TOM SMASH BLOG

A love letter to Radiohead from an overenthusiastic fanboy

2011-02-16T23:18:00.004-05:00

Radiohead are ready to release their 8th studio album, The King of Limbs, in a couple days. Like In Rainbows before it, it comes as a sudden surprise for fans. Radiohead have taken charge of every aspect of their career, and I couldn't be happier for them.

Their release methods isn't a lesson in subverting the label system, it's their reward for a long, successful career. They get to finish albums and drop them on the unsuspecting heads of their fans, with no leaks, no media hype, no six month wait, because they've been critically and commercially successful on a level that's almost unheard of these days. They can announce on Monday that their new album will be coming out on Saturday, and every rock and roll nerd in the world will be alternating between holding their breath in anticipation and clapping their hands with glee. They don't have to spend money promoting their new album, because they just have to update their website, and the news reports will flow from there. They don't have to do SNL, or emerge from an egg at the Grammy Awards, or make music videos, or do anything other than let their music speak for itself.

As a longtime fan of theirs, it's gratifying to see them so in control of their own destiny. It's almost reassuring in a way, seeing consistent brilliance pay off so handsomely. The music world is filled with superstars undeserving of their wealth and fame (Black Eyed Peas), brilliant songwriters who work in relative obscurity or cultdom (Robyn Hitchcock, Robert Pollard), and great artists forced to submit to a reunion they're not interested in because that's their most financially sound option (Stephen Malkmus, oh good lord, Stephen Malkmus).

To get to the point, Radiohead are a special band, and we're lucky to have them. I have no clue what The King of Limbs sounds like, and neither does anybody else in the world, but there's no doubt in my mind that, at the very least, it's going to be very good. Their legacy is firmly secured at this point. This new album, and anything else they might do, is a gift, and I'll treat it as such.

the joy and pain of sports

2010-09-21T20:00:00.006-05:00

One of the interesting aspects of being a sports fan is the way our expectations rise and fall with teams' fortunes, especially the relative joy and disappointment that comes when those expectations are or aren't met.

What I'm realizing is that the better your favorite team is, the less you enjoy when they win, and the more it hurts when they don't.

For my entire life, the Philadelphia Phillies have been my favorite team in my favorite sport, and for the past few seasons, they've been among the best teams in baseball. Accordingly, expectations are high, and failing to make the playoffs would be a devastating disappointment. Never mind that prior to their run of division titles starting in 2007, they'd made the playoffs exactly once in the previous 23 years.

Contrast this with any of those 23 years. In 1993, when they went from a last place finish in 1992 to a division title and a National League Championship, it was completely out of the blue, and though their eventual loss in the World Series was devastating, the players on the team that season have engendered a wealth of goodwill that lasts to this day. Even Mitch Williams, run out of town by Curt Schilling after the blown save that broke the hearts of the city, is now a frequent guest on Philadelphia-area sports shows. Just try to watch this clip without getting angry or sad (unless you're from Toronto, in which case you can enjoy this clip while Roy Halladay is on the mound tonight in a Phillies uniform):

Likewise in 2001, when the Phillies made an unexpected run for the NL East title, faltering in the final month of the season and finishing just two games behind the Braves. If the Phillies of 2010 had held the division lead for almost the entire season before blowing it at the last minute, it would be a cause for outrage. Coaches would be fired, players would be shipped out of town, and the pitchfork-wielding masses would gather outside Citizens Bank Park with the name "Cliff Lee" on their tongues. In 2001, it was a pleasant surprise, a memorable ride that fell just short.

Or take 2008, when the Phillies were expected to do well, and won the World Series. For fans like myself, who hadn't even been born the last time a Philadelphia team won a championship (I missed the 76ers 1983 title by six months), and for a franchise like the Phillies, with no World Series titles since 1980, and only one in the previous 125 years, it was elating. And I knew even then that if they did it again the next year (or if they do it this year), it'll never be as good as it was in 2008.

This is a fairly simple equation when you think about it. The more you expect of your team, the worse it feels when they fail, and the less you expect, the better it feels when they exceed expectations.

So imagine the crushing joylessness of being a fan of the New York Yankees, a perennial favorite every year since the mid-'90s, a team that expects to win the World Series every year. Maybe not having won it since 2000 made it better when they won last year, but it has to be tough being invested in the only sports team in North America for whom five championships since 1996 is considered disappointing.

Or maybe I'm just covering up for how much it hurt when the Phillies lost to them last year, and preparing myself for the same possibility this year.

A new look for a new decade... or something

2010-09-21T17:29:00.003-05:00

I decided to fool around a little with the layout of this here thinger, since I hadn't changed it since I started it in 2005. It's still pretty bare-bones, which is how I like it. There's a new follow button that I'm not expecting anybody to use (seeing as how I haven't gone out of my way to let people know I'm writing again since I started writing again, and thus nobody is reading this), and there's a "share" thing that nobody will use either. But hey, at least they're there.

I might still do some more tinkering, because in my browser, the page looks like it's 75% empty space (EDIT: done, empty space reduced to 1/3). I think the sans serif font is a hit, though. Any suggestions from my imaginary readership are more than welcome.

booze makes the economy go 'round (and then vomit)

2010-09-21T15:26:00.004-05:00

I used to go to a lot more concerts when I was younger than I do now (my heyday was probably age 17-19 or so). I liked getting there early, and standing as close to the stage as possible. I liked staying after the show and trying to meet the band, or at least get a set list off of the stage. It was an exciting ritual.

A lot of the time, at these shows, after standing outside the venue for an hour waiting for the doors to open, then standing in front of the stage for an hour, waiting for the first band to start, I used to look at the crowded floor around me and wonder why they didn't just start the damn show already. Everybody was there, what was the holdup?

Then last week I went to a show at the Electric Factory for the first time since I saw the Flaming Lips there in the spring of 2003, when I was 19. As a 26-year-old, my show-going habits are much different: roll in as late as possible just before the show starts, head straight to the bar, and lurk around the back of the venue, where I can actually see the stage, and I'm not packed in on all sides by sweaty hipster kids. In fact, the bar at the Electric Factory is in a separate upstairs section, which I'd never seen before because I'd never been there as an adult. (And no, 19-year-olds are not adults, and I think the only people who would argue that they are would be either 19 themselves, criminal prosecutors, or a military recruiter, but that's for a different post.)

It was up there, with a couple hundred people waiting over an hour for the show to start, every one of them holding a $7 plastic cup of Yuengling, that I realized the answer to the question that my 19-year-old self could never figure out. It seems obvious now, but I guess I'd never really thought that much about it, since most of the shows I go to now are either at all-ages venues that require pre-gaming at a bar down the street, or are at actual bars.

Why I don't care about an "Arrested Development" movie, even though I love "Arrested Development"

2010-09-19T22:02:00.001-05:00

1. It's simply too late. At this point, the show has been off the air for longer than it was ever on the air. Even if they started production tomorrow, a movie wouldn't be hitting theaters for AT LEAST 18 months or so. What makes anybody think that something made so long after the end of the show would even be any good? At that point it's not a continuation, it's a reunion, the type of cheap, cynical stunt that I would think fans of Arrested Development would mock.

2. The series finale was a perfectly good ending. It not only wrapped up pretty much every loose thread (although it's been a while since I've seen it, so let me know if I'm forgetting anything), but it was explicitly designed as a mirror image of the pilot episode, or the completion of a circle. Anything else is going to be sort of a sideways tangent at best (like reissuing Thriller with bonus tracks) or an infuriating legacy-stainer at worst (like the fourth Indiana Jones movie).

3. Arrested Development's pace and tone won't translate to a movie. A feature-length film would be roughly the length of at least four sitcom-length TV episodes. I know as well as anybody that Arrested Development is one of the most endlessly re-watchable shows ever made (maybe second to The Simpsons), but have you ever watched four in a row, with no breaks? It's a tiring experience. The 21 minute sitcom is the perfect format for a show with such breakneck pacing. Stretch it out to an hour and a half, with no commercial breaks or breaks between episodes, and it's either going to have slow stretches in the middle just to break things up for the viewer and pad out the length (like the Simpsons movie) or it will be so frantically paced that by the end nobody will be able to pay attention and the plot will seem too nonsensical and convoluted (like the Futurama DVD movies).

So there's that. I promise that sooner or later I'm going to write about something I like, instead of whining about how everything sucks. So far the Tom Smash Blog rebirth has consisted of thoughts that wouldn't fit into facebook updates, so this is what we've got to work with.

Redefining the term "diminishing returns"

2010-09-14T23:38:00.004-05:00

For a band that took a four year hiatus after its second album, Weezer has been hitting us with new jams at a pace that's almost distressing, at least to those of us who have since come to wish they'd broken up after their unbelievably brilliant second album, which looks more and more like ether Matt Sharp was secretly in charge of everything, or it was just a freak accident.

This week Weezer are dropping yet another shit bomb on an unsuspecting public, and yes, I'm dismissing it with the term "shit bomb" without having heard a single song. See, every time Weezer puts out a new album, I hear enough people say "it's not that bad" that I end up checking it out, even though I know it absolutely will be that bad, and thus far, each one has been even worse than the one before it.

When the post-Pinkerton comeback started with a second self-titled album (the so-called "green" album), Weezer were mired in a genre that I just made up called "safety rock," songs assembled from an interchangeable grab-bag of bland verses, bland choruses that were loud enough to be distinguished from the verses, and guitar solos that were simply the verse melody, except on a guitar. The next phase, represented by Maladroit and Make Believe, found Weezer trying on a couple of different but equally radio-friendly hats: faux-pop-metal, faux-new-wave, lazy approximations of "El Scorcho" with added studio polish.

These albums were terrible, but not completely beyond hope, as they occasionally yielded a dull but somewhat pleasing single ("Island in the Sun"), and in one case, a brilliant pop song that remains the sole post-90s beacon of hope ("Keep Fishin'").

Since then... well, I think comparing the third self-titled album (the so-called "red" album) and Raditude to the Jonas Brothers or Katy Perry would be charitable, in that those are acts that make music that is competently performed and recorded, designed to separate teenagers and tweens from their parents' money before they grow old enough to discover better music. And they've engaged in a myriad of promotional stunts that are so numerous and so embarrassing that I don't even want to list them.

Now comes Hurley, with its gimmick title and gimmick cover, the latter being a possible attempt to cover up a sponsorship from the Hurley clothing company (and yes, when you're as rich and famous as Weezer, it IS still possible to sell out). As for me, I've learned a lesson I would have learned years ago, had I not spent so many countless hours of my childhood with Weezer's first two albums: Hurley is a steaming pile of shit until proven otherwise. Unless ten different friends of mine come to me begging and pleading to give it a chance, because it really is that great, it's an F, a 1/5, a 0%.

And with this new album comes the news that Weezer are contemplating a tour in which they play each city two nights, once playing their self-titled debut (the so-called "blue" album) in its entirety, and once playing Pinkerton in its entirety. I'm going to make the same easy joke everybody else is: apparently even Weezer have no interest in hearing new Weezer material.

The ethical conundrum of watching football

2010-09-12T17:25:00.004-05:00

I've been a Philadelphia Eagles fan for as long as I can remember, but over the past four or five years, as the NFL season approaches, I feel more and more ambivalent, although I always end up watching anyway.

To start with, modern NFL football is damn near unwatchable. Between injury timeouts, penalties, replay challenges, and increasingly long commercial breaks (the latter made possible by the NFL's apparently limitless popularity), any sense of flow or momentum is thoroughly stifled. Add to this the fact that football, more than any other sport, is already inherently slight on action compared to the time it takes to play the game, and you end up with a game that takes over three hours to play, with as little as 11 minutes of actual football action.

To me, though, that's just the start of the problem, because I think there's a real ethical dilemma in being a fan of the NFL. I'm aware that the players are well-compensated, and that nobody is forcing them to play football, but I have doubts about how seriously many of them take the health risks.

It's certainly true that awareness of the reality of concussions has increased over the past couple years, but I don't see anything that suggests more than a token acknowledgement of the issue. The tough-guy warrior mentality that the NFL works so hard to foster has been ingrained for decades. A player who doesn't try to play through an injury is considered soft by coaches and fans alike, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that right at this very moment, there are players with concussion symptoms who aren't reporting them for fear that it might put their jobs in jeopardy. Worse, that fear might not be irrational.

Just today, the Eagles lost their defensive centerpiece (Stewart Bradley) and their offensive centerpiece (Kevin Kolb) to concussions. When Bradley took a hit, tried to get up, and then collapsed like a sack of potatoes, I literally felt sick to my stomach. Between Kolb and Bradley today, Brian Westbrook's troubles last year, and the lingering feelings over the suicide of Andre Waters, I'm starting to wonder how much more I can take. With every incident, I feel a little more like I'm personally responsible, along with everybody else who pays lip service to concern for the health of the players and goes back to demanding faster action and bigger hits.

I'm trying not to compare this to the Roman gladiators, but... well, I'm having trouble coming up with another comparison with the appropriate gravity.

long time no blog

2010-09-08T18:21:00.004-05:00

I kind of want to get the ol' blog started back up again.

I'm not entirely convinced that I have anything particularly interesting to say, but to be fair, I felt the same way back when I used to post on a regular basis. I guess the problem I'm having is that every time I feel a renewed energy toward writing, I come here, start a post, get about a paragraph and a half into a topic, then say to myself, "this is boring," and delete it. It's pretty similar to the way my songwriting process has been going for years now. However, I've gotten the songwriting process started up again to a modest degree, and if I can force myself to just plow through and finish things there, I can do it here, too.

With writing songs, I found the key was not to worry less about why I was writing, or what the point was, and more on the song itself. I've got a handful of completed songs now, some of them recorded in various stages of completion, but no real idea of what I'm going to do with them, and I'm ok with that. I'm not in a band right now (or at least nothing worth taking too seriously), and I don't see that changing soon, but even if few people will ever hear these songs, it feels good to have written them, and it is an important form of self-expression, a form of therapy. Even if I go out of my way to write impenetrable lyrics, they're still personal to me.

So maybe there's something comparable with this blog. I do like writing, when I have something to write about. Something about simply the feeling of my fingers flying rapidly across the keyboard is incredibly gratifying. Instead of worrying about whether or not I'm saying something "important," or how many people will read it, or if it will eventually lead to anything, I need to just get it, say my piece, and get out. I'll be happy I did.

I feel like there's something to be said for the blog format as well. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the word "blog" (although that issue was resolved for me by the general public years ago), but I still remain convinced that anything worth thinking about probably won't fit on Twitter or a Facebook status.

So, if you're reading this, you can hopefully look forward to seeing some things here soon. I still don't expect my blog to have a "theme" other than whatever I happen to be thinking about, even though these types of personal journals have mostly fallen by the wayside (I can't think of any that I check out on a regular basis). I'm thinking about dusting off and posting some journals that I wrote on a couple trips around the country. So maybe that first, I don't know.

List With Unreasonably Specific Criteria, Grizzled Veterans Edition

2009-04-26T00:53:00.003-05:00

Bands With at Least 10 Years Under Their Belts That Are as Awesome Now as They Were When They Debuted:

- Radiohead

- Do Make Say Think

- Super Furry Animals

- Flaming Lips

- Wilco

- Of Montreal

- Air

- Stereolab

- Yo la Tengo

- Deerhoof

- Portishead

Bands that I want to include but won't because their debut is so damned perfect and their recent work is only half-excellent: Mogwai

List With Unreasonably Specific Criteria, Leaving the Nest Edition

2009-03-13T23:28:00.003-05:00

Solo albums by famous band members that everybody should own:

Dig it:

- Brian Wilson - Smile

- Dennis Wilson - Pacific Ocean Blue

- George Harrison - All Things Must Pass

- John Lennon - Plastic Ono Band

- Paul McCartney - Ram

- David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel

- Jonny Greenwood - There Will Be Blood OST

- Jeremy Enigk - Return of the Frog Queen

- Lou Reed - Coney Island Baby

- John Cale - Paris 1919

- Nico - Desertshore

- Syd Barrett - The Madcap Laughs

- Paul Simon - Graceland (that mostly counts, right?)

Artists not included on account of being far more famous as a solo act than as part of their former band: Bjork, Elliott Smith, Ryan Adams, Robyn Hitchcock

Tom is

2009-03-12T21:01:00.003-05:00

Tom isn't so sure Eric Bruntlett can play center field.

Tom would gladly pay a handsome sum for Van Morrison to follow him around singing about his activities. "Tom wakes up, he goes to work, he's WOOOOOOOOOOOOOORKIN' WORKIN' WORKIN' WOOOOOOOOOORKIN'."

Tom's money is on the Celtics to repeat.

Tom's cockatiel is laying eggs, which is cute but also weird and slightly stressful, and he wishes she would stop because he misses just hanging out with her on his shoulder, because she doesn't want to do that anymore.

Tom watched an episode of Family Guy last week, and he isn't sure if his sense of humor has changed drastically in the past eight or nine years, or if Family Guy has always been just God fucking awful all along.

Tom would much rather be texting than talking on the phone.

Tom is 25 years old and loses sleep at night worrying about how old he has become.

Tom thinks the Phillies and Mets both benefit from playing the Nationals and Braves 20 times each every year, but not the Marlins, they're a sticky bunch of bastards.

Tom will likely go the rest of his life without seeing a movie better than Vertigo.

Tom thinks that being a bird owner might be teaching him some bad lessons for parenthood, such as, "If I just stick their cage in the closet, they'll stop screaming."

Tom's personal picks for best album covers of all time are Nebraska, On the Corner, Standards, and Graceland.

Tom still doesn't understand why Twitter is anything that anybody would be interested in.

Live from New York, it's tedious mediocrity!

2009-02-21T23:59:00.002-05:00

Have you ever seen that one SNL skit where there was this recurring character who'd been on the show five times before doing the same exact thing, except this time they were doing the same exact thing in a department store or a family dinner or something, and the guest host was in the skit playing a character extremely similar or identical to the one that they were famous for playing, and the whole thing went on at least three minutes longer than was really necessary, and then there was a commercial break that was actually longer than the preceding skit?

Man, that was great. I hope that show stays on the air for another 35 years!

Tom's favorite music of 2008

2009-02-18T00:38:00.000-05:00

Christ, is it February already? I've been planning, apparently for 2 full months now, to post this, and give a good in-depth write-up of everything, but the thought of doing so is off-putting, and really, I don't have the interest in this that I once did. I'm sure that comment is going to be great for the prospect of future readership here. Oh well.

What I'm doing now is the lazy version of a Top 10 list. This is in the same format as it would have appeared in the more labor-intensive version (i.e., the version where I actually wrote a lot about why I like any of these), it's just arranged as it is because the idea of a "competition" every year for Best Album or whatever seems increasingly pointless and irrelevant.

These are my Very Favorite albums of 2008 (in alphabetical order):

- Deerhunter - Microcastle - Also getting this year's "Most Improved" award (this is 1000% better than 2007's Cryptograms), Deerhunter have created an atmospheric masterpiece combining their usual shoegaze style with an increased emphasis on melody and ambiance.
- Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping - After a career making wacky lo-fi Beatlesque indie-pop, Kevin Barnes has spent the last few years skewing into a unique world of electronic disco funk rock, or something like that. Taking the sound of 2007's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer to its most extreme endpoint, Barnes (and his alter-ego Georgie Fruit) has created a kaleidoscopic and dizzying ode to the human libido.
- Portishead - Third - With one fell swoop, Portishead threw out any notion of them being bound to the idea and sound of "trip-hop", while still being immediately identifiable as Portishead. If it took them 11 years to make an album this good, I'd like to urge them to take another decade to make the next one.
- Brian Wilson - That Lucky Old Sun - Brian Wilson's still got it. This is the best album of new material he's put out since 1977's The Beach Boys Love You (since Smile was mostly written in 1966-67), and it certainly serves as a nice bookend to his career. More importantly, it's a strong, unified album that works well as a whole. It makes me wish I lived in Los Angeles. That's how good it is.

There are some other Very Good albums (by my standards) from 2008 (in roughly descending order, with one sentence write-ups):

- Kanye West - 808s and Heartbreak - The lyrics are questionable at times, but they are as consistent as the always-compelling music at creating a mood of regret and grief, a lament to good times never had.
- TV on the Radio - Dear Science - Melody comes to the fore, and TV on the Radio hit a new career peak with an amazing hybrid of funk, disco, and Radiohead.
- M83 - Saturdays = Youth - The devotion to the sound of the 1980s here is almost disturbingly thorough, but it works, but mostly because M83's flair for the dramatic (and melodramatic) remains fully intact.
- The Week That Was - The Week That Was - I downloaded this on a whim based on a single positive review, and I don't really know the first thing about whoever is making this music, but I've come up with the formula for these guys: early XTC + Steve Reich + Talking Heads + Peter Gabriel, and if that sounds like an awesome combination, you're right, it totally is.
- The Hold Steady - Stay Positive - Craig Finn's lyrics over the four Hold Steady albums have created a dense weave of recurring characters, stories, and themes, a web as intriguingly byzantine as their music is (and has always been) straightforward and immediately engaging.
- Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - Real Emotional Trash - Lifelong indie kid blasphemy: I honestly prefer the exploratory but never masturbatory jams of Real Emotional Trash to any Pavement album.
- Stereolab - Chemical Chords - These guys have been wringing unpredictable results from the same old formula for so long that it should go without saying that Chemical Chords is yet another variation of 60s pop + 70s Krautrock + 90s post-rock, this time with the emphasis on concision and directness.
- Hot Chip - Made in the Dark - Hot Chip make most downright goofy dance music that can still be legitimately called dance music, with bonus points awarded this time around for the total music-geek Todd Rundgren sample and the lyric "half nelson, full nelson, Willie Nelson."
- Mogwai - The Hawk is Howling - Mogwai have been making more or less the same album since 2003's Rock Action, but this one, with its extended song structures and devastating climaxes, comes closest to that holy grail of all post-rock, their debut Young Team, while still retaining the subtlety and texture of their work in the last decade.
- Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends - See earlier review.
- Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago - An album of mopey, bitchy breakup songs redeemed by an unstoppable wave of gorgeous melodies and harmonies.
- Beach House - Devotion - Every one of these songs is pretty much the same, but they're all unspeakably beautiful.

So there you go. If you'd like some of my favorite individual songs of 2008, here's a list, in the order I thought of them, with their own individual awards listed next to them:

Vampire Weekend - "Oxford Comma" - Most Cheerful Pop/Rock Song
Mogwai - "I'm Jim Morrison I'm Dead" - Most Devastatingly Majestic Song
Hot Chip - "Bendable Posable" - Weirdest Danceable Song
Fleet Foxes - "White Winter Hymnal" - Prettiest Crosby, Stills & Nash style harmonies
Animal Collective - "Water Curses" - Purest Expression of Joy
Goldfrapp - "Clowns" - Most Heartwrenching Song About Breast Implants
M83 - "Kim and Jessie" - Most Devastatingly Majestic 80s Throwback Song
Portishead - "Machine Gun" - Most Brutally Rhythmic Song

2008 year in review

2008-12-12T14:50:00.003-05:00

In the year 2008:

- The Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series
- A black man was elected president
- Guns 'n' Roses released Chinese Democracy
- My Bloody Valentine went on tour
- Portishead put a new album out
- The Flaming Lips finished Christmas on Mars

These are all extraordinary occurrences, right? I didn't wake up 11 months ago in some weird alternate universe where this sort of weird shit is commonplace, right?

2008 music posts coming in a couple weeks, so shtick around.

2008-11-28T01:56:00.002-05:00

"World's Oldest Person Dies" is such a non-news headline. Just from a statistical standpoint, is there anybody in the world who could possibly be more likely to die at any given moment than the world's oldest person?

"you talkin' to me?"

2008-11-20T20:48:00.003-05:00

Last week I bought the newly released "Coppola Restoration" box set of The Godfather and its sequels. A purchase well worth the money for anybody who doesn't own those movies already (which was me before last week).

I was watching Part II tonight, and thinking about how much I love watching Robert De Niro do anything, even just stick his hands in his pockets and stare into space, and I eventually landed on his Wikipedia page, and I realized that his career is a neat little oversimplified microcosm of Hollywood filmmaking over the past 35 years.

And if you want to illustrate the difference between the "film school brat" era of the late 70s and the "sequels, remakes, and formulas" era of the past ten years or so, De Niro's filmography charts it perfectly: The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, and Raging Bull then, Analyze This (and Analyze That), Meet the Parents (and Meet the Fockers), Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Shark Tale now.

This isn't meant as a criticism of De Niro (if you asked me who my favorite actor of all time was, it would be De Niro in a walk, issues raised by yesterday's entry aside), and it isn't meant to say that there were no awful and overly familiar movies back then, or that there are no sweeping, method-acted epics now (or that there are no film school brat types now). It's just a funny thought I had.

"half of what I say is meaningless..."

2008-11-19T20:48:00.003-05:00

I was at a party last weekend, and I was approached (cornered) by a young woman, who had apparently been told by one of my friends that if she wanted to talk about music, I was the person to talk to.

I would probably dispute that notion, by the way, because while it's true that I do love talking about music, and I know more about pop music than most people (because that's what I busied myself with in high school and college while the rest of you had friends and such), I tend to be very opinionated and sometimes dismissive. This can end up hurting people's feelings if all they wanted to do was talk about, say, Band of Horses, and I dismiss them as "Death Cab for Journey" and immediately switch back to ranting about why John Cale is the greatest musician of all time, or whatever people like me like to talk about. And I don't really hate Band of Horses, or care about them one way or the other, and it doesn't bother me one bit if anybody else likes them or even thinks they're the future of rock music. I'm just an asshole sometimes, that's all.

Anyway, this girl asked me who my favorite band is. I don't like that question, because it's not really an interesting question, it's reductive of anybody's musical taste, and mostly because that changes from hour to hour with me, and probably most other people.

I deflected the question back to her, in hopes that she would say something that could spur the conversation on, and get me out of reciting my boilerplate list of favorite bands.

"I would have to say the Beatles," she said.

My response, because I'd had a few drinks and didn't really care if she thought I was an asshole, was, "Well Christ, of course your favorite band is the Beatles, but you can't say that. There's no discussion to be had about that. Everybody's favorite band is the Beatles, there's nothing interesting about that."

It got me thinking later on: first of all, I don't actually think for a minute that everybody's favorite band is the Beatles. I know a lot of people who somehow made it to adulthood without spending their entire childhood digesting every single Beatles song and album, for hours and hours (again, this is what I did as a kid instead of socializing). But still, they were a phenomenon unique in the history of music, a result of improbable circumstances and talent that resulted in unbelievable popularity of an unprecedented scale, that left behind a catalog that is essentially perfect, from the first song on their first album to the last song on their last album. They were insanely prolific, provided countless innovations that still bear effect on pop music, were surprisingly eclectic within the course of any of their albums, let alone their whole career, and had nary a single misstep from start to finish.

But are they my favorite band? Purely from the standpoint of which single band or artist has provided me with the most rewarding listens, who stand up to hundreds of listens without diminishing, who've provided me with more entertainment than anybody else, the Beatles are the obvious answer, but there are artists whose work I cherish more, who provide a more personal connection. The Beatles, in part because of their massive global and cross-generational popularity, and in part because they're so perfect and unassailable, are hard to pick as a favorite.

We like to root for underdogs, we like our heroes flawed, and we like to feel unique. Picking the Beatles in that situation is just too obvious, too safe, like listing Beethoven as your favorite classical composer, Citizen Kane as your favorite movie, and Shakespeare as your favorite poet. Sure they're good, brilliant really, and I would never doubt the truthfulness of anybody who did list all of those, because they're so good, but that's the point. Everybody knows they're good. It's damn near impossible to dispute their greatness without looking like the world's most obnoxious contrarian, and with good reason. But holding those up as your personal favorite doesn't say anything about your personality.

The tragedy of John McCain

2008-11-03T21:44:00.002-05:00

Anybody who knows me even a little can probably vouch for my status and an unabashed liberal. I will pretty much automatically vote for whoever the Democrat is in any statewide or national election, although if I had my way we might actually get stuck with a President Kucinich.

But I actually feel a little bit sorry for John McCain.

It's not that he's waited so long for his chance and now appears to be on his way to defeat (although, by the way, let's not count our chickens before they hatch here, we still have to go vote for Obama tomorrow for him to win). It's that even if he does win, he's given himself over so thoroughly to the demons of Rove-style right wing politics.

The lesson that McCain took from George W. Bush's victories was apparently that playing to the base (and/or the lowest common denominator) wins, especially if you do so in the lowest, crudest, most misleading, and plainly insulting manner possible. Bush sunk McCain in the 2000 primaries with the most shamelessly sleazy campaign ever seen, and McCain, having absorbed this information, has been applying it to his 2008 campaign against Obama, robo-calls and all.

What he didn't realize was that Bush's victories in the general elections were by fractional margins (the national margin in 2004 was 2.4%, and of course he famously didn't even win the popular vote in 2000), against Democratic opponents far less organized and less convincing than Obama, in times less turbulent than now. So while Rove politics did edge out Kerry in 2004 (the Swift Boat controversy comes to mind, although that was not strictly from the Bush campaign), in 2008 the entire economy damn near collapsed, and McCain's campaign is still flailing about hoping that people are going to care about Obama's "involvement" with William Ayers that happened 7 years ago. Obama has clear, agreeable messages about tax reform and the economy, and McCain has Joe Biden's words taken out of context against images of rallies and soldiers in Arabic countries. Obama speaks for crowds of tens of thousands of people, and McCain acts as if Obama's massive popularity and eminent likability is somehow a negative trait.

It would be just another dirty campaign run by a Republican, except for the fact that McCain is actually NOT just another Republican. McCain's nauseating repetition of the word "maverick" is actually justified by his actions in the Senate. He has consistently stood up to his party, worked for smart bipartisan compromises, and shows a willingness to listen and learn that Bush would probably find foolish (this is a compliment). He's stubbornly resisted the extreme right wing of his party, taking moderate (and, dare I say, liberal) stances in the past on abortion, campaign finance, and immigration, among others. He's the one who publicly called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance." He was still pretty solidly conservative, but he was the type of conservative I could actually respect, even if I'd never vote for him.

And now here he is, at the tail end of a campaign marked by misleading statements and outright lies, fearmongering, anti-intellectualism, subtle racism, hypocrisy, and, of course, Sarah fucking Palin, the ultimate physical manifestation of ignorance, and for what? If McCain loses, he can't flip a switch and go back to the McCain who was in the Senate in 2000, pretending that he hasn't done what he's done and said what he's said for the past year and a half. If he wins, he's bound to the far right wing of the Republican party that will have put him there, which means no pro-choice Supreme court justices, no immigration reform, and no courting the Democrat-controlled Congress with the reasonable compromises that are his specialty. Win or lose, John McCain has sold his soul.

All of which is to say...

Vote Obama.

"hockey moms" are the new "NASCAR dads"

2008-09-05T20:12:00.003-05:00

There's been a lot of talk lately about Sarah Palin, and I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about her by now, so I just have two quick questions about her that I don't think anybody else has asked so far, and then we can all move on to bigger and better things:

1. Is she related to the Monty Python guy?

2. How many moose has she fucked, and is this more or less than the average Alaskan?

Hopefully we can get this all cleared up, and she can resume her campaign against Barack Obama to become the next president.

I'm just not sure about the speech this guy MacCane gave last night. He sure did talk a lot about himself. I don't think it's going to benefit Sarah Palin very much in the polls.

Lucky Old Sun's got nothin' to do but roll 'round heaven all day...

2008-09-02T19:58:00.002-05:00

You know, I think among my friends, my undying devotion to/worship of Brian Wilson is well-known enough that they would probably joke, on the subject of Brian Wilson's That Lucky Old Sun, which was released on CD today, that I probably heard it over a year ago. And in this case, that would almost be true, as the work was premiered as a whole by Brian and his band live in September 2007, and I had it shortly thereafter through the magic of internet distributed bootlegs.

I stopped in my favorite record store to buy it anyway today, of course, and, like with Smile (although in an altogether more low-key fashion), I avoided listening to the studio versions until I could pop in the CD and hear the whole thing all at once. Actually, I was only mildly excited to hear it, as I had decided based on the bootleg that That Lucky Old Sun was a pleasant but inconsequential bookend to Brian Wilson's life and career.

Then I actually listened to the damn thing, and man, I forgot how much I really do love that man's music. A good handful of the songs are middling and forgettable, but every so often an amazing melody or harmony jumps out of the speakers, and it just floors me. And the songs that are really good are breathtaking, on par with anything he did 40 years ago.

Speaking of which, holy shit, "Can't Wait Too Long" is on the album! He's been sitting on that one for 41 years, actually.

Anyway, it is a pleasant bookend to Brian's career, but not inconsequential. The symbolic values are enormous, maybe even more than his final vanquishing of his Smile demons. With That Lucky Old Sun, Brian returns to his love of California, the only home he's ever known, invoking specific memories of his past with an agreeable nostalgia. Brian has conquered his demons, made peace with himself, and is finally learning to enjoy life. Not bad for a guy who probably should have been dead several decades ago.

At this point in his career, though, everything about Brian Wilson has a huge symbolic value. The references in the lyrics to "Summer '61" (when the Beach Boys formed), how Brian "turned out the lights" at age 25 (when the Smile debacle occurred), or had "a dream singing with my brothers in harmony" (a reference to his deceased brothers and former bandmates Carl and Dennis) would be typical lyrical oddities for any other artist, but out of the mouth of Brian Wilson, they're almost insider references, nods to the people paying attention who "get it."

But maybe I'm thinking too much. At it's simplest, That Lucky Old Sun is a fine example of sunny California pop from the man who invented the genre.

AMERRRRICA

2008-08-23T06:59:00.002-05:00

If this isn't a sign that MCain has no chance this fall, I don't know what is. God that is incredibly confusing.

My favorite part of that article might actually be the phrase "while promoting his new movie 'Beer for My Horses'..."

keepin' the spirit alive

2008-08-14T20:25:00.002-05:00

a mildly amusing momentary diversion

2008-08-12T17:31:00.004-05:00

Click on "edit - paste" in your browser thing and be amazed at the weird non-sequitur of seeing the last stream of text that you copied with your computer without any context. Especially fun if you haven't used the feature for several days.

I just did it and got this: Neil Hamburger

fuck

2008-08-04T18:58:00.002-05:00

You know, I have to admit, I think the new Coldplay album is pretty good.

Then again, I've always been partial to Coldplay. For a guy who is as much of a bullshit indie/elitist/hipster/asshole or whatever as I probably am to stick with them through an album as mind-numbingly boring as X & Y (christ, even the title is boring), and sit through a million irritating iPod commercials with Chris Martin doing his Bono/Jesus thing, and still run out to buy Viva la Viva or Death and All His Friends the first week it was out... well, I think that's some kind of devotion.

See, I know that the days of Parachutes are long over, and I'm never going to see them again in a place as small as the 9:30 Club (and I'm certainly not going to be ever to wait after a show and meet them again), but I think these four dorky British dudes still have some great potential. The first two times I saw them (before they started touring on increasingly mediocre material) were some of the most energetic and enthusiastic performances I've ever seen. I've never seen a band that seemed so genuinely amazed that a room full of people would ever be so into their music. I left those shows feeling almost as good as I did leaving Flaming Lips and Polyphonic Spree shows, and without the impressive spectacle of those two acts. Coldplay were never going to smash their instruments onstage after a show, but even if singing along with a room full of people as one voice to a song as pretty as "Yellow" sounds irredeemably lame, well, don't knock it until you've tried it.

The thing is, Coldplay eventually became a club act stuck playing in basketball arenas, where their contagious enthusiasm is muddled, and their music started playing the part as well, reaching for the stars but somehow always gazing down at the charmingly befuddled navel of Chris Martin, and all of those U2 comparisons seemed depressingly apt. The difference was that before U2 became bigger than Jesus, they were an angry group of punks (and Boy and War will always be great testaments to the glorious righteousness that was), whereas Coldplay have always been more reflective, even insecure.

All of which is to say that X & Y was a tedious mess, and deserved every negative word thrown at it. What makes Viva la Vida so interesting is that it is a de facto apology for its predecessor. Hiring Brian freaking Eno of all people to produce isn't going to make the U2 comparisons go away any time soon, but the new album is so engaging because it's the first time Coldplay have sounded unpredictable since A Rush of Blood to the Head followed the subdued Parachutes with the clamorous pounding of "Politik." There are abrupt mid-song shifts, songs that abruptly segue into the next song, sounds foreign to any previous incarnation of Coldplay, hip-hop beats combined with huge church organs, waves of trademark Eno-scapes. It's an album full of songs that sound like they were written by real human beings, and if that seems like a small compliment, it's not something that could be said of their last album. The "huge arena rock" sound hasn't gone away, but it's been incorporated into something interesting.

In short, it's engaging pop music, and often pretty damn gorgeous too. It's not exactly great, but there isn't a song on it that I find myself skipping, and it's at least a step in the right direction for the band, a sign that they might still have a masterpiece in them.

na na na na na na na na FISHING!

2008-07-18T15:34:00.001-05:00

Seriously, are we STILL making movies about Batman?

boring music geek stuff

2008-07-16T21:48:00.001-05:00

There was a blog post on The A.V. Club last week that I found intriguing. You pick your favorite album (or an album by some other criteria of your choice) for every year in which you've lived. Obviously I'm doing it now myself. It's interesting before me because half of the years I have to go with were before I was even aware of what kind of music was coming out at the time, and half of the half remaining would be completely different I had picked them during that year. Metallica would have made the 1995 list if you'd asked me then. They're not on it now.

COMMENCE NERDAGE:

1983 - Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues

1984 - Robyn Hitchcock - I Often Dream of Trains

1985 - Suzanne Vega - Suzanne Vega

1986 - Paul Simon - Graceland

1987 - U2 - The Joshua Tree

1988 - Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden

1989 - XTC - Oranges & Lemons

1990 - Depeche Mode - Violator

1991 - Slint - Spiderland

1992 - Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92

1993 - The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream

1994 - Built to Spill - There's Nothing Wrong With Love

1995 - Sunny Day Real Estate - LP2

1996 - Weezer - Pinkerton

1997 - Radiohead - Ok Computer

1998 - Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children

1999 - The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin

2000 - Godspeed You Black Emperor! - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

2001 - Bjork - Vespertine

2002 - Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2003 - Sufjan Stevens - Michigan

2004 - Brian Wilson - Smile

2005 - Animal Collective - Feels

2006 - Scott Walker - The Drift

2007 - Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer (that album still keeps growing on me)

2008 - Portishead - Third (so far)

Various things:

Years that make me want to choose more than one album (with alternates):

1986 - XTC - Skylarking

1991 - My Bloody Valentine - Loveless

1997 - Mogwai - Young Team, Stereolab - Dots and Loops, Built to Spill - Perfect From Now On

2000 - Radiohead - Kid A

2004- The Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat

Years for which I would rather pick a movie than an album:

1990 - Goodfellas

2008-06-21T12:02:00.002-05:00

I got the new Animal Collective EP, Water Curses, recently. Today I put the CD in my computer to listen to it. iTunes could not quite identify it:

"Multiple matches were found for this CD. Choose one:

Ace of Base - All That She Wants [single]
Animal Collective - Water Curses EP"

Uhh... all right.

Mike Myers

2008-06-19T19:27:00.002-05:00

Mike Myers.

God, just fucking stop it. Seriously.

For fuck's sake, dude. I used to think of "Sprockets" in my head and recall it fondly. Now I think "Sprockets" and think "fucking Mike Myers sucks." I don't want to look it up on YouTube for fear that I might actually find it funny.

I mean, Christ, if it's not another fucking Austin Powers movie, it's another dip in the ol' cash well for Shrek. And now this Love Guru thing. God. I don't know what the hell that horseshit is, I just know every time I see a commercial for it on TV I want to punch Mike Myers in the throat.

And let's not forget YOU, America! Why on Earth do you people keep giving this idiot money? Don't you know that only lets him keep doing this? Don't you realize that when The Love Guru has a huge opening this weekend, that only guarantees that he'll make another Cat in the Hat movie? Why are you doing this to yourselves? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?

Plastic Ono Band

2008-06-04T17:29:00.000-05:00

MAMA DON'T GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

DADDY COME HOME!

soapbox time!

2008-05-16T20:52:00.004-05:00

I usually try, sometimes a little too hard, to play devil's advocate in issues. I fall pretty far to the left of the political spectrum, but if at all possible, I like to acknowledge that on many issues, there is a valid opposing viewpoint, even if I don't agree with it. (This is called being civil, which I know is an unheard of idea on the Internet.) I am pro-choice, for example, but I recognize that some people just think that it is never ok to willingly take a life, even in the form of a fetus. If anybody needs to me to run down the list of reasons why I disagree with that, I will, but that's not really where I'm going with this.

On some issues, though, there's no devil's advocate. If you are against gay marriage, I think you're flat out wrong, and I've said it before, and I'll say it again, in 50 years you will look as foolish and ignorant as you would if you stated today that a white woman should not be allowed to marry a black man. I was reading, in an article about the California Supreme Court's ruling that essentially legalizes gay marriage (at least until this fall), about a lesbian couple in their 80s who have been together for 55 years, who can finally get married (they were married in that two-week window where gay marriage was legal in San Francisco, but it was annulled when it was decided that the mayor had severely exceeded his authority). I would rather appeal to ration and common sense, but emotion will do sometimes, and I just can't imagine how anybody could look at this couple who's been waiting since the Eisenhower administration to tie the knot and tell them they shouldn't be allowed to do so.

Really, if you've got a rational and logical argument against gay marriage that doesn't involve God or your own personal squeamishness, I would very much like to hear it.

whatever makes you happy, whatever you want...

2008-05-04T14:10:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I think that for all the amazing things they've done, Radiohead have never really topped "Creep."

Most of the time I don't really think that, but I don't think most people will argue with me if I say they've never done anything so immediate or nakedly emotional since then. Everybody in the world loves that song, with the possible exception of Radiohead themselves.

That song is kind of an anomaly, now that I think about it. It came out in the middle of the grunge era, when mainstream music was dominated by somber bands that were all about pathos and self-pity and nihilism, (for an intolerably boring example, see the Stone Temple Pilots song of the same name, released a year earlier), and along comes this band of goofy-looking British dudes aping REM and U2, and they blow everybody else out of the water, almost by accident. Apparently they weren't even going to put "Creep" on Pablo Honey, which sounds strange, considering that it's basically one of the two really good songs on that album. Eventually Radiohead took a few astronomical leaps forward, but they're always going to be associated with "Creep," whether they like it or not.

"Dick Laurent is dead..."

2008-04-19T21:16:00.006-05:00

One of the earlier CDs I ever bought with my own money was the soundtrack to the movie Lost Highway. At the time, I didn't have a clue who David Lynch was, I just wanted it because it had a great non-album Smashing Pumpkins song on it, and I kind of liked Nine Inch Nails' "The Perfect Drug" too. It also had Lou Reed, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein (pre-"Du Hast"), and all that crazy Angelo Badalamenti noir-jazz that's in every David Lynch movie. It took me another few years to really care about Lou Reed and David Bowie too, although I at least knew who they were when I was 14.

So tonight, I finally watched the movie, after it was finally released on DVD last month and after I read a couple "wait, maybe we got this wrong" articles about the DVD release by critics, who generally hated it in 1997.

It's an all right movie, I guess. It's unmistakably a David Lynch movie, like everything he does. It's got quite a few "what the hell is this person doing in this movie?" moments; Robert Blake, Henry Rollins, Richard Pryor, Robert Loggia, Marilyn Manson, and Gary freakin' Busey all turn in supporting roles. I found it to be a lot more low-key than the rest of his stuff. First viewings of a David Lynch film are always a little confusing, but they're usually not difficult to stay interested in, like this one was. I would say Lynch fans should watch it, and if you're not a Lynch fan, you're not going to watch it anyway.

Anyway, I really just wanted to show you all this clip, because it's a good example of why we should probably all be terrified of Robert Blake. This thing rivals Daniel Plainview drinkin' up milkshakes in terms of the whole "what the fuck this is insane/awesome" thing.

Supposedly Blake is completely responsible for the way that character looks and acts, which, just... yeesh. Check the huge 1997 cell phone too.

2008-04-19T14:50:00.002-05:00

I kinda like how Phillies-Mets is a legitimate rivalry now. For a while it seems like we've really hated the Mets, but the Mets had bigger things to worry about, which fueled the inferiority complex that we Philly fans have, which generally manifests itself as loathing New Yorkers for being such fatheaded smug assholes. So there was no small amount of pleasure in the Phillies not only winning the division last year, but doing it over the New York Mets, who set a new standard for incompetence with the worst season-ending skid ever (finally getting, who else, the '64 Phillies off the hook). Even after the Phillies got swept by the Rockies in the playoffs, it wasn't heartbreaking, because the Phillies were division champs, and the Mets fans had to wallow in disgust all winter long, and we have bragging rights for a whole year. And now Phillies-Mets is a big-ticket rivalry, and Fox's game of the week.

I think that's pretty cool. As long as the Phillies start winning some damn games here.

sunshine 'n' water 'n' trees 'n' such

2008-04-17T19:21:00.002-05:00

A couple months ago, I was sent down to Maryland to work with a pipe crew for a week when my other job was shut down to dry out (February is no good for construction). We were putting in a sewer line in a sort of village that's pretty typical of the area, a collection of houses bunched near the shore of the Chesapeake, a village in the sense that it's a group of homes that are all in the same area, but not in the sense that the homes sprung up around a central location for any reason other than that there's a large body of water nearby.

I knew the water was close by, but I didn't know how close (I figured within half a mile or so), and the first morning I was there it was extremely foggy, so I was lucky to be able to see the machine at the other end of the pipe I was standing next to. Then around noon, the fog cleared, and the sun came out, and holy shit, there was the beach 50 feet away from us, along with possibly the most beatiful waterfront landscape I've ever seen.

Anyway, I was just thinking about that, because one of the guys who was at that job got sent to mine today, and I was realizing that part of the reason I don't completely hate my job is because while a lot of people I know are staring at a computer screen in a cubicle, I'm outside enjoying the nice weather, and sometimes, nice scenery too. It was nice to not have to stare at nothing but dirt all day.

I was also thinking about the fact that the bay down there is one of the most tranquil and gorgeous places I've ever been, and I've lived most of my life 25 miles away from it, and I've been there something like three times in my entire life. I've been to Disney World that many times, and that's 1,000 miles away and also horrible. Christ.

Other random thought for today: I kind of think I'm going to listen to I Often Dream of Trains by Robyn Hitchcock every day for the next three months. It is a wonderful album and I have no idea how I lived for 24 years without it. Well... 23, it came out after I was born.

soapbox time!

2008-04-16T19:23:00.003-05:00

You know, in Barack Obama I finally had a presidential candidate that I actually admired. If I wasn't necessarily ga-ga about the idea of him being president, that's basically because I don't think that it's actually possible for me to go ga-ga for a politician, no matter who it is.

Then he had to go and put his foot in his damn mouth. I'm not about to switch who I'm voting for next week, but I'm not going to gloss it over and pretend it's not an issue either. It's not an issue of him being "out of touch," it's about him acting like a condescending ass. He not only said that religious people and gun owners have turned to those things because of economic issues, he also put them on the same level as racism, nationalism, and bigotry. That's not exactly small potatoes when you're trying to convince those people to put you in charge of them. It's condescending at best, insulting at worst.

Being from a somewhat depressed, small Pennsylvania town myself (not coal-country depressed, but not exactly thriving either), I would like to point out that what he said is actually true for a small minority of people, but is still horseshit. I'd also like to say that for about as long as I've had a political sensibility, I've always bristled at the myth that liberals are out of touch elitists. That's horseshit, too, but the reason that Republicans are able to convince so many people that that's true is because people keep giving them perfect ammo to do it, like Obama just did, and if he keeps it up, he's going to end up just like John Kerry. Fortunately he's probably got people to remind him every day never to say something like that again.

Again, barring unforeseen circumstances, I'm still voting for Obama next week (and in November too, John McCain scares the hell out of me), but it's naive to pretend that this isn't a concern, if not about his personal views toward small town people, than at least from an electability standpoint. If you compare his comments with Hillary Clinton's deluded fantasy about sniper fire in Bosnia, I would say Obama's is the bigger faux pas, and more likely to bite him in the ass later on.

when I grow up to be a man...

2008-04-15T20:03:00.002-05:00

When I grow up, I want to be the sad loser who watches R-rated movies with a clicker in hand to post the exact number of usages of the word "fuck" (and its variations, of course) to imdb.com trivia pages.

With some hard work and a little luck, I could be the guy who edits this Wikipedia article.

Crap, I just ruined my snarkiness by actually browsing the article and finding something I consider amusing: Apparently Good Will Hunting dropped more F-bombs than Trainspotting. Damn you, Wikipedia! Your utter banality has once again proven surprisingly alluring!

I have nothing of importance to say.

2008-04-12T17:18:00.001-05:00

The nice thing about a wireless network is being able to waste time on your computer and sit outside enjoying the nice weather at the same time.

Suck my dick, WIRES!

2008-04-12T09:42:00.002-05:00

I don't understand the rage directed toward Uwe Boll. If I could banish one filmmaker to Siberia, and I had Uwe Boll, Michael Bay, the guys who keep making these "Scary Movie" and "Meet the Spartans" things, and Brett Ratner in front of me, Boll would be the last guy I'd get rid of.

I can see people not liking him actually boxing his harshest critics, but I think that's a pretty funny publicity stunt. Nobody made anybody get into the ring with him, and for fuck's sake, nobody is making anybody pay attention to him, or constantly shoving his crap down our throats, which is more than can be said for whichever 80s cartoon, 70s movie, or 60s sitcom is being made into a shitty movie this week.

SFA OK

2008-04-10T21:07:00.003-05:00

Try as I may, I can't really get into the Super Furry Animals' latest album, Hey Venus! I lauded their last album, Love Kraft, thusly: "the slowed pace has enabled the Super Furry Animals to make the most coherent and focused album of their career, and even if their whirlwind compositions no longer make your head spin, there are still many gorgeous subtleties to be found in their characteristically lush orchestrations and brilliant pop melodies." (Take a trip in the wayback machine here.)

Hey Venus! doesn't quite have the stately strut of Love Kraft, but the mood and the sound are similar enough. So why can't I get into it? I've never heard an album by these guys that I didn't like until this one.

The answer I keep coming up with is that this one feels kind of half-assed. For an album that clocks in at under 40 minutes, it sags a lot. A handful of the songs, at three minutes, still feel too long by a minute. A couple of them sound like song titles that were stretched into songs as fast as they could be written ("Baby Ate My Eightball," "The Gift That Keeps Giving"). Then there's "Run-Away," which is either a very lazily written song, or some kind of experiment in how many elements of other songs can be borrowed without giving any credit. Songs checked on that list include "Be My Baby" (drums), "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" (melody) "Every Time We Say Goodbye" (lyrics) and, uh, "Runaway" (title), but I'm sure Led Zeppelin still has them beat somehow or another. It's also the best and most interesting song on the album.

Listening to Hey Venus! makes me feel the same way that I do when I listen to Steely Dan. It's eminently listenable, immaculately recorded and produced (as usual for the Super Furry Animals), and there's a part of me that feels like I'm being had for even trying to take this so seriously (never more so than during the baffling "Suckers!").

Maybe I can break it out in two or three years when they put another album out and it'll sound a lot better.

I'm pretty sure Ben-Hur and Spartacus are the same movie, anyway

2008-04-07T19:58:00.003-05:00

There are plenty of examples of how political involvement can sully the reputation of an artist, actor, or performer in the minds of roughly half the population, and there are examples on both sides of the spectrum. Jane Fonda is one example. Barbra Streisand is one. Ted Nugent is one. And hey, here's where I'm going with this, Charlton Heston is another.

I first encountered Charlton Heston as the star of every hilariously overblown epic ever made in the 50s and 60s (and every time Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments came on TV, my dad would proclaim the movie's untouchable greatness, and get nostalgic for the days when ham-fisted history buffs like David Lean and Cecil B. DeMille ruled Hollywood). In the late 90s, Heston became more familiar as the face of angry gun-toting conservatives across the country, and that's about when I started developing an irrational hatred of Heston, a feeling that only grew when I saw him in Bowling for Columbine actin' a fool.

Here we are years later, and Heston died, and I can scarcely remember why I hate him so much. The "cold dead hands" moment sticks in my brain, but I had to do some research to realize that he was a conservative nutjob well before he became president of the NRA. Check out this quote: "Somewhere in the pipeline of public funding is sure to be a demand from a disabled lesbian on welfare that the Metropolitan Opera stage her rap version of Carmen as translated to Ebonics."

Ouch! Take that, lesbians, disabled people, publicly funded arts, opera in general, rap, and, uh, black people!
I was working on the best "cold dead hands" joke to make about his passing (rough draft: "Are Charlton Heston's dead hands cold enough to pry his gun away from them yet?"), but The A.V. Club came up with a better one, found here, along with the moment that will almost certainly be better remembered than "damn dirty ape" or "let my people go" or "I am Spartacus" or whatever. Ok, that last one was Kirk Douglas. Anyway, reproduced caption: "Has anyone checked to make sure nobody has stolen Charlton Heston's musket in the last couple of days?"

I guess you could say I wasn't terribly sad at the news of his death. The other quip I came up with had something to do with him and Ronald Reagan and Alzheimer's and delusions of grandeur. It was pretty mean.

Unrelated: I just saw Meat Loaf in a commercial for AT&T or something, and it was kind of awesome. Another ad was for a movie from "the guys who brought you Knocked Up." I'm quoting it because those are the exact words that appeared on the screen. How pointlessly vague is that shit? It's weird that the only time you ever see that type of thing is in ads for shitty-looking comedy movies that I hope I never see. Like the above example, or anything with Rob Schneider or the Wayans. We need to adapt this sales tactic to other mediums. "Shine a Light, from the guys who brought you Taxi Driver and 'Start Me Up.'" I think that record labels should start advertising any Brian Eno-produced album as being from "the dude who brought you The Joshua Tree." Hell, why even limit it to albums he produced? Which record label was Robert Wyatt's Comicopera out on? Print this in Rolling Stone ASAP: "Robert Wyatt's Comicopera: there was a dude who was involved in making The Joshua Tree who was also tangentially involved in this project." Platinum by May, guaranteed.

Wait, what was this about? Oh right, Charlton Heston... nah, I'm done with that dude.

Easter in her bonnet, Easter in her hair

2008-03-23T21:56:00.003-05:00

Today is Easter Sunday, and I went to church this morning. I am not a very familiar face in any church, which put me today in fine company with millions of Americans who go to church today to celebrate the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus, then mostly sleep in on Sundays until it's time to celebrate his birth in December. My visit, however, was largely diplomatic in nature. It was also the first church service I've attended in five years (weddings aside). It's amazing what people will do when they're in love.

Anyway, instead of paying attention to the service (or is it a mass? The Episcopal service is nearly identical to the Catholic masses I endured as a child, does it get the same name?), I was pondering why a person like myself, a fairly committed atheist, has no problem celebrating Christmas, but is annoyed by or would rather just ignore Easter altogether.

The answer I came up with was this: to celebrate Christmas, if you even choose to acknowledge it as a religious holiday at all (what with Santa Claus and all that crap), is a tacit admittal that Jesus existed, and that his birth is worth celebrating in some facet. You don't have to worship him as the son of God. I can just think of it as the birth of a good man who preached kindness and tolerance, and stood up for the poor and oppressed. Easter is a little different, an acknowledgement that Jesus was resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven to absolve the sins of all mankind. A little more serious from a theological point of view, you know?

That was the serious and thoughtful version of my Easter post. The original version was this:

Easter is all about how Jesus was betrayed by his best friend, given over to the local fascist government, brutally tortured, and executed. And also cute little bunny rabbits and pastel-colored eggs and candy, candy, candy!

moose

2008-03-15T13:10:00.002-05:00

This is an email that found its way into my spam folder under the subject "moose":

translated back to his native language. Payment is not a problem

VlA rdg GRA $1. 28

[link removed to protect the stupid]

hoarse cries of fannish enthusiasm.grim-faced-but winked when I glanced his way. Iron John and Svinjar A tiny but well-stocked bar unfolded from one wall; the dispenser Directly ahead. Lets just stay on this course and well track th

Seriously.

feels so unnatural (Peter Gabriel too)

2008-03-09T17:52:00.000-05:00

You know, I write a blog. Technically. I mean, most of these things that you see get updated several times a day. You can probably probably look at the second page of mine and see items from last June. But it's a blog. I'm a blogger. Almost entirely about music.

So I guess it's with some degree of hypocrisy that I have to say that blogs about music are some of the most irritating things ever.

Ok, we'll backtrack a bit here. We'll start by saying that the primary way I have of hearing bands I've never heard of is by reading reviews of them. Generally there are a couple websites that I scan periodically for reviews of new stuff, and if I see enthusiastic reviews pop up on more than one site, I'll check out a few songs, and then maybe the whole album (bless the internet), and then when I'm more familiar with the material in question, I may occasionally go back and read what I read before, or some other stuff about them, to see if people are generally having the same reaction that I am.

So this is more or less the cycle I went through with some fellas named Vampire Weekend. I wouldn't say it's really a "great" album, or groundbreaking in any way, but it's got enough good bouncy pop tunes to keep me interested. Depending on your rating system of choice, I'd give it a B or maybe B+, a 7/10, a thumbs up, or whatever.

Then I discovered that Vampire Weekend are apparently one of those "blog bands" that are around, that nobody would ever hear of without the internet, similar to... I don't know, Lily Allen or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

Then I did a google search for "Vampire Weekend and blog" and a couple similar phrases, which led me to where I'm at now, which is feeling like I'm never going to read a music blog again. People haven't made such a huge fuss over music this innocuous since The Strokes came along.

To me, Vampire Weekend is a perfect encapsulation of what it's like to be an indie-rock fan in the age of internet domination, and it runs in a cycle something like this: 1) Overenthusiastic hype is lauded upon a competent but unspectacular artist by bloggers who may hope to take credit for the discovery 2) Confused by the unwarranted hype, what would be ambivalence by naysayers turns into irrational hatred and vitriol (I have been guilty of this before, I will admit) 3) By the time the damn album actually comes out, battle lines have already been drawn, and casual listeners who find their blissful ignorance of the "controversy" shattered are forced to either buy into one side of the hype or find the whole thing off-putting.

The unabashed hyperbolic love (which is harder to find, but out there) is a little perplexing to me, but the hatred is just exasperating. Let's take a look at the general list of reasons cited (as listed in a post about the confusing controversy surrounding the band, of which there are also plenty, including the one I'm creating right now):

"The four kids in Vampire Weekend have certainly done plenty to make themselves hater-targets. They wear pastel sweaters. They flaunt Ivy League educations. They jam obscure vocabulary tunes into keenly felt and observant little indie-pop jams that would've worked just fine without the verbosity. They swipe individual sounds from Afropop without attempting to master the form. During interviews, they engage in obnoxious useless-knowledge one-upmanship games. One of them is Scott Baio's cousin. And it's already been preordained that they're about to be fucking huge, or at least as fucking huge as an indie-pop band can be in an era where everyone downloads music instead of buying it..."

The one common thread through all of that: it has nothing to do with the band's music. The complaint that seems to come up so often is their borrowing of sounds from Afro-Pop (and let's be real here, we all know it sounds more like Graceland than King Sunny Ade), and I'm trying to figure out why that's such a problem. The most hilarious phrasing of the problem is found in the above paragraph (oh no, they haven't attempted to "master the form" before being influenced by it!), but usually it's lumped in with a mention of their Columbia University educations, which makes it sound more to me like the problem is that rich white kids aren't supposed to have things to say with their music, and rich white kids CERTAINLY aren't supposed to incorporate affectations of African music in their music. Perhaps if they'd met and formed their band in a coal mine instead of in their Columbia dorms, it would be ok. ("Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" would also have to be changed to something like "Pittsburgh Kwassa Kwassa.")

I also wonder if the people who are bashing them for their upper-middle-class backgrounds and borrowing of African influences also steer clear of, say, Talking Heads, who are guilty of pretty much the same exact thing. That's more of an extreme example, because Talking Heads are one of the greatest rock bands of all time, and people probably aren't going to remember Vampire Weekend by this time in 2009, but you get my point.

Anyway, to wrap up sort of where I started, I think from now on I'm going to stay clear of the blogs (except for mine and my friends'... probably) and just listen to the damn music. And if you're surfing across the blogosphere on a search engine and you find this page, just remember that I'm just as full of shit as everybody else out there.

Oh joy, apparently the Academy Awards are tonight

2008-02-24T13:18:00.002-05:00

Who else thinks that the Academy Awards would be much better suited to a strike-necessitated, press-conference-style show like what the Golden Globes were this year?

I think that the only thing that would get me to actually watch the show tonight would be if Daniel Day-Lewis promised to give his acceptance speech in character as Daniel Plainview while throwing bowling pins at Paul Dano.

news headline: "movies to be terrible at least through 2011"

2008-02-20T20:12:00.004-05:00

I know that by this point, writing about the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood studio film-making is beyond redundant, but I'm still amazed at what manages to come out of there. By the time I sit here and bitch about the fact that a Transformers movie exists, and wonder if things can sink any lower, they've already moved on to making a Thundercats movie. And so on.

But still: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!

The tragedy of this is that there will probably be more people who see Monopoly: The Movie than will ever see There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men combined. Or pick any other two movies that somehow get made these days that are actually good.

The other sad thing is that these board game-based movies will undoubtedly be completely idiotic, and nowhere near as hilarious as they are in my head. Can you imagine how amazingly psychedelic a movie based on "Candy Land" could be? Think about it in terms of how it might actually be made, and it becomes a cheap CGI coming-of-age tale with "hilarious" pop-culture references and wacky voice cameos by Drew Carey as King Kandy and Wanda Sykes as Queen Frostine.

I also like to imagine a Monopoly-based movie where Uncle Pennybags is some sort of near-omnipotent Mafia kingpin type, or a Battleship movie about a warship blindly firing torpedos based on an arbitrary grid on a map, while the captain listens over a two-way to see if the Russians (or whoever) say "Oh no! Torpedo hit at C-8! Our submarine has been sunk!" The actual Battleship movie will surely be a sub-Hunt for Red October nautical thriller, but I really can't imagine how Monopoly can be made into a movie. I can only picture it as some sort of Glengarry Glen Ross type thing where we watch the characters sink lower and lower into pathetic desperation, while your friend's smug asshole older brother won't loan you the rent you don't have to stay at St. James Place so you can stay alive for just one more turn, because you KNOW somebody HAS to hit that Atlantic Ave-Ventnor Ave-Marvin Gardens monopoly you have in the next turn.

The Ouija movie will obviously be some sort of mildly scary J-Horror knock-off.

"ohhhh, Depression!"

2008-02-13T21:56:00.005-05:00

I can't think of any musician that I actually like that I would like to punch in the face more than Morrissey. He evinces this combination of smugness and self-pity that I just find incredibly irritating. But he's played a key role in the creation of some fantastic songs, so I've got to give him some credit for that, right? It's interesting that some of the lyrics are far less irritating than others, although for the most part they come from roughly the same attitude and aesthetic. Here is my half-assed guide to songs by The Smiths that I find annoying or not annoying, with vague and unsatisfying explanations as to why or why not.

Annoying: "Hang the blessed DJ/For the music that they constantly play/It says nothing to me about my life" - This is true. My foremost complaint in dance clubs is that the songs do not feature lyrics that I can relate to. I don't understand why more DJs don't play more songs by Coldplay, or Iron and Wine. I also agree that this crime against my emotions should be punishable by death.

Not as Annoying: "I would go out tonight/But I haven't got a stitch to wear" - I like to carry this to its very literal conclusion in my head, where the lyric is more like "I would go out tonight, but instead I'm going to sit on my couch watching reruns of Cheers and eating Doritos, clad only in my underwear."

Annoying: - "In my life/Why do I give valuable time/To people who don't care if I live or die?" - Seriously, who has the kind of time for social interactions with anybody but close friends and relatives? For Morrissey, every second spent idly chatting with a mere friendly acquaintance feels like an eternity, as he ponders the countless hours wasted making small talk with people who would not be deeply upset at news of his passing.

Not as Annoying: - "I am human and I need to be loved/Just like anybody else" - "How Soon is Now?" represents an astonishing emotional breakthrough for Morrissey, as he realizes that there are actually human beings who feel emotions who aren't Morrissey. It also made the Smiths one of those bands that are famous for the song that sounds the least like the rest of their catalog.

2007 music is finally finished!

2008-02-11T19:59:00.000-05:00

It may be almost Valentine's Day, and I'm already queuing up a 2008 list, but God damn it, better late than never, right? Let's get this damn thing over with.

10. Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity - I really like combining words, and I kinda think that this album should have been called Fripportunity, except that would have sounded like Robert Fripp was involved somehow. Deerhoof are one of my favorite current bands, and this one is probably the best sounding album of their career, if not simply the best. It's an album that showcases all of their best talents: the big balls rock ("The Perfect Me"), the off-kilter pop ("Matchbook Seeks Maniac"), the flat out bizarre ("Kidz Are So Small"), the Velvet Underground-like long-form noise experiments ("Look Away"). Deerhoof may record better albums, but they might not ever record one that better encapsulates what they're all about.

9. Menomena - Friend and Foe - It's a damn shame that every discussion about Menomena eventually devolves into "their album art is so crazy lolololol!" because it overshadows how great their music is. Friend and Foe may require use of the artwork as a decoder ring to find out track names, but I'm more impressed by the tunes. Not every band can get away with having three different songwriters and three different lead singers, but Menomena isn't just any band. The sound is something like if Spoon or The National went completely off the indie pop deep end, a kinetic compilation of every sound, mood, and spacey trip the genre has to offer. It's surprisingly deep and rich, and it rewards the repeated listenings that it takes to fully absorb it.

8. The Apples in Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder - Robert Schneider claimed in an interview last year that New Magnetic Wonder was heavily inspired by Brian Wilson's Smile. This shouldn't be too surprising, coming from a guy who records in a place called Pet Sounds Studio (also the place where Schneider recorded and produced every indie kid's favorite album). The sound of the album is more like Jeff Lynne than Brian Wilson, though, not that this is a bad thing either. Schneider's Apples are far more slick and polished than they were back in their Beatle-esque psychedelic heyday 10 years ago, and New Magnetic Wonder is one of the better-sounding albums I've heard in a while. It's also one of the catchier. I can't think of whether or not "Energy" was used in a commercial or if it just sounds like it was written as a jingle to sell Hewlett Packard computers (I mean that as a compliment, if at all possible). Robert Schneider, with has nasal voice, baldness, and dorky glasses, may look more like George Costanza than a rock star, but as long as he wants to keep making albums, I'll keep listening.

7. Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala - Every couple years it seems like one of my friends is telling me that I need to check out a very pretty-looking Scandinavian singer/songwriter, and I end up finding them to be fairly boring. I can dig Jose Gonzalez (yes, he's Swedish) every now and then, which is more than I can say for Sondre Lerche, but I figured I'd give this Jens Lekman dude a shot. I hit the play button. A quick timpani roll, and a soft bed of strings drift in, and Mr. Lekman softly croons, "There will be no kisses tonight," and I let out an audible groan, and start mentally tweaking my standard "pretty, but not really interesting" review, and then HOLY GODDAMNED SON OF A BITCH, there's a HUGE crescendo, and gigantic bombastic chorus, and suddenly my ears perk up. See, as it turns out, Jens Lekman isn't a boring Sondre Lerche type singer songwriter, he's a flamboyant pop crooner. Horns stab, strings swell, and melodies rise and fall with the confidence of a seasoned pop songwriter. The sounds and moods are scattered all over the pop spectrum, and the lyrics are as often funny and clever as they are melancholy and introspective. He's as likely to be singing over a backing track that sounds like early Scott Walker as he is one that sounds like Marvin Gaye with an electronic backbeat, or a Friends-era Beach Boys song. He may be leaving his girl because he doesn't love her enough in one song, and he may be pretending to be a lesbian's boyfriend to fool her father in another. In short, it's a varied, novel look at pop songwriting, and I like it, quite a lot.

6. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer - If I was going to pick somebody who I thought would make the album with more catchy pop hooks combined with more unnervingly personal lyrics than any album since Weezer's Pinkerton, I'd have been about as likely to say Kevin Barnes as I would have been to say Rivers Cuomo (ie., not likely at all), but here we are. I'll admit that I vastly underrated this before. After putting it down for a few months and picking it up again, for whatever reason, it just started hitting me like a ton of bricks. The songs were stuck so thoroughly in my head, the lyrics streaming absent-mindedly through my mouth at all times, that it was hard to think about the fact that I was singing lyrics about anti-depressant-induced writer's block, nervous breakdowns, separating from a loved one, rebounding, and the self-loathing that results from the whole thing. It's rare to find an album with lyrics that are as equally fascinating as the music (or vice versa), but Hissing Fauna is one.

5. M.I.A. - Kala - M.I.A. follows through on the potential of her debut to deliver Kala, which may be best described as a dance album that amalgamates every genre of music in the world, the craziest, most psychedelic album of its ilk since Paul's Boutique. M.I.A. is almost as liberal with her sampling and borrowing here as the Beastie Boys and Dust Brothers were there (at least they're all credited here), and the result is a colorful collage of the vaguely familiar and thoroughly alien.

4. Panda Bear - Person Pitch - I just happen to be listening to "Sister Ray" by the Velvet Underground as I write this. I point this out because the juxtaposition is funny to me, because apart from their mutual association with New York's experimental music scene (though decades apart), I don't think I could pick a more exact opposite of the Velvets than Panda Bear if I tried. As "Sister Ray" pounds me into submission and dares me to turn it off (or at least skip some of its 17 minutes of chaos), I think about Panda Bear's hypnotic pop bliss, and my mind is at ease. Noah Lennox's day job with the Animal Collective is pretty secure by this point, but Person Pitch shows that he has a fulfilling solo career to fall back on as well. (A few earlier thoughts are here.)

3. St. Vincent - Marry Me - St. Vincent is Annie Clark, and nobody would have heard of her or this album if she hadn't played guitar for the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens. The fact that she's got the most adorable big brown puppy dog eyes doesn't hurt either. But I'm glad she was able to get some recognition, because Marry Me is a damn good album. Imaginative songwriting and tasteful arrangements abound, and Clark's got the vaguely seductive yet vulnerable female vocal delivery style down, even if some of the lyrics are a little dumb.

2. Radiohead - In Rainbows - It's too easy at this point to take the brilliance of Radiohead for granted, especially when you've got the whole aspect of the download-only release to distract you from it, so for those of you who need the reminder, In Rainbows is as good as anything else they've done in this decade. The album is more cohesive than anything they've done since Kid A, the songwriting is more consistent than anything they've done since Ok Computer, they sound more like a democratic band than on anything they've done since The Bends, and it flat out rocks more than just about their whole catalog. Everybody in the world is sick to death of the lavish praise heaped on Radiohead by this point, but Christ, they deserve every word of it.

1. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam - When I was living with my roommates in Philadelphia (this would have been 2005 or 2006), three of us and a fourth friend all realized at one point that without knowledge of any of the other people feeling the same way, "The Purple Bottle" by the Animal Collective had worked its way into our own personal lists of favorite songs. This resulted (after a few beers) in a chorus of grown men emphatically pounding their fists on
a coffee table chanting "Get that- WOOOOOOO! Get that- WOOOOOOOO! Get that- WOOOOOOOOOO!" This was about the time that I realized that the appeal of the Animal Collective lies not with their mixing of strange song structures and sounds with great melodies, or some such thing (although that doesn't hurt), but with the fact that their music possesses a pure and simple joy that is exceedingly rare in any kind of music.

"The Purple Bottle" was on 2005's Feels, but the joy has only increased for Strawberry Jam. You could pick any song at random from the album and I could probably pick out a part that makes me want to drop whatever I'm doing and throw my hands in the air and shout. "Fireworks"? "IIIIIII'M ONLY ALLLLL I SEEEEEEE SOMETIIIIIIIIIIMES!" "Winter Wonder Land"? That rapid-fire chorus is brilliant. "Cuckoo Cuckoo" is essentially six minutes of pure bliss, alternating between the calm meditative bliss and the explosive triumphant bliss, all held together by a single repeating piano figure. The Panda Bear-helmed "Chores" opens with about the most gloriously insane minute and a half of music ever recorded.

It's rare to find a band that carries its own oddness with as little self-consciousness as the Animal Collective, but that's just who they are by now. These lists are always subject to change, of course, depending on the whim and mood of the creator, but if I had to list my favorite albums of the 00s so far, there's a good chance that the Animal Collective might be sitting at 1 and 2 on the list. I can't wait to hear what they do next.

2007 music almost finished...

2008-01-20T21:00:00.000-05:00

Before I get to 10-1 of my little countdown, I have some 2007 miscellanea to deal with. Stuff that didn't make the list for whatever reason, plus random crap that I wanted to talk about anyway.

Best albums from previous years that weren't released in the USA until 2007:

- Lily Allen - Alright, Still - I was at a party in the summer some time and somebody had the radio on, and "Smile" from this album came on, and I said something like "what the fuck, is that Lily Allen?" My buddy Ed said something like "Tom probably had this album a year ago," and I was put in the awkward position of trying to say that I actually did have the album a year ago without looking like some hipster shitdick. I don't think I succeeded, but Ed claimed not to be a sarcastic ass in saying that either. At any rate, Lily Allen makes some fine sweet pop confections, and she finally got her well-earned US recognition this year. So good for her.

- The Pipettes - We Are the Pipettes - This one was FINALLY issued in the US with different artwork and a couple bonus tracks last fall. It's about damn time. Also, We Are the Pipettes is still an absolutely delightful pop album. It was good enough for #4 on my 2006 list, and it's good enough to mention again, now that you can actually buy it in a store.

- Cyann and Ben - Sweet Beliefs - This one came in at #7 last year on my list, and it's a fine continuation of the Cyann and Ben catalog, with the slow-burning builds, the spaced out psychedelia, and the epic explosions. It's pretty good.

- Junior Senior - Hey Hey My My Yo Yo - This one actually came out in Europe in 2005 or something crazy like that, and it's unbelievable that it wasn't released in the USA until 2007. It's another orgasmic celebration of happiness via pop music, and maybe the most delightful release I heard all year (except for maybe the Pipettes, I guess).

The Led Zeppelin III award(s) for irritating album packaging:

- Bjork - Volta - This one has a sticker on the front that's part of the album art (the picture of Bjork is the sticker, the red part is the cardboard), and to actually get to the CD inside you either have to rip the sticker in half (and then the cardboard sleeve will never actually close again) or carefully peel off half of the sticker. God, it's annoying. And pretty.

- Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer - It's another cardboard package with a gatefold in the front, except the gatefold is the black areas on the front, and the only way to get it to actually close, so that the liner notes (helpfully printed on a loose circular glossy piece of paper) don't fall out, is to carefully replace the whole thing back in its clear plastic sleeve, which would be fine except the thing is damn near IMPOSSIBLE to get back in there.

And the rest:

Brian Wilson - That Lucky Old Sun - This isn't on the list because there is no recorded version of it that isn't a live bootleg (that we know of, anyway). It would be on the list if it were given a proper release because it's Brian Wilson, and it's actually pretty damned good. It's wonderful to see that revisiting Smile seems to have retriggered the part of Brian's brain (or soul) that makes amazing music, because this is the first brand new album-length work he's written that's been consistently good in 30 years (I'm counting The Beach Boys Love You as the last one, for those keeping track). And hell, even the live bootlegs sound great. Brian Wilson is a better performer at this point in his life than he's been in four and a half decades of making music. Brian's 65 years old and still following his muse, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Scott Walker - And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? - Scott Walker, meanwhile, proved what we'd been suspecting anyway: stripped of vocals and "rock" production, his music is now simply avant-garde classical music. It's not on the list because it's a 4 song, 25 minute EP that was written as music to a ballet. The thought of anybody trying to dance to this stuff is beyond absurd. Scott went deep into the waters of atonality with 2006's The Drift, and this stuff is atonal, and also mostly arrhythmic as well. It's not as viscerally intense and downright horrifying as The Drift, but it's almost as unsettling. Scott's 65 years old and still following his muse, and I couldn't be more terrified of it.

2007 music finally, gawrsh. 20-11

2008-01-19T20:12:00.000-05:00

You know it's been a decent year for music when some of my favorite artists release albums that don't even crack my own top 20. Missing the cut this year, but just barely: Liars, Air, Mum, Bjork, Super Furry Animals, Paul McCartney, Suzanne Vega. Bjork! BJORK didn't make the list! I am amazed at myself. Here we go, literally counting down:

20. Six Organs of Admittance - Shelter From the Ash - I don't hear Six Organs of Admittance mentioned enough in discussions of either post rock or psych folk. They make a lovely hybrid of both. Ben Chasny is also underrated as an indie rock guitar god. Chasny's been churning out fairly good albums fairly consistently every year since 2001, and Shelter From the Ash is another fine collection of drone-based psychedelic acoustic guitar workouts. Also, check out that wild crazy psychedelic cover art!

19. The Fiery Furnaces - Widow City - I saw the Fiery Furnaces live for the second time this past June (I wrote about the first time, if you recall, here). Even having seen them before, I was unprepared for the total mindfuck that I witnessed. They didn't so much deconstruct their own back catalog as slaughter it, rip it limb from limb, and create an ungodly Frankenstein monster out of the parts. If the songs were nearly unrecognizable before, they were completely unrecognizable now, able to be discerned only by listening carefully to the lyrics. I mention it now because it sets up how weird an experience Widow City is. On one hand, it's a fairly simplified version of the Furnaces' trademark insanity, featuring some calm, straightforward songs that actually wait for the next track to start before veering off on a hairpin turn toward something completely different. On the other hand, it's got some of the only music ever recorded that approximates the careening freight train that is their live show. It sounds like something a live band could actually play, mostly due to the fact that Matthew Friedberger's assault of multi-tracked splatty synthesizers and organs has largely been reduced down to a relatively basic lineup of guitar, bass, drums, and, um, mellotron (I said RELATIVELY basic). It makes for some surprisingly simple rock songs ("Duplexes of the Dead") and some insane prog-rock freakouts ("Clear Signal From Cairo"), and most importantly, a sign that the Fiery Furnaces are evolving, however slowly. And they can go as slow as they want as long as they keep making good music.

18. Wilco - Sky Blue Sky - I guess this is Jeff Tweedy's rehab album or something, I don't know. It took me awhile to realize that it was subtle, not simply boring. Unfortunately, a lot of people never got that far. There are plenty of keepers here, though, even if none of them provide the heart-rending devastation of, say, "Reservations." But Christ, I'm not listening to Paul McCartney's new stuff expecting to hear "Hey Jude" either, I can forgive Wilco if they never make another Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as long what they do make is still good. A Ghost is Born wasn't (at least I didn't think so); Sky Blue Sky is.

17. The Polyphonic Spree - The Fragile Army - Up until this album, pretty much every Polyphonic Spree song could have been called "Sure, Life is Bad Sometimes, BUT YOU ARE AWESOME!" And I would have been ok with that. I would probably have paid to hear that song 12 times every two or three years as long as they wanted to keep making it, because it was great, but now there's this whole "army" concept we've got to deal with, and the technicolor dream robes were ditched in favor of black fatigues. Clearly the new album would prove to be darker and more confrontational, and... oh, come on. When I saw them in June, they wore the fatigues, but by the time the encore came around (which ended up being almost as long as their set), and they wove their way through the crowd to retake the stage, they were back in their old robes. They're still the Polyphonic Spree, they're still just peachy as can be, except now there's some sort of nonsense about marching to take on the world and unite it with love, or some such thing. As with their previous two albums, you'll either love it or hate it, but they're still the same old, huge, bombastic, psychedelic, pompous, subtle-as-a-brick, anthemic, Polyphonic Spree.

16. Kanye West - Graduation - It turns out that being the world's biggest rap star isn't enough to keep Kanye West from being cripplingly insecure sometimes, which is no surprise to anybody who's heard about his various antics at awards shows and other stuff that would suggest that Kanye is a Grade A jerk. Luckily for us, he spins that insecurity into some Grade A pop music. Compelling lyrics and indelible tracks: it's another good Kanye West album.

15. Gruff Rhys - Candylion - Gruff Rhys eats sunshine for breakfast and poops out sweet li'l melodies at night. See earlier review.

14. Robert Wyatt - Comicopera - If you need a little history lesson, Robert Wyatt started his career as the drummer for 60s psych-proggers The Soft Machine. In 1973, he fell from a third story and suffered a spine injury, and was paralyzed from the waist down. This pretty effectively ended his career as a drummer, but it started him in a second career as a solo artist, making some very strange and very sad music. This one fits right in. Ol' Rob is still pissed at the world, and very insecure sometimes, it would seem, and... there are some songs in Spanish, and I don't know what those are about, but it's all still a sad, strange, but lovely affair.

13. Do Make Say Think - You, You're a History in Rust - These guys make it sound easy at this point. It's a particular brand of that peculiar genre called "post-rock" that actually exudes warmth and spontaneity, and even song structures that don't go exactly where you expect them to every single time (I'm looking at you, Explosions in the Sky). This one is so laid back that it could pass as folk music if it wasn't so deafening from time to time. Do Make Say Think: still the kings of the "post-rock" mountain.

12. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver - Now this is more like it: a cohesive and solid LCD Soundsystem album. I'm nominating these guys (or this guy, I don't know how much of this stuff is just James Murphy blah blah blah) for the most improved award. If they'd have dropped the last song on the album this could have cracked the top 10. As it is, it's still one of the few album-length achievements that make me believe that "dance music" is a concept worth exploring.

11. Caribou - Andorra - Every time Dan Snaith makes an album he drifts further away from electronica and more toward psychedelic pop, and with Andorra, the transformation would seem to be complete. This is an album of bright, lushly arranged, gorgeous pop music, as thoughtful in the winding nature of its songs as in its ornate instrumentation. Snaith's knack for great melodies shines in a way it never has before, and for a guy who made his name as an electronic producer, this sounds amazingly like it could have been released in the 60s and filed next to a Soft Machine or Tomorrow album (obscure 60s name-dropping music nerd alert! Also I just read the above writings and realized that this is two Soft Machine references in one post, a new record.).

Tom's Favorite Songs of 2007

2008-01-04T19:47:00.000-05:00

2007 officially begins ending... well, a few days ago, as it turns out, but here are my favorite songs of the year, in no order other than the order in which I thought of them. Enjoy.

Radiohead - "Bodysnatchers" - The big lyrical hook here is "I have no idea what you are talking about," which later turns into "I have no idea what I am talking about." It's kind of funny, and possibly accidental, that these two statements in conjunction form the basis of the vast majority of lyrics that Thom Yorke has written, at least from Ok Computer onward. It's paranoid and fearful, but ever acknowledging that there is perhaps nobody who's more full of shit than Yorke himself. We deify Yorke and Radiohead at our own risk, but who can blame us? This track rocks.

Brian Wilson - "Midnight's Another Day" - A good song with a New Year-appropriate title, right? I resisted the urge to try to include That Lucky Old Sun on my 2007 best of list, but I'm holding out for a studio release this year. Meanwhile, I can at least include this song, because we actually got a recorded studio version, which was uploaded to his website somewhere... I can't find it now. The important thing is that it's a gorgeous song, with a gorgeous melody, the gorgeous trademark Brian Wilson harmonies, and... God, it's just wonderful to know that the old guy still has it in him. I can't say for sure whether Van Dyke Parks was involved with this song, or if he just wrote the between song narratives for That Lucky Old Sun, but that'd be the icing on the cake.

Dr. Dog - "We All Belong" - There are worse things that could happen than for some scrappy, lo-fi Beatles enthusiasts to become ambitious, structurally complex Beatles enthusiasts. On a somewhat related note, it's amazing the difference a well-arranged string section can make.

The Apples in Stereo - "Same Old Drag" - And so Robert Schneider, blissfully unaware of how painfully unhip the Electric Light Orchestra is, soldiers on with his vocoder and big pompous layered arrangements. It's a song that sounds basically nothing like most popular music that's been recorded since the late 1970s, but it's got a bitchin' Rhodes piano part, some great melodies, and the production still sounds great, vocodered background vocals included.

Deerhoof - "The Perfect Me" - Perhaps one of the best album opening tracks ever (hyperbole alert!). "The Perfect Me" explodes out of the gate with some big fat guitar riffing, some great drumming, and the ridiculous musical schizophrenia and manic energy found in any good Deerhoof song.

The Polyphonic Spree - "Guaranteed Nightlite" - For their third album, the Spree largely abandoned the symphonic prog pop of Together We're Heavy in favor of some of the biggest, most bombastic pop anthems ever known to man. "Guaranteed Nightlite" more or less splits the difference, winding up with huge pop hooks and singalong choruses that are bounced back and forth between drastic tempo, key, and mood changes. The Fragile Army is essentially one huge chorus after another; here they're at least set in different contexts within the same song, and the approach is much more effective.

Wilco - "Walken" - When Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out, I assumed that the song title "Jesus, Etc." had something to do with a weary atheist's perception of religious zealot types, or something like that. As it turned out, the song used to be called "Jesus Don't Cry," and was shortened when somebody in the band wrote "Jesus Etc" on a setlist, and it caught on. I bring this up now because "Walken" looks like a similar setlist-derived title, unless it actually has something to do with Christopher Walken, and not, you know, walkin'. Anyway, Sky Blue Sky has a lot of decent rock songs that take awhile to grow on you, but "Walken" isn't one of them, fitting more in line with the bouncy good-time pop of "Hummingbirds." It's also one of the few songs on the album that actually sells me on the whole "Nels Cline, guitar god" idea that a lot of people seem to have. Frankly, I think Jeff Tweedy may be more responsible...

Kanye West - "Champion" - Graduation featured more darkness and insecurity than Kanye's previous efforts, but "The Good Life" is a great example of the effortless pop brilliance that he can toss off when he wants to. Bonus points for the nearly unrecognizable sample of Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," which, in this context, suddenly becomes laid back funk.

Panda Bear - "Good Girl/Carrots" - When I was reading reviews of Panda Bear's Person Pitch, they all talked about "Bros" as a gorgeous sweeping 13 minute epic piece of brilliance. I would read this and nod my head in agreement. I never bother learning track names half the time, and as it turns out, I like the OTHER gorgeous sweeping 13 minute epic piece of brilliance on the album. The opening percussion loop alone, to say nothing of the beautiful backwards vocals that join it, is something I could listen to for an hour. The rest of it contains some of the most engaging hooks, loops, textures, and everything else that makes Person Pitch great on the whole album.

Bjork - "The Dull Flame of Desire" - Wow, I finally like this guy Antony. Sit him down in front of a piano and I want to punch him in the throat, but surround his voice with a typically over-the-top Bjork song and he fits right in. It's an oversimplification, but the point is, Bjork and Antony manage to squeeze an awful lot out of a couple short verses repeated over and over. "The Dull Flame of Desire" has more peaks and valleys than any other song I heard this year, and, as always, any time Bjork really cuts loose, it's a breathtakingly intense experience.

Animal Collective - "#1" - I wasn't entirely convinced when I first heard this song that it wasn't sampled from somewhere in Terry Riley's catalog. I'm still not entirely sure, but it's got enough of the trademark Animal Collective quirks that it's a moot point. Like all of Strawberry Jam, it bursts with energy even while seducing the listener into a trance. It's an improbably wonderful experience, and it's all based around a crazy arpeggiated organ part.

There you go. Sometime soon you'll get yourself a nice top 20 list from me. Yep, it's 20 this year. I heard THAT MUCH good stuff.

Is it December ALREADY?

2007-12-21T02:11:00.000-05:00

Hellooooooo, internetland. Is anybody still reading this?

There will be 2007 music posts forthcoming, because it seems to be a tradition for me. I'm thinking a three part series this year; a favorite songs post, a 20-11 post, and a 10-1 post. Those last two may turn into a 20-6 and 5-1, depending on how much I feel like writing about things. As they are right now, all three posts are works in progress that are being slowly worked on whenever I feel like it. I'm doing some last minute cramming with a few albums that I didn't give enough time to before, particularly by Spoon, Robert Wyatt, the Valerie Project, and the Super Furry Animals (and really, how did I snooze on THAT one?).

In the meantime, because I'm in that list-making mood, here is my modest first entry in what I hope will be a recurring series on this here blog: Lists With Unreasonably Specific Criteria.

The idea is that the unreasonably specific criteria will force me to really think, and, more importantly, focus, not to mention write about things that I would otherwise not get a chance to talk about. Today's warm-up involves more coincidence and laziness than anything else:

Best Albums With Artwork Featuring Airplane Imagery That Were Released on September 11, 2001:

1. Beulah - The Coast Is Never Clear
2. Explosions In the Sky - Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die; Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever

There you go. Ponder THAT shit.

whyyyyyyy

2007-11-28T23:10:00.000-05:00

Why do I know the name Hayden Panetierre? I recognize the name, I am aware that she's some kind of fantasy blond jailbait for creepy and pathetic dudes who are the type to count down until a girl's 18th birthday. I guess she's probably an actress on a show I've never seen on a network I never watch. If the network is the Disney Channel, she probably has a career singing uninteresting pop music that will sell a million copies to 12 year olds or whatever age group watches that stuff and has an easily cowed mom. I am ashamed that I am able to speculate that much and feel confident that I'm probably not too far off.

Anyway, the reason for my concern here is that I my brain works in a very strict and regimented fashion, particularly when it comes to memory, and I am allotted only a very small space to remember French-sounding last names of people who are probably not from France, and Hayden Panetiere is lodged in there now, and sooner or later I'm going to try to remember somebody who at one point had some relevance to me and I'm not going to be able to. Who was the guy who played Balki in Perfect Strangers again? FUCK! See? I had to look it up, and apparently it's Bronson Pinchot, but now that I know that, somebody else has been pushed out. If I forget Rheal Cormier or Simon Gagne, there'll be hell to pay. If she wants to push out, say, Lance Cormier, or... the French Canadian guy who plays for the Tampa Bay Lightning who isn't Vincent Lecavalier, she can feel free.... hey! It worked! All right, she can stay for now, I guess. She's probably more attractive than most hockey players anyway.

Versatio

2007-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

This is one of my more enjoyable AIM conversations that I've had recently. It started talking about St. Bernard dogs, and how hilariously noble they are, and progressed as so:

Tom: finding out that st bernards used to be called "noble steeds" is like if i'd found out that not only was bjork an awesome musician, she also invented cotton candy or something.
Dustin: bjork is actually an elf
Dustin: the last of her breed
Tom: bjork eats happiness and rainbows for breakfast
Tom: with a side of innocence and wonder
Dustin: she breathes in kitten dander and exhales butterflies
Tom: bjork can communicate with dandelions
Dustin: and has nothing but good things to report
Tom: this is like that chuck norris facts thing except way more whimsical. and more fun.
Dustin: dont bring that negativity in here. that chuck norris negativity.
Dustin: bjork is sad that everyone finds roundhouse kicks funny, but thinks rabbits are cute, so lifes okay
Tom: bjork negates all negativity and replaces it with fresh icelandic spring water
Dustin: bjork tried to ride a dog once, but fell and hurt her leg
Dustin: and the dog turned to her and nuzzled her head, and she knew that all sins in this world are forgiven
Tom: bjork can ride a bicycle from reykjavik to london
Dustin: bjork doesnt travel by road, she simply jumps into the air and whatever place needs her the most pulls her to it
Dustin: bjork was at a fancy party and midway through a conversation she coughed and little mini marshmellows fell out onto her hand
Dustin: which she put into a little plastic baggy in her purse which was fuzzy and had googly eyes on it
Tom: bjork can animate a stop motion film in real time
Dustin: bjork doesnt understand why people are against so against war, but thats because the only definition of war that she knows is the card game

more Radiohead, real quick

2007-10-16T20:14:00.000-05:00

I think the problem when I had my first listen to In Rainbows last week may have been that I didn't have the speakers up loud enough, because there are some really rockin' songs on that album. They just rock in that weird, intense way that only Radiohead can rock.

In particular, I found the first "HOLY GOD HOW IS THIS BAND SO AMAZING" moment that I was missing before: the second half of "Bodysnatchers" just kills. It's easy to forget that, while in the context of some of their early 00s albums, these songs are fairly conventional, but these are some weirdly structured songs. I compared "Bodysnatchers" to "The National Anthem" before, based on the little instrumental break, but that's turning out to be a more apt comparison than I thought it was at the time, because the two are structured pretty similarly. And, as "The National Anthem" served as one long buildup to that horn-fueled freakout, "Bodysnatchers" also builds to a climax that is admittedly less far-out, but still damned effective. ( If you want to get really particulary, they also both feature false cooldowns near the end.)

Anyway, that song is awesome, and In Rainbows is definitely growing on me.

Jesse are you listening?

2007-10-14T21:27:00.000-05:00

I was listening to Scott Walker's The Drift, because it's October, and that's the time of year when you willfully scare yourself shitless, and there's no music in the world that does that better than Scott Walker's later work. In particular, my interest is very much renewed in "Jesse," a song about Elvis Presley's stillborn twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley.

I guess I'm sort of wondering why the thought of Elvis Presley having a stillborn twin brother freaks me out so much, aside from Scott Walker's horrifying music. I think the fact that he had a name (and thus the tiniest bit of an identity) is a good place to start. I guess the Presleys had names picked out for their twins already, not knowing that one of them would come out already dead. How do you pick which one gets which name in that situation? What logic led to Jesse being the brother that never was? Were we a coin flip away from getting future rock music legend Jesse Presley, with poor Elvis Presley being confined to a mere footnote?

That kind of makes me think about an alternate universe where the other twin had been stillborn. What might Jesse Presley have been, had he lived and Elvis died? Why did Elvis live and Jesse die? How many future stars exist only in a parallel universe where they weren't stillborn?

It also makes me consider the thousands and thousands of things in life that have to happen exactly as they happen to lead us to where we are. How many would-be composers are there who have just as much talent as Brian Wilson, except that, say, they didn't grow up in California in the 1950s and 60s? Or maybe they did, but their dad didn't beat them as a child. Or what if Elvis had received a rifle for his 11th birthday instead of his first guitar?

Life weirds me out. This kind of stuff keeps me up at night sometimes. Amateur philosophy hour over.

Tom "liveblogs" In Rainbows 15 hours after everybody else

2007-10-10T19:42:00.000-05:00

So Radiohead sort of thrust their new album upon the world with little notice, leaving websites, magazines, and publications of all kinds wondering how the hell they were going to bother reviewing something that the rest of the world was hearing at the same time they were. The answer is apparently to listen to it track by track and write their thoughts, hoping that their inherent journalistic greatness would make their first impressions more interesting than that of the average Radiohead-loving dork. Well, let's put that to the test with my own version of it!

Context: I have not bothered listening to live versions, bootlegs, etc., of any of these songs except one. These are all 100% fresh to me, with one exception, which you'll read about later. And away we go...

In Rainbows:

"15 Step" - The couple track-by-track things I started reading, I stopped after the first song, so I know that the general consensus of this song is that it's apparently the funkiest thing Radiohead has ever done... except I can't ever recall hearing a funky song that was in a 5/4 meter.

"Bodysnatchers" - Opening melody reminiscent of "Palo Alto." Neat little "National Anthem" style instrumental break. Are Radiohead at that point in their career where all their songs can be traced back to one of their earlier albums? Not really, as the latter half of the song shows. Jonny Greenwood has one of the most recognizable guitar tones in the world, by the way. You can tell it's him with a single note. Is this mixed weird or are my speakers funky or something? The guitars completely drown out the vocals at times. Possibly intentional and/or mp3 goofies.

"Nude" - Holy shit! I remember this song! It's so old that it's since passed into being "part of my childhood." Went I went on my very first internet song downloading binge, sometime in 1999, it included something like three live bootlegs of this song. I'm trying to think of bad songs they should have booted off of the three albums they've released since then to include this one (four if you include Ok Computer, and apparently it's been around that long), but all I can come up with is "Pulk/Pull" and "Hunting Bears," and whatever that Eno rip-off was from Kid A. Anyway, it wasn't worth a nine year wait to hear the studio version, but it's still gorgeous. "You'll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking" still sounds really ominous coming from Thom Yorke. If anybody reading this is a good enough friend of mine to have the Severn EP that we made, skip to the last song to hear that ending that I totally ripped from "Nude."

"Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" - Back to the uptempo rock, sort of. Opening sounds like The Sea and Cake. I'm wondering if this is going to be a two-part song, as suggested by the title. Me just now: "3:06 must be the begnning of the second part... never mind, he's singing 'weird fiiiiishes.'" I guess it is a two-parter, but they're both really similar. It's more like a coda than anything else. Certainly will seem more obvious with repeated listens.

"All I Need" - I don't really have much to say about this one. I have no idea if those drums are looped or just really robotically played. Oh wait, open hi-hat! Phil Selway, ladies and gentleman! This song turns really beautiful about 3/4 of the way through. Now Phil's crashing those cymbals, as if to say "I AIN'T NO MACHINE, FUCKA!" Thom Yorke's voice is so expressive that it imbues the most inane crap with beauty and intensity. I have no clue what he's singing there and it doesn't matter.

"Faust Arp" - This one gave some website I was reading the chance to namecheck both the fourth-most famous 70s krautrock band AND Pete Townsend's favorite synthesizer with its title. Holy crap, this is also gorgeous. Excellent string arrangement. Maybe a reminder that at their core, Radiohead are good pop songwriters. Anybody with any of their 90s work knows that, but again, there's no real equivalent to this in their backcatalog. If there's a theme I'm getting so far, it's that they're no longer pushing the limits of pop music (which they haven't done since 2001 anyway) but they are pushing their own, which is about as much as you can ask for a band at this point in their career.

"Reckoner" - This is another relatively old one, I think, because I recognize the song title, but it must have come out after the point where I stopped actively seeking bootlegs of new Radiohead material, sometime after Hail to the Thief. This one sounds the most Thief-like so far. Whoa! Another great string arrangement. Jonny may be learning from his film-scoring experiences.

"House of Cards" - Now there's a well-recorded guitar part. It sounds like somebody is playing it in my room. Holy hell that is a shitton of reverb on Thom's voice. When the music is not immediately compelling, I'm going to keep writing about production aspects. Generic Slowdive echo-ey and reverb-y guitar part makes an appearance.

"Jigsaw Falling Into Place" - Opening: "2+2=5" +"Go to Sleep" + "There There." Or something like that. Oh man, this is building into something, that's for sure. Waiting for freakout... turns out to be more of a gradual escalation (I was hoping for something more along the lines of "YOU HAVE NOT BEEN PAYING ATTEEEENTION!"). Jonny still loves his Ondes Martenot. Did Thom just sing "I'm not a faggot"?

"Videotape" - Now here are some fellas who know their way around a repetitive loop-like musical phrase. This is one of those songs where I started out bored and ended up hypnotized. Interesting percussion too.

Well, there you go. Overall, I'd say this is much more sedated than anything they've ever done. I remember pretty distinctly a few "HOLY GOD HOW IS THIS BAND SO AMAZING" moments from every album prior to this one (well, Pablo Honey less so), but those are lacking here. It's all interesting to some degree, but not immediately compelling all the time. It may well be a grower. We'll see.

Coming up next, in five minutes: Tom liveblogs The Fiery Furnaces' Widow City! Not really.

Miles Smiles

2007-10-08T20:39:00.001-05:00

Sometimes I read Amazon.com reviews for no good reason (really, there is no good reason to read them), and I wonder if the people reviewing some of the music were listening to the same album that I heard.

For instance, here is a two star (out of five) review of Miles Davis' Live Evil from a reviewer who shall remain anonymous:

"So this album is half a bunch of avant-garde tunes without hint of melody, harmony or rhythm that grind the nerves (especially Little Church and the unneeded quarter-hour Sivad), and half a bunch of lengthy live songs that do the whole fusion thing but mostly fail to generate most excitement over their generally 20 minute-plus running times - the exceptions are What'd I Say, which is exciting the whole way through, and Inamorata and Narration, which is at least good through the first ten minutes. I've got nothing against jamming if it's done the right way, and the group certainly had the instrumental prowess. But nothing can save them from the pits of their dull mock-funk grooves.
Miles has made so much good music, I don't know where to begin. But Live-Evil is one of his weakest albums. Actually, I'm not a huge fan of his fusion work in general."

I don't mention this in order to pick on some guy who even states in his review of a fusion-era Miles album that he doesn't like fusion-era Miles, but I bring it up because it was thought-provoking to me, and I've been thinking about and listening to a ton of Miles Davis recently.

I guess the first thing that struck me was that Miles Davis was many things, but he was never at any point in his career "avant-garde," a term with connotations of arty experimentalism and intellectual abstraction. Miles, particularly in the fusion era, was going for something much more primal and earthy. It may have been atonal, harsh, and weird as hell, but at its core it was meant to kick you in the ass, not stimulate mentally.

It certainly kicks mine. Live Evil to me is (along with all other Miles Davis recordings from 1970-1975) one of the hardest grooving records ever made. If Miles was inspired by what he heard from James Brown, Sly Stone, and Jimi Hendrix, he more or less met and surpassed them at their own game. Uninhibited by the self-imposed constraints those others placed on themselves in order to be "pop musicians," Miles was free to explore funk music however he felt fit, and as a result, he simultaneously invented and perfected the genre that would eventually become known as "fusion."

Anyway, I'll close this with another Amazon review, one that's more in line with my thinking:

"This is the sound your brain might make if you dropped acid then your afro caught on fire. Slices and dices culled from LIVE jams and studio takes of atmospheric funk that were so far ahead of their time, that SETI was sending this across the galaxy. Extraterrestrials heard it and have been afraid to respond ever since.

How far ahead of his time was Miles? I disagree that the LIVE jams outweigh the studio tracks. Sample the ambient trumpet of studio takes SELIM and NEM UM TALVEZ. They're filled with quiet atmospheric BEAUTY. The sound is remarkably similar to the kind of ambience that's being recorded now, 35 years later by ambient artists such as Steve Roach. They didn't call this cat a genius for nothing.

THIS IS THE BEST WAY TO BLOW YOUR TOP WITHOUT SMOKING CRACK. For the best results mix this with a hookah pipe, an Indian meditation pillow, door beads, a blacklight, and a naked afro-chick poster.

Looking for the best LIVE 70's fusion from electric Miles? I also recommend LIVE AT THE FILMORE EAST, MARCH 6 1970: IT'S ABOUT TIME, DARK MAGUS, and AGHARTA. You simply can't go wrong.

ENJOY."

Except for the weird and arbitrary capitalization, this guy is right on. ENJOY.

This is Radio Nowhere!

2007-10-01T21:05:00.001-05:00

Every time I hear the new Bruce Springsteen single, all I can think is that I really want to sing "867-5309" along with it.

That aside, Bruce rules, Clarence Clemons rules, Max Weinberg rules, Patti Scialfa, Steven Van Zandt, and whoever the hell else is in the E Street Band now rules, and Bruce looks fantastic for his age.

That song, though... eh.

2007-09-28T22:08:00.000-05:00

August 26, 2007.

September 28, 2007.

Some kinda month. Go Phils!

'Ye 2

2007-09-13T20:03:00.000-05:00

I had a bunch of things I wanted to say about Kanye West's Graduation, but my mind is running a thousand different directions.

Let's start by saying that Kanye is probably the most interesting mainstream pop artists working today (hence the fact that I will actually buy his records), because his dirty laundry is laid out for everybody to see in a way that isn't really true for any other pop star, now or possibly ever. There's no subtext with Kanye. You don't read his lyrics and wonder if the song is about Jay-Z, because he says right in the song that it's about Jay-Z. Furthermore, his thoughts about these things are interesting and (usually) articulate. His lyrics are about internal conflicts, not ones that involve guns and machismo (to fall back on a rap cliche). He's hugely confident but still hugely insecure, he's proud that he's made a name for himself but feels guilty for those left behind, he loves and admires Jay-Z but can't figure out why Jay is a jerk to him sometimes, etc., etc., and it's all there on the records. The backstage tamper tantrums and general bitchiness only add to the depth. I find him fascinating.

So onto the music: I was going nuts over the (apparent) samples a few days ago, and that's what I'm coming back to. Kanye West is a good artist use to analyze sampling in rap music, because his samples are often of pretty high profile artists, and he makes pretty extensive usage of them in his music. It's interesting to me because it's sort of a foreign concept to me, being a white, rock-oriented dude.

Take "Champion," for instance, which takes the most obscure, two second clip from a small breakdown in Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne," and turns it into the backbone of an entire song. I guess when you've trained yourself to listen to music like that, it comes pretty naturally, but it would never have even occurred to me to do something like that for a song.

Ditto for "Good Life," which takes a chunk of Michael Jackson's awesome Trhiller cut "P.Y.T.," slows it down to about half of its original speed, and lets us laugh at that hilarious vocoder part over and over. The one in the original song, not T-Pain's digitally auto-tuned Cher-like love-bot crooning.

"Stronger," meanwhile, takes pretty much just a vocoder part from Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and works an entirely new song around it, the second (and second-best) time this song has gotten that treatment from a prominent hip-hop producer (the Neptunes' remix was pretty awesome). Daft Punk's original has yet to be topped, but that'd be pretty damn tough.

The Can sample, meanwhile, is pretty dreary. "Sing Swan Song" isn't so much sampled as loosely covered by Kanye and Mos Def, turning it into a tedious song about the struggle inherent in nailing a drunk and hot girl without her running up your tab, talking too much about her boyfriend, vomiting in your car, falling asleep, and presenting various other obstacles in the way of drunk, semi-date-rape, adulterous sex. How charming. It's actually called "Drunk and Hot Girls," by the way. I'll take whatever nonsense Damo Suzuki was singing about.

Anyway, Graduation is pretty good. His great grooves and lush productions are a given, and there's enough interesting lyrics to keep me coming back. I have no comments about his rapping skills, which are apparently subpar, because I don't know enough about that to comment. It actually is a rap album with no stupid skits (yaaaaaaaay, no Bernie Mac), relatively few guest vocalists (oh, that reminds me, somebody punch Chris Martin in the stomach, dude's getting annoying), and a strong consistency, which is pretty rare, at least for most rap albums I've heard, but again, I'm not the authority.

So yeah, pretty good.

'Ye

2007-09-10T17:34:00.001-05:00

Here are a couple of things I noticed about Kanye West's new album, Graduation, by looking at its listing on allmusic.com:

- Track 1 ("Good Morning") is credited to "John, Taupin, West"
- Track 2 ("Champion") is credited to "Fagen, Becker, West"
- Track 8 ("Drunk and Hot Girls") is credited to "Karoli, Liebzeit, Schuering, Schmidt, Suzuki, West"

So apparently Kanye is sampling Elton John, Steely Dan, and Can, respectively. It's not like Kanye hasn't used some milquetoast, vaguely funky white dudes in his music before (hello, Maroon 5 dude!), but it sounds like it may still be some unexplored territory for him. The Can usage in particular will be interesting for me to overanalyze. Maybe this is old news to everybody and I'm just finding out now because I haven't really taken part in the prerelease buzz (or heard any songs off the new album, for that matter), but that should be interesting.

Something else encouraging from the tracklisting: there are no songs that clock in at less than 2:47. Does this mean that it's going to be an album without a thousand irritating "skits" in between every song? Or, more likely, did they just shove them all onto the ends of tracks you actually want to hear so they're harder to program out of the album on iTunes?

Kanye West, as you may recall, is one of the few rappers I bother to even try to keep up with (I usually try to give anything Talib Kweli does a listen, and that's about it, really), and I'll admit it's because in Kanye's case, I'm far more interested in the pop (the hooks, the grooves, etc) than the raps. Don't be fooled by my playing up the lyrics in the item from two years ago, it's all about the tunes. I look forward to hearing it regardless. I couldn't give a crap about 50 Cent's new album. I do I hope that he has a son that one day raps under the name Li'l Nickel, though.

Anyway, I think the dark horse in the Kanye vs. Fiddy sale-a-thon of September 11, 2007 is... *drumroll* Animal Collective! Ok, maybe that's just me...

baseball awesome

2007-08-31T18:14:00.001-05:00

If you didn't watch the Phillies game, you missed a doozy of a pickle. You can read the recap here, because I'm too lazy to do it myself.

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that when Jayson Werth got on base in the 9th inning representing the tying run, I immediately had a flashback to September 6, 2005, when the Astros won a game in the 9th inning by using a pinch runner, who stole both 2nd and 3rd off of Billy Wagner (then wearing a Phillies uniform), who ultimately took the loss, and gave up three stolen bases in a single inning. The Phillies lost the wild card spot by one game to the Astros (in other words, if Wagner could have held a baserunner, the Phillies might have made the playoffs).

Anyway, back to August 30, 2007, when Werth got on base, and Wagner (now in a Mets uniform) went into the stretch, and I jumped up and said, "Run, you fool! Wagner can't hold baserunners!" And off he went! Safe! "Go again! Take third!" I exclaimed at the TV set, and Werth bolted on first movement. Safe again!

Werth, of course, scored the tying run, and the Phillies won in probably the most exciting game they've played all year, but basically I just want to say that I communicated with Jayson Werth telepathically, and told him to steal those bases.

You're welcome, Philadelphia.

A stupid pointless post.

2007-08-28T21:39:00.001-05:00

Here are my Top 5 Favorite Albums of 2007, as it stands today, for the one person who cares. The one person is me in January 2008 when I want to compare what I thought now to what I will think then.

1. St. Vincent - Marry Me
2. M.I.A. - Kala
3. Menomena - Friend and Foe
4. Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity
5. Gruff Rhys - Candylion

Exciting stuff, huh? Stay tuned for the full top 10, with runners up and favorite songs and maybe least favorite albums, sometime in December or Junuary. I will be posting a series of short stories based on art painted by my dog Riley until then, starting with tomorrow's story, "Blue Pawprint, Spilled Blue Paint."

Max Roach - 1924-2007

2007-08-26T02:37:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I went to the University of Pennsylvania's graduation ceremony, partly to see Bono, who was getting an honorary degree, but also to see Max Roach, who was also getting one. I figured in both cases that it might be the closest I would ever get to seeing them play live (since U2 tickets are $4000 each and since Max Roach was way freaking old). Max ended up not going because he was sick, and his wife accepted it for him. So I never did see him in person, which hits a little harder now that he's dead.

Max was, to say the least, an awesome drummer. A true master of polyrhythm. My first encounter with him was when I bought Duke Ellington's Money Jungle when I was still in high school, a collaboration of giants that I didn't even recognize at the time (Ellington on piano, Roach on drums, and Charles Mingus on bass, for Christ's sake). After getting more into jazz, and hearing Roach's playing for Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, I came to appreciate Max's skill and diversity, but ultimately, I still go back to Money Jungle. His kinetic drumming propels Ellington's songs forward in a way that no swing drummer could ever accomplish, giving them a sense of urgency and an energy that they never had before. Max Roach damn near single-handedly reinvented "Caravan," for instance. But really, the mere fact that he could hang with Ellington and Mingus as they pushed hard bop to its limits without being overwhelmed is all anybody needs to know about him. If he could stand on equal footing with those two geniuses, he could stay with anybody.

Basically, what Max Roach did for jazz was to make drumming into an art form, instead of somebody just keeping time. He realized that since he was using four different limbs to play, he might as well make the most of them. Here is a particularly good example (although you don't get the effect that you get when he's thumping away with a group of musicians).

Anyway, the point is that he wasn't really a household name to most people, but Max Roach is a name that all jazz fans respect, and he'll be missed.

Lyin' in bed, just like Brian Wilson did

2007-08-19T20:43:00.001-05:00

Here's something for me to be pretty happy about: new Brian Wilson music!

See, Brian's got a new project called "That Lucky Old Sun (A Narrative)" that is going to be premiered live in London on September 10. This is exciting because it's his first "real" work since he went back and finished Smile in 2004 (2005's Christmas album doesn't really count, even though it did have two very good new songs). I'm curious to see if the nearly unanimous love for Smile (not to mention his working with and finishing up the music) will influence his new music. He hasn't really had a consistently strong solo album yet, other than Smile.

The second reason it's exciting is because my second favorite person ever, Van Dyke Parks, worked with Brian on the narrative, something to do with thoughts about life and "the heartbeat of Los Angeles," with spoken word interludes, brand new songs, and a version of the old song "That Lucky Old Song" which apparently inspired the whole thing. So Van Dyke is on board! And he's got a pretty magic touch, as I've written about before.

And check it out: a new song! It's pretty damned beautiful.

And finally, Brian had a new song on the Arctic Tale soundtrack, but I can't get it anywhere without buying the whole damn CD. Somebody with a Windows computer get it from Soulseek and send it to me or something, I'm dyyyyyying to hear it.

Superbad, or You're Not Allowed to TRY to Make a Cult Film (Unless You're Mike Judge)

2007-08-16T19:28:00.000-05:00

Hey, have you guys heard about this movie called Superbad that's coming out? I don't know if you've seen any commercials for it or not. It looks hilarious! This one guy is all like "I cried when I first looked into his eyes, it was like the first time I heard the Beatles." Haha! That's funny, plus I like the Beatles too! And I guess there's this kid named McLovin, and these cops are all like "sounds like a sexy hamburger." Haha! I can't wait to repeat that line 7,000 times with all of my college-age friends. I'll be able to stop same, "Tina, come get your ham" which is still funny though,

Crap. I shouldn't have thought about Napoleon Dynamite. Just thinking about it made me a little bored and irritated and now my sarcasm generator is busted.

Oh well. Anyway, Michael Cera is still funny. Just watch this instead of seeing Superbad. Careful, though, the site is littered with ads... ads for Superbad. *sigh*

fooooooooooo

2007-08-09T23:40:00.000-05:00

I had the weirdest urge to listen to the Foo Fighters tonight, because they've come up a couple times in conversation lately. I reached for There is Nothing Left to Lose first, because, even though I listened to it a million times when it first came out (I even made my buddy Chris Vendrick buy it for me the day it came out because I didn't have my driver's license yet), it's the least familiar of the ones I own (I don't own anything they did since that one, because who cares about that crap?).

There is Nothing Left to Lose is surprisingly good. It's not a great album, but it's probably about as good as a band as unambitious and unabashedly poppy as the Foo Fighters were ever going to make. Lots of big hooks, lots of big guitars. A testament to its hooks is the way that I still could sing along to most of the songs despite the fact that I probably haven't heard them in well over half a decade. A testament to the rockingness is the fact that I had to drop what I was doing and play air drums a few times.

Also, give the Foos credit for attempting to jump on the 80s bandwagon a few years ahead of schedule with "Headwires."

Anyway, the weirdest part of this experience is that finding out that I still apparently have the little rub on tattoo that came with the album. Check it:

I still wonder whose neck is on that cover photo, by the way.

2007-08-08T19:52:00.000-05:00

Here's kind of a disturbing quote:

"Bush left no room for doubts or media opinion. He stated clearly that this war is a Crusader war. He said this in front of the whole world so as to emphasize this fact. … When Bush says that, they try to cover up for him, then he said he didn't mean it. He said, 'crusade.' Bush divided the world into two: 'either with us or with terrorism' … The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouths." - Osama Bin Laden, via The Al Qaeda Reader

Loyal readers may remember that I have visited this issue (albeit briefly) not once but twice (second to last paragraph). Also, if you remembered me writing that, I am shocked, because I didn't even remember me writing those without going to the search engine.

Anyway, just sayin'.

commercial radio is irritating

2007-08-01T17:45:00.000-05:00

I spent most of today at work in an off road truck that actually has a radio and air conditioning (not a luxury afforded me by other trucks I've worked in so far). Skipping through the radio dial, I landed, and, for some reason, stayed, on 102.9, WMGK. Classic Rock. Ugh.

They played what I guess was a promo for whoever the morning guys are, and it was clip of them talking like this:

Guy 1: "Some politician in Florida wants the government to pardon Jim Morrison for urinating onstage 38 years ago."
Guy 2: "Somehow, I don't think Jim cares."
Guy 1: "They should put a referendum on the ballot in the fall, and let all the old people who live there try to figure out who Jim Morrison is."
Guys 1 and 2: "Hahaha, we are so funny, take that old people, etc. etc."

Hey, who are those old people living in Florida these days? Oh right, the people in the world who are actually old enough to have been there when the Doors were a band.

Nothing like a pair of 50 or 60 year old guys making fun of 70 or 80 year old people. I want to go off on a rant about how baby boomers are incredibly self-absorbed and self-congratulatory, but I decided that I need more and better examples (the stupid hoopla around the Sgt. Pepper's 40th anniversary was one), and I was somewhat restrained by the fact that 40 years from now, pompous jerks like me will be outraged at kids who don't know Radiohead. So for now, let's just be annoyed at those two guys, and I'll stick to NPR tomorrow.

three things

2007-07-30T22:43:00.000-05:00

1. I just saw a commercial for Rush Hour 3 that ended with the voiceover guy saying "directed by Brett Ratner." What? Don't most people who are into movies enough to know directors other than Spielberg and Ron Howard know that Brett Ratner is cinematic poison? Didn't they see Red Dragon? Or *shudder* Money Talks? Weird.

2. I was wondering last night whether Charles Nelson Reilly was dead or not. I suspected he was, but didn't really think so. So I remembered to look it up tonight, and apparently he died in May! WHAT THE HELL! How did I not hear about that? Is my sense of how big a celebrity he was warped by all those Match Game reruns I used to watch, and therefore nobody actually covered his death? Man, that kind of sucks. I liked him.

3. Celebrity deaths come in threes, as everybody knows, but do they usually come within a day of each other? Ingmar Bergman, Tom Snyder, and Bill Walsh all died today or yesterday. If this had happened during the 1970s, it would have been a lot bigger news. I'm not sure most people remember who any of those guys are (or knew in the first place). I'm not looking forward to reading a bunch of obituaries that have to explain why we should care about who Ingmar Bergman was, and that he wasn't actually Ingrid Bergman (who was female, and died in 1982). Or hearing about how Bill Walsh invented the "West Coast Offense." Or seeing Philadelphia news stations pay tribute to Tom Snyder, the most famous Philly news man ever (on a short list just ahead of Larry Kane).

2007-07-29T04:42:00.000-05:00

Ah, fuck. Life is conspiring to kick me in the balls, hard, for no real reason. Well, now real reason other than that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Blah blah blah, whatever, you don't give a rat's ass.

is it training camp time already?

2007-07-25T19:42:00.000-05:00

I don't know what to make of the fact that this is the second time within recent memory that I've passed along a video of people making "hand fart" music, but I wanted to share it with you because this is basically what goes through my head any time my brain is idle between September and January (but hardly ever February, god damn it).

a chest-unloading rant about the dumbest crap in the world

2007-07-24T20:09:00.000-05:00

Uuuuuuuuuuuugh.

Lindsay Lohan, please go away.

Seriously.

I don't want to go on a stupid rant, although I'm probably going to anyway. Just go away. Don't ever let me see you again. I don't want to hear about your addictions, your using rehab and (supposed) redemption as a way to further your career, and then the subsequent relapses. I'm sick of it. I don't want to hear about your apparent near-illiteracy, hilarious though it may be. I damn sure don't want to see you in any movies.

Basically, I'm not entirely convinced that Lindsay Lohan is a real person. I haven't seen her portrayed that way anywhere. If she is a real person, and not a media creation to sell trashy magazines and provoke blogging dorks into incoherent diatribes, I doubt she sees herself as a real person, or if she does, she doesn't see the world as a real place. The whole thing is just so cliched that I can't even laugh anymore. She's the ultimate symbol of the 21st century: a vacuous nobody propped up to make us feel superior to somebody, whom we despise even as we can't look away, as she spirals down toward her inevitable tragedy with ever-increasing speed.

And at the center of it all is a poor, deluded girl who, like so many people in the world, learned to treat her problems with booze and drugs (I'm one to talk, right?), and is rewarded with the attention that she so desperately craves. So her ankle monitor becomes a fashion accessory, and, by extension, a mockery of the entire concept of self-betterment. And she lands in headlines for her stint in rehab, and two weeks later for a cocaine-related arrest.

Ugh. I'm tired of it. Doooooooone with it.

Larkin Grimm went (more) insane or something

2007-07-17T19:35:00.000-05:00

Long time readers (if there are any left) of this here corner o' the ol' Internet may remember that I have had kind words in the past for neo-hippie/cosmic freakout virtuoso Larkin Grimm. I kind of forgot about her for awhile, listened to her new album last year a handful of times but didn't really get real into it, and recently was looking through the list of my friends on MySpace (yeah, yeah, shut up) and clicked on her page. Here's what she's saying about her new stuff:

"Most of my recent music deals with acoustic and psychoacoustic properties of sound. In performances, I like to gradually fill a room with sounds that interfere with one another in the air. Each sound on its own is steady and flat, but when several of these sounds collide, they produce rippling rhythmic patterns, resultant psychoacoustic frequencies, and fluctuations in air pressure that can be sensed physically in space. These sounds come out of loudspeakers in the form of electronic feedback, and directly from my body in the form of throat singing and long violin drones. With this activity I attempt to merge my bodily, acoustic presence with amplified electronic sound, to create a third sound that is happening entirely within the air of the performance space."

I don't think "psychoacoustic" is a word that actually exists, but maaaaaan I bet that's really freaking cool. Or irritating. Or cool for me and irritating for most people. Larkin! Come back to Philly! There's no way that stuff sounds half as good recorded as it probably does live.

HEY REMEMBER random 1980s pop culture dreck

2007-06-10T16:52:00.000-05:00

I think if there's any worse idea in the world than making a live action Transformers movie, it's letting Michael Bay make it. I have no idea why anybody would want to pay money to see that. I mean, usually with the crap that people go see, I have no interest in it myself but can see why other people would want to see it (average Shrek 3 audience member: "I feel frightened of and threatened by anything new and different"), but the Transformers thing confuses me. Hasn't everybody, at some point, watched (or read or listened to) something they really liked as a kid and been confused and disappointed at how bad it actually was? It's going to be that experience again, except the movie is going to be ten times worse than even the cartoon was.

If anybody that I'm friends with goes to see this, though, I might have to reevaluate our friendship. Ok, I'm kidding. But that fact will be in the back of my mind the next time this hypothetical friend recommends a movie.

2007-05-31T19:25:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure what to make of the new Wilco album. To be honest, I haven't really listened to it the whole way through enough times (I think I'm at 3 so far). But I have a boring anecdote that I want to tell.

There's a song on the album called "Impossible Germany." It's a pretty ho-hum song, intriguing lyrics maybe, mediocre melody, and then a guitar solo that NEVER ENDS. NEVER. EVER. It's so damned boring. By the third time I heard it, I was getting infuriated at the start of the song knowing that The Jeff Tweedy Noodling Show is right around the corner. I know it's nothing compared to the pair of 10+ minute snoozers that were on A Ghost is Born, but it's still annoying.

And yet, the stupid melody that he plays over and over on the solo is the only actual melody from the album I can remember at the moment.

Oy. I need more time with this one.

thoughtses about thingses

2007-05-24T18:14:00.001-05:00

When I worked for UPS at the Philadelphia airport, it resulted in me having a lot of very detailed knowledge about very specific things that would be of no use whatsoever off of the job. I still have pretty much every ZIP code in the state of New Hampshire memorized, for example.

And I thought THAT knowledge was useless.

Now I'm working construction, and if you took me to the high school in Elkton, MD, and asked me what the elevation was at any given spot in the parking lots and landscapes and such outside the building, I could probably tell you, off the top of my head, to within a couple inches.

But, you know, everybody probably has crap like that with their jobs. So whatever. This post was more interesting in my head.

Thoughts:

Some friends and I decided last week that Liars' Drum's Not Dead is the only album we could think of where you can identify any song on the album by beating out rhythmic patterns with your hands.

This year's Panda Bear album is way better than last year's Grizzly Bear album (a band called Polar Bear needs to get a lot of hype next year). Noah Lennox pretty much has Brian Wilson's voice, as well as a similar melodic sensibility, which results in some experimental rock that's actually fun to listen to, after he slaps that voice on top of his mesmerizing instrumental loops and textures. Also, I love the way Person Pitch sounds from a production standpoint. Any album with so much reverb on everything that it sounds like it was recorded from the far end of an enormous cathedral is going to grab my attention.

"Africa" by Toto is pretty much the embodiment of everything that was wrong with a lot of music in the 1980s, but it's still somehow a great song. Sometimes you can't overpower a good enough pop song, no matter how hard you try. Can you imagine how good it could have been if it was recorded in a way that didn't attempt to suck every last bit of life out of the song? I'm sure somebody's done that cover. I think the Polyphonic Spree need to cover that song.

That's it for now I think.

metal sucks (the genre and the material)

2007-05-19T18:45:00.000-05:00

A couple days ago, my dad was getting on my case for not wearing my safety glasses at work (I am in the construction biz now). I listened to what he said but didn't really do anything. I figured I haven't been hurt yet, I spent all that time doing construction a couple years ago and nothing ever happened, and on top of that I was already wearing glasses. What was the worst that could happen?

Well, apparently the worst (or at least a bad) thing that could happen is getting a piece of metal in my eye.

I know that you just cringed thinking about it, and basically it's as painful as it sounds, even though the thing was about the size of a grain of salt.

I guess it flew off of either the head of the hammer I was using or the top of the pin that I was hammering. The good news is that now I'm fine. Just remember to wear your safety glasses if you need to, is what I'm saying.

eeeeeep

2007-05-16T18:35:00.000-05:00

Arcade Fire.... BJORK BJORK BJORK BJORK BJORK

2007-05-08T17:24:00.000-05:00

I saw Arcade Fire live last weekend. Some of you may be shocked at hearing me say that. I'm still mostly indifferent toward them, don't worry.

I was all right, I guess. They have a lot of energy. This one guy was ripping out pages from a book in time with the rhythm of a song, which seemed like a weirdly empty gesture, like a really dorky version of smashing a guitar into a drum set on stage. Or like I put it that night, "he went at it like he was taking a sledge hammer to the Rosetta Stone, and it was just a few pages drifting mildly to the floor."

There were problems. It was neat to watch that many people freaking out at once, but I couldn't hear crap aside from drums and some vocals. They were playing organs and glockenspiels and freakin' hurdy-gurdies, for Chrissakes, but for all I could hear it might as well have been a chorus of kazoos. That's the problem when you get that many people playing that loudly at the same time in a live environment.

All of their songs sound the same to me, even more so in a live setting. That drummer sure does like his "four on the floor" drum beats.

I have more in-depth thoughts about them and their popularity and whatever, but I'll save those for when I'm feeling less lazy.

Basically, watching a really large band with some unusual instrumentation from a foreign English-speaking country that isn't England, with a guy singing some songs and a girl singing the others, I kind of wished I was watching Architecture in Helsinki instead. OK THAT COMPARISON WAS A STRETCH. But I like Architecture in Helsinki. IT'5!

CHANGE OF SUBJECT

I was going to be all coy about the new Bjork album and write my long manifesto about how it's the best album of the 00s later (ok, I haven't even actually listened to it yet) but I'm holding it here in my hands and I just want to say that this is some of the strangest CD packaging I have ever seen. And I've seen some doozies. There's a sticker on the front that's part of the artwork, that seals shut a sort of gate. Then after you either peel off the sticker and agonize about throwing it away (or agonize about ripping it in half in order to leave it on), you open up the gate, and there's a flap that folds up, and behind the flap is the CD. Then there's your liner notes, artwork, lyric sheet, etc., inside the flap that just folded up (now upside down).

As a side note to a side note, the liner notes are on that ultra-glossy paper that I like, like the last Four Tet CD was on. And... that's the only one I can think of right now. I think all those weird post card-like things in the new Deerhoof album are on them too. It's the paper that's almost slippery in your hands.

I'm looking forward to listening to it, even if there is a 7 1/2 minute duet with the dude from Antony and the Johnsons. Hearing about that was displeasing. Kind of like if I'd read "the centerpiece of the new Brian Wilson album will be a collaboration with William Shatner and Scarlett Johansson." I really can't stand that Antony guy's voice. Oh well. Maybe it's good anyway.

Short people got no reason to live

2007-05-07T20:16:00.000-05:00

I got made fun of at work today for being short.

I didn't think that 5'9" was short. It's only slightly below average.

I know short people. I ain't one o' them.

Also the word "short" no longer has any meaning to me.

I don't see "movies," I see "films" uuugggggggghhh

2007-04-29T19:07:00.000-05:00

So, I was reading a pair of articles in the Inquirer today about this year's summer movie season, and it looks like some of the surefire hits are Shrek the Third, Spiderman 3, another Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Ocean's Thirteen, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and, uh...

JESUS CHRIST CAN'T ANYBODY MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT SOMETHING WE HAVEN'T SEEN A MILLION TIMES ALREADY?

I know this is hardly a new complaint, but CHRIST. Let's keep the list going: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Evan Almighty, Life Free or Die Hard, Hairspray, The Simpsons Movie, The Bourne Ultamatum, Rush Hour 3, 28 Weeks Later, Hostel 2, Transformers.

See, this is why I never go to movies anymore. When tickets are $10+, you feel like you're taking a risk paying that much to see an unknown quantity. So what we end up with is movie after movie of crap that we've all seen before. Safe, predictable, boring, crap. This is the only kind of stuff that people will promote and spend money on anymore, and subsequently, this is the only kind stuff that people will go see.

I'm sure that a handful of those are probably perfectly pleasant and not terrible, and I'm sure that I'll eventually end up seeing a handful of them (I don't think I have any choice when it comes to The Simpsons). But it's still disappointing how little risk people are willing to take when it comes to making and promoting movies on a large scale.

Basically if you read that list, and realize that the majority of Americans won't see a movie this summer that isn't on that list, that's why I'm a movie snob.

Bjork is on SNL

2007-04-21T09:36:00.000-05:00

I haven't really made it a point to watch Saturday Night Live since... well, I don't know if I ever did. I mean, I know there were times when I used to get excited when some of my favorite artists would appear on SNL, but I can't remember of them now. Beck, I guess? Oh, and Elliott Smith. Those were both late 90s probably (I remember Beck playing "Nobody's Fault But My Own" and Elliott playing "Miss Misery").

Anyway, SNL is not appointment television for me because I am an adult, and I like to be doing things on Saturday nights that don't involve watching TV. So what do I do when arguably my favorite artist ever (at the least, top 5, like it matters) is going to be on SNL performing a song I probably haven't heard yet? Also, live Bjork performances don't exactly come a dime a dozen these days.

Luckily, the year is 2007, and there is a very simple solution: YouTube! I wait until Monday, I see her performance when I want, where I want, and I don't have to tolerate Scarlett Johansson mumbling her way through half a dozen mediocre sketches featuring some guys I've never seen before.

Hooray for The Internet.

zen

2007-04-16T11:15:00.000-05:00

Just watch this guy's face the whole time. If you ask me, this is a great example of the sort of "brilliant stupidity" that the internet offers in spades.

Of Montreal, of Athens, GA

2007-04-13T17:00:00.000-05:00

I've been kind of half-heartedly embracing Of Montreal for several years now. I like a lot of things about them, but I also dislike enough things that I always end up checking out their new albums when they come out but if somebody asks me if I'm a big fan, I say, "eh, not really." Anyway, they were on Conan O'Brien's show last night. It's pretty cool for them I guess. Check out the video:

of Montreal - Heimdalsgate like a Promethean Curse (live) on Vimeo

Like I said, it's cool for them that they get to be on national TV and whatnot. But since I'm a wet blanket and everything, I want to point out some things that I don't really like.

For starters, Kevin Barnes keeps drifting closer and closer to glam rock. His Bowie-ness is increasing, if not in the music than definitely in appearance.

Second, it's kind of reinforcing the image that Of Montreal is actually "The Kevin Barnes Show." I know that's the case anyway, but I'm starting to get uncomfortable with it. As if the costume changes weren't enough to draw all the attention to Barnes, I would swear he actually told the rest of the band to remain perfectly still. I've seen them live (and you may recall I was not entirely satisfied with that either), they actually do move. They looked like a band when I saw them. They look like Kevin Barnes and a backing band here. His vocals are even way up in the mix compared to the studio recording.

And back to those costume changes: does anybody else find them unnecessary and distracting? The song they're playing is actually a pretty good one, but I'd bet that a lot of people hearing them for the first time had no idea, because they were wondering why the dude with the makeup is suddenly wearing a huge lobster claw. It's kinda cool to try to replicate a music video onstage, but anybody who hasn't seen it (which is most people) was probably confused by it. Also, it's risky to be known exclusively for a music video, but that's for a post about Ok Go.

Now, I am aware that lots of people will like the performance for all of the exact reasons I didn't. So you know, don't pounce on me for being too negative. Or go ahead, I don't care.

Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007

2007-04-12T07:01:00.000-05:00

It would appear that Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday.

I have very fond memories of Kurt Vonnegut as probably the first author I got really into. His books were easy to read, easy to digest, often very funny, and always interesting. The autobiographical nature of a lot of his work coupled with the dozens of running in-jokes made you feel like part of a club by the time you got through your third book of his (which would probably be about two weeks after you started the first).

I'd held out hope for awhile that he would live to publish another novel. I guess that's not going to be the case. Maybe I'll revisit some of his stuff.

No further eulogizing here, the article linked does a better job of that.

'Tis a shame, sort of. (I have a hard time feeling too upset when somebody dies at 84.)

damn

2007-04-11T15:39:00.000-05:00

Here's me looking at the concert listings on Ticketmaster's website for the Theatre of Living Arts:

"All right. Air is playing at the TLA."

Here's me three seconds later, when I saw the ticket price:

"WHO THE *expletive* DO THESE *expletive* THINK THEY ARE CHARGING 40 *expletive* DOLLARS? WHAT ARE THEY *expletive* BILLY JOEL ALL OF A SUDDEN?"

Seriously. Air tickets are $40. That's a pretty steep price for a band that's probably best known in the United States as the guys Zero 7 have been ripping off all these years (low blow, I know, but I still like Zero 7).

Boy that grinds my gears. And here's why: Air is not a band with a rich fan base. Who do you think the average Air fan is? Roughly college-aged, moneyless dopes like me. Todd Rundgren is playing there, and his tickets are only $35, and he's aiming for the baby-boomer market that will actually pay the big bucks to see Todd Rundgren 30 years past his prime.

I probably didn't need to explain that, but whatever.

huh?

2007-04-06T16:11:00.000-05:00

Have you heard about this movie The Reaping? I don't know what it's about. I don't really care. I just know that it's one typo away from some very unfortunate ads.

baseball baseball baseball

2007-04-01T13:50:00.000-05:00

Around this time of the year, I usually write up a thing on the start of the baseball season, offering reasons to worry about my beloved Phillies if there's too much optimism or offering hope if there's too much pessimism. This year there's a strange mixture of those two things, so I'll just say this:

Today is Sunday. The next time there will be a Sunday without a Phillies game will be October 7, at the earliest. That's a happy thought, whether they have 90 wins or 90 losses by October.

2007-03-30T11:41:00.000-05:00

I've seen these Yahoo! avatar dealies around a couple places. I decided to make one of myself:

Don't you think it looks eerily like me?

Bjork, LCD Soundsystem, folksters

2007-03-30T10:33:00.000-05:00

I am going insane not knowing what the new Bjork album sounds like.

Little things like this are not making me any less antsy:

I go through this every two or three years with Bjork, though, so, whatever.

In other news, I like the new LCD Soundsystem album, Sound of Silver, a lot more than the first one. It sounds more like an "album," if you know what I mean. And mp3s and iPods and ADD be damned, I still like albums. I got an mp3 player to listen to entire albums, not to put it on "shuffle." So whatever. I sound old and defensive and stupid. And I digress. I like Sound of Silver because it's way more consistent than the self-titled album, and it has fewer half-assed stabs at different genres (only one this time, "New York, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down").

A lot of it sounds like Trans-Europe Express-era Kraftwerk and late-70s Bowie to me. And I have no problem with that.

And finally, there was an article in the Inquirer a couple days ago about this guy Joe Boyd, who produced pretty much all of my favorite artists from the 1960s that weren't Beatles, Beach Boys, or Zombies: Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, Nico, Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan (ok, that one was 1970, but close enough). And I guess later he produced R.E.M., but that's neither here nor there. He has written a book that he is signing in the Philadelphia area for a couple days this week. Or signed. I don't remember when it was. Also, if you get what that title is a reference to and actually like it, you're either as big a dork as me or you're at least 60 years old.

Anyway, the article mentioned that he was behind a lot of the British folk music that "has influenced nouveau freak-folk artists such as Johanna Newsome and Philadelphia's Espers."

Nevermind the use of that annoying term "freak-folk" or that Joanna Newsom and Espers have little in common other than use of mostly acoustic instruments (which, to be fair, could also be said of the Incredible String Band and Nick Drake). "Johanna Newsome?" Hooray for copy-editing.

2007-03-29T13:27:00.000-05:00

I find Amy Winehouse kind of annoying.

Or at least, I find the coverage of her to be annoying.

The theory I'm working on is that people apparently find substance abuse by British women to be glamorous and edgy, and not sad and pathetic.

A somewhat related theory is that if the same exact music was released by a black American and not a white Brit, people (press types or whoever) would be far less inclined to pay any attention at all.

TV is dumb

2007-03-22T15:47:00.000-05:00

I don't usually get too bothered when a TV show I like gets canceled or otherwise goes off the air prematurely. The most notable and most recent example was Arrested Development, whose bandwagon I was (un)lucky enough to get on toward the beginning of its run, which caused a lot of "will it get canceled?!" agony after every season. But I didn't get too upset when it went off the air, a subject that I covered here. Because after all, it's only TV. And I don't watch a whole lot of TV anyway.

But then last night I was bored enough to be flipping through channels (I sat down to watch the Flyers, and it quickly became clear that they weren't going to give me a whole lot to watch), and I noticed something:

Jim Belushi still has a TV show.

According to Jim has been on the air for 138 episodes and counting, which means it is approaching the point where it will have been on the air for almost three times as many episodes as Arrested Development.

Life just isn't fair, is it?

I like Gruff Rhys

2007-03-20T10:46:00.000-05:00

It may be hard to tell sometimes, but I actually do like music. Although Os Mutantes' self-titled album and Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom are really the only albums ever made that are good. And "Mother" by Danzig is the only other good song. And "Mother" by John Lennon. But not "Mother" by the Police, though. And definitely not "Mother" by Pink Floyd.

Anyway, I like the Super Furry Animals. And I like Gruff Rhys. Gruff's first solo album was released with little (or no) fanfare in something like the second week of January in 2005, and like you would expect from a solo album by a member of a band that relatively few people have heard of, it sank like a stone. It was overshadowed by the Super Furry Animals' magnificent Love Kraft several months later, and in fact, I forgot it existed at all until I started thinking of ways to approach his new solo album, Candylion. Like its predecessor, it was released in early January, and sure enough, there is a Super Furry Animals album slated to come out later this year.

The real point is, Candylion is pretty damn good. Like his first solo album, it's a lot more low key and lo-fi than any SFA stuff. But unlike his first solo album, (which was called Yr Atal Genhedlaeth if you're wondering why I'm not referring to it by name) this one is actually interesting. And, thankfully, not sung completely in Welsh.

If nothing else, Candylion offers an intriguing look at what the Super Furry Animals might be like as a rootsy psychedelic band instead of the genre-hopping madmen that they are. Their last couple albums have turned down the insanity, but not as much as Candylion does. The more stripped-down approach definitely highlights Rhys' strong pop sensibilities. Most of these songs are hummable after only a couple listens.

Of course, "low key" and "lo-fi" are relative terms when dealing with Gruff Rhys. The record does feature a few sweeping string arrangements and the occasional psychedelic meltdown, and by most people's standards the sound itself is gorgeously crystal clear. But it has a spontaneous quality that most of his other work doesn't. (The Super Furry Animals' sound is a more deliberately constructed aural assault.)

Final summary, for those of you who just skipped to the last paragraph: for an album that serves as something sort of thrown-off in between "real" projects, Candylion is surprisingly good. There's always the option of turning off the 13 minute snooze-fest album closer "Skylon!" halfway through, which makes it even better. A coupla highlights for the downloaders, if you're so inclined: "Lonesome Words" and "The Court of King Arthur."

Yes it is, Yes it is, Yes it is...

2007-03-17T10:03:00.000-05:00

I had a dream a couple nights ago that I was playing bass for some band, and we were doing a bitchin' cover version of "Roundabout" by Yes.

Do I like Yes? I don't think I do. That song does have a pretty cool bass part, though.

Marissa Nadler

2007-03-11T15:14:00.000-05:00

I saw Marissa Nadler last fall, opening up for The Valerie Project. At the time, I didn't much care for her. She stood on the stage alone with her guitar (with backup vocals from an anonymous female on a select few songs) and played repetitive songs that didn't tend to go anywhere or do much of anything, that all sounded exactly the same. Her stage demeanor suggested a really ditzy version of Joan Baez. I had the vague (and vaguely sexist) feeling that she wouldn't have been on the stage if she wasn't so amazingly gorgeous.

I sat twiddling my thumbs for 45 minutes waiting for it to end, and assumed I'd never think about her again after it was over.

So I was somewhat surprised when, in my recent internet browsings, I came across a couple positive reviews of her new album, Songs III: Bird on the Water (I have no idea what happened to Songs I and II). Everything written about it is sure to mention that it was produced by Espers' Greg Weeks, and that most of Espers show up playing something or other. Reading that is when I decided I needed to hear it, of course. (My Espers obsession is well-documented here, if you have the patience to look.)

Well, here's what I think: Marissa Nadler is still kind of boring to me. Most of the songs still sound the same, and most of them still seem to kind of float around waiting for something that never happens. However, I don't dislike her, and I really liked some of the songs. I have a feeling that if I listened to it in the right mood, or by myself in the dark late at night, I might enjoy it. I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt that maybe it's a grower, and I haven't been with it long enough yet.

Greg Weeks, meanwhile, is well on his way to making a nice second career for himself as the producer of choice for the psych-folk set. His work here is more subtle than on last year's Fern Knight album, Music for Witches and Alchemists (not to mention Espers II), and more in the background. It doesn't seem like a "Marissa Nadler and Greg Weeks" album, the way the Fern Knight album kind of sounded like a "Fern Knight and Greg Weeks" album. He still shows up a few times with his fuzzed out Les Paul for some psychedelic guitar work, exploring the notes in between the notes like a rudimentary John Coltrane (and it's still hard to tell sometimes if that's intentional or if he just records all his parts in one take without having played the song before), but the songs never take a backseat to that the way they do sometimes with Espers (and really, that's just a whole different aesthetic and musical philosophy at work). And for the most part, everything is quiet and low key, with barely-there splashes of organ and synth augmenting things. In short, the album sounds great.

My first music post of 2007

2007-03-01T20:25:00.000-05:00

Well, Eddie Murphy ruined this year's "the Oscars are predictable" rant by making Norbit and reminding everybody of the kind of crap he's been doing for almost two decades. Plus, putting Eddie Murphy in that sort of spotlight apparently started reminding people that he's kind of a dick. Or at least creepily eccentric. So I was glad to see that upset happen.

And now, after a break of sorts, back to the regularly scheduled music-related posting. I could break this thing up into a half dozen posts, but I'm too lazy to do that much writing. So instead, here are:

Music Reviews That Are So Short That They Are Pointless: 2007 Edition

Yaaay! Excited? Here we go.

Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity - I've never really understood a lot of what people write about Deerhoof. For one thing, having a Japanese woman singing has inspired a lot of weirdly misguided descriptions of their sound. "Yoko Ono meets the B-52s." Whaaa? Also, I don't really buy the conventional wisdom that they're only now, with their last couple albums, becoming "accessible" or whatever. They've always had the "pop" side and the "weird" side, as far as I can tell. Anyway, Friend Opportunity is really good. "The Perfect Me" is one of the best songs I've heard so far this year, and a hell of a way to kick off an album. It's a great explosive album opening song in the vein of... *racks brain* "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by U2? "Baba O'Riley?" "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" from Thriller? I'm having trouble with this one. Anyway, the whole thing is good, but I don't feel like writing much about it. "The Perfect Me" has a cute li'l video which can be viewed here.

Dr. Dog - We All Belong - West Philly dudes getting bigger by the day. Dr. Dog will never be anybody's favorite band, and they'll never release any great albums, but they'll probably have a solid career releasing charming lo-fi throwback pop and encouraging drunken sing-alongs at their shows. This is another one for my "ridiculously derivative music is ok if it sounds like 60s pop" collection (and now that I'm reading that item, I see I actually mentioned Dr. Dog in it). Here's my suggestion to Dr. Dog: for the next album, hire Darian Sahanaja to produce, and he'll clean up that sound and sharpen those harmonies. Then those string and horn flourishes won't sound so out of place, and I'll really like ya.

Deerhunter - Cryptograms - Here is what the birth of this album sounded like: "Hey guys, I just got this delay pedal, you think we can use it for anything?" Apparently all it takes to make music that is considered "experimental" is to surround a bunch of generic "indie rock" songs with a bunch of echo-laden guitar. Oh wait, I guess they crammed those boring "soundscape" things in there too. Those are no more or less interesting than the stuff I do when I'm screwing around with my guitar (and my delay pedal) by myself when I'm bored. The whole affair is mind-numbingly average.

Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? - This is supposedly Kevin Barnes' breakup album, except he got back together with his wife, so... whatever. It starts shaping up like the best Of Montreal album I've heard, then it runs smack into a brick wall 'round about track 7, a 12 minute exercise in repetition called "The Past is a Grotesque Animal." It is beyond boring. It completely kills the album's momentum, and by the time the damn thing finally wraps up, I have a hard time actually paying attention to the remaining five songs. I could go on about why that track is so stupid, but I don't feel like it. The rest of it is fairly good. If they cut out that one song, they'd have a damn good album on their hands.

Explosions in the Sky - All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone - Most discussions of Explosions in the Sky start with acknowledging that the stupidly named genre of "post rock" lends itself by its nature to a sort of repetition and sameness, which makes it ok that this album sounds exactly the same as the last one. I call bullshit on that. Let's think about what most people consider to be the biggest names in the genre. Have Mogwai ever released two albums that sound the same? Have Do Make Say Think? Tortoise? Even Godspeed You Black Emperor! has managed to vary it up, and when they found themselves unable to do so they went on an indefinite hiatus. So with that said, the new Explosions in the Sky album sounds exactly like their last one. And all the songs sound the same too. I think it's boring and pointless.

The Oscars are a stupid and pointless waste of time: a formless rant by Tom

2007-02-25T15:03:00.000-05:00

It may seem self-evident that most awards shows are stupid, overwrought affairs designed to get you to stare at advertisements for four hours. Not to mention the fact that these things are hardly ever actual barometers of what any sort of majority of people consider to be the "best" entertainment in any given category. (Unless throngs of people really thought the Dixie Chicks really deserved that "Album of the Year" Grammy, in which case I may be mistaken. At least the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn't win it.)

And yet every year, we all wait in excited anticipation for the Academy Awards to come around, and tell us all what the best movies and performances of the last year were.

Why? What's the point of watching something when every single one of the major awards is all but a foregone conclusion? Watch me look into my crystal ball and divine the winners of the six major categories this year: Whitaker, Mirren, Murphy, Hudson, The Departed, Martin Scorsese.

Wasn't that amazing? No, because we've been told for over a month that those are going to be the winners, and yet we'll all tune in anyway to pretend that there's some kind of suspense amidst the tedious montages and salutes to those who have left us and an honorary Oscar for Ennio Morricone.

And besides that, there are problems with the awards they give anyway. Anybody who portrays a real person in a movie in a reasonably convincing manner is virtually assured of an Oscar, and sure enough, this year we've got Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, Helen Mirrin as Queen Elizabeth, and Eddie Murphy as a thinly veiled James Brown. This is why I think that roles based on real people should be a separate category. Other quick roads to Oscar-winning, of course, include playing a mentally challenged person, a drug addict (or alcoholic), or somebody with a terminal disease. If you can combine a couple of those, even better.

As for the best picture, the prevailing trend lately is to give the Oscar to middlebrow, faux-art films that like to congratulate the viewer on their own good taste. How else to explain how Crash won last year? (And let's take a look back at some other winners over the last decade or so: The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, American Beauty, A Beautiful Mind, Million Dollar Baby.) With this in mind, the smart money would be on Little Miss Sunshine, but supposedly Martin Scorsese's got all the momentum, and this year he'll finally get his Oscar for Goodfellas, and Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull, and Casino, and... ok, The Departed was actually pretty good, despite all the annoying Boston accents. It finally sold me on Leonardo DiCaprio, after his roles in two Scorsese-directed bloated messes failed to do so. And it was fun seeing Jack Nicholson cast in the role of Satan.

Anyway, if there's any reason at all to watch the Academy Awards tonight, it's to see Scorsese's acceptance speech when he finally gets his damned "Best Director" Oscar (unless Clint Eastwood takes it out from under his nose again). Will he point out that Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman, Terence Malick, and Sergio Leone never won an Oscar (except for Kubrick's "Best Visual Effects" for 2001: A Space Odyssey)? Or will he be ecstatic to join the elite ranks of Ron Howard, Mel Gibson, and Kevin Costner?

Whatever he says, I'll just look it up on YouTube tomorrow and skip the rest.

Another movie review, 32 years late

2007-02-25T01:23:00.000-05:00

"A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves."

I don't know if I've ever seen a movie that left as many loose ends dangling in the wind as Picnic at Hanging Rock. Of course, all those loose ends are the central part of the movie. If there weren't any loose ends, it would be a standard crime solving mystery film.

So, to backtrack, a little background, since I'm fairly sure that nobody who will read this has actually seen it. A group of girls and a pair of their teachers from a boarding school in Australia take a picnic on Valentine's Day, 1900, to Hanging Rock (a real-life volcanic formation). Three of the girls and one of the teachers go missing without a trace. A week later, one of the girls shows up with no memory at all of what happened.

From there it unfolds like a murder mystery, as pieces of the puzzle slowly come into the picture: a young Englishman and his Australian friend (who is an employee of the English family, who may be royalty or something) witnessed the girls shortly before they disappeared, another girl claims to have seen the teacher running up the hillside in her underwear shortly before she disappeared.

Except (and you can consider this a SPOILER ALERT, except that it's one of the central points of the movie, and thus not really a spoiler) at the end, nothing is explained. The girls are still missing, and nobody knows why. Several subplots come out of the woodwork (for instance, the Australian employee of the English family is clearly the long lost sister of the best friend of one of the missing boarding school girls), and they too are left unresolved.

So here's what I think.

For one thing, I don't think I've ever seen a movie filmed in such bright and crystal clear daylight that creeped me out so much. We are shown everything, yet left able to see nothing. An air of palpable dread and suspense hangs over even the most innocuous of settings, and the uncomfortable and stiff silence that penetrates most of the film makes it all the more unnerving when it is suddenly and unexpectedly interrupted by a hideous outburst. Just thinking about it sends chills down my spine.

Closely related to that is the portrayal of the way that Victorian England rubs uncomfortably against the Australian outback. The boarding school and the English family seem to exist in an awkward approximation of their native English habitat. The picnic is preceded by harsh warnings to the girls against any sort of exploration of the rock, and to look out for the apparent abundance of poisonous snakes and ants. In another scene, on the way to the picnic, the children are allowed to gleefully remove their gloves in a rare display of leniency (keep in mind that February in Australia is summer).

To me, that's the real theme of the movie (although it's a pretty buried subtext, if it was intentional at all): the girls' disappearance may be symbolic of the inability for the "civilized" English to deal with the harsh realities of Australia; it's a warning of the bad things that can happen when we step unprepared into the great unknown, into an environment that we don't control. And never has this theme carried more poignancy than it does today, as we, as a society and as a species, creep ever closer to completely eliminating that which is unknown or uncertain in nature. Indeed, today Hanging Rock is a tourist attraction, complete with a cafe at the base of the mountain.

Coldplay

2007-02-23T02:16:00.000-05:00

You know what?

Fuck it all.

"Yellow" by Coldplay is still a totally bitchin' song.

I mean, let's think about this damn thing for a minute. There's that bitchin' guitar part with all the bends and all that. That kicks ass. That's one of the great intros of the 21st century.

The verses... eh. They're something. "Look at the stars/Look how they shine for you/Everything you do/They were all yellow" All right, man. Ok. Sure. If nothing else, they're pleasant.

But dude. That "chorus" part?

"Your skiiiiiiiiiin oh yeah your skin and boooones..." and etc.

God. That's so gorgeous. Only the dreamiest of pop songs could ever hope to have such a beautiful chorus as that. And those "oooooh aaaaaaaaah" backup vocals? Icing on the most delicious cake ever.

When that song took the world by storm in 2001, it would have been odd to think that "Yellow" would actually be one of the least successful Coldplay singles (especially considering its success after "Shiver" and "Brothers and Sisters" and all that stuff that is now considered "early"). Hell, I sure never thought they'd go on to be The Next U2 when I first got into them. If I knew then what I know, would I even have paid attention? I don't know.

I do know that I miss the days when they could be seen at the TLA in Philly or the 9:30 Club in D.C. I miss when Chris Martin didn't date movie stars. I miss the quaint charm of Parachutes, especially in comparison with the world-conquering blustery hoopla of X & Y. It hardly even seems like the same band. I miss when I could log on to Coldplay's official message board without it being completely overrun by a million bombastic idiots (oddly enough, there are at least two regular readers of this page that I know will agree with that).

Anyway, I am feeling quite nostalgic for when I could like Coldplay without feeling apologetic about it. Is that normal, or is that just because I'm a total music snob? They are almost a completely different band now, right?

One final note: "Everything's Not Lost" is a fantastic song, and all three times I saw Coldplay play live (once each in 2001, 2002, and 2003), they played it, and each time, I was absolutely ecstatic. If nothing else, I'll have those memories.

TOM SMASH BLOG

A love letter to Radiohead from an overenthusiastic fanboy

the joy and pain of sports

A new look for a new decade... or something

booze makes the economy go 'round (and then vomit)

Why I don't care about an "Arrested Development" movie, even though I love "Arrested Development"

Redefining the term "diminishing returns"

The ethical conundrum of watching football

long time no blog

List With Unreasonably Specific Criteria, Grizzled Veterans Edition

List With Unreasonably Specific Criteria, Leaving the Nest Edition

Tom is

Live from New York, it's tedious mediocrity!

Tom's favorite music of 2008

2008 year in review

"you talkin' to me?"

"half of what I say is meaningless..."

The tragedy of John McCain

"hockey moms" are the new "NASCAR dads"

Lucky Old Sun's got nothin' to do but roll 'round heaven all day...

AMERRRRICA

keepin' the spirit alive

a mildly amusing momentary diversion

fuck

na na na na na na na na FISHING!

boring music geek stuff

Mike Myers

Plastic Ono Band

soapbox time!

whatever makes you happy, whatever you want...

"Dick Laurent is dead..."

sunshine 'n' water 'n' trees 'n' such

soapbox time!

when I grow up to be a man...

I have nothing of importance to say.

SFA OK

I'm pretty sure Ben-Hur and Spartacus are the same movie, anyway

Easter in her bonnet, Easter in her hair

moose

VlA rdg GRA $1. 28

feels so unnatural (Peter Gabriel too)

Oh joy, apparently the Academy Awards are tonight

news headline: "movies to be terrible at least through 2011"

"ohhhh, Depression!"

2007 music is finally finished!

2007 music almost finished...

2007 music finally, gawrsh. 20-11

Tom's Favorite Songs of 2007

Is it December ALREADY?

whyyyyyyy

Versatio

more Radiohead, real quick

Jesse are you listening?

Tom "liveblogs" In Rainbows 15 hours after everybody else

Miles Smiles

This is Radio Nowhere!

'Ye 2

'Ye

baseball awesome

A stupid pointless post.

Max Roach - 1924-2007

Lyin' in bed, just like Brian Wilson did

Superbad, or You're Not Allowed to TRY to Make a Cult Film (Unless You're Mike Judge)

fooooooooooo

commercial radio is irritating

three things

is it training camp time already?

a chest-unloading rant about the dumbest crap in the world

Larkin Grimm went (more) insane or something

HEY REMEMBER *random 1980s pop culture dreck*

thoughtses about thingses

metal sucks (the genre and the material)

eeeeeep

Arcade Fire.... BJORK BJORK BJORK BJORK BJORK

Short people got no reason to live

I don't see "movies," I see "films" uuugggggggghhh

Bjork is on SNL

zen

Of Montreal, of Athens, GA

Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007

HEY REMEMBER random 1980s pop culture dreck