marathonpacks’ Fourtherly Assessment, Volume 1

In the interest of recapping some of my favorite music from the first 1/4 of the year, I thought I’d offer my inaugural fourtherly assessment, named so as to avoid overtly plagarizing the work of other, better bloggers around the internet. This was originally intended to be a podcast, but those are hard. So, here are three of my favorite songs from the year thus far, with a bit of explanation.

1. The Knife “We Share Our Mother’s Health” (buy) My favorite single so far this year, mostly because I’ve realized it clearly reminds me of my last two years of high school, when, in a purposeful attempt to distance myself from everyone else listening to alternative radio, I wallowed in the industrial/house abrasiveness of Chicago’s Wax Trax Records. The label was the starting point for so many great bands (Ministry, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, KMFDM, Front 242, etc.), and effectively soundtracked my final two years of high school. When I heard “We Share Our Mother’s Health“, I was struck by it’s creation-tale overtones, the interplay between distorted-beyond-recognition male and female voices, and the overwhelming sense of rhythm-as-dread. KMFDM’s “Godlike” got the dust blown off it as my first point of reference, as did PTP’s 12″ “Rubber Glove Seduction“. While the former band may be more obvious, the latter probably needs some explanation—PTP was Al Jourgensen’s (Ministry) side project with Paul Barker (credited on this track for “Spanish Guitar”) and industrial gadabout Chris Connolly, who essentially repeats the same line (”Tick tick tock”) over and over, to increasingly nervous effect. (buy Wax Trax’s Black Box set)

2. Lilys “With Candy” (buy) I’m a little distressed, but not necessarily confused at the mixed reactions to Kurt Heasley’s latest full-length. Those who don’t like it cite it’s directionlessnes, but those who do like it (like me, who likes it a lot) can’t get enough of how Heasley manages to weld together a psych-disco masterpiece that sounds like the theme song to the sitcom Lewis Carroll never got around to producing, without copping anything at all from the master of psych-disco, Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes. It’s the type of song I’d love to hear performed live with “real” instrumentation, especially a full brass section on the chorus. It was hard to trace the imaginary lineage of Heasley’s mutations, until, of course, I popped in Scary Monsters (Bowie’s best, by the way) the other week, and well, “Ashes to Ashes” (buy) essentially did a fair amount of my thinking for me. It’s not a direct line of course, and Bowie’s tale is much more self-referential and dystopian, but the two just sound so similarly tweaked and spacy. Then, partially spurred by Simon Reynolds’ post-punk book, I reapproached Duty Now for the Future, the point where Devo started their push for the mainstream with one foot still firmly in the “industrial grotesquerie” Reynolds writes about. My favorite on the record’s always been “The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprize“, and again, it just kinda/sorta reminds me of “With Candy”. Sorta. Especially the chorus.

3. The M’s “Trucker Speed” (buy) I recently saw the M’s perform here in Bloomington, and they’re easily the tightest, most assured live group I’ve seen in a long time, probably aided by a rather relentless touring schedule and a recent multi-night stand, mini-Beatles Hamburg style, at Schuba’s in Chicago. They’re a bit of a throwback in that sense, and also in the sense that their music conjures memories of mod-era Kinks (and mod-Era Lilys, to a lesser extent) and, especially on this track, T. Rex’s “Buick Mackane” (buy). Thematically speaking, both incorporate automotive metaphors, but to a different ends. The best thing is how both songs finish with blistering, beautiful tornadoes of pounding strings and severe electricity.

That’s all for now…more to come at some point but probably not.