Dr. Octagon - Octagonecologyst

Year: 1996
Label: Dreamworks
Genres: Hip Hop, Rap

I first heard Dr. Octagon when I was about seventeen. Thom Yorke was asked by Richard Kingsmill to choose five of his favourite songs for a Radiohead special on Triple J, and along with Neu's 'Hallogallo' (which also totally blew my mind) and tracks by Tom Waits and the Tindersticks he chose 'Blue Flowers', by Dr. Octagon. I'd never gotten into hip hop - as an indie rock kid I had a mate who was a real hip hop head and he was gently exposing me to things like the Beastie Boys and a few other crossover-type acts in the beginnings of a broad schooling on the genre. So 'Blue Flowers' wasn't necessarily a revelation to me, as I was across the style generally, but I do believe it's one of the first times that I truly connected with a hip hop track.


'Blue Flowers' is, if anything a subtle introduction to the album. Lyrically it's not as "out there" as some of the more disgusting rhymes or skits featured elsewhere on the album, but it's still pretty darned psychedelic. It's use of spooky B-movie violins and a number of other tripped out effects is complemented by a textured, gritty break, and Kool Keith's effortlessly cool and crazy rhyming/vocalising sits perfectly over the top. Tripy little lyrical asides like "It's totally raining green" are what make Keith's rhyming so satisfying - they don't make complete sense but they offer up startlingly original images through which the listener can escape and make what they will. Check this sterling example:

Dr. octagon, paramedic foetus of the east
With priests, I'm from the church of the operating room
With the strike support, scalpels since the holocaust
I do indeed in greed, explore meet the patients
Back to brooms with the nurse with the voodoo curse
Holding up office lights, standing at huge heights
Back and forth, left wing swing to north
East and south with blood pouring down your mouth
I come prepared with the white suit and stethoscope
Listen to your heartbeat, delete beep beep beep
Your insurance is high, but my price is cheap

But this truly inventive and uttelry impressive rhyming is backed up by Dan the Automator's always solid production, with what sounds like snippets of Disney musicals, classical music stabs and that kitschily spooky theremin line all creating a sonic cornucopia in which to lose yourself.

In fact, the way that the album in general melds jazzy instrumental elements with breaks that I can only describe as grey, sparkly and fuzzy - yet clear (?) in general is one of its biggest assets and arguably part of the reason this album hasn't dated in over ten years - of course the Automator's skill as a producer is well documented, but the specific combination of elements makes for great listening. I guess another aspect of this is the fact that at this point in his career Automator's production was oriented towards the inherently "futuristic" sounding, with lots of laser beam type effects, big hazy synths, and other sonic periphera. Add to that Keith's rhymes on tracks like '3000' and 'Earth People', where he busts out all manner of lyrical sci-fi cliches, and it makes almost for an "alternate future" kind of kitschiness, that never sounds naff or lame, because it's fun, funky and never takes itself too seriously.

And this B-movie theme runs through the whole album too. There are all kinds of snippets of dialogue from doctor-related TV shows and movies, as well as a few hilarious pieces from medical-related porn. It all feeds into the overall craziness and haphazard nature of the album, which perfectly suits its roughly constructed concept of a crazy doctor who's the nephew of a dude called Mister Gerbick, who's two hundred and eight years old, is half shark and half man, with skin like an alligator. His skin is coloured lilac and turns orange and green. Yeah, you get the gist... 'Halfsharkalligator' is another favourite, which follows the album's tendency for icky but funny lyrical allusions to bodily functions and nasty medical related humour.

The rest of the album is a kaleidoscopic trip through minimal, jazzy hip hop production paired up with interesting Science Theatre 3000-type effects, with Kool Keith's charismatic, unpredictable, yet ultimately charming persona looming large thoughout. Much has been made of Keith's battles with mental stability, and the fact that some of his projects have in fact exploited his "crazy" persona and used it as a marketing ploy. Regardless of whether you think Keith is being exploited here, you can't argue with the solidly satisfying results on this album.

And despite all of its kitschy novelty elements I find it difficult to grow tired of this album. Keith's masterful rhyming and Automator's brilliant production really do break through any novelty factor and hey, maybe the fact that I actually really enjoy toilet and porn-related humour has enabled this album to maintain its favourite status for so long.

Catherine - Hot Saki & Bedtime Stories

Year: 1997
Label: TVT
Genres: Pop-rock, 90s Alternative, Glam

This album is a complete guilty pleasure for me. Revelling in mid-90s alternative retro-glam kitsch, I always thought of Catherine as the fun-loving, Kiss worshipping kid brother to the Smashing Pumpkins’ brooding, angsty, Albert Camus reading trenchcoat clad goth teenager. But if any band deserved to slavishly rip off the Pumpkins these guys earned the right – their drummer Kerry Brown married Pumpkin D’arcy, and they were friends and contemporaries of the band, occasionally filling in on each other’s records during recording. In fact, if their biggest hit – ‘Four Leaf Clover’ – hadn’t featured D’arcy on backing vocals there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have been as big a hit as it was (not that it was even anything to write home about - I never saw it on Video Hits - the true sign of crossover success), and I probably never would have heard of this band. Wretsky also appears on a couple of other numbers here, but you can tell the call and response of ‘Four Leaf Clover’ was written with crossover hit-by-association potential in mind. What’s more James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlain are even credited in the liner notes of this album for “additional equipment”.

It’s funny then that Billy Corgan is the only Pumpkin who’s name doesn’t appear on this album, because he’s all over it musically. Hot Saki & Bedtime Stories carries the ghost of Corgan in its melodies, and its distinctly crunchy but sweet guitar sound, so I thank the Pumpkins for acquainting me with Catherine – even if their biggest virtue is being a sweet reminder of how great that band was.

Hot Saki & Bedtime Stories hasn’t dated too well, but perhaps that’s why I find it so endearing. To borrow a phrase from Forrest Gump’s mum Sally Fields this album is a bit like a box of chocolates, but not in the sense that you never know what you’re going to get. I mean, the flavours are included on the box – you know you’re gonna get chocolate, right? It’s more like there are a bunch of flavours here and, although you know that you’re probably not gonna want to try some of them again, others will taste good for a few seconds and then you’ll be onto the next one or you’ll put the box down. And when it comes down to it, it might not be a square meal, but chocolate is tasty. And if you eat the whole box you’ll probably feel sick and not want any more for a while. Yeah, this album’s kind of like that.

All the tracks here have catchy hooks, sugary melodies, shiny production and memorable arrangements. Plus every once in a while a lyric will make you smile, like this one from 'It’s Gonna Get Worse':

Count your friends/it won’t take long
Including yourself you’ll find/you only have one

Ha, cute. Every track here is like a big fat sugar hit, both musically and production-wise. The drums are compressed as hell, and there are about six or seven different guitar sounds, most of which feature on ‘Four Leaf Clover’ – the more is more school has definitely been applied. It takes me back to the time when ‘alternative’ was the new black and indie rock bands were offering up the best parts of delectable pop music with the balls of rock and enough indie cred to make their songs still sound cool at the chance to take a spin through the charts. Not many of them succeeded, but it was fun to see them try. And to top it off the album artwork had that great ultra high contrast, kitschy 50s nick nacks in front of luminescent backdrops design-style borrowed from The Cure's Wild Mood Swings album.


It’s not all crazy kitschy colour and upbeat pop numbers though. 'Sign of the Cross' is sad in a “I feel blue today” kind of way, not a “the world fucking sucks” way – it’s still slightly hopeful and has a gorgeously indulgent lethargo stoner swagger about it. It’s the perfect soundtrack to stoned, melancholy suburban teen sex – it’s like naive bubblegum-pop flirting with the dark side but not having the guts to take it too far.

Perhaps the most derivative track on the album is 'Pink Floyd Poster'. Everything about it – from Mark Rew’s bruised vocal delivery, through the whistful chiming guitars, to the crunchy chorus with its carbon copy Siamese Dream power chords – is Pumpkins lite. And to make it even more cringe inducing during the outro we get a field recording of kids playing. Ah, the follies of youth! By 1997 Corgan and co. had moved on from psychedelia-influenced alternative rock and were focussing on the proto-Adore goth-electro revisionism of 'The End is the Beginning Is the End'. Catherine sort of picked up where Siamese Dream left off and brought it careening into glam and 70s AOR.

It’s by no means a classic, nor is it even a lost gem, but Hot Saki & Bedtime Stories makes me smile. It’s an enjoyable romp through the mid-90s collision of pop and alternative, and although (or perhaps because) it's kitschy and cute, I have a continuing soft spot for this album and all its rambunctious, sugar-coated swagger.

Little Nobody - Solid Gold Collectibles and Then Some

Year: 1997/98
Label: iF?
Genre: Electronica, Hip Hop, Jungle, House

The Jim Jarmusch retrospective on SBS this month has reminded me just how much influence Dead Man had on shaping my adolescent perception of the world. It gave me an existential netherworld through which I could escape the struggles of high school, puberty and teen angst. What greater gift can culture give us but a complete and completely pervasive world in which to escape and dream?

I think Andrez Bergen understands this concept. He's an Australian ex-pat, originally based in Melbourne, now living in Japan I believe. As Little Nobody he released this collection of tracks on his own if? imprint in the late nineties. It was clearly a self-released affair. The artwork for this baby is nothing more than a colour photocopy. And, as a self-released and therefore somewhat obscure album it also flew under the radar of copyright infringement issues, as it samples from a number of pre-existing sources, including Jarmusch's Dead Man. That was what hooked me on this record.

The first part of this album is (I believe) lifted from an EP of the same name - the rest are tracks from Little Nobody's debut album Pop Tarts. There's a distinct difference between the material that comprises each. The first part was the part I fell in love with. Back when I picked this up I was only just starting to get into electronic music via the indie-crossover of the trip hop sound and a friend who was into techno. The first five tracks here are sample heavy excursions into dreamy hip hop - heavy on atmosphere thanks to their liberal use of film samples. Over blunted beats Bergen throws minimal melodies, ambient textures and some of my favourite movie quotes. I loved the fact that I recognised the samples from Dead Man, with Gary Farmer whispering "Nobody will observe" on the track Nobody's Driving perfectly capping off a broken instrumental hip hop piece. Elsewhere Johnny Depp is sampled in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, and there's a chopper sound that I liked to think was taken from Short Cuts - another favourite at the time.

The second track, entitled Old School Gangsta Slap features an extended poem from an unidentified source (I still have no idea where it's from). Over a dreamy, nay, downright gorgeous ambient synth texture comes a distant voice intoning the words:

Its a voice from heaven while I'm riding down the freeway
He say that gangsta sound is dead and gone
He say that nasty groove is something to prove
That getting your face and leaving an angry taste
Get you up in arms about the disgrace and make you shake it all over the place
He say that's been here and now it's gone
It's time for the wise to move on
He talking bout some new kinda sound with a different view
We used a hammer, a golf club will do
If the machine gun lyrics just fire blanks
Get out of the trenches - put on those pink checkered pants
He say it don't matter what you say, it's what they see that'll win the day
They change your name from six to four
You'll win the game if you knew much more

For me this piece (which I suspect is yet another film sample) predates the likes of Saul Williams, Kool Keith or MF Doom and their anti-gangsta rapping styles. There's something deeply aspirational and soulful about that piece. Something that tapped into my adolescent yearning to transcend my situation, to ascend to some new form of consciousness, some new way of being, of existing. Even though it was clearly about black gangsta culture, as a middle class white kid I could relate to its plea for cultural and social evolution. There's that existential, metaphysical stuff again. It was what I needed at the time, and listening to it now it brings back the loneliness, the self-reliance and the melancholy that comes with figuring out your place in the world.

As the album moves past its initial hip hop indulgence it veers into almost every other form of electronic dance music of note in the mid nineties - big beat, house, trance, drum'n'bass - it was almost a grab bag of styles - an attempt to cover all the bases. Around track nine the sound moves into dubbier, trancier territory - riding heavier, faster grooves for more sustained periods. For the most part these tracks bored me at the time, and listening to it again the whole thing has dated slightly. The foray into jungle, entitled ... and more still carries a distinct atmosphere that I'm fond of, but for me this collection was all about that dreamy, blurry, trippy first section.

As a streamlined investigation of hip hop sonics and cinematmospherics, Little Nobody, through the use of a cleverly chosen mystery sample, and a bunch I knew and loved, captured my imagination and offered me dreamy, cascading sonic respite from the dramas of adolescence. Bless him for that.

Wooden Fische - Syphons

Year: 1995
Label: Independent (no label mentioned, cataloged vat 37)
Genre: Art-Rock, Indie Rock, Post-Punk

I know very little about Wooden Fische. They were on the Perth scene before I was old enough to go to licensed gigs, and I've heard nothing about them from anyone I've ever spoken to in the scene. From what I've managed to glean from the occasional google search and O's myspace page they were part of the Jacuzzi International crew, which was a bunch of local bands from the early to mid nineties (including Bluetile Lounge, O and Yummy Fur) who used to play shows at the Grosvenor and have parties where they'd hang out in jacuzzis. That's about all I know... But what's funny is that although I have no knowledge of what this scene was all about, in my mind I've glorified it as this halcyon age of great local music where a collective vibe blossomed, many good times were had and that transitive, ephemeral je ne sais quoi that we (as musicians, music fans, people in a scene) search for in music and bands was somehow achieved by a select group of now ageing indie kids who used to be in bands.

Warwick picked this up at a Cash Converters around seven years ago, and when he got bored of it he gave it to me. I've treasured it ever since, because I really feel as though I've got a genuine piece of local music memorabilia here. It was pressed in 1995, when it was certainly rarer than it is now for local bands to get the money together to make a recording. Every band seems to have pro tools and a home studio these days, but this little gem takes me back to the pre-internet age, when media technology wasn't nearly as democratically accessible. The liner notes to this are all in Chicago - that generic Apple Macintosh font from the eighties and early nineties (see above), and the CD even has that now rather quaint 'Compact Disc' logo on it:

This EP was released the year I turned fourteen, which is about when I was starting to go out to local all-ages gigs at venues like Planet Nightclub (now the Dollhouse) and O2 (now a patch of lawn that's currently being redeveloped) - but the bands I was seeing were lightweight indie-pop bands like Jebediah and Beaverloop. In comparisson, the music on this EP is dark and intense - more visceral, and far more rewarding.

It's funny that Perth's been labelled as a haven for upbeat indie-pop bands, because there have also been a bunch of great - I would say world-class - bands doing something different, something awesome - something I relate to far more. More obscure, and in my opinion more interesting than your Eskimo Joes or Little Birdys, in a figurative sense bands like Tucker B's, Mukaizake and Adam Said Galore, for me, stem from this EP.

I see this as the precursor to those bands (especially Adam Said - there are the same angular minor key guitars, tight, propulsive rhythms and expressively imagistic yet off-the-cuff lyrics and vocal delivery). It's artiness is stooped in an Australianism - vocalist Chris Hann sing-speaks in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Mark Seymour's gruff, muscular, blokey delivery - but he has Seymour's sensitivity too, and his lyrics are just as poetic:

Give me one dollar and I'll get on a train
Gimme all your money and I'll call up a taxi
Stumbling out, of an angel's house

I probably shouldn't have made the allusion to Mark Seymour, cause you're probably thinking these guys sound like Hunter & Collectors, but they're way better. There's a terse post-punk angularity to the rhythms and dirty, almost-dischordant guitar work here. They're up-tempo, almost punky songs, that have a straight ahead-ness to them, and yet the guitars sound like they're kind of hanging off this big behemoth of driving rhythm, almost flapping in the wind and skipping and trilling alongside and around the edges. And then at times everything falls in together and drives through in moments of purposeful clarity and verve. I guess I get snippets of early Sonic Youth in some of these songs - the guitars have that gain-drenched mid-nineties "rock-end of indie rock" crunchiness to them that's gorgeous. What keeps me coming back to this record though are the melodies, the lyrics, and the songwriting - I think that's what keeps me coming back to many of my favourites. The songs twist and change subtly, darkly - like some organic/machine hybrid - they're never comfortable staying where they are - and the lyrics convey this tension and discontentment so well:

Put all the blood in the water
Tear the earth out of the sky
Make a wish
Tell me a lie

Hann's lyrics and his brooding/ranting delivery are pretty captivating. I really believe the emotion behind his voice. The visceral darkness and intensity of these songs is palpable - I believe they meant every note, every lyric, every beat. There's a dark mythos here that's heightened by the lack of information I have about it - by my inability to complete the story in my head. Who knows, maybe they were just a bunch of kids in a band who had fun playing shows and drinking their riders...

I don't know what happened to Wooden Fische. I assume they just broke up like every other band does. I don't know their story - this is all I have. There's an address in the artwork though - it's in Maylands. And there's a phone number too. Maybe one day I'll call it and see who picks up. Whoever it is I'm sure they'll never have heard of Wooden Fische. But what if? ...

Hello!

Hi. This blog is a venue for music criticism of various forms - it will generally feature posts about my favourite albums, or albums I am listening to that I believe require thoughtful investigation, but in future may branch out into general music-related posts.

As opposed to writing what I term "blanket" reviews, which seek to justify or analyse an album from a critical perspective, I will endeavour to write from a more personal, emotive stance that includes anecdotal material and my own subjective responses to a particular text. For this reason I don't believe this blog falls into the genre of traditional music criticism as it's not written for a general audience in a typical evaluative style, but works more from the heart in an effort to document my various musical obsessions.

Unlike other music-related blogs, I won't be including downloadable files of the albums I write about. My apologies - I don't have the file-hosting knowhow to do this, so all you're gonna get from me are rants/recollections/random commentaries and the like. Hopefully some of the stuff I write here will encourage others to seek out the subjects of my posts in some form or other.

The term "brachiating" is defined as " To move by swinging with the arms from one hold to another, as certain apes do." In this sense I hope that this blog will swing across genres, encompassing the variety of styles and musical approaches that I hold dear. I will endeavour to cover a wide range of albums across numerous genres, and will attempt to include as much of the trivial ephemera that clutters my head about a particular text as possible.

I hope you enjoy it!