Another satisfied customer

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.