Category: Rock ‘n’ Roll Photog

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Name That Face: Happy Flowers vs Happy Mondays

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Name That Face: the series inspired by Jennifer’s adventures in musician misidentification over the years. For anyone who has ever misremembered a band name at a crucial record purchasing moment and tragically bought Patty Smyth rather than Patti Smith; melded “Arctic Monkeys” with “Wolf Parade” and Googled in vain for “Arctic Parade” or “Wolf Monkeys”; or been unsure whether they want something by Swiiim or SWIMM. To tell your own tale of woe, drop Jennifer an email.

Happy Flowers VS Happy Mondays

The Time: November 1988

The Place: A hospital in suburban Virginia

What happened?

I was 13, and recovering from major surgery. My parents, being dear, sweet, people, offered to bring me some new music to listen to while I was trapped in bed. I requested: The Happy Flowers. They checked the name several times. Yes, I said, I’m sure. I was very, very keen to get hold of their music. I had been waiting for months for it to be released. The new Happy Flowers tape was absolutely the one thing I wanted.

A day or two later, a brand new copy of I Crush Bozo was delivered to my eager little hands.

I felt a pang of disquiet just looking at the cover. But I pressed onwards – I mean, bands but all sorts of random things on album covers, right?

This is the first track on I Crush Bozo:
 
http://youtu.be/ysMSuUgVdDQ
 

I listened to it in a state of baffled shock. Maybe just the first song is bad, I thought, and kept going.

No.

They were all terrible.

(I was not an experimental noise fan at the time. I am, now, and I still don’t like it.)

I hit the “stop” button and sat there, glaring at the tape in horrified confusion, wondering what had gone wrong.

Eventually I put it away; it sat in my music collection for years, a stone on my mental shoe. I wondered, frequently, what I had really been looking for.

Twenty years later, I was making my way through a Stuart Maconie book – I think it was Pies and Prejudice – when, thanks to one of his musical digressions, I realized what I had done.

My clue was Maconie mentioning that the Flowers had gotten some US press in the late ’80s, which was approximately the same time I was ducking into the magazine section at Tower Records to read Circus and anything else involving guitars and/or tattoos in rushed 10 minute bursts, while my parents picked out movies to watch.

Somehow, between relying on jumbled memories of hastily read material and trying to think around the last of the anesthetic fog, I had confused the Happy Flowers with the Happy Mondays.

This Wrote for Luck, a song from Bummed, by the Happy Mondays, released in, indeed, November of 1988:
 

Happy Mondays - Wrote For Luck

 

And that is much more what I would have been into at the time.

Mystery: solved.

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A Good Read A Good Listen and a Good Drink, Chris Jones, Ghost Twins

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It’s a simple yet sublime pleasure, and just thinking about it can make you feel a little calmer, a little more content. Imagine: You bring out one of the good rocks glasses (or your favorite mug or a special occasion tea cup) and pour a couple fingers of amber liquid (or something dark and strong or just some whole milk). You drop the needle on the jazz platter (or pull up a blues album on your mp3 player or dig out that mixtape from college). Ensconcing yourself in the coziest seat in the house, you crack the spine on a classic (or find your place in that sci-fi paperback or pull up a biography on your e-book reader). And then, you go away for a while. Ah, bliss.

In this series, some of NTSIB’s friends share beloved albums, books and drinks to recommend or inspire.

The last time I shared a Ghost Twins song, it was Dream On/Dream Off, which is a zippy up-tempo number. Today I bring you Unknown Animal, which starts off at the other end of the “dream noise pop” spectrum – it’s slower, and a little more unearthly – and then suddenly kicks into gear.

And I’m sharing it in video format because, you guys, this video is kind of dream-like itself. In the sense that it starts off with a “behind the scenes” vibe, detours through trippy and weird and then becomes a concert video.

 

Ghost Twins - Unknown Animal

 
After listening to the tracks, I was curious about the two gentlemen who created them. So joining us today is Chris Jones (vocals/guitar), to share a favorite read, record and drink:

A Good Read: Charles Bukowski – Come On In!

The poem This Machine is a Fountain is stuck up on my desk at work. It’s a great poem to refer back to whenever creating any type of art.

A Good Listen: The Velvet Underground and Nico
This record manages to travel across many, many genres but still retain its focus. Pop, folk, punk, rock n’ roll and avant-garde noise perfectly sit next to each other. Nobody else could have achieved it.
 
http://youtu.be/iLQzaLr1enE
 
A Good Drink: BrewDog Punk IPA.

The name and label drew me to it at first. And even if a lot of Brew Dog drinks are un-drinkable (Tactical Nuclear Penguin for example) the balance of the punk beer is pretty spot on. It also helps that I can get it from Sainsbury’s rather than having to order it from Scotland.

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Video: Fé, Time

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Good morning, NTSIBbers. Here is the video for Time, the first single from Fé, aka Ben Moorhouse and Leo Duncan, of London.

They first started writing together in a meat container under the Westway (elevated highway) that Duncan was living in at the time; he moved there after the houseboat he was living in on the Thames started taking on water.

You’d never know all of that from this song, though. It’s a mellow tune, and the video is sweet casual-stroll-through-a-lush-sunny-cider-farm moment of zen – with a little surprise at the end.
 

Fé - Time (Official Video)

 

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Colornoise, Polychronic

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Colornoise are Sonya Carmona (lead vocals/guitar) and Alison Alvarado (drums/vocals), and they are from Costa Rica. Polychronic is their second full-length record.

As you may have guessed from their name, they play experimental noise. There are aggressive guitars, steady drums, the occasional burst of bright keyboard tones, and just enough fuzz and distortion to make things interesting.

Here is Button, the first song on the record; I like the alternating guitar tones at the beginning and the thudding beat:
 

 
And Pieces, which blends some excellent menacing guitar with Carmona’s eerie vocals:
 

 
And finally, Weblocks, which might be my favorite, and is a heavy, droning meditation on net-censoring software and/or the hidden horrors of the Internet:
 

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Zero Zero, DannytheStreet

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While we’re on the subject of clearing the electronica haze out of my head (albeit briefly) there’s this awesome little piece of rock n’ roll ephemera, which I was reminded of this weekend via the magic of Soundcloud.

Also, while there seem to be a lot of Danny The Streets out there, this particular one is Gerard Way, formerly of My Chemical Romance.

 

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Le Trouble, Reality Strikes

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Le Trouble are from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Their debut EP, Reality Strikes, will be released into the wild this coming Tuesday (November 5), and if you like punk rock dance parties, you should pick it up.

Here are two songs from it, to serve an enticements.

I’ve been an a weird electronica haze lately. Mission Bell was the perfect high energy palate-cleanser. The burst of bracing guitar at the beginning is especially refreshing.
 

 
Real Talk (Part 2) for when you need to break up with your significant other right now. It is probably the bounciest kiss-off I’ve heard for a while.
 

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SWF, Let It Be Told

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swfletitbetold

I am not going to lie, this record – Let It Be Told, by SWF (Stevie Weinstein Foner) – really made me cranky at first.

Then after a couple of listens, it grew on me. No, not like a fungus. More like moss. Psychedelic moss.

Now I find myself queueing it up with the express purpose of wrapping it around myself like a (slightly fuzzy, perhaps faintly horse-and-patchouli-scented) aural blanket.

There are songs like Turtle Brain that have lyrics like hey turtle brain, sparrow eyes, purple haze which is both a puzzle and someone I feel like I’ve met, all at the same time:
 

 
And Warrior, for rallying the internal troops / providing a late-afternoon jolt of energy:
 

 
And also Automobile Blues, which I like because sometimes I do miss driving around listening to the radio. But it does just as well with the rumble of the uptown train as with the roar of the highway.
 

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A Good Read A Good Listen and a Good Drink, ALX, Love Crushed Velvet

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It’s a simple yet sublime pleasure, and just thinking about it can make you feel a little calmer, a little more content. Imagine: You bring out one of the good rocks glasses (or your favorite mug or a special occasion tea cup) and pour a couple fingers of amber liquid (or something dark and strong or just some whole milk). You drop the needle on the jazz platter (or pull up a blues album on your mp3 player or dig out that mixtape from college). Ensconcing yourself in the coziest seat in the house, you crack the spine on a classic (or find your place in that sci-fi paperback or pull up a biography on your e-book reader). And then, you go away for a while. Ah, bliss.

In this series, some of NTSIB’s friends share beloved albums, books and drinks to recommend or inspire.

I first encountered Love Crushed Velvet a couple of year ago when they were part of a Beatles on the Ukelele production in Brooklyn. One of the songs they covered was Back in the U.S.S.R.; afterwards lead singer ALX and I bonded over being among the few people in the room old enough to remember the U.S.S.R., and then I found out their original work was pretty great, too.

On a related change-of-world-order note, here is the video for Revolution Time, inspired by the Arab Spring of 2011, from their recently released EP Delusions.

"REVOLUTION TIME" - Love Crushed Velvet [Official Music Video]

 

When I asked ALX to be part of this series, I decided to, if not start a revolution, at least shake up the status quo a little bit, and gave him this picture of pumpkins on 34th Street as a prompt:
 

IMG_4222

Here is what he sent back:

Autumn. The shortening days, the crispness in the air whispering that summer has passed. T-shirts surrender to light sweaters, leather jackets replace denim. Sneakers are put away and boots—and the attitude that they convey—give us an added bit of swagger as they shape our strut from block to New York City block. While autumn changes how we dress and feel, it also reshapes our sensibilities…in music, in drink, in literature.

Music. The day I am writing this is the day that Lou Reed passed away. The quintessential embodiment of New York rock n roll attitude, his music never felt like a part of summertime—it was the sounds of October and November that came out of the stereo when his records were being played. And today, it’s impossible not to play Transformer, arguably his finest solo album. Walk on the Wild Side is most famous song, but Satellite of Love and Perfect Day are perhaps his finest—it’s hard not to choke up when you listen to them, especially today . . .
 

Lou Reed - Perfect Day - Later... with Jools Holland (2003) - BBC Two

 

October also makes us want to start enjoying heavier drinks again. Thicker beers, and . . . whiskey. When listening to Transformer, I couldn’t resist the urge to whip up my own version of a Sazerac, a great potion based on rye whiskey. Just seemed like the right thing to drink today.

It’s also the “perfect day” to re-read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, a brilliant book that explores the challenges of managing relationships between complex, unfulfilled characters. I’d originally read it while writing some of the songs on our new EP, Delusions, and it felt appropriate to bring it around again on this late October evening. The emotional temperature of the book is pure autumn—and it’s infused with some rock ‘n roll characters that remind me of some of the individuals that I’ve encountered in my own life. Great read.

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Introducing: Willie Dick

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Every once in a while, I get emails from artists, review their work, and then sit at my desk blinking rapidly and thinking What the actual hell did I just watch?

Sometimes I dig deeper and it doesn’t go well; other times I’m seduced by raw charisma and want to share my joyful bafflement with everyone I know.

Willie Dick, of Glasgow, Scotland, falls firmly into the latter category. His work will turn your brain sidewise and you will like it.

This is Deeper Darker, a truly unsettling tale from his Halloween special album Halloween Horror (download it for free at bandcamp!):

WILLIE DICK - Deeper Darker

 
And then there is My House My Rules, created while he was squatting in an abandoned nursing college and morgue (!), which includes Deeper Darker, but also infectious bangers like I Will Be Your Juliet:
 

WILLIE DICK – I Will Be Your Juliet from Billy Campbell on Vimeo.

 
Merry Gothic Christmas, y’all. Have fun, be safe, we’ll see you back here tomorrow.