pretazzo

“Medicine Bottle” is one of the most emotional moments in 90s music. Kozelek's voice, that enveloping melody trying in vain to warm the atmosphere against the chill emanating from the skeletal strings of a leaden gray guitar: the dominant mood is that of a disillusioned boy/girl, wandering alone through the sadly crowded streets of their city on a winter morning, with the cold lashing through their windbreaker and a lump barely held back. Pure poetry.

"Medicine Bottle" is one of the most exciting moments in '90s music. Kozelek's voice, that enveloping melody trying in vain to warm up the atmosphere against the chill emanating from the skeletal strings of a leaden and gray guitar: the prevailing mood is that of a boy/girl disillusioned with life, wandering alone through the sadly crowded streets of their city on a winter morning, with sharp blasts of cold penetrating through their windbreaker and a lump in their throat barely held back. Pure poetry.

Stunning record. An album to listen to while lounging in the bathtub. Chillout music disguised as post-rock. Or vice versa?

A record to listen to while lying in the bathtub. Chillout music disguised as post-rock. Or vice versa?

thank you odra! :-)

Question: is this the record that contains the wonderful Thirteen and September Gurls?

After their groundbreaking debut album, Ubu enrich their gallery of "modern dances": I Will Wait, On the Surface, and Caligari's Mirror are some of the most absurd things I've ever had the chance to listen to. More disarming, more irrational, more free, more fearless, more abstract, ambiguous yet capable of bringing to life one of the densest, richest, and most evocative musics ever: the places, the situations, the landscapes evoked by Pere Ubu are those (interior) of a devastated psyche. Lucid, effective, yet complex and disorienting. Apparently funny and quirky, yet tragic and austere. Unmatched. (Special mention to bassist Maimone, truly on fire here)

A somewhat hasty reception. What a pity. An immense record. 5 musicians in a state of grace. An infinite amount of ideas, inventions, innovations. A brilliant reinvention of the rock song. A new way of singing, arranging, and accompanying the tracks. And above all (a direct consequence of these stylistic innovations) a new imagery for rock music that would permeate the entire new wave, post-punk, underground of the '80s and '90s… in short, the last thirty years! Fall, Birthday Party, Killing Joke, PIL, Fugazi, J.Lizard, Pixies, Girls vs Boys (and dozens of other bands) owe a lot to this band from Ohio. When it comes to neurosis, alienation, madness, discomfort, inner apocalypse, the struggle of living one’s gray everyday life in the modern world, the absurd of the everyday, I think of the Ubu, the friezes of Thomas, the pollutions of Ravenstine, the tortures of Hermann, the syncopations of Krauss, the convulsions of Maimone. Immense!

WAAAAAAAASTE OOOOOFFF LLLIIIIIIIFE!!! MammaMia, what a record! There's everything: hardcore, thrash metal, gothic keyboards, doom cadences (when they're not slo-core), bursts of industrial, noise-rock, concrete music (the jackhammer...), progressive (in a lateral sense). It's a perverse metal symphony. Or even a kind of ritual of (self)Flagellation. Chilling lyrics that could make even Lee Ving tremble! An album that instills fear. I KILL YOU TONNNIIIIGGGHTTT!!!

Discontinuous album, but respectable. Splendid Pillows, a compendium of the soft and dreamy Floyds of the early 70s. The stormy and "aquatic" suite Echoes is obviously beautiful, along with the opener One of These Days (with its obsessive, reverberated bass line, borrowed from Mamma RAI for Dribbling!), tracks that demonstrate how the Floyd's art during that period was almost entirely focused on arrangement, sound exploration, and studio work rather than composition. Insipid instead is Fearless, which recalls the Zeppelin of their third album; the lounge interlude S.Tropez is cute; OSCENE INVECE SEAMUS, ONE OF THE MOST INSIPID SONGS IN THE WHOLE FLOYD CAREER. Damned little dog!!! :-D