I had the unexpected pleasure of seeing Brooklyn’s Red Wire Black Wire last night at Saint Motel’s—Good lord, I will tell you, I am having a really hard time forming why words right now. Fuck. Let me start over. I’ll smoke a cigarette while I write this, maybe it will make me sound cooler.

I don’t normally listen to music that is… I don’t know, like Red Wire Black Wire, it’s got this Human League meets Ladytron (and I lifted that comparison shamelessly off the internet at large because I am too unfamiliar with the genre of synth-dance bedroom-pop) vibe—and while I listened to Ladytron for a couple weeks out of my life thus far, and my familiarity with Human League starts and stops at Fascination (if that is even Human League I’m thinking of)—you know typing with a cigarette in your mouth and not getting smoke in your eyes is way harder than I care to try right now. Hold on.

I hate to say the first thing I liked about Red Wire Black Wire was that I kind of wanted to move to them. I’m not a “mover” per se, though I had a bunch of alcohol in me. But then they sang a song referencing William Blake and I was like omg. william blake. i’m going to listen to these guys lyrics. When they played Reverse Tinman, I was overjoyed.

Goddamnit I wanted to write something really nice about these guys (I even shook the singers hand and told him they kicked ass, and I tend to avoid people like the plague!) and instead I just yammered a bunch of gibberish. Dang, yo.

I need to turn this shit into a weekly podcast.

I was thinking the other day about how a lot of the albums I’ve been listening to lately start really strong and then kind of dwindle away into nothingness. I came to the conclusion that if I ever learned how to play an instrument, sing, and write songs, I would strictly compose albums full of great singles. The album has it’s place, when a running narrative is necessary, or there’s a common theme, and we all occasionally love those arty jerk-off tracks, but when the arty jerk-off tracks aren’t enjoyable it kind of drags down the rest of the music. (Arcade Fire knows how to make arty jerk-off tracks that are still worth listening to.)

So imagine my relief when I discovered that Sea Wolf has created an album full of consistently good songs. There’s no lull–even when there’s a lull, it’s a Sea Wolf-ian lull, which makes you want to fall in love and run through the frosty air in a big winter coat (something us Californian’s never get to experience, really—the frosty air part, the falling in love part is impossible only to me) so, all in all, there aren’t any lulls on this album. It’s good, all the way through, to the very end, and then again when you just let it run on repeat because it’s that good.

I had the pleasure of seeing Sea Wolf play at The Troubadour last night. It was sold out, and all the women there seemed to be really into Sea Wolf, complete with a screaming section of them in upper seated area, which I guess is understandable because from an indie/hipster stand point, Alex Church is pretty hot. And his music is kind of vaginal. As in weepy vagina.

I don’t know.

But anyway.

The new material, live, sounds a lot like the new material on the record. They were having a lot of difficulties with the keyboards wanting to play through The Troubadour’s system, not that that detracted from the experience (except that the show started 15 minutes late and I felt pretty much completely awful thanks to a fever I suddenly picked up and constant lower back pain left me thinking I was going to die on my feet at any second).

All in all:

Sea Wolf’s new album is pretty much splendid. It’s nice of them to be selling the album at the shows even though it isn’t out until the 22nd. I figure they know it’s already leaked, so what’s the point in keeping it away from the fans? Thanks, Sea Wolf, for putting on a great show (which I can’t write a decent review of to save my life) and putting out a fantastic second album that I hope tons and tons of people enjoy.

I’m actually posting the songs today out of chronological EP-based order, because I like Clean the Clock more than Blue Sunshine.

Blue Giant is the married couple from Viva Voce along with a bunch of Portland-area people (including a guy from The Decemberists) and you can read all about who they are over on Wikipedia because it’s way too hot in this warehouse right now for me to try typing too much. Oh, lord, there’s sweat beading on my forehead.

OK, the sweat went away. Blue Giant is pretty great, I say, because they’re yet another one of those horrible evil bands that pays such a homage to a time and place for music that I can only imagine how many old fucks (re: dirty hippies) would hear most of this shit and go, “Oh God, it’s so shameless, how they rip off the untouchable flawless splendid music of my youth! Oh, where are my LPs, I must caress the grooves nostalgically and remember a time when my penis worked without fail and chicks had hair that cascaded all the way down their backs to the crack of their asses!”

Blue Giant falls, as if you can’t hear it on Blue Sunshine on the more Southern end of the psychedelic rock movement… If you don’t catch vibes of Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) then you’re lost to me, entirely lost to me.

I’ll be seeing Sea Wolf tonight at The Troubadour. I changed the Concerts page with an embedded version of my personal Google calendar that I use to track concerts I want to go to. This means it’ll be updated live/real time/frequently with great Los Angeles area shows I want to go to–and thus, you should want to go to them, too, because I only listen to awesome shit.

I had the bright idea the other day of going through my 250 gig music collection that I built over the last five or six years and see if there were any albums I may have downloaded years ago that I didn’t like back then but would like now. I discover enough music from years past that I love that I figured the odds were good that I’d find some sort of gem among the familiar artists of my collection.

Archie Bronson Outfit is one of those gems. I don’t really remember listening to it, so maybe I downloaded it and just never got around to playing it back in 2006. When I played it for the first time, just a couple seconds of opening track Cherry Lips, my mind was absolutely blown.

Much of the album is good. It suffers from the typical thing most albums do, a second half that isn’t as powerful or notable as the first half, but this is still an album full of great songs. Dead Funny is a lot of fun. Dart for my Sweetheart is probably the best song on the whole album and it’s a shame that I’m not posting it here for you to listen to. Consider it incentive.

I hear this is called “post-punk” but all I can think to call it is “incredibly bad ass driving music”. I love this album.

Saint Motel, this band, right here, playing this amazing song called Eat Your Heart Out is playing free shows every Monday night in September. This means last Monday, today, and then two more Mondays. I saw them last Monday, having never heard of the band nor even really listening to much past 10 seconds of their material on MySpace, and they knocked the socks off me and my friend.

Last Monday was sci fi themed, so they were dressed as robots, which is to say they were dressed like how I suppose they normally are but they had tinfoil over parts of them. An arm here, a tinfoil tie there. Their staging was, I suppose, typical of them: fake plants, the mounted head of a deer, and tiny little cameras everywhere.

Each member of the band has a mic (or otherwise) mounted camera pointed off in various directions. The main singer has his pointed a little off to the side of his head, framing the drummer alongside his face. The projector behind them would change between the cameras, complete with a flicker and a sputter like a lost broadcast, sometimes landing on footage from 2001 A Space Odyssey which had been looping all night, including a wireless one operated by an older woman walking continuously through the crowd filming people.

Their performance was lively and electric, but I was also pretty drunk. As it was, I enjoyed them quite a bit. They made me want to dance around like a moron with all the other bouncy people up against the front of the stage. It seemed like a good time.

I bought their EP on Amazon MP3, linked above, which was actually $1 more expensive than just buying their EP directly from them at the show, which made me feel a little stupid, but the quality of the material on the EP is so high it doesn’t really matter.

Come out to Spaceland on Monday nights in September and see Saint Motel. I’ll be standing around completely shitfaced, chain-smoking cigarettes in the back bar room.

This is the first song I ever heard by Andrew Jackson Jihad. I was driving one of my many ex-girlfriend’s home and it was, at this time, a seriously long fucking drive, so I took the opportunity to play us some albums we hadn’t heard before. I’d had the Andrew Jackson Jihad/Flaspar/Golden Boots Split on my iPod for a while. I think I had gotten it because I was searching for Golden Boots on Soulseek and found the name Andrew Jackson Jihad encouraging.

Little Brother grabbed me, of course (as if you already know my taste so well) because of it’s lyrical content, from the perspective of a boy who (somehow) curses his little brother with fetal alcohol syndrome and then uses crack cocaine to make a girl (who shares a name with my second girlfriend ever) blow his little brother in the fourth grade. I don’t think the storyline for songs gets much better than this.

Interesting in the bass on the couple of AJJ tracks on this split is off the meter. Makes my whole car vibrate across the road.

I bought People Who Can Eat People Are The Luckiest People In The World off Amazon MP3 after my absolutely excited reaction to that Split EP that I downloaded completely on accident. Survival Song is what another great song on the album (Brave as a Noun) seamlessly transitions into.

I love, again, that the songwriting is macabre, but optimistic. I can’t imagine many first lines better than “I broke my promise on a very sharp rock”.

The last verse with the big “reveal” is also lots of fun.

People follows along the same lines. I use this to close out my Hello, My Ghost playlist because, well, people are people and, God, I love some people sometimes, because people are the greatest thing to happen.

NOTE: You can’t seem to buy this album but you can download it for free if you click on the album art, as far as I can tell!

It’s Andrew Jackson Jihad’s first album that I discovered next, Candy Cigarettes & Cap Guns and it’s a little hit or miss. Some of the songs are great, and some are terrible (the pure acoustic punk of Fuck White People, the good songwriting but almost unintelligible nature of Be Afraid of Jesus) but a couple are just so damn clever. But I Love You is one of those songs that I’d definitely want to learn on guitar.

Lady Killer is definitely my song. There’s nothing else to say about it really, because that’s what lady killers do.

For some reason there’s a single track existing in the bowels of Amazon MP3, and it’s a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s Two-Headed Boy and I can’t help but include it here because, well, come on. You can’t be reading my site and not know why I have to include it here.

I know Andrew Jackson Jihad is probably an acquired taste, but hopefully by giving you a wide selection of their material you can decided pretty clearly whether you wanna give all their material (and there’s a lot of it) a chance.

In October they have a NEW ALBUM coming out, so that’s pretty exciting.

The Avett Brothers aren’t exactly my cup of tea, but there’s no denying how awesome some of their songs are. It doesn’t really matter what this song is about because the partial croon of the vocals and the bouncy guitar make it pretty clear… this is one of those songs that’s in a good mood about how hard, awful, and mysterious life is. I can’t help but fall in love with a band that writes songs like this (e.g. my undying love of eels).

The rest of the Avett’s Emotionalism is kind of hit and miss. The album is all over the place and I don’t think it’s possible for that to be more honest, if not literal. There’s grizzled cowboys swooning over vanished lovers, distortion blasts of near-indie-rock proportions, tropicalia hip-swayers, and then a ton of mopey alt-country emo songs between all of them. It’s interesting stuff. I don’t know how many songs I can pull away from it (though I’d like to love Pretty Girl from San Diego I am having a hard time playing it enough to cause it to infiltrate my subconscious), so it’s relevance to my ‘taste’ is questionable.

I’ve got all of I and Love and You sitting on my iPod but I have yet to listen to it. My backlog of Avett Brothers records has grown tremendously as it’s hard to discover an artist with an established catalog? Where do you begin? With the best reviewed album? With the newest album? With their first album? Somewhere in the middle? Launch a spitwad at a makeshift target?

I wanted to hear the title track, so I listened to it, and it’s pretty much great. The lyrics are great, the emotionalism is great, and everything comes together just fine. Though I haven’t gotten to the rest of the album yet (it hasn’t been officially released yet anyway, except for this song), I hold high hopes. Emotionalism‘s ramshackle glut of genres is refreshing and fun, but doesn’t make for an entirely pleasant album listening experience. Perhaps I And Love And You‘s production at the hands of Rick Rubin (who has produced everything from LL Cool J to Tom Petty to Johnny Cash to Weezer) will elicit some sort of result other than… well, whatever the fuck, I don’t even know.