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By Jesse, September 21, 2012

There are five or so weeks left until Halloween, which gives you more than enough time to utilize your five weekly Freegal downloads to acquire These Hands of Mine and Are You Ready for an Organ Solo? by Quintron. That is, if you want your home to have the weirdest, eeriest, most chaotic atmosphere possible. Your trick-or-treaters and party guests will be beguiled, spooked, possibly annoyed, but you will be remembered.

Quintron and his wife Miss Pussycat are the sort of happy couple that perhaps only makes sense in the context of New Orleans. They exist in that less jazzy part of New Orleans that is a land of cultural crosspollination and must be described in a series of hyphens and coated in a fine sheen of off-ness. Quintron is the lovechild of Jerry Lee Lewis and Vincent Price, left neglected in a closet with only a Hammond organ and Pentecostal radio sermons. Miss Pussycat is a puppeteer and a cheerleader in the most broken and strange way.   They are characters from a movie that John Waters forgot to make sometime between Female Trouble and Desperate Living. They don’t, however, come across as contrived or weird for the sake of weird. For my money, at least, they appear to be the genuine article, which makes them all the more frightening and exhilarating.

The primary instruments on the albums are the aforementioned Hammond organ and the Drum Buddy, an invention of Quintron’s damaged mind. It is something between a drum machine and a Theremin, constructed out of a coffee can, a light bulb, and a turntable. It makes sounds using light, and it has to be seen to be believed (there is a longer and much more bizarre video on YouTube if you want to search for it). It all comes together in a loose package of funk-rockabilly-gospel-punk rock-R & B-electro something or other. This is “experimental music” where the mad scientist running the experiment is Dr. Moreau meets Voodoo priest. At its most accessible, it might be easiest to think of as punk rock and at times it even hints at a sick, toxic B-52s.

I will say, this is probably not music you’re going to set around and listen to casually, or at least most people aren’t. Are You Ready for an Organ Solo? is a bit more straightforward, but that’s speaking contextually, of course, but you might actually find yourself dancing. If you still find this all too straight laced for your taste, check out The Frog Tapes, also available on Freegal, which was conceived as Halloween atmosphere music, making it extra creepy compared to the already creepy stuff Quintron normally has going on. Think Phantom of the Opera meets field recordings of frogs (the last track is just 14 minutes of frog sounds) and throaty grunts.

These albums are all available from the library through Freegal.

“Underwater Dance Club” sample from Are You Ready for an Organ Solo?

“Place Unknown” sample from Are You Ready for an Organ Solo?

“Dungeon Master” sample from These Hands of Mine

“Meet Me at the Clubhouse” sample from These Hands of Mine

“Horror” sample from The Frog Tape

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By Bryan, August 13, 2012

While browsing genres in Freegal, I was surprised see “Acid Punk.” I don’t know what “acid punk” is but after clicking the link my chin hit the floor. I saw artists like Lightning Bolt, Noxagt, and The White Mice. All of these bands are on Load Records, an independent, genuinely experimental noise/punk label based in Providence, RI. You can search by label in the advanced search feature, and holy cow, a very large portion of the Load catalog is on Freegal.

I suddenly find myself a super excited tinnitus suffering librarian. The five downloads a week limit, which before seemed fair and sensible, now goads me like some netherworld imp tempting me only to deny me in an effort to shatter my sanity. There are so many artists on Load that I love, so many artists that make me proud to work at library that offers such a diverse selection of material, that I’m not really sure where to start.

Let’s pick three:

If Load had a cash cow a few years back it was (analog) drum and bass duo Lightning Bolt. Their decayed-prog-on-meth melodic trajectories and intense DIY ethos was butter for every kind of rock snob. This frenetic twosome is great for anyone who likes to blaze but not so much into “noise” outright.

“2morrowMorroLand” sample from the album Hypermagic Mountain

Nautical Almanac are trickster sound wanderers from Baltimore. Makers before there was such a term, their homemade equipment causes no two of their tracks to ever sound alike, but if I was to attempt an analogy I’d go with if the Island of Misfit Toys had a high school jam band it might sound like Nautical Almanac.

“Ocularis” sample from album Rooting for the Microbes

Forget the fun, let’s just jump off the cliff into the deepest darkest most punishing noise. Providence native Prurient, aka Dominick Fernow,  has created one of the bleakest, painful discographies of any contemporary sound artist. Ironically, he also plays in neo-romanticist synth pop act Cold Cave. 2005’s Black Vase is a truce between Prurient’s early feedback warheads and more “ambient” newer works.

“The Black Vase” sample from the album Black Vase

Continue reading 'Music review: Get a LOAD of Freegal'»

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By Bryan, March 30, 2010

This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk
By Steve Waksman

Waksman demonstrates the formal give and take between metal and punk. He successfully illustrates that within the music itself there was always a dialogue between the two as opposed to the malignant verbal snowball fight took place within the media starting in the late 1970s. Not that said dialogue was always as hot and heavy as a teenage makeout session. In early chapters Waksman contrasts ideological strains by comparing artists: the Runaways vs. the Dictators; Iggy Pop vs. Alice Cooper. The word “grunge” appears nowhere on the book’s cover, yet Seattle’s finest is Waksman’s great synthesis.

Waksman’s own unsaid ideology is that even in rock, that most populist of mediums, there is an underground, critically fecund history that differs from the mainstream narrative. The underground hidden channel is where new forms are born and therefore the specimens that get canonized are made. Waksman knows that the critics that know best wrote in zines not magazines. Another emerging thesis: any label that released Black Flag’s My War, Minutemen’s Double Nickels On the Dime, and Husker Du’s Zen Arcade all in the same year has a claim to best rock label of the 1980s (or maybe any other decade for that matter). The label: SST Records. The year: 1984.