Kick to the Throat

I'd been meaning to put up a final Summer Music Report post sooner or later, but I think tonight finally removed any need. That's because I went to see the Magik Markers, and those other shows don't even really belong in the same category. I'd heard vaguely nice things about them (great live, Lee Ranaldo produced the last record, they sound like Sonic Youth, etc.) but it was only eight bucks and I was curious to see openers Tall Firs as well.

I think among shows I've seen only My Morning Jacket and the White Stripes have rivaled them in sheer sustained intensity. With My Morning Jacket it's a very different type of intense experience, and the White Stripes play pretty traditional songs, even if they do kind of mash them all together. The Magik Markers for the most part did not bother with heavily structured songs or intelligible lyrics or really anything other than awesomely reckless abandon. That's not to say they don't have a pretty carefully planned show, but, well... here's a pretty apt live review from Dusted Magazine:

Although she started with barely a whisper, by the halfway point in the Magik Markers' set [singer and guitarist Elisa Ambrogio] was fully possessed, a kicking and screaming demon who kicked, scraped, dragged, and pummeled her guitar into emitting the types of thick, viscous noise that fit perfectly with her band mates. She perched at the edge of the crowd, grabbing heads and daring the audience to try and grab her six strings before she could settle on someone's head. She roared into the microphone, a sight of convulsing, barely containable energy that seemed to come only from the truest desire to spill everything on the stage for all to see. While it seemed at times that a lot of other bands that appeared at the fest were aiming for shock, high brow aesthetics, or the furthest reaches of tripped out drones, the Magik Markers came across as one of the best and most dangerous rock bands working right now. More than anything else, their sound was punk as fuck, not a lame parody of a once valid genre, but a full on kick to the throat of rock and noise in general - daring the formalists to open things up a bit and the noiseniks to make the crowd want to move it.

I should probably get out to more stuff very specifically like this, though what with live music always being a fairly iffy hit-or-miss proposition, the misses could be pretty devastatingly bad. I can recall moments at Neumo's (Junior Boys and Six Organs of Admittance) last year where short blasts of dissonance probably emerged as the highlight. I'm not sure if dabbling in (and really, really enjoying) this classifies me as a "noise dude," but I think Dan Savage would probably say no.

---

Also music-related, Brice asked something about the largesse of music I currently have stockpiled in iTunes, and I told him it had shrunk considerably since last year, which is correct. I now have around 975 albums on there, maybe less. Given a random sampling of about 1/6 of that total, I'm probably familiar with something like 600 of those. That's just a number I've always wondered about. Probably bump that up to between 750 and 900 including stuff to which I am not currently paying any attention.