This fall, I started playing with a few dudes from Sick Electric (Haywire is one of my favorite albums). They’ve been around playing music for a little longer than I
have. Jimmy (the
guitarist/vocalist) knows I’m pretty deep into the maths, and he dropped a
major nugget on me: Jetpack’s one
and only full-length album, released in 1999.
“Who is Jetpack?”, you may ask. Jetpack is Keith Souza’s band from the late ‘90s. “OK, but who is Keith Souza?”
Well: have you
heard Battles’s Mirrored? Fang Island’s Fang Island? The
Body? The Psychic Paramount? Lightning Bolt? Neptune? Daughters? Tyondai
Braxton’s Central Market? Six Finger Satellite? The Chinese Stars? Yeah. Keith Souza recorded all of those at his studio, Machines
with Magnets.
“Well that’s all well and good, but what does the thing
actually sound like?” You’re
pretty insistent with the questions there, chief. But trust me, the thing sounds fucking awesome. Angular riffs. Fuzz bass. Strained vocal harmonies. Weird songs.
Snaky grooves. You’re gonna
want to listen to this thing over and over and over and over and over.
Jetpack has no internet presence whatsoever, and it seems like the only way to get this sweet, sweet album is through your good friends at Plenty of Swords!
Well, not enough people verified their knowledge of this bands existence when I popped the question on our facebooks page, so I feel obligated to introduce Estradasphere to those who may not know them. I remember when I first heard them, back in high school when I was mostly listening to a lot of metal and rap/rock crap. At the time, the most experimental band I had heard was Mr. Bungle, who I adored; California was instantly one of my favorite albums when I heard it, but one fateful night, Metaghost invited me over to hang out and play some GTA3, as well as to share some musics and eat some snacks. He was more than excited to show me Buck Fever: he was pretty much shitting his pants. He popped it on, and for the next hour we sat in awe, shitting our pants together.
Buck Fever is epic. The first thing you need to know about this album is the bands lineup. Although they were a 5 piece band at the time it was recorded, that says precious little about their sound: each of the five members were super-multi-instrumentalists. Were talking a minimal of 5-6 instruments each, with their sax player John Whooley tipping the scales at 20 (if you include the 7 different percussion instruments listed; I do). Their recording lineup for the album is here.
Their skills at song structures is next. The scope of their sound is only surpassed by the batshit insanity of their compositions: their songs go to so many different places, with a mastery of every genre you can think of, and the imagination to link their different sections together smoothly and flawlessly. Track five, Meteorite Showers, if I recall correctly, boasts 65 different styles through its 8 minutes. It is an overwhelming track, and more of a showoff of their skills and production than a cohesive "song", but it is crazy impressive nonetheless.
Unfortunately, it is pretty hard to find good recordings of them on the internet. They were too weird and undefinable to make any kind of waves, but Buck Fever stands tall as an achievement of insane skill and creativity that, with the help of Trey Spruance, made it to the presses with awesomely produced clarity. Their cover of the Mario Brothers 2 theme as a big band jazz piece rocks: it includes one of my favorite upright bass solos of all time. Buck Fever, the first song of the album, sets things up properly, with some Beach Boys styled melodramatics that quickly run amuck into rockabilly chase music before giving way to section after section of neatness. Millennium Child sits in the center of the album, 8 minutes of greatness with some of the sickest unison violin/ sax melodies I can think of. But what has always taken the cake for me is track six, The Bounty Hunter. Although it is more straightforward big band jazziness than a majority of the album, my god is it nasty.
Do enjoy, ninjas.
The Bounty Hunter <-the bounty hunter
buck fever
Recently, I was looking through a huge book of CDs that I bought when I had just begun listening to my own music in middle school, through high school and into my early 20s. It was full of random crap with a bunch of gems and all the while completely nostalgic. While I was flipping through it, random memories would pop up about these albums I was spending time to investigate deeply, and I spent a few hours trying to remember why the hell I had bought one album, or how much I missed and had forgotten about another. Very soon, I flipped to a page that had two Flaming Lips albums: 1999s The Soft Bulletin, and its follow-up, their 10th album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and I immediately remembered my first exposure to their contents.
My girlfriend, circa 2002, had bought me some concert tickets as a birthday present that summer of my senior year in high school. It sounded like a good show, though I was only somewhat familiar with the bands on the bill. There was some forgotten, neat opening band, The Flaming Lips, and Cake as the headliner. Sweet, I knew a couple of songs by Cake, but I was pretty apathetic about The Flaming Lips. I remembered that a friend in middle school had given me whatever album of theirs it was he was listening to, and it had their single at the time, She Don't Use Jelly. That track is just some silly pop in the style of grungy rock, and it was the only reference I could use to put a sound to the name. Basically, I was unprepared for the show that followed.
There was one thing in particular that blew me away about this show. I had recently seen Battle Royale with metaghost, and during the concert, the Lips had a huge movie screen behind them playing random video clips to go along with every song, and for a decent few they were playing scenes from Battle Royale to accompany their music. It was dark, violent film to go along with the mostly psychedelic electro pop music they were playing, but somehow it totally worked; the show was a complete visual and audio spectacle, with dudes in woodland creature costumes at the sides of the stage blowing up giant glitter filled balloons to pass into the audience, awesome crowd participation, and other high-profile hijinks. It was a seriously well done show, and it completely sold me on what these guys were doing.
Yoshimi and Soft Bulletin are pretty darned nice; they seemed to only play hits from both albums at the show, and it made for a wonderful concert. Link time: Race to the Prize is an awesome way to kick off Soft Bulletin; The Spark That Bled is a bit more moody and varied as the albums third track. Yoshimi is full of hits; Fight Test kicks things off proper; the title track rocks electro pop socks off, and its basically moot to mention that it also features the culturally-absorbed and now discarded Do You Realize, though it sure holds up well.
Track 2 is what I want to share though. I forgot just how awesome this song is (especially its bassline- yeah buddy) until I uploaded the albums to my computer and revisited it. It has a great blend of electronica, spaced out vocals and tight production. Not to mention that bass, again:
Awesome show; a big time Music Moment. One of those great carefree summertime memories brought back from revisiting old tunes.
So, it does stink to start a post this way, but the music i want you all to hear and appreciate is so far unavailable in my standard pre-blogpost digging; maybe you guys here at the Swords can help me out with finding a link, but i do hate starting off by saying i do not have the sufficient links to share with you.
That being said, i love hiphop. As i have said many times before in many, many blog posts about my history with the style, hip hop is a strange beast; for the most part, i look to strong production and smooth rhyme flow in the artists that end up really sticking with me. As a highschool kid graduating in 2002, a few of my close friends had a deeper love of hiphop and rap than i did, but i sucked it all up in long blunted cruises, listening to and talking about all kinds of music, and why we loved our respective favorite genres.
