Unpiano | Music Blog

I have no idea what to write about this band, I don’t know anything about them and the fact that they took their name from a Van Morrison song makes it very difficult to search for information.  The music is a bizarre mix of drone, noise, folk and metal, and it all sounds like it should be played in the background of a Spaghetti Western stand-off.  It’s dreary and depressing, sometimes heavy enough to rival Earth, sometimes folky enough to rival Neutral Milk Hotel, but always with an upbeat tone that keeps it feeling fun.  If you have a younger sibling in high school that is ready for some heavy mushroom trips, give them this to play in the thick of it; in an alternate reality I could hear this substituting nicely for classics like Pink Floyd or Zeppelin.

Also, they have literally the best order confirmation image I have ever seen in my life.  Seriously look at this shit!!

Dweller On The Threshold – The Woods-Electric
Dweller On The Threshold – Gallery of Stars
Dweller On The Threshold – Crumbling House

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Yvette (aka Noah Kardos-Fein and Rick Daniel) are set to release a limited edition 7″ through God Mode on March 27. This type of music sort of makes my head want to explode and strangely I mean that as a complement. Sometimes that masochistic urge takes over and you just want to hurt yourself in that good way that only songs like these can scratch. I have heard that Yvette is so loud that they drown other bands out to the point where all they can do is stop playing and let it happen. If that is the case then what hope do you have? Go buy the record, drown yourself in sound and try not to open your mouth and swallow too much of it.

Oh go ahead and write another uniquely American epic and put it to tape why don’t you Bill. I’ll bet his answering machine message is worth putting on repeat for hours on end.

Bill Callahan – Drover

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British Invasion producer/songwriter Pete Miller hit the scene early into Britain’s love affair with American rock. Starting in the late 50′s, he recorded with early rock n’ roll groups, beat bands and penned and recorded one of the first English psychedelic songs. His distortion-flooded psych-era output is amazingly weird and surprisingly catchy, for some reason I had him pegged and Belgian or Dutch (probably because of his ESL sounding vocal delivery). Wearing many hats and recording under many monikers over the years (kind of like a white, British, George Clinton), Pete ended up in San Francisco in the 70′s, his studio documenting a lot of the early SF punk scene. His LPs as Big Boy Pete are so out of print that the reissues are out of print and worth a small fortune, and this killer single as Miller is basically impossible to find, as if it never happened, so just enjoy this rip below.

Big Boy Pete – Sheer Lunacy
Big Boy Pete – Crocogators
Big Boy Pete – Knit Me A Kiss

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Bonus:
Miller (Pete Miller) – Baby I’ve Got News For You

These days everyone with a computer is “working on an album.”  Most of them never actuallyhappen, and the ones that do are pretty much always terrible.  Every now and then some idiot-savant finishes up his bedroom disaster, and it somehow ends up sounding super raw and bizarre and it’s completely fucking perfect.  I don’t know anything about Local Wizards except that it seems like their changed their name from “Pizza Pizzazz,” and that’s pretty great too, so they really got the whole package here.

Local Wizards – Burn It Down
Local Wizards – I Have Nothing At Stake
Local Wizards – Cold

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A week ago, after spending an afternoon looking like an idiot in an old wood-floor rollerskating rink in Glendale, I Netflix’d (that’s a verb now) this awesomely bad roller disco movie, set in Venice during the supposed late 70′s rollerskating craze and featuring a tarted up Linda Blair with some castaway cast of soon-to-be-in-porn actors and actresses that can’t act or act-ress. Its a typical teenage fad movie, like Breakin’ or Thrashin’, with some good-hearted rich girl trying to be down and a struggling out-of-her-league underdog trying to get famous for something you can’t make money at, and his cheeky friends and her shitty parents who don’t understand and all the usual shit. Needless to say, it was awesome, and I sat through the whole thing with my jaw in my lap. My wife said I shook my head through the whole movie, probably at the completely improbable situations, characters and dialogue that danced before me (on skates, and in slutty 70s/80s fashion, of course). It was like an American Apparel boner-fest with badly delivered laugh-out-loud lines and a disco soundtrack. Well, except with this track, which opens the film and totally rips the rest of the original soundtrack double-LP a new asshole. Powerpop by numbers about some supposed “Good Girls” who are clearly sluts, sung by this one-hit L.A. wonder with a rapper’s name.

Remember the first time you hear Black Sabbath’s first record?  These guys do, like it was yesterday, because they probably listen to Sabbath every day of their lives.  Ape Machine is basically classic metal, but they are a little heavier than their 70′s predecessors.  They also incorporate prog-rock song structures, but it’s really only as complex as you would expect from massive stoners, which is to say it’s still mainly pretty simple riff and guitar squeals jams.  They recorded with Ikey, who also had his hands on the Crystal Antlers’ last record, and the heavy, raw rock sound shines again here.  My only complaint is that I wish every song was longer, maybe that’s for the live show.

Ape Machine – The Sun
Ape Machine – Black Night

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I know I’m probably a little late on this, I’m not the most current dude, but a really great way to get introduced to new music is by drinking beer and smoking pot. Blah blah blah “liver disease”, blah blah blah “low sperm count”. How about, “awesome amounts of patience to sift through hours of YouTube threads, blogs and message boards chasing forgotten treasures”? Or “tireless yapping with other record nerds about shit you don’t know about yet”? Just be sure to take notes, because there’s a good chance you’re going to forget a whole lot about what you learned before the morning. Case in point, this 7 inches of reissued wax only found its way into my collection because of a crumpled, beer soaked note I found in a pant pocket after a late nighter, in which the phrase “awesome Sing Sing reissues” was chicken scratched onto a torn chunk of grocery bag. Lo-fi power poppish punk with a hint of TV Personalities, recorded in ’79 and reissued this year. Grab one before they’re gone.

Voice Of The Puppets – I Don’t Want To Know

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This track has been in heavy mix rotation since I stole it off the awesome Mod Punk Archives site years ago. A perfect 60′s revival pop hit (tipping the hat to the Byrds, the Zombies and other post-mod British Invasion rockers), but recorded on the other side of the pond in the mid 80′s by San Diego garage-heads. Comprised of members of better known SoCal garage scene favorites like the Tell-Tale Hearts and the Crawdaddys, the Nashville Ramblers had a short run with little to show for it, but what they did manage to record was so timeless its been a staple of power-pop comps (like Bomp’s “The Roots Of Power Pop” or Rhino’s “Children of Nuggets”) for the last 20 years. Mike Stax’s Ugly Things Records recently reissued a limited edition of the original 7″, snatch one up before they’re gone.

Nashville Ramblers – The Trains

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Bonus:
Nashville Ramblers – The Trains live on “Its Happening”, 1987

Don’t say motherfucker, MOTHERFUCKER! Don’t say motherfucker, MOTHERFUCKER! Don’t say motherfucker, MOTHERFUCKER! Don’t say motherfucker, MOTHERFUCKER! Don’t say motherfucker, MOTHERFUCKER! I know this isn’t much of a review, but if you didn’t immediately hit play on this track after seeing these awesome lyrics, we probably can’t be friends.

Turbonegro – Don’t Say Motherfucker, Motherfucker

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