Space and the City
Posts tagged POWERHOUSE!
THE 2008 SKYLINE 50 – PART FIVE
Dec 19th
Our look at the 50 songs that were Houston music to us in 2008 wraps up today, as does voting in for the Sammies (at noon). Be sure to swing by our party Saturday night at Big Star to get the inside scoop on all our winners, and to sit and sip to the souds of all the songs on our list. Thanks for reading.
Underwater Staggie – The Mathletes
We’re the Mathletes and We’re From Houston so How About That Vol. 1 (All Star Power Up Records)
From their disc of covers of H-Town compatriots, this re-imagining of the Hearts of Animals original mines the furthest reaches of HOA’s occasional delicate shoegaze tendencies. Beginning in a reverberating warm lake of fuzzy guitar delay and harmonics, it suddenly quick shifts into a slide-acoustic and tippity top drumming that hews more closely to the spirit, if not the sound, of the original. Again, for all the goof in their collected recordings, it’s sometimes easy to wonder if the Matletes intend to be taken seriously or if it’s another Guilloteenesque example of one original sin joke playing itself out over a rather extended period. But to hear Joe Mathlete cry out “you stop singing, shush shush shuhs, I’ll stop stop singing” we know that his heart is as invested in those words as if he was the animal that wrote them and that’s a beautiful thing.
Weak at Heart – The Sour Notes
The Meat of the Fruit (self released)
This song makes us think of summer of senior year, with a class ring still on your finger and a stupid jacket on your back, uniwttingly falling in love late at night in chain diners and fast food resturants under flourescent lights too bright and diffuse to catch the glimmer in an overlooked beau’s eyes until it’s much to late. Before your lungs were blackened and your liver curdled and heart greyed with bad decisions, you were in a place where the world sounded like this, where aquas and pastel pinks were sincere and most of your major decisions involved deciding which t-shirt to wear. Only art can take us back to places like this. Thank God for it.
Westward – Buxton
A Family Light (Mia Kat)
This whole romp sounds like the entirety of Buxton is riding on the back of a bucking bronco that’s fleeing the ghosts of Eddy Arnold and Marty Robbins, who are both giving chase because they think these city kids have figured out how to bottle lightning and the new sound of the Old West in a sarsaparilla flavored elixir. Never has a song about ditching friends and family been so much fun, and then suddenly they round a corner and Charlie Daniels is there shouting THEY’VE STOLEN THE SECRET TO WHIPS USE OF THE FIDDLE! GET EM BOYS!
Who We Are! – Powerhouse
Yeah! (Self Released)
If there was never a time in your life when you knew which of your shoes were better for dancing than the others and part of your Saturday pre-party ritual included swapping out ties with your boys and strutting around the house you were all getting reading at as a gang listening to your favorite jams and feeling like the most insider outsiders in the whole world and then hitting the club and raising your outstretched hand to heaven at the climax of your favorite song and not giving a fuck and dancing with your boys instead of girls cause who needs them, then you should probably try listening to this song a lot and if it doesn’t give you that kind of a feeling then we wouldn’t worry about it because you’re likely already dead and so you should practice your harp.
503 – Flowers to Hide
Down the Stairs (Self Released)
After what seems like forever (and lord knows how many lineup changes, brief hiatuses, and aborted attempts in the studio) Flowers to Hide finally put out a record this year that captures the primal vision of who they are. No mater how good the live acoustics, they’ve never been able to get across the nuanced swirling of their guitar assault as effectively and beautifully as they do on this and all the other tracks on 503. On the stage, it often is just loud, here in beautiful headphoned comfort, available in your pocket whenever you need it, it comes across as intended – layer after delicious, devilish layer.
SPECIAL INELIGIBLE BONUS TRACKS
OK. So, we like to break the rules, and one of them we are breaking this year is including a few tracks that didn’t really meet our requirements to get on the countdown, either because they previously appeared on recordings covered in our countdown or never made the jump to a physical artifact. We’re also going to take this opportunity to stop writing because we’re just chock out of ways to be endlessly self referrential about our past and kinda need to go out and have some new stuff happen to us so we can have memories to mine for next year.
A Day in the Life of Walter Price – Piano Vines
Unreleased
Asteroid B-16 – Tod the Fox
Unreleased
Doctor Doctor – Young Mammals
Young Mammals (Self Released)
Underwater Staggie – Hearts of Animals
Hearts of Animals 7″ (Dull Knife)
All My Love – Kidd The Great
Unreleased
OK OK one more. One night we caught a cab from our place to Walter’s to check out a Golden Axe show and we got to talking with the cabbie about music and he revealed to us that he was an MC himself. So he popped a cd in the deck and we started seriously feeling this song, and we kinda recognized the sample but couldn’t really place it and weren’t terrible worried because after all the beats were sticky and his flow was good and then suddenly he (on the track, not behind the wheel), put the punctuation on a verse with the lyric “and thats all of my love” and then suddenly Robert Plant cried out “All of My Love” and we lost our freaking minds cause it was so good. So yeah, the only way to hear this track is to catch a ride in his cab (it’s not even on his MySpace) and ask to hear it and did we mention that his business card also outlines the fact that he offers voice lessons, studio time and that if you want to book him for a show he needs at least one hour notice. No joke.
THE 2008 SKYLINE 50 – PART FOUR
Dec 18th
Part four of our series! Don’t forget, voting for the Sammies closes tomorrow at noon!
Runin Down – Fired For Walking
Fired For Walking (Self Released)
You know the whispers in the back of the room when people talk about this track are usually about Pearl Jam so screw that we’re just going to come on out and do it. Remember back before Eddie Vedder cut his locks and suddenly became a prime target for defrizzing hair product and he was all “THOUGHTS ARRIVE LIKE BUTTERFLIES?!” Yeah well at some point he became all save the surfers or something, and look at me I’m playing drums in Hovercraft how edgy an ooh laa laa, and we’ve got all these acoustic guitars and we clearly, from the photos in the center spread, hunkered down in some sort of log cabin to record this next one, so it has a lot of introspection, like we invented Bon Iver before he even existed. Yeah forget about that crap. We’re talking about Ten here. It’s not that “Runin Down” is some sort of grandma’s preserves copy of the songs on that record (though there certainly are welcome parallels in the guitar approach), it’s more the spirit, the fire, the attitude. Like we totally expect when they’re playing this that Joel is going to take this opportunity to swing like a crazy person from the rafters during the guitar solo instead of swinging some douchebag political banner off a bridge because someone indigenous canoe race is threatening the majestic wonders of Puget Sound. Ripping!
Saved by the Bell Was a Super Good Show – O Pioneers!!!
Neon Creeps (Asian Man Records)
Congratulations on winning best song title of the year. Praise the Skreech this track is good, because otherwise we would have had to figure out some way to get it in the countdown somehow and it would have just ended up making us look like a bunch of jerks who judge merit by Weird Al-dian criteria alone (but real talk: Weird Al has been killing it lately). With trademark jangly guitar and bro,-consider-taking-the-night-off vocals Bell (and the rest of the album) contradicts our previous claims that a bass would just get in the way in this band. Somehow, O Pioneers!!! have cubed the rubix of making something catchy and hard while still authentic and damaged; tough and yet sensitive. The AC Slater of songs.
Shake It – The Caprolites
Grey Ghost #55 (Grey Ghost)
There are pretty much four stages we went through with this song. Stage One: Ugh. Is that it? Just the same thing over and over? Stage Two: Heh, ok we’re being a grouch this is kind of fun. Stage Thee: (Hums riff quietly to self during long morning meeting). Stage Four: Song is officially added to most extreme party call me get pumped up for Saturday night pre-party playlist. It’s true, this hand clappin’ party pogo of a song is kind of irresistible, (if a little longer than most party anthems). Scrawnly like a baby bird, it’s kind of easy to picture the entire band as hatchlings rocking it out in a little nest in the forest. That is a seriously random metaphor.
She Said She’s Sorry (Touch Me) – Powerhouse
Yeah! (Self Released)
You know how in the bizzaro world things aren’t really the opposite, just kind of a weird version of ourselves. Like maybe pizza is made with cornmeal crusts and has the cheese under the sauce or Detroit made cars that people wanted to buy, but instead of being located in Michigan, motor city was built on a magical floating barge that cruises from pier to pier on Lake Huron. Or perhaps all cab rides included free milk and haircombs. Sometimes when we listen to this song and contemplate that it’s not a super megahit and available as a bonus level on guitar hero and there are no Powerhouse action figures we start to seriously asses whether we are, in fact, actually living in the bizzaro dimension on accident.
Shelter – Paris Falls
Volume II (Paper Weapons Records)
You know, probably our favorite thing to do is go to Big Star Bar, find a smoldering ember of a log left over from the night before, and then use it to build a fire from scratch. No matches. No lighter fluid. Just leaves, kindling and the concerted application of our own windbaggery towards the materials. When you have the right collection of leaves on the source heat, there is a moment where it just combusts into flame. Not a slow burn or a little itty bitty flicker, just BANG FIRE. Like fuel source and ambient temperature were like “oh say man lets do this thing” and then they just click. That’s kind of how we imagine this song came together, like the elements for it were there in Paris Falls’ repertoire and someone sat at the Rhodes and hit a few keys and then BANG SHELTER the whole band was playing it.
Soup John Dot Com – Jenny Westbury
Jenny French and the Pelican Wrench (All Star Power Up Records)
One thing that much of Pelican Wrench doesn’t do very well is convey how light hearted time spent with Jenny Westbury is. Especially when she’s on the stage, she’s got a knack for making things fun even when there’s a thin slice of gloom on top of her goofy meatball sandwich. What this track does is remind us of that, it even puts the album as a whole into a more proper context of “oh yeah, just because this is someone playing an acoustic guitar alone doesn’t mean that every moment is all serious serious and the serious seriousnesses.” Besides, its a song about making soup, and who doesn’t like to make soup. CROCK POT CITY! PS: Jenny come home for the holidays KTHNX.
Spanish In Jazz – Wild Moccasins
Diamonds for Constellations (Grey Ghost)
We remember the first time we heard about Wild Moccasins it was because Elaine Greer’s drummer was all “nuh i gotta go play in this other band” and then we heard Nick Cody did the same thing and we were all WHO ARE THESE ASSHOLES AND WHY ARE THEY LEAVING THE ELAINE GREER BAND BECAUSE ITS LIKE THE BEST THING GOING RIGHT NOW ALL CAPS SHOUT OUT OUT LOUD! So, to say that we didn’t like this band before we ever heard them is kinda putting it mildly. But you know what, we gotta say, even before they completely sold us on their live performances, we were taken aback by this song and that’s saying alot.
Swans – Indian Jewelry
Free Gold! (We Are Free Records)
See below.
Too Much Honkey Tonking – Indian Jewelry
Free Gold! (We Are Free Records)
We have this fantasy where the Mucky Duck books Indian Jewelry sound unheard just cause their name sounds like they would be a country band and they are mid set and absolutely sandblasting the place to the point where a rip develops in spacetime and out steps 1987 Bono midway through his Rattle and Hum Sunday, Bloody Sunday rant right when he shouts “FUCK THE REVOLUTION” and the whole place goes hog wild and all the tables and chairs are destroyed and carried out to the street for a massive bonfire and then Bono buys everyone there an Audi from the dealership across the street and a massive Ronin-esque car chase ensues and everyone ends up at Blanco’s when the sun starts to rise and are feeling the weight of the evening on them as they eat breakfast tacos and a sassy barmaid kind of stands there in disbelief and utters “Geez. Now that’s what I call too much honkeytonkin.”
Two Ways – The Gold Sounds
The Gold Sounds (Self Released)
No song has ever, ever made us look East. Actually, we can’t think of a song that anyone has ever BSed their way through a description of where their heart or mind turns East (except maybe to be destroyed by the sunrise rather than run from it). It should say something about the power the concepts of Manifest Destiny and Go West Young Man still have in the collective uncousness of us as Americans. There’s no one even alive anymore that knew anyone that rode in a wagon or gave a mountain its European name or etched out a quiet and satisfying living on a piece of land they owned only because no one else did. And yet, the west, as both a physical space and even more abstractly as just a direction, still connotates optimism, opportunity and a chance to start. Sometimes, everybody needs a little bit of a rebirth. When we do, we put this song on and watch the sun set, in the west and hold tight to its perfection. Of all the things we might change about ourselves, its comforting to contemplate them to the sound of something we wouldn’t change one bit.
THE 2008 SKYLINE 50 – PART ONE
Dec 15th
HORRAY! IT’S SAMMIES WEEK! As you may recall from year past, to help satiate your craven craving curiosity in the lead-up to the announcement of this year’s Sammy Awards winners we offer up a little something called the Skyline 50. That is, 50 songs that caught our ear this year for one reason or another. Now, it would be wrong to call this our 50 favorite or the 50 best because, let’s face it, we would just list the five tracks from Powerhouse‘s Yeah! ep and call it a day as we would rather listen to that ten times in a row than anything else. So maybe it’s more like our 50 favorite songs if we limited ourself to just a few Powerhouse! tracks. Oh, and once again, all these bands lucked out by there not being a Golden Axe release. Rules are same as last year, where the song must have been on a physical release of some sort and have come out since the last time we did this. Songs are listen in alphabetical order.
PS: Don’t forget to vote in the Sammies! Especially if you are into bands that are not from Pasadena, because those are the only people winning right now. Seriously.
Acrylic Tomb – Wicked Poseur
Wicked Poseur/Little Trooper 7″ (Shdwply Records)
More than their self-titled 2007 7″ debut, this split with Norfolk’s Little Trooper captures the primacy of guitars in Wicked Poseur’s live performance, a welcome evolution. Though still lock-stepped to the regular beat of a drum machine, by having the human touch of the six string at the forefront, the anything can happen element of frontman Arthur Bates’ personality gets a big bottom boost (along with the overall fullness of the composition). Simple China Girl keyboard sprigs counterpoint vocals that rarely take a breather and punch up a surprisingly punchy dance track that manages to avoid the pitfalls of both New Wave worship and too-little too-late electroclashism.
Adventure Renor – Giant Princess
Grey Ghost #61 (Grey Ghost)
Spunky throwback to the uncollapsed heyday of early 90′s college radio. Makes us think of park bench polariods of little consequence that ecstatic fanboys will spend their afternoons fashioning into heady zines while the Pepsi goes flat and the doorbell stays broken. Certainly the best organized of GP’s tracks, and a peek into how rawness can be done right with a little bit of heart behind it. Sorry Mario, your princess is potentially moving on to bigger castles.
Aku Benci Kamu – The Secret Prostitutes
The Secret Prostitutes 7″ (Psycho Wolf/ArseGestapo1982/Death Exlamations/Cutthroat Records)
Almost Devoesque in the application of angular speed to concerted tightness. Simple riffs spit out over a matter of fact lyrical slate that could be about working in a cola mine for all we know (The Secret Prostitutes’ songs are sung in a language said to be indigenous to Indonesia). A minute and a quarter of deadly serious sounding goof that we hope isn’t meant to be taken seriously, because it’s some serious fun. Seriously.
Death Ride – The Monocles
The Monocles/News on the March Halloween Party Split (Self Released)
Putting the brakes on their usual Camaro tempo, “Death Ride” is the menace of a black and tint Coupe de Ville, jilted lover behind the wheel with tear streaks on his face that could be from sadness, anger or madness (and why not all three). Whitewalls slowly turning, the worse half of ourselves ascribe motive to why this man is on this particular street at this particular time of the night. With the methodical, tom-dominated drums and increasingly well honed dark guitar tone of The Monocles best recording to date as the soundtrack, don’t expect that it’s going to end well for somebody, if anybody.
Big Big Jokes Jokes – BLACKIE
Wilderness of North America (Self Released)
The most interesting (and shortest) track of BLACKIE’s Pasadenaization of Grime may lack such wiley features as a 2-step beat, it does convey the off-kilterism commonly thrown about when describing the genre. With a healthy ooze of refinery slime and a taste for massively clipping volume that somehow preserves a plink plink subtelty, Big Big Jokes Jokes shows, with its chiding battery of the stereotypes of taste and self image, that there is substance behind the slapdash smokestack of his sound (even if the entire enterprise is in danger of collapsing under the hype of a very narrow band of IP addresses. Cue BLACKIE fans who take the internet too seriously calling us ‘faggots’ in the comments).
Blue Line – Andy McWilliams
The Shoegazer EP (Three Ring Records)
Years ago, when we were spending a considerable amount of time paling around with the Scattered Pages’ multi-instrumentalist Andy McWilliams, he burned us a CDr of some recordings he had been putting together under an umbrella name of his ‘shoegaze recordings’ in response to our sharing some of our own work with him that we were doing under the same nom de rock. Though neither his work or our would fall under any conventional understanding of that jazz-mastering, jaguaring genre of swoony-balooney stompbox fetishism (we appeared to both be taking the approach of litterally looking at one’s shoes in shyness), what those recordings did do was blow our minds. Fastforward to the present, and those recordings are finally getting a wider release. Blue Line, with it’s pastoral acousitcs married to drum and bass sensibilities is a standout among a collection of mostly instrumental explorations of rich sounds, honey-eared melodies and sad summer days.
Builds Brand New – Sharks and Sailors
Builds Brand New (Self Released)
Casting off any remaining doubt that they are still the plodding, loud, hipster metal act that populated their debut EP, Builds Brand New (both the album and the song) demonstrates how a re-alignment of dynamics away from brute force and towards a wider battle between greater angles and lesser demons can be both more captivating and weightier. This single song walks through a blue-water beach and a dead-dog ditch; a dumptruck with a swan’s grace; a hope with horror in the foreground. It shouldn’t ever be a suprise to see a bill with a band doing something interesting visiting town and Sharks and Sailors opening up considering most of the songs on this album are better than most of the songs on this countdown.
Carter – Woozyhelmet
Get Down (Soda Pop Productions)
Now, just because Woozyhelmet can come to your house and play in your livingroom and transform your dull chips and dips New Year’s open house into a spontanious baccalorian chariot race doesn’t mean that they play an endless series of dumb party jams or have shifted their focus from songcraft to mindless destruction and self elevation under the guise of a musical act (something sadly common). Carter is one of those jams that has your head nodding one way to the beat and another to the Brian May-bright guitar riff on the top of it all. And just when it does seem to careen into a premature end, there’s the comeback – a second round gift from a band that knows the difference between milking and satisfying as well as they do ortund and sonorous.
Champagne – The Gold Sounds
Gold Sounds EP (Self Released)
So, when you plug an electric guitar into a tube amp, the first stage (the pre-amp) amplifys the weak signal coming from the instrument’s pickups to a more managable level using a series of vacume tubes. If you amplify that signal too strongly, though, it will attempt to extend itself outside the physical limitations of the tubes, forcing an unintended modification of the original signal that results in a series of harmonics and other whatseycallsits when it comes out the other end. In short, distortion. It’s a pure, simple concept that allows for endless tinkering and variables and outcomes. In other words, its the perfect meaphor for Rock and Roll itself. Champagne is one of those pure, simple rock songs that hits all the highlights. A good, catchy riff with an amazing sounding guitar, a solid rythm section, and a fine (if harried) voice to top it all off. It shouldn’t catch us off gaurd whenever we hear something something so understandable come off sounding so effortless, but it always does.
Crooked Shepherd – Hollywood Black
Crooked Shepherd EP (Mia Kat)
You know, this spring and summer we were dating a jaw-dropper of a law student who invited us to spend a week with her in Guanajuato, Mexico which is this amazing Spanish Colonial silver town hidden away from the greasy hands of narco-gangs, neon lights and American tourists. But rather than our memories of this place being making love to the sound of cobblestone streets below or rooftop breakfasts in private gardens or cups of coffe and quiet moments holding hands or watching old couples dance in public squares while the sun goes down and fantasizing about one day joining their ranks, all we can seem to recall is the endless hours we spent wandering around waiting for her to get out of class while we listened to this record and tried to figure out how to review it. We can’t think of that amazing place or that astonishing catch of a woman without thinking of regret and our own shortcomings and this song and vice versa. So yeah, fuck this catchy ass song.
REVIEW: THE GOLD SOUNDS – EP
Oct 7th
Generally, we’re not into simple arrangements. Nothing gets us hotter than some Pet Sounds action – all those clever little nuances and parts and instruments that pop up for just a moment once in a song or an album. If there aren’t 13 overdubbed guitars playing backwards and four random beats on a tympani thrown in somewhere, we feel cheated. DANIEL LANOIS WOULD NEVER ALLOW THIS! MUST BE A DEMO! But that’s the problem, as over the years we have spent more and more of our time plugged into recordings that were done by necessity on the fast and the cheap – where compositions aren’t much more than well recorded demos – we’ve come to really fall in love with recordings that weren’t. Sour Notes’ Meat of the Fruit, Papermoons’ New Tales and Powerhouse’s Yeah! come to mind as the sort of well produced releases that combine good engineering with equally meritous songwriting. But they’re all fairly ornate, and pretty far from notions of three-chords-and-the-truth bliss that comprises the larger part of the Rock and Roll cannon.
We’d lost sight of what a solid, if uncomplicated in production, rock and roll record sounded like. The Gold Sounds’ EP has completely cured us of this. With its tight songwriting, robust lyricism, blinding bright guitars, occasionally fuzzy bass and rock of Jericho solid beats, this self released CDr EP packs a more rockfreshing wallup than it’s hand-made cover could ever convey. These songs, especially the first three, are WHIPS of ACES (the closer, “Parfum,” is a drunky twilight on the trail ballad – still a good listen, but nowhere near the caliber of “Champagne”, “Keep it Rolling” and likely song of the year nominee “Two Ways”). You wouldn’t think it would be so much of a novelty to hear a band executing such, frankly, uncomplicated songs so perfectly – but in our experience it is.
Now, when we say simple, we’re not positing that these are verse chorus verse songs that milk the powerchord all the way to a Chinese Dairy Factory. Rather, there just isn’t much more to it than guitar, bass, drums and vocals. Gold Sounds are about as straight ahead, full on rock and roll as you could hope for. Full of touchstones, but none so strong that you can actually put a finger on it. It feels like it’s from another era, or perhaps another universe where this particular branch of closer to the roots music did not spill out of the early 70s into a cultural current of suck. There is a temperament to what’s being done here, think of the restraint it must take, afterall, to record an album as a trio that actually comes out of the studio still sounding like a trio played it.
There are exceptions, of course. There isn’t much tempered about the vocals on the album, for example, which is a relief because this is one of those rare local records where the vocalist can not just carry a tune, but actually sing (again, this shouldn’t be such a novelty, but it is) – powerful, raw and truthful. This EP has stolen away the top spots in our unwelcome sunrise playlist, combining the desert sky pearl-snap minimalism of Eagles of Death Metal with the aluminum-siding real-talk of “It Makes You Happy” era Sheryl Crow, wrapped up in the straight ahead big riffage and steady beat of early Queens of the Stone Age. (Oh yeah, and we love all those things, especially that one really good Sheryl Crow record – whatever, we had no cred to begin with.) The Gold Sounds haven’t really gotten much in the way of the inner loop spotlight yet, and that’s probably a good thing because clearly instead of wasting their time worrying about scenes and competing metanarratives of what it means to be a musician they’ve just focused on writing songs. These are guys that sometimes play with their shirts off, but most assuredly always without a cynical irony. Again, and sadly, how refreshing. Recommended.
The Gold Sounds are playing this Saturday’s Free Press’ Westheimer Block Paty at 12:45 pm Upstairs at Avante Garden. For those that can’t make it, they’ll be playing a free show at the Scout Bar the next night.
