Okay, calm yourself. It’s Friday. The weekend is dead ahead, and with it comes time to relax and have some fun. I’m going to see Bob Dylan tonight in Chicago, and that’s likely to be a great time. I hope everyone has a chance to see Dylan before it’s too late. I’m sure his live shows aren’t what they were in the 60s and 70s, but you’ve got to be pretty understanding and give him a little slack because of his age. However it works out, I’m just glad I’ll be able to hear songs like “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Like A Rolling Stone” straight from the mouth of the man that wrote and recorded them. Okay, now on to today’s Pick Your Poison. Let me recommend tracks from The Ampersands, Chela, Dog Bite, Harriet, Police Teeth, Santah and Silkies. In the Soundcloud section, please enjoy audio streams of tracks from Sun Glitters and Tyvek, along with Jim O’Rourke’s remix of Neneh Cherry & The Thing. Have a great weekend!
It’s still the beginning of November, but let me tell you that the Christmas season has apparently already begun. Forget Thanksgiving, which is supposed to be a holiday, because I’m seeing Christmas ads on TV and in newspapers. There was a Salvation Army bell ringer in a Santa hat outside my local grocery store this afternoon too. At least it didn’t start before Halloween, but I’m still bothered by this trend. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, may still be the “official” start to the season and when all the deal really begin, but too many want to take advantage of spending habits and line their own wallets as early as possible. Maybe if nobody starts buying gifts until after Thanksgiving, retailers will realize the futility of starting even earlier than normal. Sigh. I love Christmas, but don’t feel like celebrating the season for 2 months straight. The true gift that keeps on giving throughout the year though is new music. Pick Your Poison has plenty of that for you each and every weekday (except for the designated holidays…heh heh). There’s some good stuff today from DLRN, The Douglas Firs, Humans, Kirby Kaise and The Longwalls. Please also dive into some streaming tracks in the Soundcloud section from Lusine, The Octopus Project and Mika.
Don’t let anyone ever tell you that …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead aren’t an ambitious band. They are beyond ambitious, and often to a fault. Ten years ago, they were unfortunate enough to be cursed with an almighty 10.0 on Pitchfork’s richter scale, and they’ve always seemed like a band still trying to recover from that madness. Being told you’ve crafted a perfect work of musical art is enough to make any artist lose his or her mind, because that little voice inside your head essentially teases you with the idea that maybe you can maintain the impossibly high standard you’ve established for yourself. The reality is, you’ve got to keep pressing on like it never happened, and hope that the lightning in a bottle once again shows up at your doorstep. Unfortunately for Trail of Dead, they felt like the next logical step was to take their sound bigger and more robust than ever before. It led to two gluttonous major label efforts, Worlds Apart and So Divided, that left long-time fans feeling like they were standing on the wrong side of the gulf those two titles implied. Those were the days of such sharp backlash and disappointment it sent the band soaring downward in a shame spiral one might never expect them to recover from. After a bunch of in-fighting and stripping down the lineup to just the four core members, 2011’s Tao of the Dead was the start of a real recovery for the boys. They continued to defy expectations with that record, creating a conceptual premise built on two seamless parts that were recorded only in the keys of D and F. In spite of how gimmicky it looked on paper, the record’s pure rock drive and generally shorter songs were a blessing in disguise showing how far they’d climbed back up from a low point just a few years earlier.
Now about a year and a half later comes Lost Songs, a straightforward, pure Trail of Dead rock record the likes of which they haven’t done in 10 years. The high-minded concepts are gone, as is pretty much any song that clocks in at over five minutes in length. If you go strictly by the standard edition of this album, it’s the band’s shortest since their 1998 self-titled debut. Even the cover art, unlike the intense and complicated pieces created by frontman Conrad Keely in the past, is black and white simplicity showing four silhouettes standing in the middle of a desolate town. This is about as basic as the band can get both musically and stylistically, which is why they’re practically hardcore punk once you clear all the debris away. The energy and intensity hits you immediately with “Open Doors,” then refuses to let up or give you a true breather until “Awestruck” arrives 10 tracks in. This heavy punch to the gut almost starts to wear thin after about 30 minutes, but Trail of Dead’s ingenuity and ability to showcase the quiet instrumental builds to explosive finales serves them particularly well here, leaving you satisfied even as you know what curveball is waiting around the corner. Songs like “Up to Infinity” and “Pinhole Cameras” are invigorating in exactly the ways they need to be early on. It’s also extremely pleasing to hear Jason Reece get behind the microphone again a few times on this album, as he’s been largely stuck behind the drum kit the last couple records. He’s a larger than life sort of guy, throwing himself fully into whatever he does. It’s the main reason why the percussion is so strong on this record, and why the songs featuring Reece’s vocals are some of the album’s biggest standouts. “Catatonic” in particular feels like a special moment for him, to the point where you can almost hear a stage dive built into it.
But Trail of Dead want Lost Songs to be about more than just a forceful collection of rock songs. They have every intention of using their power as musicians to consistently challenge both themselves and their audience, which is why much of the new album revolves around world politics. This isn’t the same sort of politics that the new Local H record is about, though. On a much closer level they’re trying to take up the mantle left behind by a band like Rage Against the Machine. The goal seems to be less of a commentary on our leaders and more of an effort to cure social injustices. The band dedicated their single “Up to Infinity” to Pussy Riot, even though the song was written about the Syrian Civil War. On “Pinhole Cameras” they empathize with those that appear to be “starving, living in this land of plenty.” In other parts of the record they spit venom at despots and try to slap people out of comas of ignorance to serious world issues. Heroic though these efforts might be, and as much as it fills a void in the current music climate, it’s unlikely to truly spark a revolution. You’ve got to give them credit for trying though, and if that’s what fueled the post-hardcore aesthetic of this album, so much the better. Trail of Dead have reclaimed the spark they lost many years ago. In the best sense, that makes this record full of found songs, for they are lost no more.
Now that the presidential election has passed us by, and we’re in for another four years of President Obama, it’s time to focus on the many other false promises that have been made to us by musicians in recent memory. Chief among the broken promises for me has been My Bloody Valentine and their promise of a new album. Kevin Shields promised back in 2008 that the band was in the studio working on finishing up recording from a bunch of tracks left unfinished in the early 90s. The thinking was that even if the band took their sweet time, things would be ready for release in 2009 or 2010 at the latest. Well, it’s 2012 and the thought of new My Bloody Valentine material seems so far gone it’s easy to assume it’s never going to happen. But then today Shields sits down for a chat with NME during which he reveals that the plans are to have the new MBV album out online by the end of this year. For those of us counting, that deadline looms less than 60 days away. It’s one thing to say 2013, but entirely another to give such a tiny window. It makes the promise seem that much more believable. Still, I’ll believe it when it actually happens. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed. In the meantime, keep listening to new music and discovering new bands. That’s kind of what Pick Your Poison is all about. Please enjoy tracks today from ALexander Spit, Call Answer, Doldrums, Jacob Morris, The Parlour Suite and Todd Tobias. In the Soundcloud section there’s new stuff from Eels, The Internet and Sally Shapiro that are worth streaming.
There are some brand new records out this week, in spite of it being November and nearly the end of 2012. If you’re looking for new music, the following artists have new material out: Aerosmith, Califone, Crushed Out, Emeralds, Isis, Joshua James, Lindstrom, Mad Music, Pretty & Nice, Prince Rama, Teen Daze and The Walkmen. If you’re looking for some new material that’s song-sized, Pick Your Poison can cover you there. Highlights today include tracks from Desert Noises, Frida Selander, Grape Soda, The Little Ones and Teepee. In the Soundcloud section, stream good stuff from CSS, Lust for Youth, Majical Cloudz and Sufjan Stevens.
And now, a brief word on a topic I don’t much like to discuss on this site: politics. Discussions of a political nature tend to lead to a lot of fighting between persons of different views, even if they support the same political party or candidate. I’m not going to dive into my own personal political preferences, but I do feel it necessary to ensure that all eligible American citizens go to their local polling place to vote tomorrow. We live in a democracy that allows people to choose their leaders, and by that same token get rid of the ones that don’t do their job correctly or to our own liking. Don’t waste the opportunity to cast your vote in what coule be one of the most important elections of our time. I don’t care who you vote for, just so long as you do it. If you think that one person can’t make a difference and that voting is a pointless exercise, I couldn’t disagree with you more. Of course if you’re not registered to vote by now, I guess I can’t help you. For everyone else, if you need to find your local polling place, there’s a simple website where you can find your area voting location. I don’t know about all of you, but I’m looking forward to avoiding my TV and social media tomorrow, due to the sheer excess of partisan rhetoric that goes on. But while I dislike the progress and the talk, I more than advocate for exercising your own right to vote. So please kick your laziness to the curb and participate. Okay, that’s all I’ll say. Let’s talk Pick Your Poison for this Monday. Recommended tracks today come from Bromheads, Circle, Lenny Smith, Neil Nathan Inc. and PANOS. There’s a pretty lengthy (30+ minutes) single stream of music from Chromatics that they’re calling “Running From the Sun,” a mixtape of sorts collecting all the outtakes from their latest album Kill For Love. If you liked that album, be sure to check out that download below. In the Soundcloud section please stream some good songs from Earl Sweatshirt, Goldspot, Majestico and Toro y Moi’s remix of…Toro y Moi.
Have you ever been presented with the challenge of attending 2 weddings in 1 day? I’ve been told there’s a certain time in your life when it seems like all your friends are getting married at once, but 2 on the same day feels just a little bit excessive. The somewhat ironic twist is that none of my other friends have gotten married or even engaged in 2012. So the only two friends I have getting married are doing so on the same day. When it momentarily rains, it momentarily pours. At this point you may be wondering – how will I manage 2 weddings in a day? There will be a bit of bouncing back and forth between them, that’s for sure, and they’re taking place about an hour away from one another. On a side note, while I love fall weddings, I think November is a little late in the year to be getting married, especially if you live in the Chicagoland area. The high on Saturday is 48 degrees, which isn’t what I’d call pleasant. Still, no matter what the temperature outside, there’s plenty of hot wedded bliss action going on inside. So that’s going to be my weekend. I hope you’ve got something fun planned. If not, take solace in some Pick Your Poison songs. Don’t miss tracks from Crushed Out, Evil Eyes, Factory Floor’s remix of How to destroy angels_, The Luyas and Split Screens. Have a great weekend!
Today was the big day they announced the winner of this year’s Barclaycard Mercury Prize, which goes to the best British album of the past year. This year’s set of nominees was an eclectic bunch, and included such relative unknowns as Sam Lee, Lianne La Havas, Plan B, Ben Howard and Roller Trio. The more easily recognizable names included Richard Hawley, Michael Kiwanuka, Field Music, The Maccabees, Django Django and Jessie Ware. Of all the artists I just listed, the only one I feel was robbed in this case was Jessie Ware. Her record Devotion is one of 2012’s finest. That’s certainly more than can be said about the winners of this year’s Mercury Prize, Alt-J. To be clear, I don’t dislike Alt-J’s record An Awesome Wave. In fact, I think it’s very well put together. My issue is that the record feels like it panders to the lowest common denominator. The band took a bunch of sounds and styles that were popular in 2010 and 2011, and crafted songs based around them. They do a decent job with whatever genre or style they’re trying to imitate at the time, and it often doesn’t allow for any real cohesion between songs. It’s like they took a whole mess of stuff and threw it against the wall to see what would stick. Does Alt-J sound like your favorite band? They should, on at least one song on the record should. Call it a crowd pleaser, but not really a critic pleaser. I’m stuck somewhere in the middle of all that. But congratulations to Alt-J for winning the Mercury Prize. It may seem like validation of a job well done, but there’s plenty more left to do, boys. Speaking of crowd pleasers and incoherent connections between songs, Pick Your Poison has some of those things today. Highlights include tracks from Buffalo Killers, Dumbo Gets Mad, Esben and the Witch, Marissa Nadler (covering Duran Duran), Qurious, School of Seven Bells and Team Genius.
