Pistachio Kid – Sweet Remedies: The SMM Review

Here at SMM, we like the unique, the lone ranger, the poor bastards clawing and crawling to make their mark in the world.

You may not guess it at first glance, but this doesn’t just include the bizarre, horrific and weird. It includes all of those less heard and known.

Before this review, I had never heard of Pistachio Kid. Not surprising considering this is the Pistachio Kid debut album.

Singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist Charlie McKeon takes you on a calming journey in this debut album. The songs play as though he were sitting in the room with you, telling you the story of his life, stolen bikes, fields to play in, and the good times he spent in his home town of Liverpool or attending Leeds College of Music.

The music is clear and crisp, something I’d listen to while writing or working. It isn’t distracting and I could simply tap my foot to the beat while chilling, a lemonade in hand on a warm summer, or a warm drink in a mountain lodge between snowboarding runs, or a tavern in a fantasy world.

I imagine Mckeon as a bard, singing songs of his adventures to tavern patrons. Traveling from town to town in search of fame and fortune with only his guitar and laptop computer strapped to his back.

My personal favorite of the album is Vistabella Road. The acapella intro leading into guitar and piano is like warm butter to the ears. Honestly, I have no idea what the lyrics mean. And Christopher Columbus was a bit of a monster… so… there’s that… But the song is great.

The album is also surprisingly dark. One song sings about a lover and her family and friends hanging from a tree. It’s reminiscent of Doki Doki Literature Club. If you haven’t played that game, you should. Cute and cuddly at first glance, with morbidity and death buried beneath the surface waiting to spring and give you anxiety and nightmares.

Despite my enjoyment of the songs, there are a few songs that left me wanting more. They simply felt too short, not in length, but in story, the endings felt clipped and a bit rushed. The song would feel like it was picking up for something big, or a continuation, then.

There were also a few songs that I felt needed a bit more editing. I’m not sure if it was intentional, missed, or what, but the breath and click at the end of some of the songs, or the sound of what could have been a computer mouse was a bit distracting for me. It’s something I’d expect from the early stages of music recording, not today with fancy editing software. Again, maybe it’s for affect.

Overall, if you’re into chill, folky music, you should check out this album. It’s a good first installment for a great artist.

 

January 24, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

Album Review—Green 15: The Jib Machine Records 15th Anniversary Compilation

by Ben Arzate

Jib Machine is an Ohio-based record company with a wide variety of artists from different genres. Established in 2004, this compilation celebrates their 15^th year by collecting thirty different tracks from thirty different acts.

I had decided when I received this album to go in blind and I was surprised at how eclectic the artists were. From the first song, and the DIY look of the album, I thought it would be all punk. While that’s certainly a part of the album, it’s not the only one.

I want to first give attention to “Dragon Eye Girl” by Slammin Gladys, as I also received a copy of their single for this song. This song as well as the other two on the single are funk-infused hair metal that take me back to the kind of things that other kids’ young parents would listen to when I was over at their houses.

It’s no surprise that the band was first formed in 1989. While I’m not exactly nostalgic for that sound, I did enjoy this. Between the title song and “Hangin’ on to You,” the single shows them as excellent musicians with a great singer. The live version of “Color Me Gone” also shows they can get pretty wild when they play live. If you like the kind of metal Bill and Ted would listen to, the single is definitely worth picking up.

The other songs on the album vary, but they mostly fall under the umbrella of rock. The album opens with “Harley Girl,” a fast-paced punk song. I can’t say that it pulled me into it, this type of punk music isn’t my cup of tea, but I can certainly see fans of the genre enjoying it.

There is, however, plenty here that’s more to my taste. For example, “Cold” by Eli Fletcher is a country rock song with the kind of desperation that I like hearing in my country music. “Minister Sinister” by Pontius Pilot is a dark and brooding country song with excellent atmosphere. There’s also “Evel Kienevel and God” by Smf, a lo-fi folk song reminiscent of Daniel Johnston. My favorite song on the album is probably “The Major Fall of Minor Men” by The War Toys. This is an excellent folk song with poetic lyrics that has made me very interested in seeking out more from them.

Even as eclectic as this, there are songs that really stick out. “Old Skool X” by The Penfield Experience is a techno song straight out of the mid-90s and an enjoyable one if you have affinity for that type of music. There’s also “O Holy Night” by Philomena Gales. Yes, the Christmas standard. While Gales has a lovely voice, there’s nothing unique or interesting about her rendition of the song. This one stands out in a particularly bad way as it sounds so incredibly bland. It’s easily the worst on the album.

With 30 tracks on this album from many different genres, it’s guaranteed most who listen to it will find something to like. It works more like a sampler, as Jib Machine puts out too wide a variety of music to really pigeon-hole them as any particular kind of label, but it’s one worth picking up if you’re looking for new music. There are a few groups on here that I know I’m very interested in hearing more from.

July 26, 2019 by Silent Motorist Media

Not So Worthless, Not So Reclusive: On Jandek

by Ben Arzate

In 1978, a mysterious album called Ready for the House, credited to The Units, was released by a new record label calling itself Corwood Industries. The front cover was a poorly lit picture of a brightly decorated room with no text on the front. Despite the name implying a band, the album was clearly done by one guy with a guitar.

Everything about the album was strange and off-putting; from its oddly mundane cover, to its lo-fi sound, to the seemingly out-of-tune guitar playing, to the strained singing of abstract lyrics. Even its final song, the most conventional sounding one on the album, cuts off in the middle of a verse.

The music could probably be best described as about what The Residents doing their own version of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon album would sound like. All the songs are a simple acoustic guitar and voice arrangement, except for the last song “European Jewel,” which uses an electric guitar.

It’s little wonder the album only sold two copies between the years 1978 to 1980 according to a representative from Corwood Industries. It did, however, catch the attention of another band called The Units who sent Corwood a cease and desist. After that, the first album was reissued with a new band name. It and all subsequent albums from Corwood are now credited to Jandek.

Eventually, radio DJ, music journalist, and outsider music connoisseur Irwin Chusid discovered the album. He wrote to Corwood Industries and received a phone call from the representative, Sterling Smith, shortly after. Smith was reluctant to talk about his personal life or even to refer to himself as Jandek. The advice and encouragement Smith received from Chusid was apparently enough to continue the Jandek project. Corwood released the second album, Six and Six, in 1981 and has been regularly putting out albums since.

Sterling Smith has continued to be very protective of his privacy and little is known about his personal life. For the longest time, he avoided interviews, though a few “off the record” ones ended up being made public. In some of these he revealed things like that his guitar tunings were intentional and it was tuned specifically for each song, contrary to the rumor that he didn’t know how to tune a guitar. He also revealed that name “Jandek” came from having a phone conversation with someone named Decker while he looked at a calendar in the month of January.

The music of Jandek has evolved over the many releases, adding drums and bass and sometimes going in radically different directions. Given how radically different the music already is, that’s really saying something. One example of this is his trilogy of a capella/spoken word albums, Put My Dream on This Planet, This Narrow Road, and Worthless Recluse, released between 2000 and 2001. I won’t lie, I haven’t been able to get through any of these albums despite some of the very poetic turns of phrase. Another example is The Song of Morgan released in 2013. This is a nine CD set with over nine hours of solo piano music.

However, not all Jandek’s work is difficult or inaccessible. For example, 2012’s Maze of the Phantom is a soothing, vaguely Eastern inspired album that fans of ambient music will certainly enjoy. 1982’s Chair Beside a Window, while still pretty erratic, is like a more lo-fi version of an early Velvet Underground album from the gentle and beautiful song “Nancy Sings” (one of the few times a guest artist is credited) to the pounding, angry version of “European Jewel,” which starts off where the incomplete version from Ready for the House cut off.

Jandek has become less reclusive over the years as well. While they still keep to themselves in regard to their personal life, they began making live appearances, the first being at a music festival in Glasglow, Scotland in 2004. Since then, they’ve done regular live performances as well as recorded live albums and DVDs. In fact, since 2014, all Jandek’s releases have been live albums and DVDs. They even starred in a short film which aired on PBS in 2014, credited as The Representative.

Jandek really is in a class of their own. Even as weird as many of their releases are, there’s an obvious passion and care put into all of it, they’ve gone through many creative phases, and there’s nearly nothing else that sounds like them. They’ve been putting out music for over 40 years and they don’t show any sign of stopping anytime soon. I eagerly anticipate seeing the direction Corwood Industries will take after the current live performance phase.

April 15, 2019 by Silent Motorist Media

Xiu Xiu’s Girl with Basket of Fruit, a Review

Few albums will hurt you this bad.

After the release of Daughter’s masterpiece, You Won’t Get What You Want, which stole the album of the year slot for “The 20 Best Albums of 2018” on this site, it would be reasonable to suspect that the world of experimental and dark music might take a while to muster something to contend with the last leviathan. Truly devastatingly dark albums, after all, don’t come around too often–at least if we consider only the few that are undeniably great. Albums like Sunn o)))’s Black One, Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch, and, yes, Daughter’s You Won’t Get What You Want, are rare treats for treasuring, and often must satisfy us for long dry stretches. I was expected quite a wait. I was wrong.

Enter Xiu Xiu, Jamie Stewart’s experimental band birthed way back in 2002.

Some people said that listening to You Won’t Get What You Want was a fright. I can concede that there were some hair-raising moments, such as Alexis Marshall’s convincing “let me in!” on the track “Guest House,” but something reaches up to stop me before I can call the album truly “frightening.” Bish Bosch is frightening. “Shaking Hell” from Sonic Youth’s Confusion is Sex is frightening. Allan Pettersson’s sixth symphony is frightening. You Won’t Get What You Want is dense, emotional, and harrowingly gorgeous, but it isn’t frightening.

Xiu Xiu’s 2019 release, Girl with Basket of Fruit, is fucking frightening.

Every track on this album (minus only the last one, “Normal Love,”) leaves splatter patterns sure to perplex even the keenest of forensic investigators. Xiu Xiu pushes the increasingly popular glitched-and-grimed aesthetic well past ten without sounding like Death Grips, and that alone would something to celebrate were this album not a moving experience in its own right. Girl with Basket of Fruit reaches in with both arms up to the elbows and walks away dripping, leaving you behind to writhe with your wounds in the dirt.

While, in retrospect, one can impose a sort of narrative leading up to this moment in Xiu Xiu’s career based on their previous albums–particularly in considering 2014’s Angel Guts–there really is nothing in 2017’s Forget that could’ve prepared you for this. In short, if you’re familiar with the glitchy pop Xiu Xiu of the past, beware. You’re in for something closer to a Swans album than a pop album with Girl with Basket of Fruit, and dark music fanatics certainly couldn’t be happier with the new direction.

While all the tracks are pummeling, disorienting, surreal, and deeply unsettling, “Mary Turner Mary Turner” manages to stand out as an experience sure to become a benchmark in dark music, much like “SDSS1416=13B (Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter)” from Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch. It retells the story of Mary Turner, a black woman lynched in Lowndes County, Georgia for protesting the lynching of her own husband. Stewart’s wild, drunken, and distorted spoken-word reenactment of this harrowing bit of history blasts fearsomely over wild percussion and groaning industrial bass drones sure to shock even seasoned weird music fans.

“Mary Turner Mary Turner” is striking example of dramatized atrocity. It’s a lynching-gone-horror-film, and it won’t sit comfortably with most listeners. Luckily, it isn’t supposed to. While on one hand, given the excessively melodramatic presentation, this track may come across as somewhat calloused and tasteless, it is the closest you can come to witnessing something so horrible yourself. History is a Wikipedia article, a bookmark that serves to coldly remind us of what’s already transpired. “Mary Turner Mary Turner” lends flesh and blood to the event, reanimating it in a way that places listeners squarely before the sheer evil in their own heritage. Yes, that may sound a bit Hawthornian, but it’s rare and worth celebration indeed when music can enact such a towering psychic image.

Of course, not everything on Girl with Basket of Fruit is as strong as “Mary Turner Mary Turner,” (which would be thoroughly impossible) but the album is certainly a must-have for anyone who enjoys truly dark and forward-thinking music. Unless 2019 miraculously turns into a more musically fruitful year than 2018, this album is bound to stand at the forefront of the throng. Get this thing.

5/5 stars.

-Justin A. Burnett

February 22, 2019October 28, 2021 by Silent Motorist Media

Fizzy Beasts and Where to Find Them: A Review of Mark Mathews’ Upcoming Album

One of my favorite quotes is by singer and songwriter Macklemore. “It’s up to you to turn the pen into a machete and make sure that every beat that you meet gets killed.” I try to live by this line. It’s a perfect representation of what every author, filmmaker, singer, and songwriter strives for.

A remix of the old adage of the pen and the sword. How much more powerful is that line? To take the pen in your hand and not wait for it to become a sword but to create that sword and slay any obstacle in your way.

I recently had the opportunity to listen, for the first time might I add, to the music of Mark Mathews. Fizzy Beasts, to be precise. I pressed play and needed to write this review. I love music, though I tend to get most of my tracks from the radio, rarely seeking new and unique music, unless the radio tells me I should.

Yep, I’m a bit of a drone in that regard, don’t judge me. When I was younger, I would attend local concerts, picking up a few bands I still look for today, though the ones I really enjoyed are all but dead, having never caught that big break. Maybe they just needed a good review? 

Anyway, back to the point: Mark Mathews. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first clicked play. As soon as those notes hit my ears, I fell in love. The sultry voice and soft tempo forced me to listen through to the end of the set.

I am, in fact, listening to it again, for the second time. The first track just started over and I had already forgotten how much I enjoyed it. He takes his pen and turns it into his machete, slaying the notes, creating sweet rhythm and harmony, and forcing your brain into a submission which begs for you to press play again as soon as it’s over.

I am a big fan of lyrics. One of the highlights of his music is the lyrics. They aren’t hidden by synthesizers or auto tuners, he blasts them from his vocal canal with the ferocity of a loving mother dragon, spewing them forth to your ear canals as his guitar, drum, piano, and other instruments aid their arrival.

Mathews sings of love, mostly, the love of a woman with raven hair who lives down under. In one song, The Flowers Still Grow, he throws in the sounds of the city, bikes and bike horns, the click of the gears as the wheels spin. I have to say, I love the image it gives me. For a second I thought that maybe I had a music video in the background and almost went to watch what was happening.

This is the type of music I imagine listening to while…well, writing. Like I am right now. Or sitting in a Barnes and Noble listening while browsing some random novel. I can take a step out of what I’m doing to relax with the music and then immediately pick back up where I left off without missing a beat. A sweet, sweet beat. Delivered by Mark.

He is described as “the hardest working solo artist in the UK right now” That’s cool, good on him, but who really cares? I, for one, don’t other than to commend him for being hard working, but you can be a hard working stable hand and simply have a pile of cow manure at the end of the day. Gratefully, that isn’t what you end up with at the end of Mark Mathews music. 

You end with an enjoyable listening experience. And I have ended up being a new fan. I plan on listening to more of his music in the future. You should check it out if you’re into mellow tones and smooth voices. Fizzy Beasts is available April 5th. 

 

February 18, 2019 by Silent Motorist Media