54-71 | Six Albums

Six of their terrific albums reupped by special request on Sept 10, 2015, here.




Precise drum and bass guitar like wriggling in the darkness, like a machine 
It seems to go sunk feeling to the bottom to the bottom on and on. 

Snare is fiercely tight. Liked. 

Even so, relentless with drum and accurate+solid dry guitar, dry as a skeleton that did well.

Also air.

Air between every single thickness to the music comes through
To snap up, sound comes suddenly pops out.



Downer acceleration. 

Such as down one step down step spiral staircase 
Poisoning inevitable.

It is a love song? Code of feeling part of the loop other than those pinched
It is great tension anyway.

Songs trimmed to sound that need rather sound you do not need
With guitar chaos skinny enough to not know what you are connected to


Open hi-hat drum is good.

I have hardened as the songs firmly in a medium tempo. 

I like the place to rise a little late.

Guitar Vader | 5 albums, 2 EPs

Reupped again on March 26, 2015, at a reader's request, here.

If someone put a gun to my head and forced me to choose just one Japanese rock band to listen to until my retirement years, my first impulse would be: "Just kill me." For, how could I--how, indeed, could anyone--choose just one? My second impulse, tempered by the desire to continue living, would be to flip a coin: Heads = Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her; tails = Guitar Vader.

Formed in 1998 as a male-female duo, Guitar Vader was largely influenced by the Beatles and the Pixies, though they also learned and/or borrowed from every late 20th century act from Guitar Wolf to Beck. Their first album, Die Happy!, was released on cassette and never had a proper CD (or LP) release. (It is, I would argue, the single most perfect example of Japanese pop rock ever recorded.)

In 2000, they added a drummer and a couple of years later added a(n American) keyboardist. They broke up in 2007 when their drummer began to have serious health issues related to his heart; they had been working on a sixth studio album, which was abandoned. So far as I know, none of them seem to have pursued solo musical careers.

I found most of these albums on other, now-defunct sites, wiped out in the Megaupload action. They are, so far as I can tell, all out of print and impossible to find.

Included here are:

Die Happy! (1999)

Wild at Honey (2000)

From Dusk (2001)

Baby-T/GVTV/Shimanagasgi (2001)

REMIXES_GVR (2001)

Dawn (2003)

Happy East (2004)

Watch an interview with Guitar Vader's Ujuan Shozo and Miki Tanabe:

You Forgot Poland | Bodega Pop 14

Just reupped the 33-track Bodega Pop exclusive album here. You'll never forget Poland again.


Listen to "Tatuuj Mnie"


Listen to "Welcome to Poland Asshole"


Listen to "Artbroken"


Listen to "Nie Ma Nic"

 
Listen to "Rosol"

A collection of ear-blistering alt Polish pop, rock and new wave found over the last couple of years at Music Planet in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I compressed the album in a ZIP file rather than a RAR because at least one person I know who will love this album has complained in the past that she can't open RARs. (Yes, I know; hush.)

Girls Sazanami Beat! | Vols. 1+2

Listen to "Chou Gutsu Terrorist" by The Let's Go's

Listen to "Yeah Yeah" by The Portugal Japan

Make off with Vol. 1 here

Listen to "Hello!Hello!!" by The Helloes!


Listen to "Yes, No Blues" by Gaijin

Get your paws on Vol. 2 here

Nobody does retro like the Japanese. Which is to say: Whatever it was, whoever invented it, they'll play it like they own it. 

Sazanami, a Tokyo-based label that celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, is one of the archipelago's leading purveyors of backwards-glancing garage, go-go, pop, rock, surf and pseudo-punk, and these two high-voltage volumes focusing on contemporary girl-group grooves are must-haves for all of you retrophiles out there -- as well as anyone seeking a musical alternative to caffeine. 

Dolphin | Youth

Reupped because I promised I would.

Ever since I stumbled onto this video for Dolphin's "Without Us":

   

I've kept my eye out for the album it came from, imagining it was, at bare minimum, listenable. When I found a copy online late last year, I filed it away, waiting to give it a fair hearing. And promptly forgot about it. 

Maybe it was seeing a copy of Peter Hook's book on Joy Division in a bookstore I popped into on the way home after work this evening, but something nudged this album back into my consciousness. Once at home I searched for it in my computer; when I found it, I popped open a Six Point and spent the next hour letting the Dolphin wash its post-punk waves of tuna-safe Dolphin-y goodness over me. And realizing that you really, really had to hear it.

Youth, or Yunost, is Dolphin's sixth studio album, released in 2007. I realize that you and I don't know each other all that well, but ... I think you're going to like it.

Postscript: I love this album so much that, when I found a physical copy of it in an Astoria thrift shop recently, I shelled out for it so I could while away evening after evening "grooving on the cover" while listening to it. Seriously.

Fobia | Wow 87-04

Listen to "Mas Caliente Que El Sol"

Grab this record here.

Didja miss me? Well, I certainly missed you. Yes, I DID oogie woogie oogie-oogie. *Cough*. Hello? No, wait, come back. I won't do that again; I promise.

So. I've been very busy this month: I moved. No, not to Buenos Aires or Bangkok or Tower Records Shibuya. I'm still in Astoria, but closer to Manhattan, closer to my midtown job and--most importantly--closer to the Almighty 7 Train ... or, as  I like to call it: So Big Metal Sky Snake What Takes Me To Many CDs of a Delightful "Foreign Music" Nature.

Or maybe I'm in Long Island City? Honestly, I don't know because every other map I look at has completely different borders for each Queens "city." Let me put it this way: I haven't been so excited about where I'm living since I moved to NYC in 1997.

I'm still unboxing things, which is why I haven't really added anything to the Bodega shelves since September. And also why, if you've requested a reup, I haven't yet gotten to it. (Note to Self: Next move, clearly label what's in each box.) But last weekend I took a long walk around the new neighborhood and, in addition to somehow convincing the woman working at Tacos Mexico to bring me her mother's recipe for nopales (cactus), I discovered a vast warehouse of Latin CDs, mostly from Mexico, priced to move at three for $10, including tonight's thrilling offering.

Fobia was founded in the late 1980s and were part of the Rock en Español wave, largely influenced by the American and British New Wave, including Caifanes, Los Amantes de Lola, Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio, Maná, and Neón. True to their name, Fobia's lyrics shied away from the more socio-political leanings of their counterparts, favoring exploration of band members' personal fears and unhealthy obsessions. The band recorded five albums in the 90s, split up, then regrouped in 2004. Tonight's offering includes tracks from the band's first decade along with a few songs cut the year they got back together.

Hang on the Box | 4 Albums

Just reupped here.

Hang on the Box, mainland China’s first all-girl punk unit, was a glorious mess of contradictions and extremes. Their first live performance, for a small but fanatical crowd of fellow Beijing punks, was met with boos, laughter and jeering; six months later they were on the cover of the local edition of Newsweek, serving as poster girls for an entire generation of Chinese youth. Lauded by critics for politicizing gender through their empowered, femme-forward lyrics, they were famously scornful of Cobra, the only other all-girl rock group before them on the mainland. [Read the rest of the article in Burning Ambulance.]




A reader's comment this morning about the article excerpted above prompted me to go ahead and post the full run of albums by this much-loved legendary band. 

Pussy Riot | Kill the Sexist!

Reupped because ppl simply b lookin 4 it, here.

Unless you've been living in under a rock in a cave on one of Jupiter's moons, you're well aware of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot's "punk prayer" performance at Christ the Savior Cathedral in February 2012 that earned three of their members a two-year sentence in jail last August.



It remains to be seen whether the international outcry over the disproportionate sentence will result in any change in the situation. Meanwhile, in addition to enjoying their music, you can take action at freepussyriot.org.  

Beijing's first punk band, The Fly

A short article I wrote about Beijing's first Punk Band, The Fly, was just published in the Asian American Writer's Workshop magazine, Open City, here.

And for those interested in the album mentioned in the article, you can get it here. 

21st Century Chinese Rock & Punk

Subs vocalist Kang Mao (photo by Bjørn Gausdal)

Listen to "Asshole I'm Not Your Baby"



Listen to "No! No! No!"



Listen to "Eat Me"



Listen to "Wahaha"



Listen to "爱之过往"


Get the 30-band, 30-song compilation here.


For decades now it seems like the most exciting expressive culture--no matter the discipline--has been coming out of mainland China. Ai Weiwei, Gu Wenda, and Xu Bing are at the forefront of a huge explosion of visual and conceptual art that a number of phone book-thick catalogs published here and in Europe can barely keep pace with. Writers as diverse as Ma Jian, Liao Yiwu, and Mian Mian are creating some of the most raw and genuinely engaging fiction and creative non-fiction in recent memory--and making international headlines in the process. And I don't think I'm alone in thinking there is no greater, more inventive living film director than Jia Zhangke.


So it should probably be no surprise that, over the last decade or so, the PRC has produced quite literally the most thrilling rock, punk and post-punk in the world. Or that much of this music--unlike so much else on this blog--has become increasingly available through western channels.



Watch Subs perform "So Fine Emo"


For this compilation I gave myself a couple of rules: I wouldn't poach from any pre-existing, readily available compilations (although I did wind up using one song from a free comp that some of you may already have) and I would only allow myself one song from each band, no matter how hair-raisingly great their other tracks may be.



Watch Rebuilding the Rights of Statues' "TV Show (Hang the Police)"


I'll keep this post to the bare minimum, hoping the reader will listen and judge for herself, and use the opportunity to seek out more, as the interest strikes, through Amazon, iTunes and the great independent Asian-focused site Tenzenmen.com.


And, as always, I'm totally curious what you think. ...