Newsletter

Genius #1: Jan '24

New music from Chaser, Kali Uchis, & @; revisiting BÖC; memorizing the guitar fretboard; break-ups/reunions

Larry Michaels

01 Feb 2024 • 9 min read

Hi brainiacs, welcome to the first installment of Genius Dot Com!

I thought about doing a big 2023 write-up, but decided I’d rather enjoy the tabula rasa of a new venture and keep this focused on 2024. I ended up with a list of about 70 albums that I really enjoyed from last year & pared it down to a crisp 7x7 (in no order).

2024 is already shaping up to be a great year. Let’s dive in.

Capitalism

Tomorrow (Feb 2nd) is the first Bandcamp Friday of the year. Even though BC is zombie-walking toward financialization, it’s still the only music website worth visiting. Please consider going absolutely nuts online and supporting yr favorite artists thru their bandcamp pages.

Local Brooklyn band Chaser released their second LP Planned Obsolescence on Decoherence Records and I picked up a copy on vinyl. I’ve been following this weirdo band for a few years now: they take the frenetic, dissonant grind of 2000s freaks like The Locust, but pair it with more sensible songwriting structures & melodic vocals that remind of Karen O. BONUS: this LP comes recommended by legendary noise wizard Weasel Walter.

I also popped into Head Sounds in Ft Greene (the barber shop/record store combo) — it’s a nice store, but the prices were mostly uhhh way outside of my budget. And the clerk wouldn’t stop coughing (no mask). I left quickly, but snagged a couple cheap gems on the way out:

Aspects is a great fusion record — truly volcanic guitar playing from Coryell. I bought Echo Canyon solely based on the description on the back — it’s some kind of plein air solo flute free improv LP? Reverbed out woodwinds & chirping crickets, it’s nice stuff. I’d never heard of him before, but apparently he sued the Beastie Boys over a sampling dispute and lost big time. Haven’t spun the fiddle album yet!

Album Recs

2 from January 2024, 2 older recs, and a selection of Palestinian music

Kali Uchis - Orquídeas (Geffen, Jan. 2024)

I really don’t usually go for these high production mega releases, but this album has so many graceful touches & the songwriting is perfectly varied. Uchis’ vocal performance is unreal and the songs pulse with wild beat change-ups, clicky percussion, lush synth pads, and deep grooves that suddenly swing in tempo to push and pull these songs into place. An album I feel comfortable recommending to pretty much anybody. Can’t stop listening tbh!

@ - Are You There God? It’s Me, @ (Carpark, Jan. 2024)

Baltimore freak-folk duo found the arpeggiator setting for their synthesizers and decided to go absolutely off. The fuzzy lofi production & interlocking vocals would be at home in an Animal Collective record, but it’s the fun, twisting songwriting that pushes this little EP into exciting territory. Who could say no to an indie rock record featuring both metalcore double-kick rolls AND glitched out chorales?

Sarah Davachi & Sean McCann - Mother Of Pearl (Recital, Nov. 2021)

Beautiful and tender ambient record, the first from this duo (who are a romantic couple as well). Tape hiss blankets the scratchy violas, chiming guitar harmonics, and lovely four-handed piano pieces. You can practically touch the textures, all grimy & gleaming, and there’s just the right amount of space between notes to hang onto the tones without it feeling too sparse.

ชินกร ไกรลาศ - ชินกรกลองยาว (1975)
[Chinnakon Krailat - Chinnakon Klong Yao]

I couldn’t find this particular album streaming anywhere, but please enjoy this compilation that seems like it has the same songs in it. Chinnakon Krailat’s music is part of the Luk Thung genre — Thai country music that uses a mix of traditional piphat instruments and western horns/strings, with lyrics that speak to rural issues in Thailand. His voice leaps from a soulful slapback-echoed croon to a magnificent tonal yodel that defies description. It’s hard to dig up English-language information about either Chinnakon or his music — but some google-translated Youtube comments yield gems like “Let's get it. Rile, this way” and “I've listened to it over and over. No one can fight against Chinnakorn.”

Palestinian music

Palestinians are facing a genocide at the hands of a right-wing fascist Israeli government that is funded and armed by American tax dollars. Since October 7th, over 25,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and at least 300 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. Last week, the International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel has plausibly violated the Geneva Convention.

Here are a few records from Palestinian (and diasporic) artists that I’ve been listening to lately:

Faten Kanaan - Afterpoem (Fire Records, 2023)

[modern classical, minimalist/ambient]

Pure Terror - Blood Oath [demo] (self-released, 2023)

[pan-Arab hardcore punk]

Riad Awwad, Hanan Awwad, & Mahmoud Darwish - The Intifada, 1987 (1987)

[Folk songs with synths & drum machine]

Sabreen - Death Of The Prophet (self-released, 1987)

[traditional folk]

On the horizon:

5 upcoming February releases on my radar

The Closest Thing To Silence, from new age/ambient trio of Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu, and Marta Sofia Honer
Helado Negro’s new album on 4AD, Phasor
Drone/ambient queen Kali Malone’s All Life Long is going to be lit
Atlanta post-punk trio Omni’s latest for Sub Pop, Souvenir
Baltimore ex-pat & regular Bjork collaborator serpentwithfeet’s newest, GRIP

Replay

Blue Öyster Cult - Secret Treaties (Columbia, Apr. 1974)

“Classic rock” as a genre is not really one of my favorites. The message of freedom & power doesn’t exactly hold up to scrutiny when considering the racial element to rock n roll’s ascendence and the musicians’ criminal sexual appetites. If you can find albums that eschew the corny genre-specific touchstones, there are gems that hip young people still hold onto: Born To Run, Hejira, and Marquee Moon jump to mind. And of course there’s Steely Dan, with their smooth studio-perfect sound and dark sarcastic lyrics, who have found a new audience among millennials.

Is Blue Öyster Cult one of those bands you think about in this sphere? Ehhhh, maybe not. They’re from Long Island. Yikes. They are maybe best known for the SNL “I’ve got a fever…” bit. Woof. Their guitarist is named “Buck Dharma.” Oh word?

Listen, their 3rd record, Secret Treaties, is a total romp. Big riffs, a huge organ sound, and kooky lyrics written by friends of the band, including Patti Smith (yes that one). Dark occult imagery sits next to surreal and funny lines like “Oyster boys are swimming for me now” and “Stupid clouds at my door / Creepy weather coming 'round my floor.”

Look, they’re not a prog band — their parodic take on the hard rock sound of the era ends up with a lot of songs in verse/chorus/bridge structures. If you’re not in the mood for it, it can be tiresome in 2024. But each song’s bridge takes a sudden, hard turn into something much weirder.

For instance, track 3, “Dominance And Submission”: At the halfway mark, the song breaks into a motorik drum pattern chugging in straight-time for a stripped down verse. Call-and-response group vocals belt in “Dominance” every 12 beats. The “Submission” responses start off as casual spoken lines, but build up in tension to a frantic scream before a final huge guitar solo (again, this guy calls himself Buck Dharma). Total jam!

Piano-centric album closer “Astronomy” predicts the horrors of stomp-clap-hey but, as above, at the halfway point it grows out of its shape: a wonderful, quiet guitar solo anchored by a high-register bass guitar line eventually melts into a high-energy outro.

I’m not exactly sure what’s drawn me back into this band, but the athletic guitar solos, and goofy lyrics that mostly poke fun at other bands — it all reminded me quite a bit of something like a Steely Dan for the meathead set. I don’t know if their other albums hold up to scrutiny, but I think BOC is a great buy-low bargain bin find for those of us who are scouring boomer culture for bands that have been left in the dust.

Garbage Corner

I started learning to play guitar when I was 13, but the instrument didn’t really click for me until I started learning scales & chord shapes through diagrams of tablature. This visual shortcut allowed me to get better at a faster pace, but it’s left some fretboard fluency blind spots. I can tell you what the relationship is between 2 notes on the fretboard… but I can’t immediately tell you what the name of those notes are.

Jazz guitarist Mick Goodrick wrote a book in the 80s called The Advancing Guitarist and I’ve been trying out some of his exercises. In the first lesson, he recommends considering each string of the guitar as its own individual instrument. In Goodrick’s estimation, if the reader can learn to play the key of C — one string at a time, using only 1 finger — they will be on the path towards memorizing the fretboard. I haven’t memorized the whole fretboard yet — but I have been practicing and it’s been an interesting change of pace compared to my normal practice routine.

Mick’s descriptions are helpful, but his posturing is outrageous, so please enjoy this selection after he goes over the exercise:

Scene report

I did not attend a single concert in January! Womp womp. In 2023, I saw a 2 of my favorite post-hardcore bands: one was reuniting and the other was breaking up.

Unwound - Irving Plaza 3/11/23

Olympia’s Unwound broke up in 2002, a solid decade before I ever heard of them. Band members confirmed that a reunion would never, ever happen. Following the tragic death of bassist Vern Rumsey, it’s unbelievable that the band found a path forward.

There’s something special about seeing a reunion show and everyone is somewhere between the ages of 13 and 60. Unwound are a special band: their bleak lyrics, dark instrumentation, and casual arty obscureness all sparks something in me that very few other bands do. Like Fugazi for a different kind of depressed person. Seeing so many people who feel the same way, who got into them at whatever age they did — it speaks to the power of the music they made together.

When the band busted through the lingering National Weather Service public address (who needs walk-on music?) into “All Souls Day,” it was like they hadn’t missed a single day. While they didn’t play many songs from their last album, Leaves Turn Inside You (IMO their best), they played a generously long set with ferocity until a lengthy intermission in which they played the entire 12 minutes of “Excuse Me… But Pardon… My French” before returning to play basically the whole 2nd half of Repetition.

I made a point of not looking ahead at the setlists for the tour, so when the band dedicated their encore-closing 13min epic “Valentine Card / Kantina / Were, Are and Was” to the memory of Vern, I was overwhelmed. As the guitars fed back at the end, the band dropped their instruments to toss roses out to the crowd. They truly seemed thankful for the opportunity to return to these songs & breathe new life into them for the audience.

Palm - Baby’s All Right 9/9/23

In 2023, Palm announced that they would play their final shows as a band, so I went to as many of the last shows as I could (three!). I’ve been following them ever since their Audiotree set in 2016.. it’s no secret: I’m obsessed with their fucked up rhythms, blasted out through MIDI-infected dual-guitar heroics. After Rock Island came out in 2018, I wasted no breath loudly shouting that Palm was my favorite band making music.

Of the three sets that I caught last year, the standout was the middle set I saw: a show at Baby’s. They breezed through the set, pulling equally across the discography, shouting out the local bands in attendance who played with them when they were starting out. When the band broke into “Doggy Doctor” from their first LP, the crowd went absolutely nuts — the whole set was a rager.

A week later, their final show in Philly was more funereal – band members took turns trying to speak on the microphone to the audience, but were too choked up to express much. Audience members too were teary-eyed and subdued. Hardly anyone moved a muscle through the whole set, with each song played at barely-slower tempo than usual, like it was being laid to rest. When the band closed the encore with math rock modern classic “Dogmilk” for the last time, they seemed to stop a little short, rather than lingering on the tempo-slowing outro that’s closed all of their sets for the past few years.

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