Zaireeka: An Antithesis

Again, if you're into literature, join this week's guest blogger, Myke, on his Steinbeck adventure blog over at Earthbound But Aspiring. I give you Myke:
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I see Wayne Coyne -- front man and driving force behind the wonderfully bizarre Flaming Lips -- as a sort of musical prophet, or at the very least, a visionary. In support of this thesis I give you Exhibit A:

Zaireeka by the Flaming Lips
If you're a casual Flaming Lips listener you've probably heard of this record but you likely haven't heard it. Which isn't a stretch to assume because it's a hard album to listen to. Musically, it isn't challenging or inaccessible. But listening to the album itself is difficult on a logistic level. It's an album comprised of four CDs, which may not seem that odd -- but here's the catch: you listen to all four CDs at the same time.

I love this album because it goes against so many of today's popular musical conventions.

It's only available in a physical format. I dare you to try to buy it on iTunes; you won't find it. Call me old fashioned, but there's something about being able to 'handle' the music you listen to. Whether the format is CD, vinyl, or lowly cassette, there is just something about being able to heft the physical media in your hand as you load the piece into its appropriate music player.

While we're at it, let's talk liner notes. Sure, some mp3 retailers offer a digital booklet with lyrics, photos, etc., but let's get real, who looks at that more than once? Zaireeka has some great liner notes -- several pages detailing the album's origin and a couple paragraphs explaining each song along with lyrics. (Isn't there's something satisfying about sitting down with lyrics in hand as you listen to a song?)


Not long after the Flaming Lips completed Zaireeka, rather than launching a traditional tour, the band conducted the "Boom Box Experiments." In the spirit of Zaireeka, the band traveled to different venues and conducted an "orchestra" consisting of 40 boom boxes and just as many cassette tapes.

"All humans are urged to attend." Listening to Zaireeka is a social experience. Do you personally own four CD players? Have you tried synchronizing four CD players by yourself? Friends or similarly minded acquaintances are required.

I took this science class back a few years in college. At the end of the course, we were each assigned to a small group. Each group was required to formulate a hypothesis and then come up with a way of testing it. One group in my class tested an interesting hypothesis: they proposed that students who listened to music with headphones while walking to class were less likely to stop and help another student if he or she were to trip and drop their books. The group set themselves up in a high-traffic area on campus and went to work. They would purposefully trip and drop their books in front of a student with headphones and then do the same in front of a student without. The results were interesting but predictable: in almost every case, the student with headphones would step around the fallen student, while the student without would almost always stop to help. Sure, an experiment by inexperienced college students doesn't prove anything scientifically; but it nevertheless begs the question: what do we miss out when we keep music to ourselves?

The songs themselves are pretty unconventional. The Flaming Lips have always embraced strange subject matter and even stranger song titles. The band has in their catalog multiple songs about robots, outer space, time travel, and yes, even a couple about a plastic Jesus doll.

But Zaireeka even defies Flaming Lips convention. Song times vary greatly in length -- the shortest is 2:23, the longest is 10:23. One song is nothing more than Wayne Coyne reciting an amusing anecdote about the family dogs, which appropriately ends in a glorious crescending cacophony of barking dogs. Referring to the song "How Will We Know (Futuristic Crescendos)", the album cover boasts this warning: "This recording also contains frequencies not normally heard on commercial recordings and on rare occasion has caused the listener to become disoriented."

Zaireeka just might be the Flaming Lips at their weirdest.

I like to think that somewhere back in 1997, Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips somehow peered into 2011 and saw what music as it is today. And then, just because, they made a record that was the exact opposite.

Tag Team Time: Introducing Guest Blogger for the Week

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you my friend Myke

Myke and I have been friends since high school. He was part of the aforementioned San Francisco Weezer/Get Up Kids road trip. We go way back, playing in rock bands together (The Manhattan Project and XYZebra) since we were teenagers. Currently, he writes over at a blog called Earthbound but Aspiring, a literary blog he's keeping while reading through the complete works of John Steinbeck, chronologically.

I now welcome him to I Have Created a Monster for the week to do some posts on one of his own favorite "monster" artists - well, I won't ruin the surprise.

Kinch Wants You to Reside With Them

I'm pulling out a local spotlight here, paired up with some good old shameless self-promotion. Kinch is a band here in Phoenix that has this awesome guerilla style of self-management, promotion and touring that has been working like an effing charm for them. The Phoenix New Times awarded them with Best Local Album a couple years back and featured their touring efforts last year in this article.

So, consistent with their reputation, Kinch has come up with a fresh(ish) idea to continue their growth as a force-de-touring (I know, I know). The idea is for Kinch to play weekly residency shows in 3 different cities during the month of January. I say the idea is fresh-ish because a band with a residency is not a new thing, obviously, even in multiple cities. But Kinch is using the residency dates as a promoting tool, using it as a chance to play with a variety of local bands, instead of perpetuating the same-show-every-month pattern that often develops in local music scenes.

The first week of residency shows concluded this last weekend with a completely packed Saturday night at the Rogue Bar in Scottsdale. They also hit up their first dates of the month in LA and San Diego, which cities they will continue to visit weekly throughout the month of January. The next residency show happening in town is again this Saturday night (and this is where my bit of shameless self-promotion comes in) with my own band, Sun Ghost, and an even better band, Ticky Tacky (thank you, Amanda). The Kinch residency shows are brought to you by Psyko Steve (www.psykosteve.com) and details on all the shows can be found there, or on Kinch's website.

I Left My [unconditional love for Weezer] In San Francisco

In 2001, I was a junior in high school (wow, the last 10 years just flashed before my eyes as I wrote that). A group of friends and I discovered that our collective favorite band at the time, Weezer, was doing a tour with our other collective favorite band at the time, The Get Up Kids. Remember, this was ten years ago (ah, it happened again), and Weezer hadn't become the enormous, lame disappointment that they are now considered to be. Back then, they were still gods to us.
If my memory serves me correctly, there was no Arizona date scheduled for this tour, so we hatched a plan that involved half-a-dozen teenagers road-tripping in two cars and an airplane over 4 days, from Phoenix to San Francisco - by way of Las Vegas. It was the first time I had traveled out of state without my parents and, boy, was it one for the books.

• Bloody sheets. There was this horrifying phenomena that followed us from our first night in Las Vegas to our final night in a sketchy middle-of-nowhere motel in Wesley, California - there were blood spatters on the sheets in every room in which we stayed. Eventually we realized that I had a cut on my elbow which had had a difficult time healing, apparently, and that the blood was in fact leaking from my own body - not sure whether that's less gross or more gross.
• Sidewalk singalong. My friends and I arrived in San Francisco the morning of the concert and did some sightseeing (which isn't really sightseeing when it's left up to a bunch of 17-year-old boys). We grew bored of it pretty early and decided our time would be most well-spent sitting in line for the show for six hours with an acoustic guitar as we triumphantly led the people who weren't too cool for us in a Weezer-themed singalong. We very possibly may have covered the whole discography.
• My first love. Due to singing all the best Weezer songs with all the best Weezer fans on the streets of San Francisco my inhibitions were not only thrown to the wind, they might as well have been locked up in Alcatraz across the way. This allowed me to both meet and continue talking to a girl. She had come from Seattle with her friends for the show, and they came and joined our singalong. I'm pretty sure she stuck around because we had a sweet place in line, but sparks flew, emotions ran high, she touched my leg, and the rest is history. I became a lovestruck high school junior (quite a worthless thing to be, turns out) and we became pen pals and it was like really cute and stuff.
• Dopplegangers. Do you ever see dopplegangers of your friends, but with different thematic variations? Like seriously, have you ever seen a Native American Joe Pesci?* Well, we had a few of these on this trip, most notably: Gay Bearded Ed Linton and Fat Myke With Biker Shorts.
• Use of the word "word". On road trips, it's pretty standard practice for kids to form inside jokes or memes. And, let's face it, they're usually induced by driving delirium. We, as a group, inexplicably began to use the word "word" to agree with things said by others. Now, this is only really noteworthy because of the fact that I still perpetuate the use of "word" as a substitution for "yes" to this very day. Embarrassing? Maybe. Immature? Definitely. But come on, "Word to your mother" sounds so much cooler than, "Tell your mother I say hello."
• Distributing porn to children This isn't what you think. You've been to Las Vegas, right? If not, I dare you - nay, I defy you - to try getting through a Sin City visit without at least accidentally seeing the image of a naked woman. There is really no avoiding it. Unless you go to Vegas without walking down the strip, which doesn't officially count as going to Vegas anyways. Well, I was handed all kinds of porn-laden fliers and brochures all night long, and I suppose I was just too nice to say no? Towards the end of the night, my breast pocket was overflowing with nudity - and not the good kind. So, in an attempt to rid myself of all this filth (as well as all the guilt I felt for having it), I ditched my stack-o-porn in an elevator. It wasn't until I got out of the elevator and began walking around that I realized - it was the elevator inside FAO Schwartz, the world-famous toy store. When the elevator came back up, I looked in and the porn was gone. I may or may not have converted a future sex offender. Only time will tell.
  

What brought my mind to this trip - other than it being the 10-year anniversary of said trip - was an article I came across, thanks to another old high school chum of mine, Psyko Steve. The article comes from a music news site, Exclaim: Five Stupidest Things Weezer Did in 2010. Now, I've never been one to proclaim myself a Weezer-hater - no, I can never bring myself to go that far - but let's face it: they had it all, then they lost it. And I'm talking musically, because commercially they are currently seeing the some of their greatest success yet. But I like the approach of this article, and I think it pretty well sums up the general consensus on the Weeze. Rivers, you were charming. Your nerdery was endearing. Pat Wilson, your drumming/attitude was once the key to the band's simplistic genius of their early albums. Brian Bell, whatever, I don't know much about you. The three of you have spent the last decade either trying to recapture the magic of Blue and Pinkerton or trying to come up with something different that would still be epic enough to finally get fans to give up their nostalgic obsessions with the first two albums. Keep trying for as long as you want, but I have formulated an equation that proves your efforts to be forever futile. I present to you the Weezer Redemption theorem:

W = M + 3b(90)

The problem with the theorem is that is presents an unsolvable paradox. Where W is Weezer, M is Matt Sharp (whose presence is necessary to achieve greatness) and 3b represents the other band members, multiplied by the effects of the 90s. Since time has moved permanently beyond the 90s, I am afraid that Weezer returning to their former awesomeness is simply a mathematic impossibility.

*bonus points for naming the movie reference

xkcd Relates to Everything, Dammit (Volume 1)

This song...


Makes me feel...

And this song...


Makes me feel...

Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk

ARTIST: Tilly and the Wall


"Oh, I just don't get it, can't seem to make sense
I've got some jumbled-up thoughts in my jumbled-up head
I keep stumbling around on some jumbled-up legs,
I keep mumbling out some jumbled-up text."

I absolutely love this song. The opening lyrics, transcribed above, remind me of a quote I read about a brain disorder called "Aphasia."

Aphasia (or aphemia) is a loss of the ability to produce and/or comprehend language, due to injury to brain areas specialized for early breakfast, sardines backslash in fair order banana. Seamstresses minder on omniloquent basality; flagrant crumples flung fat over New York. Garage band gritty Uncle Sam, bad ass rabbit a scattered cod jump. -- uncyclopedia.org

ah, sweet futility

I want to take a second and point out the great, black hole time-waster that is the Uncyclopedia. It's the same idea as Wikipedia - the content is open for users to edit and contribute to. However, there is no standard for accuracy or, really, anything at all. They do hold some standards for smart humor and not just crass, pointless nonsense. There are some absolute gems, like the entry on language or Americans. If you're one of those people who go into a Wikipedia coma and end up snapping out of it after reading the full biography of Troy Dusosky (Google it and be bored to tears) and realizing you've officially reached the end of the internet - there is definitely more. Turns out, Uncyclopedia is much more entertaining than Wikipedia, which confirms my theory that pretend is always better than reality.

Anyways, as an added bonus to today's post, I stumbled across the fact that this week's featured artist, Tilly and the Wall, has an official sister band. Just as Tempe, the city in which I work, is part of a sister-city program with a handful of cities around the world, Tilly is the official American sister band of the Canadian lovelies, Of Montreal. So, I've included one of my most favorite Of Montreal songs below for your enjoyment and dancing pleasure.

Let Us Be Free, Let Us Sing Songs Along

In July, 2008, I stood in a crowded, small, sweaty, loud room in downtown Phoenix. Tilly and the Wall was about to play, and the smell of B.O. was already heavy in the air. But a girl in a tutu jumped up onto an amplified acoustic platform and started tapping out a mesmerizing rhythm, which garnered unified clapping from the crowd, all with excited faces. Nobody stopped sweating, because nobody stopped dancing from that moment on. The music was amazing and the energy was electric. The most apparent thing I took from their live show was that they love company, and they love having friends. Their performance seemed to be fueled by nothing else other than the crowd's involvement. They had just released an album at that time, called O, which was the follow-up to their sophomore album, Bottoms of Barrels. Their albums have this great way of riding self-created momentum, musically. Here's what I consider to be the pinnacle of Bottoms of Barrels, the first album of theirs that saw a substantial deal of commercial success. To me, it best "demonstrates the importance of Tilly’s 'we' perspective – with a gang full of voices, the band made strong declarations about love, freedom and their own place in the world" (Tilly biography)