Desert Island Discourse

“If I Haven’t Heard It, It’s New to Me” month is coming to a gorgeous if baffling end as we cover one of the most inexplicably underrated bands this side of The Chameleons: Kitchens of Distinction. Founded in Tooting, London in the late 80’s as a three-piece, Kitchens of Distinction is maybe the most unjustly…

Are you ready to get down and dirty with the lord? Because you know we are—and so is the subject of this weeks B-Side: The Supreme Jubilees.

These guys are Andrew's contribution to the one-album wonder side of "If I Haven't Heard It, It's New to Me Month", and boy, they're the epitome of the form. The Fresno, CA. Sextet (two sets of brothers, all cousins) existed for only a couple of years, released an album under extreme duress (they were kicked out of their first studio for being too funky), and were quickly forgotten. Luckily, the tireless crate-diggers at Light in the Attic managed to find that sole document—It'll All Be Over—and put it back out into the spotlight. And thank God they did, because this is something strange and special.

The Supreme Jubilees are ostensibly a gospel band, and sure enough the Lord is in just about every word they sing. But musically it's something completely outside what most would consider gospel. It's a collection of funk jams, flirtations with disco, and the fatalistic slow jams more akin to This Mortal Coil than Blind Joe Taggart. There's nothing else quite like what this album offers, and you better believe we dig in to every weird detail. Also: Sleepy Maxes, family affairs, and a 15 minute discussion on the place of anal sex in music.

Hoo boy, this month has taken a dark turn. In the first official installment of this year's "If I Haven't Heard It, It's New to Me" month, Andrew has brought to the table the works of Parenthetical Girls, with the idea that it would spurn an interesting conversation between him and Max. He was right.

Parenthetical Girls is the project of one Zac Bennington, owner of the highest cheekbones in the Pacific Northwest, as well as someone whose recently earned the dubious title of Max's Most Hated Musician. A protege of Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart, who produced his first album, Zac started off making lo-fi bedroom music before spiraling into more a direct Xiu Xiu pastiche and, eventually, string-laden chamber pop. He's also a smug asshat whose lyrics jump gayly over the line between provocative and malicious. You can see where some inter-host conflict would arise.

But their growth as musicians is a fascinating one, and beneath the terrible personalities are some actually really good songs. They're basically the indie embodiment of cognitive dissonance, and the resulting episode can kindly be called one of our most animated. If you're a Parenthetical Girls fan, we are deeply, deeply sorry. Also: hateful rosetta stones, the Papa Roach discography, and an incredibly out of place Maroon 5 reference.

Music:

Handsome Devil

C86 is Killing My Life

Inspirational Shortpants

Keyholes and Curtains

Unmentionables

This Regrettable End

Evelyn McHale

A Note to Self

A Song for Ellie Greenwich

The Common Touch

Brimstone and Vaseline

A Quick Personal Note: if you've been keeping up these past few weeks, you've probably noticed some issues with the episodes lately. While the artists have been universally fantastic (and, I think, the discourse has mostly kept up), our audio quality has varied wildly, we've been putting up episodes late, and I've been neglecting summation duties. It sucks, and we're deeply sorry to our regular listeners for that. Life has been pretty chaotic lately, with major shifts in jobs and living situations (all good!), and in the midst of all of that it's been difficult to keep up the level of production quality we aim for. This episode, on Max-Favorite One Album Wonder Life Without Buildings, is a step in the right direction, but the audio quality on Andrew's track is still a bit rough and, due to an un-undoable editing mistake, there's like a minute cut out of the beginning (nothing important happened in it, but it's an awkward jump). I still think it's a good episode in spite of that, and for what it's worth things are finally settling down. Thanks for sticking with us, and I hope you enjoy the episode.

Summer's back, and with summer comes rerun season, which sucks, but also means it's time for our annual "If I Haven't Heard It, It's New to Me!" month! Which, yes, is starting in late June and will end mid-July. But hell, the Summer Solstice was a couple of days ago, so let's just ignore the Gregorian calendar and enjoy ourselves for once. 

Anyway, this month, Andrew and Max are each bringing two artists that the other has never listened to—one with a full discography, and a one-album wonder. For this B-Side, we're covering Max's one-album contribution: Any Other City by Life Without Buildings.

Life Without Buildings is sort of the quintessential one-album wonder—they existed for three years, released one incredible album, and broke up when the band became more trouble than the members were interested in. It started as sort of a lark—three art school students started making their own brand of Don Caballero-influenced math rock, and eventually brought on painter Sue Tompkins to yelp over their songs. Somehow, this alchemy resulted in one of the best albums of the early-oughts. They made moving music, the kind of sound that's tailor made to long commutes and city walks. They're fun and beautiful and weird and hilarious, and their single published work is pretty much a masterpiece

And hey, Andrew ended up liking them too. So, cool stuff. Also: mondegreens, memes, and Fallujan Streets.

Music:

Pop Life

The Ting Goes – Roadman Shaq

Philip

Juno

PS Exclusive

The Leanover

Let’s Get Out

New Town

Love Trinity

It's a shorter episode this week, but, much like the woman who inspired it, it packs a wallop far outside its diminutive size. That's right, this week we're talking about the other five-foot assassin—Neko Case. And it's packed with all the animal violence and subversive masculinity you'd expect.

Neko Case has been in music for nearly 25 years now, from her humble beginnings drumming for Vancouver punk bands to her current status as one of the most respected songwriters of her era. But in spite of her impeccable lyricism, musicianship, and genre-hopping experiments, she's been somewhat marred by the abominable "alt-country" tag for her whole solo career—which is why, up to this week, Max had never heard of her.

So thank god Andrew was enthusiastic enough to bring her to the island, because her discography is one of the most fascinating we've ever picked through. After two albums of relatively straight-forward county, Neko Case gradually transformed into a strange, surrealist poet, someone who could adopt Nick Cave darkness and New Pornographers pop with equal aplomb.

It's a haunting blast from start to finish—sort of like being shot out of a cannon into a haunted house. Also: the Necco Wafer fortune, more a capella redemptions, and a swarm of Madonners.

Music

Favorite

Bowling Green

Furnace Room Lullaby

Things That Scare Me

Runnin’ Out of Fools

That Teenage Feeling

The Needle Has Landed

Star Witness

This Tornado Loves You

Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth

People Got a Lotta Nerve

Man

Nearly Midnight, Honolulu

Madonna of the Wasps

Last Lion of Albion

Bad Luck

Gumball Blue

Hold On, Hold On

Middle Cyclone

Knock Loud

Jackie Shane is really really good.

Sorry for the late episode, pithy description forthcoming, but the gist will almost certainly be along the lines of "hey y'all did you know that Nina Simone is in fact very, very good?" Something like that.

When was the last time you celebrated The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill? It's been two decades since Ms. Lauryn Hill released her first and, as of today, only solo studio album, and outside of some occasional appearances and a rich history of misused samples (including Drake's execrable new single "Nice for What"), it's rarely something that enters contemporary music discussion. It feels like one of those albums you're more likely to find on Greatest Albums of All Time lists than in anyone's discman, to which we loudly exclaim: fuck that.

20 years on, as Lauryn Hill gears up for an extensive tour, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill remains one of the most vital, complex, and unique debuts in music history, a dense document of faith, heartache, and motherhood with a fire and wisdom that belie the age of the woman writing it (she was 23 at the time). It set the tone for all pop and R&B music for decades to come while still sounding entirely original, even today. It's really great, is what we're saying, even if it isn't quite the wall-to-wall masterpiece we might remember it being.

So yes, we talk about our issues with the album, and the difficulties of returning to an album like this after so many years of cultural baggage. But we also talk about how effortlessly it shrugs off that weight, how startlingly complete this first album feels, and how dang charming Lauryn Hill was and remains. And yeah, absolutely we talk about Sister Act 2. How could we not?

Also: Shorty for Mayor, dead old white men, and another inexplicable jab at New Jersey. 

Music:

Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You

Lost Ones

Ex-Factor

Tell Him

Doo Wop (That Thing)

Lord, has there ever been a musician as eclectic, iconic, and utterly her own thing as Björk Guðmundsdóttir? We're talking about an Icelandic poet who recorded her first album at age 12, has worked with everyone from Michel Gondry to Timbaland, and is still best remembered for wearing a swan back in '01. Her discography is a vast, complex, and intimidating landscape, packed with clubland tributaries and avant garde vocal experiments. She can swing from heartbreaking to absurd in a single syllable. 

She's really cool, is what we're saying. 

Luckily, we have a brand new island visitor here to help on our Björk-venture: musician, dog owner, and dear friend Gabrielle Smith (of Ò and Bellows fame). With her help, we tackle a body of work as intense and difficult as it is funny and heartfelt, picking through experiments and masterpieces and complicated feelings to find our personal desert island albums (which turned out to be awfully difficult). It was way more fun than that sounds. Also: masters of unlocking, stuffed-up banshees, and a referendum for the retroactive impeachment of councilman Einar Örn Benediktsson.

Music:

All Is Full of Love (Death Cab for Cutie)

Human Behaviour

There’s More to Life Than This (Live Version)

Come to Me

The Anchor Song

Army of Me

Hyper Ballad

It’s Oh So Quiet

Hunter

Unravel

Pluto

Hidden Place

Undo

Pagan Poetry

Pleasure Is All Mine

Ancestors

Triumph of a Heart

Earth Intruders

Declare Independence

Vertebrae By Vertebrae

Crystalline

Hollow (which is what Max was actually talking about, not Mutual Core, apologies)

Virus

Stonemilker

Black Lake

Quicksand

All is Full of Love

It’s Not Up to You

Walkabout (The Sugarcubes)

Man, the past was weird, huh? When frosted tips were cool and we all thought George W. Bush was the worst we'd ever get? Such innocent, naive times. Well, at Desert Island Discourse, one of our many mission statements is to reveal the truths of the past in the harsh light of day, and it's with that intent that we're introducing a new segment for the show: Nostalgia Check. In these episodes, Andrew and Max will be revisiting the CD wallets of their tween years to see how they hold up, one album at a time. This week, we're covering Smash by The Offspring and Give Up by The Postal Service.

The bands couldn't be more different; The Offspring were vanguards of the pop-punk boom of the mid-90's, whilst The Postal Service's lone album is responsible for ushering in the soft boy era of the early-oughts, leaving a million Garden State's in its wake. But they both speak to the core of this series, in that they're both perfectly designed to appeal to the young and angsty. Whether you're the kind of angry, bullied skater kid listening to "Come Out and Play" on a loop or a sad ball of angst with Ben Gibbard lyrics scrawled in their journal, there is something in these albums that will speak to you loud and clear.

But it's 2018 now, your hosts are pushing 30, and we've both long since repressed the feelings that made these albums so important to us now. Can we still find the love our 12 year old selves expressed so fervently? Or will we cover our eyes in shame? Find out in our inaugural episode of Nostalgia Check!

Also: Seth Green Classics, the genealogy of the Crazy Taxi soundtrack, and more weirdly dated references than you can shake a devil stick at.

Music:

Brand New Colony

Come Out and Play