Untimely Ript: It Makes A Mighty Crunch

I had more fun at Enon's Madison show this April than I have at most this year. The songs on Grass Geysers, Carbon Clouds have a way of sounding urgent and tossed-off all at once. Sometimes it's satisfying and sometimes it feels incomplete in a way I can't really put my finger on. Ultimately, I'll come down on the side of liking it. Watching John Schmersal play guitar, twisting out such jagged sounds with such precision and rhyhtm, made the songs a lot easier to appreciate.

Anyways, Schmersal said something about "JonBenet" when he introduced the songs "Little Ghost" and "Swab The Deck," the two songs on a 7" released by Silver Rocket, which turns out to be a label based in Prague, of all things. And yep, there's the murdered child-model herself, her vacant gaze captured in soft focus, right on the sleeve. Is there something sharp and menacing behind this, or is it a spontaneous piece of nastiness? The music raises the same questions.

Stream: "Little Ghost"

Untimely Ript: Reprises And Rescues

Mack The Knife: Kurt Weill's Greatest Hits
Performed by Boston Pops; Morton Gould And His Orchestra; Boston Symphony
RCA, 1973

Musicals have always seemed so stiff and dreadfully forced to me. In fact, I tend to hate them (unless they're as funny and warped as, say, Little Shop Of Horrors), and would probably be more comfortable watching snuff films while resting my feet in a bucket of scorpions. I have never seen or heard Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. On this instrumental tribute, it is a relief to hear musical-theater melodies that beg to be spun around with drunken romance and silly violence. On Side A's reprise of several Threepenny numbers, 11 members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra still make it sound, well, a bit stiff, but not forced. More importantly, it's clear the music deserves to be rescued from the context of musical theater, if only for safekeeping.

Stream/download: "Threepenny Finale"


Despite similar flaws, the Boston Pops' version of the title track preserves a mystery lost in, say, the cute-'n'-cocky Bobby Darin version. Alright, so the English-language lyrics are worth keeping around, in all their excessive talk about "a body oozin' life" and "when that shark bites." It's just a bit, you know, stiff and forced when stapled onto this elegantly tawdry tune.

Stream/download: "Mack The Knife"


Along with vinyl packaging, we seem to have lost untold amounts of banal pomposity. Not just about the music—there's plenty of that in CD liner notes, after all. On the back of an LP sleeve, there's always room to spare for the babble of corporate audiophiles:

"DYNAFLEX is the RCA trademark for a new development in record manufacturing that provides a smoother, quieter surface and improved ability to reproduce musical sound. This lightweight record also virtually eliminates warpage and turntable slippage."

Untimely Ript: Where They Pour Coca-Cola Just Like Vintage Wine

"I wish that I could push a button and talk in the past and not the present tense..."


Welcome to Untimely Ript, WBC's little showcase for tunes jacked from just about any damn year. Everything will be lovingly yanked from vinyl and full of crackly goodness. I was initially planning to do this as a separate blog altogether, but then I realized I might as well put some more content on the shitty content-starved blog I already fucking have. Plus, if every annoying jackass in America started up a new blog every time he fell out of bed with some gimmicky new idea, there wouldn't be enough room on the Internet for all the world's over-enthusiastic music bloggers to share buckets of MP3s. Right?

Don't expect a great deal of recent stuff, except perhaps the occasional cool 7". It isn't that vinyl is better, or that the past was better, or any of that crap. It's that what you get in the vinyl bins, especially at thrift stores and used-record places and street fairs and whatnot, makes for so many surprises. It's mediated in a strange, arbitrary, and unpredictable way, but not by distributors.

But before getting into all that, I'll share the opening track from a record I really love, in a non-fleeting, non-kitschy way: "Brilliant Mistake," from Elvis Costello's King Of America. It is one of his best albums. I tried to explain why in this A.V. Club piece, so I'll leave it at that for now. It is also totally worth buying in non-crackly MP3 or CD format.