But here’s the problem. If you choose the shimmy-shimmy-ya, you usually wind up at a club spinning techno remixes of Michael Jackson while the yadudes, decked to the nine in Bruins gear, either hit on you/pick a fight depending on your gender/sexual orientation.

Rock and roll began as an expression of the body. What was Elvis without the hips?

Here’s the deal: On the Second, Third and Fourth Saturdays of every month, Orbis Tertius will appear at the Squealing Pig on Mission Hill to spin records. Think less James Brown and more Kraftwerk. A Husker Du song will be played. You’ll scale the walls to King Crimson and do the congo line to the Clash (though this is not recommended for various logistical reasons not to mention it will betray an appalling lack of dignity).

It’s going to be high-energy, super-danceable rock and roll. You’re going to shake your booty.

The current lineup features Andre Obin, DJ Kielty, DJ Pandemic and others. Opening night is this Saturday, 11/21.

Oh, and, by the way. The opening is sponsored by Narragansett. Cheap beers all night.

In the end, their music is well-studied, they wear their influences and references on their sleeves, and their aesthetic is that of the brokedown Detroit bar band that knocks you on your ass. Their invention is the arrangement of these influences, and their innovation is that they get it right.

The Lowell kids make me nostalgic for my college days. Most of them orbit the UMass Lowell campus, which is the home of WUML, specifically the “Live from the Fallout Shelter” program which has operated nigh 25 years, which probably is what makes Lowell a destination on the map of independent rock and roll. Play a gig in Lowell, and you’ll inevitably wind up eating vegan cupcakes. They have rock and roll shows in garages over brunch on Sundays. They are fiercely loyal to their bands—on any given Thursday half the audience at the Tavern is from Lowell, about thirty to forty minutes away.

The Dynamites are both lock and key to this scene. They probably know every band in this city, and rightfully so. They simply cannot be ignored. A Ralph Eats Dynamite show is as crazy as the name; they’re explosive and insane. Frantic, even. I’m serious: every time Olivia gets drunk we get decked with shoes. Or there’s the timeI drank a 40oz of malt liquor while cooking corn in Chelmsford, just before  drawing a gigantic red tomato on a wall with finger-paint. And beyond that there’s the Amahlahmah [sic], two freaks spinning around screaming ‘I’M A FUCKIN LLAMA.’

I have nothing more to say.

In the past months I have watched this sensitive, caring artist turn into someone so important and integral to this thing we call ‘the scene’ that I can scarcely imagine what my life in music was without him. It’s easy for those of us who are comfortable with our place in the world to take someone like Matty for granted, but we should—and I am fully aware that this obscure block of text is the perfect place to say this—recognize his importance to a score of people who are still working through their nervousness—terror, even—when they get up on the stage. There he is, dancing alone to a beat only a handful know, ready to offer a pat on the back when the set is done and the microphones are packed and the amps are loaded into a trunk on top a pile of handmade demos no one will ever hear. There are pats on the back, and there are pats on the back. His are the latter category: that lone voice in the dark that echoes your own self-consciousness, with an honesty and love that many people spend their lives without.

When we asked Stud to play a show at our October residency, opening on the pub stage of the Abbey Lounge, he jumped at the opportunity, offering to bring the then unknown (to us, anyway) Health&Beauty along with him. He opened at eight o’clock and did his thing. The old Abbey had a number of town drunks and their fellow douchebag accoutrements, and they talked all the wetbrain nonsense they could muster. I actually felt like apologizing for them, and did. His response? “I don’t give a fuck,” with a big, sweaty grin across his face. And here’s the catch: He didn’t give a fuck. At all.

To not appear like I’m going overboard, I should say that I told him all this. He was reaching in his pockets, finding nothing, on his fucking birthday no-less, at the close of a Musical Theatre show at the End of the World, and I bought him a round. I grabbed his shoulder and offered some blurry version of these words, and he got a little misty-eyed on me. But I got it wrong; this is right.

The track heretofore presented is his cover of Christie Road, by Green Day, a band I hate. It should serve to illustrate exactly what the fuck I’m talking about. Take a some commercial nonsense band like Green Day, acknowledge they’ve somehow stumbled onto something worthwhile, rethink, re-record: but, this time, hey fellas, why don’t we put some love into it? Whachoogawt?

This year Abram prepared an album Two Nineteen, all of which was recorded on February 19th for the 2009 RPM challenge. Some of the pieces were completely improvised, and others borrowed from pre-composed themes which were augmented through improvisation. The track here presented, Six, is of the latter category. When I first listened to Two Nineteen, I was busy preparing an elaborate dinner to celebrate the beginning of spring. I could not imagine better background music, which Abram will surely appreciate as a fellow lover of good food done right.

I’m one of those kids who always wanted to be a virtuoso musician, and I spent the first two years of college majoring in—of all things—the classical guitar. I sucked. But if nothing else those classes taught me how to recognize who’s real and who’s not. Abram is probably the finest musician I’ve ever encountered, which is by no means hyperbole. His ear is unmatched, and his complex musical taste synthesizes minimalism, psychedelia and noise all the while experimenting with pop timbres, subverting and distorting them at will. At the very base of his work there is that same explosive energy that could be found in Paris with Musique Concréte, and perhaps, in the end, that’s what Abram does: he arranges sounds—themselves artifacts of our fractured civilization—and weaves them into a tapestry that approaches something like consciousness.

The music of Str8angular is pop at its finest—the melodies shine through the decidedly low-fi, stripped down, minimalist arrangements and stick in your head. But that statement, uttered by countless audience members after dozens of Stupangular shows is where the art of Spectangular takes over. This is the music of freedom. We’re lulled in by these referential and comfortable melodies and then slapped in the face by the gaping void of modern existence. Take the surrealistic tragicomedy of Empathetic Environmentalist: Success is based on progress / schematics based on schemes / empathetic environmentalist, you love to dream big dreams which fills out with a suppressed, disappointed All this information means shit. And the trickster offers his answer, a conundrum: All you ever need to know lies in the heart of a suffering fox / who loves the man who loves to feed the bears. All you ever need to know, a simple truth of existence, stuck in the heart of the suffering fox, which is to say that this one thing, this one secret, the one truth worth knowing will be forever inaccessible. Except to Albert. If Boston has a rock and roll scene—Al Polk is its prophet, somewhere between Tim Carey and Moses. Boston’s Greatest Lover.

Open your eyes, let the light shine in:

The two albums, It Was Almost Certainly a Small Child, and the forthcoming The Cottonwood Leaf, Fallen, Likens to a Rat Having Died were both recorded and produced by Sulpizio at his Chicago-based studio, The Chateau, which exists to provide exceptional high-fidelity recording and mixing to creative projects lacking the financial means to pursue recording in the high-end studios. Outside of his musical pursuits, Brian can be found working at this stupid job or that. He wears jeans to work when his boss is out.

I must say I find myself wandering around muttering Keep that Shit in Somerville to strangers—it works especially well on people from Brockton. In addition to writing hit songs about crashing bikes in the city of Boston, K.Control and M.Radio drink Narragansett in Medford when they’re not lobbying Mayor McGlynn or Mayor Curtatone. The topics of their official conversations include the mysterious life of the Indoor/Outdoor cat, Net Neutrality, and that strange, greenish layer of film on the surface of the Mystic River.

At the very bottom of their varied and schizophrenic catalog is something base and important. This stuff is vintage, I said, and it’s old and storied enough to understand that good music—whatever that is to whoever cares—is grounded in the experience itself. Nothing is as important than the people who participate, whether those people are on stage sweating it out or out in the audience raising a glass of Dead Guy Ale and screaming the lyrics at the top of their lungs, singing:
Calling all the satellites:
tell me can you hear this?
We’ve got to get this information feed.
Communication lines are down,
gotta take this underground
where all are friends are buried.