Archive for the ‘music’ Category
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
The Doors - LA Woman
Sometimes, friends, the universe lines up all of its necessary components and you are listening to the perfect record at the exact perfect moment doing the exact perfect thing. Thus begins the story of album #4 on my list of my Top 15 favorite records of all time, LA Woman.
June 2004. There we were, my cousin Len and I cruising in my already laboring 2001 Corolla, down Route 40 through New Mexico on our way across the country to San Diego. We had just stopped at a ghost town’s gas station to fill up our tank, gas was about 1.40 back then. At that point we had been driving for about 28-30 hours straight, the reasons why are important to me and my family but not to this story, when whatever disc we were listening to finally ended and we had to find something else to listen to. I dont know if the sun sets slower out west than it does in the North East but it seemed like it started setting the minute 12:00 turned to 12:01. The speed limit out there is 75. I think we were probably doing 85 or 90 the whole way. We encountered a minimum of cars, maybe there were more but we didnt notice. We were in what they call “The Zone” and I must have known instinctively that the record that would make this particular moment of our trip one of the most memorable would be if LA Woman was blaring out of our windows and mixing with the New Mexican sunset.
I am planning a longer more involved post about the Doors but now is not the time to start Thinking about the Doors. I will just say that i enjoy some Doors music, specifically the first album and the last album, LA Woman. The quality of everything in between falls somewhere between terrible and ridiculous, but they make up for it with the two great records.
Back to the story…LA Woman is the album the Doors were created to make. It is greazy, its loose, its funky, Jim Morrison at this point is just a drunk with a white bluesman’s growl throwing his inane ‘poetry’ around like a monkey and its feces. But Oh man, when you are flying down the highway through the desert, two thousand miles away from home, trying to make sense of an atlas but in reality not really caring as long as you are going west, there is nothing like that moment when the band kicks in with The Changeling.
To me, three years removed from that moment, every song on the record blurs together into a mass of dirty blues and boogie rock but like i always say, if the songs aren’t tremendous then it doesnt matter when or where or with whom you are listening to it. It wouldnt hit the same way. If The Changeling wasnt followed by Lover Her Madly, If the record didnt end with Riders on Storm and revlove around the title track like our solar system around the sun my recollection of that moment as total perfection and joy, which was needed greatly after only three days before feeling nothing but sadness, loss and anger, would have been either greatly diminished or would cease to exist at all. At that moment i knew that i was doing something that i was going to treasure forever.
Len and I always called driving cross country the one stupid thing we always talked about doing but never did that we actually did do and it didnt hit me that i was doing it until those first snare drum hits of The Changeling.
Hours later, while cruising through Albuquerque, I put on Raw Power by the Stooges and then Superunknown by Soundgarden. At that point we had been up and driving for 36 hours, were driving on super unkown highways, in total darkness, hallucinating and most certainly high from all the red bulls we drank while stopped for gas and food. i think it was one in the morning. Those were scary times. Im not sure how we managed to survive. we stopped for the night at a hotel and when we woke up we found the hotel was literally in the middle of the desert. We had no idea what the landscape looked like because it was so dark and our minds and bodies were so wrecked by the time we finally stopped.
We listened to the Meat Puppets that day.
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Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
I wouldnt be surprised to find that Lindsey Buckingham coined the phrase “criminally underrated” just so he could use it to describe every aspect of his musical career. Even when people talk about the Buckingham/ Nicks era of Fleetwood Mac the only time they ever mention Lindsey Buckingham is when they talk about his Stevie Nick’s relationship. Sometimes they talk about how he produced Tusk all weird but thats it. They never talk about the fact that he wrote many of their best songs, that he produced Tusk, in my opinion Fleetwood Mac’s best record and that he is the most phenomenal rock guitar player that no one ever ever ever ever ever ever even considers talking about.
This live record chronicles one of his shows during his Under the Skin tour last year. My Dad (OneVoice) and I were lucky enough to see him play pretty much this same show at Mohegan Sun. Its a double disc record and DVD collection. Im watching the DVD as I write this. I am unimpressed with the DVD not because of anything Lindsey is doing but the camera work is literally the worst I have ever seen in a concert DVD. However, the music is Terrific and the new solo arrangements of oldies, anything not off the new record, like Trouble, Go Insane, and Big Love are amazing. He makes Go Insane sound like its being played by a mid-evil band of Lute-ists and mandoliners. The Holiday Road is fun but unnecessary and the new tunes are so good that they mix perfectly with the classics. Go Your Own Way was underwhelming at the show I saw at Mohegan but here it rips and Tusk, in any version, is on my list of Top 50 tunes of all time.
I would like to share two things that I think are funny. One is that after any song that rock particularly hard Lindsey, while taking off his guitar to switch for another, likes to jump up and down and scream at the audience. This pleases me a great deal. One day I hope to have earned enough respect with my fans to that they will find the times I “Go Insane” endearing. Two is that in the middle of this set before Cast Away Dreams, a song off his newest record, he tells a story about how he wrote the song after his wife joined him on tour with a reunited Fleetwood Mac a couple of years ago. They got into a fight about not being able to let go of something, she flew back to LA and he wrote the song. The song and the fight are obviously about Stevie Nicks, so are a lot of the songs on the new record i might add, which means that 30 years later he still hasnt gotten over her. What the hell Lindsey? Its only Stevie Nicks. Shake that beast free and write yourself some new tunes so you can make another record and live record as good as Bass Hall and Under the Skin.
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Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Ive been listening to the new Nine Inch Nails record for the last couple of days and i really think it is an astounding piece of work. However track 13, its listed on the album as Ghosts 13, is the single saddest song i have ever heard. Its just a simple piano piece, with a metronome-esque electronic bass drum beat and some heavy breathing and excruciatingly light synth strings towards the end. Im sitting at my desk with my headphones in my ears to drown out the sounds of the idiots around me, Ive got my Itunes on shuffle and out of no where, the worlds saddest song. I dont have a lot of experience with super sad songs but heres a list of some of my “favorite”:
Decades - Joy Division
Across the Ocean - Azure Ray
I Want to Vanish - Elvis Costello
Grace is Gone - The Dave Matthews Band
Boxing - Ben Folds Five
Julia - The Beatles
How to Fight Loneliness - Wilco
It Makes No Difference - The Band
Salt to the Sea - Tim Finn
Thats all I can think of right now. Maybe Ill make a tape of sad songs. Two hours of misery. For that though Ill need more sad songs.
Anyone care to help?
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Monday, March 17th, 2008
Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
A message to all of those kids out there who want to be indie rock stars: its all about the songs. Dont worry about singing super goofy or writing songs with insane chord changes that dont make any sense or having the drummer play in a funky time the song doesnt deserve. and dont worry about cutting your hair in a crazy way or wearing low rider jeans with studded belts. dont worry about any of that stuff. Just worry about writing a good song, worry about writing a GREAT song. If you need an example of how this can be done within the vein of indie rock, a place where the actual song generally comes second to what the song means or what you were trying to accomplish sonically in the studio, look no further than Pavement’s second album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the greatest collection of indie rock songs ever compiled on a vinyl or plastic disc.
There is something so simple about Pavement songs that makes you want to form a band just to play them but half way through the intro to Silent Kit, the first song on Crooked Rain, you realize that you and youre band are in no way cool enough to try and play a Pavement song, which is not your fault. They dont mean to be so cool they just are. Their lyrics make no sense and some of their songs have five or six distinct part some lasting whole minutes some lasting mere seconds its all there in a Pavement tune. Considering they invented the indie rock cliche if not the genre itself it is surprising that they are able to turn those cliches; feedback fests, sloppy guitar play, atonal singing, obvious self consciousness, into 6 classics of not just indie rock but all rock that was composed and performed in the 1990’s. Im talking about Silent Kit, Elevate Me Later, Stop Breathin, Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz, and Range Life and each in their own way grants you access to a little known place called indie rock heaven.
If there is one thing that sucks about being 26 its that i was born in 1982 which would have made me 12 when Crooked Rain came out in 1994. I dont remember if i was listening to something specific when i was 12. i think by then i may have invested my Dads money in that 12 cds for a penny scam that BMG and Columbia music clubs used to run in Spin and Rolling Stone. If this was the case then i was listening to the first Weezer record, the Who’s Tommy, Core by Stone Temple Pilots, things like that. I certainly was not listening to Slanted and Enchanted which would have been the only way for me to have even known that there was such a bands as Pavement. My age is a travesty in this case friends. Oh how i wish to have been born in 1980. Then i might have been able to say i was aware of Nirvana and if you werent born in 1982 or after, then you might not know that the subject always comes up at some point, when engaged in conversation with a peer, whether or not you were aware of Nirvana before Nevermind came out. I can honestly say i was not and i am happy to say that because Nevermind is not a great record. it is no In Utero.
Do i think my life would have been different if i had discovered Crooked Rain in my teens rather than in my 2o’s? Yes. I would have had a far greater exposure to a lot of similar music if i had known about the Pavement. Chavez, Guided By Voices, the Pixies, Sebadoh, Archers of Loaf, Superchunk. These are all need to know bands that I immediately feel in love with after having taken my first mind bending, face melting taste of indie rock.
My favorite flavour? Pavement.
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Sunday, March 16th, 2008
i tried to download this last week when it first came out but was unsuccessful. Im not sure what happened, the website kept saying that if you are having difficulty downloading the record its because they were unaware and unprepared for the amount of downloads they were getting. I was finally able to get it on Thursday. This is unlike any Nine Inch Nails record that has ever been released. For one its all instrumental, the only vocals are the occasional heavy breathing but thats to be expected on a moody atmospheric record like this one. You gots ta have some heavy breathing. Its also unlike any Nine Inch Nails record because you get the feeling that there is more going on inside Trent Reznor this time instead of just hating himself, whatever chick just dumped him, or recently the government. So finally when it seems like Trent has something to say he decides to say nothing, which makes this record so much more interesting. it isnt 1994 anymore and there are plenty of bands telling me what losers they are and what bitches women are and its nice that Trent and the whole Nine inch Nails project have finally noticed that their tortured muscled posturing is just ridiculous and all we really want from him are great freaking tunes and this record is full of great tunes.As with all instrumental albums there is some filler. There are some distortion exercises i can do without and his experimentation with hip hop beats is a little silly but there are 36 songs here and im pretty sure congress just voted in a bill that says if you have more than 11 songs on a record at least one of them has to directly influenced by hip hop. Mediocre tracks aside, the rest of the record is just so intensely cinematic you’ll find yourself writing scenes, casting the film and watching dailies in your head at night while you sleep. If you like Harold Budd and Brian Eno or any of those ambient masters this record fits right in their with the best of those artist’s material. I went in having no preconceived notions about what this would be. Im on my second run through now and the songs just continue to reveal new and interesting things with each listen.Also, this is a legitimate record, i think its being released in stores in April. It isnt just some artist dumping their hard drive onto their website and asking for money. Dont be scared.
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Sunday, March 16th, 2008
That friends, is not the name of a fantasy novel.I would never call myself a Grateful Dead fan, but i do appreciate the idea of the Grateful Dead. I dont think i have to explain what that idea is, everyone knows what they need to know about the Grateful Dead and if you dont know anything then thats how much you need to know and im not going to force the Dead down anybody’s throat. However, if you must know only one thing about the Grateful Dead, then you must know Dark Star. It was originally a three minute studio experiment on Anthem of the Sun but by the time they had gotten around to recording the shows that would be featured on Live Dead, the bands first of many hundreds maybe thousands of live recordings, the song had ballooned to over 23 minutes of improvisational glory. This song i think is the closest rock music has ever gotten to being legitimate jazz ( I welcome other opinions and examples, mostly for my own listening enjoyment). Phil Lesh plays the main melody very occasionally on bass, Bob Weir bangs out a couple of ‘Weir’d (sorry) oddly formed but perfect rhythm chords and the rest of the song is just Jerry soloing, sometimes quietly with that almost new age guitar sound Jerry likes but sometimes wailing, with the whole band kicking in behind him. The interesting thing about this is that normally, and when i say normally i am referring to standard jam bands, todays jam bands, when the improvisational section reaches this fever pitch it means the jam, and more often than not the song, is over. Not with Dark Star though. They just bring everything back down from space inside the Earth’s atmosphere and start again, Phil laying down the melody and everything folding and unfolding itself around it.Im talking about the Dead and specifically Dark Star because my band, Disjoinedin (pronounced Dis-Joined-In), has decided to undertake this monster of psychedelic rock to great effect. we had practice yesterday and i think we played the song 5 times. We never got up to 23 minutes but we consistently reach hit five or six improvising on the main melody before miraculously it turned into something completely different. The first time we played it turned into Love Will Tear us Apart by Joy Division, the second time it turned into A Love Supreme, the third Ten Years Gone by Led Zeppelin. After it turned into Sparks by the Who and then Shakin’ All Over we started dubbing it The All Song meaning that Dark Star is all songs combined into one and much like white is all of the colors mixed together. Or is that black? I dont remember, either way, Dark Star truly is the centerpiece of not only psychedelic rock but of all rock. It all revolves around Dark Star, like the solar system around the sun man.No, I am not on drugs.
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Thursday, March 13th, 2008
I received a new computer at work so my C button now functions properly, which is nice.
Tomorrow is my birthday. Im going to be 26. I dont think i have any feelings regarding this fact one way or the other. 26 doesnt really seem like a big deal. Im not going to worry about it.
I need some new sneakers so on my lunch break im going to go and try to achieve some new sneakers. I dont want anything too flashy. thats the problem with sneakers, sometimes they are just too flashy.
Im not hungry but Im going to eat. I hate that. i havent eaten in at least 16 hours so i know should eat but i am not hungry. this really bothers me.
How come there are no websites devoted exclusively to books. there are websites for movies and music and art and websites devoted to spying on people you used to know, they call them social networking sites, and politics and everything, but nothing just for books. Some one should look into this. they could review books and rank books and have constantly updated news about books and an agents site and and authors site. I really think this idea has legs and those legs are taking it to the next open spot on my mental shelf of things that i will forget the next time a slightly more interesting idea pops into my head.
Dad, maybe you can clarify this for us, I was at band practice yesterday and we were talking about Utopia and we just could not figure out the appeal of Utopia besides it including Todd. If anyone else would like to chime in on this feel free.
I hate the Yankees.
Maybe Ill write something later but i dont know if Ill have time. Its been pretty busy at work which is horrible. Im glad tomorrow is my birthday, it gives me an excuse not to come in. I think tomorrow Ill start my day with some jumping jacks.
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Monday, March 10th, 2008
Nothing much to report today so were going to take a look at album #2 on my list of Top 15 favorite albums of all time. And the winner is…
Belle and Sebastian - If You’re Feeling Sinister
I remember vividly the first time I heard this record. The year was 2000. i was managing a mall record store at the time and I was going through my Led Zeppelin phase. We had a 6 disc changer at the store and me and my co-workers would fill the changer with Led Zep, hit random and those would be our stores listening selections for the day. Before that i was opening the store every morning with Black Flag blasting out the doors for the mall walkers to enjoy and right before that i had just discovered the Black Crowes. so you can see where my head was at when a middle aged woman walked into the store wearing a long green trench coat, her face marked with old acne scars telling me all about ‘indie rock’ and that her favorite record was by the group Belle and Sebastian. I told her that that was the stupidest name for a band i had ever heard and she just laughed and told me her husband agreed with me but that i should listening to it anyway. I told her to have a good night when she left having made several purchases but when she was out of ear shot i cursed her stupidly named band and cranked up the ‘Battle of Evermore’ which isnt lame in any way.
As it ended up I grabbed the record she was talking about, If You’re Feeling Sinister, before i left for the night with the intention of listening to it on the way home. the fact of the matter was that Led Zeppelin was kind of getting on my nerves as was the entire genre of ‘ROCK’. I find everything after Houses of the Holy a little terrible and I can only listen to the Rain Song so many times before Jimmy Page’s huge 12 string open tuned chords start to grate on my generally very short and very already grated nerves. Robert Plant had no voice after Houses of the Holy and it is almost impossible to listen to his stupid little breathy squeal on Kashmir and and everything on ‘In through the Out Door’ and ‘Presence.’
Basically i needed a change in the music i was listening to. I had been drowning in alternative/hard rock for as long as i could remember and the lady in the trench coat came into my life at just the right moment.
I spent an hour that night driving around listening to If you’re feeling sinister and i suppose you can say that my life changed, if ever so slightly. It made me aware of different kinds of music and different ways that songs that would normally be rockers or folky rockers could be presented so that they conveyed a different message and brought about different images and feelings. I doubt that Belle and Sebastian do this to everyone and frankly i dont think that any of there other records are really all that great but by August every year i am longing for the days to grow short and the nights to get cold so i can drive around with the windows open listening to the wind blow leaves off the trees which most of the time is louder than Stuart Murdoch’s vocals.
The first thing that grabbed me about If You’re Feeling Sinister was how amazingly weird the lyrics were. Why were they singing about track stars and Bob Dylan and hookers and girls who are torn between religion and S&M? it didnt make any sense then and because i never bothered to research it it doesnt make any sense to me now but they make me laugh and i still havent heard very many new artists who are as adept at telling as detailed as story in a song as Belle and Sebastian is.
The magic on this record is from the total lack of electric guitars. An acoustic guitar is so much more expressive and effective at portraying emotion than an electric guitar and they use that to great advantage on this record. Imagine how different “Me and the Major” would be if they were banging out those bar chords on a well amplified Strat rather than a warm acoustic instrument. Its the same reason I love the Pogues, the instrumentation just exudes so much warmth its hard stop once you start listening to it. At the time this seemed like a big deal. now it just seems ridiculous that i was so in love with the sound of a sustained distorted E chord.
The center piece of this record is the title song. It most certainly has a spot on my Top 30 tunes of all time. With its introductory sounds coming from a recording of children playing on a Scottish play ground and the round tones of a Harmonium this is the quintessential Belle and Sebastian song. it is the song that defines them as i mixes soft almost Nick Drake-esque guitar strumming with a light propulsive shuffle from the drums. The song tells the story essentially of two people whose quest for answers just leads to more questions and more frustration and boredom and pain. In the end its decided that youre probably better off if you dont even bother. Its my ultimate Autumn song and gets me every-time.
If You’re Feeling Sinister opened me up to a whole world of music outside of the crap that is played on WPLR and on any classic rock station or mainstream ‘alternative’ music station across America. Since then i am a loyal purveyor of Pitchfork and Magnet magazine and there was a point, before I started quitting job and needing to sell my reocrds to live, that i had maybe 1,000 records most of them ‘indie rock’ and most of them sounding nothing like Led Zeppelin.
Thank god.
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Friday, March 7th, 2008
Tuesday was one of those rare days in new music when there are a lot of things coming out that you are interested in, you have the free cash to purchase anything you want, you buy 3 or 4 or 10 records, you get them home, listen to them one after another and they are all great records. Not just, “well, i dont regret buying that” great but legitimately great, like flirting with your top 50 great. Im not saying any of these records are in my top 50 but if in five years im still listening them, they would not look strange amongst the golden tapestry of my top 50. We will take them one by one…
The Black Crowes - Warpaint
What can i say about this record that i havent already said in two of my previous posts this week. There are two misses here, “Wee who see the deep” a Mississippi Queen re-write that never gets off the ground on record and “These Gold in them Hills” which has a lot of good ideas rolling around in it but its obvious they had no way to connect them. their solution just throw them all together and pray that no one notices. However, neither of these songs are bad and they definitely dont ruin the record. there are some classics here, songs that you know are going to be in the live show for years. “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution,” “Movin’ on Down the Line.” There are a couple of songs that are perfect for sitting on the porch of your giant Day-Glo commune House’s porch smoking, drinking some New Castle passing around a couple of guitars and a pair of bongos. I listened to “Whoa Mule,” at 9 in the morning, at the beach watching the sun shine of the waves and the birds come home over the water and “Locust Street” was obviously written while they were all stoned and drunk, tinkering with a mandolin, writing down lyrics they didnt know were good until they sobered up the next day. This is just rootsy groovy soulful music man. This is the record that the Black Crowes have been trying to make since they took their sound as far out as they could take it with Amorica and we should all get down on our hands and knees and thank the lord they were still around to make it.
Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks - Real Emotional Trash
There was always a kind of unfathomable magic to all of Pavements albums, something you just couldnt wrap your face around. Some songs were pretty and you could sing along and song songs were ugly and Stephen spent most of the songs yelping about nothing in particular and some songs just seemed like genre exercises. Never the less, the sums was always at least relative to its parts and the result of that was always too insane to think about for any real length for time lest (am I using that correctly?) the next time you pick up your guitar everything you play sounds like Summer Babe or Silent Kit . You cant sing along to Real Emotional Trash, you cant even really listen to it for more than two songs consecutively with out going to back to re-listen to them. There is just no rhyme to reason to this record and because of this fact it is just an astounding piece of music. I may like this record better than Warpaint and i am the biggest Black Crowes fan from here to Baltimore. It just cannot be described what tremendous things are being done here and the presence of Janet Weiss, formerly of Sleater-Kinney, adds a foundation to the band that Stephen never had with Pavement. One thing that this record has that Pavement records never had is a sense of direction and purpose, albeit while still reveling in its random psychedelia and sometimes cringe sometimes laugh inducing guitar wanking. Good Times.
The Gutter Twins - Saturnalia
How many times can Greg Dulli make the same record before it stops being good? Apparently as many times as we let him. Saturnalia is another notch on his moody, slightly dementedly sexual, sometimes overwhelmingly dark but always groovy belt, the only difference this time is the sustained presence of Mark Lanegan. Sometimes he changes the bands name, Afghan Whigs to the Twilight Singers, sometimes he releases an EP of covers instead of an album of covers but sometimes you really need to shake it up and bring in the preeminent baritone of the 1990’s. And who’da thunk it, it works, again, like it always does, for no reason. Every song on the record sounds grossly similar to the ones that were on The Twilight Singer’s “Powder Burns” and his solo record “Amber Headlights,” but in the weirdo world of Greg Dulli if it aint broke, dont fix it and he never fixes it and at the end of every record i find myself turning the record over sliding the needle to the edge and re-listening to the whole thing. Saturnalia is no different. I compare Greg Dulli records to fantasy novels, more specifically fantasy novels that take place within a very expertly detailed and creatively realized realm, think Harry Potter. Starts out a little scary, in the middle it gets a little boring but by the end you are totally submerged in this alternate reality fighting back demons and begging for more. This record is a lot like that. Its starts scary with Mark Lanegans creepy rumble gets a little stale in the middle and by the end you are apologizing to Greg Dulli for making him so insecure about women and checking his website for tour dates and an EP release schedule. I dont know how he does it but he does and i love him for it. There are just Greg Dulli days, when you wake up in the morning, look out the window, sigh and say “god dammit.” Thats when you want your buddy Greg next to you telling you hes got some stuff that will make the day pass faster. he may mean tunes, he may mean cocaine, booze and ladies either way youre going to feel a whole let better until it ends and you start itching for more.
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Friday, March 7th, 2008
There was a request for the set list for the Black Crowes show in New Jersey last Sunday. This was the first time most of these songs were ever played live, which was great to be a part of. There was a real energy in the crowd to hear something new, which is something i hadnt experienced before. Most bands test out a few new tunes live they dont force feed you the unknown for over an hour but thats why the Crowes are great.
Goodbye Daughters Of The Revolution
Walk Believer Walk
Oh, Josephine
Evergreen
Wee Who See The Deep
Locust Street
Movin’ On Down The Line
Wounded Bird
God’s Got It
There’s Gold In Them Hills
Whoa Mule
- break -
Poor Elijah - Tribute To Johnson (Medley) Jealous Again
Wiser Time
Rockin’ Chair
- encore -
Hey Grandma
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