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A Good Read, A Good Listen and a Good Drink: Andy Abbott, That Fucking Tank

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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.

My first introduction to That Fucking Tank was the video I posted a couple of weeks ago, for Making A Meal For Beethoven, one of the songs from their 10th Anniversary record A Document of the Last Set.

I watched it a couple of times, boggling, and then, because I’m always into people who are creative with reverb, static and feedback, I asked for more.

You guys, these gentlemen are really good with reverb, static and feedback. Take, for example, Bruce Springstonehenge.

It is, as you might have guessed, their rendition of a Springsteen song. I have a rule, with Springsteen: If you’re going to go there, don’t fuck it up. Do not, for example, try to play Born to Run on the xylophone and casually butcher it.

I’m not going to tell you which song this is, because that will ruin the surprise, but: they did not fuck it up. They took the sturdy bones of the song and made something new, different, and great. This version is from an earlier record, but you’ll get the idea:
 

 
Here’s another one, that’s all them: A Wonderful World Of, which starts out jammy and contemplative and then kicks into gear:
 

 

Anyway, after listening to all these and more, I definitely wanted to know more about them. So today, here is Andy Abbott, the man behind the baritone guitar, to tell us about a favorite book, record and drink. There’s a little bit of a twist to the proceedings this week: I gave him a prompt of “Halloween.” Here is what he had to say:

A Good Book: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.
This is a post apocalyptic sci-fi neo-primitivist journey-of-discovery novel set in an unrecordable time in the future. It’s based in Kent and is written in this weird mutation of the South Eastern accent.

It describes a society that has returned to the Iron Age following a nuclear disaster and the protagonist slowly pieces back together the events that led them to their current state. It’s a grim, dirty book and slow reading but has this odd euphoric, hopeful feeling throughout. I’m currently working on a music and film project with my other band Nope and artist Eoin Shea that takes it as a starting point.
 

 
A Good Drink: Most ales by Magic Rock
Magic Rock are a Huddersfield-based brewery that started a few years back. they make exceptionally tasty ales which is saying something given the proliferation of ‘craft breweries’ and the like, especially in Yorkshire. Curious is great, as is High Wire and Human Cannonball. Apparently the brewer is a Tank fan. Their design is also mint.

A Good Album: SAW2 [Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II] by Aphex Twin / No Pussyfooting by Fripp and Eno

I’m assuming that the album is to be chosen to go with the book and the drink in which case I’d want something pretty long and immersive.

I’d probably go for Selected Ambient Works II by Aphex Twin, or No Pussyfooting by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. They’d allow me to soak up the vibes and relax into an aled-up stupor quite nicely.
 


 
http://youtu.be/elTuRy7OhgQ

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Husky Burnette, Tales From East End Blvd

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huskyburnette_tales_cd_1024x1024

Tales from East End Blvd is the latest from Husky Burnette, and it is awesome. If you like good stories and sweet dirty rockin’ blues, you need to add this to your collection right now.

Here are two of my favorite tracks:

Beat & Low Down, because if this song doesn’t make you want to either dance or commit indiscretions or both, I don’t know what will:
 

Husky Burnette - Beat & Lowdown

 
On My Way, because it is a sober, sorrowful, prayer of song; the summation of a lifetime of pain and hard work accompanied by spare, delicate picking.
 

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Raccoon Fighter, ZIL

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racfight

Raccoon Fighter is: Sean Gavigan (vocals, guitar), Zac Ciancaglini (drums), and Gabe Wilhelm (bass), of Brooklyn, and ZIL is their debut record.

It is an extended burst of urgent, aggressive bluesy-surfy noise, and it is glorious. This is music for the true definition of adventure, i.e. “bad idea going to end in bruises.”

Here are some of my favorite tracks:

Santa Tereza combines surfy hooks and a little bit of hypnotic drone:
 

 
Street Urchins will meet all of your crazy-in-love, put-the-pedal-down-and-drive-to-the-sea road trip needs:
 

 
Pyramid Scheme to Heaven, where the drums slow down to a menacing thud-thud and become a dark heart amid droning, distorted guitars:
 

New Yorkers and people coming to town for CMJ: They’re playing a bunch of shows in the next two weeks, including an album release party this Friday, Oct. 4, at Cake Shop, the O+ Festival on Oct. 12 in Kingston, NY and CMJ showscases at the Rock Shop on 10/15 and the Delancey on 10/18. Go and check them out, it will be fun.

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Rural Ghosts, City of Elms

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ruralghosts2

Rural Ghosts are from Portland, Maine. City of Elms is their most recent release, and I am sharing it today because I am really fond of the way the cello adds depth and warmth as it winds through the drums and guitar.

For example, here is Tenant, which slowly spins up into a quasi-psychadelic jam, with all of the jagged edges held together by the cello:
 

And also Worried Man, where the cello provides the bounce:
 

If you like what you hear, stop by their bandcamp on Oct. 1 to get the rest!

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cata9tales, Hello Maybe Everything

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cata9tales is: Berkley Priest (vocals) and Kreator (Kenny Perkins) (beats), and they’re from Baltimore and Virginia and are currently based in Baltimore.

Hello Maybe Everything is their most recent record. It is an extraordinary, visceral, aggressive torrent of words and pop-cultural references. My first thought on listening to it was, no lie, “these dudes are going to keep the people at Rap Genius in business all by themselves.”

For example, in their first song, things they mash together include but are not limited to: Guns n’ Roses, Jay-Z, Wizard of Oz, Jungle Book, the Bible and Valley of the Dolls:
 

 
There is also Children of the Cloud, which is a complex riff on modern living and the weird things internet culture / living on internet time does to our brains that starts with a Dorothy Parker quote and then – in just the first verse – slaloms through two centuries worth of the concept of “frontier” before hitting a crescendo with All around the Starfleet they coming out their carseats which I’m pretty sure sums up both the connections and the yawning cultural chasm between those present for the birth of the web and those who have been on the web since birth in, like, nine words.

Though my favorite line is probably So you got a broken heart? Well there’s an app for that.
 

 
And then there is A Conspiracy of Ravens, featuring Brad Bass, Crafsmen, Cream De La “The Tenman” which is just Baltimore: raw, beautiful, brutal, and capable of being home to Edgar Allen Poe and Omar Little.
 

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AustraliA, Robot

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Australia Copertina!!

Okay, so, first things first: AustraliA is Olga (drums/bass/synth) and Mr. Xicano (guitar/vocals) and they are not Australian. They’re from Pisa, Italy, and they play synth-heavy, hard-fuzz punk rock.

I like them because they’re brash and refreshing and just going for it.

Here are two of my favorite tracks from Robot:

Hotter Than Me, where they stomp on the fuzz pedal and then drop in some jaggedly perfect synth arpeggios just to keep things interesting:
 

 
It Will Be, where the steady, distorted, surfy chug of the guitar is the background against which the bright sharp clean synths sparkle and shine:
 

 

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Ghost Twins, Dream On/Dream Off

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Ghost Twins (formerly Crushing Blow) are from Derby, England, and arrived in my inbox as “dream noise pop.” This might seem like a contradiction in (genre) terms, but, you know, not all dreams are quiet and slow. Some are very exciting. This song would have been the perfect soundtrack for the one I had recently where I had to jump a tall ship in full sail over a waterfall.

Dream On/Dream Off is half of a Double A single to be released October 7 through Snug Recording Co.; their debut album is expected after Christmas.

 

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Late Night Listening: Robbie Fulks, Gone Away Backwards

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Robbie Fulks - Photo credit: Dino Stamatopoulos

Robbie Fulks – Photo credit: Dino Stamatopoulos

I don’t know what it is about this record that encourages listening to it in the middle of the night, but that’s when I keep coming back to it: at the end of the day, and in the late/small hours.

I have a suspicion it might be the fiddle, though. I do like a fiddle late at night. (Actually I like a fiddle all the time.) And the lyrics, which have some bite, a little more so than country lyrics usually do.

And this is definitely a country record. Its roots are sunk deep, way past the current topsoil of pop-country, into the bedrock of the open fields and rocky hills of the genre.

It’s also a little bit of commentary on how the genre of country has changed, along with the culture, and, in the case of That’s Where I’m From and Sometimes The Grass Is Really Greener, how where you are from makes you who you really are.

Which, as I prepare to go back to the place where I grew up to visit with people I haven’t seen in 20 years, is probably the real reason I keep circling back to listen to these songs again and again.

It is, in summary, the kind of record that encourages both serious thinking and singing along.

Here are two tracks from the record, so you can hear what I mean:

Long I Ride is a meditative examination of bad decisions with fast-picking and harmonica:
 

 
When I Get to The Bottom is a post-break-up “screw you” song, and I love it:
 

Special memo to Cleveland: Mr. Fulks is doing a record release show at the Beachland Ballroom on September 29, 2013. Get on down there and see him.

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Dúo del Sol, hello Kaleidoscope

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Album art by Michele Mikesell

Album art by Michele Mikesell

Dúo del Sol is Tom Farrell (guitar/vocals) and Javier Orman (violin/vocals), and they are from Los Angeles, via Chicago and Uruguay.

hello Kaleidoscope is their first full length record, and features assistance from Oscar ‘Luminoso’ Rospide (accordion), Cameron Stone (cello), Derek Stein (cello) and Andrew Bush (percussion) on some tracks.

Their sound is an awesome intoxicating swirl of classical forms and world music (mostly Latin) rhythms, and is kind of like a fine red wine: you have to do the aural equivalent of letting it breathe, i.e. just sit back and listen to it. Allow yourself to be swept up and away.

These are a few of my favorite tracks:

Never The Same River Twice, in which the violin sings a song of longing and adventure, accompanied by a cello and guitar that sound like the steady movement of water.
 

 
Louie, which unfurls and expands slowly, like a delicate, complicated rose:
 

 
And finally Satoomba, in which the guitar and the violin are dancing a flashy, sexy tango:
 

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Oum Shatt, Power to The Women of the Morning Shift

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Oum Shatt is: Jonas Poppe (Kissogram; guitar/vocals/keys), Philipp Bellinger (guitar), John Donald (bass) and Chris Imler (Driver and Driver, Die Türen; drummer), and they are from Berlin.

As for the name: “Oum” means “mother” in Arabic and in this case is also a homage to Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum, aka the Queen of Classical Arab music.

The music Oum Shatt makes combines delicate dark electronica with both surf guitar and traditional Arabic sounds, and the result is both unusual and lovely.

As an example, here is the titular song of the EP:
 

 
And also Hot Hot Cold Cold, which showcases some of the fancy guitar work: