1. July 30, 2017, Jane Weaver, Justin Bieber, Starcrawler

This week I’ve been sampling a lot of music. Sampling in the old school sense, that is.

Jane Weaver is a British artist who’s been around in one group or form or whatever for over twenty years. Her recent solo work has become beloved of the psych-folk crowd, the same people I suspect who get giddy over Joanna Newsom, Meg Baird, and whatever. Her new album is World Kosmology. Whoo, there’s a title that any self-respecting punk in 1997 would have called pretentious twaddle. But these are more generous and inclusive times for fans of outsider music. Boris fans may be Margo Price fans may be Kendrick Lamar fans. Weaver combines trippy analog synths, motorik beats (4/4 time, but rigidly mechanical, favored by Krautrockers), chiming electric and strumming acoustic guitars and her own ethereal vocals. It all works because the songwriting is fetching. Give it a chance and it charms. It probably sounds great fucked up on pot, although I haven’t tried that yet.

I hear Justin Bieber has come to Jesus. That is all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXPhANmnAdM (Starcrawler video - they wouldn't let me download directly. Poo.)

Starcrawler rule. Two minute songs. They sound like the Little Killers to me, but with more Rodney-glam influence. They take songs and verses at chugging punk tempos, throw in Thunders-y solos, then throw down a Black Sabs bridge (half-time, nasal, minor sounding). If they aren’t the greatest thing since the Ramones, maybe they’re the greatest thing since the first Broncho album. Fill in your own superlative. Three guys and a girl, Arrow De Wilde (… noms de rock, just like Poison!), who sings with bored assertion in a voice with indeterminate gender. Free to be you and me. Starcrawler are, on the basis of the two songs I’ve heard - “Ants” and “Used to Know” - the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world.

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Better Ed than Dead

Ed Sheeran - He looks like Van Morrison, kinda, huh? Check the tats. Ed Sheeran is the highest paid entertainer on the planet. I think. I don’t know. They say he’s worth 65 million. Anyway, I read that somewhere. God knows he travels light and doesn’t have to share that dough with an orchestra or anything. I saw Ed once. At least that I’m aware of. He opened for the Rolling Stones in 2015 (or was it 16?) at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City. Just me and several thousand of my closest friends. He came out with a guitar in front of that throng and mesmerized the crowd. Okay, not really. Some kids seemed to like him. Old people, eighty percent of the attendees, treated him as a curiosity or mild irritant, not uncommon for a warmup act served up before the Stones’ Lions and Christians, bread and circuses exhibition. Later, he sang “Beast of Burden” with Mick. He was better than Dave Matthews. I see his ruddy little mug and tousled ginger top here and there in the ...

EMA is Ericka M. Anderson. Exile in the Outer Ring is her vision of American despair and marginalization. Yup.

When I selected Past Life Martyred Saints as my top album of 2011, Ericka M. Anderson was straight out of the American underground, not an artist widely recognized. EMA, professionally and for short, had released material with two groups, Amps for Christ and the Gowns, but PLMS was her solo debut, and it was on a small label called Souterrain Transmissions. If you want a little background, here’s a link to my original review and my 2011 Top 25: http://stevemahoot.blogspot.com/search?q=past+life+martyred+saints With the 2014 release of The Future’s Void, EMA consolidated her stature as an artist to be reckoned with. After the viscerally powerful PLMS, Void w as a colder, more technocratic vision. Like it’s ambiguous title, the music conveyed a vision of a sterile and oppressive near tomorrow, like something out of a William Gibson novel, humanity struggling with the powers of its own creation, with the alienations of the internet age. Void’s slabs of distorted sounds were...

10. Alan Vega - It (Fader) ... SPEW'S Top 10 countdown.

If you know who Alan Vega is we can move along. Alan Vega with one of his installations. But maybe some of you don’t. Alan Vega was part rockabilly hiccup, part electronic futurist. He was a poetic minimalist. Whether as musician, either with his partner Martin Rev in the band Suicide or solo, or as visual artist (his gallery shows were infrequent, but legendary), Vega was uncompromising and unwilling to play the game. He was interested in energy, in process, not in creating a portfolio. One romanticizes artists at one's peril, but Alan Vega didn't have time for bullshit, and his work shows it. Alan Vega died in 2016; he was seventy-eight years old. Much of his life he’d been a bit cat and mouse about his age, not wanting to let his Seventies “punk” peers at Max's and CBGB's know he was fifteen years older than them. He needn’t have worried. Nothing dated Alan Vega. His posthumous swan song It i(the back half of a New York 'exit...

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