This week we hand things over to CHUCK, aka Charles Griffin Gibson, who recently put out My Band is My Computer, one of the most interesting and enjoyable albums of the year so far. You can read our review for a more in-depth analysis of the songs, but the concluding paragraph should indicate whether or not you’ll appreciate what CHUCK is all about:

“Playing like a collaboration between Owen Ashworth and Bret Easton Ellis… covering everything that’s terrible and everything that’s not about being a young adult in the twenty-first century, somehow managing to tap into the human kernel at the centre of our zombified lurch of nostalgia and regret”

I’ll Do It Better Than Anybody Else*

by CHUCK

Song that reminds you of your favourite video game

Ben Kweller ­- Falling

Oh man, this song is a real blast from the past. As you can tell I haven’t played video games in a long time. I used to listen to this record when I would play Tony Hawk back in High School though. Ben Kweller rules. I love the songs and production on this album. I really looked up to him as a teenager. Also, I’m just realizing that he sounds exactly like Rivers Cuomo.

Song from at least ten years ago

Heatmiser ­- Half Right

I heard this song for the first time the other day because someone posted it on Facebook. And I call myself a real Elliott Smith fan! I can’t believe I never heard this! This coulda been one of his hits man. His voice was such an unbelievable treasure. I’ve been trying to record and mix my acoustic guitars like him for years, but I’ll never figure it out. Something about how he combines the high and low end is so emotive to me.

Wildest song you know

Kanye West ­- Freestyle 4

I think Kanye West generally sucks at freestyling. That’s what makes this song so wild. He stumbles. He repeats things. There’s not really a rhyme scheme. It feels like, coupled with the beat, that he’s going insane with a furious desire to fuck, and to do it in public. It says a lot about his celebrity and his ego. But I also relate to it just as a man with a sex drive. Sometimes you get these potent sexual urges at random times. Like a little angry man freestyling in your head. It literally feels like this song. The beat is so Hitchcock too. Man I love this track.

Song that makes you want to change the world

TEEN ­- Better

TEEN is a really hard working band out of BK. This was the first song I heard by them. I think the lyrics obviously fit the prompt, but also something about the instrumentation and repetition of the melody pump me up. One time I was listening to this while biking over the Manhattan bridge and I ended up crashing with this guy who was coming in the opposite direction. It was pretty disorienting and we both sort of biked away mumbling insults at each other. I didn’t have any injuries or anything, but it still shook me up. I don’t think I’ve heard this song since that incident, but it immediately came to mind when I read the prompt. Enjoy!

Song that makes you want to dance around your bedroom

TOPS ­- Way To Be Loved

If you can stay still to this song you are dead. The guitarist in this band is really special. I love his riffs, melodically and rhythmically. The singer is also great. I have actually danced to this song in my bedroom. This should be played at every party.

Song without words

Vincent Gallo ­- Was

I had a dream I met Vincent Gallo the other night. I used to be obsessed with him. I haven’t thought of him in many years though. I was digging around for a song for this, and saw his name, and remembered how much of an impression his music made on me as a teenager. I love its crudeness. It feels amateur, dirty and timeless. I really look up to him, because he’s done so much. Acting, writing, directing, music, modelling, dancing, etc. I’m not much compared to him, but I also feel compelled to wear many different hats. I remember, in the early internet days, he was selling his own semen on his website. I think it was like $100,000 and had a note that said “you can receive the semen however you want.” Man, I wonder what he’s up to now. He was so funny. I gotta watch Buffalo ‘66 again.

Here’s a Playmoss playlist that collects all the tracks, for those of you who prefer to go with the flow:

* Title decided by Jon

My Band is My Computer is out now and available via Audio Antihero/Old Money Records. Grab your copy from the CHUCK Bandcamp page.

Photo by Joseph Talman

The post Mystery Mini Mix: CHUCK appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“I started out in High School making electronic music on a Dell desktop PC in my family’s living room. It wasn’t great. Then my Mom bought me an acoustic guitar when I was 20 and at the time I was obsessed with the music documentary ‘Dig!’ so I started writing my own rip­-off versions of the songs in that movie. Since then I’ve just used whatever I had around to keep writing and producing tracks”.

Not that Gibson ever intended to see his music released worldwide. We have the ever-excellent Audio Antihero to thank for that. “The resulting music has never really left my immediate bubble of friends, coworkers and loved ones” says Gibson, “but thanks to the internet, someone like Jamie at Audio Antihero was able to find my Bandcamp and have enough of a reaction that he wanted to help me reach an audience”.

Oh, and if you’re worried that the release is just a load of demos thrown together without much thought, think again. My Band… is as cohesive as any album you’ll hear this year, and sounds great thanks to mastering by our pal Benjamin Shaw. The record opens with ‘Happy New Years Babe’, a synth heavy track that illustrates CHUCK’s blend of insular bedroom pop and an altogether more hi-fi indie sound. Gibson’s vocals, along with the gauzy synths, convey a background level melancholy, the track sounding upbeat in spite of things, or maybe even out of spite.

“When you said those cruel words
On the steps of the church
You kicked me like the dirt
You stole my Pixies shirt
Well I’m back in town
Yeah I’m back in town”

‘Oceans’ is loose love song, the lines short and simple and jumbled by a detached inability to focus, like the thoughts of a mild Less Than Zero character who’s capable of genuine sorrow in ten second snatches between distraction. ‘Mary Anne’ has the guys from Frog as a backing band, another song about pining for an ex and being stranded on the rocks of casual relationships, while ‘Camel Lights’ is an acoustic track with a soft and almost nostalgic sense of regret (“Wide awake long after saying goodnight / Rememberin”). The presumably ironic ‘Bushwick Girl’ is about going out looking for a “sweetheart” and finding the titular Bushwick girl, who wears a neon orange beanie and pyjama pants, who has her rent paid by her parents and only buys things fair-trade.

“She surfed the internet for hours
Reading articles
Ask her a question she’s got the answer
Tiny particles
She’s afraid of getting cancer
She’s my Bushwick girl”

‘Joan’ is a breezy and wordy indie pop track which references the coming of age (if you can call it that) of the title character, a girl who grows up with the assassination of JFK and the Vietnam war, and finds parties and boys and drugs, while ‘Go Into Town’ details the push and pull of mundane relationships and growing older. ‘Phoebe’s Lips’ again deals in messy big city relationships, this time framed with recollections of the simplicity of small-town teen trysts. But that’s a long way off for our narrator now, like something he saw on TV one time before he grew troubled and narcissistic. “Mikey can’t get hard,” Gibson sings, “Unless he goes too far / And says something really smart / That proves he’s smarter than you are”.

‘The Internet’ is a soft and delicate ode to the vast and bizarre realms of the World Wide Web, playing as a very well-written list of online oddities. Where else could you learn about MC Escher, sell your dad’s wedding ring and chat with girls who claim to be X-Men, all while in your underwear? The result is strange and oddly touching, the human essence captured in a thousand pathetic actions and pastimes, everyone naive and awfully lonely, staring through their screens in the impossible hope someone might be looking back.

‘Pictures’ sees life reduced to a tired loop, the same scenes playing over and over, the days not really going anyway but certainly running out, though following track ‘Death’, for all of its lines about cocaine binges and morbid thoughts, is surprisingly bright. It thuds and rings with a sense of hope and progress, like a mantra that serves as a timely reminder that things can get better.

“You hold on to whatever kin
that keeps on breathin’ in
that keeps you from driftin’
like paper in the wind”

The video adds to the dizzying transcendental feel of the song, a machine-gun rapid photographic collage of the million minute details of the city.

There are definite Frog vibes on penultimate track ‘Wipe Out’, a song about catching up with an old high school friend that’s full of the smart self-deprecation that makes lots of this album so great (“I’m scared about the Antarctic ice caps / but I stopped having panic attacks”), while finale ‘Let’s Make Out’ isn’t a love song as such, despite its dreamy vibes, detailing “relations” rather than relationships.

Playing like a collaboration between Owen Ashworth and Bret Easton Ellis, the CHUCK brand of observant and at times cringe-inducingly honest indie pop will no doubt prove divisive. But there’s far more to My Band is a Computer than drugs and self-pity and empty sex. Like the Frog release that Audio Antihero brought us last year, it crams an awful lot into its run-time, covering everything that’s terrible and everything that’s not about being a young adult in the twenty-first century, somehow managing to tap into the human kernel at the centre of our zombified lurch of nostalgia and regret.

My Band is a Computer is the first release on Old Money Records, a sub-label/imprint of Audio Antihero which “will be focused on archiving and celebrating lesser heard artists via compilations and reissues”. You can buy it now from the CHUCK / Audio Antihero Bandcamp page, including a rather lovely cassette edition.

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