Battles _-_ Gloss Drop

Who cares what this album sounds like? Look at how GOOD Ian Williams looks!

Akiko Yano - 'Japanese Girl' (1976)

A1: Kikyu Ni Notte A2: Kuma A3: Denwa-sen A4: Tsugaru Tour A5: Funamachi Uta Part II	B1: Ooinaru Shii No Ki B2: Helicopter B3: Futa B4: Oka Wa Koete B5: Funamachi Uta Part I
FEATURING members of Little Feat and Yellow Magic Orchestra
http://qooy.com/files/Z3X2WEWQQG/Japanese_Girl.zip

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Enter our raffle to win your band's name listed in the Deli: New York's Foremost Leader In Informing People That Are Hip But Consider "Reverend" Horton Heat "the Best". Remember: the more raffle tickets you buy the more redundant you feel. Whoever feels the most redundant, surely sounds the most redundant; and we here at the Deli only cater to, ass the French say, le' mediocure'.

Disclaimer chances of winning are .05 and 3,210,400 as the Foo Fighters (thebestthebestthebestthebestthebestthebestthebestthebestthebest)
have already purchased all the raffle tickets and their are several hundreds of thousand of hip, green, DIY conscious bands on the Lower East Side

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: The Deli Year End Polls for Emerging Artists
Date: Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 7:40 PM
Subject: Best of Your Scene Poll 2010: 2 days left to submit (2RCXUL advances)
To: RudyDudy@askjeevevs.com

Deli-cious Bands and Artists,

The deadline to submit your band to be considered for The Deli's Local Best of Polls through SonicBids is January 31.

Even if you already submitted for free through our site before December, submitting through SonicBids will actually give you more chances to be selected because we promised them a certain number of nominees per city - it's only $5.

Here are the submission links organized by region - good luck and Happy Holidays!

NYC - Los Angeles

Other Scenes (Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Nashville, New England, Philly, Portland, SF Bay Area, Washiington)

The Deli's Staff

P.S. Check out the charts!

You may already be famous!

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YOUR BAND MIGHT ALREADY BE A WINNER!

Remember to sign up for BMI presents The Deli's Official Visa Buxx card, for teens. It gives teens the freedom to go to Williamsburg and shop or just to hang out at home with their friends and rock.
Don't leave your loft space without it!

Smellband Brett's YEAR END SONGS of the Year: TOP TEN

1. Ceelo Green - Fuck You
As a child watching defamatory cartoons I wondered when the day would come when a hit song would just be the phrase "Fuck You," albeit then I bet on a fantastical R. Kelly ballad about tender fucking love. Oh! Was it glorious when it was a topical anti-love song about the very contemporary issue of how collectively broke we are, both financially and morally. While not the best production I've ever heard, Cee-lo delivers an astounding performance of a very simple song with a direct, insightful message. Go slight amount of pathos!


2. The Move - Chinatown
While very obviously released only to me this year, this is what I wished music actually sounds like: insightful, angsty, and well arranged; wel produced counterpoint rock music. I COULD FIND A GOOD TIME GIRL IN CHINATOWN! CHINATOWWWWWWWWNN! DANCING IN MY SHOES!


3. Ruja - Dr. Noorman
I hadn't heard about the massive Estonian musical revolution against a communist Russian ban on musical instrument sales and other musical liberties, but this cry of prog passion from these esoteric masterminds. DOC-TOR! Rachmael promised to write a multi-installment series on the Eastern-European Cultural Revolutions, which he's been extensively researching for months but you know him: always Jillin!


4. Grateful Dead - Franklin's Tower
Hell, I had heard this song a long time ago and rationalized it away as just another noodle. Man, the world of Thomas Hart Cooking will really flavor your noodles. This song is about taking your time, doing things right, and surrendering to Jah and the mother's G-deyehead. You've got to Roll away the dew. Roll away the dew. If you get confused listen to the music play.


5. XTC - Roads Girdle the Globe
Wow, it must be a really slow year if songs Rachmael showed me a year ago are cracking the top five. Average song topics: Guys and girls, guys and guys, guys and money, guys and cars. This is a classic guys and cars smash. Also has the best bass playing I've heard this year. Boo contemporary music!


6. redaccted


7. Olivia Newton John - Magic
Believe you and me, Beyonce puts out a cover of this backed by the Manualist playing "Run to the Hills" and it would top this list. Olivia Newton John still probably tops my annual list of most fantacized about women for the 13th odd consecutive year (with a close second and third by one of the Bank Teller's at the branch in Olneyville and Anais Nin). Needless to say I was forced to watch Grease at nauseum growing up and I totally equate all feelings of affection with that horn sounding part in that song where they go "YOU'REDAONEDATAWANT! YOUR'EDAONEDATAWANY! OO-OO- OO-HONEY!"
over and over in my head, so when I saw this video where she was singing this somewhat psychotic song beckoning you to join the color wiccans the first thing that came to mind was that John Travolta must have been blackmailed into joining Scientology because the scientologists had discovered video footage of Travolta repeatedly punching John in the back of the head during intercourse. Where'd she get that crazy eye from? Who knows, right? You have to believe we are magic! Nothing can stand in our way!


8. Gorillaz - Melancholy Hill
Good song good job. This is the "Feel Good Inc." of Plastic Beach. The Gorillaz are a full blown media phenomenon that all my friends in the midwest seem to write off. Good synths always win the day. I guess Damon Albern is as topical as a British pop song writer you can get if you don't worship Radiohead.


9. Readacted


10. Yes - And You and I
In a year where I felt a hopeless, overwhelming feeling that culture was condemned to a bland post-modern music world of derivatives and style packages where everyone was embracing fantasy, I decided to jump on the band wagon. Until Rachmael showed me "Close to the Edge" the song, I had been lukewarm on Yes though I enjoyed a few of their earlier albums and most of their radio singles. I was reading an interview with Frank Zappa in a book of interviews and articles I keep in the bathroom (which I stole from Edan Wilbur which he found in a dumpster) and he was endlessly decrying mediocrity.

"Progressive Magazine (this is actual a Wisconsin libertarian rag and not a prog rock magazine): Do you think anything can be done to reverse the trend?

Frank Zappa: Perhaps. I tend to view the whole thing as a conspiracy. It is no accident that the public schools in the United States are pure shit. It is no accident that masses of drugs are available and openly used at all levels of society. In a way, the real business of government is the business of controlling the labor force. Social pressure is placed on people to become a certain type of individual, and then rewards are heaped on people who conform to that stereotype. Take the pop music business, for example. Look at the stereotypes held up by the media as great accomplishment. You see guys who are making millions of dollars and selling millions of units. And because they are making and selling millions they are stamped with the seal of approval, and it is the millions which make their work quality. Yet anyone can look at what is being done and say, "Jesus, I can do that!" You celebrate mediocrity, you get mediocrity. People who could have achieved more won't, because they know that all they have to do is be "that" and they too can sell millions and make millions and have people love them because they're merely mediocre. Few people who do anything excellent are ever heard of. You know why? Because excellence, pure excellence, terrifies the fuck out of Americans because they have been bred to appreciate the success of the mediocre. People don't like to be reminded that lurking somewhere there are people who can do some shit that you can't do. They can think a way you can't think, they can dance a way you can't dance. They are excellent. You aren't excellent. Most Americans aren't excellent, they're only OK. And so to keep them happy as a labor force, you say, "OK, let's take this mediocre chump," and we say, "He is terrific!" All the other mediocre chumps say, "Yeah, that's right and that gives me hope, because one day as mediocre and chumpish as I am I can..." It's smart labor relations. An MBA decision. That is the orientation of most entertainment, politics, and religion. So considering how firmly entrenched all that is right now, you think it's going to turn around? Not without a genetic mutation it's not!"

Yes' symphonic style rock orchestration peaked almost forty years ago yet most bands now in a post-modern egotistical haze embrace their inabilities and mediocrities as "style" or as "unimportant," yet the decline in music is exactly what it sounds like. You want crap: you get crap. Not knowing how to play guitar is exactly what it sounds like. Not knowing how to play drums is exactly what it sounds like. Not knowing how to play bass or keyboards or anything is exactly what it sounds like. Using automated sequencing and metaproccessing to create music is fundamentally what it sounds like. This is probably the only song to make me cry in the last few years and I have that terminal disease Zach Braff has in Garden States and the only way to cure it is self medicating Scrubs marathons until I come to terms that their are in fact hospitals in real life. Conclusively, there'll be no mutant enemy we shall certify; Political ends, as sad remains, will die. Reach out as forward tastes begin to enter you. Ooo, Booo!
I listened hard but could not see -
Life tempo change out and inside me.
The preacher trained in all to lose his name;
The teacher travels, asking to be shown the same. In the end, we'll agree, we'll accept, we'll immortalise.That the truth of the man maturing in his eyes, All complete in the sight of seeds of life with you. Coming quickly to terms of all expression laid, As a moment regained and regarded both the same, Emotion revealed as the ocean maid, A clearer future, morning, evening, nights with you.

Skoal Kodiak - Side A of Skoal Kodiak/Knife World Split Cassette

Both staple points of the thriving Minneapolis scene, this tape was sold during a joint tour during either 2008 or 2009, I don't remember. Trust me when I say the Knife World side of the tape is equally enchanting but I've leaked way too much of John Nielsens' classic works to the internet (see the Knife World and Voyager albums...if you can find em...).

Skoal Kodiak consists of two former members of the Cows on bass and drums and an accomplished noisemaker as a front man who manipulates electronics. The sound could be defined as a cross between noisy, hip-hop influenced pop and Gang of Four or Public Image Limitedesque grooves. Unbelievably tight bass work, outright astounding drumming, and a charismatic, noise generating frontman who mostly sings through a circuit bent bleach bottle while wearing a lamp around his neck. Hands down some of the best and most functional drone and oscillator work I've seen in recent time, particularly in underground "experimental" dance music. Skoal Kodiak seems to be a step above with well orchestrated parts and catchy, yet unintelligible, hooks.

The tape stands as an excellent example of the unbranded dance music they've been bringing to Minneapolis for some time now. Their first album (Three People Keep Having Grape Emegencies) doesn't nearly capture their brilliant live show, although a new album is rumored to be on the way.

------SKOAL KODIAK/KNIFE WORLD SPLIT SIDE A

Donald Fagen - the Nightfly

One of the first fully digitally recorded albums finds the front half of Steely Dan exploring similar territory albeit without Walter Becker. Backed by a lengthy list of popular studio musicians (Michael & Randy Brecker, Larry Carlton, Rick Derringer, Anthony Jackson (the inventor of the six string bass-guitar), Marcus Miller, Paul Schaffer, Roger Nichols (inventor of digital drum replacement made popular on Gaucho), Chuck Rainey, and many more) and produced by perennial Steely Dan producer Gary Katz, Fagen explains in the liner notes the album being about:

"certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build."

The music itself is considerably similar to Gaucho (the Nightfly coming only two years later), going as far as to reuse passing sections from songs cut from Gaucho ("The Goodbye Look" has a part directly from the "Second Arrangement"). The biggest difference is finding a laid back Fagen producing dense pop songs in lue of the heavily jazz influenced Dan-work just prior. The sardonicism commonly associated with his lyrics are replaced by an exhausted, mellower delivery. With production work comparable to Thriller, The Nightfly is a popular album for testing stereo monitors due to it's deft use of early digital recording equipment.

The highlight of this record is the track is the second single "New Frontier". It finds an aging Fagen confused over contemporary shifts in culture over a delightfully dicey keyboard.

" Well I can't wait 'til I move to the city
'Til I finally make up my mind
To learn design and study overseas

Have you got a steady boyfriend
Cause honey I've been watching you
I hear you're mad about Brubeck
I like your eyes, I like him too
He's an artist, a pioneer
We've got to have some music on the new frontier"

Beyond this finds Donald covering Leiber & Stoller's Drifter's hit "Ruby Baby" with a groove quite similar to that of "The Way You Make Me Feel" by Michael Jackson. "Green Flower Street" relies on themes taken from "Green Earrings" from Steely Dan's The Royal Scam. Many of the songs on this record could be described as throw away Dan songs but definitely worth the listen for people with an already vested interest in Steely Dan.


-----DONALD FAGEN THE NIGHTFLY

Crack (Man Bites Dog)

     The anticrack rhetoric was to have other costly consequences. Congress, swept up in its own polemic, was the scene of heated debates about what to do with these heinous drug dealers who were enslaving the youth of the country. Federal penalties for drug dealing went up and up. In 1988 Senator Jesse Helms (Republican, North Carolina) lobbied for a law dictating that, since crack was a hundred times more addictive than cocaine (no one knows where this statistic came from), possession of it should merit a penalty a hundred times greater. Unbelievably, it was passed. Today the penalty for possession of 5 grams of crack (worth about $350) is a mandatory five years in jail—equivalent to that for possession of half a kilogram of cocaine (worth about $10,000). And yet, as anyone who knows anything about cocaine will tell you, 500 grams of cocaine, when cooked up, will yield 500 grams—possibly even more—of crack.

     The net result was that those found in possession of crack were sentenced to disproportionately heavy custodial sentences compared with those found with powder cocaine. This was to have profound effects, owing to the class of people who used crack versus the class of those who used cocaine. As Bruce Johnson explained to me at NDRI:

It is very clear that crack, more than any other substance, is primarily an African American low-income substance. And its sale in public places is very much dominated by African Americans (although there are some Latinos involved in it, as well). Cocaine powder tends to be more controlled and proportionally in the populations is more evenly distributed among the people who use illegal drugs. It's just that whites don't get involved that often in crack.

     By 1989, 46 per cent of all arrests in New York City were for crack possession or dealing. Since powder-cocaine traffickers and users tended to be white (they could afford to buy cocaine in bulk) and crack users black (it was sold in small quantities cheaply), federal courts found themselves banging up blacks and members of other ethnic minorities as if there were no tomorrow. As prison numbers spiralled [sic] (doubling in the 1980s alone), so more and more blacks ended up in jail for possession or low-level dealing. At the time of writing, the US prison population has just hit 2 million—up from 300,000 in 1970—of whom 500,000 are in for drug offences. Currently African Americans, who make up just 12 per cent of the US population, constitute 50 per cent of the US prison population. Blacks are arrested for drug offences at six times the rate of whites, so one-third of the black US population is under criminal supervision of one form or another. Crack is to blame for much of this. The 100:1 ratio crack law amounts to a form of institutionalized racism. This has been demonstrated by numerous academics and experts (recently even the US Drug Tsar, General Barry McCaffrey, lobbied for cocaine-crack sentencing parity) by Congress repeatedly votes against repealing it: no one wants to appear soft on drugs. Besides, banging up black crack users can hardly do that much harm, can it? It keeps them off the streets, after all. Once again, cocaine becomes a race issue.

Streatfeild, Dominic. Cocaine : an unauthorized biography. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Picador, 2001. pp.312–313. Print.