nu-discs

Methinks it’s about time for some brief reviews of things that are new to me lately.

• Rhys Chatham: Die Donnergötter. Double LP, released this year by Table of the Elements, whose website has not been working right for the past week or two. This includes some classic Chatham guitar pieces — pre-Branca drones with consistent pounding drums (”Die Donnergötter,” “Guitar Trio”) — and some pieces with different instrumentation and slightly more insane and “punk” sounding rhythms. The packaging is beautiful, though I’m a sucker for the Chatham aesthetic in general so that’s no surprise. There are some sweet photos inside and a lot of interesting historical writing. Highly reccommended if you’re interested in Rhys.
• The Red Crayola: malefactor, ade. The only other Red Crayola I own is God Bless the Red Crayola and All Who Sail On It, which predates this disc by a good twenty years. malefactor, ade has some wonderful lines and a few songs that are definitely mixtape worthy, but seems to position itself opposite of God Bless the Red Crayola in that GBtRC was a bit tough to digest on first listen but grew on me a lot, and this album was tasty at first (and had me laughing out loud at points) but grew a little boring after a few listens. I like it, and it’s worth listening to, but perhaps if you don’t have God Bless, get that first?
• Animaniacs Volume One DVD: An exceedingly clever friend gave me this for my birthday and I have, at points when I’ve had time, been working my way through it. My concerns about it not holding up were unfounded; parts, in fact, are funnier at this point than they were for me in 1994. I never really dug Rita & Runt and that holds true, but Slappy the Squirrel has a lot more going on than I realized as an eleven-year-old and most of the features with the Warners themselves are still pretty riotous. Big thumbs up.