Dirty Nails, Dirty Wheels

WHOA.

I don’t speak anywhere near enough Japanese to begin to understand the lyrics, but this song just totally blew me away. It’s fucking great.

Also, here’s a thing: I am generally ultra-stoked on women* kicking traditional gender norms in the teeth, particularly when it’s in one of the often male-dominated things that I do/make/like, like skateboarding, hip hop, or metal. It blitzes my mind with happiness. But in watching this video, I tripped over the edge of my successful internal work against socialization. When the first verse kicked in, the first vocalist’s delivery was so brutal that I was actually uncomfortable. Not simply because of the sonic brutality—that’s something I’m well accustomed to—but because I was watching a woman, someone I’ve been pressured to conceptualize as delicate, as not strong or ferocious, as supposed-to-be-“pretty,” deliver something so rough and heavy. I’m generally pretty successful at resisting that pressure—like I said, I get actively hyped when I see people defying it—but the song’s distance from the patriarchal party line was so great that it reached a place in me where cultural norms had done their nasty fucking work. It was a troubling moment, and I tried to intentionally open up my mind and heart as I watched the rest, knowing that some powerful and important shit was going down. Interestingly (and uncomfortably), I found there was less discomfort when I listened to the song while it played in another tab—that is, when I couldn’t see who was performing it, and my brain could be like “Could be a dude.” Ugh. I’ve been listening to and watching it over and over, and the cultural bullshit is getting pulverized, listen by listen. Hopefully with some more times through, some more thinking about all this, and a few good nights’ sleeps, the utter stoke that I get off this track—and this band generally, ‘cause their other stuff is awesome too, and I’ve liked it for years—will be unpolluted by sexism.

ROCK ON.

Missile Girl Scoot, Big Mouth.

*And anybody else, too, but this post is specifically about women.

Fuckin’ happy rap metal with good use of turntables?! Don’t mind if I do!

Radigalhen, Dream Train.

From my hip hop/prog/punk band back in Portland, No One Can Stop You. Apparently I never posted our stuff here! This song is called Cornflower, and it’s from the best-named EP ever, Sudden Load.

If you dig it, the whole thing is available for stream or way-cheap download here.

I’ve heard three songs with blast beats that weren’t boring, and they were all by Sepultura.

My theory is: if you’re thinking about using blast beats for anything but a short moment, for contrast or emphasis (a technique that can be really cool when judiciously employed, I think), rethink and do something else instead. Metal’s about energy and passion and excitement and startling dynamics, not counting to four really fast over and over for five minutes. That shit’s rigid and boring. Gimme some life! For one, something more funky, something with a little more swing, can make listeners wanna fuckin’ move a lot more, and for two, a smart dude once pointed out that shit often feels heavier when it’s got more space within each measure, more silence to provide contrast to the noise. And that dude spoke true.

Obviously, at the end of the day this is totally subjective; do whatchya wanna do and have a good time.

I was just watching a video of Meytal Cohen doing a drum cover of a metal song, and a highly “liked” comment on the video, courtesy of “6789smosh,” was “That’s a weird kitchen.”

For a moment I thought it was an absurdist joke—like if someone commented on a skate video “Strange bike, but I like it.”

Then I realized what they meant.

Metal at its strongest is a musical form of struggle and liberation. But like punk, like hip hop, like rock, like fucking every goddamn kind of music I love, it’s polluted with this bullshit. Even the song she was playing was Down With The Sickness by Disturbed, a track that quickly and stomach-turningly segues from a brutal critique of child abuse into an apparent endorsement of violence against women.

Now, reading further into the comments, they’re almost all comments about people being attracted to Cohen, sometimes in extremely objectifying sexual language. Jesus Christ.

Fellow musicians and lovers of music: get your shit together. It’s the twenty-first fucking century. Let’s hold ourselves—and each other—to a higher standard than this. Don’t post those abysmal goddamn comments, and when some piece of shit does, don’t fucking upvote that. If somebody plays a song where they trot out this garbage in their lyrics, walk out or stand with your back turned.

What kind of world do you think you’re creating? Come on.

For less time than I’d’ve liked, but for good times all the same, this weekend I kicked it at PDX Pop Now!, an annual free festival of local bands here in town. Out of 45 bands total, I caught but 13, and some of them only for parts of their sets, but there was some rad shit!

For starters, there was Lord Dying. Our band, No One Can Stop You, shares a wall with them at AudioCinema, where we rent our studio, so I’ve been hearing their punishing steel for months now, but always muffled and blurred. Clear and face-to-face, they’re pretty fuckin’ sweet! Hella loud and raucous, but not that all-blast-beats-all-the-time, we-don’t-care-if-our-mix-is-shit-just-turn-us-up-‘til-it-hurts wall of featureless sound shit. Compelling rhythms, noticeable chord changes, that kind of thing. Nice. I lost my pocketknife—a gift—in the pit, and it never turned up at lost and found, but that wasn’t Lord Dying’s fault—they put on a solid show, and I’ll look forward to catchin’ ‘em again.

Smegma struck a good balance of regular, body-movable rhythm and totally free experimental noise, and though I don’t think I’d seek ‘em out it was way cool to find out that that equilibrium actually exists; up ‘til now I’d pretty much assumed most groups that work with rhythmless noise would be too inaccessible for my 4/4-loving palate, but Smegma proved me wrong. I had a nice time and was impressed.

Youthbitch followed Smegma’s set, and rose above their irksome name to deliver a kickass bunch of tunes. (Outside of its feminist reclamation—which I do not think the band was trying to reference—the word “bitch” is messed up, as it makes sweeping negative assumptions about women and has different meanings when used as a pejorative toward different genders.) Super high-energy songs with conventional instrumentation—drums, bass, two guitars and three (or was it two?) vocalists—and really satisfying melodic choices. I’d say something like old-school punk with a bit of ’60s rock in there, maybe? I’m currently trying to up my understanding and analysis of genre, so I may be dishing out a lot of off-the-mark descriptions for a while here while I learn by making mistakes. In any event, the band is fast, aggressive, and positive-feeling, with a silly, cheery stage presence from the members, and some really clean and lovely fast guitar work. A blast.

The next act I saw was emcee/producer Cloudy October, performing with fellow rapper Rasheed Jamal (his verse starts at 1:22 in the link) and producer Hostile Tapeover (holy shit, good job on the stage name, buddy), and an unbilled guest emcee called (I think; I couldn’t hear it very clearly) Rose. I caught mediocre, sonically unimaginative hip hop both before and after this set, with dull vocal rhythms and beats composed of sounds you could pull from a decade’s worth of radio half-hits, and I was saddened, bored, and frustrated by the stagnation too often characteristic of my favorite kind of music, as well as perplexed by how many people get so into a sound that seems like it’s been on pause since the early two thousands, and wasn’t interesting even then. But when this set started, my feelings on hip hop in Portland improved dramatically. Inventive beats at once challenging and inviting in their rhythm and sample choices; compelling, move-your-body delivery cadences; and lyrics that, when I could understand them—the mix was kind of middle-of-the-road, and a lot was lost—seemed like they were solid, instead of the problematic drivel that passes for wordsmithing among too many contemporary emcees. It started out as the first three performers, and after five or so tracks they passed the stage to Rose, and while the rhythms of her delivery were a bit more plodding than Cloudy October and Rasheed Jamal’s, they were still better than the other hip hop acts I saw at the festival, and she had fuckin’ killer stage presence, tearin’ it up for the final three songs of the set. I caught one of the CDs they tossed into the audience, Cloudy October’s The Metal Jerk. I look forward to checking it out soon, and if you’re interested, you can download it free from his site, linked above.

White Fang’s frill-free punk was not amazing, but they were definitely solid, and I really, really like the straightforward simplicity of their lyrics. For example “This song is about… when someone’s talking to you, and you don’t… you just don’t wanna listen.” And the pit was a blast—none of the macho I’m-totally-jacked-and-I’m-gonna-knock-you-all-on-the-ground bullshit you get sometimes, just a bunch of people slamming into each other and laughing and smiling.

As Pure Bathing Culture came onstage, I was skeptical—skinny jeans, functionless thin-soled shoes that speak to never having to work on your feet, and their guitarist’s Lacoste sweater and aloof affect screamed “rich assholes,” and perhaps they are, I dunno, but their music was great. With their were-cool-then-were-sarcastic-now-they’re-just-in-style-again clothes and their instrumentation—programmed beats, synth, bass and heavily reverbed guitar—they look and sound like they could’ve just gotten off a time machine from the ’80s, and usually that’s a big turnoff to me, but the thing about most ’80s mainstream American pop music by white people for me is that, though it’s socially and politically empty and sounds like it’s trying to get as far from the physical realities of the instruments that produce it as possible (with that much reverb on it, guitar stops sounding like guitar to me, turning instead into a sound spontaneously generated by doctor’s office waiting rooms and hotel atriums), I did hear a lot of it when I was little, and music that reminds me of songs I heard when I was like five and under has a huge emotional impact on me. It grabs the tenderness of my memories of the part of my life when it was just me and my mom, and it squeezes. The timbres of the instruments, the quality of a song’s melodic changes happening over a relentless unchanging percussion track, the scales chosen to sing in and the ornamentations used—it all combines to make me feel stuff, and feel it really hard. I was surprised that instead of intense nostalgic melancholy, though, which is what tunes like this usually hit me with, I got a lot of calm, warm happiness out of their set. Their singer’s vocal melodies are amazing, and from what I could understand of the lyrics, her words are honest and innovatively written. And I even cottoned to the guitarist once I saw him get out of his cool demeanor in favor of doubled-over, face-contorting musical passion during a really long and gorgeous solo. Maybe he’s just shy, who knows? In any event, Pure Bathing Culture are pretty sweet. I don’t think I’d listen to their recorded stuff (in fact, checking it out on their bandcamp site, it sounds pretty dead), but I’d definitely like to see them live again.

The festival closed with Onuinu, whose name I’ve been seeing on posters a lot here in town. Overall they were pretty good—a largely electronic drum kit, synth, guitars, drum machine, and really excellent vocals. They blend the pleasures of the feelings of programmed and live music successfully, and they’re not bad for dancing to. For me, their opening song, with a nervous, heartfelt optimistic melody to its ambiguous, hopeful lyric refrain, like the feeling of starting a new endeavor and not knowing what challenges you might face but knowing you’re down to face them, was the best track of their set by a long measure, but the others were solid too, and though they weren’t my favorite band at the festival, they ended it well.

It was a good set of bands, and a totally awesome event overall—great local music, totally free! I look forward to next year’s installation, for which I signed up to volunteer. And shit, who knows, perhaps soon I’ll be performing there!

Yo folks,

Our fine band—recently named No One Can Stop You—is soon to meet its untimely demise, with the departure of half our members for Seattle. This is sad! But it means we’re using our last remaining month of existence to get our songs tight as fuck, and then record them all. By July’s end we’ll have a seven- or eight-song EP recorded. Mathy metal, deft and mighty singing, sick-nasty breakbeats, superpowered bass, fast flow, sandpaper guitar, and goofiness and anger. Hit me up if you want a copy!

After the smoke clears, me and our bassist are gonna regroup and start anew. Portland DJs, keyboardists, drummers, and anybody else down for the delicious intersection of hip hop, punk, metal, and old-time music, with hearty helpings of politics and good times, hit us up!

Rock on, rocker@s!

jimmattingly:

drum solo from yonder cloud of suns days

Who drums in our band? This guy. And this sweet-action solo hardly nicks the surface of his sound.

Holy SHIT!

I started listening to these guys in middle school, and I was so bummed when I learned they’d gone on hiatus.  But then they came back again.  And damn did they every come back in good form.

Puya, Hecho el resto, from the 2010 EP Areyto.  The title track is likewise amazing.

Dear heavy metal,

Why can’t sound techs mix you*?  Why do violent shits listen to you?

So I went to that Sepultura show.  And the band was rad!  But, as is teeth-gnashingly often the case, the mix sounded like cranking the volume on a pair of six dollar earbuds:  blurry and fuzzy, with too much treble.  And the crowd was peppered with folks who subscribe to the “try to slam other moshers into the floor any time you touch them” school of pit theory.  I’m all about wingin’ off each other and getting knocked around, but using your brawn and bulk to straightup full-body bludgeon people is shit.  Then there was this one recurrently belligerent asshole in front of me, who, upon simultaneously catching a drumstick with somebody else at the end of the show, threatened “I’ve got it.  I’ll fight.  I’ll punch you hard.  I’ll fight,” until the other person let go of the stick.  Made me wanna scream.  And somebody with a fuckin’ Lynyrd Skynyrd patch on their jacket.  What is that shit?  It’s fuckawful anywhere, but wearing those assholes’ patch at the show of a committedly antiracist band?  Jesus.

Someday all mixes will be clear and delicious, positive pit attitude will prevail across the land, and violent douchebags will know better than to waste their time going to shows they’ll be thrown out of as soon as they start pulling their shit.  Let’s make that day soon.

*Perhaps more accurately, why can’t many sound techs mix at all?  There is a forthcoming post about this issue featuring guest contributor Jim Mattingly, my buddy, our drummer, and a sound dude who can mix.