The Lazy Friday Mix: Moving Edition

I may have recently mentioned that I’m moving home to Portland soon to go to grad school (believe it or not, beloved  Bollocks! readers, yours truly is going to become a social worker) and I know I’ve mentioned my love of Portland and Portland bands many times in the last three years. My brain apparently couldn’t be bothered to come up with anything worth writing about the Cults record today so I’m gonna put on a pot of Flavor Aid and work on that over the weekend. In the meantime, I’ve put together a Moving Edition of The Lazy Friday Mix for your enjoyment. The songs aren’t all about moving per se; some are about long distance relationships (no, I will not be having a long distance marriage – my wife and dog are accompanying me on the trip to Oregon and, as far as I can tell, they are happy to do so), travel, freeways, and whatever else I can shoehorn into the conversation.

The first song I thought of for this mix was “Phone Went West” by My Morning Jacket. It’s an epic, reggae-tinged jam from At Dawn (you know, I’ve got a list as long as my arm of albums that need the Great Fucking Albums treatment and now I have to add At Dawn to that list) about a dude who has mounting anxiety over his girl’s move across the country. It ends with Jim James howling, “There’ll be a knock on your back door” over and over again. When I saw My Morning Jacket a few years ago, I got to get stoned for free while they played this song.

If I can continue in the direction of slightly country-inflected, broken-ass music for a second, one of my favorite recent songs about wanting to get the fuck out of whatever town you’re in (a feeling all sensible people have about Van Nuys, California) is the opening track from Lucero‘s 1372 Overton Park, “Smoke.” It’s a simple story of a girl trying to get a guy to run away with her on a motorcycle but the chorus is one of the finest vocal performances to ever emerge from Ben Nichols’ shredded throat.

Hey, if I’m moving to Portland, shouldn’t this mix include a Portland artist or two? Yes, yes it should. And now it does. Laura Veirs released a vastly underrated album in January of last year called July Flame and one of my favorite tunes on it is “Where are You Driving?.” It’s a banjo-driven tune (proving that banjos don’t always have to be used to annoy people) with some stunning harmonies on the chorus, which tells the tale of a person who can never stop getting up and going. It’s a goddamn beautiful song on a goddamn beautiful album and you should listen to it promptly.

We’ve only just found an apartment to which we’d like to apply for our move (due in large part to the fact that a lot of landlords are fucking dog racists) and that’s put me in mind of “Home Sweet Home” by Emmylou Harris, in which she sings, in that ethereal, lovely voice of hers, from the perspective of someone who is literally homeless. Hard Bargain contains a fistful of sad tales, of which “Home Sweet Home” is among my favorites because it provides a handy dose of perspective for people like me who are lucky enough to only worry about when I’ll find the right home and not if I’ll find a home at all.

Damn. I keep thinking of depressing aspects of moving, leaving, and distance. Like the title track to Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism, an album that was standard issue to every single dude at my college back in 2003. “Transatlanticism” is a slow-burning tune that builds from Ben Gibbard singing, “I need you so much closer” to the sound of a jet landing and then awesome shouts of, “So come on!.” This might still be my favorite Death Cab tune.

Okay. Time to find some upbeat, cheerful songs about getting out of town.

Well, not sure this qualifies, but Brother Ali put a pretty hilarious song about switching apartments on 2009′s totally fucking badass Us. It’s called “House Keys” and it’s about new neighbors who sell drugs and the narrator sneaks in one day, steals and sells their stash, and listens to the ensuing fireworks. It’s been two years since Brother Ali graced us with his mad skills and I think it’s time for another Ali album any day now.

I think songs about trains probably qualify for today’s Lazy Friday Mix. One of my favorites is “Driver 8″ by R.E.M.. I like the images of trees along the outskirts of farms and, two weeks ahead of moving time, the line “We can reach our destination/ but we’re still a ways away” has particular resonance for me.

I guess I could probably do an entire Lazy Friday Mix of Tom Waits traveling songs but for today, I just wanna hit you with a particular favorite, “On the Road,” which actually gets the bulk of its lyrics from the Jack Kerouac book. It’s a jaunty number about running around to all the little towns that show up in so many Tom Waits songs and it ends with Waits gleefully acknowledging, “Home I’ll never be.” I get the feeling that the narrator of this song could have  a very interesting conversation with the narrator of Emmylou Harris’s “Home Sweet Home.”

For some lovely pop about arriving home, I can think of no better song at the moment than, “Home” by She & Him. There’s nothing complicated about the song (or any of their songs) but, it’s got a great melody, M.Ward’s guitar channels Wes Montgomery, and you just can’t argue with Zooey Deschanel when she sings, “I wanna be where your heart is home.” In fact, I’d kind of like this song to play when I walk in the front door of my new apartment in Oregon, but I’m not holding my breath.

Well, that’s pretty much what I could come up with today. You know, it’s still pretty tough to cobble together a Lazy Friday Mix; after all, it’s an endeavor born of laziness so the trick is to somehow generate meaningful content and still cater to my own laziness. Come to think of it, that’s a tightrope we walk every single day here at Bollocks! Next week, we’ll have a review of the Cults record and…um… probably some more stuff too. See ya Monday, kids.

I Experienced the Flaming Lips in Concert and It Made Me a Better Human Being

One of those glowing white bubbles contains Wayne Coyne.

The cool thing about going to a Flaming Lips show is that it really doesn’t matter what they play. I mean, yeah, you wanna hear “Do You Realize?”  and, if you’re me, you wanna hear “Be My Head”, but by and large, a Flaming Lips show is about the experience. Last night was my first experience of a Flaming Lips concert at L.A.’s lovely Greek Theatre and it made me extremely happy. In fact, I defy you to be unhappy at the end of a Flaming Lips show. If you can do that, you’re one sorry bastard and/or Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley.

The first thing I did when I got to the show is eyeballed the merchandise. This being a Flaming Lips show, I expected some awesomely weird stuff – like Flaming Lips condoms or something. There were no rubbers, but there was Flaming Lips hot sauce and a t-shirt that said, “I experienced the Flaming Lips in concert and it made me a better human being.” You bet your ass I purchased that t-shirt. Yes indeed.

I was awaiting the arrival of my fiance and my pal Jacques (who was supposed to see Neko Case at the Greek with me earlier this summer but valiantly surrendered that opportunity to come see my band, Radical Edward, play what would turn out to be our only show – ever -  at a bar in Santa Barbara), so I swallowed my pride and bought a ten dollar beer. Well, a Heineken. Hey, I had time to kill. By the way, my new goal is to open a concert venue with free parking and good beer at reasonable prices. You’ll attend, won’t you? The first opening band, Stardeath and the White Dwarfs (I know that’s misspelled, but that’s how they do it and at least it’s not as horrifyingly stupid as Wavves) was on when I got there and they seemed to traffic in some psychedelic noise that sounded better from far away.

Jacques and Anna (one of them is my fiance and if you can’t figure out which one, I can’t help you) showed up about half way through the Ghostland Observatory set. Ghostland Observatory is fairly popular among the indie kids, but I can’t figure out for the life of me why. They really fucking suck. Really. Not quite Wavves bad, but nearly. One guy was wearing a cape (I call him the Dungeon Master) and the other one looked like the bastard child of Jack White and Ric Ocasek. They had a good light show, shitty guitar tone, and their singer (the Jack White/Ocasek guy) sounds like the stuff nightmares are made of. They made me long to hear LCD Soundsystem, who would’ve been a hyper-awesome opener for the Flaming Lips. If you are reading this and are somehow involved with LCD Soundsystem and/or the Flaming Lips, please get to work on this tour immediately.

But I wasn’t there for the openers anyway. The first interesting thing to watch at a Flaming Lips show is probably the people who are all costumed up to see ‘em. It was sort of like attending a comics convention (or “con”, in the parlance of our times) but the people were generally less pale and more fit (this is not an unfounded diss on the nerd crowd – I went to PAX last year and it made me really fucking happy my fiance and I can put our arms all the way around one another when we hug). The next interesting thing to watch is the set-up – while roadies ran around erecting various things and setting up amps, Wayne Coyne was flurrying about the stage, setting stuff up, talking to people, checking mics, and generally doing stuff that rock stars don’t do (come on – you’re not gonna see fucking Bono out there setting up his own shit and talking to the crowd before the show. Even if you’re a starving African AIDS baby).

The Flaming Lips set was about 2 seconds old before we had our first moment of nudity, which consisted of a naked woman in a psychedelic video, dancing in the background. Eventually, this woman was lying on her back, spread eagle, and a big white light began to come from her vagina (in a world of phallic imagery and cock-rock, I find it deeply encouraging that the Flaming Lips are all about the vagina. Good on ya, Flaming Lips). The light pulsated and grew and, eventually, the screen split, allowing the band to be “born” onto the stage. All of them except for Wayne Coyne, that is, who appeared at centerstage, inflating his bubble and inciting the crowd to go completely nuts. Which we did.

Somewhere in there, Coyne bounced ’round the crowd in his bubble and the band launched into “Race for the Prize” amid flying balloons and exploding confetti. Did I mention the dancing yetis at stage right? Or the scantily clad snow bunnies on stage left? Yeah, they were there pretty much the whole time.

As previously stated, it doesn’t really matter what the Flaming Lips played, although there were plenty of highlights – including slowed down versions of a couple of tunes from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and Coyne riding an ape during “Silver Trembling Hands” from their upcoming (Rocktober 13th!) Embryonic album. I was surprised to see them play “Pompeii Am Gotterdamerung”, but also very excited because not only is that song amazing, its title contains a German word (gotterdamerung) that means a war between the gods that destroys everything. They’ve got some good words in the German.

The overall feel of the show was like going to the circus, but with fewer clowns, stranger animals, and better music. The set leaned heavily on Yoshimi, At War with the Mystics, and Embryonic with a couple of older tunes (like “Mountain Side” from the under-rated In A Priest Driven Ambulance) thrown in here and there. They closed, of course, with the official rock song of Oklahoma, “Do You Realize?”. Pitchfork is currently counting down the top 500 songs of the decade (so far – they seem to be assuming that none of the songs that will be released in the next 4 months will crack the top 500 of the decade, a pessimism I do not share, considering that they’re gonna pick a lot of shitty songs anyway) and if “Do You Realize?” doesn’t crack the top 5 (the top 3 even), they’re doing it wrong (which they probably are).

The Illest Villain

Sometimes you have to wait a long time for your favorite artist to make a new album. And sometimes, you wait a long time, find out the album is finally coming out, and it’s a tremendous disappointment. Fans of Guns ‘n’ Roses know what I’m talking about, but let’s face it – if you were on the edge of your seat for a decade and a half waiting for Axl Rose to drop the fetid turd that was Chinese Democracy, your priorities are fucked.

It was, all things being equal, much easier to wait three years for MF Doom to drop his MF, enlarge the remaining letters, and release Born Like This as DOOM. Last time the Supervillain graced us with his offbeat and awesome rhymes, he was flowing over Danger Mouse beats and screening calls from Master Shake. Rumors of Born Like This being released last year abounded, only to have the release date pushed back like an unattractive groupie trying to wile her way backstage. But DOOM is no unattractive groupie. No sir, he’s  a dude in a metal goddamn mask.

You know how you think something is going to be awesome and then it isn’t awesome – it’s not bad either, just not awesome – but it’s not-awesomeness diminishes it so much in your esteem that you have to abandon it all together, forgetting it ever happened? Hmm. Perhaps an example: I thought last year’s Gutter Twins album was going to be fucking awesome. It was not fucking awesome. It was barely good. And now I have banished it from my thoughts. Well, you’ll be happy to note that Born Like This is not at all like that thing I just took way too long to describe.

It would seem that three years is not too long to wait (although DOOM does us the courtesy of asking if he’s been away too long on “That’s That”) for new DOOM music and, indeed, it would seem that for some artists, three years is some sort of magic incubating period. Consider: Neko Case released Middle Cyclone three years after Fox Confessor Brings the Flood; The Yeah Yeah Yeahs waited three years after Show Your Bones to drop It’s Blitz! And DOOM took three years from the release of The Mouse and the Mask to release Born Like This. If this trend continues, one can safely predict that the new Sonic Youth album will be un-fucking-believable.

There’s a lot of the old DOOM stuff on Born Like This: the album is ushered in with a skit where a guy talks about joining forces with the Supervillain. The guy sounds like a bad American voice actor who would be hired to shittily dub into English your favorite anime shows.  And he has some of the more hilarious lines on the album, like “Time to get the feta” and “That’s right, punk – I’ll slap the black off ya.” The beats are, as ever, exremely choice – Pitchfork bemoaned the fact that DOOM is the Nth rapper to sample Dilla’s “Lightworks,” but when you consider what he did with it, it’s extremely forgivable.

DOOM isn’t without a few new tricks on Born Like This either. For instance, he samples Charles Bukowski’s “Dinosauria, We” on “Cellz,” making that apocalyptically awesome track the title track for the album and cementing DOOM and Charles Bukowski as 2009′s outta-left-field rap collaboration of the year. I’m pretty sure Kanye West has no idea who Bukowski is – if you can prove me wrong, Kanye, I’ll let you buy me a sandwich. While I smash your autotuner.  Speaking of Autotune, DOOM mangles it to bits on “Supervillainz,” coming closer than anyone before to using it against the purpose for which it was designed. The damn thing still autotunes the vocals, but the song itself is pretty clearly DOOM lampooning the autotune school of rappers, all the while proving that no one can more adeptly turn a phrase. Born Like This features references to the Hadron Collider, rhyme-propelled grenades, and to the fact that DOOM’s rhymes often make scant sense (“don’t know what he sayin’ but the words be funny” he raps on “Cellz”).

The guests spots are not atypical – Ghostface stops by and is adequate. I’m not a huge fan of his solo work, but he can stop by a DOOM album on occasion. The star collaborator in my mind, however, is Empress Starhh Tha Femcee, who gets “Still Dope” all to herself and hits it out of the park.  Really, Born Like This could only be better if my other favorite MC, Atmosphere’s Slug, dropped by to kick a few rhymes.

But wait – he totally does on “Supervillainz.” Which means that Born Like This does everything I want a rap album to do, short of making Sage Francis no longer a whiny bitch. Yeah, there’s the needless intro and outro tracks, and the voicemail “song” (“Bumpy’s Message,” which I forgive DOOM for, based on a principle I established while listening to another answering machine song, Sonic Youth’s “Providence” on the otherwise unparalleled Daydream Nation. The principle is this – as regards answering machine/voicemail songs, everybody gets one. Provided, of course, the rest of the album is worth the effort. Born Like This most definitely is), but if you take those away, you’re left with 14 solid tracks of awesomeness, including a long overdue song about how Superman, Batman, and Robin are all gay. This is the kind of review you wrap up by saying “I hope DOOM doesn’t make me wait three more years,” but I say fuck it; if DOOM takes three years to make another album that is as good or better than Born Like This, put me on the waiting list.

Big Black Baby Jesus of Today

If you took Raw Power-era Iggy Pop and threw him in a blender with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Murmur-era R.E.M., and a Muppet punk band, you might come up with something that sounds kinda like The Black Lips. The Black Lips trade in a very pleasing form of raucous musical buffoonery that’s somehow never really played for laughs, despite the hilarity of songs like “Bad Kids,” from 2007′s Good Bad Not Evil. I’ve read somewhere that they call their style of music “flower punk,” but I’m content to keep calling it “Muppet punk.”

The Lips are back (in Black, har har) with the appropriately absurdly titled 200 Million Thousand, a murkier, muddier, druggier disc than its predecessor. Which is mostly a good thing. Consider – there are a lot of bands out there that strive for a certain lack of neatness in their songs, but they typically lack the balls to just lose control- or, if they do, it comes out sounding like shit. The Black Lips have an uncanny ability to play sloppy, loud, and with an impressive looseness and still make good songs.

200 Million Thousand (still a better album title than Wavvves) starts with the chugging “Take My Heart,” and works its way to the surprisingly poppy “Starting Over,” which features a guitar riff right out of Peter Buck’s playbook. But if “Starting Over” is one of the few pop moments on 200 Million Thousand, you wouldn’t know it from the vocals, which are wonderfully shambolic and come off as more than a little intoxicated. You get the feeling that the song’s narrator has pledged to start over every night for the last ten years, only to continue his habit of getting piss-drunk and pledging to change his (good, bad, not) evil ways.

“Starting Over” is followed by “Let It Grow” and the truly fucked up “Trapped in a Basement,” which the Lips claim in the liner notes to be based on the true story of a girl who was locked in the basement by her dad, a dude named Josef Fritzl,  so he could have incestuous sex with her. Apparently, Fritzl (which is German for “Incestuous Baby Fucker” – look it up) also fathered seven kids with his “favorite girl.” This story is too fucked up to be fiction as far as I’m concerned.

“Side B” of the album (they make the distinction on the CD, and why not?) starts with “Big Black Baby Jesus of Today,” and it’s worth just quoting the liner notes for this one at length: “This song is a testament to the coming of the black messiah. I imagine him something like a mix between Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Jack Johnson, and Barack Obama.” For those of you who are confused, the Jack Johnson referred to is the early 20th century boxer, not the white, surfer who is his generation’s Jimmy Buffet (if you think that’s a compliment, you don’t know me very well). That being the case, when the black messiah comes, I think I’ll finally be joining a religion. By the way, if they ever start handing out awards for Best Liner Notes, I hereby nominate 200 Million Thousand. As if the notes for “Big Black Baby Jesus” weren’t awesome enough, here’s what they have to say about “Body Combat”: “Just when you thought you knew all the answers, we go back and change the questions. When we get done with you it’s gonna look like we set fire to your face and put it out with an axe.”

200 Million Thousand never really gets off track, unless you pay too much attention to the half-assed rap of “The Drop I Hold,” the Lips’ attempt to bring  “newer, bolder, faster, trendsetting demographics for the global computer youth of today!” The liner note is better than the whole song, but the song is forgivably brief. The bonus track “Meltdown” can be a little trying as well.

The late, great Lester Bangs wrote passionately about bands like Iggy and the Stooges, praising them for their willingness to make big, dumb, primitive rock ‘n’ roll without putting on any airs. Arguments can and will be made about which current bands Bangs might like (I’ll give you a hint – none of them are Interpol), but if you told me to pick just one, I’d tell you it was The Black Lips. That, of course, doesn’t mean that you have to like them (or 200 Million Thousand) just because Zombie Lester Bangs would, but if you like what Bangs liked about rock ‘n’ roll and are tired of shiny, overproduced, safe rock music, you might do well to pick up a Black Lips album and see what Muppet punk is all about.

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Furr is Murder (And by “Murder”, I Mean “Awesome”)

Hey. Do you remember the album? (If Bollocks! is ever awesome enough to have t-shirts, one of them will be “Remember the Album!” and it will shortly thereafter replace “Remember the Alamo” as a battle cry.) See, kids, back in the day, bands made entire albums of songs, meant to be heard from start to finish. You know, instead of five singles and five filler-songs? Well, Blitzen Trapper (from Portland like half of the awesome music I’ve heard this year) remembers the album. They also remember The Band, The Beatles, and 70′s David Bowie. And if you like 1)albums, 2)The Band, 3) The Beatles and 4)You see where I’m going with this, right? Well, get ready to fucking love Furr, Blitzen Trapper’s first album for Sub Pop and the follow up to their whacked-out, awesome, self-released Wild Mountain Nation.

I saw Blitzen Trapper open for The Hold Steady last year and I must confess, at the time, I had no idea what to do with them. They looked like hippies and it made sense to me that they were from Portland. But their music was all over the map. There were elements of heavy metal, folk, punk, and country. The dudes completely won me over by the end of their set and I ran out and picked up Wild Mountain Nation (which is tied with Grand Buffet’s King Vision for “Most Undeservedly Overlooked Album of 2007″) soon after.

On Furr, Blitzen Trapper has streamlined some of their weirdness (some) and highlighted their ability to sagaciously synthesize the Beatles’ pop sound with the broke-ass country of The Band. “Sleepytime in the Western World,” launches Furr and the album does not let up until the soft country closer “Lady on the Water.” These northwest hippies have slapped together something that simultaneously sounds like nothing you’ve heard before and everything you’ve heard before. Kinda like Beck used to.

“Sleepytime” is total Paul McCartney pop, the kind of thing that would come off as a novelty song if Blitzen Trapper weren’t so naturally, earnestly weird. “Gold for Bread” follows, showing that Blitzen Trapper really has picked up something that’s been lost in the last couple of Beck records. And then we get to the title track. “Furr” is a folk/country ditty with a beautiful melody that smacks of evangelical lycanthropy with lines like “You’d better be sure/ if you’re makin’ God a liar.” The song is about a guy who turns into a wolf and then back into a human, but don’t worry: vocalist Eric Earley handles it very well, again with that off-handed weirdness that keeps the song  from straying into Ronnie James Dio territory.

As with Wild Mountain Nation, Furr operates under a pretty strict desire for brevity. The title track is the longest at a breezy four minutes, which makes the album all the more impressive. This band can pack a lot of music into two to three minutes and they have an uncanny grasp of when a song is over. There are like six guys in this band who play multiple instruments and sing and yet they never seem to produce songs that sound overstuffed (you know, like The Polyphonic Spree). Furr rides in on a summer wind and blows right back out again, with nothing really to skip over, although “Love U” is an outburst of utter weirdness toward the end of the album, it’s still kind of endearing.

An album this well thought-out and flawlessly executed has numerous highlights but a few the tracks stand out among the stand-outs, so to speak. “Furr” is, as already discussed, an excellent tune. “Black River Killer” is a murder ballad that would make Johnny Cash proud and it’s followed with “Not Your Lover,” a piano love song with the simple/sweet refrain of “In my sleep/ I’m not your lover anymore”. The song also features the awesome, “I’m a moon-walking cowboy/ dusty riding/ and I don’t know what’s in store,” which wouldn’t at all be out of place among Yoko Kanno’s songs for Cowboy Bebop. If you don’t know who Yoko Kanno is or what Cowboy Bebop was, I’m actually kind of surprised you know what Bollocks! is. My last favorite (for now – I’ve been listening to this album on a rotation that is only exceeded by Dear Science and the new Hold Steady album) is “War On Machines,” which features the line “I’m gonna catch you by the tail/ and teach you how to live,” and remains awesomely dubious about whether or not Blitzen Trapper is making war on machines in the sense that they are fighting machines (perhaps alongside The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi) or in the sense that they are creating war using machines. Either way, good song.

Furr has the feel of a so-called “breakthrough” album, the kind of thing that might lead more people to Blitzen Trapper; if it’s the right kind of people, that’s all right with me (yeah, I know that’s elitist, but have you read this blog before?). But it might also attract people who like one or two songs, buy a concert ticket, and are completely weirded out at the show. Which, come to think of it, is also all right with me.

Earth to The Dandy Warhols: Please Stop

There was a time, what seems like eons ago, when The Dandy Warhols’ blatant bush-league Lou Reedisms were (mildly) amusing. Around that time, they released 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia, an album that I still enjoy listening to. Since then, the Dandy Warhols have managed to squander every last bit of good will that I had toward them.

First, they named a shitty album after a Kurt Vonnegut book (that would be Welcome to the Monkey House) and then they followed it up with a monumentally shitty album (Odditorium or: Why The Fuck Are We Still A Band?), the only redeemable tracks on which sound exactly like tracks from 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia.

Now the Dandy Warhol’s are back with Earth to the Dandy Warhols, another pseudo-psychedelic platter of pig poo, the kind of bullshit album that should come with a warning sticker that says, “Warning: This Band Got Really High and Jerked Off In A Studio. Listener Discretion is Advised.” You know how you get when you’re stoned; no one should have to pay to listen to that over music you’ve ripped off from musical icons (usually The Velvet Undergound, but sometimes other great bands; but we’ll get to that in a second).

Courtney Taylor’s vocals are buried under a ton of annoying effects on Earth to the Dandy Dipshits, but it’s not like the music is compelling enough to make that forgivable. In fact, on “Welcome to the Third World,” The Dandies, apparently feeling they’ve mined The Velvet Underground for all they were worth, decide to brazenly rip off Paul Fucking Simonon’s bass line from “The Magnificent Seven.” Yes, that Paul Fucking Simonon, the bass player from The Clash. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? In the Overdrawn at the Memory Bank episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Crow T. Robot says, upon seeing a character watching Casablanca, “Hey, don’t put good movies in the middle of your crappy movie.” I would like to extend this warning to the Dandy Whorehols: don’t put Clash songs, some of the best songs ever, in your shitty little songs about… whatever the fuck your songs are about.

Which is another issue, among many to take with Earth to You Shameless Bastards: What the fuck are any of these songs about? It seems like most of them are somewhat about doing drugs and (maybe) fucking. I guess this is supposed to be psychedelic, but it’s mostly really annoying.  All the songs feel an hour long, slow, gauzy droning songs that must seem really awesome when you do as much drugs as the Dandy Warhols.

If you watched the documentary Dig!, about the on-again/off-again feud between the Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, you may have come to this conclusion: both bands are just chock full of dickheads. Regardless of how good their music sometimes (rarely) is, these are Grade-A assbags who seem to have an endless line of credit with their dealers. And part of what makes them so awful is that they seem to genuniely not give a single shit about anything. This is the music they want to make, and the fact that Anton Newcombe talks about either band starting a revolution is laughable. Both bands are stuck in the basement in a cloud of pot smoke, praying to Lou Reed to appear and pronounce them Officially Cool. Well, guess what, assholes: Lou Reed may be kicking it with the Killers these days, but he’s gonna need a whole boatload of senility to hit him before he dignifies your shit with a response. (I hope; for all I know, Mr. Reed may be planning to work with The Dandies for their next album, at which point I will just pretend he has died.)

If you’re interested in keeping score, Earth to the Dandy Assholes is slightly less shitty than the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 2008 offering My Bloody Underground which I’ve already cut to ribbons on this site. These two bands are capable of making music that doesn’t completely infuriate me, but they’ve elected to go the self-indulgent, insultingly derivative route, and have therefore earned all the scorn that can be heaped upon them. Hearing the bassline from “The Magnificent Seven” in a song as bad as “Welcome to the Third World” only reminds me that Joe Strummer (a man who once said that the most punk-rock thing you could do was to treat everyone with dignity and respect) will never again beat all six strings of his Telecaster and shout “Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust” but Courtney Taylor is still alive and making awful music. For which I can only say this: fuck Courtney Taylor, fuck The Dandy Warhols, and fuck fuck fuck this album.

My Morning Jacket at the Greek

What’s that you say? You’ve never listened to My Morning Jacket?

Fine. I’ll wait. Go get yourself a My Morning Jacket album based on the following criteria: if you like guitar-rock, get It Still Moves; if you like spacey, Flaming Lips-esque stuff, get Z; if you like strummy country rock, get At Dawn; if you like all of the above, get Evil Urges.

If you’ve followed the above prescription and you live in Los Angeles, you have just a taste of what you missed last night at The Greek Theatre.

The show was billed as “An Evening with My Morning Jacket.” Meaning there was no opening act for me to fret over (opening acts are always a delicate thing – sometimes they’re awesome like when Band of Horses opened for the Decemberists, and sometimes they’re fuck-terrible like when Sean Na Na opened for The Hold Steady) or drink my way through. My Morning Jacket took the stage at 8pm while some zany-ass music played over the PA. Jim James, Flying-V strapped over his shoulder, was already jumping up and down (dude gets ridiculously fired up to play live) as Patrick Hallahan (best drummer in rock right now) beat the opening of “Evil Urges” into the night air. And we were off. MMJ followed “Evil Urges” with “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 1″ and then, without saying a word to the audience at this point, they jumped right into the best song of 2005: “Off the Record” (it’s from Z. Are you listening to it right now? You should be.).

The best concert I’ve ever seen was The Hold Steady in Portland, back in 2006. My Morning Jacket at the Greek is a close and easy number two. They were workman-like to say the least (James only said about ten words to the audience all night, basically thanking everyone for coming out to “participate with all your brothers and sisters” – I’m guessing Mr. James smoked a little something before the show, but he’s a mellow enough dude), and, yeah, they got a bit jammy throughout the night but my pal Tim and I came to a realization watching Jim James and fellow-guitarist Carl Broemel exchange guitary freakouts last night: the thing that separates My Morning Jacket from jam bands is that it’s interesting when My Morning Jacket takes off on an instrumental rant. A lot of jam bands play fifteen minute versions of their songs and there’s no reason – they’re meandering, feeling for the next dull note in a long line of dull notes. With My Morning Jacket, their songs grow in length because they simply cannot stop rocking out. The outro to “Off the Record,” is kinda tedious on Z. In concert, it’s filled with squalling guitars and, last night, Jim James fleshed it out with an extremely nasty solo at the end. Unlike most jam bands, My Morning Jacket is not determined to play long, stoned versions of their songs – they’re determined to rock out as fully as possible on each song. While that added length to songs like “Off the Record” and “One Big Holiday,” it actually shortened “I Will Sing You Songs” and “Phone Went West.” James and company exhibit an impeccable instinct for exactly how much rock a song needs and a flawless execution in providing it.

At every concert I attend, there are songs that I pretty much need to hear in order to go home happy. With My Morning Jacket, they were, in no particular order: “Evil Urges,” “Off the Record,” “The Way that He Sings,” “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream” (both parts!), “Dancefloors,” and “Mahgeetah.” Of those, MMJ only denied me “Dancefloors,” but they’re forgiven because they threw in “Phone Went West,” an older, reggae-tinged chestnut that I totally didn’t expect them to play. The best part about “Phone Went West,” is the free contact-high I got from the people next to me sparking up a joint; on top of the few Newcastle Browns I’d imbibed and coupled with the song itself, I was teetering on the edge of some sort of awesome spiritual vision. Or something.

My Morning Jacket played for two solid hours before departing (closing the show with the awesome 1-2 punch of “Smoking from Shooting” and “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 2″). Then they returned for a 45 minute encore that ended with a completely raucous version of “One Big Holiday.” I’ve been a huge fan of this band since I first heard them back in ’05, but last night’s show solidified them as among my five favorite current artists (before you even ask, here they are in – as always – no particular order: The Hold Steady, My Morning Jacket, The National, Tom Waits, and The Flaming Lips. List subject to change every five minutes) and easily one of the best rock bands in America right now. If this band is coming to your town, go fucking see them.