Father of the Bride is Vampire Weekend's Blonde. But not their Blonde on Blonde. Or is it Blond? That's what the cover says. No, I think it's Blonde.
The guys from Sunn O))) dress like wizards, but Steve Albini actually is one.
Possible Humans are extremely Melbourne in that weirdly specific way that bands from Melbourne are. Dry and jangly and direct and melodic with just a hint of bitterness. The first few songs are great, but then I zone out a little, so I don't know.
Billy Woods isn't the most charismatic, energetic, transformative, convivial, melodic, magnetic, revolutionary, or even entertaining rapper, but he writes like a damn Pulitzer winner. Three brief excerpts:
But the sun crept,
diggin' at that empty house as the shadow stretched
The dog ran off, didn't come back yet
Overseas connection choppy, she's gettin' worse
Your sister talked to the nurse, everybody in church
Everybody wants to know if you comin'
But they won't say the words
I don’t wanna go see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
These are just three kinda random pulls, but every song on this album plays out with the tension and release of a very good short story. And not in like a "um actually rappers are really storytellers have you ever listened to Ghostface?" kind of way. Even though Ghostface is great. But Billy Woods is on his own level as far as wordsmithing goes. And the beats he works with are dark, minimal, and weird, making this whole album a gripping listen, if not a very fun one.
Have you ever noticed that the second disc of All Things Must Pass really sucks?
Brutus is a metal (post hardcore?) band from Belgium, with a rare triple threat drummer-slash-frontwoman, who sounds exactly like Bjork destroying her vocal chords to At The Drive In. The first two songs they released convinced me this would be the album of the year, and the album art was even engaging enough that I hauled myself all the way to Williamsburg to buy a physical copy of it on its release day. Two weeks later, I'm already kinda bored with it. After the initial excitement of hearing Bjork howl her guts out to some steely, reverby heaviness, you get a little sick of hearing Bjork howl her guts out to steely reverby heaviness. And also it's not actually Bjork.
This is a very lovely album of graceful Laurel Canyon-inspired writer-pop, lush pristine and precise, and that's all I really have to say about it at the moment. I just wanted to post this right away because the album cover is so nice that I want it up at the top of this blog for a while.
This new These New Puritans album isn't as good as that old These New Puritans album. But it's still real good, in a way that music in 2019 rarely is. Slow, thoughtful, intense. I'm not going to sit and write a big obituary for Talk Talk's Mark Hollis (which is a huge bummer, and he's every bit the genius all the other obituaries have made him out to be), but These New Puritans really do feel to me like a 21st century continuity of Hollis's late Talk Talk and solo work. Not at all in a soundalike way, but in the way that they seem spiritually in touch with each deliberate sound they make. I have issues with some of their choices that I don't with Hollis (such as, why are so many of their instruments electronically programmed instead of recorded in studio?), but the effect in the end is nearly always beautiful.
(Side note: The CD version of Inside The Rose has fantastically designed packaging. Clear sleeves, overlapping printing, a unique booklet. I know nobody really buys CDs anymore [of course not "nobody," but that's the standard line], but it's worth checking out if you're in to this kind of thing.)
When Moon Tooth's Chromaparagon came out a couple years ago, I liked the shit out of it. It was easily in my top 2 or 3 or 5 albums of that year, and I actually listened to it. A ton. It took a while to fully embrace it, because at first blush their music leans pretty heavily into the lamest of muses. Incubus, for one. Alien Ant Farm (even though, look, I kinda like Alient Ant Farm). Tool (sigh, same). And especially Dillinger Escape Plan, who isn't necessarily lame, but they're not really at the cutting edge of metal in the 20-teens. If you weren't really paying attention, Moon Tooth could strike you as a marginally progressive nu metal or post hardcore band, and then you'd never think about them again. This is what I nearly did at first, but some of their music was just too interesting to ignore. The more I listened, the more even the initially eye-rolling parts started to reveal themselves as subtly brilliant. Drum patterns played with rhythm while guitar lines went to surprising places; riffs would morph into new forms instead of repeating ad nauseam, and actually revealed an unpredictable, Mastodon influence that wasn't initially apparent; the singer didn't just sounds like The Guy From Incubus, but he actually found surprising and soulful melodies within the band's chaotic churn. And perhaps most amazingly, given the state of metal over the last, oh, 25 years, their music is fun. It's energetic, affirming, and downright joyful.I swear I listened to this fucker once a week the entire year of 2016.
Then a month ago, as I hoped might happen (they're from Long Island, and I'm now here in New York), I caught them live at a heavy metal bar in Greenpoint. The bar was over half empty, which is maybe to be expected because it was a weekday night and they hadn't yet released their new record (that this review is ostensibly about), but most simply because Moon Tooth is not a popular band. Did you read the first couple sentences of this post? They're not cool, their music is not en-vogue, and they are basically ignored by the metal cook kids table. Still, it was a bummer to see how few people actually came out to see this band, because shit: they put on a show. They play with energy and feeling like you barely see these days, the singer constantly jumping into the crowd, running back and forth (even running back to the bar to sing directly to seated drinkers, who may or may not have even been there for the show), guitar player fucking feeling it. But they weren't just a bunch of douchebags hamming it up on stage. They were total pros. They played flawlessly, tight as hell, and exploding with energy. Honestly one of the best performances I've seen a band give in a long, long time. I was double sold.
And now their sophomore album Crux is out. Honestly there's nothing terribly surprising on it, no major stylistic shifts, no huge surprises, except maybe for the proggy-ass double-time King Crimson saxophone breakdown at the end of the opening track, or the Van Halen influence that shows up for brief moments on two different songs. But it's fucking great, from front to back, in a way that confirms everything I'd thought about these guys in the last couple years. And more; I'm honestly at the point right now that I feel comfortable calling Moon Tooth one of the best metal bands working today. Full stop. I don't think many other people will jump on that train, but whatever. Maybe they speak to me in a way they don't speak to other people. Maybe they need to get some high profile gigs to convince the tastemakers of their value. Maybe their bass player needs to stop wearing a backwards baseball hat.
Crux rules. Moon Tooth rules. I promise my next post won't be as long.
La Dispute sounds like if Sparta took a few years off after their first album and got really into poetry and Slint.
Holy hell this album is good. These guys come from the Chicago DIY/noise/punk scene (in fact Erin, who used to be extremely cool and lived in a warehouse in the middle of that scene, kinda knew these guys), and they've been described by music outlets in those noise-adjacent terms. And I guess they're pretty lo-fi, they eschew nimble guitar solos for squalls of noise, and they have songs titles like "Tween Shitbag," but to my ears this is metal through-and-through. But this is beyond just 'a few Chicago noise dudes getting together and trying to be a metal band,' this is legit quality trash metal. Even while the intensity is through the roof on every single track, the riffing and chord construction is downright sophisticated. Minors turn to majors, shit gets augmented, bridges take surprise turns, dissonant assaults get thrown in when necessary, no decision is ever the wrong one. Their aesthetic promises a snotty joke, but their output is exceptional. If I have any qualms, it's in the vocals, which maybe do lean more towards a noise punk thing, but whatever. They're intense and real, rather than a guy trying to be a metal guy. Shit, did I mention I like this album?
It's been a long time since I've really had faith or excitement in anything Animal Collective related. In my own estimation, it's been diminishing returns since Feels, which was a long time ago now. Actually I don't want to think about how long. Same goes for Panda Bear himself, whose Person Pitch album was pretty great, but has generally ridden the same slow slide in the last decade as his band. No shame, it happens to everyone. So it feels like a breath of fresh air listening to Buoys, which, sure, feels a little 'minor' compared to some of his more epic work, but is otherwise a incredibly pleasant return to some of the more wide-open melodicism and DIY construct of the Collective's earlier work. You know, the Good Shit. Really Buoys is probably the closest to Sung Tongs as anything anyone from the group has done in the last decade. But lighter, more 'mature,' and comfortably less showy. Which is maybe what he's needed to do all along.
This new Bob Mould record has the worst album cover of 2019, and possibly the worst song of 2019. Otherwise, it rips hard bro. Rips hard.
I did that thing with Will Oldham / slash / Bonnie Prince Billy where I jumped into his career kind of in the middle, and then mostly just went forward from there, assuming (erroneously) that the body of work before that entry point would be lesser than from that point forward. This is a dumb thing to do and I shouldn't do it. Because, as I've recently learned, in Will Oldham's particular case, his early stuff apparently rules. Joya is a joy. No shit.
There's a recent New York Times review framed and hanging on the wall of Wafa's Express that closes with one of the most overwrought and hilariously food-criticesque sentences you'll ever read: And the scent: orange blossom and rose water, in the ashta, in the syrup and in the air, like a benediction. It's a counter-service falafel and shawarma place for cripes sake! And yet, shit, it's not wrong?
Korean fried chicken is very much a thing, and within the world of Korean fried chicken, Bonchon is generally the thing. I had Bonchon once, and honestly wasn't terribly impressed. Pelicana, meanwhile, seems to be a second fiddle of Korean fried chicken chains; the Qdoba to Bonchon's Chipotle. There's a couple of them around here, the first I saw in a (three level) food court in Koreatown, the other taking up a quaint corner bar space in Fort Greene. And I gotta say, based on just a single trip to each, I like Pelicana better than Bonchon. Juicier, spicier, just as crisp in very Korean chicken kind of way. It was extremely satisfying. Maybe a little overkill on the sauce, but that's a lousy complaint.
Addendum: While I was writing this, I did some quick research and discovered there's a Bonchon location in Minneapolis?? And it's been there since 2017?? Why didn't I know this!
I've been slowly eating through a list of Brooklyn's greatest old-school sandwich joints. This is a sandwich town, they say, and I'd like to think I'm a sandwich guy. I haven't posted about all of them on here, because basically they've all brought me to the same conclusion: pretty good I guess, but not amazing.
I can't make any conclusions of why this is. Maybe it's that everyone gets the same ingredients from the same distributors. Maybe they don't just make'em like they used to. Maybe they were never great to begin with? But even though I've gotten to visit some weird deep Brooklyn neighborhoods, heard some sweaty Brooklyn accents, and seen some fantastic old-school hand painted signage and menu boards (hey Lioni's), this sandwich odyssey has left me where I was when I started: The greatest sandwich I've ever eaten is still the roast beef from Clancey's Meats, and the greatest Italian sandwich I've ever eaten is still from (world's largest sigh) Jersey Mike's.
Anyway, the Johnny roast beef from John's Deli is at least interesting enough to post here. Just look at that photo. We've got some fresh sliced roast beef (although not as fresh as the aforementioned Clancey's), some caramelized onions, and a liberal helping of their "famous" beef gravy. It's simple, but it's not something you can find at the thousands of other delis around town. And it's tasty! And rich! But man, if this is really one of the great New York Sandwiches, I don't know what to think of this place anymore.
The week we moved in to this apartment in the lovely Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, we ordered in some Thai food. As one does. I'd been warned in advance that the Thai food "scene" in New York isn't as good as you might expect, and that most places in town (with the exception of one particular restaurant in Queens, but we'll save that for another time) serve basically the same decent generic American Thai food you can get anywhere between here and Des Moines. So with expectations low, I was caught off guard by how good, and how unique the food from this Thai Farm Kitchen was. Nothing particular drew us to this place over the 3 or 4 other nearby options; it was just a new-ish, cute-ish little joint in the middle of our weird, not-quite-yet-gentrified Russian and Bangladeshi neighborhood. But the menu had some interesting options on it, and the food we got was all fantastic. We lucked out.
Fast forward, like, two months. I'm doing laundry across the street on a weekday night, and I notice there's a line out the door (mid-winter, mind you) at Thai Farm Kitchen. The next week it's the same. Then we try to go there to eat on a Saturday night—two hour wait. We try again a couple weeks later—hour and a half wait. The place is constantly packed. The secret is out, not so lucky anymore.
Turns out, as we guessed after the first couple attempts, that in fact the New York Times wrote a very positive review of the place, and that seems to be simultaneously a holy anointment and a kiss of death in this city. Great for them, because I'm sure they're suddenly making double the money the ever imagined making in their first year. But damn, we found our little place, and now we're stuck out in the cold!
Anyway, we finally got in the other night, and it was no fluke. The food is up there with the best Thai I've had anywhere, the menu is just left of standard (they serve their pad thai with fried calamari, which doesn't sound exciting, but it adds a lot!), and the staff is downright charming. By this time next year, we ought to be able to get a table there on a weekend again.
Federoff's is a little slice of an eatery just off the annoying strip of Bedford in Williamsburg, humbly promising a Philadelphia away from Philadelphia, including cheesesteaks (of course), scrapple, and the true jewel of Philly cuisine, roast pork sandwiches. Really, the cheesesteaks and scrapple are of secondary concern; the roast pork is right there in the title.
Federoff's is doing everything right. The sandwich looked delicious, the pork was clearly fresh and roasted in house, as was the broccoli rabe, the hoagie roll is satisfyingly chewy without being tough, and the vibe of the place is full-on effortless charm. So why didn't I like it?
I didn't like it! it should've been amazing but I didn't like it! Issue one is that the pork, for as fresh and juicy as it was, simply tasted like pork fat. Maybe this is how it's supposed to be; I've only had one legit Philly roast pork before (see: Paesano's, which was amazing). But it just lacked any sort of seasoning that you'd expect in an ostensibly Italian roast. The Paesano's pork I ate last year was something closer to porchetta—porky, yes, but balanced with garlic, oregano, salt, all the good stuff. This Federoff's pork was almost as if they threw the pork shoulder in the oven totally bare and called it done, which left it not exactly bland, but in fact overwhelmed with an off-putting flavor of cheap pork fat. The next issue was in the broccoli rabe. It was bitter. Way too bitter. That's what you get with rabe when you don't do it exactly right, and apparently they didn't do it right. The Philly sandwich rabe is also usually full of garlic and lemon—something you can actually get at Italian delis all over Philly and New York—but this was just lacking. Total bitterness. Top it off (literally) with some pickled cherry peppers that didn't help any of the issues, and you've got a real disappointing lunch. I just sat there and ate in disbelief, because like I said earlier, it looked so good! It should've blew my mind. Maybe the scrapple will?
Brennan & Carr is somehow maybe the least New York restaurant in New York, and yet has been around longer longer than almost any other restaurant in New York. Located way down in deep Brooklyn—we're talking old Italian families who still probably have mob ties, entire neighborhoods of Russians who probably also have mob ties, and actual grass yards—this place was supposedly built in the mid-30s, and at the time was entirely surrounded by farm fields. Which makes sense when you see it; it's built as a freestanding house-type structure, with a couple additions that have been built over the years. It feels old and almost Midwestern in a way that hardly anything else in this city does. And their specialty is equally old and Midwestern: roast beef sandwiches. They've got other stuff on their menu, notably clam chowder (not so Midwestern), but it's the kind of place where if you order those other items, the waiter (a scummy teenager in a white shirt and bowtie) might honestly get confused for a second. You go to Brennan & Carr for the roast beef and chowder. And the wood paneled walls and old cowboy paintings. The sandwich itself was, I guess, satisfying. It didn't stack up to some of the classic Minneapolis roast beef joints like Wally's and Maverick's, but it was doused in jus and generally tasted pretty good. It could've used some horseradish though.
This is the best burger in Brooklyn until further notice. I want another one right now.
There's a Buffalo themed restaurant in my neighborhood. The city of Buffalo. Themed. We're talking wings, of course, and Bills helmets and Sabres jerseys. But they also serve a regional delicacy of upstate New York called the garbage plate. The dish was invented in a bar Rochester, apparently, as an efficient way to feed drunk college students, and can vary from bar to bar. But the basic makeup of the garbage plate is as follows: French fries as a base, a big scoop of macaroni salad (or beans), a hamburger patty or hot dogs, topped with a coney-style chili sauce either cheese or mustard. This was my first garbage plate experience—sadly in a NYC restaurant rather than actually up in Rochester or Buffalo—but I have to say, it was incredibly satisfying. I can't say that the ingredients all come together in some magical more-than-their-parts kind of way (like the garbage plate's cousin the Hawaiian plate lunch), but as long as you've got good fries and good chili and good everything else, hell yeah you've got a good garbage plate.
Also Buffalo's Famous has buffalo wings. There's nothing wrong with them, but whatever.
Hometown Barbecue, way out in Red Hook, is supposedly one of the best barbecue joints in New York. Eater even had it on its list of 37(ish) "essential" NY restaurants. So it's kind of a bummer that we went there on a whim—a very fast whim before grocery shopping right next door on some random Wednesday night—rather than really planning out and luxuriating in its barbecueness. What did I get? I got the pulled pork and baked beans. How was it? It was quite good, although maybe a little too wet, with all the cole slaw slopped on the top. And the beans had been seemingly been sitting in the bottom of their pot for too long, and just had that "thrice cooked" kind of taste. I couldn've lived without the beans. But, yeah, the sandwich was good from what I remember of it. But also nothing terribly remarkable. Really what it reminded me of was Green Street Meats in Chicago. Almost like the owners visited Green Street during the planning stages and said, "This is the barbecue place we want to be!" Right down to the service style and christmas-lights-in-old-warehouse decor. So for further detail, scroll back to, say, 2011, and read my Green Street Meats write-up. I'm sure it'll apply here.
Holy cow this is a jet-setting, internacional version of a year end food list! Minneapolis! St. Paul! And other cities! Anyway here's the list:
1. Hai Hai (Minneapolis) - Balinese chicken
2. Berber and Q (London) - Lamb shawarma
3. Nandos (Manchester) - Piri Piri Chicken
4. Paesano’s (Philadelphia) - Roast pork sandwich
5. Thai Cafe (St. Paul) - Sour pork ribs
6. Porchetteria (Minneapolis) - Porchetta
7. Werkstatt (Brooklyn) - Wienerschnitzel
8. The Naughty Greek (St. Paul) - Lamb
9. MT Noodles (Brooklyn Park) - Banh mi
10. Camping (North shore) - Grilled bbq chicken
11. Crepe and Spoon (Minneapolis) - Peanut butter and jelly vegan ice cream
12. Mission Chinese (Manhattan) - Kung pao pastrami
13. Sorriso’s (Queens) - Meatball sandwich
14. Tavial (St. Paul) - Al pastor tacos
15. Kingfisher (Manchester) - Fish and chips
I live within walking distance 4 halal Chinese restaurants, 3 Chinese-owned taco shops, 2 Uzbek restaurants, 5 Bangladeshi sweets shops, 3 kosher sushi bars, at least 1 Fiipino barbeque, and 1 very specifically Buffalo themed burger joint. And yet somehow the most surprising ethnic food I've found here in this beautiful melting pot of Kensington Brooklyn is an Austrian bar called Werkstatt. It's kind of like when you see Ingbertsen's Swedish store in the middle of Lake Street; something as seemingly dull and master-racey as that in the middle of all these seemingly endless spicy global options makes it stand out in a way that it might not otherwise. More exciting still is that Werkstatt is delicious! We split a plate of wienerschnitzel (and spaetzle, of course), and some paprika chicken, as well as a big fat fresh pretzel, and honestly I think it was my favorite meal in New York so far. Nothing was super unique or foodie about any of it, but it was just perfectly prepared and balanced, and whatever I was hoping for that night, they delivered. Plus the space is a pretty chill neighborhood bar, no hip European irony, no obnoxious minimalist modern touches. Just a place to chill and eat some fried pork and pickled starch.
There are two things you need to do to officially become a Real New Yorker. One, you have to carry around a New Yorker canvas tote bag. You know the one. Second, you have to eat a bacon egg and cheese sandwich from a local bodega. This second one, I finally did, at my local unnamed generic Deli & Grocery. (Their official legal name is Church Avenue Deli Corp, which is what it says in small letters in their window, so for the sake of keeping this music and food blog impeccably organized on the back end, that's what I'm calling it). It cost me $3 (exactly) and tasted like bacon egg and cheese on a roll (exactly). That's all I have to say about it.