staires!

I saw Electric Six a couple weeks ago, and it was a little weird, because they were down to five members, and the member missing was... the keyboardist? Quite possibly the most important member of Electric Six...? Somewhat hilariously, they opened the show with "Synthesizer", with Dick Valentine quipping, "in honor of our missing synthesizer player."

So, yeah, it was a strange show. Thankfully, even with 50% of the music missing (by my careful calculations), Electric Six was still able to put on about 90% of the show they normally do. There were songs that did not fare very well without the keyboards, like Down at McDonnelzzz, but the crowd still got just as rowdy for it as they do every other time Electric Six has played it live. They even played "Randy's Hot Tonight," which I would think could not be played without a keyboard player, but you know what, they did it, mostly, they were most of the way there on that one.

Despite my unwavering devotion to the Electric Six Live Show experience, my senses have been dulled by a long series of mediocre Electric Six records to the point I had not actually bothered to listen to their most recent one; or at the very least, I listened to it and immediately forgot it. So when they played the title track to it at this show, Turquoise, and I was treated with a classic Dick Valentine ear-worm, I knew I was going to have to go home and listen to it.

(After they finished playing Turquoise, a very drunk woman turned to my wife and said, "DID YOU KNOW THAT ONE?" and my wife shook her head no, and the drunk woman went, "I DON'T THINK I LIKED THAT ONE." Then she gestured to her husband, very much a dude, and told us, "FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, MY HUSBAND WAS A MAN," and we both reacted with surprise, because we weren't sure what she was telling us, to which she went, "no, I mean, it's okay," and we nodded our heads with concerned expressions.)

If I was more of a serious music writer, one who writes about music–not one who writes music–I would have done some research to pad out my claims here, but, I'm not. So, I will just say, I really like this genre of Electric Six song, which I will call the "bimbos getting philosophical" genre. This song joins the pantheon of greats like, "We Use The Same Products", and "We Were Witchy White Women", where Valentine writes from the perspective of a seemingly shallow or superficially glamorous female speaker, and it ends up landing somewhere unexpectedly existential or melancholy.

Furthermore I love how much this song confuses me, because I can't really come to a solid conclusion on whether this song is anti-masking or pro-masking. It's clearly about COVID–the original album recording sessions were interrupted by the pandemic. Whether "turquoise" is meant to be a metaphor for masking, I can't be certain about whatsoever, so I can't make that claim strongly, but that was my knee-jerk reaction. It's also possible that the song is just making fun of the kind of women who believe in crystals, as if a rock is going to protect her from a global pandemic. But it might just be somewhere in-between, using an exaggerated liberal bimbo character to reflect the general absurdity of the global pandemic back at us in a way that makes us laugh and makes us dance (a little).

Man, Electric Six is a great band.

I guess Toni Basil has a modern contemporary and it's this weird chick making dance music. I found out about her thanks to, you guessed it, TikTok, where I saw footage of one of her live performances, which are replete with costume changes, props, and choreography. Neat! It certainly looks like a great time, especially if you're high off your ass on some good molly. Unfortunately those days are behind me. But you, you're young, you can go to her show, do a bunch of molly, and let me know how it is. Have fun!

I've got a complicated relationship to Sufjan Stevens' music, but I'd be withholding the truth in a way bordering on deceitful if I didn't tell you that the first time I heard this song, it brought me to tears. There's a lot of interpretations around this song that don't take it literally, and I'm not sure how you can do that. I mean, the words are saying it all.

I think I spent so much of my life asking myself this question that this song hit me like a ton of bricks. Even now, as an adult, who is clearly and obviously loved, there is still a yearning inside of me for an acceptance that I will never find, because I will never be able to really accept myself as I am. I toss in everything I make, every compliment sent my way, and the pit never really fills up beyond a point that is disappointing. That's just how it is.

In its own way, death is the final acceptance, and the only true end to the yearning. That's why I think this song leans into the sacrifice stuff. For some reason it also reminds me a lot of Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, but I think everything reminds me of that because it represents my unifying theory of the universe.

It is tremendously vindicating for a diehard Year Zero fan that this Nine Inch Noize record has more Year Zero songs on it than from any other era of Nine Inch Nails' discography. Not only that, but arguably the best songs on this record are the Year Zero tracks. And not only that but these versions of these songs are quite possibly better than the originals in some ways.

I was lucky enough to get to see Nine Inch Nails perform just a month or so ago, and it was great to get to hear this version of Vessel played live. All in all, it's a great time to still be a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor is still firing on all cylinders and seems to manage to avoid fucking up NIN's legacy. I wish I had been at Coachella, but only if all the other people weren't there.

I'm three years late or more to this song, likely thanks to the fact that I didn't really use TikTok until it was banned-not-banned in the USA. But now that I do use TikTok, I know about this song, thanks to Unbotheredkev, an older gentleman who looks an awful lot like Dustin Hoffman in I Heart Huckabees, whose got a habit of flipping off the camera and doing a little dance to this song. I dig it, I like it, the vibe is right.

This song is a "movie band" song, like The Venus in Furs from Velvet Goldmine, which means this isn't a real band and they haven't got any other songs. Even after 3 years of this song being known as a "TikTok song" and countless people declaring that it is "so tuff", there is no other music. It just makes you want to cry. I guess I'll have to watch this movie.

Or, maybe I won't, and I'll just listen to this song on repeat for 3 hours instead. Could the movie really be as good as that? Only one way to find out... or live in blissful ignorance my whole life. I guess we'll see. Well, you won't, because there's no other song from this movie, so I won't be mentioning it again here.

This is definitely my favorite Devo song. Admittedly, I haven't been a true Devo fan for very long, only since I first saw them live at Cruel World in 2022. Seeing all those old guys on stage looking like the coolest fuckin' guys I've ever seen in my life, well, it changed my life. I started devouring every Devo album, even the bad ones. I saw them live again at Darker Waves 2023, and then later that year in November for one of their "farewell tour" shows. Both those last performances I was flying solo, a scrawny old maniac dancing alone amidst a sea of older people who seemed to have forgotten that Devo is dance music.

Not only is the music for this song quite possibly the strongest ear worm Devo ever synthesized, but the lyrics are just glorious. They are reportedly based on a series of threatening letters sent to a game show host by someone calling themselves Cowboy Kim, which you can view at that link.

That said, the best part of the lyrics don't seem to come from those letters, the chorus: "I'm a man with a mission, a boy with a gun. I got a picture in my pocket of the lucky one, who doesn't know I'm a big mess." I don't think it's a coincidence this song is on the same album with "I Desire", with its lyrics from a poem by John Hinkley, Jr., and "Peek-a-boo", arguably the scariest DEVO song. I think we could call Oh No It's Devo "the stalker album". Definite shades of Peter Gabriel's "Family Snapshot" to be found here.

This is another DEVO cover, of the most excellent song "Pity You", which had to be covered under a different song name for record label related legal reasons. "Pity You" is right up there in the greatest DEVO songs pantheon, at least my pantheon, and this cover might actually improve it in several ways–which is probably easy because it's all five members of DEVO playing the song. This is like "DEVO with Toni Basil", and it fucking rules so hard.

It's also accompanied by this fever dream of a music video that is probably one of my most favorite archival pieces of 80's film I've ever seen. Everything about this is so excellent, from beginning to end, just insane. To be paired with such a great song, ugh, it's not fair.

What's also not fair, for Toni Basil, is that she only did four DEVO songs. (The other two on this album are "Be Stiff" and "Space Girls", both very good as well; later there's the DEVO song "The Only One" with Basil fronting, too.) Gerald Casale semi-co-produced her self-titled album later and, sadly, it's no good (aside from Mickey, of course); and the non-DEVO songs on this album aren't any good either. Sorry, Toni, if you're reading this, I desperately wanted to like your albums, but they're just not for me. Those three DEVO songs, good lord, it's actually proof I don't live in a simulation crafted just for me, that there isn't a full album or two of Toni Basil fronted DEVO songs.

Yeah, I’m just going to hit you with another Gates of Steel cover. This one is by sludge metal band Eyehategod. I really, really like this cover a lot.

There’s someone on YouTube who says they don’t like the half-time parts and that person is unbelievably wrong. The half-time parts destabilize the song in the best way. One second you’re grooving along and then suddenly you’re slowly head-banging; it’s like hitting the softest brick wall. I just love it. It feels so weird, and genuinely brings something new to the table, something all the other covers I’ve heard so far do not.

Apple Music came out with an AI-assisted prompt-based playlist creator, so I put in the first thing that came to my mind, "DEVO influenced metal," which I thought sounded kind of absurd. But little did I know, it made perfect sense. One of two genuinely good covers in the playlist (which only had 3 songs total, Apple Music AI giving it the ol' college try, I see) was this cover of Gates of Steel, by Surgical Meth Machine, which I did not know until this very moment is a Al Jourgensen side project, though this song is played at Ministry shows, so how much of a side project is this really, but whatever. I mean, okay, being fair, being as fair as I can be, this sounds like more like an Andrew W.K. song than a Ministry song.

While I was hunting this song down again, I was surprised to see five different covers of Gates of Steel, most of them metal / hard rock bands, but there's a really bitchin' ska version by Skankin' Pickle. I guess this shouldn't be a surprise, as Gates of Steel is right up there in the holy pantheon of great DEVO songs, if not all the way up at the very tippy top of the energy dome. What a great song. It doesn't matter how it's covered, those chords are emotive no matter what they sound like.

I think I was first introduced to this song back in 2006, and I fell in love with it. I think I listened to it so much that I grew sick of it and forgot about it for 20 years until last week, when I was shuffling a playlist titled "I Miss 90's Indie" on Apple Music.

When it started playing, I felt myself bolt upright in my seat. I've missed this feeling, this strange haunting song, the repetitive lyrics somewhere between a dirge and a prayer. There was a time I would have thought this song was about someone, but I think it really isn't. The song doesn't feel like it's longing for someone, more like it's hoping for something terrible to finally stop.