hope 5. In Stitches 6. Dragons Awake! 7. Surgical Focus 8. Optical Hopscotch 9. Mushroom Art 10. Much Better Mr. Buckles 11. Wormhole 12. Strumpet Eye 13. Liquid Indian 14. Wrecking Now 15. Picture Me Big Time 16. An Unmarketed Product

Oh, yea. I remember going to a Best Buy or something in the summer of '99 and picking up Pavement's "Terror Twilight" and GBV's "Do the Collapse" on the same day. I first listened to the band with "Mag Earwhig!" and in between that album and "Do the Collapse" I bought every damn speck of GBV and GBV-related music I could get my hands on. I was insatiable. Buying up lo-fi by the truckload. And finally, after two whole years without a new GBV album, here it was..."Do the Collapse" emblazoned across its shiny, shocking white cover.

I remember promptly throwing it into my car stereo and what came out of the speakers was Robert Pollard's voice for sure. Sounding kinda tin-canny over some keyboard pulse. "Alright, I can roll with this," I thought. "I've heard 'At Odds With Dr Genesis.'" But then "Teenage FBI" suddenly explodes. Guitars roaring, keyboards a-weedle-whoo-ing, stereo all separated, no ball of hiss between the instruments and my ears. My head almost spun around a full 360 degrees. I had kinda assumed "Under the Bushes, Under the Stars," was as slick as this band was going to get. No one told me that GBV were going slick! Nobody mentioned any Ric Ocasek production! It sounded so...wrong.

I continued to drive around and listen to it. I couldn't shake the feeling that this felt like a Foo Fighters album or something. I got to "Hold on Hope" and it was a damn power ballad. Like Matchbox 20 or Collective Soul or Aerosmith would do. The songs also seemed to repeat themselves over and over and over. Where was the brevity of old? "Zoo Pie" and "In Stitches" each felt a million years long. My only anchor were the lyrics, which still maintained their signature wordplay. So I would spend the next couple weeks cranking the album and chuckling along to "Dragons Awake!" (where the absurd lyrics and the straight-faced slickness felt hilariously incongruous) and "Liquid Indian" (where the evocative line, "I'm a born-again boot-stomping witch-humper!" won me over instantly).

Then one day (a good 15 or so listens later) I was showing someone "Liquid Indian" and that subtle, sneaky chorus suddenly hit a huge pleasure center in my brain. Goosebumps suddenly grew on my arms and my eyes grew wide. The slimy slickness suddenly felt like a nice, cool breeze blowing through my skull. I had learned to love "Do the Collapse."

I was uncomfortable with this at first and still maintained it only had a handful of good songs and that while listenable, it was still nowhere near classic GBV quality. But the goose bumps kept slowly coming. I had traditionally found that the goosebump phenomena manifested itself when sudden shifts in intensity or volume occurred (the end of VU's "Heroin" for example) but I found that I was getting goosebumps from nothing less than Pollard's well-modulated vocals (particularly in "Surgical Focus"'s pre-chorus and all throughout "Picture Me Big Time"). I have to give Ocasek huge credit in this area. This entire album is Pollard's best vocal performance, hands down. Oh, and listen to the guitars on this fucking thing. They're beautiful. Constantly shifting from chiming to crunching. Listen to the acoustic detail on "Wrecking Now" or the moody fills on "Mushroom Art" or "Picture Me Big Time" where Doug Gillard busts out every move in the classic rock playbook.

Favorites: "Picture Me Big Time" is probably the single most overlooked, least-heralded GBV song. It's fucking perfect. Starts out carrying that minor-key, moody loneliness and just goes bigger and bigger until the final chorus where it feels like the wheels have all fallen off and the whole thing's going to explode as Pollard belts out "There are words that speak to everyone, which I will deliver to you..." in the most arena-ready, Roger Daltrey-esque fashion he can muster. Pollard finally nails universality. There are the goosebumps, my friend. "Liquid Indian" is also an absurd masterpiece, which aside from maybe "Subspace Biographies," sports my favorite Pollard chorus. A well-polished beauty. And more than possibly any other song, "Things I Will Keep" fulfills the promise of major-label GBV. When I would dream about a no-expenses-spared, big-budget GBV album, this song was what I was hoping for. So packed with melody and melancholy that you can't help but push that "replay" button over and over. I would probably lump "Surgical Focus" in the same "idealized" GBV category. It's a flawless pop song. Oh yea, and "Much Better Mr. Buckles" rocks. I crank the fuck out of that song whenever it comes on these days.

Listening to this recently, I was also surprised at how much I loved "Wormhole." I had remembered it incorrectly as a silly, kid-boppy nursery rhyme but when that song kicks into the "Into the wormhole" section it's so damn powerful. So much good guitar. This was the album that made me a huge fan of Doug Gillard's work. "I Am a Tree" on "Mag Earwhig!" certainly perked my ears up, but it was his sustained performance on "Do the Collapse" and this song in particular that solidified his placement as my...gulp...favorite Guided by Voices guitarist (ducks).

Least Faves: I'm still going with "Zoo Pie" and the arena-progger "In Stitches." Either song would have made a decent 30 second snippet but 3 minutes? (Oh yea, I meant to mention this earlier. There are no song snippets. The closest thing is the quick, punky closer "An Unmarketed Product" (which rules, btw) clocking in a little over a minute). I know y'all are expecting me to say "Hold on Hope," but I kinda like that song. Again, I think it's the bizarre lyrics juxtaposed against the radio-ready power ballad that makes it work. GBV would never really do a song like "Hold on Hope" again, but I'm glad they did it at least once...

I think "Do the Collapse"'s main legacy was that it ended all the old speculation of "Just imagine what Pollard could do in a real studio." The fantasies of what professionally-recorded versions of "Bee Thousand" or "Alien Lanes" would sound like were officially over. This was it. This was widescreen GBV. It turns out it was still an acquired taste and still not quite accessible. Still flawed and still beautiful. I'm not sure what the consensus is on "Do the Collapse." Not sure if GBV fans still dislike it. If so, I'd urge them to give it a few more listens. Bob was still on a roll...

Here's the updated ranking. I'm ranking this pretty high. Lots of top notch stuff and the songs that aren't' great are at least fairly hilarious.