Expect 'taters demo for yr downloading pleasure.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
the tale of 24 hour coles being suckas that can't handle the science I drop on them
So I stopped at the 24 hour Kmart/Coles megaplex on my way home from work about 2am this morning. And there was some problem with their registers, making everything run slow so it was taking like literally almost a minute to process each item. Yeah that doesn't sound like much but think about it for a second. Scan item. Count to sixty in yr head. Scan next item. Couple this with people's need to buy forty boxes of discount catfood and a packet of skittles at 2 fucking am on a sunday fucking morning and you begin to understand why a somewhat substantial backed up queue had developed, stretching all the way back past the registers and curling up into the health food aisle. And my frustration is probably better related in first person:
"It's 2am, I've been at work and had a shitty night, I just want to pay for this fucking soyghurt and go the fuck home to bed. But now I've gotta queue up. Okay, no one's fault really. Maybe people could be a little bit more organised and have their shit sorted to pay while they're waiting the ten minutes to scan their groceries instead of suddenly deciding they forgot the baking sugar. Maybe the jerk with the two full trolleys could let the guy with the single two pack of soyghurt through ahead of him, but whatever. Nothing you can do, no one's fault.
***
"Okay it's now 2:20am and there's still three people ahead of me. I'm starting to get annoyed despite myself. And why's that fucking security guard staring at me? Jesus christ the songs on the radio are fucking annoying in here.
***
"Oh hey it's 2:30 and I'm paying for my yoghurt. Sweet. Shit, is that Jack Johnson on the radio? Or one of those other criminally bland 'surf' music guys. Surf? Gimme a break. Dick Dale would call all you guys pussies and piss on yr feet, then give you a look all like 'yeah, what are you pussies gonna do about it?'. Anyway..."
So as I'm about to pay I realise the thing that's been annoying me most about the muzak (it was Ben Harper by the way), is the dude behind me in the queue singing along at a volume really not appropriate full of the stoned, chronically unemployed and sociopathic loner types at that hour of a monday morning. I turned around and said (smiling, mind you, with a total 'aw shucks we've been here for ages aint that a funny thing cor blimey you gotta laugh don't you guv'nor' kinda way) 'aw man, if you keep that up you're going to be first when I come back in here and shoot the place up in a minute...'.
Cue to, five seconds later, me being frogmarched out of coles by the security guard and given a lecture about 'making threats'.
Okay okay, look, I realise that this is like leaving unattended baggage in an airport but HE WAS SINGING ALONG IN PUBLIC IN AN ANNOYING VOICE. Plus I was joking. The cashier laughed goddamnit.
Nah I'm not annoyed, I realised that facon jerk had to do his duty, because it's hard life and all working the crucial midnight to 9am sunday shift in Burwood, I mean we're talking like mean streets of downtown Fallujah type shit...but it was kinda hard to keep a straight face as he lectured me about 'threatening violence to people'.
Nah I'm not annoyed, I realised that facon jerk had to do his duty, because it's hard life and all working the crucial midnight to 9am sunday shift in Burwood, I mean we're talking like mean streets of downtown Fallujah type shit...but it was kinda hard to keep a straight face as he lectured me about 'threatening violence to people'.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
ladies let me tell you a bit about myself; I've got a dick for a brain...
The Afghan Whigs - 'Gentlemen'
Following a fucking devastating and cruel breakup about five years ago I was reading Nick Hornby’s high fidelity, when I had this sudden like, 50,000 watt lightbulb above the head moment of insight and realisation. I identified with the Rob Fleming, the recently dumped main character in the book, absolutely. In all his desperation and cheap shots and petty revenge, I absolutely felt like that dude.
From what I remember the Afghan Whigs aren’t even mentioned in that book, but I’ll get to that…
Flash back to the mid 90s and first seeing these guys on rage: I hated this band the first (and many subsequent) times I heard them. Singer Greg Dulli’s posing and sleazy-rock affectations really rubbed me - first a straight up pissed hardcore kid, later ‘empowered’ and incredibly confused by all sorts of sexual politics stuff – up the wrong way. Because I didn’t realise it was schtick. I saw him in the video for debonair, taking drags from a cigarette in between lines in the chorus and didn’t get that this affectation that was pissing me off was precisely that; an affectation. The video for the title song to the record exudes self-conscious ‘cool’ and sleaze to an even higher degree, and it really harshed my buzz. These days I look back at it and I feel like it’s kind of taking the piss out of that whole Urge Overkill/Pulp Fiction 90s vibe as it revels in it at the same time.
And revelling in the contradictions and it’s own ambiguities and weak points is pretty much a theme for this record. Which is I think why, returning more than ten years later to a band I once hated, I finally get it. Hey I wasn’t a bright teenager, I didn’t get subtlety. And this record has really only made sense to me in recent months and weeks, throwing all sorts of things I’ve done in the past – much like that moment of sudden identification with Hornby’s protagonist – into a new light.
When I realised back then how much I was echoing Fleming’s behaviour in the book, stumbling from hope to catastrophe with as many calculated below the belt hits as I could chuck in, I fucking hated myself. Well I hated myself already, that breakup coincided with a downward spiral into a few years of utter hell for me mentally, and my behaviour during that time fuelled the virulent self-loathing that kept me wanting to end myself. I was being petty, shitty and unfair. It was all my fault and going against everything I believed in; every aspect of my life, from politics garnered from feminist theory classes and crimethinc inspired bullshit to the way I dressed was reflecting in on my own self hatred.
These days I realise, well, yeah, some of these are a reflection of patriarchal society or whatever but also people do get bummed when their ex goes out and fucks all their friends after she dumps you, and I didn’t have to be cool with it. I was allowed to feel shitty without being some inhumane sexist monster. Of course I don’t blame punk politics for that, just my own naïvete in the interpretation, and the all consuming self hate that will turn anything against you it can that is a hallmark of the clinically depressed.
So while I still think Hornby’s anti-hero is kind of a dick, well, who isn’t in that situation?
Afghan Whigs vocalist Greg Dulli is a flat out dick. At least if this record is anything to judge him by. And he knows it, he acknowledges it…and he doesn’t care. Maybe he does hate himself some for it but he also recognizes at the bottom of the pit there’s a certain perverse pleasure to be taken in exploiting yr situation and acting on yr basest instincts; lashing out to hurt people just because you feel hurt, and so on.
Apparently during the writing and recording of this record Dulli and his partner were both cheating on each other, Dulli apparently with multiple other women. Their relationship was still stumbling along however, entering that fucked up zone when ‘love’ can become all about controlling and hurting the other. And it’s justified because you’ve existed so long within that space that the logical course of action, of getting the fuck out, isn’t the clearest option that hindsight would prove it to be.
Old mate Greg portrays himself throughout this period as in it for how much arse he can get. In be sweet he sings of being trapped in the relationship because ‘she wants love and I still want to fuck’. In the intro to the song he tells the ladies that he ‘has a dick for a brain’, and while he might speak of the shame, of knowing what, or who, he is, he isn’t crying out for help. He seems so apathetic or disaffected, that cigarette smoking cool blue eyed soul guy from the debonair video that he played throughout the course of the band, that he realises he’s a piece of shit but just can’t bring himself to care. He’s in it for the fuckin’.
And man is that what this record’s about or what. I like to refer to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers blood sugar sex magic as ‘the most utterly unsexy record about fucking ever made’. Gentlemen is perhaps one of the most disturbing records about fucking I’ve ever heard. Not disturbing in a graphic goregrind kind of way, but disturbing in the sense that it gets inside the twisted power politics of a dysfunctional relationship. The title song itself is like the perfect description of hate fucking, crass and vulgar in it’s lurid detail (‘I stayed in too long, but she was the perfect fit’) and violent and hateful in it’s intent (‘and we dragged it out so long this time, trying to make each other sick’). The overall air of the song is kind of like the feeling you get with the hateful, immediately before and after breakup sex when there hasn’t been a clean break, and emotions, shitty, ugly ones, are involved. The song is sordid and dirty, setting out for the cathartic violence expected in the act and instead finding only the shame and headfucks that are the inevitable result of such situations.
Dulli plays the arsehole dude well throughout the record. In when we two parted he refers to his partners own pain and depression at their situation with condescending pity, feigning ignorance as to what’s going wrong when he clearly knows what’s up. But like Hornby’s Rob Fleming, he’s going to milk the situation for all the emotional point scoring he can get. And he’s aware of it, aware that his lady knows it’s all an act, full of sneering sarcasm that he’ll still never admit, just to twist the knife a little more.
Yet we get to the song my curse, sung by Marcy Mays of the band Scrawl, the only non-Dulli vocal performance on the record and, perversely, the most intimate moment. Though that’s apparently not through some kind of next level smartarse calculation on the band’s part. I’ve read (as much as you can believe this shit) that old mate didn’t do the vocal on the song because it was too painful for him to actually sing. And you can kinda see why as he drops the arsehole act for a second and reveals his actual heartbreak.
A few tracks on and the record ends with an instrumental that really seems to build up and go nowhere. Everything is left somewhat unresolved. No happy endings. No closure. Just like real life.
I’ve always believed the kind of rock journalism crap that I just wrote here is utter bullshit, especially when it over-analyses a record and reflects on all the implications that probably weren’t there being deliberately planned out by the composers. No one thinks about their music as much as some dick who writes about it for pitchfork does. But listening to this record a lot I’m coming to understand that maybe the ideas some see implied are in their psyche at the time and therefore make their way into the recording somehow. I dunno.
But it’s no surprise, if I think about it for a second, why I suddenly only appreciate this record now. As a teenager I hadn’t had the experiences that would put me in a place to ‘get’ it. Things like the major label ALTERNATIVE ROCK production really put me off (that said, the guitar sound’s better than I remembered), and the bass tone. Fuck I hate musicmans, I really do. And just the general polished vibe of the record. And now at 27 when I decide to check it out again, with the things that have been going on in my life recently, I suddenly got it and got why all these people loved gentlemen.
It’s not an age so much as an experience thing in the way that you’ll relate to certain music at certain times I guess. I’d already had Jawbreaker’s dear you, The Red House Painters and Elliott Smith as soundtracks to other heartbreaks. And while this time around I’m far from heartbroken, actually perhaps because of it, this record makes a fuck of a lot of sense to me. Maybe it won’t to you. Or maybe you’ll hear it go and ‘dude…totally’.
By the way this is far from out of print but it’s a major label record so whatever.
From what I remember the Afghan Whigs aren’t even mentioned in that book, but I’ll get to that…
Flash back to the mid 90s and first seeing these guys on rage: I hated this band the first (and many subsequent) times I heard them. Singer Greg Dulli’s posing and sleazy-rock affectations really rubbed me - first a straight up pissed hardcore kid, later ‘empowered’ and incredibly confused by all sorts of sexual politics stuff – up the wrong way. Because I didn’t realise it was schtick. I saw him in the video for debonair, taking drags from a cigarette in between lines in the chorus and didn’t get that this affectation that was pissing me off was precisely that; an affectation. The video for the title song to the record exudes self-conscious ‘cool’ and sleaze to an even higher degree, and it really harshed my buzz. These days I look back at it and I feel like it’s kind of taking the piss out of that whole Urge Overkill/Pulp Fiction 90s vibe as it revels in it at the same time.
And revelling in the contradictions and it’s own ambiguities and weak points is pretty much a theme for this record. Which is I think why, returning more than ten years later to a band I once hated, I finally get it. Hey I wasn’t a bright teenager, I didn’t get subtlety. And this record has really only made sense to me in recent months and weeks, throwing all sorts of things I’ve done in the past – much like that moment of sudden identification with Hornby’s protagonist – into a new light.
When I realised back then how much I was echoing Fleming’s behaviour in the book, stumbling from hope to catastrophe with as many calculated below the belt hits as I could chuck in, I fucking hated myself. Well I hated myself already, that breakup coincided with a downward spiral into a few years of utter hell for me mentally, and my behaviour during that time fuelled the virulent self-loathing that kept me wanting to end myself. I was being petty, shitty and unfair. It was all my fault and going against everything I believed in; every aspect of my life, from politics garnered from feminist theory classes and crimethinc inspired bullshit to the way I dressed was reflecting in on my own self hatred.
These days I realise, well, yeah, some of these are a reflection of patriarchal society or whatever but also people do get bummed when their ex goes out and fucks all their friends after she dumps you, and I didn’t have to be cool with it. I was allowed to feel shitty without being some inhumane sexist monster. Of course I don’t blame punk politics for that, just my own naïvete in the interpretation, and the all consuming self hate that will turn anything against you it can that is a hallmark of the clinically depressed.
So while I still think Hornby’s anti-hero is kind of a dick, well, who isn’t in that situation?
Afghan Whigs vocalist Greg Dulli is a flat out dick. At least if this record is anything to judge him by. And he knows it, he acknowledges it…and he doesn’t care. Maybe he does hate himself some for it but he also recognizes at the bottom of the pit there’s a certain perverse pleasure to be taken in exploiting yr situation and acting on yr basest instincts; lashing out to hurt people just because you feel hurt, and so on.
Apparently during the writing and recording of this record Dulli and his partner were both cheating on each other, Dulli apparently with multiple other women. Their relationship was still stumbling along however, entering that fucked up zone when ‘love’ can become all about controlling and hurting the other. And it’s justified because you’ve existed so long within that space that the logical course of action, of getting the fuck out, isn’t the clearest option that hindsight would prove it to be.
Old mate Greg portrays himself throughout this period as in it for how much arse he can get. In be sweet he sings of being trapped in the relationship because ‘she wants love and I still want to fuck’. In the intro to the song he tells the ladies that he ‘has a dick for a brain’, and while he might speak of the shame, of knowing what, or who, he is, he isn’t crying out for help. He seems so apathetic or disaffected, that cigarette smoking cool blue eyed soul guy from the debonair video that he played throughout the course of the band, that he realises he’s a piece of shit but just can’t bring himself to care. He’s in it for the fuckin’.
And man is that what this record’s about or what. I like to refer to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers blood sugar sex magic as ‘the most utterly unsexy record about fucking ever made’. Gentlemen is perhaps one of the most disturbing records about fucking I’ve ever heard. Not disturbing in a graphic goregrind kind of way, but disturbing in the sense that it gets inside the twisted power politics of a dysfunctional relationship. The title song itself is like the perfect description of hate fucking, crass and vulgar in it’s lurid detail (‘I stayed in too long, but she was the perfect fit’) and violent and hateful in it’s intent (‘and we dragged it out so long this time, trying to make each other sick’). The overall air of the song is kind of like the feeling you get with the hateful, immediately before and after breakup sex when there hasn’t been a clean break, and emotions, shitty, ugly ones, are involved. The song is sordid and dirty, setting out for the cathartic violence expected in the act and instead finding only the shame and headfucks that are the inevitable result of such situations.
Dulli plays the arsehole dude well throughout the record. In when we two parted he refers to his partners own pain and depression at their situation with condescending pity, feigning ignorance as to what’s going wrong when he clearly knows what’s up. But like Hornby’s Rob Fleming, he’s going to milk the situation for all the emotional point scoring he can get. And he’s aware of it, aware that his lady knows it’s all an act, full of sneering sarcasm that he’ll still never admit, just to twist the knife a little more.
Yet we get to the song my curse, sung by Marcy Mays of the band Scrawl, the only non-Dulli vocal performance on the record and, perversely, the most intimate moment. Though that’s apparently not through some kind of next level smartarse calculation on the band’s part. I’ve read (as much as you can believe this shit) that old mate didn’t do the vocal on the song because it was too painful for him to actually sing. And you can kinda see why as he drops the arsehole act for a second and reveals his actual heartbreak.
A few tracks on and the record ends with an instrumental that really seems to build up and go nowhere. Everything is left somewhat unresolved. No happy endings. No closure. Just like real life.
I’ve always believed the kind of rock journalism crap that I just wrote here is utter bullshit, especially when it over-analyses a record and reflects on all the implications that probably weren’t there being deliberately planned out by the composers. No one thinks about their music as much as some dick who writes about it for pitchfork does. But listening to this record a lot I’m coming to understand that maybe the ideas some see implied are in their psyche at the time and therefore make their way into the recording somehow. I dunno.
But it’s no surprise, if I think about it for a second, why I suddenly only appreciate this record now. As a teenager I hadn’t had the experiences that would put me in a place to ‘get’ it. Things like the major label ALTERNATIVE ROCK production really put me off (that said, the guitar sound’s better than I remembered), and the bass tone. Fuck I hate musicmans, I really do. And just the general polished vibe of the record. And now at 27 when I decide to check it out again, with the things that have been going on in my life recently, I suddenly got it and got why all these people loved gentlemen.
It’s not an age so much as an experience thing in the way that you’ll relate to certain music at certain times I guess. I’d already had Jawbreaker’s dear you, The Red House Painters and Elliott Smith as soundtracks to other heartbreaks. And while this time around I’m far from heartbroken, actually perhaps because of it, this record makes a fuck of a lot of sense to me. Maybe it won’t to you. Or maybe you’ll hear it go and ‘dude…totally’.
By the way this is far from out of print but it’s a major label record so whatever.
The Afghan Whigs – ‘gentlemen’ Elektra Records, 1993
If I were Going / Gentlemen / Be Sweet / Debonair / When We Two Parted / Fountain and Fairfax / What Jail is Like / My Curse / Now You Know / I Keep Coming Back / Brother Woodrow(Closing Prayer)
Thursday, February 12, 2009
crust bird knows many mystic, secret things
DUUDE MOUNTAIN
Whole set from a show at the Oldbar a couple weeks ago we played with Truth From Facts, Black Level Embassy and the Dacios. Alain from TFF recorded this (see link in previous post for their recordings, they're fucking mindblowing, seriously) for us. I'm at work and haven't had a chance to listen but I'm assuming it's pretty rad. Done with a HDR recorder chucked up on top of a PA speaker. May be subject to the weird pizzeria acoustics of Old Bar. Will definitely be subject to my voice breaking and awkward breaks between songs as we have to retune.
I Never Really Liked Metallica Anyway, But Seriously, Fuck You Lars
Spacewizard
Power Dresser
Dopelord (with the Atomic Bong)
Crust Bird's Mystic Saga
Dude Mountin is Rad Dude (gigantic caveman floor tom) and Beard Mountain (amplifiers).
Sunday, February 1, 2009
...this one's gone to pieces, this one's fallen apart
EX SPECTATOR - set from decolonise fest.
Photo by Lena, recording by the very very awesome dudes from the very very awesome Truth From Facts [http://www.truthfromfacts.org].
This is Expect Potaters playing at Decolonise fest, 24th January 2009. This show was so fucking rad dude. It was like 45 degrees inside the warehouse (no shit, tin roof, no insulation, hot day) so our guitars kept going out of tune, which meant lots of tuning breaks, which meant me running my mouth too much on the microphone. But if I sound like I'm gushing, that's because I was...it was such a good show, such a fun weekend and the people who put us up were all such ragers.
It's only one big file, I haven't got anything at work to chop it up. I'll do something about that later in the week but hey. I'm pretty excited about it; the sound drops in an out a bit, we play pretty loud and the built in mic in the recorder Alain had didn't like that much; there's a big pause in one song where Kirk changes a kick pedal, and I played the sloppiest I ever have but fuck it, it was fun. Enjoy.
Oh and a special huge thanks to Alain and Truth From Facts dudes for recording this, then for going to the time to rescue the file after he lost it, fix it all up and send it to me. Ruling dude. And of course if they ever read this, Alex, Lena, Louise, Ryan and Stella for letting us stay at their house and letting us play in their living room.
Intro
You are not anything different
Angry ghosts of the war memorial
Senderos [Born Against]
Live without dead time [Sean’s vocals aren’t loud enough mix]
It’s complicated…[broken kick drum mix]
Pregnant sounds [Dase forgets the last part mix]
Young Arsenal [Torches to Rome, ftg Alex!]
You are not anything different
Angry ghosts of the war memorial
Senderos [Born Against]
Live without dead time [Sean’s vocals aren’t loud enough mix]
It’s complicated…[broken kick drum mix]
Pregnant sounds [Dase forgets the last part mix]
Young Arsenal [Torches to Rome, ftg Alex!]
Windschuttle’s Legacy
Our four track demo recordings done by Dennis and a whole bunch of videos from different shows by Tim and other people are on our myspace, http://www.myspace.com/exspectatorband
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