regarding the passage of time.

Picasso Blue is on hiatus. I want to call it a sabbatical because I think that word sounds better, but I won't be away for that long. Turns out my house is ready to go, so my fiancee and I will be signing the lease tomorrow and thus begin the horrible experience of moving. I'll be back once I have Internet and everything is unpacked. I've got a special announcement to make too.

Red Bull Riot Fest East at the Festival Pier

In theory, Red Bull’s Riot Fest East Sept. 24 at Philadelphia’s Festival Pier should have been a perfect punk festival. Acts spanning punk’s origins (X, Descendents) up through the latest up-and-comers (Menzingers, Larry and His Flask) shared two stages, with the set times designed to allow concertgoers to catch at least part of every performance. In application, Riot Fest East was more like Warped Tour for grown-ups, replete with dubious sound, overpriced food, and corporate sponsors galore. That’s not to say the day was a bore – there were some mighty fine sets performed throughout – but it wasn’t exactly a perfect day either.

While the pier offered two stages to cut down on set-up times, they were not equal. West Stage, which really was the main stage of the day, was outdoors. The sound quality got worse the closer you got to the stage, as the sound guy really wanted to make sure people could hear the low end in the back. East Stage was located inside a hot ‘n’ sweaty tent, which cut down on crowd capacity, meaning every band from Menzingers (3:40 p.m.) through X (9:10 p.m.) kind of got the shaft. If you weren’t within the first, say, 20 rows of bodies to catch Hot Water Music or Samiam, you did not see a good show, as the speakers and acoustics were crap. Getting closer meant getting a whole lot more guitar noise in the ears, but at least the energy came through.

But the line-up was still great. No offense to festival openers the Heels, but my day didn’t start until the Holy Mess took to the East Stage at 2:40 p.m. The group ripped through a funny, sloppy set of feel-good punk tunes in the vein of Lawrence Arms and Lifetime. All the hits from their recently released EP compilation cropped up (“I Think Corduroy is Making a Comeback,” “A Soulful Punk Tune About a Working Class Dreamer”), as well as a couple of new tunes from a forthcoming full-length. The new material has a heavier sound to it, especially the unreleased track the band closed with. It’s a great direction for the band to pursue all the same. While the Holy Mess sometimes got a little too sloppy, even by punk standards, they still certainly entertained. I know the kid with the shiny new THM ice cream tattoo was stoked.

The Holy Mess essentially kicked off a string of sweet, coveted sets. The Menzingers generally stuck to their most excellent sophomore effort, Chamberlain Waits, although older tunes like “Sunday Drive” and “A Lesson in the Abuse of Information Technology” made appearances. Right now, the Menzingers are the best band in Philadelphia and, next to maybe Banner Pilot and the Flatliners, the most promising punk band in the freaking world. Their cover of the Clash’s “Straight to Hell” used to just sound cool; now it sounds prophetic. The crowd sang along with every word, and watching the members dance and writhe on stage left me ecstatic.



Meanwhile, on the West Stage, some reunited bands from yesteryear were flubbing it up. Weston, Excitebike and Naked Raygun played limp sets while Samiam, 7 Seconds and Suicide Machines wrecked crowds in that stupid tiny tent. Simply put, the organizers should have swapped out this entire chunk of the show; they would have gotten better results. Nobody puts Hot Water Music in a corner.

The first truly revelatory band to take to the West Stage was the reunited Plow United, and I didn’t even know anything about them before they played. PU dropped three apparently crucial underground records in the ’90s, avidly fought major label support systems and then broke up in 1998. Thirteen years later, the group reunited specifically to play Riot Fest East, which apparently got the ball rolling on their complete discography getting remastered and a new album being written. Bands like Excitebike belong to their era and should be left there; Plow United chose a pretty darn good time to come back and teach the masses about punk rock. Their tunes were short and sweet, crammed with all sorts of spastic movements. The banter was witty (and even, in a truly controversial move, critical of venue sponsors Miller Light!). They even brought out Exene Cervenka from X to play a country song, because why not. Plow United clearly appreciated the big turnout, and I immediately picked up Sleepwalk: A Retrospective soon after.

The lone downside to catching Plow United’s set, encore and all, was that I pretty much forfeited any chance of seeing Hot Water Music from a reasonable distance. I’m sorry, America. But they played “Trusty Chords” and “Wayfarer.” It sounded OK from 100 yards away.

After HWM ended, I skipped out on Dead Milkmen (never meant that much to me) and camped out for X. The oldest band on the bill, X pretty much wrecked all comers. The crowd loved it too, going off completely while X played through its debut record Los Angeles in its entirety. While guitarist Billy Zoom had some technical issues (cut out during “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” then way too loud for the rest of the show), X as a whole was still incredibly tight and aggressive.

I know women (“female-identified” if you please) in pits have sparked a lot of debate in the punk community (They should know what they’re getting into! But they shouldn’t have to fear for their lives at a communal event! But my version of punk rock is superior to your version of punk rock!), and I’m not going to pretend that I can encapsulate the entire conversation in this article, but I will say this: The chicks who came out to see X are really fucking tough, and I have the bruises to prove it. One girl punched me in the head just because she loved “Nausea” that much. Even though I was wearing glasses!

This instance of gender equality suited X’s co-ed lineup. A good crowd bore witness to good music. This is where the night should have ended.

But wait, the Descendents were headlining. After getting my heart and my ass handed to me by X’s bleak urban character studies and menacing music, Descendents came off a little tame. Blame it on the fart jokes. Or when frontman Milo Aukerman’s voice started to give out. Maybe even blame his kids for coming out to sing on an extended version of “All-O-Gistics.” But the ’dents’ were too dull. And I think the crowd agreed to an extent. Plow United came out for an encore because the fans demanded it; few people cheered for Descendents to play one until they were already back on stage. Still, I got to hear “Suburban Home” and “I’m the One” live.

Riot Fest East lacked intimacy. It also lacked a decent sound system. But it brought together a ton of bands from punk rock’s history. Some, like Naked Raygun, need to break up again. But then you get the Holy Mess, Menzingers, Plow United and X. Now there’s a solid bill. Just spare me the $7 pizza.

How Do We Jump This High? - 'Funny/Not Funny'

With a melodic punk bent akin to Bridge and Tunnel and Latterman, How Do We Jump This High? packs four pretty darn fun songs into their new seven-inch Funny/Not Funny despite some bummer lyrics. While the musicians add in the occasional post-hardcore flourish, for the most part, this is catchy not-quite-pop-punk bordering on ’90s emo.

“En Route” kicks off the seven-inch with a rousing round of regret. Turns out the narrator misses somebody something fierce, but the chorus begs for some gang vox live. So hey, take it easy guy. “Potential” is more sad sackery, this time reflecting on a town that’s slowly dying near the end of a year. It gets a little maudlin at times – “I’m indicted for everything I gave up on” – but there’s still a driving drum beat and throaty vox to carry the song along.

The B-side offers two more songs in a similar fashion. “The Greats” is about missing someone (again) and “Migraines” is about being disappointed in oneself (again). Clearly, Funny/Not Funny is the feel-good hit of the year. But then, the name should let you know that. How Do We Jump This High? The answer is moon shoes.

Patton Oswalt - 'Finest Hour'

Once at the forefront of what could be called nerd rage-style comedy, stand-up Patton Oswalt has gradually shed his pop cultural ironies in favor of studying human nature. Where he used to greet the world with cynicism, now he just laughs at all the little idiosyncrasies that make us human. Part of that transition has come with age; Oswalt also recently became a parent. But while these factors hampered Oswalt’s 2009 record My Weakness is Strong, they boost his latest effort, Finest Hour.

Oswalt is the comedian who made me view stand-up as an art form. He’s not the first comic I’ve ever loved (Dana Carvey) and he didn’t release my first comedy CD (“Weird” Al Yankovic’s Bad Hair Day), but his influence has set a benchmark for what I seek from joke tellers. Yes, I look for laughs just like everyone else, but following Oswalt through the random segues of his storytelling are just as fun as the punchlines. He is a bizarre sort of anecdotal comedian, and Finest Hour nearly lives up to its title.

For the most part, Finest Hour is hilarious. I thought for sure Louis C.K. had best comedy record of 2011 wrapped up, but I’m not sure anymore. On top of that, the differences between C.K. and Oswalt are narrowing. Both are sarcastic dads chronicling the ridiculous little events of existence. C.K. is just a lot darker, and that’s what might give Oswalt an edge.

Here, Oswalt drops tale after tale with warmth, whether extolling the virtues of sweatpants once you have kids or breaking down romantic comedies (“Every movie should just be called Trying to Fuck). Even when he drops the occasional critical evaluation, it’s less a move towards anger than it is a plea for sanity. When Oswalt returns to/finishes his years-long condemnation of fast food in general and KFC in particular, he argues for a return to logic while still pointing out his own shortcomings. Finest Hour doesn’t single anyone out, and in doing so pokes fun at humanity in general.

While Finest Hour is Oswalt’s most mature record yet, it does sag in spots. Some of the stand-up is an exercise in squeezing out every last riff on a topic. Sometimes it pays off (an extended bit about singing to oneself in the car goes from funny to strange to funny), but sometimes it just goes to weird places for weirdness’ sake without a real ending (“The Ham Incident”). Some bits get more applause than laughter (Every comic’s worst fear). But at 75 minutes, the set could be forgiven for dipping occasionally in quality. After all, this is Oswalt. The dude has been outshining other comics for years, partially because he takes chances on his jokes. After the somewhat middling results of Big Fan and Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, it’s great to hear Oswalt get back to his strength: stand-up.

regarding R.E.M.

After 31 years together, venerable alternative act R.E.M. is breaking up. In a way, the dissolution makes sense; the band is going out after reclaiming their critical glory on Accelerate and Collapse Into Now. Before those albums, the band was on a decade-long creative slide. On a more personal note, the band had also become just a tad irrelevant to me. Call it the curse of being an early favorite; I absorbed and progressed from R.E.M. early in my music collecting. Yet I still mourn the band’s passing all the same.

Let’s be clear, R.E.M.’s break-up is a solid move. They’ve been together a long-ass time, and as far as I’m concerned, their last good album was 1994’s Monster. But there’s still that feeling of finality. Because it’s one thing to think a band should call it a day and another for them to actually retire. And R.E.M. is arguably one of the biggest cult bands of all time. They’re one of the pillars of indie rock. You can hate all of their songs, but your life would be emptier without their influence.

My R.E.M. fandom falls into a weird space. Like many a youth in the ’90s, I knew the band for a handful of singles (“Losing My Religion,” “Orange Crush”) before I actually comprehended the band as a whole. When I got to high school in the early ’00s, I began investigating the group, along with other indie acts that made bank like Nirvana and Sonic Youth. But I was never keen on their underground early successes. Yeah, I dug “Radio Free Europe,” but I was, and remain, only kind of interested in Murmur. The hippest of the hip will tell you to get the first three records, but my trilogy is a different, more commercial one: Green, Out of Time, Automatic For the People. It’s not cool to prefer those records, but they sold huge numbers for a reason, got-dammit.

While Monster and Accelerate tried to be harder, Green is actually R.E.M.’s best strictly rock record. You get hits like “Pop Song 89,” “Stand,” and “Orange Crush.” They’re a little left of the dial, but not so much that it kept the album from going double-platinum. Out of Time is more of a hodgepodge. It’s pop-minded (“Shiny Happy People,” and ya know what, I like “Radio Song” with KRS-One), but it also mines these intense emotional depths (“Losing My Religion,” “Texarkana.” Automatic For the People would take that even further, committing its entirety to a rumination of health and innocence. Yeah, “Everybody Hurts” is thoroughly cheesy, but did you write “Nightswimming?” No you fucking didn’t, so shut your fucking mouth.

Automatic is R.E.M.’s finest moment, and that’s perhaps the only thing Rolling Stone and I have ever agreed on. But from there, the band struggled to find a new direction. Monster tried to take on the already fading grunge movement. New Adventures in Hi-Fi just kind of existed. It wasn’t until 2004’s Around the Sun that the band started to show life again, dropping another soft-rocker akin to Automatic. I think I’m the only person who liked that record, but from the wistfulness of “Leaving New York” and “Last Straw.” Yeah, the band has since disowned the record, but sometimes artists aren’t the best at judging their own work.

For me, Sun should have been the last R.E.M. album. Partially because I couldn’t get behind the retreads of Accelarate or Collapse, but also because 2004 is the last time I truly cared about R.E.M. I was a freshman in college, and yet that’s when I stopped listening to college rock. All of R.E.M.’s supposed strengths – the cryptic, mumbled lyrics, the jangly guitar – started to fade from view. Instead, I found artists who really spoke to me on an emotional level: I started to really pay attention to artists like The Cure and The Mountain Goats, whom I had loved but not truly explored. I got back into punk rock. I went through an ill-advised hip-hop phase. Seven years later, I find that I rarely listen to R.E.M.

But I still have a stack of their albums. And I intend to listen to every last one of them in memoriam.

Vinyl Vednesday 9/21/2011

[Vinyl Vednesday is a weekly feature about three favorite vinyl finds. It’s not meant to be a dick-measuring contest, but it usually turns out that way. This week’s edition is in anticipation of the punk rock festival Riot Fest East. As always, e-mail pelonej1@gmail.com with your own big finds!]

Records: The Holy Mess’ Benefit Sesh seven-inch (2010) on white, The Menzingers’ Chamberlain Waits (2010) on clear blue, and X’s Wild Gift (1981) on black.

Place of Purchase: Benefit Sesh was sent to me for review. Chamberlain Waits didn’t actually come out on vinyl until 2011 for Record Store Day, at which point I picked it up at Repo Records in Philadelphia. Wild Gift came from Hideaway Music in Chestnut Hill.

Thoughts: I’m pretty darn stoked for Riot Fest East. The Chicago festival finally added an East Coast variant, one that covers punk rock from the ’70s (X, even though they didn’t get to release a studio album until 1980), ’80s (Descendents, Naked Raygun), ’90s (Hot Water Music, Weston), and today (The Menzingers). I’m pretty darn excited to see The Holy Mess live again. Dudes are hilarious, and they write some pretty catchy punk rock jamz. Curiously, my love all began with a two-song seven-inch their publicist sent me. I was intrigued by those tracks, and a year later consummated my romance with the group’s self-titled Red Scare debut. Now that Riot Fest East has announced set times, I’m going to begin my day at the concert with The Holy Mess (after hitting up Blackbird for lunch).

I haven’t seen The Menzingers live in a long time. Before they blew up – relatively speaking – the Clash enthusiasts played through my stupid little piece of Pennsylvania plenty of times. I saw them play all over Doylestown on the strength of hot shit debut A Lesson in the Abuse of Information Technology. But it’s been years since I caught them – I still haven’t even heard the Hold On Dodge material live yet. Menzingers, then, are the band I’m most excited to see live. Since the halcyon days of playing Siren Records, the group has gone on to write one of my favorite albums of, well, ever, Chamberlain Waits. I made copies of that record when I received it digitally for review on CD-R AND cassette. I spent more hours on the road with Chamberlain Waits than any other album in 2010. And it still gets me pumped up a year later. Yeah, I’m excited to hear Lesson live again, but I’m just so dang excited to hear Waits in a live setting. I need the crowd to be a good one for my boys in the Manslingers.

A close second in anticipation is X. Arguably the best West Coast punk band of all time, I saw the legends live a few years ago, and they were still amazing. I hope that, health problems aside, the band can still deliver the same energy. They’re going to play Los Angeles live in its entirety, which should go over well with the crowd. But I’m just as excited to hear later material. I’d love to hear some See How We Are cuts, but that’s doubtful. Wild Gift might make an appearance, though. Songs like “The Once Over Twice,” “When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch,” and even the comedic “Back 2 the Base” have a haunting anger to them. Steeped in a kind of rock ‘n’ roll that was retro even for ’81, Wild Gift is better than most records, punk or otherwise. Yeah, people are probably going to leave early to catchy Descendents’ set, but fuck ’em.

Wild Flag - 'Wild Flag'

While I still miss Sleater-Kinney’s fiery punk passion, the former members’ follow-up projects have made one thing clear: Everyone is a winner. Singer/guitarist Corin Tucker released a mighty fine solo album, 1,000 Years, in 2010. Drummer Janet Weiss has been playing drums in about 95 percent of the world’s indie rock bands since SK split, but this year sees her recorded reunion with SK guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein under the moniker Wild Flag. Mary Timony (ex-Helium) and Rebecca Cole (ex-The Minders) join on guitarv/vox and keyboards/vox, respectively, and the result is surprisingly classic rock-leaning.

I don’t mean that as an insult, either. Wild Flag ain’t Aerosmith, but it does recall acts like The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mott the Hoople, and Ziggy-era David Bowie. After their debut seven-inch, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Then and now, Wild Flag has embraced a retro-leaning sound. But they’re not robbing graves; just writing really catchy tunes.

Album opener and single “Romance” is the “hit” of the bunch, a rumbling, tumbling ode to the power of music. The drums push the song through a series of propulsive movements. Despite a first class chorus, the song’s best moment is actually the pre-chorus after the second verse, as the group collectively shouts out “Hey, you’ve got me crawling / You’ve got me spinning / Shake shimmy shake / First you wreck me / Then resurrect me / It’s too much,” over a bout of handclaps.

Track two, “Something Came Over Me,” is less immediate, but deceptively so. While it lacks the energy of “Romance,” the hooks are just as strong, carrying a ’60s girl group series of “la la las” along the way. Brownstein and Timony are the lead songwriters in the group, and while they’ve created a cohesive album overall, there are still clear indicators who’s better suited for what. Brownstein fronts rockers like “Boom” and “Future Crimes.” She goes big. Timony is more subtle. Listen to a tune like “Glass Tambourine.” It opens with a big Hendrix style guitar ‘n’ drums introduction before Timony starts switching between psychedelic interludes and plaintive vox. Brownstein brings attitude; Timony creates atmosphere.

Basically, Wild Flag achieves a nice balance. At 10 tracks, this record is fun without dragging, and Brownstein and Timony’s sensibilities differ from yet complement each other in all the right ways. Sleater-Kinney comparisons are still going to follow the group (especially since Wild Flag kind of picks up where The Woods left off), but hopefully that just means more people will tune in for more good music. Like I said, everyone’s a winner.