...the thing we do instead of the things we're supposed to do... Posts on Mondays & Thursdays
Note: fixed the link to include the entire comp. Thanks to Friend for leaving the comment.
GSL made it a decade and a half, starting out in Boulder in 1993 and wrapping things up in Los Angeles in 2007, with a stop-over in San Diego. During that time, they released no less than a half dozen records that I still find irreplaceable. Early releases from the Locust, the V.S.S., and Get Hustle built a track record that would soon include the Mars Volta, !!!, and the Rapture. This was the sound of late 90s hardcore growing up. And I'm not talking about the youth crew...these were the weirdos from your town who were booking Born Against and Heroin and Huggy Bear in their basements, then going off to college towns where they'd get into Christian Death or Albert Ayler or Karen Dalton. They'd meld it all together, making sounds that'd turn off every macho shithead and turn on their friends and younger siblings.
This sampler came at the midway point of Gold Standard Laboratories' lifespan. GSL would put out the first !!! full length, a Mohinder discography, a collaborative 7" between xBxRx, Miss Pussycat, and Quintron, the Locust's remix 12", and the first post-At The Drive-In release from Cedric and Omar as De Facto in 2001. The last of those would lead to the Mars Volta, who ultimately reached the sort of popularity that honestly blew everyone's I knew's minds. These were deeply different, viewed with some level of distrust, and thus were deeply, honestly, punker than anything else running at the same time. 25 years on, this still feels pretty transgressive, and makes me wonder why the hell we thought anyone was selling out.
It only took me around 40-something years before I finally came around on what made Siouxie & The Banshees so great, so this wasn't something I would have sought out even just a few years ago. This is just an unbelievably cool collection, curated by Siouxie Sioux and Steve Severin. You know, those two.
Primarily comprised of film and stage music, spanning the 1940s to the early 60s, and loaded with sounds you've almost certainly absorbed throughout your life, whether you're 12 or 80. C'mon, you don't have to have been a Disney kid to know "When You Wish Upon A Star" or "A Night On Bare Mountain"...but it helps. For those of us who grew up on the western side of the Atlantic, maybe we didn't get turned on to the themes from "Whiplash", "The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre", or "Fireball XL5". But they left indelible marks on they who did encounter them; hence their appearances here.
This is also a good introduction to Satie, Lotte Lenya, not Bernard Herrmann; not to mention Siouxie & The Banshees representing with their 1987 cover of a song from "The Jungle Book". That's why I'll be packing this off in a care package to my 11-year-old niece, who deserves to hear only the finest.
I wish I came across more of these Scion A/V releases in the wild, because the rare times I cop them, they always bring me joy.
This twelvth volume in the hip automaker's promotional series is a mixtape from turntable collective Oakland Faders. They bring some great beats to this 68-minute mixtape, kicking things off with jazz-funk god Roy Ayers. This is a who's-who of mid aughts backpack hip-hop; everybody from Ghostface Killah and Talib Kweli to MF Doom and Lyrics Born show up. There's a 45 King track that locks in on me at minute five; DJs Shadow and Q-Bert also provide minute-long features that remind me why I continue to celebrate their catalogs. This one's just a good reminder of how creative things were in hip-hop 20+ years ago, and a perfect "drive around with the windows down" listen...as long as gas doesn't cost $5 a gallon.
This is not typical Primitive Offerings fare. A 30-year-old German tribute to Depeche Mode is not my bread & butter. But I snagged this one a year and a half ago specifically because it's so outside the norm of what I write about, and because it allows me to talk a bit about my favorite secret subgenre.
I fucking LOVE EBM.
I dated a fair amount of goth/industrial girls in my teens and twenties. And while the visual aesthetics and general mope-ery of those genres aren't my bag, I'll be damned if the music doesn't make me horny as hell. It sounds like sweat and body heat feels to me. Even in middle age, with a record that came out at a particularly fallow time for EBM, this just makes me want to grind it out in a pair of tall Docs and a tight pair of jeans. And Depeche Mode felt like a proper group to pay tribute to, as my favorite songs fit well in a setlist made up of the Normal, Die Krupps, Nine Inch Nails, and Suicide.
All in all, it was worth picking this one up and, quite frankly, it's weird to me that this never got formally released here in the States. It seems tailor made for a late-90s Cleopatra reissue.
This one called to me from a darkened shelf in a Monterey record store last winter. It was the pink spine that caught my eye first. It's something I associate more with the Pagans' "Pink Album" reissue than anything associated with Chris Blackwell. Yet here it was, a comp of British folk, recorded by Joe Boyd and released initially on Island Records. I had to have it. My tastes have expanded greatly since the first time I heard Nick Drake (who, oddly, doesn't appear here), and I've grown to love the records Richard & Linda Thompson made together, the music of Sandy Denny, the songs of John Martyn. I quit giggling about how poncy the Incredible String Band looked, and started humming along when I listened to them in the car.
I ultimately paid $5 for this one, more than I typically would for a Mojo free CD. And I still won't fuck with Jethro Tull.
At some point in the summer of 2000, Dave from the Oranges Band, who I knew through punk rock and would later work with at the Ottobar, informed me that TOB would be opening for Lifter Puller at Brownie's in NYC. Would I like to tag along? Of course I would; I was no dum-dum. To see Lifter Puller in their home away from home, at a classic indie club that I'd never visited before...well, that was a treat too delightful to pass up. So I wedged myself into their van's loft (hangers-on do not get a seat), and off we went to Manhattan.
Pilot To Gunner opened up that show, and I'd be lying if I said they made a major impact on me at the time. It was emo-derived indie rock, not so dissimilar from what was coming out on Equal Vision or Deep Elm at the time. I remember thinking they were probably on their first record with a major label, a la Jimmy Eat World or Shift. It wasn't until after their set, when I took a look at their merch table, that I discovered they were actually on Gern Blandsten, home to Rorschach, Chisel, Native Nod, and a bunch of other North Jersey/ABC No Rio hardcore and hardcore-adjacent outfits. I wished I'd paid more attention, I thought, right up until the Oranges Band started their set.
This one would get reissued by Rykodisc under their Arena Rock imprint, alongside Pilot To Gunner's second full-length. I uncovered my CD copy, obtained sometime before 9/11, just recently, gave it a spin, and found it a perfectly reasonable flash back to the days when I was physically able to fit within a 24" tall space for 3 hours to go see a band. This is a pretty good one, it turns out.
This sampler, a recent discovery in a tranche of the missus' CD collection, reminds me of Joston's sponsoring the validation sticker on Bart's Hullabalooza ticket on "The Simpsons". Like, what better way to show the kids your battery is the coooooooool battery than to sponsor a sampler of Island Def Jam's finest artists, circa 2005? Still, it's always big fun in my house when I discover an item that wasn't previously listed on Discogs, and this one fits. Add in tracks from Fall Out Boy, Thrice, and Juelz Santana, and this is legitimately a keeper.
Tomorrow is the Iggster's 79th birthday, and to celebrate this audacious occasion a day early, I present the soundtrack to Alex Cox's 1984 classic "Repo Man". Iggy provided the eponymous title track to this soundtrack, which my cursory research tells me came in between the release of "Zombie Birdhouse" and "Blah Blah Blah", the latter of which I bought on cassette sometime in the early 90s because a girl put "Real Wild Child" on a mixtape she gave me. That was my second exposure to Iggy Pop, the first being the 10 minutes of "Repo Man" I watched on HBO when I was 10 or 11 before my mom switched it off "because punk rockers are violent." Well, I showed her; I grew up a punk.
This rip comes from the copy I found a few weeks ago in a nearby thrift store for one American dollar. That's right; I paid less than a quarter of what I would for a gallon of gasoline. Pretty sweet deal. Pretty rad movie. Pretty great soundtrack.
I sometimes wonder if I hold a low opinion of the Who because they just won't go away. Like, if they'd wrapped it up, gone solo after the death of Keith Moon, would I more easily be able to separate the music they made from 1964 to 1978 from the people composing the band? This is one of the bands I actually remember my parents going to see when I was a kid, whose records I was allowed to look through and listen to in my first encounters with the family turntable. I still enjoy a lot of their catalog, but it seems like, for most of my life, anything I've heard about Pete Townshend or Roger Daltrey just left a bad taste in my mouth. I almost want them to pass away so they can't further damage their reputation.
But this was a minor step in the right direction. Even if you think Roger Daltrey is a grumpy old prick, or that Pete Townshend might have...predilections, there's no disputing that they can put together a solid comp. There's not a bad song in the lot. I'll even give them a pass for putting on two songs released after my birth, b/c they're by Ian Dury and ANOHNI and, hey, not everyone can keep their finger on the pulse of modern music like Paul Weller or Jon Savage do with their compilations.
In conclusion, Primitive Offerings remains a blog of contradictions. They wish death on 80+ year old rock stars, but commend their curation of giveaway comps.
If you're not tooling about this weekend in your 6-4, what are you even doing with your life?
You can make up for things by downloading this fun comp from the good folks at Thump Records, who are as Los Angeles a label as SST or Buddyhead, IMHO. Bonus points if you play it while riding a mower while cutting your yard or cruising around on a minibike.
It took from May to August 2000 to go from 100 to 200 posts. Then I hit 300 posts two days before Christmas 2000. And now I'm here, anot...
