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Jamz 2007

The Staff :: 23 December 2007 |                

Pinch f/ Juakali: "Brighter Day"



The thing came in the mail. It was huge, jutting out like a ship wrecked bow first in the reef of my overwhelmed mail slot. I set down my work shit and after a bit of clawing managed to dislodge the whatever-the-hell. I walked inside. My briefcase thudded onto its side on my porch.

First line of sender address: "Dom Sinacola." Oh god. It took me a moment before I dared think about opening it. Five minutes later and I was poking a steak knife through the bubbled envelope, trying to peer through the holes and see what waited inside. My impatience overtook my caution and I slit the thing open like I was cleaning a fish. Tearing away the postal skin and holding in my hands...I dunno, a big card? Or something like a children's book, the thin hardcover shining a blank obsidian. Unintentionally, Dom knew how to creep me the fuck out. I sighed and opened it with my left hand, my right gripping the steak knife.

Music immediately started playing, a MIDI version of something that felt very familiar, as the "card" spewed into the air its contents; yes, shit was a pop-up, rendering a scene that Dom must have hand-made -- the paperized staff of Cokemachineglow standing on a crude boat with a flimsy Chicago skyline flapping behind it all. On the deck of the boat Dom had written a note in gouda-scented ink, but it was hard to make it all out because he'd apparently written it down before placing the litter of little music critics that stood on top of it. Something about "holiday party" and "boat tour" and "sweet-ass songs from '07" and then a rambling sentence that made no sense for several reasons, one being that drunk mini-Boogz was passed out on top of it. Meanwhile, my brain had started to sort out the tones bleating from the invitation's bowels, or poop deck, or whatever. Damn Dom had programmed the card's chip with my jam of the year, Pinch and Juakali's "Brighter Day." Recognition sparking my synapses, memory translating the MIDI Morse into music message; I felt like I could hear Juakali spitshining and ragging the deck of that boat, a space-filled three-dimensional construct of two-dimensional planes -- just like Pinch's few synth swoops and punctuating effects and percussive accents touching each other's edges, creating just barely a lattice of integrity atop a hull of drum 'n bass rolling with the steady flow beneath. In my mind the music breathed life into Dom's static scene: tiny paper Mark was getting ready the next paper vinyl for his paper record player; paper Alan lifted a paper arm to point at a paper skyscraper; paper Andre, playing paper Guitar Hero, did a scissor-kick up in the air, thus revealing the last two words of Dom's note which had hidden beneath his paper feet. I gasped.

My head swam. The pop-up characters became more and more active. The music became louder and fuller, until I wasn't sure I was even still hearing the MIDI. Paper Chi seemed to have a lot of nooks in the crannies and crannies in the nooks and lighted windows with people moving behind the windows and trash in the streets being picked up by the wind. I realize that I did in fact close Dom's freakishly crafted invitation, did in fact pack my bags, did make the six hour trip to Chicago to join my comrades on what was sure to be one fucked up boat tour. But when I saw those two beautiful words, "OPEN BAR," it's like the interim never happened. Suddenly, I am on that paper boat, now a very real boat, making long strides towards the punch bowl.

Chet Betz

Panda Bear: "Comfy in Nautica"



I hear the El that brought Dom & I stoned from Bucktown rattle away, and the big Big City city scenes roll into view. The distant slap of something on the Chicago river acts as percussion to the "Ah!"s booming resolutely from the big Paradigm speakers set up on our boat -- Panda Bear, okay. I mutter again that I am not and will never be an Animal Collective man, but I'll be goddamned if Person Pitch didn't contain a few transcendent tracks. "Comfy In Nautica" is the shortest and most heliotropic and thus the most relevant in this frigid and brightly snowless morning. Panda lets the vocal samples echo against each other, and in the intervening space the fact of my physical existence in this beautiful pale blue equilateral city again draws my breath out in a twirling cloud, dissolving like Panda's vocals. "Always remember to / Have a good time / Good time / Good time ..." I see birds, a plane swooping toward Midway, the blank sky above the Bean, the beacons Hancock and Sears. I am going to have a good time -- I am going to steal Mark's scotch this year. I look down from the skyline just in time to see Eric gingerly step off the boat, a soft ten pounds of law school plushness applied to his once-gaunt frame. My fists clench involuntarily.

Clayton Purdom

Aesop Rock: "None Shall Pass"



There that motherfucker is.

Since the moment I opened my deliciously gaudy invitation my limbs have been filled with palpable anticipation like vibrating pins and needles. I feel it even now, rising up in me as the heartbeat drums pump blood into the hollowed out piano notes bounding lively towards the lyrical acrobatics to come. I feel this beat, and I felt it even as I finished up a round of brutalizing exams. Nothing and no one could rain on my aquatic one-floated parade. No one, that is, except Clayton R. Purdom.

Having arrived in the city this morning still tingling, I jumped off the plane, strode confidently through the concourse to the place where Clay had assured me, through half-a-dozen phone confirmations that he would be waiting to meet me. I can only imagine my comically crestfallen look when, after 40 minutes of waiting his cherubic visage was still nowhere to be found. A half hour cab ride and almost $50 later I arrive at the address indicated in Dom’s manic scrawl. I head into the bar, past Chet who is ladling himself some punch with a wry grin. I grab a beer from the cooler and begin to brood. With about half of our expected crew still missing Goldstein appears to already be double-fisting, though only one of his beers is open.

I first glimpse Clay and Dom stumbling toward the boat during Panda Bear, but by the time I’ve made my way within shouting distance Mark has flipped the record and begun spinning Aesop Rock’s foreboding classic. Insults and epithets tumble through my head like Aes’ chaotic cadence, tripping over each other on their way to the front of my cerebrum, each hoping to be spat in Clay’s direction with vitriolic relish. But before I can decide on one he beats me to the punch.

“Whoa. Put on a little weight there, haven’t we, guy?” I am literally going to kill this little fuck. I’m going to pick him up and carry his stoned ass to the edge of the...but wait. I can’t let him win like that. Lord knows the abuse will continue unabated and if each blow finds its mark then I will go down like Ricky Hatton and that sublime tingling will be replaced by the sting of bruised ego. “Fuck off,” I say as I accept his outstretched hand. This is going to be a great night, no matter what. He can keep launching those barbs, but as I take a long pull from my beer I decide to take a cue from Aesop. Fire away, Clay. None Shall Pass.

Eric Sams

Feist: "My Moon My Man"



I arrive on the boat with my Golden Ticket that entitled me to one listen to "My Moon, My Man" on condition that I never mention it again. And so we go from the "don't go there" of "None Shall Pass" to the much less forbidding "Please go easy on me, it's that time of the month." Its bouncing piano seems to attract fish, as well as a slew of yachts filled with white, upwardly-mobile thirty-somethings who demand I play the whole record, but I'm all like "I can't hear you, I have water in my ears." I unroll my plush carpet on the main deck and tie a mirrorball to the mast. Alan asks when we're going to reach International Waters so he can open up his suitcase full of illegally-obtained pharmaceuticals; I don't have the heart to tell him we're not on the ocean. Ignoring the suspiciously-close Coast Guard fleet, I spark up a joint.

Joel Elliott

Lucky Soul: "One Kiss Don't Make a Summer"



The band is wrong: one kiss does, indeed, make a summer. I may have been a few cities over when this occurred to me a few months back, but it’s good to be back on the East Coast, the site of a few glorious summer-making kisses. Still, somehow I don’t think Lucky Soul spent their summer on JDate reveling in new bachelorhood -- how un-twee is that? -- so it’s unfettered pop heartbreak that this song beats with. Backed by a chorus of achingly sunny “ahhs,” Ali Howard tries and fails to console herself: “One kiss don’t make a summer / but if that’s true / what am I supposed to do?” Hit the town with Dave Goldstein, for one. Dude slays at rock ‘n’ roll jeopardy. He walks toward me with a pair of beers in hand and, stopping to take a too-large gulp, looks me in the eye: "Are you ready?"

"Ready for what?"

David Greenwald

Budos Band: "Chicago Falcon"



One kiss may not make a summer, but it sure as shit can suck the life out of what was previously a furiously swinging boat party. Nothing against the sighing pap that Greenwald gravitates to like moth to flame, but there's a proper time and place. Fortunately, whispered cries of "wussiest shit ever" are drowned out by a defiant blast of trumpet and anticipatory hi-hat, leading to a superfly guitar lick officially signaling the arrival of the motherfucking Budos Band. This boat party might have been considered "enjoyable," "lots of fun," or even "revelatory" (we are loser rock critics after all), but up until now it could never be classified as cool.

The transformation is swift. Hastily rolled doobies have magically morphed into Method Man sized blunts, the Hennesey bottle is being passed at an alarming rate, and nobody aboard will deny that they feel at least eight hundred times more badass than they did three minutes ago; living out their 70's cop tv show fantasies on a vessel that's barely seaworthy, but feels like a yayo-fueled yacht for the three minutes that "Chicago Falcon" is on. The Budos Band have that kind of effect on people.

David M. Goldstein

Times New Viking: "Teenage Lust!"



I prepped my intro with care: one boombox, three towels, and a rat. I hope the other guys aren’t too bothered -- I saw it by the airport coffee cart making eyes at the beans. Animal restlessness, I put it down to. Nothing a long haul flight can’t put right. And it being the Winter Season and all, probably a good time to go out and adopt a little creature comfort. Get a new vitality, a little sunshine in that old pocket. Discover if I’m really cut out for this private philanthropy shtick -- America, right? Land of the Buffets. Just you me and the Bean. Here, have this peanut. My name is Alan: come with me.

We get there on time, I think. The boat’s a bit bog-standard -- all salt and silk, with a bit of black wood and some hard nails maybe. There’s this vicious fishy smell that’s coming from somewhere not altogether tangible. The paint sorta looks like some frosted up birdshit. “Yellow Lettuce,” Dom calls it, whilst drawing my attention to the vessel’s masthead, a Pelican with extra wings and an attitude problem. But whatever: this cruise/jaunt/seatrip is going to be awesome, even if there are gunkholes and grapnels, and cute little cavalcades on the shores with dancers that glow in the dark and say hi and shit. Because this is a boat trip so that means big buxom because the Glow do like that, right? Big Pimpin’ with Jay? Hi-hats with Foucalt and Eva Green? The one true manifestation, finally, of the word “butterfuck”? Oh God please.

I scale the steps (all five of them) with a smile (I think the rat is smiling too). The speakers are blasting “Teenage Lust!” This is going to be one hell of a night.

Alan Baban

Future of the Left: "My Gymnastic Past"



"Wave, wave, wave, I don't wanna wave, wave, I don't wanna wave, wave, I don't wanna wave at them".

Dom's the first one to deftly point out that "it's like, totally ironic that we're all like, on a boat, and, y'know, listening to a song that mentions 'waves' at least 47 times." That it does this to a furiously groovy bassline swiped (unknowingly I'd assume) from Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" -- coupled with frequent bouts of circular shouting about cows -- makes "My Gymnastic Past" a perilous song to listen to on a boat. We're dangerously close to capsizing this thing, all howling "BETTER BOVINE THAN EQUINE!" on the way down to the briny deep.

Eric's lost himself doing the Soulja Boy, Clay and Chet are slam dancing while simultaneously screaming that "Curses is the only 2007 indie shit worth believing in!" and I'm sipping a Sierra Nevada while surmising that Mclusky's old bassist must be really fucking jealous, and equally bitter. Not unlike my beer, actually.

David M. Goldstein

Sean Kingston: "Beautiful Girls"



It's 4:30PM and I'm already freezing, mostly due to my inability to julienne anything with mits on. Mits off, my fingers are still gold from the crayon I used to transform a wrinkled bus pass into Joel's Feist credit. The appetizer table has already been converted into a fort for Alan's rat Paul Revere, which for some reason he finds hilarious. Maybe he and Danny think they're actually reconquesting the US; the two have hoisted a Union Jack on the pole that wags off the stern of the boat behind my DJ rack. The light is really glinting off Chicago's downtown; the cars on Lake Shore scribble along, and I put one of my unifying theories of music into play: soul makes cars look happy.

Rivaling Kanye for Obvious Sample of the Year, Sean Kingston somehow manages to be overbearingly cute at the same time that he moves the by-now boringly facile drive in our television culture to link fat men with thin women into the world of music. It's stupid, of course, but at least where beer commercials and According to Jim act like the whole shit’s just natural (and, memo to the latter: please stop ruining my fond memories of Melrose Place, even if the upcoming release of Season 3 means I’m going to have to relive the aftermath of Billy and Alison’s aborted wedding) Kingston plays it like the most groovy Greek tragedy ever: "they'll have you suicidal." In other words, the only things Kingston's got going for him as tools in the complex brinkmanship of courting is his artistic voice and his winning smile; at least at this point in his very young career, he's got to work for love. Which is probably bullshit, because the success of this single probably eradicated the reasons why it provoked shimied sympathy in the first place, but that's the story of the male ingenue, right? Look at this track as a snapshot into the life of Kingston back before his money did the talking.

Besides, the music here doesn't really reflect the social discussion the song initiates; the reworked bass of "Stand By Me" is more a clarion call as I send it out across the deck. Three fingers/sheets to the wind already, it's time to start picking up the pace. I stare at the setting sun, its light refracting off the mirror ball that Craig has hoisted up a line over Eric's head. The little bubbles of light silhouette Drew batting golf balls off the port side towards the city. Swoosh.

Mark Abraham

Spoon: "The Underdog"



I’m not sure why I asked for this song to be played now. In fact, I can’t believe I had the balls to go over and ask Mark encyclopedic-musical-mind-I’ll-retcon-your-face-off Abraham to play anything that might not have been pre-ordained in his vision of where this party’s headed. What the hell was I thinking? I should have just stuck to throwing limes at Clay and Chet from underneath the mirror ball. I mean, I might as well have barged into the cabin and one-sided the captain, snatched the ship’s wheel, and found us a channel to the ocean so Baban could shit-can those strawberry daiquiris and bust open that suitcase that, buzzing rumor has it, is full of scrips shuddering with possibility.

Don’t get me wrong, Mark was charitable enough; took it in stride with a simple, “comin’ up.” But I got all caught up in the head rush of that fast-picking intro and forgot that this song is dominated by mariachi horns. There are maracas for God’s sake. The beat isn’t an ass-shaking beat. It’s fit for a furtive white-boy sway. I need another fucking shot. Boogz looks like he’s pouring a round of tequila. That’s the ticket. Let my face burn for some reason other than shame.

Then, with the cheap shit still smoldering in my throat, I decide to sing the chorus. I’m going to make the most of this song even if no one else gives a fuck. The flames turn to warmth as I hear another voice across the deck join with mine, mimicking Brit Daniel’s rasp. Then another. By the second chorus most of the boat is singing and drunkenly failing to echo the intricate handclaps that serve as punctuation. Only the current duo manning the axes on Guitar Hero seem mildly annoyed (they can’t properly hear the Audioslave jam they’re attempting to shred).

I turn back to the bar for another shot as Mark, unmoved, changes the record. That worked out great. Maybe I’ll DJ this thing next year.

Eric Sams