No Skin Off My Ass

The booklet for the "Going Against Maz's Advice" compilation has to be one of my favorite booklets ever: "Jangle, my ass!", "Fuck with Us and We Fuck with You", "Total Running Time: 15 Fucking Hours!" Plus the fact that the label is called Four-Letter Words, I mean, it still makes me chuckle every time I flip through it. Clumsily, I chopped up the booklet with a pair of scissors years ago, trying to make it fit into a jewel case so the compilation wouldn't keep getting lost in my CD tower (the compilation originally just came in a bag). How was I supposed to know that someday I'd eventually be scanning the cover for some internet bullshit. Fuck that.

"Beaches and Canyons" is a great lead-off track, gliding into a huge swell, and in fact both Summer Hits tracks on this are fairly ace. Even if you're not completely sold by some of the other stuff on here-- Cat's Miaow, Belmondo, Holiday Flyer, etc-- you'll still be able to tell where Weed Hounds get most of their ideas from (not that I don't love Weed Hounds, plus they're playing Popfest New England this year, which is weird but great). This was also the first time I'd ever heard Boyracer, whose tracks somehow got stuck at the end of the compilation, as if they were an afterthought. Boyracer, of course, totally floored me; terrifyingly hooky, blown-out, one-minute pop songs, how could you not like that? "Meadowhall" starting off with a tossed-off improv bit and then suddenly switching over to the real song with the click of a recorder button reminded me of Guided By Voices, another band that I was just getting heavily into at the time, and Stewart's laugh as he flubbed the vocal but kept going was sorta Westerberg-ish. "Meadowhall (acoustic)" isn't even the same song, much less entirely acoustic. (Tricycle Popstar is shit, as always.) We need more dumb humor in music.




The Summer Hits -

"Beaches and Canyons"

"Spanish Films"

Starstreamer -

"Halo"

Belmondo -

"Girlfriends' Revenge"

Orange Cake Mix -

"The Doctor's Wife"

Tricycle Popstar -

"No Skin Off My Ass"

Boyracer -

"Meadowhall"

"Meadowhall (acoustic)"

No Longer In My World

Another brilliant minimalist Blackbean and Placenta Tape Club packaging job on this one, with a couple of glossy mag photos pasted to the front-- each sleeve had different photos, from what I've seen-- and barely a handwritten "45" or "33" on the label to differentiate between the two sides (each side plays at a different speed, naturally). The sleeve on my copy got a little messed up from being stapled to the wall at Brass City Records, but when you're an international pop star like Jim Rao, that's what happens: your records go right up on the wall next to the butcher cover and the collectible Venom shaped pic discs.

Tricycle Popstar is a Japanese guy living in Australia, if I remember correctly from the Four Letter Words comp, and if you own that comp then you can trust me that the song I'm posting here is even better than "No Skin Off My Ass". Really, no higher praise exists.




Orange Cake Mix -

"Sunday Kind of Girl"

Tricycle Popstar -

"Peach Boys Bed Sounds"

(these files are now listen-only)

She Won't Fade Out

It wouldn't be much of an overstatement to say that Jim Rao's mid-90's bedroom pop recordings put him at the forefront of the Shrimper Rebellion-- those home-tracked twee pop artists with "thing" names (Refrigerator, Fishtick, Paste, Orange Cake Mix, Beanpole, Wallpaper, Crayon, etc). If you're into the Chilton/Bell songs on Big Star's "#1 Record" and the Chris Bell demos that came out afterwards, as obviously I am, then there's some Orange Cake Mix stuff out there that you've definitely gotta hear.

That's not to say that all of the Orange Cake Mix releases are great; it seemed like Jim had a new CD or 7" or 12" coming out every week once his music started to catch on, and most of them are pretty much crap, actually. For a while there I used to buy one Orange Cake Mix 7" or CD or LP after another, in search of at least one track where Jim would set aside the baby crib synthesizer noises and finally remember to plug his guitar in, but almost always came up empty.

"Observations of Tomorrow and Today", though, represents the peak of Rao's Chilton/Bell-styled output (along with the Orange Cake Mix track on Cher Doll's "Champagne Dancing Party" EP, which is a real gem). But you don't just have to take my revisionist version of history this time; here's my review from twelve years ago, in Brushback #5:


All I have now is the single-channel "mono" version, although I fixed it so that the one track shows up in both speakers. Always fixing what others fuck up, that's my motto.




Orange Cake Mix -

"She Won't Fade Out"

"Closely Guarded Secrets"

"Within"

"Don't Let Tomorrow Get In Your Way"

(these files are now listen-only)