Producer Series Mix #2: Rich Harrison

1. Missy Elliott - "Can't Stop"
2. Toni Braxton - "Take This Ring" (mp3)
3. Tha Rayne f/ Joe Budden - "Didn't You Know" Remix (mp3)
4. Kelly Rowland - "Can't Nobody" (mp3)
5. Destiny's Child f/ T.I. and Lil Wayne - "Soldier"
6. Beyonce f/ Jay-Z - "Crazy In Love"
7. Alicia Keys - "Dragon Days" (mp3)
8. Jennifer Lopez f/ Fabolous - "Get Right" Remix
9. Jennifer Lopez - "Whatever You Wanna Do"
10. The Pussycat Dolls - "I Don't Need A Man"
11. Amerie - "Why Don't We Fall In Love"
12. Amerie - "Why Don't We Fall In Love" Remix
13. Amerie - "1 Thing"
14. Amerie - "Talkin' About"
15. Amerie - "Talkin' To Me"
16. Amerie - "I Just Died" (mp3)
17. Amerie f/ Carl Thomas - "Can We Go"
18. Amerie - "Rolling Down My Face"
19. Amerie - "All I Need"
20. Amerie - "Come With Me"

By no means an obscure producer, but I wanted to put together a solid mix of his best stuff, half Amerie and half other artists. If you want a more complete discography, you can go here, but I went for a personal selection, starting off with a handful of my favorite kinda underrated tracks, so none of his boring Mary J. Blige tracks or that weird Duran Duran single. I think my favorite thing about RH, more than just the heavy Go-Go percussion or brassy samples, is the way he waits patiently to add textures and melodic embellishments, like the piano chords that drop in more than halfway into "Talkin' About," or all the layers that gradually accumulate throughout "Can't Nobody." I'll note that the "Get Right" remix is the one with the Fab verse and the original beat, not the weird synthy beat on the video version.

Previously in the Producer Series: Shondrae "Bangladesh" Crawford

Labels: hip hop, Jay-Z, music, music babble, Producer Series Mix, R and B

Ruth Ruth - "Jerome" (mp3)

Ruth Ruth - "Julia, You Have No Heartbeat" (mp3)

My brother Zac and I used to subscribe to Alternative Press back in the mid-90's, before it went all nu-metal/emo and was a decent alt/indie rag that I thought was way better than Spin (and were way ahead of the post-Blender trend of cramming dozens of album reviews into every issue, but didn't really skimp on the wordcount in order to do so). Most of the subscription issues came with label samplers and singles attached, usually on cassette, because people still owned tape decks back then. Most of them were worthless, of course, but one that was so good that I managed to hold onto it for 10 years was the 2-song sampler for Ruth Ruth's The Little Death EP.

In '95, Ruth Ruth were one of a gazillion vaguely pop-punk bands that came out post-Green Day and had a minor alt-radio hit, in their case "Uninvited," which my brother liked and I kinda hated. After one album on American Recordings, Laughing Gallery, they jumped to Epitaph a year later for one EP, before jumping to RCA a couple years after that for their 2nd album. The Little Death, and its AP cassingle sampler, were wrapped in artwork made to look like the Catcher In The Rye paperback, and the sampler's promo hype paid a lot of lip service to influences that I was just beginning to get into in 1996, so it makes sense that those songs grew on me with time. After rocking "Jerome" and "Julia, You Have No Heartbeat" in my car deck for years and years, I finally checked out the rest of the EP recently, as well as Laughing Gallery, which have some good tunes but nothing I love as much as these two songs.

Labels: mp3, music, music babble

Last night I went to the Noise Against Fascism thing at the Black Cat. I was a little wary about driving into downtown DC on the night of the inauguration, but by the time I got down there around 9pm, traffic wasn't heavy at all and the only difference was a slightly higher volume of cop cars than usual. Although it was pretty obvious what the occasion of the concert was, given the timing and the location, I was thankful to not be confronted with too many Fuck Bush-type messages throughout the night. Not that we should be apolitical or complacent just because the election's over, just that I don't really feel like thinking about it that much right now. But there was definitely something pleasingly cathartic about standing around and listening to a bunch of shapeless noise be performed at insane volumes. Plus it gave me a chance to observe the noise dude in their natural environment that I've heard so much about on ILM's pickle bar. I've never seen so many beards on people under the age of 30 in my life.

I missed the first handful of bands, but the ILM thread contains a pretty complete recap of the show. Mirror/Dash (Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, respectively, a la their pseudonyms going all the way back to the Sister liner notes) were the 2nd or 3rd band that played after I got there, and their set was short and kind of underwhelming. Kim played an electric guitar, and Thurston had an acoustic and just kind of made a nice feedback hum with it. Kim strummed some nice sounding stuff and did her weird repetitive mumbly poetry style, mostly saying "hey cowboy, what's your name?" and "hey cowboy, what's your game?" over and over. I kept waiting for Thurston to reply "I'm hunting for little Mexican girls". But after a while, Kim let loose and did some wild feedback and flailing around, which was kind of cool to see since at Sonic Youth shows she usually is the first to stand off to the side or leave the stage while Thurston and Lee go off on noise tangents. Actually, it kind of looked like she was doing an impression of Thurston.

After that was Nautical Almanac, who are from Baltimore, and I've seen a couple of those people participate in High Zero shows before. They kind of epitomized the very enthusiastic and cheerful approach to avant noise that dominated the whole night. In between sets a couple times there was this weird pair of DJs wearing shapeless elephant man-style cloth masks with eye holes and making really brutal noise by distorting old vinyl and Led Zep riffs. One of my favorite sets of the night was by a drums/sax duo, Chris Corsano and Paul Flaherty. They didn't really do anything out of the ordinary for a skronky improv noise combo, but they were really good at what they did, especially the drumming. Something I've realized is that while I'll always prefer structure over chaos in music, I can get with chaos too if it's intense enough to hold my attention. I don't have a lot of time for the minimalist stuff, but if you make a lot of noise and get in a ton of notes, it can be fun to listen to even if I can't tap my foot or hum to it. Plus they were pretty much the only act of the night that didn't make noise with any electric/electronic instruments, so they were kind of refreshing in that context. They got such a strong response from the audience they actually kind of came back for an encore. Magik Markers were alright. It was during their set that it occurred to me that almost every single I saw that night included at least one fairly attractive woman. So much for the noise dude stereotype!

The evening climaxed with the last band, To Live And Shave In L.A. I wasn't really familiar with them before, and I'm still not sure what their deal was, but their lineup, for this show at least, was: Don Fleming, Thurston Moore, Andrew W.K., Tom Smith, Ben Wolcott, Mark Morgan and a guy who goes by the name of Rat Bastard. Rat Bastard was the MC of the evening, introducing and talking between bands, sometimes just drunkenly rambling for several minutes at a time, and he kind of talked like and resembled a Darrell Hammond character from SNL. At one point, something vaguely beat-driven was being played on the PA, and he got off on a long rant about how industrial music is dead, and that DC needs to sever its connections with "mid 80s industrial shit" because "Al Jourgensen is a Miami Cuban, and he's a pussy", and that they should play Can or the Silver Apples instead. Whoever was in control of the sound responded to this by playing the Monkees.

Oh yeah, so anyway, To Live And Shave In L.A. They were awesome. 7 mostly 40ish-looking guys, making the most extreme, sloppy, punishingly loud noise: 3 of them on guitar, one hollering incomprehensible syllables in a strange oafish voice, 2 making sounds by pressing buttons on metal boxes, and one on drums (Andrew W.K., who at one point tried to get people to clap along in time to his thumping, tribal beats, but it never caught on). Almost every other band played for 15-20 minutes at most, but TLASILA played for something in the neighborhood of an hour. I was so close to the speakers that it became kind of an endurance test, but it remained pretty entertaining throughout. At the end of their set, Thurston grabbed a mic and started yelling about how it was time to fight and started asking various members of the audience directly in front of the stage, "hey beard, are you ready to fight?" and handing them the mic to reply. "Hey flannel, are you ready to fight? You, little beard, are you ready to fight?"

Labels: Baltimore music, concerts, music, Sonic Youth

These are the songs that my band (Zuul) covered at our last 2 shows:

Tomoyasu Hotei - "Battle Without Honor Or Humanity"
Since our show 2 Fridays ago was Halloween weekend, we all wore costumes onstage (actually we wear costumes onstage all the time). Our singer wanted to be The Bride from Kill Bill, he had the yellow jumpsuit and a blonde wig and everything, so the rest of us wore suits and Zorro masks so that we were Crazy 88's. We tried to learn 2 or 3 different songs from the KB soundtrack but this was the only one that stuck and we opened our set with it. It was also used in one of the Team America trailers. I think it really helps give even the non-animated parts of KB Vol. 1 an anime feel, it totally reminds me of the music in what little anime I've ever watched (mostly Lupin The 3rd). I think it actually got more recognition and audience reaction when we played it at the other show without the costumes.

Enrique Iglesias f/ Kelis - "Not In Love" (remix)
Apparently this was a single off his last album and there was a video and everything, but I'd never heard of it until our singer played it for us. It's not Neptunes, although it kinda sounds like "Like I Love You", same kinda start/stop acoustic strum. The Kelis verse is maybe the hottest she's ever sounded. We've done plenty of weird covers but usually we make them all fast and heavy but we play this one pretty straight. It sounds totally fucked up in the middle of our set. But the other guys all wimped out at the last minute and pulled it out of the setlist. But then we ended up playing it for our soundcheck (with most of the audience in the room already), which was really awkward and not nearly as fun out of the context of the set.

Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind - "The Shining (Main Title)"
More soundtrack fun! This is the music that plays over the opening credits of the Kubrick flick. Long spooky whole notes, but of course we sludge it up and make it super heavy. They've been playing it since way before I was in the band, we open sets with it a lot.

Nerf Herder - "Buffy The Vampire Slayer Theme"
I've never really watched Buffy, so I didn't know this (none of these covers were my idea). But this is really fun to play, especially toward the end of a set, fast and simple and exactly 60 seconds long. Since there's nothing for our singer to do except the 4 synth notes at the beginning, he likes to yell the names of characters on the show over the song ("Buffy, Buffy, Buffy! Spike, Willow, Angel!").

We've done a lot of other weird/silly covers, like "Rebel Yell" and Christina Aguilera (both "Beautiful" and "Fighter"). I used to be really uptight about covers, I'd protest when whatever band I was playing in wanted to do any, especially silly/ironic covers, and someday when I have 'my own' band, I'll probably never do covers. But for the purposes of this band, I don't really give a fuck, I'm up for anything.

Labels: music

I wrote this a couple weeks ago in the back of one of my notebooks while bored sitting in class and in my car waiting for my bandmates to show up at our practice space. I wish I had gotten around to posting this earlier before Miccio and Best Week Ever weighed in on it, but oh well. There's something seriously wrong with my priorities that I can crank this kind of thing out but get writer's block when it's time to do stuff for school. If I had balls I'd submit this for my essay course.

748 words on the new Shania Twain single

Shania Twain's last studio album, 2002's Up!, confronted the uneasy alliance between pop and country that she epitomises by releasing it a double format 2CD set, with the same set of songs presented in two different mixes: a "Green" (country) disc, and a "Red" (pop) disc¹. For the new single off of her new Greatest Hits album², she's taken the Red/Green concept a step further by simultaneously releasing 2 versions of the duet "Party For Two" with 2 different duet partners. The pop version features Sugar Ray's Mark McGrath³, and the country version features the relatively obscure Billy Currington. I heard the Currington version first and thought it sounded pop enough and that the only different between the versions would be the co-vocalist, but Shania's career proves, if nothing else, that there's no such thing as too pop, and the McGrath version takes it further with a pumping dance beat.

The lyrics are full of Twain/Lange's trademark flirty, thinly-veiled innuendo, including a spoken intro and everything. The couplet "it doesn't matter what you wear/'cause it's only gonna be you and me there", which is followed by a spirited "WOO!", distinctly (intentionally?) recalls "Dancing In The Street", which is appropriate considering that "Party For Two" is perhaps one of the most stilted, unenjoyable pop duets since the Jagger/Bowie version of "Dancing In The Street". The song/videos conclude with Twain saying, with the most horrifyingly unconvincing mock post-coital tone, "that was grrrreat", and her duet partner mugging to the camera and saying "let's do it again!", punctuated by a big banging two-note musical finale. Don't get me wrong, Shania⁴ is fine and all, but if there was such a thing as a reverse boner that's what "Party For Two" would give me.

¹ _{Someone on ILM had the brilliant idea to lay the Red and Green mixes of Up! on top of each other, resulting in the "Brown" mixes, some of which were just amazing (especially the "Nah!" remix, which had the two vocal lines start at different points, resulting in a wonderful disorienting row-row-row-your-boat effect). The original thread is}

² _{It's kind of amazing that Shania is just now releasing her first Greatest Hits album, considering the regularity with which most modern country stars pump out GH's - Brooks & Dunn and Toby Keith are each just now releasing their respective 2nd best-of's, and neither of them have been around much longer than Shania.}

³ _{Mark McGrath is kind of fascinating to me, for being so synonymous with the late 90's alterna-rock sellout era that he's got this weird kind of anti-cred going for him. He earned the grudging respect of many rockist nerds who otherwise despised him by cleaning up on Rock'n'Roll Jeopardy, and showing that he's one of them (us), although let's face it, the questions (er, answers) on that show weren't that hard, I think the average rock fan could kick ass on there. And ever since then, I've noticed McGrath being more and more eager to show off his music trivia knowledge at every opportunity, mostly VH1 list shows. It was kind of endearingly pathetic on I Love The 80's when he made a big show of knowing the names of the members of the Pretenders besides Chrissie Hynde but messed up and eagerly blurted out "James Honeyman" instead of James Honeyman-Scott. Recently, I saw a piece on some entertainment news magazine show (either Extra or Access Hollywood) about how McGrath is the new co-host of another entertainment news magazine show (again, either Extra or Access Hollywood, whichever one it wasn't the first time), and he said something about his new job like "it's like an old Replacements record, there's a lot of mistakes but at the end of the day it comes out pretty well". It was the most awkward rock geek pandering I've ever seen. I'm not hating on the dude, though. I didn't care for "Fly" when it was inescapable in the summer of '97, but every subsequent Sugar Ray hit (or at least every subsequent "Fly"-style beatbox/acoustic guitar SR single) has been better than the last. "When It's Over" is my jam.}

⁴ _{Shania Twain is the only person involved in the movie I [Heart] Huckabees who I have seen publicly refer to it as "I Love Huckabees", which I think makes me like her more.}

Labels: music

Even though I just saw Travis Morrison there a couple months ago (which I believe was his first show with his new backing band, or at least the first official club show), I'm looking forward to seeing him again at the Talking Head next week mainly because it'll be a chance for me to finally pick up a copy of his album. I've looked in a couple stores that I thought would be sure to have it, with no success (and I'm kind of a luddite in that I still regard ordering music online as a last resort if there's a chance I can find it in a record store). Is it possible that the indie backlash against Travistan is so severe that even stores that stock other Barsuk releases and every Dismemberment Plan album aren't bothering with it? Or do I just keep looking in the Sound Garden when they don't happen to have any copies out? In any event, I'm looking forward to finally getting the record proper after all the teaser MP3's and hearing the songs in different live incarnations at the solo show and in the Plan's sets in the months before they decided to break up (I doubt the Travis version of "Angry Angel" will be able to touch the Plan version, which had a georgeous bassline). Plus, Miccio's review was a really articulate voice of dissent to the general reactions to the record, and much of what he wrote rang true enough for me that I'm thinking I'll like the same things about it.

Plus, Beauty Pill is also on the bill, which is added incentive for me to go to the show. When their first full-length, The Unsustainable Lifestyle dropped a few months ago, it was pretty underwhelming, especially after the long wait, 3 years since their first EP (with another EP in between), and almost 7 years since the last album by Chad Clark's previous band, Smart Went Crazy. But, while still a disappointment overall, Lifestyle has become a good go-to record for late nights when I want something that isn't too loud but isn't too sleepy. I think Clark's lyrics are a bit too self-consciously 'clever' sometimes, but when he actually manages to express some righteous anger and outrage, as opposed to just cynicism, as on "Terrible Things" and "Won't You Be Mine?" (which is a deceptively silly and cheerful-sounding diatribe about racism punctuated with samples of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood), that's when the record really engages me. And BP now have a new co-lead singer (their 3rd in as many years), so I'm looking forward to checking out the new lineup, which will hopefully get them back on the track of the promising early EP's, or possibly a different direction entirely.

(Breihan, are you gonna be there? Get at me, maybe we can trade those articles we were reccomending to each other a while back.)

Labels: concerts, music, Travis Morrison

On Friday CMT aired their "Outlaws" concert special, which featured the extremely ILM/blogosphere-friendly lineup of Big & Rich, Gretchen Wilson and Montgomery Gentry, in addition to Hank II presiding over the affairs. It's kind of interesting how new-school their definition of "outlaw" is; even Bocephus as elder statesman is kind of a strech. I mean, sure, Waylon and Cash aren't around anymore, but they could've at least gotten Willie in there, he always seems to be up for that kind of thing (maybe Willie did pop up for a guest spot, I didn't see the whole thing, but they did use his version of "Midnight Rider" in one of the ads).

And Kid Rock of course had to be there to run around and wave his country flag a little more. It's funny how accomodating the Nashville community is of any mid-level rockers who want to be join the club; all he has to do is say "Johnny Cash" in the chorus of a single and do a country ballad with Sheryl Crowe and he's in, they treat him like royalty. The best part of his set was a slowed down, countrified cover of "Fat Bottomed Girls", which was a pretty inspired choice. I always thought the multi-Freddie harmonies on the chorus had a touch of twang (and I was a little disappointed that Juelz Santana's recent "Fat Bottom" only saw fit to sample the guitar riff from the verses of the original; those a cappella "ahhhh"'s are really begging to be chopped up over a Dipset track).

I'm still a little mystified by the Big & Rich hype that started on ILM and seemed to blossom into a critical darling from that almost independent of the album's sales boom. Granted, I actually take a little credit for that (I was the first person to post about "Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy)" on ILM, although Chuck Eddy had posted a bit about B&R prior to that). Maybe I'm just conservative or stingy about checking out albums, especially based on the strength of one big single, but I haven't given their record a chance for the same reason I didn't cop the Terror Squad LP. But I guess not having given it a listen isn't really grounds to criticize. And I'm not very down with Gretchen, even on a singles level. I don't think her voice/presence really sells the lyrics, especially her timid, holding but barely strumming a guitar on "Redneck Woman", which just reminds me of Avril Lavigne playing up the whole guitar playing thing. But I was a bit impressed by the Outlaw concert performance of "Here For The Party", which came off a lot stronger than the one in the video.

Labels: music, TV

It's annoying how weeks can go by with no shows or anything like that that I really wanna go to, and then suddenly there'll be too many things overlapping in a single weekend to do them all. This past weekend was one of those, and I had to miss out because of my band's show and other personal commitments. Lewis Black performed at the Towson Center on my school's campus, and since I work for Towson's events department, I had to set up the stage and seating for the event, but wasn't able to actual go see him that night. I saw him once before at the Baltimore Improv a year or two back, but it would've been really great to see him froth at the mouth less than a week before the election, his material practically writes itself these days.

On Saturday there was a good bill at the Ottobar that I had to miss out on. Two bands that I'm up for seeing anytime (Skeleton Key and Mike Watt), plus another (Rasputina) that a friend from work was hyped to see and I wanted to go and hang out with. I'm not too broken up about it, though, just because they both tour constantly anyway. And now that Watt's new album, The Secondman's Middle Stand is finally out, after years of talking about it (I interviewed him 4 years ago and we discussed it in detail) and touring the material, it's kinda underwhelming. And I say that as someone who *loves* Contemplating The Engine Room, so I have no problem with Watt's grumbly spiels or his 'punk rock opera' concepts. But where Engine Room had some of Nels Cline's best work ever and heartfelt tributes to Watt's father and fallen bandmate D. Boon, Middle Stand has a B3 organ (which sounded great on the last couple tours when they covered "Little Johnny Jewel" but not so much on the originals) and parallels between Dante's Inferno and Watt's near-fatal illness that are so faithful to the experience that inspired it that it's pretty unpleasant to listen to at times. "The Angel's Gate" is pretty intense, though.

Skeleton Key, on the other hand, had one awesome under the radar major label album, Fantastic Spikes Through Balloons back in 1997, then broke up, and then about 3 years ago one of the founding members, Erik Sanko, bought out the other guys for the use of the name and re-formed the band with a completely different lineup. I've seen the new incarnation of Skeleton Key a couple times and they're alright, but it's kind of a bittersweet consolation for not having caught the original lineup. Recently, the official SK website had a bunch of mp3's up of a bunch of cool remixes of Fantastic-era songs by people like Christian Marclay, Foetus, Sparklehorse and the Automator, and one of my main motivations for writing this post was to link that, but just now when I looked the MP3's are gone. Dammit. Hopefully that collection of remixes will pop up in some form, legit or otherwise, sometime soon.

Labels: comedy, concerts, Mike Watt, music

Speaking of the Posies (who have a new full-length, their first since the first attempted "breakup" in '98, in the can and due out on Rykodisc in 2005; I'm so hyped...the Posies are the fake-retirement Jay-Z of power pop), compare the first few seconds of their "Apology" off of 1990's Dear 23 to the first few seconds of "The One Who Got Us Out" off of the new Ted Leo album, Shake the Sheets. Not identical, but kind of an uncanny similarity.

BTW, I'm really not trying to hear this shrugging reaction to Shake the Sheets. I've only had it since I was able to buy it in a store last week, after 3 months of listening to downloaders poo-poo it, so I haven't been able to settle into it yet, but I have no complaints. Meanwhile, I had plenty to complain about Hearts of Oak's obnoxious bass tone and underwhelming production (it's the same limited tolerance for conspicuously indie production and rhythm sections that has kept me from getting into Chisel). This album delivers the level of fidelity Ted deserves and the insistent tempos he sounds best over, although it may not be his best set of songs (which for me is still The Tyranny of Distance). My friend Jeffy described "Heart Problems" well as "the catchiest song you'll ever hear about healthcare woes" (although "Treble In Trouble" is pretty catchy too). But what I'm really feeling are the disco hi-hats on "The Angels' Share" and "Little Dawn", which was my favorite of the new songs last time I saw Ted over the summer, and remains my favorite on record. But maybe more than anything else I'm grateful that my girlfriend likes Shake the Sheets, because I've made her into a serious Ted Leo fan over the past year and it was perfect timing for his new album to come out the same week as her birthday, so I'm glad she wasn't disappointed by the gift.

Labels: music, Ted Leo, The Posies

Woah: in this interview, Queen Latifah gives a shout out to one of my favorite bands, the Posies. Apparently there's also an interview with Movieline where she talks about listening to "Coming Right Along" to get ready for her death scene in "Set It Off". I don't really care if the only thing she knows by them is a song that was on the Basketball Diaries soundtrack, just the fact that Queen Latifah has repeatedly given props to a power pop/grunge footnote like the Posies has made my day.

Labels: music, The Posies

Attn: Baltimore heads - a band I play drums for, Zuul, has a couple shows coming up: a kinda-Halloween show at the Sidebar this Friday the 29th, opening for a Misfits cover band; and a show at a fucking Knights of Columbus hall in Odenton, Maryland, wherever that is, the next Friday, November 5th. It's going to be ridiculous, especially the Sidebar one. We're going to be wearing costumes and playing a bunch of bizarre cover choices we've been working on that I won't spoil. We're a terribly disorganized band and every time we have a show to get ready for we end up either almost breaking up or having some other sort of crisis, and this time has been no exception. But the set is starting to come together and I'm really excited now. I'm the only member of the band that doesn't really have any kind of background in the kind of music we play (which would be Faith No More/Mr. Bungle style weirdo metal), and I get a lot of shit from them for not having a double bass pedal or a floor tom, but whenever we manage to get our shit together for a show it turns out to be a lot of fun, if terribly embarrassing for everyone involved. My roommate is working on engineering some kind of exploding pumpkin stunt for the show.

Labels: Baltimore music, music