The extrawack! Album Of The Year Is...

Asobi Seksu!



Asobi Seksu are an NYC quartet, specializing in an amazing kind of swirly/shoegaze/dream-pop. Yuki, the singer, performs the songs in combinations of Japanese and English, while the band surrounds her words and keyboards in noisy textures that remind you of My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Slowdive, Catherine Wheel, and Cocteau Twins, while sounding very original at the same time.

This self-titled album actually came out originally in 2003, but was re-released this year on Brooklyn's Friendly Fire Recordings.

Of all the great music that came out this year, this album is the one that moved me most, especially the track "It's Too Late", a seven-minute opus that ends in a sonic wall of loud beautifulness that nearly brought tears to my eyes when I first heard it. It's the kind of song that if you are playing it in your car and it's still on when you reach your destination, you stay in the car until the song is completely over, rather than just turning the key off and jumping out.

I've never seen this disc in a record store other than Other Music in Manhattan, but if you'd like to buy it, the good people at Insound.com have one for you here. Their website has some downloadable MP3's (including a couple tracks from their recent live-in-studio appearance at Rutgers University's WRSU) and a video on their media page here.

Steampipe Alley Revisited

For Christmas, Kimberly gave me a pair of tickets to Mario Cantone's Laugh Whore, a Broadway show I've been wanting to see, but was sure I'd miss before it closes the first week of January...quite a nice surprise.

If you don't know Cantone, he's probably best known for his role as Anthony, the queeny confidant of Carrie Bradshaw on Sex In The City. However, in the greater NYC area he's also known as the host of the supremely weird kids' show, Steampipe Alley which ran for about 3 years on WWOR-TV. The show was full of crazy double-entendre and Cantone was always hyper, urging the kids on in obstacle course competitions, and also featured him as "Sammy Sammy, Jr", who hosted a game for the kids requiring them to bob in a tub for his missing eyeball! Awesome.

Anyway, after a boss pre-show pizza at John's Pizzeria on 44th Street (which is not quite as good as the original John's location on Bleeker Street, but pretty excellent anyway), we hit the show and enjoyed every minute of it. He's a total old-school movie buff, and a lot of his act is him impersonating the Queens of The Golden Age of Film. But even if you have no idea who Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis were, the references were still hilarious based on his nuttiness. I think my favorite bit was him reenacting both Ann-Margaret AND Elvis's parts from a dance scene of "Viva Las Vegas". He also does a great wacked Judy Garland and drunken Liza.

The show's only there until January 2nd...I'd go if I were you.

This Is Why Christmas At My Mom's Rules.

Hazel's rockin' her new Sugar Plum Fairy gear while Dash gets ready to score some shrimp cocktail with a Pepsi Holiday Spice chaser:



My greed pile under the tree was huge again this year, and included a pound of some awesome Grumpy Monkey blend from Small World Coffee in Princeton, a gift from Mick & Nancy. I'm hammering a mug of it right now.

Scared Of Santa

Michael K. of the heady The Parallel Campaign and I were blowing precious time today exchanging URL's of insane blogs and websites, when I stubled upon this gem:

The Scared Of Santa Photo Gallery

which features nothing but pictures of little kids horrified by the presence of The Big Guy In Red. Classic.



Merry Christmas, indeed.

Rappy McRapperson

I can't decide if this is really, really funny, or the worst Christmas song ever.

"Gimme Stuff" by Rappy McRapperson

MP3 link courtesy of The MJ Morning Show, which appears to be some wacky morning zoo radio show somewhere.

The always excellent BrooklynVegan has lots more hip holiday links here.

Somebody Told Me That You Had A Remix

Back in the Eighties, people actually danced to rock songs in night clubs.

Any single with any semblance of a beat got the remix treatment, and ended up on a 12" club mix record for dancefloor play. Many of those mixes were terrible, really being nothing more than the same tune with a thicker backbeat and some high hat & echo added, and maybe a middle drum part added to extend the song. But some of those mixes were great...

In that same tradition, Island appears to be bringing back the rock/dance-mix my tuning up some tracks by The Killers...there are a couple of remixes of "Somebody Told Me" floating around, and according to about.com's Dance column, more of "Mr. Brightside" on the way.

You can download a free MP3 of the Josh Harris remix of "Somebody Told Me" here.

"Romantic Me"...Or "Why The Internet Rules".

Around 1978-1982, there was this really cool band that played around NYC called Polyrock. They played that kind of jerky, angular new wavey stuff that was all the rage downtown at the time (think Talking Heads & Television), but they were heavy on the electronics, and more danceable. Their first couple of albums (put out by RCA) were produced by Phillip Glass (!!) and were really adventurous, but accessible in a dance-pop kind of way. I'd seen them play live a few times, the last being a really fun bill the shared with Our Daughter's Wedding in the student center at Rutgers in New Brunswick.

I had some of their music on cassette, but as cassettes are want to do, they either vanished under the seat of somebody's car after a trip down the shore or into the city, or they melted and twisted themselves into unplayablity on that little shelf behind the car's rear window.

Anyway, I've been searching for their music, or at least a copy of their best known song "Romantic Me" for the better part of fifteen years, to no avail. Since my discovery of the MP3, I've been searching the internet for that song at least once a month, again with no success.

Today I hit paydirt.

The good people at Scenestars.net have been looking for Polyrock as well, and took it upon themselves to post "Romantic Me" and another track here. Seems like they are spearheading a campaign to get Polyrock's music reissued on CD.

If you wanna hear what Downtown NYC sounded like back in the day, Polyrock is a pretty nice slice.

--Post Script--
Scenestars has since posted links to the entire ROIR Polyrock Demos & Live Cassette ripped to MP3 here. Nice.

If Michelangelo Had An iPod...

I've been painting my new basement room (a.k.a. "The Lair") accompanied by my iPod and the cool Harmon-Kardon speaker thing that lets you crank your music like it's coming out of a pimped-out Escalade.

Monday night's playlist:

Foreigner - "Best Of"
Arcade Fire - "Funeral"

Tonight's playlist:

The Cars - "Candy-O"
The Dandy Warhols - "13 Tales Of Urban Bohemia"
David Bowie - "Changesone"

That Cars record always sounds so cool to me, especially Elliot Easton's guitars...I've got to play that record for a teenager to see if they can guess how old it is...no way does it sound 25 years old.


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Assault With A Deadly Meat Product

This is why I don't hang out in Oklahoma prisons much:

Pork Chop Assault

Rock Me, Joe.

I saw The Pixies last night at the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC in their second show of a string of eight and had a ball.

I hadn't seen them since 1991, when they played on a barge on the water at Le Ronde amusement park in Montreal, opening for Love & Rockets. I remember they sounded great then, but then again I was so loaded on $2 Laurentide Beers that it could have been Corey Hart and Celine Dion up there instead of Black Francis and Kim Deal and I might not have noticed. I'd seen them twice prior to that in more coherent situations.

Last night they played about 30 songs in rapid fire sequence, all of which were killer. It wasn't until the very end of the show when Joey Santiago goofed up (possibly purposely), "La La Love You" that any of the songs sounded less than brilliant. I bought a double-CD copy of the show from Pixies Discs which should be delivered first week of January...that oughta be a hoot to load onto the iPod and re-live.

The crowd was a bit reserved, in typical New Yorky seen-it-all-fashion, but by the end of the night it looked like most of the place appropriately loosened up.

Kim Deal is still way cool.

Tickets were being sold on the street for a mere $20 before the show. It's always great to see the scalpers get scalped. At that price, I may try to catch them once more before the end of the run Saturday night.

More reviews can be found at the always excellent Brooklyn Vegan.

BTW, (like I don't have enough time to type "by-the-way"), they are on Letterman Tuesday night.

Here's how they looked at the first show, courtesy nytimes.com:

This Is Why Electric Six Rules.

In case you thought "Danger! High Voltage!" and "Gay Bar" was the last you'd hear of the amazing Electric Six, I'm proud to give you their video for their cover of Queen's "Radio Ga Ga".

Righteous.