The Afrika Korps - Music To Kill By

I wouldn't typically dive into KBD territory, but having gotten this 2001 reissue for a fantastic price a bit ago, I couldn't resist sharing it. The Afrika Korps were a DC-area proto-punk/garage band active in the late 70s. When I first encountered them, it was along with other pre-Dischord punks like the Slickee Boys White Boy, and the Chumps on mixtapes and comps like "30 Seconds Over DC". It was all more new wave than hardcore, which meant I wasn't going to dig it until I was older, but tracks like "N.Y. Punk" and "Jailbait Janet" appealed to me in that scuzzy way that Iggy and Turbonegro did. The older I get, the more I dig it.

This reissue came out on the esteemed, long-lived Gulcher Records of Bloomington, Indiana back in '01, It's topped off with a slew of outtakes from their initial recording sessions, and four tracks from a 1977 show at Cantone's in Boston. This would be followed up a year later with the complete Cantone's set, a 2005 reissue of the Korps' second LP "Hellow World". cBased on how much I dug this one, I'll no doubt be following the link above to pay full freight on those two discs in due time.

Discogs

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various artists - Extraits Des Bandes Originales Des Films De Jacques Tati

The missus is now almost a year deep into daily French lessons, which means I've been watching a fair amount more French cinema than is usual. Which was already a sizable amount.

So we've been revisiting Jacques Tati's six films again. I snagged her Criterion's The Complete Jacques Tati a few years back; no need to figure out where or if they're being streamed. And I found this lil gem in a stack of cruddy easy listening and modern jazz CDs at an estate sale a few months ago. It's all music scored for Tati's first four films, from composers including Alain Romans, Francis Lemarque, and Franck Barcellini.

Slap this on, revel in the caperin' and clownin'. It is all very, how you say, French.

Discogs

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Elton Motello - Jet Boy Jet Girl b/w Pogo Pogo

It's a day when many of us are reminded to recognize the things to be grateful for. I've been in the Pacific Northwest for four years today, and it hasn't already been easy to do so. But things are getting better, and this is an excellent practice. So here goes:

• I'm grateful my family and I are safe, dry, and have food to eat today.
• I'm grateful for my new job, and the possibilities it holds.
• I'm grateful that all seasons of "The Venture Bros." are up on Hulu, thus preventing me from tracking down all my various DVD sets.
• I'm grateful that almost everyone I live around share the common courtesy of masking up when they're out and about.
• I'm grateful for fake punk, in all its various, money grubbing permutations.

Here are two English studio musicians performing an English-language cover of Plastic Bertrand's "Ça Plane Pour Moi”. It is ridiculous and, if you've never heard it before, well, get ready to shake ass. I'll play this loud whilst preparing Thanksgiving for two.

Discogs

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Augustus Pablo - East Of The River Nile

I'm 43 today.

I've really hit a wall about what I wanted to write about for this momentous occasion. Birthdays are just...mehf. I come from Patton Oswalt's stance on the matter: when you're an adult, a celebration once a decade until you're 90, then a slap on the ass the other nine birthdays. Is it a sign of a depressed personality? Almost certainly; I'll own it. I'm part of that last "great" generation of white men who were raised to believe that no one really gives a shit about your feelings, and that you should do something that really "matters" if you think you should be celebrated. No wonder I'm fucking depressed. What a hell of a way to be raised.

I've often thought about musicians dying young as I've grown older. I once thought I wouldn't make it past 22 (Buddy Holly, Darby Crash). 1999 was such a shit year, having sold a big chunk of my record collection, split up with the first love of my life, and moved off to a college I'd fail out of within a year. I slept with a pistol under a pillow for months, begging myself not to use it. I blew past the 27 Club. I got married, finally got a degree, and bought a house. Within another five years, most of that would be gone, the only thing left another several years of student debt. I hit 40, and I felt like I finally had the world by the balls. I lived in a place I loved, with a woman I adored, making a living wage for the first time ever. I even took a real staycation for the first time ever. I returned to work three days later, and got laid off. I haven't had a stable job since.

Can you see why I'm not high on my birthday? There are times where it feels like it's the herald of a new load of misery.

Augustus Pablo was 44 when he died of a collapsed lung in 1999. There are two ways I look at this. One is that I'm almost as old as he was, and that I'll never make a work of art as great or lasting as "East of the River Nile". The man made the melodica sound as cool as Coltrane's sax or Watt's bass. What can I possibly do to measure up? The other is that I'm still here; I can still discover the genius in a piece of art like this. It's in the discovering that, even when everything else feels like it's shit, I find the momentum to keep moving. Crate digging can make a bad day good, a good day great. I found a Canadian cassette of this a couple years ago that had never been entered on Discogs; at 19 cents, it's probably one of my favorite thrift store finds from the past few years.

Depression is an anchor that weighs me down every day. I take medicine and participate in therapy and work on myself every day and it's a fucking drag even on the best days. Yeah, even on a day like today, it can be tempting to let myself drown. It's music like this that helps me float, sometimes even surf in life.

Discogs

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Neon Hearts - Venus Eccentric b/w Regulations

I feel like putting on my pogo shoes.

This is one of my all-time favorite KBD singles, released 2 months after I was born in December 1977. Neon Hearts hailed from Wolverhampton, which the map tells me is smack dab in the middle of England and right down the road from Birmingham. They featured future Killing Joke bassist Paul Raven, and the saxophone plays a big role in their sound, which I guess pushes them closer to new wave territory than punk territory. They played together for four years until breaking up in 1981, releasing an LP and three singles in that time, the first of which is presented here.

This is a double A-side, self-released slice of fried gold. "Venus Eccentric" melds jangly guitars with a sax lead that just works. My favorite part? Keith Allen's drums sound so cool, like he has two different sized boxes and a pie tin for a cymbal. "Regulations" is definitely the punker of the two cuts.  It has this fantastic tempo to it; the guitar is a buzzsaw, the sax, honking goose calls. It's super bratty, even with a four-measure guitar solo. This song is pure teenage ecstasy.

Overground Records in the UK reissued these two songs as part the "Ball & Chain" CD compilation back in 1997, and Germany's Last Year's Youth Records reissued them on vinyl back in 2001. So I'd say we're due for another release. In the meantime, check this slab out.

Discogs

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