I saw these guys last night, and wow were they fucking incredible. Honestly, if you get a chance to go see them, do. They made this Brooklynite proud, too: way to represent, guys. I wanted them to play for three days straight. Damn.

Gorgeous.

It still makes me happy, and they were amazingly cool live. They were the only band I ever played that my mother asked me to turn off, and I vaguely remember her calling it something like “Nazi death music.” I love this description at Trouser Press:

Ah, Blixa: check out the creepiest version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” ever recorded. (He was one of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds too, by the way.)

or there’s always this option.

As someone who goes to see a great deal of music these days – go figure, but it turns out I love chamber music – I tend to leave my phone somewhere in the entrance / antechamber to the actual performance hall. It would make sense if people could check their phones before walking into an event.

Now they just have to add some local live dates, and I will start 2012 off exactly right.

Take, for example, the deceptively buoyant “California.” Although Wainwright’s songwriting ability has been compared to that of Joni Mitchell, this song is decidedly the opposite, in spirit, to her song of the same title. The Sunshine State, in Wainwright’s view, is hardly “home” but a freon-fueled mess hall of vapid, self-conscious poseurs (sure). There’s hardly a more damning conclusion than “Life is the longest death in California,” but what a deliciously delivered pronouncement it is: Wainwright’s specialty is the beautiful pain behind the bruise. The song’s gift lies less in its misery than in the insidious glee of its tune. If New York brings out the brooding sweep of Wainwright’s voice and lyricism, then California shellacs his melancholy and shoves it out with a bright fuck-you.

I once heard Poses described as the perfect modern penthouse apartment – especially as compared to Wainwright’s debut, which is an over-stuffed but perfectly appointed Victorian drawing room.

There is one note in “Greek Song” that to this day can make me weep when I hear it, even out of the blue: the perfect melancholy tone, a cri de coeur but beautiful. Just listen to it, the first “all” in the refrain.

If any generous soul out there would like to buy me his House of Rufus box set, please feel free.

So if you’re around & this is your kind of thing, feel free to say hi if you see us there.

The music itself merges traditional klezmer scales and rhythms with the aggressive energy of early gay punk bands like Pansy Division.

If the musical satirist Tom Lehrer were to write a hard-core anthem about sex reassignment surgery, with a driving guitar lick, a “Hava Nagila” breakdown and a keyboard line lifted from Super Mario Brothers, it might approximate the Schmekel sound.

Schmekel means “little penis” in Yiddish. And people wonder why I like hanging out with trans guys.

I know, I’m being corrupted, & my punk rock credibility is going to fly out the window any day now. Still, this shit’s GOOD. I’ve always wanted to know more jazz, since my dad was a fan, & it’s good to be in a place where being entirely ignorant doesn’t make you feel silly. Ah, educational atmospheres!

I wish I had seen him live, too.