Leslie and the LY's

Big girls rule! Leslie's playing at the Rickshaw Stop in SF on March 8th. I'm a steal that gold lame jumpsuit if it kills me.

Celebration (The Band not the Song)

I've been listening to Celebration's The Modern Tribe on non-stop rotation for the past few days. Lead by singer Katrina Ford, who recently did a guest vocals on TV on the Radio's latest Return to Cookie Mountain, Celebration combines elements of Sioxie-style goth, a Fela Kuti influenced horn section, and intense, tribal percussion elements, into one grand amalgam. Here, we find songs that could be sung from the tops of mountaintops, a tribute to the world before us--a basketful of crime, war, tempered with the stalwart beauty of nature and the possibilities of human kindness.
I've been following Ford and her organ-stomping bandmate Sean Antanaitis since their early days doing blasting noise punk as the Jaks and in a later incarnation called Love Life, where they paid tribute to the undead ghost of Nick Cave. The Modern Tribe documents a band that has reached a pinnacle. It taps into something primal, the idea of the spirit unbound, and the closeness of humanity with all it's trappings and vestments, to the animal world, and the world of trees lifting towards the sky, our nature as creatures of a wild, unpredictable earth. The German philosopher Hegel wrote of something called the Zeitgeist, which he defined as "the spirit of the age." Celebration ride at the forefront of the Zeitgeist, calling for a new way of being, learning and loving as the system breaks, and societal ruptures knock us further towards the abyss. And they say, Jump.

"If you hear a howl near/It's time to feel, not to fear/If you see Running Bear/Go ahead shake his hand for me."

From "Tame the Savage"

What's Hardcore?

Democracy Now played "What's Hardcore?" this past Tuesday, after a segment on Somalia. Amy Goodman said the artist's name so fast that she left me wondering who wrote this fucking rad song. Later, while listening to a forum about the San Francisco 8, host Mos Def referred to a rapper named K'Naan. After a bit of google searching, I put two and two together and was stoked to discover that Somali Rapper K'Naan was my mystery artist. He has an album out called "The Dustyfoot Philosopher" which I am going to purchase as soon as I can get myself over the Last Record Store on Mendocino Avenue.

White Chalk

White Chalk, P.J. Harvey's first studio album in three years, is quite a marvel. I've been listening to it on repeat for the past two days and can't get the title song out of my head. The album is rife with stark piano lines and high register singing reminiscent of a child ghost singing haunting lullabies. One particular song, "When Under Ether," conjures images of a Victorian woman ala the main character in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, who is going under ether and possibly dying as she holds the hand of a woman by the side of her bed. I imagine a woman much like the Harvey on the cover of the album, wearing a long white dress, dying in the throes of childbirth or dementia. White Chalk is the perfect soundtrack to my attempts to write a lesson plan for a class in Gothic literature. Not to sound trite, but it is so much about ghosts, yearning, transgression and sexual awakening, which all happen to be major tropes of the gothic. There is also pirate cabaret sound to songs like "The Devil" and a couple of others. What a fucking fantastic album.