bloodthirsty butchers’ follow-up to yamane, titled Kooya ni OKERU bloodthirsty butchers, found the group getting back to its rougher sound. They hadn’t, however, forgotten the songwriting craft employed on the previous album. Coupled with a more concise writing style, the album became one of the group’s tightest.
Toward the end, Kooya ni OKERU bloodthirsty butchers (translation: "bloodthirsty butchers in the wilderness") harkens back to the slower mood of yamane. Till then, the butchers barrel through the first half of the album.
"Lucky man" is simple but dischordant, monotone but rhythmic. Yoshimura Hideki delivers an self-unconscious performance on the track, and the band sounds messy and unhinged.
bloodthirsty butchers — the name alone sounds like trouble.
In reality, the butchers are one of the most respected bands in Japan. They inspired two tribute albums — one on a major label, the other on an indie label — and they’ve opened for the likes of Beck, J Mascis and Rage Against the Machine. After more than a decade of being a trio, they recruited Tabuchi Hisako as a second guitarist when her tenure with Number Girl ended.
When bloodthirsty butchers released yamane in 2001, it had been six years since the release of the band’s previous album. I never learned what accounted for the Lucinda Williams-like pause in the band’s career.
It’s a rare and gratifying experience when a record store employee puts something on the in-store stereo that gets customers asking about what’s playing.
I was surprised when I discovered the buyers at the record store where I used to work managed to get Bleach’s self-titled album in stock. This was before Australian Cattle God released the album in the States.
So I cued it up to play in-store, and when it came on, a number of customers came up to the counter to ask what was playing. I think one was asking out of repulsed curiosity, but the other two were genuinely digging it. Someone eventually bought the album right then and there. I earned my paycheck for the day.
Back when I hosted a Shoutcast server here on the site, one song on the playlist was "Koe" by Bleach.
It’s the most deceptive track on the band’s debut album, Kibakuzai. Sporting a melody and an actual guitar hook, the song indicates nothing of the stormy performances featured on the rest of the album.
Oddly enough, Kibakuzai is the band’s most polished album, fidelity-wise. Subsequent albums would go for a muddier, less pristine sound, but all of them pack one hell of a wallop.
When I finally came around to the idea Björk could actually have a decent solo career — I was not impressed with Debut — I heard tell of a jazz album she recorded in Iceland. I figured I probably would never lay my eyes on so esoteric a release.
Then I was introduced to Waterloo Records — some time in 1997 — and eventually, the store had Gling Gló in stock. Curiosity won out, and I bought the album.
Björk recorded the album in 1990, between the Sugarcubes second and final albums. By the time I heard it, the idea of Björk singing jazz wasn’t alien — "It’s Oh So Quiet" was a radio staple by then.
Bill Frisell’s music can be introspective, sparse and unsettling. He titled one of his albums, Ghost Town, and the environment he evoked on that album was certainly appropriate.
But with Nashville, Frisell brought in musicians not necessarily schooled in the high-minded aesthetic of his downtown New York regulars. As a result, the album turned out to be one of his most accessible.
When I heard Bill Frisell tear through Naked City’s miniature hardcore epics, I made the usual youthful assumption that Frisell plays that way everywhere. His own albums, however, come from a creative space worlds apart from John Zorn’s seminal band. Where Naked City was precisely controlled, compact chaos, Frisell’s solo albums were expansive, transparent serenity.
Have a Little Faith, Frisell’s cover album from 1993, is what every cover album should be — a perfect balance between the spirit of the source material and an interpreter’s own perspective. At times, Frisell’s take on a song is worlds apart from the source material. He made the songs his own without shutting out the author’s voice.
To think it was only five or so years ago that teen pop was practically a means to print money …
Something that lucrative begets strange experiments — tweaks to a formula to stretch the longevity of fad with the half life no faster than an eye blink.
That’s how you get BBMak, a band that combines the pop appeal of 98 Degrees with rock appeal of the Goo Goo Dolls. That’s synergy, my friends! It’s also a Frankensteinian cross-breeding yielding inadvertently humorous results.
I took a music class that bundled a trio of cassette tapes with the textbook. This was back in 1991, when CD players were starting to achieve their ubiquity. Textbooks bundled with CDs wouldn’t happen till the following year.
I wish I had taken that class a little later in my college career. Those cassettes are long gone, and they provided a really great cross section of European music from the Renaissance all the way to the late ’80s.
One of the pieces on those tapes was Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by Béla Bartok.
"A couple of years ago, I started thinking about how so often when classical composers write a piece of music, they are trying to tell you something that they are proud of and like about themselves," composer David Lang writes in the program notes for his work, Cheating, Lying, Stealing. "Here’s this big gushing melody, see how emotional I am. Or, here’s this abstract hard-to-figure-out piece, see how complicated I am, see my really big brain ….
"So I thought, What would it be like if composers based pieces on what they thought was wrong with them? Like, here’s a piece that shows you how miserable I am. Or, here’s a piece that shows you what a liar I am, what a cheater I am. I wanted to make a piece that was about something disreputable."
Dude, if you wanted to do that, you should have gone into rock ‘n’ roll.