Articles

POLJUNK: Don’t Be A Fucking Idiot

Leave a comment

POLJUNK, the National Affairs desk of Glorious Noise

Welp, the stage is set for the 2024 presidential election and it’s the rematch we all knew was coming. With Nikki Haley “suspending” (a misnomer for quitting) her campaign this week after getting trounced in a primary that was a race in name only, Donald J. Trump is once again the Republican nominee for president. Yes…we’re doing this again.

With a shift to the general election comes a shift in messaging, usually. The most worn general election message is one that asks, “Are you better of today than you were four years ago?” It’s a simple question and one that gets trotted out every four years like clockwork. It’s one that House GOP Conference chair and all-around goofball Elise Stefanik had the gall to ask this week. Let’s see, what was going on in March of 2020…?

Answer to Elise Stafanik asking if you're better off today than four years ago.

Oh right…that.

And lest ye forget, COVID was just the latest in a four-year shitfest of chaos and madness that defined the Trump years. Here’s a quick reminder of the damage he left behind:

  • America’s global image was in shambles and he nearly broke NATO
  • Family separations and the deaths of migrant children at the border. You know…the one he was going to build a wall on and have Mexico pay for it. That didn’t happen either
  • Unilateral withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, created chaos throughout the Middle East we’re still dealing with
  • His decision to pull US troops out of northern Syria in October 2019, abandoning the Kurds
  • Replacing the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Oh wait, that didn’t happen because the ACA provides coverage and requirements for coverage for millions of Americans and the big, beautiful replacement that was forever “two weeks” from delivery never materialized
  • The economy faltered, even though President Obama delivered years of growth. As Business Insider said, “As Trump left office, the US national debt was at the highest levels since World War II. And US economic growth was set to average just above 0% for Trump’s first term because of the pandemic recession, according to The Washington Post.”
  • The dipshit was impeached TWICE and let off by a compliant Republican Senate who seem to have forgotten they represent an equal branch of government and are supposed to stand as a check against just this kind of bullshit
  • The end of Roe v. Wade (which he sometimes brags about and sometimes pretends is someone else’s fault, depending on the audience) means our sister, daughters, nieces and friends have fewer rights to body autonomy than anyone in America in 50 years

I could seriously go on with this list for pages and pages, but you get it. He was awful. Not just on policy either. He was a terrible executive manager and an even worse human being. He’s garbage.

Just imagine what a second Trump administration would be like, especially if the Supreme Court actually endorses his insane idea of absolute Presidential immunity. He’s told us what he would do with that. They told us to “take him seriously, but not literally” and then January 6 happened. And he’s said he’ll be a dictator on Day One, so…

Continue reading POLJUNK: Don’t Be A Fucking Idiot →

Shorties

New PJ Harvey: Seem an I

Leave a comment

Video: PJ Harvey – “Seem an I”

Directed by Colm Bairead. From I Inside the Old Year Dying, out now on Partisan.

When I first heard this song my inclination was that it must be adapted from a Robert Burns poem or some other barely English literary source. The sounds of the words are emotionally evocative on their own, but thankfully PJ Harvey provides a glossary in the lyrics section of her website.

Seem an I – seems to me; bedraggled angels – wet sheep; blether – to bleat or blare much, take noisily; bwoneyard – graveyard, churchyard; rangle – to reach about like a trailing or climbing plant; archet – orchard; conzum-ed – consumed; twanketen – melancholy; dummet – dusk; zun – sun; wordle – world; lwone – lone; quartere’il – a disease of sheep, a corruption of the blood; vog – fog; devil’s bird, chattermag – magpie; chilver hog – a yearling ewe lamb; fleecy – fleece; drunk, drunken; nuts – joy, testicles; reapy – reap

So now you know!

The video stars English actress Ruth Wilson. Harvey says, “Ruth and I became friends after working together on Clio Barnard’s film ‘Dark River’. I have always greatly admired Ruth’s work as an actor, so had long harboured a dream that we might work together again in some way. When the opportunity to work with Colm Bairéad came up I knew him to be a director Ruth thought highly of, as I did, so it felt right to ask her if she would star in the film. I find the resulting short film beautiful and moving for having Ruth’s magical presence, and Colm’s unique vision.”

Wilson says, “I have always been a huge fan of PJ, so it was a great privilege to work alongside Colm and Polly to bring ‘Seem an I’ to visual life in this mysterious and hypnotic short film. There is no better way to spend a day than in the magical world of PJ Harvey.”

PJ Harvey: web, bandcamp, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.
Shorties

New Isobel Campbell: 4316

Leave a comment

Video: Isobel Campbell – “4316”

Directed by Richard Heslop, Vee Vee and Natalya KD. From Bow To Love, out May 17 on Cooking Vinyl.

The world is a mess and Isobel Campbell is tired of it.

Campbell says, “I was talking to an Uber driver the other day and I said, ‘I don’t want to be living in a video game.’ And he said, ‘Well, we are.’ I feel like I’m offering a human element in these transhuman days of artificial intelligence.”

With her signature breathy vocals over a chugging acoustic guitar with bloopy, pulsing synths, “4316” is an anthem for the fucked up times we’re living in/

Isobel Campbell: web, bandcamp, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.
Shorties

“There’s 1 for You, 19 for Me”

Leave a comment

Historically—with that history being also what we’re living in today—British music has pretty much defined what “music” is for many of us.

There is no band that has definitionally described “music” in a way that the Beatles did.

While some may point to Elvis or Dylan as American analogues, did either of them really change things in a way that they continue to be changed? Wasn’t Elvis something of Bill Haley’s successor or Dylan Pete Seeger 2.0? And didn’t the Beatles perform songs that would have been perfectly comfortable in the contexts of those two musicians?

What American band can be pointed to as being as influential as the Beatles? The Beach Boys? The Doors? The Eagles? Aerosmith? The Doobie Brothers? I think not and it would be arguable that the Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Fleetwood Mac could be stood up against them.

The point of this is not to make the “who is better than whom” argument but to say that it seems that there is better care, feeding and concern for musicians in the U.K. in a way that is lacking in the U.S.

This week (on March 6), the U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, will be presenting his budget. (This is a different situation than in the U.S., where the president presents and Congress refuses.)

Like in the U.S., there are trade associations that lobby for the protection of their constituents. In the U.K. there is one that has a straight-up name—UK Music—and a clear-cut mission: to serve as “the collective voice of the UK’s world-leading music industry.” On the political front it “promotes the music industry as a key national asset to central, devolved and local governments and Parliaments, as well as other relevant policymakers, stakeholders and influencers.”

So UK Music has asked Jeremy Hunt to include something in his fiscal calculations: cutting the tax that consumers pay on tickets to musical performances.

Continue reading “There’s 1 for You, 19 for Me” →

Shorties

New Vampire Weekend: Gen-X Cops and Capricorn

Leave a comment

Video: Vampire Weekend – “Gen-X Cops”

Directed by Drew Pearce. From Only God Was Above Us, out April 5 on Columbia.

In retrospect Father of the Bride was a disappointment. It was too long, too many guest vocals. It sounded “mature.” Boring. Maybe Modern Vampires of the City had set the bar too high and nothing they did could’ve lived up to it. Which kind of makes me think it might be time to give it another spin to see if it really does suck or if I was just heaping my own baggage and expectations onto it.

Regardless, they made us wait another five years since then before putting out something new so maybe this time it’ll be worth the wait. These first two songs are pretty dope. On first listen “Gen-X Cops” and “Capricorn” both sound more akin to Modern Vampires than anything on Father of the Bride. That’s not to say it sounds like a step backwards, but more like a return to form. The upside to waiting five or six years between albums is that everybody gets all excited for something new and forgets about the stuff that bugged them last time.

So I’m cautiously optimistic for Only God Was Above Us. These two songs are what I want my Vampire Weekend to sound like. Plus, the new album is only 47 minutes long, which is how long an album should be…so it can just barely fit on one side of a 90-minute tape. There’s also the whole thing about vinyl albums only being able to fit about 23 minutes per side at maximum fidelity. So there we go. Cross your fingers and hope the other eight songs are as good as these first two.

Vampire Weekend: web, bandcamp, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.

Continue reading New Vampire Weekend: Gen-X Cops and Capricorn →

Shorties

New Old 97s: Where The Road Goes

Leave a comment

Video: Old 97’s – “Where The Road Goes”

From American Primitive, out April 5 on ATO.

It used to be easy to hate the Old 97s because Rhett Miller was so beautiful, but now that he’s aged into being just extremely handsome I guess we’ll have to reconsider.

Just kidding, they’ve always been good.

And they’ve been around for thirty years now, which seems hard to believe but time is a motherfucker. The first time I heard them was on a mixtape of “insurgent country” from my man Vitas that turned me on to all kinds of great new stuff like Jack Logan and Wilco and Son Volt. Thirty years. Wow.

Miller says, “I started building this song as a statement of gratitude for having survived this long. It revisits some of the darkest moments of my life, including a suicide attempt at age 14 that by all rights I shouldn’t have lived through and yet somehow did. In a way it’s like a spiritual travelogue that rolls back through all the places that shaped me for better or worse, and ends up in this beautiful place that I felt so thankful to experience.”

Old 97’s: web, bandcamp, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.
Shorties

The Show that Apparently Never Ends

Leave a comment

Emerson, Lake & Palmer first (“officially”?) broke up in 1979. That means 45 years ago.

Keith Emerson died in 2016. Greg Lake also died that year. Carl Palmer is still alive, age 73. Oddly, on his website in a post dated April 26, 2023, it says:

“This morning, Carl underwent a successful Ablation procedure to restore sinus rhythm as he was previously in Atrial Fibrillation.

“Carl would to thank his Consultant Cardiologist, Dr. Tushar Salukhe, who performed the procedure, and all the wonderful attending staff on the Sir Reginald Wilson Ward at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London who have been looking after him today.”

There are several pictures of post-op Palmer, with the patient grinning and giving a thumbs up, presumably indicating not only that the team at Royal Brompton Hospital did a first-class job, but that he is ready to rock with ELP.*

“But wait,” you think. “It says at the top that not only did the band break up decades ago but that two thirds of the members are dead. Does this mean that he is out there with two other people who conveniently have surnames that begin with an ‘E’ and an ‘L’?”

No, actually the two guys that are standing on stage with him for “Welcome Back My Friends, 50, The Return of Emerson, Lake & Palmer” are Paul Bielatowicz on guitar and vocals and Simon Fitzpatrick on bass and “Chapman stick.”

Continue reading The Show that Apparently Never Ends →

Shorties

New Waxahatchee: Bored

Leave a comment

Video: Waxahatchee – “Bored”

Directed by Corbett Jones and Nick Simonite. From Tigers Blood, out on March 22 on Anti-.

I love the Joey Santiago-style guitar that opens this song.

Katie Crutchfield says, “I feel like my comfort zone when writing songs lies somewhere on the emotional spectrum of sadness and heartache. Writing from a place of happiness scares me. Too earnest. Anger scares me even more. I wrote ‘Bored’ about one of those situations where anger was called for and was the only authentic place from which to write about what I was experiencing. It was a challenge for me and ‘Bored’ is the end result.”

Anger scares me too. I feel angry way too much lately. It sucks. But I’m not writing cool songs about it when I get angry. I just grump at my family. Crutchfield is dealing with her anger in a far more productive way.

Waxahatchee: web, bandcamp, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.
Shorties

The Long and Winding Road

Leave a comment

One of the things often used in news stories posted on the internet is a descriptor of some sort of the writer of the piece. Presumably this provides the reader with some sort of metric by which to assess the credibility and reliability of the person. Last week The Washington Post ran an article with the headline (and know that reporters don’t write headlines, editors do):

“Paul McCartney’s bass guitar was missing for 51 years. Fans helped find it.”

And at the footer of the piece was the capsule bio of the writer:

“Victoria Bisset is a breaking-news reporter for The Washington Post’s London Hub, covering the most urgent and consequential stories as they unfold on the European day.”

This is a crime committed some time ago (“the bass guitar had been lost since it was stolen in 1972 without a trace,” she writes). According to the Lost Bass project website, which had undertaken the search for the missing 1961 Höfner 500/1 bass, “it had been stolen from the back of a 3 ton van during the night of 10th October 1972, in the Notting Hill area of London.”

So through crowdsourcing and publicity, especially during late September 2023, “someone living in a terraced house in Hastings on the south coast of England contacted Paul McCartney’s company and then returned the bass to them.”

A statement posted on McCartney’s site on February 14 (should we read some Valentine’s Day into the timing?) reads, in part, “The guitar has been authenticated by Höfner and Paul is incredibly grateful to all those involved.”

Continue reading The Long and Winding Road →

Shorties

New Liam Gallagher and John Squire: Mars To Liverpool

Leave a comment

Video: Liam Gallagher & John Squire – “Mars To Liverpool”

From Liam Gallagher John Squire, out March 1.

The second single from dream team Gallagher-Squire is out and starts with a warbly solo straight out of the Silvertone-era of the Stone Roses and shimmies into a catchy chorus, the likes of which first made Liam Gallagher a star. I like that these two know what they do well and double-down and triple-down on it for all the chips on the table.

It was trendy–nay, required–that famous people of the 90s hate being famous. Not for Liam Gallagher or his now estranged brother. If anyone loved being famous it was the Gallaghers, and they let you know it in every interview. So it’s no surprise to me to see Liam lean on that fame with a video stuffed to the brim with clips from his days in Oasis and Squire’s days in the Stone Roses. They know why we’re interested in this partnership and they’re going to deliver it until we’re sweaty and tired.

The first two singles from the duo have piqued interest enough that I am genuinely excited for the release of the full monty. I’m old enough not to care if it doesn’t hit the same highs as their previous bands and will be happy to sit back and pick from it what I can. Gallagher and Squire will happily serve it in splatters and swells.

Liam Gallagher: web, bandcamp, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.
John Squire: web, bandcamp, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.

Rock and roll can change your life.