dayan’s blog

1. Karate, "Cacophony" - "Pockets" is my favorite Karate album, if you want to know the truth. It's a little heavy on the jazz wankery (but what Farina record isn't?), but the production is superb - the drums especially, which sound crisp and martial on this song. They used to play all the fucking time in Boston, which was an amazing thing to have in your city whenever you wanted it. Every time I listen to Karate I think of this great Weekly Dig retrospective:

"I'll never forget my first summer living in Boston," Kristina Johnson of Roh Delikat recalls. "I heard the sounds of a Karate practice coming out of a second story window above the ball-bearing company. I stood there and listened for a long while in disbelief and excitement at what I was hearing - and it was awesome."

2. Juvenile, "Around the Way" - The first four or five songs off the new Juvenile album are pretty great. I love the way the 16th-note hi-hats give way to that little horn riff before the chorus; Juvenile has such a cool voice, liquid and glottal, and he always sounds so enormous when he's slurring over a beat like this one.

3. Gang of Four, "Natural's Not In It" - One of my favorite songs of all time. Unimpeachably, 100% classic. Still sounds as great as the first time I heard it.

4. Consonant, "That Boston Life" - That first Consonant album is so fucking good. Clint Conley's lyrics, abstract by Burma standards, neatly manage to convey so much; I was making the Boston - New York commute fairly regularly when this record came out, and it almost knocked me dead. Probably the best thing, start to finish, any member of Mission of Burma ever did, which is saying a lot.

5. Three 6 Mafia, "Side 2 Side" - Easily the worst guest verse Crunchy Black ever did, which is also saying a lot. Notable mostly for separate, equally ludicrous remixes featuring Kanye West and Bow Wow (!), and the "club montage" on the "Most Known Unknown" DVD.

6. DJ Assault, "Kill the Bitch" - I'm as much of a fan of casual misogyny as the next guy, but it really says something about a song when it makes "Dick by the Pound" look positively subtle by comparison.

7. And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, "How Near How Far" - A rare example of a band getting major-label money and knowing exactly what to do with it.

8. R. Kelly, "Intro (Weatherman)" - Jaw-dropping. Deserves way better than just to be the intro, but the fact that it is tells you all you need to know about how good "Happy People" is.

9. Nothing Painted Blue, "Missed the Point" - I've been listening to "Emotional Discipline," an old Nothing Painted Blue singles comp, a lot lately, and it's kind of striking how well most of their old songs aged - it could just be the fact that Franklin Bruno writes lyrics that just run circles around everybody else's, or maybe it's just my abiding love for early 90's bands that blatantly rip off Superchunk riffs. Regardless.

10. Sporty Thievz, "No Pigeons" - I have a half-finished piece for Oh, Destructo written about novelty response songs, and here's what I wrote about the Sporty Thievz:

I recall the moment my friends and I heard "No Pigeons" by Sporty Thievz on the radio for the first time. We were juniors in high school; we were driving down route 57 in Liverpool, New York to Science Olympiad practice in somebody's basement, where I would nearly set myself on fire trying unsuccessfully to control a chemical reaction for the important Mission Possible event. (I took physics instead of chemistry; I don't know why anyone thought it'd be a good idea to trust me with beakers of reactive substances.)

We were pulling out of a Wendy's parking lot when it came on Hot 107.9. We laughed so hard we almost drove off the road.

"No Scrubs" by TLC was a song that was beloved for some reason by the only two girls on the team, Virginia and somebody (upon whom, naturally, we all had awkward high school crushes). When it came on the radio in Virginia's basement, they started singing along really loudly while gyrating in as groovy a fashion as orthodontia-laden 16-year-old girls could gyrate in 1998. We boys, all of us with terrible haircuts and worse fashion sense, were suitably shamed. The actions of the only women who could willingly relate to us on a social level proved it once and for all. We were scrubs.

However, I don't believe that many of the central allegations levied at the male targets of "No Scrubs" rang literally true with me or my friends, which may account for why, in retrospect, "No Pigeons" was the song we liked better. Very few of us could actually get girls with any sort of regularity. We did all live at home with our mamas. Only some of us had cars. (For God's sake, there were five of us crammed into a Chevy Celebrity at that very moment, eating chicken nuggets and plotting how to "get" Fayetteville-Manlius in the Experimental Design finals.)

I visibly cringed not long ago at the line "I got two nuts, bitch/choose a ball" when we were listening to it in the car. It hasn't aged very well at all.

When my friend Carl and I got drunk this spring and he told me about our friend Shaw's new band Ra Ra Riot, I sort of wrote him off at first. Carl has fantastic taste, but when somebody describes their friend's new band to you, you can reasonably expect to hear either a bongo player or a seven-string guitar - both, if the band's from Syracuse, which is where I grew up and which is where Shaw went to college and now lives. Nonetheless, I went and saw them in May when they played a free show on a Monday night at our local hesher bar.

Listening to their demos, it's easy to think "Arcade Fire" and be done with it; live, I couldn't really make such an easy comparison. There are seven people in the band, and the string section wound up standing on the floor in front of the stage, a la Lightning Bolt, as the others squeezed between their amps and drums onstage. Shaw, who sings and plays synth, spent the entire show hopping around the crowd dressed in a headband and too-small running shorts, thrusting his ass in people's faces and tripping over the mic cable. It was largely out of necessity due to the size of the tiny bar, but they managed to immediately erase all distance between the crowd and the band, and given that the crowd was mostly comprised of people's parents and friends from high school (Shaw and a couple other people in the band are from the Boston suburbs), it ended up feeling more like a party than any other midweek show by an unknown band I've seen in Boston, which as a city tends to be indifferent at best to small-time bands.

Their demos don't really give you a sense of what their live show is like, but "Dying is Fine" is pretty terrific, a dreamy reworking of an e.e. cummings poem that displays a wry, dark sense of humor; Shaw has enough of an eye for the mundane ("There were piles and piles and piles and piles of paperwork pertaining to me/It was the job of a desk clerk to X out all the death parts") to know to sing his vocal perfectly deadpan, which lets the cello and violin build and swell and create tension. It isn't a pretentious song at all, which is a small triumph.

Ra Ra Riot are in a funny place right now - they've only been together for a few months, they don't have a label that I know of, they're booking their own tours and nobody really knows who they are, but everybody who does (who are, admittedly, mostly still their friends) seems to be convinced that they're about to be really huge. They go on the road next week, playing little bars and college parties around the East, and it wouldn't surprise me if they came back home in September with a little more attention directed their way than they expect.

The lack of any kind of scene in Syracuse means that when they play there, they typically open for touring bands who they don't really sound anything like; they played with Kid Koala and Lake Trout this spring, and their current month-long tour concludes with a show in Syracuse opening for, uh, John Brown's Body. My tolerance for earnest, ornate indie-pop is fairly limited at this point, but Ra Ra Riot play it well, and more importantly do it live in a way that makes them sound bigger and more of a spectacle than the places they play. All those string flourishes, hi-hats, and octave synth lines are meaningful in the context of watching this band in a dive bar - they signal a kind of ambition I can't ever remember coming from a band from my hometown. I hope this is just the start.