Month of March , 2007

Tris McCall with the smack-down!

They’re on the wrong side of history now, they always have been, and I’ve got no problem naming them the worst cultural institution in town.

In other local Jersey blog news, Tris and Jim Testa have presented some really differing views of the new Luna Lounge out in Brooklyn, and now I'm very curious to go hear things for myself (as usual). It's pretty awesome to have this kind of discourse going on.

Me, I haven't been writing lately. I know. We did get sent one CD, although a few folks said they were sending them and didn't. I'm sorry to that guy who's CD I didn't review. I will do it soon.

We do have folks who want to write reviews, and if you send us music and I think it's worth writing about, it's definitely getting written about, DEFINITELY (even if we are slow), so don't write us off, please send us your stuff. E-mail sceneless@gmail.com, please. We prefer to write about independent artists here, anyway. I know from personal experience how hard it is to get your CD reviewed by any music blog when all of them only pay attention to "indie" ad agencies pitching the newest Brooklyn swag.

I haven't been writing much because I have my own rock band that I'm trying to put more time into, and I'm very excited that we're playing 58 Gallery in Jersey City this Saturday. Mostly because I've been spending some time at the place, I really like the art and the artists I've been seeing, and I'm excited to show off. You should come, it's all ages. I would say there is a solid community of artists and musicians revolving around this place as a hub, and it's worth your attention. Is the word "scene" appropriate? I think so, and I think it's this guy's fault! Details on Saturday night are over here.

That's enough whore-baggery from me. Soon there will be reviews up here of the new LCD Soundsystem and !!! releases, oh yus.

I'm sick of the new Modest Mouse single already and I'm still in love with "Good News For People Who Love Bad News." I live in the past. I've been listening to old Metric a lot.

But there's this new band called Blood Red Shoes that played out with !!! in London, and they are bomb-funk good. Check out "You Bring Me Down" on their MySpace page (Thanks to Jamie McKelvie for the tip)

Wherein I am one of three people on the planet who actually isn't very excited about the new release from our friends up north:

On first blush, I didn't much like any of Arcade Fire's new album Neon Bible. Even for them it seemed a bit overblown and strained. I put it down and didn't come back to it for a few weeks. Upon my return I realized that buried underneath the overbearing and uninspired first half of this album is at least solid single's worth of new material.

Opener "Black Mirror" when A/B'd with "Neighborhood #1" from Funeral comes off flat and sour. "Keep the Car Running" makes me think of Robert Smith hugging Midnight Oil - it makes me afraid. The title-track is repetitive (but mercifully short) and "Intervention" aims high but trips all over some clumsy lyrics and a rather hollow performance by Win Butler.

"Black Wave / Bad Vibrations" is my dividing line for the album. The first half, Regine's half, is poorly mixed, bass heavy, and ill-conceived - which is unfortunate because honestly I prefer her voice over Butler's. By this point I'm ready to quit listening to the album yet again.

Fortunately, the very first stanza of the "Bad Vibrations" half is easily the most evocative on the album up to this point, and the music is the sound of a storm's rolling thunder - a perfect set up for "Ocean of Noise", easily the best song on Neon Bible.

"Ocean" does what all of my favorite Arcade Fire songs do, which is to take a familar old motif and update it to accompany modern paranoia. To my ears it sounds like a "Killing Moon"/"Red Right Hand" rip off, but it is a very very good one with a coda to match anything they have ever written. The sequencing here is key to how this half of the album plays out, because when "The Well and the Lighthouse" starts, it kicks you in the stomach and runs away.

"(Antichrist Television Blues)" is a point of annoyance and a signal for more rough water ahead. Butler specifically mentions 9/11, and makes what I feel is the most Dylan-esque thing Arcade Fire has done - neither of which I might add are positive for me. At all. Regine's vocal bridge is weird as hell and almost saves the song for me. But hey, I didn't really like "7 Kettles" so much, so I can excuse a lull.

Things pick up a little on "Windowsill" which is (ironically) a musical cousin to "7 Kettles", but more desperate and affecting: "The tide is high and rising still", fortells the apocalypse. We probably ought to "Keep the Car Running" so we can escape easier. However, Butler deserves a kick in the shin for the line: "I don't want to live in America no more." You don't live in America. You don't. We all know that. If you are paranoid about living Next to America, then by all means write about that. It works better for us because it sounds more honest.

"No Cars Go" is an old song - circa 2002 - and no amount of synthesizer can cover that up, because it is by far the most interesting thing on Black Mirror. Too bad Win phones in his vocal performance again, replete with lackluster "Hey!"s and an cringe-worthy modulation on the third chorus. It's still better than most of the rest of the album. Closer "My Body is a Cage" is pretty rousing stuff, as Arcade Fire throw the gospel at us. While not spectacular, it makes an appropriate denouement.

Ultimately, Neon Bible is missing much of the enthusiasm and tightly packed arrangements of Funeral, and thus falls short of the hair-raising impact of that album. I do appreciate the attempt by the band to not make Funeral: Part 2, but they've taken a pretty sharp turn towards entirely remapping the past without their own peculiar twists - and seem to be struggling to find their unique voice again.

WFMU is arguably one of the coolest radio station's ever. Their free-form format is absolutely fucking crazy and has exposed me to many a great new and old thing. So check it out. Right now as part of their pledge-drive (the two week fundraising marathon they do every year) you can win a Bucket of Smut!

I filled in for a friend Saturday night answer phones at FMU down in Jersey City and it was awesome to take those phone calls where people eagerly and quite generously contribute. Many people send in $10, $350, or even $1000 over the internet because they listen on line. We even got a donation from Norway, and there's this regular from Paris, too.

Anyway, it was really neat to be inside the station and to meet some of the staff. Just as you'd expect, everyone is a little off beat and quite awesome. Got to meet Tom Sharpling, who is a character and a half. I love his show (called "The Best Show").

Check it

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Billy Meltdown

I just noticed, by way of WFMU's excellent Beware of the Blog, that today marks Charlie Bukowski's passing, and they've got this really nifty mp3 up there mixing some of his readings with some ambient beats. Very neat and weird to listen to, I never imagined his voice to sound like that. Such a strange and sour fellow, but kinda enjoyable to listen to speak publicly. Humorous humour-lessness. I'm about near done with Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, which a friend gave me for Christmas. It's a trip and a half. I think I could use some more uplifting things to read. Not necessarily peachy, but honestly I'm a little done with the mega depressing stuff for a little while.

On a total tangent, there's an opening reception tonight at Red Saw gallery in Newark, NJ for a show called Shame, which I'll be hitting up. More info here. Go see some new art.

Produced by AWM's Bassist John Fesken and 58 Gallery's Orlando Reyes, Brotherhood is the final struggle between a power saturated President Fuchface, who controls all of the world's land mass and the Brotherhood of the Sea, his obstacle against his Fuc*ing Machine.

So a couple of weeks ago, February 17th of 2007, to be exact, I attended the debut of John Feskin and Orlando Reyes's new film, Brotherhood of the Sea and the Fucking Machine at the Dictators and Tyrants party at 58 Gallery in Jersey City.

This short digital film was an absolute riot, starring Tony Susco as President Fuchface. It was a mega-over-the-top story of an underground movement of super humans and criminals systematically assassinating a world empire by taking out its leaders (Black Skull #1 and Black Skull #2). The fight scenes were half faux kung fu, half WWF, featuring the heros of the story literally beating the bejeezus out of the President's men, then braking into his compound as he slowly breaks down while chain smoking and screaming the dying throes of his sexually charged domination of the world, ending in his assassination.

The world of the Brotherhood is without any women at all, making the suggestion that this power struggle is taking place at the end of humanity -- in otherwords, there's nothing left to fight for, cuz this is it.

The footage is cleverly set on beaches, stock footage of submarines, Grace Church Van Vorst, somewhere in the woods (of South Jersey?), and what appears to be an old office building.

One of the most moving scenes in the film was in Grace Church Van Vorst, a low angle shot of the leader of the revolutionary movement The Brotherhood of the Sea, screaming and preaching away about choice, mixing it with syllabic things, ("A BA BA BA BWWAAAAYYYYYY!") doing what was apparently an improvised rant in the thunder of the Church's reverberation.

There definitely seemed to be some general element of insidiousness to the revolutionary movement, with the leader being clearly pretty nuts, and the assassins of the movement being emotionless executioners.

The filmed ended with a shot of the twin towers, which had a few folks (myself included) wondering if that was really necessary, or distracting from the rest of the film's point. I've definitely changed my mind, reflecting on it without being so inebriated, I like how it throws the whole Never Forget thing into your face after a cold blooded farce to which you're basically cheering along because it's intentionally symbolic of current events and President Bush (and his hidden number two calling the shots). It's entirely confrontational and that's why I loved it. John and Orlando really did a great job putting it together, along with the cast, and the soundtrack by American Water Color movement really kept the film going, adding extreme tension and excitement to many of the scenes. It was a really fun movie to watch.

After the showing of the film the party really got started, and 58 Gallery turned into a dance party, which was really just good kleen fun for everyone involved.

A small booklet was handed out to attendees to accompany the film, titled after the movie, with the introduction: "What happens when you ask schoolchildren to write about their leaders in their private journals, using the following prompt: (Are) we being run by dictators, tyrants, ....????" It purports to be "taken from various student's journals, grades 3-12 – Jersey City, NJ," and it certainly seems to be the case, neat little read with random pictures of women being hung (since they had all been killed in the world of the film).

Here are a couple of quick scans: