Post Post – Meta Meta EP

Post Post
Meta Meta EP
Awkwardcore Records

I want to start this review off in a sort of stupid direction. I don’t want to begin with some dissection of this band’s style, musical ability, message, or anything like that. I don’t want to rattle off reference points and mark off what scene they belong to and who should listen to this. I want to open this thing with something relatively superficial. I want to talk about signifiers… about names.

At first blush, Post Post just struck me as “clever,” you know? Generic indie rock wordplay, minor intellectual fronting with a liberal arts sense of humor… the usual thing. Normally, I guess I’d stop paying attention at this point. Most of the time, band names are little more than the least stupid thing the group could agree on when they started playing shows. They’re usually kind of throwaway, a put-on, without much relationship to the actual music (cough… I’m looking at you, Dismemberment Plan). Who the fuck cares about a name?

This is usually a sane way to approach things, but as I got into Post Post and grew to love the music that they make, their name kept coming back to me. It’s almost like I’d made up a story about these two words, a story that helps me understand and position this band in a context that’s bigger than the usual “sounds-like,” “looks-like” fodder that most record reviews are built on. As crazy as it may sound, in this story, the words “Post Post” take on the weight of almost perfectly summing up the moment that I hope we’re moving into right now musically, culturally, and politically. In this story, “Post Post” is what it means to grow up out of post-modern nothingness, and to become something new, meaningful, and beautiful. “Post Post” is to move past the recent fad of declaring history to be over, of declaring that the forces, struggles, and positions that defined our old historical progression have magically evaporated or become too unfashionable to take seriously… that the contradictions that once burned bright and hot in our lives and in our social reality have been finally resolved. And artistically, it means a renewal of the premise that art can serve as a means of honest expression that takes sides, provokes, reveals truths, and creates strength through an acknowledgment of vulnerability.

To give context for this idea, once upon a time folks risked their lives and their material comfort fighting for justice, freedom, control over their work, and liberation along lines of race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class. Behind the scenes, the state brutally repressed those movements, killed a few folks, bought off a few more, and put most everybody else in jail. Commentators, corporations, and all the people in power took the moment of relative quiet to announce that the slate had been wiped clean, that the benevolent few at the top had voluntarily transcended the blood and bad manners of the past. The world had supposedly blossomed into a utopia of “post-racial,” “post-feminist” social harmony. Whatever narratives survived about the past struggles were cleaned up and turned into inspirational bedtime stories. The activists and revolutionaries left standing found themselves reduced to cartoon characters in the popular imagination… curiosities at best. Whatever problems remained in this new order could only be accounted for through the failings of individuals and a few constantly redefined “bad elements.” This mirage of social peace was sold to us at a heavy cost: we had the same problems, but now we had only ourselves to blame. The songwriter David Bazan hit the full depth of this deception when he sung the lines “the class war is over / and everyone wins” in a song that was ultimately about suicide. This is roughly how they drowned history.

As a suburban punk coming up in the late 1990s, I stood in the wake of this transformation… the heyday of the post-modern condition. The same systemic forces that were erasing memories of resistance and committing genocide in urban ghettos were producing alienation and psychological dysfunction on my relatively privileged side of the class lines. On a cultural level, this translated into the full-blown retreat of the broader alternative (aka “indie”) music scene from functioning as a real site of resistance. Though the scenes I was a part of were filled with kids like me—full of pain, social anxiety, and desperately looking for connection and a different life—the spaces I found myself in weren’t centered around liberation or even bringing people together to gain strength from shared experience. What pervaded the scene at that time was estrangement on the deepest possible levels, a feeling like we not only had to keep space between each other, but publicly we had to put space between ourselves and anything we might feel or believe. We played out the script that we were given: there was nothing wrong, there was nothing that needed to be taken seriously, no causes to be joined, no fights to be waged, this crushing alienation that drew many of us into the scene could be remedied through vapid socializing and cool points.

Irony, that great chicken-shit strategy for making statements the ultimately state nothing, became an essential cultural currency during this period. To admit anything, to even put something serious on your fucking t-shirt was to be vulnerable to ridicule or sideways glances. Except for small tribes of fanatics—anarcho-punks, some straightedge kids, the few emo kids that wanted more from their scene than self-indulgent melodrama, and the riot grrl true-believers that had survived its commodification—it felt like everybody was just hiding in view. Where the punk rock nation once had the symbolic and emotional character of being at total war with society, the 1990s indie rock scene it helped spawn often felt disconnected from a coherent grasp of even personal/emotional struggles. There were places in the scene, places as vast as they were utterly lifeless, where truth had been abandoned in favor of pure artifice. Too much of the art that was coming out of our community was sustained with a core of little more than dumb jokes and fashionable posturing. The outsiders had made outsiders of themselves. Our post-modern rock scene was devouring itself, and as I got older, it only got worse.

In 12-step programs, there’s a notion that change doesn’t come until you first recognize that your life has become unmanageable: that the shit you need, you ain’t getting; the shit you do to fulfill your needs, it ain’t working. On a cultural level, I’d like to think that we’re getting to this point: that those of us that take a conscious approach to engaging this generation’s music scene are beginning to recognize that in order to have art and community that meets our needs and our desires, we have to do things differently. Philly’s Post Post may not be an outwardly conscious band (they’re certainly not as outwardly political as this batshit review I’m writing), but in my view they are doing something differently than a lot of the indie rock bands out there… namely, the songs they write, the music they play, it all feels honest to me. The tracks on Meta Meta are emotionally rich, often heartbreaking, but without self-pity. As lyrics go, lines like “I wish I wasn’t this way” and “I don’t ever want to be sober” are about as straightforward as you can get in expressing what it feels like to hurt. Michelle Zauner’s delivery—belted out in impassioned crescendos—only serves to drive the point home. As beautifully lush as Post Post’s sound is, as gifted as these musicians are, and as much as their music conjures up similarities to well-marketed bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there’s a plainness and a directness here that stands apart from other easy-on-the-ears acts who are more comfortable hiding behind wit and intellect than they are getting up on stage and just communicating who they are and what they feel.

On Meta Meta, there’s a kind of fearlessness and a willingness to stand exposed that is rarely heard from a pop-inflected indie rock group. It’s fearlessness like this that makes me hopeful. The post-modern conditions of our reality taught many us to deride truths, deride the deeper narratives that frame our individual and social lives, and took away many of the ways we had to partially understand and communicate the validity of our experiences with each other. Today, we cannot go back: we cannot rebuild old struggles, rewrite old love songs. But we can evolve. We can find new ways to express meaning, new methods to come together and get what we need. The phrase “Post Post” describes our situation—historically we stand in the aftermath of an aftermath. And it also raises the obvious questions: What do we do now? Where do we go now? To me, the band Post Post implies an answer: we write new love songs, and we go forward.

Post Post’s demo ep, Meta Meta, came out Fall 2009 and is available for download (with donation) or purchase from Awkwardcore Records (http://www.awkwardcore.com). On August 7th, they will be having the release show for their newest ep, Residents, at Kungfu Necktie.

Layers/Quake – tape 2009

Layers/Quake
tape 2009
self-released

Deconstruction is to punk rock as gasoline is to internal combustion. Punk rock propels us forward. Through punk rock we are able to feel something different than we used to feel in our normal lives. When we are in the grips of punk rock, we are able to know and taste and sweat and shake with a transcendence—with a sense of power in ourselves and in each other—that is beyond words, that is deeper and more profound than words. This process, this holy fucked up experience, is fueled by an intentional breaking shit down to its rawest, most basic components.

There are many modes of art that move people. There are many modes of art that impress or entertain people. What makes punk rock different than many modes of art is that punk rock demands that we all take part in its creation—that it is only realized out of the love, the closeness, the positive frenzy we share together in common. “Talent,” “expertise,” or any other arbitrary pretense that elevates the artist above the audience or shuts any of us out of the collective act of making shit together can thus be seen as fundamentally poisonous to the project of realizing punk rock. Such elitisms hold us back, turn us against each other, and in the end they will keep us from getting what we really want. Our art must be democratic or it will not be. Our art must be articulate and explosive enough to rock people’s souls, but at the same time it must also be rough enough and honest enough and humble enough to make any of us capable of its creation. This is how you make punk rock.

I write these words more or less in response to the Layers/Quake tape that came out back in August of 2009. Layers/Quake is an instrumental-heavy, female-fronted, drum/guitar 2-piece that’s been playing around Philly a good bit over the past couple months. Their tape 2009 really hits at a lot of what I find valuable in punk rock music and is probably one of the finest masterpieces of DIY rock that I’ve heard coming out of the city in a bit.

As you might expect from a self-released cassette debut, the production values of tape 2009 are raw and dilapidated. The drums crash in blurry cacophonies, the guitars are massive and overblown, the vocals are variations of frantic howling and distorted harmony, the lyrics are almost universally undecipherable. Banging out 14 tracks in less than 24 minutes, Layers/Quake make the most of their stripped-down format, diving headlong into song after song without pause, transition, or apology. Overall, this is less a proper album than it is documentation—a simple recording of two friends throwing molten lava at each other for fun and brutal self-realization.

This isn’t music that lulls you with catchy choruses and pleasant melodies (although there’s a few points where they come remarkably close such as “just gazer,” “feel it,” and “have it all”). This isn’t music that fronts intellectual or impresses you with well thought out composition. At its core, this is ass-kicking music. This is shit that’s about crescendos, contortions, crushing weight, and regular bursts of full-throttle intensity. Halfway between Pink & Brown, riot grrl, and The Breeders; between bratty punk and pummeling guitar-driven instrumentals, Layers/Quake is yet another Philly band that is out there killing it right now—creating music that is alive, powerful, and provoking our passionate engagement.

If you would like to pick up a copy of tape 2009, get in contact with the band. The tracks are also available for free via the band’s website: http://layersquake.wordpress.com.

My Mind – Path Masher 7″

My Mind
Path Masher 7″
Badmaster Records

Once upon a time in the land of Philadelphia, there was a band called Eat Forever. Eat Forever played a frenzy of loud, melodic, ADD-fueled pop songs with abrupt endings and surrealistic lyrical undertones.

Back in 2005 or 2006, they played a show in my old house’s tiny basement and afterwards, smitten by their deafening awesomeness, I asked Mr. Tim Westberg from the group if he could give our webzine a promotional copy of one of their releases to review. When I was going to shows back then, this was a frequent question I’d ask musicians. The sane answers that I’d get in reply would usually range somewhere between “Yeah, sure” and “No asshole, you need to fucking pay for that!!!” (Fair enough.) Tim’s response was much more illusive. He made it clear he was excited to have us write up a review of Eat Forever’s music, but at the time Eat Forever didn’t actually have any official releases for us to write about. His solution to this apparent quandary was to make me a fucking crazy, rough-as-shit burned cd of songs they were thinking about using for an ep (as a bonus, he also tossed in a handful of his solo experiments on 3″ cds with full artwork).

I was hardly a stranger to thrown together DIY recordings, but this Eat Forever pseudo-promo was a real kick in the butt. The whole thing was comprised of thirty-six rough mixes of only about seven or eight distinct songs played in a different random order over and over again. Some of them were decently recorded, some were totally fuzzed out or taken straight from from practice recordings. I didn’t even have a track list to help me sort out song titles or anything.

For almost any other band, I feel like this kind of confusing, completely unedited vomiting of raw material would be nearly impossible to sit through, let alone review. For Eat Forever, it strangely worked. The shit was just so catchy, so quick, so energetic, so careening from one idea to the next that it didn’t phase me to listen to a distorted third or forth out-take of the same song I’d heard just a few minutes ago. And since Eat Forever songs were inevitably written to leave you wanting more, the extreme repetition proved to be a really satisfying way to listen to the material. All in all, it was a fine introduction to a fine Philly band.

Flash forward to 2010, and much of what was Eat Forever has morphed into My Mind. Now, instead of finding myself trying to intelligently review a sprawling heap of unfinished proto-songs, I’m faced with Path Masher—a totally together, totally tight, ten minute monster of a 7″ that plays like a fucking LP.

It’s pretty clear on Path Masher that Tim and the rest of the EF holdovers in My Mind haven’t given up their old ways. Just like on the Eat Forever recordings, almost all of the eleven songs on this 7″ are well under the one minute mark. Just like before, all the songs start and stop on a dime, pull you in with sweet melodies, rile you up, and cut out just when you feel like the chorus should cut in. The opening song “Be A Fascist To A Fascist” is even straight up Eat Forever-era material—an updated version of a song that had made it onto the original burned promo they gave me years and years ago.

But as conceptually true as My Mind is to much of the old Eat Forever schtick, Path Masher definitely isn’t a simple regurgitation of old formulas. The most impressive part of this 7″ for me isn’t how much it sounds an old band I used to like, it’s how much they are able to break new ground and take the music to the next level. While Eat Forever was more bound up in the spastic gesticulations of their psyche-pop punk oeuvre, My Mind’s pop stylings are somewhat cleaner and more expansive—on Path Masher they seem more willing to slow things down, making it easier to pick out discernible notes of The Zombies or inflections of old Elephant 6 bands in their brief compositions. Despite their self-imposed limitations around length and pacing, My Mind seems to constantly push the envelope to find new ways to bust out razor sharp song-writing that makes its point in less than sixty seconds flat.

Jam-packed with compellingly innovative tunes, Path Masher is about as full a meal as you’re going to get on a 7″ record. It’s a special thing to come across music that is as provocative as it is catchy, and so I absolutely recommend this release as an entry point into the work of a band making important music here in Philly.

While I believe this 7″ may presently be out of print, you can still check it out via this My Mind-related blogspot. (This site also features most of the Eat Forever discography, some of Tim’s solo projects, and a bunch of other really solid music for your downloading pleasure.)

mischief brew // songs from under the sink

Mischief Brew
Songs from Under the Sink
Fistolo Records

This is the new(est) full-length album from Philadelphia sweetheart Erik Petersen. Erik’s been regaling the city with anarcho-folk-punk anthems for years, and recently (on 2005’s Smash the Windows) acquired a bass, a drum kit, and several amplifiers to back up his tunes. The full band arrangements were vibrant and airy, while still preserving the old acoustic grit, and proved Erik’s musicianship to be several notches above the average sit-and-strummer.

Songs from Under the Sink brings this fuller sound to some of Erik’s oldest tunes. The album is the result of some musical spring cleaning—songs culled from odd comps, dusty tapes, and forgotten demos. Although the result sounds like the junk drawer that it is—don’t expect the flow and tempo of a standard l.p.—the balance among these songs is carefully considered: even as Erik revamps some old favorites, a good number of the tracks here will be unfamiliar to most listeners.

And this, as it turns out, is a good thing. Even those of us who’ve faithfully collected every damn thing that Erik’s put out over the years—from the West Chester demo tapes to the Orphans discography—will find something here to illuminate the more obscure corners of Mischief Brew. We get to hear Erik’s growly hardcore roots on “Tell Me a Story” and live his high school angst in “How Did I Get Out Alive?” There’s even a nice Leadbelly reworking (”Midnight Special 2002″) to round things out at the end.

The new versions of some of the old live staples—”A Rebel’s Romance,” “Dreams of the Morning”—will sound a bit jarring here. Erik seems to have outgrown the need to write wistful ballads, so he’s lifted the spirits of these songs with a good deal of instrumental celebration. The tunes no longer brood—they rollick. Sometimes, it doesn’t quite work; but more often, the arrangements play as a celebration of how far Erik—and his listeners—have come.

circles // when the big river floods

Circles
When The Big River Floods
Well Below Records

I think it’s fair to say that barring some great 90s Sub Pop-esque cataclysm in this city’s music scene, Philadelphia rock music is never exactly going to make sense. In the fifteen-twenty block radius that constitutes the “hipper”/whiter parts of West Philadelphia, there might be over a hundred fledgling punk and experimental rock bands forming and playing out of various basements and rehearsal spaces. I would suspect that three-quarters of these bands make music out of boredom or as a joke, half of them will probably never play a show, and only a handful of them will actually get to the point of seriously playing and putting out releases. Nonetheless, out of all the artists that have actually had their shit together enough to eek their way onto my (or anyone else’s) radar, there’s one thing that I think is sometimes really, really striking about our local fare: almost nothing is ever the same.

It’s not exactly fair to say that Philadelphia has no “sound” exactly—the fact that this city has produced two somewhat known, somewhat similar bands like Need New Body and Man Man might hint at a certain local flavor in the work of some of our city’s hipster art-weirdos, and the countless sloppy punk bands here might all sound the same by definition. But beyond a few, almost coincidental points of convergence within the punk/experimental scene here and there, for the most part we are a city of iconoclasts—a single space that somehow contains the slap-stick calliope punk of The Low Budgets, the jolting/daydreaming experimental rock of Make A Rising, and the metal-inflected dance-party of Pony Pants. Rather than a single, clearly defined line, Philadelphia’s music scene is and may forever be a tangled knot of loose threads.

This fact was driven home to me when I was listening to the copy of Circles’ When The Big River Floods that was passed on to me by their singer/guitarist Nick Mellevoi. Circles is yet another interesting twist in Philadelphia rock music that basically takes traditional rock and roll/indie rock singer-songwriting and punctuates it with the looseness and technical proficiency of this city’s homegrown experimental free jazz. As an album When The Big River Floods has a lot going for it, the musical ideas at work in it are generally well-conceived and impeccably executed, Nick’s song-writing consistently holds its own, and the songs are full of instrumental richness and gloriously ecstatic rock moments. Particularly successful in all of these regards is the album’s opening track “Away with the tide,” a song about an apocalyptic flood set against a beautiful mess of down-tempo guitar riffing, drum crashes, and trombones.

In the sheer terms of their ability to place high-concept, heavily-trained music techniques within a totally non-pretentious stylistic frame—one that’s neither afraid to rock or jam the fuck out—what Circles does more than earns my respect. Through their occasional roughness and their honesty of purpose, Circles has born into this world yet another paradoxical archetype of Philadelphia rock music: a band playing riffed-out bar rock for kids that listen to Ornette Coleman. However they’ve managed arrived at this point and however amazing the music they can make is, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will ever be able follow them.

make a rising // rip through the hawk black night

Make A Rising
rip Through The Hawk Black Night
High Two Recordings

Maybe I’m just becoming cynical in my old age but in many ways it seems like it’s really hard to find bands that make honest music. Now “honest” may be a somewhat loaded term but really, how many bands can you think of that play music that stands up on its own, unshaped by fashion, irony, pretension, self-importance or any other of a myriad of conscious or unconscious poses? In my experience, most of the music out there—whether phenomenally executed or mind-numbingly mediocre—takes most of its cues from what’s going on around it, what’s popular within a particular circle, what’s considered funny, satirical, etc and often spends loads of time and energy creating artifices designed to impress, depress, anger, enthuse, or just generally manipulate its given audience. The band essentially creates a mask of its own desired self-image and subsequently uses this mask to obscure the human truth of their creative project. They try to hide all their weaknesses, to overstate their strengths, or generally make themselves into something more than a bunch of kids playing with expression and trying to eke out some meaning in the process.

In these terms of what it means to be honest, I’d say that there’s no band that comes close to the evocative honesty of Philadelphia’s Make A Rising. Yes, they possess some sense of the theatrical. Yes, they’re prone to literally hiding their faces behind a small array of handcrafted animal masks. But fundamentally, these elements of pomp and pageantry are about as diversionary as the worn cover of an old book of fairy tales—it’s simply a kind of depiction or celebration of something pure and simple within, an invitation to the imagination, or a small loosening of the confines of an otherwise magicless day-to-day life. If anything it is this last thing—magic, or the widespread lack of it—that seems to motivate this band and is essentially what I believe their honesty is all about. When it comes down it, they’re basically just a few dreamers trying to create dreams in more real terms than is usually possible; man-children who have discovered some fantastic playground hidden amongst the mundane hostilities of West Philadelphia.

As canned as it may sound to describe a band’s work as embodying the innocence of imagination, there’s really no better description that I could use to describe rip Through The Hawk Black Night, Make A Rising’s recent release on the local jazz/experimental label High Two. Spread out over 45 minutes and ten tracks, rip Through The Hawk Black Night essentially reinvents music, mashing pop harmonies, gentle lullabies, experimental noise, rock and chamber music sensibilities into cohesive pieces that are as much driven by the conventions of elementary school play-acting as they are by their forward-thinking orchestrations. Precariously balancing an unflinching sense of whimsy with lush, painstakingly composed musical passages, the sonic terrain of …Hawk Black Night can quickly alternate between sweetly sung narratives with silly lines like “he fell asleep / beneath a wooly beast…” to the devastating enunciations of musical themes that are as massive as anything produced by the major post-rock acts of the turn of the century.

While much of Make A Rising’s lyrical and conceptual content is marked by an apparent bent towards escapism and the fantastic, at the core of all of their lyrical flights of fancy is a deep understanding of the fundamental realities of human existence: our desires to be better than we are, our fears of loneliness, and our simple want to be loved and to love. For every wildly grandiose wash of piano, strings, guitar, bass, or drums, etc, for every mind-blowing instrumental rise and fall or savage foray into the musical unknown, the songs on …Hawk Black Night inevitably return back to their original place of calm intimacy, leaving you—in the end—with the simple human presence of the band itself, with all of their imperfections and frailties open and exposed. Listening to some of Make A Rising’s plainly-phrased lyrical gems, such as their one-time choral chant “I am scared of being alone” and the album’s closing words “I love yoooooooou,” it immediately becomes clear what their costumes and their minor theatrics are all about. These displays are not to shield themselves from our eyes but merely to expose a part of themselves that might otherwise remain concealed, a more innocent self that endurs despite our pretentensions about growing old and more serious—a self that still believes in limitless imagination and the plain truth of feelings.

It goes without saying that any band capable of conjuring such critically human stuff as Make A Rising regularly does on …Hawk Black Night is not only a great band, but perhaps one of the finest around today. There’s no doubt that this record is the one of the most impressive releases to come out in 2005, and it is an absolute testament to the kind of music that can be made when people put aside convention and image, and just play out of their truest nature. Make A Rising is a singularly rare and beautiful band, and rip Through The Hawk Black Night is a singularly rare and beautiful album. If you take any stock in the opinions of this webzine, then please, do not let either this band or this album pass you by.

mischief brew (erik petersen) // smash the windows

Mischief Brew/Erik Petersen
Smash the Windows
Fistolo Records

This is the first, real, honest-to-God full-length album from Mischief Brew. After the spate of tantalizing e.p.’s that this guy had been putting out, Smash the Windows came as a veritable relief. I was really interested to see what Erik would do given the scope of an l.p.; I was surprised, not surprised, and delighted with the result.

For those of you unfamiliar with Mischief Brew’s oeuvre: this is a one-man anarcho-folk-punk band based out of Philadelphia. The music is highly political, but, with its glittering wordsmithery and boundless energy, transcends the limits of simple political anthems. These qualities, always the trademarks of Erik’s music, have carried over into the new album. What’s changed is the instrumentation. Mischief Brew’s earlier recordings tended towards straight-up acoustic and voice; a more recent release, 2003’s Bakenal e.p., hinted at an expanding musical palette with the addition of some junk percussion and sophisticated guitar arrangements. Smash the Windows shows Erik’s songwriting at its free rollicking fullest, with complete band accompaniment and sonic innovation. The band doesn’t feel entirely settled into its new sound yet, and I sure hope this isn’t the end of Mischief Brew acoustic, but overall the expanded setup is a lot of fun. The heavily-instrumental tracks, especially “The Gypsy, the Punk, and the Fool”, capture the whimsical, carnival element that has always been submerged in Mischief Brew’s music; these songs really showcase Erik’s musicianship in a way that simple three-chord folk ballads never did. He has an especially keen ear for percussion; he knows how to apply beats so that they accentuate both the micro- and macro-rhythms of a song, always complementing the melody without ever overwhelming it.

To be sure, this record still has its fair share of simple folk songs; there is a re-recording of “The Lowly Carpenter”, and the bittersweet “Departure Arrival”, which fittingly closes the album. There are some revamped versions of old favorites: a souped-up “Roll Me Through the Gates of Hell”, and a more carnivalesque “Liquor Never Brewed”. The majority of the album, though, is made up of this new sound, and it’s really interesting to see how the tone and content differs from the older stuff. Whereas the earlier songs embrace the nomadic life with open arms, the new songs pose a lot of questions about what it means to grow older within the context of punk culture. What happens when people start cutting off their dreads, opening bank accounts, getting married? There is some sense of loss in these songs, but perhaps a greater sense of what has been gained: “Sure, there’s power in unions of ramblers that got nothing to own,” Erik sings in “Nomad’s Revolt”, “But there’s more in one fist-swinging mother, swearing: ‘My children shall never be sold.’”

The lyrics, as always, are in top form here. I’m always impressed by the way Erik can turn a phrase, but (nerd-snob that I am) I’m even more impressed by the number of literary/historic/philosophical allusions that he seamlessly weaves into his songs. “The Reinvention of the Printing Press” references the industrial revolution, Catholic doctrine, Rabelais, and the advent of printing, all in one song… and there’s probably even more stuff in there that I’m missing. It all tends to tie in, of course, with Mischief Brew’s tendency toward a medieval/Venetian/Irish aesthetic; these songs, with their words and with their tunes, celebrate a lot of old traditions.

Erik’s respect for tradition, his ability to preserve old forms while simultaneously updating and reviving them, may in part explain why his own songs are so durable. Fellow folk singer Robert Blake once commented on how Mischief Brew songs, entirely apart from their performances and recordings, have the ability to take on a life of their own: “Underneath the bodies moving and the hands-in-the-air singing along,” he writes, “I heard songs that will be sung for a long time.” Here’s to you, then, Mischief Brew: may your songs never get stuck out of my head.

eat forever // tracks to be maybe used for a single

Eat Forever
tracks to be maybe used for a single
self-released

After finding out that my former webzine Deep Fry Bonanza was going to shut down, I remember how much apprehension I had about the prospect of going it alone and stringing together a new webzine out of next to nothing. When it shut down, DFB had been going strong for about a half-decade and as such had acquired quite a sizeable base of decent-to-fucking-amazing record labels who’d constantly cram their wares down our collective throats. Starting from scratch, I’ve never had any illusions that this here webzine might have a tough time making it on just about anybody’s list, and that rather than the deluge of promos that essentially drowned DFB, we might be hard pressed to even amass a steady trickle.

But as the old saying goes, when life gives you lemons, chuck them at the rock aristocracy! While I may secretly look forward to the day when ARTNOISE beats out as Spin as the most widely read soulless alt-rock journal in creation, it’s definitely been a source of pride for me to see just how many of the reviews on this site are from “self-released” bands and artists. Though the DIY scene has by and large matured past the point where there’s a strict choice between being known and staying true to your craft, there will always be something to said about music made strictly for the love of music (heck, if it weren’t for that ethos this site wouldn’t be here and I’d have a fair bit more money and free time). Releases in this vein may be pretty rough around the edges—lacking much in the way of packaging or recording quality—but who can seriously deny the thrill of picking up a crappily thrown together CDR and having it become one the best things in your collection?

Just take this demo passed on to me by Tim from Eat Forever. There’s no question that in aesthetic terms this disc is a huge fucking mess: without liners, tracklist or any real packaging, this is clearly just a hasty burn of thirty-six Eat Forever tracks to be used for a later single, the bulk of which are just variations of the same ten or eleven songs recorded live or on 4-track. This CDR actually seemed unruly enough that—in the name of empowered listener participation—I even briefly tried sequencing the tracks together on my computer into something vaguely resembling an album for review on this site (needless to say I never quite got it right).

But in spite of all its rough edges, this disc has totally awakened my eyes to one of the strongest punk acts to emerge in Philadelphia for quite awhile. With their massively enthusiastic delivery, rock solid pop sensibilities and intelligent, super-playful song writing, just about every song Eat Forever puts together turns out to be pure punk rock gold and a beacon of orgiastic hope in my otherwise drab rock critic life. Do you remember that rush you felt the first time you ever listened to The Dickies or The Briefs? Imagine a band with equally addictive amounts of energy and melody, but with enough brains and good taste to hold your interest well after the choruses have lost their initial punch.

Ranging from the bouncy guitar pop of the surrealistic “You Have No Eyes” and “Noah’s Ark” to the less punchy, euphoric rock of “She’s Got Legs,” to the brutal breakdowns of “Sixty Cent Samosas” (or at least I think that’s the title… see aforementioned lack of tracklist) the real constant throughout the wilds of Eat Forever’s repertoire is that their music is exactly what you’d expect from a talented band that’s absolutely in love with what they do. I probably don’t need to tell you that this sort of joi de vivre is a rare blessing in recorded music; if these kids can hold on to that spark they’ll certainly be something to write home about when they put out a more coherent release. In the meantime though, this demo’s certainly worth checking out repeated tracks and all.

Unless Eat Forever does something crazy like break-up or get bored, I highly recomend keeping an eye out for them be it live or on record. There are a lot of profoundly wonderful things in the Philadelphia DIY community but few have gotten me as stoked as this amazing demo and the inredible band behind it. My friends, it just goes to show: sometimes good things do come in small, shoddily made packages.

band website: www.eatforever.com

howard’s dilemma // s/t

Howard’s Dilemma
s/t
self-released

I feel like I can really only write half a review of this EP, since the essence of Howard’s Dilemma seems to be the spectacle. What we have here is almost like a soundtrack to Howard’s one-man performance art: each song introduces us to one of the many characters that Howard plays during his shows. Roboman sings “Am I human?”, while Dayv, the washed-up rock star, gives us “Look at me now.” Doctor Phaser contributes his own eponymous tune, and Sideshow Bernie, the master of ceremonies, brings us home with the Howard’s Dilemma theme song.

One-man shows, robot references, synthetic beats, campy lyrics, a deadpan Devo-esque delivery… not surprisingly, what ties all these things together is an obscure philosophy reference. I give you, courtesy of the university of waterloo, Howard’s dilemma:

According to a possibly apocryphal story, an eminent philosopher of science once encountered a noted decision theorist in a hallway at their university. The decision theorist was pacing up and down, muttering “What shall I do? What shall I do?”

With annoyance, the other replied: “Come on, Ernest. This is serious.”

Oh, those decision theorists… Interestingly, none of the three philosophy majors with whom I work (don’t ask where I work) had heard this apocryphal story. Granted, the story of Howard’s Dilemma is probably not worth knowing. The band, however, most certainly is. The songs on this EP are fun, original, and simply made for dancing. They fall solidly into the category of quirky performance art while maintaining a wide accessibility. Ten-year-olds can appreciate the choppy robot aesthetic just as much as your average ARTNOISE reader can savor the ironic delivery and deep philosophical implications (or something).

If anyone can contribute the second half of this review—that is, if you’ve seen Howard’s dilemma live—please, leave us a note. Meanwhile, I’ll be sure to catch this kid at the Fringe Festival in September.

need new body // where’s black ben?

Need New Body
Where’s Black Ben?
5 Rue Christine

I was excited, so goddamn excited for the Need New Body/Sun Ra Arkestra show in Philly last month. Like many Philly kids, and many others as well, I love Need New Body. The first time I ever saw them was on the back of a truck, banging and strumming their way on an oddball assortment of makeshift instruments through a crowded old city Friday night.

And that spirit of spontaneity, of dedication to creating unusual, thoughtful yet lighthearted music (not to mention unabashed joy) has remained with them, introduced on their first, self-titled release and honed to something damn near like perfection on their last album, UFO (partly due to the addition of the fabulous Jeff, who can chiefly be recognized for his banjo and vocals – occasionally also his very cute daughter). Expecting nothing less at that concert, then, I was mostly just confused when I didn’t quite receive it. What’s missing in this new incarnation of Need New Body that was previously so integral?

The first track, “Bright the Day,” is an irrepressible celebration, perfectly coordinated with the colorful, goofy cover art. It holds the promise of a beautiful summer day of an album, preferably one spent swimming in a fountain downtown, but this is not quite what is delivered. The dance numbers here can’t quite match up to the rock’n roll spasms of yesteralbum, like “Show Me Your Heart” or “Pen.” The instrumental tracks are interesting, but pale a bit next to their UFO counterparts (try “Ox”). The band seems to have lost some of the glowing intentionality that made them worthy of playing a gig with the Arkestra in the first place.

Perhaps the best song on the album is the banjo-and-sentiment-heavy “Poppa B,” in which Jeff proclaims that, whatever may have happened, “I still got my dancing shoes.” Being slightly spare in that trademark NNB way, the song avoids being cloying, and instead just seems, well, true. It also contains just the slightest hint of graceful aging as a band, which, being totally absent from the rest of the album, is almost bewildering. But nice. Taken as a complement to – not a replacement of – the general craziness, “Poppa B” indicates that the whole NNB thing doesn’t need to get old, not if they don’t want it to.

There’s other highlights, too. “Outerspace,” the band’s tribute to Sun Ra, is a pretty, dreamy song, and a few other more clearly jazz-derived tracks catch the listener’s attention. Fuzzy production detracts from these songs, though, which is especially annoying since – again – the production seemed just about right on UFO.

Despite what many critics may say about Need New Body, they are not solely a joke band, surviving on gimmicks and their own insanity. Good, thoughtful, original music, and lots of it, is needed to keep that persistent humor from wearing thin. Ironically, it’s taken a release that’s slightly disappointing in that department to prove this.