Music: The Cherry Blossoms “Live in Amsterdam” LP

Well ya know The Cherry Blossoms are after all maybe the best band in Nashville, and they're certainly the most authentic, (whatever that means...) Like a scoop of ice cream on the porch of your grandmother's naïve wisdom, minus the latent racism, CBs kind of ramble on toward some nonexistent rustic ideal. It seems real enough that you assume the whole “Past” is just like it. Though it probably never was?

To a few older dudes it was, man. You've got your Holy Modal Rounders and maybe Yo Ho Wah or whatever. To be honest this is more enjoyable. For one thing CBs are designed for, like ideal live, which this record is. But the recording is spruce: nicely separated stereo image and clean. The acoustic guits and kazoos and everything are real crisp, and the drums sound great.

Chris Davis's drums are really crucial to any Cherry Blossoms jam, dude's playing is extremely disheveled, but realllly profound, which is about what conversing with him is like. Davis is adept at playing this kind of “pseudo-free” style, all off-kilter, loosey-goosey, but will chug-along too. “Bean Bag,” which closes out the record is a great example of The Cherry Blossoms' general M.O. of spacey traditionalism: the meat of it is a meandering chuga-chug beat, like Neu meets Graham Parsons or like how N.R.P.S. might sound, maybe they do? (It's been a while, ya know?)

If you're familiar with the CBs than you get that John Allingham's kind of the glue of the thing, or whatever, but Peggy Snow is the absolute show-stopping delight. Her quavering vibrato and goofball romanticism and general enthusiasm, (and kazoo,) are the focal point here, and elsewhere they shan't be. One can definitely appreciate this incarnation of the band, that finds CBs rolling as a full quintet. That Chuck dude who works at Bongo on righteously “out of it” bass and especially Taylor Martin's vocal harmonies and especially her angelic counterpoint on “Lay the Cloud Thin.”

I'm pretty sure a couple of these songs can be found on The Cherry Blossoms' equally compelling studio LP, but I'm too lazy to cross reference which ones right now. If you're familiar with the CBs and dig them, than you'll dig this record. Familiar with them and don't dig, then leave it alone, but if you're intrigued by the band, yet unfamiliar, this one should make for a decent introduction, on par with their OOP self-titled album. A nice shrink-wrapped package from Chicago label, Hairy Spider Legs. Recommended!

Music: Leather Nightmare 12” EP

I think this is the Leather Nightmare we were supposed to be hearing all along, and really the distinguishing features are mostly in the (impeccable) visual design, (matte black generic sleeve with printed stickers, black inner sleeve,) but judging also by frothy jokiness and real-life applicability, than this is the one you want too man.

I still like to assume LN are a cruel joke, the laughing, gaping asshole of Nashville's Genre-Rock scene du jour, delivered with a stoney-faced irony so impenetrable it might be real, maybe, the cutting and sardonic other genre... Better Bauhaus than Black Flag, tbh. Better Swans than sycophantic JTB-sympatico swill.

The riffs--and this is riff rock at its purest--are usually pretty good, memorable even. The lyrics are "relatable" too: “I gotta fuckin' cum,” like, I can relate to that, ya know. Elsewhere lead singer, Reid Barger sings about trying to get high w/o any weed, like when you scrape out all the resin from your bowl. These are real issues one wishes more artists would tackle.

Yeah man, Leather Nightmare were good. Supposedly they hit a self-imposed high water mark and called it quits before they could ever produce a real, all the way there LP. Maybe it's for the best. Maybe not? Still, I wouldn't want to get caught in The Rapture w/o owning this here 12” EP.

Black Jacket, Black Sleeve, Def. Recommended!

Music: Terror'ish / Textbook Punk split tape

God knows I've blathered on about Rob Bekham's Terror'ish project on this blog before, "at length"... and with no disrespect to those previous posts, this shit here, this is the best Terror'ich music I've ever heard.

Shit comes strobing out of the gate, and it sounds like your computer's internal sequences eating themselves but “beatwise.” Rhythmic. Add MIDI-fucked piano, voice, the thing is becoming a garbled mess of digital horror-show pop, like a haunted cabaret, man, like WW2 nightmare, Gravity's Rainbow, The Video Game. The tape goes on and on, industrio-pop-noise future. It is very long, and it goes a lil' soft by the end, tbh.

Textbook Punk's side is all goofy loops, sometimes compelling and sometimes not. I know this dude very well, like let's just say that I am this dude, and so even confessing that “this is not my best shit,” betrays insider confidence. Let's just say that “this is some shit I did.”

Dubbed onto recycled (insane paranoid religious re-use) tapes, that have a lil' “No Heresy” logo right on them. (Email textbookpunk @ gmail for availablitliyoiulit.) Very Very Very Highly Recommended!

Music: Piss Bath tape

Here we have a fairly long (45-60 minute?) cassette from Murfreesboro's "venerated" Piss Bath, whom I must confess to never having seen live. That's on me, but I just don't really... eh whatever. Maybe I'm old or maybe... ehhh.

So: to me this tape's tracks, of which, for all intents and purposes, there are infinitely many, all sound about alike. Most of them pretty much consist of a heavy-handed, down-stroked “riff,” (on bass and guitar,) and shouted (female) vocals.

Shit, I could really enjoy this at a show for sure, and yeah I'd probably feel annoyed after like 15 minutes, but ya know, I feel confidant these guys have probably never played for longer than that, and good on 'em. Feel like they know what they're doing.

I drove around with this thing in my car's tape deck for the better part of a week and honestly couldn't tell you if “Side A Repeats,” or if it's all different songs or what, but I like it, I mean it is what it is and I figured I knew what it was when I got it and it, uh, lived up to whatever I thought it would be. The recording quality changes a few times: different "sessions," I guess, but it's all pretty grimy "lo-fi," obviously.

Generic cassette but the Norelco case is yellow (piss) tinted and the art is pretty funny, I guess... J-card doesn't fit into the case properly, so I'll detract a few points for that.  Recommended anyhow ...

Music: Ttotals "Silver on Black" 10" EP

Ttotals' guitarist, vocalist, and de facto leader, Brian Miles, takes a heavy Jim Morrison tip on the first side ("Special A") of this 45 RPM 10" record. It's the first time I've noticed the similarity between BM's and the Lizard Queen's voices, but it makes a lot of sense.

Both Ttotals and The Doors deal/dealt in pop songs, abstracted beyond their logical purposefulness, to the point that they become almost-ambient, mind-wrapping art pieces, in which the listener's subconscious becomes a character in an exploratory world of reverb-drenched, stoner-rock dream-environs.

I mean, it's seriously easy to imagine Martin Sheen's head slowly rising from the steaming Cambodian river to these tunes.

Ttotals, at their best, get at the Punk-dream. They are, after all, two dudes with a guitar and a few drums, (OK, and a lot of FX pedals.) The raw primacy of punk is imbedded in their being. They're all id, man.

Side 2 gets into mushroom-punk territory with "Flowers Follow", and "Over the Years". It's still the classic Ttotals tones. They're secure and it's damn alright with me.

Really nice packaging: sparkly silver silk screen on semi-recycled black sleeve, (Art by Tim Norton, ex-of Holy Spirit Suckers.) Self-released by the band. Jam it.

Music: R. Stevie Moore "Advertising Agency of Fucking" lathe cut

I have the sneaking suspension that this piece of transparent polyurethane is eating up my phono needle. Is that a thing? Even if it's not, I'll be the thousandth person to say it: (most) lathe cuts sound like shit. I may not review mp3s, but I'll definitely enjoy listening to them over cheap-cut vinyl alternatives like this all day.

OK, enough bitching...

The songs represented on this abomination of a medium-sample are pure RSM Classics, as in, are absolutely brilliant pop (/punk, to be addressed below,) tunes that don't require the listener to submerge her/his self in R. Stevie's singular world of absurd puns, Beatles-worship, self-congratulation, and, uh, general quasi-genius, to appreciate.

"Advertising Agency of Fucking" on the A side finds RSM working his lyrical forte: sexual politics. It's melodically engaging in the way that British canonical acts like The Kinks and XTC are. Major key jumping all over the place, but focused, convinced of its own arrangement and full of forward momentum.

The B side is a brilliant post-punk-aping tune with a slinking, dissonant bass line and a deceptively important piano part: hammered chords, Reggae-syncopated during the chorus, but used only as punctuation during the verses. And lyrically it's R.'s second-best consistent theme: meta-style questioning the relevance of his own art.

So, don't buy this piece. (Ed. note: you can't buy it. Limited to preorders amounting to 76 physical copies; the one in my possession is #24.)

Do download RSM's "Poached Punk" comp. on bandcamp. The two sides of this record are tracks one and two, and there's a bunch of other great shit. And your payment goes directly to the artist. And it'll sound way, way better.

If you're the collector type, and a RSM fan, I recommend PIAPTK's "Javascript" lathe cut (onto a glass mirror.) Same label, maybe slightly better sound quality than this one, but it's a mirror, and it looks pretty cool spinning on yr deck.

Music: DJ MDMHey tape

If you're looking for DJ MDMHey's usual take on contemporary pop via fractured, noisy remixes, head over to soundcloud. This tape is another beast all together.

I can't say it's much like any releases I've heard by Rob Bekham's main outfit, Terror'ish either, although that project's most consistent feature is its inconsistency: ranging from harsh, clipped pink noise onslaughts to tape loop abstraction, to fuzzed out drum machines and everything in between.

This is atmospheric synth music, think a more Industrial-leaning take on Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack, minus the bluesey Film Noir affect, plus throbbing digital drums. The warbling, detuned oscillators and studied-over ADSR envelopes are there, as is the attention to atmosphere, though it's a distinctly tape saturation environment we're talking about here. (Praise is due to the mix, which manages to find an ideal level of natural tape-distortion/compression, without becoming murky or ugly.)

Side 2 begins with a more aggressive rhythm than anything on Side 1, calling to mind the recent "Tech-noise" style of MTVE-favs Container and Unicorn Hard-On, albeit with much more attention payed to harmonic progression, and with out the obvious genre tropes. This is loosely Synth Pop, but its minimal aesthetic and dark tonalities make it a unique effort. The sounds may be rooted in Depeche Mode and Cabaret Voltaire, but these are the weird outtakes that could never be. Dig it.

Label is Ranky Tanky "Champs" (or R.T. "Champs"?, I don't fucking know.) (It's Noah Anthony of Night Burger/Form a Log's label.) Edition of (more than one.) Decent art.

Music: Bad Friend "Let it Go" LP

"Throw away your first keepsake" is how this record begins, I mean, that is the first lyric, after some (eh, I hate to but yeah)-90s, semi-angular guitar riffage.

This is a record of solid to very solid "Big I" Indie rock. If these dudes knew the right people in 1998, they might be a big fuckin' deal. As it is, we're left with a record of tunes recorded too many years ago for the media cycle to take an interest.

It's some pretty great song-writing, at least at times. It's rooted in Matador tropes circa 2001, sure. But I haven't listened to that kinda shit in long enough that it's effective.

I used to have a serious emotional connection with "The Fruit That Ate Itself". If you did too, check out this record. Eight tracks of longing living room rock music. Recorded by Scott Martin. First full length LP on blossoming Nashville label, Hag Bloom too.

Music: Leslie Keffer & Valerie Martino "Prissywillow" single

Pretty killer 2008 release from Nashville's two ex-leading ladies of out-music. Unfortunately Keffer's fallen into unprecedented obscurity after the release of her sex-pop crossover 12" from late Spring, (play a show!) And Martino's left Music City for Rhode Island, like as in Nashville ain't sophisticated enough.

Anyways, A-side, "Letch Luff", bares LK's bruised and battered visage on the label and begins with a-rhythmic drum machine battery as creepy-but-consonant Industrial-style synths enter. There's a brief pause for electric bongos and gym coach whistle, then a harsher low-note pattern re-introduces the scattered tripping-over-yourself vibe with some unadjusted accoutrements, and repeat.

B-side shows an equally beat-up VM on the label and this one's all stuttering drum-pattern while horn-like drones and crystal-synth lead evaporate over top. You get some random-LFO action and other analog-style noodling whilst the drum machine fills out, all distorted like.

Pretty stoned-jammy vibe on both sides, but the sounds are killer.

Pick it up at Fusetron. Cool silk screen and spray paint art by Gina Denton. Collab-release by Tusco Embassy, I Just Live Here, Tangled Hares and Action Claw.

Music: Minimalogic "Irritant" tape (mp3)

Alright I'm breaking my self-imposed exile from reviewing digital albums in order to write up this (impossible to find) gem.

Minimalogic was, best I can tell, Nashville's very first Noise/"experimental" band. Citing influences such as Throbbing Gristle and The Residents, D.A.C. Crowell, Greg Killmaster (surely not his real name?) and Charlie Newman produced a gnarly sound-world out of pulsing oscillators, heavily effected guitars, tape-loops of found audio and strangled vocals that would sound absolutely at home at a Keffer-organized Betty's show some 16 years later. Noise ages well? "Irritant" is their sole album, released on cassette in 1984.

The creeping A side includes ring modulated monk chants, distorted drum machines, detuned vocals and otherworldly sound effects that are all the more disorienting for their uncompressed presence. Metal pings strike at your temples over a churning guitar/synth loop that gradually falls apart, leaving these incredibly anxious out-of-sync puzzle-pieces.

Later there's heavy storm-ambience over which a weird-whistle synth makes bird calls into the ether. Dramatic Darth Vader string-synth patterns undercut the atmosphere and a gurgling low frequency rolls in, evolving into a cutting pink noise buzz, filter-waffles, and cuts out.

Side 2 opens with a slowly-rolling low synth with Arto-styled detuned guitar chimes and random LFO chirps. A dissembodied semi-falsetto sings about Minimal Love: "Minimal love/ is cuming in silence," while clicking anti-rhythms feel like footsteps of a stalker in a dark alley. It's roughly as creepy as Throbbing Gristle's best work, and really it's hard to imagine this band was working in the weird-vacuum of Nashville Intelligence Report days, alongside so so much rehashed punk (Jason and the Scorchers, Cloverbottom, et al.)

About a quarter thru Side 2, the track ends and we're presented with a nastily melting, bright square wave arpeggio. It's academic Minimalism thrown to the dogs of punk: entirely unsettling and strangely beautiful. And its warped beauty lasts a long time, gradually reforming as a metallic bulb-worm, then ripped outside itself, computer-guts hanging out of its android skin. Almost thirty years before the Nashville Symphony commissioned an original work by Terry Riley, this is maybe the first Minimal piece to originate in Music City.

It's certainly the first piece of "harsh noise" to come out of a town where feedback loops and heavily distorted electronics would eventually flourish.

Good luck finding the cassette. (And if you have one for sale, please let me know.) I'll be happy to share mp3 files (with C. Newman's blessing,) to interested parties if you email me. Highly Recomended!

Music: Sparkling Wide Pressure "Previous Openings" tape

2011 release from Sprakling Wide Pressure's Frank Baugh, prospering in the cassette underground, seemingly.

Jeez this thing starts out beautifully with a sequenced sine wave and fretless bass lead. Add rusting guitar drone to fill out the chord progression, man is that something a lot of this so-called drone music lacks? Chord progressions? Is that antithetical to the whole idea of drone? Is it pop-drone? Heady resonance sweeps into the synth program, delay-cluster ending... acts as track's end, but liners tell me Side A is all one: "Crestland I".

A bass-arping synth, no it jumped an octave, then back down, it's alternating under machine-grade guitar reverberation, plus some light-picked single-note solo, trippy styled, oh god there's a wah pedal! Man, if you put a wah pedal onto so much of this fucking drone I'd dig it a lot more!

Crusted over machine, factory floor, industrial revolution: prettier than Eraserhead, less horrible, for one thing because it ends, and you know it's going to end. Soon enough we go back into some light-wah guitar-chordery, very nostalgic and bleh, if you're me. Like, dude is really feelin' it ya know? Like, head back, wind-blown silk scarf... Jimi-feelin' it, ya know?

Machinery comes back in for a moment, (really just a mic-on-the-ground, phaser and delay pedals.)

Side B starts with just a little of this interstice before a heart-felt folky strum + meandering electronics vibe-field takes over. This is "Crestland II" and I give it just a little credit.

Some background caterwalling and about three minutes later we find ourselves at "Battleground", the slowly loping percussion loop-and-bass guided track that sounds like an Eno ambient thing rendered with recognizable instruments. There's a guitar and some synth stuff too, plus eventual scraping electronics which provide the only tension. Slow-build, very nice background stuff, better than a fucking fridge, at least.

C-32 on Diatom Bath Tapes out of Ashville, NC. Another nice Ab-Ex cover and I'd generally recommend this for your Facebook-philosophy-discussing dinner parties over cous cous and red wine, or any time you wanna get so stoned and stare at your bookshelf. Recomended!

Music: Cypress Rosewood "Isle of Wyrms" CD

This CD represents a live concert event performed for the opening ceremonies of the Summer Festival 2007 at Cathedral, a part of the Isle of Wyrms continent in Second Life.

So here we have an earnest, not-tongue-in-cheek document of hyper-reality in action. This is the parody-fodder James Ferraro drools over, if you could call what JF does parody... But this thing is of a completely separate mindset than the "Vaporwave" phenomenon, I think... Ultimately with out the ironic distance of the cassette-bound Neo-New Age set. Unencumbered by "Everything Time's" self awareness-worm hole. It is unafraid to not make a joke, and that is laudable.

The liners go on to state that the music is performed by Tony Gerber (profiled extensively here,) and features the "Native American flute".

An ancient instrument, thoroughly decontextualized by the virtual platform of hyper-modern role-play. In Second Life, authenticity absolutely just doesn't exist. It's a hang-up we can live with out.

The flute is swathed in reverb and not dissimilar to the flutes you hear while wandering around Gatlinburg-esque mountain-tourism centers, played by real mostly-Natives hawking cheaply produced CDs, paintings of eagles, leather vests and the like.

The flute is surrounded by arpegiating synths and effect pedal-coddled, often Ebow-ed guitars. The effect is ambient electronic/New Age music not unlike that of Nashville out scene-mainstays 84001.

This is sleepy, meditational and/or background music for the online presence. Office-working suburbanite avant garde. It's heart-felt experimentalism within the rigid constructs of a non-present other-world.

Low-res artwork on cardstock, factory printed disc. I can't quite recommend the music, but it's an interesting concept.

Music: Mass at Dawn "Trimutation" 3" CD-R

Ignoring the fact that the three-inch CD-R is easily the most insufferable medium on which modern "underground" music is released, and that this, like most Mass at Dawn releases, seems slightly guilty of placing vintage-gear-credibility ahead of actual musicality, this thing is really pretty good.

Soft distorted drum machine opens "Cycle of Movement", track 1, over which octave-arping, gently losing focus synths play, all unruly like. It's all head-nodding, out-of-phase club music for doctoral students in ethno-linguistics or post-Lacanian psychology. It's cold and unnerving, but human in its imperfection. The beat is sort of front-loaded, too heavy on the 1, which only becomes apparent by the end of the track. It's a creeping imperfection that's nice once you notice, eye-opening, even.

Track 2, "Demons of Fire" starts with a gnarly drone, passed down from that cycling analog octave-jump on track 1, but more muddled. Then beautifully distorted drums and Dylan Simon's psychotically distorted monotonal narrative enter and from here it's just a wrecklessly thought-out mess of of dirty 60s nightmare. Synth patterns are dominated by the slow-charging drums and it's head-back-Manson Family ICK.

Maybe it could be a little more dynamic, but analog purity gets the best of MaD. If well-mastered, this could be 7" of the year.

Nice packaging from Kimberly Dawn, but again, it's a tiny little baby CD, so have the foresight to rip it into iTunes before it gets lost under your couch.

Music: Quietly "Unfortunate Sound" tape

One thing: this tape sounds fuckin' huge. Guitars, bass and vocals all smear together in this cavernous sound-mass. Lo-fi to an extent, but not messy, as every instrument is played with precision, rooted by relentless, massive-sounding drumming.

Seemingly drawing inspiration from European post-punk and 90's American alternative rock in equal measure, the chord progressions are all tension-and-release, very dense and swathed in room-reverb and distortion while vocalist, Kara Stafford's darkly melodic singing cuts then dissipates.

It's easy to mistake Stafford's voice for that of a man's, as she sings primarily in a rich tenor that's almost other-worldly, unnatural at times and very affecting. She's like a spectre, man. Real urgent haunting.

Hints of Bauhaus emerge in the music but there's a certain sadness to highlights like "In the Mouth of the Wolf" and "Borrow Tomorrow" that Bauhaus and those other Goth-originators could never achieve from behind their makeup and fake cobwebs. This is evident in the lyrics as well, collected inside the j-card, though barely legible. Waiting, for something cryptic but probably very heavy, is a recurring theme. (And wait you should: there's a "hidden" track at the end of Side 2.)

Totally unlike any other punk in Nashville, and it's a steal at $2 from local retailers. Color ink-jet printed insert. Self-released. Recomended!

Music: Bonus Beast / Terror'ish "Incantations" split tape

Two one-man awful-noise projects, (and both were members of Big Nurse at one point,) divided by like a few thousand miles and the estimated 3-8 seconds it takes to flip over the tape.

Bonus Beast, based in San Fransisco, is Ryan King's projected muck-lust via cassette loops, pedals and all-together nastiness. His side is full-throttle blown-out tape saturation: you know the kind of noise music that's so distorted it doesn't sound like distortion. It's just a big fat slug of sound, wriggling around and occasionally slithering over some obstacle. Real bass-heavy sludge that probably sounds great on mushrooms, and kind of makes your stomache feel all weird, (just like mushrooms?)

The Terror'ish side is a little less intense, starting with whacky resonance-filtered noise and a pulsing low-end. It pretty quickly gets wrapped up in some serious-warp-delay, but then you get a track 2!

Real instruments: heavy, descending distorto-bass-line and strangled sax (similar to that on "Marvelous Cosmic Space Association".) There's also a whispy synth on top. This is followed by some formless delay-pedal noise, making this particular side of tape by far the weakest/least interesting outing I've heard from Terror'ish. (Full disclosure: Rob has always compelled me to "take a shit" on his music but I so far haven't because I pretty much love everything he does.)

High Density Headache, catalog number 52, which makes this circa early-2009 or 2008, by my estimation. Pick it up at Grimey's (haha, not really.)