September 28, 2005

Sinfully Australian

The Stoneage Hearts are good for you. They’re from Australia, like so many great bands, which means they talk funny and are probably prone to skin melanoma. They play rock & roll with a very sixties flavor and a warm fuzzy tone. They write good songs.

This article explains guitarist Dom Mariani’s history through the eighties ‘til now in bands like the Stems and the DM3, and delivers some free downloads. The Stems, by the by, have since reformed and their new site has a 1985 video of the song “Tears Me In Two” that you can watch – or download it here (right-click, dammit!).

Here’s a page of critics raving and dropping even more names and band references than I do about the Stoneage Hearts’ Guilty as Sin record, which came out this year and from which the track below is taken. And there’s two more mp3s from the album! Between this site and that one, you’ll have three elevenths of the album right there. These folks deserve money just for giving away so much free digital material. Yes, I know that’s not very logical.

If you like ‘em, go over here and buy the record, you deadbeat.

Some 1960s-worshipper bands drain all the fun and soul out of the music for me; some, like DMZ or the Lyres or the Hypstrz, really transcend the druggy, kitschy nostalgia and create something better. You be the judge.

Thanks to Patrick Boissel for passing along the good stuff.

The Stoneage Hearts – “Your Smile”

Rick at 10:43 pm

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September 27, 2005

Green Light

Anyone who has received a mix tape or disc from the Toe Stubber in the past four years has heard at least one Equals song. Not only because they’re one of the most underrated pop/rock bands ever, but because their tunes are so fucking catchy, I feel that I must pass them on like a chain letter or bad luck will befall me.

The band is mostly known among non-nerd musicologists as being Eddy Grant’s band in the 1960s. (You know, the Guyanese-English guy who wrote, performed and rocked on down to “Electric Avenue” in the ‘80s, and then he took it higher…) Aside from that monster hit, his solo stuff is not really to my taste, but you can find out everything about Eddy’s post-1980 career here.

When Chris Santamaria first gave me an Equals tape, I grooved on it for weeks before asking him who “all the bands” were. There was such a wealth of sugary sweet funk and soulful pop on the tape it seemed like it must have been a compilation of the very best of some recently discovered 1960s underground scene – no one group could have such a broad range of styles that all kicked ass. Jessica Mirmak has an early-’70s film on video that has two vintage lip-synchin’ Equals performances, and lemme tell ya, them cats were wild! And apparently they liked hanging around in English castles!

Some retard at Trouser Press actually has the gall to call some of the Equals’ songs “utter tripe“! Asshole.

Contrary to the opinions of loser assholes, there really are no bad Equals tunes. Figuring out which two songs to post was, for me, like deciding which eight toes to chop off.

Fortunately, I only use two digits to type.

The Equals – “Christine”
The Equals – “Honey Gum”

Rick at 10:17 pm

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September 23, 2005

Slicker Than Snot!

Many, many thanks to deadly codemaster / computer whisperer Michael Clifford for helping iron out all those stupid layout bugs. He actually fixed things up better than you see here, but I further fucked up the code in translation, so get used to what you see. For now. (If your browser isn’t Safari, you might be the problem.)

While you’re waiting for another mp3, you can look at these photos of my beautiful records.

Rick at 7:31 pm

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September 20, 2005

You May Have Noticed This Sucks

The discerning blog-o-holic (okay, not a good word, but I had to jump on the “making up shit that contains some variation on the term ‘blog’” bandwagon) will quite possibly note the myriad fuckups on Toe Stubber. It’s easy. Don’t get all smug, blogfucker.

There are so many things I see when I pull up the page. I see the right half of the header image either missing or, depending on the browser, half a mile down the page, covering up the Navigation links. Some browsers show the sidebar broken in two and continued at the bottom of the main section, mocking my efforts with a condescending sneer.

Rest assured that I hate the fact that this is forcing me to learn PHP and CSS and HIV just so I can make the page load properly, and that I’ll be enjoying a thick, juicy migraine until ToeStubber.com is coming correct. Perhaps some smartypants programmer who understands WordPress can diagnose my idiocy. Until then, all your helpful comments are oh-so-helpful, bloghelpers. Careful you don’t sprain your self-back-patting hand.

Rick at 8:44 pm

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Of Fishes Great and Fishes Small

New blog. New post. This is all new to me. Please bear with me while I learn how to do simple, basic things like wrap text and get a goddamn digital photo of a vinyl record. (They’re really difficult to take in focus without glare.)

I first became an Al Kizys fan when I saw his band the Bag People play at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC in the early ‘80s. All anybody knew about them was that they were from NYC - which at that age was all I needed to know. Couldn’t tell you who they were opening for (the first or the second time they played) but I remember feeling real cool hanging “backstage” with the band. There’s a blurb I wrote in the Live section of an issue of WDC Period that I can’t seem to find anymore. I don’t know who broke the dressing room mirror. The Bag People were a fun band, sort of in the noise/hard rock vein – which was an unusual combo at the time, not a massive collection of subgenres like it is today. If I’m not mistaken, they did a Deep Purple cover.

A few years later, I was in NYC myself. Like most of my memories of that time, it’s obscured by a heroin haze, but amid all the lifestyle bands that formed my music worldview, Of Cabbages and Kings held a special place behind my eardrums. Their first self-titled 4-song 12” on Purge/Sound League Records (home to Missing Foundation and other L.E.S. noise hooligans) is a grand hymn to rock’s intellectual majesty, with Algis doing a knuckle-shredding Lemmy-esque bass strum over a subterranean bellow of pain. “The Veil Thins” is magnificent, the lyrics an apocalyptic seaman’s poem credited to David Stowell.

Check out the classic ugly photo-booth mug shots, the kind that practically every noise band of the era used on their album art to evoke a sense of pseudo-anonymity and criminal menace.

Face, the 1988 followup LP, has its moments, too, but for me nothing beats the debut number. Both of the first two records were recorded at Fun City studios by Wharton Tiers. Until doing the research for this post (not really my strong suit, as will become clear), I didn’t even know that the Cabbages had put out four releases. Tracks from the last two albums are available for download here.

  
An Italian webpage about them is located over here.

DISCOGRAPHY
Of Cabbages and Kings (Purge/Sound League) 1987
Face (Purge/Sound League) 1988
Basic Pain, Basic Pleasure (Triple X) 1990
Hunter’s Moon (Triple X) 1992
...also, Mesomorph Enduros comp (Big Cat) 1992

The rhythm section of this band could do no wrong. Al and Ted joined the motherfucking Swans for a time while Ted helped found Prong and later joined Godflesh and Jesu. Al and Carolyn both played with Glenn Branca’s Guitar Ensemble along with Miriam McDonough, who used to do my taxes.

Enjoy the spell.

Of Cabbages and Kings – “The Veil Thins”

Rick at 12:20 am

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