The Trouble With Noise

So Daniel, one of the guys i work with, came over to my desk about a month ago wanting me to listen to something, a band he'd come across - kind of a 'Hey, these guys got a record deal so anything's possible' joking around sort of thing. He's like, "You gotta check out this band Skullflower, it's absolutely fuckin' horrible!" So I put on the headphones and was ATTACKED by what sounded like the highest frequencies of cymbal crashes and guitar feedback. Kind of like one of those Sonic Youth noise pieces they'll slip into their songs only more dense and assaulting... Less like music and more like a construction site amplified or the sound of a twenty car pile up in slow motion. It was an imediately oppressive and painful blanket of tingling noise that caused my face to bunch up in an ugly grimace. Daniel laughed and walked away, feeling confident in my disgust. But after he left i kept listening. I couldn't turn it off. I listened to each of the nine tracks on the album (which is called Tribulation, by the way, and came out this year on Crucial Blast Records) and then went back and listened to them all again.

Since then I've gone back to Tribulation many more times and despite the fact that I feel complelled to listen repeatedly I still can't tell whether I like this shit or not. This is the trouble with noise - it's so hard to tell brilliance from sheer laziness and stupidity. It's art that tests our capacity for acceptance of art. Like John Cage's forrays into organized silence, noise art forces us to question where the boundaries of music lay. And that's all good but it's just a fancy way of talking around the big question at hand: is this stuff any good? Well I still can't say with any certainty that noise art, or even this Skullflower stuff is good, but I CAN say their album, Tribulation, has caught my attention and held it better than any other noise oriented work I've been exposed to from Merzbow to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music to contemporaries like Wolf Eyes... Tribulation is a deeply textured and forcefully earsplitting record that achieves psychedelia in a way that's entirely different than any 'psychedelic' music of the past. If your looking for melody or structure or anything that even remotely makes sense you won't find it here - but you may find something that mystifies you enough to keep listening.

Tecate: Always A Bad Decision

Why is every 20-something bar patron in the Mission is pretending that swilling cans of Tecate beer is a good idea and a fun time? Every time I find myself at the Phone Booth or some other carcinogen laced Mission neighborhood bar everyone's got a can of Tecate in their hand. What the fuck?! How many horrible hangovers have these pissy tasting suds caused and how many more must we suffer before we learn? Just because a beer costs two bucks at the bar all night long doesn't mean you should drink it. In fact, it more often means you shouldn't drink it. DANGER! And why do these peeps seem to believe that stuffing a wedge of lime into the can makes this shit any better? If we must drink Mexican beer in the Mission (an understandable accomodation) there are plenty of better choices. Pacifico anyone?

Just the other morning i woke up with another stinging and biting Tecate hangover... It didn't come as a surprise since the hangover started before my third can the previous evening. Even drinking a pint of water after every beer consumed couldn't save me. What the fuck do they do to this stuff to make it so lethal? Well that's fucking IT! The buck stops here. No mas Tecate! Please join me and let's stop the madness.

Sufjan Stevens: Forgiven For Loving Jesus

Okay, I dunno for sure if Sufjan Stevens is a jesus freak but I've heard enough people say he is to believe it's true. And I have to say that for once, this doesn't bother me at all. Who fuckin' cares if you love God when you can make an album as absolutely mindblowing as Illinoise? Christian? Maybe, but we're not talking about Jars Of Clay or Creed here. There's no precedent in Christian popular music for an album as varied and beautiful and hard to figure out as this one. This is music made by a man crazed by sleep deprivation, unable to eat or pay attention to the world outside the recording studio. The time and energy it must have taken to come up with something like this is just effing insane. If this guy isn't a religioso he's definitely nuts in some other way cause the sheer amount of instruments and ideas on Illinoise is enough to rival Pet Sounds. Yeah, I just said that - disagree all you want but it's true.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know critics have been jizzing about this guy for awhile now, but i'd been ignoring the hype - too busy digesting new releases by confirmed atheist bands to be bothered. I figured he was just another singer/songwriter with shrug inducing love songs or one of these neo hippie freak acoustic guitar-in-a-field-of-daisies types. Praise the lawd for letting me hear Illinoise before I heard about Sufjan's jesus infatuation - I would most certainly have gone on ignoring him just like i ignore the diseased and starving children of the world or natural disasters that don't affect me.