favorite nuclear squadrons

There has yet to be a movie made about nuclear brinksmanship that quite equals Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, released back in the sixties, but if eventually someone does (maybe a propaganda work, to be commissioned by the North Korean leaders), the filmmaker would do well to consult the latest Black Dice album Repo for soundtrack assistance: the waves of paranoid load-blown dissonance; the terse handiwork of industrialized subterranean sounds; raw, roughened electro-textured twitches rubbing up against a seabed of itchy-bitsy radio-sampled histrionics distorted beyond recognition (or actually, the other way around instead). Going nuclear, in other words; writing on The Guardian, Creation Records founder Alan McGee calls Repo "a grand statement of visceral intent". All aboard the Black Dice bandwagon then.

Also: I am pretty excited about the upcoming Dirty Projectors LP Bitte Orca, their first on Domino Records. I am sure some of you guys would have heard the brilliant lead single "Stillness Is The Move", which is as appropriate an anthem for today's token recessionists as any, and some of the other Bitte Orca songs are just as good. I've never been the biggest fan of their totally messed-up previous concept albums, including the critically acclaimed Rise Above in which frontperson Dave Longstreth imagines himself rewriting Black Flag's seminal Damaged, but this new one has the band going into a more pop direction. Judging by the track record of kindred bands like Black Dice, Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance that have done the same recently, I can't say it's a bad thing for Longstreth.

silence kit #8

Black Dice
Beaches and Canyons [DFA, 2003]

Not to take anything away from the Fuck Buttons but I think when I listed their Street Horrrsing album as one of my five favorite records of last year, somewhere in the back of my head I was plainly missing Black Dice. Not to say too that these two bands sound too particularly alike or that one copied from the other, except both certainly have a predilection for repetitive ambient drones. This week I was also listening to one or two Black Dice tracks from the new album Repo and it struck me that it would be virtually impossible now for Eric Copeland and company to recreate anything close to being as brutally compelling as their 11-minute black-hole ditty called "The Dream Is Going Down" off Beaches and Canyons. The much beloved stoner epic "Endless Happiness" is also on this album - listen to this early in the day and yes, the morning sounds eclectic. Other songs on Beaches and Canyons revolve around the same violent patterns, and as I mentioned in my last post on Sonic Youth, other American moderns were taking note. The other release from Black Dice around the same time that I really enjoyed is 2005's Broken Ear Record, which again sounds discordant and beautifully messed up and actually not as harsh sounding as the album title would suggest. But Beachs and Canyons clearly represented a peak for Black Dice and perhaps in years to come this is one album that will be a defining influence or reference point for folks to get obssessed over the idea of milking some pastoral-sounding melodies out of its infinitely fucked ocean beach.