Recent WFMU New Bin faves

Mueran Humanos, S/T (Blind Prophet / Old Europa Cafe)
Mueran Humanos (Die Humans) is a boy/girl duo from Argentina via Berlin who manage to combine a dark synthwave heart with muy rockismo guitars & fuzz-bass and an effortless pop sensibility. Like their sexy-trashyglam-slasherfilm visual aesthetic, the wrappings are aloof, cold and violent, but the melodies are often sophisticated and pretty. Best case in point is the brilliant slow-burn of album-opener "Horas Tristes", an 8-minute piece of carefully constructed patience featuring dub percussion, kraut guitars, horror movie organ, a lovely vocal chorus and perfectly timed development of layers and events. References to Suicide, Ilitch, and Chrome are made explicit in the fine mixtape the band put together for the 20jazzfunkgreats blog (dl it here) but I also hear strong (surely accidental) echoes of the great early-oughts multi-national San Fran band Troll (anyone remember them?). Members Carmen Burguess (synth / vox) and Tomas Nochteff (bass / vox) sing entirely in Spanish. Carmen's beautiful yet horrifying collages provide their album artwork, while Tomas contributes the menacing charisma of a creepily handsome cross between Joe Strummer and Costes. Both are great screamers. Listen to "Horas Tristes" (stream). (Scott Williams)

WE - s/t 10" (Kollektiv) Oh jeez, another band strapping on some kind of ironic take on childhood-era pop hits, replacing Devo hats with 2001 monoliths on their heads and injecting shprocketsy-coldness into pop. Their manifesto includes this bit of prose: "Challenging the individualism of the Western pop song, WE reveals the latent politics of the love song and transforms chart hits by annihilating their liberal subject and replacing it with a collective consciousness. Through the simple substitution of the plural for the singular, intimacy becomes a form of collective action and the unique the universal. Despite being the mass product of an anonymous culture industry, the very premise of the pop song is one of extreme individualism, elevating the ‘one’ subject of romantic desire above any other and declaring one moment in time more significant (‘when I first saw you’) than any other." Bullshittin' us? Well, it's bottom line is it's pretty enjoyable. Equal parts Freur and the Better Beatles, WE grapple with and garble up Black Flag, George Michael, the Beatles, Whitney Houston and others and give you back exactly whatever you want to put into it (i.e. more pop music). They're fairly certain that they're not going to break down the walls ala Kraftwerk, but they're gonna enjoy the stripping of it all for the sake of art and I'm all for a schrpocketsy stare-down every once in a blue moon. Listen: "We're About To Have a Nervous Breakdown" (stream) (Brian Turner)

Prisoners Go Go Band - Live! At the Butchery with Special Guests On Fire! (S-S) A university experiment in South Africa circa 1980, PGGB were a the result of hours of jamming, collage and freewheeling that remained truly underground for several reasons, I guess mostly due to the conservative climate of the country and especially the fact the band was mixed-race (2/3 Indian) in highwater Apartheid times. They eventually pressed up 250 copies of vinyl, most of which got ruined from a glue mishap in their DIY-paste-up proceedings. Most of the salvagable copies were just sold to friends and rejected for proper release even by labels like ReR. Now out on S-S after some major detectivework, the recordings sound like a basement Faust Tapes done live rife with some rubbery Pere Ubu basslines, motorik drumming, surround-sound vocal mantras, gnome-like spirits of Cecil Taylor and Derek Bailey in assorted corners. High invention, low budgetry. Win win. By the way, the label has a nice assortment of MP3's up on the Free Music Archive for grabs. Stream: "Air Raid Shelter". (Brian Turner)

Peter Hope & The Jonathan S. Podmore Method - Dry Hip Rotation (Klanggalerie), I suspect this album found few allies in the medical community back in '86. Originally released on Native Records, the home of Hoodoo Talk, Peter Hope's contemporaneous and fantastic left-field collaboration with Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire, this one-off project featured Hope, vocalist of The Box, a Sheffield band formed upon the dissolution of Clock DVA's original lineup, and Podmore, later of The Corn Dollies. Hope's warped humor and over-the-top vocal strangulations are a perfect match for the bizarro universe of Podmore's musical mind. Each multi-tracked sound construction feels like a hallucination. "Canal" rumbles like someone's unhappy digestive tract before Hope unexpectedly breaks into a sea shanty. "217" shifts on a dime into a Birthday Party screamer tumbling forth with any sense of band and recognizable song structure surgically removed. The messed-with vocals, tape loops, clanging percussion and use of major household appliances, rhythm boxes, and guitars keep the listener perpetually off-balance, ready for more propulsive confusion lurking just around the corner. Mocking self-centered humanity, consumer culture, and the pharmaceutical industry, Hope careens into odes to the creepiness of the kitchenette, paranoid ravings of home invasions and washbasin vandalism, and tales of industrial accidents. What's not to like? Predecessors like the Pop Group or Neubauten come to mind, and like them Dry Hip Rotation is not bland, indeterminate defeatism on a stick. It's great to hear an album that not only has something to say but also has a laugh while bashing the crap out of a pipe to make you listen. In the 21^st century, this reissue is just what the doctor ordered! Listen: "Dog-Eared Pictures of Birdwing Cars" (stream) (Daniel Blumin)

Comments

[John Hell]

Very tasty treats. Thanks for sharing these. I love the build up in the Mueran Humanos track. It creeps up on you.