Silkworm: C/D?

also a big fan

I finally got around to seeing Bottomless Pit live about 4-5 months ago and it was great. I can't get into the records as much as Silkworm but it was just amazing to see Midgett and Cohen, they're an intense live band.

the "AIN'T YOU EVER BEEN ALONE IN YOUR LIFE?" part of the chorus to "Treat the New Guy Right" might be my favorite moment in any rock song ever

dude we are fucking soulmates & I wish we could see this song played live at the Triple Rock or Minneap venue of your choice so that we could @ 4 beers deep yell this line in unison

that would be awesome

damn i'm gettin' all melancholy now, i miss this band!

I've probably said this before but I think my entire guitar soloing "style" (such as it is) is based on trying to sound like Andy Cohen (and failing).

fucking love the solo in That's Entertainment

All this love makes me so happy!

I've always loved the solo in "Miracle Mile." It blew my mind that it was this despondent acoustic-guitar-and-vocals tune and then two minutes in you hear this CRACKLE CRACKLE as dude plugs in the electric guitar and then it's just like a minute of BRRREEAAAAAOOOWWW blaring electric guitar solo before cutting back out and he finishes the sad song.

rocking "empty elevator shaft" right now, a favorite & the one I would cover if I could find that passing chord in the second half of the verse

all right I'm in full Silkworm fanboy bloom now...TANGLED IN YR WEB, TANGLED IN YR WEB

also:

possibly fewer percentage of female fans that even Rush

silkworm is serious dude rock.

lol, that is true of so much early/midnineties midwestern indie! shows at the empty bottle ca. '95...all dudes

except my gf obv

so true--though my empty bottle days were more ca. 2000.

j0hn didn't u live in iowa too? did you know gabe's in ia city?

gabes was 2.5 hours from us, but we went there a little...most notably I drove in to see High on Fire circa winter 2000. like forty people there I'd guess. fucking epic.

gabes! i went there a few times as a grad student.

Are you guys into the Bottomless Pit stuff? I love their LP but I cannot get enough of their Congress EP. I feel like the songs are compositionally more fleshed out than the Silkworm material. Really its all wonderful!

except my gf obv

haha and my wife. and my friends' wives. I know a lot of female Silkworm fans actually!

love "Miracle Mile." one of those songs where I had the words memorized before I had ever encountered the New York places named so whenever I'm over on Avenue A half the time that shit pops in my head. "he was fucked in his lung, got shot on Avenue A sucking on some slut's tongue"

I think J0hn was referring more to the mid-nineties Empty Bottle crowd than just Silkworm fans. I can't speak for that myself, I was young and more of a Fireside Bowl kid at the time.

haha and my wife. and my friends' wives. I know a lot of female Silkworm fans actually!

*waves* Hey there!

consistently surprised how most people prefer later silkworm to the joel phelps era. i don't get it.

Both eras were great.

Hey remember when Andy Cohen was a member of Bush?

Man every single time I play Lifestyle I'm...

Yes. Their best record. It was irritating that it didn't make any best-of-decade lists because surely it's one of the best guitar rock albums of the last 10 years.

Right now I'm really into their cover of Let's Kill Saturday Night.

aww damn i missed a skwm lovefest last night i see

my contrib: tracks 1-6 of developer is my favorite sequence of music ever.

i guess i have to reevaluate their later work. really liked bottomless pit, though.

yeah! bottomless pit is great. i hope they put out some more stuff.

Fuck, now I'm stuck at work and badly want to dig out their recs and play'em

Again, I really loved the Congress EP. Anybody else feel like Bottomless Pit have melodically for fleshed out songs than Silkworm? I love both.

I need to check out Bottomless Pit, just haven't gotten around to it yet.

agreed that bottomless pit continues to improve, i like both but yeah "Red Pen" off congress is so amazing..

listened to Blueblood, Lifestyle, and Italian Platinum last night.

goddamn what a band.

michael was such a great drummer ;_;

i think his death is the saddest rock death ever to me. so unfair.

also...cohen is such a weird/awesome lyricist:

There are kike jokes and then the street mimes
In times like these no one seems to mind
But just you wait ‘til the pendulum swings
Toward the inevitable decline

Crossed-eye talk and a halting walk
Blind Willie is down the block
He will never see again

Right after the thread action last night I was going to the gym and I put every Silkworm album I own on my ipod to listen to on shuffle, it was great.

THE GREAT SILKWORM LOVEFEST OF 2010

thank you bookmark function

xp otm--i think recognizing how incredible cohen's lyrics are was a major turning point for me and silkworm

rocking "empty elevator shaft" right now, a favorite & the one I would cover if I could find that passing chord in the second half of the verse

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Thursday, March 4, 2010 12:09 AM (15 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

j0hn...

i was thinking of this last night and if i may humbly suggest...maybe you could try "Roots" off lifestyle...i could kinda hear that in your steez.

so many killer choruses too

"Was it YOU-OOOOO-OOOoooOOooOOoO-OOOO? You were WOOOOORLD PROOF!"

you guys ever see the video of them doing LR72 with no drummer after dahlquist was killed? chilling, really sad.

i was thinking of this last night and if i may humbly suggest...maybe you could try "Roots" off lifestyle...i could kinda hear that in your steez.

OMG yes! Particularly my favoritest lyrical bit on the whole album:

There's a Puerto Rican in this bar, she's thinking about San Juan
If I could, you know, I'd wave a wand and send her home
But first, you know, I'd send myself back where the river flows
But I can't even see that road, "When" is a secret, and that means nobody knows

For as awesome as the drumming and guitar work is, sometimes it seems people forget just how funny, clever, and genuinely affecting their lyrics could be.

isn't andy cohen a lawyer now or something? am i crazy?

yes he is

i think he was a lawyer for a lot of the time skwm was a band?

that was my impression

he would lawyer onstage between songs iirc

jewish lawyers in rock

when i saw these dudes open for Bikini Kill, he wore a big gold Star of David on his chest--the show was a Friday night, as i recall

http://www.jrp-graphics.com/jb/covers/LawyersInLove.jpg

I'm really trying to put a finger on why I love Silkworm so much, and the nearest I can get is this:

I really grew up on my Dad's records...the Stones, CCR, Neil Young, etc. There's a certain part of me that – although I have grown to love all sorts of music - weird post punk, hip hop, electronic stuff, noisier rock, punk, metal, world music, jazz, etc etc - there's a certain part of me, way down in the lizard brain, that loves classic rock in a way that that stuff can never touch..

just thinking of stuff like "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere" or "Lodi" by CCR or "Rocks Off" by the Stones...like music that basically gives you that "Four beers deep" feeling J0hn mentioned upthread, where you feel a something in your chest and you just want to rip your heart out cuz it's so anthemic and real and makes life seem so awesome and rocking

But at the same time, you can't just be stuck in those songs because there aren't any more of them being made, and any band that tries to be *actual* classic rock is going to fail. Those days are gone and it just seems fake and it won't even sound like those records sound.

So I guess for me Silkworm was a band that gave me those feelings of real "bro" classic rock, but at the same time they acknowledged and used influences from all the other stuff that changed how i viewed rock music - fugazi and mission of burma and sonic youth and the minutemen and gang of four etc – they were a part of that world two, the whole lineage of the "this band could be your life" era

they were able to combine the strange angles and skronk and sorta impenetrable lyrics and sometimes odd sounding chord changes and rhythmic hiccups in a way that still felt as anthemic and huge and heartfelt and full of everything as all the old music did.....but they weren't pretending to be like "hey we're a throwback to the old days" either like kings of leon or dudes that have a whole "let's bring OLD TIME ROCK BACK" jive.

basically they were exactly what i need out of rock, or at least a big part of it.

also a lot of the stuff i just posted might not make total sense when you read it, but i makes sense when i feel it.

(this also figures into why i think Lifter Puller was a great band and Hold Steady is only a good band)

great post