Archive for January, 2014

Ed Wood’s The Violent Years, and Ministry’s “So What” samples

Monday, January 20th, 2014

I found out that Ministry sampled Ed Wood’s The Violent Years, for the main “So What” samples. I found the movie on YouTube and decided to watch it. It’s pretty good, at least for what it is.

45:32 – The “you’ve had all that money could give you, but that wasn’t enough, you became a thrill seeker” speech
51:08 – “So what!”
52:08 – “Adults create the world that children live in.”
53:22 – “So what!”

00:43 – The “you’ve had all that money could give you, but that wasn’t enough, you became a thrill seeker” speech
02:12 – “So what!”
04:38 – “Adults create the world that children live in.”
02:15 – “So what!”

Happy birthday, dear Oma

Sunday, January 19th, 2014

Today’s Oma’s 75th birthday. We couldn’t plan a big surprise like last year, but we still had a nice time going to White Rabbit restaurant for brunch. Nice place!

Happy birthday, dear Oma

Happy birthday, dear Oma

Happy birthday, dear Oma

Happy birthday, dear Oma

Happy birthday, dear Oma

Happy birthday, dear Oma

Happy birthday, dear Oma

Happy birthday, dear Oma

complimentary birthday cake!!

complimentary birthday cake!!

complimentary birthday cake!! SWOOSH!!!

complimentary birthday cake!! SWOOSH!!!

Zen's burger

Zen's burger

Zen's dessert

Zen's dessert

Peter and Naoko

Peter and Naoko

The whole gang!

The whole gang!

PNZ

PNZ

PNZ

PNZ

Zen uniform change

Sunday, January 19th, 2014

Zen started school at Maris Stella High School recently, here are the cool uniforms that he gets to wear!

Monday to Thursday he wears the white uniform, but on Mondays he has to put on the tie.

Monday uniform

Monday uniform

Friday uniform

Friday uniform

Softball uniform

Softball uniform

Rudra, RTA

Tuesday, January 14th, 2014
RRTA

RRTA

Rudra, RTA – I always liked Rudra, they have a great, ancient yet modern vedic metal sound (maybe they invented the sub-genre?!), so it always sounds fresh, even when it sounds familiar. The vocals are aggressive and scary without sounding cheesy, and the experimentations are always interesting. I’ve seen the guys play twice here in Singapore, and I love their show. I have met one of the guys a few times, and he’s a really cool dude. The band is awesome and they always deliver. Well, nearly always – in terms of production, the sound of this release is spare and thin at parts, but this is probably more for delivering a layered variety than simply delivering punishment – the release is exciting, diverse, and lots of fun. The band has been around for over 20 years, they have given so much, and they still have so much to give!

This release only has six songs, but they’re pretty long – from 9 to 12 minutes (an additional track, the seventh “Untitled” number is shorter). “Death” starts the fun, with singing in Sanskrit and mellow guitar, flute, and other madness, before it zooms off into aggro-land. Cool solos! “Heartbreak” also has a cool, mellow intro, with some nice sounds, before it gets aggressive – a measured, precise grind, that incorporates some gamelan, dragging the sound down a bit; but the song warms up with a great solo and cool riffs, and ends with cool guitar riffage interplay. “Abduction” also starts off with a slow riff, but this one very quickly builds into nasty feedback and goes dark and mid-tempo. Great flute part in the middle contrasted with clean and dirty guitar! “Resolve” is a pretty standard cruncher with cool riffs, great drum fills, and howling and growling, ending with some beautiful flute sounds. “Manipulation” starts off fast and heavy, nice, then builds and builds, to a nice mellow solo with tabla and flute, then gets absolutely ferocious. The song has so many great moments, it’s just endless. The ending is full of flute and noise, great great great!! The final song, “[Untitled]” is an outtake of Gamelan sounds and chanting, good fun!

Zen’s stage debut!

Monday, January 13th, 2014

Sunday, January 12th another dream came true – I shared a stage with Zen. We all went to the Hard Rock Cafe was I was playing a short set at their open mic night (everyone gets 15-20 minutes). I did my first song, “Dead Flowers”, and then Zen came up with me to sing my next two songs, “You Are My Sunshine” and “Hotel California”. It was great – so many people were singing along to “You Are My Sunshine”… but only I knew all five verses.

Naoko and Zen and Oma and Opa went home earlier, I stuck around to watch Peter Fogarty, who played amazing original songs, and my friend Jae Lee, who played songs by Michael Penn, Elliott Smith, Big Star (!!!) and Oasis. Great great great!!! Mike was an awesome host, and a true gentleman. I had to leave during his jam – some nice harmonica work.

Great night. Great great great!!!

Here we are here we are...

Here we are here we are...

You Are My Sunshine

You Are My Sunshine

Hotel California

Hotel California

I’m In The Band, Sean Yseult

Saturday, January 4th, 2014

IITB

IITB


I’m In The Band, by Sean Yseult – I love this book. I’d been a fan of White Zombie for quite some time, and was very sad that they broke up (since Rob Zombie never fulfilled his potential as a solo artist, in my opinion). Sean’s book is fantastic, in that it’s the first autobiography from any musician of any of the great heavy bands of her era (Sonic Youth, Raging Slab, Corrosion Of Conformity, Warrior Soul, eyehategod, Pantera, the Cramps, etc); it’s also in a cool format, being half-text, half photo collage, and with a weird horizontal flip format! Yes, stylish/garish to the max, everything we’d expect from a good zombie girl!

My one complaint with the book is the one that hit me first – why does the book need a very long 30-page introduction that covers a lot of the same turf that the rest of the book also e covers? But that doesn’t matter, as throughout the whole work the text is fun, light-hearted, and always positive (even in the “guest” sections that were written by others). Sean tends to downplay the hard times (describing them for what they are, without being judgmental, whiney or downbeat), but revels in the good times and the friendships. And while she doesn’t deny that she went through a hard break-up with her boyfriend/lead singer in the band that she co-founded with him (awkward touring and recording and all that), she doesn’t ever properly diss Rob Zombie at all, and even includes him in a few pictures (and a few solo shots!). Not sure what went on between the two, which is a shame as an autobiography is supposed to bring key issues to light (Keith Richards and Al Jourgensen addressed their arrests and heroin addictions in his autobiographies didn’t they?), but the volume still has tons to offer nonetheless.

The books can be broken into three parts: her childhood as an arts princess, the struggling years in New York City with Rob and a young White Zombie, and the nutty big-tour fun that hit them by storm when the band hit the big time (with a little help from Beavis and Butthead – you can actually see the progression of how money came into the compound as the once starchy white band adds tattoos); there’s also an “aftermath” section where she talks about what she’s doing today, none of which is on the same scale as her former life, of course. We also don’t get sex, or drugs (Sean and Rob were vegetarians, and the one temporary band member that did them got booted from the tour – there’s only mentions of booze, and occasionally “funny” mushrooms)… but we do get limitless rock ‘n’ roll, which is how it should be; and we get plenty of style and substance with it as well! And, Keith Richards-style, she also gives pages to friends and collaborators like filmmaker Steven Blush, former guitarist Tom Five, former drummer Ivan De Prume, musician Daniel Rey, the Geffen A&R guy who signed them Michael Alago, guitarist J Yuenger, latter drummer Joey Tempesta, CJ Ramone and production manager Chris Kansy (only no Rob Zombie, of course) to add their say to the legend that was White Zombie. The anecdotes are enormous, and they go on and on and on and on and on…

So those are the words, how about the images? The photos and layouts are gorgeous, with nearly every photo including Sean (as an infant, a pre-teen ballerina, as a raven-haired bass goddess/university student in New York, and as the funky bass chick we know and love), but also lots of other memorabilia – flyers, backstage passes, anything you can imagine… this is the ultimate rock girl scrapbook!! We get fantastic pictures of the band with those cool musicians that they toured with – the Ramones, Glenn Danzig, Marilyn Manson, Trouble, Michael Stipe, the Supersuckers, Monster Magnet, Voivod, the Cramps and Pantera. The best pic is definitely the one of Sean with Lemmy and Joey Ramone! Another one has the band in the studio with Iggy Pop, probably at the time that they did “Thunderkiss ’65″ with them (easy enough – he was already a fan right?).

There’s a picture of her with Rob from 1985, the year the band put out their first recording, there are pics of her many bass guitars, ticket stubs, sheet music (she was a trained musician and could read and write musical notation), limitless photo booth strip-of-four pics, toy monsters, pics of her parents, newspaper ads (CBGB, etc), media coverage, band notebook entries, early tour pics, postcards, concert fliers (White Zombie, Prong and The Obsessed on the same bill!!!), White Zombie’s entry on the Top Lists, album art, set lists, reproductions of the White Zombie fanzine, belt buckles, guitar straps, fashion design pages, pics in the studio, notes, tour diaries, passport pages, art photos, guitar designs, and tons of other stuff.

Interestingly/coincidentally, I ordered this book from Amazon in the same shipment that I ordered the new Al Jourgensen autobiography, and there are three interesting overlaps in the book – both were close to Dimebag Darrell of Pantera, with Sean touring with the band and Jourgensen playing Columbus, Ohio the same day that Dime was killed (Jourgensen claims the gunman even turned up at his gig thinking he was at Dime’s show, then leaving for hit appointment with fate).

The other similarity is that the two dated. And while she’s very gracious, talking about how she had a blast hanging out with Al and Timothy Leary and all of the interesting people that were around at the time, Al is a bit more honest, talking about what a messed up guy he was to her at the time, and how the break-up came when he made a serious mess-up. Interesting couple – what with Al and Rob having similar looks, and similar vocal sounds!

Final overlap… both also have Schechter tombstone guitars. How did that happen?

In fact, Sean is very discreet throughout her book, mentioning Al more as a friend than a lover, and who knows who she dated after the break-up with Rob Zombie, and how many were only guy friends; but she WAS the only rock chick in the boys club (something she plays up in her intro), and it must have been a lot of fun as long as it didn’t get ugly. She mentions her current husband from time to time, and it sounds like she’s happy with her life.

Rock ‘n’ roll, Sean Ysault, rock ‘n’ roll!!!

Pixies EP1, EP2 and EP3

Saturday, January 4th, 2014

The Pixies finally started releasing new music, after more than twenty years of relative silence (their last full album, Trompe Le Monde, came out in 1991)!!! Three EPs containing 12 songs, of which they’ve already released nine videos! All twelve songs will be combined on a full-length called Indie Cindy later in 2014, but I won’t get it, because I’ve been buying the EPs as they came out (couldn’t get EP1, as it was sold out by the time I caught on, but I bought EP2 and EP3 the first days they became available through Pixies.com). I liked the first two very much, the third one is a bit of a dud, though (with only three new songs – “Bagboy” is the fourth song on the EP, but it had been released as a free single at the end of June, 2013 as the Pixies’ first new song since “Bam Thwok” in 2004…

Funnily enough, none of the nine videos (so far) seem to show any band members, just stand-ins. Oh well…

PEP1

EP1 – As I always say… any day that the Pixies release a new song is a good day, and on September 2nd, 2013, the band came through and released EP1, with four totally brand new songs on it! The songs are “Andro Queen”, “Another Toe In The Ocean”, “Indie Cindy” and “What Goes Boom”. They’ve also (eventually) released a video for each song!!

Andro Queen is a wonderful, trippy song, fully of zooming atmospherics and very catchy, with a bit of Spanish thrown in. The video is also trippy, with its mixture of tiger-helmet band and town and country and party touring images. Oh, and there’s a tattooed queen in it too.

Another Toe In The Ocean is a great high-momentum  tune that is very catchy and full of sweeping guitar sounds and a driving pulse (and, of course, the phrase “another toe” does remind me of The Big Lebowski…). The video is animated, and shows a not-so-chunky Frank Black running around town, riding with cats, fighting ninjas, and going on trippy adventures. It just gets weirder and weirder and it totally hilarious!!

Indie Cindy slows things down with some cool minor riffs that sound like something from Surfer Rosa, ranting and raving things like “you put the cock in cocktail, man, well I put the tail in WAIT!” There’s a slow chorus; this is a really awesome song. The video describes some kind of teenage bar time adventure, but it’s shown backwards and forwards and it’s hard to follow the narrative; the ending is very dark. Probably need to watch this one twice.

What Goes Boom is a rockin’ hard number that is near metallic, maybe more like something from Trompe Le Monde, with soft Frank Black vocals, and wild guitar mannerisms. The video shows moon-like desert scenery, and people wandering over it, it might be Cappadocia in Turkey. Beautiful. There’s also some spontaneous human combustion. Yuck!

Overall, a great release, with each song good in its own way! EP2 is also very good, by the way, it’s only EP3 that is a bit of a dud…

Of course, the got four trippy videos, one for each song on this EP:

PWP2

PWP2

EP2 – As I always say… any day that the Pixies release a new song is a good day, and on January 3rd, 2014, the band came through and released EP2, with four songs on it! The songs are “Blue Eyed Hexe”, “Magdalena”, “Greens and Blues” and “Snakes”. I immediately bought the limited edition vinyl and MP3 download from their website and am listening to the MP3s now as I await for my vinyl to arrive (it only becomes available on Amazon on January 13th, man). Yay! They also have videos for all four songs. In 2014 they will release a third EP (with three new songs, alongside the “Bagboy” single), and eventually release the 12 songs from the three EPs on a single CD. They also (eventually) released one video for each song, as they had for EP1 (and will probably do so for EP3).

For now, let’s consider the songs:

Blue Eyed Hexe has attributes of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and the Pixies, which I see as a good thing. The song really rocks on and on and has everything in it that makes the Pixies great – huge riffs, a wild chorus, weirdness, angularity, and nutty guitar effects (no Spanish, though). Plus it has a cool title (and what is a “Hexe” anyway?)! The video for “Blue Eyed Hexe” is a bunch of cut-up images that are often drawn upon, sort of stop-motion animation with found images, starting with images of blue-eyed girls (if their eyes aren’t blue, they’re colored blue with a river of blue ink), religious images (Christian, or Satanic), more eyes that fill with ink, anatomical illustrations, skulls, flowers, only one or two pictures of Frank Black, newspaper clippings, often faster than the eye can process. The rest of the band doesn’t appear. Funky. Directed by Mount Emult. But the song is the best on the EP.
Magdalena is another  song about a girl – so it joins “Velouria”, “Ana”, “Alison” and “Cecilia Ann”, all from Bossanova – and it even sort of sounds like all of them, slowed down to a certain pace, with haunting wails. The video follows the wanderings of a tall, troubled transvestite with long hair (his face and identity is obscured for some time by lighting, angles, etc). Great shot of rice falling over his head in purple light. Nice.
Greens And Blues is a somewhat interesting mellow strummer with a catchy chorus and some loud-quiet-loud. The video shows a very fat man who resembles Black Francis (but probably isn’t him) wandering around town with a spray paint can, checking out the beach, tripping on the blue sky, etc. Also, there’s an astronaut girl wandering around. Interesting how there’s a lot of green and blue in the artwork of EP2 and EP3 – is this a theme?
Snakes is a simple guitar song, sometimes dark and sometimes bright, with a goofy chorus: “Snakes are coming to your town, in tunnels underground, some traveling over ground…” Angular guitar solo, of course. Nutty, but hey – it sounds great! The video is very disturbing, showing a national pogrom against papier mache-headed men, and candy Nazis. Yes, that’s right – candy Nazis!

Like EP1, this is a great release! It’s only EP3 that’s a bit of a letdown.

PEP3

EP2 - As I always say… any day that the Pixies release a new song is a good day, and on March 25th, 2014, the band came through and released EP3, with four songs on it! The songs are “Bagboy”,  “Silver Snail”, “Ring The Bells” and “Jamie Bravo”. It was released as a digital download some days later.

Bagboy starts off with some weird mix-around stuff that’s not very nice. But by the time you hit the big Kim Deal chorus you know “ah… this is a Pixies song!!” The video shows a kid trashing his parents’ house, not so great.

Silver Snail is a slow and spooky song that really lets you hear Black Francis’ vocals prominently. Very nice. There’s a comic book store in Toronto called Silver Snail, I bet the guys who work there are stoked about this one!

Ring The Bells is a sweet little pop song, it doesn’t sound like the Pixies at all. Maybe a less boring version of Coldplay?

Jamie Bravo is another pop song, although it is a bit more “angular” than “Ring The Bells”.

I’d say that this is the dullest of the EPs, with no standout tracks, and an over-reliance on pop songs; “Silver Snail” is probably the best song on the album. “Bagboy” has been out for quite a while as well, and it’s not as good as something like “Blue Eyed Hexe”, which is a truly remarkable tune! But, well, what can you say – it’s the Pixies!!

I suppose that they’ll release videos of all four of these songs, but for now here’s “Bagboy”: