Kurt Pankau Dot Com

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the  explainer  or view  the master list . Artist:  Galt McDermot, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado Title:   Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical Released:  1968 Genre:  rock musical Every now and then a musical captures the zeitgeist of a generation--at least, the zeitgeist of that generation's starving New York art scene. For the late 60's, that musical was Hair , a ground-breaking succès de scandale that depicted the burgeoning hippie movement in all of its racially-integrated, free-loving, drug-taking, war-protesting glory. It gained notoriety--and is likely best remembered--for its nude scene, but it was a significant cultural phenomenon for its time, running on broadway a full year before the era-defining event that was Woodstock. The soundtrack spawned a number of major radio hits that have been subsequently covered. It helped launch the careers of Meat Loaf, Melba Moore, Diane Keaton, and Tim Curry, amongst

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the  explainer  or view  the master list . Artist:  July Talk Title:   Touch Released:  2016 Genre:  indie alternative swamp-rock For a few years there, it was just a given that an "indie" band would have both a male and female singer, the most famous probably being either Of Monsters And Men or She & Him. But aside from a few exceptions, the blended male/female typically result in neither vocalist being very memorable or distinct. July Talk is the exception, co-fronted by Leah Fay and Peter Dreimanis, who sound kind of like a happier Karen O and an angrier Leonard Cohen, respectively. They sing at complete opposite ends of the spectrum, Fay with an almost keening soprano and Dreimanis with a growly baritone, which means they don't blend so much as form a two-pronged assault. Fittingly, a lot of their vocal lines aren't so much handed off to each other as they are a call-and-response. You can hear that u

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the  explainer  or view  the master list . Artist:  Smash Mouth Title:   Astro Lounge Released:  1999 Genre:  alt-rock surf-pop Twenty-two records in and this is the third surf-rock album. I may have a type. This is another album that is just plain fun. And yes,  All-Star  is much maligned, and I suppose that's fair. It's light and fluffy and got seriously overplayed when it came out. But the entire album holds up. I make sure it's on my iPod before any lengthy road trip, because not only is it compulsively listenable, it even sounds good on crappy car speakers with messed up EQs. It opens with Who's There , a track that gleefully announces what you can expect for the next fifty-odd minutes: vintage-guitar-and-rock-organ dance-pop that's been bedazzled with sci-fi sound effects and theramins. It's not deep, but it's up-tempo and immensely fun. And even if the singles are kind of played out, there a

Hey everybody! I'm going to be doing some housekeeping around here, deleting older posts and what not. Part of that means I'll be taking down the Friday Flash Fiction posts. I anticipate most of them will be given a coat of polish and then moved over to Curious Fictions. Which, oh, by the way... I've got a page at Curious Fictions . It's a platform for authors to post their reprints, so I'll be migrating previously published stories over that way. If you are so inclined, you can subscribe to my posts over there. ]{p

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the  explainer  or view  the master list . Artist:  Moby Title:   Play Released:  1999 Genre:  alt-rock but also techno and somehow kind of archival? Alt-rock and grunge were on the wane in the late 90s, having been displaced by nü-metal, rap-rock, and the boy-band revival. Into that melange, enter Moby, a tiny bald vegan from New York whose song Natural Blues  was essentially an EDM-lite remix of a Depression-era Mississippi Delta song by Vera Hall. So when that creeped into radio playlists, my cohort's collective reaction was "Wait, what the hell was that ? Play it again!" Though Play  felt like a bolt from the blue, Moby had been working in music for nearly two decades. He'd started in the early 80s playing guitar for a hardcore punk band called the Vatican Commandos and then had a career as a DJ and techno artist through the late 80s and early 90s. In the mid-90s he'd started blending those sensibili

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the  explainer  or view  the master list . Artist:  The Kickstand Band Title:   Puppy Love Released:  2012 Genre:  garage surf-rock I got this album as part of a bundle from the now-defunct music curation service Sound Supply. Of the dozens of albums I got from that service, this is the only one that really stands out (I've discovered lots of interesting songs , but this is hands-down the best album). It's light, it's poppy, it's energetic, and while musically it hews to a fairly classic formula, it has a lot of fun within the constraints of said formula. The two singers--it's an early teens indie band, so of course there's one female and one male singer--sound great together, and the playing is tight and lively. Puppy Love  is a mere 24 minutes long--the longest of its ten tracks barely crack two-and-a-half minutes. Still Thinking Of You  is one of the of the slower songs. My fave from the album is Pu

I've got a story out in the Futures  section of the new issue of Nature Magazine . This is my second time being published in Nature . It's probably the weirdest story I've ever sold, and I'm super proud of it. ]{p

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the  explainer  or view  the master list . Artist:  Daft Punk Title:   Tron: Legacy Original Motion Picture Sountrack Released:  2010 Genre:  orchestral electropop I've never seen the film, but I love this soundtrack. Neither am I a particularly huge fan of French EDM pioneers Daft Punk. This is simply a situation where the right elements came together to make some incredible. Instead of their normal sample-heavy dance tracks, Daft Punk crafted the music for this from whole cloth, blending their synth sensibilities with an 85-piece orchestra to create something that wasn't quite a movie score and wasn't quite a dance record, but existed somewhere in between. It's great background music. I can put it on while working on something and enjoy it without being too distracted by it. In fact, after  Trouble Will Find Me , it's my favorite music to write to. There is a single motif that runs throughout the album,

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the  explainer  or view  the master list . Artist:  The Beatles Title:   Help! Released:  1965 Genre:  The frickin' Beatles I almost went with 1  instead because honestly how the hell do you pick a favorite Beatles album? On a different day of the week I might have said Rubber Soul  or Revolver  or  Sgt. Pepper , but I settled on Help!  because it's the absolute best album of their early period when they were the most like a normal band. They still played together as a group and hadn't started getting super experimental yet--which, to be clear, I love their experimental stuff, but there's something to be said for a rock band in a room playing straight-forward rock music. At a certain level, it becomes less about what songs you like on an album and more about which album has the bits that annoy you the least. And for my money, I'd rather hear George Harrison mess around with an expression peddle ( I Need You

Kurt is going through his favorite records. Read the  explainer  or view  the master list . Artist:  Janelle Monáe Title:   The Electric Lady Released:  2013 Genre:  afrofuturist R&B The Electric Lady  picks up the tale of Cindi Mayweather, a time-traveling android, hunted in her home city of Metropolis for falling in love with a human. So, Janelle Monáe is a big old sci-fi nerd, is what I'm getting at. This album was a bit of a slow burn for me. Dance Apocalyptic  is just breathtakingly fun, but nothing else on the record is quite as immediately accessible. The songs do get under your skin, though. After a complete listen, I found myself going back to groove on  Electric Lady , It's Code , and We Were Rock & Roll . Monáe mostly belts out soul, but  Q.U.E.E.N. and  Ghetto Woman  both feature some blistering raps. But I think my favorite on the album--after Dance Apocalyptic --is  Sally Ride , an ode to eponymous astronaut who was the third woman in space, th