RIFF MARKET

Riff Market Presents:
"Status Ain't Hood: Quarterly Report: Riffs"
November 2006



THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE RIFFS

01. Assman parodies Tom Breihan. "Yung Artist is a slippery wordplay wrangler out of Greenville with a hypnotic rasp that stomps with brutal authority."

02. There are some sweet new rules to this music called indie rock. I.e., this is how a pair of insipid thirtysomething shitsmokers get paid to write blog posts about how all you indie-rock hangers-on are getting paid, the irony completely lost on them.

03. I go that Knife show. You better believe I have some thoughts about that Knife show!

04. Chris Ott teaches Decemberists how to pronounce the word "ya burnt." More thoughts here.

05. I googled 'Ghost Dad' and found a new band I like. Googling 'I Spy Returns' comes at the price of your face exploding.

06 The Fuzzy Politics of 'No Homo'. A must-read for both homos and no-homos.



NEW SONGS 2006
The Game [ft. Kanye West]: "Wouldn't Get Far"
Fam-lay [ft. Pharrell]: "Head Bust"
Lo-Fi-FNK: "The End"
Lil Wayne: "Show Me What You Got (Remix)"
Indian Jewelry: "Going South"
White Magic: "The Light"



NEW SONGS 2007
Deerhoof: "Matchbook Seeks Maniac"
Deerhunter: "Cryptograms"



OLD SONGS 1900-1999
Dennis Parker: "Like An Eagle"
Swell Maps: "Harmony In Your Bathroom"
Plastikman: "Consume"
Folke Rabe: "Was??" [HT: BETA]

Notes on Young Jeezy

Download: Young Jeezy: "Hypnotize"

Walking from my checkcashing place to the B.O.A., which means a two-ave stroll down 56th for no good reason other than that's how I stroll, I was listening to the new Young Jeezy album, when at Ninth Ave and 56th I saw something I've never seen before, which is a cat getting run over by a car. I'm by no means a cat person so I wasn't particularly bothered by this. That said, I'm still struggling with the image of this cat like fucking writhing in the middle of the street, in a pool of its own blood, right next to a steam vent too so from afar it looked like the cat was writhing and melting, the cat's owner trying her best to comfort the dead cat as it backflipped the last of its nine lives, all while Young Jeezy keeps whispering in my ears: "I command you niggas to get money." What the fuck?

9 RIFFS

Not A Habit, But Maybe It Should Be, Considering

I will spare you the trouble and just post the results here. You'll notice, after the IMDB link to the famous Bill Cosby flick, there is the following:

ghost dad for congress in 2007
antarctic ghosts shows (chris + gary) www.limbsanddigits.com/antarcticghosts · killer in the woods tape - $4 to united states (paypal smalltapes at gmail) ...


Follow the links, you'll get to this band called Antarctic Ghosts, and then you'll get to this song called "Ames Lake" (MP3 provided). I think you'll agree with me that for just goofing around on Google, googling for my favorite childhood movies, this song is quite a score: lo-fi noise-pop that's like a less creepy Iran, or a less popular Modest Mouse, or a less-one Spacemen 3 (a/k/a Spacemen 2). Something about the progression too. I don't know who these guys are, and the label page is pretty much unnavigable, but when I type in "Antarctic" into iTunes, this song comes up, and then I play it, and then it goes into Cale's "Antarctica Starts Here" without skipping a beat.

75 RIFFS

OK Dad Get Off My Back About Your Friend's Band's CD: Riff Market Family Edition

Download: Gas: "Nach 1912" [from Pop Ambient 2007]

This is hard to explain without sounding the taddest douchey, but since all promos are sent to my parents' house, and since my parents still think that sending people free CDs is batshit insane, the equivalent of sending somebody a stack of unmarked benjis, mom+dad tend to be extremely diligent in handling them. Several times now I've come home to stacks and stacks of promos-- meticulously alphabetized, all the annoying plastic off them, all the compilations organized by record label-- all just sitting there on the kitchen table set up like it's a Sam Goody window display. That, and I'm pretty positive dad got rid of this enormous truck he loved just so he could make room for more promos in the garage, and I'm increasingly suspicious that mom+dad had kid #5 just to alleviate the burden of sorting. Briana, I'm sorry this is the way you had to find out.

The first ten minutes back home involve dad making reference to the following:
-how I "got some mail"
-how CDs are really expensive these days, aren't they huh
-how "I bet you could make a lot of money selling some of these CDs"
-something about snowmobiles
-how "after dinner let's go drive over to the mall and sell some of these CDs"
-another thing about how awesome snowmobiles are

Anyway the shortest possible version of this story, and without being too poetic about it all ("all of the CDs were alphabetized... except one"), is that my dad's been pestering me for like six or seven months to write about this band that some friend of his is in. Three or four months ago, this "friend" was merely "this guy I know," and three months before that it was "I got a sweet tip for you on a hot young Philly band," so I have no idea what the exact story is. It could even be his band for all I know (my dad is a famous drummer in the Philly bar mitzvah band circuit). As for payola, which obviously I asked for since I'm a B.W.A. (blogger with attitude), my dad said he would make me one of his delicious Superbowl Sundaes, which I'm pretty sure is just moose tracks ice cream served in a dirty coffee cup. Even still, it's pretty hard to argue with the guy who taught you that it's perfectly normal for a grown man to carry a few wetwipes on him, just in case he's in the bathroom and the going gets tough.

So, dad, this is for you: Evolv is this band from Philly that plays pretty technically proficient proggy-but-not-prog rock, lots of drum fills and double-bass kicks and soaring vocals and billion-dollar fx pedal programming a la your Linkin Parks and Korns and Audioslaves and other metal-ish arena bands, though with infinitely less rapping. One song called "Agenda" sounds like a Mars Volta track, but then it moves more into Foo Fighters territory--all major label-sounding rock and roll that's not yet on a major rock and roll label. I'm pretty fascinated by this circuit since it's like they play in totally different clubs than indie bands, at least in New York. Like it wouldn't surprise me if the guys in the band have never heard anything beyond classic and major-label rock type acts--works for them, since suddenly commercial possibilities closely mirror personal creative satisfaction. They can sing, they can play, it's all there, no note out of place, it's pretty bombastic most of the time but maybe that's your thing. Plus they're playing the Khyber on Thursday-- check them out. No guarantees, but you may or may not see a guy who looks exactly like me, but with really long hair (in the back), and two pretty bad-ass tattoos on his arms, and a well-kempt beard to shame all well-kempt beards.

70 RIFFS