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- Earthling Society "Tears Of Andromeda - Black Sails Against The Sky" 2007 (UK)
This
month we'll be featuring all classic albums of the 21st century.
Earthling Society, from the city of Fleetwood on the northwestern coast
of England, released their debut album in 2005 and were one of the very
first records "from the Kosmik Radiation mailbag" to be played on the
show (in fact I am pretty sure the title of "The Kosmik Suite" from
their second album was inspired by this show!) They released another
ten or so albums over the years and broke up in 2018, though the two
constant members - singer/guitarist Fred Laird and drummer John Blacow
- debuted a fine new psychedelic music project in 2019 called Taras Bulba. Generally classified as a "space rock" band, ES definitely has shades of classic British space rockers like Pink Floyd and especially Hawkwind
(with the occasional foray into cosmic British folk music), but they
are not copyists and do not sound quite like any other band. My
favorite of their albums is their third Tears Of Andromeda, a proper kosmik trip of a double album where half the songs are more than 10 minutes long.
Also on the show this week: the first new tune from Haru Nemuri since 2018 - and she will be doing a short North American tour in the spring, including a Midwestern stop in Chicago! And Poppy released her third album this week (also dying her hair back to its natural brown).
Finally, we must also pay tribute on the passing of one of rock's most iconic drummers.
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- Oh Sees "Face Stabber" 2019 (USA)
The
Kosmik Radiation top album from my best of the year list gains automatic entry into the
classic album hall of fame. The selection for 2019 is a fitting
conclusion to the decade just passed, seeing as John Dwyer's various
musical outfits - Oh Sees, formerly Thee Oh Sees, sometimes OCS,
and also his "solo project" Damaged Bug - have been consistently making
my best of the year lists for most of the history of this show. Face Stabber
is his 16th album to make one of my lists (easily topping any other
artist), but the first time he's had my #1 album. I think it's the best
(Thee) Oh Sees album yet: a couple years ago Dwyer revamped the band in
a jammier, proggier direction, which included the addition of a second
drummer. The evolution from their punkier garage band roots has reached
full flower on this album's central jams like the 21-minute "Henchlock"
- it's still a little punk/garage and they've always had a touch of
krautrock in their grooves, but now they're jazzy and frankly have
turned into the 21st century's leading San Francisco jam band.
More highlights of the year: my favorite new bands I discovered in 2019 are Australia's pastel surf-rock hippies The Babe Rainbow, whose album Today
created one of the most consistent and pleasant aural soundscapes of
the year, and (yes here we go again) the fabulous Japanese nerd girl
prog-pop band Dempagumi.inc - here's the baffling music video that introduced me to them (Mirin is wearing a stuffed pig in a bikini as a hat!)
As far as 20th century geezers, Meat Puppets nearly claimed the top spot this year with Dusty Notes, their best album in a quarter century and my favorite record of 2019 in terms of classic songwriting, while Kim Gordon finally released her debut solo album No Home Record eight years after Sonic Youth broke up - it sounds 100% like you'd expect a Kim Gordon album to sound (I mean that as a compliment!)
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- Frank Zappa "You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore" (12 CD set) rec. 1966-1988, rel. 1988-1992 (USA)
Happy
Zappa Day! This year marks the 79th anniversary of FZ, and our annual
CAOTW for the Z-man is arguably one of his greatest works. Zappa tried
several times to create an EPIC WORK, beginning with a 10-album set to
be called The History And Collected Improvisations Of The Mothers Of Invention that never got released (record labels be like "FTGB"), then later a 5-album set Läther
which Warner Brothers chopped up into four separate albums (Frank's
complete version later came out as a posthumous release). But the one
time during his life he was able to release a massive chunk of music
was the 6-volume series of double CD's called You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore
which literally encapsulates his entire career as a professional
performing musician, from 1966 tapes of the original Mothers playing in
dive bars to the final "big band" world tour of 1988. One of the
interesting facets of Zappa fandom is that I don't think anybody likes
everything he did, in fact most fans have Zappa albums or bands that
they hate (personally, the 1982-85 tours and albums are at the bottom
of my list). So I doubt anyone who has ever lived is going to love
everything on this sprawling 14-hour compilation, but there is no
better place to sip from the totality of rock's ultimate maximalist.
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- Dempagumi.inc "GOGO DEMPA" 2016 (Japan)
At the beginning of this year I featured a series of "weird girls from the Internet" classic albums that were all recorded in the last 5 years and mostly from Japan.
Well, here's another to bring this year to a close, with not just one
weird girl but six of them.
Since there is much to unpack here, I present a list of findings for
what is surely the most epic CAOTW essay of all time (and don't call me
Shirley).
Idols: Dempagumi.inc is an IDOL
("aidoru") group, which in Japan means a group of
singers and dancers (almost always of the same gender) who wear
matching outfits and perform tightly-choreographed dance routines while
singing pop songs. This is a structure for organizing musical
performance and doesn't necessarily imply much about the style of music
a group performs, and most professional idol groups seem to
differentiate themselves
based on gimmicks and fashion rather than musical identity (for example,
one of the most famous idol groups AKB48 is well-known for having 48
members!) But there are literally thousands of idol bands in Japan
today, most of them amateur groups assembled the same way "guys who
start a band together" are, and only a lucky few make their way up the showbiz
ladder to becoming professional entertainers. On the top end, the most
globally popular Japanese idol band today is of
course BABYMETAL,
whose musical style is rooted in heavy metal - though they are not the
most popular idols in Japan. (The secret of BABYMETAL's great success
has been not playing by the rules for Japanese
idols, which only has a national fanbase compared to the global
popularity of metal music.) Another key feature of idols is that they
exemplify a
Japanese cultural trend of "characters as products": the best example
of this is the Sanrio toy company's Hello Kitty which sells
billions-worth of products every year but doesn't "do anything" other
than be a well known character (Hello Kitty is not a tie in to a movie
or TV show, it's really just a logo you put on products.) Thus a
portion of the appeal of idol groups is the audience's investment in
the personalities in the group. On that score, the offbeat charm
of the Dempa girls has arguably been the main factor in their
revolutionary success on the idol scene. Most idol groups have members
who seem to have the same interchangeable personality (cute, young and innocent), and indeed many professional idol groups
replace their members constantly (AKB48 has supposedly had about 200 different
members pass through their ranks of 48). Dempagumi.inc is the
exception where the band's image is defined by the unique girls in the
group, rather than the girls in the group being defined by the image of
the band (which the performers probably had nothing to do with creating
in the first place). Personality has always been a
big part of great pop music: The Beatles would not have been nearly as
popular and influential if those four guys didn't have such distinctive
and likable personalities.
Otaku Culture: The most important thing about Dempagumi.inc's identity is that they are OTAKU:
a key term in current Japanese pop
culture which could be translated into English as "nerd" or "geek" (it
literally means "house", as in a person with no social life who stays
at home all the time indulging their geeky hobbies.) Until the
2010's
decade, it was strictly a prejorative term in Japan, with a connotation
much like "kids in black trenchcoats" had in America in the days
after Columbine. However, in recent
years there has been something of an "otaku pride" movement as nerd
culture has become more mainstream. The cuddlier slang term
WOTA seems to be replacing "otaku" among insiders. The genius of
an "idol band for otaku" is that wotas are the most obsessive and loyal
fans imaginable: the subculture is literally defined by its members'
obsessive devotion to their pop culture hobbies and passtimes. But
fandoms like that can't be created through marketing; only a group of
wotas who "talk the talk and walk the walk"
can generate genuine wota-devotion. Though DG has been scoring top 10
hit songs in Japan several times a year ever since 2013, they seem like
the most popular cult band in the country rather than a mainstream
group (the most popular idol group in Japan are examplars of "cute, young, innocent" and are not otaku.)
Denpa Music: One of the many weird
things to
come out of the otaku subculture is a style of music called DENPA SONG, music which is deliberately "awkward and strange"
in an attempt to catch your ear by any means necessary. (Here's a short documentary on origins of the denpa scene 10 years ago
before the arrival of DG.inc.) Which is where we finally get to the
"psychedelic progressive
underground" part: Dempagumi.inc songs tend to be complex
multi-sectioned theatrical works with dramatic changes in tempo and
dynamics, key
modulations, time signature changes, and every section of every
song crammed full of as many catchy earworms as possible. Their version
of denpa is basically a maximalist "prog rock" approach to making pop
music. The closest Western example I can think of is Frank Zappa's
densely layered records that were "basically rock" (and did not lack
for pop hooks) but were crammed full of motiffs and ideas from
jazz, classical, and every other type of music known on earth. Though
you could never mistake Dempagumi.inc for a Western rock
band: if there is a signature sound of J-Pop, it is the high-pitched
singing voices of Japanese women (and in the denpa style, the more
extreme the better: Dempagumi do sound like "chipmunks" sometimes.)
Footnote: the group name is spelled
"dempa" not "denpa" because their
early performances were held in the DEMPA building in Tokyo - thus the
name is a pun on their musical style and the location of their
origin. In English, the most literal translation of Dempagumi.inc
would
be something like "radio wave team incorporated."
Band History:
Coinciding
with the trends above, in 2008 video gamer nerd Mirin Furukawa began to
perform denpa songs with a duo called "Dempagumi" at the Dear Stage
bar in Akhibara, Tokyo (the center of wota culture). There were a bunch
of personnel changes in the
early years that we can skip over (the important thing is Risa Aizawa, Nemu Yumemi
and Eimi Naruse joined during this period), and a 2011 indie-label debut
album that didn't get much notice aside
from it's crazy title (in English: Say What? It's Not Sushi That Will Save The Universe...It's Dempagumi.inc!)
After struggling in the idol underground, their breakout came in 2012
with the formation of the iconic
six-girl
line-up that lasted until 2017; the last to join were the blonde Moga Mogami and 17-year old high
school student Ayane Fujisaki a.k.a. "Pinky!"
(discovered from dance videos she uploaded to YouTube; she would have
been 15 when that video was uploaded.) At
this time they also signed a
major label record deal which brought their
music, costumes, staging and image to a whole new level.
This classic lineup recorded three classic albums: World Wide Dempa (2013) was a complex, theatrical, hyperkinetic record unlike anything the Japanese pop scene had produced before, and WWDD (2015) was more of the same with even catchier songs. Next up was GOGO DEMPA
(2016), which generally received a lukewarm reception from critics
because they were seen as straying "too far" from their roots
as a wacky denpa band. However, I would argue this makes GOGO
their high-water mark to date, as they maintained the distinctive
elements of their original style while expanding their range of
material in new directions. It's also their most "live" sounding
record: they are the only idol group that tours with a live band
rather than exclusively dancing to prerecorded tracks. Here's the music video from the album
with two songs (both heard on the show this week); the first combines
bluegrass(!), jazz and techno music and shows their wacky comedic side, the
second is more of a rockin' Broadway showtune. However, this
album also marked the end of the group's rise and the years 2017-2019
were a challenging period beginning with the unexpected departure
of Moga. This led to a pause of nearly three years before their
5th album Wareware Wa Demagumi.inc Da
(2019) was released: a decidedly transitional record that recapitulated
their earlier sounds but was also thematically a feature for departing
member Nemu (thus had a more mature and nostalgic tone than
previous records). The group recently announced that album #6 is
due for release in early 2020, which will be the first featuring the
current six-girl lineup. The new recruits in place of Moga and Nemu are
Nagi "Nemo" Nemoto and Rin "Perorin" Kaname who both share the wota superpower of illustration (also Nagi is a bikini model, you can google that one yourself!)
Performance:
Don't let my description of the Gumi girls as "geeks" confuse you, they
are more graceful and talented than the majority
of Japanese idol groups. The importance of dance in J-pop cannot be
understated: the best J-pop choreography is really a modern form of
KABUKI, with exaggerated gestures and movements that accentuate the
meanings of the song lyrics. (Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is another contemporary
Japanese weird girl who has made the kabuki connection explicit in her recent work.) Dempa choreography is so dramatic it often feels more like musical theatre than a rock concert and they are also more high-energy
and athletic than other idols (most idols dress very fashionably and
wear platform heels for their demure dances - Dempagumi's uniform is
sneakers and tennis skirts over bike shorts because of all the kicking,
twirling and jumping they do; they are the sweatiest idol group in
Japan). The complexity
of their dance also reinforces the complexity of their music and vocal
arrangements: though Mirin and Risa are "first among
equals," all six are lead singers who trade
lines at a rapid pace rather than following a "lead and
backup" vocalist structure.
Audience Participation:
The importance of dance is not limited to the performers on the stage.
Wotas have developed their own traditions as this subculture
has flowered. The most striking of these is called WOTAGEI ("art of the otaku") which is sort of a dance which looks like doing rhythmic karate poses (though not necessarily skillfully!) and is often performed with glowsticks, but also involves a lot of chanting at concerts (which reminds me of audiences interacting with the screen at The Rocky Horror Picture Show). Behold, the dorkiest mosh pit since the Grateful Dead! But wotagei is mostly for dudes; lady wotas show their appreciation by dressing up as the band (cosplay) and learning their choreography, or if you are a true music nerd you could also try to learn how to play their songs (they're not easy!)
The Future:
One of the iron laws of Japanese idols has been that they must be
romantically unattached (at least publicly) because supposedly fans
won't follow them if they are "unavailable" (The Beatles followed this
exact logic when they first came to American and kept John and
Ringo's marriages secret from the public). This rule is also
meant to create a perception of reciprocity between performer and
audience: the idol doesn't have time for romance because they are too
busy working to earn the devotion of their loyal fans (if an idol
starts dating they are breaking this covenant with their fans and no
longer worthy of their devotion). Over the years there have been
several high-profile examples of girls in idol groups being fired after
a paparazzi caught them out on a date. Obviously, the longevity of
idols is limited for this reason (particularly for women): if you want
to start a family, you need to retire from showbiz. Dempagumi blew
through that barrier in late 2019 when Mirin announced at one of
their concerts that she had gotten married (to
another high profile otaku, the author of a popular comic book)
- BUT she
has no intention of quitting her career as an idol. This was a national
news story in Japan, and perhaps just as shocking the news also came
out that Mirin is an ancient crone of 33 years' age,
which makes her twice the age of typical idols who are
usually teenagers that "retire" by their mid-twenties (it also means
Mirin was already 22 when she started the band and 27 when they had
their first hit; Risa and Eimi's ages have never been made public but they must also be well past 30 by now). Thus the
journey of the idol band Dempagumi.inc has already entered uncharted
territory. Can a 40 year old woman still be an idol? Only if she is a
wota, because you'd have to be some kind of nerd to still be doing that
in middle age! |
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- Kevin Ayers "Joy Of A Toy" 1969 (UK)
The original bass player of The Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers only made one album with that group before moving on to a solo career of legendary obscurity. Joy Of A Toy
was his debut after leaving The Soft Machine, and features all the
members of that band playing in supporting roles. I first heard his
name attached to a notoriously hip live album in collaboration with
those popular mainstream artists Nico, Eno & John Cale.
I kid; actually Ayers was pretty popular in his native England, often
compared to Syd Barrett (whom he also collaborated with). Ayers was
actually the headliner at that aforementioned cult-supergroup concert,
though he is probably not as known as those other three outside of
England. A writer of weird
but catchy songs who played several instruments and had a unique deep,
mumbly singing voice, Ayers passed away in 2013.
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- The Isley Brothers "3 + 3" 1973 (USA)
Today would have been Jimi Hendrix' 77th birthday. Since all four albums
he made during
his lifetime are already classic albums, here's a showcase for one of
Jimi's greatest guitar disciples of the 1970's, Ernie Isley of The
Isley Brothers. The Isleys really should be hailed as one of the
greatest American musical groups of all time. The original trio
(Ronnie, Rudy & O'Kelly) scored their first hit in 1959, which
makes them contemporaries of Chuck Berry, Elvis and the other founders of
rock & roll. Though their hits were generally not that high-charting, in 1963
an obscure band from Liverpool
used the Isleys' song "Twist And Shout" as the climactic finale of their
debut album. That same year, The Isley Brothers hired a 21-year old
guitar player called "Jimmy James" who made his first recordings with
them before moving to England to become "Jimi Hendrix"
in 1967. In 1969 the Isleys jumped on the funk wagon and scored the
biggest hit of their career with the classic groover "It's Your Thing"
which began an interesting transition to a new level of stardom in
the 1970's. At the beginning of that decade, they specialized in taking
"white rock and pop" hits and turning them into progressive soul ala Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield.
By 1973, with the release of this week's CAOTW they formalized their
transition from a Motown-style "three slick guys singing and dancing" group
into a "rock band" by adding a younger generation of Isley brothers on
Hendrixian guitar (Ernie), funky poppin' bass (Marvin) and futuristic
synths and keyboards (Chris Jasper, The Isley Brother-in-law). Hence
the title "3 + 3" equals six brothers in the new line-up. "Who's That Lady?" from this album was
another big hit for the band and featured Ernie's guitar
soloing and they also turned Seals & Crofts hit "Summer Breeze" into a
gorgeous funky jam with heavy psychedelic guitar (much cooler than you
thought that song could ever sound.) From then on, the group focused on
original songs and became one of the top bands of the 1970's with a
string of platinum albums. They've also had more longevity than most,
scoring three more platinum albums in the early 2000's, nearly 50 years
after they debuted.
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- Jane's Addiction "Nothing's Shocking" 1988 (USA)
The
1980's were a very lame decade for mainstream music, but one of the
greatest eras ever for "the underground scene." In particular, by the
second half of the eighties Top 40 radio was appalling dreck such as
probably had never been heard on the radio since radio was invented
(remember those superstars like Paula Abdul, Whistesnake and Bryan
Adams? Even earlier 80's stars like Madonna and Flock Of Seagulls were
far more interesting.) However, at the same time the DIY punk, metal, and hiphop underground scenes were producing legendary artists and classic albums.
By the dawn of the 1990's, rap, "grunge" punk and "real metal" ruled
the pop culture zeitgeist and the pop charts. And falling between the
cracks, there was Jane's Addiction. A Zepplinesque quartet with a
mystical L.A. surfer/hippie vibe, Jane's managed to be edgy during
a lame era while also appealing to classic rock traditions. Nothing's Shocking
was the their first studio album and it got a lot more notice than
their debut, which was a live album released on a small label. Though
it was the follow-up Ritual De Lo Habitual
(1990) that went platinum, they then broke up just as the
"grunge-a-palooza" began in earnest. In fact, JA lead singer Perry
Farrel was the guy who started the famous Lollapalooza concert
festivals in the 1990's, though he was in a different band by that
point (Porno For Pyros, remember them?)
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- Neil Young "Tonight's The Night" 1975 (Canada)
Neil
Young turned 74 years old this week. Believe it or not, after 600
CAOTWs there are still some incredibly classic albums yet to be
inducted and this is one of them! Neil Young has always been famous for
being the master of "bummer vibes" - very few in the history of music
have been as good at making listeners happy by expressing sadness. Tonight's The Night is Neil's biggest bummer of them all, the final installment of the so-called "ditch trilogy"
of cathartically depressing masterpieces he made in reaction to
becoming a superstar in the early 70's with CSNY and his big hit album Harvest (1972). The songs here were inspired by specific dreadful events, including the overdose deaths of Crazy Horse member Danny Whitten
and CSNY roadie Bruce Berry (memorialized in the title track) plus a
gruesome drug deal murder that shook the gentle hippiefolk of Laurel
Canyon where Neil lived at the time. But "critics say" it all adds up
to the ultimate statement about the dissolution of hippie idealism in
the increasingly cynical 1970's. Musically, it's probably the greatest
"drunk rock" album of all time: Neil and his band (Ralph & Billy
from the defunct-at-the-time Crazy Horse
plus Ben Keith on pedal steel and Nils Lofgren on lead guitar while Neil mostly plays piano) sound
totalllly waaaaysted on every song, which you can think of as brilliant
method acting for an album whose main theme is basically drug
addiction. I can't think of any other album by anyone that really
compares to this one. Like the author himself, Tonight's The Night is unique.
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- Charles Mingus "Mingus Ah Um" 1959 (USA)
Joni Mitchell turns 76 years old this week, and 40 years ago she released an album called Mingus.
Joni was a folk music singer-songwriter of the Bob Dylan variety back
in the 1960's, but in the 1970's her music turned into jazz-rock fusion
and her bands and records included big names from the jazz scene like
Jaco Pastorious, Pat Metheny and Wayne Shorter. Somewhere along the way
she became pals with Charles Mingus, a legend from the post-bop "modern
jazz" scene of the 1950's and early 60's. Joni's Mingus
album was released after Charles died, but most of the tunes are
written by Mingus with words by Mitchell, including a remake of one of
the most famous Mingus tunes "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" with new Joni
lyrics. The original Mingus version of that tune is from this week's
classic album, which is probably the most acclaimed of Mingus' records,
though he made a lot of good ones so check him out if you're interested
in groovy old jazz!
In new music news, Ariel Pink has a new video for his latest collection of old tape music and I just found out about a new abum from Aussie heavy psych band ORB (released in the spring).
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- Slayer "South Of Heaven" 1988 (USA)
Happy
Halloween! Kosmik Radiation likes to play some metal around Halloween,
because obviously. When I think of scary Halloweeny metal, there is one
band that always rises to the top: the eeeevilll "satanic" thrash metal
icons SLAYER. South of Heaven
was the first of their albums I ever heard, around the time it was
released when the metalhead down the hall bought their latest cassette
(80's tech!) Though not a huge fan of metal at the time, I immediately
recognized the over-the-top gusto of these legendary metallions.
After catching up on the rest of their discography (before seeing
them in concert for the first time in 1991), I concluded that this is
one of their finest albums for its almost-progressive sense of moods
and dynamics. Why, they even have a sort-of ballad song with
non-distorted guitar (called "Spill The Blood" because they are still
eeeevilll!) They also pay tribute to their great forefathers Judas Priest with a cover of "Dissident Aggressor" which is actually beter than the original.
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- The Replacements "Let It Be" 1984 (USA)
The
Replacements were a unique and legendary band from the 80's American
underground scene, but I think the reason they haven't had a CAOTW yet
is that they never really made a "classic" album. The Mats were a
notoriously inebriated and unreliable group whose motto was "all for
nothing, nothing for all." They made a ton of great songs, but also
recorded their share of lazy punk rock bar band tunes: "Gary's Got A
Boner" is probably the biggest dud on Let It Be.
The other mediocrity "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out" at least has funny
lyrics and is performed with plenty of drunk rock energy (and their
version of KISS's "Black Diamond" is
actually awesome!) That's as good a ratio as you'll get from this band,
and the "hits" on this record include some of Paul Westerberg's
greatest compositions like "Sixteen Blue", "Unsatisfied", and his
near-solo performances of "Androgynous" and "Answering Machine". Back
in the 1980's Bruce Springsteen was seen as the "people's poet" who
portrayed the "realistic" hopes and dreams of the Working Man in
America, but really his songs are second-rate Woody Guthrie wannabe BS
(the working class romanticized from a distance by a multimillionaire).
Westerberg sounds more like the real deal: a lonely drunk on a barstool
wondering where the hell it all went wrong, and with a voice that
sounds like that's all he would have ever been if he didn't have a
knack for classic songwriting.
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