New Crap To Buy

PANDA BEAR: I'm Not/Comfy in Nautica 7" (UUAR 006EP) 8.50
7" vinyl version. "Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), one of the influential voices in Animal Collective, returns with two essential new songs available on 45 rpm 7" vinyl and CD."



TOWN AND COUNTRY: Up Above CD (THR 165CD) 13.00
"Up Above may tend to make you woozy. It's a sleepy, trance-inducing affair, an effort to engross the black bee of our minds on the blue lotus feet of our divine mother. This is a first for cover tunes and a first for singing. 'Blue Lotus Feet' is a yoga tune -- apparently there is a Will Oldham version of this tune floating around as well. 'King of Portugal' is based on Cancao dos Reis from an old Folkways 10" of Portuguese Christmas carols. Up Above refers to the Paul Bowles novel Up Above the World. Psych folk drone may be the flavor of the month but Town and Country been doing this for eight years."



WIRE, THE: #264 February 2006 MAG (WIRE 264) 8.00
"On the cover: Edan (The Boston DJ/MC/producer trawls widely, from Old School hiphop to 60s freakbeat heroes). Features: Battles (David Stubbs skirmishes with a leftfield New York 'supergroup' slugging it out at the frontline of rock and electronics); Birgit Ulher (The self-taught Hamburg trumpeter and artist expands her instrument's lexicon of sputters); Sleeparchive (Philip Sherburne attempts to unravel the Berlin minimal Techno producer's complex web of identities); Invisible Jukebox: Steve Reid; Bardo Pond (Philadelphia's psychedelic freeform collective reveal the secrets of their sonic vortex); Derek Bailey (David Toop plus a host of admirers and fellow musicians pay tribute to the pioneering guitarist who died in December).



PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI 5, ARIEL: House Arrest CD (PAW 008CD) 13.00
"Think you've heard enough Ariel Pink? Well our favorite omnivorous media junkie from LA still has a few tricks left up his sleeve -- like the left-of-center House Arrest. Sure The Doldrums and Worn Copy had some hits and humdingers on them, but House Arrest never lets up. It's hit after hit after hit. Sorta like if you listened to your friend's boombox mix tape from Top 40 radio around 1985. Some people might think that sounds like a recipe for disaster. We say bring on the Doritos.



CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS, NICK: Road To God Knows Where/Live at the Paradiso 2DVD (MUTE 9310DVD) 21.00
"Previously available on VHS, now released on DVD for the first time. The Road to God Knows Where is a film by Uli M. Schueppel featuring a cast of Nick Cave, members of the Bad Seeds as well as Anita Lane, Lydia Lunch, Jim Thirwell, & more. Live at the Paradiso is a full-length live concert from the famed Paradiso club in Amsterdam from 1992 featuring Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds performing 'The Mercy Seat,' 'The Ship Song,' 'Tupelo,' amongst others." NTSC format, 168 minutes.




And via Aquarius Records:

PISSED JEANS s/t ( Too Pure) cd 13.98
A punk record for people who haven't bought a punk record in a while. It's not a retro exercise, but still something about this young Pennsylvania band brings back memories of '80s hardcore, Black Flag or Flipper back in the day, nasty punk scuzz with lots of badass guitar distortion and feedback, shambolic rock n' roll with rabid bite. The lyrics are sadsack smartass dumb, yowled over the band's noisy, catchy trashcan stomp, the vocalist really letting it all (down-and-)out on such songs as "I'm Sick," "Boring Girls", "Ashamed Of My Cum", and "I Broke My Own Heart." Can you feel sorry for someone who's wallowing in it? Doesn't matter, just enjoy the careening chaotic entertainment that results. The packaging features cool cartoon graphics of surburan banality.
MPEG Stream: "Boring Girls"
MPEG Stream: "Closet Marine"

RECORD REVERSER, THE (Top Quality Rock And Roll) record reverser 15.00
For those of you who missed out on what is quite possibly the greatest record player related invention of all time, we just got another batch of these in!
SDRAWKCAB RETTEB SDNUOS CISUM LLA!!!! I mean, ALL MUSIC SOUNDS BETTER BACKWARDS!!!! It's just a fact. There's something completely alien but so strangely beautiful about music in reverse. The way the drums sort of swoosh backwards, the attack and decay exchanging their rightful places, the vocals, a sweetly smooth garbled alien language, even more musical once the context and words are removed, leaving just the sound and timbre, and melodies become seasick, woozy smears of sound. Everyone discovers it eventually. Maybe it was when you were first trying to discern the hidden Satanic messages on your Iron Maiden or Beatles records. Once you tired of that, you suddenly realized that the rest of the record sounded pretty dang cool backwards too. Maybe even better! For some, it happened even earlier, just messing around as a kid with your folks' turntable, that almost always resulted in some sort of scolding that it would damage the needle. But what was it that they were really trying to hide? Satanic messages? Maybe. But maybe it was the fact that music really did sound better backwards. Once the word of that got out, what would happen to music as we know it. For me, it was the realization as a teenager, that you could unscrew a cassette tape, turn the tape over and put the tape back together, resulting in some of the coolest weirdest music we had ever heard. Fifty cent tapes from the thrift store became our car music of choice, once they had been reversed of course. A favorite that I still have to this day is a Bangles cassette, that once reversed turned into a gorgeous dizzying blast of Sgt. Peppers-ish My Bloody Valentine psych-pop! Some folks took this sacred knowledge, and started bands, the most notable being Teenage Filmstars, who employed backwards drums, backwards vocals, reversed guitars, sometimes whole songs played in reverse! (For a taste, check out their track on the Here's To Old England comp we reviewed recently.) And who can forget the first Sonic Youth ep, the cassette version of which featured the whole program in reverse on the other side of the tape. And you know what? It sounded so much better!
So now it's the age of computers and electronic music, so with a push of a button you can turn songs around or do whatever you want really, but there's something about vinyl records, lp's, and the act of playing them backwards that cannot be reproduced on a computer. You can also by a fancy DJ turntable that will play backwards, but A. we're not entirely sure that's good for the needle OR the record, and B. that'll set you back hundreds of dollars. Thus, we have the Record Reverser, an ingenious gizmo that enables you to play any record, backwards on the turntable you now have! We weren't sure to expect, but when we got one, and threw on a record, BACKWARDS, we were floored. I took one home and have been listening to backwards records for the last two weeks almost exclusively, because music DOES sound better backwards. IT DOES!! How does it work? Well, first you just need to make sure of two things, first that you have a removable stylus on your turntable, and second, that once removed, also make sure the tone arm has BOTH a top and bottom slot. Then all you do is flip over your needle, attach your favorite record to the record reverser and VOILA, it's playing backwards! Here's a pretty extensive 'how to' videoclipRECORD REVERSER
Each Record Reverser is hand made out of recycled lps -- mine is a High Masekela record on on side and an Engelbert Humperdinck on the other! So completely cool. We've even been talking about the idea of buying 50 Record Reversers and pre-preparing 50 records and DJ-ing with nothing but backwards lps and Record Reversers!!