Nashville Music Blog

So I was doing my daily combing of YouTube, as always, trying to find some hidden and/or new gem to distract me from my general directive of data entry. When combing I'll look out for one of two things, the first being something uniquely awesome or hilarious, the second being something that's relevant Nashville. Rarely do I find something that meets both criteria. But it's a new day and a new year, and you know what? Yahtzee! As a gracious user by the name of tinycorkscrew has uploaded two videos of the criminally under-appreciated '90s indie outfit Brainiac performing at Lucy's record shop in Nashville on Jan. 31, 1991.

It's hard to believe the golden era of indie-rock is nearly 20 years past. Brainiac was a seminal band whose cutting angular guitars, fractured rhythms and possessed vocals were the panoply of rock 'n' roll's final gasps of creativity in the '90s. Their career was cut short, tragically, by the death of lead singer Tim Taylor in 1997. This video pre-dates their debut release by two years and not only captures the formative stage of the band, but in Music City nonetheless.

If any of you reading this were actually at this show then I'd love to smoke pot with you while you tell me about it and other shows you must have seen before independent music was hi-jacked by the kitsch-obsessed laptop hackery, disco beats, '80s nostalgia, fashion-crazed '60s and '70s revivalism and phantasmic irony that suffices for a cultural zeitgeist these days. I picked up (and by picked up I mean downloaded off rapidshare) this new Hot Chip record that everyone and their mom are currently having multiples over, and you know what? Sucked!

Also, who the fuck does Greg Gillis think he is? Some people call him Girl Talk. I call him an empty spectacle. You know how if you take a road trip and end up eating inordinate amounts of fast food that give you 20-wipe truckstop shits? That's kinda what the GT album did to my brain when I listened to it. Seriously, now that this guy has managed to finagle his way into the iTunes library of every 20-something nationwide, from hipsters to frat boys, he has put this already at-risk age group in further peril. I don't think people realize the chance they are taking when they listen to Girl Talk. What if you happen to be listening to it and some unforeseen traumatic event happens, forever associating that particular track you were hearing with that experience? That means that instead of having just one song that reminds you of the event you now have 20 classic pop-hooks to conjure up the awful memory of the worst night, like EVER. I digress. Unfortunately, just as the content of this video represents a bygone era, so does the camcorder sound quality, which is a bit lacking. Still, this is quite a nugget if you ask me.

Since some of you might be hearing this band for the first time I suppose it's appropriate to give you a better fidelity (if only slightly) representation of their work. Here is the video for "Vincent Come on Down."