SINGLES AGAIN / Chuck Eddy

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 10^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

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THE LIDS - "No Fool For You"/"Too Late"/"Nothing To Do" (Die Slaughterhaus, 2003)

Garage-punk brats from...somewhere (there's basically no information about them in the Internets), seemingly singing into a toy microphone and hoping to be picked up by the hand-held tape recorder down the hall. Fast, primal slop for hip young caveboys and cavegirls. One chord and one sentence per song, if that. Guy tells us he's no fool for us; girl chimes in randomly in the background, seemingly responding boy's monosyllabic ramblings but lagging behind the beat. "Too late too late too late." "Oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah." Oddly, or maybe not (how easy or difficult would this be?), all three songs are hooky anyway. "All I want is something to do," he sings bored through the blur; then...a time change, which sends the music careening toward some semblance of climax. Which makes "Nothing To Do" the Lids' epic, almost.

(www.grunnenrocks.nl/bands/l/lidsthe.htm)

LOVE AS LAUGHTER -"Hall and Oates Have Disappeared"/ "Looks Like This City's Broken" (SubPop, 2000)

The Stones to Pavement's Beatles? Whatever that means. Anyway, they're from Brooklyn, and "Hall and Oates Have Disappeared" - which, as far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with the Philly blue-eyed-soul duo in question - does have a certain lower-minor-league Exile On Main Street muffle to its shuffle. Doesn't really rock; not much drummer push, but it's got a little roll to it - and in 2000, and maybe even still now, a little roll was at least a step in the right direction for notoriously scared-to-dance indie rock. High-registered stuff about finding a parking spot in the parking lot, then the music switches into a sort of vamp, even almost a hint of disco throb at one point (did they think that was the Hall and Oates part?), with whimsical noises gurgling out of it. Just sort of meanders on and on, but it does quote "Space Oddity" by Bowie at one point. "Looks Like This City's Broken" has more of an apparent low-grade attempt at a boogie riff. Given the city's busted state, the singer suggests, we should just turn around and go back. But to where? (www.myspace.com/loveaslaughter)

MATMOS - "On And On"/DIE MONITR BATSS - "Black Out Cross" (Ache, 2004)

Baltimore-via Frisco duo Matmos work plinks and urps into some robotic semblance of extended funk-like repetition; drum-like objects of some sort double the rhythm, and then a bassline enters -- almost phat, in its own geeky way, though presumably unrecognizable to Curtis Mayfield or Gladys Knight fans who know the original song supposedly being covered. Thing is, when the melody picks up, you can actually hear remnants of a mournful "Freddie's Dead"-style soul melody for a couple minutes; the emotion really accumulates. And then it's back to space-age robot wars. Die Monitr Batss, meanwhile, manage a distant memory of boogie chug in their own post-punk way, with Contortions-or-Lora-Logic-style free-jazz sax splat fleshing out the field. "You can't see me/I can't see you" (or "can," maybe - hard to tell.) "I'm not gonna watch you do it" - so they're not voyeurs. They have more instrumental than vocal energy, though - Die Monotone Batss, they should be called. "Ho Wave," the Portlanders (somehow tangentially related to theoretically dancefloor-unscared indie band the Gossip) call themselves on their Myspace page; har har. Climaxes in yer usual Wagenerian post-Sonic Youth drone-clank. But first, extroverted instrumental parts lead to a nervous breakdown, suggesting an old woman falling out of a wheelchair during a magic show.

(www.myspace.com/matmos1)

MEANEST MAN CONTEST - "Contaminated Dance Step"/ "Feelin' Pretty Psyched (About Love)" (Weapon-Shaped, 2002)

Another San Fran duo; this one via L.A., and rapping. Or at least talking, or reciting poetry, or whatever you call it, with a matter-of-fact diction, about logos and crescendos and managerial positions, words coming at you way too fast for note-taking unless you remember way more shorthand than I do. Not much attempt to use the voice as rhythm or maintain a groove - and the background music sounds more like a movie soundtrack than dance steps, contaminated or otherwise -- but they sure pack in a lot of syllables. Eventually the A-side song turns into some subliminally familiar spiel about how "hyphenated Americans mean divided Americans." An opinion that goes back at least to Teddy Roosevelt, and which may well make Meanest Man Contest unreliable narrators. Then there's another spoken word sample: an intro to Louis Armstrong playing trumpet. Then on the flipside, another long collage suite, returning to what I assume to be the Mean Men's own voices, talking about a male professor who "wasn't fired, he was let go." More changes of direction, more monotonous verbosity, different voices out of each speaker: "It was hidden in the cardboard and the cobwebs, it is not dead." "The stories suffer from deadline pressure." One guy starts almost actually rapping, sounding legitimately underground (rather than under-underground), rhyming about rising like a phoenix something material venereal MCs get murdered in cereal. Pretty sure he's joking. "Aren't we bitter little people, we ought to be unable to say anything except sardonically." Or something like that. He may not be joking there, but then I may not be following him.

(www.myspace.com/meanestmancontest)

DAN MELCHIOR - "Instant Love"/"That's No Way To Get Along" (Smartguy, 2000)

Fuzzed-up megaphone grumbling over blues chords; arty by virtue of production (or lack thereof) not structure. At times he just beats his guitar, the only instrument here I think. One of those eternal eccentrics, hunting for something to kill the pain. From London; now apparently in North Carolina. Yet despite its surface weirdness, "Instant Love" sounds too average. Needs more of a hook, or something, to justify its normality. "That's No Way To Get Along" opens with Delta picking, and is marginally more interesting by virtue of sounding more antiquated. "I'm goin' home/Don't tell my mom." Why not? Would she move before you show up? An old song, I assume. Those lowdown women treat a person wrong, and there's no way to get along. Keeps returning to the same place -- circular like a roundelay, or round like a circle.

(www.myspace.com/dasmenace)

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.