Been a month

It has been a month and two days since my last Hey Irony post. Over the last month, I painted a house, watched a lot of baseball, wrote a few songs, and fell for a girl. Fell hard. Didn't work out at all so I'm pretty down right now but I'm getting better. I'm visiting Daniel in Phoenix tomorrow and staying for five or six days. When I get back, I'm going to the city to see Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon fame and then staying in Westchester for a couple of days to write songs with Quinn. Yup, I'm trying to move on and I'm trying to do it right.

Anyway, the first thing I did yesterday when it ended was whip out my three Pygmy Lush LPs (or two plus the Turboslut split LP). I bought Bitter River when I went to the city last weekend, so I did them in succession, took a shot of Jameson, spent time with a good friend, watched the new Harry Potter, and overall did my best. It honestly would've been a pretty good day if I hadn't started out at negative eight million, but that's how it goes. I wrote a song about her the night before and I think it's pretty good. I can't wait to give it the proper treatment in front of people. Anyway, that's my month, especially the last few days. Getting out west should help a lot.

I just uploaded the Pygmy Lush/Turboslut split LP. It's been exceedingly hard to find in MP3 form, which is a shame, because I had always thought of how great it'd be to listen to these songs in any number of situations. As it turns out, I was completely right. Since this is my blog, I can write about this in as much detail as I want, so I'm going to. I'll probably post it over on GIRTH CRISIS with a shorter review and with a few other albums over the next few days or weeks or whatever, but I'm going to post it on here now.

DOWNLOAD PYGMY LUSH/TURBOSLUT SPLIT LP

I bought this record exclusively for the Pygmy Lush side. I posted a live set they did on the radio that featured a then-untitled and absolutely excellent track a while back. Not long after I heard that, they posted the song "White Oblivian" on their Myspace and I listened to that about five times. These songs proved to be indicative of the new material as a whole: the loud songs, like "White Oblivian," are snarling, noisy, and ferocious, and sometimes fast, faster than anything on Bitter River but not quite veering back into Pg.99 territory. Chris Taylor can still yell and scream with the best of them. The untitled song, which turned out to be "Proud King of the Doomed," does show the marked change PL's quiet songs have undergone, though. There are three here, and "Proud King" kicks off with a very dreamy and elegant line, a feeling which continues throughout the song. The two other quiet songs, "It's a Good Day to Hide" and "November Song" are much longer and more swirling, which, especially in the case of the former, suit the songs well. "Good Day to Hide" is, at least to me, the most depressing song PL have done. It's beautiful and it's a great one to sing along to when everything fucking sucks.

I only spun that side for about the first month this record was in my hands, but I knew that one day I would have to flip it over and spin Turboslut's side. When I did, I was fucking steamrolled. The first song, "Speed," starts off with this killer slow, pseudo-Sabbath out-of-tune riff while one of the girls in this band spits some of the most miserable, negative lyrics I've ever heard. "This is awesome," I said to myself as I gazed wide-eyed at my ceiling and listened to four women tear my ears apart. The genre I'd generally put this in is the ever-controversial "grunge," but this "grunge" does something for me that Pygmy Lush can't do, even though PL are my favorite band going right now (and it just occurred to me that Turboslut are not. R.I.P.). Honestly, I put this more in a league with Master of Puppets, Black Ships, and the mighty Sabbath themselves: I just grit my teeth and bang my fucking head and yell along to some of the words, and believe me, shit like "Gut my arms like fish/armpit to wrist, armpit to wrist" is great to speak and think about. It occurred to me after I dazedly put the record back into its sleeve that Turboslut are also unique in another way: they're the first "female" band I've ever heard to not seem dominated by the need to be respected, or to need to prove that "chicks can rock." Actually, as I was typing that, the Vivian Girls came to mind, but Turboslut are like the negative of them: their music is anything BUT cute.

All in all, I have an inkling this split (yes, a split) is going to be one of the most enduring albums of 2009 for this year. It'll probably get bumped out of #1 by the new Darkest Hour, but I'm not even sure The Eternal Return will have the staying power of this. Yes.