Get Fucked, Get Bent.

Get Bent is back, and it's back with a bang! Well, okay, I missed a few weeks there, but it's because someone at Get Bent -- presumably Rebecca Seung -- realized that the shorter a post is, the less potential for awfulness it has. Soon all Get Bent posts will just be the word "music," and Get Fucked, Get Bent will cease to exist.

Anyway, thank god someone over there is finally recognizing all that MEN have done for music! Women, women, women -- it's all I ever read about in music criticism. How refreshing to finally get to read about some men! I'm sure some will argue that this piece is supposed to be a joke of some sort, but that's clearly not the case, since a.) it's not part of Get Bent's clearly-labeled "humor" column, I Fell In, and b.) the entire piece is exactly what the title indicates: a list of male musicians who Franklin Byrd Thomas considers underrated. (If you thought "it's not funny" was going to be one of the reasons I could tell it's not a humor piece, clearly you haven't read I Fell In.)

All right, let's get to it!

Van Morrison

Van Morrison might be one of the most critically acclaimed musicians of all time and had a bunch of mainstream hits to boot, so I'm not quite sure how he's going to qualify as "underappreciated," but I'm sure Franklin Byrd Thomas will explain it to us if we read on!

Have you ever had to diagnose Asperger Syndrome? I’m no doctor, but I think I just did. I just watched a few videos, and in every one of them the dude just looks mad. He must be the first man to ever scowl at “Brown Eyed Girl”, but I’d bet the farm that he wasn’t the last.

Yep, sure sounds underappreciated! Franklin Byrd Thomas thinks he probably has Asperger's, which automatically makes him underappreciated. Or is the last sentence the underappreciation? He scowled at "Brown Eyed Girl" -- I'm assuming, based on the quotation marks here, that FBT means the song, and not a girl herself -- but he probably wasn't the last! To...scowl at the song. Because...of...something. I dunno, I give up on this one, I think.

Jack Nitzsche

This piece isn't called "Underappreciated PRODUCERS with Penises, Franklin Byrd Thomas, come on!

Joe Meek

ALSO NOT A MUSICIAN

He was paranoid, convinced that Phil Spector was trying to ape his shit. Of course, right before he killed himself, he murdered his landlady with a shotgun. So maybe he was right.

Yeah, Joe Meek's killing his landlady and himself definitely indicates that there's a chance Phil Spector was stealing his production secrets. Remember, Get Bent readers: if nobody will believe your insane conspiracy series, just murder some people! Then everyone will realize the faultlessness of your arguments.

Your Dad

Yeah, I mean, fair enough, it's definitely true that not enough people pay attention to my dad's impeccable nose flute skills -- OH WAIT am I being set up for some sort of reversal of the classic "your mom" burn -- ?!

Just who the fuck does this guy think he is?

Oh...nope. Just more Get Bent gibberish, this time in the form of a one-liner with no apparent punch line or relevance to dads, musicians, or being underrated.

WELCOME BACK, GET BENT! You haven't changed one bit.

I can’t really say I remember the 70s; as much as I love polyester and despise Richard Nixon, I did not exist until the downfall of disco. 

Fucking fascinating stuff here, Ray Charles, but maybe save it for your memoirs, okay?

a diddy with a catchy chorus

But now, just a little over a month ago

In the world of Get Bent, words do not have meanings. "Now" is equivalent to "over a month ago."

this time around, those already sharp tracks they first left a mark with have got some real teeth to them.

Solid country acts are hard to come by in New York City. 

Enter in Juniper Rising, the real deal when it comes to graduated students of the Carl Perkins’ school of cool.

I’m going to save a lot of you a lot of reading time. Subsonics’ In The Black Spot is my album of the year. Period. 

Whoa, thanks for the timesaver, Tony Lofi and Anna Anabolic!  No need to read any further if it's YOUR album of the year!  That just tells me everything I need to know.

You don’t release anything after seven years unless it’s an amazing record. That’s one of the first signs of a great album, in my opinion.

Oh yeah, totally.  Everybody knows that the longer you wait between albums, the better that new album is going to be!

There aren’t any beaches in Indianapolis. No sand, no tide, no bikinis—nothin’. As it turns out, the same goes for the majority of this country and the inhabitants of our beloved Midwest would be the first to tell ya’

Actually, Devin Ross, I suspect that the inhabitants of our beloved midwest would be the first to tell ya' (sic) that YOU CAN HAVE A BEACH WITHOUT THE OCEAN.  Bikinis are not outlawed everywhere but the coasts.  Sand exists in Indiana.  In fact, Indiana is midwest-famous for the Indiana Dunes, whose official site asks, "Did you know Indiana Dunes is home to a 15-mile coastline?"  Devin Ross did not know.  The National Park Service website informs us, "Immediately inland from the beaches, sand dunes rise to almost 200 feet in a series of ridges, blowouts, and valleys."  Both beaches and sand.  You see, as some of us learned in second grade, Indiana borders Lake Michigan, one of the five lakes known as the Great Lakes.  Get your fucking elementary school-level geography straight, Get Bent.

All right, so this one's pretty old and not important (UNLIKE MOST OF THE SUPER-IMPORTANT STUFF WE LIKE TO HIGHLIGHT HERE AT GET FUCKED, GET BENT) but I just read it and I have something to say so this is what you get.

Goodbye Boozy released their early band Party Fowl’s STD’s in 2008. The wax is so rare, count your blessings if you ever hold it in your grimy mitts.

Yo, Lisa Parisi, my friend literally gave me this record for free after it came out it came out (way back a whopping four fucking years ago) because NOBODY WOULD BUY IT FROM HIS DISTRO.  Because it was not, is not, and will never be, a good or even memorable record.  And it's sooooooo rare that there are only three copies that I could find for sale online with the most cursory of Googling.  Granted, I "hold it in [my] grimy mitts" maybe like once a year at most, but when I do, I'm not counting my blessings, I'm wondering why the fuck I haven't sold it to the local record shop for $2.

PS This:

They’ve pressed 7”s from musicians like Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, Mark Sultan, and Seth Sutton that later became the antecedents to the full lengths that now are marveled as the must-haves in the genre of American garage.

sounds like you wrote a normal sentence, then entered it into that website where it translates it into 20 different languages and spits it back out at you so you can laugh at how incomprehensible it has become.

Track Premiere: OBN III’s - Nicky the Knife

This song has been up on the current Rubberneck comp for like two weeks now so I don't know how it qualifies as a "premiere" in any way other than, like, the premiere of this song on Get Bent, which I do not know why ANYBODY WOULD GIVE A FUCK ABOUT, although I suppose that applies to the entirety of Get Bent.

Also!  In the huge-ass album art at the top of Paul Blawat's post, it's clearly spelled OBN IIIs without an apostrophe, so why would he go and stick one in the title, only to spell it without an apostrophe throughout the rest of the article???

whatever hyperspecific wild-to-listenable psychedelic rock revivalist ratio they were aiming for

"I'm not sure what the ratio is, but it's definitely hyperspecific!  You want to know what it actually is?  Oh, you know, whatever!"

psyche-period Hollies

Whoa, did the Hollies have some sort of, like, Roman mythology-based rock opera that I didn't even know about or something?

I would be remiss if I forgot to mention that repetitive boogie banger “Up In Her Room” is the undisputed single of the year

Hi, I'd like to dispute the selection of a seven-minute-long Seeds cover that is a non-single album track as "single of the year."  To whom should I send my petition?

The Reverberation Appreciation Society, better semi-known as “that label that grew from the Austin Psyche Fest” to those curious.

And even better semi-known(???) as "that label that grew from the Austin Psych Fest," since that is a real thing, and it is clearly identified as such in the link you included that you surely had to type out at some point.

Yo, look, I actually think Get Bent's been doing a lot better lately, and Zach Braun's probably the best writer they've got, because he's so straightforward that he usually manages not to come off as a total idiot.  However.

Think Ariel Pink by way of Paul Collins and Matthew Melton and you’d be close. 

The first album by Andy Jordan's old band, the Cuts, came out in 2000.  I'm unaware of Melton writing songs for any project before the first Snake Flower 2 record in 2006.  The Time Flys, in which Andy Jordan played guitar, made a fairly big splash upon release of their first album, Fly, in 2005, and even at that point, people were referring to it as "Andy Jordan's new band."  So to use Matthew Melton as a reference point for Andy Jordan's new record is not only a slight to Andy Jordan, who's been doing the whole "soft punk" thing for half a decade longer than Matthew Melton, but also serves to highlight just how short the length of time is that Zach Braun has been paying attention to this kind of music.  

"Hey, this R. Stevie Moore guy sounds like he's got kind of an Ariel Pink thing going on!"

“Fault Lines Fact” plays like entering into a glam grunge dungeon where the warden awaits your descent to spray glitter into your face and douse you in muck.

”Sex Beat” brings it all home with some fiery punk fury. Spikey, palm-muted guitars intensify the dire atmosphere, pushing on through with a pounding beat and plenty of explosive energy. It’s hard not to be sold after a track like this one, which is exactly why you can listen to it right now.

Uhhhhhh.

Is Zach Camagna reviewing a cover of a Gun Club song -- a cover of the most popular Gun Club song -- and he doesn't even realize it's a cover?  Is that seriously what's going on here?

Oh shit, y'all!  Rebecca Seung lured me in by pretending to "appreciate" the blog, then just up and turned on me.  Look, Rebecca Seung, here's the thing: if you think this blog is about having good grammar at all times, you're missing the fucking point.  This blog is about all the shitty writing on Get Bent.  I only point out grammar mistakes when they're egregious: "its" vs "it's," basic subject-verb agreement.  Honestly, grammar is the least of Get Bent's numerous problems.