Archive for the ‘music’ Category
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
This gas thing is starting to freak me out a little bit. Its not that I really mind all that much paying 4.30 for gas but its the way that it has been presented us. It feels like only one in a combination of shades that have been systematically lifted off of the way we had been living for several years. Yes there was a war in Iraq but it never effected us adversely, unless you had a loved one over there, but for the most of us it never came that close to effecting us on any kind of personal level. But then the housing crisis came and the economy slowed down, and the government sent us $600 for free in the hopes that we wouldnt freak out when the gas prices hit 4 bucks and a lot of this was due to the amount of money that we have been ceaselessly pumping into the war. It seems like one thing after another after another is starting to go wrong or not wrong precisely but backwards. It isnt the end of the world but I am starting to see that at some point there will be one. Global warming and record amounts of tropical storms, hurricanes and floods. and on top of that we have to live with David Cook as our American Idol!!! Its all just starting to get to me i guess.-> The new Spiritualized album is pretty good, its a grower. The new Weezer album is very bad.-> I liked Indiana Jones 4 but Shia Lebouf was sort of a mistake and the scene where he swings on vines with a bunch of monkeys is perhaps the worst scene in the history of cinema.->Celtics in 6-> Im writing this on a Mac and for whatever reason it doesnt register when i make a new paragraph.-> I havent read a good book in a while any suggestions?-> and finally good work to the Democrats for finally getting their act together and picking a candidate however in my current state of mind I dont have very high hopes for November. I think America likes crazy people and John McCain might be the craziest. Imagine if he makes Mitt Romney his running mate? they would spend all of their time smiling insanely at each other reminiscing about what it was like when they both believed totally different things than they do now and comparing the taste of the Republican teet!
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Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Expect a post in the very near future about why i havent been posting more often. Thanks for your patience. this came out today, or rather it came out two weeks ago on vinyl but was released on cd today for the “masses.” Under different circumstances i would call this record Elvis’s best record since his Burt Bacharach collaboration, Painted from Memory but because Elvis would like us all not to give a s#!t about this record I will only say that it is a all time album tainted by the most insanely pretentious marketing campaign in the history of music. I dont think anyone can argue that Elvis is one of the only relevant artists left from the era that birthed him. Some of these bands are still making records, some might be touring but they are not relevant. they are living trips down memory lane, tangible nostalgia but i repeat they are not relevant. Elvis on the other hand sits comfortably in the top 10 of the greatest song writers living, i actually think there might only be 10 great songwriters living and they are all in their 50s and 60s well except for Paul Westerberg but he doesnt really count anymore. So, instead of releasing this album with the fanfare and coverage that an album of this quality would usually get, he sneaks it onto the shelves of a few dozen record stores that still carry new vinyl and tells the press that he is looking for new an interesting ways to release his music. i dont see how releasing an album exclusively on vinyl two weeks before the cd release is either new or interesting. it is especially stupid because the story became the release process and not the album. Then to top it off on the eve of the cd release, Lost Highway, the label, or Elvis himself decided that again they would distract the press, reviewers and listeners with the preposterous notion that this record is in someway a collaborative effort with a long list of people that include Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley as well as the swiftness with which this album was created. “We wrote and recorded it in three weeks,” Elvis has been telling people making it seem that the album is in a kind of toss off an experiment in collaboration and nifty marketing. For the record no one but Elvis had any input into how these songs were written or recorded and if he is going to maintain that he did have help then i am going to assume that means he saying that Jenny Lewis and the rest of his so called “collaborators” have been secretly helping him make records since Blood and Chocolate. This is an Elvis Costello record through and through and it is a freaking great one. He mixes all of the best parts of all of his rock albums from Brutal Youth on, mashes them up into a sticky groovy paste and spread it all over this disc. every song here is fantastic in ways that Paul McCartney only wishes he could still accomplish. This album makes it clear that Elvis only songwriting peers are Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Leonard Cohen. Throw Neil Young onto that list i you like, Neil hasnt made an album as great as Momofuku in 20 years but he still gives it everything hes got and his records are always interesting. Ive listened to this album twice already and im listening to it again as i write this and while i am in love with it i cant help feel angry and confused as to why Elvis would try to relieve himself of full credit for its creation and to portray this magnificent work as just a quickie meant to make a point about the music industry. i dont understand it. im all for trying different ways to get your music into the hands of the public but this is not the record to do that with. this needs to be forced down the throats of all the dumb asses that are listening to Daughtry and Maroon 5. This is song writing people. this is rock and roll.
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Thursday, April 10th, 2008
I saw Tim Russert speak at SCSU last night. hes a good story teller and seems like a good guy. he likes Bruce Springsteen and was voted Dad of the Year by some publication. To steal a line from Seinfeld, “I dont know how official any of these rankings are.” Not his fault. hes a good speaker and i enjoyed the evening.
I am planning on suing American Idol to get the 2 hours of my life back that i wasted watching Idol Gives Back. The air was thick with self congratulations in the Kodak Theatre the night they filmed that train wreck. Let me ask you a question, on a show that is supposed to be promoting great singing, how do you let one of the worst singers in the history of pop music, Miley Cyrus, sing two songs when one of the best singers in the history of pop music, Annie Lennox only gets to sing one? Not only that but Miley Cyrus got to peel paint off walls TWICE and this years candidates for President of the United States got bumped due to time constraints. it nice to know AI’s priorities are in the right place.
Thank god for Annie Lennox, Bono and Forest Whitaker. The rest of the celebrities that lent their precious time to the cause should take lessons on how to not patronize the people they are exploiting for their own gain. And yes Alicia Keyes we should talk more about kids in Africa with Aids then we do celebrity drama but maybe, just maybe, when you are visiting these places, take off your designer clothes and your jewelry that is probably worth more than these people have ever considered earning in a lifetime. And thank you so much famous people for lending your time and your perfectly sculpted faces to the cause. Hey Reese Witherspoon, i think you make 20 million dollars per movie dont you? Well then maybe along with your time while your down there in New Orleans earning compassion points with people who might go see your next piece of s#!t movie you write that school a check for a million dollars or so. Why is it that the people that are most fortunate in the world are just content to lend their time. Kids with Aids in Africa dont want your freaking time, the need, need, NEED your cash and you have plenty of it. They need you to actually care as Bono and Annie Lennox and Forest Whitaker actually do. they dont need you flaunting your dangley 100,000 karat gold earrings in their faces while you wonder how they manage to live.
American Idol if you are going to make a spectacle of yourself in an effort to get my money youre going to have to do better than Billy Crystal and Robin Williams making fools of themselves, B list celebrities telling me to give them my money and Miley Cyrus’s unholy shriek. She is a banshee!!!
Also another tip to celebrities using poor people to try and get into heaven: all the sun glasses around the neck and tucked into the neck of your t-shirt look does for you is tell people that you dont really want to be there and you are going to run away screaming the first chance you get.
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Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
My thoughts are all over the place today…
The new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record came out today. Its called Dig Lazarus Dig!!! Its not a concept record but several of the songs revolve around the premise of God raising Lazarus from the grave against his will, only to find himself a homeless junky tooling around the streets of New York City. It is amazing in every way.
There Will be Blood came out today on DVD. I find it highly amusing that this movie and the Nick Cave record came out on the same day. they are both superior works of art that try their hardest to be unlovable and difficult but are ultimately better for it. The whole point of the ending to There Will be Blood is that Daniel is finally satisfied and it is so perfect that it comes at the expense of leaving critics and the audience unsatisfied. Personally, I cannot wait to see it again.
Everyone called out today except for me and two other people and it feels like the end of the world. The phone will not stop ringing and nobody wants anything that i can actually give them. they all want some kind of magical special treatment that they dont deserve and are not entitled to and it is my great privilege to give them this news. I have been screamed at today, swore at, called useless and i might be mistaken but i pretty sure i was challenged to a fight. I would love to fight that guy today, its just too bad he is in another state. if he happens to read this i will be taking my break around 3, im in Connecticut, if you have the ability to get here by 3 i am going to rip your head off.
Mike and the mad Dog yesterday were debating whether or not Dick Vitale deserved to be in the Basketball Hall of Fame. They were both leaning towards answering the question No, but neither of them seemed willing to come out and say it. I will say that they are wrong. he totally deserves to be in the hall of fame soley because no one, NO ONE, loves basketball more than Dickie V and for that reason alone he should be in the hall of fame. He has been on Mike and Mike (the ESPN morning guys) every morning since Friday and he has ended every conversation in tears thanking everyone under the sun for giving him the opportunity to do what he does and for putting him in the hall of fame. Its all about the love of the game.
I think one thing the war has done for us is re-written the definition of the word ’success.’ before the word success meant ” the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors.” our new definition probably reads something like this, “The semi-favorable but ultimately the same persistence down an inevitable road to failure.” I think its clear that our government has no real interest in stopping this war, pulling our troops out , or even acknowledging that the only way their surge can be deemed a success is that it put more of our soldiers in a position to die. So according to the new definition the surge/ war in iraq is a success. Hopefully, George, John, and their minions of death wont re-write the definition of victory to mean “The death toll in Iraq has reached 140,00 today.”
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Monday, April 7th, 2008
Saturday was a good day.
I got up early like i always do. I got dressed, put on some jeans and a tshirt and scooped up our laundry to bring it down to the basement where our ‘laundry facilities’ are located. I wasnt expecting it to be so perfectly nice out, if i didnt say it out loud as i sometimes do when im alone, i definitely said to myself in my head, “Holy smokes, it is a nice day out today.” Not only was it nice, it was much too nice to be wearing jeans, so for the first time this year i put on some shorts, dug my trusty pair of sandals out of the wasteland that is the back seat of my car, im not sure why they were there, and went about my saturday morning ritual of cleaning my house.
I dont go crazy when i clean, i have a cat so vacuuming is very important. Along with that i like to clean out the sink, run the dishwasher, wipe down the counter tops, this makes me feel like a i work in a diner which is nice. I sometimes clean the toilet because even if you cant see it, the toilet is a dirty place. We rarely clean the shower, i think this might be a character flaw or a genetic defect. It just never occurs to me that this is something that really needs to be done although i can see everyday that it does. If this makes me a bad person then so be it. I aint cleanin’ no shower.
It was so nice on Saturday I opened a bunch of windows and let fresh air and street noise circulate through the apartment. My cat, Buddy, the ultimate cat, descended from a long line of jungle kings, enjoyed a few hours pining for the freedom of the outdoors laying in the open window sill.
Now, i finish vacuuming, so its time to get to work on putting the kitchen back together and for something like this, you have got to have some music but, what music to play, whats the perfect record to relax and enlighten and to heighten the experience of scraping old lasagna from a Pyrex pan and scrubbing questionable stains and materials off my kitchen counter? Some people think the key to good weekend light manual labor background music is to find something nice and light, something you dont have to pay attention to too much. It literally sits in the background so at some point while youre doing whatever it is youre doing you will forget that the music is on. It will become part of the background noise and will take its place with the sound of the water running, the traffic outside and, if you live in an apartment, the sounds of your neighbors letting their red headed 6 year old systematically destroy their house one mysterious “just fell of the bunk beds” THUD at a time. I am of a different school of thought when choosing tunes for this very tricky time of the day. I prefer something really weird, something that i wouldnt normally listen to if i had to pay full attention to it. My normal selection for a nice day house cleaning session would be from my pals The Penguin Cafe Orchestra. they are by far my favorite psychedelic, new age, ambient island lounge folk band and their first three records are very charming indeed. However on this particular Saturday i was in the mood for something a little different so i sifted through my vinyl collection and finally decided on David Byrne’s ‘The Knee Plays.’ This fit the bill perfectly. Its weird, the whole record is full of marches comprised of synth horns and there’s is no singing just David Byrne spoken word. Awesome. It was laid back and just the perfect piece of music to keep me interested even when i was realy paying attention and it never once configured it’s sounds to the general cacophony of life.
Then…band practice. Oh glorious band practice. Our practice space is in West Haven. It is located inconveniently in the back of a warehouse in a cinder block room we rent from a guy that rents it from someone else. it was so nice out we propped the door open, had a few beers, and played music for 4 hours. Thats what i call relaxing friends.
Later that night Nicolette and I watched Frasier for a while, ate some food, flipped back and forth between baseball games and the Final Four. After, she studied and i continued reading The Iceman Cometh. I went to bed around 11 i think, early maybe but sometimes friends, its just time to go to bed.
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Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Oh Lord, yesterday was just one of those days my friends. My Wednesday ended up being saved by a wicked band practice and copious amounts of Regular Coors (the Banquet Beer and by copious I mean 3 or 4) but it was close man, it was real close. I almost lost it there for a while. The work just kept piling up and my boss told me that Friday we have to dress business casual because his boss is coming in ( as an example of why this is such a problem for me today i am wearing a Mets tshirt, jeans and my red torn up converse. I usually wear something similar everyday). The morons that inhabit the cubes around me would not stop talking about their kids and their diseases and their vacations and what they had for breakfast and what they were going to have for dinner and i didnt get to eat any lunch because i had to pick up a bag that i thought would fit my bands keyboard on my lunch break and the key board ended up not fitting in the bag and i was late getting back from lunch because people dont know how to drive any more and i got stuck behind a school bus and car drives funny, it makes funny noises and it feels like it is being ripped apart in a nuclear explosion when i hit pot holes, etc. etc. insert your own daily horror stories here…
I needed an outlet as i do four out of five business days. I needed a friend and a confidant and someone that would not only understand what i was going through but would stand up for my rights as some one who wants to jump out the window because the bottom rung of society will not stop laughing its hideous maniacal laugh in regards to something that isnt funny. Let me ask you a question, how long should a debate about how much you would be willing to pay for a double disc edition of Aeon Flux staring Charlize Theron last? The answer is not an hour which is how long that exact conversation lasted over my head between the person that sits opposite me and their boy friend.
I needed to commune with a person or rather a being who could commiserate with my misery. So i reached into my pocket pulled out my ipod and found the person who is always there for me…Bill Hicks. I loaded up Rant in E-Minor and set my soul to relax.
I was really mad though people and i needed something else besides Mr. Hicks. I needed an extra jolt of fury in my putrid office kitchen coffee-ish sludge. So, went through the entire Bill Hicks catalog made a mix of favorites and then made of mix of some appropriatly chaotic and angry and sometimes but not always loud music. I finished my mix around 5pm. My shift ended at 6 so i spent the rest of the afternoon floating down the soothing river and mutual angst and cultural indigestion.
The music mix looks like this:
The Fox - Sleater Kinney
New Wave - Against Me!
If White America Told the Truth for One Day Its World Would Fall Apart - Manic Street Preachers
Careening With Conviction - Mission of Burma
World Wide Suicide - Pearl Jam
Waiting Room - Fugazi
Working Class Hero - John Lennon
Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix
I think everyone probably has a ‘One of those days’ mix.
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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Several weeks ago i said some pretty mean things about REM. In a discussion with friends I declared that REM was totally irrelevant. While not horrible, Up and Reveal were unfocused and messy and their production out shone the songs which is something that should never ever happen unless you’re Bjork. Around the Sun was legitimately terrible. I dont care what anyone says, specifically huge REM fans, there wasnt one good song on that record and Michael Stipe sounded like he was asleep through the whole thing.
Now 4 years later they give us Accelerate and while i refuse to take back any of the mean things i said about them a couple weeks ago Im not going to beat around the bush: this record is a monster, even more so than Monster which wasnt fantastic either but did rock. On the first track, Living Well is the best Revenge, they sound like their ’80s indie mates the Replacements (when are they getting in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by the way), which is really saying something when youre talking about REM. Michael Stipe sounds super engaged, Mike Mills is singing his super high back up vocals and Peter Buck sounds like hes playing on a Minus 5 record which are all pretty good. The only thing missing is Bill Berry. this is the perfect Bill Berry record. Bill Rieflin is a hell of a drummer but sometimes his fills are just too much when all the song really needs is a little 1-2 tom and snare hit. Nice and simple and clean.
Accelerate is loud, its passionate and it has brought REM all the way back from total irrelevancy to being a band that you have to listen to. Awesome, way to make me look like a jerk REM.
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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Becasue it cant be put any better than Allmusic.com’s Tim Sendra put it, “She is actress Zooey Deschanel (Almost Famous, Elf, her sister is on Bones), Him is alt-singer/songwriter M. Ward.” Thats the only thing im going to quote from another review. Let me start by saying that it would be unfair to judge this record as an album by simply an Actress. the record is too good for her not to have earned her stripes as a musician and a singer. Also this record was released on Merge and the last time i checked the label home of Bob Pollard, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Arcade Fire and Spoon wasnt in the business of releasing vanity projects for actresses who think they can sing. Zooey can sing and she writes a mean ’70s sunshine pop and country tune.
People have been comparing her voice to everyone from Dusty Springfield to Linda Thompson but her voice doesnt sound like a lot of other voices you may have heard. she frequently fails to hit notes and the tone and timbre of her voice switches sometimes so drastically in the same song you might be fooled into thinking, as I was, that someone else is singing. You would be wrong. As i was. her voice is slightly alien but honestly this album would not work in anyway if she was a better singer. 90% of this records appeal is in her voice. The other 10% is the songs which the album credits entirely to her except for two covers and one collaboration with Jason Schwartzmann (Rushmore and Phantom Planet), which leads me to believe that M Ward’s participation was limited to backing vocals on two songs and production. There is a haunting echo to almost every tune which is also how M Ward records sound. Weird.
The covers, You Really Got a Hold on Me and the Beatles’ I Should Have Known Better, are not great, the album would have been better off without them but, while this may not be the greatest record ever or even one of the best of the year, it is a surprisingly solid affair by an artist whose opportunities to make another record hopefully rest in her abilities as a singer and a song-writer and not on her name.
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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Ugh.
I have spent the last two days writing lyrics. Of writing lyrics i am not a fan although i have done a lot of it over the last two years or so. They just always seem really goofy to me and i can only get used to singing my own words after the song is a few years old, that way it doesnt seem like my song, hopefully it has been played so much that it feels like we’re playing a cover and not something that I slaved over. Which is how i approach my lyric writing.
There is no rhyme or reason to how i write lyrics. i come up with a melody first and there are usually a few lyrics naturally embedded in the melody. if they make sense i use them in the song and write around them, if they dont i try to come up with something that sounds very similar. My lyrics seem to always be about myself although in a more surreal context. Another way i write lyrics is to sift through these manila folders i have that are filled with scraps of paper with novel, short story and lyric fragments on them and try to adapt something that was previously written to the structure of the song. I was sorry to learn yesterday that i have almost exhausted this lyric writing ‘crutch’ i have and any songs i write from now on are going to have to have totally fresh shiny new lyrics.
Which really sucks.
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Friday, March 28th, 2008
Cutlers is a record store on Broadway in Downtown New Haven. It was founded in 1948, is a New Haven landmark and, although I don’t remember the circumstances which precluded this, there was once a small picture of it in an issue of Vogue Magazine. Maybe it was Esquire. Either way I have been going to Cutler’s since my Dad (OneVoice) brought me there a significant number of years ago. When I learned how to drive I drove myself and my friends there on a weekly or sometimes daily basis to rummage through their collection of 45’s and jazz cd’s. When I got older and started reading Magnet and Big Takeover I would go there to find the latest in super hip indie rock and to browse their used bins for copies of Elvis Costello albums, that was of course until they re-issued all of them but that’s a different story for a different day. When I was older still, about a year ago, I would go to the only place I knew that kept a complete-as-could-be collection of Criterion DVD’s, my drug, my passion, the ruiner of my credit. Dad if you were ever wondering where all my money went you can blame Cutlers and the Criterion Collection. And while the décor inside seemed to change on a regular yearly schedule, there was always Standard Cutlers on one side and to the right of it, the store next door, was Cutlers Classical.I don’t think I need to go into detail about what they sell.
That was until last Saturday. I went there to pick up the new Mission of Burma re-issues, which they didn’t have, a not quite new trend for Culter’s, not having something they absolutely should have, that people count on them having, and noticed that Cutlers Classical is gone. Not only that but Standard Cutlers shrank due to the fact that Standard Cutlers ate into half of Cutlers Classical for their used cd, vinyl and old school arcade games section. That’s 50% less Cutlers folks. Which means the already crowded store is now more crowded. It means a more limited DVD selection and it means, from what I could see, a lot less used product and significantly less used product. Pick an artist. Any artist. You could find that artist in the bins and even if they had only three or four albums Cutlers would have a collection of import singles some weirdo live bootleg and a dvd or two even if you were previously convinced that a dvd for that artist didn’t even exist. That was Cutlers. There was a point in their history where you could honestly say that they had Everything. Now not so much.
So I guess the next question would be why did they shrink their business? I suppose the easy answer would be because the music industry is in the toilet but that would really only be a third the answer. Even if the music business was tanking record stores could continue to thrive at some level if it weren’t for iTunes and other music download sites. I will admit that I am as guilty of this as the next person. If the record industry would like to file murder charges against all of those who frequently engage in the downloading of music rather than purchase that same music at a store well then I will plead guilty in court and will gladly do sometime behind bars. Do I feel guilty when I download an album that only a year ago I would have forced myself to trek to the record store at the end of the world before I would even consider taking the suckers way out and just downloading a hard to find record if it was available online? Absolutely. But while I am certainly not alone, I don’t believe that me and my co-conspirators are the real reason Cutlers cut itself in half and why the music industry is in such dire straits. The real reason is…
The music sucks. And if you don’t see that then you are lucky because you have yet to be exposed to the worst era in music in the history of humanity’s reign upon this Earth. Truly we have hit a low point culturally when the Billboard Top 40 is filled with people like Chris Brown, Rhianna, Flo Rida, OneRepublic, Miley Cyrus, Buck Cherry, Sean Kingston, The Jonas Brothers, Fergie, Three Days Grace, Linkin Park, Finger Eleven, Danity Kane, Madonna! Still with the Madonna people come on. Open your ears to something new but more importantly something good. If we all stopped listening to junk and paying for junk and stop enabling people that created the junk their would be less junk and Cutlers would have to cut it self in half and we could all go swimming in a pool of imports and bootlegs and we can live in a world where bad music can only be played at clubs where people wear white sweat suits with big fake diamond necklaces around their necks and wear their hats crooked, where men call women bitches and refer to themselves as pimps. Where people laugh at things that aren’t clever and who say that things they don’t like are “Gay.” Where people talk about movies like “Never Back Down’ and the newest Tyler Perry movie like they’re art films. If people like this want to listen to bad music they absolutely may. The rest of society doesn’t need them for anything anyway except maybe as examples of who not to act like and what a lifetime of listening to junk music gets you.
I like to think of music as Hell. It has seven layers. The surface or layer one is where you get the junk and have to portray the above attitude towards culture for all of eternity but the deeper you go the better the tunes get, the better the food gets, the better the films get. Its really hot and its tough to get there but if youre willing to put in the effort you will be handsomely rewarded.
I suppose its only like Hell in the layers sense. I suppose I could have used a dip analogy as well but I have never been a fan of layered dips. I’m not a Hell supporter either but I like it better than layered dips. Hell for me would be having to eat layered dips for all eternity.
(Tom cringing)
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