Thomas Mahoney

Here are ten songs that came out in 2008 which I listened to anywhere between 50 to 1000 times (those are precise numbers, of course). I couldn’t find the Sigur Ros track or any of the obscure metal shit I like on iMeem, but if I do when I’m less lazy, then this list will expand (duh).

You’ve probably seen a bunch of these on every other pretentious indie rocker list, so I’d pay the most attention to the following: Amazing Baby’s “The Narwhal,” which sounds like a cover song of some long-lost track off “Led Zeppelin III,” the Black Angels’ “You On The Run” from the criminally-overlooked sophomore LP, Santogold’s Bad Brains cover, and the Primal Scream track from yet another album that didn’t get enough attention.

P.S. you either like to blow up houses, kill children, rape women, destroy cultures, enslave the weak or you don’t. Stop destroying the world in the name of religion, oil, money, etc. Hey, it’s Christmas. I had to throw that in! FREEDOM FIGHTER.

How often do you hear an album and absolutely need to tell someone about it, as if the life of your mother and father depended on converting at least one flesh-and-blood human to a true believer? Maybe never. If you love music, this probably happens once or twice a month when you’re a teenager, and proceeds to fade into a once or twice a year phenomenon as you grow older. For me, tonight is the tipping point for such an album.

I’ve openly mentioned Dr. Z several times in the past few months, but tonight, I need to unleash. “Three Parts To My Soul,” the trio’s only album, released in 1971, is far from essential. But for several of the people I know reading this, it absolutely crushes.

In the late 90s, when I was in college, I was fortunate enough to work in a somewhat cool record store — Newbury Comics — and was subsequently exposed to a ton of music beyond my immediate punk/hardcore/metal interests. For whatever reason, I found myself attracted to free jazz and prog rock, and Dr. Z represents the height of the latter genre. For fans of early Genesis, Pink Floyd, Yes, Return to Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson, et al, “Three Parts To My Soul” will be a welcome revelation. If you love J.R.R. Tolkien, virtuouso keyboards, drum solos a la Billy Cobham, uncontrollable guitar progressions, and absolutely fucking ridiculous lyics/vocals, you’re truly in for a treat.

For a full recap, visit the allmusic description of the band/album. Oh, and if you want the album itself, visit ChrisGoesRock, read the review, and scroll down to the ShareBee link.

As I posted earlier via the Trademark Recordings site:

And it would be criminal not to mention our discovery of the year was the epic 1971 prog masterpiece by Dr. Z, “Three Parts To My Soul.” Any album featuring a 5 minute drum solo halfway through track 2 after the phrase, “I was born / In the Middle Earth” leading into an angry chorus of “Three parts to my soul / Spirtus, manes et umbra” goes off.

Also, I would be a jerk if I didn’t mention that Camerin recommended this album to me. For the second year in a row, he successfully turned me on to exactly one band. In 2007, he converted me into a Le Orme fan, specifically due to its album “Felona e Sorona,” which I still feel even more strongly about (if you have any doubts, listen to side A on vinyl, specifically when “L’Equilibrion” breaks into pre-cocaine/gangsta rap jam “Sorona.”)

Prog rock is one of those things you probably hate unless you like Dungeons & Dragons and/or play an instrument. Growing up as a punk rock kid, I was supposed to hate it. But to me, it’s as anti-establishment as playing three chords at 100 watts and 100 mph. To me, it proves the theory that the extremes of any given spectrum are basically the same. And extreme ideals/conditions often, for better or worse, foster incredible results.

Get into it.

In September 2006, I launched a new record label entitled Trademark. Later on, my close friends would claim I named it that because of my own sign off (TM), but in reality, I wanted something as generic as Factory, my favorite record label ever. Along with two discolored boxes as an icon, Trademark was launched. Two years later, we finally have a “real” web site. We put it out there tonight. Visit it at http://www.trademarkrecordings.com. It’s not complete, but it’s close.

If I had money and started a label, I’d sign TV on the Radio, Deerhunter, the Black Angels, the National, and…well, that’s about it. I’d probably lose money and die. So be it. 

Anywho, please visit the site, criticize its shortcoming, despise its releases, and otherwise fuck yourselves. All feedback is welcome. And all players are welcome. Thank you. Goodnight and good luck.

TM

Tonight marks a special occasion in my life: I get to finally see one of five dudes who ever influenced my guitar playing. The band is Krallice; the guitarmageddonist is Mick Barr. Let’s go through a quick countdown of those riffmasters and sonic terrorists who inspired me to rip off a chord, a technique, or buy a certain effect pedal.

1.) Jimmy Page - Led Zeppelin
This is a no-brainer. Zeppelin are the greatest rock band ever (OMG, I can’t believe I said it!). Watch the fucking DVD if you don’t believe me. Plant was the sex, Bonham the brute force, and Jones the reasonable one that held it all together; Page was simply the black magick channeling forth riffs from the underworld. Anyone who lived off of banana daiquiris, heroin, and Les Paul’s cranked through Marshall amps for a decade is a special person, indeed.

2.) John McLaughlin - Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, Shatki, etc.
No one out-shreds McLaughlin. Miles Davis, who once proclaimed if he had a few minutes left on earth he’d spend it choking a white man nice and slow, even named a song after this honky. Jazz, fusion, heavy metal, Indian ragas, flamenco — whatever. McLaughlin went off, and he did it while wearing white and hanging out with Jan Hammer and a drummer who can play with full glasses of water on his toms, never spilling a drop. When your solos cannot be notated, you’re on to something.

3.) Ian MacKaye - Fugazi, Minor Threat (non-guitar), etc.
Ian MacKaye is why I own a Gibson SG and why I play guitar. I don’t need to say anything else.

4.) Kevin Shields - My Bloody Valentine
The first and only guitarist who ever made me want to go into a Guitar Center and buy $5k worth of reverb, delay, and tremolo pedals. While most guitarists cover up their playing under racks of effects, Shields used such technology to broadcast a wall of sound harder, deeper, and louder than anything else ever in the history of planet Earth. When Matt Pike says, “wall to the Universe,” I think he is subconsciously describing Kevin Shields.

5.) Mick Barr - Krallice, Crom-Tech, Orthrelm, etc.
I think it was 1997/1998 when I heard the Crom-Tech LP on Gravity Records. It destroyed my mind and has since rendered all imposters obsolete (see: the Dillinger Escape Plan, blargh). That Crom-Tech LP (and subsequent releases) changed the vocabulary of avant-garde punk rock guitar. Put on anything with Mick Barr and watch as heads explode the way the aliens’ heads do in Mars Attacks. Flamethrower riffs played like a circus acrobat on speed. Fuck yeah!

In certain circles formed around an independent community known as hardcore punk rock, Benjamin Harold Jenkins is known as Sexjams, a Milemarker-derived pseudonym he used as an email handle pre-Y2K. In related trivia, Sexjams is also tattooed above my right knee, an homage to a man my mother remembers specifically for cracking his knuckles repeatedly in her presence and for the infamous, “I’m drinking the Classico Tomato & Basil pasta sauce because I’m thirsty AND it’s delicious” incident that occurred during the original Summer of Fun.

Inside jokes and irrelevant information aside, Sexjams has responded to my previous post about self-described “country ‘n’ northern” band the Fall.

Sexjams writes:

Here are my albums by the Fall that I can strongly resonate with to the point where I’ll commit it to a list:

NO particular order:

*Fall Heads Roll & The Real New Fall LP: decades into his career, MES comes up with a classic line-up that revisits the Fall’s most “accessible” career-spanning fascination of garage rock.

*The Complete BBC Sessions: This box can perhaps count as two albums. I like how MES re-tools random songs from, say, the 70s when doing a BBC sessions in the 90s. Drastic revision aside, he also uses the BBC to take on crazy covers e.g. “Jingle Bell Rock” from a late December performance years ago.

*The Light User Syndrome: Has some of my favorite lyrical moments from a favorite lyricist such as, “Pink Floyd are short. The Stones are short.”

*Hex Enduction Hour: An album with two dueling percussionists on board, this is the post-punk Allman Brothers that contains some of the Fall’s most intricate take on their own moments of angular yet dance-ready numbers. The opening lines contain the wonder “Where are all the obligatory niggers?”

I patiently await responses from the rest of the world.

I love the Fall. I love the Fall not just because they’ve put out (mostly) great music for 30 years, or because they are UK punk’s last band standing, or because Mark E. Smith once demanded that a Philadelphia promoter pay him in cocaine (and this was only a few years back). I love the Fall because they may be the only band I love whose catalogue I’m not fully acquainted with. With nearly 50 official full length albums to the Fall’s credit, I can readily admit I haven’t heard half of them. Sold to me years ago as the ultimate musical polarizer — you either want to make mad love to them or hang them at the gallows —  the Fall come up in conversations with my music snob friends at least every few months.

So I’m doing an informal survey, which started out as an innocent email to Fall aficionado Benjamin “Sexjams” Jenkins. If you love the Fall, please email me your top 5 or 6 albums by the band. In return, I will compile a list and eventually publish it here, so all Fall fans — past, current, and future — have an unofficial blueprint not just for themselves, but for friends who may be leaning in the direction of becoming Fall fanatics. 

Also, I just like saying the Fall a lot. It sounds cool. It’s one of the best band names ever.

That’s it. I got nothing else for you at the moment.