Them Apples

originally published October 10, 2001

CIRCULATORY SYSTEM
Circulatory System
Cloud

Like both proper Olivia Tremor Control full-lengths, Circulatory System (the work of Olivia's co-founder Will Cullen Hart and most of his OTC colleagues, with the noteworthy exception of sixth Lemon Piper Bill Doss) could only exist as a double-album. This sort of groggy psychedelia rewards only deep, unquestioning immersion. It's not frisky, and its target audience is hardly ticklish. (While more sensual and cerebral than OTC at its best, CS pleads an emotional nolo, like any good hallucinogen.) It bumps and sways but never rocks, not even in spite. With seemingly every ass that ever indented a stool at the Flicker Bar in the kitchen, and lacking Doss' sense of (relative) thrift, it's a molasses-glazed mess of a record, an overbaked, sun-poisoned fever dream. It'll charm/convert approximately zero casual listeners. However, with the needed chronological and psychic investment, Circulatory System provides some of the juiciest rewards available on Athens' increasingly fragmented neo-psych scene.

Total immersion: 1. Inherit a rickety old house with broken shutters, hardwood floors and spiral staircases. Or squat in one. Live alone. 2. Start collecting old clocks. Learn to fix the ones that don't work. Work only enough to afford this hobby. 3. Buy a bitching set of headphones, with a cord long enough to allow for liberal somnambulism. 4. Learn enough about your own physiology to know when that big white sleeping pill will catch up with those two mild psychedelics and engineer it to happen during Circulatory System's "Now" during step 5. 5. Fall asleep to Circulatory System, set on infinite repeat. 6. Wake up with the headphone cord wrapped around your neck. Analyze your results. Repeat as needed (desired).

Circulatory System plays at the 40 Watt on Thursday, October 11. Read more on p. 25.
BASEMENT JAXX

Rooty
XL/Astralwerks

A pounding drive-thru carwash of underwater funk holds up neo-bubblegum callout hooks abstracted into no-context ether. Like most of what you'll hear at a disco (let's just give it up and call this shit disco, want to?), it's bullshit, in all likelihood: Carefully designed to sound simultaneously more innocent and experienced than it is. Still, it's certainly amusing bullshit, and good bullshit beats hype every time, from every direction.

Air too stuffy? Daft Punk not flirtatious or joyful enough? Basement Jaxx brings the underwater Eurofunk with the giddiness of Prince And The Revolution's "Kiss," the friction of Prince And The N.P.G.'s "Gett Off" and the eerily dehumanized teeth-grinding of M/A/R/R/S' "Pump Up The Volume" (for extra credit). The intriguingly syncopated "Romeo," the dizzying "Get Me Off" or the intermittently ELO-ish "Where's Your Head At" may be the perfect numerals for you to cut a rug to, file away and gleefully rediscover years later, when things get really humorless.

P.S.: Astralwerks desperately needs a new art director. Apply, and use me as a reference.

P.P.S.: I'll take you one further. Any sort of bullshit beats any sort of hype. Every time. (104 West 29th St., NY, NY 10001)

Basement Jaxx plays at Earthlink Live in Atlanta on Friday, October 12.
STEREOLAB

Sound-Dust
Elektra

I can't figure out who still gives a fuck about Stereolab. Björk outclasses them every time she pulls back the covers. Surely the last droning, mothball-reeking collegiate Stereolab holdout was sucked into the Can and Neu! nostalgia boom months ago and realized he/she was taken for a long ride over the last eight years. Surely Motel and Crippled Dick Hot Wax have mined up enough swank old Europorn soundtracks to demonstrate the fact that Stereolab was never any more original than Combustible Edison, just so intimidatingly academic that no one bothered to check its references. Surely Die Moulinettes spread the knowledge, at least on the old continent, that this sort of cosmopolitan-sippin' ersatzia can be pretty goddamn fun when it isn't so pompous and distant. Surely anyone who heard Jim O'Rourke's Eureka was so charmed by the hint of melancholy showing beneath his Bacharachian affectations that this sort of aloof, abstract, supremely cynical fluff is no longer necessary. Nevertheless, even Komeda and The Cardigans out of the picture, we get another Stereolab record, containing more defiantly uninteresting pleasantness. 1994's Mars Audiac Quintet was the last sign of a heart beating beneath the group's plastic shell — the last time snapping fingers could be heard in the vicinity of a Stereolab record — but the Lab keeps clocking in and bastardizing its snotty pose.

Good pop is at once furtively hedonistic and elegantly submissive. By contrast, Stereolab, even in its more melodic mode (as last heard on ’97's Dots And Loops, or so I've been told), is sadistically cold in its id-lessness. The wretched "Captain Easychord" is the best example of everything resigned and frigid about Stereolab: whoever is in charge of the "arrangement" throws in a slide guitar, horns and an abrupt tempo change, all signifying nothing but opaque desperation. It's like putting lipstick and a corsage on a work of photo-realism. Sound-Dust makes no effort at inspired satire and fails even as uninspired function. I doubt the voice of Ray Charles could hold this calculated gimmickry together, much less Laetitia Sadier's fashionably detached drone of a sigh.

Like all Stereolab, Sound-Dust floats but never dips or soars. It hovers. It's a lifeless daydream about graceful pop. Hark, Stereolab: The day is fast approaching when name-checking Archie Shepp will no longer save your vacant souls. (75 Rockefeller Plaza, NY, NY 10019)
13 GHOSTS

13 Crimson Ghosts: 13 Ghosts' Tribute To The Misfits
13 Ghosts

Punk owes as much to surf-rock as it does to any genre of music (with the arguable exception of polka, natch). The Dead Kennedys were little more than an overamped, politically charged surf band, and any perceptive Misfits fan can see the overlap between the cartoonish sci-fi pretensions of The Ventures and The Tornadoes and the cartoonish horror pretensions of Glenn Danzig. In the spirit of unity, the beantown surf combo 13 Ghosts submits, for your liquor-swilling consideration, a clumsy collection of ocean-sprayed instrumental Misfits covers.

Sure, the Ghosts miss more notes than they hit, and they don't always stay on the same bar. And, in the absence of Danzig's comically grandiose ethos and gripping rhino-in-heat bellow, these tunes ain't much, uh, compositionally. Still, this is excellent ramshackle fun, and there's undeniable revisionist creativity beneath the likable amateurishness. Fuck a bunch of tats and tees, these jokers are living the band and the music they love. Look for them on Cartoon Network, sooner than later. (P.O. Box 58, Boston, MA 02134)