Mixtape 257 :: Can’t Be Still
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Some of us are lucky. Some of us get to sit in a comfortable broadcasting studio and play Orville Peck, while others are hacking their way through a couple of gloomstalkers with nothing but the barely-magical weaponry a fifth-level figher can afford.
The sound of Chicano Batman is a half-dozen ice-cubes liquidly clinking in a tall glass.
It was a globe-spanning show, with listeners checking in from the Grand Valley, the Florida swamps, and as far as Japan, where it was already Wednesday lunchtime. Meanwhile, The Libertines are up to their old antics again, at least the ones where they sound like a recently unfrozen cadre of British Invasion troglodytes. Also fun: playing a track called “We Will Not Apologize” and following that up with “Stop Apologizing”. Sounds about right.
I haven’t decided if Bully is a great name or a terrible name, but it certainly fits their melodic bludgeoning.
“You missed the white crocodile,” the chipa vendor told them. The mycologist and the munitions expert gave the expected sounds of disappointment, the same as any tourist drawn to Paraguay’s Ojo de Mar would. One of them spread a blanket by the lake side while the other one got busy with entering the passcodes and unlatching the efficient-looking metal case they had extracted from the moped. Opening it once the blanket was ready, they began taking out the 3D-printed pieces from the foam molding with quick, efficient movements as the Easy Star All-Stars blared out a David Bowie song from the vendor’s portable radio.
The world that deliberately-lowercased beabadoobee presents in her new album Beatopia is pastel neon colors, soothing howls, bright shadows, and all manner of psychedelic oxymorons. Tonight’s show features its introduction of sorts, and closes with the unexpected krautrock drone of my current favorite discovery, Japan’s deliberately-uppercased MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS, whose all-over-the-placeness manages to live up to its intriguing name.
Exploding out of upstate New York, The Bobby Lees have returned with a their third outing, titled Bellevue, and it delivers more of that biting, can’t-you-see-I’m-in-the-middle-of-an-episode post-rock blues energy. Tonight’s Mixtape closes out with Escape Mechanism’s “Being,” sampling William S. Burrough’s unmistakable reedy voice into an existential mantra.
The story of Nell Smith & The Flaming Lips is as improbable and unexpected as their album full of Nick Cave covers. Existing in a triangular universe of mutual admiration, Where the Viaduct Looms gave us the opening track tonight, the menacing “Red Right Hand”.
You can say that bedrock funk bassist Bootsy Collins is The One, and you would be right on so many levels.