The Top Ten “Pass The Drugs, Man!” Albums

A routine is emerging. Wake up between 10 and 12. Shower. Eat a bagel. Drink diet soda. Work on the book. The sample chapter is coming along, there will be many edits. Try to make a skeletal version of the Chicago section in order, and then enable it to grow, expand, and [hopefully] become a beautiful vibrant thing. Eat an early dinner. Get belligerently intoxicated, abusing a veritable liberal-arts-student-load of substances. A rotating cast of multi-instrumentalists come over and make music together. Each night is a new attempt at a different style of sound. At four or five in the morning, when alarm clocks buzz across town signaling the start of a new day for city-commuters, head upstairs and turn in for the night.

Last night we made dirty, grimy rap music over weird dancy, hardcore razor-blazed guitar strumming and hip-hop drum beats. Did I throw enough adjectives into that last sentence? Then we wrote old-timey folk songs. If you want to know what kind of ethereal terrain these nights normally traverse, you can listen to this soundclip of us playing “natural” instruments and chanting old slave songs. We channeled the hearts and souls of those who worked the fields and built the railroads and we sang of their plight, while percussing on whatever surface could be found. It reflected the mood of the room. Intoxicated.

In this spirit of the season, here’s a top ten we can all enjoy-

THE TOP TEN “PASS THE DRUGS, MAN!” ALBUMS

10) Suicide Suicide [First Album] – The first track, “Ghost Rider” is heavily reverberated with lots of neat bird calls, and “Frankie Teardrop” is a monumental ten-minute epic. Take with lots of speed.

9) Wolf Eyes Dread – For them it’s pretty tame. Long songs with only occasional vocals, very sparse but with persistent electronic punches. When the cries, screams and guttural howls enter the mix, it gets ugly and it’s brilliant. Perfect for hiding in a car on a dead end street.

8) Godspeed You! Black Emperor F#A#00 - It’s hard for me to listen to Godspeed when it’s not winter. Their work just doesn’t seem as interesting in the summer. It’s fun to spin this one when you’re just laying around with a bottle of downers and it’s gray outside and you want to disappear for a while.

7) Can Tago Mago – Maybe it’s because we have a tendency to make music like this when we’re together in a room imbibing different things (herbs, liquids, pills, compressed air, smack), but it always sounds better when your head is light and you can crawl up inside that barren space and take everything as it comes.

6) Dead Meadow Shivering King and Others – Right now I’m digging Feathers a bit more, but this one was an instant favorite from the moment I purchased it. Heavy, boastful guitars that channel Zeppelin or Sabbath or Bardo Pond or whatever. It can sound kind of brown, like a headache bad grass high.

5) Spacemen 3 Playing With Fire – It’s Spacemen 3. Fairly self-explanatory.

4) Tarentel We Move Through Weather – Oh those guitar drones, the projector spinning, Jim Redd’s incredible drumming… There isn’t much more I’d rather listen to at 4am when the night is coming to an end.

3) Boards of Canada Music Has the Right to Children - Except for this, which is brilliant even when you’re not in one of those deranged states. It’s also near the top of the late night driving favorites list.

2) Yume Bitsu Auspicious Winds – The next two bands, you could pretty much pick any of their albums and they are interchangeable. Yume Bitsu is out there in the ether. Space never seemed so pretty.

1) Jackie-O-Motherfucker Fig. 5 – What could you possibly enjoy more than trippy drones and old folk songs reworked into an eerie fusion between jazz and unidentifiable noise. I go back and forth between enjoying this album and Liberation, but both of them are perfect for drifting off to sleep after a night you probably won’t remember in the morning. Soothsayers, these dirty hippies are. No other band I’ve seen has ever sparked up on stage and shared their bowl with the audience. Of course this band tops the list!