Hey hey, my my… something something! And possibly something else! It’s Episode the Fifth… which is to say our SIXTH outing… and we are here to… crow… about that… in our chats about Fave and/or New to Me in 23. Thank you muchly for checking in!!

As per the usual, we have all these tracks in a burnin’ hot YT playlist…

Dan’s Notes

Zulu

Initially a solo project of former DARE/Culture Abuse drummer Anaiah Lei, LA’s ZULU play heavy heavy hardcore full of blast beats and big breakdowns with lyrics celebrating Blackness and Black culture in the context of the punk and hardcore scene while incorporating influences from hip hop and spoken word poetry into their sonic assault. They had released a couple of EPS over the past few years but are gearing up to release their first full length this spring (on hot label du jour Flatspot Records) and all of their new material they’ve released in advance has been awesome. How many other bands are quoting Paul Mooney over sick mosh breakdowns in 2023? I dunno but I am looking forward to their debut full length. The band has a vision and a message and an energy that you don’t often run into in a genre where screaming can just be another genre trope rather than genuine expression of anger. Plus they made a music video recreating Tribe Called Quest’s classic “Scenario” for a song featuring guest vocals from members of Soul Glo and Playytime which is pretty fucking cool in my book. Zulu are one of the most exciting young bands going right now and I’m looking forward to seeing how they grow and expand their sound.

Domi and JD Beck

I honestly think they are aliens or something, or at least grown in a lab somewhere. I had first seen these cherubic instrumental prodigies as back up band for equally prodigious bassist/oddball Thundercat in a video on YouTube but never really looked too deep into their music as a unit until recently. Domi Louna is a jazz pianist from France, and JD Beck is a drummer from Texas and they are so talented at what they do that my hair turns white and my bones turn to dust when I watch them play. Their debut album “Not Tight” features hip hop jazz with vocals by folks like their frequent collaborator Thundercat, indie heartthrob Mac Demarco, Anderson Paak, and even Snoop Dogg over their complex polyrhythmic keyboard and drum compositions. It’s not hard to hear the influence of avante garde beatmakers like Madlib and J Dilla in Beck’s stuttering, often hyperkinetic drumming, and while a lot of their stuff is a little outside of what I normally listen to and I honestly don’t know a whole lot about the finer points of the jazz styles they traffic in, I can’t help but sit in awe at their technical ability and have to wonder where they are hiding all of the extra sets of arms they must have to be able to pull off their songs. 

Long Knife

I first became aware of Portland Oregon’s Long Knife through various year end lists of best punk and hardcore records of 2022, though it turns out some of the members had previously been in some great bands I was familiar with like The Riffs and Remains Of The Day (who coincidentally happened to play the night of the “Jesus Loves You, Aaron Cometbus” incident I tried to recount minus various incriminating details in the notes for Episode 1, Five Bands That Changed Your Life). They have been kicking around the Pacific Northwest since the early 2010’s though their 2022 full length Curb Stomp Earth on Blackwater Records is arguably their most high profile and 26 minutes of purely pissed off hardcore punk rock and roll that is not afraid to play with a spooky keyboard interlude here or art-damaged saxophone solo there to enhance the mood while kicking you in the face with speedy riffs and spite-filled vocals. These are big ugly dudes playing big ugly songs but it would be reductive to say their sound is more than just a clone of fellow big ugly Portlandians Poison Idea, though Jerry A and co could definitely be considered influences on Long Knife’s sounds. Despite the speed and anger and aggression of their sound, Long Knife have big hooks, catchy choruses, and songs that under different arrangement choices could make good dark rambling country songs with their tales of dingy bars and boarded up storefronts, like Hoyt Axton teaming up with Battalion Of Saints or something, with vocals that sound like the singer chases his PBR with ground glass. Curb Stomp Earth is rapidly becoming one of my favorite releases of last year even if I may have been late to the party by six or so months.

Screaming Females

Their new album is great, and I can’t believe I have neglected them.

I would ask what’s in the water in New Jersey that causes that state to produce so many great rockin’ artists, but I assume it’s just ambient evaporated Springsteen sweat that has re-entered the water table mixed with nuclear waste and tire fire runoff. Anyway, Screaming Females are a great power trio built around the massive riffs and powerful vocals of singer/guitarist Marisa Paternoster. The band’s sound is a powerful mix of punk and for lack of a better term alt rock that sort of resembles PJ Harvey or Patti Smith jamming with Greg Sage of The Wipers. It had been five years since their last record, but their 8th studio album Desire Pathways just came out this last week and it’s pretty killer to the point that I am kicking myself for letting the band fall off of my radar like that until this new batch of tracks they have graced us with. This was a very recent addition to my list, just being released on Feb 17tn of this year (making it the newest to me in 2023 by default) but the impression it has left so far made it impossible not to mention on the show given the topic this ep.

(Getting back into) Ted Leo And The Pharmacists

Ted Leo’s music was a huge part of the 00’s and early 2010’s for me but  I’ll admit I had drifted away from it a little until very recently when talk of his breakthrough third LP with backing band The Pharmacists “Hearts Of Oak” celebrating its 20th Anniversary a week or so ago. I think I was first introduced to Ted Leo’s music through a label sampler CD from Lookout Records around the time his previous album Tyranny Of Distance was released, but I became most familiar.air with his music a few years after that through his frequent involvement with legendary comedy and music program The Best Show in its terrestrial radio incarnation on New Jersey’s legendary WFMU. Ted and his band appeared on the show fairly frequently, whether he was crowdsourcing lyrics to a new song line by line from the show’s callers (“The World Is In The Turlet”), performing for one of the listener-supported station’s many fundraisers, or even debuting his post “…and The Pharmacists” collaboration with Aimee Mann, The Both, on one of The Best Show’s last episodes on WFMU before a brief hiatus and move to online streaming and podcasting exclusively. Best Show host Tom Scharpling even directed the video for Leo’s song “Bottled In Cork” from his final album with The Pharmacists in 2010. I just got around to finishing Scharpling’s memoir It Never Ends recently which got me nostalgic for The Best Show’s classic era, including a bunch of moments Ted Leo was involved in. Between that and Hearts Of Oak’s anniversary I’ve been giving his catalogue a bit of a revisiting lately. Ted Leo plays catchy melodic punk rock mixed with reggae, new wave, soul, and even Irish folk music at times, all with smart wry but heartfelt lyrics and an underlying sense of humour and it’s been great revisiting his classic albums from the 00’s again recently.

Miscellany

RIP Dave Jolicoeur aka Trugoy of De La Soul (1968-2023)

Matt’s Notes

Thanks as ever, Dan for the radical topic!! This one keeps MUTATING as the days go by…

And so… with or without you… we continue… [WTF, man… Editor]

Also… very real respect to the memory of Mark Lanegan… who passed away one year ago on this day… Feb 22, 2022… in Kilarney, Ireland… singer, songwriter, author, poet, producer, auteur… singer for Screaming Trees… and about two dozen albums many of which many of us have never heard of… including me… and much, much more…

I can’t recommend the dude’s memoir Sing Backwards and Weep enough…

Rest well, Scratch…

The Lawrence Arms

This is it… they’ve leapfrogged in a very short time into the “holy pantheon” [Editor: SERIOUSLY…] of punk &/or alternative music for me… including…

• The Replacements
• Leatherface
• Hüsker Dü
• Fugazi
• Hot Water Music
• Alkaline Trio* new since ‘22

And now…

Lawrence Arms…

Again… I’ll defer to whatever gushing I put on during the recordings… but their lyrics are exactly the kind of smart, desperate gasps that I’ve gravitated towards since I was a squirt…

From the land of Nelson Algren, with Bukowski on the brain…  

Their Best Of (Fat Wreck Chords) is exactly that… every song on it is a banger… with most songs clocking in closer to 2 minutes than longer… I’m holding off on taking a deeper dive on iTunes cause I’d prefer the first experience to be on vinyl as much as possible… with the notable exception of the Buttsweat and Tears EP… which I’ve listened to incessantly for at least the last couple of weeks…

Not as popular as Alkaline Trio or Hot Water Music or other Fat and/or Epitaph bands, they still perform and record… at least as recently within the past couple of years…

I could go on. I will. But that seems like plenty for now. My only regret is that I was late to the game discovering them at all… but… they’re fucking dope… so… it’s all good…

Samiam

I feel like sometimes I should call my segment of the notes and/or the show… Late to the Fucking Party by Matt Stranach…

Not be pejorative about it… simply… these guys existed for so long and were / are clearly so fucking good…

But uh… onward and upward? Or some-fucking-thing? Lol.

So… MAJOR shoutout to No Idea Records for keeping a bunch of their records in print… it’s not clear to me if they released them in the first place or if they are rereleasing things originally put out on other labels…

At this point, I dig the mystique… these dudes have been flying somewhat below the radar… maybe like the Lawrence Arms?? And so I am deliberately NOT GOOGLING them… which is ridiculous, but there we are… I’m a middle-aged man… etc., etc., etc….

The only reason I know about this band is from an interview or IG post by Chris Wollard (Ship Thieves, Hot Water Music) I forget which… and some beautiful lyrics in a gorgeous song by Yesterday’s Ring… see my next thing about Mudie for more about that… so… this is a band THAT PEOPLE IN MORE POPULAR BANDS revere… it’s one of those…

Which now reminds me how much I fucking love that Yesterday’s Ring record from last year…

ANYWAY

I was stoked to learn they have a new record coming out this year! On my kid’s birthday, no less! Which I am celebrating by going to see David Spade in Vancouver by myself…

Huh? Uh… yeah… mutter, mutter… mmmm….

Northcote (Victoria, BC) + Mudie (The Saint Catherines… Yesterday’s Ring… etc.)

These are two dudes who are both amazingly accomplished punk and postpunk and posthardcore and folk musicians… they’re both fucking as close weirdly… in a fucked-up millennial way… to Springsteen as we have among the younger cohort in this country… each in their special, slightly skewed way… as in… they both sing their faces off every time out… as near as I can tell, anyway…

I feel like I kind of rambled on this (these??) for a good amount of time during the recordings… so…

AND… I think I’ve provided enough info here about these artists here… and/or previous episodes of this show… so you can sample and track this stuff down if yer so inclined…

To reiterate… cause I’m middle-aged like that… both of these artists… and all their preceding work(s)… as well as the works of the associated scenes and musicians… are all worth checking out. It makes me… slightly… maybe… weirdly glad to be… oh fuck it…

Bad Religion

So.. I’ve REALLY not got much to say here… except…

They deserve 100% more credit than they get within mainstream music. While this is nothing new… we have members of Tom Petty’s band showing up on these albums… they put out videos when all the other Epitaph bands were doing the same and getting richly rewarded for it… forget how popular they are… it’s nearly unbelievable that they still tour and record and show no signs of slowing down…

And then… all of these dudes have worthwhile side projects and solo records and everything else… it’s actually pretty difficult to imagine 90’s music… and therefore the music of my generation…. WITHOUT Bad Religion… you might as well say that the whole 90’s music that wasn’t grunge just… didn’t happen…

ANYWAY

The lyrics are fucking phenomenal. It’s easy to forget how smart both lyricists… Greg and Brett… are… cause for the speed and melodies and oozin’ ahhs… creating and perfecting a format which so many other bands post-grunge rode to such wild success…

I can’t recommend Jim Ruland’s co-authored band autobiography enough… or any of his other books for that matter…

And… fuck…

Just because this came up on the show while Dan and I were talking about The Lawrence Arms… Chicago… and Nelson Algren…

Plus…

Left to right, top to bottom…

• Alkaline Trio have, rather ingeniously, reissued a double comp album of outtakes, live, alternates… and the like… I do indeed hope for new AK3 music this year… but if not… this is fine…
• Lucero are one of those rare bands… from my standpoint… that have yet to release one album… or even one song… that I can’t fucking support effusively… the new one Should’ve Learned by Now… will probably be out by the time you read this… as in… a matter of days…
• October Drift were a band I discovered via FB message from Jeremy from the Rocking Argentos… like a couple months ago? Anyway… on the LP that I have of theirs… the first of two… I have the other on the way… I actually found myself thinking that this singer guy sounds eerily… NOT UNLIKE Mark Lanegan… with a whole bunch of Joy Division and Northern English misery thrown in for good measure… this is high praise in my world…
• What, you think I need a reason to hype the Tribe??

Hey hey, you you… thanks for swinging through! May you roam freely and/or weirdly until next time…

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Filed under: Uncategorized - @ February 22, 2023 12:27 pm