Jake Mckelvie and the Crew Are Back!

Six long years and here it is. Jake Mckelvie and The Countertops have finally released their third album. A moment I've been waiting on since approximately a week after a sweaty evening in 2014 at the Keene Local Burger in a month I can't remember, the guys wearing suits for a crowd of fifty or so college age kids and me and my friend at the time, Zoe. They played their new record Solid Chunks of Energy end to end, and then they play a few of the heat tracks. It's still one of the best shows I've ever been to. My name, my old name, was chanted at the end of the set. Suffice to say I've been waiting a while. 

It's no secret that I'm a Jake Mckelvie fan of an old kind. I have lyrics from the first record tattooed on my back. It is safe to say more or less I have listened to everything this band has ever done and I mean that with no exaggeration. At all. I am their largest fan. My biases are clear. Solid Chunks was in a lot of ways a disappointment. the gulf between my love for their first record (my favorite album of all time) and their second effort was fairly sizable (mind you it had little to do with the songs on that album, many of which I have heard dozens of times at live shows and love, but the production). I had my trepidations going into this messianic album. After all these years, was it not like a light bounding over a hill? Was it not a rumor or a whisper at this point? My on going attempts to write music reviews like poetry, please bare with me.

What we get for our wait, dear friends, is another perfect Countertops album. Full stop. It's another stage in the Countertops evolution. This band is too tight and too skilled to pick apart the playing. Their veterans at this point. almost a decade into their existence as a band, slightly less with this lineup (again showing my age with a Jeff Hall reference). Here's What You Do takes the Countertops sound and expands upon it. Its really that simple. They shred harder for sure (my mind flashes to when Jake couldn't solo and the show where they opened up for Big D and The Kids Table at the Mable Brown Room where I saw Jake Shred for the first time live). The songwriting has more twists and turns. If their is any dull I feel for this album that's all on me. I am the one whose context has calcified, their skills and execution have only gotten better. 

When I first heard the tops I was young, I still am but we'll clarify that ahead, I was living in Keene with them and saw them all the time. So much of the joy I got from their music was being a scene kid. I was an awkward and mildly friendless kid in highschool and loving their music, and dancing so hard to it, gave me a way to feel cool and apart of something. It was such a part of my life in those days. I'd get up to get ready for school in my families apartment on Marlboro street and I'd put on the first album and play it into the kitchen off my cd player, my mom dancing in the bathroom as she got ready for work. that's how I wracked up 300 plus plays of that record. These days the tops aren't so integral. I am a few heartbreaks away from those days. A lot more suicide attempts than I'd like to admit from those days. 

It's a perfect album y'all. These days their music makes me nostalgic more than anything else. That's the bias y'all. That and I don't want to go on about jakes absurd lyrics... I've had that conversation countless times, writing about it would be like writing about the sky or the memory of my father. I have been living with Jakes words for so long. They are inseparable to how I think of lyrics. Can't really grade that on an axis of good and bad can I? Surely I can't. As I keep Listening to the album I am bolstered by a feeling of hope. That these things continue, the legacy of the good things we have in our lives can keep going. I might not be the same as I was, and hell back then wasn't idyllic. there was abuse and suicide then too. Its just that now I have to try and figure a way to move out of my moms house. frankly there's almost a sick cyclicality. Living with my mom on Marlboro street when the self titled came out and almost a decade later in a different house with my mom on Marlboro street when the new album comes out. I am wistful folks. this album gets ten out of ten wistful. 

Its a great album. No one who knows me would be shocked to find me telling you listen to a Jake Mckelvie record. but then again this wasn't really an album review was it.              

Secret Society

I walked home last night in the rain, after a day of being wholly unaware and untold of when i was allowed to leave work. I was just happy to leave so I walked home in the grinding rain, just one foot after the other, clothed in a serene sense of a continuing in the journey with the closing in of impending death... the lightning flashes getting closer and closer, the light illuminating more and more of my peripheral surrounding as I walk, soaked to my skin, no umbrella, alone down this wide street littered with construction equipment and upturned gravel. I kept scanning back and forth, after every white light flash and low rumble, looking to see just how close to the tallest object I was around me. I kept rerunning in my mind everything I had learned about about lightening safety in elementary school. I figured the possibility certainly was there. that I could get struck by lightning on the road. all the ground we, wide pavement road. the conditions seemed right. would have been a pretty solid way to die
                                                        a
                                                          n                                                                                                                                                                     y                                                                                                                                                                    w
                                                                   a                                                                                                                                                                   y

                  let's start a secret society.                                             just you and me and all the people we love
                                         let's make art just for us
                                                                                                     lets take long car rides and write songs places and not release them or plan for nothing but lets make a thing or two together.


            we'll have names on names inside of names. we'll think of something

                                                              we'll have handshakes and call signs. we'll have safe houses and mailing lists. we'll live in as a robust and open hearted way imaginable. we'll work jobs and save money and know we have each others backs. there will always be floors to sleep on. couches to surf. I want to see all of you out on the slab my beloved. we'll write a manifest. we'll have a guild.
                                                           lets buy cb radios. lets pool money so we can all buy cb radios.                                   i hope that shouting into a staticy either would bring response
                                                     

lets start a secret society

A transmission from The Butch Princess

Hello all, a transmission, an echo in the canyon of me from Cora the Butch Princess of the sensitive misanthrope kingdom.

Rhymes are an illusion, like a lot of things. I shape words in my mouth and make them fit together. My mouth is a kiln. In my mouth I forge vessels for holding, dispensing. my heart is a farm for joy, sometimes. I birth happiness twins and name then yesterday and tomorrow.

other days i dream of robbing liquor stores and killing all clerks behind counters or turning my eyes from anyone who tenderly kisses my heart, who would want to eat such a poisonous apple. I am certainly sick for sure. I can't know what unsick days feel like. I know the farm days. I know what the growing times feel like. and the fallow times, the wild fire season is always and it comes quick after a few dry weeks of happiness. of beautiful phone calls with a beautiful girl whose throat wishes me well with its laughter.

                                 what even is a life
            i don't                                   think                  i can tell you . . .  . . . . . .
                           let's start some bands please
i would like to forget why i love firing squads so much and how much space that takes up. y'all must tend to the girl on the tightrope. she could fall and not even know why. i don't want to be tended over, or to know that i could or should or might'n't be tended over. language is an illusion. suck on that post modernists.

tell me that this was constructed
                                                          LIKE this DIDN'T Just CRAWL OUT OF MY BELLY
LIKE THIS WASN'T HERE WHEN MY MOMMA COULD GO to the store and buy liquor for her mom. we all have moms probably. and they had moms and i think we should know that
                                                   what is life i am trying to figure that out. what would it mean for me to have a good one, i think i need to know what love is first, or how to have a good one. the farm days remember. trying to kill myself in my ex girlfriends kitchen. i need to get a card that says that. i say it not infrequently. the sensitive misanthrope in her castle. pontificating for breakfast, hoping before my pants come on i will understand how the tides might take me to a promised land. and perhaps all this is                                 is waiting for me to relise gods arrows don't miss
                                                                                                                  or another morsel of wisdom.
                   



I have gorged on the profundity of wizards and conjurers and the mages of every corner searching for a constancy  of inconstancy. just sticking my nose in the trough.



           SO.     whats life?   ?   ?   ?  ? ?????  i'm still not sure if this isn't a disjointed sensory trip that just ends one day. which frankly sounds pretty lovely. though i am so enamored of the idea of a moral truth i can't see a world devoid of morality. righteousness lives somewhere just not in you or me or anyone else. 

               I haven't moved anything . managed by some chance to posses the love of some amazing people, for the care of others to fall on me in ways that were not understood. is that my  life. the summation of too much inertia and a lack of understanding ? i am the demon princess of the misanthropes. a thief of thieves. a stealer who letsyou know it has been stolen, who draws a map of the crime scene (PEACE TO THE RUBY YATCH AND ALL THE WRITERS WHO PUT TRUTH IN TRANSMITTABLE FORM). life. might just be this and i hope to kiss someones feet for the pleasure. i don't hate life. the droughts live in me not her. no more punctuation
there isn't punctuation in my mind no not even in my kingdom as a i sit on my throne and transmit this to you

         my beloved
                                  i have probably hated you at some point. saw, in some chamber in my mind, how i might brutally kill you. life has no punctuation. mine at least. its just blurred feelings of grace and utter terror fucking one another for days on end. peace beloved. i hope god blesses you and the house you build. i want  that
                               blessings and a house to build
                                                                                      lets start some bands. lets start a secret society and manifest things. i want to make anything with all of you. but not in words anymore i want to make things in life. in this space. i want unrestrained desire to meet unfettered actions. burn cars. fuck the police. fuck the internet too. i'm not gonna be hogtied by a devious mediocraty or maybe i should submit. i should learn where east is. i miss my headscarf some days. blessings.
        i hope the hate is an illusion like the rhymes, that i can shape it in my mouth. my mouth is a kiln. i forge vessels.
 

 

Apocalyptic prophesies

i'm not really... like a music journalist actually. not that anyone was saying i was. i think this is the child playing in their dads truck (like i used to do in my dads) version of music journalism. i am uninterested in a lot of ways in making a point here. having a point means you could have a wrong point. it means assuming a certain weight of moral vision. of having the right framework. i have been dubious of frame works lately. in part brought about by a certain quietism. and the feeling that so much is grasping at straws. i am probably just angry. anger has been the shadow force in me for a while. and i just never knew. angry at myself. angry at feeling useless and out of step and boiling in my own ignorance. so who am i to say anything about anyone. to make a point. but i still like to write. and i still love billy wood's music. so why not say just anything. no points. no trying in anything else other than to illuminate an artist whose work has changed my life. i have a laptop and a feeling.

woods is a rapper from new york by way of d.c and zimbabwe. he got his start in the new york underground with the likes of rap legends vordul mega and others (frankly that's my one example sorry, he's had a long career in underground rap). I came to him around the time of his 2018 album hiding places, produced by the equally amazing kenny segal. it helped propel me through a philosophy paper i was working on (an addendum to a previous paper on hegelian recognition theory and the relationship between cis and trans people). without that record i probably wouldn't have finished the danm thing, let alone had so much fun.

wait, lets talk about frameworks for a second. i like a particular kind of rap, and this isn't to be all 'well he's not like the other rappers' about it. that's racist bullshit that white geek rap fans have been pulling forever and just reasserts the exceptional negro troupe. so stop it. anyhow i digress and also say that woods is like other rappers, he raps. rap is a lineage, an artistic tradition. again, digressing. what i mean is my idea of what fun is my own distinct version of what fun is. woods is what i think of when i think of fun hip hop. i like dark and sad music truly and he is dark and sad hip hop. i get a genuine thrill when i hear him rap 'grew up around where dogs was racist/ fathers pulled firing pins out of guns gave 'em to us to play with'. that shit kills. like hot damn. he raps like a house fire, not just in image but in feeling. he raps like a burning police precinct. a flickering intensity that lets you know these are only the tips of some particularly nasty icebergs. settle in. get ready. cuz we ain't stopping just yet. we've got a lot of very corrupt and vile systems to get rid of. rodney carmichael, npr staff writer on hip hop, in 2019 said woods was the 'poet laureate of our afro-dystopia.' the most concise and effective explanation for what woods does and why its amazing.

the density and command with which woods rhyme is what i think earns him the laureate title. he orates these fragments and snippets he masterfully strings together into his own kind of punchline structure (his line "shorty can't eat no book, what i told ta-nehesi coats" is just one of the most fantastic things i've ever heard. take that award winning and generally beloved cultural critic mr coats)... like i said i don't have or want a point... i just have a lap top and a feeling and i could just start quoting lyrics and going 'see he's a genius' but that would get very very boring. so i'll say, he's a more abstract wu tang to me. he isn't rapping about trans people getting killed or abut how uncomfortable it is to live the fallacy of social gender all the goddamn time. but in the terror and the novelty of life which he raps about, i do find a sense of comfort and a sense of cinematic entertainer, much the way i do with wu-tang clan lyrics, hearing this man rap about the violent and apathetic characters which inhabit his songs. plus he wrote one of the greatest songs ever written; red dust.

shout out to my future neck tattoo.

and i got out without making a point.

Review: The new Chodus Album

recently my buddy Lauren put out a new album. It's no secret I love his music and his band Chodus. I've written about them before. I made a Facebook post about how much I loved the new album A Clown Who Lost the Circus. And boy did I love it. In that post I said that if I wished I could write a review for a publication of the new album. And then I remembered that I have this blog, so here it goes.
There's a magic to what Lauren does that I can't talk about enough. He's the hero in music we all wish we had growing up, or at least I do, and to the extent that I am still growing up, I am glad he's around. He does what he does. No apologies and no back steps. I always appreciate someone who wears their heart on their sleeve and isn't afraid to dress down and yell about it. The thing with Lauren, and the other players in Chodus (Jake and Jason), they aren't just raw and effective. they are good. the songs take dips and dives. His guitar playing is mesmerizing. He painted the tracks on this one with ambiance. reversed wooshings and synthy wiggles. He plays with electronics and drum machines like I haven't heard from him before. The first track, an album highlight for sure, "Salenthropus Tchadelehensis" opens with strange vacuous sounds and rolls into a woozy spread of modulated and reversed guitars. its a divine opening track. no lie, divine. these songs are heart openers. they split you open, let all this light come in. His songs are like old friends that know where you keep the spare key. they just come in. the guitar solos don't hurt either.
I have some deep associations with this music, with Lauren's music. Perhaps a journalist would call them biases. Me and Lauren both come from New Hampshire. Similar towns at that. His music always reminds me of New Hampshire, feels like almost it couldn't have been made outside of our state. I don't have a handle completely on this idea, though I have been contemplating what New Hampshire music could mean. If there's a starting point I am pretty sure it's Chodus. its weirdo woods music. the sound of hills and trees and not having journalists and A and R's lurking around and being extremely creative and young and having to build it all yourself. I am sure there's more too it, and that describes a lot of places without intense 'industry infrastructure'. This record reminds me of home. and it reminds me of my dad. 
Do I like every song on this record, probably not. though the more I listen, the more I find a value in all of them. "I Do Not", a song about a secret underwater Nazi base, indulges in a humor that isn't so much my cup of tea. Secret Shopper is a ragged garage freak-out follow up to the serene opener, a sequencing decision that was not my favorite. it's all still radical. for whatever detraction or critique I could levy here, the good songs are so good that nothing else really matters. the sonics, the song craft, the places he goes where he had not gone before. Too fucking good.
Now a lot of these projects are the brainchild of Lauren cooking these records up in his basement, recording and producing them himself. So it is hard to avoid putting him under the spotlight... to a certain extent I don't want to avoid that. Clown certainly didn't sound much like the proper Chodus studio album that came before it, or the Lauren centered basement album before that Happs B. 
In a lot of ways it sounds like a fusion of both. On Clown Lauren manages to get a robust and full sound out of his basement studio, much like Dark Web, so not only are the songs good, this is a beautiful sounding record, those ambient and experimental flourishes mixed in beautifully with the guitars and percussion. And hey if there are rough edges, its all part of the experience. Throughout the Chodus catalog they often rerecord older songs. It creates a wonderful fossil record of where the project is at creatively. If you've listened to a Chodus project before you'll be familiar with this one. You'll already know how great this is.