Pissed Jeans

Hope for Men
(Sub Pop)

Overheard at a Pissed Jeans gig:
“My mom thinks that me and my boyfriend Tony are having sex, which we completely are. And when I turn 18, we’re getting married. Tony’s not the first guy I’ve been with. That was Omar, this total skank counselor I had last summer at Camp Okeechobee. I didn’t really want to screw Omar, I just wanted to do it with somebody, and he promised to buy me a 4-track. What a liar. He didn’t buy me anything, he just laughed at me. That’s why I had my friend Jessica key his car while I was screwing him the second time. What a loser.

“I need a 4-track so bad! My band, Abortion Barbie, needs to make a demo and get the fuck out of here! This town is so dead! Thank God for Spencer, my meth dealer. He thinks he’s all from the hood. He’s a douche bag, but he gets the best drugs. He wants to screw me. Gross.”

c. 2007 LEO Weekly

Tomahawk

Anonymous
(Ipecac)

If you have followed Mike Patton’s journey from late-’80s backward-baseball cap-wearing, funk-rocking frontman for the never truly understood Faith No More on to Century 21 middle-aged, experimental, underground art screamturbator, then you’ve been witness to an ever surprising, uniquely inspiring voyage of risk-taking and discovery.
Tomahawk has existed, arguably, under the beer-belly shadow cast by Patton’s other heavy music supergroup, Fantomas. The latter, under Patton’s direction, has had more unique concepts. Tomahawk, led artistically by guitar ace Duane Denison (Hank III, The Jesus Lizard), has stood out as a (relatively) more subtle prog/jam/space project.

Anonymous bills itself as a collection of early 1900s songs from Native American tribes, found while researching their culture. Representative song titles include “Ghost Dance” and “Song of Victory.”
Most vocals are predictably wordless and/or screamed, at times chanted. When the vocals are understandable, as in the suggestive “Mescal Rite 2,” they seem inauthentic as native hymns. While respectful in general, the band often brings their fast and heavy rock sledgehammer to the ceremony, which might be misunderstood by teen boy fans as mockery.

c. 2007 LEO Weekly

Bryan Ferry

Dylanesque
(Virgin)

While some folks might consider Bryan Ferry’s biggest blunder of 2007 to be his ill-stated comment about how much he admired Hitler’s influence on fashion, I prefer that to this collection of Bob Dylan songs, surprisingly not recorded for Starbucks.
Comments about Hitler’s coats might also miss the point, but at least they don’t last an hour. Ferry, long known to baby boomers as a stylish and once purposeful man, tackles some of Dylan’s less obscure songs with the same finesse that a Bahamian hotel lounge singer might while slightly buzzed on Bartles & Jaymes.

The backing band, led by the expected British never-weres likely to show up at the next Live Earth concert (Paul Carrack, Chris Spedding, Robin Trower), speeds through most of the material as if eager to finish the session by lunch time.
Finally, before Brian Eno fans get excited about his “electronics” on “If Not for You,” let me save you the trouble of continuing that feeling.