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As Radiohead venture further into electronic experimentation, remixers find themselves utterly giddy with possibilities. TKOL RMX focuses on the band’s 2011 release, The King of Limbs, which was already quite the playground of bloops and loops wrapped around butter-smooth melodies and Thom Yorke’s phantom croons. Though the result here has a seemingly haphazard order, it generally keeps the fluid vibe of the original material, whether it’s sculpted with Caribou’s funky plops, Harmonic 313’s churchly robotics, Four Tet’s trippy drones, Objekt’s throbbing bass or SBTRKT’s moody beats. [Stephanie Benson]
Hear It Now! |
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Brokencyde: I'm Not a Fan but the Kids Like It
3OH!3: Want
Hollywood Undead: Swan Songs
Cobra Starship: While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets
The Devil Wears Prada: With Roots Above and Branches Below
Or you can just listen to this compilation, Punk Goes Crunk,
which I (or someone younger than me) should probably review but I
haven't done it yet because something about the title kinda bums me
out. Maybe I'm not totally ready to go all in with this crabcore,
tweener-pop, uh, bastardization-of-all-that-is-holy-in-this-world, or
whatever you want to call it. But like I said before, I am not exactly
the demographic these weirdos are going for.
Michoacan, "In the Dark of the Night"
The Crystal Ark, "The City Never Sleeps"
Black Van, "Yearning"
Sh*t Robot, "I Got a Feeling"
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Elektra signed
The Stooges hoping they'd become the next Doors. Morrison's influence on Iggy
is common knowledge. There was even talk of Pop taking Jimbo's place a
few years after his death. But let's talk music: the knotted mechanical
pulse powering now-legendary rockers such as "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "No Fun" can in part be traced back to The Doors' first two albums. There's something wonderfully inorganic about tracks like "Back Door Man," "Soul Kitchen" and "Twentieth Century Fox."
At the time, critics dismissed The Stooges as sonic primitives, but
they were simply inspired by The Doors' ability to take garage rock's
crunchy stomp and sculpt it into a precision timepiece.
At first blush, Can's
Krautrock feels dimensions removed from what The Doors were up to. But
it seems to me there's a lineage connecting the two, and it has to do
with the idea of building an extended hypno-drone from jazz-informed
finesse, touches of Eastern music, spacey guitar effects, classical
minimalism and keyboard-derived atmospherics. This is something The
Doors pioneered, particularly on the infamous "The End."
It's a concept this piece returns to over and over. Just about any
alternative rock band interested in creating hazily undulating
atmosphere primarily through the use of keyboards, synthesizers and/or
electronics is — directly or indirectly — influenced by you know who.
Believe it or not, Patti Smith
is one of those canonic artists the Crate Digger has failed to explore
in any appreciable depth. However, when I do hear a track from Horses,
I hear a poet-punk goddess who understands the genius of Jim Morrison
more than anybody. The only other contenders are Suicide's Alan Vega,
Ian Curtis of Joy Division and a young Glenn Danzig (all of whom we'll
soon get to).
Squeaky-clean Jonathan Richman
seems like the unlikeliest of artists to be influenced by Jim Morrison
and The Doors. After all, this is the guy who penned the lines, "I'm
certainly not stoned like hippie Johnny is/ I'm straight, and I want to
take his place." Let's set that aside for a moment. The Modern Lovers'
proto-punk sound was straight-up Doors drone-pop filtered through the
Velvet Underground's choppy minimalism. Jerry Harrison's organ solo on "Roadrunner" is pure Ray Manzarek.
In
the Age of Aquarius, when the children of Woodstock made primitive love
in the mud, The Doors were static-age futurists extolling the joys of
mechanized sex. Morrison wasn't a hippie; he was a character straight
out of a J.G. Ballard sci-fi novel that had yet to be written. These
are facts Suicide's Alan Vega and Martin Rev totally understood. On their debut album they took "Hello, I Love You" and drowned it in a post-industrial nightmare that felt so good — pain as pleasure and all that arty biz. "Frankie Teardrop" was punk rock's "The End."
TOTAL. DOORS. WORSHIP.
The
most immediate connection is just how much Danzig sounds like Morrison.
Jimbo taught Glenn how to shift from a riotous punk bark to a smooth, Sinatra-like
croon in a single tune. (Morrison's love for classic vocal
craftsmanship is way overlooked.) Then there's lyrical content: "Last Caress"
— which contains the incendiary lines "Well, I got something to say/ I
raped your mother today" and "Sweet lovely death/ I am waiting for your
breath/ Come sweet death, one last caress" — was torn from the Morrison
playbook. On the other hand, a more fundamental influence exists on the
instrumental level. The early Misfits, as documented on Static Age,
a collection of demos recorded in 1978, rocked like a stuttering funny
car. They were basically accentuating the gnarly robo-pulse dominating
The Doors' middle period: Strange Days and Waiting for the Sun.
Ian
Curtis fans are just as rabid, if not more so, than Jim Morrison fans.
I've met more than a few who bristle at the notion of The Doors
exerting an influence over their beloved Joy Division.
But it's true. It has been reported several times over that Curtis
loved The Doors. The brooding baritone aside, his ability to
orchestrate the band's funereal-rock rituals, full of negative-space
and a claustrophobic heaviness built from implication, is in many
respects very neo-Morrison/Doors.
X
sounded like The Doors only vaguely. Yet there's a reason why Ray
Manzarek, who produced the group's first four studio albums, freaked
for them. Both groups created raw poetry-rock that stalked the
crap-stained streets of the L.A. night. Dig Los Angeles' "Soul Kitchen" cover, and the way the line "learn to forget" so easily translates into punk-rock incantation. (Patti Smith also covered "Soul Kitchen" on her 2007 covers album, Twelve.)
The
flaw with many Doors haters is the way they focus way too much
attention on the band's shaman-boogie shtick. The group did produce its
fair share of white-boy blues rock. However, bands like Echo & the Bunnymen
were more about channeling Morrison's ability to mix dark/desolate
imagery with the ethereal beauty of Robby Krieger's guitar and organist
Ray Manzarek's mesmerizing repetition. Compare, say, "I Can't See Your Face in My Mind" or "Strange Days" with just about any track off Heaven Up Here,
and you immediately hear what I'm yapping about. Then again, my
Rhapsody cohort Stephanie Benson recently reported that Echo & the
Bunnymen covered "Roadhouse Blues" at this year's Coachella festival. So apparently, New Wave Brits dig The Doors' white-boy blues shtick as well.
The Damned's discography contains better albums (Damned Damned Damned, for instance). But Strawberries contains historical significance directly tied to The Doors' legacy. The 1981 release of Danny Sugerman's Jim Morrison bio, No One Here Gets Out Alive, ignited an intense Doors revival. Elektra's Greatest Hits
package, released a year prior, quickly went platinum (amazing). Though
The Doors' influence on punk's first wave was apparent, the full-bodied
resurgence Sugerman's book invoked helped sell The Doors to a new crop
of post-punk bands who were smitten with the group's ability to conjure
both dread and beauty through atmosphere, ambience and phantom reverb. Strawberries, which saw The Damned starting to explore Goth, is one of the first high-profile albums to reflect these inherited traits.
There's not much difference between Nick Cave flopping about the stage and howling "Release the Bats" and Morrison flopping about the stage howling, "Break on Through." OK, so The Birthday Party were a bit more ... violent.
Want to hear Doors drone-pop taken into the 21st century? Then check out one of San Francisco's best modern-rock bands, Wooden Shjips. Pay special attention to the guitar on "We Ask You to Ride"; it totally nails "When the Music's Over"-era Robby Krieger via Suicide, Spacemen 3 and Loop.
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Major Confession(s): I hate crowds. I hate large gatherings of people. I hate being herded like cattle. I hate the obligatory "moo" from the few "clever" cattle. I hate being knocked over, pushed around, stepped on, spit on, pointed at, shouted at. I hate sitting in a car for three hours… at one mile an hour. I hate festivals. I really do.
Echo & The Bunnymen: 
Coachella 2010 Radio]]>