deer elephant fish

Deerhoof are a band I "got" long after the cool kids but I love what I've heard by them. Hey maybe you "prefer their earlier stuff" but we're hear to talk about the music I like and I frickin' *heart* the 'Hoof. It shouldn't really make sense - spastic improvisatory drums, guitar pyrotechnics and strange little-girl lost vocals. I could theorise for ages but at the end of the day this is just POP.

Deerhoof - Wrong Time Capsule



I remember reading a quote about John Cale's bass-playing on "White Light White Heat", which praised the fact that it sounded like clods of earth and muck, and I think there's something similar here. Love the stumbling endlessly inventive rolling drums and the wildly creative guitar playing - John Dieterich is all over the fretboard on this one. Plus the fact that in a couple of minutes this song takes in so many different ideas, including one of my favourite guitar solos of recent times, a real face-melter.

Deerhoof have just released Friend Opportunity which is amazing too, featuring my favourite song of the year so far...

Deerhoof - The Perfect Me



Again in a couple of minutes there are more ideas than you can count. Plus the wood block is my new favourite instrument! It sounds totally joyous and uplifting to me and the whole album is well worth checking out if you like your pop with an experimental edge.

Except you probably downloaded it last year. Ah well...

Visit - Deerhoof
Visit - Deerhoof MySpace
Buy - The Runners Four
Buy - Friend Opportunity

Ella Guru - Noisy Insects



Here's a real mystery. I first heard of Ella Guru on the Rough Trade Country compilation I mentioned last time. I got the imaginatively titled First Album, and then the trail goes cold.

It's a pretty cool album in a Lambchop stylee (featuring Jimmy Carl Black, the "Indian Of The Group", on occasional backing vocals). Nice arrangements on some lovely and mellow Americana. From Liverpool (*ahem*).

The real star of the show is backing vocalist Kate Walsh doing her best Emmylou Harris impression.

Ella Guru - where are you now?

Visit - Ella Guru
Buy - The First Album

The summer we first started doing Johnny Domino music, I was working in a supermarket and Oxbow was working at the American Adventure, a fairly random theme park that was near where we lived - it closed last year but to be honest it was always a poor man's Alton Towers. Hell, it was a poor man's Drayton Manor Park & Zoo. The Magic Kingdom it was not.

We started getting obsessed with Country music at the same time when Ox brought some tapes home from work. One had Hank Williams one it, one had Hawkshaw Hawkins, and one featured Flatt & Scruggs. You'd think that after a hard day working at a fake Wild West theme park, the last thing we'd want to listen to was Bluegrass but there you go.

After leaving Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys Lester Flatt (guitar and vocals) and Earl Scruggs formed the Foggy Mountain Boys, to become one of the most successful bluegrass bands of all time. They were also responsible for the theme tune to the Beverley Hillbillies - "oil that is... Texas Tea...".

Flatt & Scruggs - Pike County Breakdown



Man, you can practically see the smoke coming off Earl Scruggs' banjo! I have no idea how you would move your fingers so fast. I love the way this song just keeps going, sounds like they could keep going for days.

Flatt & Scruggs - I'll Be Going To Heaven Sometime



I also love their more maudlin spiritual numbers. I'm not a religious man by any stretch of the imagination but I do find myself veering towards the god-fearing in my musical tastes. What's that about? Maybe I'm just jealous of people who have faith and like to experience it vicariously through their music. Who knows.

Visit - Flatt & Scruggs
Buy - A Proper Introduction to Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs: the Mercury Years

ant banana cat

With sincere apologies to The Art Of Noise [and their A-Z of Music feature] and to our good friend The Singing Detective. If an idea is good, it's worth borrowing from. And if an idea is worth borrowing from, you might as well copy it outright... Anyway, I'm going to be trawling through my music collection in an alphabetical stylee and featuring tracks that I really love, from artists that I mostly know very little about.

Animal Collective - Who Could Win A Rabbit


I bought Animal Collective's Sung Tongs after reading a review, something that we all do when we're feeling flush, out of touch or both. I know nothing about them and I don't really want to, either. To know that this music was made by rational humans would ruin it for me - in my mind these are field recordings of campfire folk-songs from a tribe of demented glove puppets. With a delay pedal.

Great stuff - I've always thought that if you wanted to upset a neighbour, a high-volume blast of this in the early hours would do the trick, more so than Metallica or whatever. Plus they'd probably think twice about complaining.

Visit - Animal Collective (MySpace)
Buy - Sung Tongs

The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Choir - Kalimankou Denkou



In this alphabetical journey through my collection there will be a LOT of music released by the 4AD label. When I was at college I was a major 4AD geek. As such I bought a lot of beautifully packaged half-baked rubbish. I also got some really great stuff. Like Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares, a collection of field recordings of traditional Bulgarian vocal music which is still quite unlike anything I'd heard before or since.

Amazing hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck stuff. No idea what they're singing about (although according to the CD this title translates to The Evening Gathering) but it's just beautiful. Considering that these singers are mostly untrained, the vocal harmonies they use and the blend of registers are simply amazing. There are all kinds of complex chord inversions and voicings - which become even more mind-boggling when you think that this is a recording of an oral folk-art tradition, passed down from generation to generation.

Visit - Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares at 4AD
Buy - Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares Vol 1

Chickasaw Mudd Puppies - Nighttime (Ain't Got No Eyes)



Now this is a real unknown. I got this on the great Rough Trade Shops - Country Vol.1 album. Like They Might Be Giants, they were a duo - were there lots of these in the 80s? What were the sales figures like for drum machines? Where were the drummers at?

This is weird mutant swamp rock with a demented edge - me likee.

Visit - Chickasaw Mudd Puppies
Buy - Rough Trade Shops - Country Vol.1

intermission

I used to love making tape compilations for people and one of my favourite things was putting bits of movie dialogue in between tracks. The late 80s were a golden age for weird films and TV programmes - series' like The Incredibly Strange Film Show featured films by Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis alongside other more obscure filmmakers. I would video these and scour them for nuggets of dialogue and non-sequiturs. No, I didn't get out much. But I made a mean mix-tape.

Maybe one-day I'll get round to digitising those old C-90 tapes before they fall apart. Until then here a couple of likely tracks from a great CD I picked up years ago, The Wild Wild World of Mondo Movies Music. It features lots of trailers and bits of soundtracks recorded with a tape deck from in front of the telly.

Ah, happy days! Enjoy!

Strange Rampage Trailer (1967)


Strange Rampage by WeirdoVideo

Rocky Roberts & The Airdales - The Bird's The Word



Girl From S. I. N. Trailer (1966)



Buy - The Wild Wild World of Mondo Movies Music from The Freak Emporium

monkey magic

Long-time visitors to the site will remember an earlier post featuring the mighty Coconut Monkeyrocket. A recent commenter pointed out that there had been a CMR album released which I purchased straight away. I got it through the post this morning and it's magic! A whole album of crazy 1950s cocktail lounge electronica for the ADHD sufferer in your life.

The Coconut Monkeyrocket - Juicy Jungle


This is the first track and is a kind-of manic hyper-concentrated CMR track - all 50s glee-club vocals, clipped guitar riffs, bongo-frenzy percussion and a million other ideas within the first minute. Plus it has the same title as a song by The B-52s - what can go wrong?

Great stuff, I urge you to buy this from the man himself. It's the "funnest" album I've heard in yonks.

Buy - The Coconut Monkeyrocket "With Birds"
Visit - CMR website
Visit - CMR MySpace

all killer, no filler

Musicians don't look threatening anymore, no matter what they try. Jerry Lee was The Killer.

Jerry Lee Lewis on Ready Steady Go! - Hi Heel Sneakers and Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

I LOVE this footage of Jerry doing one great song after another. The first time I saw it was when RSG! was repeated on Channel 4 while I was at university. I remember kneeling in front of the TV and thinking that there really wasn't much point in any of the music that had come out since 1964 when this was filmed. It's all there. I'm still jealous of the audience.

Jerry Lee is: Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, a striking cobra, a weirdly predatory older family member, a teenage heartthrob serial killer, Norman Bates at the end of Psycho and your cool uncle with a secret who you don't see all that often all rolled into one. At the start of that amazing performance he look like a bank clerk, hair all slicked back. He pounds out the opening chords and looks at the audience as if to say, "Idiots. I will kill you all". And then he slays them.

I love the way his eyes roll into his head when he hits the long repeated staccato chords and the amazing burnt edges to his vocals when he starts to testify. How is it comfortable for him to keep the mic stand in that position?

Half way through Whole Lotta Shakin' his hair comes undone and he's a bank clerk no more. You wouldn't trust him as far as you could throw him.

Then he starts to testify, looking straight into the camera, looking straight at YOU. And the final gallop to the finish line never fails to give me chills.

Plus the band in this footage is called The Plebs. Awesome.

Here's some prime Jerry Lee for you right here. Like many great artists, he seems to have had the potential to be an amateur human being. But at the very least Whole Lotta Shakin ' Goin' On is a top 5 all-time track. Don't you agree?

Jerry Lee Lewis - Lewis Boogie

Jerry Lee Lewis - High School Confidential

Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lotta Shakin ' Goin' On

Buy - The Essential Jerry Lee Lewis
Visit - jerryleelewis.com

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Posted By stevedomino to Domino Rally at 2/22/2007 04:43:00 PM

and in other news...

I've taken part in the latest edition of the mighty Contrast Podcast - go there now and listen to me ruminating on My Favourite 45.

I'm talking about Deep Purple by Nino Tempo & April Stevens - this is something that I wrote about a long time ago. An anonymous commenter recently asked me to repost the single's B-side, so here it is!

Nino Tempo & April Stevens - I've Been Carrying A Torch For You So Long That I Burned A Great Big Hole In My Heart



In other news, Spoilt Victorian Child is back back BACK! Go there NOW and shake them firmly by the hand - still class! 

it's getting funky 'round here

I'm probably the least qualified person in the world to talk about the funk (or Da Phonque). But I've recently rediscovered Funkadelic's amazing fourth album, America Eats Its Young.

Now, I came to funk music pretty late in my musical eduction (adolescent suspicion of music that sounds like the band are having fun, perhaps?), but listening to it the other night I was again struck by their use of SPACE - the funk and rhythmic hiccups are in the gaps where no-one is playing. Plus I love the fact that guitarist Harold Beane can just hang out on that great spiky 7th chord all the way through "Loose Booty" without it getting dull.

Funkadelic - Loose Booty


This was the first album to really benefit from Bootsy Collins' amazing timing, like on this track - the whole rhythm section is totally relentless and unstoppable. Plus there's some funky "Jew's Harp" on there and the amazing keyboards of Bernie Worrell.America... is seen as a transitional Funkadelic album by those in the know, taking nearly two years to record as the original line-up was falling to pieces at the time (the album was recorded in 3 cities and features over 30 musicians). It was also where George Clinton took complete artistic control which is probably why the album is - in the best possible way - all over the place. They even invented a new genre on this track - Funktry and Western, no?Funkadelic - Biological Speculation



My favourite track on the album is the mental psychedelic gospel workout, "Everybody Is Going To Make It This Time". This song is crazy.

Funkadelic - Everybody Is Going To Make It This Time



They practically throw everything at this track, a huge arrangement with massed backing vocals. The lead vocal is something else entirely - an occasional touch of the "Sexual Chocolate"s there, methinks.

But it's still utterly engrossing and strangely moving and uplifting. There's a beautiful liquid guitar break at 3.10, but by the end of the track it sounds like the end of the world in there. One of those tracks where you could quite happily listen to the coda section go on forever in a Hey Jude stylee.

Buy - America Eats Its Young
Visit - Funkadelic on Wikipedia
Visit - Funkadelic at the Motherpage

PS - the title of this post is from a song by Stax-Volt recording artists Black Nasty - I may have to post that someday...

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GRUMBLE - I recently migrated to New Blogger which works fine most of the time, but with a few occasional glitch fests - most notably, the migration completely spanked the Feedburner site feed and now every time I edit an old post (to remove links to files that aren't on the server anymore) the post gets added to the feed as a new item.

So if you visit an old post and the link to the file doesn't work, it's probably because the file ain't there anymore - apologies. If you're desperate for something, however, we have been known to take requests... which reminds me...