(Put a) Coin Under (your) Tongue (and see)

Coin Under Tongue: What an astringent jolt of a band name! Check this here review of their latest joint (rolled with metal shavings and warehouse dust):

“I came out of my shell - Into a cutesy neon hell,” sings Joe Kelly near the beginning of Coin Under Tongue’s new album, Reception, and during seven of the record’s nine songs, he does some serious screaming about it. As Kelly depicts his urban experience with a profusion of lyrics and a searing mixture of refined and unrefined post-punk guitar, bassist George Wilson and a trio of drummers (including regular band member Greg Wilson) help kick up a slamdance with metal polyrhythms that ground the noise.

Album opener “Beyond Yes,” which includes Kelly’s nifty description of the Bedford scene, invades the ears with twisted, trebly guitar cuttings and a vocal as deliciously distorted as Kurt Cobain’s on parts of Nevermind. “Dogma Sheen” clears the air with a volley of clean, Cure-like chords before the assault begins anew, and Kelly’s playing incorporates hints of Wire and P.I.L. during a luminous solo in “Junksmith.” After a mid-album respite comprised of a folk protest and a noir narrative, the volume rises again with the title track, a song that begins as a doom-metal dirge and quickly goes hardcore. With vivid, economic images that would make a writing teacher proud, Kelly screams about a wedding party that seems perfectly enjoyable, but instead features “a couple frozen in its prime.” It’s not the best song on the album, but the contrast between the singer’s perspective and the scene he describes is disturbing and rare.

In fact, it’s during the closing “Strong Things,” a mixed acoustic and electric song, when you start to realize that Kelly is a pretty good lyricist, something which can get lost underneath the sheer quantity of the words. “I know your schedule’s pretty packed / Mine’s just started unraveling,” he sings, over a strand of winsome, acoustic guitar, about an ex-lover from home who’s started to make it in New York. “It’s hard to hold onto strong things,” he later drones, applying a dab of lustrous black to the neon he sees around him. Kelly swipes a Stephen Malkmus chord progression to make the point, but the instrumental squall that follows is all Coin Under Tongue.

Gimme some A-D-P

Hey folks,

I met this squinting gentleman at Death by Audio this summer, and wrote a 'lil review of the collection of songs he gave to me. C'est ici:

Some albums take a long time to like, and others enter your ears like a guest you never knew you were waiting to receive. Stick to the Shadows, the forthcoming disc of sun-kissed Americana that songwriter Andy Dale Petty gave me at Death by Audio this past summer, is one of the latter. After pressing play, an electric guitar breaks like dawn over grassy hills, and then an acoustic complement picks a careful path across the landscape. You might not forget where you are when you hear it first.

After the opener, which sounds like a hushed counterpoint to Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline Rag,” a harmonica and a dancing mandolin inject a sense of regret into the picture. “I’ll tell myself that you’re movin’ this way,” Petty sings in the elementally titled “making a point with light,” but he might just be hoping—as the possibility of loss hovers above the notes, the line “Life is the morning, and long is the day,” carries a sweet ambiguity. A hint of R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon” tinges the opening of “lost caves,” a narrative of solitude after a failed connection, and Petty’s guitar continues to build a wheelwork of country licks and textures. During a second instrumental, an acoustic melody grows out of a bog of bass notes like a green shoot. It’s a mess of riches.

The album continues with the rollicking “stick to the shadows,” in which Petty uses a ratchet to lend a festive, corny air to a friend’s promised return: “I’m coming home, and you will see, that I’m so young and I’m so free, and there’s nobody fooling me,” he sings, triumphantly. After an interlude composed of bits of spoken word and high-pitched violin, a bright-toned solo highlights “death wail,” the record’s one conventional pop number, and in “coming home,” a banjo traverses the same hills that the guitar maps in the album’s opener, with a flute rising above a faint analog synth before the fade. “Through deserts and woods, there is much that is good, but the world is hard to please,” Petty later sings, sparely evoking the emotional ruts in his travels. His voice has an amber tone and an occasional nasal edge, and it shares equal space with the other instruments in the mix.

If the album ended here, Petty’s work would still be outstanding. But distinctive songs keep emerging near the end of the record. “falling to earth” features a lyric that wrestles with mortality by modifying the meaning of the idiom “no matter,” and it also contains a hopeful chorus melody that stuns like a second dawn. In “for their blood,” lush pedal steel quivers like the moon in a country pond, expressing mysterious longing for journeys not yet taken, and a measure of weariness from ones already made. The album ends with “psychic surgery,” a tune with a ruddy, rested delivery that shines like a candle in a dark clearing. Based in Huntsville, Alabama, Petty hopes to release the record this winter, and he also wants to stop in New York during a fall tour. Until then, pay him a visit on his MySpace page.

Notes on Pavement in Central Park

I saw Pavement earlier tonight! Swear to God, it's true! My friend Ben had an extra ticket and I couldn't say no, so I went and heard a great band in great form. Songs included Summer Babe (rainstorm version), Cut Your Hair, Stereo, Shady Lane, Major Leagues, Gold Soundz 'n' Range Life (I once had to choose between buying one of those two seven-inches, and I think I was paralyzed for a good two minutes), and a whole lot of others. An epiphany came when Stephen Malkmus sang what I now think is one of the most prescient lyrics of the nineties: the transition from "A career" to "Korea" in Cut Your Hair. I've decided that it's just perfect, on so many levels. And here they are:

1. It clearly (Korealy?) expresses an inability to embrace the idea of building a traditional career.

2. Turning the sound of "career" into the sound of "Korea" is musically creative and semantically meaningful. It's like leaving business school for art school, or rejecting narrow-mindedness in favor of exploration.

3. How many English majors who couldn't choose a career have taught English in Korea?

4. Whether teaching English or just visiting, Korea may be an escape, for some people, from the pressure to build a career.

5. According to a Chinese woman I know from Singapore, I should "watch out for those Korean girls. They're crazy." According to my all my life experiences, they're crazy in a good way.

6. "It's all Korean to me": building a career, that is. (See No. 1)

I just think it's the most brilliant lyric. How many of us have thrown up our hands sometime in our twenties or thirties, and surrendered to Korea, instead of career? How many of us are still working on doing that? It's like James Murphy sang, about sixteen years after Cut Your Hair: "You spend five years trying to get on track, and the next five years trying to find your friends again." I wouldn't know, but Pavement seemed to have skipped the first part, and maybe that's why they got so good, so fast.

A tale of three quarterbacks, part one

Something I've been wanting to say for a while concerns Peyton Manning, the lanky, hunky quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts. Manning is probably the most prominent, or recognizable NFL QB; Tom Brady, just as famous and even more accomplished, dwells in a kind of stone tower, good-natured but inaccessible, like a European nobleman. In Stupid White Men, or the book he wrote before that, Michael Moore, writing a little outside his purview (snark watch on the rapport!) but well nonetheless, likens men's bodies to Chevys: we're built for speed and horsepower in the short run, but then we break down in middle age, laying on the junkyard of our couches. I think that the reason Peyton Manning is so easy for American men to identify with is that he embodies Moore's idea of the American car: he's got all the touchdowns, long passes, and regular season victories that we like to watch, but then he often breaks down, and kind of spectacularly, in the playoffs. Manning has won a Super Bowl, but it was against a Bears team led by Rex Grossman, the equivalent of a Yugo to his 'vette.

The most recent Super Bowl, won by the Saints over the Colts, seemed to feature a classic Manning performance: hot out of the gate, playing like he's all world, and then, sometime in the 4th quarter, you could see the breakdown begin when he was almost picked off by a Saints defender. The gears were starting to get stuck, parts were beginning to come loose. After that, it wasn't much of a surprise when Manning did throw an interception (which was returned for a touchdown), basically sealing the game for the Saints. By throwing it, he was able to have a mostly brilliant game, and also fall apart at the end. Exciting and vulnerable to collapse, he's All-American, that Peyton Manning, and that's why he fits so well into NFL telecasts and commercials alike.

MGMT, a summer (almost) too late

Well, I'm not sure how wise it is to read too closely, or closely at all, into the lyrics for the immortal (clichéd term, but I think they've earned it) Time to Pretend, but these days, wondering how long I can make it in the technicolor jungle of Williamsburg / Greenpoint, I do find myself missing Mom, Dad, sis, and the silences and ruminative rambles of home, even if they did take place on not-too-far city streets, on the way to clubs and bookstores that led, I guess, to NYC. Good for MGMT to address, however couched within a tongue-in-cheek song, the need to leave behind home and family for, um, vomit.

Lemonheads 4-Eva

A simple, summary, and summery thought that this lapsed Boston boy had this afternoon while organizing his (okay, let's ditch the self-referential second person and just keep it really real) cds: If I liked all my cds as much as I liked the Lemonheads's It's a Shame about Ray, I wouldn't get rid of a single one. Hey ya.

Comin' around to Animal Collective

Here's a thought on the last Animal Collective album, Merriweather Post-Pavilion (do I have that right? Lemme check itunes...oops, no hyphen). The music is kind of like the framework for an F. Buckminster Fuller (do I have that right?) geodesic dome: very impressive, structurally, and certainly overarching, but where's the material inside the hexagons? Where's the warm stuff inside these interesting shapes?

Well, there's certainly some of that. Earlier, I thought I'd make the point that a framework geo-dome is not where you'd want to be during, say, a rainstorm, which I wanted to use to suggest that when the emotional chips are down, one might reach for music with more pathos or soul. I don't mean to be a hater; there's definitely something about a band that seems so committed to music-making and yet inspires so many grimaces, nonetheless. But is this music for smarty-pants liberal arts kids, and S.P.L.A.K.'s only? One thing's for sure: I have whiffed, and whiffed hard, at creating any kind of memorable acronym here.

We (my roommate, his girlfriend, and I) saw them somewhere in Midtown, and the sonic scene (just wanted to use the phrase) was like a be-in in Golden Gate Park, 1967, filtered through a million smashed pieces of vinyl and poured into a rave. I appreciated it, it was cool, but I wasn't swooning. When you notice that you're appreciating, more than, say, genuinely enjoying, you can feel fatigued almost right away. But now Summertime Clothes is playing on my itunes, and I am enjoying, babe. Feel that chorus.