wallscenery demos is another band that popped into our electronic mail unannounced.  (We’re assuming they’ve got some sort of e.e. cummings thing going on, as all of the contact we’ve had with the band and their new record has been capital letter free.  We’re going to accede to what we perceive as their wish and roll without caps when we refer to the band, even though we find it just a touch twee.)  Frontman James Hicken passed along a link to the website and let us know that they had new material on the horizon.  It’s one of those e-mails that I’m glad I responded to.  The album, check this!, is a sprawling, mostly uninterrupted string of fifteen finely crafted vaguely lo-fi, genre-hopping indie rock songs with eight hard to describe bridges in between.  The songs meld into one another, aided by the parenthetically titled space fillers.  Sometimes the bridges are ill-defined white noise or guitar slices or snatches of dialogue; regardless of their form, they serve to help the record work as a whole.  As a listener, it seems like you’re getting a single forty minute song, instead of an album composed of disparate pieces.  A song like the delicate, dreamy “they’ve fallen down” is linked to the slightly more roughly edged, nearly surreal “riding with the tide” (and it’s wildly absurd spoken word bits) by the twenty seconds of funky distortion that is “(voxtub).”  Both songs are killer, but when they’re connected as inextricably as they are on the record, they hit a bit harder.  (For the record: the spoken word bits on “riding with the tide” are worth the price of admission on their own for fans of the voiceover trick.  See:  “Little Acorns.”)  wallscenery demos cite Guided By Voices as an influence and the scattershot, quick hitting approach of something like Bee Thousand is clearly evident.  This seems to be a bit more of a unified vision than Bob and the boys generally pumped out though; wallscenery demos are doing something that’s worth paying attention to.  The two tracks below give a taste of what they’re about, but it’s well worth exploring further.  My personal favorite track is the deeply fuzzed out “raw shit,” which is a song I’ll be hitting repeat on quite a bit for a while.  On the other end of the spectrum, “my highest regards” sounds like the bastard child of “Here She Comes Now” from White Light/White Heat and “Fade into You.”  The guitar line is one for the ages and it just keeps rolling out of the speakers.  On a record where many of the tracks hover right around the two minute mark, its three minute length makes it feel like “Machine Gun.”  Suffice it to say that I love it.

wallscenery demos – i kept it real

wallscenery demos – hooked on lame

Live tracks from The Clash this week.  I talked about them super briefly in last week’s post and haven’t been able to stop listening to the first record for the last five days as a result.  London Calling is, obviously, the truth, but I often enjoy the snarl of The Clash as much or more.  There’s, arguably, nothing as visceral as “Garageland” in the rest of the catalog, so I spend a lot of my Clash time with The Clash. The two tracks below don’t really need a lot of introduction or preface.  Turn up the speakers though.

The Clash – (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais – Live, 1980

The Clash – Janie Jones – Live, 1980

Last up this week is the Top 13 Albums Project, which is currently keeping me on the edge of my seat with anticipation.  The concept is simple and clean: tell these folks the 13 best records of the aughts (2000-2009).  (I’m going with the aughts.  If you think you have a better moniker for the past decade, suck it.)  They’ll tally up the votes and offer a definitive list after the voting closes on October 2.  For my money, number one’s got to be Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I could certainly be wrong.  (Is there a way to wager on this?)  I’m not terribly interested in the lists that individuals might generate (I think Kevin’s touched on this in the past), but I think that, as a group, we can come up with a list that we’re all happy with.  (Just as an aside, or maybe as a cautionary example:  I love Pavement just as much as the next guy (maybe more), but did they so define the 1990s that they deserve two records in the top ten from that decade?  Probably not.  That’s why lists generated by individuals (or faceless corporate drones, a la P4k) are useless and mind crushing.  That said, I have no doubt that we here at Citizen Dick will give you a ton of lists as the year concludes.  That, friends, is cognitive dissonance.  A group list, on the other hand, is something I can get behind.  Democracy!  Yeah!)  I put The Black Album on my list, even though I really wanted to put on the Danger Mouse remix.  Long story short, I thought that The Grey Album might be a re-issue and get disqualified or something.  Whatever.  I have buyer’s remorse.  I stand by Jay-Z and the record however, even if all signs point to his new thing being a bit of a flop (“DOA” is awesome, the rest kind of elicits a “meh.”) If I had a time machine though, I’d punch in The Grey Album.  “Public Service Announcement,” “What More Can I Say” and “Change Clothes,” amazing on the original release, are transcendent after the addition of Danger Mouse’s manipulated Beatles beats.  (Lastly, I’m not going to divulge the rest of my list, as I don’t want to sway your votes.)

Jay-Z + Danger Mouse – Change Clothes