Elvis Has Left The Building

Photo by Kate McQueen

You’ve Been Warned

Gritty, violent, harsh.

Not exactly adjectives you’d use to describe Pasadena’s Ultimate Party Band.

Fair Warning, Van Halen’s fourth studio album released in 1981, is the band’s darkest sonic statement and unlike anything else in their catalog.

The record contains no radio hits and few pop moments. It is their weakest-selling long-player of the David Lee Roth era. It is also one of their greatest artistic achievements.

Frantic, lawless, depraved. Van Halen offers the only album of their career that is not the soundtrack to the Eternal Southern California Beach Party. It is uncharted territory. A wrong exit off the LA freeway into the desperate parts of town.

Danger in the rearview mirror
There’s trouble in the wind
Badness bringing up the rear
The menace is loose again

Dirty movies starring former prom queens, seedy mean streets that lead nowhere. It’s always the end of the night and everything is in doubt.

No one’s above suspicion

It is Van Halen’s nastiest, most hopeless record. They would never go any deeper or rock any harder.

Opener “Mean Street” is the centerpiece. A place you do not want to find yourself after dark. It’s a dangerous rocker that opens with one of the most virtuosic guitar moments ever put to tape. Edward Van Halen shatters the fretboard with a finger-tapping technique that is still untouchable to this day.

“Unchained,” a concert favorite, is proto-pop-thrash. An early metal chug-a-lug with a burning riff and a sleazy strip-club middle eight:

Take a look at this
Hey man, that suit is you
You’ll get some leg tonight for sure
Tell us how you do!

The album doesn’t let up, or forgive. Its riffs snake and coil, venting pent-up energy from a bad trip that hits back in a serious way. Fourteen hours later it’s “Sunday Afternoon in the Park,” a doom and gloom instrumental that sounds nothing like a Sunday afternoon, or a park, unless it’s Needle Park in the dead of winter. The song butts heads with the record’s closing statement, the punk-infused “One Foot out the Door,” which is over before you hear it.

Total time: 30 minutes, 58 seconds. You may need to take a breath.

And then there is the album cover.

In 1953, while hospitalized and being treated for mental illness, Canadian artist William Kurelek painted a raw, unflinching psychological self-portrait that would become his most famous work.

The Maze depicts a tortured childhood, a vision of confused madness. The troubled subconscious of a young man at odds with himself, his world, his god.

Brutal, savage, without beauty.

It’s the source for the perfect image to accompany the nihilistic soundscapes held within the sleeves of Fair Warning, Van Halen’s most brilliant moment.

Kurelek, William, The Maze. 1953. The Leicester Galleries, London.

Best. Score. Ever.

Video by zerokomma

Slow Time Monday’s

Oregon Mysticism, 2011

YOB
July 12th, 2011
(Le) Poisson Rouge
New York, NY

YOB is the Great Mystic of the Oregon territories, the topography of Oregon herself—rolling desert sands, sawtooth Pacific cliffs, penetrating black forests.

Nature, unresolved.

Everything is one and nothing stands alone.

YOB played New York City for the first time in as long as anybody could remember. Sightings of this great behemoth northwestern band are rare. They keep to the wilds of their homeland, venturing out among the territories only when necessary.

Do you have anything to say? I believe you do.

The band wasted no time in laying waste to its physical surroundings, as if to say, “everything you see here is a lie, we reconcile this divide between the real and the unreal with a new sonic language.”

They tore into their set with the pulsating, crushing “Quantum Mystic.” A flood of heavy thunder and ethereal intensity. The heavens opened wide and we all stepped in.

Quantum mystic arise
……………………………………………..
The unreal never lived
And the real does not ever die
Beyond all birth and death
The real is timeless
Open the shutter of the mind
And it will be flooded with light

Far out.

More cathedral noise followed—sheets of metal, the constant reign of cymbals, a dense meteor storm of pounding low-end theory. “Grasping Air” crashed like waves and rocks and cliffs and everything else known and unknown. “Burning the Altar” was the red-hot electric rain itself, and the endless roots of thousand-year-old trees breaking through the surface. New doom monster “Prepare the Ground” was a barn scorcher with a creeping heavy undertow.

There is space in this intensely focused musical form. Open guitar strings ring wide and loose within chords, creating subtle tonal variations. A pleasing dissonance, sometimes hard to decipher, is always there in the undercurrent of the moving soundscapes.

This is music from the extreme western corner of the country, which informs its every nuanced howl. All big sky, sandstorm doom. Forests of azure and low-pressure systems. The sound of YOB spreads long and wide over the mountainous terrain and cannot be contained by the continental United States. It is like the dark cloud of an impending tempest that covers the whole landmass of the Americas.

Everything YOB attempted on this night was an offer of transformation. They approached their instruments with such intense commitment and focus, it was hard not to feel lucky to be in attendance, or even alive on this night. A path to, and through, the future. A burning new dawn.

YOB, the ancient song improvisers, has returned. There’s a new album on the horizon, which brings hope, and a continuation of the mission—spreading the good gospel of transcendental Oregon and opening a new non-reality.

Were we willing, or even able, to accept this most gracious gift?

If they are here to teach, we are here to listen.

YOB is building the New Sonic Jerusalem. Are you ready?

Graphic: YOB 2011 tour shirt

Queens & Grohl, 2002

Film Geeks & Rock Nerds

What do you get when you cross legendary film directors with legendary band logos?

The ultimate convergence of style and substance, sound and vision.

New York artist Bob Bianchini and Cinefile Video of Los Angeles have collaborated on some truly rocking shit—the Cinefile Director Shirts.

You will see these posted all over the Web, and why not? They totally rule.

Film Geeks & Rock Nerds Unite!

Artwork by Bob Bianchini for Cinefile Video