Review of last night's Tightlights show at Billiamsburg Underwater Glass Museum Soundspace

[Many loyal readers will know that I have in the past criticized other music bloggers for being too self-indulgent in their reviews. With that being said, everyone's musical tastes and experiences are subjective and inextricably linked with our own personal lives. So allow me to be a hypocritical just for a brief moment]

I'll never forget the day when I , just 14 years old, walked to my local music store and purchased Tightlight's debut mp3. To be completely honest, I didn't know as much then about music as I do now. I'll never forget walking home, putting the mp3 in my mp3 player, and putting on my headphones while my mom cooked dinner. In many ways, it was my first really real musical listening experience and the beginning of a journey and life that defined much of my life to come. I'll never forget the first 45 seconds of the mp3 - descriptions of "girls in girl-shaped dresses / walking down the marinade" was strangely beautiful to my 14 year old ears. It was like the world exploded into my worldview, and the process extended into all areas of my life.

That summer, I burned a copy of the mp3 for my first girlfriend, Sarah Millow. We used to sit on the back of my mom's porch and...

continue to talk about self, end with "unfortunately I was never able to really work things out with my old man"

Booklight reunion and Nice Cream reissue

Nobody can argue that when they imploded onto the scene at 3:00 on January 7, 1987, Booklight were instantly galvanized as the step-fathers of ectopic rock. For the next ten years, they defined the genre and have been copied by just about everybody. One needs only to ask anyone who was a teenager or family member between January of 1987 and January of 1997, to realize what a decade-defining group this band was. Mitch Shrapner himself called Booklight "the only band that was really the only most important band" during this tumultuous time for postmodern music. Few eight-guitar ensembles have attained in an entire career the level that Booklight reached in their first nine EPs.

That's why the internet music world experienced a near-proverbial solar eclipse this morning when Booklight announced they were coming out of their extended hiatus and putting out a reissue of their renegade automobile-influenced masterpiece, "Nice Cream."

Many will remember Booklight as the less commercial counterpart to the oft criticized 87-97s smock-rock band The Releasers. And although they never reached the level of acclaim or liquidity as The Releasers and other guilty-turned-reflective groups of the decade, Booklight have always been looked upon favorably by music critics and political cartoonists alike.

Whether you remember them as 'that weird group who released their first EP on floppy disk' or 'the band that made Bongo magazine rewrite their entire classified section' you're sure to have an opinion on the band and their brow-raising comeback. The band's now infamous breakup was a very public ordeal in '97 when Tiggler announced to the band's listserv that Booklight would be taking "a long long long, possibly never-ending, break" due to his "realization that [bassist Scott Mullton] is constantly annoying."

But if you're looking to get a chance to see the group on their brief reunion tour, don't hold your breath. At time of writing, the band just announced they would be doing a limited six-show "Train-Car Stint" across the U.S., playing intimate acoustic sets in renovated box cars or train-themed museums in mid-sized towns. By the time you're finished reading this article, the shows will almost definitely have sold out. Other than these select shows, a spokeswoman for the group confirmed the rumors that the band will be playing the coveted headliner spot at the Art Is Still Always Music Festival in Miami this October.

So it looks like for the unlucky majority, we'll just have to be content with the Nice Cream reissue. The band's website states the release is a 'beautiful and sprawling collection' of rarities, C-sides, with a bonus disc containing the 11 tracks of the album with alternate titles." The album pre-pre-sale begins tomorrow afternoon at 3:30 p.m. and the first 50 pre-pre-sale orders come with autographed lyrics.

Links to album pre-pre-order and tour dates can be found Here.

Album Review – Lady Carnival/Fingerfake

Hey folks. We here at WaveWave can’t tell you how excited we are to launch our site with an album review of seminal newcomer Long Island pre-industrial punk-post band Lady Carnival. This group has been building a ton of buzz, and rightly so. Their new EP Fingerfake is a patchwork of beauty and maximalism that stands out as one of the absolute best releases of the last 14 weeks.

On first listen, one might ignore the subtler tendencies of this album – its Nietzschean overtones are present but unobtrusive. But after a few spins, the full magnitude of this sonic mosaic is apparent; this is not your standard bedroom-drone. While to their detractors Lady Carnival has been labelled as a “rich man’s electro-funk outfit,” Fingerfake makes it difficult to argue with the directions and intentions that herein speak so saliently. Vocalist Estella Mitchell makes this clear when, over the quiet yet comfortable ambience-turned-hiss-cloud guitar lashes of the opening track she croons, ” You felt like me once / I’ll steal you in months. ” Giving a nod to punk-post figureheads The Trucks, this duo-trio has certainly done their homework. From the elegant bump of Lethal Label to the more intricate and compressed hints of 80s noise-dub band YOUTHANIZE, Lady Carnival’s influences are hot-glued together in a deceptively timid yet unfettered statement of originality.

The most apparent difference one notices between Fingerfake and the band’s debut, Welcome Back to my Cabin Again for the First Time, is the striking absence of left-fi portraitism and the eminence and leanings toward wave-wave underpinnings. Although jarring, the change is welcomed. And whileWBTMCAFTFT certainly had its time, place, and audience, Lady Carnival has smartly angled its sounds towards a more refined and existentially apt statement. The production quality on Fingerfake, to be sure, is cleaner, crisper, and more cotton-like. As an unabashedly elegant answer to the group’s debut, this EP shines. Mitchell’s breathy and hearty utterances soar over the bitter-but-swollen guitar work of keyboardist Eric Quiggers. And on the albums third track, “14 Minutes…Please,” the light play between the two explodes into an nu-noise romp that makes you feel like you're listening to early 70′s era Hardhat.

I think my readers will agree that retail-oriented drum tracking has never been a strong suit for Lady Carnival (or any pre-industrial ensemble for that matter), but this flaw becomes a defining attribute of the EP. Take the final track, “MMMouth/////////Leather”, for example. The beats that sound for the first 2 minutes of this glow-pop mammoth die and resurrect over 8 times, but the overall effect is mesmerizing. One gets drawn in to the light production values of long time LF contributor Mitch Mose (of Jackrappers and Fountain Wars fame). And listeners might be surprised to know that bassist Tim Pouter has stated in interviews that “yeah even though ["MMMouth/////////Leather"] was recorded on an old analog 3-track in my attic, it was originally meant to be the first track of the album.” The subsequent alterations made to these early album plans leave us with a captivating statement of unanswered certainties and insipid cruelties.

A brief look at the contention of the sub-indie punk-post world over the past 4 years show just how fragmented this genre is. The single unanswerable question that every band, blogger, and critic has lost sleep over is, ‘How can trans-guitar dominance, drawn from a palette of sonic variety and Hegelian insubordination coexist with discordant-but-soft vocal swells?” I think its safe to say that with Lady Carnival’s Fingerfake, this question has been answered.

Rating = Y