Stephen Mejias

Ceramic Dog's Party Intellectuals wins the award for Best Album of 2008 That I Never Wrote Anything About.

I don't know why I never wrote about it. Probably because I couldn't. But Robert Baird wrote about it in our September 2008 issue, so you should read that. Robert filed it under "jazz," but it's not so much jazz as it is pretty straightforward New York City No Wave. I mean, as straightforward as No Wave can be, blending punk, funk, jazz, noise, and avant garde art, or whatever you want to call it.

Robert wrote:

About as close to jazz as anything here gets is "Midost," where Ches Smith builds a nest of percussive textures into which Ribot and Ismaily birth a storm of fusion arms and legs before things turn menacing and begin to run and flail with power-chord intensity.

I happen to be listening to "Midost" right now, and I'd say Robert pretty much nailed that beast.

Yeah: Marc Ribot, Ches Smith, and Shazad Ismaily make up an impressive trio. We saw them live at the Knitting Factory. Ribot sitting there, pulling notes until the neck of his guitar groaned in pain; Smith with his cymbals raised ten feet in the air so he had to almost jump up to hit them right; Ismaily rocking and swaying at his synths like he was trying to dodge the sounds as they exploded around him.

We held our wet bottles of beer loosely at our sides and kind of just stared at one another with these dumb looks that said, Holy shit.