tirado/thrown

Mazzy Star, “Lay Myself Down”, Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, April 20, 2012

Strictly Ballroom, “Elevator Action”, Hide Here Forever, Waxploitation Records, 1996-8.  The seven inch that premiered this particular song a couple of years before this version is somewhere in the drawer under the turntable.

Christie Front Drive, “Fin”, Stereo, Caulfield Records, 1998

The release of CFD’s last record—a year after the band had broken up—has a particular resonance for us here at tirado/thrown. First listening to the record in the touring van of some fellows we befriended in college was something of a melancholy occasion, because we were all under the impression that the band wasn’t going to get together anytime soon. It was like hearing faint messages of possibilities that merely flickered past but hardly realized themselves. So hearing a song called “Fin” was enough to sense that the song, the album even, was a premature yet somewhat ominous goodbye.

Fast-forward almost fourteen years.

To hear that CFD will be playing the Noise Pop Fest in San Francisco next February comes as fantastic news, if only because it partially satisfies a desire to see a band that stopped performing too soon.

There’s a minor symmetry at work between a band who announced their end with a song whose title designates an end, only to return years later on the one hand, and on the other, an old year announcing its end and the entry of a new—if somewhat uncertain—cycle around the sun. “Fin” is enough to offer some consolation as 2011 comes to an end.

Happy 2012 everyone.

via mudwerks: The Psychedelic Furs | Love My Way

So, I could have sworn I heard Richard Butler sing “I follow where my line goes…”, which would be much more fascinating and far less rationalistic than, “I follow where my mind goes…”.  Creative misinterpretation aside, it’s a brilliant, and much needed track at this particular point.

(via oversets)

Manu Chao, “Denia”, Proxima Estación: Esperanza, Virgin Records, 2001, Reissued by Nacional Records.

School of Seven Bells, “My Cabal”, Alpinisms, [Ghostly International, 2008]

There was a point in which this post was going to have some commentary on how SVIIB’s music is often under-represented in the indie music press as merely influenced by shoegaze and dreampop.  They’re obvious references, really; but the band’s sound suggests influences that are definitely more along the lines of what one would hear in freestyle and urban pop during the mid to late 80s.  It’s difficult not to hear traces, afterlives of Sheila E, Lisa Lisa, and other Latin@ musicians of the time.  But among the collateral deficiencies of rockism is a tendency to produce some negligent and lazy criticism, to say less of the dismissal of certain rhythms unbeknownst to the typical rockist as somehow ‘exotic’.  For shame.

Lambchop, “Grumpus,” Nixon, Merge Records, 2000

It’s difficult to find songs as well crafted as this one.

Chicano Batman, “Itotiani”, live at the Hobby Shop

There’s a line that Los Lobos sing, which seems to resonate while writing from Berlin.  ”No matter where you are, your’re never really far…Good Morning, Aztlan.”  Thanks to the Intertubz, the sentiment can be indulged in for a bit, half a world away.

Though we here at tirado/thrown sprechen ein bisschen Deutsch, it was nice to hear hispanohablantes milling about the streets of Berlin, riffing en castellano.

Broken Social Scene, “World Sick”, Forgiveness Rock Record, Arts and Crafts Records, 2010.

Selecting a type of post for this blog’s one hundredth was a little tricky.  Photo? Music? a Quote?  They seem like that’s all tirado/thrown really has time for these days.  But that’s just as well, as the editorial voice is still in the process of shaping and not quite ready to go live yet.  In the meantime, here is a cut that doesn’t necessarily thrive on nostalgia, which is a rather significant motivating factor in the music posted on this page.  This particular song, being a fairly recent one, is a welcome departure from the trend.  Then again, the experience of watching a dozen or so musicians perform this song is one that elicits sharing said song, only to have the listener of the studio cut imagine what it would sound like live.  Let number 100 wash over us all.

Image: Dallas Magazine

Stereolab: “Come Play in the Milky Night”, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, Elektra Records, 1999

In A Child is Being Killed, Serge Leclaire writes:

“The loss of a representation of fullness, of motionless jouissance, must be relentlessly mourned and mourned.  A light must be eclipsed so it can shine and spread out on a background of darkness.  Whoever does not mourn, over and over, the loss of the wonderful child he might have been remains in limbo—in the milky light of a shadowless, hopeless waiting.  But whoever believes he has won the battle against the figure of the tyrant once and for all cuts himself off from the sources of his creative spirit and thinks he is strong when he stubbornly resists the reign of jouissance.”

Image: Maui Magazine