ONEIDA - HAPPY NEW YEAR

The layered motorik drive of “Up With People” was a bit of a red herring. This seems like Oneida’s most overtly 60s psych-influenced album. With call-and-echo chants and vintage guitar treatments and solos and synths, they're clearly aiming for as trancelike a mood as heavy guitar rock can achieve. There’s no doubt that the guitars sound great as always. The vocals seem even more amateurish and weak than before. Sometimes this works for me, with a sense of murmurs wafting in through a hallucinatory haze (usually if I’m in, uh, a bit of a haze myself); other times, probably more often, I feel like it detracts from the atmosphere. The songwriting seems more basic than on The Wedding, which doesn't seem like an improvement if they're going to stick to short rock songs. Too often, the main vocal melody lines can just sound tossed off. Highlights (aside from “Up With People”: the electronic noise breakdown in “Pointing Fingers”, the intricate mandolin-or-equivalent in “Busy Bee”, the delicate and eerie “Reckoning” (where they have the sense to run the vocals through heavy FX) which ends before it answers its questions, the bass and sonics on “You Can Never Tell”. Low points: any track with a drum machine (just 2, thankfully). A keeper?: don’t know. I miss the twisted screaming hard rock of “Did I Die.”

Buck Dharma's voice sometimes makes me think of a snake somehow: the leathery tone; the undulating vibrato; the dirty, creepy quality; the way it slithers at a low level before jumping out. Secret Treaties is such good organ-drenched boogie sleaze. I like how the "Career of Evil" riff is pretty much just one big chromatic turnaround.

The box is open

I started a Pandora station here. I've generally been very pleased with what it throws out. I wish there was more classical music but you can't ask too much. The selection in other genres is generally impressive. I commented on ILM that it might be the only radio station that plays both AC/DC and Milton Babbitt. I still need to do a little fine-tuning sometimes (probably due to me having over-finicky tastes in old rock music) when it plays a wretched 90s Scorpions album track or something but I'm pretty happy with it now. I've been introduced to lots of great stuff, especially psych and kraut that I was otherwise too lazy to check out. I'd never heard of Clark-Hutchinson before but they're spectacular! Everything I look for in guitar solos.

I've started setting up a pop/rock station as well.

Awesome Coltrane video.

RYOJI IKEDA - DATAPLEX

I've been waiting to write about this because there's a lot to digest here and because I consider Ikeda the most important living artist. Also, every time I put on the album, I end up drifting, just wanting to listen to the album without having to focus on anything else.

Over a number of releases, Ryoji Ikeda has created works that investigate the fine sonic properties of pure electronic sound, always in a highly listenable and pleasing (to my ears, at least; "pleasing"!="pleasant") form.
Disc 1 of Matrix, for example, is an album-long drone piece based on combinations of sine tones that produce different pitches and patterns depending on where one stands in the room. Disc 2 is a perfectly flowing disc of rhythmic 'dance' music made up of sounds such as these, as well as clicks, hums and static.

This album begins with a solitary high tone. I waited attentively, expecting something to follow. After some silence we get the sound repeated with a pattern of pulses in an extremely high frequency range (one that I sometimes feel massages my skull in a bizarre but comforting way). (The register actually reminds me of the "teen buzz.") The relative quiet is shattered by shocks of static. Eventually drilling beats in a low register are added. The third track ("data.duplex") adds a massive low drone to the mix, with an almost claustrophobic tense quality. This tension is built relentlessly for some time, with rhythms slowly developing using these basic elements, crumbling then rebuilding. It is not until track 9 ("data.microhelix") that the 'dance' really begins but the wait is repaid. We get the most intricate beats Ikeda has constructed, stereo-panned clicks and sine tones, jarring yet flowing and rhythmically compelling, progressively more complex, some kind of surreal drum-and-bass. For me, this is the most appealing and successful part of the album. The album ends with a track that is designed to cause some CD players, including mine, to skip. Sometimes it becomes an infinite piece, sometimes it plays all the way through, sometimes certain passages turn into bizarre loops. The track manages to be musically interesting in every case and is a fitting close. The only other album of which I'm aware that does this is Theo Bleckmann's Origami, which also used the technique effectively, in the context of a song about memory, but in a totally different musical style.

Dataplex is another intriguing and successful recording of Ikeda's that shows evolution in his work. While it may not, in the end, be the masterpiece that Matrix was (it will take time to assess this), it is still an interesting and enjoyable release.

" To get your playing more forceful, hit the drums harder. " - Keith Moon

Thanks to the Rockist Scientist for this wonderful link.

Like a dweeb,

I only checked out Broken Social Scene when they named a song after a time signature. If Feist sings lead on everything, I'll need to check out more.

There better be a whole album of this stuff

Thanks for the link, Mike.