Patrick- Kids Pushing Kids says:
shit danielson is driving me insane
Josh says:
the band?
Josh says:
they'll do that
Patrick- Kids Pushing Kids says:
ye
Patrick- Kids Pushing Kids says:
two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting duck
Sometimes I forget that conversation quality increases as a time approaches 3AM.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
The scientific community agrees that towel is in fact a verb
I can remember with some precision, or at least what I assume is precision because according to cognitive psychology such a quality is impossible, a day in my early childhood when I realized I could read. Except to my young brain, whose primary purpose at that point was to discern where food goes and the finer points of pooping, I interpreted this fearsome new skill as not something progressive, but the apparent crippling of my ability to look upon pretty shapes - "letters" to the terrorists of education - with nuanced impartiality.
I remember being absolutely goddamn enraged by this.
We'd be driving 'round the Masonville proper, and I'd close my eyes real hard and try to surprise myself with this fast food special or that gas station name. But to no avail - ghostling meaning would always come forth, cackling and unbidden. I demanded that they bring back the meaningless shapes which used to fill my world like thousands of towering butterflies, for this intrustion of "2 medium sized pies for twenty dollars" or "Unleaded now ten cents cheaper" was tyrrany and I could not emancipate myself.
Looking back though? Shut the fuck up Josh, of course.
But here's the rub. I'm in something of a similar situation lately. Except, more troublesomely, I've been studying Ethics and Political theory instead of the measly alphabet. The works of classical philosophers have, stunningly, cross-referenced and enshrined themselves within my psyche in a manner much like what I am sure scientists call knowledge. Now, every time I do anything at all in my mundane, commonplace sort of life, I've got Kant or Hobbes or Mill pissing down my neck about what it all means. This is a bit more stressful than the machinations of advertising executives. Sure, you can choose to not buy that shiny in the window, but do you really think you can get away with violating the Categorical Imperative or rendering your existence as a rational moral agent logically absurd?
Eating a burger is now done in the metaphysical audience of a billion sensual cavemen holding knives to each others' throats and demanding whether that shit is for business or pleasure and don't even think about lying because then everyone's getting fucked. It is bothersome.
Combine this with a solid six hours of cramming Cognitive theories of psychology into your noggin and you've got yourself a sleepless night on the blogosphere. I don't think Plato knew that I am actually just a computer. Sigh.
"Percussive maintenance" sounds dirty.
I remember being absolutely goddamn enraged by this.
We'd be driving 'round the Masonville proper, and I'd close my eyes real hard and try to surprise myself with this fast food special or that gas station name. But to no avail - ghostling meaning would always come forth, cackling and unbidden. I demanded that they bring back the meaningless shapes which used to fill my world like thousands of towering butterflies, for this intrustion of "2 medium sized pies for twenty dollars" or "Unleaded now ten cents cheaper" was tyrrany and I could not emancipate myself.
Looking back though? Shut the fuck up Josh, of course.
But here's the rub. I'm in something of a similar situation lately. Except, more troublesomely, I've been studying Ethics and Political theory instead of the measly alphabet. The works of classical philosophers have, stunningly, cross-referenced and enshrined themselves within my psyche in a manner much like what I am sure scientists call knowledge. Now, every time I do anything at all in my mundane, commonplace sort of life, I've got Kant or Hobbes or Mill pissing down my neck about what it all means. This is a bit more stressful than the machinations of advertising executives. Sure, you can choose to not buy that shiny in the window, but do you really think you can get away with violating the Categorical Imperative or rendering your existence as a rational moral agent logically absurd?
Eating a burger is now done in the metaphysical audience of a billion sensual cavemen holding knives to each others' throats and demanding whether that shit is for business or pleasure and don't even think about lying because then everyone's getting fucked. It is bothersome.
Combine this with a solid six hours of cramming Cognitive theories of psychology into your noggin and you've got yourself a sleepless night on the blogosphere. I don't think Plato knew that I am actually just a computer. Sigh.
"Percussive maintenance" sounds dirty.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
You don't say
Apparently my Gorillaz (yes, I know how it's spelled) comment about Absence's flavour was in fact not how I first described Dalek to Jams.
The correct description was, "It's music made by monsters! Scary scary monsters who rap!"
Jams then giggled, span round three times, and giggled again.
The correct description was, "It's music made by monsters! Scary scary monsters who rap!"
Jams then giggled, span round three times, and giggled again.
Yelling at movie characters is neither pleasant nor productive
Exams are leering over the horizon. It's offensive, really. Just as bad is the Lake Ontario climate, which decided to mark the beginning of the brief vacation afforded to me between papers and mid-years by dumping snow all over my goddamn campus.
I manage to keep busy in spite of this.
New one for you today, O gentle and largely imaginary reader. I'm still picking through the massive endeavour which is Califone's Roots and Crowns for proper service within the blogosphere, but the new dusting of snow's pushed pushed up shimmering memories an album I fell in love with in winter.
Dälek are hip hop to me. That's die-ah-lek, for some reason; I'm no linguistics major and am not down, per se, with the umlauts. Prior to being exposed to the tidal wave of sound these two men produce, I was in the comfortable position of spouting epithets like, "I love all kinds of music. Except for rap and shit like that." The genre gets a - just wait for it - bad rap (BAM. Yes I did) at the hands of far too many self-described aficionados. People like their music just so, and it's a knee jerk response to heap scorn on any song sporting a rapping emcee. I was like that, but I was fortunate enough to download the duo's third album, Absence, and have my face, arms, and legs melted off.
I mean that in the best possible sense.
Dälek sport a rapping lyricist, he goes by Dälek (but doesn't constitute Dälek the band) and he is phenomenal. His delivery is absurdly sharp and filled with more genuine passion and, what I really love, anger (!!!) than most any punk or metal vocalist out there. I don't have the stones, much less the experience to try to place him in any sort of context within the greater hip hop genre, but his performance is unbelievably sharp and consistently, jaw-droppingly impressive. I've never, ever heard anyone on record with such flawless rythm and gymnasticly powerful cadence. Dre-era Benjamin Andre might surpass on some points, but his rubber band excellence has been a little overshadowed by his senseless prediliction for mediocre singing of late.
What's even better, and genuinely inspiring, Dälek's subject matter is deliciously dark and astonishingly, viscerally strong. His gruff, meaty delivery of political diatribes is never, ever boring, and thought provoking in a way very very few musicians can really accomplish. He weaves near-future film noir soundscapes, glittering with revolutions and uprisings of passion. Listen to his verses on tracks like Culture For Dollars or Distorted Prose, give him a real shot, and tell me it isn't extremely affecting. His repeated invocation of griot heroes is telling. Griots are traditional African story tellers, troubadours of ancient black tribes respected for their preservation and eternal defence of a culture.
I learned that from Absence and yes I did have to look it up.
Now, here's the rub. Skilled as Mister Dälek is, his presence on Absence is much less than half the story. Much much less. Let's discuss the Oktopus.
I can probably identify one or two of the sounds that show up in a given Dälek track. The rest are sheer goddamn mysteries, and it is absolutely fantastic in that right. The man known as the Oktopus handles the instrumental and production and of Dälek's existence (apparently a fellow named Still contributed on the turntable end, but not as a principle component of the troupe), backing his emcee with unfathomably gigantic beats and mountains of noise that sound like My Bloody Valentine routed their guitars through a reverb effect in Hell. To dub the result as A) Stunning and B) A tad difficult would be more than understatement, it'd be injustice.
I think, as I remember it, the first time I sat through Absence I raved to Jams about it as being something like "If you stripped Gorrilaz of their humanity, tortured them for years and then set them up in a studio with the ability to sample field recordings from Hades, you'd have this record."
Of course, this was gross hyperbole and the Gorrilaz comparison didn't make any kind of sense, but it's a rough approximation of Absence's ability to fuck you up most gloriously.
The Oktopus is a genius. A verifiable candidate for Mensa, entirely on the basis of what he does here. From the skyscraping jaws of Distorted Prose, which bends and scrapes a sampled guitar lick to ridiculous heights, to the jarringly brilliant saw blade and heart-stoppingly technical (and properly beautiful) scratching of Culture for Dollars, the barely contained gargantuan assault of A Beast Caged and the cold clarity in the steam-driven symphony of Ever Sombre, this man is limitless. The music to be found in this album can hardly be catalogued in words, given over much more to severely intense and provocative ambience than simpler musicianship. The Oktopus destroys what anyone might conceive ambient music to be: he's DJ Shadow with rabies and a persecution complex, he's The Books with chainsaw arms. Hell, he's Sigur Ros possessed by the devil, and he does unthinkably creative, utterly unstoppable work.
And it sucks that they've got such little support in the world. They're too noisy for the hip hop crowd and too hip hop for the noise crowd. I don't know if it's my place to call any artist ahead of their time, but I'll be damned if these two never get the respect that's so keenly owed to them.
The Descent was a terrible movie. I have never slept so well after taking in an alleged horror movie. They could've called it Gollum: The Big Hungry Musical with Stupid Scottish Women in a Cave for some Reason.
It may've gotten more attention that way, I'm just sayin'.
I manage to keep busy in spite of this.
New one for you today, O gentle and largely imaginary reader. I'm still picking through the massive endeavour which is Califone's Roots and Crowns for proper service within the blogosphere, but the new dusting of snow's pushed pushed up shimmering memories an album I fell in love with in winter.
Dälek are hip hop to me. That's die-ah-lek, for some reason; I'm no linguistics major and am not down, per se, with the umlauts. Prior to being exposed to the tidal wave of sound these two men produce, I was in the comfortable position of spouting epithets like, "I love all kinds of music. Except for rap and shit like that." The genre gets a - just wait for it - bad rap (BAM. Yes I did) at the hands of far too many self-described aficionados. People like their music just so, and it's a knee jerk response to heap scorn on any song sporting a rapping emcee. I was like that, but I was fortunate enough to download the duo's third album, Absence, and have my face, arms, and legs melted off.
I mean that in the best possible sense.
Dälek sport a rapping lyricist, he goes by Dälek (but doesn't constitute Dälek the band) and he is phenomenal. His delivery is absurdly sharp and filled with more genuine passion and, what I really love, anger (!!!) than most any punk or metal vocalist out there. I don't have the stones, much less the experience to try to place him in any sort of context within the greater hip hop genre, but his performance is unbelievably sharp and consistently, jaw-droppingly impressive. I've never, ever heard anyone on record with such flawless rythm and gymnasticly powerful cadence. Dre-era Benjamin Andre might surpass on some points, but his rubber band excellence has been a little overshadowed by his senseless prediliction for mediocre singing of late.
What's even better, and genuinely inspiring, Dälek's subject matter is deliciously dark and astonishingly, viscerally strong. His gruff, meaty delivery of political diatribes is never, ever boring, and thought provoking in a way very very few musicians can really accomplish. He weaves near-future film noir soundscapes, glittering with revolutions and uprisings of passion. Listen to his verses on tracks like Culture For Dollars or Distorted Prose, give him a real shot, and tell me it isn't extremely affecting. His repeated invocation of griot heroes is telling. Griots are traditional African story tellers, troubadours of ancient black tribes respected for their preservation and eternal defence of a culture.
I learned that from Absence and yes I did have to look it up.
Now, here's the rub. Skilled as Mister Dälek is, his presence on Absence is much less than half the story. Much much less. Let's discuss the Oktopus.
I can probably identify one or two of the sounds that show up in a given Dälek track. The rest are sheer goddamn mysteries, and it is absolutely fantastic in that right. The man known as the Oktopus handles the instrumental and production and of Dälek's existence (apparently a fellow named Still contributed on the turntable end, but not as a principle component of the troupe), backing his emcee with unfathomably gigantic beats and mountains of noise that sound like My Bloody Valentine routed their guitars through a reverb effect in Hell. To dub the result as A) Stunning and B) A tad difficult would be more than understatement, it'd be injustice.
I think, as I remember it, the first time I sat through Absence I raved to Jams about it as being something like "If you stripped Gorrilaz of their humanity, tortured them for years and then set them up in a studio with the ability to sample field recordings from Hades, you'd have this record."
Of course, this was gross hyperbole and the Gorrilaz comparison didn't make any kind of sense, but it's a rough approximation of Absence's ability to fuck you up most gloriously.
The Oktopus is a genius. A verifiable candidate for Mensa, entirely on the basis of what he does here. From the skyscraping jaws of Distorted Prose, which bends and scrapes a sampled guitar lick to ridiculous heights, to the jarringly brilliant saw blade and heart-stoppingly technical (and properly beautiful) scratching of Culture for Dollars, the barely contained gargantuan assault of A Beast Caged and the cold clarity in the steam-driven symphony of Ever Sombre, this man is limitless. The music to be found in this album can hardly be catalogued in words, given over much more to severely intense and provocative ambience than simpler musicianship. The Oktopus destroys what anyone might conceive ambient music to be: he's DJ Shadow with rabies and a persecution complex, he's The Books with chainsaw arms. Hell, he's Sigur Ros possessed by the devil, and he does unthinkably creative, utterly unstoppable work.
And it sucks that they've got such little support in the world. They're too noisy for the hip hop crowd and too hip hop for the noise crowd. I don't know if it's my place to call any artist ahead of their time, but I'll be damned if these two never get the respect that's so keenly owed to them.
The Descent was a terrible movie. I have never slept so well after taking in an alleged horror movie. They could've called it Gollum: The Big Hungry Musical with Stupid Scottish Women in a Cave for some Reason.
It may've gotten more attention that way, I'm just sayin'.
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Every thug needs a lady
I don't think I ever actually spelled out my adoration for Regina. To further aggravate Krista - who haaates Antony btw lolz - I think she's super purty. So do most people; Krista doesn't. Them's the breaks!
Well. Sitting down and extolling Regina's work would take me hours, which I don't have. I'll gloss over this by saying everything, and I mean absolutely goddamn everything, prior to her recent Begin To Hope is perfect. Perfect. She's the best singer-songwriter ever. Except maybe she's second to Tom Waits. I don't have time to get into why. If you want to know, everything is perfect. Everything, so don't ask. I gave you your answer.
Begin To Hope had some bad points. And by bad, I mostly mean insufferably poppy and inconceivably shallow. I heart Fidelity, as anyone with a working soul does, but Better and Hotel Song and Field Below aren't good. Not... not terrible. Just not good. That Time is iffy, but gets by on unshakeable pluck. The rest is perfect like the rest of her seemingly limitless repertoire.
Apres Moi is amazing. Lady is better. Summer In The City is fantastic. Every track on the extra special-edition disc is wonderful, and I will fight any one who says otherwise. By hitting them.
And she's purty. Ahee, etc.
Deontological moral frameworks and why you should get out of bed in the morning
As it turns out, one's second year of university is tougher than one's first year. Part of me hadn't anticipated this.
I've been more than a little despondent of late. No single album has grabbed my attention in the same way Danielson and Beirut and so on have managed to in months past, and it's not been for lack of new material coming my way. Clue To Kalo's One Way It's Every Way is an ethereal, jangly little album with lots of pretty sounds. Think Sufjan Stevens fronting the Books with the express purpose of crafting easy-going pop songs. Lovely as they are, the songs have precious little meat on them. Not a lot to write home about, not something I can really sink my teeth into as an imitation imitation critic, you see.
I guess I could gush about Antony and the Johnsons, couldn't I?
I first stumbled onto Mister Antony about a year ago. I remember still being up to my eyeballs in generic rock and roll and punk bands, though I really had made significant progress since high school. The very first chord of Hope There's Someone felt, and I sincerely mean this, like a goddamn breath of fresh air. About all I'd heard about him prior to his sophomore album, I Am A Bird Now, was that he is A) Mind numbingly beautiful and B) Warbly as all get out.
And that was pretty well accurate.
The album is stunning from start to finish. Heart-breakingly honest and absolutely gorgeous. Antony needs little more than a piano and his own, yes it is warbly, voice to carry this album. His song craft is spotless, so much so that trying to quote him out of context invariably sounds ridiculous. He exemplifies, among so many of his excellences, that lyrical work gains its power much more from its delivery than its content. Again, fuck you Decemberists.
Songs run a relatively limited gamut, but in such a way that I Am A Bird Now emits a cohesive, beautifully film noir atmosphere. Like a cozy little restaurant in winter, or a hillside drowned in that sound of rain that everyone thinks of when they think of rain. The sensitive swing of Fistful of Love pops and swaggers ever so slightly, swelling with a perfect little brass section. Hope There's Someone is gothic balladry without the goth, easily the song best encapsulating Antony's gentle, sweeping style. The monumentally powerful outro, with pounding grand piano engulfed in an veritable typhoon of overdubbed wailing, is knock-you-flat-on-your-ass magnificent, and still puts me on pins and needles. Spiralling and Bird Gerhl head down a similar path, but with fantastically different effect. Both can and will break your heart with its plaintive, ineffable honesty and gloriously uncomplicated instrumentation. The latter showed up toward the end of V for Vendetta, and I may have wept.
There's not much else to explain, really, and the album doesn't need anything more. Uniformly stark and mournful, simultaneously triumphant and vibrant, and all tied together by that indescribable golden voice.
That I Am A Bird Now ensconced itself into the pantheon of my favourite albums so quickly is a testament to its beauty, and fuels my continuing bafflement in how divisive the album is. People hate this music. Not just dislike it, hate it. They ridicule it as childish and stupid, and miss its point entirely.
Now, I try to reign in my opinions on other people as much as possible. I do maintain a strict doctrine of some-things-are-art-and-some-are-entertainment-only, but I can observe a modicum of niceness. But some things get to me, and none more so than a story Jams related to me concerning some residence floor mates. Being connected via hub, and being nosey, she discovered that one had, amongst many many pop standards and mass-produced hip-hoppers, I Am A Bird Now.
That's feckin' weird, innit?
Turns out that the gal in question kept it around specifically to play for her friends and deride as being absolutely ridiculous and awful. Apparently they'd get a good laugh out of the stupid transsexual man playing at making music.
That fucking burns me, it really sincerely does. Not liking something is one thing, and more power to you if you can respect it without enjoying the music, but that girl's reaction to Antony was tantamount to dragging him into the street, stripping him naked, and spitting on him with a grin on her goddamn face.
I'm oversensitive in matters of antagonism like this, but you get what I'm saying.
Kant, Hobbes, and Morgenthau are running together in a manner much like knowledge. I fear I may be learning.
I've been more than a little despondent of late. No single album has grabbed my attention in the same way Danielson and Beirut and so on have managed to in months past, and it's not been for lack of new material coming my way. Clue To Kalo's One Way It's Every Way is an ethereal, jangly little album with lots of pretty sounds. Think Sufjan Stevens fronting the Books with the express purpose of crafting easy-going pop songs. Lovely as they are, the songs have precious little meat on them. Not a lot to write home about, not something I can really sink my teeth into as an imitation imitation critic, you see.
I guess I could gush about Antony and the Johnsons, couldn't I?
I first stumbled onto Mister Antony about a year ago. I remember still being up to my eyeballs in generic rock and roll and punk bands, though I really had made significant progress since high school. The very first chord of Hope There's Someone felt, and I sincerely mean this, like a goddamn breath of fresh air. About all I'd heard about him prior to his sophomore album, I Am A Bird Now, was that he is A) Mind numbingly beautiful and B) Warbly as all get out.
And that was pretty well accurate.
The album is stunning from start to finish. Heart-breakingly honest and absolutely gorgeous. Antony needs little more than a piano and his own, yes it is warbly, voice to carry this album. His song craft is spotless, so much so that trying to quote him out of context invariably sounds ridiculous. He exemplifies, among so many of his excellences, that lyrical work gains its power much more from its delivery than its content. Again, fuck you Decemberists.
Songs run a relatively limited gamut, but in such a way that I Am A Bird Now emits a cohesive, beautifully film noir atmosphere. Like a cozy little restaurant in winter, or a hillside drowned in that sound of rain that everyone thinks of when they think of rain. The sensitive swing of Fistful of Love pops and swaggers ever so slightly, swelling with a perfect little brass section. Hope There's Someone is gothic balladry without the goth, easily the song best encapsulating Antony's gentle, sweeping style. The monumentally powerful outro, with pounding grand piano engulfed in an veritable typhoon of overdubbed wailing, is knock-you-flat-on-your-ass magnificent, and still puts me on pins and needles. Spiralling and Bird Gerhl head down a similar path, but with fantastically different effect. Both can and will break your heart with its plaintive, ineffable honesty and gloriously uncomplicated instrumentation. The latter showed up toward the end of V for Vendetta, and I may have wept.
There's not much else to explain, really, and the album doesn't need anything more. Uniformly stark and mournful, simultaneously triumphant and vibrant, and all tied together by that indescribable golden voice.
That I Am A Bird Now ensconced itself into the pantheon of my favourite albums so quickly is a testament to its beauty, and fuels my continuing bafflement in how divisive the album is. People hate this music. Not just dislike it, hate it. They ridicule it as childish and stupid, and miss its point entirely.
Now, I try to reign in my opinions on other people as much as possible. I do maintain a strict doctrine of some-things-are-art-and-some-are-entertainment-only, but I can observe a modicum of niceness. But some things get to me, and none more so than a story Jams related to me concerning some residence floor mates. Being connected via hub, and being nosey, she discovered that one had, amongst many many pop standards and mass-produced hip-hoppers, I Am A Bird Now.
That's feckin' weird, innit?
Turns out that the gal in question kept it around specifically to play for her friends and deride as being absolutely ridiculous and awful. Apparently they'd get a good laugh out of the stupid transsexual man playing at making music.
That fucking burns me, it really sincerely does. Not liking something is one thing, and more power to you if you can respect it without enjoying the music, but that girl's reaction to Antony was tantamount to dragging him into the street, stripping him naked, and spitting on him with a grin on her goddamn face.
I'm oversensitive in matters of antagonism like this, but you get what I'm saying.
Kant, Hobbes, and Morgenthau are running together in a manner much like knowledge. I fear I may be learning.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Purchased experiences don't count and how Generation X ruined my constitution
There's something certifiably wrong with The Dears' recording output.
Their music sounds so much better when played live its as if the two formats contain completely separate bands. Songs which absolutely floor one with magnificience in life sound on compact disc or empeethree as pleasant as an open mouth kiss from an extraordinarily attractive member of the opposite sex, only they've got horrible dragon mouth rot. You know you should be enjoying it, on some level, and yet your senses are telling you to just fucking stop because that is gross.
On record, their guitars sound limp, their drums irritate, and Murray Lighburn's unspeakably golden vocal chords leave, to pound this metaphor into the ground, a bad taste in my mouth.
But Jesus tap dancing Moses, you wouldn't think so from their live work.
I can't understand where the disconnect is. The Dears' sound isn't too far afield of any number of bands who succeed on record. Okkervil River, TV on the Radio, My Morning Jacket, Murder By Death (of whom I was distinctly reminded of at the show), Cursive, Broken Social Scene, all of them pack similar ambitions to Lightburn and Co.'s into a solid format and sound great. No Cities Left and Gang of Losers are good albums; unlike these others, they're not great. Why does this happen?
I can't make heads or tales of it and I'm not going to try. Needless to say the show last night floored me, and was much more than good enough to make me forget the death's doorstep feeling of being awake for thirty four hours with a bad case of the flu. Every note was glorious, the band was class right down to their fingernails, and Murray was one of the most genuinely gracious and obviously serious-about-his-art frontmen ever. The set was a perfect mash of No Cities Left and Gang Of Losers material. I was infinitely more familiar with the former, but I enjoyed both despite being in that peculiar show-state of really liking a band and yet not being able to affect the fluidity of motion/appreciation that other patrons do.
I'm like, I love this band! But no, I don't know this song! Please don't judge me harshly!
I'm so enamoured of Opera that if I don't have at least four tabs open
I feel like a poser.
Their music sounds so much better when played live its as if the two formats contain completely separate bands. Songs which absolutely floor one with magnificience in life sound on compact disc or empeethree as pleasant as an open mouth kiss from an extraordinarily attractive member of the opposite sex, only they've got horrible dragon mouth rot. You know you should be enjoying it, on some level, and yet your senses are telling you to just fucking stop because that is gross.
On record, their guitars sound limp, their drums irritate, and Murray Lighburn's unspeakably golden vocal chords leave, to pound this metaphor into the ground, a bad taste in my mouth.
But Jesus tap dancing Moses, you wouldn't think so from their live work.
I can't understand where the disconnect is. The Dears' sound isn't too far afield of any number of bands who succeed on record. Okkervil River, TV on the Radio, My Morning Jacket, Murder By Death (of whom I was distinctly reminded of at the show), Cursive, Broken Social Scene, all of them pack similar ambitions to Lightburn and Co.'s into a solid format and sound great. No Cities Left and Gang of Losers are good albums; unlike these others, they're not great. Why does this happen?
I can't make heads or tales of it and I'm not going to try. Needless to say the show last night floored me, and was much more than good enough to make me forget the death's doorstep feeling of being awake for thirty four hours with a bad case of the flu. Every note was glorious, the band was class right down to their fingernails, and Murray was one of the most genuinely gracious and obviously serious-about-his-art frontmen ever. The set was a perfect mash of No Cities Left and Gang Of Losers material. I was infinitely more familiar with the former, but I enjoyed both despite being in that peculiar show-state of really liking a band and yet not being able to affect the fluidity of motion/appreciation that other patrons do.
I'm like, I love this band! But no, I don't know this song! Please don't judge me harshly!
I'm so enamoured of Opera that if I don't have at least four tabs open
I feel like a poser.
Monday, November 13, 2006
I'd rather be watching Firefly
I'm always curious about which way music's going to progress to next.
Shh, I'm trying hard to avoid pretension here.
Back in the tenth grade, when punk was beginning its super saturation of everything everywhere and we'd yet to see the machinations of dance-punk sweep over, again, everything, I was telling my friends that synthesizers were going to dominate music, popular or no, before long. Sure, affixing "core" to the end of everything was awesome, and it was great how every flippant chearleader and pot-smoking jock in my high school insisted that they loved punk and emo (Dashboard Confessional/My Chem/FOB and Bright Eyes singles respectively) to death, but it wasn't going to last. A few years down the road, I asserted, punk's going to be a joke and all the bands we listened to wouldn't have made the least bit of impact on music's real history.
Of course, I still wore my Sparta shirt and listened to Taking Back Sunday every single day. The point is I at least knew better. I put my TheSTART on and committed to memory the synthesized noodlings of The Cinema Eye and Thunderbirds Are Now! and the Stiletto Formal and I believed.
And now what've we got? Samples and synthesizers are standard issue building blocks of music, attached to every genre under the sun. Artists featuring neither aren't taken seriously unless they're doing the country or folk thing, and in that case a band's expected to at least feature myriad traditional and orcehstral instruments to even in out. I'm seeing the term "guitar band" used more and more as a pejorative. "Dance punk" seems to function like ipecac on anyone with ears, punk's going to be recovering from an overexposure hangover for the next several decades, and even mentioning emo is liable to get you shot dead.
I was right, motherfuckers.
I like it, really. The somewhat unpalatable glitch-folk of Grandaddy and A Sun Came/Enjoy Your Rabbit era Sufjan have given way to the absolutely gorgeous likes of Akron/Family, Chad Vangaalen, Grizzly Bear, and Califone. Synth and chamber-pop laden rock, born, I think, principally out of Canadian acts like the Unicorns and Broken Social Scene have flourished through too many artists to name. Electronica, more than any other, has absolutely exploded in popularity and sheer creativity. This has been a renassaince deliciously devoid of posturing and icon-dependence, and possesses a fantastically down to earth sensibility and warmth that I hope has got years left in it.
But my curiosity's piqued again. Where's music headed to now? Everyone I've talked to seems to have been astonished and pleased by the country and folk revivals of the past few years, but I don't think these fixations have much further to go. I don't see a reversion to guitar rock or punk as feasibly possible for at least another generation, so what else is there?
Metal's started to enjoy some more widespread and creative exposure, with bands like Sunn 0))), Agalloch, and Boris incorporating radically new approaches to a stereotypically burnt out genre, along with being increasingly well received amongst different audiences. But metal is extraordinarly tough to predict, and any branch of extreme music is going to have to overcome an absolutely staggering stigma amonst non-believers to go critical in the way punk and electronica have in the new millenium.
Is it going to be world music? I genuinely can't think of where else things could head. It plays directly into the current prediliction for folk and country, doesn't it?
I've got hints of this direction through Man Man and Gogol Bordello, but mostly I've been thinking this because I love Beirut's debut album, Gulag Orkestar, way too damn much.
Beirut has a population of one, officially. Zach Condon plays, and I quote: "Horns, violins, celli, ukuleles, mandolins, glockenspiels, drums, tambourines, congas, organs, pianos, clarinets and accordions (no guitars)." Holy shit, celli? I don't think that's a word. What pushes the arrangement into indie-kid wet dream territory is the contribution of two bonafide Neutral Milk Hoteliers in the mix. Jeremy Barnes and Heather Tros, presently of A Hawk And A Hacksaw, lend percussion and violin with the same poignancy and understated grace they brought to Mister Mangum's seminal masterpieces, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
It sounds like a mess on paper, and the unorthodox instrumentation can indeed sound a bit sloppy, but this is by and large a terrificly focussed, richly colourful swath of music. Sparklingly exotic balkan melodies are hijacked into beautiful pop songs of the Western persuasion. The tone is overwhelmingly depressed, but sad music has never, ever felt so organic and toe-tappingly alive. It's far, far removed from dance music, but I find it impossible to sit still through the album's indescribably lovely movements.
I tend to sway.
Zach's robust yet ineffably pubescent warble sets down an entirely new path of melancholia, and his miniature orchestra of vibrantly mournful brass and woodwind - and whatever category the accordian falls under - blends unbelievably well. There are lyrics here, but the most brilliantly poetic verses on the album feature Zach giving himself over entirely to worldless wailing, as in the excellent closer After the Curtain and album's heart Mount Wroclai (Idle Days).
Jeremy Barnes's simplistic but rich drumming, favouring a steady bass thump covered in various exulting cymbals, does a superb job of grounding the precocious Condon and his symphony. It's easy to recall NMH throughout, especially flavours of Holland, 1945, The Fool, and Ghost. Barnes is a truly excellent percussionist, and his work here showcases the drums as a viably beautiful sound, not simply a timepiece.
The album is remarkably consistent, and I'm sure the greatest criticism which will be levelled against is its tendency toward sameness. I can forgive it for that, personally. In fact, the greatest departure from Gulag Orkestar's magnificient sound, the near-electronica blips of Scenic World, turn out to be the album's weakest moment. The fantastically realized old-country sound that pervades most all the rest of the album is too good to let go of.
I'm tired and Douglas Coupland isn't helping one bit.
Shh, I'm trying hard to avoid pretension here.
Back in the tenth grade, when punk was beginning its super saturation of everything everywhere and we'd yet to see the machinations of dance-punk sweep over, again, everything, I was telling my friends that synthesizers were going to dominate music, popular or no, before long. Sure, affixing "core" to the end of everything was awesome, and it was great how every flippant chearleader and pot-smoking jock in my high school insisted that they loved punk and emo (Dashboard Confessional/My Chem/FOB and Bright Eyes singles respectively) to death, but it wasn't going to last. A few years down the road, I asserted, punk's going to be a joke and all the bands we listened to wouldn't have made the least bit of impact on music's real history.
Of course, I still wore my Sparta shirt and listened to Taking Back Sunday every single day. The point is I at least knew better. I put my TheSTART on and committed to memory the synthesized noodlings of The Cinema Eye and Thunderbirds Are Now! and the Stiletto Formal and I believed.
And now what've we got? Samples and synthesizers are standard issue building blocks of music, attached to every genre under the sun. Artists featuring neither aren't taken seriously unless they're doing the country or folk thing, and in that case a band's expected to at least feature myriad traditional and orcehstral instruments to even in out. I'm seeing the term "guitar band" used more and more as a pejorative. "Dance punk" seems to function like ipecac on anyone with ears, punk's going to be recovering from an overexposure hangover for the next several decades, and even mentioning emo is liable to get you shot dead.
I was right, motherfuckers.
I like it, really. The somewhat unpalatable glitch-folk of Grandaddy and A Sun Came/Enjoy Your Rabbit era Sufjan have given way to the absolutely gorgeous likes of Akron/Family, Chad Vangaalen, Grizzly Bear, and Califone. Synth and chamber-pop laden rock, born, I think, principally out of Canadian acts like the Unicorns and Broken Social Scene have flourished through too many artists to name. Electronica, more than any other, has absolutely exploded in popularity and sheer creativity. This has been a renassaince deliciously devoid of posturing and icon-dependence, and possesses a fantastically down to earth sensibility and warmth that I hope has got years left in it.
But my curiosity's piqued again. Where's music headed to now? Everyone I've talked to seems to have been astonished and pleased by the country and folk revivals of the past few years, but I don't think these fixations have much further to go. I don't see a reversion to guitar rock or punk as feasibly possible for at least another generation, so what else is there?
Metal's started to enjoy some more widespread and creative exposure, with bands like Sunn 0))), Agalloch, and Boris incorporating radically new approaches to a stereotypically burnt out genre, along with being increasingly well received amongst different audiences. But metal is extraordinarly tough to predict, and any branch of extreme music is going to have to overcome an absolutely staggering stigma amonst non-believers to go critical in the way punk and electronica have in the new millenium.
Is it going to be world music? I genuinely can't think of where else things could head. It plays directly into the current prediliction for folk and country, doesn't it?
I've got hints of this direction through Man Man and Gogol Bordello, but mostly I've been thinking this because I love Beirut's debut album, Gulag Orkestar, way too damn much.
Beirut has a population of one, officially. Zach Condon plays, and I quote: "Horns, violins, celli, ukuleles, mandolins, glockenspiels, drums, tambourines, congas, organs, pianos, clarinets and accordions (no guitars)." Holy shit, celli? I don't think that's a word. What pushes the arrangement into indie-kid wet dream territory is the contribution of two bonafide Neutral Milk Hoteliers in the mix. Jeremy Barnes and Heather Tros, presently of A Hawk And A Hacksaw, lend percussion and violin with the same poignancy and understated grace they brought to Mister Mangum's seminal masterpieces, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
It sounds like a mess on paper, and the unorthodox instrumentation can indeed sound a bit sloppy, but this is by and large a terrificly focussed, richly colourful swath of music. Sparklingly exotic balkan melodies are hijacked into beautiful pop songs of the Western persuasion. The tone is overwhelmingly depressed, but sad music has never, ever felt so organic and toe-tappingly alive. It's far, far removed from dance music, but I find it impossible to sit still through the album's indescribably lovely movements.
I tend to sway.
Zach's robust yet ineffably pubescent warble sets down an entirely new path of melancholia, and his miniature orchestra of vibrantly mournful brass and woodwind - and whatever category the accordian falls under - blends unbelievably well. There are lyrics here, but the most brilliantly poetic verses on the album feature Zach giving himself over entirely to worldless wailing, as in the excellent closer After the Curtain and album's heart Mount Wroclai (Idle Days).
Jeremy Barnes's simplistic but rich drumming, favouring a steady bass thump covered in various exulting cymbals, does a superb job of grounding the precocious Condon and his symphony. It's easy to recall NMH throughout, especially flavours of Holland, 1945, The Fool, and Ghost. Barnes is a truly excellent percussionist, and his work here showcases the drums as a viably beautiful sound, not simply a timepiece.
The album is remarkably consistent, and I'm sure the greatest criticism which will be levelled against is its tendency toward sameness. I can forgive it for that, personally. In fact, the greatest departure from Gulag Orkestar's magnificient sound, the near-electronica blips of Scenic World, turn out to be the album's weakest moment. The fantastically realized old-country sound that pervades most all the rest of the album is too good to let go of.
I'm tired and Douglas Coupland isn't helping one bit.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Gubbish
I will not preface any article herein with any variation of the phrase, "So, it's been a while."
I think anyone who's ever tried to keep a steady journal or diary or blog has had moments where they realize they've neglected their self-imposed charge and, stricken with guilt and returning to the pen or keyboard, they declare that this time will be different. They insist, I will not lose this one!
Nooo.
I think everyone's experienced the odd moment in their life where some subsurface ideas or notions, present but not fully realized or discussed, are suddenly brought into sharp relief by some revelation or another, and then you feel stupid.
Know what I thought? I thought that the wondrously smart and complex hip-hop found in 13 & God, Subtle, and cLOUDDEAD was so good. I just couldn't get over how the emcees from each had picked up the exact same nasal delivery style. I went so far as to encapsulate my unending praise for Subtle (which, to be fair, adequately answers the question of what jamming every genre ever together sounds like: awesome) by explaining to Jams that they were like a much deeper, more listenable 13 & God.
These outfits have the same freaking emcee. Bam.
It's too late an hour to write more. I feel silly.
I think anyone who's ever tried to keep a steady journal or diary or blog has had moments where they realize they've neglected their self-imposed charge and, stricken with guilt and returning to the pen or keyboard, they declare that this time will be different. They insist, I will not lose this one!
Nooo.
I think everyone's experienced the odd moment in their life where some subsurface ideas or notions, present but not fully realized or discussed, are suddenly brought into sharp relief by some revelation or another, and then you feel stupid.
Know what I thought? I thought that the wondrously smart and complex hip-hop found in 13 & God, Subtle, and cLOUDDEAD was so good. I just couldn't get over how the emcees from each had picked up the exact same nasal delivery style. I went so far as to encapsulate my unending praise for Subtle (which, to be fair, adequately answers the question of what jamming every genre ever together sounds like: awesome) by explaining to Jams that they were like a much deeper, more listenable 13 & God.
These outfits have the same freaking emcee. Bam.
It's too late an hour to write more. I feel silly.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Cast it at the setting sail
Ever since adopting Opera as a replacement for my trusty, but, let's face it, out-dated Internet Explorah, I've been creeped out by how deeply this tabbing thing affects my psyche.
Yes Jams, I know Firefox has that too. Opera is still better. I researched this.
The thing is, what do my tabs say about me? I've been thinking on this. Opera saves my tabs when I close them, y'know. I open up my browser in the morning and find my previous night's surfing waiting for me, like a young puppy eager to go for yet another walk. Today, I find that I have:
Scary Go Round
Cokemachineglow, open to their archive of reviews of artists beginning with the letter P.
A recipe for curried pumpkin soup that both intrigues and appalls.
My Google homepage, which is an escherian landscape of newsfeeds and wine advisories.
My last.fm, which I refresh feverishly ever time a song finishes to
bask in the permanent record of how awesome I am.
Also, I want to know what my weekly artists are, last.fm. Hurry up with it. My ego requires its peculiar nourishment.
Danielson is ridiculous.
I assumed from the deep blue abstractness of their album's cover, and this album's bleak, monosyllabic moniker, Ships, that the sound would be something like a post-rock Bright Eyes. I could imagine how it would proceed, all glacial instrumentation featuring some plucky, bearded troubadour wailing overtop about how he misses his shanty and rubber dingy. These things would've met destruction at the hands of a particularly stiff Atlantic gale, or some other nautical villain. Perhaps a whale.
Wrong, Josh.
Though it took me a while, and several intarwub sites, to figure it out, Danielson is not a man but a family. Their last name is Smith, and they are exceedingly far removed from any kind of dreary Newfoundlandian weather. As near as I can figure, they in fact come from a land containing nothing but sunny days and kittens. They wind up sounding like Sufjan Stevens if he were seven people and had never hit puberty, or the Decemberists if they focussed on making listenable music instead of altars to their own fictitious superiority. They most assuredly sound like The Fiery Furnaces if they were happy instead of insane.
The instrumentation is dense, rich, and inspired baroque-loving pop. There are flutes, and banjos, and fiddles, and more old-timey sounding instruments I can't confidently identify. Acoustic guitar and Daniel Smith's astonishing squeak form the spine of these songs, an intensely charming pairing of completely honest camp. His siblings' noodling with their attic of antique sounds fill things out nicely, an airy mass of sincerely catchy twee that would be sugary if it weren't so gleefully bizarre. Song structures wheel and jump in whatever format these people wish, verses giving way to sudden shouts and chorusses as one member or another feels the need to express how great they think life is.
It's tempting to call this family band silly, but that'd be unfair. Danielson sing songs about trumpets, ducks, girls and boys, lions, movies, and, yes, ships with such simple cheer and uncomplicated enthusiasm that one shouldn't sell them short in such a way. They're free-spirited and energetic, but they'll make you skip and clap, not send your breath racing. They're weird. Holy crap are they weird, and they're genuinely fine with that.
Did I Step On Your Trumpet is one of the catchiest, most listenable songs I've ever heard come out of this particular corner of indie-pop. In a subgenre bloated by monuments to songwriters' egoes, an unjaded romp like this is an absolute gem. A rollicking, old-West acoustic guitar rythm frames the Smiths' simplistic, bouncy bass, bare tap-and-plink percussion, and what I am positive is an exuberant xylophone. This all joyously underpins a call and response singalong about totally unrelated and barely comprehensible events. It's impossibly entertaining, and the smart, perfectly orchestrated music here betrays a massively talented band.
My Lion Sleeps Tonight is the closest approximation to a slow song on the album, but its beautifully mournful melody does not afford a moment's complacency. Daniel jerks and starts in his role as vocalist, his prepubescent throat not content to sing at any one tempo or rythm for more than a few bars. The lady-Smiths inject a lovely, wordless sigh into the background, a perfect counterpoint to Daniel's insanity, and a pretty method of tying his loose-brained wigging into a cohesive, gorgeous song. I do believe the low-end is held down by a single, grinning oboe.
Kids Pushing Kids carries this tactic further, into an upbeat, piano-laden number which I'm certain was recorded while Daniel was gesticulating wildly at the microphone. Small groups of strings, which appear on most tracks, never fully supercede vocals in the mix, but frolic with bass and piano to complete a frenetically colourful backdrop to the more overt bombast of the vocals. It's something akin to a country marching band following a lunatic hobo around town. Of course, they're an extremely creative marching band, and it's a hobo with uncanny musical sensibility.
Each song is a wholly unique expression of smiling nonsense, a cogent, unfettered ode to the sunnier feelings of being alive, and I could never rightly remark on the album as a whole without doing injustice to any number of songs. He Who Flattened Your Flame Is Getting Torched sounds exactly like The Arcade Fire playing an impromptu number about cowboys and pillbox hats at a country fair. Ships The Majestic Suffix punctuates a children's symphony on a caffeine high with heartbreakingly beautiful, medieval balladry, then it throws the two together and makes them sort out their differences.
Main bullet points? It's pretty, it's happy, and it's the best realization of orchestral twee I think is possible. It's not ironic or self-conscious, a welcome breath of fresh air in the indie world where both traits breed like rabbits.
Tonight I am going to eat bison and read Machiavelli. How deliciously evil.
Yes Jams, I know Firefox has that too. Opera is still better. I researched this.
The thing is, what do my tabs say about me? I've been thinking on this. Opera saves my tabs when I close them, y'know. I open up my browser in the morning and find my previous night's surfing waiting for me, like a young puppy eager to go for yet another walk. Today, I find that I have:
Scary Go Round
Cokemachineglow, open to their archive of reviews of artists beginning with the letter P.
A recipe for curried pumpkin soup that both intrigues and appalls.
My Google homepage, which is an escherian landscape of newsfeeds and wine advisories.
My last.fm, which I refresh feverishly ever time a song finishes to
bask in the permanent record of how awesome I am.
Also, I want to know what my weekly artists are, last.fm. Hurry up with it. My ego requires its peculiar nourishment.
Danielson is ridiculous.
I assumed from the deep blue abstractness of their album's cover, and this album's bleak, monosyllabic moniker, Ships, that the sound would be something like a post-rock Bright Eyes. I could imagine how it would proceed, all glacial instrumentation featuring some plucky, bearded troubadour wailing overtop about how he misses his shanty and rubber dingy. These things would've met destruction at the hands of a particularly stiff Atlantic gale, or some other nautical villain. Perhaps a whale.
Wrong, Josh.
Though it took me a while, and several intarwub sites, to figure it out, Danielson is not a man but a family. Their last name is Smith, and they are exceedingly far removed from any kind of dreary Newfoundlandian weather. As near as I can figure, they in fact come from a land containing nothing but sunny days and kittens. They wind up sounding like Sufjan Stevens if he were seven people and had never hit puberty, or the Decemberists if they focussed on making listenable music instead of altars to their own fictitious superiority. They most assuredly sound like The Fiery Furnaces if they were happy instead of insane.
The instrumentation is dense, rich, and inspired baroque-loving pop. There are flutes, and banjos, and fiddles, and more old-timey sounding instruments I can't confidently identify. Acoustic guitar and Daniel Smith's astonishing squeak form the spine of these songs, an intensely charming pairing of completely honest camp. His siblings' noodling with their attic of antique sounds fill things out nicely, an airy mass of sincerely catchy twee that would be sugary if it weren't so gleefully bizarre. Song structures wheel and jump in whatever format these people wish, verses giving way to sudden shouts and chorusses as one member or another feels the need to express how great they think life is.
It's tempting to call this family band silly, but that'd be unfair. Danielson sing songs about trumpets, ducks, girls and boys, lions, movies, and, yes, ships with such simple cheer and uncomplicated enthusiasm that one shouldn't sell them short in such a way. They're free-spirited and energetic, but they'll make you skip and clap, not send your breath racing. They're weird. Holy crap are they weird, and they're genuinely fine with that.
Did I Step On Your Trumpet is one of the catchiest, most listenable songs I've ever heard come out of this particular corner of indie-pop. In a subgenre bloated by monuments to songwriters' egoes, an unjaded romp like this is an absolute gem. A rollicking, old-West acoustic guitar rythm frames the Smiths' simplistic, bouncy bass, bare tap-and-plink percussion, and what I am positive is an exuberant xylophone. This all joyously underpins a call and response singalong about totally unrelated and barely comprehensible events. It's impossibly entertaining, and the smart, perfectly orchestrated music here betrays a massively talented band.
My Lion Sleeps Tonight is the closest approximation to a slow song on the album, but its beautifully mournful melody does not afford a moment's complacency. Daniel jerks and starts in his role as vocalist, his prepubescent throat not content to sing at any one tempo or rythm for more than a few bars. The lady-Smiths inject a lovely, wordless sigh into the background, a perfect counterpoint to Daniel's insanity, and a pretty method of tying his loose-brained wigging into a cohesive, gorgeous song. I do believe the low-end is held down by a single, grinning oboe.
Kids Pushing Kids carries this tactic further, into an upbeat, piano-laden number which I'm certain was recorded while Daniel was gesticulating wildly at the microphone. Small groups of strings, which appear on most tracks, never fully supercede vocals in the mix, but frolic with bass and piano to complete a frenetically colourful backdrop to the more overt bombast of the vocals. It's something akin to a country marching band following a lunatic hobo around town. Of course, they're an extremely creative marching band, and it's a hobo with uncanny musical sensibility.
Each song is a wholly unique expression of smiling nonsense, a cogent, unfettered ode to the sunnier feelings of being alive, and I could never rightly remark on the album as a whole without doing injustice to any number of songs. He Who Flattened Your Flame Is Getting Torched sounds exactly like The Arcade Fire playing an impromptu number about cowboys and pillbox hats at a country fair. Ships The Majestic Suffix punctuates a children's symphony on a caffeine high with heartbreakingly beautiful, medieval balladry, then it throws the two together and makes them sort out their differences.
Main bullet points? It's pretty, it's happy, and it's the best realization of orchestral twee I think is possible. It's not ironic or self-conscious, a welcome breath of fresh air in the indie world where both traits breed like rabbits.
Tonight I am going to eat bison and read Machiavelli. How deliciously evil.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Locks and doors with locks in them
Jams insists that my perseverence in locking my bedroom door is both aggravating and offensive to our house-mate relationship. I have countered this complaint by doing the knock-knock-barge routine to her, the routine which prompted me to utilize the friendly little lock of mine in the first place. You all know the scenario. Someone knocks just long enough for you to let out an unintelligible syllable and then comes on in.
It is perilous.
I'm hoping my campaign of braggarty awkwardness will bring about an age of security, but then I am a bit of a romantic.
I like to cook. I treat marinading chicken as though I am the midwife of deliciousness into the physical realm, and tend to my lovely creations with an affection that utilizes a scrumptious branch of science. Food science. I am, as a matter of fact, only writing as a means of distracting my self from the fact that it is not yet six o'clock and thus presently unseemly to be laying about with pans and produce.
Do you find yourself adopting the mannerisms and speech of whatever author or television series you're currently immersed in? I've been pressing through the archives of Scary Go Round for the past few days and now my brain thinks it's English. I unthinkingly called my (genuinely) English friend Pat "boyo" the other day and he threatened to bring a violent end to my existence.
I can't help it!
On an unrelated point: fuck Scientific American.
Who do those guys think they are? They sling heart-stoppingly amazing headlines around like nobody's business, when nothing interesting (or comprehensible) has actually happened in the world. Seeing "Invisibility Cloak Sees Light of Day" and "First Teleportation Between Light and Matter" floating around their RSS feeds sent me, an openly nerdy man, into immediate fits of apoplexy. Then I read the articles. Let me assure you of this: their headlines are lies!
An invisibility cloak, eh? This, to a poor little pleib like myself, implies a device that might shroud something and, in doing so, render it invisible. Invisible - not visible to, you know, vision. What the SA in fact mean by this is that some scientists somewhere have constructed an unwieldly array of concentric metal circles that can make whatever's in its centre a little bit less easy to see when one is looking at it through the microwave spectrum of light. You can still tell something's there, but it's fudged a bit. Oooo... invisible.
Yuh huh. Handy! I'll be sure to slap one of those on my person to avoid detection by my enemies' many microwave-based viewing systems. I'll leave it to faith that they won't notice the enormous fiberglass ring orbitting my body.
Teleportation between light and matter sounds like Star Trek teleporters are on their way to production, right? Turns out what happened was scientists shot a laser at another laser, which changed the way a cloud of cesium atoms was vibrating.
...
I am imagining a slovenly Scientific American editor, his haggard skeleton of a body wrapped in a dress shirt and brown clip-on tie, his day old stubble giving way to gravy stains and unnoticed bits of chip. He fancies he is better than the unwashed masses whom lack prestigious posts in important magazines, those people who maybe picked on him when he was a schoolboy. He imagines these lower forms of life as sifting through the internets late at night, clinging to the light of his great publication for word of the greatness of their betters. And this disgusts him. He wants to make anyone who dares enter his supreme corner of the internetverse suffer, and he deftly tempts them into soul-crushing tedium with his shiny, shiny titles. With his left hand he clutches a can of soda, and with his dorito-cheese encrusted right, delivers misery.
Fuck off, Scientific American!
Tonight's menu includes garlic potatoes and garlic chicken. And widdle grape tomatoes which I'm sure I can work garlic into somehow.
Mmm.
It is perilous.
I'm hoping my campaign of braggarty awkwardness will bring about an age of security, but then I am a bit of a romantic.
I like to cook. I treat marinading chicken as though I am the midwife of deliciousness into the physical realm, and tend to my lovely creations with an affection that utilizes a scrumptious branch of science. Food science. I am, as a matter of fact, only writing as a means of distracting my self from the fact that it is not yet six o'clock and thus presently unseemly to be laying about with pans and produce.
Do you find yourself adopting the mannerisms and speech of whatever author or television series you're currently immersed in? I've been pressing through the archives of Scary Go Round for the past few days and now my brain thinks it's English. I unthinkingly called my (genuinely) English friend Pat "boyo" the other day and he threatened to bring a violent end to my existence.
I can't help it!
On an unrelated point: fuck Scientific American.
Who do those guys think they are? They sling heart-stoppingly amazing headlines around like nobody's business, when nothing interesting (or comprehensible) has actually happened in the world. Seeing "Invisibility Cloak Sees Light of Day" and "First Teleportation Between Light and Matter" floating around their RSS feeds sent me, an openly nerdy man, into immediate fits of apoplexy. Then I read the articles. Let me assure you of this: their headlines are lies!
An invisibility cloak, eh? This, to a poor little pleib like myself, implies a device that might shroud something and, in doing so, render it invisible. Invisible - not visible to, you know, vision. What the SA in fact mean by this is that some scientists somewhere have constructed an unwieldly array of concentric metal circles that can make whatever's in its centre a little bit less easy to see when one is looking at it through the microwave spectrum of light. You can still tell something's there, but it's fudged a bit. Oooo... invisible.
Yuh huh. Handy! I'll be sure to slap one of those on my person to avoid detection by my enemies' many microwave-based viewing systems. I'll leave it to faith that they won't notice the enormous fiberglass ring orbitting my body.
Teleportation between light and matter sounds like Star Trek teleporters are on their way to production, right? Turns out what happened was scientists shot a laser at another laser, which changed the way a cloud of cesium atoms was vibrating.
...
I am imagining a slovenly Scientific American editor, his haggard skeleton of a body wrapped in a dress shirt and brown clip-on tie, his day old stubble giving way to gravy stains and unnoticed bits of chip. He fancies he is better than the unwashed masses whom lack prestigious posts in important magazines, those people who maybe picked on him when he was a schoolboy. He imagines these lower forms of life as sifting through the internets late at night, clinging to the light of his great publication for word of the greatness of their betters. And this disgusts him. He wants to make anyone who dares enter his supreme corner of the internetverse suffer, and he deftly tempts them into soul-crushing tedium with his shiny, shiny titles. With his left hand he clutches a can of soda, and with his dorito-cheese encrusted right, delivers misery.
Fuck off, Scientific American!
Tonight's menu includes garlic potatoes and garlic chicken. And widdle grape tomatoes which I'm sure I can work garlic into somehow.
Mmm.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Sloppy make outs with bands no one likes
Liisa finds me the nicest things. She introduced me to Thrice years ago, and today to the comic I stole up thurr.
I wouldn't call Thrice a guilty pleasure, but I do have some. I have a 30 Seconds to Mars tshirt in regular rotation, despite their new album being nowhere near as good as the first (:P) . I listen to Millencollin, Rob Dougan, and Feeder when the mood strikes me. Lacuna Coil is delicious Italian femme-death-pop, and the entire genre of power-metal makes me giddy.
Honestly, with bands like Goblin Cock and Demons & Wizards, who couldn't love it?
Brass tacks and other serious metaphors
Last night I used the word exacerbate in casual dialogue.
I felt like a golden god.
My mom dropped by the university yesterday, it reminded me keenly of what an alien landscape this place can be. Family living is unbelievably different from school-livin', innit? I miss my momma.
Words cannot express my glee over the early birthday present I received today from my most excellent fish, Krista. Marylin Manson covered This Is Halloween. I'm not overly enamoured of
Mister Manson, but hearing a metal cover of that song was an actual, written down goal of mine. Something to do by the age of thirty, you see. The thrill I felt upon listening was
religious, and honestly? I cried a little.
Okay. I'm having trouble writing about the hip bands that a hip boy like myself actually listens to on a regular basis, and seem to keep coming back to my unusual mainstream fixations. I'll try to fix that, but I simply can't shut up about Thrice's Vheissu. Jams hasn't heard the end of it, and I don't intend to stop until I've convinced at least one freaking member of the indie community that this album is worth a damn.
It's easy to see the problem with the album. No one could be expected to listen to it, and in the liner notes the band reports that they couldn't even find a producer willing to touch their new direction. Screamo was waning rapidly, and their seminal The Artist In The Ambulance had unjustly been touted as one of the premiere results of that movement. Very few had paid attention to the bands insistence that they didn't care for the screamo fad one bit, and strove to be more of an Isis or Pelican than a My Chemical Romance. With a long break between albums, apparently full of reflection and musical experimentation, the band tried to convince the musical community of their larger-than-genre ambitions and hard-earned maturity, but who was going to listen?
Anyone willing to listen to the refinement and grandiosity of Vheissu has to overcome the appallingly negative emo-stigma that's so unpopular nowadays (some would say finally). Likewise, such a huge component of the band's fanbase was composed of skinny, fad-beholden emo kids now either moving on to "better bands like teh awesome Panic! at the Disco!" or hitting puberty and diving headlong into faux-esoteric college rock standards like Sufjan or the Decemberists (Which no one knows about and you wouldn't understand because they are sooo way artistic you pleibs), that these poor men couldn't hope not to make martyrs of themselves.
Vheissu is smart, literate, brilliantly aggressive, and beautiful. It reminds me intensely of the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan in execution. Both outfits released a blistering, album-opening single too reminiscient of their established style, then proceeded to craft albums unlike anything they'd ever produced.
Every man in Thrice's solid quartet is a master of their respective instrument. Riley Breckenridge is one of punk's best drummers, and his work on Vheissu far outshines my standard favourite's (Mark Gajadhar of the Blood Brothers) latest work. Listen to any track Vheissu has to offer and tell me you aren't impressed, from his subdued electronica-inspired beats on Atlantic - an unbelievably fine accent to a chillingly perfect ballad - to his fiercly technical runaway train assaults on the album's heavier tracks, like Image of the Invisible and Hold Fast Hope. There's something unidentifiable about this drummer. Every track he lays down seems heart-wrenchingly weightless.
Teppei Teranishi is an absolutely outstanding guitar prodigy, a brilliant, consistently creative guitarist not receivingn half the praise he deserves. His reverb-drenched solo on Of Dust And Nations serves as my computer's bootup sound, and will for a long time to come. This man is unwilling to allow a single basic chord dirty his instrument, content instead to send astonishing firework melodies and gleaming siren leads skipping across frontman Dustin Kensrue's denser noise.
I feel woefully inadequate in describing the performance of any guitarist, any where, and Teppei defies my abilities to the extreme.
I don't have time to discuss the bassist. He's atmospheric and dreamy.
I've long thought that the band's output was somewhat less than the sum of its parts, but Vheissu is a beautifully coherent effort not tied down by its base components. The album enchants me. Its equisitely elaborated theme and imagery is that of a near-future, 1984-copping political apocalypse. Some critics have tried to reduce the band's message to a reaction against the emo scene they've tried to escape - they're mistaken. Herein is a celebration of human value, an everyman's revolt against assimilation, an endlessly poignant lament and plot against the machinations of military and politician and corporation. It is the music of refugees, prisoners, wounded, and slaves, and of their unity, and their rising up.
It evokes the frustration of down-trodden youth, the manipulation of intellect and emotion, the beauty of immaterial belief, the lost-meaning of freedom and safety, the obscured value of a human life.
Vheissu is an incredibly articulate voicing of our generation's fear and oppression under the ever-swelling poltical malfeasance and corporate cheapness that envelops us. This record is vital to me for this reason - I know of no one untouched by such feelings, but few can give release to them in the way Thrice does.
And people would acknowledge this if they, you know, listened to the damn thing.
Tickets to call my last few paragraphs stupidly romantic and overly gushy must be bought through listening to Vheissu all the way through, jerks.
I think it sounds better when there's snow falling.
I felt like a golden god.
My mom dropped by the university yesterday, it reminded me keenly of what an alien landscape this place can be. Family living is unbelievably different from school-livin', innit? I miss my momma.
Words cannot express my glee over the early birthday present I received today from my most excellent fish, Krista. Marylin Manson covered This Is Halloween. I'm not overly enamoured of
Mister Manson, but hearing a metal cover of that song was an actual, written down goal of mine. Something to do by the age of thirty, you see. The thrill I felt upon listening was
religious, and honestly? I cried a little.
Okay. I'm having trouble writing about the hip bands that a hip boy like myself actually listens to on a regular basis, and seem to keep coming back to my unusual mainstream fixations. I'll try to fix that, but I simply can't shut up about Thrice's Vheissu. Jams hasn't heard the end of it, and I don't intend to stop until I've convinced at least one freaking member of the indie community that this album is worth a damn.
It's easy to see the problem with the album. No one could be expected to listen to it, and in the liner notes the band reports that they couldn't even find a producer willing to touch their new direction. Screamo was waning rapidly, and their seminal The Artist In The Ambulance had unjustly been touted as one of the premiere results of that movement. Very few had paid attention to the bands insistence that they didn't care for the screamo fad one bit, and strove to be more of an Isis or Pelican than a My Chemical Romance. With a long break between albums, apparently full of reflection and musical experimentation, the band tried to convince the musical community of their larger-than-genre ambitions and hard-earned maturity, but who was going to listen?
Anyone willing to listen to the refinement and grandiosity of Vheissu has to overcome the appallingly negative emo-stigma that's so unpopular nowadays (some would say finally). Likewise, such a huge component of the band's fanbase was composed of skinny, fad-beholden emo kids now either moving on to "better bands like teh awesome Panic! at the Disco!" or hitting puberty and diving headlong into faux-esoteric college rock standards like Sufjan or the Decemberists (Which no one knows about and you wouldn't understand because they are sooo way artistic you pleibs), that these poor men couldn't hope not to make martyrs of themselves.
Vheissu is smart, literate, brilliantly aggressive, and beautiful. It reminds me intensely of the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan in execution. Both outfits released a blistering, album-opening single too reminiscient of their established style, then proceeded to craft albums unlike anything they'd ever produced.
Every man in Thrice's solid quartet is a master of their respective instrument. Riley Breckenridge is one of punk's best drummers, and his work on Vheissu far outshines my standard favourite's (Mark Gajadhar of the Blood Brothers) latest work. Listen to any track Vheissu has to offer and tell me you aren't impressed, from his subdued electronica-inspired beats on Atlantic - an unbelievably fine accent to a chillingly perfect ballad - to his fiercly technical runaway train assaults on the album's heavier tracks, like Image of the Invisible and Hold Fast Hope. There's something unidentifiable about this drummer. Every track he lays down seems heart-wrenchingly weightless.
Teppei Teranishi is an absolutely outstanding guitar prodigy, a brilliant, consistently creative guitarist not receivingn half the praise he deserves. His reverb-drenched solo on Of Dust And Nations serves as my computer's bootup sound, and will for a long time to come. This man is unwilling to allow a single basic chord dirty his instrument, content instead to send astonishing firework melodies and gleaming siren leads skipping across frontman Dustin Kensrue's denser noise.
I feel woefully inadequate in describing the performance of any guitarist, any where, and Teppei defies my abilities to the extreme.
I don't have time to discuss the bassist. He's atmospheric and dreamy.
I've long thought that the band's output was somewhat less than the sum of its parts, but Vheissu is a beautifully coherent effort not tied down by its base components. The album enchants me. Its equisitely elaborated theme and imagery is that of a near-future, 1984-copping political apocalypse. Some critics have tried to reduce the band's message to a reaction against the emo scene they've tried to escape - they're mistaken. Herein is a celebration of human value, an everyman's revolt against assimilation, an endlessly poignant lament and plot against the machinations of military and politician and corporation. It is the music of refugees, prisoners, wounded, and slaves, and of their unity, and their rising up.
It evokes the frustration of down-trodden youth, the manipulation of intellect and emotion, the beauty of immaterial belief, the lost-meaning of freedom and safety, the obscured value of a human life.
Vheissu is an incredibly articulate voicing of our generation's fear and oppression under the ever-swelling poltical malfeasance and corporate cheapness that envelops us. This record is vital to me for this reason - I know of no one untouched by such feelings, but few can give release to them in the way Thrice does.
And people would acknowledge this if they, you know, listened to the damn thing.
Tickets to call my last few paragraphs stupidly romantic and overly gushy must be bought through listening to Vheissu all the way through, jerks.
I think it sounds better when there's snow falling.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
He's a clarinetist by trade
William Basinksi is probably the coolest experimental composer ever. Not that there's terribly stiff competition for that title.
I'll explain the concept behind his Disintegration Loops later, but needless to say it is the most creative thing I have ever heard. Also, I took a bit of a nap whilst listening to a few of his Loops, and I swear it entered my body, slowed my heart rate to well below a healthy bpm, and took me on an intergalactic journey.
It is the music that planets would make had they the tools to do so.
I'll explain the concept behind his Disintegration Loops later, but needless to say it is the most creative thing I have ever heard. Also, I took a bit of a nap whilst listening to a few of his Loops, and I swear it entered my body, slowed my heart rate to well below a healthy bpm, and took me on an intergalactic journey.
It is the music that planets would make had they the tools to do so.
Disintegration Loops
Paper writing is weird. I didn't so much stay up all night writing as I just got up hours before the sun did. More editting to be done, as well as effective sowing of quotations, but I've plenty of time and a surplus of words. Being immersed in scholarly activity again is invigorating.
I've also amassed a veritable army of cd's to review, some of which will be appearing 'round these parts shortly. I don't know if I'll ever get to all of them, but I will say that Grizzly Bear, Ellen Allien & Apparat, William Basinski, The Horror The Horror, Malajube, Mr. Lif, the Heartless Bastards, Delta 5, Danielson, Herbert, The Fucking Champs, Tiger Trap, The Softies, Talulah Gosh, Susanna And The Magical Orchestra, and My Dad Vs Yours are all... very good.
That's not even all that I could talk about, it's just the ones I've really liked.
I also got my mitts on the Sunn 0)))/Boris collaboration I was so excited about earlier. I feel bad about not waiting for Halloween, but the album is more than effective at obliterating all vestiages of happiness from my soul anyway.
It's totally wicked you guys.
I've also amassed a veritable army of cd's to review, some of which will be appearing 'round these parts shortly. I don't know if I'll ever get to all of them, but I will say that Grizzly Bear, Ellen Allien & Apparat, William Basinski, The Horror The Horror, Malajube, Mr. Lif, the Heartless Bastards, Delta 5, Danielson, Herbert, The Fucking Champs, Tiger Trap, The Softies, Talulah Gosh, Susanna And The Magical Orchestra, and My Dad Vs Yours are all... very good.
That's not even all that I could talk about, it's just the ones I've really liked.
I also got my mitts on the Sunn 0)))/Boris collaboration I was so excited about earlier. I feel bad about not waiting for Halloween, but the album is more than effective at obliterating all vestiages of happiness from my soul anyway.
It's totally wicked you guys.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Blitzkrieg!
The first significant wash of assignments and exams has arrived, and I'm courageously plucking away at a particularly troublesome english paper. It's a 1000 word snooze for contemporary lit, which I'm being a bit of a cock about because, as the record will show, I recently turned out 1400 words without even batting an eye. And I'm assuming my output on the matter of And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead will be identical to that of the treatment of women by poet Larkin and novelist Amis. Because, y'know, they're both interesting.
See if you can spot the holes in my assumptions.I'm banishing myself from the blogosphere for my own good, until such time as the present rush is over with. I need to treat my school work with a modicum more respect than I did last year, if I'm to pierce the covetted 80% average barrier. Although, and the record will show this as well, I was just 2.5% shy of this last year without actually trying or paying attention.
Someday I'll herein recount the tale of the philosophy final and the Whole Bottle of Cointreau.
One thing before I go. Am I the only one who harbours deep, nearly religious suspicions over their mp3 player's random-play feature? WMP played +/-'s All I Do SO MUCH since I acquired that album that I deleted it minutes ago out of sheer alarm. It was just unseemly for one song to come up so often amidst a library that exceeds nine thousand tracks.
+/-'s All I Have To Do Is Make You just came on.
My computer is doing this on purpose and it is terrifying me.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
In which our hero abandons his aspirations for journalistic legitimacy
I've changed my mind and want her for my birthday.
I Want To Sing is the single sexiest song of all time. Fuck Barry White, I'm talkin' Regina.
Shut up you guys. I just wrote a fourteen hundred word essay ripping on one of my favourite bands. Give me a break.
I want to take a fuckin' bath.
PS Send Regina.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Uncontrollable falling down syndrome
I'm devastated that Indie Rock fans 'round the globe must now be engaged in a discussion very similar to the one I've just been having with my music chum, Jams.
Josh, "What the fuck is with this new ToD album? It's like they forgot what they were doing, or how to use their instruments or some shit."
Jess, "I just... it's just not good."
Josh, "Okay. This last track is pretty good. In a not-interesting-even-a-little-tiny-bit kind of way."
Jess, "Have you listened to the whole thing?"
Josh, "No... no, I got through the first two tracks and got pissed off. Okay, okay I haven't listened to the title track here. It's the title track, it has to be good, right?"
Jess, "Well... usually."
The title track from ToD's new album So Divided plays.
Josh, "..."
Jess, "..."
Josh, "Okay, so this is like a big joke where ToD... they, they must have released a fake album to piss off every body who ever liked them because they hate their fans."
Jess, "Yeah..."
Josh, "This is shit."
Jess, "It's Shit."
Josh, "For fuck's sake, this sounds like Wings."
That's pretty well exactly how our intake of So Divided has proceeded.
While all of the tracks are certainly listenable, they occupy an entirely new realm of music to my ear. The kind that is able to make you forget that you are in fact hearing music and is better processed by that part of your mind accustomed to ignoring CNN and CMT while you flip around for cartoons to watch. I may've actually listened to the album in its entirety already, I don't know. I can barely muster a solid memory or words to describe any of it except, "It bored the hell out of me and I forgot where I was for a forty five minutes
That's a little harsh, but this is coming from a jilted fan. Trail of Dead will always be among the canon of My Favourite Bands Evarr, but it's looking as though I'm going to have to excise the memories I have of everything post-Source Tags & Codes to keep them there. Hold on, Secret of Elena's Tomb came out after ST&C, so everything after that. I don't know what happened to these men after 2003, whether they suffered from the overreaching nature of their endless ambition, or any such wankery as Pitchfork and co. would have you believe, but any listener of sense must agree that it's been a decidedly downhill journey for the Trail ever since the last few seconds of the flawless Intelligence ticked away.
Jess, "Noo!"
Okay, let's talk Worlds Apart. I loved that album fiercely for the first track and a half. Big opener, I love it. Still gets big reactions at parties. Nothing beyond that is genuinely worth a damn. Oh, there's that one track where Conrad wheezes about rock and roll and the twin towers or something. And he swears at schoolchildren. Rock and rollll.
Get your own blog, Jams.
There are, admittedly some drops of old-school ToD pizazz to be found, I think. The album is generally a blur of half baked annoyances, which confusingly underemploy every single piece of talent ToD have in their arsenal. For example: why, WHY does this band have two drummers when every track proceeds at a stately 4/4 high hat tappin' beat? It's like -
I'm sorry, the song Eight Day Hell just came on and I am now weeping uncontrollably. The band has finished raping Wings and, not being sated of its appetite for godawful blandness, is now violating the Polyphonic Spree in all of its four hundred members worth of orificii.
Agh. As I was saying. We all know this band has talent. Technical ability, sharp songwriting, and Conrad's unique bad-but-good singing - all this skill couldn't have just sauntered away in the off-season. Worlds Apart was blaise, but brought the chops. Said chops simply weren't put to the same effect they had been on previous outings. So Divided, even with such talent at the ready, is confoundingly devoid of any massively hooky guitars, prog rock dynamics, creatively utilized strings, or savage drum beat downs which once made the band great. Kevin Allen and Conrad's legendary guitars are so horrificly underused, and on many tracks actually, unthinkably absent, that these men ought to be slapped with a heavy fine. Conrad's voice, unfortunately thrust into the spotlight as it is, is nowhere near strong enough to carry the album, and makes one beg to have it once again clothed in a thick wall of noise. The man is whiny.
These new songs are so hopelessly toned down it's comparable to building a spaceship out of cardboard boxes and tin cans. You are supposed to be doing something amazing, and you will never do it in this way.
I think I was trying to talk about the album's good parts.
They are there, but only briefly. I've been listening to Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory on repeat, trying to imagine that the band can still produce compelling vocal strains and polyrythmic harmonies like they once did. It is, like all other tracks, extremely underdone, but succeeds in a minimalist way that recalls Counting Off the Days. A little bit. It even reminded me, for a moment, of David Bowie's Five Years, as Conrad pipes his imitation-British wail over a meandering rock piano. Then again, unlike all the other tracks on So Divided, this is a freaking Guided by Voices cover, which would be a delightfully ridiculous premise if they hadn't dropped it smack in the middle of the rest of this album.
Life, in a similar manner, is a foot-stomping singalong that reaches achingly toward busting out ST&C calibre guitar crashes, but never does. The drums thump along with acceptable oomph, but I still cannot fathom the two drummers who brought us Baudelaire, or Relative Ways, or even Will You Smile Again? could plod along at such a lacklust pace. What's worse, this is typical of all the songs on So Divided. The band positively teeters on the brink of cranking it to eleven, but inexplicably reel themselves in to fart out another lounge-pop song not worthy to be an Oasis b-side.
It sounds like the band is being held hostage, they and their skills tied up and forced to play gaunt musical tributes to other, lesser bands under threat of immediate and painful execution. They try to break free, they do, but are restrained by pistol-whipping and broom-sodomy.
I'd forgive them if this were true. This album really is bad.
Naked Sun is a terrible faux-blues rock number that attempts to channel Led Zeppelin but simply sounds amateurish. I have never heard such a poor incorporation of woodwind into rock, and I once listened to a Dream Theatre record all the way through.
Wasted State of Mind packs what must be the most ridiculously poor imitation of tribal drumming ever put to tape, accompanied by jarringly out of place piano. I don't know what ToD drummer #2 was smacking around, but it sounds like a small wooden bongo. This track, ironically enough, eventually stumbles into what is arguably the album's most memorable moment, a soaring vocal chant that is at least as good as anything on Worlds Apart. But, again, the band simply does not rock. They do not even kind of rock. This is a rockless album, inoffensive and impotent. I wanted to love it, but there is sincerely nothing to love about a limp-wristed voyage through wankery.
In fact, Wasted State of Mind is capped off by an accordian solo. Case in point.
So, now the band that was once the definition of tightness, heaviness, and melody in the indie genre has made a record suitable for the "Adult Contemporary" pile, and that saddens me beyond words. It's difficult to believe that musicians who used to be renowned for their insatiable ferocity, a band that would destroy their equipment, their bodies, and any worldy stage simply as an expression of their unrelenting intensity, could be reduced to this.
But we'll always have Source Tags & Codes.
Josh, "What the fuck is with this new ToD album? It's like they forgot what they were doing, or how to use their instruments or some shit."
Jess, "I just... it's just not good."
Josh, "Okay. This last track is pretty good. In a not-interesting-even-a-little-tiny-bit kind of way."
Jess, "Have you listened to the whole thing?"
Josh, "No... no, I got through the first two tracks and got pissed off. Okay, okay I haven't listened to the title track here. It's the title track, it has to be good, right?"
Jess, "Well... usually."
The title track from ToD's new album So Divided plays.
Josh, "..."
Jess, "..."
Josh, "Okay, so this is like a big joke where ToD... they, they must have released a fake album to piss off every body who ever liked them because they hate their fans."
Jess, "Yeah..."
Josh, "This is shit."
Jess, "It's Shit."
Josh, "For fuck's sake, this sounds like Wings."
That's pretty well exactly how our intake of So Divided has proceeded.
While all of the tracks are certainly listenable, they occupy an entirely new realm of music to my ear. The kind that is able to make you forget that you are in fact hearing music and is better processed by that part of your mind accustomed to ignoring CNN and CMT while you flip around for cartoons to watch. I may've actually listened to the album in its entirety already, I don't know. I can barely muster a solid memory or words to describe any of it except, "It bored the hell out of me and I forgot where I was for a forty five minutes
That's a little harsh, but this is coming from a jilted fan. Trail of Dead will always be among the canon of My Favourite Bands Evarr, but it's looking as though I'm going to have to excise the memories I have of everything post-Source Tags & Codes to keep them there. Hold on, Secret of Elena's Tomb came out after ST&C, so everything after that. I don't know what happened to these men after 2003, whether they suffered from the overreaching nature of their endless ambition, or any such wankery as Pitchfork and co. would have you believe, but any listener of sense must agree that it's been a decidedly downhill journey for the Trail ever since the last few seconds of the flawless Intelligence ticked away.
Jess, "Noo!"
Okay, let's talk Worlds Apart. I loved that album fiercely for the first track and a half. Big opener, I love it. Still gets big reactions at parties. Nothing beyond that is genuinely worth a damn. Oh, there's that one track where Conrad wheezes about rock and roll and the twin towers or something. And he swears at schoolchildren. Rock and rollll.
Get your own blog, Jams.
There are, admittedly some drops of old-school ToD pizazz to be found, I think. The album is generally a blur of half baked annoyances, which confusingly underemploy every single piece of talent ToD have in their arsenal. For example: why, WHY does this band have two drummers when every track proceeds at a stately 4/4 high hat tappin' beat? It's like -
I'm sorry, the song Eight Day Hell just came on and I am now weeping uncontrollably. The band has finished raping Wings and, not being sated of its appetite for godawful blandness, is now violating the Polyphonic Spree in all of its four hundred members worth of orificii.
Agh. As I was saying. We all know this band has talent. Technical ability, sharp songwriting, and Conrad's unique bad-but-good singing - all this skill couldn't have just sauntered away in the off-season. Worlds Apart was blaise, but brought the chops. Said chops simply weren't put to the same effect they had been on previous outings. So Divided, even with such talent at the ready, is confoundingly devoid of any massively hooky guitars, prog rock dynamics, creatively utilized strings, or savage drum beat downs which once made the band great. Kevin Allen and Conrad's legendary guitars are so horrificly underused, and on many tracks actually, unthinkably absent, that these men ought to be slapped with a heavy fine. Conrad's voice, unfortunately thrust into the spotlight as it is, is nowhere near strong enough to carry the album, and makes one beg to have it once again clothed in a thick wall of noise. The man is whiny.
These new songs are so hopelessly toned down it's comparable to building a spaceship out of cardboard boxes and tin cans. You are supposed to be doing something amazing, and you will never do it in this way.
I think I was trying to talk about the album's good parts.
They are there, but only briefly. I've been listening to Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory on repeat, trying to imagine that the band can still produce compelling vocal strains and polyrythmic harmonies like they once did. It is, like all other tracks, extremely underdone, but succeeds in a minimalist way that recalls Counting Off the Days. A little bit. It even reminded me, for a moment, of David Bowie's Five Years, as Conrad pipes his imitation-British wail over a meandering rock piano. Then again, unlike all the other tracks on So Divided, this is a freaking Guided by Voices cover, which would be a delightfully ridiculous premise if they hadn't dropped it smack in the middle of the rest of this album.
Life, in a similar manner, is a foot-stomping singalong that reaches achingly toward busting out ST&C calibre guitar crashes, but never does. The drums thump along with acceptable oomph, but I still cannot fathom the two drummers who brought us Baudelaire, or Relative Ways, or even Will You Smile Again? could plod along at such a lacklust pace. What's worse, this is typical of all the songs on So Divided. The band positively teeters on the brink of cranking it to eleven, but inexplicably reel themselves in to fart out another lounge-pop song not worthy to be an Oasis b-side.
It sounds like the band is being held hostage, they and their skills tied up and forced to play gaunt musical tributes to other, lesser bands under threat of immediate and painful execution. They try to break free, they do, but are restrained by pistol-whipping and broom-sodomy.
I'd forgive them if this were true. This album really is bad.
Naked Sun is a terrible faux-blues rock number that attempts to channel Led Zeppelin but simply sounds amateurish. I have never heard such a poor incorporation of woodwind into rock, and I once listened to a Dream Theatre record all the way through.
Wasted State of Mind packs what must be the most ridiculously poor imitation of tribal drumming ever put to tape, accompanied by jarringly out of place piano. I don't know what ToD drummer #2 was smacking around, but it sounds like a small wooden bongo. This track, ironically enough, eventually stumbles into what is arguably the album's most memorable moment, a soaring vocal chant that is at least as good as anything on Worlds Apart. But, again, the band simply does not rock. They do not even kind of rock. This is a rockless album, inoffensive and impotent. I wanted to love it, but there is sincerely nothing to love about a limp-wristed voyage through wankery.
In fact, Wasted State of Mind is capped off by an accordian solo. Case in point.
So, now the band that was once the definition of tightness, heaviness, and melody in the indie genre has made a record suitable for the "Adult Contemporary" pile, and that saddens me beyond words. It's difficult to believe that musicians who used to be renowned for their insatiable ferocity, a band that would destroy their equipment, their bodies, and any worldy stage simply as an expression of their unrelenting intensity, could be reduced to this.
But we'll always have Source Tags & Codes.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Come on Josh, check your fucking facts
I just looked and saw that Tom Waits is, in fact, only fifty six years old. I had mistakenly assumed that he was in his mid to late sixties, and, as such, likely to die of old age relatively soon. I apologize, Mister Waits, you mean the world to me. But, in all fairness, I can't begin to hypothesize the sheer volume of drinking and smoking you've done in your lifetime, but you look like you could be a centuries-old wizard.
Seriously. I love that man to death, but look at that mug.
Now I've insulted Tom Waits. That is total bullshit Josh! I'm sorry, Mister Waits. I'm going to go listen to Sixteen Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six right now. Please keep making records, I need them.
Hell you guys, he's younger than my dad.
six-teeenshellsfrum-athurteeougghtsix! cough.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Combining astrological signs for fun and profit
Outkast's Aquemini is the finest hip hop album of all time. If you listen to it, you will join me in this opinion.
I think I need to talk about indie music some time soon.
Man Man has consumed an incredible chunk of my listening time since I first stumbled upon them back in April. I can't find any lyrics, and it is thus far unconfirmed to me whether to pronounce the band's name MAN man or just manman (I've favoured the latter), but I'm blessed by them all the same. With Tom Waits nearing death, I'm overjoyed that his spirit - and fubar'd vocal chords - have found a new home in frontman Honus Honus. I'm pretty sure that isn't his real name.
I haven't got a hold of the band's debut, but Six Demon Bag is more than enough to secure them in my top ten best evar list.
I played the album for my dad once, briefly, and he's a pretty cool guy, but he fairly summed it up as "Circus music. Like the kind people would play if the end of the world were announced and their minds snapped." It's cacophonic, to be sure. Drummer Pow Pow is astonishingly high in the mix, and isn't the least bit shy about taking charge of songs with richocheting floor tom beats. Beyond him, I can't rightly discern what if there are any other goddamn standard instruments. Members switch between trombones, pianos, synthesizers, woodblocks, and the odd cello. Electric and bass guitars are used spastically, and more to add punch to particular measures than as any kind of centrepiece. Songs get their hooks from Honus's monstrously strong voice and uncanny sense of rythm (Black Mission Goggles clips along with a delicious rip of Come Together's infalliable cadence; it is teh motherfucking awesome), which his bandmates assist via further insane growling and girlish squealing.
The album's punctuated with the occasional throw away track of pure freakout. You don't want to put SDB on your iPod and then hit shuffle, these songs will fuck you up if you're not prepared. While such unnecessary show-boating (Cedric and Omar, I'm looking squarely at you two idiots) usually makes an otherwise great album an exercise in pure tedium, it works here. I still can't quite palate the two second long Fishstick Gumbo (summary: a squeaky door slams and Honus lets loose the scariest peal of laughter you will ever hear), nor the way way overdone Hot Bat (it repeats the same scathing couple of bars for a minute and a half), they work in the context of the album.
It's one of those. You have to listen straight through or you only receive 1/3 your daily requisite intake of awesome.
Einstein on the Beach is the finest swath of total madness ever to come out of non-grind music. Honus's adoption of a shrill scream instead of his usual Waitsian crackle is deliciously well done, as are the pumping synthesizers manned by some other guy. The big payoff? The ending breaks down into Russian Dancing Music. You know that time where russian guys in big coats and little fur hats cross their arms and kick their legs out like they're made of rubber? It's phenomenal.
The absolute centre piece of the album is the unbelievably sharp Van Helsing Boombox, a melody infused dirge that's the easiest starting point to appreciating the band. It's had a fair bit of airplay on college stations, as I understand it, and it's about the only song I can get non-believers to listen to on a regular basis. But for good reason: Honus plays the piano with an eqloquence that isn't readily apparent on other tracks, and the low chord/high chord melodies he summons for Boombox are absolutely enchanting. He tones down the vocal intensity to sing about loss and hopelessness, and is flawlessly accompanied by his bandmates' New-Orleans funereal march playing.
Engwish Bwudd is also a must hear, if only for the chorus. Honus rythmically barks out, "Fee fie fo fum", and the band chimes in falsetto, "I smell the blood of an English maa-an!"
It's gorgeous, you'll see.
The album closes with the enigmatically poppy Ice Dogs, which is about as confusing a closer as an album can get. Beginning in strong Man Man form, the band takes a breath halfway through and skips off into a mo-town sing along that has to be heard to be understood. The band creates a wall of effeminate "doop. shee-doobie-doop." while Honus soars above on a positively bluesy high. It's not like anything on the rest of the album, and it fills me with bewilderment and joy even after six months of listening. I still haven't properly registered the instrumentation of this fine closer, it's all about the band trailing off into what I'm sure are neon-sign lighted forests and rhine stone canyons.
I like to think Man Man lives in a place like that, and are deliriously happy about it.
Everyone go to sleep.
I think I need to talk about indie music some time soon.
Man Man has consumed an incredible chunk of my listening time since I first stumbled upon them back in April. I can't find any lyrics, and it is thus far unconfirmed to me whether to pronounce the band's name MAN man or just manman (I've favoured the latter), but I'm blessed by them all the same. With Tom Waits nearing death, I'm overjoyed that his spirit - and fubar'd vocal chords - have found a new home in frontman Honus Honus. I'm pretty sure that isn't his real name.
I haven't got a hold of the band's debut, but Six Demon Bag is more than enough to secure them in my top ten best evar list.
I played the album for my dad once, briefly, and he's a pretty cool guy, but he fairly summed it up as "Circus music. Like the kind people would play if the end of the world were announced and their minds snapped." It's cacophonic, to be sure. Drummer Pow Pow is astonishingly high in the mix, and isn't the least bit shy about taking charge of songs with richocheting floor tom beats. Beyond him, I can't rightly discern what if there are any other goddamn standard instruments. Members switch between trombones, pianos, synthesizers, woodblocks, and the odd cello. Electric and bass guitars are used spastically, and more to add punch to particular measures than as any kind of centrepiece. Songs get their hooks from Honus's monstrously strong voice and uncanny sense of rythm (Black Mission Goggles clips along with a delicious rip of Come Together's infalliable cadence; it is teh motherfucking awesome), which his bandmates assist via further insane growling and girlish squealing.
The album's punctuated with the occasional throw away track of pure freakout. You don't want to put SDB on your iPod and then hit shuffle, these songs will fuck you up if you're not prepared. While such unnecessary show-boating (Cedric and Omar, I'm looking squarely at you two idiots) usually makes an otherwise great album an exercise in pure tedium, it works here. I still can't quite palate the two second long Fishstick Gumbo (summary: a squeaky door slams and Honus lets loose the scariest peal of laughter you will ever hear), nor the way way overdone Hot Bat (it repeats the same scathing couple of bars for a minute and a half), they work in the context of the album.
It's one of those. You have to listen straight through or you only receive 1/3 your daily requisite intake of awesome.
Einstein on the Beach is the finest swath of total madness ever to come out of non-grind music. Honus's adoption of a shrill scream instead of his usual Waitsian crackle is deliciously well done, as are the pumping synthesizers manned by some other guy. The big payoff? The ending breaks down into Russian Dancing Music. You know that time where russian guys in big coats and little fur hats cross their arms and kick their legs out like they're made of rubber? It's phenomenal.
The absolute centre piece of the album is the unbelievably sharp Van Helsing Boombox, a melody infused dirge that's the easiest starting point to appreciating the band. It's had a fair bit of airplay on college stations, as I understand it, and it's about the only song I can get non-believers to listen to on a regular basis. But for good reason: Honus plays the piano with an eqloquence that isn't readily apparent on other tracks, and the low chord/high chord melodies he summons for Boombox are absolutely enchanting. He tones down the vocal intensity to sing about loss and hopelessness, and is flawlessly accompanied by his bandmates' New-Orleans funereal march playing.
Engwish Bwudd is also a must hear, if only for the chorus. Honus rythmically barks out, "Fee fie fo fum", and the band chimes in falsetto, "I smell the blood of an English maa-an!"
It's gorgeous, you'll see.
The album closes with the enigmatically poppy Ice Dogs, which is about as confusing a closer as an album can get. Beginning in strong Man Man form, the band takes a breath halfway through and skips off into a mo-town sing along that has to be heard to be understood. The band creates a wall of effeminate "doop. shee-doobie-doop." while Honus soars above on a positively bluesy high. It's not like anything on the rest of the album, and it fills me with bewilderment and joy even after six months of listening. I still haven't properly registered the instrumentation of this fine closer, it's all about the band trailing off into what I'm sure are neon-sign lighted forests and rhine stone canyons.
I like to think Man Man lives in a place like that, and are deliriously happy about it.
Everyone go to sleep.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
I can't wait until it doesn't work
I really think it would be awesome if the newest iteration of iTunes hadn't removed all convenience and most functionality from managing my iPod (Ziggy), or introduced useless and cumbersome new levels of screens, or decided to crash every time I try to exit it.
And wtf is gapless playback information and why does iTunes7 slow down my entire system trying to figure it out over and over again?
Google desktop, you're my only friend.
And wtf is gapless playback information and why does iTunes7 slow down my entire system trying to figure it out over and over again?
Google desktop, you're my only friend.
Grand larceny and the Man in Black
Gavin is my BFF. It's a real indication of love when someone's willing to steal electronics for you, even if that person is a kleptomaniac and a sociopath. And works in technical support. He's got awesome curly hair, everyone should see it.
Josh said:
it doesn't want to stay connected and it's only getting a very low signal all the damn time
Josh said:
I might have to rearrange my room
Josh said:
damnit
Gavin said:
probably because of the low signal it keeps dropping
Gavin said:
does your attena screw on to your computer/
Josh said:
yep, out the back
Josh said:
anything I can do about it?
Gavin said:
hold on a sec
Five minutes pass.
Gavin says:
i got you a big antena from work
Gavin says:
i gotta run to class now though, so i will ttyl tonight
Josh says:
hot diggity damn!
After years of apathetic resistance, I've listened to my first Johnny Cash album. American V was put out posthumously, as I understand it, and I really wish I didn't know that little fact because the album sounds like Johnny's reaching out from the other side to scare whomever dares listen to him. Previously, when I sat down to listen to the Man in Black, I could never get past the blaring lights and klaxons that went off in my head every time I heard Johnny's voice. They all said, "COUNTRY. WARNING." In bold glowing letters and attention shattering whoops.
Long nights spent with Tim Kasher and Jack White have alleviated this particular condition somewhat.
It's good to get past it, the album is wondrous. Johnny's guitar playing is mesmerizing throughout, and the minimal, but very polished, additional instrumentation is uniformly perfect. There's rarely more than one instrument accompanying the guitar and vocals on a track, be they subdued string flourishes or snapping drum beats. They're most always low in the mix and leave plenty of room for Johnny's guitar tinklings and signature world weary wheeze. It's a perfect arrangement, particularly with the lyrics being overwhelmingly on the topic "I am so old I am going to die soon but damn that shit was good". You know, the blues.
It's not going to supplant Streetcore or Bone Machine in my "Best OMG I'm OLD" album category any time soon, I think. Joe Strummer was a veritable god, and his final piece of work was not so much a gorgeous lament for youth-now-lost as it was his Triumphant Ascension to Heaven. And Tom Waits? I have too big a crush on him. I don't think he expected to live as long as he did when he penned BM.
Come to think of it, Nick Cave is getting old. Soon he'll write a "BOMGIO" album and I won't know what the fuck to think.
Anyway.
Having only previously heard the famous "Hurt" cover, and snippets of the recent biopic I watched solely for Joaquin Phoenix's handsome face, I feel horridly out of place saying more than this. Who am I to comment on Johnny fucking Cash's legacy? I'm a... a city slicker. I can't go and tell Johnny whether he's got his shit together or not. Plus, he's dead.
I will mention that I didn't expect God's Gonna Cut You Down to turn out to be Run On. Or that If You Could Read My Mind would be, well, If You Could Read My Mind. Turns out both are actually folk stand-by's and were respectable long before Moby and that awful 90's outfit got a hold of them. Thank you Mister Cash, you learned me something good.
Both tracks do disturb the shit out of me.
I need to read somewhere in the vicinity of 100 pages of Plato, 14 pages of Larkin, and twice the sum of those in some bloated Cognitive Psychology textbook by the end of the night or I will fall down, die, and quit school. I will, however, wait until after Canadian Thanksgiving to do so. I'm headed to London to spend it with my Dad, and that man can cook. I'm so deeply pleased I am essentially his genetic copy. You know, being a laboratory clone.
It's Liisa Donaldson's birthday today: Happy Birthday Liisa!
Josh said:
it doesn't want to stay connected and it's only getting a very low signal all the damn time
Josh said:
I might have to rearrange my room
Josh said:
damnit
Gavin said:
probably because of the low signal it keeps dropping
Gavin said:
does your attena screw on to your computer/
Josh said:
yep, out the back
Josh said:
anything I can do about it?
Gavin said:
hold on a sec
Five minutes pass.
Gavin says:
i got you a big antena from work
Gavin says:
i gotta run to class now though, so i will ttyl tonight
Josh says:
hot diggity damn!
After years of apathetic resistance, I've listened to my first Johnny Cash album. American V was put out posthumously, as I understand it, and I really wish I didn't know that little fact because the album sounds like Johnny's reaching out from the other side to scare whomever dares listen to him. Previously, when I sat down to listen to the Man in Black, I could never get past the blaring lights and klaxons that went off in my head every time I heard Johnny's voice. They all said, "COUNTRY. WARNING." In bold glowing letters and attention shattering whoops.
Long nights spent with Tim Kasher and Jack White have alleviated this particular condition somewhat.
It's good to get past it, the album is wondrous. Johnny's guitar playing is mesmerizing throughout, and the minimal, but very polished, additional instrumentation is uniformly perfect. There's rarely more than one instrument accompanying the guitar and vocals on a track, be they subdued string flourishes or snapping drum beats. They're most always low in the mix and leave plenty of room for Johnny's guitar tinklings and signature world weary wheeze. It's a perfect arrangement, particularly with the lyrics being overwhelmingly on the topic "I am so old I am going to die soon but damn that shit was good". You know, the blues.
It's not going to supplant Streetcore or Bone Machine in my "Best OMG I'm OLD" album category any time soon, I think. Joe Strummer was a veritable god, and his final piece of work was not so much a gorgeous lament for youth-now-lost as it was his Triumphant Ascension to Heaven. And Tom Waits? I have too big a crush on him. I don't think he expected to live as long as he did when he penned BM.
Come to think of it, Nick Cave is getting old. Soon he'll write a "BOMGIO" album and I won't know what the fuck to think.
Anyway.
Having only previously heard the famous "Hurt" cover, and snippets of the recent biopic I watched solely for Joaquin Phoenix's handsome face, I feel horridly out of place saying more than this. Who am I to comment on Johnny fucking Cash's legacy? I'm a... a city slicker. I can't go and tell Johnny whether he's got his shit together or not. Plus, he's dead.
I will mention that I didn't expect God's Gonna Cut You Down to turn out to be Run On. Or that If You Could Read My Mind would be, well, If You Could Read My Mind. Turns out both are actually folk stand-by's and were respectable long before Moby and that awful 90's outfit got a hold of them. Thank you Mister Cash, you learned me something good.
Both tracks do disturb the shit out of me.
I need to read somewhere in the vicinity of 100 pages of Plato, 14 pages of Larkin, and twice the sum of those in some bloated Cognitive Psychology textbook by the end of the night or I will fall down, die, and quit school. I will, however, wait until after Canadian Thanksgiving to do so. I'm headed to London to spend it with my Dad, and that man can cook. I'm so deeply pleased I am essentially his genetic copy. You know, being a laboratory clone.
It's Liisa Donaldson's birthday today: Happy Birthday Liisa!
While you're up
I'd also like Boris and Sunn 0))) to collaborate on an album which will be released on Hallo-fucking-ween. It will be known as the scariest mother fucking album of all time.
And I want Tom Waits to come to my house and sing me Happy Birthday.
Best Birthday Evar.
And I want Tom Waits to come to my house and sing me Happy Birthday.
Best Birthday Evar.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
For my birthday I want a Trail of Dead/Blood Brothers tour
You mean there is one? Fuck yeah.
"With their new record coming out October 3 on Interscope, ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead are putting the rock-mobile into overdrive. They have just* announced the dates of their autumn tour with the Blood Brothers, who also have a forthcoming album. We wish all the best 4 the band on this tour and hope the new album is worlds apart from the last one.
The Blood Brothers album is called Young Machetes and is due out October 10 on V2. Crimes/Sleater-Kinney producer John Goodmanson and Guy Picciotto of Fugazi produced the record, and considering that Fugazi probably won't be releasing new material anytime soon (never say "never," right?), this is probably your best chance to feast on some of that good old Picciotto sound" Pitchfork
The tour is coming to venues in Toronto AND Montreal next month, the fifth and sixth of November, which happen to be the two days leading up to my birthday. I'm hopefully headed to the latter. Money is tight, but it's a safe bet that a money laden birthday is nigh, so I'll take a chance on the thirty dollar bus tickets and twenty one dollar admission.
I've never seen either of the bands put on a show, but I've heard some mixed reports. ToD are legendary, for sure, and I'm all for bands kicking the shit out of equipment they've spent thousands of dollars on and need to make their living. The Bloods, if unconfirmable rumours from high school students can be believed, are hit and miss. I'm not sure if I'd pay money to see Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney do their thing if they couldn't do it in key. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a stickler for technical acuity in music, but have you heard those motherfuckers? One note out of place and they could cut you.
More important than that, however, is both bands' shiny new albums. There's no way either of these outfits are going to be at less than peak performance when just getting out of the gates with new material. ToD's So Divided dropped today, I think, but I've yet to get my mitts on it.
TBB's Young Machetes is due out next week, but I've been blessed with a promotional copy. I've given it a few listens, but I still can't quite give a sober analysis of it. The initial rush of "OMGZ SHINY AND NEW", and all pertinent euphoria, has settled down into fairly calm percolation, but beyond that I'm still digesting it. It's good, and I'm sure it's going alienate fans, both the pre and post Crimes kind. There's no mistaking the Blood's style or form. It's post-Hardcore of the most frenetic persuasion, but I'd say it's fair to call YM their tightest realization of it yet. I don't want to say "fullest" or "deepest" or "best" just yet, but holy cow do the Brothers rock out.
There was talk, months ago, about a possible break up for TBB, when the members were going off piecemeal to other projects, namely Neon Blonde and Headwound City. It looked bad, but with YM in hand it's apparent that these guys working out their own shit for a while has made the band stronger than ever. Previous albums worked on the basis of each member completely flying off the handle within their respective roles, with the occasional straight ahead piece like Ambulance vs Ambulance punctuating more aggressive freakouts. The new songs are different in that they've got the best of both worlds without losing any bite.
Jordan, who was put in a bit of a secondary role for Crimes, is much more prevalent in these tracks and sounds better than he ever has. I'm thinking being numero uno in Headwound City did wonders for him. Johnny's still Johnny, and I don't think fans would have their favourite manbanshee any other way. The weird piano flourishes and synthetic touches, care of bassist Morgan Henderson, which were a bit too overbearing in Neon Blonde have found a comfortable home on tracks like Spit Shine Your Black Clouds (which is also probably the first TBB song one can properly shake one's ass too).
Mark Gajadhar is my favourite drummer in punk music- goddamn that man is creative. He's a little reserved and cymbal crazy for too many tracks on YM, but drumming like that in Set Fire to the Face on Fire and Vital Beach is just not to be fucked with.
I hope it stands up to repeated listens, I can't be sure just yet. I am sure that it'll make for a hell of a good show.
I think I'll appropriate CFRC's copy of So Divided. I need to swing by to pitch my Drum n' Bass idea at them, so I'll be in the neighbourhood.
I wonder what time it is.
"With their new record coming out October 3 on Interscope, ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead are putting the rock-mobile into overdrive. They have just* announced the dates of their autumn tour with the Blood Brothers, who also have a forthcoming album. We wish all the best 4 the band on this tour and hope the new album is worlds apart from the last one.
The Blood Brothers album is called Young Machetes and is due out October 10 on V2. Crimes/Sleater-Kinney producer John Goodmanson and Guy Picciotto of Fugazi produced the record, and considering that Fugazi probably won't be releasing new material anytime soon (never say "never," right?), this is probably your best chance to feast on some of that good old Picciotto sound" Pitchfork
The tour is coming to venues in Toronto AND Montreal next month, the fifth and sixth of November, which happen to be the two days leading up to my birthday. I'm hopefully headed to the latter. Money is tight, but it's a safe bet that a money laden birthday is nigh, so I'll take a chance on the thirty dollar bus tickets and twenty one dollar admission.
I've never seen either of the bands put on a show, but I've heard some mixed reports. ToD are legendary, for sure, and I'm all for bands kicking the shit out of equipment they've spent thousands of dollars on and need to make their living. The Bloods, if unconfirmable rumours from high school students can be believed, are hit and miss. I'm not sure if I'd pay money to see Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney do their thing if they couldn't do it in key. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a stickler for technical acuity in music, but have you heard those motherfuckers? One note out of place and they could cut you.
More important than that, however, is both bands' shiny new albums. There's no way either of these outfits are going to be at less than peak performance when just getting out of the gates with new material. ToD's So Divided dropped today, I think, but I've yet to get my mitts on it.
TBB's Young Machetes is due out next week, but I've been blessed with a promotional copy. I've given it a few listens, but I still can't quite give a sober analysis of it. The initial rush of "OMGZ SHINY AND NEW", and all pertinent euphoria, has settled down into fairly calm percolation, but beyond that I'm still digesting it. It's good, and I'm sure it's going alienate fans, both the pre and post Crimes kind. There's no mistaking the Blood's style or form. It's post-Hardcore of the most frenetic persuasion, but I'd say it's fair to call YM their tightest realization of it yet. I don't want to say "fullest" or "deepest" or "best" just yet, but holy cow do the Brothers rock out.
There was talk, months ago, about a possible break up for TBB, when the members were going off piecemeal to other projects, namely Neon Blonde and Headwound City. It looked bad, but with YM in hand it's apparent that these guys working out their own shit for a while has made the band stronger than ever. Previous albums worked on the basis of each member completely flying off the handle within their respective roles, with the occasional straight ahead piece like Ambulance vs Ambulance punctuating more aggressive freakouts. The new songs are different in that they've got the best of both worlds without losing any bite.
Jordan, who was put in a bit of a secondary role for Crimes, is much more prevalent in these tracks and sounds better than he ever has. I'm thinking being numero uno in Headwound City did wonders for him. Johnny's still Johnny, and I don't think fans would have their favourite manbanshee any other way. The weird piano flourishes and synthetic touches, care of bassist Morgan Henderson, which were a bit too overbearing in Neon Blonde have found a comfortable home on tracks like Spit Shine Your Black Clouds (which is also probably the first TBB song one can properly shake one's ass too).
Mark Gajadhar is my favourite drummer in punk music- goddamn that man is creative. He's a little reserved and cymbal crazy for too many tracks on YM, but drumming like that in Set Fire to the Face on Fire and Vital Beach is just not to be fucked with.
I hope it stands up to repeated listens, I can't be sure just yet. I am sure that it'll make for a hell of a good show.
I think I'll appropriate CFRC's copy of So Divided. I need to swing by to pitch my Drum n' Bass idea at them, so I'll be in the neighbourhood.
I wonder what time it is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
