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Meg
Lee Chin, Crush Violet, Reload, Zone Wire
Satyricon
125 NW 6th Ave., 243-2380
10 pm Sunday,
Dec. 17
$7
Meg Lee Chin:
Junkies and Snakes
(Invisible)
Nitzer Ebb's Julian Beeston, Test Dept.'s Martin King,
Sheep on Drugs' Lee "Bagman" Fraser, the ubiquitous Jeff
"Critter" Newell and others hold their remix knives against
the throat of several songs from Meg Lee Chin's Piece
and Love album. The deepest (and dopest) cuts add new
sounds to the techno-funking originals, like the veering
noise underneath the spoken-word lope of "Nutopia" or the
stoner-dub drum'n'bass beats rattling around "Heavy Scene."
The two new tracks--"And God She Created Civilization" and
"Bittersweet and Sour"--may be Chin's best to date, with
sinisterly spinning synths and spirograph guitars speeding
around Chin's energized rants on each. Unlike many remix
EPs, not only for the converted.
Elysian Fields:
Queen of the Meadow
(Jet Set)
Foetus' Jim Thirlwell once told Elysian Fields chanteuse
Jennifer Charles that she could "fuck an entire room with
a look." By the sound of it, she could practically fellate
them through the speakers, too. But unlike, say, Liz Phair,
who tosses off blow-job boasts like so much scenester namedropping,
Charles' flickering whisper of a torch-singer voice seems
as natural as nudity to Jim Spagg and a million times more
appealing. Over a crawling backdrop of minor-key guitar
shimmers and piano plinks, Charles lures listeners through
Elysian Fields' gloomily gothic cabaret-pop like a siren
drawing sailors lost in the gloaming, hoping to follow her
licked-velvet vocals to eternal sanctuary and finding shadowy
romantic doom instead. With its femme-fatale personality
sketched out via moody murder ballads and sultry, jazz-draped
seduction numbers, this Queen of the Meadow is one
to invite in with caution--the moist gorgeousness of it
all is as alluring as any aphrodisiac, but could quite possibly
be dangerous to your mental health.
7 Seconds:
Scream Real Loud
(Side One Dummy)
In recent years, an older and wiser 7 Seconds has made
a smart choice: it returned to the music it made when the
band was younger and wilder. This recent live document captures
the Sacto-via-Reno HC crew sprinting through 26 veritable
classics of the genre ("This Is the Angry," "Regress, No
Way," "Walk Together, Rock Together," and the somehow-not-irrelevant
"Young 'Til I Die") with more sprightly energy than 99 percent
of the dope-dulled, young Warped Tour skate-rock babies.
Sound quality is impressively clean. Too clean, in fact--the
anthemic crowd shoutalongs are shoved to the background,
and the guitars don't always bite quite deeply enough to
strike the heart. But I'd still dive into this hyperspeed
punk pit before the meatheaded metal dressed up in hardcore's
clothes these days. And after the misguided melodic drift
into U2 Land on 1987's Live: One
Plus One, it's good to finally have
a 7 Seconds live album on which Kevin doesn't strive to
be a self-styled messiah like Bono. Learn from it.
Hampsterdance:
The Album
(Koch)
All you need to know about this yodel-sampling piece of
post-Chipmunk poptronic shite can be found at the Retarded
Candy Raver website: www.wiskate.com/rave/raveframe.htm.
Weep for the future, friends.
Limp Bizkit:
Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water
(Flip/Interscope)
"This ain't no fucking Limp Bizkit show," Kevin Seconds
tells the kids on 7 Seconds' Scream Real Loud (see
above), and for good reason: he don't want no leatherneck
jocks coming 'round his show and acting all badass and tuff,
yo, by playing linebacker and blindsiding someone in the
pit. This, naturally, is the primary appeal of Limp Bizkit--unchecked
aggression, simplistic and mean, without the slightest chance
of one's brains distracting from the brawn's small-dicked
overcompensation. Angry? Awesome. Direct it at the politicians
and businessmen who made this, as young Master Durst sings
so eloquently on Starfish, "a fucked-up world." But
if you're so strong, NüMetal man, why you always punching
people in the back of the head?
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