The Chocula Hunt

2008-07-22T18:03:00.000-07:00

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned. It has been nearly two months since my last blog entry. The slave-drivers at work have been cracking the whip especially hard lately, and rather than let the quality of writing here slip, I put updates on hold until I could give the blog this blog the time it needs. I refuse to play NL ball and put out a steady stream of piss poor entries that "get the job done". Big hits only. That's a promise. I am committing to 100% A's Brand Blogging ... that means as many disappointments as ass-kickings, and I hope everyones comfortable with that.

Good. Because let me tell you about some of the latest developments in the chocula hunt scene that I'm _not_ comfortable with:

1) The new N*E*R*D album.

Why? Well for starter there's the album cover:

I won't even begin to speculate on what could have possessed Pharell to think this was cool, except maybe that he's realized he's cool enough that he can probably get away with anything he wants. But really, a giant, red-haired (and I'm a ginger dammnit) king-kongesque gorilla with snarling teeth hovering over your frail little group? Really? Couldn't the gorilla at least be wearing ice creams or BAPE or something pertinent to your whole shtick? Honestly, WTF? For even more laughs at the preposterousness of this, you need only go to their website, where not only do you get to see this atrocity, you get to hear gorilla grunts and moans to go with it as you navigate the page. Try to keep the page open for 10 seconds without laughing, I dare you.

All of this sheer ridiculousness, however, pales in comparison to the absurdity of the next half hour. N*E*R*D very subtly explores drug use at the club with the banger "Everyone Nose (All the Girls Standing in the Line for the Bathroom)",

spazzing out (on the irritating "spaz" -- he says "i'm a little tea pot short and stout" to open this track ... need i say more)

and many other "complex" issues on the CD. These songs are, frankly, just bad, and Pharell knows it. The man's got some chops though -- I mean, come on, at least that one Rockstar remix was fun to listen to -- he's just not trying here. This is just lame.

2) The abundance of nakedness of the new Sigur Ros album:

Yeah ... I have this thing on my iTunes which shows the album artwork when a song comes up on the screen. People at work are like "what the hell are you looking at?" and I have to try to explain that these people are ... well ... Icelandic. That's usually enough for most people. The CD is pretty good though.

3) That this blog isn't factored into metacritic's composite scores. If it were, Hercules and Love Affair would not be in the top 10 I assure you.

4) People that list themselves in the "Zouk" genre. I really don't think it applies in most cases. Stop thinking its cute. Its not. I'm talking to you St. Vincent ... I don't care how much Ram loves you.

5) Not this:

Hellz yah, stompahs a ginger and a baller. That's my A's.

More posts are on the way my few and faithful readers. Stay with me.

Fuck Buttons - Street Horrrsing

2008-05-12T17:05:00.000-07:00

(sample track: sweet love for planet earth)

(802/1000)

*incoherent screaming* / *scream* *scream* *scream*

Drone and noise can be challenging musical genres for impatient people. I can't tell you how many times my boss at work came by and turned off Angel's new dronetastic album (no it has nothing to do with the Buffy spinoff) that I was trying to listen to last Friday, protesting: "I'm sorry its just too much of the same thing".

Its reasonable, I suppose; not everyone appreciates how a single guitar chord will decay over the span of one or two minutes when its fed through thousands of effects units. Even if they appreciate it once, will the appreciate it the second time? The third? The fifteenth? Drone purists arguing in favor of such tracks often end up rambling like Malcolm from Jurassic Park (woo Jeff Goldblum reference!), spouting how drone is chaos theory set to music, that the sequence of strums and decay exposes not only the irreproducibility of the drone itself, but of the behavior of the universe as well ... (*couch* pass that shit dude). Noise can be equally challenging: the fact that most people making noise music prefer to drop the word "music" from the genre is already telling you something, isn't it? Where's the melody in noise? Where's the rhythm in drone? Is this music or just crap?

Well for those of you that said "crap" (and I'm talking to you Dr. Wendy Gilbert), please give Street Horrrsing a chance. I hesitate to apply the terms noise or drone because really this album doesn't fit those genres in the traditional sense. Nonetheless, Street Horrrsing is an album characterized by drones and noise: huge electronic walls of sound are held up for several minutes for us to hear them swirl, breath, sigh, and die out before being put up again, and again, and again; distorted screams, screeching static and feedback soak every track in cantankerous cacophony. Drone and noise. No mutha-effing doubt.

But beyond the noise there is melody; beneath the drone there is rhythm. Album opener "Sweet Love for Planet Earth" begins with a twinkling loop that sounds like its coming from a music box. The childlike melody dances playfully for over a minute before the first pulsing wave of drones sweeps across your headphones and into the mix, where it pulses and throbs about for the next 8 minutes. While loud and distorted, it is a drone which sits below the melody, never rising above it. "Street Love" is a remarkable song in which the listening experience is the sonic equivalent of watching the tides come in, in which it seems like nothing is changing only to find that suddenly the ocean has risen ten feet.

"Sweet Love for Planet Earth" blends into "Ribs Out", a track driven by tribal drumming and distorted screaming passed through a delay unit. Its noisy, screechy, but always moving. The next two tracks are heavy on the drone, light on the melody, and far more difficult to listen to than the earlier tracks. They continue to be palatable, though, due to an emphasis on lively rhythm, whether it comes from actual drumming itself (as on "Okay let's talk about magic") or by the pulsing of the drones themselves (as on "Race You To My Bedroom / Spirit Rise"). The penultimate "Bright Tomorrow" returns the album to the more listener-friendly form of "Sweet Love" before closing with the equally accessible "Coulors Move".

While Street Horrrsing is definitely a solid set of tunes, the album is far from perfect. The vocals on the album always come as effects-soaked screaming, and while not always bad, they often border on being Linkin Park-esque. I also found the transitions from song to song uneffective. Its not a seamless blending of songs and instead sounds like someone just sliding a crossfader from one song to the other over the span of ten seconds. Lastly, my boss still has no qualms about coming over and turning off this album for being repetitive and annoying, so there still are some accesibility issues arising from the drone/noise. Still, Fuck Buttons has managed to produce what is easily one of the most rhythmic and melodic albums to hail from the generally inaccessible arena of drone/noise in some time.

Buy it from Insound.

[Myspace Monday] Coat

2008-05-12T14:57:00.000-07:00

The Chocula Hunt is pleased to introduce another gimmick to the blog in order to give the illusion of fresh and original content: the Myspace Monday. This weekly feature will provide exposure for bands found through aimless clicking on myspace which don't have very many play counts. Starting from a horrible dub reggae group's myspace, fifty degrees of friendship (and six wrong turns leading to male enhancement websites) lead me to ...

Coat

(499/1000)

visit the artist's myspace page

According to their myspace biography, Coat is the songwriting project of Chicagoan (is that a word?) Libby Reed, whose "ideas" are developed into actual songs in the studio with the help of some talented fiends. "Together", she writes "we make coat what it is - - a stiched rhythm of tones and harmony and ideas. ideas. ideas." And that's exactly what we hear in the tracks posted in her myspace: a lot of different ideas. Unfortunately for Libby, a math professor I had in college told me that "you have to have seven bad ideas before you have one really good one"; Libby's myspace has only three.

"Doodle" is not a bad idea, buts its not a fantastically good one either. It opens with a bouncy electronic bit that sounds like it could have been the overworld map music for an old NES RPG -- yes I played NES RPGs when I was a kid, you can stop laughing now. Libby's singing is amelodic on the verse, which fits nicely with the simple electronics and minimal percussion. A little splash of piano and we transition into the chorus: lyrics give way to melodic do-do-dos in three-part harmony, a xlyophone doubles the vocal melody, and this catchy movement gets punctuated with by a stab on the electric harpsichord. Its a bit verse-chorus-verse-chorusy though (God forbid anyone ever use such a structure, especially in a pop song) and might benefit from a little something something.

Coat's other tracks are neither bad nor good ideas. Rather, they are ideas of ideas in desperate need of more development. Strings and horns sway back and forth to a crawling drum beat on "Retrieve", which sounds like it would work well if you were trying to have an 8th grade slow dance in an old barn. "Happy Road" is equally slow, and if it weren't for the irritating swirling static in the background of the mix or the ocassional bass drum hit, I might have fallen asleep while listening to it (and I've had four cups of coffee today already). Libby's voice is really the only thing holding these tracks together.

After these last two tracks, I'm really left wondering: where are these "overwhelmingly talented" friends of hers that are supposed to be he helping develop these ideas. Scrolling down her page shows that in fact she is only one degree of myspace top-12 friendship away from Califone (which in turn makes Califone only 51 degrees away from The Zion Train ... ), whose previous effort, Roots and Crowns, was one of my favorite releases of 2006. Disappointingly, Libby's "talented friends" helping her out in the studio don't include any of the Califone boys, who have a knack for taking their vague ideas and reify them through the structure of folk and blues. This ability to make an idea more than just an idea is sorely lacking in Coat, and until the band finds a way to give Libby's ideas the structure they need (or unless Chocula Hunt's fanbase grows enormously), Coat seems destined to remain in the doldrums of myspace.

Boris - Smile (Japanese Version)

2008-05-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

(623/1000)

"woo hoo!" "messa-ay-ay-juh"

Full House. What a show. Seriously. Remember that episode where Michelle was trying to get her cooking merit badge for that girl scouts group she belonged to? No? Well then you should watch more TBS, because the analogy between the episode I'm referring to and the Japanese cut of Boris' latest album Smile is solid.

In order to get her merit badge, Michelle has to cook something delicious that everyone can enjoy. It took her about four tries though before she cooked something that actually was any good though, and it had nothing to do with her cooking skills; it had to do with her choice of dishes she tried to make. See, Michelle kept taking foods she really liked and then would combine them, without any regard to how her favorites might taste when mixed together. This resulted in things like pickle popscicles, or tunafish sandwiches with hershey's syrup on them. Danny Tanner had to sit her down and explain that just because two things taste good on their own doesn't mean they're going to taste good together. Michelle then made an ILLicious bologna sandwich--hold the hershey's-- Joey made some Bullwinkle noises, Kimmy got a boyfriend, and the Tanner family lived happily ever after.

In Boris's latest effort, there is a lot of Michelle style cooking going on. The aim of course is to create a psychadelic masterpiece, why else would they be calling it Smile? Their strategy? Mash up every genre you can think of, be really loud, and use stereo panning ... a lot of stereo panning. When it works, the results can be satisfying. Tracks like "Next Saturn" place fiercely strummed and overly-distorted guitars in the background of the mix, keep a nice electric piano line at the front, and restrain the bad vocals. The track rolls along until a snare-fill brings us into a Smashing Pumpkins inspired breakdown. In this case, the track works alright.

Most of the time though, you end up with a pickle popsicle. "Flower Sun Rain" begins with a drone that recalls the bands earlier work on Feedbacker, but then shifts unexpectedly into a ho-hum Beach Boy's inspired strum and drum. "BUZZ-IN" combines baby noises, yelling, classic rock guitars, metal, sergeant pepper, a screaming ghost, hardcore, and the voice of god. Sounds kick ass, but then again so did half of Michelle's dishes.

So please, Boris, cut the crap: I know you know how to cook. Hell I'd even go as far as to say you're pretty decent chefs. So make me a masterpiece, not a master-piece-of-shit.

[Pub Play Friday] The Smiths, "How Soon is Now"

2008-05-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

Pub Play Friday is Chocula Hunt's new feature to hilight songs that should be played in the Pub (no Journey will be discussed here as they are always obvious pub choices). "Why can't I just play the normal music I listen to?" you ask. Because the pub is not the time or the place for your favorite Shins song. The pub jukebox is not your personal ipod set to deliver some whiny shit into your private headphones. The pub is a *pub*lic place, and while jukebox choices should be personal, they should still have some general appeal (unless you're at the Thalassa in which case I say you play whatever you want). In addition to presenting a song, you'll also get crucial information about when and where its most appropriate to play and what you should be drinking at the time. Let the games begin...

Song: The Smiths, "How Soon is Now"
Time of Day: after 11am; before 5pm
Type of Bar: dive; irish pub; hipster joint without the hipsters
Your mood: triumphantly depressed / proud of being an alcoholic / getting over "something"
Your appearance: disheveled, red-faced from excessive drinking
Drink: whiskey, neat. and a beer.
The Oakland A's are ... losing.

Hats off to The Smiths: you've got that pulsing guitar, and that cool noise that comes in every few bars, and some really ill, downer vocals. This is a great song for those of you who express your angry frustrations and emotional distresses by wallowing in self-pity and drinking. The power of this song is that allows you to transform that wallowing into something far more exultant. This song is guaranteed to have not only you, but the drunk old man next to you as well (the two of your are probably the only ones at the pub at this time of day anyways), thrusting your hands into the air for the chorus: "You shut your mouth! / How can you say / I go about things / the wrong way? / I am human / and I need to be / lo-o-o-o-ved / just like everyone else does".

(not recommended for play during happy hour)

[live review] The James (Something Something) Band

2008-05-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

Bears Lair Pub, Berkeley, 5/9/08

(14/1000)

Wow. After getting on stage twenty minutes late, The James ... what the fuck was this guy's last name ... band's lead singer (I'm assuming this guy's name is James?) let out a screeching yelp and strummed a chord: let the rock begin.

Unfortunately this band sounded like a terrible Weezer cover band, a terrible B52s cover band, and a terrible Evanescence cover band all rolled into one ... well ... terrible band. Bad chord changes were on the loose, sloppy drums, and bad gimicky vocals (did you really think singing through a megaphone was going to make you sound better?).

The band also had additional support from a member of UC Berkeley acapella group Artists in Resonance (AiR). Besides acapella groups in general being lame as f, AiR has the special privelage on the Berkeley campus as being the lamest of the lame. Yet for whatever reason James (if that is his real name) decided that what his mediocre band clearly needed was more mediocrity, and decided to throw in some girl from AiR on backup vocals. She contributed nothing.

The silver lining in this show (besides getting a good laugh out of the whole thing and drinking a bunch of beer -- thanks Eunice) was that the bass player for the band (brought in just for this show) was impressively solid. Smooth clean lines, no overplaying, good taste level. If they had just cranked him up so loud that he drowned everyone else out, I would have felt like I was listening to an advanced bass instructional CD, which would have been a dramatic improvement over what I heard last night. Kudos to you, bass player, you are the saving grace of the otherwise atrocious James [Insert Last Name Here]'s band.

Sheeeeiiiiiit.

[still on my ipod...] Panda Bear, "Carrots"

2008-05-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

(917/1000)

"theres a reason that i work / so hard at this stuff"

This is the inaugural "still on my ipod" section where I showcase a song that isn't that new but is still in the regular rotation on my ipod (note that this obviously means it must be a phenomenal song). It should come as no surprise to anyone who read my Top 10 albums of 2007 list (i.e. only Ram) that the inaugural song comes off of Panda Bear's Person Pitch, my favorite album of 2007. Person Pitch was five suns worth of sunshine in a horrendously dark and miserably depressing period in my life; "Take Pills" is a much better mood effector than zoloft.

I wasn't alone in my love of Person Pitch ... it was on just about anyone worth caring about's top 10 lists for 2007. Yet while most people pointed towards Bros. as the standout track (and it certainly is badass), to me nothing tops Carrots for making me feel good. Carrots consists of two movements. The first is based around a fairly simple piano and drum loop polished with various sound effects. Panda's vocal melody -- ridiculously catchy -- shines brightly through an ocean of reverb, and for once the analogy to Brian Wilson's voice actually seems legitimate.

Then there is this strange but cool little interlude that cuts into the track -- it sounds sort of like an abstraction of an emergency siren, complete with a doppler effect as it whizzes by before sliding into the second movement. This again builds on a simple loop, though this time the loop feels more full with a windchime sample drifting over guitars, bass, and drums. There are also far more effects in this section, like sounds of explosions, guitar turnarounds, scratching sounds, echoes. However, despite the increased density of sounds it continues to be Panda's melody that steals the show. The amount of reverb he puts on the vocals could have easily washed away any connection to the rhythm, but Panda's vocals remain remarkably bouncy thanks to his deliberate lyrical cadence before drifting away as the song comes to a close.

One criticism I often read of Person Pitch was that the songs were too long for what often were very loopy or one-melody pieces. While I find these people to be morons, if I try to appease their criticism Carrots is not one but two infectious melodies, connected by an intriguing little linker.

So why is this track not getting the same love from the big music sites as some of the other tracks? I'm guessing there are two main reasons. The first is that, as it appears on Person Pitch, the song is part of a two song mix Good Girl / Carrots. While I like both songs, Good Girl is built around a pretty aggressive sample that might make the track as a whole quite skippable for a lot people. The second is that the lyrics are somewhat critical of the whole elite music zine scene in the first place. Panda first sings, "you kind of make me want to / shut your mouth just to keep out / all of those unfriendly feelings / just because you've got / a lot of wax / and all those first editions", and then goes on to advise the listener "get your head out from those mags / and websites who try to / shape your style".

Don't worry dear readers, the likelihood of Chocula Hunt shaping anyones style is slim-to-none at the moment, and so for now I have no qualms repping the shit out of this song. It's "Ill" (and that's two Ram references in a single post)!

Buy it from insound

Kingdom Shore- ...And All the Dogs to Shark

2008-05-08T13:55:00.000-07:00

sample track: Stray Bullets Singing "It's not what you say, but who you give it to" (cut down to 3 minutes)

(805/1000)

*screech* .... *screech* ...

First off, P.T. Anderson > Coen brothers. Second off, There Will be Blood > No Country for Old Men. And even if you disagree on the first two (in which case I'm going Daniel Plainview on your ass), there can be no doubt that There Will be Blood's soundtrack pisses all over No Country for Old Men's, and the only thing more intense than those violins is Daniel Day Lewis's performance.

I bring all this up because Kingdom Shore's ...And All the Dogs to Shark takes the most intense ideas from Greenwood's score (which is already pretty fucking intense) and goes apeshit with them. The end result sounds like a string quartet getting pushed through a wood-chipper (that was for the Coen brothers fans). Opener "Stray Bullets Singing 'It's not what you say, but who you give it to'" is relentless with its application of aggressive and unsettling techniques. Franticly plucked violins crash violently into sweeping high pitched crescendos which in turn tumble back into awkwardly quiet plucking and bowing all in the span of fifteen seconds. The track is just under thirteen minutes long, but is as extreme and uncompromising in the last five seconds as it is in the first. Subsequent tracks vary in length but little else.

While I commend Kingdom Shore for this ceaseless ferocity, one consequence of such vehemence is that the album can be pretty difficult to handle at times. Unlike Greenwood's score, in which periods of high tension give way to release, ...And All the Dogs to Shark never eases up. Even when a track is at its most minimal, the anticipation of a violin stab cutting into the track at any moment maintains the tension. An impressive accomplishment, but unfortunately not every listener is going to like being afraid of what's coming next on the track.

My friend Andrew said of There Will Be Blood something like "That was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen ... but I will probably never watch it again." Kingdom Shore's latest is indeed a very impressive album, and you probably should listen to it at least once. However, for most people one listen will probably be more than enough.

Mount Eerie - Black Wooden Ceiling Opening

2008-05-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

(sample track: don't smoke)

(713/1000)

"is it because / there's a little part of you / that wants to be dead?"

I am confident that no matter how big of a Phil Elverum fan you are (or more likely, aren't), you aren't hoping that his next release will be a continuation of the aimless and dull noodling that has made up the majority of the Mount Eerie catalog. Even if you're the kind of person that does get hot and bothered over these releases, I'm sure you were ten times giddier over the (shocking) return of The Microphones with 2007's Don't Smoke / Get off the internet 7". That's because, let's face it, while Mount Eerie has been an interesting project, everyone liked The Microphones a lot more.

Why though? Because The Microphones had something that Mount Eerie doesn't, and I'm not talking about screeching feedback, tape loops, or the sounds of tugboats. The Microphones showcased someone who was in love with the process of creating music: Phil's excitement was apparent on every beat of even the downer songs on The Glow, Part 2 (which, if you don't have, please drop everything and obtain it immediately). In contrast, Phil seldom sounds like he's enjoying himself on most Mount Eerie releases; sometimes it sounds like he doesn't even care about the songs, and this apathy has made his music a lot less fun to listen to.

So when I say that the latest Mount Eerie release is a return to The Microphones form for Phil Elverum, I don't want anyone thinking that Black Wooden Ceiling Opening is going to be The Glow, Part 3 we've been waiting for forever because it is not. Those of you longing to be swept away on a magical wind into the woods by Phil's whispering voice wrapped in layer upon layer of sonic bliss will have to keep waiting, because Black Wooden Ceiling Opening is, in fact, relatively straight forward in its production. Vocals, guitars, drums, bass: the whole thing could easily have been recorded on a 4-track in a garage, and maybe it was. Many of the tracks indeed sound like something a high-school garage band might have recorded, like "Domesticated Dog" with its screechy vocals, off-beat drum fills, and "I turned all the knobs on my amp to 10" guitars on the chorus. But if you've ever been in a garage band during high school, you know how much satisfaction there is to be had with each misplaced chord or feeble harmonization attempt. The point was to think your pick-slide-during-epic-drum-fill-into-pulsing-hardcore-chorus was kick ass, even when it wasn't really that kick ass. If you were enjoying yourself, then so were your five friends who came to see your show...

And so by letting go of pretension and just going balls out, Mount Eerie comes through with an EP which for the first time in a long while sounds like Phil is having a blast making music, and its in this sense that this EP feels the most like The Microphones of anything he's released in a long time. Not surprisingly, then, I'm actually having fun listening to it. Is it an amazing album? Definitely not. To be honest I'm not even sure that it's really particularly good ("This is awful" -- Sylvia). But in the heavier and less formal setting of Black Wooden Ceiling Opening, Phil has finally liberated himself from, well, himself, and in the process has created an engaging album in which his sense of composition and arrangement are bullied, but not trumped, by these new garage-rock aspirations.

Buy it from Insound