Saturday, August 30, 2008

"Did you ever see The Holy Mountain on ice?"

I'm not certain that is the lyric that opens the last track on the new Max Tundra record, Parallax Error Beheads You, but that's how I heard it, as I listened to it for the first time, thinking that if it isn't the best record of the year (which it might very well be) it is definitely the record that Alex Tripp and I would listen to three times a day, as we were working on frenzied animation, if we were still living together. I'm already associating it with hypothetical good times. It's inspiring music.

Maybe the new Marnie Stern record will kick its ass for sheer inspirational force.

It's like glitchy, video-game music, with a lot of live samples, drum machine rhythms, kind of intricate compositions making all the disparate parts flow together, sissy-English-boy vocals on top sometimes. His "Some Best Friend You Turned Out To Be" was all instrumental, and I stole the first track, Cakes, for a video which is probably going to be showing at Tacoma's Tollbooth Gallery for a month starting on the seventeenth of September. I really like that record. His second album, Mastered By The Guy At The Exchange, I did not like as much, but I was really obsessed with trying to hear it after I heard about it, from a really positive Pitchfork review that mentioned there was a song called "Gondry" urging the director to do a video for him- Gondry's letter in response can be found in the booklet accompanying the Works Of Michel Gondry DVD. (This was before Human Nature had even come out, I think- certainly before everyone in the world knew what a genius the dude was. Before those White Stripes videos, even, maybe?) This record kind of integrates both of those records into a whole, and an awesome whole it is.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

haven't heard max tundra, but i think the new marnie stern is pretty great. i'll have to mail you a copy to your baltimore headquarters once you set up base there.

Brian said...

I'm going to be staying at The Comfort Dome with the band Teeth Mountain, who I told you about over pizza one time.

Alex said...

I can in fact confirm that the lyric in the title and anything in the post involving myself is accurate.

It's still no Some Best Friend You Turned Out To Be, which totally soundtracked my life in high school, I would use it in photo class to time out how long I needed to use certain chemicals. So it's hard to compete with that, especially with the vocals that if other people heard you listening to, they would think they could beat you up. But it's still probably the album of the year.

cpratt said...

It is the album of the year. No doubt about it.

J.Bebop said...

The Holy Mountain is a film by Alejandro Jodorowsky which is kinda renowned for it's craziness; a real landmark of acid trip films of the 70's.

The next line in the song is "30 Pounds of frogs and blood, cascading like dice".

Max Tundra is referring to a scene in which an "army" of frogs dressed like conquistadors are blown up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPxqWTVl1MI

Watch it, it's insane and I'm amazed that it's referenced on this album.