Easy Goings - Most Of All There's You

(Bee-Fast, 1989)

Released by the Breakfast Without Meat folks, and performed by Gregg Turkington and John Singer of the Zip Code Rapists accompanied by Gary Strasburg and Stephen Hanson, the first Easy Goings single is a natural musical outgrowth of that magazine and its various obsessions: two bizarre/obscure genre-tribute cover songs, artwork that nods to cigarette ads and Solo plastic-cup queen Dora Hall, and a general air of mind-bending in-jokiness that hangs around the sonic weirdness. Much more “musical” than the work of ZCR, the band delivers its lewd charms via a half-hokey, half-creepy sound best heard on “Most of All There’s You,” with its wheezing carnival keyboard and Turkington’s insect-like croon. It’s sentimental sap done in a nightmarishly psychedelic fashion, but still catchy as all heck – a repulsive triumph. “The Straight Life” and “Hoboes Need Lovin’” (an original) take a rootsier, more stripped-down approach, the latter being the disc’s closest stab at an outright joke; it even features a Neil Hamburger-esque apology for poor sound quality at its end. This single is a tough one to find, but it’s a pretty vital precursor/companion to the Amarillo catalog that makes for some fun listenin’.

Historical notes for the nerdy: According to an ad in Breakfast Without Meat issue 14, this was a record the band was “trying to sell in order to raise enough money to build a 40 feet high, 20 tons of steel monument to the human thumb.” Or howzabout this description, from an ad in issue 13? “Wildness at its way-out-est, to the pitch of furious frenzy – the height, apex, acme, epitome – the living END!!! That is The Easy Goings. Singing and playing the young sounds of today. Wind up the Gramaphone, turn the horn towards the action and let’s dance, let’s listen…it’s the sound you asked for! This rocking group, with all its many knobs, buttons, and doo-dads, looks and sounds like it might launch a rocket. The sounds of ‘freakout’ heard on this record are sure to please the most discerning palate.” Sounds about right.

Earthmen - Cool Chick #59

(Slumberland, 1993)

A luddite, I only recently – and reluctantly – bought my first iPod after getting the chance to cautiously fool around with one a generous dame loaned me for a few days. Thing’s pretty neat, I must admit, and I’ve been listening to a lot more music thanks to its convenience. Unfortunately, I’m just playing the same old stuff on endless repeat: My Bloody Valentine, Wipers, Flipper, Galaxie 500, and (while charging through Times Square each morning) Pussy Galore. I tend to get into musical ruts, and this doggone iPod is helping me dig ever deeper with greater speed. But at least I’m diggin’ in the most technologically with-it fashion available!

The early Slumberland Records roster, with its noisy Americanized tweegaze, has long fit nicely into that sweet rut o’ mine. Really, almost anything the label released through the mid-’90s will satisfy fuzzheads and rockin’ lo-budget MBV popjunkies alike. Crazy reliable, its records are some of the safest buys out there, so I felt mighty OK about picking up this Earthmen single based solely on the presence of the Slumberland logo. And LO! For once I found myself nonplussed. While it’s definitely not bad, it, like late Drop Nineteens, betrays a few too many hints of the mainstream alt-explosion in its clear vocals and clean power-guitar to make me comfortable. “Momentum” does burst into an extended, distorted frenzy that stamps it as a keeper, but even that song isn’t so very nifty that I can imagine ever wanting to find out more about the Earthmen. So stay in Australia, you crazy band that I know almost nothing about! I’m perfectly happy with my Black Tambourine and my Lilys. And will be.

Early Day Miners - Southern Myth

(Zeal, 2001)

Tonight’s Presidential debate, semi-moderated by the somniferous Tom Brokaw, was boring as sin, so it’s certainly timely that this 7” is a stone-cold drag as well. Thanks for being current, Early Day Miners! Brushed drums and gentle vocals in the American Analog Set style mark “Southern Myth,” but without that electric keyboard zing that keeps even the sleepiest of AmAnSet songs crackling, it’s an exercise in feather-light tedium. “Room and Pillar” scuffles along, attempting a rural, after-hours Tortoise-like instrumental dynamism that fails to make an impression. A rather specific kind of 1990’s indie subgenre hangover, this, and one that can be safely ignored, whether you own it or not. Snooze away, America. Barack wins.

Earlimart - Answers And Questions

(Suicide Squeeze, 2006)

Lush drama from these underdoggies. I’m kinda puzzled as to why there isn’t more lovin’ thrown Earlimart’s way; they’ve put together a solid catalog reminiscent of disbanded peers like the Delgados or a bleepsnbloops-free Grandaddy, but haven’t seemed to ever receive the attention those groups did. Oh well and oh shucks – they soldier onward. “Answers and Questions” came out in advance of album no. 5, Mentor Tormentor (where it also appears), and showed off the band’s continuing mastery of the dense, dreamy, mildly-psychedelic (are those mellotrons?) midtempo pop it jumped into on Everyone Down Here. Thanks to the meaty drums and churning guitars at the end, the song’s not too adulty, as these things can sometimes be, and thus it’s not too bad. Is outta sight, in fact. “Carruthers Boy,” which is on this single and this single only, focuses on vocal interplay and strips away most of the sonic layers of the A-side to show without distraction that Aaron Espinoza knows his way around a melody like a something knows its way around a whatsit. By which I mean: Yep!

Dave E. & The Cool Marriage Counselors - Searching Through Sears

(Christmas Pets, 2008)

HOLY MACKEREL! Absolute must-have boot reissue of three post-Eels Dave E. songs. Better than Palin, these! Elect ’em VEEP! Why NOT?! In the scumfreak Electric Eels, Dave tended to project a mix of snottiness and vulnerable bafflement; with “Searching Through Sears” (originally on a flexi back in ’81), any punk leanings get chucked for a full-on frazzled oddity that out-weirds and out-laffs anything else I’ve heard from Cleveland, ’70s onward. Anti-social to be sure, but SMART and FUNNY up the rearhole. And how! The horrors of modern life writ ’n’ sung loud – with a LISP – as only this skronky horn + xylophone-backed goof can do. “Look at this underwear / It’s a value beyond compare / I’ll take it home and set it up in a chair,” he sings as he aimlessly tours the city’s department stores, consumer-nation terror barely tamped down beneath the ridiculous shower-croon pop facade. A riot. Hilarious. Scary. Whatever; it’s the bestest. The B-sides – a surprisingly straight a cappella love-gone-wrong song from a radio broadcast and a rough Eels-esque live track – are nothing to wait in line for, but with an A so swell, who cares? Miss the boat on this one and you better be ready to regret it. Like, for life.

Bob Dylan - Tight Connection To My Heart

(Columbia, 1985)

It occurs to me: you know what Bob Dylan needs? Synthesized horns and strings, drum machines, guitar solos, a laid-back vibe, state-of-the-’80s production, and – most important of all! – a bunch of terrible songs. Imagine such a thing! It’d be peachyperfect, a real creative and commercial step forward for America’s #1-favorite Voice Of A Generation. OH WAIT, WHAT’S THIS?? HELLO, HIT LP EMPIRE BURLESQUE! My prayers iz answered!

Now pardon me please while I go throw up for entirely unrelated reasons.

Hi! I’m back! Embarrassing as it is, at least “Tight Connection to My Heart” isn’t as rotten as the other songs on the album, and in fact gets the honor of being the best of the bunch, aside from the incongruous acoustic throwback “Dark Eyes.” Yes, Dylan’s weird, hiccupy vocal performance sounds like a self parody, and yes, he is swallowed up by the wholly inappropriate use of then-modern musical technology, but the song is catchy in its own knuckleheaded way and gets to function today as a novelty item that succeeds at bringing on laughter and groans, and maybe a tapping toe or two. It’s memorable, even. Perhaps not for the reasons Dylan might have liked, but memorable nonetheless. As far as these “aging rock-guy trying to update his sound” things go, the single is hardly a disaster.

But get this. “We Better Talk This Over,” from Street Legal, turns up on the B-side, and I’ll be damned if I know why. It’s certainly not a song that needed or deserved to be resurrected seven years after its original release, and its appearance here is very strange indeed. Maybe Bob wanted to rehabilitate the reps of those older records by demonstrating how comparatively not-shitty they were when placed next to his current material?

Bob Dylan - Heart Of Mine

(Columbia, 1981)

I appreciate the loose feel Dylan achieves on “Heart of Mine” – especially after the embalmed sound of the last few records – I just wish he’d bother to write COMPELLING songs instead of tossed-off forgettables like this. Backing him and sharing the blame are fellow celebs Ringo Starr and Ron Wood, who shuffle in and barely earn their paychecks with ragged, unexciting performances… on full display are the horrors of musical middle age. Making matters somewhat baffling after sitting through that yawner are the surprise energy and QUALITY of Shot of Love outtake “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” on the other side, its mid-’60s-style electric blues and raw vocal showing that yeah, Dylan still has some gas sloshing around in the ol’ musical tank as the ’80s begin. It also shows that he has very questionable judgment when it comes to selecting what makes it onto any given album and what gets tossed aside. Some Columbia exec apparently agrees with me, since “Groom” has subsequently been added to CD copies of Shot of Love, which, I oughta note, is otherwise a turd of an album that should remain far, far away from your precious collection. Advice you can use, see?