Mlee Marie, Tire Fire (Grey Ghost #42)/BDM, BDM (Grey Ghost #43)/Linus Pauling Quartet, Hawg! (Grey Ghost #48)

Okay, so this is going to be a little weird. I’m sitting here reviewing three CDs that you’re not real likely to ever be able to hear or find, in spite of how good they are, because, well, they were released in super-limited-edition sets of 13 (I think?) and only sold for a week apiece at the Domy Bookstore here in lovely, mosquito-infested Houston, Texas. Meaning that if you missed that one week window or showed up after the store sold all its copies, you’re shit out of luck.

What’s the deal? Well, H-town “record” label Grey Ghost has been releasing a series of weekly CD-Rs, each by a local musician/band playing songs you can’t find anywhere outside of maybe Myspace, each with hand-made/copied cover art, and is selling each one as described above for a measly $2. John Sears, the guy behind the label, seems to be some kind of cracked genius, in that he’s been steadily putting out stuff by the obscurest of the obscure for years, a lot of which has ended up turning out to be more “real” than anybody had expected (for example, the first release I saw by the label was the Fatal Flying Guilloteens’ debut tape, still a classic).

This time he’s gathered tracks from the best and brightest of the current Houston indie crew to put out in super-limited fashion, and the result is pretty great. Of course, all the limited-release-ness wouldn’t matter much if the music sucked, and going by what I’ve heard, it certainly doesn’t. The bands he’s released to date have covered a wide range of styles and formats, from one-song rock epics (keep reading) to intense prog-rock to raw, scratchy garage-rock demos.

I’ve managed to snatch up three of the Grey Ghost series, the first of which is Hearts of Animals’ Mlee Marie doing a(nother) solo thing, albeit one that’s significantly less electronic than her “main” project, even if the songs themselves are kissing cousins. This is bedroom folk by definition — i.e., it sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom — but there’s such a dark, gloomy tinge to it that it feels like Marie’s going to slit her wrists by the time the EP’s finished. There’s “Chapter,” a soft-voiced and sad little track that makes me think, weirdly, of both The Secret Stars and Jewel at the same time. Then there’s “My Shoes,” the slightly awkward lyrics of which made me cringe just a bit at first but which now makes the song that much more endearing (love the “ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh” bit), and the gorgeously sweet closer, “Break My Heart.” All three tracks whip on past so quick that if you blink, you’ve missed it already and have to go hunting for the “Play” button again. Which is no bad thing, considering.

Next at bat is BDM, the acronymization of local music scene fixture Ben Murphy, who’s done time in bands from Pop Deflation to Bright Men of Learning and beyond. He’s a talented songwriter, guitarist, and singer in the indie-rock vein, and this CD-R’s been an especially cool surprise, seeing as I’d only been able to hear some of the songs as MP3s before now. I’m happy as hell that this stuff’s finally seeing the light of non-Myspace day. Opener “Crazy Susan” is quiet, demure guitar-pop that brings to mind Austinites Silver Scooter, while “Make ‘Em Like They Used To” comes off like a weird cross between Crooked Fingers and the gentler side of The Replacements, with nimble, Blackpool Lights-ish guitars.

Then there’s “The Bigger the Heart,” which is personal as hell but still beautifully poetic; honestly, it’s a bit sad when you’re waking up and can tell what time it is by how bad the hangover is. Murphy then stabs right to the heart of it, condemning the state of New Mexico “for keeping you there,” and it becomes pretty clear how he ended up so foggy-headed. “The Grey Call” is one of my favorites on here (and one of the songs I’d heard previously), reminiscent at points of Guided By Voices and with a nice, thick bass and echoing drums — my one complaint about the track is that it ends too soon.

The disc’s highlight, though, is “Weather King,” which is practically a Silkworm song, sucking in the essence of that band’s understated, melodic, gloomy-in-the-rain glory. The limber guitar lines and the solid thrumming of the bass underneath bring to mind those erstwhile Seattle/Chicago sons. And by that point, it makes perfect sense to follow it all up with a cover, a great version of Big Star’s “Thirteen” that’s sweet and melancholy and defiant all at once.

Finally, there’s the Linus Pauling Quartet’s contribution to the series, the epic-long “Hawg!,” which was reportedly left off the band’s recent All Things Are Light due to reasons of length and, uh, overall sanity. It’s not hard to see why — it’s a monster of a “song,” one that starts off with fucked-up, distorted guitar and slowly staggers to its feet to become a heroic ode to a beloved Harley. The track’s stomping and messy, all slobbery, gloriously sunstroked fuzz-psych-rock. And it’s badass. When it crashes and trudges to a close, there’s a quick clip of one of the guys in the band explaining how it felt near the end of the song, and it fits pretty much perfectly: “I wanted to keep going; it seemed instinctual at that point. But you can cut it–” Okay, yeah, I get that. It’s like the neverending stoner-rock groove; if you let it, it’ll just go on forever.

Looking at all three releases, though, I keep coming back to the problem that you, dear reader, won’t ever get to hear ’em. So why the hell am I even bothering with this? It’s a fair question, and it leads me to the conclusion that what I’m really reviewing, at the heart of it, isn’t so much the music — although I’ve hopefully done some of that, too — but the idea behind the whole Grey Ghost CD-R series.

To me, what Grey Ghost is attempting with these releases is to essentially make music special again. Not that music’s all shit now, mind you, but just that the immediate-delivery nature of music today is a double-edged sword: if you can pop online and purchase a CD’s worth of MP3s at the press of a button and listen to the “album” a minute later, where’s the challenge to it? You’ve reduced the music-listening, music-purchasing experience to the equivalent of, say, paying your credit card bill online. You know what you’re getting, you can get it whenever you want, and it’ll still be there tomorrow if you decide you can’t be bothered to get it right now. There’s no urgency to it.

I’ve griped before about how hard it was back in The Good Old Days to find some obscure metal band you heard once on the radio — now you can Google ’em and then download their entire catalogue straight to your hard drive — but there’s a part of me that misses that, even still. It’s the thrill of the hunt, so to speak. True story: I caught part of Van Halen’s “Love Walks In” on the radio one afternoon when I was in middle school, and I was totally bowled over (no, I have no clue why), but I missed the name of the song. After that, I was smitten with the damn thing. I searched the shelves at the record store, sang snatches of the lyrics (what I’d caught, anyway) to record store clerks and friends, the whole thing; the best I got was shrugging and occasional uncertain responses of, “Iron Maiden, maybe? The thing with the master and the slave, that sounds like Maiden…”

I don’t remember how I finally found 5150, unfortunately, but when I did, I was over the moon. I listened to the damn tape for years, I swear, ’til college and I discovered the wonders of CDs. Even now, though, in spite of growing somewhat out of the collected works of Messrs. Van Halen, Hagar, Anthony, and Roth, there’s a part of my soul that still loves that fucking album, because I had to fight for it, struggle for it. And it’s not about elitism, not about “ooh, I liked them first,” but rather about being part of a club that anybody can be in, if they just make a little effort.

What Grey Ghost (and, in a different realm, the Secret Saturday Shows crew here in Houston) is doing is bringing some of that sense of wonder and risk back to music. You never know what you’re going to get beforehand, you can only get it for a limited amount of time, and if you miss it, it’s gone for good, probably never to be seen/heard again. Which, at least to me, is pretty damn awesome.