Guest Edit #49: Male Bonding

We are Male Bonding. They kindly asked us to Guest Edit this thing. So we have. So hold yourself tight for skewed opinions, contradictory love and pure-as-dirt nonsense. But we are allowed to be wrong, misguided and honest because we are a band and bands are allowed to be that way, especially when asked. So thank you I Like Music and thank you the browser.

You can read about Gene Clark, The Stones and Ganglians. You can listen to Sun Kil Moon, Wu Tang, Pentangle and Huggy Bear (among others). Eat it up, burp it out. Oh, we have an album out at the end of August called Endless Now and we play lots of shows in America, Canada and the UK and Europe over September, October and November. We post details of that and other stuff here. Thank you and sorry.

Track
Artist: The Rolling Stones Track: Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow? Release: 1966 Label: Decca

Written for I Like Music by Robin Silas Christian, Male Bonding

I love the earlier Stones recordings and the energy they contain, all full of studio bleed and fuzz. This track, from 1966 is perfectly 'unpolished', and you get the impression they might have nailed it on the first take. I like that they recorded songs fast and then just put them out as singles, often leaving them off the album. This one was only ever played over 12 days and nights in '66.

This is the first Stones song to have brass in it, and the first to have feedback as an intro. Kevin recently said to me it could be Sonic Youth for the first five seconds. Check out the amazing 'live' version of this from their first live LP - Have You Seen Your Mother? LIVE, "recorded at The Royal Albert Hall" (but in fact just a loop of crowd noise and a much faster studio rendition), it's really good.

Album
Artist: Gene Clark Album: No Other Release: Decembr 1974 Label: Asylum Records

Written for I Like Music by John Arthur Webb, Male Bonding

Clark wrote this album at his friend's Mendocino cliff top home with a note book and acoustic guitar in hand, staring at the Pacific Ocean. Clark hated touring. He had a chronic fear of flying and suffered anxiety brought on from travelling. To combat this fear he drank. Drank a lot. Funded by the royalties generated by writing so many amazing Byrds songs. This excess eventually killed him.

To me No Other is the soundtrack of a man confronting his fears. A man watching his troubles bounce around the great Pacific Ocean. Travelling whist remaining still.

It's one of my favourite albums ever.

Video
Artist: Ganglians Track: Jungle Release: May 2011 Label: Souterrain Transmissions

Written for I Like Music by Kevin Hendrick, Male Bonding

Ganglians, Sacramento’s stand-alone astral voyagers, have a new record - Still Living - out now-ish. Before that they dropped a track called Jungle all over the internets. They saw a something in a man named Pete. Maybe you saw / heard him last summer, when there was a summer, twisting hungry minds with his demon-teasing, cat-calling group: Grafitti Island. Ganglians had Pete make a video for Jungle. Pete looked wide and assembled an international cast of musical misfits and villains. On this song, perfect already, see how Pete grates our beautifully wonky cosmos all over it. Watch how this thing comes to weird life.

And what a cast it is: on bass and fag, all the way from Dunsteven, New Zealand: Carnal Throberts of the hip-hep guitar band Mavis. And on demonic drums, on leave from leading the burgeoning ‘Grungetry and Western’ scene with her band: Tahiti Iceland, Cherylise Pains. Oh and look at Heaven Depardoo there on guitar, on a brief, but fruitful, sojourn from pioneering Ballston’s ‘Boozegaze’ scene. And leading the whole sloopy charge, up front, fresh from birthing the World Music Punk scene (known to me and you as WUNK) with his merry band The Phwoar Ehs, the man legend: Maplin Flag.

Dig in to this. Drool.

Male Bonding Playlist

1. Kurt Vile - Freak Train
2. Aaliyah - Are You That Somebody?
3. Wu-Tang Clan - C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)
4. Beach House - Used To Be
5. Dinosaur Jr - The Wagon
6. Leatherface - Springtime
7. Sun Kil Moon - Carry Me Ohio
8. Gun Outfit - Feeling Good
9. Nico - I'm Not Sayin'
10. Wipers - Telepathic Love
11. Huggy Bear - Her Jazz
12. The Get Up Kids - Holiday
13. Comet Gain - I Close My Eyes To Think Of God
14. Goblin Mix - Travelling Grave
15. Rolling Stones - Child Of The Moon
16. Judee Sill - Jesus Was A Cross Maker
17. Gross Magic - Sweetest Touch
18. The Gordons - Future Shock
19. Pentangle - No Love Is Sorrow
20. Nick Drake - Time Has Told Me

Interview #716: Male Bonding Read the full interview here