I'm in a punkish mood, not helped by various and assorted rants here and there in the blogosphere, (all deserved and supported by me, 100%). So while it's Friday and I do believe Fridays are for gearing up for a sex-a-licious weekend, I am also feeling a bit sharp around the edges and that combination calls for only one type of music!

Luckily I ran into The Loved Ones' new album recently and let me tell you Build and Burn, their sophmore album, is awesomely good. It's solid, it's well mastered, sounds very professional and not muddy as so much good recorded punk music does. Released in early 2008, it's full of songs that show off the band's growth lyrically from Keep Your Heart, a broader vocal style and just some really catchy tracks. Always earnestly focused on love and loss, The Loved Ones put a really sweet love song on this album which I give you today to give ya a little tingle for your hot date tonight ;)

And what punkish mood would be complete without some girly tunes? I've not listened to Sleater Kinney in a while, and combing their catalogue for a love song took quite a while! Not surprised are you? Yes, they're a dreary group generally. "I wanna be your Joey Ramone" is just so.... so.... well, if you know me, it's so me, ha! Like The Loved Ones, this track is off their sophmore album. And the other track, "The Size of Our Love" I'm afraid only MeatPocket will truly understand completely. I love you baby! xoxoxo

So, get off your asses this weekend, snuggle up to your lover or your one night stand, or even to your one hand (and your favorite movie/magazine) and make something of it. Channel that rage at the economy, at those major corporations who rip us off on a regular basis, at your hated political figure of choice, at the lack of political choices in general! -- take all that rage and have some outrageously loud sex with it, people! Wake the fucking neighbors! They've done it to you at least once.

I Swear mp3 The Loved Ones Build and Burn (2008) give em some money!
I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone mp3 Sleater Kinney Call The Doctor (1996) pony up
The Size Of Our Love mp3 Sleater Kinney The Hot Rock (1999) big love, small price

photo credit: Charlemagne 13

Vote early please folks. It's as simple as that. If you live anywhere near a large city or if you live in an African American neighborhood or in a "swing state" please vote early. There is early voting in 46 states and it's started already. Go stand in line now and get it over with, find out now if your vote can be cast. And most importantly, DO NOT ACCEPT A PROVISIONAL BALLOT. Stand in line and wait until the poll workers can give you a real ballot and come back the next day if you need to in order to cast a ballot.

Read this fantastic article in Rolling Stone to see how voter suppression works, it's a biased article, I'll say it right here. It claims that the Republicans are actively suppressing the vote. But Robert F. Kennedy and Greg Palast give ample, legal evidence for his claims and I think everyone should see it, and decide for themselves what they think. In the very worst case scenario, you read the article and go to the poll and prove him wrong!

Now, have a great day, go vote, and rock on with our friends, Against Me! a great punk band from Gainesville, Florida (that's a swing state, by the way.)

Unprotected Sex With Multiple Partners mp3 Against Me! Americans Abroad!!! Against Me!!! Live in London!!! (2006) -- yeah it's about the music industry, ya pervs!

Reinventing Axl Rose mp3 Against Me! Americans Abroad!!! Against Me!!! Live in London!!! (2006)
buy into the system

Some days you're just in the mood for some chick to yell at you with lots of experimental music in between. Those days are for Rolo Tomassi. So if your weekend wasn't full of marital strife then this album is right up your alley!

Eva Spence is simply amazing on lead vocals, they're a UK band from Sheffield and are playing England, Scotland and Wales this fall, so go check them out and let me know how they are on stage, eh? And tell them to come to the U.S.!

Chez Tart was full of work, lots of sleeping and only a wee bit of yelling over the weekend so I'm enjoying this today, hope you do too, and this is about as far as I'm going into Halloween land folks, xoxo


Macabre Charade mp3 Rolo Tomassi Hysterics
Trojan Measures mp3 Rolo Tomassi Hysterics

Rolo Tomassi on MySpace
get out your pocketbook for Hysterics

(special thanks to Battle For Midwestern Housewifes for introducing me to this! That is one rocking punk blog over there, check them out)

Do you still listen to the music you loved in high school? Lately, I'm beginning to feel that the worse the news gets, the more us 30 and 40 somethings retreat into our past, into the music we cut our teeth on during the last great economic downturn.

Every semi serious music lover experiences changes in their musical taste as they become exposed to more and different kinds of genres. Part of blogging about music, for me, is looking back on how I received new music at different points in my life and comparing those memories to how I listen now. A great post over on Pretending Life Is Like A Song has me reminiscing and analyzing my transition from guitar-driven rock and roll to Punk and New Wave music in the early 80s. Adam unravels the meaning of "Alison" by Elvis Costello in both an academic and quite personal way -- this is great blogging folks, check it out.

And yes, Elvis Costello was pivotal for my transition. Other groups of the time also opened my eyes to a less regional sound (southern USA, "hard rock" bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Outlaws, The Allman Brothers, Molly Hatchet and Tom Petty dominated the airwaves where I lived. I took that to simply be what rock music was, not knowing how much more there could be). Soon, like everyone my age, I was lapping up everything the UK could offer me and American bands were evolving as well. But Elvis Costello--he was first.

This transition morphed into a very important social marker in highschool. There were three crowds to fit into: The Jocks/Preps, The Nerds/Geeks, and The Stoners. As you might guess they were closely aligned with social class, identified by the kind of clothes you wore, and the grades you earned. Until Punk and New Wave music hit, I had firmly been a member of The Stoner crowd. We liked our Southern Rock just fine, and threw it back with a hefty shot of Jack Daniels, a Budweiser chaser and some imported Colombian you-know-what. Football games were spent under the bleachers, Saturday nights saw us huddled around a blanket on the beach getting high to the sounds of a car radio.

Then the 80s hit and I began to find a niche academically. New Wave and Punk music had a cache that tore me out of my stupor, the lyrics were witty and meaningful. Reagan and Thatcher were gutting the working class, the mentally ill, and the children while the upper classes' wealth grew. My teenage angst was in high gear. I knew I'd never be "cool" but I might as well enjoy pretensions of Continentalism now if I were to ever escape my little beach town. I dreamed of college, Socialism, travel, love- all things that my Stoner friends hated with justifiable class resentment. But academics might be a way out, I reckoned and indeed, I was one of the lucky few who did make it. Music propelled me to aspire to larger things, it still does.

So the first major transition occurred. Another big one would happen about 10 years later, but that's another post....

Goodbye Stranger Supertramp Breakfast In America, buy it
Kid The Pretenders Singles, buy it
Is She Really Going Out With Him Joe Jackson, Classic Joe Jackson, buy it
Cockney Kids Are Innocent Sham 69 The Punk Singles Collection 1977-80, buy it

Rol, at Sunset Over Slawit posted last week about a book that is going right on my xmas list this year, Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City. One question that Rol takes from the book, is the mystery of why some girls (and women) actually like metal, or more specifically what Rol calls "glam metal" such as KISS, Poison, Thin Lizzy, Bon Jovi, etc... and I stumbled into the middle of a conversation on whether or not a particular Whitesnake video with a hot female model "having sex with a car" (as Rol describes) was sexist or not. Go see it here. I replied that some of us girls wanted to be the girl on the car, some of us wanted to have the girl on the car, and more importantly some of us knew exactly how to get the metalmen, namely by liking the music they liked regardless of the videos. So, sexist or not, we didn't really care. Scheming bitches aren't we?! Oh and thanks Rol, for a really thought provoking post! I'm not criticizing it in any way hun!

But seriously, what's so mysterious about metal? Or about any genre for that matter? Why divide the world so neatly so that The Carpenters are girly and Ozzy's for the boys? I admit, I started out listening to metal to piss off my parents like all you guys did :p Yeah, it worked for me too. Punk worked even better, I just couldn't do the satanic head trip on my poor christian mother that metal afforded me!

Now, this got me thinking, why have all the people in my life, who knew anything at all about music, been men? It's not just that certain genres of music are roped off for women, even musical knowledge is considered "a manly sport." Yeah, I know I lost some of ya there. You can smell a feminist rant coming, right? I'll try and take it easy on ya, I promise I won't go all Camille Paglia here. Just tell me when's the last time you had a real conversation about a band -- not a song, with a woman? When you go to gigs, look around? I was seriously the only woman at the Duke Spirit show the other week not wearing makeup and a low-cut fashionable blouse/dress, and I was one of maybe 5 single women there (probably the only one who wasn't "working" that night, lol!). Yeah, I'm odd that way sometimes, but this was a pretty scuzzy venue. I was there for the music (not that they weren't, of course, of course).

There's an ad in my local coffeehouse for an all women punk rock collective, they do gigs that spotlight local women's music. I usually avoid that crap like the plague. Maybe I just spent too many years in the dyke community, it was a fine place to visit but nobody wants to live in the ghetto, ya know? And yes, I understand that women don't have as much money to spend on entertainment as men, that women don't want to play by the rules of "the system" or "the man" etc... I got it. But I also see how "the industry" funnels us band after band that sounds the same, that has no female voices in the foreground and that sucks too, cause damn I love me some girly punk. Most of all, (and this is what was missing from the whole riot grrl phenomenon, in my memory) I love to see women having FUN with music and FUN with sexuality in music, for a change. Maybe I'll surprise you with a review of that local collective thing one day, who knows? ;)

Blender mp3 Amy Ray from Prom commentary on the industry
Buy it

More Rock More Talk mp3 The Butchies from Population 1975 Amy's queercore backup band for her first two solo projects, and an entity onto themselves, also known as Team Dresch
Buy it

I like Fucking mp3 Bikini Kill from The Singles great song, but honest to god, this doesn't sound like a woman who likes to fuck!
Buy it

Slide mp3 L7 from Bricks are Heavy: not a happy camper either :(
Buy it

O Bondage, Up Yours! X-Ray Spex from: The Rolling Stone Women In Rock Collection [Disc 2] mp3 * now there's a reason this is my all time favorite girly punk song! I'm just so unevolved xoxox
Buy it

*also available on Germ Free Adolescence (2005) expanded version

So I'm toolin' around the interwebs as normal looking at all the pron I want to download when I receive a message from one of my old friends... he has a package waiting for me to download. So I begin the download.

I wait for 2 days as the download seem to take forever. So while we wait let me take you back, a little over a year ago I found a band that I fell in absolute love with, Murder City Devils. To me it was the kind of music that made you want to go buy a 50's rat rod (or make one, even better) and cruise til the wheels feel off. It was pure rock n roll made from the necture of the gods, raw and powerful. The sad thing I found was that MCD is no longer a band and have been split since "2001" (except a couple of reunited shows in the years after)

So in my sadness I went looking for anything that the members did after leaving MCD. I found front man Spencer Moody and several members of MCD went on to make a short lived attempt at Dead Low Tide that lasted for 9 months. I also found bassist Derek Fudesco went on to make a band... ok this shouldn't be to hard I thought, I quickly located 3 Pretty Girls Make Graves EP's (named for either the Smiths song or a line from Kerouac's The Dharma Bums) I was not sure what to think first on the first listen as I was expecting to have a bit of MCD sound, what I got was punk n roll with a female touch. Front woman Andrea Zollo took control of the mic and wouldn't let it or the song go, I was hooked. So since then I have been spreading the EP's to my friends with the caveat of... they are no longer around folks, split since 2006.

So back to the package, I am now in possession of the PGMG discography, as I type I drool and listen. Do yourself a favor and remember the your modern underground heroes that molds your underground future.

Speakers Push Air - Pretty Girls Make Graves off of Good Health
Buy Pretty Girls Make Graves

Broken Glass - Murder City Devils off of Murder City Devils (self titled)
Buy Murder City Devils