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Going single
The strange new world of vinyl
BY DOUGLAS WOLK

Major-label vinyl singles are all but dead now, and indies have slowed down their singles output severely over the past few years — even Sub Pop is shutting down its legendary "singles club." That means that the ones that do come out tend to be a rare breed. Here’s a quick look at some of the newest little platters that matter.

For years, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion have accompanied new albums with a "jukebox 45" (complete with old-fashioned typeset red-and-white jukebox label) on the tiny indie In the Red. Their new full-length CD, Plastic Fang, just came out on Matador, and right on cue here’s "Do You Wanna Get It," an In the Red 45 of a track that would be at home blaring out of a quarter-operated machine in a greasy spoon. It’s a massive early-’70s-Faces-style rocker featuring a kick-ass piano break by New Orleans R&B legend Dr. John and some bullheaded guitar playing from Spencer and Judah Bauer. "Ghetto Mom," the B-side, is a little dopier as a song, but it’s saved by some frenetic Russell Simins drumming — that guy hits the cymbals so hard it almost makes the needle jump out of the groove.

A year or so ago, New York retro-goths the Rapture tucked away an incredible Cure-style groove workout, "House of Jealous Lovers," on a tour-only EP. (The lyrics are basically the title screamed Robert Smithishly many times, along with "one, AAAAH!, two, AAAAH!", etc.) But adventurous DJs caught onto it, and now the band have re-recorded it as a 12-inch single on DFA, with the house beat the title promises but didn’t deliver the first time. Even better is Morgan Geist’s remix, which complicates and brittles up the rhythm of "House" and overlays a keyboard part and a trumpet solo that haul it straight into the same kind of 1981 underground dance club where Don Cherry had a hit with "I Walk."

Along the same neo-new-wave lines, the Faint, a Lincoln (Nebraska) band who are singlehandedly bringing back everything Gary Numan and Duran Duran donated to the Salvation Army in 1985, have put out a dance 12-inch of their own, an electrofied cover of Sonic Youth’s guitar maelstrom "Mote" (GSL). The riff translates well to their synth-pop idiom, and they wring as much as they can out of the lyric with their American-singing-English-singing-American accents. The single also includes a blurt of lite-industrial jackhammering called "Victim Convenience," a collaboration with their home-town emo trembler and former bandmate Conor Oberst (of Bright Eyes) that sounds like Depeche Mode in a seriously grim mood, plus a Latin-freestyle cut-up of the Faint’s own "Passives."

Nobukazu Takemura, the Japanese beatmaster whose tippy-tap rhythms and balloony tones are so cute that he created the sounds for the Aibo robot-dog toy, hit his stride in 2000 with his "Sign" single. His new 12-inch, "Mimic Robot" (Thrill Jockey), is more or less a sequel. Over a jittering, fractally evolving percussion-and-synth bed that deliberately avoids making melodic sense, a voice that sounds as if it were straight out of a Macintosh speech synthesizer rattles and hums an incomprehensible lyric by frequent Takemura collaborator Aki Tsuyuko. "Sign" itself reappears on the flip slide in drastically mutated form as "Resign part 2," and the disc is rounded off by a percolating, almost monotonic piece called "Cons" that sounds like a large room full of slot machines.

The British label Pickled Egg (it’s on the Web at www.pickled-egg.co.uk) consistently releases odd but delightful stuff. "Helicopter"/"Kufushoot," by the Japanese duo Pop-Off Tuesday, sets a tender voice and an acoustic guitar alongside a menagerie of bizarre electronic noises and samples that switch between mock–Beach Boys and pastoral digital freakout. The effect is a little like Daffy Duck strumming his guitar as the background speed-mutates behind him.

Finally, one of the greatest indie singles labels is celebrating its anniversary. K Records’ 100th single in its 15-year-old "International Pop Underground" series is Mirah’s "Cold Cold Water," a fragile, bittersweet song with a tremendous spaghetti-western arrangement involving strings and orchestral percussion. It’s backed with a bare demo of the song and discrete bits of the elements that went into the final version — the recorded equivalent of paper-doll clothes.

Issue Date: May 2 - 9, 2002
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