Houston Music Blog

​When He Said began researching the music that came out the year we were born, 1983, we were taken aback by how much of this music has warped, shaped and informed our life. Pretty much all of the albums and bands that were prevalent that year are still on our turntables and playlists. Why just this morning in the shower, we were rocking the first Metallica album while using just this darling facial cleanser we got from Avon. You wouldn't believe how well it invigorates your pores.

Anyway, the year we were born, most people would say the music world was steeped in Michael Jackson, New Edition and the Police. It's funny how popular culture chooses to gloss over the real metal and hardcore potatoes that existed in the '80s. Gaudy Nagel prints on T-shirts and neon headbands sell way better at the mall than leather gauntlets and jean vests, we suppose.

Anodyne: Noun. Anything that relieves distress or pain. (dictionary.com)

​When Son Volt goes onstage tonight at the Continental Club (we've heard around 11 p.m.), there's an outside chance the band might pull out Doug Sahm's "Give Back the Key to My Heart" - we are in Texas, after all. Otherwise don't count on hearing anything from Jay Farrar's former band's final album, also known as Uncle Tupelo's Anodyne.

This makes Rocks Off kind of sad, but we understand. With its last two albums, 2007's The Search and this year's American Central Dust, Son Volt is on a creative hot streak. Besides, the 14-year-old group has a plenty deep back catalog all by itself without having to stretch back into the Tupelo days.

Give Back The Key To My Heart (Album Version) - Uncle Tupelo

It's just as well. Despite the title, Anodyne is the sound of a band coming apart at the seams. Co-founders Farrar and Jeff Tweedy, friends since their teens, very publicly grapple with their growing creative and personal differences, first dreading, then denying, then realizing they're insurmountable. Uncle Tupelo broke up in May 1994, eight months after Anodyne's release. They only held on that long to give their fans one final tour.

Today is the first day of school for almost all the public school districts in the area. Children and teens from Alvin to Alief are trudging into polished halls and sterile classrooms for yet another year of romantic intrigue and bitter class struggle, and impromptu dance routines in the cafeteria, gym and commons areas.

We actually miss those first days of school, when we had hope and ambition that the coming year wouldn't be like the last, with all the weapons charges and stairwell drug deals, but alas the underground crime current of fourth grade pulled us back in for one last score.

We compiled a list of songs to send mommy's little monster off to the salt mines of government-funded learning and societal shame. Steer clear of the seniors, because they will be out for blood, and try to find a friend with a bitchin' car. Also, wear deodorant like everyday. And remember to make friends with the dude who sits under the stairwell talking about the Clash all day - he may be reviewing your album in a few years.

After almost two years of programming and tinkering, the developers of the Beatles edition of the "Rock Band" videogame have released a trailer for the game in advance of its release in the fall.

The visuals in the trailer are faithful to the boys from Liverpool, down to every detail. We were astonished at how close the designers got the avatars to look like the actual Fab Four. The game chronicles the band as it crawls out of obscurity in the Cavern Club, changes the world on the Ed Sullivan Show, gets trippy in the late '60s, and finally closes out with the band on top of the Apple building in 1969. Throughout you will hear snippets rarely heard from in-studio recording sessions, adding to the game's already heavy nerd cachet.

Pi Studios, a Houston-run videogame production shop, is actually developing the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 2 components for "The Beatles: Rock Band", set to hit stores on September 9. The production house has helped produce many of the "Call of Duty" games, but it seems its main job is to produce expansion packs for the extremely popular "Rock Band" series, such as November's AC/DC edition.

Don't ask Rocks Off to explain how it came to be that we hadn't listened to the Vaselines in such a long time. It is what it is. Fortunately for us, Sub Pop just gave Eugene and Francis the deluxe double-disc treatment, and we've been listening almost non-stop since it arrived. How this band managed to find its way to the bowels of our music collection we can only guess, but it's good to have them back.

Still, as much as we love the Vaselines - the exuberant vocals, just off enough to sound earnest; the sly combo of naive kink references and genuine naivety; the gentle piss-taking aimed at everything from sex to religion to themselves; the melodies, so simple and yet so perfectly in tune with the jubilant juvenilia - it's hard to get behind Enter the Vaselines, Sub Pop's aforementioned double disc, with much more than a shrug.

That has nothing to do with The Vaselines, and everything to do with the fact that a lot of this material is already available on the label's earlier comp, Way of the Vaselines. Both of the collections feature the band's entire official recorded output, including both EPs and the Dum Dum long-player. The first disc of this new set is, effectively, just a standard reissue.

Sometimes when Rocks Off has had a little too much to drink, he has a little trouble remembering specific details of the night before, like how he got back upstairs. If pen and paper are handy, he'll occasionally scratch out a paragraph or two of semi-coherent, semi-legible prose, but he's certainly never done anything like record one of the greatest hard rock/glam-metal albums of the 1980s. This is why he's fairly certain he'll never be asked to join Motley Crue.

Until today, Rocks Off somehow missed the salient fact that, to mark its 20th anniversary, the Crue plans on playing 1989's Dr. Feelgood front to back on this summer's Crue Fest 2 tour, which stops at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion August 7. (The album also figured heavily in last year's Crue Fest.) Luckily, Rolling Stone didn't, and sat down (separately) with the Crue's Nikki Sixx and Vince Neil to discuss the complicated artistic origins of "She Goes Down" and "Slice of Your Pie."

The title song, allows Sixx, "was inspired by drug dealers. Is there ever just one?" A few more choice quotes after the jump.

When I heard about a Creed reunion in the offing - set to hit Houston September 25 - I didn't cringe angrily or go into music-snob convulsions, clicking through my iTunes looking for the new Bon Iver EP or feverishly dialing up the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Nor did I commence making scatological apoplectic posts to my Twitter, Facebook, MySpace profiles.

And why should I?

What did Creed ever do to me? Besides give my friends and I hours of enjoyment, playing ironic air guitar and dressing up in leather pants and a wifebeater, placing a high-powered fan one of our garages as we bellowed "With Arms Wide Open" like Creed singer and amateur porn star Scott Stapp.

In my last Flannel File entry, I asked if there was any file more flannel-y than that of Screaming Trees. Well, embarassingly enough, that rhetorical question has an answer: yes, and that file belongs to Pearl Jam. Let's step in the time machine and go way, way back to one month ago, March 2009, when Pearl Jam's debut album, Ten, was released in a new edition.

It included not just the mandatory remastered version of the original LP, but, more curiously, a remixed version courtesy of Atlanta's Brendan O'Brien, producer of the other albums in the first and second parts of Pearl Jam's career, from 1993's Vs. to 1998's Yield.

This is what really interested me about the reissue. It's not very common for a middle-aged band to revisit the artistic decisions they made when they were first starting out, and when they do, the result is that, surprise, when you mess with perfection you don't usually improve it. I'm looking at you, Gang of Four.

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of a Seattle electrician discovering the dead body of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in a small room above the musician's garage. The man who busted indie and punk out of their respective undergrounds had killed himself days prior, with a shotgun that Earth frontman and doom legend Dylan Carlson had bought for him.

Cobain's death on April 5, 1994 put an end to a chapter in the nascent national grunge scene and laid the groundwork for almost a generation of corporate imitators seeking the secret to Nirvana's magic formula. What could very well be decades of tributes and cultural canonization continues unabated to this day.

As the years pass and all of us of that generation age, our memories of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain grow fonder and ever more vibrant. We've begun to lose our cynicism about the band's legacy and sickening afterlife. We start to forget the batshit widows and awful "modern rock" bands trying to pilfer Nirvana's sonic blueprint.

Because things aren't already bad enough out there right now, the original lineup of crotch-rocking mooks Limp Bizkit annouced today they are reuniting. Here, according to a joint statement by the band's Fred Durst and Wes Borland, is their reasoning:

"We decided we were more disgusted and bored with the state of heavy popular music than we were with each other." 

Well, thanks for that, guys. Here's the catch: So far the band is only booked at festivals in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, places apparently so starved for music that even Limp Bizkit sounds like a good idea. The release made no mention of any U.S. dates, and let's just hope it stays that way. Bet the new Live Nation Ticketmaster can't wait to try to sell this one. 

Once he finished throwing up in his mouth a little, Rocks Off polled his writers for a modified round of "Who Would You Rather?": What would you rather do or see than witness the reunited Limp Bizkit in concert? 

Personally, Rocks Off would rather have intimate relations with whichever groupie was the impetus for Kings of Leon's "Sex on Fire." See what else our staff would rather do/see than this unholy abomination after the jump.

"Hey Ladies"

As another year begins, record labels start unleashing commemorative editions of classic albums to take advantage of anniversaries of release dates and more importantly, yo' money. We already got wind of the impending Pearl Jam reissues a few weeks back. Now we get word that the Beastie Boys polished up their sampling-as-art opus Paul's Boutique for re-release on January 27.

The new edition of the 1989 classic was lovingly remastered by the Beasties, and will include expanded artwork and a code to download the band's track-by-track commentary for each song. Hopefully they can clue us in as how they managed to put at least half a dozen samples on each track alone, with no repeats.

It's hard to believe that Paul's Boutique is now almost legal drinking age. This album brought us the Dust Brothers and, thanks to the "Hey Ladies" video, the early-'90s '70s revival. The hyper-sampling paved the way for guys like Gregg Gillis' Girl Talk to sample like beat-crazy meth heads.

"Every Day Is Like Sunday"

If you haven't read "Songs from the Heart of a Marketing Plan," Jon Pareles' essay outlining how, basically, the only way for artists to sell their music these days is by licensing it to sell something else, in yesterday's New York Times, go ahead and check it out. Rocks Off detects a faint whiff of Boomer "It's about the music, maaan" sanctimony, but Pareles seems ultimately reconciled to this new market-driven musical climate, and admits many of his favorite songs from 2008 have already been licensed by one if not several companies.

Rocks Off has no problem whatsoever with musicians "selling out" to finance future endeavors, reach a broader audience or simply put food on the table. Music may be a passion, an art and a calling, but it's also a job, and its makers deserve compensation for their efforts. Besides, not being an especially big blog junkie, TV commercials and the like are how he found out about bands like Iron & Wine and the Postal Service.

Still, he had barely put down the Arts & Leisure section Sunday afternoon when he came across a hilarious example of how clueless some companies can be when choosing which songs with which to identify themselves: The NFL Network has adopted Morrissey's "Every Day Is Like Sunday" as its theme song for the upcoming playoff campaign.

Let that sink in just a bit.

 

In an announcement that will make many people's beards turn instantly gray, Pearl Jam is planning a re-release campaign in advance of the band's twentieth anniversary in 2011. The band's 1991 debut Ten is the first to get the treatment, due March 24.

Yeah, that's right. Pearl Jam is almost 20. Eddie Vedder and the gang have been in our lives for two decades of Who-worshipping, flannel-waving, grunge-fathering rock. Ten still stands as the band's definitive statement; the singles - which you can still hear about once an hour on "New Rock Alternative" the Buzz - have more than stood the test of time.