Future Rock of the 1970s...

...reads kinda like an oxymoron, but the genre brought us two incredibly influential bands with sonically disparate but conceptually similar visions of the dystopian Future-Is-Now that loomed large in the noösphere during the late 20th Century: Chrome and Tubeway Army.

Tubeway Army's sound incorporates early Moog technology into what starts out as a fairly traditional snotty-punk-rock vibe complete with some riff-heavy guitar work (My Shadow in Vain, Listen to the Sirens), augmenting the sound with a machine-like precision + presaging the synth-laden new wave of the early 1980s (Down in the Park). Chrome, on the other hand, creates a much more paranoiac soundscape with trippy-ass guitar-driven psychedelia (SS Cygni) + the same snotty-punk vibe (TV as Eyes, Chromosome Damage) that Tubeway Army has mostly discarded by the end of their first album.

Chrome's overall effect is much more organic than that of Tubeway Army; while Tubeway Army often sounds like the danceclub music of a droog-infested future, Chrome sounds more like the raw rebellious punk-rock of a future society oppressed by technological masters.

Without sounding similar at all, each band achieves a powerful sound and evokes comparisons to the druggy futurescapes of both Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs, as well as Anthony Burgess' brilliant A Clockwork Orange.

Post-Tubeway Army releases by frontman Gary Numan continue the development of their sound, as does after-Chrome work by guitarist Helios Creed.

Recommended Tubeway Army releases:
Tubeway Army (1978)
Replicas (1979)

Recommended Chrome releases:
Alien Soundtracks (1978)
Half-Machine Lip Moves (1979)

As I was writing this post, a commercial for some materialistic bullshit came on the television... using Marvin Gaye's brilliant A Funky Space Reincarnation (from his final Motown release Here, My Dear), another excellent piece of future-rock of the late 1970s - this time focusing on future-sex...

Schizophonia... Same Silly Storage Schism

...or "That Fuckin' iPod!"

I am screwed... my friggin' iPod is full at 60Gb, but I am still importing my collection into iTunes. So far, I'm roughly 10Gb over capacity, and that's before importing all of my music collection or adding any other media... and I am not getting a new iPod for Christmas this year. Santa already emailed me + it's all switches + ash for me this time... (sadly, that's all I deserve...)

While I take a shoehorn to my iPod in a last-ditch effort to stuff in a few more gigabytes of space, please dig this mildly risque' video...

The song is "My Baby" by Figplucker. Figplucker is me, and often also includes drummer Matt McKinney.

Eric Beetner crafted the video (evidently from old stripper reels), which was immediately yanked from MySpace + YouTube for adult content violations. So screw those guys, we're hosting it ourselves. Let us know what you think!


Watch the video here!

Oops! Had a small dork-gasm just now...

Posters teasing the upcoming Watchmen film project were released today!

Though I doubt the movie will do the graphic novel justice (see the DVDs of From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta for strong arguments against filming the comicswerk of Alan Moore), I'm having a small fanboy-moment in spite of myself. Like getting a hard-on in pre-algebra, I s'pose...

Anyway, see all of the posters here

Recommended Reading...

Voice of the Fire - Alan Moore

The first novel by magician, comics legend + pop-culture icon Alan Moore builds on some of the same foundations as Moore's excellent script for From Hell - which are, in turn, based at least in part on Iain Sinclair's concepts of psychogeography, by which the storyteller can imbue the location of the tale with its own personality + history.

The tale spans roughly 6000 years, but the setting remains the same: Northampton, England. As Moore himself has related, his use of psychogeography often reveals an underlying pattern that bolsters the direction of his work. There's a pulse inherent in this book, one that returns again + again to violence and subterfuge... resulting in a slowly-unfolding vision of Time's gyric nature. And Moore's clever research brings this pulse to the forefront.

Told in 12 chapters, the novel is narrated from a different first-person perspective in each chapter, presenting the peculiar authorial challenge of crafting a dozen individual internal voices, each with its own vocabulary, mindset, tics, etc... For the most part, Moore succeeds incredibly at this, especially in the first two chapters which present prehistoric parables about trust + truth, and the final chapter, narrated in first-person by Moore as himself.

This is a good, solid read + an excellent first novel. Highly recommended.

Used + new copies available here...

Here's a bonus list of recommended comics-work written by the always-entertaining Alan Moore:

• Miracleman (out-of-print, but there are collected editions)
• Swamp Thing (available in collected editions)
• Watchmen (available in a single collected volume - read it before you see the film, OK?)
• From Hell (available in a single collected volume)
• Promethea (available in collected editions)
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (available in collected editions)
• Lost Girls (available in a three-book slipcased edition)

F.U.C.T. - Dimensional Depth Perception

F.U.C.T. was a brutal band when I saw 'em live in Birmingham circa 1988, and this recording lives up to their live show! This is very reminiscent of Corrosion of Conformity, at least their early stuff (Eye for an Eye, Animosity, Technocracy)... Spastic time-changes, jazzy chords + Voivod-esque gearshifts, insanely fast drums... Highly recommended!

Track listing:

• infectious world
• lost
• ripen
• technikilation
• suekoesng
• my define
• screen
• infraction
• demeaning
• dimensional depth perception
• ungratical

These guys burst forth from the Deep South around the same time as some other wildly different but strangely complementary bands like Lastregus Nosferatus (thrash metal / Atlanta), Clockhammer (post-hardcore / Nashville), Loppybogymi (post-hardcore / Nashville?), Vacation Bible $chool (post-punk / Birmingham), G.N.P. (hardcore / Birmingham), Cafe des Moines (indie-rock / Starkville), Bone Dali (post-hardcore / Auburn), Skeleton Crew (post-punk / Starkville), Vomit Spots (hardcore / Mobile), Flinghammer (funk-punk / Jackson), Guiltmonkey (post-hardcore / Hattiesburg), Compound Fracture (crossover metal-hardcore / Birmingham) and Black Like Vic (post-hardcore / Memphis), among others... These bands were actively gigging throughout the late '80s and provided a lot of excellent live music to scenester kids all over the Deep South!

I found this one on eBay for $10 (shipping included); another release - Into the Aggro - is available on iTunes. The band has reformed (though founding guitarist Brooks passed away in 2001) + has a song-laden + informative MySpace page.

When I got this in the mail on Friday, I threw it right into the CD player in the car... The first thing I noticed is how weird listening to an album in order + in its entirety seems to me. My iPod is almost always set on 'shuffle' + can provide some utterly bizarre playlist material... Click the playlist image for a peek at my Recently Played list (most recent at the top). Ain't no other mailman rockin' his delivery route like I do!!!