Peaches is a naughty lady/bitch guilty of delicious crimes in the name of gender-bending and electrosex. Her albums revolve around very select subject matter: fucking (not sex—this is definitely about fucking), fluid gender identities, and intentionally indefinable sexual tastes that range from men to women and everything in between. The music itself is comprised of the dirtiest electronic beats, often appropriately pulsing over her vocals that alternate between singing and semi-rapping.
I Feel Cream won’t disappoint long established Peaches fans. Admittedly, the beginning of the album is a little underwhelming. The songs are slower and lacking the heat that makes Peaches so sweet. Fortunately, things quickly pick up, as the song “More” promises to “whip this party into shape” and slyly notes, “seems you got a little bit more than you asked for.”
The title track is the album’s standout. One of the most danceable beats on the album oscillating along with Peaches deceptively angelic voice until a shift occurs that sends her back into a seductive growl for a few seconds while a new pulsing beat grows in volume until we explode climactically back into the chorus. Another song of note is “Show Stopper.” Driven by a fuzzy guitar and the Peaches signature growl, she promises her listeners to “rock [them] harder than a martyr in a holy war” and declares herself a “show stopper/panty-dropper/ everybody’s favorite shocker.” One a final note, Peaches provides her own take on the “cougar” phenomenon on the song “Mommy Complex.” As an artist unashamed of her embrace of all things genderqueer and “deviant” by traditional standards, it’s no surprise that she celebrates her age instead of hiding it, a tough choice to make in a world full of barely legal pop-tarts Bogarting all the masturbatory fantasies of America’s lustful youth. If listeners are not wholly convinced of her bad-assery at this point, then they’re not listening. Or they’re assholes.
Peaches is not for the faint of heart or nuns or your mother, but for listeners without prejudice, I Feel Cream is a turn-on and a party starter. It’s up to you to take those feelings and apply them accordingly.
by Veronica Wilks
I didn’t have a single good reason to watch The Bachelorette. I did not know, Jillian, the newest woman to search for love on national TV. I had not watched any of the last installments of The Bachelor franchise, nor had I cared to. I really only watched it because I was worried a lot of other people were going to watch it—and then, 12 weeks from now, after THE MOST DRAMATIC ROSE CEREMONY THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN, I’d be the girl who was not on a first name basis with the men who had made it to the finale. I had no impression the series would be good; I only figured it might be popular. I made no promises that I’d continue to watch it, but I did not want to be left out of any upcoming “watercooler” discussions.
Though I can’t say I really liked the show that much, it was impossible not to get into it. This is because the ABC casting team has a very great formula: make sure the eligible mates are a mix of good looking, and either arrogant or overly sincere, and make sure the lady who is choosing is into that. (Also make sure all of these people are white.) I couldn’t remember any of the men’s names, but I found myself screaming at them several times throughout the two-hour premier. “OH no you did NOT get out a guitar!” “What woman honestly wants a man who says TOE JAM on a show like this?” “WHY do I keep likking the BLONDE ONES?” “Oh look at that receding hairline!” and “Pick Juan! Pick JUAN!” (OK—I did remember his name, because he’s sexy, and because they played Latin music when he first entered the scene.) She humored them, gave roses to the ugly ones….I am greatly alarmed that ABC refuses to have a normal woman on this show—that is, a woman with a sense of humor, who, if approached with such cheesetastic displays of douchebaggery in any normal dating setting, would call them out on such behavior! Even the most good-hearted, looking-for-love girl next door knows better than to fall for some of their tactics. Forget the fact that it’s staged—for me, that’s what takes the “real” out of “reality.” Next time, ABC, cast a woman who makes us think of Chelsea Handler, not Charlotte York.
That said, given that a few of my friends have started to get married, I am continuing watching it under the guise of “research.” I will take dating tips wherever I can get them, even if it’s from watching people “date” in a completely contrived and improbable setting. The next time I am with three hunks on a ranch or sitting in a hot tub with five guys, I’ll know what to do. Well, I will in a few more episodes. The preview of the season to come promises some drama—does one have a girlfriend at home?! I am hoping one is gay—but I can’t see myself, no matter how popular the show gets, twittering about these kind of things. I’ll only admit I watch if someone asks me. I won’t learn any of their names. (Not even the pilot—he’s my secret fave.)
by Imogen V. Shahrazad
The Quiet Storm is a sanctuary for Pittsburgh’s anti-meat crowd. Vegetarians are largely accustomed to walking into a restaurant with friends or family and having roughly three choices: salad, French fries, maybe even provolone sticks. Upon entering The Quiet Storm, veggies sigh with relief and take their time perusing a menu built just for them.
The interior of The Quiet Storm is fun: thrift store furniture and dishes, eclectic local art, and a staff of tattooed hipsters adding further visual interest. Chaynes and I recently visited for a late breakfast, starting with the house coffee, which is a little strong for my taste; however, I also like my coffee fucking pathetic and thick with non-dairy creamer. I think what I had at The Quiet Storm was what we might call Real Coffee. We ordered the same entrée, deceptively listed as the “Home Fries.” At any other restaurant, home fries would be chunks of fried potatoes with (maybe) a few onions or peppers mixed in. At The Quiet Storm, the Home Fries includes “smashed” red potatoes, caramelized onions, “soysage,” scrambled eggs or tofu (we both got the tofu), cheddar cheese, and aioli—all of it mixed in a nice big pile of food.
Why this is The Most Amazing Breakfast of All Time: 1) the scrambled tofu and 2) the aioli. The scrambled tofu is important because it’s easy to fuck up tofu. Anyone who has ever eaten poorly cooked tofu knows what I’m talking about. It can be tasteless and/or very squishy—and sometimes both simultaneously. Carnivores sometimes assume that vegetarians don’t have taste buds anyway and so they don’t bother to make tofu dishes taste like food. Not so at The Quiet Storm—the tofu is perfectly flavored and cooked to the point of being perfectly chewy, matching the “soysage” in texture. In addition, the aioli is probably a sin. Garlic mayonnaise? Seriously, I’m sure God is troubled by its very existence. In past trips to The Quiet Storm, I have asked for a side of aioli to add to dishes that don’t normally include it.
All in all, The Quiet Storm fucking rocks. If you want non-meats done right, visit the restaurant at the corner of Penn Ave and S. Graham in the Garfield/Friendship area of Pittsburgh. Admire the beards and weird tattoos on the very hip staff and clientele. Delight in the coffee. Chew enthusiastically on the soy-based faux meat products.
by Eriq F.
For our impatient readers, here are my instructions: Go to D’s, come hungry, and bring your friends. You won’t regret it. For those of you with patience enough to read the whole review, D’s might be the right fit for you.
But take care, this is not Dee's, it is D's. The difference in name is inaudible, so make sure your friends know to meet you at D's, not Dee's. Dee's is located in Drunk College Student Nirvana (aka Pittsburgh's South Side), while D's resides in Regent Square, a neighborhood where you are more likely to see drunk college professors. Dee's is an excellent place for a game of pool, but D’s it ain’t.
When you arrive at D’s, don’t be surprised if you have to wait for a table to open up. Once you’re seated, it’ll become pretty obvious that this isn’t the sort of place where you do things in a hurry. Making your food fresh and delicious? That takes time. Sifting through the more than 900 varieties of beer on hand? That, too, will take time. So order a tall glass of a beer that you’ve never had before and take a moment to enjoy the hand-painted murals on the walls. Tired of adventure? Unsettled by the unfamiliar names and slightly-above-average prices on the draft list? Don’t worry, there is a small portion of the walk-in cooler devoted to well-known domestic brews from gigantic faceless corporations.
Though the sheer number of beers available can be daunting, the menu is much more manageable, offering several varieties each of hot dogs (of course), sandwiches, pizza, appetizers, and salads. Though I have never met a hot dog that I enjoyed, I ate dinner with a young woman who had been anticipating her provolone and sauerkraut hot dog for several days prior to our Friday night visit. Upon this confession, the rest of our party disclosed that they had also been anticipating thei. So what I deduce is that these hot dogs are good enough that they will haunt your taste buds for several days before and after each visit.
If you’re in a hungry hurry, order some fries. The surprising generosity of the menu’s “small” portion will leave you wondering how big “large” would be (for the curious, it’s freaking huge.) The pizza will take a longer time, but as usual at D’s, it turns out to be worth the wait. Take a moment, enjoy your company, and sip your beer slowly. Patience is a virtue.
If you listen to any form of electro-hop / glitch with any regularity then you have heard Prefuse 73. Just maybe not by that name. Like the elusive DOOM, reviewed here not long ago, Guillermo Scott Herron is one man behind many names: Prefuse 73, Savath y Savalas, Piano Overlord, Diamond Watch Wrists, among others. The spectacular thing about Prefuse, however, is that while all of those projects sound different, you can easily tell that they are all Herron productions.
This is no easy task, especially in a genre that most non-believers complain “all sounds the same.” While that argument falls flat on its ignorant face when tested, you never even have to worry about it with Prefuse 73. The man seems to be a never-ending fount of spectacular ideas; he just creates different projects to channel like ideas together.
The cover of Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian, the most recent Prefuse 73 output, shows an astronaut/explorer traveling into what looks like a version of our world, only slightly skewed. While this image is interesting in its own right, I believe it represents something of what Prefuse 73 does. It seems that he draws upon a massive reservoir of sounds that are almost from our world, but not quite. He gets the grainy synths that no one else can; the sick drum breaks no one else finds; the creepy vocal samples no one else uncovers; and then places them in a sound pastiche held together by sheer will.
That description could in some ways apply to all of the records released under the Prefuse 73 moniker, from the scratchy boom-bap of Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives and seminal haze of One Word Extinguisher to the glitch-hop of Surrounded By Silence and blissed-out Preparations. But nowhere is it exemplified so perfectly than on Everything. Running 29 tracks long, few longer than 2 minutes, the album is a collage of sound: ideas flow in and out of one another, colliding/eliding, meandering around, some bursting forth only to recede and then show up in some altered form later. Some are hip-hop, some funk, some psychedelia, some folk, some electronica, some all of those and none simultaneously.
The mixing of sound pallets puts Prefuse in a sort of cosmic DJ role, creating a soundtrack for a post-modern world filled with jagged international urban landscapes, filled with people half-plugged in, unsure of their footing while ushering in a new world paradigm of electronic contentment/complacency. While it is mostly pretentious to seriously call something “dada” these days, Everything is Prefuse 73’s dada experiment in a world reeling from over-produced CGI order in a chaotic universe.
Everything finds Prefuse smashing together sounds (that most artists would keep apart and on different albums) within each song. A perfect example of this is the movement between “Violent Bathroom Exchange” and “Nature’s Uplifting Revenge” (two of the longer songs on the album at 1:30 or so): “Violent” builds into a crushing beat fuzzy with synth and overdrive layers, muddy and bass-heavy, forcing your head into bobbing position, but just when you have tasted the rhythmic kool-aid, the beat fractures, turning inside out, running backwards and forwards, flying off axis – only to be hammered back down as “Nature” comes in with broken up vocal harmonies and an old-school 808 beat.
The transition is seamless, as are all of the transitions on the album, and supports the need to listen to this album straight through, no breaks, no skipping. I know, the iPod generation is not used to this, but hey, you can put whole albums on iPods and listen to them straight through, I know I do.
Every Guillermo Scott Herron fan has a favorite Prefuse 73 album, and I am no exception despite the fact that I couldn’t tell you what mine is. Whether or not Everything is my favorite is less important than the fact that I believe it to be his best. On no other album is the thesis of the Prefuse 73 project more explicit. Herron has accessed some remote corner of the human experience, only to replicate it, mutate it, loop it, sample it, cut it up, rearrange it, (damn, I sound like a Daft Punk song!) and blast it back into are faces one tiny fragment at a time.
Listen to this album; you will not be disappointed.
by Mitch LeClair
Listen to Medeski Martin and Wood. Buy Tonic, see them live, whatever. Listen to MMW.
Now that I got that out of the way, I can talk about a sick Will Bernard show I recently downloaded. A show you should download. It will make your life better. I know credit cards suck, school’s got you down, maybe your old lady won’t quite calling; whatever your ailment, get this show. Miracle cure shit.
A collaboration, a compilation, a conflagration of sound, damaging normalcy and creating an atmosphere of funk took place at the Roxy Theater in Los Angeles on March 21.
I was lucky enough to get my fingertips on a recorded copy of the show on March 26. Since that date, I estimate I’ve listened to the show approximately 14 times. Mmmmmm….disaster jazz. As one of the band members says during the show, “I think we’ve created a monster.”
Will Bernard, terrific guitarist hailing from the San Francisco area, brought together three other musicians and created Blue Plate Special last year, one of the best records from 2008. Andy Hess, former bass player for Gov’t Mule joined Stanton Moore from Galactic and John Medeski of MMW to form one of the hardest, sliding grooves of a band I’ve ever listened to.
They’re smoother than a loaded Corona and spicier than the 22 Buffalo Wild Wings my roommate just ate. Listening to this particular show and not grinding teeth, closing eyes, and bopping to the beat becomes elusive once you get to track two. “Blister,” a ten-minute journey through The Jeffersons’ apartment, across Amsterdam canals, and around Giza’s three commanding creations surprises even the most seasoned listeners. My aforementioned roommate plays some of the sickest chops on a drum set a guy will ever hear, and as I play this show over our living room speakers, he’s distracted into a dizzying daze by Andy Hess’s bass line on “Blister.”
“How can he get that? That’s a fuckin’ black bass line,” the near-expert-in-his-own-right says. I agree, and we both try to rightfully react to Stanton Moore’s loud-ass rhythms. Moore decisively beats down on his drums; he kicks the shit out of each and every measure, making even South Dakota boys bite their bottom lips and ride along.
The rest of the show follows suit. As I scan the track list yet another time, “Gonzo” and the reworked MMW original “Fuck You Guys” stand out as “if you’re going to listen to one or two tracks from this show, listen to these” mentions.
Times are tough, but the sky is bright. Medeski’s still filling our upstairs with organ vibrations, so all is well.
I highly recommend you visit your favorite torrent site, search for, and download this show. It’s definitely made my Cinco de Mayo a bit more sunny.
By Imogen V. Shahrazad
I’m entirely convinced Bat For Lashes (aka Natasha Khan) recorded her sophomore album Two Suns in an evergreen forest, after dark, in the space between midnight and a thunderstorm. Indeed, I get the impression that Bat for Lashes herself splits her time between dancing in the moonlight and prowling the banks of slow-moving rivers.
The gentle, folky curves of her voice mask something deep, an instinct for human rhythms. Elements such as the hand-claps in “Two Planets” become body as instrument, and one almost forgets that sounds other than those coming out of the musician herself exist on the album. It’s a dream vision, a call to ancestors, an ear to the ground.
That said, Two Suns is not a wishy-washy, faux-hippie, part-time goddess worshipping “I was inspired by a weekend retreat to Allegheny National Forest” album. This is a serious work of art.
Bat For Lashes makes music for the bare bones of the soul, and we hang our hearts on the deep breath of her vocals, nestled like cubs. Despite her instinctual grasp of something fundamentally nature-made, the theatrical final minute and thirty seconds of the album (the end of “The Big Sleep”) could be a swan song—one imagines a dancer spinning slowly off the stage in a fading spotlight, the audience holding its breath.
There’s a quiet little town, in a world, on about a 78 degrees angle from Venus, about 2389329 miles away from Venus, full of really, really, really fat people. These people loved to eat; they would eat everything, from liver to asparagus, from chocolate to Sticky Cheese, and from Jelly to Jam. Now these people were happy people and no one ever put them down.
Outside Earth, there’s this gigantic space ship. This space ship looks exactly like a hamburger, with seeds every few yards and all. Their salt and pepper guns were loaded, and ready to hit this planet full of fat people (although they the McDonaldians didn‘t know they were fat.) The King Grilled Chicken stood up on the ice cream cone pillar, ready to make a speech.
“Hello My fellow McDonaldians” The King Grilled Chicken said. “Today we march down to earth, and we fight to death!” he screamed.
This got much applause, especially from a Chicken nugget, named Crispy Gangsta. “Yeah let’s show dem homies we gunna pop a soda cap up their-” But he was cut off when the king threw a ketchup packet at him. “Shut it. Now unleash all flamin’ hot sauce!” The King screamed.
Down on Earth all the fat people were having a “we-ate-ten-thousand-pieces-of-chicken-day.” Now as we all know that’s a huge celebration, everyone who’s anyone goes there.
Then, out of nowhere, it started raining salt and pepper. Then the sound of hamburgers the size of pillows ringed in everyone ears. Then… a giant pillow sized hamburger flew down from the sky. It was Crispy Gangsta ready for action.
Unfortunately a boy named Chungy saw Crispy’s ship and got over excited. He ran at the hamburger full force, and swallowed Crispy Gangsta whole. Then he tore that hamburger down and ate the entire thing in five seconds, and wanted more. Then the rest of the space ships came down. In half an hour not one scrap of food was left. Except the mother ship which had landed.
“I come to you humans in peace and hope we can make a fair agreement, and-” but he got cut off when Chungy got a little too hungry. He swallowed the king in one gulp. The poor McDonaldians had no idea what was coming… But the voluptuous folk on the ground sure got a lot of fun out of eating the mother ship.
