Boy Least come to LA

Boy Least Likely To is the latest band to announce plans to come to LA for a one night stand after they soak in the 4 day indie frat-party that is SWSX.

March 20 - Spaceland
support TBA

it could be fun to pick out awkward moments between bandmembers and the random confused groupies they hooked up with in austin who are sure to show up at the show having fallen helplessly for their wendover accents.

The 5 Minute Masterpiece

So in my circle, we like to bust out on occasion with what we call the "5 Minutes Masterpiece"

it's basically an exercise in freaking out with photoshop. i've been on a pretty good roll with them lately. this was originally going to be a more heavily battlestar galactica themed piece, but it took a bit of a frontier turn in there somewhere... so anyway, here's a piece i called "Starbuck."

Of Montreal - Video

Video: Of Montreal - Requiem For O.M.M.2 (Quicktime - 26mb)
by RadicalFriend.tv

Atlanta based Radical Friend has recently completed a video for Of Montreal's "Requiem For O.M.M. 2". great track, but i'm pretty "whatever" on the video treatment. the whole video game meets monty python subculture genera ... i'm not sure it's tired so much as it's not all that well done here. some pretty compositions and nice color pallets... my guess on this is that the final product looks like they spent a more money on it that they really did. just a guess.

Mates Of State

Fluxblog: Mates Of State - Fraud In The 80's

Mates have just announced their upcoming spring tour in support of the forthcoming debut on barsuk records Bring It Back set for a March 21st Release (a slightly belated happy birthday to me, motherfuckers).

no los angeles date is set yet. the final date on the schedule in a late april show in san francisco. there's a big gap in april dates, so keep an eye out for more shows to be announced. after several (presumably) SWSX shows, Mates set out for real with Maria Taylor (Azure Ray, Now It's Overhead - saddle creek records).

Taylor performs mellow, pretty pop songs not unlike bettie serveert. honestly, she sounds like a lot of people, i'm just feeling a little to lazy to be more accurate. some low-fi downloads are available through the ground control touring website.

pancake mountain

Pancake Mountain
Anti-Flag - Police State In The USA from Die For Your Government


let's set some things straight - i don't live in D.C., i don't have cable, i am not a parent. but i do have what has been referred to as an "excellent sense of humor". as long as i'm setting the aforementioned record straight - thats mostly because i make the best fart noises with my palm in my armpit. it is also true that i have an "excellent sense of chlamydia", but who over the age of 12 doesn't these days?

to illustrate my point - the one about an excellent sense of humor - when Bernard asked me if i did stand-up when i was buying a bike from him a few days back, i didn't blink. i just added him to my brimming legion of adoring fans and told him to sign up for my newsletter. i realized as i left that "do you do stand-up" is just bernards way of saying "you seem to have urinated in your pants"

that realization has little or no connection to my subsequent realization that the Washington DC based cable access show Pancake Mountain is genius. the kind of genius that i thought could only be achieved with my old college friends after a delirious night of binge drinking and copious amounts of weed. Pancake Mountain it's what i would do if i lived i n DC, was into puppetry, broadcast technology, and alternative/punk music. fortunately for the children of DC, i'm only into that last one. I like to think of the show as evidence to what people who lack a coherent thought process are capable of. don't fuck with us. we'll bust cable access on you and free-style-blog all up side your nut. while that's a little shy of taking over the world and running your life, it means we'll influence your children, and that should frighten you. Ah... that seems to segue nicely into presenting some actual facts (gasp!) ...

Pan Mo is a kids show on DC cable access that performs hysterically wacky skits and gets bitchen bands to play live and is generally very, very juvenile. the best thing about kids is that being juvenile is what they're SUPPOSED to be at that age, and it's a good influence on non-kids - because the alternative is to become your parents. unless of course your folks were new age hippies who did lots of regression exercises and acted like chimps on mescaline three times a week. in that case you should be a CPA and do tax returns for the people who run things like Pancake Mountain.

So what does Anti-Flag have to do with all of this? well, nothing at the time of the recording of Die For Your Government. except that the Pancake Mountain theme song is performed by AF.

you can watch a bunch of clips and even buy DVD's for just a few bucks through the website.
pick them up for all the kids you know.

do the kids a favor - Buy Pancake Mountain

tobin sprout

the "indi" attitude destroys itself -or- why latter day guided by voices has no appeal

note: today's tracks are linked at the end of the article.

disclaimer - if you're a crazy guided by voices fanatic, there is nothing for you here. if you maybe like the band but can't differentiate between vampire on titus and do the collapse then you might be interested in what follows.

the secondary song writer and creative influence (setting aside pollard's brother jim) behind indie legend guided by voices has had a mediocre solo career at best. i don't question that pollard was not only the vision but the oft-drunken charisma behind the vast majority of guided by voices work. however, it was tobin sprout who by all measures seems to have been pollard's creative ballast in the band.

as is typical when a band member leaves the creative fold that nurtured so much of his or her influential work, it's the children who suffer - in this case, the material took a turn. i'm not calling into question pollards motivations for sacking the band after the falling out with sprout in 96, but the results are a sea change in the nature of guided by voices artistic direction that saw them become increasingly more canned with each successive album.

guided by voices heyday consisted of several EPs and LPs like propeller on ohia indie labels (mostly i wanna, and rockathon. maybe some others as well). a lot of the material on these early recordings overlap - with the same song appearing on 2, or 3 records. 1993's LP vampire on titus was released by the more established scat records. scat would eventually strike a distribution deal with matador records, paving the way for the widely distributed and acclaimed LPs bee thousands, alien lanes, and under the bushes under the stars.

in early 1996 the band released under the bushes - the follow up to opus alien lanes. having something of a falling out while touring that album, pollard and sprout would spit in one another's faces by both releasing solo records on the same day in the fall of that year. that's just not a nice thing to do, so sprout decided to quit the band.

with the departure of sprout, pollard elected to dismiss the rest of the band and start fresh. he brought in cleveland based cobra verde to back him on the next guided by voices record mag earwhig!. being so freshly removed from the band, this record still sounds closely connected to classic guided by voices material (tracks like the clearly solo track 'i am produced', and 'learning to hunt'), but demonstrates a clear departure in the sonic mentality.

since then, guided by voices has released progressively louder and simpler songs on records with less and less connection to the original spirit of the band. with each post-sprout record, they've become harder and harder to listen to - evolving into something increasingly difficult to identify as guided by voices. nearly any track from the heyday recordings can instantly and happily be fingered as a GBV track. now? it's difficult to differentiate gbv from the other muck on the radio.

to that end, it was sprout's influence that counterbalanced pollard's more jocular tendencies and gave guided by voices it's most identifiable quality - elusive vulnerability. pollard seems to be over that. no longer interested in writing songs like king of arthur avenue or game of pricks. he still throws us tracks like the conciliatory hold on hope as late as 99's do the collapse, but his interest has clearly shifted away from such songwriting.

i may be overstating the impact of sprout on gbv's sound considering the entire band was replaced following his departure - it's not the most scientific evaluation to attribute the entire shift to sprout's influence. however, that pollard felt comfortable dismissing the remainder of the band following the loss of sprout would indicate the tobin was in fact the centerpiece of the unit.

with that, here's a couple tracks each from the spit-in-the-face records - tobin sprout's carnival boy and pollard's simultaneously released solo record, the sometimes-stellar not in my airforce.

Rob Pollard - Not In My Airforce

Chance To Buy An Island
Maggie Turns To Flies
Psychic Pilot Clocks Out


Tobin Sprout - Carnival Boy

I Didn't Know
White Flyer
Martin's Mounted Head