[Bledermann]

Scissor Shock is idiotic.

[atsonicpark]

Hell yeah! If that's the best insult you've got, then I don't really have much to worry about!

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by atsonicpark

yeah, i was just humoring the drummer since i sent a demo to ecstatic peace and i didn't want him to be like "Hey thurston don't even bother listening to scissor shock, they hate 'boss'!" but now i guess it's okay to let the truth out. magik markers always have and always will suck a big fat dick. They denied me on myspace because they're jealous that I have more friends than them. And they won't come to Indiana because our fans don't like them. And they try to snub me at every turn because they know that Scissor Shock is the better band with the two of the same letters for their initials. See.. SS is WAY cooler than MM.

ha ha.

you're just jealous because they can climax, and you can't. :P

[Moshe]

14-09-07

Magik Markers - Boss

 

When confronted with an example of magnificence in nature, such as a waterfall, Jane Goodall reported that the chimpanzees she observed were captivated, as if in awe of the beauty of the world. On BOSS, the Magik Markers have tried to capture the chimps' awe. A formality and restraint the Markers have never exerted on their previous recorded material is present on BOSS. Now the Markers are Jainists, with their mouths masked so as to not inhale even one tiny insect, here pursuing the killer gentle with a vengeance. Recorded in the cavernous dark of Echo Canyon West, with producer Lee Ranaldo working the boards like a diviner, BOSS documents the Markers with a previously unheard fidelity and orchestration. Idiosyncratic song structure and melodies interspersed with a destructive drum stomp are reminiscent of the early electrified blues of Junior Kimbrough, or the black hole rhythms of Kousokuya. Mixing a gentle vulnerability with a winded egomania, the Markers have always had a musical tunnel vision; BOSS is that vision made manifest. The tug of war the Markers enact, the way they are fully prepared to start yanking their world apart as they find themselves losing their place in, makes moot possibilities of greatness or mediocrity. It makes them unapologetic soothsayers with their ears pressed to the ground, waiting for footsteps.

With Peter Nolan, we finally hear what Lou Reed would have sounded like had he sallied with the drums instead of getting seduced by the easy praise of front man status. Like Rashid Ali squeezed into the Teutonic leather pants of Faust, Nolan drums like there are hell hounds at his heels but he just can't be bothered. Here both laconic and frenzied, Nolan's drumming arms reach out like an octopus's: tickling the ivories, humming the organ and blasting taps on some kind of endtime trumpet. As a pianist, Nolan reminds us that the piano is a percussive, beating out the whoomp of some old war dance, a bare foot-fall rhythm of fighters to battle and the heavy hands of a whiskey burlesque in the afternoon. Nolan is easy to underestimate, but finally, here is high fidelity record of the strange soul of one of America's most natural and quizzical musical minds.

In a 2005 interview in The Wire, Elisa Ambrogio said, "I want [The Magik Markers] to concentrate on music and focus inward, to concentrate on our own language of sound." BOSS stands as the Markers' first stab at getting to the meat of this ambition. Ambrogio is not easy to categorize. Nose deep in New England Calvinism and the brutality of nature, Ambrogio's lyrics are like a transcription of a drunk lunchtime argument between Lisa Yuskavage and Herman Melville. A guitarist whose notes form question and hatchet marks with equal measure, a musical humility to the point of ingratiation fused with all visible seams to grandiose self-importance speeds through her playing. With a mix of blues simplicity, an almost Sonny Sharrock wailing and a janky Americana punk reminiscent of Pat Place and Roky Erickson, Ambrogio avoids preciousness like a rash. On BOSS, a tent rises right out of the empty plain and we are thrust into a full blown revival show with no audience and no lights; it is just Elisa preaching, Pete blowing Gabriel's horn, and the mad wind of the prairie blowing all around. Fairfield Porter wrote that: 'Art does not succeed by compelling you to like it, but by making you feel this presence in it. 'Is someone there?...' "

www.ecstaticpeace.com

[Everyneurotic]

i don't mind if people like them or not, that's fine, whatever. but what really bothers me is the comparisons, "sonic youth meets mars", "sonny sharrock", "mid-period germs"...i mean, they don't deserve the comparisons, they are not as good as the germs or sonny sharrock or mars were (and frankly, they sound absolutely nothing like those artists)...do every pop punk band formed by 12 year olds should be compared to the adolescents? should every death metal be meassured like morbid angel or cryptopsy? is every idm artist as good as aphex twin?

[atsonicpark]

I was just joking...

[PAULYBEE2656]

cant agree with that last statement adam, blood brothers were ALWAYS shite!

[Everyneurotic]

ok, here's an example; i'm not that against the blood brothers, i kinda like a couple of things by them but i know they are not a really great band.

now, if someone described the blood brothers as "a new generation heroin" "the heirs of at the drive-in" or "a punk out converge" that would not be true at all because, even if they sound a little like that, they are and were never as good as any of those bands.

same with the magik markers.

besides, lee can forgive me or not, but the most irritating thing about boss is the whole skronk noisy guitars going throughout all the songs in the background, i think they wanted to keep that as insurance so people wouldn't call them sell outs "the noise is still there, rock n' roll!!!!" still, even that wouldn't have saved the album, but they should have gotten rid of that.

[HaydenAsche]

I'm going to give this album a shot. I don't think they've released anything that isn't boring, talentless tripe yet but whatever.

[k-krack]

Originally Posted by Everyneurotic

ok, here's an example; i'm not that against the blood brothers, i kinda like a couple of things by them but i know they are not a really great band.

now, if someone described the blood brothers as "a new generation heroin" "the heirs of at the drive-in" or "a punk out converge" that would not be true at all because, even if they sound a little like that, they are and were never as good as any of those bands.

Heroin and ATDI I can jive with... but... Converge?!
But to be honest, I like the Blood Brothers just as much as ATDI + Heroin.

[atsonicpark]

speaking of at the drive in, i always thought they were clikitat ikatowi ripoffs.. haha.. but i love 'em./

[Everyneurotic]

where atdi excelled wasn't in sound innovation (proven by their subsequent bands), it was on their songwriting skills.

yeah, i saw the converge comparison somewhere; actually, it compared them to converge AND botch!!

[atsonicpark]

speaking of converge.

the last song on "you fail me" sounds like fugazi covering a mastodon song. i've always thought this. listen carefully to it and think of that comparison and it'll make you chuckle.

[k-krack]

Originally Posted by atsonicpark

speaking of at the drive in, i always thought they were clikitat ikatowi ripoffs.. haha.. but i love 'em./

I think what you meant was "I always wanted to namedrop some weirdo, probably asian band." Bastard.

[Everyneurotic]

clikatat ikatowi were from san diego, and they certainly influenced atdi.

[atsonicpark]

Originally Posted by k-krack

I think what you meant was "I always wanted to namedrop some weirdo, probably asian band." Bastard.

1) Why would I want to namedrop a band EVERYONE knows? They were on gravity records.. the vss, antioch arrow, angel hair, you surely know those bands?

2) Not asian.

3) And if you bother to listen to clikitat, a lot of the vocals/playing is very similiar to ATDI.

Before you attempt to be insulting, do a little research. I swear, some people on this board...

[Moshe]

Magik Markers
BOSS
Ecstatic Peace!

Rating: 8.6/10

Man, this is a great year for Lee Ranaldo to take other bands to Sonic Youth Fantasy Camp, isn't it? First, he gave the starstruck Cribs a taste of how real indie cred feels, beknighting their crossover breakthrough with his disjunct beat poetry on the avant-anchor "Be Safe." Now he's helping noisy protΘgΘs Magik Markers live the opposite fantasy, an album of songs and melodies, the forbidden dream of the noise-rock scene, I always suspected. Heed, theologians of Merzbow: accessibility warning. Even with a nine-minute spoken dirge, the duo's first official album, BOSS, won't be hard to take for anyone who's been softened up by PJ Harvey's Rid of Me or Ranaldo's own band's A Thousand Leaves, the two landmarks BOSS recalls instantaneously. A nice little pipebomb to indie's current obsession with billowing lanes of sugar and safe orchestral watercolors.

Not that BOSS rocks or anything. It creeps along like one long feedback-swollen hymn, always noising up denser and denser but rarely exploding into punk or anything you could describe as a wall of something. It rather gorgeously hums low and disturbing, hiding in the grass like some kind of jungle cat. You know its there, you see the yellow glow of its eyes, but the entirety of the beast is camouflaged in shrouds of thickery.

Itchy drummer Pete Nolan tries his damnedest to go against everything I just said. He doesn't peel off petals, he tears the flower's whole damn head off. Guided missile "Body Rot" isn't totally unlike the work of spastic labelmates Be Your Own Pet, and you can tell it was just what Nolan needed after picking at the scabs of "Axis Mundi" for six minutes. His contributions (and lack of contributions: piano ballad "Empty Bottles" is just the perfect relief between the tough stuff) craft the perfect negative space throughout a thrash-and-release album to make the noise beat harder and the quiet ring all the more shakily.

Frontwomen don't come more arresting than Elisa Ambrogio, either, who wraps dark abstractions like "My wet youth just made me queasy" around electrical malfunctions in "Circle," with birdlike effects a la "Tomorrow Never Knows," and weary pleas like "I gotta decay" in "Body Rot." Her voice is captivating and full of theater, brimming with icy, sexy evil in the bluesy "Taste." The ballads are especially surprising, with not just "Empty Bottles," but "Bad Dream/Hartford's Beat Suite," all chiming acoustics and beating Chan Marshall at her own game. And if Cat Power ever came in contact with the John Updike character Harry Angstrom, as Ambroglio does, it was probably just to snort a line off a jaundiced copy of Rabbit At Rest. Nice to have a noise band that lets a little light into their cave now and then. You know, literary references, proof of some relation to melody, linear song structures. It's just more human.

Reviewed by Dan Weiss
A former editor of the William Paterson literary magazine, Zeitgeist, Dan Weiss is a contributing writer for LAS.

[Moshe]

 

Band of the Week: Magik Markers

Writer: Andrew Earles
Department, Published online on 24 Sep 2007
Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Fun Fact: Absolutely no one spells their name right.
Why They're Worth Watching: Their live show keeps getting better and louder, and will continue to do so, what with the duo's impending two-guitarist expansion.
For Fans Of: The Dead C, early Sonic Youth, Bardo Pond
The rather useless term “noise-pop” is frequently attached to bands that are deficient in one or both of those areas. Magik Markers can bring the noise. They can rock an extended jam that veers outside of structure or melody. They are good at these things, but truthfully, who isn’t? There is a very thin line between tomfoolery and talent in the noise scene — any group of chumps with a table of pedals can be the next Wolf Eyes. But though the Magik Markers attract a noisenik following, they are a pop band at heart, and a very catchy one at that. Their most accomplished full-length to date, Boss, hits the streets tomorrow (Sept. 25) via the appropriate home of Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace.
“I mean, I’m friends with a lot of people in the noise scene, but we obviously don’t have much in common with a power electronics or the ‘new weird America’ band," says drummer Pete Nolan, who along with guitarist Elisa Ambrogio, formed the Magik Markers in 2002. "Some of that is just kids and their idea of what’s cool. Plus, we made a conscious effort to make an album of fully realized songs.” That album, Boss, is the Brooklyn-based band's third proper release (along with some CD-R’s).
If this new Magik Markers record resembles early Sonic Youth, (particularly 1985's Bad Moon Rising), it’s probably by accident. “I’m not all that familiar with early Sonic Youth, and the constant comparisons in print can be a bummer,” Nolan says. Ambrogio’s vocals and phrasing do recall a more tuneful Kim Gordon, but the savvy listener will detect another landmark experimental band. “I was more into the Xpressway label and the Dead C, especially as I was finishing high school,” Nolan says. “And I’ve currently been into a lot of older singer songwriter stuff, like Townes Van Zandt.”
In order to do justice to the new album, the Magik Markers have increased their live lineup to four members. Conversely, Boss is the focus. “Before, we were all about playing live, and recording was secondary," Nolan explains. "This time, I wanted to make an album that I’d want to listen to over and over again.” With this renewed sense of energy and purpose, the band will traverse the States this fall. These shows are not to be missed, namely because the Magik Markers are exactly what rock needs: something more challenging and miles away from the pedestrian pretentiousness and brainless rehashing of many modern-day groups

http://www.pastemagazine.com/action/..._magik_markers

[pbradley]

Originally Posted by atsonicpark

hmm.

I find it difficult labeling Magik Markers as any type of "noise" band. If anything, they're amateur avant garde dancers who bang on things. And I also find it repulsive that people actually care about this album; that latest review is just moronic. "THEY DISCOVERED MELODIES! BUT UNDERNEATH, THEY'RE STILL THE SAME OL' NOISE KIDS, MAKIN' FEEDBACK." The album may have... melodies.. but they're not necassarily good ones. The album doesn't really have much noise except really slicky produced feedback and farts (the only noises Magik Markers know how to make). What the album does have is an inspired performance by Ranaldo and good production by Ranaldo. Rating: 0.0/10.

Oh shit, you don't like the Magik Markers?

[atsonicpark]

how'dja kno?