Bitchdork hits SXSW

A porta potty, Austin, TX

Just got back from an awesome weekend in Austin with the Sloan bitches. Not as awesome as lesbians or Dick Cheney obviously, but still pretty damn good. Too busy with work right now to put up a summary but we'll get round to it at some point soon. Thanks for a great weekend bitches...

Just - Mark Ronson

I love this hip-hop stylee cover of Radiohead's 'Just'. An mp3 link has been up on this blog for ages. Now there's a rad video to go with it...



Or, if the fancy youtube link above is too slow, here's the quicktime link.

Pitchfork Writer Suspended For Talking Shit!!!

Nick Sylvester, regular contributor to Pitchfork, has been suspended for publishing utter crap! The only surprise is that the crap in question is a partially fabricated article published in the Village Voice this week rather than any of his shitty reviews for Pitchfork. I mean, if he can write an article about pick-up artists without going out to a bar, he can presumably write a music review without listening to the CD.

Wouldn't surprise me if that's what all the Pitchfork writers are up to....

UPDATE: He's now resigned from his Pitchfork post after being asked to quit.... Does that mean there's now an open position at Pitchfork? Anyone want to apply....?

News From Sweden...

What a great country Sweden is, eh? Schnapps, meatballs, flat-pack furniture. Bergman, Strindberg, Limpar, Ljungberg. More importantly, what great music Sweden produces: Abba, The Hives, The Cardigans, and, currently, Dungen, Shout Out Louds, Love Is All, Jens Lekman, Jose Gonzalez, etc, etc.

So who'll be next to emerge from our favorite country in all of Scandinavia? Luckily, we don't have to wait for Pitchfork to tell us which Swedish bands we should like as Bitchdork has it's very own Swedish correspondent, Dørk Dørksson. He sends us this from Stockholm:

Three Swedish bands/artists to check out:
- The Knife: some kind of electro pop. They are tremendously popular in Sweden among the non mainstream music lovers. Check out “Deep cuts” and their latest “Silent shout”
- Laleh: young girl who has won all the important Grammy’s in Sweden this year. Playful, interesting, talented. Her album is called “Laleh”.
- Moneybrother: a personal favourite. Looks like, and sing like, a young Springsteen. Two album released: “Blood Panic” and “To die alone”.

So check them out! And remember where you heard about them first!

anti-depressants....

Cat Power: The Greatest

Oh dear 2006, we are not off to a good start.

First the Strokes put out the disappointment album of the year and shatter all of my juicy masturbatory fantasies of Julian Casablancas shouting obscure but possibly clever(?) lyrics into my ear. Then some cuddly frat boys pose as MY people, to daring call themselves Scientists. Then some vulgar band I saw at Siren Festival gets a big fat record contract and I have to see their vulgar name all over town (Morningwood? Like that moment when your first awaken, roll onto your side into the sweet cuddle of your bedmate, wiggle in reverse into the spoon position, only to receive a rock hard morningwood planted longways between your ass cheeks? Yes THAT morningwood. Like I said…vulgar.) And now! Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, started taking Prozac.

See the thing is about Cat Power, the reason I listen to and love Cat Power, the reason I think most Cat Power fans listen to Cat Power, is because she does the depressive gloom thing with such glamour. And it’s not some self-deprecating pathetic teenage brand of self-loathing gloom, but more of a broken-down, life-weathered, older-but-wiser gloom. It gives us hope that if we keep it up with the bad decisions, bad relationships, bad habits, over-indulgences, and general self-destructive behaviors we’ll at least have some salty-sweet stories and a smoky voice to show for it. I’ve probably got her all wrong, but this is what I imagine she gives me nonetheless.

So here we are in Jan of 2006 and Cat Power must be taking anti-depressants. I mean, her album is called The Greatest. It is cheerful. It is soulful (apparently deliberately through collaborations with some soul veterans, if you care about that sort of stuff). There are saloon piano jams on ‘After All’. There is whistling! There are ooh-ooh’s and fiddles fiddling on ‘Empty Shell’. You can sway back and forth to ‘Could We’. Seriously, I just saw Dork doing it. The old Cat Power had this fragile voice like a glass vase precariously perched on a ledge, ready to fall off and crack at any moment, and her voice often did. Here her notes are drawn out softly, and they remain on key. My mom would really like this album. But I don’t.

But what this album really does is crush all my delusions that glamour and wisdom can arise gracefully and artfully from a self-destructive life. Worse, it verifies what I feared might be the truth: that all I’m in for is lifetime of therapy and prescriptions.


Overall Score: 4/10
Best Track: ‘Hate’
Okay really: 'Love and Communication'
Weakest Link: ‘After All’ (just delete from itunes lib. immediately)

Weird Al Jankovic, Maxwells, 1/20/06

Friday night at Maxwells, Hoboken, saw the much anticipated return to the stage of Weird Al Jankovic. With Bitch and J-Ho in tow, Dork couldn't wait to see the master perform such classics as "Eat It" and "Like A Surgeon". Unfortunately, at this concert at least, Al decided to perform only a series of neo-pop-punk parodies under his new bands name of "We Are Scientists". Granted, some of the lyrics were still hilarious but W.A.J.'s musicianship seems to have sadly declined since his mid-80's heyday. Unfortunately, Bitch's digital camera is still in California, so our only pic is brought to you via flickr.com:

"Shut the fuck up and play 'Eat It'"

The set grew increasingly tedious as time wore on. Thankfully, Al and his boys had one last wacky trick up their sleeves, managing to set one of their amplifiers on fire, causing the show to end earlier than planned and Maxwells to be evacuated. Personally I would have preferred to see this after the first song, but better late than never.....

Finally, I would just like to commend this review's comment that "Men of science do not wake up in a puddle of their own puke." Quite right. I managed to make it to the toilet. Damn, those vodka-sodas are strong at Maxwells...

An Aural Analysis of the New Album by We Are Scientists, With Love and Squalor
Dork PhD, Bitchdork University, New York

Abstract: The debut album by the much-hyped Brooklyn-based band, We Are Scientists, was listened to in order to determine how good it was. It was found to be quite shit.

Materials and Methods: The CD "With Love and Squalor" was purchased from Kims Video & Music, imported into iTunes, transferred onto an iPod, and listened to twice.

Results and Discussion: The sample was first analyzed for its constituent parts and influences. Contrary to previous reports (Spin, 2005) We Are Scientists do not "mix punk, funk, and a lil' bit of disco to yield a shiny, metallic bar of infectious, genre-bending rock". Instead, the sample was found to contain large amounts of poor quality commercial pop-rock punctuated with substandard Green Day-influenced hooks and choruses. The album was next assessed for danceability and was found to have a net danceability value of zero. Again, this is in contrast to previously published results (NY Times, 2006). The reason for this discrepancy is likely due to the common misperception within indie-rock circles that music played at a relentlessly high tempo is directly proportional to danceability. The two values are, in fact, completely unrelated. Finally, the album was assessed for it's lyrics, which were found to be embarassingly awful, including, but by no means limited to, "What's the point of medication?/Only makes me wish that I were dead". The relationship of many of these lyrics to the poetry of 15-year olds is worthy of further study.
Although the album was only listened to twice, we are confident that our analysis (and score of 3/10) is much more accurate than previous studies (Pitchfork, 2005). We were unable to test the album through additional listenings due to its extreme shiteness.

Conclusions: American bands should not try to make jerky, angular, post-punk, punk-funk. They couldn't do it the first time around and, so far, they haven't managed to do it this time either. Such music is much better left to the Brits. Also, in future, Dork should not be taken in by either hype or cute album covers, in order to avoid writing further angry reviews.